“Get started. I don’t have all day.”
He tossed the garbage bag to Theena. Her repulsion was priceless.
Rothchilde sat in a chair and kept a bored eye on the doctors while they set Halloran’s head in a vice.
They were all too busy to notice the EEG machine sitting on a table in the back.
Manny’s EEG machine, scribbling down a continuous jagged line of Beta waves on an endless ream of paper.
Jack Kilborn
Disturb
Manny opened his eyes to pain.
It was an alarming experience. Not the pain-he was used to that. But the feeling of waking up. That was something he hadn’t done in a long time.
He looked around and discovered he was in the lobby of the DruTech Building. There was blood all around him. When he tried to sit up, he realized the blood was his.
“You don’t look so good.”
David was staring at him, reflected in a chrome garbage can that had fallen over.
It was one of those moments of instant clarity, like a fog lifting. All at once Manny understood.
He only saw David when he looked in a mirror.
Manny had seen David at Dr. O’Neil’s place. He’d gone there to warn the doctor, to tell him he had to hide. But David had gotten there first. The apartment looked like a slaughterhouse. David had been sitting on the sofa, eating a box of chalk.
Manny had tasted chalk, too.
He tried to remember prior conversations with David. They all involved a mirror of some kind. Through the vanity mirror in Townsend’s bathroom. In his bed back at DruTech, which faced a dresser with the oversized mirror. Was there a mirror at the hospital?
“The window, next to your bed. You could see my reflection in there.”
Manny stared at the garbage can.
“I’m you.”
“Don’t act so surprised. This is news to me, too.”
“You’re not really my brother. You’re me.”
“We’re two sides of the same coin, Manny. This is what I’ve been trying to tell you. This is what that drug has done to us.”
Manny closed his eyes, tight as he could. He tried to remember the night of the banquet, when David killed Dr. Nikos. But the memory didn’t exist. He remembered going into the bathroom, seeing David, and then nothing else.
“That memory is mine, Manny.” When David talked, it was like a speaker emanating from the middle of Manny’s head. “It’s like we’re two people, sharing one body. I have my thoughts, you have yours.”
Manny began to shake, the tears streaming down the sides of his head.
“How many people have we killed, David?”
“Do you want to see?”
He didn’t. God help him, he didn’t want to see.
“I think I can show you the memories. They’re yours, too. We’re of one mind.”
“Please, don’t.”
The feeling was similar to deja vu, like suddenly remembering something that you’d known all along, but many times stronger. The memories flooded into his head all at once, overpowering him. He saw everything… Dr. Nikos… Dr. Townsend… Dr. Fletcher… please make it stop… Dr. O’Neil… Dr. Myrnowski… no more oh god there’s more… a big man with a gun… and then a smaller man, the ax chopping and chopping…
Manny threw up. He watched David throw up as well.
“How about Theena?”
“She’s in the lab, downstairs. We were going to kill her, too. But we’ve been shot a few times.”
Manny touched his chest and David let him see the shots, relive the experience. The small man, Dr. May, Albert Rothchilde…
“We should be dead.”
David agreed. “But we’re not. We can’t die. Not like before. I won’t die again like before.”
Manny had been in gym class when the assistant principal pulled him aside, gave him the news that his older brother David had killed himself at the juvenile correctional institution. The institution he’d been sent to because Manny tattled on him.
“You’re not really David. David’s dead.”
“His body, yes. But your memories keep him alive. Your guilt made him grow. And the N-Som-well, you know what a bad deal that turned out to be.”
Manny could remember his reaction to David’s death. How he became withdrawn, violent. Almost as if he was filling the void created by his brother’s absence. Manny became the one who got into trouble all the time. Trouble that continued into adulthood with, arrest after arrest.
But never murder.
Manny bitterly laughed, the action causing the pain in his chest to flare.
“I should have killed you when you asked.”
“It’s too late now.”
Manny shook his head. It wasn’t too late. The next chance he got, he was ending it.
“Won’t work, Manny. First of all, we don’t die easily. But mostly, I won’t allow it.”
“You won’t allow it? It’s my body.”
The face reflected in the garbage can changed. At one moment, Manny was looking at David’s reflection. Then there was a shift, and he could sense that it was David who was looking at him.
“I’m in control now, Manny. You follow my will.”
Manny experienced a feeling of isolation, darkness. He tried to cry out, but he kept getting smaller and smaller, his vision dimming. His own mind was trapping him, shielding him from his own senses. He tried to scream, but nothing came out.
A moment later, he was gone.
David sat up. He could feel Manny inside him, struggling to free himself, like a tiny fly in a web.
It was a strange experience, but an understandable one. The mind was a mysterious thing, but science was demystifying it a bit more every day. David knew enough to grasp what was happening to his.
Memory is chemical. He could remember an early lecture from Dr. Nikos, talking about experiments with flatworms. They could be taught simple stimulus/response reactions, and these reactions could be passed on from Group A to Group B by feeding Group B the brains of Group A.
In his free time, of which he had a lot, he’d read about the collective unconscious, and inherited memories known as archetypes. These were common in animals. How could horses walk minutes after birth? How did salmon know to travel upstream to spawn? It was called instinct, a genetic imprint passed on to offspring. A form of inherited memory.
But it was so much more than memory. Every thought was a chemical reaction happening in the brain. Movement, speech, emotion, motor skills; these could all be removed with a scalpel or overridden by an electric probe.
Even the personality was nothing more than a complicated exchange of neurotransmitters. Drugs can alter mood and control behavior. A blow to the head could turn a nice person into a permanent jerk, and a lobotomy could tame even the most savage psychotic.
David was simply a result of complicated chemistry and brain damage. Every time he took N-Som, a residual amount stayed in his brain-a stockpile of other people’s neurotransmitters. It literally took root, changing his chemical structure, allowing Manny’s violent thoughts to grow until they’d taken over the core of his personality.
A maniac is born.
David sat up, ignoring the pain. He no longer needed thoughts of revenge to compel him to kill. The compulsion existed without logic; it was an emotional response. And David’s overriding emotion was hatred. He didn’t question it. He just went with the flow.
David got to his feet, wobbling a bit. A coughing fit brought up quite a lot of blood. He took a few tentative steps until he was sure he could trust his legs.
His ax was waiting for him, near the security desk.
Then he headed for the emergency staircase.
“A hunting we will go.”
He was just opening the front door when he saw someone walk into the lobby.
Jack Kilborn
Disturb
Special Agent Smith didn’t consider himself crooked.
He’d entered the Bureau out of college, young and full of energy. The FBI had been his dream job. The pulse-pounding training he’d gotten at Quantico promised him a career filled with thrills and shoot-outs and manhunts and TV interviews.
But real life conspired against him.
He broke his ankle tripping down a flight of stairs just one week after graduation.
Three operations later, Smith still didn’t have full use of his foot. He was assigned to the Chicago office, riding a desk. Smith had become a bureaucrat, which was a fate he’d been purposely trying to avoid when he joined the Feds in the first place.