by Rob Thurman
“In the outside world for three years and you haven’t learned how to play a game yet. It’s rather sad how you’ve wasted your freedom. I feel sad for you, Michael. I honestly do.”
Peter hadn’t felt sad in his life and while he knew the meaning of honesty, he was incapable of it. “What do you want, Peter? I’m done with following you around. I don’t have to. There are other people out there who want to catch up with you more than I do. I’ll let Raynor do what he does best and maybe I’ll go on vacation. Hawaii. I’ve always wanted to see a volcano.”
He laughed. “Raynor. The Institute’s invisible pet pit bull. None of us knew he existed until you escaped, and suddenly he was at the new one we were moved to all the time. Checking up on Bellucci, who, as it turned out, did rather need some checking up on, didn’t he? Too bad, so sad, but Bellucci didn’t learn what Raynor constantly told him about lax security.” His voice hardened. “But that’s all over now. Turn on your TV or your laptop. Find a cable news channel. You might see my bright smiling face. Do it now, Michael. The games are over. Next time I see you, it’ll be in Heaven.”
The phone clicked and went silent in my ear. I tossed it onto the bed and took the remote from the bedside table that not only turned on the TV but also slid back the entertainment center doors. I was not going back to a thirty-eight-dollar-a-night motel as long as I lived.
“What’d the bastard want now?” Stefan growled, joining me in front of the TV.
“I think to tell me it’s time to meet at the OK Corral. He’s ready for the showdown.” I cycled through several news stations until I found what Peter had wanted me to see. In Eugene, Oregon, more than a thousand blackbirds had fallen from the sky, stone dead. The screen showed people milling about and looking in confusion at the carpet of iridescent black that covered their streets and yards. Only one person didn’t seem puzzled. There was only a short glimpse of him before the camera panned elsewhere, but it was Peter. He was waving before pointing at the sky with his finger and pulling an imaginary trigger. It was Wendy’s work. Fly away, birds. Fly away no more.
“Eugene.” Stefan started to rub his hand over his jaw and stopped, remembering in time the lacework of cuts and scrapes that crossed his face.
“Wait.” I studied him, concentrated, and then said, “Okay, you’re good now. You can even shave if you want.”
He ran his hand lightly across his face, then harder before moving into the bathroom to check the mirror. “They’re gone. I can’t tell they were there at all. That’s . . . Damn, Misha. Unbelievable.”
I had done it. I’d healed without touching . . . as Wendy killed without touching. That made our chances of survival better, and made me feel more like her, a hundred times the freak I had been seconds ago. But I could deal with being a freak if it meant I was able to live through this.
“If I can heal a blind, evil-tempered hundred-year-old turtle, a few scrapes are no problem. How’d it feel?” I asked. I was curious. I knew what it felt like when I healed myself with my new accelerated ability, but I didn’t know what it was like for someone else.
“It tingled some, and weirdly enough, I knew it was you. I could feel the, I don’t know, the Misha of you. It was better than a tetanus shot in the ass, that’s for sure.” He turned away from the mirror.
“I can fix your leg too. Bone takes forever to work with, but give me a few days and you won’t limp in the winter anymore.”
“Hell, kid, I never cared about that.” And because he was who he was and it had been for me, he hadn’t, but I did. It would be a Jericho memory I could bury forever: the one of him shooting my brother to take me back to Hell.
“We’ll see. And don’t call me kid.” I turned off the TV. “They’re in Eugene, or they were.”
“They’re going to Cascade Falls. They’d know that was where you were living. Raynor would’ve told Bellucci and God knows Bellucci would’ve told them anything they wanted before he died. And if Peter wants to punish you. . . .”
Wiping out a place I’d considered home would be one of the harsher punishments I could think of. “He said he’d meet me in Heaven.”
“The Bridge of the Heavens. On top of the dam. That scenario has nothing but nasty and suicidal written all over it. Too bad we can’t really let Raynor handle it. I know you have the cure, but even cured, give these kids guns and knives and they’ll do it the old-fashioned way.”
“Raynor’s smart and he did manage to capture me, but I’m only one. He doesn’t know it, but he’s out of his league. They’ll roll over him like a tank.” I planned on being there to see it too. No one deserved it more.
