Mystery Writers of America Presents Ice Cold: Tales of Intrigue From the Cold War

SIDE EFFECTS BY T. JEFFERSON PARKER

We’re down in the bomb shelter alphabetizing the canned foods so we can find what we’re looking for during an invasion or nuclear attack. Not bitchen on Labor Day weekend. The shelter is a long rectangular room with fluorescent lights, a bathroom at one end and a sink and small stove/oven at the other. Surplus military cots, blankets, pillows, and flashlights everywhere you look. No windows because it’s underground. The ceiling is low, and the lights flicker and hum and make you squint. Mom and Dad have a small record player set up down here for Tijuana Brass, Engelbert Humperdinck, and Andy Williams. If we get bombed I’ll take in my Cream and Doors. Amazing, the music old people would want to hear during a nuclear attack.

We’ve already reviewed the Batteries/Drinking Water/Perishables Rotation Schedule, which is written out on graph paper in Dad’s perfect handwriting and tacked to the corkboard below the Radiation Exposure Do’s and Don’ts. The whole family is here — Dad, Mom, Max, Marie, and me. I’m Mike, sixteen and the oldest. I can’t wait to finish up the work so I can get to 15th Street in Newport Beach, where there’s a south swell and waves running three to five feet, glassy conditions, water temp of seventy. Of course Dad has other ideas.

“Take your time and do a good job here, troops,” he says. “Chicken noodle before clam chowder and so forth, right on down the line. When this is done we’ve got some reloading to do in the gun room. The forty-five brass is really piling up! Then, the rest of Saturday is yours. But remember we’ve got the chapter meeting here tonight.”

Again, not bitchen. Fully not. The meeting is the South Orange County California chapter of the John Birch Society. Which means monthly atrocity films about the World Communist Conspiracy, programs on how to detect drug use in young people, plenty of cocktails and cigarettes, moms in short skirts, and dads with skinny ties and flat-tops. Dullsville. Me and Max steal almost-finished drinks when the grown-ups lose track of them. Which is easy when the living room is dark so they can see the atrocity films. Piled bodies, executions, maimed survivors. The speakers all agree that these things will happen here in America if we let them take our guns away. Or negotiate with the Russians. Or if we let the government put fluoride in our water. Fine, but I’m a member of the Newport Beach Bodysurfing Association, and Newport’s three-to-five and I’ve got the keys to the Country Squire.

It’s more like six to eight feet by the time we get to 15th Street that afternoon, a blow-out, the waves just mountains of chop. Some of the other club members are there. We wear white water polo caps to distinguish us in the water from nonbodysurfers, whom we call “goons.” We meet once a month and talk about contests, techniques, and trips to other breaks. I catch a right and stay tucked up high in the pocket as long as I can hang there, trimming along, palms and swim fins vibrating on the wave, which catches up and breaks over me. I could stand in that cylinder it’s so big. It’s loud, too — a full-on roar. I’m blinded by the spray, the brine grinding away under my eyelids for my short, sweet ride. Then the usual bodysurfer’s exit — a lip-launched freefall. Gravity tilts me downward but I try to maintain my elevation. Like a falling jet. I’d scream but I’ll need the air. Soon. The wave drives me straight to the bottom, where I flatten, rake my fingers into the sand and hold what’s left of my breath while the wave thunders by above me. Fireflies in my eyes. Finally I shove off and wriggle upward, break the surface in the oddly smooth and spreading wake to gasp in sudden red sunlight. Fully bitchen. So bitchen I swim back out and do it again. Several times. Later Max gets a great ride but comes up under a jellyfish and when we’re riding home his face looks like a stewed tomato. Marie, who has worked hard on her tan, thinks it’s hilarious.

When I turn onto our street I slow way down and casually look at the Lamm house. Adlyn is nowhere in sight, which is a bummer. Neither is her older brother, Larkin, which is fine with me. His van is in the driveway. The house is all concrete and glass, curvy and science fictional, nothing like the tract houses across from it, where we live. The Lamms moved in six months ago. On the last day of school I got brave enough to talk to Adlyn. Dr. Lamm is an important officer at the Tustin Naval Air Station, says Dad.

