Mind + Body by Aaron Dunlap (free books to read TXT) 📖

my head, slowly, without realizing it at first.

“No. No. Too many lies, all of it, my whole life?”

Schumer ignored me.

“Obviously, to facilitate this we needed to have somebody inside the school system to coordinate your training and to monitor your progress and behavior. Nate Comstock was looking for an early retirement from the Corps, so we gave it to him and put him into your schools since elementary. He made sure your class schedules allowed for a free period, coordinated the training team, and made sure you behaved normally for the rest of the day. We had to keep moving him around from school to school to follow your scholastic career.”

My face felt hot. “Comstock,” I said, finding it harder to speak. “He… Dingan.”

“Dingan?”

“Some guy, in Lorton. Police officer.”

“Oh, him.” He paused. “Things became more complicated after the fight in your school,” Schumer continued.

I tried to remember. Just over a week ago, it felt like a distant memory. Vodka in orange juice. A locker handle into my back. Hands on my arms. A fist coming at my face. A twitch in my brain.

That was it, I realized, that moment. Something snapped in my mind when I was attacked, and my life was never the same after it.

“We hadn’t anticipated the effects of the fight-or-flight response when we developed the program. All of your training, knowing how to fight, how to use weapons, how to live like a soldier on the battlefield, it was all protected from your conscious mind through a series of mental barriers put in place during hypnosis so that the only way to ‘unlock’ the knowledge would be for a trained hypnotist to specifically reverse the series of barriers. But fight-or-flight is above that, it seems, a core component of our basic evolutionary programming. When one feels like his life is threatened, the mind literally grasps at anything it thinks it can use to defend itself. As far as we can tell, the acute stress of being in a fight combined with external stresses like grief over your father’s death or other social issues weakened the mental barriers, and when you thought you were in mortal danger for the first time, your mind broke down its own walls and used whatever it could.

“Unfortunately, you never returned to classes after that event so they were unable to repair the damage.”

“Damage,” I said, reflecting on it all. The damage. My car, some guy named Dingan, a wake of destruction in Austria, my house.

“After that, with the walls cracked, it seems that the training we put in your mind has been leaking out and you’ve been able to recall it as instinct for self-preservation. I didn’t believe it at first, until then I saw what you did to the two guards in my office.”

“Why did you even have bodyguards?”

“I called for them when you showed up at the front gate. I thought you might be out to kill me.” He rubbed his stomach through his clothing where the edge of his desk had fallen on him. “Clearly I was wrong.”

“Why would you be afraid of me?” I asked. “You didn’t seem worried when I came the first time.”

“The first time I didn’t know how much you knew or even what happened. Comstock said you got in a fight, and then stopped showing up at school. After that he stopped contacting us. Apparently he thought we were trying to kill him. Nervous guy, Nate.”

“That was you on the phone that day, wasn’t it? Telling him not to punish me for the fight or to tell my mom. ‘It could be expensive.’”

Schumer’s brow furrowed slightly.

“Why didn’t you want him to tell my mother? Doesn’t she know about all of this?”

Schumer looked down at me again from the corner of his eye. He was getting better at telling me things without saying anything.

“She doesn’t?”

“Not as far as I’ve been led to believe.”

“So it was only my dad? He lied to her, just told her she was getting an in-vitro and don’t ask questions.”

“Don’t ask questions,” he repeated.

“She never knew about the training? The program?”

“Don’t think so,” Schumer said.

“Okay,” I said, trying to get back onto one of the trains of thought I hadn’t finished. “Dingan. Why did Comstock hire him to bring me in, and why did he try to kill me?”

“According to Nate, when you stopped showing up at school and things started happening with his bank account and car, he thought we were angry so he contracted somebody to scare you into coming back to school, or to bring you in so you could be put back under and the problems fixed. I don’t understand why he did this, but he did. His mistake was that he contracted the wrong kind of somebody. Somebody who usually doesn’t finish the job with the target still alive.”

“Another member of the program?”

“No, somebody outside the program. Outside the military. Outside a lot of things, actually.”

Okay, a hitman. At least I was right about that.

“You know more about what happened that night than I do, but you must have done something to upset him if he tried to kill you.”

“I think I broke his wrist,” I said, recalling the cracking sound and the feeling of forcing an arm into the edge of my car’s open window and blistering pain in my eyes. “Or his arm.”

Schumer smiled slightly. “Well,” he said, “we’ll have to work on getting that cleaned up with the police. We’ll also need to sit you down with one of the psychiatrists and work out what went wrong with your training and how to fix it.”

“What?” I said, standing up from the bench and facing him. “You want to put me back under and start screwing around with my head again?”

Schumer looked up at me, confused. “Something has clearly gone wrong with your mind; you’ve practically got two conflicting subconscious minds now. One of a teenager, the other of a trained soldier. We can have the training removed if that’s what you want, but the broken parts of your mind still have to be put back together.”

“How do I know you won’t just make me forget this whole conversation, make me think I spent the last week camping in the woods or washing my hair?”

“Chris, you have to trust that what we’re doing here isn’t as devious as you assume—”

“Devious? You still haven’t explained why my house was burned down last night, and why guys in tac gear with prototype assault rifles stormed my house, or why I’m probably a wanted fugitive in Europe now.”

“I told you, some of your questions I can’t answer. If you come with me back to the labs, we can have somebody go over your experiences and try to figure out what went wrong.”

“What went wrong? Why do you need to know that? So you can fix your program and do this to more kids without the nasty side effects? Use me like the test subject I was born to be?”

I stepped back from the bench, turned to face the river, and then turned back to Schumer when he didn’t respond. “I’ll just go to a regular therapist, have him undo whatever you did to my head.”

Schumer stood up weakly, “You can’t do that. If someone doesn’t know what he’s doing, he could cause more damage to your mind. He could either further blur the distinction between who you are and what you know, or introduce too much stress to your subconscious and make it collapse. You need to see somebody who knows the exact protocol for your training.”

“You just want to clean up your mess, put back together your broken toy soldier.”

“You need to understand, Chris, you’re in danger of literally losing your mind. Until those walls in your mind are put back up, any amount of stress will destroy them further. Haven’t you felt it growing worse? Felt yourself doing things you can’t account for?”

Doing things I can’t account for? He was right, I realized, I was getting worse. I could feel my personality diminishing with every event. Looking back, I had no idea why I did what I did to those Interpol agents in Vienna, what I did to Comstock in that hotel room, or driving a knife into the body of a person I didn’t know, or only passively wondering if I’d killed him when I’d twisted his neck with his own rifle strap, or aiming at a man’s head down the rail of a rifle and being a hair from pulling the trigger; I didn’t give those things a second thought as I did them, but I would never have dreamt of doing such things before all this. Before all this, before the seams of a secret life were pulled free by the stress of my father being killed by and for that very secret life.

My jaw clenched so tight that my whole head shook. I pulled the Beretta from my belt with my right hand and pointed it at arm’s length at Schumer’s chest.

“The only thing I’m in danger of is you, your program, and the hitmen you have on speed dial. Whatever is wrong with me, I’ll figure it out myself.” I kept the gun pointed as I backed away. Suitably distant, I turned in the direction we’d come and started to walk forward.

“You have no idea how far this goes,” he said with a whole new clarity.

I kept walking.

“You won’t know who to trust,” he shouted from a distance.