“Yeah, I know, but it’s nice to dream once in a while. Pack and get us tickets to Portland. I’ll go wake up Saul and make sure he has one of his guys meet us with some weapons and a car at the airport. Damn, what about your tranq guns? There’s not much sense in going if we can’t take the cure with us.”
“They’re plastic and disassemble in three minutes. Then I reassemble them into a larger gun that is nothing more than a toy. I also have stickers that say TOY, MADE IN CHINA, and SUPER-DUPER MEGA-MACHINE that go on the side. The tranq cartridges we can drop in a bottle of shampoo. We’ll have to check one bag, but no problem. Don’t tell Saul that, though. Tell him we have to smuggle them the only way God and the TSA have left to us.” I grinned. “Tell him it’ll expand his sexual horizons and he should try not to walk funny through the scanner.”
He snorted. “You are pure evil.”
I shrugged. I had no problem telling the truth when I couldn’t get around it and that meant I didn’t have a right to be offended when I heard it. “Somebody has to be.”
Jokes aside, by the end of it all, that could be more true than Stefan imagined. Someone had to do the only thing left to do. I hoped he could live with that.
I hoped I could too.
The flight was long. I’d commented that if they let me do the flying, it would be much shorter. Stefan accepted the statement with all the forgiveness and love one brother had for another. He popped me one in the shoulder, hard. Considering I’d learned to fly using the Internet and a few DVDs and the crash was minor, in my opinion, I’d think that he’d let it go, but no. I had a feeling I was grounded, quite literally, for a very long time.
When he was handing me his peanuts, crackers, chips, and soda, he said, “You’re planning on Raynor’s being there to help out, aren’t you? Not intentionally, but you think he can provide some sort of distraction.”
My lips curved as I took his food. I used to try to make sure we both had equal shares on the run or at home, but we’d both come to realize that despite his doing it out of big-brother instinct, I actually needed more food than did either he or your average four-hundred-pound sumo wrestler. I’d stopped protesting then. In this particular case, anyone sane would have considered it a favor that someone else had taken the inedible airplane snacks off their hands.
“He does have an Institute tracker, the same as we do,” I said. “And I don’t think Peter likes him any more than he likes me.” I opened the bag of peanuts and sighed as they spilled out stale and rock hard into my hand. Saul had the aisle seat and I leaned over Stefan to say in a low tone, “Is the you-know-what still with you?”
“You son of a bitch. I didn’t buy that for a second. I know more about the S word than you ever will.” He couldn’t say smuggling. There are no secrets on airplanes. Sound travels and passengers these days were more than willing to take off their belts and try to strangle an orange-haired would-be terrorist/smuggler or a man who simply liked to walk around with a tranquilizer cartridge concealed in his rectum for no special reason.
“Sure you do, Saul. And you weren’t disappointed that you didn’t have to bend over and take it like a man.” I’d learned that phrase on TV when I was fresh out of the Institute and Stefan had choked on his dinner when I’d asked him to explain it to me. “I believe you.” I went back to my peanuts and the SkyMall catalog. Godzilla, in his carrier unde
r the seat in front of me, had his pointed muzzle through the crosshatch of metal bars and was vengefully biting the toe of my shoe. Flying didn’t seem to be anyone’s favorite activity today.
“How many plans do you have for how this can go down?” Stefan asked. “It’s not as though there are too many hiding places on a bridge. I’ve been able to come up with one plan on this. Two if Raynor shows up.”
I turned a page. They had the most absolutely needless inventions in this magazine. It was hypnotic. “Two.”
“Not your usual ten or twenty? I think I’m unnerved.”
I glanced over at him. His tone was light, but his face was serious, grimly so. “Only unnerved? I’m scared shitless.” And there was nothing theoretical about that.
One of Saul’s subcontractors met us at the Portland International Airport—not that it looked international, but I supposed the designation was true. The FAA doesn’t let you lie about things like that. We had a car and enough guns for Saul and Stefan to take on an army, so all was right with their world if not Godzilla’s. He was still biting the carrier’s cage bars. Air flight had not agreed with him. If ferrets were meant to fly, as Stefan had commented midflight, then I would let him throw Zilla out the window.