“Adlyn is nowhere, nowhere, nowhere to be found,” singsongs Marie from the back. “She’s too mature for you, Mike. You’re too chicken to call her so she has to call you.”

“Shut up, Marie.”

“My whole face is burning. Mom’s going to make me soak it in vinegar again.”

In the darkened living room the eight-millimeter projector clicks along, showing a mass grave and soldiers looking down into it. The black and white film makes all of it look even more freezing and bleak than it must have been. More doomed. Some of the soldiers still have their rifles unslung. There’s a mist in the air, but you can’t tell if it’s fog or gunpowder or the cigarette smoke in the living room.

My brother and sister and I sit three-across on the piano bench in the back. Max smells like vinegar. Mom and Dad make us sit through these things, the atrocity film and guest speaker, anyway. Mom will give us a quiz on Tuesday evening after dinner to make sure we paid attention. The next footage shows a man sitting on the edge of a big pit, stiff with bodies. He’s dressed in a beat-up suit of all things, and his hands are folded over a small suitcase on his lap, apparently something he’ll need for his coming journey. His face is sad and dirty, and he reminds me of Charlie Chaplin. A soldier steps up beside him and shoots him in the temple with a pistol, and the man slumps back against the pit side and slides in.

“Latvia? Lithuania? Estonia?” asks this month’s speaker, State Senator Brock Stile. “Do you think the World Communist Conspiracy simply stopped in Europe? How naive can you be? What do you think happened in Korea? What’s going on in Vietnam right now? Do you think the U.N. will protect us from this? I urge you to take steps to prevent this from happening here. First… become informed by joining the Society tonight. Second…”

I sip a stolen cocktail medley over fresh ice with plenty of root beer poured in. The projector clatters along, and I look at Max and Marie, the images playing on their faces, their eyes fixed to the screen. I look at Dr. Lamm, trim in his golf shirt. His mustache is brief, and he stands beside Mrs. Lamm. Mrs. Lamm is half a head taller, slender and mini-skirted, a Barbie doll with a chocolate bouffant. I spring one, hope it goes away. Why now? Why should an important part of me be outside my control?

Between Dr. and Mrs. Lamm stands their son, Larkin, a husky guy with a strong face, a cleft chin, and calm gray eyes that don’t blink. His hair is short like the grown-ups’, but he looks just a few years older than me. Smile lines at the corners of his lips. He seems amused by the film. He’s been to a few of these. He walked by the house yesterday wearing a beret and sunglasses, then came past the other way a few minutes later. Now he turns slowly and looks at Marie, then me, then back to the screen. Click-click-click-click goes the projector. Mom says Larkin attends a prestigious private liberal arts college in the Midwest, so he’s only around holidays and some weekends.

As soon as Senator Stile’s presentation is over I wander out to the back patio, where the picnic table is loaded with chips and dips, beer, and soft drinks. When no one’s looking I stride to the side yard, march past the trashcans to the gate and let myself out to the driveway. Half a dozen gleaming police motorcycles are parked in formation on the front lawn, local law enforcement always welcome at our Birch Society meetings. The streetlights shine off their black-and-white paint, their chrome, and their civic emblems, but I hardly notice them. There’s a flagpole in the middle of the lawn, too, one of Dad’s and Mom’s patriotic projects. There’s a toilet float spray-painted gold bolted to the top of the pole. As a family, we hoist the flag in the mornings before school, and take it down at sunset. Humiliating.

A minute later I’m halfway down the block, and I can see the Lamm home, fortress-like and glowing at the end of it. As I trot toward it, I look to Adlyn’s large bedroom window for a vision of her. No vision, but the light is on. Her room is an upstairs corner on the west side of the house. I let myself through the side gate and stand under her balcony. Leaning my back to the high concrete sidewall, I see the railing and the beam ceiling, from which all kinds of glass-enclosed candles and potted plants dangle in macramé slings. It’s like a jungle. Suddenly she’s standing amid long tendrils of Wandering Jew and Creeping Charlie and Boston fern. She looks down at me and gathers two handfuls of greenery then holds them to her breasts.

“How you doing down there, little Romeo?”

