by Rob Thurman
I fell asleep. It wasn’t hard to understand how it could happen. Hard to forgive, but not hard to understand. The physical trauma of being shot the day before combined with a full stomach and an hour of swinging at golf balls took me down like a Mack truck. When I woke up ensconced in an overstuffed armchair close to the front windows, I felt a momentary ripple of confusion. It was one of those where-am-I flashes that bounce through your brain like a manic Ping-Pong ball. It was similar to the mornings when the alarm clock rang shrilly and you couldn’t begin to comprehend what was screaming at you.
But there was no alarm this time—only low voices, glossy covers, and a chair beneath me that was patterned with roses and hummingbirds. The smell of cinnamon and coffee hung in the air and a sports magazine was lying across my knees. That same magazine slid to the floor in a heap when the world abruptly slid into place and the confusion disappeared in the face of stomach-plummeting fear. I’d fallen asleep and left Michael unguarded. I’d . . . Jesus Christ.
Before I headed into complete panic, the gleam of a familiar head of blond hair had my head whipping toward the window. Michael was outside. Talking to another kid who was about thirteen or fourteen, he appeared to be in one piece. Safe. He was safe. The air was just air again, not heavy unbreathable chunks, and I headed for the door with a chest that ached only slightly. Although it took only seconds, by the time I reached Michael, the other boy was already gone. But he’d left something behind.
“What the hell is that?”
He’d given me one damn good scare and it put a snap in the question that I ordinarily would never have used with him. Then again considering what he held in his hand, I couldn’t be one hundred percent positive about that.
“A ferret.” Hoisting the cage to eye level, he gazed fascinated at the creature through the crosshatch of wire. “That boy sold him to me for only thirty dollars.”
“Only?” Beady black eyes and a glimmer of pointed ivory teeth turned in my direction to regard me with an ill-favored stare. “It’s like the fairy tale. I send you out for a cow and you come back with magic beans. Worse yet, stinky magic beans with sharp teeth.”
Another ill-favored glare came my way, this one blue-green. “Are you saying he smells bad?”
“He doesn’t exactly smell good, now does he?”
“And you’re making the assumption that you do?”
This was getting us nowhere in a hurry. Switching topics, I said more harshly than I intended, “I told you to get me when you were done with the books. I can see how that might sound like ‘traipse up and down the sidewalk like a bulls-eye with legs,’ but use some goddamn common sense, would you?” Immediately, I regretted lashing out. These past few days had been Michael’s first taste of freedom. It was easy to see that he would want to do some exploring on his own, and he hadn’t strayed far.
The faintest wash of dull red stained his neck as he said stiffly, “You were tired. I thought I’d let you rest for a few more minutes.”
Suddenly, regret was kissing cousins with the sudden unshakable belief that I was an utter asshole. “Ah, damn it.” Morosely, I rang a blunt fingernail off the metal of the cage. “Welcome to the family, Stinky.” Jerking my finger back, I barely avoided a nasty bite.
Michael recognized it for the apology it was and unbent enough to correct me. “His name is Godzilla.”
I groaned aloud. “That’s encouraging.”
He tilted his head curiously. “Why is that?”
That must be one of the movies that hadn’t made it to the Institute. “Godzilla is the big lizard that ate Tokyo. Famous movie monster, and from what I can tell, he had nothing on this little fur ball.” There was a bag of books at Michael’s feet and I retrieved them. While I did so, I offered gruffly, “I’m sorry for snapping, kiddo. I was worried.”
“I know.” He gave me one of his rare smiles. It took a lot of imagination to call the stoic quirk of lips a smile, but I saw it for what it was. “Babushka . ”
“Granny, my ass.” I grumbled on in that vein as I steered him through the parking lot, stopping only to swipe another license plate for our car. Michael didn’t hear a word of it. He was too involved in a mutually rapturous conversation with his weiner-shaped weasel. It would chitter happily at him while he clucked a musical tongue back. For me it had nothing but murder in its tiny brain, but apparently my brother passed some sort of muster known only to plague-carrying ankle-biters.
