Basilisk c-2

by Rob Thurman

  “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 didn’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.

  Stefan nodded at the deputy’s car. “Don’t forget that while you’re on a roll. You’re the computer genius. See if the car has a camera. Are we on video, can you erase it if we are, or do we need to blow the damn thing up?”

  Computer genius? “I’m the everything genius”—I frowned—“and that seems either your or Saul’s criminally inclined abilities are up to something that simple.”

  Stefan grinned. “You’re the newbie in this elite fighting force. I wouldn’t want to take away that rite of initiation.”

  “Initiation?”

  “You know,” he said, his grin wider and, I thought, more evil, “where we make you do all the scut work while we sit back, drink beer, and criticize your technique. We all go through it. Saul peeled potatoes in the military. I mopped up the restrooms in the strip club. Good times, Misha. Welcome aboard.”

  “Stop playing around, you jackasses.” Saul had his own window down now. “He could have called for backup. Let’s get out of here before our secret weapon with a double-oh-seven in puke has to spray the entire sheriff’s department.”

  I was going to have to commit one way or the other on Saul’s not being that bad or being a demon from Hell who deserved a thousand ago
nizing deaths.

  But I had scut work to do and that decision would have to wait. While Stefan dragged the deputy off to a safe distance, I blew up the car with the three pipe bombs I had left. It was quicker and more efficient. I also ended up thinking that being a partner wasn’t all chocolate pancakes, sex with a smart girl, and late-night movies. How fair was it that the genius had to be the cleanup crew, too? I continued to bitch to myself. I’d worked too hard for this. I’d ride out this “newbie” thing and then it would be all chocolate pancakes, sex with a smart and pretty girl, and late-night movies. And if I had to build a state-of-the-art smart and pretty Fembot to make that happen, I’d do it. The real thing was difficult to find while being on the run from killers or chasing killers or both. Maybe I’d give her a pink wig, the same color pink as Ariel’s hair.

  I’d better stock up on WD-40.

  In minutes we were back on the road with yet another explosion in our rearview mirror. I drove several miles until we saw the first opportunity to steal another license plate—Wyoming this time—from an abandoned rust bucket on the side of the road. This time we were headed toward Tucson, Arizona, Wendy’s chip beckoning the way. It wasn’t a tingle that went down my spine this time. It was a chill.

  Icy as winter’s first breath and a dying man’s last.

  Chapter 9

  Tucson was well over twelve hours away, which meant another motel stop in Springerville, Arizona. I could’ve admitted I could go on much less sleep these days and driven on, throughout the night if necessary, but there were other things I needed to do as well. A few hours at a motel to let Stefan and Saul sleep in beds instead of in a car with an increasingly agitated ferret would give me the time to do them. Godzilla wasn’t claustrophobic. As with most ferrets, he liked tight spaces to squeeze his long slithery shape into and wreak havoc. But also as with most ferrets, he became bored easily. A change of scenery would give him new things to sniff out, investigate, and then obliterate like a furry missile of destruction. It would be good for him and good for me as I had something to create rather than destroy.

  The motel room was the same as the other motel room. The bedspreads were orange instead of bile green, but the rest was identical. Even the landscape pictures over the beds were the same or similarly bad. One was a full moon with what was supposed to be a coyote but looked more like Tramp from that other Disney cartoon—the cheerful mutt they’d had the dogcatcher drag off to kill. God, I hated that Disney bastard. If I ever found his cryogenically frozen head, I was unplugging that unit pronto. Funny that it was only his nightmare creations that the Institute let us watch, cartoonwise, when we were in the younger group. The other picture was a dusty trail leading up a dusty hill with a dusty man riding a dusty horse. The man didn’t resemble Butch or Sundance or Val Kilmer in Tombstone , so I had zero interest.

  “So why the room with a microwave?” Stefan sat in the chair at the small table. He indicated the four bags of cheeseburgers, fries, burritos, refried beans, and two milkshakes—mine, all mine—with the small brush he was using to clean his gun. “If I know you and food, and, Jesus, do I, there won’t be a crumb left to heat up.”

  “Think of it as a science project. All those science fairs I missed out on, what I’m going to build would’ve gotten me an A and maybe laid by the hot science teacher.” At least with Saul around, my use of incorrect and sexually inappropriate language was improving in leaps and bounds. I grinned at Stefan’s bemusement, grabbed my bags of food, and spread it out over my bed, sharing with Zilla when he popped out of the bathroom, dragging one end of the toilet paper in his mouth. I could hear it unrolling as he ran. He passed over the carpet and under the low-hanging blanket, out the other side, up and over the bed, under again, and then back up to perch on my knee, turning my bed into a fairly accurate depiction of a Möbius strip. Spitting out the end of the one-ply, he accepted a French fry with a contented mrrrp.

  “My science teacher was named Mr. Wilfred Wyatt, but knock yourself out. Do I want to ask what you’re going to make or be pleasantly surprised when it explodes, disintegrates the motel, or opens up a black hole and sucks in the earth?” He reassembled the Steyr with practiced ease but didn’t slide in the clip. With a curious and thieving ferret around, a loaded gun wasn’t a good idea. Stefan slept with the gun and clip under his pillow. He could jam the latter home in a fraction of a second and Godzilla didn’t have to face manslaughter charges. It was a win-win.

