Project Cain Read Online Free PDF Page B

of these names do you recognize?
    Except for one, which I’d learned only the day before, I’d never heard of any of them.
    They happen to be six of the most famous serial killers ever.
    That’s why they were chosen. Why they were born again. Manufactured.
    An Olympic Dream Team if the Olympics murdered and rapedpeople. All added up, they’d killed almost two hundred people. Though “killed” doesn’t quite capture the specifics, but it will have to do.
    My dad wanted only the best. So he went out and got their DNA and made clones of the best.
    Now the “BEST” were all teenagers again.
    And they’d apparently restarted their KILL COUNT at twelve.
    •  •  •
    Castillo asked if I knew these guys. He’d not yet brought up the clone thing at all. He was still speaking about these six boys like they were just Albert Young, David Spanelli, Henry Roberts, and so on, etc. But something in his voice, his look, made me realize he knew exactly what they were.
    He’d just come to my house directly from DSTI, just spent hours in my father’s secret room while I’d cowered in the closet. Yes, I imagined, he knew the New Truth all too well.
    Castillo shook me from my ever-darkening thoughts, asked again: Do you know these guys?
    I admitted I knew three of them. I’d met Henry and Ted. And David. Various events and programs at the Massey school my dad had brought me to. David had always seemed like a pretty cool kid. Funny. And I told Castillo that. He wrote it down like it mattered somehow.
    He asked specifically about Henry and Ted.
    I shook my head. Explained what I thought of them. Told Castillo they, to me, seemed like “BAD KIDS.” (Not knowing how much my silly notions of such classifications would be challenged and changed over the next two weeks.) When pressed for more specifics, I told him they just seemed to be like people who might be involved in something, well, “BAD.”
    Maybe that was unfair. I mean, guys like my father and Mr. Eble had always seemed “GOOD,” and this was clearly no longer a given.
    Part of the New Truth.
    Castillo asked me a bunch more questions about Henry, Ted, and David.
    What they liked to do. Places they talked about? Girls? Etc.
    I told Castillo everything I could think of. It wasn’t much.
    I mean, how much do you really know about people you’ve met only a couple of times?
    As to the other three guys he was looking for . . .
    I told Castillo honestly I’d never met them.
    I’d certainly have remembered meeting Jeffrey Williford.
    Meeting another copy of myself.
    •  •  •
    Castillo had told DSTI about finding my dad’s secret room and about all the materials and documents within. He projected DSTI would return in about thirty minutes to pick it all up, and then he made it pretty clear that wasn’t ideal for me. Turns out he had the exact same assessments of DSTI my dad did: I probably should keep as far away as possible. It occurred to me briefly that his warning and concern were some kind of cruel trick and that he was just gonna drive me straight to them anyway.
    But Castillo didn’t work for DSTI. Just with . (At least that’s what he was telling me.) And that small difference made ALL the difference in the world, I think. Castillo was working for the government. The Department of Defense, ultimately. For some guy named Colonel Stanforth. And the gang at DSTI hadn’t told Castillo (or this Stanforth guy) they werecoming to clean out my father’s office before Castillo got there.
    And they sure as heck hadn’t told Castillo anything about me. That I even existed .
    Castillo’d had to figure that part out on his own after a night in my dad’s secret room reading his journals. Watching videos of various patient interviews and of top-secret tests conducted.
    Turns out there were a lot of things DSTI hadn’t told Castillo about.
    And I think it kinda pissed him off.
    So he didn’t plan to take me to DSTI.
    Instead he asked me to