My name is Neville Morris, and I’m 19 years old. No-- wait! I, Neville Morris, being of sound mind and body, do so… uh, shit. I don’t remember how it goes. Look, I’m just telling you my side of the story in case I get dead. Which, at this point, is highly possible.
The first time I met Cereal, we were squatting with some other kids in an abandoned building doing whatever we had to get through the endless nights and longer days. I called him \"Cereal\" because whenever we went \"shopping\", he’d shove a box of the sugary sweet stuff under his black-hooded sweatshirt. I never knew his real name. Anyway, he’s dead, so what’s the point? He’s dead because T-Minus 30 killed him.
Anyway, Cereal and I were looking to make some money and get a place together. I know I’d just met the guy, but we clicked right off. We just jived. Get us together, and we were a two-man riot. We were, however, a two-man riot that was tired of starving, tired of freezing, tired of being shit on, and tired of showing our dicks to dirty old English professors in darkened parking garages for grocery money, so we decided to go in on a place together and get the fuck off the street.
It was at that time that we got our hands on the flyer. It was a want ad, some guy looking for \"healthy males\" to participate in a \"scientific experiment\". He was offering a thousand dollars a go, with no questions asked from either party. Now, being a \"healthy male\" who just happens to travel in circles where the words \"healthy males\" and \"party\" are frequently used in the same sentence, usually by older men wearing makeup, I could tell you things I’ve done for money that would force your lunch to the sidewalk. But I like to think I’m above that. Let’s just say I’ve done some things I’m not so proud of, so I figured I could handle a few more.
\"Okay, so call the guy and see what’s up,\" I said, handing the flyer back to Cereal. \"But I put my foot down at scat games, and no kissing.\" He burst out laughing like a thunderclap and lit another cigarette, his eyes glittering like wet tarmac behind the plume of gray.
Long story short, we used the last of our funds to purchase a pack of cigarettes apiece, a large bottle of cheap wine, a small bottle of ephedrine, a deck of cards, and last but certainly not least, a box of Trojans. We each took two of the little white bullets and washed them down with the wine. Then we played cards in the back of the bus. The ride was nearly two hours long.
\"You scared?\" I discarded a five of hearts. I had two aces, and a pair of sevens.
\"Nah.\" He tossed a jack of clubs and a two of spades, drawing two fresh ones from the pile. \"You?\"
\"No way.\" I picked up a third ace, a ten of hearts, and, as luck would have it, a fourth ace. The spade. I laughed triumphantly, and snapped the set on the seat between us. \"Ha! Eat that, bitch!\" I helped myself to three more cards, hoping he didn’t notice my hands shaking.
The doors hissed open like the gates of Hell, and the humid summer night dropped four coins in the fare box and took a seat. Fact: we got off at the end of a long gravel road, having followed the directions and arriving later that night. Fact: it was dark as fuck out. Fact: at the other end of the drive, just visible in the fading light, sat a ramshackle two-story house on an otherwise barren farm, smack center of a valley 50 miles from nowhere. Fact: there was no name on the mailbox. You do the math. The facts, as they added up, should have put us back on that bus before the doors stopped hissing. I mean, we’ve all seen horror movies, right? If you were sitting there in the dark with a bucket of popcorn, what encouraging advice would you be shouting at me right about now? Being as smart as you are, it’d probably start with \"Get\", and end with \"the fuck out of there.\" Am I right? I hope so.