  “I’m not going to blow anything up. Anything else,” I amended around a bite of a bacon cheeseburger. It was good, better than good—the perfect amount of grease and cheese and slathered with mayonnaise. The hell with understanding the mystery of the Brussels sprout. I was never touching another one again. “As for a black hole. . . .” I took another bite, chewed, then swallowed before going on regretfully. “If only I could get my hands on the right equipment.”

  “You’re kidding, right? I hope you’re kidding. You have enough felonies on your plate. Let’s not jump straight to Bond villain.” With the gun tucked under his pillow, he lay on his own bed and rubbed his eyes. It had been a long day, especially for someone as breakable as a human. Peter had certainly done his best to break my brother and anyone else with me.

  “Black holes are misunderstood. Besides, just creating the conditions a black hole could potentially thrive in. . . .” Those tired eyes were now aimed at me thoughtfully, the consideration of revoking my partner status swimming behind them. “I’m joking,” I grumbled. From now on I’d keep my fantasies to myself.

  “I’m going to make a microwave beam gun in case we pick up another enthusiastic cop.” They existed now, but at around one hundred pounds. I could get that down to thirty, maybe twenty-five easily. “Aim, pull the trigger, and it’ll fry the electrical system in his car. You won’t have to shoot him. I won’t have to blow up his car. And best of all I won’t have to roll around in the dirt beside my own vomit again. Trust me, that’s worth sacrificing a hunk of metal to the microwave gods. Plus maybe Saul will stop calling me ‘double O puke,’ because it’s getting harder and harder not to maim him. He’s the only person in the world who makes me regret I’m not a killer.”

  Saul had been afraid of me when he’d seen the clip of the Institute video, and he’d stayed cautious all the way up to when we were pulled over by the deputy. In the aftermath was when his love of vomit humor overcame his sense of survival.

  I was definitely back to hating him.

  “The guy does like to give people a hard time, but he thinks it’s harmless. He doesn’t know he’s hitting all the wrong buttons with you. I could tell him.” He toed off his shoes and yawned, the skin under his eyes gray with exhaustion. “But that would let him know where you’re vulnerable. Psychologically. And theoretically.” His lips curled as I snorted at my favorite catchall. “I know how much you love having your weak spots exposed or admitting you have any at all.” My snort was much darker this time.

  “And this is part of being an adult,” he continued. “Figuring out who you like and who you don’t. Who’s worth putting up with despite some questionable qualities. Learning more about them and finding out those qualities aren’t so bad when you compare them to all the good ones they have. Or just tuning it out and forcing yourself to get along. That’s life.”

  “When it rained last week and you couldn’t paint, you sat on the couch and watched Dr. Phil, didn’t you? Admit it. I renounce you. You are no longer my brother.” I went to work on the bean burrito and fed Zilla a bite out of pure spite. The ferret flatulence in the car in the morning might be enough to take out Saul. It would be my own form of chlorine gas. I’d be guilt free—hands clean of anything but innocence and cheap motel soap.

  “Am I wrong?”

  “Go to sleep already.” I pelted him with a fry. “You’re twenty-seven. Almost as old as Saul. I’m pulling the weight in this geezer parade. You need your rest.”

  “Nineteen and already you don’t want my advice. They grow up so fast.
Like a stake through the heart. Sharper than a serpent’s tooth. Soon you won’t let me hug you in public anymore.”

  He was unbearably smug and I had no problem with tossing another fry at him. “Ass. I never let you hug me in public. We’re guys. Even Institute-trained know better than that. Did you ever hug anyone in the Mafiya?”

  “If by hug, you mean choke into unconsciousness . . . all the time. I’m not afraid of my emotions, Misha. Embrace yours.” The words were dripping with enough amused sarcasm that I knew there was no winning this one. I finished the last burrito, balled up the final paper sack, and headed for the microwave with my tool kit.

  “You’re a disgrace to mobsters and ex-mobsters everywhere.” I unplugged the unit, put it on the floor, sat next to it, and started to strip it down to its basic components. As I worked, I finally admitted, “But I’ll always listen to your advice. You know that, right?” Stefan had led me through almost three years as if I were blind, and basically I had been. The world had been an illusion inside the Institute. Stefan had been my guide through the reality of it; he’d taught me to be part of it. I wasn’t sure I’d have made it without him. Hell, I knew I wouldn’t have. I tossed the microwave door to one side and repeated, “You know that, right?”

  A quiet snore answered my question. I studied him for a moment, sprawled on the bed—a very dangerous man who was anything but that to me. The shadows of weariness stained his face. I got to my feet and walked over to him, my hand hovering over his chest. He was healthy and whole. I could feel that sensation running through me, tickling my nerve endings. He was fine. He needed rest; that was all. I went back to the microwave and kept working. A half hour later I was at the door. As soon as I turned the seventies-style knob, Stefan woke up. “Where you going?” he muttered, his hand moving in an automatic reach for the gun under his pillow.