Project Pallid (16 page)

The
split second silence that followed was one of utter dread and worry for what
she might say and how she might respond.

“I
love you, too.”

Her
words flipped a switch in me, and everything took on new, vivid form. I was
instantly brought fully conscious to a world that I’d only half seen before.
The invisible barriers I’d built and safeguarded had collapsed.

“What’s
wrong, Damian?”

“Huh?”

“What’s
wrong?” she asked again.

“Me?
What? Nothing? Nothing’s wrong, Catee. Everything’s perfect. It’s never been so
perfect.” My hand squeezed her thigh in support of the unfiltered words that
escaped my mouth.

“Good.
I’m glad.” Her hand settled over my own, and her fingers interlaced with mine.
“I’m happy.”

Geometry,
Mr. Atkins, and even Justin—who still shot death looks our
way—became entirely inconsequential from that point forward. Priorities
change after you’ve opened Pandora’s Door, and while we didn’t know it at the
time, that’s exactly what we were about to do. And when the evils of man swarm
and fight for your soul, you start to appreciate the triviality of parabolas,
hypotenuses, and jaded boyfriend wannabes.

I
bounced from foot to foot at our locker that afternoon. I was irreparably
anxious for what the next three hours would bring, and it didn’t feel like
she’d ever arrive. And when Catee rounded the corner, I couldn’t help but run
to her.

“Do
you still have them??” I asked, foolishly questioning her abilities. She looked
at me like I had three heads.

“You’re
crazy, right?” Her response propelled me to normality, or something like it.

“Oh.
Yeah. Right. Sorry. I’m sorry. My bad. How was your day?” I rambled nervously.

“What’s
wrong with you?” she asked.

“Me?
Oh. Nothing. Nothing’s the matter. I’m just excited. That’s all.”

“Damian,
you’re weirding me out. I don’t know what you think we’re going to find in
there, but I doubt it’ll be anything more than office supplies.”

“I
know. I know. I’ve just got a feeling, Catee. There’s something not right about
your dad, and his office might be the key to figuring it out. You know what I’m
talking about.”

And
then, like a dam that’d been weakened by years of pounding waters, she opened
up. “I don’t know if I want to know, Damian. He’s my dad. And he’s a dick
sometimes, but he’s still my dad. Whatever’s in there, he’s got it locked for a
reason. Whatever it is, it can’t be good.”

I
consoled her then, like a professed lover would, and I assured her that
whatever happened, she’d never be alone again. It was a promise I made to her
in the hall that day, and it’s a promise I’ll keep until my dying breath.

“Which
is which?” I asked, as we fumbled with keys in the curtain-drawn darkness
outside her dad’s office.

“I
don’t know. I didn’t put labels on them, meathead,” Catee gave me a nudge from
behind. My question was inconsequential anyhow. I’d already tried the first and
had the second key in the lock by the time we’d finished the exchange. And with
a cautious turn, the knob unlocked.

“Never
mind,” I smiled and slipped the second key into the overhanging padlock. The
red plastic glided easily into the chamber, and it turned cautiously to the
right. But when the lock popped open, the key snapped free in my hand.

“Damn
it!” I yelled.

“What?

“It
broke!!”

“Broke?”

“Yeah!
It broke!” I exclaimed, and held out the small, remaining nub.

“Oh,
shit.”

“I
know,” I squinted and looked into the slot for the missing half of the busted
plastic. I ran my thumb over the edge and hoped, against all odds, that enough
would protrude for us to reclaim our deception. No such luck.

“Let’s
just deal with it after,” I relented.

“Okay.”
Her compliant response came easily and unaffected by the consequences of what
would happen if we were caught, and we held hands as we crossed the threshold
of Mr. Laverdier’s private sanctum.

The
room was more distinguished than the rest of their house: more refined in its
own erudite sort of way. The shelving that lined its walls gave off a
scent—mahogany, oak, pine, or something—and there was a methodic
precision to the organization of the hundreds of books that lined them. The
room had a deliberate feeling about it that stood in stark juxtaposition to the
rest of their house; it was a room that’d been given a great deal of thought.

The
thick carpet sank under my feet and squished between my toes as I made my way
across it. Catee in tow, we headed toward his desk.

I
wiggled the mouse and the desktop popped up: “SCREEN NAME” and “PASSWORD”. No
luck there—we hadn’t come equipped for hacking.

I
went to the desk’s drawers, instead.

Supplies
…

Paper
…

CD’s
…

Maybe
one of these?
I thought,
thumbing the stack and reading labels. But there was nothing maniacal about any
of them.

“Start
looking on the shelves,” I suggested. Catee turned and began scanning book
titles.

“What
am I looking for?” she asked.

“I
don’t know. What am
I
looking for?” I questioned back. “We’ll know when
we find it, I guess.”

“But,
what if we see it and we don’t know we saw it?” she asked.

“Just
keep looking,” I replied, and she continued to work her way through the rows and
rows of books. Head cocked sideways, she scanned their spines. Up and down, up
and down, Catee quickly made her way along the lavish shelves.

“What
am I looking for again?” she asked.

“You’re
kidding me, right?” The look I gave her was stoic. My hands stopped shuffling
through the files they’d found their way into, and I stared at her with
eyebrows raised in feigned confusion.

Her
response was a smile. White, bright, and wide, it solidified our unification in
pursuit of whatever we searched for. Without words, we returned to the hunt.

Minutes
of silence passed.

