Free Project Cain by Geoffrey Girard

face scrunched up like he’d eaten something bad and he told me there was a phone in my room.
    So I just kept going to Subway. They didn’t have a phone either.
    I ended up ordering two sandwiches. I don’t know why. At this point I had no intention of ever going back to that room, of ever seeing Castillo again. I guess I was just on autopilot. Practically sleepwalking. Nightmarewalking. I pointed at food and picked bread and grunted out answers about whether or not I wanted stuff toasted or not. I wasn’t even sure what I had just ordered.
    The guy making the sandwiches kept looking at me all weird. He probably knew my hair was dyed. He probably thought I was the spitting image of that “one-guy-you-know-the-one-sure-you-do-that-serial-killer-guy.”
    I wondered how many people even knew what Jeffrey Dahmer looks—looked—like. I mean, was it just a name that people knew and used? Or did everyone in the country know what this freak looked like? And, if so, how much did I really look like him?
    •  •  •
    I’ve since read that only 22% of American adults identified “Gerald Ford” as the name of a recent US President, but 98% could, on the very first try, identify the name “Jeffrey Dahmer” as a serial killer.
    •  •  •
    I handed the Subway guy the money, and he looked at me all weird again. Maybe because it was a hundred. Probably because I looked exactly like someone who’d murdered seventeen people.
    He asked if I needed anything to drink. I’m not sure if I answered him. I took the two subs to the far end of the empty store and sat at a table with my back to the guy. I ate in the same haze with which I’d ordered. Trying to decide what to do next. I had ninety dollars now.
    Where and how far was I gonna get with ninety dollars?
    I sat there for a long time. Started thinking about my dad again. If I could just get ahold of him, he’d . . . He’d what? Who knew anymore?
    Castillo had told me a little about the experiments conducted on some of the boys who were missing. Maybe “experiments” isn’t the best word. “Prescriptions”? “Treatments”?
    Maybe “TORTURE” was the best word.
    Torture orchestrated by DSTI.
    By my father.
    •  •  •
    Some of the clone boys had been beaten. Even molested. By their “adoptive parents.” Some of the boys had just been verbally abused.Told they were worthless, stupid, gay, whatever. Some had been given drugs and alcohol. Or forced to kill animals. Or to watch porn. Or . . . All kinds of things just to replicate some of the bad life things that had happened to the original killers.
    (THIS is the man I was supposed to call? The man who would save me?)
    But some clones were completely, unreservedly, utterly left alone. I don’t mean alone alone. They had parents and all that, but there was none of that bad stuff going on. Nothing pervy or twisted. You know, raised like “normal” kids. Soccer teams and swim lessons and Subway sandwiches. And, quite honestly, that’s exactly how I’d been raised. Normal. My father had never laid a hand on me. Never called me names or gotten me high. Never put me in dangerous or confusing situations. The man took me to museums and parks and talked to me about science and history. Signed me up for soccer camps and piano lessons. Found me the best tutors and speech therapists money could buy.
    But WHY     ? Why did I get piano lessons and another guy, maybe even another Jeff, had gotten molested by guys HIS fake dad had met on Craigslist?
    I knew enough basic science to understand test groups and controlled experiments. DSTI had created us all to harness the XP11 violence gene. Guess they wanted to determine precisely how much of the violence was directly related to the gene and how much was connected to environment.
    If Ted #1 had x level of violence in his system, how much would Ted #2 have if we just added a little physical violence? Mild routine spankings, say. And how much would Ted #3