Chapter 15
I’ll skip ahead here. There are pages and pages of Dark recruiting a scientific team and setting up the laboratory specifically to study the subject they’d codenamed Cain.
It’s pretty dreary stuff. Lots of details. Needless to say, the whole operation was strictly off-book with the Army, but the mysterious executive committee, MJ-12 is able to provide Groves and Dark with all the recourses they need.
Dark had no scientific experience himself, but he’s acting as a sort of ideas man for the General. Groves, for his part, cherry picks the best minds out of the post-war medical and biological communities.
It all adds up to something about the size of a Manhattan Project, Part Two. Both Groves and Dark are convinced that Cain represents a new type of weapon, their atomic super solider, one that can dominate whatever future fallout-soaked battlefield America finds itself fighting on.
They’re desperate to weaponize their prisoner in some fashion. They hope to somehow harness his strength and agility without replicating the sun allergy or the loss of life functions. With a whole platoon of soldiers like Cain, they know that the U.S. Army would be unstoppable. It reads like something lifted straight out of one of Dark’s pulp sci-fi novels. Novels he hadn’t yet written.
Soon, they were making staggering advances, inventing much of the science as they go along: DNA, genomeic sequencing, endogenous retrovirus polymorphism. They’re breaking ground on a lot of what we now know as molecular biology. Cain represents, above all else, a genetic mystery. A mystery the General and Dark are eager to solve.
Cain’s thirst for blood comes late to their understanding. Keeping him in a constant torpor as they are, they remain ignorant to the exact reasons behind his murderous tendencies. But as time passes, and the PFC’s health seemed to worsen, the scientist team are forced to examine how their patient is able to stay alive at all. The longer they deny Cain blood, the more human he seems to become. His ultraviolet sensitivity diminishes, as does his apparent superhuman strength.
They are even able to detected slight life signs in his inert body.
Paradoxically, the lack of blood doesn’t kill Cain but causes him to appear more alive.
Not once in the book does Dark ever use the word “vampire.” Maybe he was in denial about what 1728 really had on its hands, but the ‘V’ word almost leaps off every page of his book. Blood, sunlight...they do everything but test for an allergy to garlic. Dark’s commentary might read like some dime horror novel, but Dark writes with such banal attention of everyday detail that it’s hard to think of it as anything but a faithful documentation of fact.
But I’m editorializing. What I think of Dark’s Last Novel is beside the point. I’ll skip ahead to where the book once again intersects with the Montavez case. Right about when the relationship between Dark and Groves starts to break down.
They’d had some success separating the details of Cain’s genome from that of a normal human being’s. They’d tagged the genetic divinations with markers and then synthesized a retrovirus that replicates the strings in a healthy genome.
But their animal test subjects fail to manifest any of the characteristics they were hoping for. Instead of increased strength and endurance, the genetically modified chimpanzees demonstrate a punch-drunk, sloppy blissfulness.
Sound familiar? Yeah, that’s what I thought as I read it. And Dark explicitly makes the connection as he’s talking with the General: