Basilisk

by Rob Thurman

  She stared at me. She didn’t understand. She couldn’t understand; she was psychologically incapable of it—at least now. And now was all we had. The water was louder now. Nature knew evolution better than we did. It knew a wrong turn and we were that. “You do have a cure, don’t you?” she asked slowly, for the first time seeing something in me that was similar to what she’d been wary of in Wendy, something to be feared.

  “I do,” I said quietly.

  “And you’d use it? On your own kind?”

  “As Wendy had killed our own kind, I will. There’s no other way.”

  “I didn’t know that about Wendy. That she would kill her own, kill one of us. I hope you believe that.” She shook her head then, denying it. “Whatever it is, you know it’s not a cure, Misha. It’s a poison, to strip us of what we are.” She took a step back from me.

  “No, it is a cure, but not for you or the others. It’s a cure for the human race. We’re not right. We’re twisted. We were made that way. We’re a malignant cancer and, as with any cancer, the cure is a poison. You won’t be able to kill anymore.” I hesitated, because it was dark and ugly, but it was necessary. She’d lied to me; I’d lied to her. I’d lied to everyone for all my good intentions and promises to the contrary, but that was over.

  “And you won’t be you anymore. You’ll still be intelligent, that won’t change, but Ariel will die. Someone will take her place. Someone who doesn’t care what color her hair is or that she likes mermaids and short skirts or purple sandals. She’ll be a new person—not an interesting person; brilliant but not clever; alive but she won’t care particularly if she is or not. She won’t have hopes and dreams, and fun will be only a word to her. But she won’t kill again and that’s the best I can do. We’re not the next step in evolution. We’re a mutation created by a madman and brainwashed to be monsters. Monsters belong in those movies we watched, Ariel, not in the real world.”

  That was when Ariel chose to take herself out of the world. She spun on one heel, spread her arms wide, and sailed over the low concrete wall. For a moment she seemed to hover in the air, a butterfly in color and light, too much a part of the air and sky itself to fall. But fall she did, with a graceful dive that would take her into the same thrashing crush of water that had swallowed Wendy.

  It was beautiful, that incredible soaring flight and inevitable plunge, and I hadn’t taken a step to stop her. Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease, and more rarely the cure is worse than death itself. Ariel couldn’t be anything less than she was and she made her choice. But she took the virus canister with her. Metal, it would sink to the bottom of the river and the airborne virus would never see the light of day. Ariel’s last gesture wasn’t a gift to the world or to Cascade Falls; it was a gift to me.

  She wanted to surprise me. I let her.

  With that surprise, that gift, she redeemed herself—in my eyes at least, and my eyes were the only ones that counted.

  “She took yoga and ballet,” I said, more to myself than Stefan or Saul. “If anyone could fly, she would be the one.” I didn’t go to look over the side. It made it easier to believe.

  Fly away, bird. Fly away always.

  Then there was work to be done.

  Energy already recharging, I knelt beside the nearest chimera. He had fallen facedown when the tranquilizer dart had hit him. I rolled him over. Dark blond hair, light-skinned; it was Michael Three. It seemed somehow right a Michael would be my first. I laid my hand on his forehead. What I was doing was almost as complex as putting Stefan’s heart back together. The physical connection helped.

  “What are you doing?” Stefan squatted beside me. “You just said there was no cure.”

  “Not a genetic one, no.” The cartridges we’d shot the chimeras with hadn’t held a mixture of “cure” and tranquilizer—another lie. They’d been nothing but pure tranq, because there was nothing else to mix with it. “I’m basically destroying a good deal of their amygdala and a particular portion of their frontal cortex and hypothalamus.” I felt the cells die in Michael’s brain, leaving a lesion of darkness I could’ve seen if I’d closed my eyes. I moved to the next one—a Lily. She had brown hair and dark skin—Lily Four, then. “I’m giving them highly improved lobotomies or a variation of an amygdalotomy combined with other procedures. They should retain almost all of their emotions, except aggression.”

  “Almost”—it was a word that encompassed more than a person could imagine.

