Tatters of the King (The Warren Brood Book 3) Page 12

  For a few minutes, she waited patiently for a response from Mark to come, listening vacantly to the prime time talk show host’s stale jokes. He was a snarky, toad-like man with greased black hair and a loud bow tie. Whatever he was on about, it certainly had the crowd rolling in laughter.

  “Not a bad way to start the weekend, if you know what I’m saying! And it’s only Thursday! Well, might as well kick off the weekend right. Call your boss, tell them you’re callin’ in sick tomorrow.”

  At least the Highborn’s kick was potent enough to distract her from the idiot frog-man. With a small sigh, she laid her head upon her crossed arms. Beneath her jacket, her spider legs shuddered autonomously, just as they did right before falling asleep. Despite the caffeine, the world began to recede.

  “Tonight, we’ve got an incredibly special guest.” The crowd began to hoot in approval. “Now, please, everyone, before you go hollerin’ and laughin’ and hee-hawin’ all the way to the bank, I’d like to remind you that we take hecklers very seriously on this show. Leave it to the professionals. Now please give a warm welcome to Mr. Harold Wiser!”

  Spinneretta bolted upright with a small yelp. One arm bumped her drink and nearly sent it over the edge of the table. Eyes drawn to the screen, her heart pounded with raw terror. No, she pleaded with an illusory god. No, please!

  The cheers from the TV grew deafening as an aged man in a tweed coat entered from the left. He made his way to the front of the stage and sat in a chair across the toad-host’s desk. The host was laughing to himself the whole while, as a clearly uncomfortable Harold waited for the applause to die down.

  “Now, Mr. Wiser,” the host said, “thank you so much for coming on our show. Words can’t express how deeply appreciative we all are that you’ve decided to give the media a second chance. I actually tuned in to UNNC last week, and I have to admit the way they treated you was absolutely appalling. It left a real bitter taste in my mouth.”

  Harold nodded, looking distracted. “Yes. Quite bitter.”

  “So, let’s get right down to business. I’m certain everyone here tonight has heard about The NIDUS Report. It’s gone completely viral since last Thursday, after all.” The crowd was already cheering, making his last words difficult to make out.

  Spinneretta choked. Viral? Holy shit, you’re kidding me!

  “But for those of you who don’t know,” Ribbet von Toadstool continued, “I was thinking perhaps you’d like to give them a brief rundown.”

  Harold licked his lips. “Right. The NIDUS Report is a collection of my, uhh, first-hand accounts, working at a company ostensibly called Stonefield Genetics for the last thirty years. It’s split into, I guess you’d call them two chapters, really. The first is my story, talking about all the most important parts, the most shocking of it all. The second half, really more than that, is something of an extended appendix filled with all the research I was able to grab before fleeing.”

  “Right. And this is when you fled after being set free by the two spider-women and their dog? When you ran from the rising flames in slow motion, right?” The crowd hollered in laughter as the host mimed running dramatically.

  Seeing the crowd’s reaction, Harold glared and stood up. “Thought so. I don’t have to take this, you know—”

  But the host made a conciliatory gesture with open hands. “Hey, hey, hey. Sit down, sit down, I’m sorry. Okay? I’m sorry, man. Just sit down, I’ll talk straight with you. I just couldn’t resist.”

  “If you invited me on here just to mock me—”

  “No! No, no, no, wouldn’t dream of it. This is a serious show for serious people, right? Sit down, I’m really interested in hearing some more about this.”

  With a look of loss and a discontent sigh, Harold sat back down. He was visibly distraught.

  “Okay, so, needless theatrics aside, I genuinely think your book is fascinating. I mean, I’d heard the G-word thrown around a bit, mostly by some of my investor friends who’re always wondering, you know, when’s that Golmont Corporation out in Cali going public? Now, I’ve learned enough from the Microsofts and Googles of the world that there’s a few opportunities you just can’t let slip away. I’m sad that I’ll never get a chance to blow my life savings on a piece of the world’s first human-spider hybrid company.”

  The crowd lost it. A tide of derisive laughter lapped at the stage. Harold shrugged indignantly and looked off to the left, as though expecting a producer to come in and make the host behave like an adult.

