by Jon McGoran
I let go and he lowered me to the ground.
I turned to look up at him, embarrassed. “Thanks,” I said, my voice strangely hoarse.
His eyes twinkled in the dim light and he smiled. “Let’s go.” Then he turned and trotted off into the trees.
Hurrying to follow him, I looked over my shoulder at Aunt Trudy’s house. I felt bad sneaking out on her, but I’d be back before she knew I was gone, I told myself. Then the trees swallowed me up.
For a moment I thought Rex had gone on without me. But then I put out a hand in the darkness and it landed on his chest. I snatched it back immediately.
“Sorry,” I said.
“It’s okay,” he said. “The trees will thin out in a minute. Here, hold my hand.”
His massive hand was warm and dry as it enveloped mine.
He led me down into a shallow gulley that smelled of mud, then back up the other side. The trees parted and moonlight shone on the tall grass.
He let go of my hand. “You okay?” he asked.
I nodded. “Yeah, I’m good.”
He pointed up ahead. “We have to get over the fence. How are you at fence climbing?”
When I was younger, I’d been an enthusiast, but it had been a little while. “Great,” I said.
He didn’t raise an eyebrow, but I was getting better at reading his expressions. He had doubts.
“Let’s go,” I said quickly, before he could voice them.
TWENTY-ONE
The base of the fence was twenty feet away from where we stood. The top was probably another fifteen feet, straight up.
As we approached, Rex paused and looked at me. This time he actually did raise an eyebrow, and then an arm, gesturing for me to go first. Annoyed by his lack of faith, I hooked my fingers into the links, dug in with the toes of my boots, and started climbing.
The first ten feet wasn’t bad, but then it got tougher. I was two feet from the top when my foot slipped.
I’m not going to say I wasn’t a little scared, but I still had everything under control. My other foot stayed where it was and my hands kept their grip. Even so, the fence suddenly shook violently and then Rex was there next to me, one hand grasping the fence and the other hand on the small of my back, barely touching me but ready to catch me if I fell.
“I got it,” I told him.
He stayed where he was as I climbed the rest of the way, then over the top. Frankly, fifteen feet off the ground, I would have felt better having him there with me, but now I really had something to prove. I met his gaze through the chain links as I climbed down the other side. Once I was on the ground, he flipped over the top and landed on his feet with a soft thud right next to me.
“Big fence,” he said, his eyes flashing in the darkness.
“Very big fence,” I agreed.
We crept through some more dense woods and out a rusted gate and onto a wide deteriorating street I didn’t recognize. Rex turned to the left, and I followed along.
“How do you know Del’s in Tyson’s Point?”
“I’ve been asking around.” He looked at me. “Like I said I would.”
“Has he already been spliced?”
“I don’t know.”
We walked in silence. The street was badly cracked and dark except for spots of moonlight. Through the dense trees that lined the road, I caught glimpses of houses being swallowed up in the kudzu and mile-a-minute vines.
It was a lot like the zurbs where Del and I had first encountered Rex and his friends. Some houses were almost whole, and others were almost reduced to rubble. Same thing with the streets—some looked like streets in the city, others were little more than asphalt stepping-stones through a forest of trees and weeds.
Twice we passed enclaves that seemed to be functioning neighborhoods—clusters of nice houses with solar roofs on top, orderly rows of garden plots, and warm candlelight inside. I knew plenty of towns managed to operate with their own wind or solar power and everything, but I hadn’t thought of anyone living out in the zurbs between them, at least not anyone but chimeras and criminals. And Aunt Trudy.
Maybe Tyson’s Point wouldn’t be so bad.
After another twenty minutes or so, we cut through a damp, empty neighborhood of small brick townhouses, most of them tinged with green at the bottom from mold or moss or algae. The place seemed vaguely familiar. A couple of blocks in, we came to a deep gully gouged diagonally across the street. A small creek ran along the bottom, its banks littered with chunks of asphalt and the remains of houses that had collapsed into it. We climbed down to cross it and I paused at the bottom. Looking both ways, I could see it extending off in each direction, cutting a jagged line through the neighborhood.