Cereal, meanwhile, had given sudden birth to good sense, and his voice shook like a spooked horse. \"Fuck this. I’m having second thoughts, Nev.\" The hand he placed on my shoulder brought me to a full stop in the middle of the long gravel road that led up to the house. I could see one light in the back, and a flickering blue glow coming from the second floor. I shook my head, and started walking again. Again, his hand found my shoulder, and I faced him. \"Think, man. Is it worth it?\" Cereal pointed off toward the house, which drew closer with each step. \"We have no idea what’s in there!\"
I followed his finger, and while I admit that I found myself imagining the house looked more and more like a sleeping animal with one eye open, watching us march faith-first into its gaping maw, I found it far more useful to think about a one, followed by three zeroes. And so empowered, I proceed to half-talk, half-bully, half-cajole (wait, that’s three halves) Cereal into taking one step, and then another, and another still. If my reasons were Jeopardy categories, they would be: You Can Buy A Lot Of Mouthwash With One Thousand Dollars; Shit In One Hand And Wish In The Other; Fragile Old Queers I Have Stomped For Kicks; Things You Can Sell At A Pawn Shop Without Raising Eyebrows; What Percentage Of English Professors Have Secret Degrees In Male Anatomy; We’ll Look Back On This One Day And Laugh; We Might As Well Since We’re Already Here; and As If You’ve Got Anything Better To Do.
Across the yard. Up the steps. Across the planks to the door. There was some confusion about who would knock on the door, and I knocked for almost five minutes before anyone came. When the door creaked, Cereal grabbed my arm as I took two steps backward.
The man who answered was basketball-player tall, and crooked like a corkscrew. His shock-white hair stood on end, and a well-weathered face bespoke his age, pronounced as it was by shadows of the porch light. From six steps away, he smelled like he’d been drinking since noon. He was dressed in old, gray work pants and a faded red shirt, which hung slack on his angular frame. One pair of bifocals rested on his face, another \'round his neck.
Cereal got his second wind, and set sail for business. \"Hi, we’re here about the flyer?\" He unfolded it from the back pocket of his jeans, and took his time smoothing the creases on his thigh, making sure the man got a look at his legs. Cereal was in pretty decent shape for a rent boy who existed solely on Cap’n Crunch: good teeth, high cheekbones, curly hair, and a lean build. Pretty boys like him make a lot of money. \"Is this offer still good?\" He held out the flyer with a smile, his pearly whites flashing.
The stranger took the flyer, held it at arm\'s length, and stared back at Cereal before reading it slowly, as though he’d never seen it before. When he was done, he eyed us one at a time. Probably sizing us up, fitting us together in his mind like some perverted game of Tetris he’d been longing to play, figuring out what piece would fit best where. Cereal rubbed his hands together slowly, showed his whites again, and did his best to be charming.
Maybe this guy was having second thoughts. Maybe he’d chickened out. I closed my eyes and imagined him exclaiming, \"I didn’t write this! Now get off my property, you perverted filth! Both of you! Before I call the cops!\" I imagined him slamming the door in our faces, and I could almost hear the gravel crunch beneath my shoes. I imagined the wave of relief that would wash over us. I’d light a cigarette, and say, \"Man, I’m glad that’s over.\" And Cereal would agree. Then we’d talk about how to get home. On the long walk home, we’d talk about how that was the last trick we’d never have to pull again. We’d dreamed about opening a comic book store someday, or a head shop, or something. By the time we’d walked home sometime tomorrow, we’d already have a name picked out. We’d call it--
\"Yeah. It’s good. Come in. I’m Max.\" He turned and led us through the house, which was dark, and full of strange noises. A TV blared from somewhere upstairs. The kitchen was in the rear of the house, and bathed in yellow light from a bulb covered in fly shit. The paint on the ceiling was cracked and peeling in sections. There were dishes in the sink, but the floor was clean. Max gestured for us to take a seat in one of the four chairs around the Formica table, and began rifling through a cupboard near the sink. I heard the friendly sound of plates clinking, and wondered if maybe he weren’t one of those born-agains who rent young meat for the evening, but only want to cook them dinner, buy them clothes, and listen to their stories. I was hungry as fuck.
Instead, Max placed a sterile-looking tray on the table, which held a jar of cotton balls, a brown plastic bottle of rubbing alcohol, a length of rubber tubing, two plastic-wrapped syringes, and a small vial made of brown glass, and began arranging the items according to some inner plan. My mouth ran dry like the proverbial tit. \"Uh, wait a second. What’s this shit?\" I demanded.