“Groovin’, Adlyn. And you?”

“Oh, fine I guess.”

“Far out. I was pretty stoked when you called me.”

She looks at the plants in her hands with what appears to be mild wonder. “Mike, I’ve seen the way you look at me. Like in class and at the beach and at that party at the end of school. And I’ve made some difficult decisions. I want to tell you some things.”

“Uhhh…”

“Sorry I couldn’t go to the beach today.”

“I looked for you. It was blown out.”

“Larkin’s back for a whole week. So we had to do cultural stuff. Went to lunch in Pasadena, then the Huntington Gardens.”

“I’m glad you’re back now. Larkin’s over at our place for the chapter meeting.”

“He likes that kind of thing. He always has. Wherever we live.”

“Freaky.”

“That’s nothing!” She giggles, lets go the foliage, and leans over the railing. Her beautiful red hair drops forward into the light. She’s wearing a lacy white top that there isn’t much of. “Would you like to come in?”

“Bitchen, Adlyn. Fully boss.”

“Would you mind climbing up? The house has alarms on the doors and windows and I don’t know the code.”

“Alarms?”

“Silly. But Mom and Dad never quit trying to keep us safe and sane.”

The round columns supporting Adlyn’s balcony are concrete and ivy-covered, and I manage to bear-hug my way to the balcony floor, swing one knee onto it, then get my hands on the railing and pull myself over. I’ve got ivy juice on my favorite Hang Ten shirt and jeans, but Adlyn is smiling. I can smell her strawberry perfume. Under the white lacy top she wears a two-piece swimsuit, pink-and-orange swirls. Her legs are tan and smooth.

Her room is three times the size of mine and Max’s, with a tall ceiling. There are lights built up into it, not like in my room, where there’s only one ceiling lamp in the middle of the popcorn, with an opaque shade that collects dead moths. She slides a button on the faceplate and the lights dim and brighten. “It’s called a rheostat.”

“We don’t have those.”

“On our way home from Pasadena today, Ronnie Feurtag was on the news. They found her in a drainage ditch in Huntington Beach.”

“That’s good news.”

“Not for her it isn’t. She was dead. They think murdered.”

“Oh, Geez.” Ronnie had disappeared from the beach on the Fourth of July, and it was front page of the Register for a week and even made the L.A. TV news. She lived a few blocks away. First they thought she ran away to Knott’s Berry Farm or Disneyland, then police said it could be foul play. I didn’t know her but I’d seen her around, always roller skating down the block. Ten years old — same as Marie.

Adlyn takes my hand and leads me from her room down a wide hallway. We pass one closed door on the left, another on the right, then on the left another closed door that has steel bars across it. The bars run horizontally across the door, from top to bottom, spaced approximately six inches apart. They look like stainless steel, and I think at first this is some science-fictional design flair for advanced, sophisticated people like the Lamms. “Larkin’s room,” whispers Adlyn, stopping and running the backs of her fingers up the rungs. Sounds like steel alright. “You can only open it from outside and guess who has the key? Mom.”

She smiles, pecks me on the lips, and takes my hand again. Bitchen! I smell the strawberry perfume very strong on her. I spring one again and as we walk down the wide marble staircase I put my hands in my pockets and shove it up and to one side where it won’t show as bad. It always happens at the worst times, like catching some rays at the beach, like watching TV, like now. Somehow Dad seems to know, warns me about becoming “a bathroom idiot.”

We sit side-by-side on a black leather-and-steel sofa in their living room. The room is very large and high and it has more of the hidden lights up in the ceiling. The walls are plain white, and the carpet is white. There are paintings hung everywhere, huge things that don’t look like anything I’ve ever seen. No frames. I wonder if some of them are hung upside down then wonder: how would you know?

“Would you like to try a confession pill?” asked Adlyn.

“I don’t know what that is.”

“It makes you want to confess.”

“A pill does that?”

“Pills can make you do anything.”

“Hmmm. What’s it called?”

“Just X62-13. There’s no name for it yet because it isn’t approved. The X means experimental. The 62 means it was first formulated in nineteen-sixty-two, and 13 makes it the thirteenth drug created in that year. Nineteen sixty-two was a good year, so far as numbers go. The number of drugs created, that is.”

