Basilisk

by Rob Thurman

  I worried about how we were going to explain to Ariel how Stefan and Saul were waiting for us before we had a chance to call them. Despite her comment, she wasn’t going to buy psychic. Her four-year-old sister with the horse morgue and human hair shoes might buy it, but not a woman who was, I couldn’t deny any longer, more intelligent than I was. But it turned out not to be a problem. I was given a humbling example of how experience in duplicity edged out genius without trying.

  They said nothing.

  In the back with me, Ariel, Dr. Ariel Annabelle Mac-Leod, verbally poked and prodded Saul and Stefan relentlessly for two hours on how they’d known where we were. Neither of them said one word. The louder and more persistent she was, the denser the silence became. At one point, Stefan dozed off while Saul drove, which was the equivalent of sleeping through a tornado siren two feet from your ear. That was when Ariel turned her frustrated attention back to me, but it was too late. I’d learned by example. Everything she asked about Raynor, the Institute, if the two up front were indeed “fucking psychic Men in Black,” if the sky was blue and the grass was green, I smiled, shrugged, and kept my mouth shut. I half expected another attack with purple footwear, but it didn’t happen. She finally gave up, folded her arms, and started reciting Pi. If we were going to ignore her, she could do the same, but she was also Ariel. She could ignore us and annoy us, except for a snoring Stefan, by assaulting our eardrums all at the same time. She was up to the eight-hundred and seventy-fifth decimal—I wasn’t intimidated as I could go up to a thousand—when Saul decided he needed a bathroom break of his own.

  How did I know since he wasn’t talking? I could feel, literally, his bladder aching. When little kids read their comics and wished for superpowers, I couldn’t imagine any of them wishing for that one. Wolverine, Magneto’s distracted. He needs to piss like a racehorse. Make your move! It wasn’t as if I could feel every ache and creak of a person’s body, and I had to be extremely close to them to feel anything at all, but if it was painful enough and the proximity was there, I could often feel more than I wanted.

  Like now. Thank God he didn’t have prostate problems yet.

  He picked an off-ramp on the trail back to Tucson, and Peter, and stopped at a McDonald’s packed with the breakfast rush. We looped the building twice before finding someone pulling out and taking their parking spot. The second we stopped, Ariel opened her door and said the first thing since she’d started on Pi. “I have to go to the bathroom and I’m starving. That government asshole took my purse. So one of you as-yet-indefinable assholes hand over some cash.”

  Saul grunted but handed her a five. She flipped him off with a perfectly appropriate doctorly finger and said, “Thanks, big spender. That might buy me a sausage and biscuit but no OJ. I’ll be sure to name my scurvy after you.” Then out of nowhere, she turned and kissed me. It wasn’t a long kiss, but it was warm and firm with the sweet taste of tongue, and abruptly she was gone, flouncing her way into the restaurant. I wasn’t being sexist when I said flouncing. Ariel didn’t flounce. She walked with a strong and determined gait, but her skirt flounced. It couldn’t help it. It looked made of filmy scarves. If you’re a scarf, you don’t have much choice: flutter or flounce. Between the kiss and the flounce, I smiled. I couldn’t help myself.

  Saul sighed as Stefan yawned and straightened. “Okay, Smirnoff, now that you slept through the make-out session, what are we going to do with the mouth that ate the continent? Send her home? Bury her in a shallow grave? What?”

  Stefan tilted his head to look back at me at Saul’s news. I shrugged again. It had worked for me so far for the past hour. He was caught between a teasing smirk and a frown, I could tell, but settled on a frown. “Raynor took her,” he said. “He has her ID. He knows who she is, where she lives. If we send her home, there’s a chance he might snatch her again to get at Misha. We’ll have to stash her someplace. With someone we trust until this is all over. She damn sure can’t come along.” He left it unsaid that it would be more dangerous than sending her home.

  He rubbed his face. I could hear the scrape of his palm over the bristle of his beard. “You know anyone out here you trust, Saul?”

  Saul yawned himself, his bladder complaining more. “I have people that subcontract for me, sure. I have people like that all over the country. But someone I trust? In my business? Yeah, right. How about you? You have anyone you trust?”