Before his man left, I asked Saul, “Could he take Godzilla? In case . . . just in case.” I dug through my backpack for our money and counted out a thousand. “And find him a good home if he has to?” I handed the guy the carrier and the thousand dollars.
The man looked at Saul and at the money and replied in a drawl that originated far from Oregon, “I don’t mind. Hell, my sister does animal rescue. Has a houseful of furry critters.”
“Give us at least a week to come back for him,” I warned, putting a finger through the bars to rub his small head. He promptly bit me and I smiled. It was two predators bonding, not a good-bye, because that was what I chose to believe.
Once again we were supplied with an SUV. I didn’t have anything against the environment, but when you hauled around as many weapons as Stefan and Saul needed to feel comfortable, you required a roomy vehicle. “I’ll drive,” Stefan said.
I claimed the passenger seat. Saul could sit in the back all but buckled into an infant’s car seat for once. “His sister rescues animals and he sells guns to anyone with the cash. People are strange,” I said, slamming the door behind me as Stefan began to navigate our way out of the airport parking garage.
“Says the genetic superman riding around with an ex-mobster brother and an international criminal mastermind,” Saul pointed out.
I didn’t know about the mastermind part, but the rest was true enough. It didn’t change the fact that people were strange. In our case I liked to think it was a good kind of strange.
It was an hour and a half from Portland to Cascade and in that time I told them my plan, which, compared to all the other plans I’d engineered in the past years, was beyond simple. We went to the bridge, I did my best to stop Wendy from killing us, we shot the chimeras with the tranq guns, everyone was cured, and we went back to another nice hotel. And if Raynor showed up, he could simultaneously distract the chimeras while we shot them, again with the tranq guns, and Stefan could beat him to a pulp afterward.
“Sad to say, that’s my plan too,” Stefan admitted. “But it’s a crappy plan. We’re on a bridge with no place to hide or set up an ambush, although since I imagine they’ll be waiting for us, that’s a point in our favor. At least they can’t ambush us either. If they were ordinary people, weak, puny, and not too bright like Saul and me”—he punched me casually in the arm—“I’d say our chances were good. Saul kicked ass in the military, I kicked ass on the streets, and you are the self-proclaimed Einstein of our times.”
“I’d say that’s an accurate description,” I agreed without a hint of a smirk, although I’d seen couples at night cross the street if they saw Stefan coming. Hell, I’d seen three or four men cross the street. Weak and puny he was not. He looked not like what he was all the time, but like what he was capable of being anytime—a wolf in human skin.
“A suicide run with a couple of smart-asses,” Saul mumbled. “I hate my life.”
Stefan continued. “But they’re not like Saul and me. They’re like you, Misha. They’re fast and strong and smart as fucking hell. And Peter has them doing whatever he says, which makes him something even more than them.”
“Except for Peter and maybe Wendy, they shouldn’t be as fast and strong as I am. That comes with maturity, and the rest of the chimeras are years younger than Peter.” Except one. “And Raynor is smart as well. In a different way and in this case it might be a better way,” I said. “We’re trained to take out targets, usually one—maybe two or three. We didn’t need to worry about defensive tactics, because no one would suspect us. Someone falls over because of a natural death and a cute sixteen-year-old waitress who was serving him dinner goes into hysterics. Who’s going to blame the waitress for a heart attack because her hand brushed his when she handed him his glass of water? No one. When Raynor kills people, chances are everyone in the area is going to know it and Raynor is vulnerable. He can be killed much more easily than a chimera. Don’t think he doesn’t know that and that he doesn’t value himself very highly.”
Stefan nodded. “I wondered if you’d see that. You know, then. Raynor won’t be coming alone.”
“You were testing me?” I scoffed. “The fully trained assassin?”
