Splintered

by Jon McGoran

  I ran, too. Fast.

  I glanced back and saw Rex pounding across the lot, maybe fifty yards behind me. Behind him, the second police car was trying to go around the first, the tires on one side grinding their way up the embankment before the car slid down and got wedged between the dumpster and the embankment, completely blocking the driveway.

  The cops climbed out of their cars and started running, but there was no way they could catch us. We were too far ahead of them. Even Rex.

  I was almost at the trees when I glanced back and saw the third police car speeding down Bogen Road. It must have gone out the front entrance and come all the way around.

  “Faster,” I screamed at Rex.

  The third cruiser skidded up the main driveway from the street, then turned onto the second driveway, up onto the muddy lot. It shot past the cops running after us, its tires spraying mud.

  We still had a good lead on it, but it was going to be close.

  Claudia plunged into the woods. A moment later, I did, too. I glanced back at Rex, who was churning up huge clods of mud as he ran.

  As I scrambled into the trees after Claudia, I heard Rex crashing through the brush behind us. I had just allowed myself to think that maybe we were going to make it, when I looked back again and saw his body go rigid and his eyes roll up.

  “Rex!” I cried. “Rex!”

  A hand grabbed my arm, and I started to flail, but it was Claudia, dragging me away. Tears filled my eyes as two cops set upon Rex, cuffing his hands and feet. They kept the current running through him as they did it, not wanting to take a chance with someone so big—and maybe enjoying it, too.

  Claudia pulled me along and I stumbled halfheartedly after her, part of me still considering going back. Then suddenly we were splashing in icy water. It soaked into my jeans and seeped into my boots. We were at the creek.

  We looked at each other. In seconds they’d be after us again, too. And if they caught us, there’d be nothing we could do for Rex at all.

  “We need to go,” Claudia whispered, and I knew she was right.

  Blinded by tears, I stumbled along the stream after her, deeper into the woods. Farther away from Rex.

  CHAPTER 26

  The fishing shack was disgusting. The tiny porch out front was stained with God knows what from years of anglers cleaning their catches. It was dusty and mildewed and so overgrown with vines that it was almost invisible in the fast-falling darkness. It was cold and filthy and smelly. To be fair, I was, too, but that just made it worse.

  Miraculously, we’d found an old chemlight stick in a cupboard with enough left in it to fill the tiny room with a weak green glow.

  I looked at my watch, for the tenth time since we’d been there. Kiet should have been there an hour ago, and I was jumping out of my skin. Part of me wanted to go back and try to free Rex from the cops, who were obviously working for OmniCare. Part of me wanted to rush home and rally Ruth and Pell and my mom and Aunt Trudy and Jerry and the lawyers at Earth for Everyone and the rest of the so-called civilized world, and get them to help Rex. At this point, there was zero part of me that wanted to sit in that smelly shack, doing nothing but wait for Kiet.

  “Kiet’s not coming,” I said, looking into the night through the dust-caked windows. It must have been the tenth time I’d said it. Each time, Claudia had replied, “Yes, he is.” This time she said, “I know he’s not.”

  I turned and looked at her. She was sitting in a saggy wooden chair with her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands. She had been arguing the point with me for so long, I was a little stunned that she’d given up, too.

  “Well, he might,” I said, walking over to her. The fact was, he had to. We needed to get back into OmniCare and get Rex out. I didn’t know how we were going to do that without Kiet.

  Claudia shook her head without lifting it. I couldn’t tell if it was her neck doing the work, or her hands.

  I pulled an old plastic crate closer to her and sat on it. The grid bit into my thighs and butt. The partial remnants of a second chair were piled on the floor by the woodstove—a pair of legs and a couple of slats from the seat. The rest of it had apparently been burned. Claudia had suggested starting a fire, but I was already worried that the weak glow from the chemlight would give us away.

  I leaned back against the wall, hugging myself against the cold. “What do you think was going on down in those sub-basements?” I asked.

