“I’m sorry,” Chapel said. “You worked for the DoD? I thought the chimeras were a CIA project.”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that. I know the man who recruited me was wearing a uniform, that’s all.”
Chapel nodded. No need to jump to conclusions. “So the DoD approached you about a teaching assignment. When was this?”
“Nineteen ninety,” Ellie said.
“So they would have been pretty young,” Chapel said. “Did anyone ever tell you why they were created — or why they were detained?”
“Absolutely not. Before you ask, yes, I did wonder. I burned with curiosity about that for a long time, but when you ask the same question a hundred times and are routinely told you don’t need to know the answer, you eventually give in and stop asking. I’m sure you can understand that.”
“Yeah,” Chapel said. “Yeah, I can.”
“Captain, the word ‘yeah’ does not belong in the English language. The word you want to use is ‘yes.’ As in, ‘yes, ma’am.’ ”
Chapel felt himself blush. “Yes, ma’am.”
Ellie frowned and picked up her teacup again. “I think this will be a very long night if I make you guess which questions to ask and then tell you what I think you should know. Why don’t I just go through the story as I remember it?”
“All right,” Chapel said.
Ellie knocked back her cup in one gulp and began.
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS: APRIL 13, T+40:12
“It was 1990 when they first approached me. A captain of the navy whose name I don’t remember — I never saw him again — came to my school on Roosevelt Island in New York. He asked if I had any experience administering intelligence tests, specifically culture-neutral IQ tests. I explained that I had been doing just such a thing for more than ten years. I asked why he wanted to know, but of course he didn’t answer. A few months later, during my summer break, I was asked to come up to the Catskills for a weekend and to bring anything I needed to administer such a test to a group of two hundred children, all of them four years old, all of them boys. In exchange I would be paid handsomely for my time, but I had to agree not to tell anyone where I was going or why.
“Back then I was just a little older than you are now. Still young enough to think an adventure sounded fun, rather than exhausting. So I went. I was certainly not expecting what I saw. Camp Putnam was about a hundred acres of ground enclosed by an electric fence. There were guard towers and quite a number of soldiers. Inside the fence were the boys. They were adorable, and even when I noticed what was so strange about their eyes, I couldn’t help but feel they were the healthiest, most curious bunch of four-year-olds I’d ever met. I’m sure I asked a thousand questions that day, but I did not receive any answers, as you can imagine.
“I did the job I’d been brought in for, administering the tests. Julia, dear, your parents were really quite interested in the results. They kept asking me if I would stay and tabulate the results then and there. They offered me more money. It was summertime, when every teacher needs more money, so I did as they asked. As it turned out, I ended up staying at the camp for eight more years.
“The boys were incredibly healthy and most of them had quite high IQs. They never seemed to get sick, and when they fell out of trees or skinned their elbows, they healed with astonishing speed. The soldiers played with them and treated them very well — at that time — but nobody, no one at all had considered they needed to be educated. In the end I had to volunteer to be their teacher. The prospect of these boys growing up in that camp, unable to read, unable to do basic math, was just startling to me. I was under the impression, you see, that they were orphans or something. That they were being raised there by the military but that when they were old enough they would go forth into the world, that they would get jobs and marry and have happy lives.
“I sometimes think your father, Julia, hired me on simply because it was easier to do that than to disillusion me.
“In many ways that was an idyllic time and I was quite happy. The Catskills are a beautiful place, and I fell in love with country living. In the summer I would hold class in a field of wildflowers deep in the camp. In the winter we would all crowd into a cozy little schoolhouse, the boys wrapped up in blankets around woodstoves. Beyond that — I was electrified. It was an incredible opportunity for someone like me. There were no televisions in Camp Putnam. No radios or newspapers. I could teach these boys to become men, to become upstanding gentlemen without any of the distractions or temptations of modern life. I imagined the papers I could write based on my observations, the awards and grants I could win with the data I collected. I will admit I was not above the scientific impulse that drove people like Taggart and Bryant.
“That changed, though, in 1993. That was the year of the first death.
“The boys had always fought among themselves. They were quick of temper, though at the time we thought that was just a product of their environment. Boys will be boys, we said. They squabbled over any little thing that one of them had and the others lacked. If a guard gave one of them a candy bar, we knew it would end in a fistfight as one of the other boys decided it by rights belonged to him.
“When one of them — his name was Gerald — failed to show up in my class one day, I assumed he was just playing hooky or that he was sick. When he was gone for a week, I began to worry. Eventually Dr. Bryant took me aside and explained. Gerald was dead. He had been attacked by three other boys, and they had broken his neck. She made it sound like an accident. A tragedy, but nothing unnatural. The three boys who killed Gerald would be punished, she said, but I didn’t need to worry about it.
“Three months later it happened again. Two boys went into the woods, just playing, exploring, doing what eight-year-old boys do. Only one came back. He refused to tell us what happened to his friend and so guards had to go out looking for him. The missing boy’s name was Marcus. They found him impaled on a tree branch. When his friend, Tyrone, was questioned, he admitted they had fallen out over whether Huckleberry Finn or Tom Sawyer was smarter. It was a question I had asked in class that day, and they had debated it at some length before Tyrone decided he could settle the question once and for all. He had made a kind of spear out of the tree branch and he ran Marcus through with it, puncturing a lung.
“I had plenty of training in dealing with emotionally confused youths. I offered my services in helping Tyrone, but Dr. Taggart said that wouldn’t be necessary. I did not see Tyrone again. I assumed he had been taken to another facility, separated for the safety of the population. What actually happened to him is something I don’t like to contemplate.
“It became rapidly apparent, however, that we had a real problem on our hands. The violence escalated each month. Fistfights turned into boys throwing rocks at each other, which turned into horrible beatings and boys using makeshift weapons against one another. The scientists tried all manner of ways to settle things down, from putting drugs in the boys’ food to splitting them up into small groups and forbidding them from being alone with each other at any time. The number of guards in the camp was doubled, and then tripled.
“It did not help. A guard was killed, in 1994. It was a horrible time. The other guards swept through the camp looking for the culprit. They were not… gentle in their interrogations. For a while things quieted down as the boys were put under a draconian sort of lockdown. They were forced to stay in their cabins at all times, not even being allowed out for exercise. That couldn’t last, though, not if we wished to keep the boys healthy. I imagine some of us believed the rash of violence had been a fad. A phase the boys would grow out of.