Absynthe, page 22
“I hate this war, sir. I hate it with every fiber of my being. I’ll fight in it, because it’s important, but I’m not going to be like Kohler. I’m not going to kill where it’s unnecessary.”
The Major sized Liam up. “I can live with that. Take your leave, Corporal. Blow off some steam. When you come back, be ready tell me if you’re willing to take on a larger role in this army of ours.”
“Sir?”
“I’m being promoted to Lieutenant Colonel, to head the new psi-ops division. I’m giving serious consideration to bringing Kohler with me. If that were to happen, you’d take Kohler’s place and lead the Devil’s Henchmen.”
Liam was stunned. “You want to promote Kohler?”
“I do.”
“He deserves a trial, not a promotion.”
De Pere was nonplussed. “I’m going to share something with you now, Liam, so that you’ll understand. Kohler’s tactics may be distasteful, but if there’s even a single whiff that Project Echo isn’t working as expected, it may be shut down. Senator Vaughan has the Armed Services Committee all worked up about it.” He waved behind them, toward the command tent they’d left earlier. “They’re watching us like hawks already. What do you think they’ll do if they hear about an indiscretion like Kohler’s? It’ll get blown out of proportion. Then it’ll become a bludgeon that Vaughan and his cohort of holier-than-thou politicians use to shut the project down unless the President caves to their demands.” Liam started to object, but De Pere went on. “I’ve spoken to Kohler. What happened the other day won’t happen again. And besides, with Kohler’s promotion, he won’t be in the Devil’s Henchmen any longer. Assuming I have a suitable replacement, that is.”
Liam paused. “Are you saying Kohler will remain in the Henchmen if I decline?”
De Pere worked his jaw. He seemed disappointed by the question. “I’d hoped that wouldn’t be an issue.”
Liam was well aware he was being manipulated, but De Pere had him pegged. The last thing he wanted was a promotion, but he also didn’t want a man like Kohler to remain in active combat. If Kohler wasn’t going to get a trial, the next best thing would be for him to be as far from the battlefield as possible.
“I’ll take it, sir. The promotion.”
“You’re sure?”
“More than sure.”
De Pere smiled his winning smile, a thing that looked much dimmer in Liam’s eyes than it had before the conversation began. Then he clapped Liam on the shoulder. “You’re a good man, Liam Mulcahey.”
As De Pere left, Liam spotted Dr. Silva standing between the tents with Senator Vaughan. Senator Vaughan was doing all the talking. He was animated, gesticulating wildly, occasionally dabbing his forehead with his handkerchief. Dr. Silva, meanwhile, kept sending glances at De Pere.
When De Pere ducked into the command tent, her gaze slid toward Liam. Her steps slowed, then stopped altogether. She seemed to be staring through Liam, not at him.
Liam waved, a gesture he was certain looked as awkward as it felt. Dr. Silva, as if waking from a daydream, blinked, gave a brief smile, then turned away and caught up to Senator Vaughan.
* * *
A drizzle fell as Liam arrived in Chicago later that night. He and the rest of the Devil’s Henchmen were stuffed into a cramped personnel car, one of dozens delivering a thousand soldiers into the city for leave. Like his squad mates, Liam was headed downtown, but he paused on the cobblestone yard when he saw Dr. Silva standing alone near the ticketing booth, casting her gaze over the crowd of civilians.
“Let’s go, Mulcahey!” Clay Graves shouted.
“You go on,” Liam said. “I’ll catch up.”
They all groaned. “He’ll catch up,” Clay said, exaggerating his Southern drawl while grabbing his crotch. “He’ll catch up after his dick’s caught up, he means.”
They laughed and lost themselves around the corner.
Dr. Silva was wearing a stylish flapper dress, mustard yellow with black sequins, and a velvet cloche hat, the brim of which she had pulled down against the drizzle. She smelled of lavender, and looked surprisingly human. Liam was so used to her in a white lab coat that, dolled up, her hair unbound and cascading down her back, it felt as if she’d been replaced with another woman entirely.
