by Rob Thurman
The sirens behind us were louder and closer. Who needed to be lucid to know that wasn’t good? “Shit.” Stefan twisted his head. “I made it through the mob years without having to shoot at a cop once. Doesn’t it goddamn figure? Think I can hit the tires of three police cars?”
“Gun.” My tongue felt thick, but I could do the little words. Cake of piece. Or something like that. “Micro. Wave. Gun.”
“Okay, that I approve of. Beats pipe bombs by a mile. Where the hell is it?” He leaned over me, careful not to rest any weight on my chest, and dug around in my duffel bag. “Damn it!” I saved my sympathy. He’d packed the bags when they’d come after Raynor, Ariel, and me.
“Forget? Old. Senile. We need a drugstore . . . adult diapers.”
“Misha, seriously. Dial down the damn endorphins. Jesus, finally.” He yanked the microwave gun out of my backpack, rolled down the window, and, holding me against him with one hand as we rose up off the seat, he leaned out and fired. “Christ, it worked.” As if anything I built wouldn’t work. He fired two more times and there were no more sirens. Easing back inside, he dropped the gun in the floorboards.
“Way to save our ass, kid,” Saul said from the front. “You done good.”
“Always do good. I’m brilliant. The most brilliant genius to. . . .” I lost my train of thought and then caught a more important one. “Still hungry.”
“Saul, emergency kit.” Stefan lifted his hand from my chest and caught the bag that sailed back. Stefan didn’t go anywhere with me, on the run or living our once peacefully mundane lives in Cascade, without food. I didn’t know if chimeras in general required more calories than humans or if it was merely me, but I outate Stefan three times over.
Outate.
Which reminded me again.
Food.
Now.
Hungry.
Stefan had a ham sandwich half—unwrapped. I snatched it clumsily from his hand and took huge bites, swallowing without chewing. While I ate, I did what Stefan suggested and eased back on the endorphins, although I hated to see the rainbows in the streamers of sun disappear. They were nice. They reminded me of home. There they arched over the river and the dam almost every week. It was the reason the bridge that topped the dam was called the Bridge of the Heavens. It made more sense than a golden ladder.
But I wasn’t dead yet, so no Paradise for me.
As I finished the sandwich and eased back on the production of the endorphins, I began to notice things. The pain that stabbed my ribs was gone. A point against lucidity. Stefan was the other thing I noticed. When I’d woken up, I’d seen him covered in dirt, dust, and blood. He hadn’t been hit or clipped by a semi, but a building had fallen on him as it had on me. “Are you. . . . ?” I grimaced and braced my ribs with my hand. “Are you all right?” My body wasn’t close to full capacity yet. I couldn’t feel if he was hurt or not. My lingering damage took precedence and I couldn’t change that. The body’s self-preservation overrode what my mind ordered it to do. I raised my other hand and swiped at the blood-dust paste on his face to see the damage. There were several cuts and scrapes, but they weren’t bad. The blood was from them and his nose. It didn’t look broken, though. It was all superficial, but that was nothing compared to what could be going on inside him.
“I’m all right,” he assured me. “Sore and getting less and less male-model material all the time, but I’ll live.”
I wouldn’t be satisfied until I knew for myself. Lucid and determined, both made me inescapable. “More food,” I demanded grimly, opening my eyes. I went through three more sandwiches and two Gatorades in five minutes. It helped. My ribs were healing, but not instantly. Bone was slower to repair than anything else. After eating, I lay quietly, Stefan’s legs remaining my pillow. With my eyes shut, I concentrated on stretching my limits further. Damn stubborn bone. “Does your back or neck hurt? Your abdomen, chest, head?”
Stefan had explained while I was eating how part of the ceiling had dropped, one end resting on top of the semi and the other landing on top of him where he’d been flung to the floor. It had been what had shielded us from chunks of the second floor and saved our lives. There’d been barely enough room for him to grab and drag me with him as he tunneled through tangled cots and debris to crawl under the semi and out the hole it had knocked in the front wall. He also was filling Saul in on what had happened with Peter when I’d interrupted with my woefully inadequate attempt at a diagnostic.
