Basilisk

by Rob Thurman

  “Yeah, thanks, but I’ll pass,” Saul muttered; then, more softly, in hopes I couldn’t hear, he added, “Brat.”

  “Grown men can’t be brats.” I sent Ariel an IM. “We can be bastards, though. Do you like your hair, Saul? And your ability to semi-please women with your equally semi-erections? Do you want to keep those?”

  Ahhh, and there it was.

  Silence.

  The next hour remained blessedly quiet. Ariel wasn’t around and Laramie hadn’t suffered any clusters of peculiar if natural-appearing deaths for eight days, the same as when I’d looked into it yesterday. Five heart attacks, six aneurysms, and four people who abruptly fell over dead with no cause determined. It had all happened last Wednesday and it reeked of Institute tactics. Leave no sign behind . . . unless your owner wanted to send a message. Peter and the others were following training, but they’d stop soon. Where was the satisfaction in having all that power if you couldn’t get the recognition—the fear—it deserved? There would be more deaths and they would become more and more bizarre and obviously unnatural. There would be more wings of blood when Wendy cut loose—flocks and flocks of them. She, without any help at all, was perfectly capable of wiping Laramie off the face of the map. There would be red, red wings as far as the eye could see.

  Fly away, bird. Fly away no more.

  Chapter 8

  The tracker led us to a house just beyond the outskirts of Laramie. It was the only one at the end of a long gravel road. Its isolation made me think of our house in Cascade Falls—or what had been our house before it had burned. The isolation was the only thing that reminded me. This house needed painting, but it had no Stefan to paint it. Its wooden shutters were split and on the verge of falling off most of the windows. The weeds that made up the yard were taller than my knees. It was all gray. The unpainted concrete porch, the bare, rotting wood, the grime-covered windows—they were the colors of no color at all.

  Except. . . .

  There were balloons—red, yellow, blue, green, purple; the helium had them bouncing in the breeze. They were tied to the mailbox at the road as people did for birthday parties. When I’d first seen that, fresh out of the Institute, I’d asked Stefan if clowns lived there. What did I know about celebrations and parties? Peter knew, though. Two weeks on the outside and he knew what it had taken me months or longer to learn. How had I missed seeing that in him? Genius beyond customary chimera genius—he was extrapolating information and customs I’d had to learn and he was doing it with what little data the Institute had given us. He was the chimera Einstein, and that not only made him as dangerous as Wendy, but maybe more so with his maturity level and cunning. I was in over my head. We all were, but there was nothing to be done about it. I wanted my brother to stay safe; I wanted Saul . . . well, out of hearing range, but that didn’t matter. We couldn’t let death roam in a pack across the country. If we did, I couldn’t say how long the country would be left.

  We were the only option; I was the only cure.

  “I don’t think they’re in there. Not anymore.” Stefan had traded his Steyr for one of the tranquilizer guns. “I believe they outfoxed the tracker, Misha.”

  I didn’t have a lot of doubt about that either. The homemade banner across the front door that read TOO SLOW, MICHAEL. BYE-BYE and the fact that their GPS signatures hadn’t moved in more than twenty-four hours were sure signs that too slow was me indeed.

  Peter had thought of something else that I hadn’t during my escape. Stefan and Saul, not I, had figured out I’d been implanted with a GPS tracking chip. It hadn’t crossed my mind then, but it had crossed Peter’s. I tightened my lips and headed down the grass-spotted driveway toward the house. I managed two steps before Stefan moved in front of me—no surprise there. “When do I lead the way?”

  “When you’re sixty, not nineteen, and I’m in the nursing home. And I’m hoping before then we can stop worrying about who goes where first.” Stefan had switched the tranq gun to his left hand and now carried his 9mm in his right.

  Behind me, Saul said, “You can both go first. No skin off my nose.”

  “You’re bringing up the rear, guarding my flank, aren’t you?” I demanded, for Stefan if not for me. It was hard to gain acceptance as being as efficiently dangerous as an ex-soldier, such as Saul, and an ex-soldier of a different sort, such as Stefan, without their seeing me in action. And while I did want their respect, hurting people to get it . . . That situation hadn’t come yet. I should hope it wouldn’t. Being a man and leaving childhood behind were damn challenging and equally damn confusing.

