by Rob Thurman
Why wouldn’t it be? Jericho told us.
It didn’t mean I wanted Stefan to know, which made me the overprotective one this time. Taking turns was what we did. It was what real family did and what Peter’s “family” had no interest in at all.
“No, it’s not the med lab,” I answered as I started down the stairs. “It’s a lab, though, and I think you need to see it. The researchers called it the Basement. Some students”—Wendy, first and foremost, I thought to myself—“called it the Playground.”
Stefan followed me, but the trudge of his feet on the stairs told me he wasn’t happy about it. “I don’t have a whole lot of desire to see someplace that girl called the Playground.”
“You aren’t . . . weren’t the only one who thought that.” I reached the bottom and opened the door. It was already unlocked and bore the thumbprint of a guard’s hand, which was now lying on the floor. The guard was superfluous, heavy, and unnecessary. Only the hand had been needed. I stepped around it and into the lab to turn on the lights inside. Two weeks—that one guard upstairs had been an exception. I didn’t think we’d find any pseudo zombies down here.
I ignored the room. I remembered its double in Florida, although I’d seen it only once. Large with five cells, the room held video cameras to record the “play” and computers to type in reports for Jericho—or for Bellucci after Jericho’s death. Bellucci was here now, right here. I couldn’t recognize his face through the rot, not from the other four researchers dead on the floor, but his once-starched and immaculate lab coat had his name stitched over his chest. It was easily readable through the stains. He had less confidence or more false pride than Jericho. Jericho wore a suit. He didn’t need his name out there like a billboard. We knew who he was—the beginning and the end; the alpha and the omega of our lives. That didn’t need a name tag. It would be the same as marking the Apocalypse on a puppies and kittens wall calendar.
Pointless.
I took what I was searching for from the flop and stink of Marcus Bellucci’s hand. An eight-by-ten rectangle—I could picture him holding it between him and Wendy or Peter as the most useless of shields. It was only a clipboard, made to hang on a hook beside the door. It wasn’t high-tech like most things in the Institute, but it was as informative.
Stefan, I saw from the corner of my eye, had walked forward to examine the cells. They were the same as jail cells basically: a toilet and a bunk. You couldn’t be sure how long it was until someone earned their playtime. You had to keep the prisoners from stinking up the place. For hygiene, there was a hose and a floor that slanted down to a drain to let the soapy water pour away.
“What the hell is this?” Stefan moved from cell to cell and finally I let myself see. Two cells were empty and three others had a dead man in each. Unlike the “red birds” upstairs, they weren’t ready to fly, fly away; they had virtually exploded. Torn apart, they covered the floor of the six-by-six cells in pieces. Did you ever wonder what would happen should every vessel in your body burst under enormous pressure, each one, down to the tiniest vein? Probably not. Why would you wonder something like that?
But if you did . . . Wendy was the answer, and now Peter, unfathomably, had her on a false familial leash.
I looked away from the human version of raw hamburger. “In the Everglades, they brought us the homeless from Miami. Here, I’m guessing they went all the way to Las Vegas. Barstow is too small. The disappearances would be noticed.” I handed Stefan the clipboard. He read it aloud.
“Wendy, Peter, Peter, Peter, Wendy, Wendy, Wendy, Michael Three, Wendy, Wendy, Lily Four, Peter, Peter, Peter, Peter, Belle Three, Peter. What is this?” He dropped it on the floor. I didn’t blame him. The paper was as stained as what was left of Marcus Bellucci.
“This is the Playground. This is where you got to go if you’d done especially well, scored very high on a particular test,” most often of the killing sort, “and deserved to be rewarded. You were brought down here to pick a prisoner and play as long or as quickly as you wanted. As messy or neat. Down here was the only free-for-all in the Institute. And there should be two names that stood out on the list. Every time you saw their name, someone down here died.” I bent down and picked the clipboard up to hand it back to Stefan. “Maybe you should count.” I’d scanned the date at the top of the page, which looked to be the first of about fifteen pages in all. “And the clipboard covers only three months. You need to know, Stefan, who spent most of their time down here. I said some of the students wouldn’t want to be cured. Peter and Wendy would sooner die than be cured.”