I was surprised Michael would want a pet, especially one so similar to the lab animals that had died in his hands. Then again, maybe having one would help him get past that; help heal the parts of him that didn’t knit as fast as his skin and bones.
Redemption in an overly musky ferret; stranger things had happened.
Chapter 20
Tokyo might’ve been half a world away, but I was right here to terrorize, and that was more than good enough for Godzilla.
“Okay, that’s it,” I snarled. “This time that half-digested hair ball took my gun.” The bedspread twitched at the bottom and I saw a toothy grin bared at me. Somewhere under there in no-man’s-land were my Steyr—unloaded, thankfully—four socks, a pair of underwear, and my comb.
“I think I saw a public service announcement about gun safety just this morning.” Sprawled on the bed, Michael turned a page. “Carelessness and tiny paws just don’t mix.” And that was the sum total of his sympathy as he continued making his way through one of the science books that we’d bought yesterday. This one was about the thickness of a phone book, but he’d devoured the majority of it, taking in every single word like a human sponge. Lukas had been a bright kid, bright as hell, but this . . .
Smarter, faster, stronger.
I hadn’t seen any signs of the faster yet, but as for the rest . . . I felt an uneasy ripple tickle the base of my brain. Saving Michael was first and foremost in my mind always, but when he was safe, what then? There were many Jerichos in the world, in intent if not talent. If any one of them sniffed out Michael’s capabilities, we would be on the run all over again—perhaps for the rest of our lives. It wasn’t what I wanted for my brother.
But that was another worry for another time and premature at best. We might not survive long enough to see an existence beyond Jericho. Or beyond the damn ferret for that matter, a distinctly evil squeak had me adding to the thought.
I slid my foot under the bed to feel around for my gun. In retrospect it wasn’t the most intelligent move to be made. The sensation of a miniature bear trap clamping on my big toe had me hopping backward and swearing loudly. If the lamp hadn’t been bolted to the nightstand, it’s hard to say what I might have been tempted to do. Two dots of scarlet bloomed on my sock as a length of charcoal fur flowed past me to perch on Michael’s head. Under a black mask a wet, pink nose wrinkled derisively at me.
Damn rat.
As I used the opportunity to retrieve my belongings, Michael lifted up a finger and scratched the chin of his new best friend. “You should be more understanding, Stefan. Hoarding is probably a natural instinct for the ferret. Isn’t that right, Zilla?” The polecat made a contented sound, a cross between an eep and a purr, before draping bonelessly over Michael’s skull for a nap. “I really do need to get a book on ferret care and their habits. Maybe we could stop tomorrow?” He’d lowered his voice in deference to the snoozing spawn of Satan.
I didn’t know which was more annoying: that he whispered for his pet but stomped around like a drunken lumberjack in the morning when I tried to sleep, or that he wanted to take time out of fleeing for our lives to get a how-to book on his carpet shark. “Yeah,” I said with blatant insincerity. “I’ll put it right at the top of my to-do list.” Securing my weapon against thieving paws, I zipped up the duffel bag and jerked my chin at his book. “You find out anything interesting yet?”
He scooped the ferret into his hands and sat up to place it carefully on a pillow. Stretching, he then traced his fingers across the glossy pages and said, “Everything in here is
interesting . . . in its way.” As if the thought unsettled him, he closed the book firmly and pushed it away.
“A little too close to home?”
“Maybe,” he admitted reluctantly only after I started to reach for the book. “No, it’s all right.” The volume was swiftly retrieved before I could get a grip on it. “This is me. This is my history. I want to do this.” That he embraced, but my part in it he refused point-blank.
“I’m a chunk of that history too, Misha, believe it or not.”
