Providence, Rhode Island - 1973
The doctor moved with an air of authority from the street, through the hospital lobby, up the elevator, past the floor desk and down the hallway.
His crisp white lab coat and confident demeanor made him indistinguishable from the other doctors. He had a knack for blending in. And it was a busy Friday night at the hospital, the hallways and waiting rooms bustling with people, so no one questioned the doctor’s presence or his credentials.
In the maternity ward, Mary Evans lay on her bed. She was in her third trimester, eagerly awaiting the birth of her daughter. Her husband Mike was on his way to the hospital. They had discussed names, and had decided on Jane, her grandmother’s name.
Mary sat up as what sounded like a fire alarm filled the hallway outside her room. People were running past the door window and Mary craned her neck to see if she could see anything.
It was then that the doctor entered her room and shut the door behind him.
"Good afternoon, I’m Dr. Blackwood," the doctor said, his voice smooth and reassuring. "I’m a specialist in prenatal care.” He picked up the clipboard at the end of Mary’s bed. “I've been reviewing your case, Mrs. Evans, and after talking with your doctor, Dr. Soloway, she and I believe there's a new treatment that could benefit both you and your baby."
“What’s going on out there,” Mary asked.
“Oh, someone pulled the fire alarm by mistake,” the doctor replied. “Nothing to worry about, it will turn off in a moment.”
“Is Dr. Soloway here?” Mary asked. “I’ve been waiting for her.”
“She is here, I just spoke with her,” the doctor replied. “She sent me in first, and will come in after we’re done.”
“Oh, okay,” Mary replied, tired and uncomfortable, holding her stomach and shifting her weight in the bed. “You mentioned a treatment. What does it do?”
"It’s a vitamin supplement that has shown remarkable results in improving the health of both mother and child,” the doctor explained. “It's a simple injection, but it could prevent your baby from acquiring many concerning and potentially lethal conditions as they get older."
“I don’t know. It sounds experimental,” Mary said. “Dr. Soloway recommended the treatment?”
“Yes,” the doctor replied. “I talked with her just before I came in here. The treatment is new, but it's proven and safe. We’re starting to give all expectant mothers the injection as a matter of routine.”
Mary hesitated for a moment, but the doctor’s calm assurance eased her doubts.
"If you think it's best, and Dr. Soloway approves,” Mary decided, “then it's fine.”
Dr. Blackwood prepared the long syringe with practiced precision, the red liquid inside shimmering under the greenish-white fluorescent lights. He went to lift Mary’s shirt which caused her to flinch.
“Oh, you’re going to inject it into my stomach?” Mary asked.
“Yes,” the doctor said. “The treatment is most effective when delivered directly into the child. And the needle is the latest technology, so you’ll barely feel it.”
Before Mary could object or move, the doctor sunk the needle down into her stomach. It was a disturbing sight, but Mary tried to stay still, figuring any movement might disrupt the process and endanger her baby.
The doctor pushed the end of the syringe and all of the red liquid disappeared. He pulled the needle out of Mary’s stomach just as the fire alarm out in the hallway stopped ringing.
"There you go. All done. That wasn’t so bad, eh?” the doctor said smiling.
"Uh, no, it was fine,” Mary replied, pulling her shirt down.
"Well, Mrs. Evans,” the doctor said after he had put the empty syringe into his lab coat pocket, “I hope you have a quick and safe delivery.” At the door, he turned and added, “I know you’ll be a wonderful mother. Take care of our little Jane, eh?”
Thrown by the doctor’s use of the word “our”, Mary nodded politely, as the doctor left the room. She replayed her entire interaction with Dr. Blackwood, trying to remember when and if she had told him that they had decided on Jane as the name of her baby.
A few minutes later, Dr. Soloway came into the room.
“Hello, Mary,” Dr. Soloway said. “How are you today?”
“I’m well, thank you,” Mary replied. “Dr. Blackwood was just here and gave me the treatment.”
“What treatment? Doctor who?” Dr. Soloway said with a confused look on her face.
Providence, Rhode Island - 1993
It was a humid summer evening in Providence. Jane Evans, a striking young woman of twenty, trudged home from a long day at the studio.
An undergrad art student at RISD, Jane was staying in town for most of the summer, teaching some art classes for kids and working on her own pieces. She had just started exploring abstract oils, and went back and forth between thinking her work was brilliant and garbage. Her boyfriend, Scott, an architecture student, raved about her newest work. But she was sure he would have said those nice, supportive things, even if he hated them.
Jane arrived at her apartment building, which was just off campus, and stepped through the front door into the lobby. Waiting for the elevator was Mrs. Howard from 5C.
“Janey,” Mrs. Howard said, holding a bag of groceries. “Long day at school?”
“Hello, Helen,” Jane replied. “Yeah, long but good. It's so rewarding when a kid paints for the first time and enjoys it, you know. It's like a revelation that they actually have creativity inside them, and can express it.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful,” Mrs. Howard said. “I haven’t painted for years, but I used to enjoy it in the years after Arthur and I married. Now that he’s gone, maybe I should take it up again.”
