Splintered

by Jon McGoran

  “After we fix the car?” Claudia said.

  “We’re going to get E4E up here,” I said in a rush. “We’re going to get Rex out of jail and shut down that mine. And if you can get one of those inhalers, we can expose OmniCare, and get our friend Doc out of jail, too.”

  Kiet nodded solemnly. There was a lot on his shoulders. “I get done work at five. I’ll be home by five thirty. How about we meet at five thirty at Frank’s?”

  We took turns hugging him, then Kiet turned and started jogging one way and we started walking the other.

  We didn’t talk much as we walked, both lost in our own thoughts, but the toolbox clanked with every step.

  Seeing Kiet and Devon together made me think about Rex. Our circumstances were way less dire, but there were undeniable similarities. It seemed like the universe was conspiring to keep us apart.

  Half an hour later we saw the car up ahead. At first it looked exactly as we’d left it. As we got closer, we saw what looked like dried soda on the windshield and a Dairy Queen cup on the ground next to it.

  “That’s just great,” Claudia muttered, but she didn’t pause as she took off her coat, pulled a socket wrench set out of the toolbox, and slid under the car.

  I had warmed up from all the walking, but it was still cold out, and as I stood there, feeling useless and hoping whoever had thrown the soda didn’t come back to cause more trouble, the chill began to work its way back into my bones. I thought about getting into the car, but it wouldn’t have seemed right with her underneath, fixing it.

  By the time Claudia slid out from under the car and brushed off her hands, I was hugging myself for warmth.

  “Helps to have the right tools,” she said as she got in. The car started right up and she bobbed her eyebrows at me through the driver’s-side window, kind of cocky, but she’d earned it.

  She popped the trunk and I put the tools in and closed it, then I hopped in next to her.

  “Oh my God,” I said, holding my hands in front of the vents. “Heat!”

  Claudia laughed. “I know, right? I’d almost forgotten what it felt like.”

  Together with the plush upholstery, the warmth seeping into our bones felt incredible, and I could feel my exhaustion trying to lull me to sleep. We indulged in a moment to savor the luxury, then we drove off.

  Claudia drove slowly and carefully, taking pains to avoid every crater-like pothole and dislodged chunk of asphalt.

  When we reached Belfield, we turned into the center of town. Two blocks down there was a charging station next to a diner. Claudia pulled in and paid with a card, declining my offer of a few bucks.

  As she dealt with charging the car, I went to the pay phone at the charging station. A decal on the door of the diner said there was a pay phone inside, but I didn’t want to be overheard.

  First, I called Jerry.

  “Where the hell did you guys go?” he said when he found out it was me.

  “OmniCare.”

  “Goddamn it, the lawyer specifically said not to! And I said—”

  “How’s Doc?” I interrupted.

  That stopped him. “He’s okay,” he said with a sigh. “He says he’s okay. I don’t know. It’s hard. He’s having a hard time.”

  “Jerry,” I said. “There’s some crazy stuff going on out here.”

  “There’s crazy stuff everywhere these days.”

  “Not like this.” As quickly as I could, I told him about OmniCare and the mines, and about Centre Hollow and what Devon had told us. Then I told him about Rex getting arrested.

  “Goddamn it,” he said again, breathlessly. I heard a sound like a wooden chair scraping against the floor, like he was sitting down. I was glad of that.

  “We have a friend who works at OmniCare. He’s trying to get proof, one of the inhalers, but we’ve seen this with our own eyes. We need to get word to E4E,” I said. “They need to get on this right now.”

  He made a growly, grunting noise but didn’t respond.

  “What?”

  “Ah, just that E4E has their hands full with the GHA stuff. They’ve got all hands on deck as it is.”

  “Jerry, didn’t you hear what I said? People are being killed! They’re being held against their will and having…medical experiments done on them.”

  “I know, I know, I hear you. I get it. It sounds terrible. I’m just saying E4E is overextended and—”

  “Well, we need them,” I interrupted. “And they need to get Rex out of jail, too.”