“Do
you think this could be it?” She pulled a battered and used copy of
Dinner
for One: Strategies for Surviving Your Spouse
, for me to examine.

“Ouch,”
I said.

I
didn’t trust him, and I didn’t like him much, but that didn’t mean I didn’t
feel a little bad for him, then.

“Hey!”
I jumped. “What’s Project Pallid?”

“Project
Pallid?” she repeated, hearing the words for the first time.

“Yeah,
Project Pallid,” I came down from my toes with an unassuming, blue folder,
pulled from the top of the cabinet’s three drawers.

“Never
heard of it.”

“No?”

“No,”
she reaffirmed.

“Well,
that says something.” I replied, and dropped cross-legged to the carpet to
examine its contents. Careful not to disrupt their order or to crinkle its
pages, I began to flip through the inch-think stack of papers. I skimmed, read,
and became more and more consumed in the process.

Catee
took up cross-legged position beside me. “What is it?” she asked.

“I
don’t know. It just sounded weird,” I replied. “I figured it was worth a look.”
I read the first three pages and skimmed through the next several before
stopping. The first few were distinctively different from the rest. For
starters, they were creased: like they’d come out of an envelope. And based on
their formal heading,
CrossPoint
Pharmaceuticals
, and their rigid
formatting, they seemed more official than the others—in the strictest,
most governmental sense of the word.

“Did
you know about this?!” I asked in alarm, waving the creased pages in the air.

“Know
about what?” Her response, innocently unaware, answered my question.

“Did
you know about your dad getting fired? About why you guys
really
moved
here?”

“He
quit, right? What are you talking about, Damian??” she asked.

“I’m
talking about how they got rid of him. This CrossPoint
Pharmaceuticals—whoever they are. They canned him and sent you guys here.
That’s what this is. It’s his pink slip!” I fluttered the papers in the air.
“They fired him and transferred him to Madison General and—”

“Why?”
she whispered, more to herself than to me.

I
reached for a comforting response that would console her hurt-soaked question,
but I came up empty-handed

“Why
did we have to come
here
?” The emphasis of her words made me think her
reaction had something to do with me. It didn’t.

“Hold
on, let me keep reading,” I insisted, handed off the creased pages, and moved
onto the rest of the stack. She caught up quickly, and I began passing its
sheets directly to her.

And
at 5:00, we finished. We’d barely spoken a word during the hour and a half that
passed and, although we didn’t read each page word-for-word, we’d read enough
to understand what her dad had so calculatedly hidden from her and everyone
else.

His
research for CrossPoint Pharmaceuticals had been treatment based, and he’d
worked in a government lab in DC, on cancer research, for three years before
their move to Madison. His work there was focused on naturally occurring,
blood-born antibodies—those that affected the quantity and combativeness
of white blood cells during infection. His research had only gone as far as lab
rats, but his results were decisive: Molecular-based manipulation of white
blood cells showed promising results. A series of compounds, injected into the
host, enhanced the body’s ability to detect and fight infection. White blood
cells quadrupled and, by numbers alone, they eradicated cancerous, red blood
cells. In doing so, they eliminated all traces of infection in test subjects.

Immediately,
CrossPoint Pharmaceuticals labeled her dad’s work as
Project Pallid
, and
additional resources were provided in the push for human trials.

From
there, the documents showed increasing influence from CrossPoint
Pharmaceuticals—Mr. Laverdier’s research had captured their interest, and
they became his primary benefactor. Proposals, replies, findings, and
assertions were exchanged more fervently between her dad and the
company—all chronologically sequenced in the paperwork before us. And, as
work on Project Pallid intensified, her dad’s role in its success became more
and more consequential.

Catee
pointed out that the dates of the correspondences overlapped with her mom’s
terminal diagnosis. My heart broke at the reminder and, not surprisingly, Mr.
Laverdier’s work on Project Pallid accelerated.

The
dates and hours logged became almost obsessive. His notes became more copious
and regular, and the exchanges between him and CrossPoint Pharmaceuticals
intensified, while the objectives of the two grew more and more bipolar.

Mr.
Laverdier’s accelerated work showed remarkable progress and was moved to human
trials within months, but his results there were varied and unpredictable.
There was evidence of no reaction at all in some test subjects. In others, he
found results comparable to those of pre-existing treatments. And then there
were some findings that were remarkable in an entirely unexpected way. Those
were the results that caught the attention of National Defense, and then the
paperwork became even more convoluted.

Though
only select tests showed promising, human results, those few became the core of
the government’s concentration. In “successful” trials, test subjects not only
showed complete recovery from their cancerous infections, their increased white
blood cell count, and the immeasurable strength within those, was of almost
superhuman proportions. This unexpected outcome prompted National Defense to
recruit and re-label her dad’s work for development of what they termed,
Soldier W.

National
Defense ordered Catee’s dad to harness the power of the white-blood-cell-dominated
body. Provided with new direction, he was instructed to refine his work to
produce more combative test subjects. The government wanted hosts who were so
driven by “white blood cell instinct” that anything beyond it would be regarded
like a virus. And, like foreign particles, outside “invaders” were threats to
be annihilated. National Defense had recruited his work to develop a
military-grade, killing machine.
 

In
later pages, Catee’s dad rejected the proposal, arguing that it contradicted
the original objectives of his work—the preservation of life—and
that he would only stay the course.

His
argument was shut down.

And
thinking solely of his dying wife, he fought back.

But
his concerns fell on deaf ears. The government responded that his role was not
one of decision-making: it was to follow orders, even if that meant a rerouting
of courses.