\"The experiment, of course,\" barked Max over the tops of his bifocals. He had crazy thick eyebrows, which moved like antennae, or those things in the ocean. Sea enemies. \"What’d you think you were here for?\" He took a seat closest to Cereal, and gestured for him to roll up his sleeve. Max removed a cotton ball from the jar and doused it with alcohol, and I could hear the liquid swish as he upended it briefly.
\"Thought I was one of them old faggots looking for a hump, did you?\" He snorted derisively as he swabbed Cereal’s arm. The sting of rubbing alcohol cut my nostrils in the closeness of the room, and my stomach slowly turned. Cereal’s face went white, and he looked at me with fear in his eyes. He was still showing his teeth, but he was just as scared as I was. Sex was one thing, but this was different. \"Well, no-- of course not,\" I lied, realizing he probably wasn’t going to cook us dinner, either. \"But what’s in the--\"
Max looked at Cereal’s face, and then at mine. \"Oh. I get it,\" he said exhaling a sigh of disgust and removing his bifocals. \"As I recall, gentlemen, the flyer said quite clearly, \'healthy males wanted for a scientific experiment\'. It did not say \'lonely old fruit bat desires dirty dancing with young bucks\'. It also specified you’d be paid one thousand dollars a piece for not asking any questions.\" His voice box growled like a rock tumbler, and I could feel the baritone in my chest.
\"As I am a man of my word, I promise you will be paid according to that agreement. In turn,\" he continued, forcefully turning Cereal’s elbow toward the floor and exposing a series of tiny scabs to the shit-stained light, \"I agree not to ask you any embarrassing or obvious questions about what you do in your spare time. Speaking of time, you are wasting mine. One thousand dollars. Do we have a deal? If not, you and your friend here are free to get the hell out of my house this instant.\" Max looked back and forth at us, waiting. \"Now.\"
Cereal looked at me for a moment before nodding his head. Then his eyes closed, his perfect teeth now concealed behind tightly clamped lips which had nothing further to say. Well, I did. \"Fine,\" I said, taking off my jacket. \"But I’m going first.\"
Max replaced his bifocals and repeated the swabbing operation on me before opening the packet containing a fresh syringe. I remember thinking how silly this was: I was in the middle of nowhere with a strange man who, for all I knew, was about to inject me with cat piss and kerosene, and I had just insisted on going first. It was a weird moment, and I felt as though I were outside myself, watching.
Max grunted at the marks along my arms as he swabbed my arm. Then he wrapped me tight, woke the vein, and slipped me like a pro. I watched him draw my blood into that tiny cylinder before ramming the plunger home. He placed another pre-soaked cotton ball over the needle and withdrew the syringe, all very manner-of-fact. Before the empty syringe hit the trash can in the corner, a sudden chill ran down my spine. I felt the room close in around me, and for a moment, I knew no pain.
Now it was Cereal’s turn. I vaguely remember him laughing as he held out his arm while Max did him up, but just after the needle was out, Max did something unexpected. He began to talk about spiders.
\"Did either of you boys know that the silk of the common spider is unique in all the arachnid world? It’s incredibly strong, and terribly resilient,\" he said, gazing through the empty syringe at the bulb overhead. Some well-sedated part of me was shouting out a warning, but I wasn’t listening. I was riding down a river of light on the sound of Max’s voice, without absorbing any of the dangerous content.
\"For example,\" said Max, accentuating each syllable, \"if you produce enough of it and bind it with other like polymers, you’d create a powerful new body armor ideal for military and law enforcement applications. But you’d be ignoring the bigger picture.
\"You see, I wanted to explore the possibility of weaving it to the human skeletal structure, to the muscle mass, or grafting it to skin. It’s far more plausible than it sounds, really.\" He tossed the second empty into the trash and leaned back in his chair, removed his glasses again, and rubbed his eyes. \"I had hard facts, and the research to back it up. Unfortunately, I was unable to convince my... colleagues of my claims, so I was forced to continue my work alone, with a handful of silent investors and one assistant.\"
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Cereal stiffen. His eyes were as big as saucers, and his mouth locked tight in a ghastly \"O\". I’ve seen that look before, but for some reason, I refused to accept what was happening. If Max noticed, he seemed not to care, and instead continued speaking.
