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  EGalley Disclaimer REV 1P.indd 1 10/16/09 3:27 PM Geoffrey Girard

  Cain’s Blood

  A Novel

  Ted Bundy. The Son of Sam. The Boston Strangler. Albert Fish. Henry Lee Lucas.

  The DNA of the world’s most notorious serial killers has been cloned by the U.S. Department of Defense to develop a new breed of bioweapon. Now in Phase Three, the program contains dozens of young men who have no clue of their evil heritage. Playing a twisted game of nature vs. nurture, scientists raise some of the clones with loving families and others in abusive circumstances. But

  everything changes when the most dangerous boys are set free by their creator—escaping with three canisters of a mysterious chemical weapon that could destroy an entire city. A man with demons of his own, former black ops soldier Shawn Castillo is hot on their trail. But Shawn didn’t count on the quiet young man he finds hiding in an abandoned house—a boy who has just learned he is the clone of Jeffrey Dahmer. As Jeffrey and Castillo race across the country on the trail of the rampaging teens’ increasing violence, Castillo must protect the boy who is the embodiment of his biggest fears—and who may also be his last hope.

  Melding all-too-plausible science and ripped-from-the-headlines horror, Cain’s Blood is a stunning debut about the evil that runs in all of our veins. National Marketing and Publicity Launch • National online advertising campaign, with target venues including New York Times.com, Goodreads, and more • National print publicity campaign •

  Digital media and blog tour campaign • National radio campaign • Multiple-City Author Tour

  • Extensive cross-promotion with S&S Books for Young Readers and their publication of Project Cain, including joint custom landing page with bookseller assets • Early reads campaign, including Goodreads, LibraryThing, and IndieBound • Social networking campaign on Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads • Feature title in the Simon & Schuster Book Club eNewsletter • Cross

  promotion with the author’s website and social media • Author Q&A available online • Library marketing, including ARC mailings

  Geoffrey Girard graduated from Washington College with a B.A. in literature and earned a M.A. in creative writing from Miami University. He is the English Department chair at a private boys’ school in Ohio. Visit him at www.geoffreygirard.com or follow him on Twitter @Geoffrey_Girard.

  Cain’s Blood

  September 3, 2013

  Touchstone Hardcover

  Fiction

  6 x 9, 288 pages

  $25.99 / $29.99 CAN

  ISBN: 9781476704043

  Contact: Shida Carr [email protected] NONMERCH 9781476709291

  CAIN’S BLOOD

  A Novel

  Ge O ffrey G I r A r D

  A TOuChSTONe BOOk

  Published by simon & schuster new york london toronto sydney new delhi

  Touchstone

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New york, Ny 10020

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2013 by Geoffrey Girard All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. for information address Touchstone Subsidiary rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New york, Ny 10020

  first Touchstone hardcover edition September 2013

  TOuChSTONe and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  for information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or [email protected]. The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. for more information or to book an event contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.

  Designed by ruth Lee-Mui

  Manufactured in the united States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tk

  SBN 978-1-4767-0404-3

  ISBN 978-1-4767-0406-7 (ebook)

  dedicated to

  Barbara O’Breza and Joe Truitt for the nurture What are little boys made of?

  Snips and snails, and puppy-dogs’ tails, That’s what little boys are made of.

  A Brief History of Cloning

  I

  t started with peas. An Austrian monk named Mendel tried some biology experiments in the small garden of the monastery where he lived and worked and prayed to God. It was the 1850s. Charles Darwin was still drafting On the Origin of Species and the first Neanderthal remains

  had just been found in a cave near Düsseldorf. Mendel’s religious order, the Augustinians, believed the pursuit of truth through scholarship was essential toward spiritual enlightenment, and Mendel’s particular scholarly interest had turned to the study of heredity: how life-forms pass traits on to their offspring.

  To study this, he grew peas. Thirty thousand pea plant “children” carefully bred from specific pea “parents.” he meticulously pollinated and wrapped each pod, then examined and recorded their most minute detail: blossom color, pod hue and shape, and pod position. Thirty thousand times. It took seven years, and he became partially blind from squinting at all those peas.

  he authored a single treatise on his conclusions and presented it

  x A BrIef hISTOry Of CLONING at two meetings of the Natural history Society of Brünn, who subsequently published “experiments in Plant hybridization” in the club’s official journal. In the document, Mendel proved how specific genetic alleles (which he called factors) in the parent peas controlled the traits of the children peas. Some factors were strong/dominant, and others were weaker/recessive, and the strong prevailed when the two met in an offspring. he started mapping these factors and eventually could predict exactly what the offspring plant would look like.

  he’d invented modern genetics. Very few people read his paper, however. he wasn’t a “real” scientist, the real scientists decided. he was just a monk with a small pea garden, and his work had more to do with ordinary hybridization than the emerging field of Inheritance. And so he was almost completely ignored, and his findings were to be cited only three times over the next fifty years.

