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.It’s part of his experiment.He’d felt similar soft places along Alice’s own scalp.The medicine makes new nerves grow, Alice had told him.It fills in the missing places in my brain.It makes the electrical signals get to the right places.“It’s the same,” he whispered in horrified realization.“You gave that shit to Alice?” He gave Moore enough of a shove to send him stumbling back a step.“The same virus you put inside Lucy? Inside O’Malley? Are you out of your mind? She’ll turn into one of those…those things!”Moore reclaimed his footing, then bared his fists, squaring off against the younger man.“In small enough doses, your body can regulate the virus on its own.I used Lucy to calculate those proper doses to correct the neurological defects that caused Alice’s autism.Look at how much progress I’ve made.”“Progress?” Andrew nearly spat the word.“You’ve been carving holes into her skull!”“She was crying,” Moore snapped back.“You saw her—crying and laughing.Crying over you, and laughing because it’s the first time in her entire life that she’s shed tears at the right place and time.Do you have any idea what it’s like to be autistic? To have an autistic child?” He managed a bark of laughter.“No, you don’t.And spare me your bullshit, half-assed sympathies about how you can only imagine how hard it must be, because you can’t, Mister Braddock.You have no earthly idea.”He shoved his forefinger out, pointing to Alice.“Look at her.She’s not grieving.She’s disassociated.Whenever she’s challenged too hard to think or feel or reason, this is what she does—she tunes out, turns off, disappears somewhere inside of herself so deeply, there’s no way to reach her.Nothing you can say, nothing you can do, not until she wants to, not until she chooses to emerge from this self-imposed psychological exile.“By the time she turned three years old, she’d stopped smiling.She’d stopped laughing.She didn’t cry, she wouldn’t look at you when you called her name.It was as if something somewhere inside of her had come unplugged, some vital electrical circuit that made all of the other circuits in her brain work properly.And without it, she became a hollowed out shell, a life-sized, living, breathing doll.”His brows furrowed and the corners of his mouth wrenched down in a frown.“Autistic catatonia, that was her diagnosis.She was so developmentally disabled and neurologically impaired, the doctors told us the most she could ever hope for was a lifelong regimen of medications.Do you know what it was like to hear that, Mister Braddock? To hear that your child is going to be afflicted with the mental capacities of a nine-month old infant for the rest of her life? To know that although you may have won a Nobel Prize for unraveling the secrets of the human body’s immunological processes, you couldn’t offer the same insight or capability to benefit your own flesh and blood?”His voice had grown ragged and strained, his eyes glossy in the dim light.“Do you have any idea what that’s like to know your daughter will never look at you and be able to say I love you, not just because she can’t find the words, but because she can’t feel it? It’s hell.An unending, relentless life sentence in hell.It drove a wedge between me and my wife from which we never recovered.She left me.And when she did, she took Alice with her.Less than a year later, she had Alice institutionalized.”“Gallatin,” Andrew whispered.The state hospital he’d seen in the photograph in Moore’s scrapbook.Moore nodded.“Yes, Gallatin State Hospital.They stopped calling it a lunatic asylum some years ago when it was no longer politically correct.Do you know what Alice’s treatment there consisted of? Regular bouts of electroconvulsive therapy—electroshock.She was forcibly administered electrical currents through her brain that triggered seizures and loss of consciousness, because the state of Massachusetts said this would make her better.And there was nothing I could do to stop them.”Jesus.Stricken, Andrew looked down at Alice.She remained oblivious to them, her gazed fixed somewhere across the room, her hand draped lightly against Lucy’s blood-dampened fur.“Last year, Prendick came to me on behalf of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,” Moore said.“He promised me that they could get Alice out of there.By that point, she’d been incarcerated for nearly three years.I would have done anything, traded my own life, to get her out of that place.I don’t expect you to believe me, much less care, but it’s true.I had been battling nonstop in court to have Alice released.Prendick promised me he could have her set free in a day.And all I had to do was agree to work for them.”“And you did,” Andrew said.“You’re damn right I did.And I’d do it again—a thousand times, whatever it takes, if it meant fixing Alice.I don’t give a flying fuck about anyone or anything in this entire compound except my daughter.” Shoving Andrew aside, he marched back toward Alice.“Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to get her out of here before we end up carcasses strung up and eviscerated in a tree.”“But the roads,” Andrew said.“You can’t leave.Prendick said—”“Prendick’s the one behind this entire operation,” Moore said without even pausing in his stride.“It was in his best interest to keep everyone trapped here.” He spared Andrew a glance.“Or at least believing that they were.”“Wait.” Andrew watched him catch Alice by the hand and pull her unceremoniously to her feet.Like a puppet, she complied, her expression neutral.“What about Dani Santoro? We can’t just—”“She’s a soldier,” Moore said.“Given my past association to this point, I don’t have much sympathy for her.”“She’s a mother.”“Again, given my past association, I don’t have much sympathy.”“But I don’t know the way to your office,” Andrew said.“We can’t leave without her.”Moore uttered a sharp laugh.“There is no we, Mister Braddock, except for me and Alice.You do what you have to [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]