by Rob Thurman
“Are we clear?” I cut him off as a reddened bruise began to form beneath the metal.
He gave in to the inevitable. “We’re clear,” he said tightly.
“Great. Clarity is good for the soul.” I let the gun drop to my side. “Michael, are you ready?”
He had been or at least he thought he had been until that moment. Looking at the hospital-style bed so similar to the one from the Institute, he came within a hairbreadth of losing it. It wasn’t anything as noticeable as trembling or fear-sweat slicking his face. He simply went still. It wasn’t a human stillness. It was the crouch of a cocky jackrabbit frozen under the gaze of a hawk; it was the inner core of a stone hovering on the lip of an avalanche. He wanted to move; he wanted to run, but I couldn’t let him go. With that chip in place, it was only a matter of time until they found us again. He couldn’t ever be free until he lay down on that bed.
Trailing IV tubing, I placed a hand on the back of his neck and squeezed lightly. “It’s about time you kissed those assholes good-bye, don’t you think?”
He exhaled, then gave a wooden nod. “I think. I do think.” Making it to the bed under his own power, he lowered himself onto his stomach. The thin pillow was ignored and pushed aside as he used his folded arms instead. Despite his adult response, he’d never looked younger or more lost, not even when I’d plucked him from the heart of the Institute in the middle of the night. I dragged up a chair beside him, rested the gun in my lap, and ordered, “Get started, Doc. We don’t have all night.”
As he was pushing the X-ray machine in our direction, I reached out and pulled Michael’s left hand from beneath his head. Simple human contact was something he’d been deprived of most of his life. Here was hoping it could help him now. “Squeeze it as hard as you want, kiddo. It won’t break.”
A green and blue stare reminded me that actually it could, if he wanted it to, or worse. But he remained quiet and let his hand lie loosely in my grip. It was only after the X-ray was developed and his bare lower back was swabbed with Betadine with meticulously professional care that his hand swiveled in mine and tightened until my bones creaked. “Butch and Sundance,” he offered in a barely audible whisper.
It was a distant echo of a long-past conversation, one he didn’t remember and one I couldn’t forget. Swallowing thickly, I asked, “What about them?”
“They showed us the movie. Along with others, about all sorts of things. So we’d be convincing, you know? We’d be able to have normal conversations.” His cheek rested against the sheets. “If we had to.”
I don’t think he expected that occasion would’ve arisen—kill and get out; chatting rarely required. “What about our favorite outlaws?”
His eyes shut as a needle delivered the same local anesthetic used on me. His voice had thinned but was still solid. “When they jumped.”
On the run from the posse, they’d sailed off the cliff hand in hand, going down together toward an uncertain fate. “Yeah, I remember.” The soft drip of the IV hung in the background. “So which of us do you think will hit the water first?”
“You. Your legs are longer.”
I admitted with a small laugh, “You’ve got me there.”
He didn’t speak again throughout the rest of the procedure. It was done in a relatively short time although it had to feel much longer to Michael. The chip wasn’t implanted too deeply and was plucked free to lie bloody and innocuous on a sterile drape. It was small, one-third the size of my pinky nail. A tiny bathroom adjoined the room less than four steps away and I promptly flushed the tracer down the toilet. Let them follow that straight to the nearest waste disposal plant. I only wished I could see them stumping through the steaming muck.
Acutely conscious of my eyes on him, Vanderburgh sealed the inch-long incision with some sort of skin adhesive and covered it with a bandage. Backing away as I helped Michael sit up, he muttered something about getting our pills together and sidled over to a glass-front cabinet. I changed my mind about using the shower. I wasn’t turning my back on this piece of shit for a second, much less ten minutes.
“You doing okay?” I asked as Michael rearranged his shirt and stood.
He nodded. “It’s still numb.” Even when the local wore off, it should only be mildly sore. “But I feel . . . lighter. It couldn’t have weighed even an ounce, and until today I didn’t even know it was there.” His hand unconsciously moved to cover the unseen bandage. “It’s stupid, I know.”