  “I’m not interested in your rear or your flank,” came the breezy reply. “You’re not a woman into thigh-high boots, thongs, or getting the good parts vajazzled, are you?”

  I’d been ready to detect his lie. I was not ready for “vajazzle.” I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t want to know what it meant. My suspicions alone were ghastly enough, and now was not the time to be distracted. Peter and the others were gone; I was ninety-five percent positive. But five percent could kill you the same as ninety-five. One percent could kill you.

  If Wendy was inside, she could kill us all.

  Stefan kicked down the front door. I had my own tranq gun up and ready to fire. As Stefan had said, aim for the torso and I’d be fine. And while real guns didn’t interest me, I had practiced once with the tranquilizer gun. My aim was more than adequate, and my hand/ eye coordination excellent, which was not a result of denying myself Sara from the coffeehouse’s company and keeping my own company while locked in the bathroom, as Stefan had suggested. That wouldn’t have given me good hand/eye coordination, only repetitive motion injury.

  Stefan disappeared into the gloom of the house and I followed. My eyes adjusted quickly and I could see the signs of habitation in the here-and-there streams of sunlight finding their way through gaps in the musty-smelling curtains. Full garbage bags were stacked neatly against one faded green wall. The bags were white but transparent enough for an observer to see they held empty food containers. Pizza boxes, empty tubs of ice cream, microwaved potato skins and fried cheese; bag after bag from fast food hamburger places. There was more, but I looked away to continue visually searching the room. Knowing that Peter and the others were like me when it came to taste and appetite wasn’t helpful to the situation. Anyone locked in a prison where sugar was a concept, not a reality, would flip in the other direction with freedom. That didn’t make us the same, not even close.

  Saul darted out from behind me and, moving in a crouch, checked out the rooms off the main one to the right. Stefan handled the one, a dining room, to the left as I made my way to the kitchen. I’d thought the house was abandoned, which was why Peter had chosen it. It wasn’t. The ancient refrigerator was humming noisily. The electricity was working and so was the water. I tested the tap—the water ran cold and clear. It would be with thirteen chimeras making use of it. There’d be no chance to get rusty and orange. The kitchen table was as scarred and rickety as ours had been in Cascade but with only one plastic chair. Whoever had lived here, and I was completely certain it was “lived” in the past tense, had lived here alone.

  On the table was a chipped mug and in the mug was a pile of small pieces of metal—GPS chips. “They figured that out damn quick, didn’t they?” Stefan remarked grimly at my shoulder. “How’d they know where they were? And how’d they get them out? With a butcher knife?” He waved a hand at a butcher block knife holder on the counter. It and the knives were dusty with disuse. Our absent owner wasn’t into cooking. No, they hadn’t used those knives.

  I put the gun on the table and pulled up my sleeve to absently trace a finger across my forearm. Beneath my touch a cut instantly opened. Chimeras, except for Wendy, were bred to block harm from other chimeras, but harming yourself was another story. You had only to open that internal door you kept locked from others like you. “That’s how. As for knowing the chips were planted at the base of the spine as mine had been, if you knew you had a ch
ip, you could search and find it within yourself. I didn’t know, so I didn’t look. Peter’s smarter than I am, Stefan. Much smarter than I remember him being. You should know that. You should know that things have gotten more difficult.” I pulled my sleeve back down as the cut began to heal. “More . . . lethal. We should send Saul back to Miami.”

  If Stefan had gone for it, I would’ve added that he should head somewhere far away too. Let a chimera deal with an impending chimera apocalypse. But that wasn’t going to happen. I knew my brother too well there.

  “You really should’ve slept with that girl at the coffee shop.” Stefan had both hands full, but he had a free elbow to poke me lightly in the ribs. I didn’t know how an elbow could be reassuring, but it was.

