Basilisk

by Rob Thurman

  If wishes were horses, they’d kick you in the gut and, when you were down, dump a steaming load of manure on your head. Why didn’t useless homilies ever tell it to you straight?

  “We’re in.” I put away the picks and my phone.

  “Good job, vors.” Vors—it meant boss in the Mafiya. This time the comment was said with an exasperated light swat to my jaw and a reluctant pride to the compliment. “Sorry I came down on you, kid. You’re doing the best you can, which is better than I did.” Then the sugary sweet, birthday-cake-frosting moment was over—one of the moments guys aren’t supposed to acknowledge—and Stefan was pushing open the door cautiously. It was dark inside, darker than the house had been. Here there was only one tiny window set up high in the back wall. I could make out the shape of a riding lawn mower, some tools against the right wall—a rake and shovel were most likely. I could see the cables running up the walls. This place was wired for electricity. So where was the switch? I had just spotted it, halfway back on the left wall—a stupid and inconvenient place to put it—when I saw something else almost at the same time. Less than half a second separated the discoveries.

  It was a girl. She looked four or maybe five; it was impossible to tell in murk this thick. She was standing in a back far corner, facing into it—a bad girl who was sent for a time-out, nose to the wall. She had bright blond hair, but not as blond as Wendy’s. It was tied back in two ponytails. There might have been ribbons . . . I narrowed my eyes, and the gloom and shadows lightened. Ribbons, blue ribbons. Her dress was blue as well, her socks pale, probably white, her shoes gone. She didn’t move, didn’t say a word. She was a child left to die alone in a locked building, too afraid to turn and ask for help, too terrified to know we were better than the ones who left her there.

  Except. . . .

  She wasn’t crying for help because she wasn’t breathing. She wasn’t turning toward us and freedom because her heart wasn’t beating. I couldn’t hear it or sense it. I couldn’t feel the life in her because there was no life. There hadn’t been any life in her, not for a moment. I knew life. You couldn’t steal it if you didn’t recognize it and any chimera would know what she was—a fake; a life-sized doll.

  A trap.

  But Stefan wasn’t a chimera. He was a man and a good one. He had been taught by his bodyguard days to be cautious and suspicious, but this was a little girl and not one he’d seen on the Institute video. To him, all he would see was that she wasn’t a chimera. To human eyes it was too dark to recognize she wasn’t anything at all. Before I could open my mouth to tell him to stop, he was there, turning the toy around. It didn’t matter that he felt the plastic under his hand and backed up immediately. It was too late. The wire was tripped and the cloud that billowed was as thick as a summer storm.

  Chlorine gas—it was easy enough to make. Rob your kitchen or bathroom of ammonia and bleach and Mr. Charles Darwin stepped in. You could scrub your toilet and die with a brush in one hand and People magazine in the other, or you could be a chimera, smarter than you had any natural right to be, and use it. You could gather enough, put it in a container, seal it, connect it to a trip wire that was attached to a doll cute enough to pass for the real thing, and you had a way to kill two men almost instantly . . . or however many men happened to be with the Institute escapee trailing you. It wasn’t a good way to go, the gas. Your lungs scarred nearly immediately from the corrosive fumes, then filled with fluid, drowning you. If mixed right, it was fatal.

  If you were a chimera yourself, it was mildly inconvenient. We were made to be predators, not victims.

  I didn’t bother to yell Stefan’s name. It would be time wasted. I ran for him, grabbed his arm as he started to stagger, then raced back toward the door. Along the way, Saul was starting to drop to his knees. I used my other hand to grab his shirt, another brain-bleed-colored monstrosity, and yanked him along too. The rectangle of light we’d entered through wasn’t far, but in a cage of poison gas, far is relative and time is not your friend. I managed to get them outside, each step seemingly mired in mud as thick and cloying as molasses and quicksand, before dropping them in the grass as I slammed the door shut behind us. Then I grabbed each by the shirt collar and dragged them farther away. Little gas would escape that sturdy metal door, but I wasn’t much for playing odds, especially when it came to the lives of my brother and my friend.