  “You said chimeras naturally blocked other chimeras from damaging them? And if that’s what you’re doing, won’t they heal?” He didn’t like this. I didn’t blame him. I didn’t like it either.

  “All that practicing I told you about, all the healing I did on the animals and myself for almost three years every day, it increased what I can do tenfold. We weren’t taught to try to be more than what we were. I don’t think it crossed any of the researchers’ minds that we could actually increase a genetic trait by exercising it, but I did. I worked Jericho’s gene until I could make it do fucking backflips.” Lily went quicker than Michael and the third even faster. “If you can build something up, you can tear it down more easily and efficiently—even if it is a chimera.” It was a simple logic and I thought the only reason Jericho hadn’t thought of it was that healing others and building, not manipulating, wasn’t part of his mental wiring.

  I looked at all the fallen chimeras around us. “They couldn’t stop Wendy and they can’t stop me now. They can’t heal what either of us does to them. They’re not strong enough.”

  “There was no cure, was there? All along there never was.” Stefan stood, his hand resting on my shoulder.

  This was my last omission from all that I’d told Stefan and Saul. I wasn’t going to say it was my last lie. I knew better now.

  “I am the cure.” I raised my eyes to him. “There’s no way to turn off the gene Jericho gave us. It would fight off any attempted gene therapy, any bone marrow transplant. And I can’t stop the gene from functioning either, not without killing them. It’s an intrinsic part of our DNA, not an extra chromosome. Not something we can do without. I turn the gene off, I turn them off, permanently. This”—I rested my hand on the next forehead—“is the only answer.” That was one lie I hadn’t told. I had researched for a way, which was how I’d found Ariel. I’d had hope, but I was a child of Jericho and that meant reality and ruthless necessity always trumped hope. When I finally accepted the truth, I used the time to become what I was now. I found the cure inside of me, not in an outside world nowhere near ready to scientifically understand what we were, much less change that.

  “Misha. . . .”

  The sympathy in his voice was strong. He knew. I knew. It didn’t have to be said aloud. I’d pledged day in and day out that I wasn’t a killer, but I was a thief of souls. The twelve that remained here, they might as well have been the Four Horsemen, bringing death and despair to the world. They had to be stopped. But which is worse? To take who a person is, for good or bad, and erase his free will, or to kill him? If I’d asked them, every one of them would’ve chosen the same fate Ariel had. I didn’t give them that choice. I did what I thought was best. I played God . . . just as Jericho had.

  But with him dead, someone had to.

  “They can’t murder without aggression,” I said, “and they can’t have aggression if I destroy the part of the brain that births it.” It was the best I could do—a very poor best.

  I rested my hand on the forehead of the last one—Peter. He’d played genius and villain well, while all the time Wendy had been pulling his strings and feeding him his lines. He was a killer too, same as the others, but he wasn’t what I thought he’d been. He was both predator and prey, because there was nothing in his mind now except silence. Wendy’s last act before falling away, besides killing the sniper who had shot her and his companions, had been to turn Peter off as if he were a toy she was done playing with. Only his brain stem worked now, keeping his lungs inflating and deflating, h
is heart beating, but the rest was dark and dead. He was brain dead. She’d made a true puppet of him, empty and hollow. It would’ve made her laugh, the irony, even with a bullet in her small chest. Peter was gone and I couldn’t fix that. The other chimeras wouldn’t be able to undo what I’d done and I couldn’t undo what Wendy had done. She and I were a new breed of chimera—with a new balance of power.

  Ariel had been a chimera, able to survive a good deal, but the unquenchable hunger of water at the bottom of the dam? No. I had no hope there. Wendy, though . . . the Grim Reaper himself would be afraid to touch her long enough to take her life. Fine. If I saw her again, I’d do it for him.

  Somehow.

  Chapter 15

  For the second time in his life Raynor was going to do some good. The first had been having one of his men shoot Wendy, because Raynor knew as well as anyone that Wendy wasn’t viable for sale, profit, or life in general. He’d saved Stefan or Saul from having to do it—if they could’ve lifted a hand to do it. It didn’t matter how evil a ten-year-old little girl was; putting a bullet in one would haunt your nights for years to come—unless you were Raynor. The only regret he would have was a lack of a commemorative photograph to hang on his wall.