  Stefan groaned, low and resigned. “Besides the two guys sitting in the car with me? No. Shit.”

  Saul undid his seat belt. “Well, keep thinking. Gotta shake the snake before I explode.” He got out and disappeared inside after Ariel. The difference was twofold: His clothing didn’t flounce—blinded, but no flouncing. The second difference was that he came back. Ariel didn’t.

  Stefan and I went in to search for her, but she was gone. I checked out the women’s restroom myself. That was one good thing about growing up without ingrained social customs. You didn’t care when you were caught doing what traditionally you weren’t supposed to do. And naturally I was caught peering under occupied stall doors and was summarily hustled back out into the parking lot. Compared to the whole of my life, I had no problem with being called a pervert and a line cutter. I knew I was only one of the two.

  Stefan stood with me on the asphalt. “She must’ve gone out the other side. Hitched a ride maybe. I don’t know, but she’s gone. I ran the perimeter. I’d have seen that pink hair if she was on foot, but nothing. She’s just . . . gone.”

  I nodded. “I’m not surprised.” And I wasn’t. I’d rather expected it. “Can you go back in and get me something to eat? I’ve been banned.”

  He studied me, more than baffled. “You’re not worried about her? Pretend all you want, but I know you like her. You’re not worried Raynor will catch her again?”

  I more than liked her, but that wasn’t the issue. “She’s smart, Stefan. Smarter than I will ever be, and if I’m saying that, with my ego, you know it means something. If she doesn’t want to be caught, she won’t be. You think I make great fake IDs? If she wants to make any, they could blow mine out of the water.” I no longer wondered if that was the correct phrase. I knew. A few days of chasing Peter and running from Raynor and my brain was in overdrive. Cascade Falls had been good, better than good, and I missed it, but it hadn’t stretched me; it hadn’t pushed me. I was learning much more now because I had to. Necessity wasn’t the mother of invention. Desperation was. “Ariel will be fine. Probably better than we’ll be. And she’ll be safer than with anything we could do for her.”

  If anything, he was more bemused than before. “You believe that?”

  “No, I know that. I’ve known her for two years now. It doesn’t matter if it was on the Internet or with video cams. With my psychological and profile training, I would know her—genuinely know her, her personality, what she would do, what she wouldn’t do, everything that makes her her. I would know all of that even if we’d only written letters once a month. She will do the smart thing and that is to not be with us, near us, or anyone we might think we could trust with her. Trust me on this, Stefan. Just . . . trust me.” I gave him a light shove toward the restaurant. I’d said all I could say for now. “And I’ll see Ariel again someday. I can guarantee it. One hundred percent.” It wasn’t a lie. I believed it wholeheartedly. I knew it as I knew her.

  “Pancakes and biscuits and gravy,” I ordered to get him moving. “Oh, and hash browns. Four of them. And I know they don’t make milkshakes this early, but maybe could you bribe the manager? Chocolate?”

  He narrowed his eyes but started walking. He knew I wasn’t lying. I liked Ariel too much to lie about that. It was embarrassingly plain to see. But he also suspected I wasn’t sharing everything. He let it go, though, and did what I asked him. He trusted me. “You are one weird kid, Misha.”

  “I’m not a kid, remember?” And for the first time since I’d been complaining about the term, I knew it was true—I knew it for an absolute fact. I wasn’t
a kid, not compared to my twenty-seven-year-old ex-Mafiya bodyguard brother, not compared to the ancient Saul, not compared to anyone. I wasn’t a kid. I would never be one again. I also knew now you shouldn’t wish your youth and pseudo-innocence away.

  You’d never get it back.

  Chapter 11

  We found Peter in Tucson.

  He was waiting for us. If he was losing confidence that we’d catch up, I didn’t question the logic. But we had other things come up and they would come up again. Raynor couldn’t track me . . . or Godzilla, being in the dark there about ferret chipping, but he had to have an Institute tracker of his own. He would be following Wendy’s chip the same as we were. Peter and the rest of the chimeras, us, and a government sociopath—it was a parade no one wanted to see.