“So, drugs like pot or speed or downers?”

“Oh, no! X62-13 is not recreational. Although not-real-smart people might think so.”

“Your mom or dad work at a pharmaceutical place, then?”

“Well. Let me just take the pill first. Then I’ll tell you everything you need to know. Probably more!”

She runs across the carpet, up the stairs. Her legs are beautiful and the bottoms of her feet are white, like the carpet. I try to distract myself by making some sense of the paintings, but they make no sense. I look out the windows, but it’s dark and there are no streetlights nearby. The Lamms’ big, unreal house seems to sit in a nest of darkness. It’s on a slight rise. I go to one of the big windows and can see our tract below — Heritage Acres — huddled in orderly fashion, gridded off by the streetlights that lie in perpendicular rows and burn strong, none of them flickering, none of them out. There are orange groves surrounding Heritage Acres, though some of them are being cut down to build houses. Out there, beyond the streetlights, where the groves and partial groves are, it’s very dark. A new moon.

Behind me Adlyn clears her throat. When I turn she’s got a glass in one hand and a large white pill in the other, which she holds up to me like a treat for a dog. She’s wrapped a long, airy, green scarf around her neck. She smiles and sits primly back down on the big black sofa and I stride over, beginning to spring again. Damn. I sit near but not close to her, and cross my legs. She drops the big pill down into her mouth and swallows half the glass of what looks like water.

“Larkin discovered what Dad does years ago,” she says. “Which is, he’s a doctor and he works for the military. He creates tactical drugs. Helps create them. It’s extremely top secret, but Larkin figured it out anyway. Larkin’s kind of talented like that, and Dad’s very absentminded and careless sometimes. Dad’s fundamental belief — I read this in a top secret paper he wrote — is that drugs are a better way to win a war than bullets. He wants to have wars without any killing. Or hardly any. He says that ‘targeted malfunctioning of the human organism’ is the goal of his drugs. On a battlefield, that will probably have to be a gas. But there are pills too. This one, the one I just took, was developed to make prisoners confess. Larkin gave me my first one of these when I was six. I spent the next four hours confessing exactly what kind of horses I had dreamed of having, and every detail about my ranch in the mountains, where the horses and I would live. I confessed things I didn’t even know I knew. And then I confessed the name and gave a full description of every boy I had ever had a crush on, and every person who had ever scared me, which turned out to be really only one — him, Larkin.”

I look hard at Adlyn then, harder than I’d ever looked before. Yes, she’s a pretty, lightly freckled, suntanned redhead with green pools for eyes, wearing a bikini and a white lacy top and a bright green scarf around her neck. But she also seems… compelled? Driven? What I mean is, when I look into those really bitchen green eyes they are really, really eager. Like she can’t wait to get there, can’t wait for the next thing. So I wonder where she thinks she’s going. And what the next thing might be.

Adlyn shudders then, as if a cold blast of air has come through the room. She twists the green scarf tighter and holds it over her eyes. “Would you please tie it?” She turns her back and wriggles closer to me. You know what that causes. I manage to tie the scarf in a loose knot. The green ends fall across her back. In the strong light I can see the fine golden hairs dusting her suntanned shoulders showing through the lacy openings. Because she can’t see me I lower my right elbow to my zipper area and grind down hard.

“It’s hitting me strong now,” she whispers. “The 62–13. One day Larkin found drug samples Dad had hidden in the garage. Later we found out it was because Dad thought there was a Soviet spy in his research lab. This was back in Bethesda. Larkin started sampling the pills. There was X59-11, X61-14, and X62-13—what I just took. The first one put Larkin in a coma for eleven days and he woke up feeling happy and relaxed. The second one gave him seizures and he broke out in red measles-like triangles. The third one made Larkin confess to me his very… scary fantasies about, well… me, and other girls my age. In the garage Larkin also found some things Dad had written. Larkin slipped some 62–13 into Dad’s vitamins then demanded to know what Dad did, and where, and when, and for whom. Everything. Of course Dad told him without a fight, because the drug can’t be defeated. Larkin tape-recorded it and said he’d play it to the Washington Post unless Dad brought home plenty more samples — he wanted everything Dad had because Larkin enjoyed trying them out. He also demanded a fifty-dollar per week allowance and a new car, even though he was only fourteen. It was a Roadrunner.”

