The words hurt to say: “A teacher.”
Carbajal tsked. “Even worse. People trust teachers. If he started talking—well, shit. I don’t want to say this. I’m not a cruel person. But Major Dawkins, any of those Biatalik fucks…”
“The major was a friend! He loved my dad! He wouldn’t have tried to trick him!”
“Did I say he wasn’t a friend? He probably did love him. And thought that this was his only shot to live.” Carbajal sighed. “Doesn’t matter. Your dad’s dead now. They would have killed him. Sorry, but that’s how it is.”
Liv had never believed anything different, despite Doug’s enticements that, by spreading the skinner’s blood, they might prompt some sort of exchange. No one, though, had ever pronounced his death aloud. It hit her like a slap. She saw black spots. Strangely, though, she was grateful. This stranger had planted a gravestone where the rest of them should have long ago.
“None of it was super-villain shit,” Carbajal continued. “It never starts that way. People always think they’re doing the right thing. Two doctors headed it up, Faddon and Nance. The best and brightest. I’m sure Mengele was the best and brightest, too. Please tell me your school teaches you about Mengele? This Faddon and Nance, their plan was to rid the world of degenerative disease. Who’s going to argue with that? Move the pancreas over here so it’s easier for doctors to access. Thicken a bone plate over there to protect vital organs. Accelerated eugenics, that’s all it was. I’m sure they had a nice word for it. Me, I’d call it mutation. The one you saw, what did he look like?”
He—the pronoun punctured her. A human. A man. A sick, struggling patient that, instead of helping, they’d ground through the gears of a second hell.
“Eyes,” she sputtered. “Big eyes.”
“That’s easy: superior vision.”
“A second knee. It bent back.”
“Like an animal. Land speed would be off the charts.”
“Ribs. On the outside.”
“Organic body armor. You see where this is headed?”
Liv tried to nod, but instead her head only shook, back and forth.
“Military applications,” Carbajal drawled. “They got a way of creeping in. It’s fucking Faustian. At least your teachers taught you Faust, didn’t they? Dr. Nance got cold feet. She was young, idealistic, way over her head. She sought me out. It was some Deep Throat shit. Notes left on my car. Coded phone messages. She tells me they’re using prisoners. Lifers. Giving them get-out-of-jail-free cards in exchange for a year or two of experiments. I’m not going to lie, little girl. It was exciting. I’m a pissant reporter in dull-as-a-board Iowa—right?—and here’s this nuclear bomb placed in my lap. I’m seeing Pulitzers. I’m seeing Nobel Prizes. So I went in alone. Had my camera, my recorder. God, I was stupid. So, so, so, so stupid.”
He stared at his hand for a while, as if craving the mints he held but unable to spur his arm into action. When he spoke again, his quaggy voice was further jelled by emotion.
“Sorry, but here’s the truth, and you deserve to know it. You and your friend are no better than Faddon and Nance. You really convinced yourself you were doing good by doing bad? That’s the oldest self-deception in the book. You’re going to find out what that kind of deception does to you when you get older. When it’s just you and your nightmares, night after night after night.”
Liv thought of her comfortable, rumpled bed, of holding A, and wondered if she would ever sleep so well again.
“Biatalik fell apart,” Carbajal sighed. “Of course it did. The prisoners, their bodies all rearranged—most of them weren’t going to live. And the ones who did? Those walking petri dishes? You can’t push men like that back into society. You’ll end up with a whole slew of Anatoli Bugorskis, out there telling the truth. Far as I know, the compound was sealed up, and the whole program brushed under the rug.”
“The survivors,” Liv whispered.
“What happened to them? What do you think? Who’s going to bemoan losing a few rapists and murderers? On the other hand, there’s you. You have one of them in custody. He escaped. Hid out somewhere. My god, the life he must have lived. The world—right?—it never fails to astound.”
“And the doctors?” Liv managed.
Carbajal shrugged. “A job like that, you sign away constitutional rights. Best-case scenario, they dropped into the shadows, same as me. You want to know the truth? Mr. Brown’s thousands of followers don’t mean shit. End of the day, I’m still here in my hidey-hole, no better off than those prisoners. I keep hoping one day I’ll get a private message on the forums, and it’ll be Dr. Faddon or Dr. Nance. Wouldn’t that be poetic? To find out we all ended up alone in dark little rooms?”
Liv’s eyes had fully adjusted to the murk. This only made the evidence of Carbajal’s life more oppressive. An assortment of liquor bottles to put Aggie’s old collection to shame. A garbage can overflowing with TV dinner trays. An empty aquarium lined with scum, a listless stab at companionship. A fedora, the dapper accent of the roving reporter, relegated to a dusty top shelf, never to be worn again.
“You satisfied?” Carbajal clacked the Tic Tacs to the table. “You get what you came for?”
Had she come to be ruined? That’s what she’d got. The world outside, so bright and of such depth, seemed unreal to her now, the idea of returning to it revolting. How could she go back to Bloughton and smile at her mother, joke with her friends, and stand in front of teachers, all while knowing what she’d done? The only way to convince herself she didn’t belong in this crypt was to reject all of it.
“I don’t believe it,” she said from clenched teeth. “There’s no proof.”
Carbajal’s right eyebrow rose.
“The girl wants proof? Here’s proof: Your father got one glimpse and ended up dead. Here’s proof: Faddon and Nance, verifiable geniuses, wiped off the face of the earth. Here’s proof: Fourteen months ago in Florida, Major Dawkins blew his head off with a military sidearm.”
A picture of the major popped inside Liv’s mind, his bullish forehead, his block chin, his mustache so neat and silver it might have been made of steel, followed by a second picture, all those straight, hale lines scrambled into wet, red meat. Liv gasped to refute the whole idea but was silenced by Carbajal’s shout.
“You want more proof? Do you?”
He swung upward from his chair with unforeseen agility. In the same fluid motion, he ducked his face in front of Liv while thumbing the switch on a table-side lamp. The click was soft, and the bulb lit up a wan, orange wash, but it was enough to overpower the blacked-out windows.
The left half of Carbajal’s face, shrouded in gloom until that instant, was a glossy, mealy cluster of fatty extrusions and thick patches of stiff hair. It held a roughly human shape, like a mannequin head melted and stirred with a stick, but the ballooned left eye and deep canal of the left cheek defied all rationalities of muscle and bone. The jump from the chair made Carbajal pant, and Liv watched a sheer lamina of skin pulse where the left half of his mouth should have been.
“A souvenir from my visit to their lab,” he said. “They weren’t overly thrilled by my proposed exposé.”