“You look lost,” Liam said as he came near.
“Not lost, no.” The smile she gave him was polite, forced. “Not exactly.”
Liam had never been very comfortable approaching women. The nervousness became worse with those he knew, doubly so for those as attractive as Dr. Silva. Normally he would have said his goodbyes and left, and surely she had plenty more things to do than waste her time with a simple man like him, but there was something Liam needed to get off his chest. He wasn’t sure where to begin, though. He couldn’t just blurt it out here in the open.
“You’re waiting for someone?” he asked after an awkward pause.
“I was supposed to be, yes.” The muscles along her jaw worked. Her whole body was tight.
“Maybe they’re just running late.”
“No,” she said flatly. “Sergio always does this.”
“Does what?”
“Sends me infantile messages after we’ve had an argument.”
“And you had one recently?”
She nodded. “Last night when I called him. He doesn’t approve of my being in the military. He doesn’t approve of my being a scientist. He wants to marry me, he says, but only if I can commit to it.”
“You don’t want to?” Liam asked. “Commit, I mean?”
“I’m willing to commit, but only if he is too. I have a life already.” She waved to the square, which was now practically empty. “A life he’s not ready to acknowledge. Until he is, there’s nothing for me to commit to.”
The engine whistled. As the couplings clanked and the train began to pull away, the drizzle fell harder.
Liam waved to a stout brown building on a nearby street corner, where a pub sign read The Bonnie Lass. “Why don’t we get out of the rain, go have some tea while you wait for your fiancé? It’d be nicer than standing out here all alone.”
After staring at the pub’s emerald green door as if it had offended her, then turning her gaze to the empty square, she leaned into a crisp walk, her heels clicking against the cobbles. “Boyfriend,” she said, “and there’d better be whiskey in that tea.”
They sat at a table next to the window so Dr. Silva could look for Sergio, but by the time their second round of drinks arrived, she was hardly checking anymore. She told Liam about her upbringing in Buenos Aires, how her father had brought her family to the United States through a work visa, how he’d received his green card three years later, how he’d risen through the ranks of the Novo Solis elite through the brilliance of his research in microbiology.
“He must have been very proud of you,” Liam said as a woman in the corner took up a fiddle and began to play. The crowd clapped in time, many of them badly, but the mood in the room was merry.
“My father?” Dr. Silva snorted. “He wanted a son and got three girls. Nothing was ever good enough for him.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in life, it’s that you have to be proud of yourself first. And I am. We’ve accomplished a lot in this project of ours.”
“You have, you mean.”
Dr. Silva smiled a suffering smile. “Tell that to my fellow scientists.”
Liam had heard rumblings. “They’re giving you trouble?”
“You could say that. They want me kicked out of the project.”
“But why? You’re dedicated. You’re smart. You’ve advanced the serum miles ahead of where it was when you arrived.”
Dr. Silva tilted her head with the sort of pitying look one gives when someone else is being hopelessly naïve, and Liam suddenly understood. Dr. Silva was the only woman on the project, and she had outshined them all.
“Oh,” he said simply.
“Oh, indeed.” She flashed a brief smile. “It was what got Sergio and I arguing. I confided in him, and instead of offering support, he used it as an excuse to try to get me to quit. Again.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I’d rather know now where he stands.”
For a time they listened to the music. Liam still didn’t know where to begin. “Dr. Silva—” he finally said.
“Colette,” she corrected, and lifted her steaming cup of whiskey-and-tea to her lips.
“Colette.” Without really understanding why, Liam found himself smiling broadly. The feeling inside him was so bright, so good, he didn’t want to ruin it—and he absolutely would the moment he touched on the things he’d learned the day before. It couldn’t be helped, though. He had to know. “Something happened on the last mission, at the end.”
