Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest #11 Read online

  The Thing on the Bed.

  Just like in the pictures.

  Just like in the dreams.

  Jacobson dragged the kukri knife gently along her forehead.

  Do I cut again?

  He'd already hacked off her ears and nose.

  Do I rip some more?

  Slashed away her lips and down over the chin. Her eyebrows and lids, her cheeks.

  Except for the hair, there was nothing left.

  Picture perfect.

  She'd lived for almost two minutes while he cut her. Hemorrhaging slowly, painfully, from a deep slash across her throat that went down to her spine. The carotid artery slowly filling her slashed windpipe and then flooding her lungs as he continued his work.

  He'd started next on her abdomen. Then her face.

  Was this the moment I did wrong?

  Perhaps he was supposed to start with the face. He simply did not know this detail, forensics in 1888 not being what they were today...

  He closed his eyes and leaned back, letting the vulgar smells of the tiny room fill his nose. He could suddenly feel the warmth of the small fire on his face. Something warmer and wet trailed slowly down his left forearm, and his mind chased after the promising and familiar sensation.

  His very first memory, his first recollection of childhood, of being, had always been a dream. He'd been four or five at the time. He'd woken, screamed for his parents, found he'd wet the bed like a baby. He could not stop crying. His father had spanked him that night.

  The dream returned later. He didn't recall exactly when, but it had. A month later, a year. He'd screamed and wet his bed again, but he did not call out for his parents this time. He made sure his terrified sobs were as quiet as possible, and only his bedroom's darkness was there to comfort him. Boy became man and still the dream came. Once or twice a year. He no longer screamed or cried. He simply woke up, methodically cleaned himself.

  In the dream, he was in a small, dark room. There was a fire in one corner and a bed in the other.

  And, there was something on the bed. Something “evil.” He knew that part. Felt it. Completely.

  That it was evil.

  That the thing on the bed wanted him to get closer. That it wanted to destroy him, consume him. That it wanted inside him. He also knew that it was much stronger than he was. That he would ultimately surrender to its wishes.

  He could not win.

  As the years passed, the Thing on the Bed became more detailed. In his teens, he learned that it was a woman. That it was soaked in blood. Ripped open. That it was still alive. Years later, it spread its misshapen legs wider and thrust its hips lewdly at him. It burbled blood from its missing lower jaw. It tried to talk to him. To kiss him. It wanted to fuck him. In his twenties, he stood over it. He held a blade.

  There were other dreams. Other women. Each became more familiar over time. But none had ever returned as often as the first. These eventually became fantasies he carried into the waking world. Girls he saw at school, some of the women he worked with, a stranger in a bookstore. He could picture them on the “dream bed.” Ripped open and waiting for him.

  He could not ejaculate unless he imagined such horrible things. Sex proved unspeakable. To finish, he would close his eyes and imagine pushing into the Thing on the Bed. In college, he'd dated only two girls because of this. The last, he'd asked if she would play out a silly fantasy with him. To tie her up, to pretend to cut her. It had not gone well. He'd avoided women thereafter and focused on what he hoped was his true passion.

  Science.

  But, while his career as a geneticist blossomed, he closed his eyes to the darkness each and every night, knowing that he was a freak. Monster.

  Until ... until that day. May 14, 1978.

  During a conference in Baltimore, a colleague had been reading a book and, one afternoon, curious, Jacobson had picked up the paperback. And, just like that, everything made sense.

  Everything.

  Right there, in black and white, on page 176.

  The Thing on the Bed.

  She was real. The woman in his dreams.

  Mary Jane Kelly. Murdered on Friday, November 9, 1888.

  He spent the next hours reading the book from cover to cover. Then again. And again.

  Jack the Ripper: Memoirs of the World's First Serial Killer.

  That one of the many suspects was named Tumblety, he was not surprised.

  What else, the geneticist marveled, was passed on through RNA and amino acid sequences? His research and efforts refocused. The offspring of killers studied, and then the killers themselves. Their clones. Searching for the root of evil. But not to cure...

  To find the basest traits of our forbears absolves us.