  “Okay, okay. I’ll do what I can. What’s your plan?”

  “Right now? We’ve got to eat something and try to get to Rex. Can you call the police and find out if they’ve set bail for him, or what the charges are?”

  “Yeah. Where is he?”

  “A town called Gellersville, we think. Rex said the charges from Genaro’s Deli got dropped when Genaro died, but I’m not sure what’ll happen if they put that together with this. Hopefully he hasn’t told them his birth name, so don’t ask for Leo Byron.”

  “Yeah, okay,” he said. “I’ll just ask what’s the bail for the biggest dog they got in there.”

  By the time I got off the phone with Jerry, Claudia was leaning against the car, waiting for me. Unfortunately, I still had another call to make.

  I took a deep breath and called home, holding my breath as the phone rang at the other end. I knew this wasn’t going to change anything, but I figured I had to at least let Kevin know I was okay, and maybe even somehow put off or minimize whatever trouble I was in.

  As the phone continued to ring, I started to hope the voice mail would pick up.

  My heart sank when I heard a thick “Hullo?” on the other end. Kevin sounded almost confused, as if he’d never encountered a phone before and just happened to be passing by it when he was enticed by the ringing noise.

  Crap, I thought, wondering if he’d been home the night before, and if he had, if he’d noticed I wasn’t.

  “Hey,” I said. “It’s me.”

  He paused, then said, “Hey.”

  I racked my brain, trying to remember if I’d left my bedroom door open, trying to figure the odds that even if he’d been home, he hadn’t noticed whether or not I had been.

  “Where are you?”

  “Out with friends.”

  He let out a heavy sigh, like he was yawning and stretching. Like he was bored. “Whatcha do last night?”

  I couldn’t tell if he was anxious to get off the phone, didn’t really care about my response, or was setting me up.

  “Hung out at the coffee shop.”

  “What time didja get home?”

  I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know if he had been home. If he had been, and had gone to bed, I needed to say I got home late. If he got home late, I could conceivably have gotten home early and gone to bed. I took a gamble, guessing he’d been at his friend Malik’s house playing Holo-Box basketball all night.

  “Not too late,” I said.

  He yawned again. “Bullshit.”

  “No, it’s—”

  He cut me off, laughing. “I can’t believe you’re doing this again. You’re off somewhere with your crazy friends, aren’t you?”

  “Kevin, this is important—”

  He was laughing again, a super-loud, forced laugh. It grew fainter and farther away, and I could picture him, doubled over, fake-laughing so hard he had to hold the phone down while he did it.

  “Kevin, stop it!” I yelled into the phone. “I said this is important, asshole!”

  Claudia winced and half whispered, “I’m going to call my folks from inside,” then she hurried into the diner.

  I wanted to hang up, but I needed to talk to him, and he knew that, or else I wouldn’t have called.

  “You know…,” he said, still getting over his big laugh, “Mom thinks getting through high school without a criminal record is important, too.”

  “Please don’t tell her,” I said quietly.

  “Don’t tell her you di
dn’t come home last night, or don’t tell her you’re mixed up in more chimera craziness?”

  I growled. “Either.”

  “And when whatever it is you’re involved in blows up, and she asks me why I didn’t tell her, what am I supposed to say?”

  “They’re killing chimeras,” I said quietly.

  “Again?”

  “Come on, Kevin.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, his sarcasm turning to anger. “So, someone’s killing chimeras again. That’s terrible. It is. But you know what? Most people, when they find out a crime is being committed, they call the cops and let them deal with it. Why is it that you have to save them?”

  “Oh, please. You know what the cops can be like!”

  “Jimi, you’re not spliced! You’re not one of them. Why is it that out of everyone else in the universe, sixteen-year-old Jimi Corcoran—”

  “I’m seventeen, moron. My birthday was last month.”

