by Jon McGoran
Still, every day at four thirty, my mom called to make sure I wasn’t burning the place down, to make her feel like she was a good parent, and to remind me that if I screwed up, I would have to stay with Aunt Trudy.
The call came right on time, a video call on the landline. When I was younger I had a personal web phone, but that was before the Cyber Wars. Then Russia and China and North Korea and everyone else—including the US—thought it would be a really good idea to send all these super viruses and killer malware at each other. The wars were brief and ended in a tie, pretty much, but they succeeded in making the Internet and the old cellular systems a useless tangle of garbage that collapsed under its own weight. Now mobile phones are for rich people, the Secure Web is for even richer people, and the richest people of all have networked computer implants in their skulls. Everyone else is out of luck.
“Hey, Mom,” I said.
“Hey, Champ,” she said unironically. “How was school?”
“Good.”
“What kind of homework do you have?”
I went through the list of classes and assignments, getting more and more depressed as I realized how much my evening was going to suck.
“Well, that doesn’t sound so bad,” she said when I was finished. Like she hadn’t been listening.
“Nope, not too bad.”
She took a deep breath and seemed to hold it. At this point in the conversation, she either told me how my brother was doing or she paused, waiting for me to ask.
“How’s Kevin doing?” I asked.
She smiled. “He’s doing great. Working hard so he doesn’t fall behind on his schoolwork and impressing the heck out of all the coaches.”
“Yay.” Maybe I didn’t put enough into it, because her smile faltered. Since I’d gone to the trouble of asking and all, I beefed up my own smile so she didn’t launch into one of her “Kevin” talks. I was in no mood for a “Kevin” talk.
She took a few minutes to tell me about some of Kevin’s most spectacular plays of the day, and when she could tell I’d had enough, she paused, trying to think of something else to talk about. As always, she failed.
“Okay, then,” she said with a wise nod. “You’re doing okay, right?” She never asked me how I was doing without letting me know what the answer was supposed to be.
“Doing fine, Mom.”
“Great. We’ll be home before you know it. And we’ll get back on track with those driving lessons, right?”
“Sounds good.”
“Love you, Jimi.”
“Love you too, Mom.”
The next few hours were peanut butter crackers followed by homework. I had been hoping to go for a run, but by the time I finished my homework, I was tired and it was late. I was making some mac and cheese with ham and peas for dinner when the shouting started up next door. Apparently, Del had come home. It began with a quick back-and-forth followed by a door slamming deep inside the house—too brief to be the end of it.
I found myself wishing I’d been more forceful with Del when I’d said he shouldn’t push back so much with his dad. Stan was getting crazier by the day, and I didn’t blame Del for sticking up for himself, but usually the way he did it made things worse.
Even before Del’s mom died, Del and Stan hadn’t known what to make of each other, but when we were younger and Stan was still working as a chemical engineer, he was always at the office. He got fired after Del’s mom died and he kept missing work. She was gone and Stan was unemployed and the two of them were stuck in that house. It was awful.
Then Stan got temporary work setting up illegal gas drills and liquefied coal wells out in the sticks. He’d be out of town for a week or two at a time and during the school year, he’d leave Del with us, which was cool. But in the summer, he would drag Del along, and that was even worse than when they were home.
Stan loved the work, partly because he got to go hunting while he was out there—even though there wasn’t really anything wild left to hunt. Del was miserable, though, being dragged off to all these little towns where he didn’t know anybody. He got a hard enough time from our classmates in the city, what with his amphibian fixation and his weird music. But some of those small-town kids would just tease him mercilessly.
He hated the hunting part, too. When he’d come home he’d entertain me with impersonations of Stan tiptoeing through the woods with his rifle. It was more Elmer Fudd than anything else, but I would laugh my butt off.
Stan didn’t think it was funny at all. He wasn’t supposed to see Del’s impressions, but a couple times he caught us, and then nobody would be laughing.
Del was relieved when Stan got the job as a cop in the zurbs, but at that point, they were already at each other’s throats.
By the time my mac and cheese was ready, Del and Stan were going back and forth again, louder and harsher than before. It reminded me of two gunfighters in an old Western movie, one going bang, bang, bang, then the other one going pow, pow, pow. Except the gunfight quickly escalated from six-shooters to machine guns, then bazookas and heavy artillery.