  “I really should have.” I sighed and reached past the mug for a cell phone resting there. There was one voice mail. I thought for a fraction of a second, then punched in the only password it could possibly be: Jericho. The father of us all. Bellucci had been nothing but the most distant of reflections, an ego with nothing to back it up. The phone pinged in my ear and I heard Peter’s voice, smooth and convincing as any lawyer on the TV commercials telling you he’d get you millions for your fender bender. “Michael, Michael, how can you be with your family when you can’t keep up? Can’t catch up? I thought you were better than that. You always lacked a love for the work, but I’d hoped the outside world had changed you. After all, our god chased after you and didn’t come home again. No one could have predicted that.”

  No, no chimera could, and Peter couldn’t know I had nothing to do with Jericho’s death. Even that monster I couldn’t kill. There had been failures before me—chimeras who weren’t genetically perfect, not strong enough to kill. I had been the only one strong enough, but I had refused.

  “We have things to do, Michael. Many things. Entertaining things. We can’t wait forever on you, but I’m not writing you off, brother. If you’re worthy, you’ll find us. Don’t forget you are one of us.”

  The voice mail disconnected in my ear. Peter’s voice disappeared.

  It wasn’t true. I wasn’t like them, not in the ways that counted.

  And they were not my family.

  “Are you all right?” Stefan’s elbow nudged me again. “I heard the voice. It was that kid Peter. What did the son of a bitch say?”

  “That he wants me to find him, but I’m just not trying hard enough.” I wanted to throw the phone against the wall. I didn’t. When you could kill with the touch of a hand, when you were taught to want it and do it exceptionally well, you were also trained to not lose your temper. No one wanted to buy an assassin who got pissed off that he was served fish instead of chicken and would exterminate you instead of your enemies. Obedience was a must. The Institute had failed there with me and failed with Peter too. Peter’s disobedience had been more catastrophic than mine. I wondered how his temper training had taken.

  “There’s something in the backyard.” Saul joined us. Like Stefan, he had a tranq gun in one hand and a real one in the other. He peered in the mug at the bits of metal encrusted with dried blood. “Yum. There’s a new way to get your daily iron. Chug it in your coffee.”

  “What’s out there?” Stefan headed for the window over the cracked and stained sink.

  “Looks like a body.” Saul shrugged. It was the kind you saw in ex-military people: been there, killed that. “Smells like a body. I cracked a window for a whiff. Someone had to own this mansion before the kiddies moved in.”

  “Shit.” Stefan stared out the window. “Another one bites the dust. Could be worse. I just hope it’s not another Zombie Bob. I’ll go check it out. You two look around and see if you can find something, anything that points to where they’re going next.”

  “I already have that. I’ll explain later.” I slipped the cheap phone into my jacket pocket. “So we can all check out the body. I can tell how long they were here by the decomposition rate.” The helium in the balloons gave me an estimate as to how long they’d been gone. The bright balls, though still floating, were beginning to dip. They’d left three to five days ago.

  “Looking at dead bodies doesn’t bother you, Mikey?” Saul asked with a bemused note that thrummed under the words.

  You didn’t have to be ex-military for that to be true. I shoved the tranquilizer gun into the back waistband of my jeans. “I’ve dissected dead bodies; I’ve been surrounded by dead bodies; I’ve made dead bodies,” I said flatly. “I wish they did bother me. You bother me, though. One more ‘Mikey’ and every time you see a woman, you’ll piss your pants, then vomit, and maybe, just maybe, lose control of your bowels. Good luck finding a thong lover who’s willing to take you on then.”

  Stefan, who’d also put away his tranq gun but kept his Steyr, grabbed a handful of my shirt and ushered me toward the back door. “Enough. No more jealousy. It’s not becoming to a genius. Now, get your ass in gear.”

  As he hustled me with enough annoyance to let me know I was somehow screwing up, I sputtered internally. Jealous of Saul? Why in the world would I be jealous of Saul? Because Stefan had a friend who was here and now when, for the past three years, Stefan and I had been each other’s sole support system, unable to trust our neighbors and fellow employees? That Stefan was family, my family, my brother, my friend, and the only person who had ever been any of those things to me? And that I didn’t want to share him because there had to be people out there less . . . challenging than I was—the little brother Frankenstein experiment, and he might realize that if given the chance?