“Why did Larkin take all the drugs?”

“He craves sensation. He’s sensational.”

“You’re shivering, Adlyn.”

“It’s one side-effect of 62–13.”

“I’m kind of mind-blown by this stuff about Larkin.”

“Oh, that’s nothing. It started getting really scary. It… Mike… it still is really scary. Can you get me a blanket from my bedroom closet, the pink one with the unicorns on it?”

“Be right back.” And I am.

“They found her in the woods near Bethesda.”

“Who?”

“Tammy. Our neighbor. Ten. Strangled. Two months later Dad got transferred to the Edgewood Arsenal up on the Chesapeake Bay and guess what? It happened again. In the woods, our neighbor, Kathleen. I knew her. Then Dad got a big promotion that took us way out to Missoula, Montana, and guess what?”

“Another neighbor girl strangled and left in the woods.”

“Forest, actually. Our next door neighbor. That was when Dad finally put two and two together. So did the police. The detectives interviewed Larkin for hours. Several times. Of course he wouldn’t tell them anything because before the questioning he’d taken X62-15, which Dad designed to prevent captured Americans from confessing. It was intended as an antidote to X62-13. It raises your pain threshold to almost nothing and gives you a gigantic but completely logical imagination. You can make up convincing lies and follow them up with irrefutable details. Even a lie detector can’t tell. You get real calm. Larkin told me one night, in tears, after taking 62–13, that he had taken 58–37 before he killed the girls. That drug was supposed to be a waking-hours sedative but instead it causes dissociation and violent behavior, and Dad and his partners considered it a total failure. Larkin told me he cased the girls’ houses by daylight but always went out and took them on new moons, so he’d be harder to see at night. Afterward, he felt so bad about what he’d done, when he took 62–13, that is. So bad.

“Well, then the Pentagon generals came in and met with Dad and Larkin and the local police and the next thing you know we’re living in Albuquerque, where they’ve got another government pharmaceutical research facility. But not Larkin. He gets sent away to a prestigious private liberal arts school in the Midwest and only comes home on holidays and some weekends. Mom and Dad put bars on Larkin’s door and windows, and alarms on all the other doors and windows, for when he visited. So he couldn’t get out. Mom would be his jailer-nurse-cook. They never let him outside the house unless they were both with him. Never. But? He still gets another girl in New Mexico, from her own house around the corner, Christmas break. Left her in the desert. So we packed up and headed out to California. Everything was fine until the Fourth of July, when Ronnie Feurtag disappeared. And until tonight, because it’s a new moon and Larkin took the 58–37 about a hour before he left for your house.”

“Marie!”

“I genuinely like you, Mike. Can I say one thing before you go?”

“No!” I’m already to the door. I hesitate at the keypad on the wall, lights blipping red, red, red.

“Mike, I took a lot of those pills with Larkin. I helped him but only a little. That’s why Mom and Dad lock me in, too. I’m more prone to shoplifting, burglary, and self-destructive behavior. But I have residual goodness. I hate what those drugs did to us. They broke down our souls then built them back shapeless and black. Sometimes I can smell them. Our souls. I can’t wait to die.”

I throw open the door and the alarms shriek. Adlyn yells out that she’s sorry. She’s confessing her sorrow in very emotional detail, raising her voice higher and higher. But it only gets fainter as I run across the lawn toward Heritage Acres, faster than I’ve ever run before.

The chapter meeting is just breaking up. People stand out in the yard by the flagpole and the police motorcycles. Some of them are the cops who ride them. A station wagon sweeps away from the curb. Mom stands on the porch, saying goodnight and handing out the red-white-and-blue John Birch Society ballpoint pens that litter our entire house. No sign of Dad. “Where’s Marie?”

“What’s wrong, Mike?”

