Free Project Cain by Geoffrey Girard Page A

develop if the spankings wereactual beatings? And what if Ted #4’s beatings include molestation? And Ted #5 . . .
    These are the games DSTI was playing. The tests they were running for almost twenty years. And my . . . my own father had been head of the entire operation.
    WHY? I screamed inside my head again. Why would he do something like that?
    A distant voice said something, saved me from my thoughts.
    I turned to the Subway guy, who asked me again if I was OK, said I looked a little zoned out.
    I told him I was just tired.
    Then I asked if he had a pen and some paper I could use.
    He eyed me curiously, then nodded.
    I pushed my half-eaten sub aside and worked for the next twenty minutes.
    I’d never worked so hard at anything in my whole life.
    •  •  •
    So there’s no confusion here, I 100% still knew Castillo wanted me to go away. I just didn’t care. I wanted to prove to him he was wrong. I was worth keeping around. I could help.
    Find the other guys. Find my father.
    And if I couldn’t, well, then I guess Castillo was just gonna have to shoot me and dump me in the woods.
    Or give me more than a hundred dollars.
    •  •  •
    What’s this? Castillo asked when I returned to the motel room.
    If he was upset about my return, I didn’t notice. I was too excited.
    I presented Castillo with my list of everywhere my father hadever taken me. Every city, store, restaurant, resort, museum, park . . . everywhere. Another list of every city I could remember he ever went to. Conferences and guest lectures and stuff. Places he said he was going. I’d even made little stars where he’d brought me back a souvenir or something.
    Castillo read the whole list. Both sides of the paper were completely full.
    I asked if it was good.
    He nodded. It’s a start, he said.
    And for the first time, I felt that too.



CHAPTER ELEVEN
    T hat same night, Ted found me in a dream.
    I don’t know how he did it. I don’t even know now if it was a dream, but I also wouldn’t know what else to call it. Any other possibility—whether more supernatural or even scientific—would be even more terrifying. In any case, I knew it was him right away.
    Ted Thompson was the most awful boy I’d ever met.
    But the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it?
    Ted Thompson had been made from the DNA of Ted Bundy.
    One of the biggies. First-ballot Hall of Fame for Serial Killers.
    In the 1970s, Bundy raped and murdered thirty women in just four years. He’s infamous now for being kinda good-looking and would just walk up to women and ask for help, pretend to be hurt, or lost, or . . . And they’d take one look at his big blue eyes and shaggy hair and crooked smile, and that was that. And then he’d rape and kill them.
    Sometimes (a dozen times) he decapitated his victims and kept their heads as souvenirs. Sometimes he went back to where the dead bodies were hidden and did sex stuff. Sometimes he’d just randomly break into girls’ houses and beat them to death while hemasturbated. He escaped from prison twice, and the second time invaded a whole college sorority, successfully attacking four different women.

    He was finally electrocuted in 1989. He wouldn’t be able to hurt anyone else ever again. All those sisters and mothers and wives and daughters would be a little safer again. Or not.
    Thanks to cloning, his DNA was still alive and well. Eyes. Skin. Brain. Bones. Blood.
    Every cell. Copy, Paste.
    Ted Thompson.
    We’d met at the Massey Institute more than a dozen times. We’d been forced together to play group games and share in group talks together that my dad supervised with some of the shrinks from Massey.
    See, all the guys who went to Massey were there for various diagnosed depression, anxiety, addiction, or anger management issues.This, of course, was largely a lie. Some of the guys who went to Massey actually had these issues and were just normal kids born the regular way to regular parents. But some of