by Rob Thurman
“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 door 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.
If wishes were horses, they’d kick you in the gut and, when you were down, dump a steaming load of manure on your head. Why didn’t useless homilies ever tell it to you straight?
“We’re in.” I put away the picks and my phone.
“Good job, vors.” Vors—it meant boss in the Mafiya. This time the comment was said with an exasperated light swat to my jaw and a reluctant pride to the compliment. “Sorry I came down on you, kid. You’re doing the best you can, which is better than I did.” Then the sugary sweet, birthday-cake-frosting moment was over—one of the moments guys aren’t supposed to acknowledge—and Stefan was pushing open the door cautiously. It was dark inside, darker than the house had been. Here there was only one tiny window set up high in the back wall. I could make out the shape of a riding lawn mower, some tools against the right wall—a rake and shovel were most likely. I could see the cables running up the walls. This place was wired for electricity. So where was the switch? I had just spotted it, halfway back on the left wall—a stupid and inconvenient place to put it—when I saw something else almost at the same time. Less than half a second separated the discoveries.
It was a girl. She looked four or maybe five; it was impossible to tell in murk this thick. She was standing in a back far corner, facing into it—a bad girl who was sent for a time-out, nose to the wall. She had bright blond hair, but not as blond as Wendy’s. It was tied back in two ponytails. There might have been ribbons . . . I narrowed my eyes, and the gloom and shadows lightened. Ribbons, blue ribbons. Her dress was blue as well, her socks
pale, probably white, her shoes gone. She didn’t move, didn’t say a word. She was a child left to die alone in a locked building, too afraid to turn and ask for help, too terrified to know we were better than the ones who left her there.
Except. . . .
She wasn’t crying for help because she wasn’t breathing. She wasn’t turning toward us and freedom because her heart wasn’t beating. I couldn’t hear it or sense it. I couldn’t feel the life in her because there was no life. There hadn’t been any life in her, not for a moment. I knew life. You couldn’t steal it if you didn’t recognize it and any chimera would know what she was—a fake; a life-sized doll.
A trap.
But Stefan wasn’t a chimera. He was a man and a good one. He had been taught by his bodyguard days to be cautious and suspicious, but this was a little girl and not one he’d seen on the Institute video. To him, all he would see was that she wasn’t a chimera. To human eyes it was too dark to recognize she wasn’t anything at all. Before I could open my mouth to tell him to stop, he was there, turning the toy around. It didn’t matter that he felt the plastic under his hand and backed up immediately. It was too late. The wire was tripped and the cloud that billowed was as thick as a summer storm.
Chlorine gas—it was easy enough to make. Rob your kitchen or bathroom of ammonia and bleach and Mr. Charles Darwin stepped in. You could scrub your toilet and die with a brush in one hand and People magazine in the other, or you could be a chimera, smarter than you had any natural right to be, and use it. You could gather enough, put it in a container, seal it, connect it to a trip wire that was attached to a doll cute enough to pass for the real thing, and you had a way to kill two men almost instantly . . . or however many men happened to be with the Institute escapee trailing you. It wasn’t a good way to go, the gas. Your lungs scarred nearly immediately from the corrosive fumes, then filled with fluid, drowning you. If mixed right, it was fatal.
If you were a chimera yourself, it was mildly inconvenient. We were made to be predators, not victims.
I didn’t bother to yell Stefan’s name. It would be time wasted. I ran for him, grabbed his arm as he started to stagger, then raced back toward the door. Along the way, Saul was starting to drop to his knees. I used my other hand to grab his shirt, another brain-bleed-colored monstrosity, and yanked him along too. The rectangle of light we’d entered through wasn’t far, but in a cage of poison gas, far is relative and time is not your friend. I managed to get them outside, each step seemingly mired in mud as thick and cloying as molasses and quicksand, before dropping them in the grass as I slammed the door shut behind us. Then I grabbed each by the shirt collar and dragged them farther away. Little gas would escape that sturdy metal door, but I wasn’t much for playing odds, especially when it came to the lives of my brother and my friend.
I sat between them in the scratchy, high-arching weeds and laid a hand on each of their chests. “It’s okay. Chlorine gas is easy to make, but Peter hasn’t been out of the Institute long enough to know the Internet is usually wrong. He didn’t get the mixture right. The ratios were incorrect for a lethal blend. It’s nasty, but no worse than pepper spray. Take some deep breaths. You’ll be all right.”
That was when the small concrete building exploded. Interesting fact: Not only could you make chlorine gas out of bleach, you could also make plastic explosive. It was more likely you’d blow yourself up while stirring the pot than succeed in your “recipe,” but that was why funeral homes had closed caskets . . . to carry your many varied moronic pieces to Heaven or God or whatever you believed in.
I bent my head, hands on Stefan’s and Saul’s chests as they coughed. Fragments of concrete flew over and past while the dry grass–weed mixture all around us smoldered and caught fire. It had rained once, but once wasn’t enough to save this place. A chip of metal or concrete hit my jaw, then flew on, leaving a jagged slice behind. I felt the clotting begin and the skin knitting back together. There wouldn’t be a scar. I’d healed fast at seventeen. Now I healed at a speed I didn’t want Stefan to know about. I’d been different long before he’d found me. Now I was different to the tenth power. I didn’t want to be. I wanted to be more human, not less. I wanted to be like my brother.
