Brood Read online

  “And Borman and Davis has a program for its employees. I’m not sure you’re aware of it. Dare to Excel?”

  “I’ll bear it in mind, Cal.”

  “You’ll want to talk to Dave Pritzer, over in HR.”

  Dennis decides to deploy his beloved blank stare.

  “Dave will walk you through the application process,” Rogers says. There is a little tremor of uncertainty in his voice. Knowing where the weakness is in a person is a source of great strength for Dennis. It’s like splitting logs: You look for a crack, a fault line, and that’s where you bring down the maul’s blow—voilà! Firewood.

  “I’ve got a lot going on, Cal. You want to tell me why you asked me to come in?”

  “Three things, Dennis.” Rogers linked the pointer finger of his right hand onto the crooked pointer of his left. It made him feel better—now, and always—to enumerate things. It suggested a grand design, and it projected authority. “You’re aware of the directive regarding Mayor Morris’s son.”

  “Ah. The elusive Dylan,” Dennis says.

  “Well, just make sure you keep in mind that His Honor would be furious with us if anything happened to that boy.”

  “We’ve been over this,” Dennis says.

  “Two.” Now two fingers from the right hand are hooked onto the left pointer. “We’ve lost one of our subjects. The boy you brought in last week from the Upper West Side.”

  “He escaped?”

  Rogers’s eyes open wide for an instant, and his head snaps back, as if recoiling from the unspeakable horror of the thought of one of the subjects making his way out of the facility and back into the world. “Oh, no, not escaped. Expired.”

  “Really? What happened?”

  “We’re working on it. But we need to step up operations a bit. We want a substitute for him—it was frustrating because he was, right off the bat, yielding some very exciting results. But the thing is, we’re expanding the whole project. The more we learn about these creatures, the more we are…I don’t know what the word is here. I think I’m going to say inspired. Yes, we’re inspired by what we are finding them capable of. We’re bringing in new teams of researchers, we’re expanding hours.”

  “Yes,” Dennis says. Despite having his guard up, he is allowing himself to feel just a little bit collegial. In his heart, he is a team player, and it is his great misfortune, or so he believes, that his work has been mainly freelance, without coworkers and the camaraderie and intellectual stimulation that he imagines would be his if he were working inside this very building, if the powers that be would somehow find it within themselves to overlook his spotty credentials and recognize his intelligence and his dedication.

  “I always thought there was a lot more we could be doing with this than coming up with another product to increase sexual health in older men.” Dennis doesn’t like even saying sexual, and he clears his throat, as if the word has left a weird taste behind. “I think people are having all the sex they should be having anyhow—they don’t need to be taking pills or drinking something to be doing it to each other more.” He cannot help adding that, although he knows full well that very few people agree with him, especially here in a laboratory where all the smocks are chasing after a formula that can turn a limp ding-dong into solid rock.

  “Well, aren’t you the quick study,” Rogers says, unaware of the condescension in his tone. “You’re absolutely right. There are many, many possible applications we are evaluating, everything from the cosmetic to the lifesaving. Needless to say, we are all completely excited. The only damper on the whole enterprise is that we must do it with a degree of confidentiality. A high degree, actually.”

  “Like complete secrecy,” Dennis says.

  Rogers dismisses the candor with a wave. “Our path to figuring out just how to use the biochemistry we have here would have been a lot easier if a couple of conditions had been met.” He looks at his hands, realizing he has already used both of them for the first countdown, and proceeds without visual backup. “First, if we’d gotten wind of this mutation a bit earlier and had had a chance to work with some of these little creatures before they matured, that would have been extremely helpful. But, alas, that was not the case.”

  “Some of them are still pretty young,” Dennis says.

  “Yes. And some have delayed maturation. Those twins who you were meant to collect for us.”

  Dennis nods.

  “The ones you let get away.”