  Mendel next tried bees. he kept five hundred hives with bees collected from all over the world: African, Spanish, egyptian. he built special chambers for the various queens to mate with foreign suitors and promptly bred a new species of hybrid bee that produced more honey than any other bee on earth. Alas, Mendel’s bees also proved more aggressive than any other bee on earth. They stung the other bees, his fellow monks, and then struck Brno, a nearby village. he had to destroy every hive, and killed ten thousand bees.

  he returned to plants, which didn’t sting, but tried something other than peas—a kin of the sunflower family called “hawk
weed”—and it didn’t work out. he was unable to corroborate his original conclusions. Mendel grew depressed and stopped doing experiments of any kind. When he died, the abbot who ran the monastery burned Mendel’s notes and unpublished essays on Inheritance. It was another fifty years before the scientific community rediscovered his original paper.

  The professionals now liked, and understood, what they saw. using Mendel’s principles and evidence on the biological machineries of Inheritance, they summarily progressed from charting peas to charting frogs. from frogs to mammals. They figured out how to craft detailed maps of DNA and isolated where each factor resided. Once isolated,

  A BrIef hISTOry Of CLONING xi

  analyzed each factor to understand how it really worked. Once understood, explored how to modify. They eventually cloned a sheep from a single strand of DNA. A small animal-sciences research institute in Scotland took one cell from a parent donor, wedged it into an unfertilized egg cell that’d had its nucleus removed, zapped it once with good old-fashioned electricity, and made another animal. Identical. Two of—ignoring, technically, the mitochondrial DNA within the donor egg—the exact same sheep.

  They named the 98 percent copy Dolly, and Dolly became famous. It was 1996.

  Now, it was game on. The next five years yielded an explosion of “clones.”

  Japan constructed Noto the Cow. Thousands of Notos. The Italians cooked up Prometea the horse. Iran made hannah the Goat while South korea made Snuppy the Dog and Snuwolf the Wolf. The Scots made pigs; the french, rabbits. Both China and India grew duplicate water buffalo. Spain and Turkey, bulls. Dubai crafted the exact same camel a hundred and four times.

  The united States, ultimately, did it better—and more quickly— than everyone else combined. More labs, more commercial interest, bundles more money. Cloning and biogenetic research were added to every pharmaceutical company in the nation. even university students were making clones, and California alone has more colleges than all of Germany, france, and Great Britain combined. Within a decade, Americans had created Cumulina the Mouse. ralph the rat. Mira the Goat. Noah the Ox. Gem the Mule. Dewey the Deer. Libby the ferret. CC the Cat. And, at last, Tetra the Monkey. Mice to livestock to primates. Ten years.

  Cloning humans, by the way, is still completely legal in the united States. everyone just assumes it’s not. A few states have banned it. Most haven’t. And Washington keeps out of the way. Presidents may publically denounce it and advocate for moratoriums, but no such halts have ever actually been enforced. The human Cloning Prohibition Acts of 2003 and 2007 were both voted down by Congress, and the 2009 version has been waylaid in various subcommittees for years. American

  xii A BrIef hISTOry Of CLONING scientists can pretty much do whatever they want as long as they don’t overtly use federal dollars. human cloning remains legal in twenty other developed countries.

  When Sir Ian Wilmut, the scientist who led the team that cloned Dolly the Sheep, was asked about the possibility of cloning humans, he replied simply, “It would be naive to think it possible to prevent.”

  And he was right.

  CAIN’S BLOOD

  Prologue: A Field Test

  One of thousands performed during the longest war in u.S. history. An irresistible opportunity for assessing the potential effectiveness of newborn policy and products in model test environments, thus fulfilling the primary tenet of all military research and development: What hasn’t been tested doesn’t work.

  everything, from new camouflage and body armor to computer-driven bullets and laser cannons directly out of Star Wars. recon systems, satellites, advanced combat rifles, pesticides, cold-storage warehouses, radio sets, and lamps all had their turn. This field test, from a purely scientific

  standpoint, was no different.

  The two helicopters were stealth-modified Black hawks on loan from the 160th Special Operations Aviation regiment (SOAr), an airborne army unit known as the Night Stalkers. They swept over the village, silent and veiled as buoyant shadows caught in the valley’s cold predawn winds. The target had been rated mostly empty. Mostly enemy. And, suitably remote.

  As the helicopters passed overhead, one of the passengers, a man the Night Stalker crew had never seen before and would never see again, dropped a canister no bigger than a Pepsi can into the village square. hell, it was a Pepsi can, and it bounced and skittered in a dozen different directions before settling against a mud-lined furrow running along the village’s lone dirt road. The Black hawks were halfway into the next valley before the handful of village watchmen even thought to shoot after them.