“But they’d much rather we die than try to cure them,” he said as he shuffled through the pages, either counting or seeing what he’d rather not know the exact numbers on. “Did they ever bring you down here, Misha?” His eyes were on mine. “Not because you were the killer they wanted you to be, but for accidentally doing too well at some other test.”
Everyone was brought down here. Ninety percent of the time it was a reward; ten percent of the time it was a test in itself. “I never killed anyone down here,” I replied. And I hadn’t. I’d been brought down in the evening of the same day Stefan had rescued me, four hours before he’d shown up in the doorway of my room.
I’d made my stand in the mirror of this place. Obedient, but not obedient enough. Genetically altered to be a killer, but refusing to fulfill my scientific destiny. I knew what it meant, that disobedience, but I didn’t care. I just couldn’t bring myself to care about surviving anymore . . . not in this life. I was taken back to my room where I knew they would come for me. They always came for the failures in the middle of the night. It was less of a disruption. We all knew what happened to those who flunked out of the Institute, but telling us and showing us were different. It led to more students losing it and killing everyone around them in a psychotic fit.
Good discipline, but in the end not profitable, Jericho had eventually decided.
That was why, when Stefan had come for me and had opened the door to my room, I’d been sitting on the bed, waiting, but not for him. I hadn’t known he’d existed or that rescue was possible. I’d been ready for them to come and take me to the other lab . . . where failures were taken apart, studied, and then tucked away in specimen jars. Stefan didn’t know that. He didn’t know that had he been a day or a few hours later, I would’ve been scraps on an autopsy table.
And he wasn’t going to know. That was a “what if” no brother could live with.
“I never killed anyone in the Basement,” I repeated. Unless you counted almost killing myself by breaking Institute rules.
“Never thought differently, kiddo,” Stefan assured me, tossing the clipboard forcefully across the room and slinging the M249 across his back. Putting both hands on my shoulders, he steered me back toward the door. “Now, let’s get the hell out of here, call Saul, and abort the mission. It’s not as if we need an army now. We have no idea where these kids are.”
I countered, “You have to stop thinking of them as kids. Whether they’re nineteen or ten, Stoipah, they can kill you, and you won’t be able to do a thing to stop them with that attitude. All right? Nothing. Think of them as what they are—killers. Killers who, unlike some of the others, love to kill. Live to kill. You have to be ready and never, never let one touch you or you’ll die.” “Stoipah,” the Russian nickname for Stefan, had slipped out before I could snatch it back. But, damn it, I worried about him. The big brother, the protector . . . he’d seen the tape of the massacre, but he’d also lived with me for three years and, deep down, I knew, he saw all the students as he saw me.
Salvageable. Needing only my cure. Teenagers, kids, children.
He was dead if he continued thinking that way. I had to figure out a way to send home the fact that killers were killers, children or adults, and if seeing all he had in this place hadn’t done that . . . hell. I didn’t bother to marvel anymore at how easily the curse words came. “Cancel the army, but your friend Saul—he might be able to help. Hav
e him come. And we do know where the students are, or did you forget the tracking chips?” I’d had one in my back until Stefan had had a very shady doctor remove it. All my former classmates would have the same. “I’ll grab one of the Institute’s GPS trackers upstairs.”
“Tell me what it looks like and I’ll get it. You’ll be better off down here doing your computer thing. They might have information that’ll help. You keep saying your cure is almost ready or should work . . . theoretically.” He mimicked the last. “It’s been almost three years. Who knows what these shitheads have come up with. They might have something to help us.”
He was right. They might, but not in the way he thought. The Institute wasn’t interested in cures, but they could have come up with a way to disable chimeras for a time. Wendy’s abilities to kill with only a thought had always been a worry for them, although seeing what had happened upstairs and down here, I rather doubted they’d accomplished anything. It wouldn’t hurt to check, however. Before I could start toward the bank of computers, Stefan handed me a gun. It was his backup—one of his many backups, rather, a small revolver. A .38? Guns didn’t much interest me. I knew the types Stefan favored above all, the same way you know someone’s favorite color, but that was it. Other than when I had been shot that time, guns were pointless in my life. I had the ability to perform better than any handgun. Now, a pipe bomb . . . that was a different matter. I respected my limitations.
“It’s a thirty-eight Special,” Stefan said. I’d been right as I usually was. But today wasn’t a day for being proud of that. “It’s light, not much recoil, no safety, and it’s double action. All of that means you just have to point and pull the trigger over and over until you run out of ammo. Hopefully by that time you won’t need any more ammo.”
I held it and it was heavier than it looked. “Stefan, everyone down here is dead.”
“That’s what we thought about Zombie Bob upstairs. Since you’ve not shot a gun before, stubborn bastard, aim for their torso. It’s your best bet of hitting them.” Stefan had tried to get me to learn to shoot for the past two years. It wasn’t that he wanted me to have to shoot someone. It was the last thing he wanted for me and told me so, but he was also a strong believer in better safe with the other guy dead than sorry with you dead.
I’d refused. I’d made it clear time and time again I wasn’t going to kill anyone. I simply wasn’t. That was the choice I’d made and I was comfortable with it. Stefan pointed out I could limit myself to shooting people in the legs, and he was right, but it was one more layer of lethalness to me I didn’t want to add. I was all the lethal my psyche could deal with. The pipe bombs were for killing SUVs and other vehicles, not people. They were also an interesting experiment and I was a sucker for interesting. “No.” I gave him back the gun. “You know I’m not going to do it. And if there is a Zombie Bob down here, I’ll touch him and cut off blood flow to his brain long enough to knock him out.”
“Stubborn. Goddamn stubborn.” But he took back the gun, muttering under his breath that he’d rather shoot one of these rotting monsters than touch one any day.
As I’d said before, it was anatomy class all over again. Bodies were bodies; nothing new or unusual. I didn’t spare them another glance, stepped over one on my way to the computers, and went to work. I didn’t find anything especially helpful, but I did find one thing I’d suspected for a while. Life: Expect the worst and be pleasantly surprised. My life in the past day: Expect the worst and find out how lacking in imagination you really are.
I bowed my head, exhaled, and closed my eyes for a moment. Then I straightened, retrieved several travel drives of Institute information, and headed toward the stairs. Life was life. You either gave up on it, as I had while imprisoned in the Institute, or you made the best of it, as I had every day since I’d made it out of those walls.
Now that I was free, the best was all I’d settle for.
Two hours later we were in Barstow. We’d taken an SUV, tan to blend in with the dirt and sand, from the Institute and gone back to the plane for all our equipment. The Cessna’s nose had been only slightly crumpled. One wheel bent sideways a bit. Stefan, who would be considering the day we’d had—I’d had, seeing my fellow students dead—had said nothing. Big brothers know when to give you a hard time and when to let it go. I learned that in the first six months I’d been on the run with Stefan.
After packing up everything, including Godzilla, we’d driven into Barstow and parked at an outlet mall. Mixed in with all the other vehicles, we may as well have been invisible. It would’ve been dark if not for the parking lot lights, but the lot was still packed full of cars.
In the driver’s seat, Stefan was arguing on his cell. “Saul, just park your ass at the Las Vegas airport, send the mercs back, pay them full price . . . pay them full price, I said, same as if they’d done the job. The last thing we need in the middle of this is pissed-off mercs. We’ll pick you up there.” From the loud squawking, Saul didn’t sound enthused at joining us without his army to chase after a band of killer kids. And Stefan’s further excuse of we’d only attract attention with a caravan of mercenaries, perhaps government attention we definitely didn’t want, didn’t calm the squawking any. “Saul, just shut your yap. You’re coming and you know you’re coming. Wait for us. It’ll be about three hours. Okay, Jesus, fine. We’ll pick you up at the craps table at Caesar’s. And, yeah, yeah, I know your fee will bankrupt me and three Third World countries.” Disconnecting, he smacked his forehead lightly with the phone. “I know he helped save our lives God knows how many times, but breaking my foot off in his ass would be damn satisfying.”
