Basilisk c-2

by Rob Thurman

  Be kind to Stefan, Anatoly whispered . . . because life hadn’t been.

  “Where’s Raynor now?”

  I didn’t turn, the road unspooling behind—the same road to nowhere as Stefan’s scar. “Gone. He lives in Washington, D.C., a house, so I was able to get into the utility companies there and take a look. His electricity and water use has been pretty much nil for the past two weeks, which means he left one light on and has a dripping faucet. I used Google Earth and his car is parked in the driveway, no airline has his name for that time, so either he had a nasty bathroom accident, statistics rank those very high on the scale, or he bought another car—a used one, with cash, because it hasn’t been registered yet.”

  “He’s smart. Fuck.”

  “I know. I think he might be as smart as me.” I did turn this time, offended as they came at the notion. No, offended as . . . hell. Right. Offended as hell. “Do you think that’s actually possible?”

  “That he might know you’re keeping an eye on your back trail to see if he might come following? Yeah, I think he’s that smart. But as smart as you? Come on. Where’s that ego I know and put up with?” He shoved my shoulder with one hand. “Although the earplugs really help with that last part.”

  We’d passed through town—there wasn’t much to pass through; blink and it was gone—and we were headed for the Bridge of the Heavens. Kicked out of Paradise and I didn’t even like apples that much.

  Didn’t that suck?

  The plan called for driving through Washington, crossing the border into Canada and then we would keep going until we were lost in Banff National Park. Our fake IDs would pass border patrol; I knew that. I’d made them, but camping in the wilds of Canada wasn’t going to help me continue my research to help save the rest of Jericho’s children, all of them—to take away their power to kill. Saul had found their location two years ago and I’d been working on a way to fix them since then. I hadn’t needed to be fixed. I didn’t like to kill, but I knew the same wasn’t true of all the rest. Some might be like me—it was a possibility—but some loved to kill. Where we were going there wasn’t even the most hideous of creations—dial-up—much less WiFi. I’d never be able to continue talking with Ariel about my fake “paper,” about the cure. And I needed to keep in contact with her—even if that was my business and no one else’s at the moment. Maybe “suck” wasn’t a strong enough word for this. “Bites”? “Blows”? “Sucks balls”?

  I had to get a dictionary for these sorts of situations.

  “Holy shit!” Stefan spat, and slammed on the brakes.

  I automatically braced myself with one hand on the dashboard and with the other tossed Godzilla into the backseat. He hissed and I felt him crawl under my seat. He’d been through this type of thing before. He had his own drill plan.

  As we three-sixtied off the road onto the grass and dirt side, I saw an unfamiliar car and an annoyingly familiar face through our windshield. The tourist—Mitchell, the sheriff had called him—was sitting on the hood of a car, gape-mouthed with a half-eaten sand-wich dropping from his hand.

  There is no such thing as coincidence in the known universe. This blobby ass didn’t come close to the failing end of that grading curve. If nothing else, it was nice to know that stress improved my cursing abilities.

  Stefan was out of the car with a fistful of the guy’s shirt and slamming him repeatedly into the windshield of the man’s car before I managed to get my seat belt unbuckled and get out myself. I was quicker, stronger, had trained for this for all of my life that I could remember, but Stefan hadn’t only been trained. He’d lived it in the Mafiya every day, and that made him better than me. I wasn’t envious of his skills. I was only sorry it had turned out that way.

  “What are you doing here, asshole?” Stefan snarled, and banged him against the glass again, this time cracking it. It formed a spiderweb pattern around Mitchell. He was a tourist—a fake tourist—caught in a web of violence and rage that I didn’t think he’d escape. “When I give people the kind of beating I gave you, they don’t tend to stick around. They damn sure don’t park by one of the two ways out of town and eat goddamn sandwiches. Who are you?”

  Suddenly, the hand that had held the sandwich now held a gun, the dazed and stupid eyes sharpened, and what had seemed like fat now looked like something much more solid. The muzzle of the gun didn’t have far to go to end up jammed under Stefan’s chin to blow a hole through it, his brain, and out the top of his skull. Stefan stiffened before falling on the grass and road, a spray of blood and brain matter fanning the pale worn asphalt widely behind him. Eyes, neither brother brown nor aggressive amber, instead mirrored the gray of the sky.