  The gunfire awoke Tahir al-umari, who rose slowly and grumbled at his stirring children to remain quiet as he pulled on sandals. Outside, there was random shouting and dogs barking. In the doorway, with arms crossed and tilted forward enough to see down the path some, he called across to a neighbor who’d struck a similar pose. “u.S.,” the man replied simply. Tahir nodded, rubbed at his nose in thought as the soft winds off the adjacent black mountain slipped down, cool across his face. he was one of a dozen families who still lived in the outlying village, the rest having vanished over the last ten years. he and his sons now owned and worked eleven acres, and nine were planted with poppy. Allah willing, when the others departed, he would plant wheat and saffron again. One day soon. Now, perhaps, it didn’t matter. The Americans would come back or send the Afghan narcotics police to burn the fields. he’d heard they possessed some sort of virus that could kill an entire crop in hours. he thought, I will lose everything. he thought, Maybe this is a good thing. And, Now maybe the Taliban will move on to some other place.

  Automatic fire from the center of the village. The distinct clacking of Ak-47s. Then excited voices; became screams.

  Tahir and his neighbor locked eyes across the distance between them, both with hands half lifted in confusion. A raid by the Americans? The neighbor quickly retreated into his house, while Tahir stepped fully outside.

  “Daddy?” his youngest daughter’s voice emerged from within, and he turned. his wife and other children had crowded in the doorway behind her. Whispering. his oldest son, thirteen, had pulled on his jacket and shoes.

  “Stay inside,” he told them, eying the boy especially. “I’ll be right back.”

  he stepped hurriedly down the uneven dirt pathway, skirted the other mud-brick homes alongside. Another man followed him, a small

  C AIN ’ S BLOOD 3 crowd moving together toward the sounds of boisterous cursing and gunfire. More shots were fired and Tahir crouched low in the shadows. It sounded like an entire clip emptying. A woman beside him moaned a half-prayer, and he shooed her still with his hand. The air tasted funny, he realized. The back of his tongue was acrid, like he’d been chewing on something plastic.

  he caught the eye of a friend, both men finding the courage to creep toward the end of the street together. There, the headlights of a stock-still van cast a muted glow onto the cramped main square. Bodies lay there, sprawled and twisted like a collection of his daughter’s cloth dolls dropped absently to the ground. Like, except for the widening pools of blood.

  “They’re . . . they’re shooting themselves,” someone whispered from the shadows beside him, the voice both retreating and truthful. Tahir watched as one of the Taliban fighters shot another and then immediately brought the rifle beneath his own chin in a sudden ruby spout. A day laborer named rafeeq scrambled to seize the dropped rifle but was shot down as two more Taliban charged into the square shouting more curses and commands. One noticed the onlookers and turned to fire. four shadowy figures of various sizes spun and collapsed across the pathway from Tahir. The soldier cast off his now-empty rifle and stumbled toward the dead as if drunk, pulling free a handgun. fired unremittingly into the first corpse. Then he turned.

  Tahir froze with nowhere to escape. The man pointed the gun and shot. Nothing. The clip already emptied. Still the man stood, wrist jerking half a dozen times, as if he’d actually been firing at Tahir. There was something in the m
an’s expression. his eyes. What is wrong with his eyes? Tahir shuddered.

  Another fighter pounced beside this one and clubbed him in the head with a rifle. The man with the strange look went down and the second straddled him, driving the rifle butt into his face. Again and again and again.

  Tahir stumbled backward, withdrawing in panic with the others. his eyes were stinging. Smoke from the rifles, he thought, a new chill suddenly nagging at the base of his very skull. Screams echoed behind him, and Tahir had to turn.

  A woman—Padja’s wife, he thought—had been pulled down by two other men he knew well. her face pushed to the ground, her chadri ripped away as both men struggled with their own pants. Tahir stopped his retreat. “No,” he shouted at them. found himself moving forward to stop them. found himself watching the woman’s body writhing beneath them, struggling to be free. her exposed loins lifted and vulnerable for their every pleasure. for his too if he so desired. Tahir shook that sudden awful thought away. he advanced closer. “No,” he said again, but the word came out too slow, like in a dream. The worst dream.

  Padja’s wife had rolled over, shamefully opening herself to them. But, the man on top of her was now screaming. Clutching his face, something dripping and red hanging between his fingers. his cheekbone glistened in the first rays of the rising sun. from beneath, Padja’s wife smiled at Tahir. Blood running down her chin. her eyes. Something in her eyes.

  Tahir crumpled. Crawled, his head vibrating. Shadowed figures both scrambled and lumbered past him in every direction. The unnatural taste and smell of plastic utterly filled his throat, his nose. Screams swathed the village, echoed off the looming mountain, where impending dawn burned crimson. his mind crowded with incessant and infinite thoughts, awful thoughts, buzzing like a million insects. Over this unrelenting swarm, he reflected, This is what Hell sounds like. And also, I must get home.