“I’m fine, Misha,” he reiterated. “I’m a muscle-bound human. You’re a skinny chimera who lies like a dog.” He gave me a napkin to wipe his blood from my hand. Some of it, along with dirt and dust, had ended up on the sandwiches, but I was too ravenous and too set on feeding the healing process to care. “Of the two of us, who do you think is going to walk away?”
I wanted to snort, but I knew what my ribs would think of that. “I’m athletic, like a runner.”
I had the self-esteem to know that was true. The six and a half times I’d had sex, no one had any complaints about my body. In fact, they’d enjoyed the look of it and definitely enjoyed what I could do with it. I had read up on the subject beforehand. I wanted to do it right and from the reactions, I thought I had . . . excepting the half time, which had been my first. The books said that was normal too. “So what if I’m not a walking triangle of steroids,” I added. That, however, was completely untrue, but if I couldn’t have endorphins, I could sting my brother . . . and distract him. He was joking with me, but there was no humor in it. In less than twenty-four hours I’d been kidnapped, in a car wreck, hit by a truck, and had a building fall on me. As brothers went, I was high maintenance.
As an apology, when I asked for a candy bar, I broke off half and gave it to him. With my obsession with food, there was no higher gesture. He accepted it with all the gravity it deserved. Or he was mocking me. Either way, the graveyard shadows in his eyes receded and that was enough for me.
Godzilla, curled on my stomach, had been chirping nervously. As I was giving the ferret a peanut from the PayDay bar, Saul put down the visor against the searing Tucson light that sunglasses couldn’t handle and said, “I don’t get it. You said they killed all those gangbangers in there. That punk-ass teenage Jim Jones said this wasn’t about Michael’s being good enough to join up with their Sesame Street serial killer family after all. Why weren’t the rest of them there? Besides the one driving the truck?” Who had gotten away so quickly Saul hadn’t seen whether it was a girl or a boy. He hadn’t seen anyone period. “Why didn’t they stay put and try to kill us or, for God’s sake, give us a chance to do the same to them?”
“Because they’re not done playing yet.” My muscles tightened. The moment was coming. I’d put it off as long as I could—too long. This came from a combination of Institute-ingrained secrecy and something else. Once I was free, I’d picked up quickly the practice of denial. Inside Institute walls, it was impossible. Outside them, it was a drug—mental heroin. The more you did, the more you’d do. I was headed straight into cold turkey rehab now.
“Peter didn’t say play. He said punish,” Stefan said quietly, but without yielding. He’d been patient with my evasions these past few days, giving me the chance to prove I was the man I said I was. That patience was over. “Why do they want to punish you? What did all Peter’s bullshit mean?”
The moment was closer, its consequence-laden breath on the back of my neck.
I sat up slowly, Stefan’s hand bracing me. Godzilla slithered to the floorboards in search of more peanuts. I settled against the seat, giving my ribs a chance to get used to the change of position and increased pain. It was all done slowly, but not as slowly as I answered Stefan. “It means Peter knows more than he’s saying.”
“He’s not the only one, is he?”
The moment was here.
“No,” I said, “he’s not.”
It was time for the truth and I told it—the majority of it. There was one thing I held back. Among other things, I to
ld them Peter knew about the cure. What I didn’t tell was the truth of the cure itself. I had to. If I hadn’t, the only cure for the chimeras would be a bullet to their brains. Killing thirteen teenagers and children, murderous or not, would be on Stefan’s and Saul’s consciences for the rest of their lives. I wasn’t going to let them carry that with them, especially when I couldn’t take part of that weight myself.
I wasn’t a killer; it was a vow to myself—not one that I wouldn’t break, but one that I couldn’t.
Not a killer, never again.
I was a liar, though.
And a manipulator.
A deceiver.
A hypocrite.
What good is a conscience if it lets you commit every evil under the sun save one?
No damn good at all.