  Outside the SUV’s window, I could see the city. I didn’t need a map to know we were in South Tucson. I’d already memorized the map I’d Googled on the computer. It wasn’t Cascade—not a coffeehouse or bakery in sight. There were crumbling buildings and cold, hard faces. I knew why Peter had chosen this particular place in the city. The old man they’d killed in Laramie hadn’t been a challenge. Now Peter was looking for one, or at least more entertainment value.

  Stefan was driving now and he clicked the locks shut. “We’re too busy to kick some wannabe-carjacker’s ass right now,” he explained. “Dealt with that crap all the time in Miami. Wannabes. It gets real boring real fast kicking the baby fat off some fifteen-year-old gang-banger with an HK. You have any people working down here, Saul?”

  He blew out a puff of air ripe with disgust. “Nope. I tried recruiting some locals a few times, but they kept getting whacked after a few weeks or months. A waste of time. This is a kill zone, pure and simple.”

  Peter’s kind of place. I glanced down at the GPS tracker. “Turn left, then left again. They’re less than three blocks from here on the right.” I gave him the address. Discarding the tracker beside me, I pulled the case with the tranq guns out from under Saul’s seat and started unloading them.

  “You know that if we park here and live to tell the tale of how we cured a horde of psychotic murdering kids, we’ll have to walk home. The SUV will be gone the instant we’re out of sight,” Saul said.

  “That won’t be a problem.” I handed him one of the oversized tranquilizer guns and Stefan the other as he steered with one hand.

  “No?” Saul questioned skeptically. “Why is that?”

  “People know. Normal people too. They’re in that building up there.” I pointed at the windshield toward the corner ahead of us where a two-level pueblo-style building squatted in a precarious heap at the intersection of two streets. “And everyone in that building is dead. The people around here might not smell them yet or maybe they do, but either way, anyone who was in there is dead. The most oblivious person in the world couldn’t walk past it and not know. They’ll cross the street to avoid it. Instinct. It’s left over from a time when instinct was the only thing that kept early man from being eaten by a giant Canis dirus. No one will come near the building or bother the car.”

  “A Canis what?” That would be Saul. Again.

  “A dire wolf. A big-ass Pleistocene wolf. A three-hundred-pound people-eating puppy. Woof, woof.” I took a gun of my own out of the case and then closed it.

  “Smart-ass.” Saul shifted the tranq gun to one hand while pulling his own gun with the other, once again prepared for any situation. “Why are we trying so hard to save these kids? They killed an entire building full of people. They kill and they love it. If they were normal people, we’d wait until they were old enough, slap ’em on death row, and give them their last booster shot. Jesus, Stefan, Michael, they’re too dangerous to let live. They’re too dangerous to try to cure. That Wendy kid killed the possibly salvageable ones; you said yourself. Why are we risking our lives for murderers without an ounce of remorse?”

  “Because they weren’t just born that way. It wasn’t an accident of nature that produced a rare sociopath. Someone made them this way, through genetics and training and brainwashing. They’re monsters, but that’s because a monster mirrored his own ego in them. They deserve a chance, even if it’s not much of one or the monster wins. Jericho wins and that’s not acceptable.” I put my hand out, ready to open the car door. “Let me go first. It’s Wendy’s chip. If she’s there with them, Stefan, you need to stay outside until you hear me yell for you. Saul, you go around back in case a few try to escape.” I doubted sincerely that would happen, but I had to plan for all eventualities. Because of Wendy, I needed to go in first.

  Wendy was a new kind of monster. We were all chimeras, a name from the creature of mythology—twoin-one—but Wendy was something else. Wendy was a chimera with a fucking cherry on top. She was another creature of legend.

  Basilisk.

  Mythology said if one saw you, you died. One look and your life was over. Wendy was that myth, born to reality and walking the earth for the first time.

  “What makes you think you’re immune? You said it yourself; Wendy is the only chimera who can hurt other chimeras.” Stefan, like Saul, had his gun backing up the tranq one. He parked the SUV on the street two buildings down from our target. He and I got out and headed for the front of the squat box of a building while Saul headed around the back.

  “Peter is running the show and Peter wants something from me. He won’t let Wendy kill me. And,” I muttered low and fast, “I’ve been practicing.”