  “How did you come up with it? I have to know, because it’s just so crazy. Like, this isn’t Area 51. It’s a private company that burned down in some no-name town. What part of that screams mysterious secret society to you? I’m not making fun of you, I’m genuinely curious. I’m fascinated by it. Because you’re somebody who must’ve seen the fire on the news, or something, and said to yourself, wow, that’s some Da Vinci Code shit right there.”

  Dead-eyed, Harold shrugged. He stole a glance at his watch as the crowd roared in approval.

  “Now, can we just be serious for a minute? I’m really, honest to God, fascinated by your research. Now, in one part, you claim that you were involved with two primary fields of study. One was the stewardship of one of this NIDUS corporation’s hybrid programs. The other, however, I was particularly interested in. It was on the topic of memory synthesis. Would you like to talk at all about that?”

  Harold didn’t meet the host’s eye. “You didn’t even read the book. If you had, you’d know I wasn’t involved in memory synthesis. Just happened to get some of their data on the way out.”

  “Sorry. It’s an easy mistake to make.”

  It looked like Harold was trying not to scream. Then he gave a half-hearted nod, clearly just waiting to be allowed to leave. “Fine. Memory synthesis. They created special carriers. Attached to genetic material. In the DNA. Artificial protein chains. They were programmed to target the hippocampus and amygdala during the development of the fetus and attempt to replicate chains of memories from an original.”

  “And this is what you used in all spider-child hybrids? So they’d remember how to wiggle their legs?”

  Harold exhaled through his teeth. “Another team used it toward the end of the Fifth Project’s lifetime. Only the third child was born with manufactured memories. Other than that, I only know that it was used in the Eleventh Project.”

  “Interesting. It may disappoint some in the crowd, but I actually showed some parts of your book to a friend. Masters in biology, government research program. And he seemed to think there was pretty good research backing it up, although obviously there are some inconsistencies and problems with it, not the least of which is the artful incompletion of it all. I bring this up because, to have that kind of research, you must be a real renaissance man. A true polymath.”

  Harold waved his hand dismissively.

  “And what I really want to say with this is—and I’m not playing this for laughs—you are obviously a brilliant mind. If you had just taken this report and called it what it was, a Blair-Witch-style found-document sci-fi story, you could have really started something. And it’s killing me because I see how you were treated last Thursday. I see the stupid memes already starting to spread on the internet, and the derision that’s flooding toward you from everywhere, absolutely toxic stuff, Mr. Wiser—”

  Harold stood abruptly. “And just whose fault is that!? You invite me here on your damn show just to mock me. Don’t feign pity at how I’m treated when you’re the problem!”

  “Mr. Wiser, I’m genuinely a fan of yours, there’s no reason to get so upset. I’m a fan of your work, I think it’s brilliant in a lot of ways. It’s just that your presentation is questionable. If you wanted this whole thing to take off, you shouldn’t have come public. I mean, ghost-publish it. Send away bits and pieces to different publications, build a whole mythos like Lovecraft did. But a found-document thriller doesn’t really work if the author is still hanging around somewhere.”

>   “Read the damn Report! There are photographs in here!”

  “Yes, very good ones. They came pretty damn close to fooling me, too.”

  Harold’s anger wavered. His lips were trembling. “Fooling?”

  The host gestured toward the camera. “Can you guys throw one of those images up? Let’s get my favorite one up there.”

  The screen faded into a grayscale image, and Spinneretta couldn’t help but gasp. She knew the image well. It was an infant suspended in a tank of clear fluid. The child had six eyes. The two forward facing ones were nearly normal, while the other four were red, reflective almonds set further back on the skull. Two horizontal slits replaced the nose, and the thing entirely lacked a lower jaw. Curved, hook-like teeth reached around a plastic breathing tube feeding into the child’s mouth.

  “That picture is my favorite thing in the book,” the host said. “I mean, a lot of work must have gone into it. Because seriously, that picture scares the hell out of me. Like, after I saw it the first time I seriously had trouble sleeping because of how unnerving it is. What was this made out of?”

  Harold glared at him.