We climbed out the other side, and Rex quickened his pace. I hurried to keep up with him, walking alongside a rusted-out fence. Through it, in the moonlight, I could see an old playing field, now more swamp than anything else. The baseball diamond was completely gone, but remnants of a batting cage and dugout were still there.
A faded sign on the fence said ROCKLAND REC CENTER.
I gasped at the realization that this was the park where Del and Leo and I had been attacked so many years ago. Rockland had been bad then—now this was what was left of it.
Rex looked at me strangely, his eyes narrow and intense. “You okay?” he asked.
“It’s nothing,” I said, quickening my pace even more so that he had to speed up to keep up with me. In the back of my mind, I wondered what had become of the Davidsons. “Are we almost there?”
“About a mile.”
The streets grew wider and the houses became bigger and more spread out. To the east I saw a flicker of light as a Levline train zipped across a bridge in the distance.
Fifteen minutes later we came to a street flanked by two low, curved walls of fake stone that had crumbled to reveal powdery concrete underneath. There were faint lines and marks on the wall, where letters had once been attached to it. Squinting, I could make out the words: Tyson’s Point.
“Is this it?” I whispered.
He nodded, angling toward it.
The street was lined with houses and driveways spaced every hundred feet or so. Most of the yards were overtaken with brush and vines, but there were gaps where some of the lawns were just high grass.
Rex pointed them out. “Weed killer,” he said. “You can tell which houses used the heavy-duty chemicals right up until the end.”
It was interesting, I guess, but I really just wanted to get to Del. The street curved around, but Rex went straight, up onto the buckled sidewalk and across one of the weed-killer lawns.
We crossed between two darkened houses. They were both halfway collapsed, but I couldn’t shake the feeling we were trespassing. As we shuffled through a thick layer of fallen leaves, Rex put his hand on my shoulder and gently guided me off to the side. “Careful,” he said He tossed a stick right where I had been about to walk. The ground wobbled and the branch disappeared for a moment, then surfaced, glistening wet in the moonlight. “Swimming pools,” he said. “Empty or full, they can get you either way.”
As we kept walking, I looked back. The leaves on the water settled down and looked once again just like dry land.
The next street over was a cul-de-sac, and at the end of it there was a house, mostly intact, with lights flickering in the windows.
“Is that where Del is?” I whispered.
“We’ll see,” he said as we stepped onto the front path. “Stay close.”
TWENTY-TWO
Two dog chimeras came through the front door of the house and positioned themselves on either side of it, like guards. Physically, there were obvious similarities to Rex—the structure of their noses, the jutting jaw and mouth—but the vibe they gave off couldn’t have been more different. Their eyes were cold and black, their faces hard. I wondered how much of the disparity between them and Rex was due to differences in their splices and how much of it was due to differences in who they had been to start o
ut with. Rex ignored them as he walked up and grabbed the doorknob, but one of the guards growled at him. The other one looked down at me and lifted his lips to show big, sharp teeth.
Rex snarled with a sudden ferocity that shocked me, first at the one who had growled at him, then at the other one. They both stepped back, off balance.
Not a word was spoken in the exchange. Maybe words weren’t important in that kind of competition—for chimeras or regular people, for that matter—or maybe they actually had used their words, in some dog-chimera kind of way.
Rex loomed over them, staring them down as he held open the door. I ducked under his arm and went inside.
My hands were shaking—from that exchange, from anxiety about whether we’d find Del, and from apprehension about what state he would be in.
The inside was dim—just two candles on a wooden crate—but we’d been walking in darkness so long I could see fine. I immediately wished I couldn’t.
In one corner was a low-tech lab setup—battery-powered hot plate, beakers and a test tube rack, a couple of pipettes and syringes. A guy who looked about twenty with a shaved head and a goatee sat on a cushion, his face devoid of expression. An IV tube ran from his arm to a bag hanging from a nail in the wall. I stared at it for a second—the IV was feeding him the spliced virus, infecting him with some foreign gene.
