Liquid fear

CHAPTER THIRTY

“Do you think you can drive?” Alexis asked, looking at the final pill in her bottle and the apartment walls that now seemed like a prison.

“Sure,” Roland said. “I’ve had a lot of practice driving drunk. This can’t be any harder.”

He’d calmed down considerably, his jittery rage giving way to a placid, almost dull resignation in the wake of his final dose. Alexis studied the way he tended to Wendy, displaying a gentleness that masked the raging monster he’d been only ten minutes before.

Despite her horror and shock, Alexis was impressed by the efficacy Briggs had achieved with his Halcyon formula. If the drug went legit, it could ease the suffering of many people, not just the military veterans that were the intended patients. Rape, car crashes, and random violence often created long-term debilitating effects on the victims, and if science could alter or suppress the impact of those memories, it would be a welcome act of compassion.

But where was the boundary? How far into their heads could Halcyon reach, and how many memories, both good and bad, might be raked away with all the indifference of an orbitoclast jammed into an eye socket to peel away a frontal lobe?

Wendy rubbed the circulation back into her wrists after Roland released her bonds.

“He wants us to go back to the lab.”

“What lab?” Roland said.

“The Monkey House,” Alexis said.

Roland looked from one to the other, then back to Wendy. “What’s she talking about?”

Wendy stood shakily and took Roland’s hands. “Roland, you have to trust me.”

He nodded without conviction. “I always trusted you, Wendy.”

“He doesn’t remember,” Alexis said. “Not like we do.”

“Are we going to forget, too?” Wendy asked.

“We’re on staggered schedules,” Alexis said. “Briggs must have counted on one of us freaking out at any given time.”

She was thirty-five minutes from her final dose. She didn’t want to think of the sprawling, open-ended nightmare that lay beyond that last pill.

Briggs must have been so close back then. If Susan hadn’t fallen down those stairs, Briggs would have been hailed as a genius.

Of course, the success would have been a keystone to Alexis’s own career, especially if she’d coauthored the research. The amygdala was the secret center where fear, sex, and food combined, a mysterious and complex stew of electrical connections and chemistry that offered endless opportunities.

It should have been mine. And now I’ll lose everything.

“So we go to this Monkey House,” Roland said. “Then what?”

“We find Anita,” Wendy said.

“This is getting confusing,” Roland said. “Who’s Anita?”

“Roland, please,” Wendy began, face creasing in anger. Wendy was two hours from her final dose, and if the cortisol rush was already invading her, she might become a liability. And Alexis wasn’t sure she wanted more liabilities.

We learned how to deal with liabilities ten years ago. You always have to get rid of the weak link in the chain.

“Roland, I know this is hard to understand,” Alexis said. “But you’ve just taken a drug that suppresses traumatic memories. That’s why Wendy wants you to trust her.”

He shook his head. “I feel more or less normal. There was…something in Cincinnati, and I had to come here.”

“You didn’t come here,” Alexis said. “You were lured. Shepherded by Sebastian Briggs.”

“You’ve lost me,” he said. “Monkey House, Briggs, Anita. I don’t know what the hell’s going on.”

Wendy limped to the wall, favoring her right leg. She removed a charcoal sketch pinned against the drywall with thumb tacks. She carried it to Roland, who peered at the nude figure.

“That’s Anita,” Wendy said.

“She was with us in the trials,” Alexis said. “You, me, Wendy, and Anita. And the real David Underwood. Whatever happened to David?”

“Don’t forget Susan,” Wendy said.

Bitch. Wendy Leng had always wanted the project to fail. First she’d tried to coerce Roland, and when that didn’t work, the little yellow slut had mated with Briggs. That was a violation of every ethical code in the book, and some that were unwritten.

“We don’t talk about Susan,” Alexis said. “No matter what. Susan didn’t happen.”

“Am I going to have to tie you up?” Roland said to Alexis.

She could feel the tension and anger gripping her face. “You’d have to carry me to the car, and the neighbors might notice. We don’t need cops.”

Roland shrugged. “I have a feeling they’re after me for something anyway.”

“Come on,” Wendy said, leading the way to the door. “We have to save her.”

The early-evening sunlight cast ocher and orange light into the trees. Alexis shielded her eyes against the glare. The parking lot was like an alien landscape, the windows of the cars glittering needles of fire.

“This way,” Roland said, pushing past Wendy. “But one of you better know the way to the lab or we’re lost.”

“I do,” Alexis said. She glanced at her watch. “But only for eighteen more minutes or so.”