“You’re a lot of things, kiddo, but stupid isn’t one of them.” Putting away my gun, I grabbed a square of gauze and used it to quell the gush of blood that welled when I pulled out my IV. I accepted the piece of tape Michael scrounged for me from the pile of supplies on the counter and used it to fasten the gauze to my skin. The grinding headache was still present, but I felt slightly better. The fluids had lessened my light-headedness, if nothing else.
“Antibiotics and pills for pain and nausea. Follow the directions on the label,” Vanderburgh commanded curtly as he extended a clear plastic bag filled with three brown bottles in my direction. I took it, opened all three bottles, and extracted a pill from each.
With my other hand gripping his thick wrist, I placed the pills, red, purple, and white, on his palm. “Dry or with a glass of water. Your choice.”
His fingers closed over the pills. “What?”
“I’m just not a trusting man, Doc. Go figure. Now take the goddamn pills.”
Opening his hand back up, he stirred the tablets with a finger, then took the red and purple ones. Swallowing them dry, he opened his mouth to reveal an empty pink cavity. The white pill he crushed underfoot. “I think perhaps we can find you a different pain pill.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought.” The gun at my back positively itched to be used. Despite my recent career, I wasn’t prone to violence. I did what I had to do, but I hadn’t liked it. I would’ve liked hurting this man. I think I would’ve liked it quite a bit.
Once he’d demonstrated the new pills were safe, it was payment time. Meanwhile, Michael had moved with alacrity back out to the living room. He may have survived the experience, but it was unlikely he wanted to hang around that medical environment any longer than he had to. By the time I finished passing over the cash and followed, he’d had time to hide Vanderburgh’s gun and start messing with the man’s VCR/DVD player. Yeah, he’d hang on to the VCR part as long as he could. No doubt some of his best stuff hadn’t made it to DVD or Blu-ray yet.
I took note of the now-empty coffee table and was duly impressed. Vanderburgh probably wouldn’t rush out to shoot at us as we drove down the street, but there was no need to leave him the option, and Michael hadn’t. “Let’s go, kid.”
“Okay.” He dropped the tape he was shifting from hand to hand and stood from his squat. As he walked toward me, he passed close to Vanderburgh—much closer than I liked and much closer than he normally would have. I’d noticed in the store and restaurants that Michael had a large sense of personal space—not surprising considering what he’d been through. That he was voluntarily violating it now made me wonder . . . until I saw his hand brush Vanderburgh’s robe below the tie. It was the lightest of touches with the most drastic of consequences.
The old man’s face went an unpleasant plum color and the portly figure of the former doctor fell to his knees with a choking gasp. Fat hands paddled desperately before settling on his crotch, cupping with exquisite care. “What?” Air whistled through his open mouth. “What—what’s happened?”
What indeed.
“Good-bye, Dr. Vanderburgh,” Michael offered politely before exiting from the front door. He didn’t look back at his handiwork, although I did. Vanderburgh had fallen onto his side and curled up, an obese and tearful fetus. He could cry the proverbial river; it wasn’t going to equal one of the tears of his victims.
Trailing after my brother, I closed the door behind us and cut off the pants and sobs issuing from behind us. “Misha.” I watched as he fished the keys
from the pocket of his sweats.
“Mmm?” He inserted the key into the lock.
“All right, Mr. Casual. What did you do?” I demanded.
“Cut off the blood flow to his testicles. Permanently.” Opening the door, he looked at me across the top of the car. “You were right. He’s not a nice person. Not nice at all.” Then he disappeared behind the wheel.
The tape. Michael had seen something on that tape that had given him a glimpse at Vanderburgh’s blackened soul and that glimpse had given new meaning to the phrase “blue balls.” Once in the passenger seat, I took one of the pain pills. After swallowing, I said in the best big-brotherly tone I could manage through my pounding headache, “You really shouldn’t destroy a man’s balls.”
“No?” The car started, the sound only ratcheting up the pain in my head a notch.
“No.” I closed my eyes.
“Even if they deserve it?”