Dr. Silva immediately tensed, and Liam felt something new. When he was young, his da used to beat him with his belt. It didn’t happen often, only when Liam had been especially naughty, but when it happened, it was intense, his belt falling again and again as if all the other small infractions had built in his da’s mind, and he was lumping them together, taking them out on Liam all at once. The sound of leather snapping—whether from a whip crack from the Aysanas’ horse trainer or the snap of reins on a horse and buggy—brought Liam back to the dimly lit interior of his house, him over his father’s knees, the bright pain of the belt falling again and again over the naked skin of his rump and the backs of his thighs.
The feeling he had in that little pub was just like that, a deep-seated fear bubbling up to the surface in a rush. It took Liam a moment to understand it. “We’re still connected,” he said as the din of the pub suddenly re-entered his consciousness. It made him feel as if everyone could hear what they were saying.
Dr. Silva—no, Colette—felt the same way perhaps. Staring at her cup, she nodded.
Before leaving the base, the Henchmen had been given a dose of E. sentensis as part of their continued training. The telepathic ability did not come easily and had to be maintained, so they had regular sessions out of their hopper armor where they practiced passing orders and sharing senses. Liam had been nervous about it all morning—the last person he wanted to trade thoughts with was Kohler—but luckily Kohler had been called away by De Pere, surely to talk about his promotion. Even without Kohler it was a difficult session, everyone working through the horrors they’d seen, the horrors they’d committed.
“It’s only supposed to last an hour or two,” Liam said. The session had ended well over six hours ago.
“Yes.” Colette shrugged. “But you know we’re headed toward permanence. The serum I gave you had longer effects.”
“Just me?”
“Just you.”
She spoke the words calmly, but he could sense the fear in her more clearly now. He could define it in ways he couldn’t have only moments ago. She was worried he was going to turn her in.
“I just want to understand,” he said as calmly as he could manage. “Why are you doing this? Why have you made yourself a part of the experiment?”
She twisted her teacup in its saucer as a song came to an end, and a round of applause filled the small pub. “How can I properly evaluate this project, Liam, if I’m not part of it?”
“You interview every one of us after every mission. Exhaustively.”
“Yes, but how would you say that compares to the real thing?”
Liam considered that a moment. “It doesn’t hold a candle to it.”
“Exactly,” she said, her tone righteous. “No matter what De Pere says, no matter what the Army says, I have to know.”
She was staring straight into his eyes, daring him to deny her her due, daring him to say a word against her actions. Now that he knew the truth, though, Liam didn’t want to object. He’d been worried she was spying on them for some other purpose—he’d been worried she was an SLP mole—but that was clearly not the case. There was a simple but undeniable curiosity in her, and a will to make sure she was doing things right. It wasn’t so different from when Liam worked on the hoppers. He often took the reins himself when he thought someone was fumbling the job. He wasn’t always proud of his reluctance to put trust in others, but he understood why it existed, which helped him to understand Colette’s motivations.
“Where is Project Echo headed?” he finally asked.
She glanced through the window, where the lights outside the train station were making starlike patterns against the rain-slicked glass. Her pride glowed like a distant bonfire, her worries crows on the wind. “To a place where we’re connected like never before, like we could never even have dreamed.”
“And you think that’s a good thing?”
“What you or I think no longer matters. For the good of the country, we’re about to find out.”
Liam had a dozen more questions lined up but never got a chance to ask them, because just then the pub door swung open, and in swept a stunningly handsome Italian man. He wore a fine tailored suit that hugged his muscular frame. He had black hair, a dark, five o’clock shadow, and piercing blue eyes that looked like they could cut diamonds. “Here you are!”
Colette stared at him as if she’d heard it a thousand times before. “Where else would I be?” She waved to Liam. “Corporal Mulcahey here was kind enough to keep me company while I waited.”
Sergio smiled as he thrust a massive hand toward Liam. “Sergio,” he said.
“Liam,” Liam said as he took the offered hand and shook it.