  “Was it a dummy? Or was it made in Photoshop or something? Seriously, I want to know, because that looks real.”

  “It is real.”

  A section of the audience began to laugh again. The host gave the crowd a knowing look and shrugged. “Either way, a lot of work must’ve gone into it.”

  At that, Harold seemed to snap. “A lot of work did go into it. Do you know how much? Years. Decades. My thirty years as a prisoner of Stonefield Genetics is nothing compared to the man-centuries that collectively went into advancing the projects upon which the Eleventh was based. Do you understand that? This isn’t some half-baked UFO hack-job! This is a living creature! You can’t even begin to comprehend the amount of money that was spent on the research and development of these specimens—”

  The static roar of the audience’s laughter drowned out his words. The toad-faced host turned to the camera and shrugged, smiling the world’s biggest shit-eating grin. “We’ll be right back, folks,” he seemed to be saying. The last thing Spinneretta saw before the image cut away to commercials was Harold Wiser stomping away from the host, wielding a vulgar gesture in each hand.

  She could only stare at the screen in shock. What the hell had just happened? Had the scientist who published The NIDUS Report actually just been laughed off stage on prime time TV? She couldn’t make sense of it. It had to be a dream. The host had said that the book had gone viral; this was news to her, but had everyone reacted like this? He’d said something about receiving a poor reception on another program, but how? The book was packed full of data and evidence lifted right from NIDUS’s networks. Had they just ignored it? Or was it just so unbelievable that it was worth not even the dignity of skepticism? Her hands were shaking. Everything felt wrong. She grabbed her phone and for a moment just held it between her trembling fingers. She needed to talk to someone about this, now.

  Chelsea knocked on the door to Amanda’s family’s apartment. The walk over had done little to cool her blood. The air was still balmy, though the sun was half-sunk below the western woods. She tapped her foot on the doormat and heard shuffling from inside. This ritual was starting to wear on her patience.

  The door swung wide, and Amanda’s mother greeted her. “Evening, Chels. You came for Amanda, I suppose.”

  Chelsea tried to smile. “How’d you guess?”

  Her mother nodded with a worried expression. “Come in. She’s in her room.”

  “She’d better be bedridden,” Chelsea said, no longer bothering to hide her frustration. She entered and walked through the Lark home with purpose in her step. She greeted Amanda’s father as she passed him in the hall, and then bashed the door to her friend’s room open. “Special delivery.”

  The room was dark. The glare of a computer monitor assaulted her eyes. She instinctively flicked the light switch on, and when the warm, orange glow beat back the blackness, she saw Amanda slumped over her keyboard.

  Amanda groaned and writhed in response to the light. “Chels?”

  “Don’t Chels me. I’m getting pretty damn sick of this, you know. We used to do things, Mandy. It’s been weeks! When are you going to snap out of this shit?”

  She groaned again, but left her head on the keyboard. “Just put the homework on the desk and leave me alone.”

  Chelsea withdrew the packet of worksheets from the bag over her shoulder and dropped them on the untouched stack of papers accumulated over the last week. As she did, she noticed something new on her friend’s desk. It was a thick, cream-colored book. There were tattered notes and bookmarks of all colors growing from between its pages. When she saw the title, her heart skipped a beat. “NIDUS . . . Wait, Mandy, what is this?”

  “Scientist wrote it,” Amanda said after a fitful yawn, “before they burned down. It’s a link. But you can’t imagine what the media . . . ” She shook her head and seemed to lose the thought. She looked up at Chelsea, affording her a glimpse of the dark bags under her bloodshot eyes.

  Chelsea couldn’t help but pity her. “Mandy, when was the last time you slept?”

  Amanda rubbed her forehead with the back of her hand. “Just now? I think.”

  “I meant really slept.” The stacks of notes and crumpled photo paper littering the desk were disheveled, without even the pretense of order. It looked almost as bad as Chad’s room. “Is this really all you’ve been doing? You’ve gotta get a hold of yourself. You need to get your ass back to school.”

  “Can’t go to school,” Amanda muttered. “Feel terrible.”

  “Whose fault is that!” Chelsea grabbed her friend by the shoulders and helped her out of her chair. “Come on, get up.”