  I sat between them in the scratchy, high-arching weeds and laid a hand on each of their chests. “It’s okay. Chlorine gas is easy to make, but Peter hasn’t been out of the Institute long enough to know the Internet is usually wrong. He didn’t get the mixture right. The ratios were incorrect for a lethal blend. It’s nasty, but no worse than pepper spray. Take some deep breaths. You’ll be all right.”

  That was when the small concrete building exploded. Interesting fact: Not only could you make chlorine gas out of bleach, you could also make plastic explosive. It was more likely you’d blow yourself up while stirring the pot than succeed in your “recipe,” but that was why funeral homes had closed caskets . . . to carry your many varied moronic pieces to Heaven or God or whatever you believed in.

  I bent my head, hands on Stefan’s and Saul’s chests as they coughed. Fragments of concrete flew over and past while the dry grass–weed mixture all around us smoldered and caught fire. It had rained once, but once wasn’t enough to save this place. A chip of metal or concrete hit my jaw, then flew on, leaving a jagged slice behind. I felt the clotting begin and the skin knitting back together. There wouldn’t be a scar. I’d healed fast at seventeen. Now I healed at a speed I didn’t want Stefan to know about. I’d been different long before he’d found me. Now I was different to the tenth power. I didn’t want to be. I wanted to be more human, not less. I wanted to be like my brother.

  This was one of the less times, but the rapidly disappearing wound on my face wasn’t something I wanted him to see or a truth I wanted to spill. Not yet. I’d said it a hundred times to myself over the past year.

  Just . . . not yet.

  Stefan coughed hoarsely and Saul, whom I might not hate after all, choked out, “Been . . . pepper sprayed. This . . . is . . . worse.”

  “Pepper sprayed. You.” Stefan coughed explosively again, then managed to get up on his elbows. “Not . . . surprised.” He looked around, eyes streaming from the gas. “Holy shit. We’re on fire.”

  “Only a little,” I said, exaggerating or rather underestimating some, but it was a triage moment. You had to breathe before you could run. “Catch your breath and we’ll make it out of here before we’re charcoal.” I felt his and Saul’s hearts beating under my hands, fast with adrenaline but healthy and whole. There were no arrhythmias. Chances were approximately seventy-nine percent that we would make it out of here without being barbecued as they’d wanted to do to Wilbur. I had a flashback to the Institute and brightly colored videos. What had poor Wilbur ever done to anyone? Or the spider, Charlotte? Or Bambi’s mother?

  That Disney guy had been an excessively cruel man.

  The building blew up a second time, what was left of it. Stefan took matters into his own hands. “Breathe . . . later,” he wheezed as he got to his knees and then to his feet—unsteady and weaving, but upright. “Run now.” Saul followed suit. They were tough, for humans, both of them. Strong. It had helped them survive their lives and it helped us survive now. We did as Stefan said—we ran. Saul’s khakis caught fire once. I patted out the flame when he would’ve paused to do it himself and pushed him on. We ran around the house instead of cutting through. Who knew what traps could be waiting in there that we’d simply missed the first time or were waiting their turn.

  At the SUV, I climbed behind the wheel while Stefan all but fell into the passenger seat and Saul literally dived into the back, nearly squashing Godzilla. I started the engine and tore down the gravel road as fast as the SUV would go without sliding on the gravel and off the road. I didn’t think the house would explode as well, but naturally with all things Peter in the past
two days. . . .

  I was wrong.

  A smoke detector wired to more homemade explosives would do the trick. That was how I would’ve done it, but with Peter showing himself to be more intelligent than I was, guessing was all I could do. The vehicle rocked, but we were out of range, barely, although part of the roof landed close enough behind us to momentarily lift the back wheels inches off the road. They smacked back down and I kept driving. Stefan was hanging on to the door handle. He hadn’t had time to fasten his seat belt—safety first, he’d always told me, the hypocrite. But I would let it go this time. “I guess I should be grateful you stuck to pipe bombs,” he said, his voice hoarse from his coughing. “This Peter might not know shit about chlorine gas, but he knows explosives out the ass.”

  “Sometimes you get lucky,” I said darkly, jerking the steering wheel and spinning the SUV in a tight circle at the end of the road—a dead end. Why was life so damn appropriate when you least wanted it to be? I headed back the way we’d come, weaving around the pieces of roof and wall in the road.

  “If Peter wants you to catch up with him, why is he trying to kill you?” Stefan finally put on his seat belt after I smacked his arm repeatedly and pointed at it.