  “Practicing? What do you mean you’ve been—”

  The door to what had once been a pawnshop, but was most likely a meth lab now, slammed shut behind me. I’d been quick, because I was that much quicker now—quicker than any human. The door cut off Stefan’s voice and I concentrated. Inside it was quiet. The walls and floor were covered with years of dust and grime. There were bars on the windows, the glass itself covered with newspaper to hide the interior from prying eyes. There were cots all over the one big room. The bodies of several Hispanic men lay dead on them—not because they died peacefully in their sleep, but because there was so little space between them they couldn’t fall to the floor. There were some exceptions where a few cots had been turned or tipped over by death convulsions. Most had guns or knives in their hands or laying by them. They had all, to a man, gone the Basement way. Not one had died easily.

  The one closest to me had gray rubbery streamers of flesh spilling out of his gaping mouth—part of his lungs. You couldn’t cough up both of them at once, or just one, but you could cough up pieces of them until you choked and asphyxiated or died from another lack of oxygen: lungs blown to tatters. Either/or. Another man lay on his back, his brain matter having spilled out his ears, nose, and mouth. Someone had crushed his skull.

  The next victim was shirtless and curled on the floor, his abdomen split neatly from breast bone to below his baggy jeans somewhere. His arms were curled around the large pile of intestines that had poured free, as if he could push them back inside and hold himself together. The man closest to him had shot himself in the head with his own gun to escape his torment, but first he’d ripped off his pants. His penis and testicles. . . .

  I stopped cataloging the carnage. It was nothing I hadn’t seen before—nothing new under the sun that could be done outside the Institute that hadn’t been done inside. The one difference was this wasn’t a reward for excelling; this was freedom.

  I could smell anhydrous ammonia fumes wafting down from the top floor. Meth lab—I’d been right. I was also right in not expecting Stefan to listen to me. The door opened and shut almost silently behind me, but he didn’t say anything—battle ready.

  “Michael, finally.” The voice echoed in the still air. There was the sound of one footstep.

  “It’s been so dull waiting for you and your . . . pets? Isn’t that what you call lesser creatures you keep with you and alive for no apparent reason? I’ve seen them being walked in parks and down the sidewalks in rhinestone collars and pink leashes. Did you forget this one’
s leash? Will he bark for a treat? Will he piss himself at what he sees here?”

  Peter had drifted nearly soundlessly down the stairs against the back wall. Now he sat, midway down, and dangled one hand over the rusted wrought-iron railing. He was the same as he had been on the Institute tape—cheerful, charismatic. He had changed from the white pajama-style uniform to a black shirt and jeans. Dark shirt, dark hair, shadows clinging to him—Death himself. “So. Look at you, Michael. You have changed. Having seen what was outside our walls, I think all of us would change. Will change.” I didn’t raise the tranquilizer gun yet. I wanted to know more. What did he want with me? Where were the others? Stefan, now beside me, followed my lead. He knew violence and he knew it well, but in this particularly vicious subcategory, I was the expert.

  Peter leaned to rest his forehead against the thin metal banister. His eyes were chimera eyes—one blue, one green. He hadn’t bothered to conceal that with contacts as I had. Ordinarily those colors would be the calm pastels of a spring morning. Somehow on Peter they seemed almost blind. He was blind in a way, seeing only what he wanted to see, and what surrounded us now was all he wanted to ever see—destruction. I didn’t see his mask; I saw what was behind it.

  “I have to say, Michael, I’m rather surprised. We all knew you wouldn’t graduate. You were days at best from dissection. Strawberry jam in a jelly jar. In the refrigerator you’d go. Yum, yum. Good eating.” His grin was friendly and happy as a golden retriever’s. In two weeks he’d picked up the language, the casual nature, the obscure phrasings we’d not been taught. I was only now coming into my own after almost three years.

  How had I not seen him before for what he was?

  “But now you’re different.” His eyes went distant as if he were listening to inner instruction, his brain studying the peculiarity that was me. “You have bite to you now. Inside. Before, you would’ve let them walk you down to that metal table, obedient. . . . No, not necessarily obedient, but passive. Passive to the end. Now, however . . . now I think you would fight.”