Before he could deny or give me a sympathy that was unwanted and unneeded, I sat down beside him and pulled off my sock to examine the puncture wounds in my toe. “You used to drive me crazy, you know? Typical little-brother stuff.” I brushed a thumb across my skin and wiped the drop of blood away. “You stuck to me as if I had Velcro on my ass. When I first kissed a girl, you were there, hiding in the bushes. I think your exact words were ‘Eww, cooties.’ Funny, how thirteen-year-old girls don’t appreciate that. Or thirteen-year-old big brothers for that matter.” Balling up the stained material, I tossed it over onto my bed. “Then there was the time you thought my bike wasn’t snazzy enough, boring navy blue not being your favorite color. So you painted it purple . . . with a couple of yellow stripes. And I yelled at you.” I sent my other sock the way of the first. “Not much of a surprise, considering. But you were hurt. You’d done something to make me happy, and I yelled at you for it.”
I still had that bike. It was in my condo storage unit. It was one of those things you simply couldn’t look at, yet couldn’t throw away.
“Did you ride it that way?”
Surprised, I laughed. “Um . . . yeah, I did. For a while.”
I’d forgotten about that. We’d lived in an actual neighborhood at that time, with sidewalks and huge houses on postage stamp-sized lots. I’d tooled up and down our street on that clown cycle to universal howls of laughter. Mom had been alive then and she’d gently coerced me into it, saying it was the only way to cheer up Lukas. “It was pretty humiliating, but I guess I don’t have any right to complain.” As understatements went, it was a goddamn doozy, but Michael didn’t challenge it. Why would he? As far as he was concerned, it had nothing to do with him. If he didn’t accept that he was my brother, then he could hardly blame me for his life with Jericho.
“I never had a bike.” There was a bag of pretzels beside him and he dug for a handful. “But I prefer cars anyway. Purple, yellow—the color’s not important as long as they’re fast.”
“A potential speed demon—that’s all I need,” I remarked with a roll of my eyes, accepting the snack bag he passed me. He was joking, I was fairly sure. The times he’d driven, he’d been very careful to stay within the speed limit even before I’d explained that the last thing we wanted was to be pulled over by a cop. “Hey, it seems I’m always the one doing the talking, telling the tall tales. Let’s hear some from you.” I didn’t know if he was ready for that, but I wanted to give him the opportunity. He’d already told me about the classes, the training, the experiments, but he had been careful to keep it impersonal and at arm’s length as if it had happened to someone else. If he had expended even an ounce of emotion in the telling, I’d missed it.
“You don’t want to hear my stories.” He leaned forward to deposit a pretzel by the sleeping ferret’s head. “Boring, all of them. Eat, sleep, go to class—not much entertainment value there.”
“I’m not a demanding audience,” I prompted. “So lay it on me.” At his continued silence, I nudged him with my shoulder. “I know they won’t be happy stories, kid, but don’t pull any punches. I want to know what you went through at that hellhole.”
“At the Institute.” His head dipped and fingers wrapped around a strand of hair over his eyes. Tapping those knuckles against his forehead, he exhaled. “It’s been only days. I can’t believe it. When I wake up in the morning it takes me a minute to remember that I’m not still there, but the rest of the day”—he shook his head—“the rest of the day it seems forever that you showed up in my room dressed up like a Hollywood ninja.”
That had been last night’s cheesy movie. That was one thing Michael hadn’t gotten his fill of at the Institute. He would watch a movie on any subject—good, bad, or just plain freaky. I let the ninja remark, damaging though it was to my ego, sail past and I waited for him to go on.
“I didn’t think you were there for me. Not for one minute, not for one second. You were just another test, one I couldn’t pass. Jericho had made it clear I wasn’t doing too well. Graduation was coming up for me, but I wasn’t living up to my potential.”
I could hear the quotes around the last word. “How many graduated before you?”
“A few. I’m the oldest now, but it doesn’t go by age.” He released his hair and dropped his hands onto his knees. Lifting his shoulders slightly, he let them fall in a small shrug so precise, so controlled that any casual element was lost. “But I wasn’t going to make it. I’m not as obedient as the other students, and I don’t like to kill. I’m good at it, but I don’t like it.” Pitch-black humor came and went in his face. “Your Wendy will probably graduate before she turns eight.”