  I had ideas—terrible ideas—and I was hoping to hear a theory that was less ghastly and more reasonable.

  “I don’t know,” she said quietly. A tiny round wet spot appeared on the dusty floor beneath her head, soon followed by another, an inch or two away. “But they were doing something really, really bad to those chimeras. They were altering them somehow, and making them work in those awful mines.” She wiped her eyes and looked up at me. “What do you think was going on there?”

  I got the feeling she knew I’d been thinking the same thing.

  “Well…,” I said, “they’re mining something down there, right?” She nodded and I continued. “But the air isn’t breathable. That’s why we all passed out. The guards had breathing masks, but not the chimeras, the miners. They didn’t have anything like that. They didn’t seem to need it.” Maybe to reassure myself that I could, I took a deep breath and let it out. “I think they put out word that they’ll treat chimeras—like Kiet’s friend Devon and Cornelius—but instead of healing them, they’re…you know, altering them or whatever, maybe even splicing them again, I don’t know. But changing them so they can breathe down in those mines.”

  “It’s horrible,” she said, her voice ragged and thick.

  “I know,” I said quietly. “And they’ve got Rex.” I’d been mostly keeping it together up until that point, because as dark as my thoughts had been, and as much as they centered around that one fact, I’d avoided saying it out loud. Now that I had, I started making some of my own wet spots in the dust.

  Claudia put her arm around my shoulder. “He’ll be okay,” she said. “I know it.”

  “You don’t know it. You can’t. And we’re just sitting here doing nothing instead of helping him.”

  I pulled away from her and stood up, pacing. “We have to go back. We have to find out what happened to Rex and help him. We need to get out of here and get help, for Rex and for all those others down in that hole.”

  “I know,” she said. “But we can’t right now. We can’t do anything out there other than get ourselves killed or break a leg in the darkness. If Kiet’s not here by sunrise, we’ll sneak back, and we’ll do whatever we can.”

  “Okay,” I said quietly. A wave of exhaustion came over me, so intense that for a moment I almost wondered if I’d been breathing toxic fumes again.

  “Let’s get some rest,” Claudia said, taking my hand.

  We lay on the bare floor, huddled together for warmth. As I shivered, I thought about home. The feeling was not unfamiliar—once again I had big things to worry about, and people’s lives could be at stake, but I also had to worry about my family.

  I’d put Kevin in a tough spot. He was going to have to decide between contacting my mom at the ski lodge and telling her I hadn’t come home tonight—and to be fair, he had no idea if I was okay—or not tell her and risk catching hell for it later.

  I’d never wanted a Wellplant—and I still didn’t, not even a little—but I couldn’t help thinking how much easier some things would be if I did, or even if I just had a cell phone, like my mom did when she was my age. Things would be so much simpler if I could get in touch with Kevin or my mom or Aunt Trudy, even just to lie about where I was.

  I felt like I was being inconsiderate and irresponsible. Again.

  I didn’t like it. For so long—until Del got spliced, really—I’d thought of myself as responsible and levelheaded. But even when Mom and I had that talk a few weeks ago, when she finally said she understood why I did what I did in Pitman, and that she was proud of me, I knew she was
seeing me differently. In her eyes, I was no longer the sensible, responsible, dependable one.

  After tonight, I never would be again.

  As I slipped into sleep, I told myself maybe that was okay. Maybe responsible and dependable wasn’t who I was anymore. Maybe it wasn’t who I’d ever been.

  CHAPTER 27

  I woke up abruptly. It was still dark, but maybe marginally less so, like a drop of white had been mixed into the blackness coming through the windows, punctuating the dim green of the dying chemlight. Claudia was awake, too; her head was tilted, listening. I couldn’t tell if I’d been roused by a sound or by her reaction to it.

  For a long moment we both lay there, the air prickly with intense concentration. Then a twig snapped outside. It couldn’t have been an animal—there weren’t any animals out there.