He had me there. “Well . . . yeah, the son of a bitch definitely did. There’s no denying that. But I don’t want you getting hurt in the process.”
“It doesn’t hurt me.” He sounded so certain, but I remembered just last night how he’d told me he and the others at the Institute couldn’t do anything good and how in the morning he expected me to discard him as tainted and leave him behind.
I rolled down the window an inch and let the cold air play over my face. I was getting tired, damn tired, and the twilight chill would help keep me awake. “Funny. You didn’t seem so sure of that when those assholes had you trapped in the bathroom.”
“That’s different.”
I opened my eyes the better to see in his face exactly what it was he was trying to say. “How so?”
“He hurts kids. Normal kids,” he amended. “Kids who can’t protect themselves.”
“Yeah, they can’t protect themselves like you can, but that doesn’t mean you’re not normal.” He rolled a darkly disbelieving eye in my direction but didn’t comment. “But that’s not what I’m talking about,” I added. “I want to know why you’d do something for faceless strangers that you won’t do for yourself.” It wasn’t as if there was much he could’ve done in the face of two guns, but even if the men had been unarmed, I still doubted he would’ve “laid on the hands,” so to speak. I’d seen his face. He wouldn’t have done it . . . not then anyway.
He shrugged with discomfort that wasn’t as concealed as he thought, but I didn’t let it go at that. “Misha. Give. Why wouldn’t you protect yourself? You wouldn’t have to kill, God no. But you could give a little of what you gave to the doc. So why not?” I could understand his never wanting to use what he had in him. I might think it unrealistic, but I would understand. To use it for others and not himself, though, that I couldn’t.
There was the squirt of cleaner on the windshield and the swish of wipers. He watched them with fascination before reluctantly bowing to the inevitable. “Because”—he paused—“because I’m beginning to wonder if I don’t belong in a cage after all.”
That woke me up quickly and thoroughly. Glaring, I reached over and thwapped him lightly in the back of the head. Startled, he looked over at me with wide eyes. “Say something stupid like that again and you’ll never see an empty calorie again as long as you live. No cakes, no candy bars, nothing. You’ll be cut off.”
He was smoothing the back of his hair as I talked and entertaining the thought of giving me a dirty look. I could see it as clear as day. “Don’t bother,” I warned. “Bottom line, kid. You don’t belong in a cage. No one but no one is going to say that, not even you. Got it?”
“Guess I had better, hadn’t I?” he answered with what seemed to be only mild irritation. After a few minutes of the only sound being the tires on the pavement, he said quietly, “I wouldn’t have given up. I wouldn’t have let them take me without a fight.” The dusky purple light filled the car, making him increasingly hard to see . . . as if he were fading away. “I just don’t know if I could hold that part of myself back once I started to use it in a situation like that. All the adrenaline. Fighting for my life.” I thought I saw his face work in the darkness. “I won’t risk killing again. I can’t. I still remember how it felt . . . with that man’s heart beneath my hand. How it pounded; then the muscle melted like wax. I could feel it scream and die even through his chest.” He stopped, and I wasn’t sorry he did. Hearing that wasn’t doing either of us any good right now. There would be time to talk about it later. When we were free and safe, we’d talk about a thousand things until he was at peace with every one of them.
“Then you don’t have to.” End of story. “Leave the violence to me, Misha. I’m already used to it.”
He had something to say about that; I didn’t have to see him to know the wheels were spinning in his head. But winter air and determination aside, I dozed off before he was able to get the words out. Against a concussion and a pain pill, consciousness was a lost cause. Michael woke me up when we stopped at a gas station and I cleaned up as best I could in the grubby bathroom. The paper towel dispenser was empty and I scrubbed away dried blood with wet toilet paper. There wasn’t much I could do about what was matted in my hair, but hopefully I would pass a brief inspection at the motel.