  Now, if he could only finish what was started. Reach the same release his own blood had once known.

  Then, everything would make sense. It would.

  It had to.

  He looked back down at the bed. The fire's shadows cast unevenly over the mutilated shape there. He gently traced the blade sideways across the skin on her thigh, cleared away a thin trail between pools of blood.

  Mary Jane Kelly. The blood-drenched act that had somehow ended the Ripper's career. He'd studied every report he could find, knew the crime scene pictures as well as he knew his own face. The very same molecular fabric of his own body, his own mind, the blood pumping through his veins, had been there. Then, and now. It was the same.

  The Thing on the Bed.

  He sighed. No. This was not the one. Not yet.

  But there was still time. Please, God...

  He would simply have to try again.

  * * * *

  Becker tossed another stone into the dark waters of the man-made lake, and the stone skipped twice before vanishing into the blackness beneath. The irony of the lake's origin was not lost on him. Sitting on its shore, he could think of little else.

  Yes, the lake was filled with black bass and frogs, and framed in fall-burned spike-rush. Yes, a small sunfish had jumped briefly behind the splash of his stone as the setting January sun draped golden lace along the treetops of the opposite shore.

  But he knew it was only an illusion. Unnatural.

  The fish were stocked, dumped from the backs of trucks each spring. Added only for future hooks. And, the artificial flow velocity and sediment loading found in such reservoirs barred the algae and bottom-dwellers found in real lakes.

  Some men had fabricated this lake beside Montrose, Colorado. It looked like a lake, sounded like a lake, even smelled like a regular lake. But it was, he understood fully, not. It would never be.

  Years later, some other men had fabricated a boy.

  Dozens of boys, actually. Killers.

  How “real” were they? How real was Jeff?

  Becker looked over at him.

  He knew very well how Jeff and the others had been “stocked.” How some of them had been abused, molested, neglected. Injected with varying levels of serotonin, dopamine. Tweaked and modified.

  It seemed that Jeff had not. His test group was to be raised in a loving environment. An environment tolerant of his passive nature, of his emerging homosexuality. The end result was a kid who was polite, curious, and sharp. Yet, he'd still been crafted from the DNA of one of the worst serial killers in history. Becker knew such men were often gifted socially. They could mimic and master, for a short time, social norms. They could use them to their advantage.

  Is that what Jeff was doing? Was he merely waiting? Pretending? Was it all only a matter of time?

  Where did the fabrication end and the true boy begin?

  "What's that you got?” he asked aloud, hoping to chase away his own dark musings.

  "An old bobber.” Jeff held it up. “Some line, too. Washed up on shore."

  The early winter wind swept back the kid's shaggy hair and ruffled the new jacket Becker had picked up for him in Topeka. Christ. Becker couldn't even remember being that young any more. “You fish?"

  "Coupl
e times."

  "Did Dr. Jacobson take you?"

  "No,” Jeff shook his head. “So, where we going next?"

  "I don't know.” Becker allowed the boy to change the conversation. “I think my bosses want me off this mission now."

  "How come?"

  "Don't know. It happens."

  "Maybe they're afraid that guy will kill you."

  Suddenly a chill swept down his back, one not born of the low breeze off the lake or the cold ground beneath him. That guy, whoever the hell he was, had been ... he'd been like the lake, but more noticeably so.

  He'd been unnatural.

  "Maybe,” Becker said. “Doubtful. Wish I knew who ‘that guy’ was, though."

  "Yeah,” Jeff agreed.

  Becker looked back over the lake.

  "You gonna turn me over to DSTI?” the boy asked.

  "I don't know."

  "But you will eventually."

  Becker warmed his hands together. “This will all end soon."

  "I could run away. You'd let me, wouldn't you?"

  "And then what? You're thirteen years old."

  "I wouldn't be the first. I'd manage."

  Becker shook his head, imagined the road Jeff was choosing. “Most people seem to."

  "So, are you gonna quit? The mission."

  "If those are my orders, yes. Don't know if they are yet. Officially."

  "Not answering your phone. Is that, like, legal?"