  Life changes just that fast.

  People . . . they die faster.

  And your desire to live can change from fierce to absent in that instant.

  But that wasn’t what happened.

  It was what I saw in a split second of dark imagination, a calculation of the odds, the preparation for every possible outcome, and the Institute-honed, razor-sharp logic of predator prediction. We all had it, inherent, and were trained to see the deadliest of potentials on top of that, but Stefan proved it wrong. The man’s gun was not far, but not far was too far. Harry used a paintbrush—his alter ego, Stefan, used a Steyr 9mm. A bullet from that could destroy a man’s heart as easily as I could. And it did.

  “Shit.” Stefan stepped back from the body that sprawled on the hood of the car. He had blood on his shirt from the blowback of being so close when he’d pulled the trigger. “Shitshitshitshit.”

  I echoed the sentiment mentally, because right then I was as verbal as a goddamn rock.

  Hey, more cursing. Look at me.

  I dropped onto the hood of our own car, which was slick—Stefan waxed it as if practicing to represent his country in waterproofing in the Olympics. It was slick enough that I slid and went down over the bumper without feeling it—wax, wax, wax—and hit the ground, which was considerate enough to be gritty and solid. No car fanatics had gotten it yet, and there I sat. I would’ve thought my mouth was hanging open like the dead guy’s, gaping in eternal surprise, but I tasted blood, so it was more likely that my teeth were buried in my lower lip.

  It was the Institute all over again. The escape. The blood.

  Once you thought you were out, they pulled you back in. Stefan should be saying that, though—it was from a mob movie.

  Funny. Wasn’t I funny?

  But this wasn’t the Institute repeated. This was almost three years later. And I wasn’t obedient Michael trained thoroughly enough to sit on his single bed smelling of industrial bleach, unmotivated to move until they came to take me for graduation or downstairs where they took the failures and dissected them to see where they’d gone wrong. I wasn’t that Michael anymore. I was Misha, claimed son of a dead Russian mobster and brother of a live one, and Misha wasn’t going back to Jericho-land fucking ever. Stefan had encouraged me to live the life of a teenager, a kid, to catch up on all I’d missed out on. But that time was over. Just as that logic-defying, contradictory book said: It was time to leave childish things behind. I was not a victim any longer. I was a man. I’d been saying it for a while now, and it was time to start acting like it.

  “Michael?”

  “Misha,” I corrected him as I stood up, solid as a rock, inside and out. “You touched the hood of the car with your left hand. Wipe off the prints, finger and palm,” I ordered.

  He gave me a skeptical look but did so, using the long sleeve of his shirt. “You’re sure you’re okay? Because I don’t feel too goddamn great.” He jacked in another round and put the gun back in his shoulder holster—one thing the fifteen-minute-escape plan had allowed him to grab. “At the end, when we finally finished Jericho, I know I killed his homicidal thugs, but not this close up.” And with that, his eyes went a little colder. “I guess if they’re going to up the stakes, so will we.” He rested his foot against the bumper for a second and said, “All right. Help me p
ush the car and our lying-ass tourist into the river.”

  “What about his ID?”

  “It’ll be as fake as he is. He’s not a tourist and he’s not a civilian, and he fooled us both, which made him smart, tough, and highly trained.” Stefan was already pushing the car, the sleeves of his shirt pulled over the heels of his hands to keep it print free, as the dead man’s slack legs scraped the ground.

  “I know they’ll be fake, but who made them will tell me something. Different methods, different materials.” I moved past him as he stopped pushing the car, rolled the dead body to its side with no sympathy for the bastard who’d almost killed my brother, and pulled his wallet out of his back pocket. “All right. Now we push.” I followed Stefan’s lead and in less than a minute the car plunged down a nearly straight embankment into the river below.

