She Has A Broken Thing Where Her Heart Should Be - J.D. Barker Page 0,218

always had the best LSD,” Cammie muttered. “I should have stuck with that instead of getting wrapped up in this bullshit. $1000 was nearly twice what the other studies paid, and who wants their future kid to be subjected to dozens of vaccinations? Seemed like a no-brainer at the time.”

My father said, “After the shot, we had to report back for regular blood tests and monitoring. The eighth of every month. Nothing crazy, and they paid us for that, too. There were no side effects, not for any of us. Not at first, anyway. But then, your mother got pregnant. Don’t get me wrong—like I said, we talked about having kids, but the plan was to finish college, get married, get jobs, establish ourselves, then have children when we were ready. Your mother and I were careful, but somehow she got pregnant anyway. Same with Richard Nettleton and Emma, Keith Pickford and Jaquelyn Breece. All of us got pregnant around the same time. We halfheartedly joked the shot boosted our hormones. Richard and Emma dropped out of school and broke ties with Charter. The rest of us continued to go into our scheduled appointments. When you and David were born, they paid us all even more to monitor you—routine blood work, vitals, the same they were doing for us. Everything seemed okay, seemed normal. Then I started to hear from the Nettletons. What happened every time their daughter, Stella, touched something that was alive. They didn’t know what to do. They went into hiding, off the grid. Keep in mind, this was the late seventies, early eighties. Much easier back then than it is today. Richard was convinced whatever was happening to his daughter was related to that shot, whatever Charter had given us. I thought he was crazy, we all did. But your mother and I watched you close anyway. I kept in touch with Keith and Jackie. They watched David, too. You both seemed okay. Richard got paranoid, said people were chasing him, these people dressed in white, just like the people from Charter. I began to wonder if maybe the shot had just triggered some kind of mental breakdown in him, like an allergic reaction. That kind of thing happened, too. Safety protocols were so lax.” He paused for a second, dusting off the information in his head. “Keith Pickford and Jackie stopped showing up at their appointments in mid ’78. Your mom and I didn’t really get all the facts until about a year later, but it was bad. Keith lost it. He threw a pot of boiling oil at his little boy’s face, burned him horribly, then he stabbed Jackie to death before turning the knife on himself. Neighbors found David on the kitchen floor, screaming at the top of his lungs, in terrible pain, both parents dead, blood everywhere. David was talking back then, but not much. Only two years old. He couldn’t really tell anyone what happened, and they didn’t press him. I thought about the shot. If that shot somehow drove Rich Nettleton crazy, maybe it had done the same with Keith. I heard David went to live with relatives. That’s what the staff at Charter told us, and we had no reason to question them, not at that point. Rich and Emma Nettleton, Stella’s parents, that’s about the time they came back to Pittsburgh. They were both dead less than a week later. Murdered in some kind of home invasion. Stella was gone. I heard about the bodies they found there, grown men who looked like they’d been burnt, and I realized that Stella might have actually done it. What Richard had been raving about, what she could do, might actually be true.

“In May of ’79 we heard about Perla Beyham, how she drowned in her bathtub. I barely knew her, only from her participation with the Charter study. It sounded like an accident. They said she fell asleep. It happened. But again, I thought about the shot. Was it really an accident? When your mother and I heard Garret Dotts hung himself in 1980, we again thought about the shot. We decided to stop going to the Charter follow-up appointments, we stopped taking you. That’s when we noticed them watching us. People in white, white vehicles parked outside our apartment all the time. When we started looking for them, we realized they were everywhere, just like Richard said. I went to one last appointment, only me. I didn’t bring you