Chapter 12
After the two-hour drive to Phoenix, we stayed at the first nice motel—hotel—I’d been in. Saul checked the three of us in while Stefan and I made our way cautiously along the shadowy recesses of the lobby. There were potted trees, fresh flowers, and furniture—the kind you could sit in without catching a venereal disease. An art deco–style chandelier of brightly colored blue and purple glass gave the large room an underwater feel. If a dolphin had gone swimming by, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
Or a girl with a mermaid tattoo.
Keeping our heads down, we waited for Saul by the elevators. We’d changed clothes in the car and cleaned the blood and grime from our hands and faces as best we could with napkins and bottled water. We couldn’t do anything about the hair, though. Pouring bottles of water over our heads at a rest stop had the mess going from dusty mop to matted, clumped hair that made the homeless on the streets the salon poster children for great hair care in comparison.
Saul met us and handed us a key card. “You don’t have to go through with this, Skoczinsky.” Stefan was carrying his duffel bag as well as mine, my backpack, and my laptop. The ribs would be better than new in a few hours, but the pain, dull and insistent, hadn’t left. That was why we’d stopped, although there was plenty of daylight left to keep going. The chip, which hopefully remained around Peter’s neck, was headed west toward Los Angeles. Stefan had said if they went on a wild, crazed murdering spree there, it wasn’t as if anyone would notice. LA, after all, was crazy central. We couldn’t do anything about it anyway. We needed time to stop and recuperate.
By “we,” he meant me. Here, I could sleep in a real bed and not in the back of an SUV bumping over every pothole in existence. I could shower in hot water, lie flat, sleep, eat more. The hunger had faded, but it would be back. I hadn’t forced myself to heal this fast before. But I’d never had anything close to these injuries since I’d learned to speed the healing process. When I was seventeen, I couldn’t control my healing very much at all. No chimera could. Your body healed at its own automatic, albeit, accelerated rate.
But as I’d gotten older, my body matured, and that, combined with relentless exercises in healing myself of self-inflicted cuts and burns, turned me into an athlete of healing—the best in the world. I wasn’t invulnerable, but I was harder to kill. Or that was what I’d thought before I’d been run down by a semi and had a house dropped on me. It was a wonder that passing Munchkins hadn’t sung a song and stolen my shoes before running for it up the Yellow Brick Road.
I wondered if I could genetically engineer a flying monkey.
I jerked back to the subject at hand. This time the mental meandering was from exhaustion, and with not too many endorphins. “I wouldn’t blame you,” I said. “Thanks to me, you didn’t come into this with open eyes.”
He considered Stefan first. “Having a friend is a pain in the ass. But you’re easier, Smirnoff. You pay me big bucks for the really entertaining illegal work. The rest of what I do—find someone, lose someone, suggest a reputable hit man, break a kneecap on a slow day, obtain and deliver rolls of plastic, duct tape, and three identical khaki green shirts when all the stores are closed during a Miami hurricane; the usual crap—it gets boring and before you know it I’m watching The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills to see whose skin is stretched the tightest. But you? Lots of money, a yearly Hanukkah card, and occasionally crazy, wild shit that Spielberg would find unbelievable. You keep me on my toes.”
Saul zeroed in on me next. “As for you, you played things close to the chest, but so do I. Occupational hazard. And despite everything, it doesn’t change our plan or hopefully the end result. If anything, it gives us an edge we didn’t have before. Besides, dropping your ass means dropping Stefan, and I like his money too much.” As the elevator dinged—a low, expensive sound that could’ve been an ancient Tibetan gong—Saul grinned and shot me with his finger. “Looks as though you’re stuck with me, Mikey.”
Skoczinsky giveth and Skoczinsky taketh away.
The elevator was paneled in dark, rich wood, intricate crown molding, and a bench against the back wall covered in sedate black and gold striped cloth. The small discreet TV above the doors was the single exception to the British library look. “And books,” I muttered. “What’s a library without books?”
I didn’t realize I’d said it aloud until Stefan told me to hold it together; we were nearly at the room. Adept as I was at reading people, a murderous mind is a terrible thing to waste; I had no idea what he was thinking. Since telling him and Saul almost all of what I’d held back, I’d been waiting for my brother’s reaction. He hadn’t shown one. He’d given me one last sandwich, had asked frequently how I was doing, had eased me out of the vehicle as I kept my arm wrapped around my complaining ribs, and had taken all the bags, but mainly he was quiet, deep within himself.