  “—has to step up and save the chimeras of the world from evil? Who appointed you?”

  “No one! I’m not and I don’t. Look, I’m trying to get help, I’m trying to tell other people, lawyers and whatever, but…”

  My voice trailed off, like I had just run out of energy, right at that moment. Kevin was never going to understand, not ever. I wanted to tell him that was exactly it: no one would understand. And sometimes it’s easier just to do whatever needs to be done than to try to explain the situation to the people who were supposed to be taking care of it in the first place. Because those people just weren’t going to, and that’s what was wrong with the world.

  “Please don’t tell Mom,” I said, my voice even and flat.

  He sighed again, and this time I could tell that even if he didn’t understand, he really did care. “I’m not going to call her. But she’s going to find out anyway, you know, when you get arrested or hurt or when whatever crazy bullshit you’re involved in ends up on the news again.” He was quiet for a few seconds. “When are you coming home?”

  His reasonableness took me by surprise. “What? Um…soon. I’m going to get home soon.”

  “Okay, well I’m crashing at Malik’s tonight. Mom’s supposed to be home tomorrow night. So, what I’m going to do, as a responsible big brother, I’m going to write Mom a note. I’m going to say you didn’t come home last night—”

  “Kevin!”

  “—and if you don’t come home tonight, I’m going to write that, too—”

  “I just said—”

  “—and I’m going to put it on the kitchen table. If you get home before Mom does, and if the note’s somehow gone when she walks in, well, as far as I’m concerned, I tried.”

  “Kevin, don’t—”

  “Look, you said you were on your way home right now. If you are, then great. If I were you, when I got home I would totally tear that note into tiny bits.”

  “Kevin, just—”

  “But I’m telling you, Mom was worried sick about you when all that stuff went down three months ago. Hell, so was I. She’s just about gotten over it, but if you think she’s going to get over it again, you really don’t know Mom.”

  CHAPTER 32

  The diner had a big E4E sticker in the front window. The guy behind the counter was watching an old-fashioned flat screen, with a BREAKING NEWS banner across the bottom and a couple of talking heads. But he turned and gave me a big, friendly smile. “You can sit anywhere you like.”

  His name tag said DOUG.

  As he turned back to the news, his smile fading, I spotted Claudia waving at me from one of the booths.

  I sat in the seat across from her, exhausted from the night we’d just had and from my conversation with Kevin. She held up a menu. “Buy you breakfast?”

  My stomach answered before I could, growling loudly enough that Claudia’s eyes widened and she laughed. “Sure, that would be great,” I said.

  The menu was massive, and I was engrossed by all the choices. When I looked up, Claudia was staring past me, at the flat screen.

  “What is it?” I said, turning around to look.

  “Another bombing.”

  The TV showed a cluster of news drones and police copters circling a square brick building with its windows blown out and black soot staining the bricks above them.

  “Where?”

  “Baltimore,” she said. “Regional H4H office.”

  “Damn,” I said. “Like we didn’t have enough trouble.”

  She looked back at her menu, shaking her head. “Yeah, that’s not going to help things. But I can’t say I don’t get it.”

  I didn’t reply. I felt like it wasn’t my place to disagree with her, and in a way I didn’t. But I couldn’t condone bombing, the same way I couldn’t condone what H4H was doing.

  “Was anybody hurt?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “They don’t think so.”

  Doug came over to take our order. It was still breakfast time, but we both ordered vedge burgers, fries, and shakes. When he left, I whispered to Claudia. “Do you think it’s chimeras?”

  Claudia nodded. “I think it has to be, right? When it was just the church, it could have been about something else, but this…”

  I nodded, then she said, “Oh, great.”

  I looked over at the TV, and there was Howard Wells, being interviewed outside the damaged H4H building. Doug turned the volume up, shaking his head.

