Chronic fear

CHAPTER FORTY

My wife’s fault. If not for her, I’d have heard Scagnelli sneak up on us.

Scagnelli lowered the binoculars after the last round of gunshots.

“I believe that was the last one,” he said. “Right, Mark?”

Mark and Alexis sat side by side on a sunlit boulder, a little away from the creek and perched on a ledge so the cabin was visible in the valley below. Scagnelli had taken their weapons, and Mark’s restlessness caused him to twitch. Memories of the Monkey House danced in his head like primitives around a bonfire. He wanted to leap from the boulder and run screaming through the trees, raging at the intense awareness of sunlight and breath and the rushing water and the crisp, naked rocks.

But that final shred of self, the vestige of his ego, hung like a spark in the darkness, the lone, distant star in a rapidly dimming universe.

Alexis.

He forced his hands to quit shaking, gripping the slack fabric of his pants.

“Only three,” Mark said, the words feeling strange on his tongue, as if language were a lost thing. “There were only three gunmen.”

“He needs the Halcyon,” Alexis said to Scagnelli. “Please.”

Scagnelli pointed the AR-15 at her. “Did your husband really expect you to use this? Looks to me like Seethe turns you into a goddamned idiot. But that’s good news for me. People pay dearly to turn themselves into idiots.”

“You have both the Seethe and the Halcyon now,” Alexis pleaded. “Just give him a few sips of the Halcyon, and then go.”

“Yes, I have both. I’m not sure what the hell I have, except two tickets to paradise. Or hell. But why should I help your husband?”

Mark wanted to tell her to shut up, but language was lost in the Seething storm of his skull.

“Because,” she said. “Seethe and Halcyon are useless without us. We’re the test subjects. We’re what happens.”

“Plenty more where you come from.”

“Sure, if you want to wait a decade. A lot of people want those drugs. Powerful people. If you stay with Daniel Burchfield, you’re going to lose a lot of money.”

Scagnelli chuckled, turned for a quick squint through the binoculars, and said, “Who says I’m working for Burchfield?”

“He’s had a taste. He’s motivated. And he’s infected enough to crave the power it will give him.”

“So, what’s the problem? Burchfield’s going to be president. I’d say being on his team is a good thing.”

Mark gauged the distance between him and Scagnelli. Twenty feet. Semiautomatic rifle. He’d get hit, for sure, probably four times.

He raked his knuckles across the rough skin of the boulder. The pain felt good, an echo of the Monkey House where it had saved his life.

Pain is your friend.

And, in the deepest truth of existence, pain was the dominant story. It was the core truth, maybe even the entire point, of life.

Suffering.

When people invented God, they invented suffering. And God was the relief from suffering.

Death was deliverance.

But on this Earth, God was pain.

Or pain was God.

Scagnelli’s bullets wouldn’t hurt him. They would just be part of what already was, the story of Mark Morgan’s pain.

His wife’s words came to him as if through a fog on a hidden lake full of slithering leviathans.

“You can do better,” she said, and Mark wasn’t sure if the words were meant for him.

“I’ve considered it,” Scagnelli said. “But the way I look at it, six people know what this stuff is. Two of you are here, Wendy and Roland will probably be coming out of the cabin any minute now, and Darrell Silver is probably on the run to New York or San Francisco or wherever else the drug culture will give him a home.”

“You forgot Wallace Forsyth,” Alexis said.

Scagnelli took the vial from a pocket of his cargo pants and held it to the light. He gave it a little shake, and the rattle reverberated in Mark’s head like a stone bounced down an elevator shaft. Mark ground his fist against the boulder, drawing blood until the sound went away.

“Your fundamentalist friend took the express elevator,” Scagnelli said. “Guess he couldn’t wait to get his wings and harp. But I’ll bet God has a special floor for former politicians, don’t you?”

“That vial was nearly full,” Alexis said.

“Yeah, and I can’t waste another pill. And I can’t waste one drop of Halcyon. So your dear, sweet husband will just have to ride it out.”

Scagnelli was talking as if there would be a future, and Alexis was playing along. No way could Scagnelli let them live.

No way Burchfield would let them live.

Mark scraped his knuckles back and forth, rasping his flesh open, and the pain was like fire, but it was also ice. He narrowed his focus to the expanding pain and allowed it to fill his skull.

The monkey brain says, “Ease the pain.”

He took it up like a chant, his own personal mantra as he danced around the bonfire of war, the bonfire of harvest, the bonfire of the kill. His muscles coiled as he soaked in its macabre heat.

The monkey brain says ease the pain, the monkey brain says ease the pain, the monkey brain says ease the pain…

Voices came from the cabin door below, calling his name, and when Scagnelli turned toward them, Mark exploded off the rock.

He was half-right.

Scagnelli hit him with only two rounds.