When the moment had come, it hadn’t come alone—but hand in hand with a trail of consequences. It wasn’t the truth that made a man, but standing face-to-face with the cost of deserting that truth. Whatever that cost was, I’d accept it. I took the key card from Stefan and opened the door wide, both of us visually checking out the room. That was the best I could do. Stefan could look under the beds for chimeras or bogeymen. My reserves were running out and I needed to save them. Saul’s door to the room beside ours shut, but not before I heard him on the phone arranging for a massage.
Eat, drink, and be massaged, for tomorrow we may die.
I went into our room. The beds were huge and the color orange was nowhere in sight. There were white puffy bedspreads. When the motels we stayed in had the option of charging by the hour, a white cover would last all of five minutes. There was a TV hidden away in a massive entertainment center, a refrigerator, coffeemaker, microwave, and the bathroom had a whirlpool tub and a shower. I saw it all in one swift scan. There was the soft snick of our door shutting, but I didn’t move out of Stefan’s way for him to dump our bags. Instead, I put my hand on his forehead, his chest, and then his abdomen. My ribs were a work in progress and my body fought my mind, but I was close enough to being whole that I was able to wrench enough control to assess Stefan. Normally I could’ve touched him on his arm and felt all of him at once. If there were anything wrong anywhere within him, I’d have sensed it. But close to whole wasn’t whole and I had to put more effort into it.
“You’re a human MRI, huh?” It was a comment, but the emotion behind it was impossible to interpret.
I nodded. No concussion, no brain damage. I moved my hand to his heart. “Improving my own self-healing wasn’t enough. All those sick animals I found, all the blind turtles, birds with broken wings”—and the chipmunks that escaped foxes but not soon enough. The rabbit with a broken leg, probably from a stray dog—“I fixed them. I’d thought for a long time: If I can take things apart, why can’t I put them back together? It’s the same principle, the same ability to manipulate cells. On the first day we moved to Cascade, I found Gamera in the woods, blind as a bat. That’s when I started to practice.” Last, I put my hand on his stomach. Good. There was no internal bleeding. He had bruises and cuts, but he was all right. He’d walked away from a collapsed building and I hadn’t
. Human 1–Chimera 0. Life loved to mock our egos.
I wanted to go to bed and sleep for a few years, but in this place, I couldn’t imagine getting a speck of dirt on their immaculate bed. I headed for the shower, but I kept talking. “I thought it would be simple, but it wasn’t. It’s always easier to destroy than to create; easier to break something or someone down than to build it up. Luckily, Gamera was in no hurry.” I stripped down and neatly folded the clothes I’d changed into to try to pass as something more than a guy who lived in a box on the street. “It took six months to cure Gamera of cataracts—basic, simple cataracts. A doctor could’ve done it in less than an hour.” I stepped into the shower, pulled the curtain, and turned on the water.
It was hot, almost scorching, and good—too good. It loosened every muscle in me and I decided to take the shower sitting down. I should’ve used the whirlpool tub, but I wanted sleep more than jets to ease any residual aches. Washing my hair with one hand, I let the other one lie idle. No more aggravating the nowcracked ribs. No longer broken—bones were difficult—but I was getting there.
“I’m listening.”
I moved to scrubbing the dirt from my neck and chest. The EMTs hadn’t wasted any time in cutting my shirt down the middle to slap on the electrodes hooked up to the cardiac monitor. “You are? I thought you were putting on a wig and grabbing a butcher knife. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
“Norman Bates? I doubt I could find an old lady’s dress that would fit my manly shoulders. Think the Terminator instead, and, yeah, I’m listening.” There was the creak of the door frame as he leaned against it. “You told us the rest, but the healing thing, but you were pretty succinct. You don’t seem a hundred percent sure about that. As you’re most often one hundred and fifty percent positive about everything you set out to accomplish, it seems weird. And no bragging on your brilliance? That’s not you. You’re your number one fan.”