  “I know some of you out there want to retaliate for these vicious attacks,” Wells said, looking directly into the camera. “And I totally understand that urge, I do. Frankly, I want to as well, but Humans for Humanity can’t. We have more important things to do, like winning the fight to save that which makes humanity special.”

  The reporter pulled the microphone back and said, “Wait, are you saying you would condone retaliation from those not affiliated with Humans for Humanity?”

  Wells smiled wide. “No, no, of course I can’t condone…cruelty to animals or anything like that. But at the same time, humans have their own free will, and I certainly can’t condemn them for exercising it.”

  Doug turned the TV back down, shaking his head as he worked on our orders.

  The food showed up minutes later, and it was delicious. We were halfway through before we paused long enough to speak.

  “I talked to my dad,” Claudia said, hooking her thumb at the pay phone by the entrance. “He’s back in California. You know what he told me, though?” She took a quick sip of her milkshake. “He’s thinking of getting a Wellplant.”

  “Really?”

  “He’s on the wait list.”

  “But…you’re a chimera. And Howard Wells is…Howard Wells.”

  She shrugged. “He says all his competitors have them. He feels like he’s at a disadvantage.”

  I didn’t know how she felt about it all, so I didn’t want to lay it on too thick. “Maybe he’ll rethink when you tell him what’s going on at OmniCare.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” She ate a fry and picked up another one. “He wants me to get one, too. So we can keep in touch.”

  “Ew! Really? That’s so creepy.”

  She dropped the fry she was holding. “You think everything is creepy.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You think chimeras are creepy.”

  “No, I don’t. I used to, but I don’t anymore. Not at all.”

  “Okay. But it’s not like you’d ever consider getting spliced.”

  “I might.”

  She sat back and raised an eyebrow at me.

  “I might,” I said again. It surprised me to hear myself saying it out loud, but I wasn’t lying. The thought had crossed my mind a few times over the past few months. If I had to choose teams, well, pretty much all of my friends were chimeras. And Rex, of course.

  But it also bugged the hell out of me—why should I have to choose teams? Why were there even teams at all? It wasn’t like the people with splices were marching around hating on everyone else.

  “Reall
y?” Claudia leaned forward, her eyes sparkling with mischief. “What would you get spliced with?”

  I couldn’t tell if she was messing with me, but I hadn’t given that part of it a whole lot of thought, or at least not enough to give her an answer. It was not a conversation I especially wanted to be having, but when I suddenly realized it was over, I didn’t feel the slightest bit of relief.

  “What?” Claudia asked, studying my face.

  It was there again—that feeling of being watched. But suspicion quickly turned into fear as I realized that this time, it wasn’t my imagination.

  Two men were walking toward us across the diner. They were both white, both had Wellplants. One of them was in his forties, blandly good looking but also vaguely threatening. He reminded me of an unhinged version of the salesman that sold my mom her car. The other one I recognized right away. It was the guy who’d been staring at me with his creepy gray eyes at the Lev station back in Oakton. He wasn’t wearing his fedora.

  Doug had been intently watching the news coverage the whole time, but he turned to watch these two approach us.

  Before I could warn Claudia about any of this, they were standing next to our table, looking down at us with smiles that were half-phony and the rest of the way evil.

  “Dymphna Corcoran?” said the younger one, the car salesman.

  The creeper from the Lev station smiled wider.

  “Who are you?” I said.

  “We just want to talk to you,” said the creeper.

  Doug glanced over, did a double take, and was now giving the two of them a hard stare from behind the counter.

  “Why are you following me?”

  “Like I said, we want to talk to you.”

  “About what?”

  He smiled again. “It’s kind of complicated. Perhaps we can go someplace quiet.”

  “Seems pretty quiet right here,” Claudia said.

  His smile faltered. “Somewhere quieter, then.”

  “Are you cops?” I said.

  “Not exactly,” he said.

  “Then I don’t exactly want to talk to you,” I said. At this point, Doug had left the counter and was coming over.

  “It’s about your friends,” said the car salesman.