Stormbreak (The Serenity Strain Book 1) Page 3

  When she wasn’t thinking about Megan, other emotions swirled around inside her in a maelstrom. Gratitude to Mark, ironically, that she hadn’t been the one to earn the crosshairs of family disgust for pursuing the divorce. Self-doubt and some shame that he’d gone outside the marriage to fill a desire for sex and questioning within herself that her inability to satisfy him was at least partly to blame. She’d even considered trying the latest get-thin-quick drug, Slenderex, to make herself more attractive to him.

  Then, righteous indignation that no, it wasn’t her fault; she was the victim here, and he either needed to learn to keep it in his pants or—never mind, it was too late for the “or” part. Grief that her marriage, something she’d loved so fiercely for a long time, had died. It was, for Lauryn, like losing two best friends at the same time—one of them Mark, her friend and lover, and the other her feeling of security in what she’d thought was a lifelong partnership.

  Not long after discovering the affair, she’d been lying on the couch alone, watching a bad sci-fi movie but distracted by her own racing thoughts. The movie monster was a giant octopus, and a woman was rescued from the creature by having its tentacles peeled off her. She’d screamed in pain as each one, secured by dozens of suction cups, was pried from her skin. But she’d lived.

  That’s what it felt like to Lauryn as her marriage died. Like the connection between her and Mark was formed by emotional tentacles binding them both in love, trust, and shared interests, making two lesser halves into a greater whole.

  After discovering the affair, when Lauryn finally accepted the marriage was dying, it felt like someone was prying the tentacles away from her heart, one suction cup at a time. Every time a wave of mourning washed over her, it felt like her love for Mark, for their marriage together, was being extracted from her, slowly and torturously.

  But on better days like today, she largely felt relief that an end was in sight. They would all move on with their lives and she and Mark would, no matter what, always put Megan first. It was the one thing they could still agree on.

  But hope for a happier future had yet to dawn in her heart. Anger, her constant companion now, replaced Mark there. The easiest thing to feel, and the one emotion that every other emotion became these days. Frustration-anger, fear-anger, jealousy-anger. She hated Mark for the affair, though a part of her knew his straying had handed her the perfect, morally acceptable excuse for pursuing a divorce. A divorce she didn’t really want because she feared being alone. Living alone, paying the bills alone. Never finding love again. But a divorce apparently the both of them needed.

  The driver of the truck in front of her threw on his brakes. She barely noticed in time and veered toward the shoulder, then swerved back into her lane as the truck moved over. She recognized Pickup Man, who had the courtesy to slow down before flipping her off. She was suddenly aware she’d been tailgating him for a while. Her speeder-self had returned with a vengeance. Admonished, she just stared as he sneered and hit the accelerator, the loud, popping rumble of his tailpipe a machine gun aimed in her direction.

  “Goddamn men and their double-fucking-standards!” Lauryn yelled at his tailgate.

  Always, the anger.

  * * *

  “It doesn’t matter,” Lauryn said dismissively.

  Mark was looking out the window, clearly uncomfortable with the whole discussion. As usual.

  “Of course it matters, Lauryn,” said Marci Binford. Their marriage counselor had a placating quality to her voice that grated on Lauryn. By the time they were thirty minutes into a session, as they were now, it drove her right up the wall. “Mark has not been able to keep the promise he made you. That matters.”

  “I don’t give a damn anymore!”

  Binford closed her mouth, exhaling through her nose. The room was silent for a few seconds. “From your outburst, it’s pretty clear that you do. Is this, for you, one more broken promise?”

  “Hey,” said Mark. “I’m sitting right here.”

  Binford looked at him and he withered. His eyes went left again, out the window. “Mark, we’re trying to get to how Lauryn feels about your continuing the affair. After you’d agreed to end it for the sake of your marriage.” Her voice dripped, and not with honey.

  “Look,” said Lauryn, “I just think we’re at a place now where none of this matters anymore. Not just … not just the affair, none of it.”

  Mark was drumming his index finger on the arm of the couch, Binford noted. And there went the foot tap.

  “Mark, does it make you uncomfortable to hear Lauryn say that?”