This was one of the less times, but the rapidly disappearing wound on my face wasn’t something I wanted him to see or a truth I wanted to spill. Not yet. I’d said it a hundred times to myself over the past year.
Just . . . not yet.
Stefan coughed hoarsely and Saul, whom I might not hate after all, choked out, “Been . . . pepper sprayed. This . . . is . . . worse.”
“Pepper sprayed. You.” Stefan coughed explosively again, then managed to get up on his elbows. “Not . . . surprised.” He looked around, eyes streaming from the gas. “Holy shit. We’re on fire.”
“Only a little,” I said, exaggerating or rather underestimating some, but it was a triage moment. You had to breathe before you could run. “Catch your breath and we’ll make it out of here before we’re charcoal.” I felt his and Saul’s hearts beating under my hands, fast with adrenaline but healthy and whole. There were no arrhythmias. Chances were approximately seventy-nine percent that we would make it out of here without being barbecued as they’d wanted to do to Wilbur. I had a flashback to the Institute and brightly colored videos. What had poor Wilbur ever done to anyone? Or the spider, Charlotte? Or Bambi’s mother?
That Disney guy had been an excessively cruel man.
The building blew up a second time, what was left of it. Stefan took matters into his own hands. “Breathe . . . later,” he wheezed as he got to his knees and then to his feet—unsteady and weaving, but upright. “Run now.” Saul followed suit. They were tough, for humans, both of them. Strong. It had helped them survive their lives and it helped us survive now. We did as Stefan said—we ran. Saul’s khakis caught fire once. I patted out the flame when he would’ve paused to do it himself and pushed him on. We ran around the house instead of cutting through. Who knew what traps could be waiting in there that we’d simply missed the first time or were waiting their turn.
At the SUV, I climbed behind the wheel while Stefan all but fell into the passenger seat and Saul literally dived into the back, nearly squashing Godzilla. I started the engine and tore down the gravel road as fast as the SUV would go without sliding on the gravel and off the road. I didn’t think the house would explode as well, but naturally with all things Peter in the past two days. . . .
I was wrong.
A smoke detector wired to more homemade explosives would do the trick. That was how I would’ve done it, but with Peter showing himself to be more intelligent than I was, guessing was all I could do. The vehicle rocked, but we were out of range, barely, although part of the roof landed close enough behind us to momentarily lift the back wheels inches off the road. They smacked back down and I kept driving. Stefan was hanging on to the door handle. He hadn’t had time to fasten his seat belt—safety first, he’d always told me, the hypocrite. But I would let it go this time. “I guess I should be grateful you stuck to pipe bombs,” he said, his voice hoarse from his coughing. “This Peter might not know shit about chlorine gas, but he knows explosives out the ass.”
“Sometimes you get lucky,” I said darkly, jerking the steering wheel and spinning the SUV in a tight circle at the end of the road—a dead end. Why was life so damn appropriate when you least wanted it to be? I headed back the way we’d come, weaving around the pieces of roof and wall in the road.
“If Peter wants you to catch up with him, why is he trying to kill you?” Stefan finally put on his seat belt after I smacked his arm repeatedly and pointed at it.
“Because if these minor problems stop me, then I’m not deserving enough to find or join them.” I steered around a flaming piece of drywall.
“That was minor? You’re kidding, right? Two explosions and not-quite-good-enough chlorine gas is minor?” Saul sat up in the back and rubbed his chest as if it should ache. He took his hand away and frowne
d as if surprised that it didn’t.
“Chimeras can kill with a touch, but other people, nonchimeras”—humans, in other words—“kill in other ways. The Institute taught us all the ways there are to accomplish that, to be on our guard against the weaker . . . I mean, normal people.” Chasing daily after those genetically the same as me, if not mentally, made it easy to forget who was normal and who was not. “They didn’t get into specifics on how to make those types of weapons. We didn’t need to make them—we just had to know what we might be up against. But give one of us chimeras the Internet and we don’t have to be in the same state to kill you. We specialize in assassinations that look like natural deaths. Peter isn’t interested in whether they look natural or not now. He’s free. They all are. Free to kill in any way they like.”
“Like a buffet.” Stefan exhaled, leaning back in his seat. “They’ve found new toys to play with and after a virtual lifetime of solitary confinement, why wouldn’t they want the different and the new? If it weren’t for the trying-to-kill-us part of all this, it would be hard to blame them.” His eyes flicked to the rearview mirror to watch the burning foundation of what was left of the house behind us. “You said you had a way to find them despite their removing their chips. I don’t doubt your genius, kiddo, but how?”
“There were only twelve chips in that mug.” I took a hand off the steering wheel and for the first time in my life ruffled his hair, wavy and thick as a dog’s undercoat, in mockery of what he’d done to me more than a time or two when I was younger. Turnabout was fair play. I wanted to see how he liked it. “I’ll teach you about counting sometime. I might get you up to twenty if we try really, really hard.”
“I’d call you a shit again, but it’s not helping with your behavior, so it’s a waste of breath I could use. And both hands on the wheel.” He didn’t swat my hand, though, which was considerate in view of how many times I’d swatted him. “Are you telling me, in your own thoughtful way, that one of them kept a chip? Why?”