“You definitely should,” Jane replied. “Let me know if you’d like to join me in one of the kid’s classes one day, or if you’d like a more private session. I’d be happy to help you get started again.”
“Thank you,” Mrs. Howard said. “That’s very kind.”
The door opened, and Jane and Mrs. Howard stepped into the elevator. Jane was preoccupied chatting with Mrs. Howard, so when the elevator doors slid closed, she hardly noticed the older man who had entered and stepped behind them just before they shut.
As the elevator began its ascent, the man behind them started to make a sound that Jane would later attempt to describe as ‘a Morse-code kind of clicking’. Jane's heart began to race, and a wave of nausea washed over her. The odd clicking sound was both foreign and familiar, pulling at something deep within Jane’s psyche and biology.
The clicking grew louder, more insistent. Jane’s vision blurred, and she felt an overwhelming surge of rage. Her breathing became erratic, and she clenched her fists until her knuckles turned white.
“Janey, are you okay?” Mrs. Howard asked.
Without warning, Jane turned and lunged at Mrs. Howard. She grabbed the old woman’s head with both hands and slammed it against the elevator door. When Mrs. Howard fell to the floor, dropping her bag of groceries, Jane grabbed a can opener that had fallen out of the bag and jabbed it repeatedly into the old woman’s left eye. Her screams echoed through the confined space, but within moments, there was only silence.
Fueled by a blind and uncontrollable fury, Jane twisted and snapped both of Mrs. Howard’s arms, and then lowered her head to Mrs. Howard’s cheek and bit and pulled at the flesh until the old woman’s jawbone was exposed.
The old man stood in the corner of the elevator, hovering over the horrific scene, a broad smile on his face.
When another neighbor in the building gave his statement to the police that arrived on the scene, he said that he had found Jane cowering in the corner of the elevator behind Mrs. Howard’s lifeless body, sobbing and her eyes wild, her hands and face and clothes covered in blood and flesh.
The sound of police sirens, and the fact that Jane wasn’t home yet, drove her boyfriend Scott out into the hallway, only to find the elevator was stuck on the ground floor. He ran down the stairs and came into the lobby just as the police had handcuffed Jane and were escorting her out of the building.
Scott looked into the elevator, past the yellow crime tape, then back to Jane.
“Jane!” he yelled, dumbfounded by what he saw and what could have happened.
It wasn’t that she was ignoring him, she just didn’t hear him. Whatever devious spell the old man had triggered was slowly wearing off, but her mind was still a chaotic whirl of confusion and terror.
From a parked sedan across the street, the old man watched Jane being led out of the building to a police car.
After two decades, this long-game biological experiment finally, finally, was offering splendid results.
Providence, Rhode Island - 1994
After months of fielding questions from family, friends, reporters and investigators regarding Jane and what had happened, Scott Iwata sat in the dimly lit living room where he and Jane used to watch MTV’s ‘The Real World’ and stared at yet another newspaper article that placed his girlfriend’s name next to the word ‘killer’.
Jane was locked away in a maximum security penitentiary down south in Cranston, charged with a murder she didn’t remember committing. Scott would visit her twice a week, and they would sit across from each other, talking on phones through plexiglas, trying to figure out what had happened.
But it was always the same: Scott asking questions and Jane telling him she didn’t remember anything.
“I’m getting tired of sitting here going over the same details every time you visit,” Jane said into the phone. “I’ve told you everything. I can’t tell you something I don’t know, unless you want me to start making stuff up?”
“You know I don’t want that,” Scott said. “I’m just trying to help.”
“I know,” Jane replied. “I just wonder how long you want to keep coming here. At some point, if we can’t figure out what happened, I might be in here longer than you want to wait.”
“I’ll keep coming as long as it takes, until we find some answers,” Scott said. “Because I love you.”
Desperate for answers, Scott began his own investigation, following every scrap of a lead Jane had given him, and even digging into her distant past.
It was during his research that Scott stumbled upon the name Dr. Blackwood.
The name had come up many times related to a series of incidents that had occurred twenty years ago in 1973. A string of women at maternity wards in three Providence area hospitals made similar statements relating incidents where a man named Dr. Blackwood came into their rooms in the maternity ward and gave them injections that were not authorized by their official doctors.
Police investigated at the time and weren’t able to track down the man. The babies of all the women were born healthy and survived, and showed no abnormal or concerning issues.
But now, incidents like Jane’s started happening all around Providence. Random, normal people who were suddenly triggered and committed brutal and lethal attacks. Scott made contact with a twenty year old man named Asan Ramon, who had recently killed someone and ended up in the same penitentiary as Jane. Talking with Asan led Scott to the man’s mother, Miriam, who had left Providence for many years, but had returned a couple years ago to be closer to her son.
Scott’s talk with Miriam yielded an important piece of information.
“Are you sure?” Scott asked Miriam, over a cup of tea in her Providence apartment.
