Velvet Rain - A Dark Thriller (32 page)

“
DIDYOUHAVESEXWITHHIM?
”

She had not missed her period, the good Doctor knew; he had kept close watch. But if Richards
had
had intercourse with her, then no doubt he had had it with others. And if there had been others … then the chase would be expanded.

There could be offspring.

In one experiment, to induce such good fortune, he had brought in the best whores money could buy, in another the worst that would never be missed. The German boy and the aged Australian had been coerced with the assurance of money and freedom—lies, of course—but in the end, had been unable to perform. Perhaps it had been a side effect of the drugs, perhaps their age, but as the women worked them with their mouths and their wares, they had simply lain on their cold steel beds as flaccid as their will.

Richards, on the other hand, Richards, damn him, had simply refused to participate. Richards, damn him, had balls of steel matched only by his striking will to resist.

But a free man is different. A free man is free.

He did not believe the woman. Richards had stayed with her long enough, had certainly found her attractive enough.

Tears were streaming down her cheeks. Down her throat. Down her bony body.

“Please. No. You h-haf-have to b-believe me—”

Brikker straightened, the dripping blade poised at his side. He held a creeping black gleam in his eye.

“Foolish girl. And yet … after all of
this
… perhaps I’ve been asking the wrong fool.”

Brikker set the knife on the table and lit up. He took a long, calming drag, and then he moved over her.

“So tell me,” he said, not looking at, but speaking to, the man from Missouri. “Who is the man in the photograph?”

The man looked at the woman, her bleak, shrunken face all eyes suddenly. And then, almost instantly, his expression fell to horror as he realized the price of his ignorance.

“I see,” Brikker said, and without hesitation, drew his cigarette and proceeded to burn what unspoiled flesh remained of the woman’s right breast. The Crypt swallowed her shrieks, but later around sunset, just as Brikker was on his walk reflecting on the day’s progress, the queer, Christensen, would swear to Strong he had heard something in there, just before Strong informed him that he never heard a goddamn thing. No one heard a goddamn thing.

Brikker drew on his cancer stick, savoring the moment.

Then he burned her again, drilling it into her. When it was over, he slipped away and lit up another.

“
Jesus, God,
” the man pleaded.

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” Brikker shouted among the wails. It was impossible to know if he was grinning, but he was. This would be child’s play, and he was certain there would be no call for even a single injection of truth serum with this one. Still, administering a fatal dosage of that magic elixir, LSD, a favorite of one of his counterparts in the CIA and far more effective than sodium pentothal—after every drop of information had been extracted, every scream had been bled, of course—held its appeal. It was quite a sight watching the mind collapse like that just before death, not unlike watching bullfrogs flitter and flop and explode when pumped full of air, a game he used to play as a curious child, a game where he first learned the joys of how it was to inject living things, to make them do what you needed them to do. No, unlike the woman, who had endured countless injections and episodes of uncontrollable laughter and vomiting and the occasional seizure, there would be no need at all. Pity.

Brikker spoke curtly, like a father asking a child of the dollar missing from his wallet.

“His name.”

“… I think it was Rawlings.”

“Rawlings.”

“I think so … only heard it the once. Maybe Rawthorne. Somethin’ like that.”

“Rawthorne.”

“Don’t hurt her no more, okay?
Okay?
”

Brikker beat him. Metal knuckles.

The lesson had only begun.

For the next two hours he circled the chair in calculated steps, moving in and out of the shadows, repeating each and every digit. And with each and every digit came the lashes, one upon one, from a length of barbed wire.

“Chivalry has no place here,” Brikker told him. “You have no
person
here.”

The man bled a river, his body ripe with welts and gashes. He could barely speak. His eyes listed as if he were drugged.

When asked for his name the answer displeased. The digits had come as they had from the woman, spoken only to avoid punishment. But they had come.

“Now,” Brikker said, his will to break this man as unbreakable as iron. “Tell me about Rawlings.”