  "For right now."

  "Won't you get in trouble?"

  "I'll check in again soon. I just ... I think we're real close to catching up with these guys. I feel it, you know. You get this ... a feeling. Feels like we're close."

  "Yeah,” Jeff said. “I think so, too."

  Becker looked back at the boy, struggled for the next words. “Whitaker,” he said. “I've been thinking about Whitaker."

  "What about him?"

  "Nothing, maybe. But ... I guess I've tracked down some real bad guys over the years. Men who've killed a lot of people. But I always knew what I was dealing with. I got it. The fanaticism. Or greed. Power. Duty. Whatever it happened to be, I understood it."

  "But not Henry."

  "No,” Becker admitted. “Not Henry Whitaker. Or Henry Lee Lucas. These kids or their original selves. Physiological, biological ... they're, they've become monsters to me. And I'm too damn old to believe in monsters anymore."

  "You've killed people,” Jeff said.

  "Yes.” Sure as Hell killed that Whitaker kid.

  "Are you a monster?"

  "That's exactly what I'm talking about. War is different."

  "It is?"

  Becker laughed. “You a Michael Moore clone now?"

  Jeff looked down at his feet. “That bothers you a lot, doesn't it?"

  "What's that?"

  "That I'm a clone."

  Becker lowered his head. Damn it. It had been a shitty thing to say. But, yeah, you're sure as shit right it bothers me. “Doesn't it bother you?"

  Jeff tossed the bobber and string back into the undead lake. “I know I'm not that other guy,” he said.

  Becker pulled himself up to his feet.

  "Becker."

  "What?"

  "I don't want to ... to hurt people,” Jeff said. “I don't think about hurting people. I don't care whose blood is inside me. I never even think about ... I'm not some disgusting monster."

  "I know."

  "Do you?” The words were a soft plea. “Do you really?"

  Becker stared at the boy. He didn't reply.

  "Well, don't feel too bad,” Jeff said, turning to look back over the lake. “To tell the truth, I'm not totally sure either."

  * * * *

  Dr. Jeremy Erdman cupped the fetus in his left hand, holding it up to the light for a better look. Its tiny head dangled awkwardly off the end of his forefinger as fluids from the incubator dripped down the geneticist's wrist. One of its small hands had mechanically latched onto the tip of Erdman's thumb.

  Seventeen weeks, the chart read. So much had already started, but the option of speeding up gestation to adulthood or continuing to retard development for another couple years was no longer his to make. Another decision had been made already.

  DSTI was cleaning house. Or, at least, sweeping everything under the carpet.

  Erdman didn't mind. He'd never cared much for the “Cain” project anyway. That had always been Jacobson's hard-on. Erdman's lay elsewhere. Therapeutic cloning had already become the trillion dollar industry everyone expected it to be. While the rest of Nasdaq had fallen 35 percent in the last year, the biotechnology indexes had risen 40. It was time. IVF, transgenic foods, commercial eugenics, pharmaceuticals, Americans already paying $500 a year for the storage of DNA for pets and loved ones. The dot-com orgy would prove pennies compared to what was coming, and Erdman was sure as hell not going to miss it.

  We must never approach the temple of science with the soul of a money changer. He could still hear Jacobson's reproof. Fuck Jacobson. He was the asshole who'd gotten them all into this jam anyway. His fascination with the XP11 gene, his fanatical deals with the powers that be for more funding. Now there were a dozen, or more, manufactured serial killers running about the country. And worse.

  If things didn't clean up quietly, DSTI and everyone with it would lose everything. They'd already chemically lobotomized two dozen kids, including an Ed Gein clone they'd recently brought in. Others were being disposed of more absolutely by the Pentagon apes. And Jacobson, where the hell was he? Dead, murdered by the special children he'd bred, or, as it was rumored, running around the country on some unknown crusade?

  Erdman almost hoped Jacobson wasn't dead yet. Because he knew what was out there looking for him.

  "This the last of it?"

  The geneticist turned. “Yes,” he said.