  “I’m working on it. I know where they live. I mean, you know, I have to be careful. I can’t just grab them in broad daylight.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you have all kinds of little tricks up your sleeve, Dennis. Just make sure you do it.” Rogers glances down at the folder again. “Twisden. Adam and Alice. We have reason to believe they are potential genetic gold mines. While they were in school, they exhibited virtually no antisocial behaviors. We have obtained records that track them through their various foster homes, and they were obedient, well mannered; one foster parent even described the boy as meek. Yet they have both done well athletically. And their parents were extreme cases. The mother, as you know, quite literally destroyed our Slovenian friend from whom they got their treatments. Of course, you can never be sure, but our hunch is that these twins may have the perfect balance. They have the hybrid vigor we are hoping to duplicate but are still human enough so we can get whatever we come up with approved. If we could reproduce what is running through their veins, it would save us a year, maybe more. And a lot of hassle with the FDA.”

  “I’m on it,” Dennis says.

  “We’re already getting amazing results. We’re turning our rats into damned geniuses. One shot of blood taken from those kids, and the rats are solving mazes thirty to forty times faster than the control group. Those idiots in Washington have made it tricky for us to get primates for our work, but we have our ways. And the results we’ve gotten in our chimp trials have been very exciting. Tumors shrunk. Thirty-five percent increase in connectivity between brain cells. Signs of aging reversed. Frankly, I can hardly wait to take it myself.” He smiles. “And the way we’ve been working—round the clock!—we’re all going to need it.”

  Dennis swallows. It’s breaking his heart to hear all this. He should be in the lab, not in some fricking truck wrestling stinky teenagers.

  But Rogers does not recognize the distress in Dennis’s eyes—or if he does, he chooses to ignore it.

  “You know, a lot of this would not have been necessary if we could have made use of the original research done by this Dr. Slobodan Kis, in Slovenia. But he was murdered, and shortly after his laboratory was dismantled; all traces of his work vanished. Government job, no doubt. We think his papers were burned, but perhaps they’re somewhere on the bottom of Lake Bled. We sent people over and…” Rogers shakes his head sadly. “It’s as if the man never existed. No one will say a word—no one ever worked with him or studied with him. It’s like the Soviet Union in the 1940s. The man has simply been eradicated, purged, removed from the human alphabet. So we’re on our own.” He sighs, maybe self-moved by what he perceives as the trials and tribulations of his own life. “Onward and upward with R and D. Right? The good news is we’ve got a team of truly great and just altogether dedicated researchers working on this.”

  “Yes, that is good news,” Dennis says, folding his arms across his chest.

  “That’s why we’re going to need new subjects and plenty of them as soon as possible. Luckily, there are a lot of those little creatures in this city. Mainly they are homeless, living like animals in our parks, making messes, just being a nuisance—and, frankly, on their way to becoming more than a nuisance. You’ve seen it yourself, I’m sure. As they mature, they can go from mischief to violence, and we certainly don’t want to be in a position where we have to hunt them down with high-powered rifles like a bunch of ranchers in Utah protecting their sheep from packs of coyote. I don’t think that would look very good on the six o’clock news. You understand?”

>   “Yeah. Sure. That’s point number two. You want me to step it up. But you said there were three things. What’s the third?”

  “The third is you, Mr. Keswick. You.”

  “Me?”

  “You were seen coming here on your own at night. You were seen spending a lot of time here for some reason that had nothing to do with your job or with Borman business, lurking like a criminal just outside the perimeter of our property. We don’t want that. Not from you. Not from anyone. It draws attention. We are going to have all the attention anyone could ever want once we roll out the drugs we are going to synthesize from our work here. But until then, we don’t want any attention. None whatsoever.”

  Dennis opens his mouth, prepared to defend himself against the insinuations—hell, they were a lot more than insinuations; he was being accused, he was being threatened. But Rogers raises his left hand—relieved now from its counting duties—to silence him.

  “This is more than a matter of your ability to follow the regulations, Mr. Keswick. This is an existential issue that goes straight to the heart of our ability to maintain security and fulfill our mission. If you are unable to comply with these very reasonable expectations, you will, without further warning, be terminated. You understand? Do you? Do you fully understand what I am saying to you?”