  “Well, chaps, it looks like you’ve done my work for me.” He had walked around the sheriff’s car and was heading toward us, his gun up and aimed at the cluster of the three of us. “One, two, four . . . twelve unconscious chimeras wrapped up in a bow and ready to go to rehab. Learn to mind their masters.” He didn’t know what I’d done to them and I wasn’t inclined to tell him. I didn’t know what kind of life they would have now. The ability to kill remained within them, but they wouldn’t use it. They couldn’t. With a complete lack of aggression, they wouldn’t be able to kill, even in defense. As I’d told Ariel, they’d be smart as they’d been before, but they’d be blander, milder, less interested in life in general. When they woke up from the tranquilizer, my best guess was they’d keep the Institute story to themselves—they’d know by now that would only end them in a psych ward. They’d wander off and do as Ariel had done; as I’d done. They would make fake IDs, get jobs, live their lives—but without flavor or zest. They would be gray people in a gray world, but without leaving a trail of torture and murder in their wake.

  Raynor would say you have to break some eggs to make an omelet. Raynor was a dick.

  “Stefan,” I said.

  Stefan shot him in the right shoulder. It was his right hand that held his gun. Raynor dropped it as he clutched his shattered and bleeding shoulder. Saul whistled. “You’re fast. How’d you get so damn fast? I was in the rangers and I’m not that fast.”

  “I think Misha juiced me up some. Either that or you were a piss-poor ranger.” Stefan walked over and swept Raynor’s legs out from under him. “All your men up in the hills are dead now, Raynor. A couple months’ paychecks and all you have are a pile of dead mercenaries to show for it, thanks to one little girl. And I’ll bet my last dollar they’re mercenaries because you wouldn’t share the Institute with anyone else in the government. Too messy and much less money for you.” He kicked him in the stomach next. “I hear you shot my brother in the head with a rubber bullet. Not nice, asshole. Not nice at all.” He kicked him again and air whistled out of Raynor’s trach tube as he doubled over. “Nice. Maybe I can get you to whistle ‘ “Yankee-fucking-Doodle Dandy’ ” on that thing.” He kicked him once more, in the ribs, and harder this time. I had the feeling, if I let him, he would go on kicking Raynor until he was dead. I didn’t mind that too much, but we needed him for something first—that second good thing he could do.

  “Stefan, we need him,” I said, catching his arm before he launched another kick. “We could call it in ourselves, but no one knows how intelligent a chimera can be, especially one like Ariel. We need him to find the bomb.”

  “Bomb? What are you prattling about?” Raynor spat blood onto the road. “Don’t try to distract me from the merchandise, and that’s what you all are and were always meant to be, Michael One. Merchandise. Don’t ascribe to delusions of grandeur and think you’re a person. A regular human being. You’re not. In fact, the Institute would’ve tattooed a price on you lot if your value didn’t keep going up.”

  “All these chimeras loose on the world for weeks now, Raynor.” I bent my knees so I could stare him in the eyes. “Do you think killing an old man and gangbangers was all they were up to? They built a virus bomb and planted it somewhere in the Portland airport. It’s airborne and set to go off at eleven a.m. tomorrow. No one will even notice what’s happening. The incubation time is seven days. It will kill thirty percent of the people it infects and Portland airport is an international airport. You know what that means, how far it will go. You’re the one with the capacity to think like a chimera if you have to. Find it and stop it or you may be one of the ones it kills.” That was the one argument that would have him cooperating.

  “It’s a silver metal cylinder this long and this big around.” I demonstrated with my hands before resting my hand on his unwounded shoulder. “Since you’re Homeland Security, I hope to God you can do something about it. But before you go, tell me how you knew where to look for us. How’d you know Stefan was my brother?” I wanted to make sure he was, as Stefan guessed, the only person in the government who was after us.