In another corner a girl my age was sitting on a mattress, crying. A chimera with cat ears and tabby stripes sat with her, talking to her soothingly.
It all seemed horribly wrong. The vibe of the place was decay and ruin. I’d seen Del make some bad decisions, self-destructive ones, but this was worse than I’d even imagined.
Rex had been noble and helpful and great, but he was part of this, too. He’d made this same decision. He was part of this world.
The cat chimera looked up, and I saw it was Ryan. He gave me a smile that was surprisingly gentle and nodded at me. I nodded back, but I didn’t smile. He seemed like he was being nice to that girl, caring for her, but he was also encouraging her to go through with this terrible mistake. I wondered if someone was doing the same thing with Del, talking him through it, convincing him to take the plunge.
I followed Rex past the stairs, into what had probably been the dining room.
Several rolled-up rugs were stacked against one of the walls, like a makeshift sofa. Three chimeras were sitting on them, smoking in the light of a lantern. They looked up when we walked in. The one in the middle said, “Rex. What’s up, dog?”
Rex tipped his head. “Malcolm.”
Malcolm was small and twitchy, almost squirrely, but vaguely predatory as well. He looked like a rat, beady eyes and a narrow face, but he was thin and wiry, like a mongoose or a ferret. He got to his feet in a single fluid motion and looked at me like he was sizing me up. “Someone wants to join our ranks?”
I stepped back and suppressed a shudder at the thought.
Rex shook his head. “We’re looking for a friend.”
Malcolm’s eyes narrowed. “Looking why?”
The air was suddenly tense. The other two chimeras got to their feet, too. They were bigger than Malcolm, more formidable. They both had pointy faces with wide black-and-white streaks emanating from their snouts. Badgers, I thought.
Rex held up his hands, palms out. “Just want to talk to him.”
“What’s this friend’s name?” Malcolm asked.
Rex turned to me.
“Del,” I said quietly. Then I cleared my throat. “Del Grainger.”
Malcolm smiled and let out a soft laugh. The other two relaxed as well. “Yeah, you can talk to Del. He’s upstairs in the front room.”
My heart jumped, but as I wheeled around toward the stairs, Malcolm called after us, “If you’re here to talk him out of it, you’re too late. He’s up there sweating out the change. We spliced him this morning.”
TWENTY-THREE
Iran upstairs to the darkened second floor, Rex pounding up the steps behind me. I’d heard about the sweating out. Chimeras reacted differently to their splices, depending on the animal they were spliced with, the genes inserted, and the individuals themselves, as well as the skill of the genie. Most of the changes took place in the first twenty-four hours after the splice, and that’s when it hurt the most. In health class, after the “Things Can Go Wrong” speech about all the kids who die from bad splices, they focused on how much it hurts as your bones and your organs and your skin stretch and change and rearrange.
As I rounded the banister at the top of the steps, I heard a sound from the front room, a cross between a groan and a whimper. Then I heard my own voice whispering, “Del?” as I sprinted down the hallway.
The room was dark, but in the moonlight through the dusty window, I could see him.
It was Del, lying under a thin blanket on the floor, trembling, his skin glistening with sweat. Rex came up behind me, lighting up the room with a flashlight, and I gasped.
Del’s skin was a sickly green and his forehead was swollen and bruised. His lips—the lips that had kissed me—were cracked and bleeding.
I knelt beside him. “Jesus, Del,” I whispered. “What have you done?”
His eyes fluttered open but didn’t focus.
“He won’t be able to answer you for a few hours yet,” said a voice behind me. I turned and saw Malcolm standing at Rex’s elbow, smoking a cigarette.
“What did you do?” I demanded.