  “Because if these minor problems stop me, then I’m not deserving enough to find or join them.” I steered around a flaming piece of drywall.

  “That was minor? You’re kidding, right? Two explosions and not-quite-good-enough chlorine gas is minor?” Saul sat up in the back and rubbed his chest as if it should ache. He took his hand away and frowned as if surprised that it didn’t.

  “Chimeras can kill with a touch, but other people, nonchimeras”—humans, in other words—“kill in other ways. The Institute taught us all the ways there are to accomplish that, to be on our guard against the weaker . . . I mean, normal people.” Chasing daily after those genetically the same as me, if not mentally, made it easy to forget who was normal and who was not. “They didn’t get into specifics on how to make those types of weapons. We didn’t need to make them—we just had to know what we might be up against. But give one of us chimeras the Internet and we don’t have to be in the same state to kill you. We specialize in assassinations that look like natural deaths. Peter isn’t interested in whether they look natural or not now. He’s free. They all are. Free to kill in any way they like.”

  “Like a buffet.” Stefan exhaled, leaning back in his seat. “They’ve found new toys to play with and after a virtual lifetime of solitary confinement, why wouldn’t they want the different and the new? If it weren’t for the trying-to-kill-us part of all this, it would be hard to blame them.” His eyes flicked to the rearview mirror to watch the burning foundation of what was left of the house behind us. “You said you had a way to find them despite their removing their chips. I don’t doubt your genius, kiddo, but how?”

  “There were only twelve chips in that mug.” I took a hand off the steering wheel and for the first time in my life ruffled his hair, wavy and thick as a dog’s undercoat, in mockery of what he’d done to me more than a time or two when I was younger. Turnabout was fair play. I wanted to see how he liked it. “I’ll teach you about counting sometime. I might get you up to twenty if we try really, really hard.”

  “I’d call you a shit again, but it’s not helping with your behavior, so it’s a waste of breath I could use. And both hands on the wheel.” He didn’t swat my hand, though, which was considerate in view of how many times I’d swatted him. “Are you telling me, in your own thoughtful way, that one of them kept a chip? Why?”

  “I think Peter is curious about me. With my escape—with me went Jericho. That will make him more curious. Jericho was our creator. It’s almost unbelievable he could die. Peter wants a look at me, to see if the outside world has changed me to make me more like him.” I turned off the gravel road onto a paved one. It was empty except for us. “That doesn’t mean the chip is in one of them—one of them could be carrying it in a pocket for all I know. They could be rid of it in seconds. They might’ve split up, too, although I don’t think that’s likely. Peter’s charisma, his ‘family’ brainwashing, and his intelligence are vital to keep them all from going wild and getting noticed. They want to kill and they will kill, as often as possible, but they don’t want to be revealed for what they are for the first time ever and possibly put down. They need guidance. Peter is doing that.”

  “Sounds like a fun guy.” Saul had his phone in hand in the back. “I’d better call nine-one-one before that shit burns down all of Wyoming.”

  I ignored him. He could save Wyoming, which made him the good citizen of the hour. However, I had other things on my mind. “This is a guess, Stefan. All of it. Keep that in mind, okay? I can’t predict Peter. He’s not the same as other chimeras and not the same as me. He’s—what do they say?—a mystery. He’s a mystery.”

  “A goddamn, arson-loving mystery,” Stefan corrected.

  “That too,” I agreed.

  “And same as you said, nothing like you,” he added.

  “I know.” Or I hoped, and hope was the best you could do sometimes.

  I drove for an hour after talking Stefan through recalculating the tracker to focus from a mass of chips to only one—it had Wendy’s ID code because the universe sucked that way—before I noticed the cop behind us. He was far back but closing fast. With the explosions, I’d avoided the interstate in case of the state police, Hazmat, or fire trucks. What had happened at the house would bring in the federal responders on top of the state and city ones. It was best to stay out of sight. But it turned out a deputy had better sight and intelligence than I’d given the locals credit for.

  Instead of joining the circus that had to be surrounding what would be left of the house and building by now, he was out trolling the local country roads for any suspicious vehicles. And with our stolen Utah license plate, we were out of place, off Laramie’s beaten tourist track, and that definitely was worth investigating.

