Liquid fear

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I’m not like that. Not anymore.

Wendy’s hand shook. The pills rattled in the bottle.

“It didn’t happen that way,” Alexis said. “Tell me it didn’t.”

“That’s the trouble,” Wendy said. “We all remember it differently.”

“Or not at all.”

“Thank God you called me.”

“Once I remembered, I had no choice.”

Wendy looked around the confines of her off-campus apartment, still feeling vulnerable even with the doors locked. She’d learned that even inside-maybe especially inside-you still couldn’t escape yourself, your fears, your deepest impulses.

Alexis was just as nervous. She leaned against Wendy’s drawing table and stared down at the drawing spread across it. Wendy had been working on charcoal sketch, a huddled human form suffocating in shadows. She’d been driven, knowing a deeper message lurked beneath, but as always, art proved inadequate when it came to expressing the full breadth of human truth and lies.

“Is it happening again?” Wendy asked.

Alexis looked up with those ice-blue eyes that always projected a bright but cold intellect, but they both knew that blue was also the color of the hottest stars, the raging storm of a body consuming itself. They could hide their duplicity from the rest of the world, but the Monkey House survivors knew.

“When did it kick in?” Wendy asked.

“About an hour ago. I got dosed on the commons. It was in a crowd, when classes were changing, so I couldn’t tell who stuck me.”

“And you found the pills waiting in your office?”

“Whoever did it must have known my routine,” Alexis said.

“You know who did it.”

Wendy crossed the cluttered living room to check the locks again. After the separation, she’d taken a one-bedroom apartment within walking distance of campus. Neither she nor Roland had been able to afford the mortgage on their Chatham County farmhouse, and Wendy had always hated the half-hour commute to work. Now she longed for that remoteness and isolation.

“I don’t think we have to worry about him getting in,” Alexis said. “He couldn’t be any more ‘in.’ He’s already got a back door to our brains.”

“I’m at least a day ahead of you. So grant me a little extra paranoia.”

“I know. I’m feeling it, too. I walked here because I didn’t trust myself to drive. It’s Briggs, all right.”

Wendy paced, irritated by the stacks of framed canvases and the art screaming from the walls. She fought an urge to rip down the fruits of her dreams and talents, to stamp them on the floor.

The works of colleagues also adorned her walls, ranging in style from surrealism and cubism to such postmodernist frenzy that it hadn’t yet acquired a label. Alexis’s arrival had originally comforted her, but now her friend was just another object fueling her claustrophobia and anxiety.

“How long before we completely lose it?” Wendy asked.

“How soon is now? How crazy is crazy?”

“Jesus, Lex, you’re starting to freak me out, and I’m freaked out enough. You’re supposed to be the brains here. You know, that academic voice of reason?”

Alexis sipped at the chamomile tea Wendy had made, a pitiful attempt at a calming antidote. “Sorry. In the trials, the window was eight hours, but it looks like Briggs has altered the formula.”

“It’s time we called the cops. Or the attorney general. Somebody.”

“Right. They take us in for observation and seize the Halcyon.” Alexis held up her own orange bottle, and Wendy realized they’d both been clutching their pills as if they were sacred talismans.

“And we go all the way to the end of the cycle.”

“An uninterrupted ride. And I don’t think we want to go there.”

“Because you don’t come back.”

“Just like Susan.”

The name invoked a silence on the room that penetrated beyond the walls, as if the whole world were hushed and eavesdropping.

“Besides,” Alexis continued, more quietly, though she, too, appeared to be trembling a little. “That might open the door to questions about what happened ten years ago, and none of us wants that.”

“I’m not so sure,” Wendy said. “I’m an artist. I can do my thing just as well in prison or in an asylum.”

“They take away your sharp things,” Alexis said, studying the drawing again. “You’ll be stuck finger painting with your own feces.”

“Maybe Anita has the right idea. Take yourself out of the game before you lose.”

Alexis crossed the room with such speed and ferocity that Wendy squealed in shock. Alexis gripped her wrists, right where the scars were, and squeezed hard enough to hurt. Alexis’s eyes were as mad and glittering as a lost, stormy sea.

“Don’t you dare say that,” Alexis said. “Don’t you dare even think it.”

Wendy nodded, unable to speak. Alexis had been the first to come up with the idea of dealing with Susan. In many ways, Alexis was a born leader, an Aries, with a forceful sense of justice and a practical approach that could border on pathological.

But they all were sociopaths, each of the group members, and they would never know if they’d been born that way or made that way by Sebastian Briggs.

It’s all her fault. She’s still jealous over Sebastian. Just like Roland.

“Okay,” Wendy whispered, her pulse rate still elevated. “I’m back.”

“How many pills do you have left?”

“Three.”

“Damn. I only have two left. Briggs started us all on different cycles. Do you recall getting bitten or stung, maybe a little pinch in a crowd?”

“No, there was just the accident this morning I told you about.”

“Maybe during the chaos somebody injected you.”

Wendy shook her head. “I don’t think so. I think that was to get the adrenalin going and kick-start the fear response.”

“He must have synthesized a liquid form.” Alexis glanced out the window, where the solid brick buildings of academia in the distance suggested order and sanity. But the brick and ivy hid things that went on in the basements, where researchers sometimes took intellectual liberties in the interest of science.

And other liberties as well, Wendy thought.

“So we can’t go to the cops or the doctors,” Wendy said. “What about your Washington friends?”

“You don’t have ‘friends’ in Washington. You have units of political capital.”

“Your husband, then? Isn’t he in that business?”

Alexis paused in her restless pacing. “I want to keep him out of it if I can. Something like this could ruin his career. Besides, he doesn’t know who he married, and I want to keep it that way.”

“I think you’re a little more important to him than CRO.”

“I wish I could believe that.”

“Lex, that’s the fear talking. It’s already getting to you. Don’t you see?”

Alexis hugged herself. “You’re talking civilized logic, and this stuff is cooking away inside the lizard brain.”

A buzzing sound erupted, and the noise was almost painful. Her anger flared. Taking a breath to focus, Wendy located her purse and pulled out her cell.

“Who is it?” Alexis asked her.

“I don’t recognize the number. Should I answer it?”

Alexis shook her head. “We should limit outside stimuli as much as possible. If Briggs is playing with us, he’ll infect us any way he can. Because his fear drug needs triggers. Anger, trauma, fear, excitement. He’s learned our weaknesses and will hit us where it hurts.”

Excitement. The way he touched me and inspired me…

Wendy found that she couldn’t wait to see Briggs again. Maybe they’d finish what they had started.

All of them. Everything.

The phone quit buzzing after the seventh ring, and Wendy closed it. Alexis sat beside her on the couch, and they waited. For what, they didn’t know.