Chapter Twenty-Nine - Lincoln
The lights flick on and I’m awake and out of bed instantaneously. “Molly?”
She’s pressed against the cave wall, her mouth agape, staring up at my ceiling, then panning her eyes across the walls. Sheila is standing behind her, behind the threshold she is not allowed to cross.
It takes me a minute to realize what just happened. Then I turn slowly, my eyes glued to the bedroom walls. I take it in. I take it in the way Molly would. And when I turn back to her, she’s looking up at me with tears in her eyes.
“W-w-what…” she stutters. “What are you?”
My shoulders hunch and a sigh escapes. She was going to find out. There’s no way to keep this a secret if I want her in my life.
Molly snatches a computer printout from the wall. “What,” she yells as she walks forward and thrusts the paper into my chest with all the force she can muster, “is this?” She looks down at my legs. The metal plates running down my outer thighs are in plain sight now. She never had the opportunity to touch me much last night. I was doing all the touching. “What the fuck is on your legs?”
But there is no good answer for any of these questions except the truth. “I’m a monster,” I say quietly, owning it out loud to someone I care about for the first time ever. “A monster, Molly. The monster they made me.”
She turns away, her hands covering her face. “You’re a killer.”
“Yes.”
“A serial killer.”
“Yes.”
“You really are the one responsible for killing those Blue Corp scientists.”
I sigh. “Yes.”
“I have to go.”
I grab her by the arm and twirl her around, a wave of nausea rolling in my gut. I let go of her immediately to allow the inhibition sickness to pass, but I catch the anger for manhandling her. “Just wait, Molly. Let me explain.”
“Explain? What exactly is there to explain? You’re a murderer.” She scans the wall, taking in all the newspaper printouts I’ve collected over my fifteen-year career. “A mass murderer. And these,” she says, ripping more printouts off the wall, “are your trophies? How many are there, Lincoln?”
I shrug. It’s all I can do. “I used to keep count, but—”
“Oh, my God.”
“—a lot.”
“And that lab out there? The one with the mice?”
I shoot a look at Sheila and she stares back, unaffected.
“Tell her,” Sheila says. “Tell her everything, Lincoln.” And then she turns to look at Molly. “I’ve begged him for years to stop. I’ve tried reason, I’ve tried threats. I’ve tried to be supportive. I’ve done it all, Detective. He’s not afraid of getting caught. He has a death wish. And if you weren’t his long-lost partner from Prodigy, he’d be playing a cat-and-mouse game with you right now. Just like he’s done with the other detectives who tried to figure it out.”
Molly glowers at me, but I have nothing to say except, “I am the monster they made me.”
“Bullshit,” Molly yells. “Bull-fucking-shit, Lincoln.”
“How would you know? You don’t even remember what they did to you, let alone what they did to me.”
“I remember enough—”
“You don’t remember shit,” I growl at her. It comes off so animalistic, she takes a step back. Then she looks over her shoulder at Sheila and retreats to her side, assuming, correctly, Sheila will keep me at bay. “I have always needed a control, even after I sent you away, Molly. And maybe Sheila isn’t my Omega. I gave her severe limitations. But if I’m in the cave, she can… dissuade me from acting. You don’t have to fear me. Ever.”
Molly directs her anger at Sheila now. “Then why did you allow this?” She points to the printouts and photographs that paper the wall from floor to ceiling. “Stop him, for fuck’s sake.”
“I can’t be everywhere, Detective. All things have limits.”
“What is going on here, Lincoln?” Molly sets her jaw and grits her teeth, determined to figure out the truth. “What is all this?” She sweeps her hands wide. “What is all that?” She points to the cave outside my room. “And what are you doing in that operating room?”
Fuck. She saw all of it. “I wanted to explain—”
“But what? You wanted to fuck me first?”
“Stop it,” I bark, scaring her into a backwards step. “Don’t get vulgar with me in front of Sheila.”
“Sheila? Fuck you and your stupid robot minion! What the fuck is going on? Are you really keeping me here? Am I your prisoner? Is that why you told me to come find you? To save yourself the trouble of luring me out here?”
“Of course not,” I snap. “What happened to, ‘You’re my Alpha, Lincoln. I’m your Omega?’ I mean shit, Molly, if you’re just looking for an excuse to bail, fine. But the truth is all those people I killed were associated with Prodigy. Every one of them is guilty. Every one of them was fucking there, Molly. With you. With me. With Thomas and Case. They killed my parents. Burned my goddamned house down so I’d never have a home again. This lab, this cave, this work. This is all I have left. This is the only thing on this whole motherfucking planet that’s still mine.”
“So you kill them. Pick them off one by one and make it look like a suicide.”
“I didn’t make it look like a suicide. They really did kill themselves.”
“But you helped them do it.”
I shrug.
“How?”