  “Your brother?” I tightened my hand on his shoulder and I gave him pain, considerably more pain than was in the shoulder pierced by a bullet. He shuddered beneath my touch and went from white to gray. He cleared his throat, the trach and its talking valve bobbing as he swallowed convulsively. “Yes, I . . . for whatever reason, Jericho didn’t bother to document that Korsak was your brother. He was an arrogant bastard about sharing information. We had to wait until he died to even see his files on the kids. That’s how he wanted it. Only when the top man is dead are the files automatically sent to a chosen successor.”

  He took a few more breaths to recover. “Perhaps Jericho didn’t think it was important. When you were taken from the Institute, Jericho went after you, and I was in charge of finding out how anyone knew the Institute existed at all.” His breath wheezed in and out of the valve. “I thought it had to be someone military or with law enforcement. The raid was too well planned. I visited the offices of the local cops and FBI, and that was when I saw it. A top Russian mob boss had been offed and Korsak was the main suspect. They had their whole murder board covered with pictures of the families. Even down to a picture of a boy kidnapped ten years before. I could see how certain incorr—” I let him feel the pain again, the exquisite pain of careful wording. What Stefan and I knew, voiced or not, was ours only. No one else needed to know. And that included Saul. Raynor winced and went on. “I could see how certain conclusions could be drawn. I drew mine and have been chasing Korsaks since then. Any one I could lay my hands on.”

  “Like my father,” Stefan said without question.

  On that, Raynor remained silent. It was for the best.

  “Then I was an idiot and got my fingerprints on file and you found us.”

  Raynor looked up at me uneasily and nodded at Stefan’s comment. “No one else knows about us?” I asked.

  “No one.” He shook his head.

  “Are you telling me the truth, Raynor? I want you to look at those chimeras. You shouldn’t worry about collecting them. They’re not killers anymore. No use to you. What I did to them,” I said, thinking I’d let him wonder exactly what that might have been, “I can do to you, but for what you’ve done and allowed to continue and wanted, I could leave you the very goddamn picture of drooling subintelligence. Someone would have to change your diapers for the rest of your life. With your dignity and vanity, I don’t think you’d like that.” I leaned in closer until he could feel my breath on him. I made it cold—the touch of a corpse. “On the other hand, leaving you alive and sane if you’re cooperative means nothing to me either. Only results matter. So go find that cylinder and save lives, including your own.” I took m
y hand from his shoulder. “I’m not like you, Raynor. I’ll always be better, because I’m not a killer.”

  It was a lie.

  I had killed him—the moment I’d let go. I’d weakened a vessel in his brain and destroyed all the pain receptors in the meninges. They wouldn’t register the pressure of the leaking blood. There’d be no headaches to warn him. He had three days maximum and when he died, death would be in a split second. He would never know it was coming.

  As I’d said, I had killed him for what he’d done and what he’d allowed to be done at the Institute, but more than that, I had killed him for what he knew. He knew about Stefan and me. But his successor wouldn’t. There’d be no murder board of a mob murder Stefan hadn’t committed to be stumbled across. There wouldn’t be a picture of a little boy with bicolored eyes like mine. His successor wouldn’t know Stefan existed, but Raynor did. And he’d come for us again. At least for me, and Stefan might die trying to protect me. Raynor might wait a few years, but he’d come. Men like Raynor didn’t give up. Men like Raynor, Jericho, Bellucci, they never gave up. Monsters didn’t.

  Stefan had done his best to keep me true to myself, although he’d been clear that self-defense was justifiable and to go for it if I had to. I’d refused all that time. I’d told him I wouldn’t be the killer they had made me. I’d said I wouldn’t kill, not even to save my life.

  But there was one life I would kill for. I’d been blind because I’d wanted to be. There had been that false image that had fooled my mind of Raynor’s man killing Stefan when we’d first fled Cascade. In my mind’s eye I’d seen him pulling his trigger, yet I’d refused to let it go any further, that thought. I’d seen it and then I’d unseen it. Felt it and buried it. Saw its face in intimate detail, yet couldn’t tell you a single feature.

  I hadn’t let my own brain recognize this choice would come, undoing everything I had built the new Michael/Misha on. The games I played in my head where thoughts could be knotted and hidden away ended as one of my own kind had killed Stefan when he was less than ten feet from me.