  He had fooled me, the son of a bitch, and that took a great deal of training . . . and a shitload of laziness on my part. But hadn’t I gotten lazy in Cascade Falls? I did my background checks, and I was properly suspicious of what lay behind all the friendly faces—at first. Then I’d gotten complacent. I filed this one under asshole tourist and didn’t use anything the Institute had taught me, didn’t take a second glance, much less the third and fourth he deserved. I’d thought earlier that you could read anyone if you bothered to look . . . but I hadn’t bothered to look. I, the shamefully stupid fucking asshole, had almost gotten us killed.

  “That is a lot of frigging curse words from someone who has to study up on just how to say them.” Stefan had my arm and was dragging me back to the car.

  “Did I just say all that aloud?” I found my footing and ran with him.

  “Yeah, it was damn impressive, but you did not almost get us killed.”

  “Right. It must’ve been that other Michael. The idiot.” I slammed the car door and buckled up. “I’m guessing no Canada. We fool Raynor or whoever into thinking we went there, but head south? We’d better head for the new Institute before they get nervous with our being so close and move it. The cure is more or less done anyway.” I looked through the wallet. The ID was fake all right, and shoddy. That had government subcontracting all over it.

  “I’ll call Saul and get the troops lined up then,” Stefan responded. We’d been planning this for a long time. Saul and about twenty mercenaries were on call, more or less, for when they were needed. They could meet us there. They’d be hours behind us, but that would give us a chance to check out the place close up and not just from satellite pictures.

  Stefan had left the car running. He jerked the steering wheel and headed back the way we came, adding roughly, “And it’s not your fault.”

  It was definitely my fault, but I’d fix it. Kids let someone else fix their mistakes. Adults fixed their own. It was time Stefan had an equal now, not a responsibility.

  Time to grow up.

  There were actually more than two ways out of Cascade Falls, but the third way was known only by locals or handymen the locals trusted. It also would rip out the bottom of your car by the time you made it out, but destroying—no, trashing; that was the more apt word—trashing a car was better than meeting Raynor face-to-face before we were ready. An adult, but an adult with a completely average vocabulary to go with completely average brown hair, eyes made as average by contacts—camouflage, you have to work at it. If we were ever free, then I could talk like the genius I was—if I stopped making mistakes and made it back to genius status.

  I started to reach for my computer but stopped to dig a shirt out of Stefan’s bag in the backseat. “Do you want to get into something less . . . ummm . . . covered in ex-tourist?”

  Anyone and everyone he’d killed he’d killed to save me, and as he’d said, I don’t think he’d ever done it literally face-to-face, mere inches away. Wearing the evidence of it probably wasn’t pleasant. Saying thanks, he let me grab the wheel as we bumped over the narrow excuse for a dirt road, and quickly took off his jacket and holster and changed the shirt. Once he was armed again and back in his jacket, he took the wheel. “Now, go e-mail your girlfriend.”

  I was going to deny that I was intending to e-mail her, although I had been planning to, and certainly say that she wasn’t my girlfriend. I hadn’t met her in person yet. She lived across the country in New York, not to mention many other obstacles. I didn’t have a chance to get any of that out, however, as Stefan, instead of going with “holy shit” this time, went with “mother-fucker.” He was looking in the rearview mirror. So much for locals giving out private town info only to their good-old-boy handyman.

  The SUV behind us was built for this type of road while our used, low-slung Toyota wasn’t. It gobbled up the dirt and rocks behind us. It was black and I couldn’t see more than a shadowy shape through its tinted windows. Raynor? The Institute? Raynor working for the Institute? It didn’t matter. I couldn’t do to him what I’d done to the dead tourist—make him vomit up his breakfast or cut off the blood flow to his brain for a few seconds. The latter would cause unconsciousness, and maybe he would veer off the road, and we could leave him behind. But I had to be able to touch the person to do those things. We all did, Jericho’s legacy. All but one. And she wasn’t here now, although if she had been, she would’ve gleefully had his brain melting out of his ears, blood spurting from his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. Then she would’ve done the same to us.

  Even the Institute had been glad there had been only one Wendy. She’d be ten this year. I’d seen what she could do at seven. I didn’t want to know what she could do now.