I have to turn to hide the diabolical smile. Because what I’m doing is life-changing, world-shattering, and downright evil. Does she really want to know?
I turn back and eye her.
She stares me in the face and says, “Tell me.”
“You’re not gonna like it.”
“Tell me,” she repeats.
“Did you know,” I start slowly, barely a whisper, “that some species of jellyfish can regrow their own bodies?”
She swallows and backs up a step.
“Did you know they can even regenerate their own brains? Even after you detach them from their bodies? It’s practically a miracle, Molly. Scientists have declared it unnatural. But those neurons are completely natural, and so is everything I’m doing. I can take those cells out of the jellyfish and replant them into the mice. I can grow new parts to their little mousey brains, Molly.”
“I feel sick,” she says, her hand going to her stomach.
“And did you know that you can drive mice to violence if you stimulate a certain gland in their brains in just the right way?”
“You c-c-cannot be serious,” she stammers.
“That gland is in every brain. It’s a part of you, of me, of every human being on this planet. And did you know that there’s a serum you can inject to make people more violent?”
“You’re sick,” she says, her eyes searching my face for the Alpha she once loved. “You’re sick. I was right the first time. You’re some kind of deviant maniac.”
“The lab, the jellyfish, and those mice, the computers, all of it—everything you see in here is what Prodigy School was doing, only better. More advanced. They made me smart. The smartest of all the kids they had. They made me that way, Molly. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that you gotta use the gifts you’ve been given.”
“I should arrest you.”
I put my hands out, wrists together. “Go ahead. There’s no evidence, I promise you. There is nothing here but legal research on mice and jellyfish. I have permits and permission. Hell”—I laugh—“I even have government grants funding this shit.”
“Who the fuck would give grants to a lab in a Batcave?”
“His retrovirus, Molly,” Sheila says, speaking for me. “He can rewrite any program in the world using me as his vector. I’m a delivery mechanism for a global technology revolution. We can reprogram any computer to do our bidding. Governments, private companies, anything.”
“So you stole that grant money. You’re a serial killer and a thief. A crazed liar who wants to end the world? Just what the fuck are you doing?”
“You forgot monster, devil, and evil. Go ahead, Molls, spit in my face for good measure.”
She recoils, but it’s from the nickname, I just know it. “I want to leave now.”
“Molly—”
But she pushes past me, grabs her jeans from the floor, and starts pulling them on. “No,” she says. “No, no, no. I can’t listen to another word. Just let me go.”
I sigh, looking over at Sheila. But Sheila’s gone. She got what she wanted, I guess. She wants me to be accountable to someone and she got her wish. I pull on my own jeans just as Molly finds her shoes and slips her feet into them.
She walks forward, pushes me hard on the chest to get me out of her way, and bolts past, heading across the cave to the tunnel where she disappears into the darkness.
I follow her, slowly, giving her a little time to calm down.
“Open the fucking gate, Lincoln,” she yells, and once I turn the corner, the breaking dawn outlines her shape against the rusted bars of the gate that stands between her and freedom.
I walk up to her. She looks scared, and confused, and tired. “Molly, please—”
“Open the gate.”
I have nothing left. Nothing to say. No more ways to justify anything I’ve done. I only have one excuse and it’s not good enough for Molly. Sheila was right. All this shit has finally caught up with me and it’s gonna cost me everything. Again.
“Open the gate, Sheila,” I call out to the air. Seconds later the rusty bars begin to lift up. Molly doesn’t even wait for it, she drops to her knees and crawls under, heading for her bike.
I follow her out and watch helplessly as she grabs her helmet and shoves it on her head, then straddles the bike and kickstarts the engine. It roars to life and I stay quiet. Hoping she’ll say something. Anything.
But she doesn’t. She gives the bike some throttle, whips it around in the dirt, and then speeds off, her front wheel leaving the ground for effect.
She is outta here.
I turn and walk back into the tunnel. “Close it up, Sheila.” And the gate comes back down, whining and creaking the whole way. I make my way back into the cave, pass Sheila standing in the middle, looking like she’s got something to say, and then go into my room and close the door.
I feel like a kid again.
No. I never got sent to my room by my mom as a kid. I don’t even remember my mom. And my dad never paid much attention to me. He was always down here, I guess.
No.
It doesn’t remind me of being a kid. It reminds me of being Alpha.
Molly wants him, but only the parts she loves. Because if she thinks the killer in the cave is worse than the Alpha from her dreams, she’s lost more than her memory. She’s lost her sanity.
I sit down at my computer and type in my password, then bring up my scorecard. I started with so many names. But I’m down to the last few now.
Three more targets and I can be finished. Three more days of killing and I can be done with this life.
After that, I’m not sure there’s anything left for me. After that it’s just a big black hole. After that I might think about using the protocol on myself.
After that it might be the end.