“You said it yourself. Chimera warfare is different than human warfare. You’re like a single bullet, elegant and deadly. Humans are like ten thousand NASCAR fans, each one with his own tank. If our lives are at stake, we are bringing all we have, all we can borrow, and all we can steal. Raynor is definitely not coming alone. Whoever he brings won’t know a damn thing about chimeras. That’s Raynor’s secret. But they’ll be shooters and the kind that don’t mind mowing down a kid or two to get the rest to cooperate. Not to mention Tasers, the rubber bullets like Raynor used on you.” He tapped a finger on my head. “Not as hard as it seems. Who knew? Raynor goddamn knew, Misha. So if something happens to me or Saul, remember that. Raynor is more than a distraction to be used. He’s a genuine threat.”
He was. He was human, but I couldn’t dismiss that he’d caught me and had me chained in his car. ’“I’ll remember, but nothing is going to happen to you.”
“Hello? I’m along for the ride too. How about nothing is going to happen to me?” Saul complained.
Stefan ignored him to say, “And Saul and I might not have USDA-grade assassin stamped on our asses, but between the two of us we’ve killed a shitload more people than you care to know about. So don’t be so quick to jump between me and a bullet this time. If you can keep Wendy from doing her creepy thing, I can take care of myself. Okay?” He waited until I confirmed it.
“All right.”
“If we’re lucky, we’ll all get out of this in one piece,” he finished. Then he gave me a hell-on-wheels grin and quoted my favorite word: “Theoretically.”
I tried to grin back, but I didn’t feel it. I planned on this working, but I thought that Butch and Sundance had planned on eventually leaving Bolivia in one piece too. I wished now I hadn’t given us their names while we’d lived in Cascade.
As omens went, it wasn’t a good one.
Chapter 14
It shouldn’t have felt like coming home with Peter and the others waiting to punish me, and if “punish” wasn’t to kill slowly and painfully, then my imagination wasn’t all that I knew it was. It did though—it felt like coming home. We’d been gone only a few days, but I’d missed it. It didn’t stretch my mind, make me learn faster, soak up more knowledge, instinctively fit in better as the adrenaline rush of being on the run did, but it was a nice place all the same. It felt the same as when I watched one of my favorite movies for the fifth or tenth time. I knew every line of dialogue, every explosion, every wave that crashed against a sinking ship, every gunshot, but it was as good as the very first time I watched it . .
. better almost. It was warm, familiar, and safe. I’d not had a moment of that in the Institute. I learned the value of it when I’d escaped.
The Bridge to the Heavens was blocked off on Cascade’s end by the sheriff’s car. Sheriff Simmons was dead on the road beside it, and I saw Jess Quillino, his deputy, her legs showing beyond the bumper from the other side of the car. Other than that, there were no other people around—none alive. The bridge over the dam didn’t go anywhere too important, definitely not to an infinity of heavens. If you crossed it and drove about forty miles on a single-lane road, you’d get to a town small enough that it made Cascade seem like New York City. Hardly anyone made the trip from this direction and if they were coming from the other direction, that end of the bridge was blocked by the Institute bus, long GPS disabled; I was certain.
I passed out the tranq guns, tightened my lips, and went with one hope—that I didn’t get us all killed. “Stoipah, Saul, just remember one thing. They’re not kids. They never were. If something goes wrong, they’ll kill you and they’ll laugh while they do it. If it goes bad, use your guns, not the tranq ones. And be sure to shoot them in the head. So—” I inhaled, exhaled hard, and opened the car door. “Let’s go.”
We walked around the sheriff’s car and I didn’t look at the body too closely. He’d been a nice enough man. He’d given me a break with the fake tourist. He’d played pool with Stefan. He had a wife and a little boy. If we’d never come to his town, he’d still be alive. Those thoughts weren’t helpful at the moment and I shoved them down as we headed onto the bridge.
They were waiting halfway across. We stopped forty feet short. The thirteen of them were waiting in various poses. Some stood, some sat cross-legged on the road, Wendy—my eyes locked on Wendy—sat on the threefoot-tall concrete wall that kept cars from plummeting into the river boiling at the base of the dam. Dressed in a small blue sweat suit with a spray of rhinestone flowers across the top, she was kicking her feet idly against the concrete, her fair hair lifted in the wind. She waved at me. “Hi, Michael. Hi, hi, hi. Did you see the birds? They fell like they were a part of the sky at night. Black, black everywhere. I did that. That was me.”