~ 3

Ronald Jackson Jacobsen, a truck-driving, chain-smoking, church-going family man, a man who would cheat a stranger at stick but give you the shirt off his back, maybe even a nice, big Buick—spoke weakly, words coming, words fading. He had lost all trace of that fine Missouri graciousness he would offer so genuinely to friend or to foe; no
Sir
for this good Doctor, no sir. Still, he spoke gamely given his condition, regaling his captive audience of two of how he had picked up a drifter in a late-October rainstorm. How they had stopped at a roadhouse; how the man on the screen had hustled him.

How the world had gone black.

“You see how it was?” he went on. “You see how it was? He could … could—”

The man spiraled into a body spasm, and Brikker watched with mild interest. It was not unlike the reaction when charged cables were applied to the genitals, where the vast majority would scream long after the clamps had been pulled away, some so loudly they must have believed their brains were bursting. A good number bled profusely from the ears and nose, some the anus, while others simply succumbed. Some fought it, endured it, just as this one was enduring it, as if in their delusion they might somehow steel against the agony. Their efforts failed without fail.

The man stirred as the pain ebbed. Blood dribbled from his lips. A drop slipped to his doughy chest and formed a neat little splat where his heart was.

“I know how it sounds,” he said, struggling. His eyes probed the shadows, like a lost child in dark woods who has heard the sudden snap of a twig. “He … he turned back time.”

At this the woman groaned, as if she believed not a word—as if this nonsense would serve them both swift punishment. He looked to her for some level of belief, only to be met with tears. Eventually his gaze shifted from her, slipping back to the astonishing image of the man who had sentenced them to this hellish end.

“He cheated me,” the man said. “Maybe I was cheatin’ him, too, just a little, but … but what
he
done—”

The man cringed. The bleeding had eased, but not nearly enough to stay the inevitable. Moments passed, and only when the pain permitted did he speak, laboriously, as if the words and the images wedged into his brain were heavy bricks to be carried up a long, steep hill. He offered a naïve expression that begged for some kind of assurance from his captor he would be rewarded for his forthright, perhaps even released. When nothing of the kind came he simply continued his story, telling it to the darkness like a man confessing through a small window, to a priest he believes is listening.

“I was scared like I never was,” he said, and nearly stopped there. He paused to swallow. “But what scared me most was when it all went black.”

~

At the precarious birth stage—before there
was
a Project—doubt and disbelief in the highest ranks nearly wrought it stillborn. In the very few privy to the myth of the magic (save one Bulgarian physicist, a man who would yet lose an eye to his not too distant future), to buy into the notion that an old man, an obscure dairy farmer from Down Under, could turn back the clock, was next of kin to madness … and assuredly the fast track to demotion. There would be but one trial, they’d said to the physicist.
One.

An atomic clock was synchronized with its cesium-based twin, the twin stored safely out of range at the far east of the continent, in a rather nondescript “bottling plant,” a laboratory in southern Virginia. Placed with the Australian, not a chance was risked, isolating he and the clock in the bowels of an abandoned, and newly converted, silver mine, twenty-three hundred feet beneath the Nevada wasteland. There would be no witnesses (especially the good Doctor, he held no illusion of subjecting himself to a journey through Time until he was certain he would survive the trip), no recorders of any kind (it had to be explained to the stiff-minded Albrecht, more than once, why any recording device would be an exercise in futility), and, to ensure the farmer’s co-operation (and much later, Numbers Two and Three), the man was properly motivated. In addition to the requisite torture and drugs, for every defiance, an Indian child, one of scores taken from various reservations, would be shot. History would record that only the American had refused, and seeing his bluff called before him with a five-year-old Shoshoni girl, had never refused again.

And so the singular trial took place. But then another. And another. Upon completion of each “Proof of Concept” experiment (the duration growing from a single second to several), the clocks in Virginia and Nevada would be compared and, without fail, would be precisely—and impossibly—out of sync.

The magic was real. The Project was born.

