Luna Nightmares

From the collection: Murder at Thompson Bog
Episode 2

Horns woke me. I was toppled over onto the couch; my neck and back were stiff. I got up and went into the bathroom, stubbing a toe on the way.

Standing in front of the mirror as the florescent bulb flickered to life, I looked myself over. 'Gees! I look terrible. No wonder Carol left. No, that wasn't it,' I told myself, starting my daily routine, going through the steps as if it mattered. 'It was the fights, the long hours, the second drink, then the third just to tune out the day. Then a fourth to tune out Carol, screaming how I promised her more.' I sighed deeply, picked up a razor and looked at it. 'Not much chance of me cutting myself badly enough to do any good. Might as well just shave.'

An hour later I pulled into the lot at Lunadyne, parking far away from the entrance, hoping no one would see me in a car I ordinarily would have traded two years earlier. The back stairs were rarely used and even more rarely swept; they had become my 'main entrance' so as not to be detected by co-workers I wanted to avoid. Only Ted was in the lab as I opened the door.

“Hi Ted,” I cheerily tossed over to him, already in his white coat and looking over the results of yesterday's tests.

“Hi Phil,” Ted said without looking up. “C might be the one. C seems to be testing like we hoped Luna-A and B would. If these preliminary results keep up we may have something.”

“Glad to hear it. That'll take some heat off.” I said as I busied myself with some items on the desk, trying to get up some excitement for the work. Ted nodded solemnly.

There hadn't been a lot of enthusiasm of late. Word came down that Lunaprex was falling off, people were starting to think of it as the 'old way' to handle depression. “Other brands are touting new cures to new stresses of life,” said the people upstairs in the rarefied air of the board room, “the public wants breakthroughs – Lunaprex is something they already knew about; It's yesterday's news!”

Luna-A, as we called it until Marketing could come up with a catchy name, was the answer. Fewer side effects and a stronger internal formula with a thinner, faster-acting coating made Luna-A a leading contender for the top slot in the anti-depressant race. “A” removed the highs and lows of life leaving a gray middle ground where nothing was very good, but nothing was very bad. It was like whiskey-and-water in a capsule.

There was only one problem with “A”; the subjects died. We couldn't tell what it was that made “A” deadly, because every autopsy result was different, thought the results were the same. After a dose of Luna-A, the subjects would convulse wildly and eventually beat themselves to death. It was ugly and very disturbing to watch. It was a wonder I didn't have nightmares about that.

Luna-B was much better. There were no fits, no convulsions, no beating of oneself to death. It was a breakthrough. “B” was testing well in the lab, then went to the animals where it tested well, then to human tests where one of the subjects simply dropped his head into his mashed potatoes. We went back to the lab.

We found what was causing it this time. One of the masking ingredients interacted badly with common foods, resulting in death. You could take Luna-B safely, you just couldn't eat. It was a disaster. Pressure was on from the board room upstairs to come up with a safe product.

Reformulation of “B”, avoiding the pitfalls of “A” brought us to what we called, naturally enough, “C.” When tests began, first in the lab, then on animals, it seemed to be working. Of course, no one breathed that sigh of relief until human test subjects took it without dying.

“Yes, this may be it,” said Ted calmly, not being one to get excited prematurely. “The first returns seem to be within acceptable levels.”

“You mean no one has died yet?” I asked, standing beside Ted looking over his shoulder at the results.

“Precisely!” said Ted. “Of course, we're still doing in-house lab tests.”

We both scanned the reports in silence.

“You up for a coffee?” I asked, once the report was fully digested.

“Yes, I'm ready for a coffee,” replied Ted, putting the report down and turning his attention to more worldly things.

The coffee bar was a long walk from the lab on purpose. We wouldn't want anything falling into the coffee, now would we?

“How's things?” I ventured.

“Things?” replied Ted.

“Yeah, you know, Alice, the kids, life in general.”

“Great! Couldn't be better. Alice is going to start photography classes now that both the kids are in school. They're doing great, seem to get on well in the school environment. All in all, life is good. The only cloud on the horizon is the Luna-alphabet problem.”

“Well, I'm glad things are good at home.” I was, in fact, glad to hear it. Of course, that meant that my dream was totally a projection of my own problems, but that was expected.

“And how are you, Phil. Adjusting OK?” asked Ted.

“As well as can be expected, but I could sure use a bonus.” Carol was financially draining me dry. She must have gotten advice from every divorced friend and sister she had. Carol had three divorced sisters, all full of spite and advice.

“The failures were costly. Some of those test subjects had relatives who want to be compensated. I doubt there will be a bonus,” Ted said, wincing at his coffee.

“They were homeless volunteers – paid volunteers who signed wavers. Any family they had abandoned them years ago. How can they expect compensation?”

“That's the way the world works. People smell money and the third-cousin twice-removed-that-never-got-invited-to-Thanksgiving-dinner suddenly becomes a terrible loss to the family.”

Ted and I stood there, looking into our coffees and pondering the ways of the world.