  He turned his own what-the-hell-do-you-think? stare on her. “This whole process makes me uncomfortable.”

  “Understandable. Perhaps you’re experiencing feelings of guilt, since it was you that went outside the marriage.”

  Mark sighed. “Which we’ve established. Over and over again.”

  “Oh my God,” exploded Lauryn, turning on the couch to face him. “Really? Really? Do we need to feel sorry for you now? Did your dick lead you astray? Mark, I’m so sorry you were born a man! Life has been so hard—ha!—for you! It’s okay, honey. We women have our problems, too!” Lauryn’s voice boomed off the walls.

  “I wasn’t asking you to feel sorry for me. This hasn’t been easy for me, either.”

  “This is good,” said Binford. “We’re getting to real feelings here.”

  “Shut up,” they responded together.

  “Not easy for you,” repeated Lauryn. “Well—and I’m just guessing here—I bet it’s been easier for you than it has been for me. You don’t see me running to a co-worker to get laid.”

  That was enough for Mark. “Guilty as charged! Again!” He paused, letting his engine rev up. “But I don’t blame you. I’ve seen the Neanderthals you work with!”

  “Okay guys—”

  “And you’ve just, once again, shown how little you actually pay attention to what’s really being said,” Lauryn shot back.

  Mark heaved a sigh. He placed his hands on his thighs, his right index finger tapping incessantly. He stood up. “I’m done.”

  “Mark, the session isn’t over,” said Binford.

  “Oh, yes it is. In fact, it’s my last one.” He looked to Lauryn. “Feel free to turn it into individual counseling. Maybe that’ll help you with your anger issues.”

  Lauryn clucked her tongue. “Shove it up your ass. I seem to remember you like that sort of thing.”

  Mark bolted for the door, his face cascading red.

  “Mark … Mr. Hughes! You agreed to be the one to pay—”

  “Bill me!” he yelled, slamming the door behind him.

  The room was suddenly quiet. And somehow more uncomfortable than just a few moments before.

  “Well, I guess that’s it then,” Lauryn said. The indignation was gone from her voice. It was almost devoid of sound altogether. “Right down to the sad cliché of a slamming door.” She put her face in her hands and began to sob.

  “We still have some time,” said Binford, her voice genuinely empathetic.

  Lauryn wiped her nose with the back of her hand, her cheeks with her palms.

  “No, I need to go. I need time to fix my makeup before I pick up Megan,” Lauryn said. “I think you should consider this our last session.” Her voice hitched when she said it. “Damn it!”

  “It’s okay if you’re grieving,” Binford said. “It’s a natural part of the process.”

  The process, thought Lauryn. What a cold, clinical term for such an excruciatingly painful thing.

  “I’ll be fine. Thanks for all your help, Dr. Binford. And thanks for putting up with us.”

  The therapist smiled. “I wish you and Mark the best,” she said as Lauryn rose and picked up her purse. “Um, one thing, I hate to mention it, but … the payment for this last session?”

  Lauryn gave her a weepy grin, the slightest hint of her former outrage returning.

  “Bill him.”

  Chapter 3. Thursday, aftern
oon.

  Eamon Stavros set his voice recorder on the table and pressed its red button.

  “How are you doing today, Peter?”

  The huge man in the jumpsuit smiled at him. “Great, Doc. And you?”

  “Pretty good,” Stavros said, flicking his coat at the wall. It was soaked through, despite its design to repel rain. Beads of water arced across the sparse room, its only furnishings a table with two chairs set opposite one another. The cinder-block walls were a cold white, like the uniform of the prisoner sitting in front of him.

  Stavros returned the smile. “That you’re doing great is good to hear.” He pulled a chair out, its metal legs scraping on the floor, and sat down. “Very good to hear.”

  The man in the white uniform cocked his eyes at the ceiling as if praying. All was quiet for a moment, save for the constant drumming of the rain on the roof two floors up. Then the normal sounds of prison resumed. A loudmouthed inmate. Someone banging on bars somewhere down the block. An irritated guard promising punishment if one or another rule wasn’t followed to the letter.

  “Storm sounds bad,” the inmate said.