  Claudia slipped into a crouch against the wall, under the window and next to the door, both hands clutching a chair leg. I grabbed the other leg and scrambled to the other side of the door, my feet scuffing loudly against the floor.

  We looked at each other across the door. Claudia’s eyes flashed in the darkness.

  Another twig snapped outside, louder. Closer.

  I was holding my breath to stay silent—and beginning to realize that wasn’t a long-term strategy—when the porch creaked.

  Every muscle in my body was rigid with fear and stress and anticipation, ready to spring into whatever action was necessary as soon as some goon stepped through that door and—

  Tap, tap, tap—my plans were interrupted by a tentative knock on the door.

  It was such a soft sound, I wondered if I’d imagined it. But as my eyes met Claudia’s I could tell she had heard it, too.

  The knock came again—tap, tap, tap.

  Before we could reply, or even react, a soft voice whispered, “Jimi? Claudia?”

  It sounded like Kiet. We exchanged a quick nod in the dim light, but as Claudia reached out for the door handle, I stepped back and kept my chair leg raised, just in case.

  The chemlight barely reached through the door, but the sky had another drop or two of white mixed in, enough to see Kiet, and to see he looked scared.

  “Come on,” he said, his voice quiet and rushed. “We need to get out of here.”

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  “The OmniCare people are still combing the woods. I’ve been trying all night to get past them. I doubt they’ll keep searching much longer, but if they do, they’ll be here soon.”

  “Where are we going?” Claudia asked.

  “Belfield, I guess. I have to be back at work in a few hours, and we need to figure out what’s next. But before anything else, we need to get a little farther away from them.”

  “What about Rex?” I said.

  “The cops have him.”

  “We need to go back for him. We can’t just leave him there.”

  “Are you kidding me? You saw what was going on in that mine. He’s safer with the cops than we are with OmniCare after us.”

  “Wait…,” I said. “Aren’t the police working with OmniCare?”

  Kiet looked confused. “No. They actually had a bit of a dispute about your friend. The police arrested him and OmniCare insisted they should keep him, claiming he stole trade secrets or something.” He leaned back and looked to his left, off into the distance. “Look, we can talk about it later, but we need to go. Right now.”

  I paused one more second. “Wait, so…is it safe to go to the police?”

  He looked at me like I was insane. “Oh, hell no. Just because they’re not on OmniCare’s payroll doesn’t mean they’ll take our word for anything, or even that they wouldn’t just arrest us. They’re still cops.”

  I knew he was right, that there was nothing we could do for Rex right then—and if we got caught by OmniCare, we might never be able to help him. I could only hope that what Kiet was saying was true, and Rex was safer where he was than we were.

  We kept our chair legs, just in case, and filed out onto the porch.

  “They’re up that way,” Kiet whispered, motioning with his head.

  We nodded and fell in behind him as he started walking in the opposite direction.

  The sky continued to brighten, casting everything around us in a predawn blue that was the absolute color of cold. We hiked without talking, a tense and scared quiet fueled by the awareness that people with guns were fanning across the same woods we were in, searching for us.

  But as the gray sky continued to brighten, so did our moods. None of us spoke—we still didn’t dare—but it seemed as though we all felt we were out of immediate danger.

  It started to snow. For days it had been snowing on and off, but this was different: big, soft, pillowy white flakes that floated in the air. They almost defied gravity, like we were inside a snow globe.

  It had warmed up considerably, and didn’t feel cold enough to be snowing, and yet there it was. A thin dusting became an opaque layer as we walked. I turned back and saw Claudia skipping through the deepening flakes, and Kiet, behind her, looking on and smiling.

  It was the first time I had actually seen him smile, and it made me smile, too. But even as I did, I had a slight but insistent feeling that something was somehow wrong with this picture.

  We were just rounding a pile of debris from an old mudslide when Claudia opened her mouth and stuck out her tongue to catch a particularly fat snowflake.

  “Claudia,” I said. “Don’t.”