But I’m already past her and into the still-darkened living room where through the smoke I see Dad in close conversation with Mrs. Lamm, and Ken Crockett pounding out “Battle Hymn of the Republic” on the piano while Mrs. Crockett slow-dances alone, and my brother Max using the beam of projector light to cast shadow figures on the wall with his hands: rabbit head, flying bird, devil with horns. But no Marie and no Larkin Lamm. The sliding glass doors are open to the back patio and the curtains sway. I fly through the house, room-to-room. In the master bedroom Mrs. Frantini and Mr. Dale are kissing. Back in the living room I throw open the slider and spill onto the back patio by the snacks-and-drinks table, where a few last guests are smoking and loading up paper plates. I can see the whole backyard: no Marie. And the side yard: no Marie. But I see the lights on in the gun room and the door slightly ajar. Suddenly, Dr. Lamm bursts out, looking left and right, searching everywhere, fast as his eyes can focus — just as I am. He sees me and throws his arms wide and cocks his head like I’m supposed to know where Marie and his homicidal pervert of a son are.

And then I remember. The woods, the forest, the desert, the drainage ditch.

I yank open the back gate and run to the flood control channel. I hear Dr. Lamm behind me. At the edge of the channel I see the trickle of water at the very bottom. And in the faint patio lights from my house I can see the still-dripping footprints — just one pair — leading up the opposite side of the concrete canal toward the orange grove. In a blink I’m down the near bank and through the little stream and up the far side. When I get to the grove the light is too dim for footprints so I have to go right or left and I choose right because I always do, automatically, I always choose right because I’m right-handed, and because Dad and Mom choose right, the right wing, because the right leads to freedom and liberty but the left leads to communism and death. I run a few yards then stop. I hear footsteps behind me and turn to see Dr. Lamm catching up.

Suddenly, back in the trees, Marie is screaming. It’s more of a snarl — a throttled grunt made while biting or tearing with your teeth, though her two front top teeth are missing. She has a ferocious temper. The trees are dark, the oranges just faint dabs of color. The earth of the grove is big-clodded and firm. I run toward her like in a dream — slowly, laboring so hard but moving so little. Some fool inside me thinks: this is a dream. Wake up. Wake up!

Marie has stopped screaming. But I see them, Larkin Lamm crouching with his back to me, wrenching her wrists, pushing her against the trunk of a big orange tree, pulling her back, slamming again. I hear her breathless huffs. It takes time to get there. Minutes. Hours. But some dreams come true some days, and mine comes true that day. I jump up and drop my arms around Larkin Lamm’s neck and choke him as hard as any sixteen-year-old has ever choked another person in the history of this Earth.

He’s strong. He stands, but I stay on. He tries locking his hands on my arms then pulling on my hair but I can feel the start of his panic. He spins away from Marie and crashes me into another tree trunk. The same fireflies buzz my eyes as when I held onto the bottom of the ocean while the wave went over me. I do not let go. I will not let go. Then Larkin straightens and jumps and lands on his back, crushing me between himself and the ground. Lights out. I’m gone, completely.

But just for a second or two. I open my eyes to Larkin above me, his hands outstretched. He’s moving backwards, like a lunging dog held by a leash. I roll away and get to my hands and knees and I see the belt around his neck, and Dr. Lamm, holding on with both hands, arms taut and legs braced, pulling Larkin back.

Marie runs up behind me, grunts, and a good-sized rock sails past Larkin’s head, barely missing Dr. Lamm. Larkin gags and tries to get his fingers under the belt. “I am responsible!” calls out the doctor. “I… take… full…” Marie’s next rock hits Larkin smack in the middle of the forehead and a spurt of black blood appears.

When I look back I see our patio lights still on and the open gate and flashlight beams crisscrossing in the darkness toward us. Then voices: Dad’s and Mom’s, higher-pitched than usual, voices calling out for Marie and me, voices full of fear and hope. Dr. Lamm has gotten the belt into a branched “V” of a tree trunk and he’s pulling hard. Larkin stands levered against the tree, arms in a reverse hug of it, his head raised in order to draw breath. His face is smeared with blood and tears, and his gray eyes are calm as always, and, as always, unblinking. Marie throws her small light body against me and I lift her and trudge back toward the light.