  “There’s so much in there, Chels. You need to see the report. But they’re just ignoring it. Stupid memes and pastas everywhere now. I have to show them that they’re wrong.”

  “You’re not making any sense. Come on, let’s get you to sleep.” She walked Amanda over to her bed and pushed her down. The girl’s resistance was momentary and feeble. “Get some rest for God’s sake, Mandy. I need you to start making sense again. Please.” She watched for a moment, convinced that Amanda would try to get up again, but her eyes fell shut the moment her head hit the pillow.

  Chelsea wobbled back a step. Christ, she thought. What’s going on with you? She walked back to the computer desk and lowered herself into the chair, exhausted. The brightly colored notes protruding from The NIDUS Report attracted her eye. So, too, was her gaze drawn to the website open on the monitor. The banner at the top of the screen read Beyond Confidential. Her heart jumped. Wait, isn’t this that crackpot conspiracy site? She glanced over her shoulder to make sure Amanda wasn’t going to get up and punch her in the face for snooping. That wasn’t an experience she was eager to relive. To her relief, Amanda seemed to be fast asleep. Breath shaky, Chelsea opened the browser’s history.

  She was greeted by a wall of forum topics from Beyond Confidential. NIDUS Report: What are the pundits hiding from us? Harold Wiser is a Reptilian (confirmed). G-Corp / Area 51 Connection. Another mass media misdirection. Wiser’s report points toward Hollow Earth.

  Confused, she clicked through the topics one by one. Each was filled with wild and paranoid speculation on the nature of NIDUS and the Golmont Corporation. From the posts by Songbird96—Amanda’s handle—Chelsea surmised that the cream-colored book was filled with research stolen from the Golmont Corporation before the flames swallowed it. Amanda’s posts were accusatory; it seemed most of the conspiracy theorists were ignoring the most damning evidence of the book, instead trying to cram it into their own canon, twisting the facts to support the moon landing hoax, the Kennedy assassination, Roswell. She rarely saw Amanda angry, but her tone on the forum was incredulous and livid. She’d even created her own topic on the board, dated three days prior—evidently before she’d read the new book.

  The topic was entitled Re
pton Scriptures, California Cover-up. In it, she’d posted almost two dozen scanned images from the old, dusty tome, and went on to present all of her ideas and theories from the night she’d explained her findings. Her thread was even more thorough than she’d been that night; Amanda had even found original documents and newspaper clippings related to the case of the Norwegian Killer. The rest of the board, however, was disinterested, dismissive. Out of twelve responses, six had been Amanda herself bumping the topic. One was a moderator warning her against bumping her own thread. The remaining five were by the tinfoil hat brigade, who wasted no time suggesting the involvement of the Illuminati, the Bilderberg Conference, Majestic 12. None of them paid the concept of spider people any mind; even the crackpots knew that was ridiculous, after all.

  Before Chelsea closed out of the browser, she noticed a tab sitting open on the far right of the screen. She opened it and found Amanda’s conspiracy-inbox. A half-written reply sat in stasis, and she averted her eyes out of respect for her friend. For a moment, anyway. Curiosity was too powerful a foe to overcome, and she soon found herself reading the first message in the chain. It was from a user calling themselves RitaRaccoon.

  Hi Songbird,

  I saw your thread and thought I’d contact you directly about it. I read through those images you posted—best I could anyway (could use some better lighting, in my opinion). Pretty interesting! Hope they’re real; it’d be disappointing to learn they’re just another hoax or something.

  I live in Manix in San Bernardino County. Recently, my boyfriend has been acting pretty strange, and I can’t help wondering if there’s some connection. His whole family joined some weird New Age religion that showed up here a few weeks ago. He’s been rambling a lot, like he’s gone totally nuts. I can’t make sense of most of it, but I’m like 90% sure I’ve heard him use the phrase Over-Spider. You can imagine how creeped out I was when I came across it in that book! He also keeps talking about being the enemy of the yellow, or some crap like that. After reading your thread, it struck me as ominously similar. He hasn’t been himself at all lately. I don’t want to hijack your thread or anything, but I think whatever’s happening here is related to your book.