Instinct by Jason Hough (ebook reader web TXT) 📗

Time to redirect my anger toward the people responsible for all this. Toward Ang, and whoever that woman was on the screen. She looked so damn familiar, but I still can’t place it.

I let the blinds fall and sit back down on the bed, trying to think of what the fuck to do because another memory has just come back to me, something I’d forgotten about in all this insanity:

Captain Tweaker and his barrels, which he’d been emptying into the town’s water supply.

Holy shit. There’d been debate, when I was bound in that room, about whether to give me the liquid version. Oh hell. What if the contents of those barrels had been laced with Ang’s drug? Contaminate the water supply and boom, you have a whole town of people who appear normal but, with the right command from the right person, obey like robots.

Only, that can’t be right. I think through the details of my own experience. Weight and blood pressure and pulse, then that timer with the oddly specific 73 seconds, which started the moment they sprayed that crap into my mouth. You couldn’t put something like that into a water supply. Who the hell knows when anyone will consume it, and even if you could get them to do it at the right time, what then? How do you imprint the desired behavior on an entire town all at once?

So whatever Tweaker was dumping in the water, it wasn’t Ang’s creation. So what was it? And why?

My stomach lurches. The vision in my head changes. Instead of The Stepford Wives robotic slaves, what I now imagine is Jonestown. That death cult. Bodies in the grass, in the church, everywhere. They’d drunk the Kool-Aid.

Suppose what Tweaker had been putting in the water supply wasn’t Ang’s creation at all. What if it was simply poison? In one fell swoop, all evidence of the experiments would be wiped out. Left behind would be just myself and Greg—the town’s only police—and Doc, the town’s lone doctor, all agreeing on the same version of the story per the bidding of a voice in our ear. We’d say it was some outbreak or suicide cult or who-knows-what. Who’d think to check of a drug no one’s ever heard of before, especially if it’s long since left the system, its damage to the brain already done?

No one would. Christ, it’s fucking perfect.

Except for one thing.

“They’re not expecting me,” I whisper toward the floor. For the moment, at least, they think I’m part of the gang. That’s the only card I have to play.

If that is their plan, though—to hide here while Silvertown commits an unwitting mass suicide—then I may already be too late. Staying here, pretending to be one of them, waiting for the right moment to make some arrests… that’s not going to cut it. People could be dying off even now.

I need to get away. Warn them. Save whoever I can.

Kyle. Clara. Sally and her twins. All of them.

I need to save Silvertown.

The problem with this goal is immediately obvious to me.

Even if they believe I’m one of them, the primary trait of membership in their gang is not the broken nose, but blind obedience. If I’m wandering around the house, they’ll know instantly that I’m not under the spell, seeing as I was ordered to stay in the room.

On a whim I go to the door and try the handle, just to know if it’s even an option.

Locked from the outside.

To quote Doc, that’s interesting.

Either he doesn’t trust my state of mind as much as he’s letting on, or this treatment of Ang’s isn’t as foolproof as it seems.

I sit on the bed again, thinking the idea through. Perhaps blind obedience is not entirely correct. Reviewing everything I’ve seen and heard here, there are plenty of instances where Ang and Doc’s “gang” seemed to stray from their orders. And one detail in particular stands out. Doc had to tell Tweaker a second time not to talk to me. And then, a few seconds later, Ang chastised the big oaf. “You have to remind them,” he’d said.

Why, though? And I guess more important, can I use this knowledge somehow?

Instincts, as I understand them, manifest in the way we behave without thinking. Or, rather, before thinking. Flinching when something is thrown at us. Running from danger. There’s the instinct first, then the rational thought after. We flinched, but the object being thrown was soft. We fled, but the threat chasing us was just an affectionate pooch. One governs our behavior more quickly than the other.

I think back once again to Doc’s words as we viewed the body of the hiker. “Consider the animal handler,” he’d said, perhaps giving away more than he should have. His point had been that with enough training you can overcome your instinctual behavior.

If that were true here, though, then why hadn’t Greg just gone all Charles Bronson on Doc and Ang the moment his head caught up with what his body’s been doing?

The answer hits me like a bolt of electricity: The woman from the screen.

I hadn’t thought about her much until now. And suddenly it occurs to me that the only real rewiring of the brain they’ve tried to do to me here is to get me to believe whatever she says.

You will do whatever I say. Only once that has been absolutely baked in do the next instructions come. You’ll do whatever Ang says, unless it conflicts. Etcetera.

Well, fuck, now that makes sense.

Her original command is the new instinct at the core of Greg, Tweaker, and all the others. When Doc tells one of them to do something it is her command that makes them comply.

But over time perhaps their brains start to erode this reflexive trust in the woman’s original order.

Okay, Mary, that’s great and all, but what does it mean? And why is