I did. It was a small, run-down place with only ten rooms and a small gravel lot. The guy behind the counter had blond dreads decorated here and there with rusty metal hoops. If he had noticed the condition of my hair, it would only have been to give me a thumbs-up. The room was even worse than the outside, but it didn’t matter. With a thin, rock-hard mattress and a dingy cracked ceiling, it was the Ritz-Carlton as far as I was concerned. I fell into bed as if it were feather stuffed and covered with silk sheets. I was gone in an instant, and I dreamed. Like Michael’s, my dreams were of horses. There was also the beach with churning waves and a sky as improbably blue as an Easter egg. There was no strange man; no gun. There were only horses that lived to canter into the water and boys who never learned to live without their brothers. They were good dreams.
The best.
Chapter 19
“ Saul, you’re giving me a headache.”
That wasn’t entirely true, but he was adding to my already existing headache.
“Giving you a headache?” Outraged and louder than the voice of God booming down on Moses, it had me yanking the phone from my ear with desperate speed. “Giving you a headache? I’ve got Pudgy the Pervert crying to me from his hospital bed that his balls have been cut off. Have you ever heard a fat ex-con cry? It’s no goddamn fun.”
“I didn’t do anything to the man’s sack, okay?” I repeated with weary patience for the third time.
“The balls are gone, aren’t they? And my business relationship with the dickwad isn’t looking too good either. He might be a bastard, but he was handy to have on the roster.”
“He still had balls when I left, Skoczinsky,” I growled.
“You can’t blame that on me.” On Michael maybe, but I was thoroughly innocent. As for the missing balls, either the hospital had amputated them or Vanderburgh had botched a do-it-yourself home job.
“I know you, Korsak. You had something to do with it.” He’d said my name on a cell phone, the least secure connection in the world today, which broke his rule of “protect the client.” He was pissed all right. There was a groan that turned into an aggrieved sigh and then a reluctant question. “He wasn’t doing that shit again, was he? With the kids?”
“I have no idea,” I answered honestly.
“If he was, I would’ve driven up to hold him down while you made with the cleaver. You know that, right?” I did know, but he didn’t wait long enough to hear my confirmation. “Ah, hell, balls or not, he can still work. And speaking of work, I’ve got that info you wanted.”
Fumbling for the bottle of pills on the nightstand, I wrestled with the stubborn cap. “Yeah? Lay it on me.”
There was the rustle of papers and Saul became even louder as he cradled the phone between shoulder and chin. “John Jeri
cho Hooker. Forty-seven years old, raised in Massachusetts. He’s a doctor several times over, medical and otherwise. He has doctorates in human and molecular genetics and biochemistry. Started college at the tender age of fourteen—a genius brat apparently—and hasn’t looked back since. Genetic replacement and manipulation—what there is to know he practically wrote the book on. What his peers felt wasn’t worth knowing is where he got into trouble.”
This sounded promising. Getting up, I filled a glass at the bathroom tap while Michael showered. “How so?”
“Two words. Human chimeras.”
Okay. I got one of those words, and that wasn’t so bad. I was the king of partial credit in college. “Come again?”
“Human chimeras, obviously. Surely you’ve heard of them, Korsak. Big college-educated mob guy such as yourself.” Then Saul dropped the lofty tone and admitted, “Yeah, I’d never heard of them either. Apparently there are more things in Heaven and Earth, just like my bubble gum wrapper said. A human chimera is the result of twins, mostly identical but occasionally fraternal, intermingling in the womb. Blood or other genetic material mixes between the two of them. One twin usually dies in the womb and the twin left has the building blocks of two instead of one. Sort of like human to the second power, I guess.”
All right. It was vaguely interesting, but was it pertinent? The jury was still out on that one. “And what’s this have to do with the man in the moon?”
“Hooker is one. A natural chimera—and damn proud of the fact. He did a lot of groundbreaking work, so says Google, that’s the backbone of the field of genetics today, but his true passion was for chimeras. He was of the opinion that his humans squared should be stronger, faster, smarter . . . everything we are, but only much more so. Now, the fact that he wouldn’t submit proof of that was really no big deal. It was a pet theory; all scientists have them. It was when he started into the psychic crap that eyebrows began to rise.”