She wasn’t sure how well Briggs had timed the doses. In the original trials, both Seethe and Halcyon had reaction times that varied by a couple of hours. And each subject had responded differently.

If he’d been working on the formulas for ten years, there was no telling what sort of refinements he’d made. And part of her, a sick, grasping, ambitious part, knew she should have been there.

Halcyon has evident value, but what about Seethe? Wouldn’t you love to play with that one? Exploring the most primitive impulses of the brain would open up limitless avenues of research and knowledge. What would the bioethics council think of you then, when you were the one pushing the boundaries?

Fuck the council. I’d dose their asses and laugh while they Stooge-slapped each other with their journal publications.

Oh, yes, “Seethe” had been a good name for it. She could almost feel the blood boiling in her veins.

She looked at the last pill in her hand. All she had to do was get rid of Wendy and Roland, and she could have Wendy’s pill to herself. It might grant her a window of opportunity to synthesize the Halcyon and perhaps break its formula.

Then it would be Alexis Morgan and not Sebastian Briggs who would change the world.

And maybe I can trick Wendy and Roland into getting rid of Briggs for me.

“Lex?” Wendy said.

Alexis pulled herself from the murderous reverie and looked down the flight of steps. Roland was already behind the wheel of a blue sedan, and Wendy was standing beside the open passenger-side door.

Time was already slipping away.

But maybe there would be a better chance later.

From the back seat, as Roland pulled onto the highway following her directions, Alexis asked Wendy for a piece of paper. “I don’t remember the road names, but I can draw a map from off the highway,” she said. “Then it will be up to you, Wendy. Roland and I won’t be much help.”

Wendy turned, her frightened eyes just at the level of the seat. “What do we do when we get there?”

“Don’t worry about that,” Roland said. “We’ll think of something, babe.”

Wendy touched his arm with affection, and it triggered a rush of feeling inside Alexis.

Mark. How could I have forgotten him? Are the drugs already changing me that much?

“Can I borrow your phone?” she asked Wendy.

“No calls,” Roland said. “These people seem to be one step ahead of us, all the way. We can’t trust anybody right now.”

“I need to call my husband.”

Roland glanced at her in the rearview mirror. “I didn’t know you were married.”

He’d been at the wedding. They’d all been acquaintances then, if not friends, bound by a force they couldn’t define. Now Alexis understood their involuntary denial-the Halcyon had dulled their awareness, but the memory of the original trials must have hibernated deep in their unconsciousness. They were like survivors of a bloody war in which they still weren’t sure which side had won.

“Mark can help us,” Alexis said. “He’s got sources at CRO that can-”

Roland nearly ran off the highway as he slammed on the brakes and pulled to the shoulder of NC 501. Impatient homebound commuters blared horns as they passed.

“Goddamn, Roland, you nearly killed us,” Wendy said, with the bickering familiarity of a long-time couple.

But Roland was nearly over the seat, reaching for Alexis. She shrank away. The Halcyon was supposed to suppress the rage and fear, but cracks showed in Roland’s face.

God, what if the compounds are merging? What if it all clashes together in a hot ball of crazy?

“CRO?” Roland said. “Who the fuck is that?”

Alexis shrank out of his reach, not trusting him. “You know. The pharmaceutical company.”

“They killed her.”

“Who?”

“The girl in Cincinnati.” Relief and confusion battled for control of Roland’s face, but neither could beat the anger that pinched and contorted it.

“Keep moving,” Wendy said. “Lex is about to take her dose, and we’ll lose her.”

“Those guys are in on it somehow.” Roland turned his attention back to the steering wheel and spun back into traffic. “Hell, it’s starting to feel like everybody’s in on it but us.”

Mark? He couldn’t.

But Alexis had images of him meeting with defense officials, lobbying the health committee, moving in mysterious orbits that were always a little too complicated to explain. She’d taken it as the dedication of a career-driven husband, but maybe her own career had clouded her perception.

And one image froze in her mind, like a still frame from a movie that summed up the entire plot and theme: Mark shaking hands with Burchfield, an ambitious eagerness in both their eyes and a smug, conspiratorial air.

She couldn’t be sure when she’d seen that. It could have been after a meeting of the bioethics council or it could be simply a fantasy, but it screamed at her so insistently that it became the truth.

The bastard.

She didn’t know what he’d done, but she was going to kill him. Wendy’s voice pulled her from the self-inflicted pain as she realized she’d been digging her fingernails into the flesh of her wrists hard enough to draw blood.

She looked down at the wounds and found she was able to focus.

“Two minutes until your pill,” Wendy said. “You’d better give me those directions.”