  Dennis slowly nods. He fully understands. He understands that he was caught on CCC when he visited the site; he understands that despite his services, the smocks think of him as a goon who can easily be replaced, and he also understands that when Rogers (and the Borman brass that stand behind him) says terminated, he’s not talking about a pink slip and two weeks’ severance pay. He’s talking about the real kind of severance, the kind in which, say, your head is severed from your body.

  Adam stands in the tub adjusting the temperature of the shower. He frowns because the water pressure sucks here in this ramshackle apartment on Riverside Drive—it’s worse than the worst of the foster homes Adam drifted through over the two years between his parents’ deaths and his aunt Cynthia adopting him.

  He winces. Thinking of Cynthia makes him feel bad for a moment. He knows she is worried. Oh, well, there’s nothing to be done about it…

  The water temperature is right, or at least as right as he is going to get it. He looks down and sees the water pooling over the drain, which, as Rodolfo warned him, is clogged with hair. There’s an economy-sized bottle of Liquid-Plumr on the side of the tub, but when Adam picks it up, he can feel it’s empty.

  Adam steps into the spray of water broadcast by the shower’s corroded head. He lifts his right arm and worriedly runs his finger along his armpit’s moist skin. A single, nearly invisible hair is growing, and he pinches the top of it and yanks it out. He hunches his shoulder until it touches his cheek and sniffs. A very faint odor of something that reminds him of turkey soup. Uh-oh. He is on constant lookout for early signs that his body is transforming, and he knows that a change in your body’s smell—a deepening, an intensifying—is an early volley puberty shoots across the bow of childhood. Next thing you know, the pirates of adolescence have boarded your ship…

  Adam grabs the soap. Once this perfumed bar was animal fat, and now it seems to be reverting to its original state. Hairs, long and short, dark and yellowish, are embedded everywhere in that slippery pinkish parallelogram. Adam tries to pick the hairs out of the soap, but there are too many, and he is defeated by the hopelessness of the task. He decides the hot water alone will be enough to wash him clean. He steps farther into the spray, letting the water beat against the top of his head. He tilts back, opens his mouth, and lets the water fill it. He glances down at his lower half. Every time he visually visits this part of his body, his heart quivers with anxiety—one day his stuff is going to be bigger, encircled by a disgusting doughnut of hair; one day the silvery down on his shins is going to darken and curl. Who knows? Even the knuckles on his toes might sprout their own wiry vegetation.

  He inspects himself through a squint. So far, so good.

  His shower completed, Adam steps out of the tub. The racks are jammed with towels, and the black-and-white-tile floor is strewn with everything from washcloths to bath sheets, not one of them dry, all of them redolent. Adam chooses the least gross one he can find and quickly dries himself as best he can, keeping his eyes half closed so he won’t see something on his own body he doesn’t care to see.

  Rodolfo—whom Adam has never trusted, and whom he now trusts less than ever—has come back from their house with two laundry bags full of their clothes. It’s sort of annoying that the clothes that Cynthia folded so nicely have all been crammed together and wrinkled, but nevertheless, Adam is happy to see his Levi’s with the perfectly frayed cuffs and his green Bruno Mars T-shirt that he has owned since he was nine and that still (sort of ) fits him.

  Adam emerges from the bathroom. The moisture from the shower is soaking through his clothes—but it’s preferable to him than using any more of the towels. He shakes his hair to get some of the wetness off, and the shake moves down his entire body—his shoulders, his torso, his hips, his rear. Don’t do that, he thinks. You’re acting like a dog.

  He walks to the front of the apartment, where he’d left Alice, Dylan, and Rodolfo before taking his shower. But they are gone. The visual clutter here is extreme—racing bikes, a broken Segway, video games, a foosball table, an attic’s worth of furniture, crumpled potato-chip bags, crushed cans of energy drinks, candy wrappers—and at first, Adam doesn’t see that someone is there.