In the next phase, Brikker introduced new variables into the equation. He placed organic material—fruits and vegetables, plants and bugs—with the Australian, and when tomatoes remained tomatoes and cockroaches remained cockroaches (although the insects often appeared darker in color and quite blotchy upon arriving from the past), the stakes were raised. Rats and cats, dogs and monkeys, were hauled in as Turn-fodder. Despite their obvious fear and extreme aggression towards Schenck and Lakeman (and later, Richards), nearly all of the animals had returned quite normal … rats scampering, cats ignoring, dogs tail-wagging, monkeys scratching. There were, of course, unusual side effects (strangely, dogs seemed more susceptible to afflictions of the eyes, while cats and monkeys seemed predisposed to vomiting; rats were curiously unaffected in any way at all), but of the hundreds subjected to the sweeping maelstrom of the Turn, only two had not survived, and only two had arrived, as Brikker had written, “retarded” (which he jokingly referred to as “Animal Crackers,” a term Albrecht had never found amusing in the least). Save these “rare, inconsequential exceptions,” there had been “remarkable predictability,” the very essence of the synergistic goals of the military and of the Project (despite Brikker’s fascination with the randomness of new timelines). And so the green light had been given.

On that first day of human trials, an eight-year-old Quoeech boy had been lowered into the mine with the Australian. A trip of precisely thirty-seven seconds had taken place, and a subsequent physical examination suggested a child in perfect health. Aided by an interpreter, a psychological investigation over a period of two weeks revealed that the boy seemed quite normal, yet suffered from one “recurring issue.” The issue—the nightmares—had gone unrecorded in Brikker’s official report, but was certainly recorded in his personal notes and scrapbook. In the weeks that followed, test after test exposed intriguing patterns: while most subjects suffered similar physical maladies as the lower animals, it appeared that humans of “lower intellect” suffered the least ills, while those of “mid- to upper-intellect” were prone to nightmares, sleeplessness, irritability, and acute sensations of
déjà vu.
Only later would the good Doctor realize that his own suffering was nothing of the kind. That the Fates had smiled upon him with an incredible gift called the Sense … but so much more.

And yet, in spite of these unqualified successes, there remained a burning question. Even Albrecht, the military maggot with the military mindset, had been far more than curious; the answer held vital implications for future conflicts. Insect or animal, roach or rat, all subjects killed prior to a Turn had always (with the exception of one mongrel dog) arrived alive.

And so the question burned, until a fine spring day in April. The fourteenth, the day after Brikker’s birthday.

Brikker had submitted his plan to use “expendables,” but Albrecht held no interest in what
he
called “civilians”—the Indian children. The trials would take place discreetly, one per day, to the expressed maximum; Brikker had been forewarned that even a single failure might doom the Project. And so eighteen men—nine enlisted, nine officers—were “voluntold” to report to Brikker, and eighteen men, not a one the wiser, were asked to sit in the chair set across from the Australian. They had been informed that the experiment would be quick. And painless.

Like the dogs and the monkeys (the cats and the rats had been poisoned), all eighteen were shot in the head. All eighteen rose from the abyss.

Sixteen were treated for mild aches and pains and returned to duty.

One suffered a nasty bout of diarrhea—and returned to duty.

One lieutenant complained of a headache—and returned to duty.

Not one reported any memory of their death, yet a week after the tests concluded the lieutenant slit his own throat. His suicide note, written neatly and soundly, held a touch here and there of the metaphysical, concluding its calm discourse with a curious question:
If katydids can dream, can not a dead man take his own life?

Albrecht had simply scribbled FAILURE in his report, had threatened to recommend the immediate termination of the Project. Brikker, on the other hand, considered the tests an important milestone, an unequivocal triumph. Arguing that the “recovery rate” was a perfect one hundred percent, Albrecht had countered that “a fucked-up soldier was as good as a dead one.” To which Brikker countered: “Success … indeed, progress … is not measured purely by lives or by deaths, rather by knowledge gained through experience, by predictability and repeatability.” While he admitted, “there appear to be some difficulties,” this had been but a footnote. The Project, approved beyond Albrecht’s reach, summarily received “indeterminate funding” for “unspecified duration.”