The lights began blinking on, stinging Roland’s eyes. All their faces were pale. He picked up Wendy’s clothes and dropped them on her lap.
“Get dressed,” he said.
“What happened?” she asked.
“I’ll tell you later.”
“Make Briggs give us the Halcyon,” Alexis said, standing outside the cage and holding her husband with fierce desperation. “You can go crazy if you want, but we still have to deal with this.”
Roland felt the rage flood him, and he saw Susan’s bruised and blood-spattered body, and then he imagined Alexis with a bright red hole in the middle of her forehead.
But you can’t bury the past. Halcyon just helps you lie to yourself, and I already know how to do that.
But he could tell he was getting angry, so he kicked the base of Wendy’s chair. He grunted in pain. He might have broken his big toe, but it felt good.
That was the trick behind it all. God invented suffering because the world had no meaning without it. And without pain, you had no need for God, because you didn’t need relief. Pain served a higher purpose, maybe the only purpose.
And pain felt kind of good when you got used it.
At least it was always there when you needed it.
“All right, Briggs, give them their monkey juice, before I get tired of playing Mr. Nice Guy,” he said, his jaws tight.
Briggs moved to an old industrial locker beneath his computer and fumbled with the key. He opened it and brought out a plastic bottle about the size of a quart jar.
“That other stuff, too,” Roland said, loving his pain. “The Seethe.”
Briggs brought out a pint of clear liquid in a glass jar.
“That’s all?” Alexis said.
“He’s got to have more,” Mark said. “He promised Burchfield enough Seethe to dose an army.”
“You think this is easy?” Briggs said. “You, better than anybody, Alexis, should know you don’t just cook up this stuff in a bathtub like a meth redneck.” He lifted his hand to indicate the equipment in his office. “Look what I’ve had to work with. And now my data’s destroyed. I’ll have to reconstruct it from memory.”
“I think you’re holding out,” Roland said. “And I don’t give a shit who ends up with it, as long as it isn’t you, and as long as you never put any more of it into Wendy.”
“He’s got more,” Mark said.
“CRO can shove it up their asses,” Roland said, forcing himself to focus on Wendy, who was struggling to slide one slim leg into her pants. “Now, give me the key to the front door and open the gate, and if I have to come back here, I’m going to be a little unhappy.”
His heart felt like a bottomless black hole. But that was okay. It was deep enough to swallow anything.
He took the key from Briggs and put his free arm around Wendy. “Come on, babe.”
They limped a few steps in the direction of the main entrance, Roland walking backwards. He debated locking the three people in Briggs’s cage, and his money would be on Alexis to be the last one standing. That was one cunning bitch.
“Look out!” Alexis yelled, and he dodged on instinct.
Briggs was a blur of movement, and the glass jar hit Roland’s shoulder and bounced to the floor, shattering, its liquid seeping out and soaking into the concrete. Roland pulled the trigger twice before he even thought about it.
Briggs gave a grin, winked at Wendy, and then he collapsed. The shirt hadn’t stopped bullets after all.
The plastic bottle busted open as Briggs dropped it, and dozens of green pills rolled across the floor. One crunched under Roland’s foot as he escorted Wendy past the rusting equipment.
He thought about collecting a few pills, but decided he’d rather take his chances with madness rather than the sick brain candy of Dr. Sebastian Briggs.
“Did you kill somebody?” Wendy murmured.
“Maybe,” he said. “I don’t remember.”
One thing he did remember. He sure as hell wasn’t David Underwood.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Alexis frantically gathered the pills as they rolled across the floor.
She couldn’t believe this was all the Halcyon Briggs had manufactured. She fought an urge to kick his sorry corpse.
“My head’s clearing a little,” Mark said. “But my tooth is killing me.”
“The gas has lower efficacy than the other forms. You’ll make it.”
“Yes, Dr. Morgan.”
“Help me pick up these pills.”
“I have to let the others out first. If they haven’t eaten each other’s livers, that is.”
“That’s not funny.” She glanced at the bloody plow blade.
“How are you doing? Is the Halcyon working?”
“Barely enough.” You fucker. You’ll probably tell CRO everything. And all this could be mine.
“You look okay. I can leave you alone for a minute, huh?”
“Sure.”
As Mark jogged off, she retrieved the plastic bottle and began dropping pills in it-tick tick tick.
She wondered how long the Seethe would run through her system without the Halcyon suppressing it. It could be hours, or it could be days-or maybe the rest of her life. As far as she could tell, she was the only one who’d been injected with the serum form, though God only knew what David Underwood had gone through or how long he’d been imprisoned in the Monkey House.
Briggs probably had a backup hard drive somewhere. And he’d probably been too paranoid to move data off- site, so it would be here somewhere.
She glanced at his face and the blank eyes staring past the world. Then again, secrets to Seethe and Halcyon might be locked in the dead vault of his brain.
Her eyes kept going to the plow blade and she recalled how it had felt driving the tip through Kleingarten’s skull. She’d never felt so alive and powerful. And she could have that feeling a long time, if she cracked the formula.
Fear is its own kind of pleasure. Up there, it all gets cross-wired.
A few of the pills had rolled into the pool of Sebastian Briggs’s blood. She fished them out, wiping them one by one, and slipped them into her pocket. She’d retrieved most of the pills by the time the others returned.
Anita stood between Burchfield and an unsettled Wallace Forsyth. Mark was supporting a pale skeleton she recognized as David.
“You killed Susan,” David said, upon recognizing her.
Alexis glanced at the blade. As the Halcyon eased, she didn’t want this transitional feeling to end-that cliff edge of awareness, the black abyss on one side and the peaceful plateau of forgetfulness on the other.
Two kinds of oblivion.
No choice, really.
“No,” she said. “She died of fright.”
Anita nodded, closing a couple of buttons on her blouse with shaking fingers. “Yuh…yeah. It was a fake experiment, David. It was make-believe.”
Burchfield looked subdued and embarrassed. He cleared his throat and attempted to sound authoritative, but he failed. “This is official property of the U.S. government, Dr. Morgan.”
“Shut up, Senator,” Mark said, pointing to the monitor bank. “The cameras recorded your behavior. Fox News will love it.”
“Are you threatening me, Morgan?”
