Mind + Body, Aaron Dunlap [smart books to read TXT] 📗

I remember my hand, my left hand, groping against the smooth-painted brick wall, my fingertips in a groove between the bricks. The world spun around me, buzzing, blurry, all except for my hand against that wall.

And in an instant, everything was fine.

I stood up straight and looked at the gun in my hand. No smoke. No recoil pounding through my fist. So, I was dead.

I let go of the wall and brought my left hand to my chest, my stomach, my neck and my head. All dry. So, I was alive.

A few feet in front of me, Lieutenant Colonel Chuck Schumer was slumped on the floor, leaning slightly against the wall behind him. His eyes were wet, glossy, scanning slowly from left to right. His mouth was drawn on one side to a tight point, the other side hanging slack. His arms were down at his side, on the floor; his right hand empty, his hand open, his index finger still hooked around the trigger guard of a small revolver.

There was a fresh hole through his gut, his overcoat sure to be ruined by the free flowing blood.

To my right, just a few feet, Amy was still holding that silver Beretta I pulled off a Marine guardsman. She held it out, straight toward where Schumer would have been standing. Her hands shook, her eyes were wide, her breathing sharp. A few feet to her right I could see light reflecting from a brass 9mm casing on the floor. I could smell gunpowder; I could still hear the echo of the gunshot through the ringing in my ears.

She wasn’t moving. Just standing there, arms outstretched, cradling the pistol with both hands in what something told me was called an isosceles stance.

Nothing is ever going to be the same, I knew.

Gathering my thoughts, I took a long breath and spoke, quite slowly, “What did you do?”

As soon as the last syllable was completed, Amy replied in one breath, “Idon’tknow.”

She was still looking forward, at the wall at the end of the corridor. I looked down at Schumer. He was breathing, slowly. His eyes were as unfocused as Amy’s.

I slowly held out my left hand toward the gun in Amy’s hands, to lower it. When my hand was a few inches from hers, she sucked in an unsteady breath and suddenly turned sharply toward me, pointing the gun at me now.

The instructions were sent from my brain as clear as could be. Duck the left shoulder down, push left leg against floor, move to the right. I ignored them, though. I just stood there. Amy stood there, nothing between us but a loaded gun.

“Is it true?” I asked, just as deliberately. “You’re part of this?”

Her eyes were unchanging, like a spooked animal.

“Idon’tknow,” she repeated.

Dozens of documents, photos, and file folder were scattered across the floor around the box Schumer had brought. On top of them all was a folder lying open, its contents spilled to the side. I could see pages and pages of typed text, some handwritten notes, and a few photographs. I saw a little girl smiling against a blue patterned background, a school portrait. The girl had brown hair, and as she smiled her eyes narrowed in a familiar way. They were eyes I knew, eyes now staring at me.

It was a photograph of Amy, taken years ago. Around it were other photographs, some of her younger, some older.

There was a pain in the back of my throat. The pain came after the realization, the only explanation for why there would be a file full of documents and photos of Amy in a series of files about Schumer’s program. I breathed slowly, letting the implications branch out in my mind. Schumer had just been trying to distract and disorient me. I hadn’t killed Comstock and Amy wasn’t working for anybody.

I grabbed the gun from Amy’s hand, just as I had from the Irishman in Comstock’s house. One quick arm movement and a turn of the wrist and she was disarmed. I stripped the gun and dropped it on the floor, stuck my own gun back under my belt, and snapped my fingers in front of Amy’s face a few times until her eyes refocused and the color seemed to return to her face. It was shock.

“You didn’t know?” I asked as Amy began slowly looking around, rubbing her head.

“I…” she began, and then seemed to lose focus.

I repeated the question, louder this time, trying to break through the mental barriers our brains put up when we can’t process any more information.

“I…” she repeated, “No. I just saw a folder. My name was on it, there were pictures of me, logs, names, and I…” She looked over at Schumer on the floor, no longer breathing. “He had a gun,” she said, looking back at me.

I nodded, and then just stood in silence for a while. Amy did the same, and the silence began to fill up the room and hammer at my skull. There was a body in the floor, a pile of evidence. We had to get out of there. I had to go somewhere and let my brain explode.

“That should be enough,” I said to nobody in particular. Then I lifted the front of my shirt, pulled the strips of medical tape from my skin, and freed the long wire running from my back pocket, around my side, and up my chest. I pulled Rubino’s recorder from the pocket, turned it off, and stuck it and the bundled-up microphone wire back into my pocket.

“That should be enough,” I repeated.

+ + + +

Schumer’s near-meticulous records painted a clear enough picture of the truth.

In the case of myself, it turned out, most of what he said was true. I was the first in a series of experiments to test the possibility of using hypnosis as a training platform where a subject doesn’t know he’s being trained. This was all shoehorned in with another project in in-vitro fertilization and, most likely, genetic engineering. The files didn’t detail anything on the genetic side of the program, but the logs and notes made consistent reference to things like reflexes, vision, hearing, and critical-thinking skills.

Amy’s file told, with a cold disconnection, the story of her entire life. Erik Westbourne, her father, was approached because his Marine Corps profile listed personal financial trouble and problems with his wife conceiving. He was told that by volunteering for a new project he could solve both problems. His wife could receive an in-vitro fertilization without cost, and he would receive an initial payment of $63,000 and a conditional bonus of $15,000 when the child turns eighteen.

The “catch” was of course clearly explained.

And so Amy was born and raised, at first, on base in Quantico. Her training was done on-site at the project headquarters within the Marine Corps University until her father withdrew himself from the Corps and they moved to Fredericksburg so that she could attend my school and her training could be orchestrated by Comstock as well. Every day, she and I would report to an empty classroom for what we thought was study hall. A hypnotist would put us under quickly, using phrases we had already been programmed to respond to, and the schooling began. Different instructors were brought in to cover different topics for around an hour, and then the hypnotist repeated the necessary prompts to keep us from actively remembering the whole process, and then told us to remember sitting quietly at our desks for an hour, reading or daydreaming.

The day before my fight at school was the last entry in both of our logs. The day of the fight, when the imaginary wall holding back a lifetime of training finally broke, I left school before