Not my Wendy, thank God. That was a thought I didn’t want to contemplate, and it led me to others of a similar nature. What if I’d opened Michael’s door to find that he was like that little girl, his brain as twisted as his genes? What if taking him into an unsuspecting world hadn’t been feasible? As I’d said, they were thoughts not worth thinking.
“You? Disobedient? The hell you say.”
With a jaundiced air at my mockery, he revised. “Maybe it would be better to say unenthused.”
There was the crunch of teeth against rock-hard bread and I swiveled my head to see the drowsy ferret clutching the pretzel in its peculiarly adept paws as it nibbled. The sight reminded me of my earlier curiosity. “Jericho, do you know how he lost his hand?” Since he healed at the same breakneck pace as Michael, I would’ve thought, short of chopping the appendage off, any normal damage would heal.
“John.” He frowned and got to his feet. “It was John.” Moving over to the window, he fiddled with the blinds. Fidgeting was uncustomary behavior for Michael. He was so routinely sanguine, in his way as unflappable as our father was—or as Konstantin had been. Like both of them, he lived deep inside himself. But whereas my father and former boss came by the trait through the slow erosion of their finer human emotions, Michael had developed his out of a sense of survival. It made sense, that inner retreat; for him it had always been far safer there.
“John?”
Opening and closing the slats, he let in the dim yellow illumination of the security lights that bathed the parking lot. “He was the only one older than me. He was my first roommate, the first person I can actually remember in my life.” He kept his back to me as he talked, still gazing out of the window. “Aside from Jericho.”
I remembered how he said they numbered the children, identified them as the experiments they were considered to be. Wendy had been Wendy Three, and Michael had said he was the first with no number necessary. “The first John then.”
“The first one,” he affirmed. “And the only one. There were no Johns after him. Jericho retired the name, I guess you’d say.”
“He retired John too, didn’t he?” I asked quietly when he fell silent, lost in the golden haze drifting through the glass.
He didn’t answer and that in itself was answer enough. “He was like Jericho in a lot of ways, same features, same hair and skin. The eyes were a different color, of course, but the same shape. They looked as if they could’ve been”—he struggled for a moment and then settled on a word—“related.” The concept of family, of father and son, brother to brother, was almost a myth to him. It was something to be read about in books and watched in the endless stream of movies, but not something that he’d seen close up in the walled-off microcosm that had been his world. No wonder he was having such a difficult time with it, and me, now.
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“A miniature Jericho? Now there’s a scary thought,” I commented with utter sincerity.
“No. On the outside they were similar, but on the inside John was nothing like Jericho. Nothing like me either.” There was self-recrimination there, a thin brittle layer under a glittering frost of calm. “John wanted to be free. He always wanted to be free. I can’t remember how many times he tried to escape. He wanted me to go with him, but I never would. Not the first time. Not the last time.” The blinds were closed with a savage snap. “He kept asking me why. Time after time. When the lights were out for the night, he would whisper it so they wouldn’t hear. Why? Why won’t you come?”
“And what did you say?”
“Where would we go?” he responded evenly.
It was the question of a prisoner serving a life sentence. Only this prisoner had been a child, one with no memory of anything but the cage he lived in and the monster that ruled it. Where could we go that Jericho wouldn’t find us? Where would we ever fit in? How could we survive in an outside world as inexplicably alien as a distant star? I wasn’t sure that I would’ve been any different if the situation had been reversed. John must have been unique in that respect, with a will that was as superhuman as the rest of him. Poor damn kid.
“How old was John?” I let the rest of the question hang in the air, implied. How old was he when he made the last futile attempt?
“About twelve.”
Only twelve. Jesus Christ.
Michael gave up on the window. What he wanted to see wasn’t there; wouldn’t ever be there. “He slipped out of bed one night and just . . . never came back. I didn’t think he had made it, though. I never thought that. And when I saw Jericho two days later with his hand missing, I knew for sure. We can heal fast, but we can destroy even faster. John didn’t make it.” He swallowed, but his voice remained calm. “But at least he took part of that son of a bitch with him. It was afterward that Jericho wouldn’t let any of us get close enough to touch him or the teachers anymore. They carried stun guns in case any of us tried.”