\"Spider silk is a protein similar to goat\'s milk, you see. When the spider gene is injected into a goat, the goat produces a protein identical to that found in spider silk.\" His voice echoed off the paper-thin walls. \"It’s really just a simple chain of amino acids, primarily glycine and alanine,\" he said, leaning back in his chair and staring at a spot somewhere above me.
\"Did you also know that spider silk is almost five times stronger than steel, and twice as strong as Kevlar of the same weight? It has the ability to stretch about 30-percent longer than its original length without breaking, which makes it very resilient.\"
The room around me spun and fell like a knife fighter in a gunfight, and I followed it.
\"Now, theoretically this protein would then be extracted from the goat’s milk to produce silk fibers. Ordinarily, the process stops there, but I took it a little further and came up with a way to hyper-accelerate the result to form a new compound.\" He glanced at Cereal, and checked a watch on his wrist I hadn’t noticed earlier, before turning to face me, his eyes boring into mine, as though he was looking for something.
\"After that, I attached it to a human enzyme for easier joining, and laced it with a strong sedative to take the edge off. I hope you approve. I call it \'Arachnid\'. Do you like it? I don’t think your friend did. Wait here, please,\" and he left the room through a curtained door.
I slumped over on the table, and stared at Cereal. His head was tilted back, and his eyes were staring through the ceiling and out into the starry night beyond. There was foam around his lips, and a tear was drying on his cheek. There came a noise like a high-pitched whine, and soon I realized it was me. I was crying. \"Oh, God. Cereal…\" I whispered, and shut my eyes. I was treading water in lukewarm syrup, and there was a weird sensation rippling down my spine, like having my skeleton rolled in silk sheets. \"Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God…\"
Max’s voice reached my ears from light years away. \"Anyway, I was working on germline gene therapy, an additional step to PGD. I was beyond screening embryos; any trait could be added to an embryo: cerevisiae, elegans, melanogaster. Endless possibilities.\" I could only make out bits and pieces of what he was saying. Something crashed, and I heard him swear.
He continued, and his footsteps brought his voice closer. \"Ninety-five percent of the initial sequencing is finished, with a ninety-nine percent degree of accuracy. There’s just one problem-- we have to test it.\" And that’s when Max padded into the kitchen through the dividing curtain with a double-barrel shotgun aimed at my chest. I sat upright in my chair with fear. \"This won’t hurt a bit,\" he said, and stroked both triggers.
The gun went off with a deafening roar, and I saw the flash of light leap out of the barrels. I threw my arms up to shield myself (like that was really going to help), and felt the sting as the pellets impacted with my skin, and I was thrown to the floor. From my position, I remember a most curious thing: Max’s feet were stuffed into bunny slippers. I lay there staring at them, waiting for the warm voice of death to tickle my ear, but it never spoke.
\"It’s all right, you can open your eyes. The experiment worked. Well, for one of you, anyway.\" I opened them slowly, not sure what I would find, but I sure as shit didn’t expect to see what I saw. There was about a hundred smoking holes in my clothing-- my favorite T-shirt was shot to shit, and there were a lot of metal fragments lying in my lap. My chest stung like a belly flop, and I was trembling as I scooped up the pellets and poured them through my hands like sand. I ran my hands over my body, looking for blood in disbelief. But there was none. I was unharmed. I looked over at what used to be Cereal. His lips were blue and his chest was missing. I was too scared to move, and I couldn’t take my eyes away from the meat puppet that had been the closest thing I had to a friend.
\"I had to make sure he was dead,\" said Max. \"As for you, for the next half-hour, you’re a living god. Enjoy it.\" He parted the curtain and glanced back at me. \"Oh. You can sleep on the couch. There’s food in the fridge.\" The curtain closed, and I passed out. And that’s how I met Max.