He shrugged. “I just helped. The question is, what did he do? And the answer is, same thing I did.” He hooked a thumb at Rex. “Same thing big dog did.” Then he laughed, a cruel, wheezy cackle. “Course, I never done a salamander splice before, but I always wanted to try a lizard, so there you go.”
“A salamander?” I looked back at Del and put a hand on his swollen face. It was damp and cool. The texture was strange, rubbery.
Like Sydney.
He started coughing, and his body shuddered as a convulsion ran through him. His mouth stretched wide in a noiseless scream, the cracks deepening in his lips, fresh blood welling up in them.
“Del!” I cried.
Malcolm laughed again. “He’ll be fine. It’s all part of it. Just give him a few hours.”
I looked over at Rex, and he nodded. “That’s how it happens.”
I tried not to think about how Del had permanently changed himself, how the friend I had known my whole life was never coming back. I tried not to think of how angry I was, how lonely I felt. Right now, my only concern had to be for Del’s well-being. “And this lasts twenty-four hours?”
Rex scratched behind his neck. “Sometimes a little longer.”
Malcolm snickered again and shook his head. “I told him, go mammal and you’ll get through it quicker. Less chance of complications, too. But he insisted.” He shrugged. “I told him same as I told you, I never done a lizard, but he wouldn’t let it go.”
“It’s an amphibian,” I said.
“Whatever,” he said. “At least he’ll have a good sweating-out story. Bragging rights, you know what I mean?”
I didn’t answer and as he walked away, I looked back at Rex. “I’m going to stay with him.”
Rex stared at me wordlessly for a moment, then nodded. “Okay. I’ll be back soon.” Then he was gone, too.
I sat against the wall with Del’s head on my lap. The feel of his skin was unsettling, but I brushed the damp hair from his face and patted it dry with my sleeve.
He shifted and his arm flopped out from under the covers. His bandages had been changed, but they were bunched up, exposing the wound where his father had scraped the skin off. It looked better than I expected: healing well with no signs of infection. I adjusted the bandage and tucked his arm back under the covers.
After a few minutes, the trembling stopped and his breathing slowed. His eyes opened briefly, and he looked up at me. This time there was recognition. He gave a soft sigh of a laugh and a hint of a smile. Then he closed his eyes and slept.
I sat there for
a long time, just me and him. I pictured him as a little kid, running around in the sunshine with me and Leo and Nina. Back when Del’s mom and my dad were still alive. It seemed so unbelievably, irretrievably long ago. Tears streamed down my face as I was overcome with sadness, mourning the loss of it all.
TWENTY-FOUR
I let myself weep long enough to feel I’d gotten some small part of it out of my system. As I was pulling myself together, I heard a quiet voice say, “Are you okay?”
I looked up and saw a bird chimera standing at the door, a girl, looking at me with big dark eyes. I didn’t say anything, and she looked away, a nervous, jerky movement. But she came into the room anyway.
“He’ll be all right, you know,” she said, one hand absentmindedly smoothing the beige feathers on her head. “We all go through it.” She turned her back to me and the room lit up from a lantern she had brought. She turned back around with a reassuring smile and I saw it was Ruth, the girl the cop had shocked so badly.
The stark light exaggerated the otherworldliness of her face, the texture of the feathers that covered her head, the shadows cast by the arc of her beak-like nose. Her large black eyes flashed with some kind of light from within. She was strange, all right, but she had an innate sweetness.
She sat next to me on the floor and put two bottles of water between us. “Keep him hydrated,” she said. “You too.”
“Thanks.” I realized I was parched. I opened one of the bottles and drank half of it.
“There’s more downstairs,” she said. She turned to look at me again. “I’m Ruth.”
“Jimi,” I said.
Her head tilted to the side.
“You helped me before,” she said. “Back at the other house, with the cop.”
I nodded.
“Thanks.”
I nodded again.
She fumbled in her bag and held something out to me. It was a small button, a black pattern against a white background, the heads of three stylized animals radiating from the center—a lion, a ram, and a snake. “This is for you,” she said.