  Major General Durbin nodded and slowly surveyed the room. A hundred cylindrical incubators, which ran from the floor to the ceiling, were lined in several long rows. Almost half had already been removed, except for their wide bases. Three DSTI workers had begun dismantling those, too. Dr. Mohlenbrock hosed down one of the emptied cylinders. Its surface cast a light blue glow across the lab's floor. There were two large steel bins on wheels lined with black plastic in the center of the room.

  The rest of the pods were still occupied. The clones inside ranged from five weeks gestation to eight years. Each floated serenely in the piss-colored liquid inside. In another room were two more that had been matured to thirty years. A different project altogether, really. Durbin wanted to keep those, for now.

  "So,” Erdman asked carefully, “the FBI still puzzled over why John Wayne Gacy's DNA keeps showing up at murder scenes?"

  "As he's been dead for more than ten years now, yes, they are."

  "How are—"

  "Focus on what's here,” the Major General said. “We have the situation well covered on the outside."

  "You still think you can control that thing, don't you?"

  Durbin smiled. “Keep up the good work, Doctor. Everything will turn out fine. Always does.” He winked and stepped slowly from the room.

  Erdman watched him go, then looked back down at the experiment growing cold in his hand. Its eyes were closed, thank God. Seventeen weeks. Only five inches long and less then five ounces. Yet ... a hundred billion neurons already firing away. Vocal chords. The genitals of a man. A thyroid gland already pumping male hormones into its premature brain. Testosterone artificially laced with genetic rage and malice.

  It gasped suddenly. It had been only a tiny sucking sound, then another. New lungs fighting for their first taste of air. He felt the tiny shape shift against his wet palm. What thoughts were even now forming in its primal brain? What terrible thoughts?

  Erdman had forgotten already if it was another clone of Bundy or DeSalvo. He reminded himself it no longer mattered.

  He reached for one of the steel bins.

  #

  Jan. 9—What a dance I am leading. The
papers now carry the story. Perhaps this is what is missing. Attention? She is never satisfied. No details released yet. Only that the authorities suspect a “serial killer.” Ha ha ha. La police, ne t'a pas encore trouvé? [50W Parma drive, rebeca] I gave birth to the twentieth century. I've given birth to the twenty-first also.

  Jan. 10—In violence, we forget who we are. All the men and women who passed me today, who looked me in the eye ... who know nothing of what I truly am. Veritas Lux Mea. Since the Renaissance, God's Death, we have presumed to elucidate, to alleviate, Violence through Science. Before, when I was T., they presumed anthropometry could reveal the mark. That specific facial characteristics and body measurements could tell if you were looking at a Killer of Man. Rapists were blond, pedophiles had long left feet, murderers were homely with smaller foreheads, etc. This was scientific fact. Absurd? Any more than claims of possession by Satan or other primitive gods? Any more absurd than our pursuit of the Cain gene? Xp11.23-11.4 Do we only need to look there? No. I am still marked. Now art thou cursed from the earth? In violence, we remember who we are.

  Jan. 10—What is broken when he can bring himself to kill another? Men are responsible for ninety percent of all violent crime. In every culture, every country. In every age. Serial murder is criminal abstraction, masculine in its deranged egotism and orderliness. It is the asocial equivalent of philosophy, mathematics, music. There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.

  Jan. 12—the others called again today. Something troubling. Wanted to talk. It is only because they are alone. So very alone. I know. Do I now destroy what I have created? Or will they destroy the creator? Either may still satisfy. Yours ‘til death.

  * * * *

  When Ted was nine years old, he'd hit a nest of rabbits with the lawn mower. It had been an accident. Or, at least, he thought so at the time. Later, he would learn the incident had been staged, prescribed, as part of some test group to see if his MAOA levels would exceed another “Ted” somewhere else who hadn't killed rabbits. Fucked up.

  He still remembered the weird thump sound, and then little black shadows running in all directions, scattering. He remembered screaming. And blood on the grass. His dad, who'd been watching, had moved slowly toward him. Not his real dad, he knew now. Some guy they'd hired with stock options and monthly payments.