  But she was too quick, looking triumphant as she caught it. Her face froze, then fell, her grin dissolving into a grimace. She stopped in her tracks, her tongue extended, the snowflake still on it, mostly intact.

  “It’th not thnow,” she said.

  “What?” Kiet asked, confused.

  “It’th not thnow,” Claudia said again.

  Past the rocks, I saw the source of the flakes. “Spit it out,” I said sharply.

  Kiet looked confused, as Claudia frantically spat, trying to clear her mouth.

  “God, that was disgusting,” she said, working her tongue around her mouth, spitting some more. “What the hell is it?”

  “That,” I said, pointing at a concrete ring maybe two feet wide, barely jutting above ground level and partially obscured by fallen rocks and a deep ring of white powder, with a steel grate leaning against it. It was belching out a steady geyser of smoke or gases, almost invisible, but along with it was an inverted blizzard of thick white flakes. Our eyes followed the column as it rose high into the air, then followed the flakes as they settled back down to earth.

  “But what is it?” Kiet asked.

  I pressed my foot down on the stuff. It flattened but didn’t melt.

  “I don’t know,” I said, looking back at the vent pumping more and more of the stuff into the air.

  “It tastes like…burned chemicals,” Claudia said, spitting again.

  It was settling on her head. Kiet’s, too. I shook out my hair. They did the same.

  “Whatever it is,” I said, “we should get the hell away from it.”

  CHAPTER 28

  As we ran, the snow that wasn’t snow slowed to a flurry, but we didn’t stop until it had quit completely and the cloud cover had thinned almost to blue.

  We shook out our hair and clothes, getting as much of the stuff off us as we could before we continued on. Looking back, I saw a cloud behind us, a dull white mound, billowing almost imperceptibly and falling in on itself. I still didn’t know what it was, but it gave me a chill.

  “Everybody okay?” I asked.

  They looked at each other and nodded.

  “Do you think we lost them?” I asked Kiet.

  “Yeah, I imagine,” he replied. “We’ve probably put enough distance between us and anybody looking for us.”

  “Where the hell are we?” Claudia asked.

  Kiet looked around. “We must be close to Belfield, I’d think. From there, we should be able to get a ride back to my place in Gellersville. Before I go back to
work, we should compare notes about what we saw in that subbasement, and hopefully come up with some ideas about where Devon might be. And your friend, too.”

  Claudia and I exchanged a quick glance. I felt guilty, realizing I might have accidentally misled Kiet about Cornelius.

  “Kiet…our friend isn’t down there,” I said quietly.

  “What?” he turned to look at me. “How do you know? What did you find out?”

  Claudia stayed silent, letting me take the lead.

  “He was never down there,” I said. “Or he was, I think, but hasn’t been for a while. And actually, he wasn’t really our friend.”

  Kiet’s eyes went flat and hard. “What do you mean?”

  I told him everything, about Doc and about Cornelius, and how Cornelius had an OmniCare bracelet, but they denied he’d ever been there. As I spoke, Kiet’s glare lost its edge.

  “So he’s dead?” he said softly.

  “Yes,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean Devon is,” I added quickly. “I mean, this was back in Philadelphia. It seemed like Cornelius had hopped a freight train to get there. Who knows what happened to him after he left the hospital. Plus…”

  My voice trailed off as a thought began to assemble in my brain.

  Kiet looked confused. “Philadelphia?”

  I was only half listening as Claudia explained, “Yes, we drove out here yesterday. We hoped to confirm Cornelius had been at OmniCare, find out whatever else we could, then drive home.”

  “Wait, you have a car?” he said, shocked and maybe a little annoyed. The going was easier now, with the ground sloping gently down, but we’d been trudging through the frozen woods for what seemed like hours. “Where?”

  Claudia put up her hands, calming but defensive. “It’s down on Bogen Road, but it’s broken down. Bent charger plate. I need to fix it.”

  Kiet gave her a dubious look. “You’re going to fix it yourself?”