  It’s Polly, kneeling in front of the sofa. On it is a yellow tin tray rescued from an old Thames and Kosmos chemistry set, but in place of the playthings that were originally held there are thirty vials of blood, each with a little piece of masking tape on it. Using a goofy ballpoint pen—the case is sparkling, and the back end supports a little rubber troll holding a chartreuse feather—Polly is numbering each of the vials.

  “Hi,” Adam says, not wanting to startle her.

  “You looking for your sister?” Polly asks without glancing at him.

  “I guess.”

  “She is in Rodolfo’s room,” Polly says in a tone that invites him to draw the most dire conclusions from that simple fact. She might as well have said they were taking their clothes off or were perched on the windowsill sky-grabbing at the pigeons.

  “Where’s that?”

  “End of the hall. The big-door room.” She finally does glance at Adam. “I wouldn’t go there, though. Rule number two hundred forty-four: Come knocking when the door is closed, get ready for a punch in the nose.”

  “For real?”

  “Totally.”

  Adam gives the hallway a long look. He hears music. He can’t tell what the song is. Just the stiff bang of a drum, the deep slur of the bass, a voice that sounds as if it were coming from a tomb, a monster in a tomb, but in the fakiest way. Here’s what Adam knows about monsters: Most of them look real regular. They like fish tacos and cry at stupid sad movies and some of them hold your hand when they walk you to school…

  “So what’s that?” Adam says, looking over at Polly and the neatly arranged, carefully labeled vials of blood. She is wearing a pair of black shorts and a white T-shirt that has a couple of bloody streaks on it. The sleeves are rolled up. Her arms are like sticks, like the arms of a little princess who’d never done a day’s work, who didn’t even have to carry her own toothbrush. Her legs are skinny too, and Adam guesses that under that T-shirt is a chest no different than a boy’s. She is doing what Alice is doing, holding back the rising river of puberty with a dam built of low-calorie days.

  “Didn’t Rodolfo explain to you?” She has a kind of head-of-the-class voice, the tone of the kid who’s always first with all the right answers.

  “I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  “Then no. I don’t know. Explain what?”

  “We pay for this place with these.” She picks up a vial, shakes it back and forth.

  “What is it?”
r />   “It’s us. Some of us, anyhow. Peeps out there pay to have a little taste so they can be young and stuff. Me’s—” She slaps herself on the forehead. “Ye gods, I’m starting to talk like the rest of them. I. I am in charge of organizing the product, keeping track of what goes out.” She picks up a narrow ledger with a maroon cover. “It all goes in here.”

  “Where do you get the blood?”

  “From arms. Where did you think? Needles. Stick it in, suck it out.”

  Adam makes a face.

  “You’re not very tough, are you?” Polly asks.

  “Maybe I am and maybe I’m not.”

  “I think you’re not.”

  “Wanna try me?”

  Polly smiles. She slowly stands up. Her face is very, very serious. Her brows are hooded over her intense green eyes, and she holds her bony fists in front of her, moving them in a tight circle, like a slow-motion boxer. She moves ever closer to Adam, who reluctantly raises his hand, not to strike but to defend.

  “I’m serious,” he says.

  “I am too,” says Polly.

  She moves ever closer. There are little flecks of darkness in her green eyes. The tear ducts are bright pink. Her nostrils dilate and constrict, dilate, constrict, dilate, constrict. And all of a sudden her head jerks forward like a snake striking its prey. Startled—hell, scared—Adam tries to get out of her way, afraid that she is going to head-butt him and knock him unconscious. But she has anticipated his move and her hand is on the back of his head. She holds him steady and…what? She kisses him full on the mouth.

  It’s a first. His mother used to kiss his cheek. His father used to tousle his hair. His new mother seems afraid of him, though she kissed his eyelids when she thought he was sleeping. Once, when he was in second grade at his old school, he fell in the hall running to class and Mrs. McBurney swooped him up—she was a giant of a woman, with a mole on her face as big and moist as a puppy’s nose—gave him a gigantic, explosive raspberry on his bare stomach, and then put him down on his feet again and went on her merry way.