  But I could do something too. It was more mundane and might not work as well, but if it got the SUV off our trail, that was good enough. “Hold the wheel again,” I heard Stefan say as I dived back into the backseat for one of my bags this time. “Let me take a few shots at the son of a bitch.”

  With this being more of a hiking trail than a road, we were bouncing roughly up and down. Stefan was a great shot, but under these conditions, it would be hard to make a shot that would count. Luckily, I had something that took less accuracy than a bullet. “Wait,” I said as I unzipped the bag and pulled out two gray cylinders. “I have something better.” I dropped one into my lap, rolled down the window, leaned out, set the detonator, and tossed the first one. It blew up one of the back tires of the SUV. The second one took out a front one. First, the vehicle spun, sending clouds of dirt and clumps of grass into the air, before tipping over on to one side. No one got out as long as we were in sight, but the shadowy figure inside was moving. If he was Hugo Raynor, with his impressive resume, I assumed he’d have more guns and be better with them than the sandwich guy who obviously had worked for him. Without a better view of what Raynor was doing and how he was armed, we were best to leave it and be happy with one SUV dead in the water.

  I smiled in satisfaction. “Guns are for boys. High explosives are for men.”

  Stefan didn’t seem as satisfied.

  “Bombs? You were making pipe bombs?” he demanded incredulously as he drove on.

  “Garages don’t blow themselves up,” I pointed out with some exasperation at his lack of gratitude. “And they’re not pipe bombs so much as proactive explosive measures. Little pipe bombs,” I emphasized. “You know . . . just in case.” With electrical detonation devices—very simple. Military detonation cord wasn’t as quick as I might need it to be. “They’re really quite easy to make. Too easy. They should be more responsible with the information on the Internet. . . .”

  “You told me that equipment was for your genetic research”—I think he hit a rock on purpose as my head smacked the inside roof of the car—“to find a cure for the rest of the kids. You lied to me, Michael Lukas Korsak.”

  “I didn’t lie,” I shot back. “I said that the equipment was to help me find a cure. I didn’t say all the equipment was to help me find a cure. Some of it could be used to save our lives too.”

  “And you didn’t think that was worth mentioning? You running an armory behind our house?” Stefan grit
ted his teeth. “I swear, when we switch cars, I’m going to take a minute to beat you like a redheaded stepchild.”

  “I didn’t not mention it. It didn’t come up, that’s all.” Yes, a fine line, but it was my line and I was stubbornly walking it. “And why do people have a dislike for people with red hair? I’ve heard that saying once or twice since moving here. Why would their hair color make them the targets of violence?”

  “Not the time, and you know it’s just some old saying. Don’t think I don’t recognize your version of smart-ass, Michael.”

  “Misha,” I insisted again.

  “And what’s with that? We’re running from who the hell knows and you’re worried about your nickname?”

  “Michael is the Institute. Misha is free. I’m free and I’m staying that way. I’m a man now, a new person, and Misha will remind me of that. I don’t want their name anymore.” But I couldn’t go back to Lukas. That would be as wrong. I wasn’t ever going to get my memories of Lukas’s first seven years back, not to mention what I’d discovered in my research. I couldn’t be that person. I couldn’t be Lukas. I was Misha and only Misha now, for good. I was me, finally finished, finally recovered from the Institute, finally real. They weren’t getting me back and they could keep their damn Peter Pan name.

  “Fine. Misha the Mighty.” The car bounced again and I heard the muffler hit one rock too many and it was gone behind us. “You got it. Now put that mighty brain to use and figure out how Raynor, and whoever the fuck he works for, found us.”

  I didn’t have to put my brain to work. I knew. In a flash of inspiration . . . and subconscious brilliant deduction—a given—I knew. “Anatoly and you, Stefan. You both told him where we were.”

  Raynor was smart all right. Too smart. And we hadn’t tried to finish him off when we had the chance. It was a thought I wouldn’t have had three years ago—when I hadn’t known what it was to have a real life. I wasn’t ashamed I had the thought now. I’d learned a lot since that time. Life and death . . . It was the cycle of the world. For someone to live, someone had to die—especially if that person was trying to take your life, be it mental or physical.