Before Liam could even attempt to match Sergio’s impressively strong grip, Sergio swept past Liam and gave Colette a kiss on each cheek, then kissed her hands. “Our dinner awaits, mi amore, and now we’re late.”
“And who’s fault is that?”
“Mine, my love. All mine.” He turned to Liam briefly. “You have my thanks.”
With that he and Colette were through the door and into the rain. The last he saw of Colette, Sergio was ushering her into a hansom cab. His body language as he climbed into the cab and lay one arm across her shoulder was clear: you’re mine, only mine.
Colette looked out from the cab only once. Liam couldn’t be sure by the gaslight of the streetlamps, but the expression she wore looked like regret—whether it was for Liam or Project Echo or the war itself, he wasn’t sure. A moment later, the cabbie clucked his tongue and snapped the reins, and they were gone, clopping down the dark street.
Liam’s drink and the next song on the fiddle lasted precisely the same amount of time. Taking it as a sign, he left the pub and headed out to find his comrades. The rain lessened, then stopped altogether, but the streets were slick, the air brisk. Despite Sergio’s sudden arrival, Liam was still high from the feeling of being with Colette. The scent of her perfume still lingered, as did the warmth he’d felt whenever she smiled. As he approached the brasserie where the others had been going, all feelings of warmth faded.
The excited squeal of a young woman came from farther up the street. Concerned, Liam walked past the steps leading to the brasserie’s entrance and came to a plot of land with a rather odd structure on it. There was a stone foundation and a wooden floor, but little else—no roof to speak of, and only one wall still standing. The home had been the victim of an SLP bombing raid a few months back. The owners had cleared the rubble in hopes of rebuilding but had since abandoned the lot and moved to the country.
Standing in the room that might once have been the master bedroom were a man and a woman. The man was Max Kohler. He was waving a hand toward the sky. The woman, whose long blonde hair flowed down her flower-patterned dress like a wet mop, was casting her gaze about, looking this way and that. She suddenly shivered, ran to the edge of the floor, and mimed looking out a window.
Fascinated, and more than a bit horrified, Liam took the front steps up and passed through a yawning opening in the home’s mostly shattered front wall. He watched as the woman shivered in fright, then stepped away and ducked down as if someone were peering through the nonexistent window at her. She thinks she’s standing in a proper home, Liam realized, this one, before it was bombed. As Kohler had done on the battlefield, he was now doing to the woman.
It was so powerful, Liam fell deeper into it. He saw what the woman saw. She hid behind a proper bed, staring at the window, the plaster walls around her solid. The sound of heavy footsteps came. Orders were called in Flemish to search the home.
As the sounds of bombs fell over Chicago, there came the rattle of soldiers moving about, of clomping up the stairs, of doors crashing open. One set of footsteps reached the door of the master bedroom. There came a heavy thud. The door rattled. A second strike, and pieces of the door jamb flew inward, the latch surrendering to the force of the blow. A soldier stood there in an SLP uniform. Except it wasn’t just any soldier. It was Max Kohler himself.
He rounded the bed. The woman collapsed into the corner. Kohler fell on her. Put his hand over her mouth when she tried to scream. Slapped her when she tried to break free. Setting his rifle aside, he ripped her dress, exposing her bra. When she released a muffled scream, he pressed harder, then reached under her dress and began yanking her silk underpants down.
Refusing to allow it to go any further, Liam searched for the boundaries of the illusion. Soon he felt it, a drape hanging over the three of them. He picked at the edges of it until he found a stray thread, then pulled on it. Bit by bit the illusion unraveled. The sky was suddenly visible through the bedroom ceiling. The sound of the soldiers and the bombers faded, replaced by the muffled conversation coming from the brasserie. Faster and faster it melted, until Liam, Kohler, and the woman were standing alone in the ruins of an empty house.
Kohler turned, clearly confused, but then a look of understanding came over him. Just like the illusion, Liam felt that too. It was the serum. Only, Colette had said it was just the two of them who’d received the longer-lasting formulation.