  All right, that was completely psychologically healthy. Not fucked-up in the slightest. Stefan gave me encouraging pushes toward other people, and I yanked him back with my background checks and my occasional infliction of gastric reflux on his rare dates. I was a genius and an idiot wrapped into one, but most of all . . . I was a dick. And unlike other things in my life, there was nothing theoretical about that.

  “Sorry, Saul,” I grumbled. “I won’t turn your body and its ability to process Viagra against you.” At his elderly fortysomething, he was bound to require it. “Just, seriously, don’t call me Mikey, all right?”

  A hard smack hit my back and Saul’s gloating grin didn’t have to be seen—only imagined, clear as a bell. “Sure thing . . . Mikey.”

  I really did hate him.

  The body, a man in his seventies, was sprawled in the tall weeds by a detached concrete building—too big to be a shed, too small to be a garage. The decomposition was more advanced than that of those in the Institute, but Wyoming had had some rare rain over the past week and the coyotes hadn’t let some fast food of their own pass by. Both Stefan and Saul leaned in for a closer look and then stepped back a few paces when the smell truly hit them. To me it wasn’t any worse than the smell of cooking cabbage coming from the Institute cafeteria—different but no worse, and in some ways, not as bad. Cabbage was disgusting.

  “They came straight here from the Institute.” I straightened from my crouch. “He was about a month away from a massive stroke. A dead man walking, isn’t that what they say? No challenge, no fun. They didn’t bother to play with him. One of them simply blew out his aorta and down he went.”

  “I’d say that’s something at least, but I’m not sure it is.” Stefan was slowly picking up on these chimeras being nothing like me. That was good. It would make him more careful. “Let’s take a look in the outbuilding, then get the hell out of here while you explain how we’re going to track down this pack of rabid human wolves and fix them.”

  “Kids did this,” Saul mused. “I know what you guys have said, but it’s weird to see.”

  “This?” I shook my head and tossed him my own phone. “This is nothing. If they had it in them, you could almost call it a mercy killing. Here. I transferred some of the Institute video onto it. Take a look. You might want to see for yourself what all of this really is.”

  Stefan tried the handle on the metal door. It was locked. He tried kicking it down as he had the front do
or of the house, but he only ended up cursing. “I think that poor bastard thought Y2K was the end times and planned on riding it out here. You can pick the lock or I can shoot it out.”

  “How do you know I can pick locks?” I asked suspiciously.

  “Assassin, drug lord, bomber, hacker, man of a million identities. Now that you’ve come out of the closet as a master criminal and not the little brother who can’t understand Lolcats, I’m pretty sure there’s not much out there illegal that you can’t do.” He didn’t appear pleased at that, only tired. “You grew up to be me. It’s not what I wanted, Misha.”

  “It’s not real,” I said quietly. “It’s not forever. It’s only until we’re safe for good. And I don’t make any money off any of it. I’m a pro bono criminal.” I tried to smile. It didn’t feel real either. “We’re the only ones who benefit from it and that benefit is staying alive. It’s not the same as what you had to do.” I didn’t want to disappoint Stefan, but I didn’t want him dead either. I’d do what I had to, just as he had.

  I fished inside my jeans pocket for a tiny packet of metal tools rolled up in a piece of felt. As I went to work on the lock, I heard Saul make a sound. If there was a word for it, that particular mixture of horror and disbelief, I didn’t know what it was. I could hear the tinny screams from my phone and then Peter’s and Wendy’s voices. But the time I had the door unlocked, Saul gave the phone back to me. “Okay,” he said, brusque and pale under that leathery Miami tan. “I’ve seen it. I get it now. Let’s go.” I noticed he’d dropped the phone into my hand without touching my fingers. I had a feeling there would be no more “Mikey’s” from now on. I’d wanted respect. I had it. I hadn’t wanted fear, but I had that too.