  Stavros nodded noncommittally. “Might be bad in Houston. Up here, not so much.”

  “Up here, we could use a good rain,” the prisoner said. “Was a long, hot summer. The one thing you can say for Huntsville, Doc, is that it’s not anywhere else.”

  Stavros blinked. “I’m not sure what that means, Peter.”

  The big inmate laughed. “Nothing, Doc. I was just making fun a little bit.”

  The scientist gave him the eye. “You know everything you say we have to parse, then analyze, then run through an algorithm for hidden meanings.”

  The big man chuckled again. “Now I’m not sure what that means. Still, I wouldn’t want to skew your results. I’ll be good,” he said, winking.

  Stavros sat back. “You are in a good mood today.” He pulled out a pad and jotted a note down. The lower half of the paper was wet. “You’ve been consistently …” The scientist struggled for the right word, a tricky thing when talking to a test subject.

  “Docile?” offered Peter Ray Marsten.

  Stavros paused. He gauged the other man’s attitude. There was a hint of challenge in Marsten’s voice, as if by trying to be helpful he was letting the doctor know his true value. That was different from their last session a week ago. And the four weeks before that. Any difference was something worth noting. The bald behemoth was a convicted axe-murderer. A family of six back in 1999. Parents and four kids. No real reason, Marsten himself shrugged at the time. That very detachment caused Marsten’s attorney to plead insanity, but Texas juries rarely buy that one, even when it’s true. He’d been sitting on death row for twelve years now, exhausting his appeals. The Serenity Virus and the gene therapy it delivered were his salvation. And yes, he seemed very docile. At the moment. He hadn’t always been that way.

  “I wouldn’t have chosen that particular word,” began the scientist carefully, writing.

  “Serene, then?”

  Stavros stopped writing. “Was that a joke, Peter?”

  The big man cocked his head and smiled. “Now, you tell me!”

  The scientist looked at him. Something was different. Not threatening. Not exactly. But different.

  “It’s okay, Doc. Look at me!” Marsten spread his arms wide, inviting the scientist to measure him any way he saw fit. “I ain’t got nothing to compensate for. Words don’t mean crap to me.”

  Stavros jotted something else in his notebook. Marsten watched him do it, clearly amused. “They used to,” the scientist noted warily. The big man across from him hadn’t cursed, even in jest, for two weeks, not since his second injection of Serenity.

  Marsten nodded his big head. “Yep. No debate there. One wrong word and I’d fly off the handle. No pun meant, there, Doc.” The mountain in white winked again.

  Stavros jotted, a bit more quickly, more nervously this time. He was quite sure that Marsten had intended to be punny, a private joke to himself about being an axe murderer; half the satisfaction of which was, no doubt, feeling like he’d put one over on the egghead in front of him.

  Still, humor—even black humor—could be a good sign. Marsten and four of the other five test subjects had, in recent weeks, become progressively more—let’s just keep it simple and say calm. Yet Marsten’s manner now gave Stavros pause.

  “Have you been having the dreams again, Peter? The dreams in which you reenact the murders?”

  Now it was Marsten’s turn to take a moment, his recent glibness fading from his face. “My dreams are my business,” he said.

  Stavros recognized for the first time in his association with Marsten something that approached fear on the other man’s face.

  “Your part in this is to be forthcoming and forthright,” said Stavros. “You know that.”

  “Oh, I’ll give it to you straight, Doc,” Marsten replied, some of his earlier wit returning. “I promise you that.”

  Lightning cracked outside, thunder rumbling through the whitewashed masonry around them. The scientist shuddered. Hurricane Glenn had hit the Port of Houston straight on, which meant, if it tracked north on its way inland, the northeast wall would slam Huntsville. Marsten would get his rain and then some, if that happened. What they could hear now was just the prelude. The scientist couldn’t get back to his hotel room fast enough.

  “All right then,” said Stavros. He tried to shrug off the tiny legs he felt crawling up his spine. “Let’s get on with this week’s assessment questions.”

  “Yes, let’s,” said his test subject, winking again.

  * * *

  “Well, Professor?”