“Yes,” Miriam replied. “The man who came into my room that night said his name was Dr. Malone, not Dr. Blackwood.”
A week later, as Scott was sitting in front of a microfiche machine at the local library, looking through twenty year old issues of the ‘Providence Journal’ for leads, he made a connection. There was a small article about a minor traffic accident involving a then-prominent politician and a local man named Dr. Bernard Malone.
Was it nothing, or could this be the man Miriam had encountered twenty years ago?
For Scott, having no other leads or clues, there was only one way to find out.
A look through the phone book for ‘Dr. Bernard Malone’ gave Scott an address. The next day, he pulled up to the house on the outskirts of Providence. It was a small, old house with a newer, more modern outbuilding behind some trees at the back of the property.
Scott decided to skip the house and check out the outbuilding. After backing up his car out of view of the house, he walked into the yard, around the side of the house, and quietly approached the building. The door wasn’t locked, so he pushed it open and went inside.
He passed a couple of rooms and then emerged into a large room which looked like a laboratory. There were empty beds, tables with laboratory equipment, bookshelves filled with old medical books, and a bank of monitors showing various views of the property.
“Excuse me, can I help you?” a voice came from behind Scott. Startled, he spun around.
“Are you Dr. Bernard Malone?” Scott asked, trembling.
“That depends,” Malone replied. “Who are you?”
Scott had prepared what he would say, in order to be cautious and make sure that the man was indeed responsible for what happened to Jane and so many others. But in the heat of the moment, he was angry and impatient. “What do you do to my girlfriend?” he yelled.
Malone’s eyes gleamed with a sinister light. "After all these years,” Malone replied, “I was wondering when someone would find me."
"You turned her into a monster!" Scott shouted, stepping forward. "Why?"
“You will never know,” Malone said calmly. “But this research will have a far-reaching impact. The sacrifices you and your loved ones have made are appreciated.”
“What?!” Scott’s blood ran cold. "You’re insane!"
"Perhaps," Malone replied. "But my work is far from over."
Before Scott could react, Dr. Malone withdrew a silenced pistol and shot him in the head. Scott dropped to the floor. Malone stood over him and watched impassively as the life drained from Scott’s eyes.
Jane would never know what happened to her boyfriend, only that he never came to visit her and was never heard from his friends and family again.
Rural Virginia - 2024
A blindfolded man knelt on the ground in the middle of a large, empty warehouse. A bright spotlight shone down on him.
A uniformed man stepped into the circle of light and removed the blindfold from the kneeling man, then walked away. The kneeling man blinked, unable to see anything outside the beam of light.
After a moment, a young man walked into the circle of light and stood before the kneeling man. The young man looked timid and confused, turning his head, unsure about what was going to happen or what he was supposed to do.
Then, from the darkness came an odd clicking sound.
As it got louder, the young man twitched, balled up his hands and sunk down into a defensive pose. His wild eyes darted side to side frantically, until they locked onto the kneeling man.
The young man leaped at the kneeling man and began to tear him apart like a wild animal. Within a minute, the man who had been kneeling was a mass of smashed, dismembered limbs and heaps of bone and flesh in the middle of the circle of light.
At the sound of a high-pitched whistle, the young man stepped back away from the gruesome mess and stood quietly looking forward.
Two uniformed men came into the light, laid hands gently on the young man, turned him around and led him back into the darkness.
With a loud click that echoed through the warehouse, the lights came on, revealing a collection of about two dozen United States military personnel. The ranking commander, General Milhouse, stepped toward the terrifying mess of human remains.
“What you just witnessed was the results of over 50 years of work and research, begun in the 1970s by Dr. Bernard Malone, may he rest in peace,” the General said. “His research, called Project Berzerk, concluded that by injecting fetuses with an engineered substance just before birth, that significant and structural changes can be made in a human’s biological and neurological makeup that remains dormant until they reach the age of about twenty years old. At that point, the structural changes result in volatile but controlled responses that can be triggered and halted by unique aural inputs. In layman’s terms, Project Berzerk allows for the creation of human killing machines.”
“Sir,” one of the other Generals asked. “Is this somehow related to the incidents that occurred in Providence, Rhode Island in the 1990s?”
“I can neither confirm or deny that,” Milhouse replied. “But everyone in this room is under strict orders not to make any statements or acknowledge that there is any connection between this and what happened years ago in Providence.”
“So, the plan is to utilize this research to aid us in some way?” another General asked. “To somehow make soldiers who are controlled killing machines?”
“Yes,” Milhouse replied. “But it is a plan that has already been set in motion. Twenty years ago, we began Operation Berzerk, recruiting soldiers from low income families before the fetuses were even born. The first batch of soldiers came online this year. Thousands of them will now come online every year. We will roll out the systems and workflows needed to integrate these soldiers into your ranks in the coming weeks. And a special group will be retained for an elite squad under my command.”
“Twenty years,” one of the other Generals said. “Why did it take so long?
“Well, there is a scientific, biological reason,” Milhouse replied, “but I won’t bore you. Let’s just say that some good things take time.”
