Liquid fear

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

“Help me, hurry, we’re in the factory where we killed Susan.”

Roland stared at the dead cell phone, contemplating several reactions. He wanted to hurl the phone against the wall, but he no longer trusted his instinct. And a small part of him wanted to race into the bedroom and pummel Wendy with his fists. Not for any particular reason he could think of, but just because she was the latest contestant in the Blame Game.

“What was that all about?” Alexis said. She was visibly nervous, picking at her fingernails.

“They have Anita. They’re waiting in the Monkey House.”

Alexis sat down hard. “That place wasn’t real!”

“Shut the fuck up,” Roland said, and she looked at him, blue eyes wide. He realized his hands were clenched into trembling fists and he immediately opened them, cool air enveloping his sweating fingers.

“Sorry,” he said. “It’s happening.”

Alexis pointed to the three pill bottles on the coffee table. “Take your Halcyon. This could get ugly fast.”

“I’m afraid to take it,” he said. “I don’t even know what the hell it is.”

“You’re on Seethe, Roland.”

“Seethe?” The word rang a distant alarm in Roland’s head, but it was in a mental vault he didn’t want to enter.

“The trigger. The drug that stimulates fear response. Seethe shocks the amygdala and floods the nervous system with neurochemicals.”

He couldn’t avoid sarcasm. “Thanks, Doctor. Maybe you were sleeping with Briggs, too.”

She was angry, but Roland didn’t care. If she had a hand in all this, maybe she should have been the one to die instead of Susan. But maybe it wasn’t too late to set things right.

“Look, I was just a young researcher fascinated by the potential. I didn’t know what was going on. It all appeared so…legitimate.”

“Since you’re the only one who remembers Seethe, what exactly does this shit do and how can I get it out of my head?”

Alexis rubbed her mouth, face twisted in concentration as she struggled to remember. “He had an injected form back then, but it needed an amplifier. That’s why the trials were set up to shock us, to see how far over the edge we would go.”

“And then he’d give us Halcyon to float us back from la-la land without remembering a thing?”

Alexis nodded. She bit her thumbnail, tearing off a ragged piece. She spat it out and said, “Halcyon is temporary, but Seethe is permanent.”

Roland thought of all his drunken blackouts and wondered what acts he might have committed. He could have been Seething all along and never even known it. “You mean this shit’s been sleeping in our brains for ten years?”

“Briggs has probably been planning this for a long time, and he finally found the backers to help him pull it off.”

“Who are these ‘backers’?”

“I don’t know, but they must have deep resources if they can move us around like chess pieces.”

Roland picked up the closest vial and read: “D. Underwood.”

“What if I got the wrong pills?” Roland said.

What if I killed that woman in Cincinnati? I know I’m capable. Because I helped do it to Susan.

“You need to take it now, Roland,” Alexis said.

“Or else I’ll remember?” he asked.

“Yeah. It could get ugly. And we don’t know what we’ll turn into, what we might become…”

Or what we already are. Like maybe both of us are murderers and we don’t know it.

“We better tell Wendy,” he said.

“And then we find Anita.”

“No. Goddamn it, can’t you see that’s just what he wants? All his little monkeys back in their cages?”

“We have to stop him.”

“Yeah.” Roland glanced at the door as if expecting arrest just for thinking about it. “The cops are out of it, because we all have normal, happy lives now. Well, except me. And there’s no statute of limitations on murder.”

“I need to call Mark.”

“Mark?”

“My husband.”

“Damn. I forgot.”

“He’s with CRO Pharmaceuticals and they have connections. Maybe we can-”

“What did you say?” The red rage was simmering at the edges of his vision again, like sheets of rain building to a hurricane.

“Mark can help us.”

“CRO,” he said, half to himself. “Those initials were in Cincinnati.”

“Cincinnati? What’s in Cincinnati?”

“The last person I killed.”

She came at him then, her fingernails raised like the talons of a wildcat. “We’re not killers, goddamn it. Shut up.”

Wendy’s muffled voice grunted from the bedroom doorway, and she awkwardly ran toward them, hands bound behind her. Her shin hit the coffee table, knocking over the remaining two bottles, and she lowered her head and charged toward Roland like a missile. He fought an urge to drive his knee up into her face.

Instead, he stepped to the side and gave a small shove to her shoulder that sent her sprawling on the carpet. As she rolled over, Alexis jumped him, clinging to his back.

“Get off,” he yelled, bucking and flinging her toward the couch. She fell a little short and slammed into the armrest. She spat out a whoof and rolled away, curling into a ball.

Roland backed into a corner and crouched. Now he knew how a caged tiger felt when those maniacs with their whips and chairs closed in.

But he wasn’t going down without taking a piece of He looked down at the orange bottle, which he’d gripped so tightly that the plastic was cracked.

Take one every 4 hrs. or else.

“It’s the Seethe,” he whispered.

Then, aloud, so the two women could hear him. “It’s the Seethe!”

A neighbor banged on the wall, the urban demand for “Quiet, goddamn it,” and Roland focused on the throbbing spot where Alexis had banged the back of his head.

The pain helped him calm down. He was clammy, sweating, and hyperventilating, but he’d beaten the Seethe this time.

This time.

He gobbled down his pill and went to untie Wendy.