Under Stefan’s eye, I had finished double-checking the two cases I had stowed in the SUV with several injection systems that looked like bulky guns. These were designed to be the mode of delivery for the cartridges. Those cartridges, plastic cylinders, had been made to be filled with a drug I’d started working on two years ago to alter the genetic makeup of the other chimeras. The cylinders could also be filled with enough tranquilizer to take down a rhino for a week or a chimera for an hour. Everything was intact in the foam packing despite the slightly less than smooth landing.
“Is it all good there?” He continued to smack his forehead with the phone.
“Nothing is broken,” I said, evading with the truth. “And you’re not going to do your forehead any good banging on it more.”
“I’m hitting it now, my choice. The windshield of your plane chose to hit it earlier.” He had a two-inch cut, crusted with dried blood, and a dark bruise surrounding it. I determined to hack into that training video Web site and take my money back. As instructional tools, they were all but worthless, even to a genius. With proper videos, I was positive the landing would’ve been perfect.
The bump on my forehead was naturally already gone. Quick healing shouldn’t make someone feel guilty, but occasionally it did. There was something I wanted to bring up to Stefan about the healing matter, but now wasn’t the time. I wasn’t quite sure when that time would be. “We need to get the first aid kit. I took it from the plane and put it in the backseat,” I said.
“He’s right, you know. That’s a nasty cut you’re sporting there, mate.”
I had rolled down my window to get a flow of cool twilight air. It could’ve been to air out Godzilla’s musky smell; that would’ve been reason enough. I’d stuck my head out when I had to make a cursory check to make sure no one was close enough to hear Stefan talking to Saul, but that hadn’t kept someone from crouching and moving their way up beside my window to now rest a muzzle of a gun against my temple. “By the way, Michael, I’ve been with the Institute long enough to know you can’t heal a bullet in your brain, and if you try to touch me, I’ll put one there.”
I couldn’t turn my head, but I could see Raynor from the corner of my eye, and I recognized him from the photos. He had a pleased smirk that revealed startlingly white teeth. Up close, I could also see the short dark hair and the satisfied glint in his
black eyes. His face was cheerful with victory, but I had a feeling it would turn dark and toxic if he was crossed. “And Stefan Korsak. Nice to finally make your acquaintance. You were better at hiding than your father was . . . for a while. And please don’t go for your gun, if you had any such rude inclinations. You might get me, but how gratifying would vengeance be when you’re splattered with Michael’s brains? Or should I say your brother’s brains?” The smirk became more mocking. “Or should I not?”
I kept what vision I could on Raynor, but I didn’t feel the air stir or hear the seat squeak. Stefan was doing as he was told. He was not moving and he wasn’t speaking either. With an unknown element like Raynor, it was his best instinct, honed by his time in the mob. My time had been honed elsewhere and that led to a different approach. “You have a slight accent, Mr. Raynor. New Zealand. Christchurch, I think. But you came to the United States when you were twelve? Thirteen?”
The glitter in his eyes brightened as the muzzle ground harder against my temple. I felt blood vessels breaking, causing an incipient bruise. A fraction of a second later, I felt the blood vessels slowly knitting themselves back together. As I slept less now, I healed faster too. The difference almost three years could make in my abilities was staggering. When or if he pulled the gun away, I wouldn’t have a bruise—the damage having healed before it had a chance to fully develop.
“You know me, then, and you’re good with accents,” Raynor commented, unfazed by my guess. “You are as clever as them all, aren’t you? My mum’s American. Would you like to see my papers? I’ve dual citizenship. I’m even human, which is more than I think can be said about you, Michael.” The muzzle pressed harder against my head as that cheerful dark glint was snuffed out. “But enough about me. I’d like you to tell me what happened to the whole bloody lot of them, humans and freaks alike, back at the Institute.”