  “Measurable progress,” Stavros answered. “All test subjects, with the exception of Maggie Spinks, are headed in the right direction, Warden.” He didn’t mention his misgivings from the interview with Marsten. Everyone could have an off day. But he’d noted the aberration for the record. Next week, no doubt, things would be registering normative values as expected at this juncture in the trial.

  Parker grunted an acknowledgment if not an acceptance of the doctor’s diagnosis. “So you say.” The rain was coming down in sheets on the prison, now. Lightning flashed against the cold steel of the cell doors, the answering thunder rattling them on their hinges.

  The dance with Parker always pissed Stavros off. The warden’s job was to keep order in the prison. The last time Stavros checked, Parker hadn’t completed his Ph.D. in genetics or microcellular biology or any other degree that would give him a clue about bioengineering viral strains to rebuild cells from the inside out. He didn’t know anything about DNA sequencing he hadn’t learned in a poorly researched sci-fi movie. Having the blue-collar bully question his professional capability frustrated the hell out of Stavros. But dealing with Parker was part of the job. And every week for the past six weeks, when he or one of his team visited the prison to gather data, Parker always made sure he was around to remind them who was really in charge.

  “Yeah, Maggie’s a special one, she is,” Parker said. “You’d get your own category too if you’d dosed your kids with Benadryl and bourbon and drowned them in a lake. Maybe your cure just won’t work on her, Doctor.”

  Thank you for your clinical insights. Stavros drew the corners of his mouth up. He hoped it looked as put-on as it felt. “Your insights are always welcome, Warden,” he said, the line rehearsed in front of a mirror, rictus smile in place, earlier that very morning. “But as I’ve said before, Serenity isn’t a cure. It’s a …” He thought of the way he explained it to the press, then simplified it another level down from there. “It’s a way of reprogramming your brain. Not unlike antidepressants or even aspirin—”

  Parker sneered. “I know you think I’m dumb as a bag of rocks, Doctor. But I’ve seen the media stories on this stuff—”

  “And they always get it right, don’t they?” Stavros interrupted sarcastically. “Look a little closer, Warden. There hasn’t been that much l
egitimate journalism on my therapy yet. You’re reacting to a lot of lazy so-called journalists repeating the sensationalism of bloggers and tweeters who make money by stirring up ant piles. Besides, there’s not that much to report on. Yet.”

  “Oh, but there is.” The warden put his feet up and leaned back in his wooden chair. Its springs creaked with four decades of use. “You make this thing work, the whole prison system changes. The worst of the worst might actually get rehabilitated instead of locked away for life. Or get the needle, like your buddy Marsten. The not-so-bads? After the initial treatment, a prescription paid for by the state for life. You might even put me out of a job.”

  Stavros smirked wolfishly. “Would that be so bad?”

  Parker pierced the scientist’s expression with eyes that were used to standing down men like Marsten, and worse. Stavros lost his lopsided grin.

  “Maybe not,” breathed the warden. “I’m close to retirement anyway. But using a virus to control who a man is? That’s screwing with nature. With God. I don’t care if you shoved a whole pharmacy full of pills down Marsten’s throat. I know what that man did. I saw the crime scene photos. I processed the paperwork when he stove in the head of Redbelly Maitland just two years ago. I wouldn’t be in a room with him without a .45 on my hip. In fact, I’d just as soon not be in a room with him at all.”

  That’s exactly what I’d expect from a Neanderthal like you, thought Stavros. If you fear it, shoot it.

  “Besides,” continued Parker, “that still doesn’t explain Maggie Spinks. She seems just as dead-eyed and nonresponsive as when you waltzed in here with your traveling medicine show. What’s up with that? She just too crazy for you to fix?”

  Stavros looked at his watch, wondering as he did if Parker was sharp enough to pick up on his obvious body language. “Some subjects are resistant to certain viral strains. It’s why some people get colds and others don’t. We picked half a dozen subjects, typed them in as varied a manner as we could given their limited number, and we’re watching what happens. It’s called the scientific method, Warden. You should acquaint yourself with it.” Stavros motioned with his head. “In a way, we’re lucky we identified someone resistant to Serenity early on. It’ll help us tailor the therapy to be more widely applicable.”