  “He’s sniffed us out.” Stefan had swiveled in his seat when he saw my quick look at the rearview mirror. “Smart cops can screw your shit up, especially when you don’t have the Family’s money looking out for you. Damn.”

  “Your boss paid off policemen?” I asked. “Like in the movies? As in The Godfather?” The same as the movies—it shouldn’t have left a type of celebrity tingle down my spine, but I forgave myself. I was going through serious movie withdrawal these past two days.

  “In his day, he paid off policemen, police chiefs, judges, senators.” Stefan turned a forbidding look on me. “Do not be getting any ideas, Misha. You’re already full of enough of them to be Lex Luthor. Now pull over and let’s deal with this guy. Saul, don’t kill him.”

  “What am I? An idiot?” came the answer from the backseat. “It’s hard to run a business from death row. No, thanks.”

  I pulled the SUV over just as the sheriff’s department car turned on its light and sirens. When the deputy climbed out of the car, his face was blank, but I could see a twitch of displeasure in his jaw. He hadn’t gotten to play with his toy car nearly as much as he would’ve liked to. I already had my fake license in hand. . . . The registration and insurance from the glove compartment wouldn’t match, but I expected to take care of our cop problem before it came to that. Or so I thought.

  The deputy had drawn his gun and had run from his car to ours, shouting, “Get out of the car! Get out of the vehicle, all of you, hands behind your head, and lie flat on the ground! Do it now!”

  “Fuck,” Stefan muttered, and, cop or not, he slid his hand inside his jacket for his gun. He’d have good intentions; that was my brother—following those good intentions all the way to an internal Hell, though those intentions had saved me. He’d doubtlessly try for a leg shot, but you never knew what would happen when you were trying not to kill someone and you were both armed.

  I had planned to touch the deputy’s hand when he took my license and put him to sleep. I’d say it was now time to improvise, but chimeras di
dn’t improvise. We moved to plan four. Plans two and three were based on a less aggressive and less intelligent deputy—balls and brains, irritating. I’d already rolled down the window and had to keep my voice low as to not be heard by the Law Enforcer of the Year outside. “Stefan, I have diabetes.” I didn’t ask if he got it or understood. My brother was smart too.

  I opened the driver’s door and stepped out. I wavered a little, hands up but too floppy and uncoordinated to cup behind my head. My license fell from fumbling fingers into the dirt where we were pulled off the road. “I . . . I don’t feel so . . . where . . . I? What’s going on?” As soon as the “on” left my mouth, I bent and projectile vomited, Exorcist style. Linda Blair would’ve given me a ten out of ten for style and a record-breaking eleven for velocity. The splatter of my lunch on his shiny mirror-bright shoes distracted the deputy as I fell to the ground, to the side of my recycled lunch—that much into The Exorcist I was not—and began having a full-blown seizure. I flailed, convulsed, foamed a little at the mouth for veracity, and decreased the circulation to my lips to turn them temporarily cyanotic blue.

  Stefan came boiling out of the car. “He’s diabetic! He’s going into ketoacidosis. That’s a diabetic coma, you dumb country shit. Help me hold him down.” He yelled back at the car, “Jack, call nine-one-one!”

  The deputy had seen a lot of faked illnesses in his day; that was the nature of being a cop. Fake pregnancies, fake grandpa’s-having-chest-pain, fake kidswallowed-the-dog’s-squeaky-toy, all to get out of a speeding ticket. But he had never seen anyone who could vomit and turn cyanotic at the drop of a hat. He was smart, though. He didn’t drop his gun, but he stepped closer—close enough that one of my flailing hands smacked his leg. Cloth didn’t stop the touch. It was too flimsy an armor. He went down, loose-limbed and easy as Godzilla did for his afternoon ferret nap. Stefan grabbed the gun from his hand as he fell, explaining, “No need for baby to accidentally shoot us as he goes sleepy-time. Good job, Misha.” No Good job, Misha, except for risking your life when I could’ve risked mine instead and probably gotten shot in the process. Not even a Good job, kiddo. I couldn’t imagine I appeared proud while at the same time wiping the foam and traces of vomit off my mouth . . . but I was. Proud as hell. It was good to be the little brother, but it was also good to be an equal—a partner.