I sat in the front room the next morning, while Max and Irene patiently explained T-Minus 30 to me after we buried Cereal in the cornfield. Irene, the intern who worked for Max, was the first person to take a shot of TM30 almost a year ago. \"Why didn’t it work on Cereal?\" I asked, staring woodenly at the floor. Max just shrugged. \"His chromosomes zigged when they should have zagged.\"
\"You heartless bastard!\" I yelled, jumping to my feet. \"What if we’d both died? How many fucking people have you had out here? How many people have you killed? And why the hell did you shoot me? Jesus, I need a cigarette--\" My voice broke, and my throat constricted around the last syllable like a boa.
They looked at each other for a moment, and then Max spoke. \"I can answer that. First of all, there is no smoking here. As for the money, you and your friend were willing to risk your lives for a thousand dollars cash, and I needed to test a formula designed to render the human body bulletproof for approximately one half-hour. Your lives were forfeit when you walked through that door.
\"If I had injected you and that batch of formula had been a failure, it may have held some very unpleasant side effects for you, in which case, shooting you on the spot would have been an act of mercy.
\"If the test was a success, which by the way it was, I could then persuade you to help me with my experiment. Which I am doing right now.\" He stood up and strode to the window, his hands clasped behind his back. I totally fucking hate it when people do that. They look really pompous. \"Here’s the contract: there are no exceptions. Live here, free room and board, meals provided and all the TM30 you can stand. I can’t promise it won’t kill you any more than the junk you were shoving in your veins, Neville. But there can be no other drugs of any kind unless Irene or I administer them to you. Absolutely no drinking, and no cigarettes. I need you healthy or not at all. I hate to sound so cliché, but if I can’t use you, I will kill you. You’ve been exposed to Arachnid, and I don’t want you telling the whole world about what goes on here. Do what I tell you, pull your share, and I will make you a god on Earth. On the other hand, lie to me, steal from me, break our agreement or otherwise piss on what we’ve got going on here,\" he said, indicating himself and Irene, who just smiled, \"and I will simply wait 30 minutes and shoot you myself. Do we have a deal?\"
Outside the birds sang sweetly in the trees. A breeze mowed the grass and swept the dust from the driveway. Just beyond a grove of trees, not 300 feet from where I sat, a fresh patch of earth marked the spot where Cereal was having a long and meaningful dirt nap. He was a year older than me. I didn’t even know his name. I just kept calling him \"Cereal\". \"How many people have you injected with that... that spider-come, whatever the hell it was?\"
\"Arachnid. It’s called Arachnid. It’s just part of T-Minus 30, and it’s not important right now. I need your answer,\" said Max.
\"Well, what if the police come looking for him?\"
Irene walked over and sat on the couch next to me, putting one hand on my shoulder, the way you would a small child. She was tall, athletic, with arms like an oak banister and an Amazon’s physique. She was also incredibly attractive, with a pixie face and sparkling green eyes. \"What if they do?\" she asked, leveling her gaze at me. I couldn’t look away from her eyes. They threatened to swallow me whole.
\"What are you going to tell them? You’re in this, too, Neville. Besides. You touched immortality last night. Aren’t you curious as to what comes next? Don’t you realize how lucky you are to be here? I can understand your apprehension-- it’s probably not the most effective way to screen applicants,\" she said with a slight smile, like a hostess at a party ignoring vomit on the floor. \"But we had to be sure the serum worked. Try to see our side of it. If we had just given you the dose, how else could we test its capabilities without, well, shooting you at close range with a shotgun?\"
Of course. How silly of me not to see this for myself. Jesus H. Christ, these people were stone-fucking insane! I sat back on the couch and thought for a moment. I had nothing else to go back to. My mom was dead, and my dad, well, I didn’t know where he was. I didn’t have a job. I just did what I could for money and stayed with friends. And right now, I had no friends and no mon--
\"What about the two thousand dollars, mine and Cereal\'s share?\" I asked.
\"There never was any money,\" replied Max. \"Besides, room and board is free. What is there to spend it on?\" Damn, this just gets better and better. But what the hell else was I supposed to do?
\"Okay.\" I took a deep breath. \"I’m in.\"