There was an ominous pause in the shouting and my shoulders tensed. In my mind I heard the cartoon whistle of a bomb falling from the sky, about to explode. What I actually heard was a jumble of sounds—furniture sliding, glass falling but not breaking, silverware hitting the floor.
Then I heard a scream.
SEVEN
Iran to the phone to call the police. Then I stopped, realizing how futile that would be. Stan might work out in the zurbs, but he was still police. Del was a troubled kid whom the other cops would never officially believe, even if they knew he was telling the truth. Besides, they would figure he probably did something to deserve it.
For the first time since she’d left, I wanted my mom.
I was weighing whether I should call her when Del’s screen door screeched and slammed. Then there he was, running across the grass toward my house. His face was wet and he had a dish towel wrapped around his left arm. There was blood on his shirt. I opened the door just as he got there. He didn’t slow down as he came in. Instead of running past me, though, he pushed into me, throwing his right arm around me, burying his face in my hair and sobbing.
I hugged him back, whispering “It’s okay” in his ear. I pulled him inside, far enough that I could kick the door closed, then I reached out and locked it. Just in case.
After a minute I pulled back and looked at his face.
“What happened?” I asked quietly.
His head was still down, but his eyes looked up at me, the tears replaced by a haunted look, full of pain and smoldering with anger.
“Stan killed Sydney.”
“He what?”
“He said he was done having a serpent in the house. He said something like, ‘Let’s see if he can regenerate this.’ Then he stomped on him and flushed him down the toilet.”
I put my hand over my mouth. “Oh Del.” Then I noticed blood seeping through the towel wrapped around his arm. “What happened to your arm?”
He kept his eyes locked on mine as he gingerly unwound the fabric, wincing as he pulled away the last bit. The tattoo was in bloody tatters.
I looked up at him. “He did this to you?”
“With a cheese grater,” he said, his voice croaky. His face was like stone except for a twitch in his eye. “He said it was blasphemy.”
I put my arm back around him and pulled him tight. It was clear that Stan had gone off the deep end. This situation was out of control.
Eventually Del put his hand on my shoulder and stepped back, until he was at arm’s length. His eyes met mine, and the weird thing was, he looked like he felt sorry for me. And it wasn’t just sympathy, there was a tiny hint of condescension as well. Like he’d learned some truth about life I wasn’t yet ready for. Like he was suddenly older and wiser than me.
Then it vanished as a hint of a smile pulled at the corner of his mouth. “You making mac and cheese?”
I nodded. “You hung
ry?”
He shook his head. “Not right now.”
“I should clean that,” I said, looking at his arm.
He shrugged, like it didn’t matter, but his eyes looked afraid. I couldn’t blame him. It was going to hurt.
We sat in the living room—him on the sofa, me on the floor, the reading lamp shining directly on his arm.
I gingerly peeled away the towel again, and before anything else, I doused his arm with numbing spray. A lot of numbing spray. I gently cleaned it with damp gauze, then gave it more numbing spray, just in case.
Three sets of gouges crisscrossed his arm, obliterating most of the tattoo. All that remained was the coiled tail. I shuddered, wondering what kind of man would do that to his own son, again and again.
I guess the spray worked, or maybe Del was tougher than I thought, because he kept it together the whole time. As I finished bandaging his arm, I noticed he was looking down at me with an odd smile.
“What?” I asked.
“Thanks,” he said softly.
His smile lingered. He looked like he wanted to say something important. Or do something.
His hand rested on my shoulder. I could feel its warmth spreading through my body. But I also felt awkward and self-conscious, and my head was spinning over what had just happened.
“We should eat something,” I said, looking down as I finished taping his bandage.
“Okay,” he said, and the moment dissipated.
Del might have said he wasn’t hungry, but he ate with gusto, holding his fork like a little kid and shoveling it in. “This is really good,” he said, his mouth full of food.
When we were done, we sat on the sofa with the Holovid on, but neither of us was really watching it. Del flicked through the channels absentmindedly and for some reason stopped on the local news, which was generally stupid and always depressing.
They led with the weather, then reported that the year was on a pace to break another record for global temperatures and sea level rise, the twenty-ninth time in the last forty years. They seemed almost excited about it, like they had a streak going and they wanted to see how long it would last.
After the weather was a story about a big Humans for Humanity march tomorrow. H4H was the anti-chimera group pushing GHA. They’d been around for years, long before splicing became a thing. Mr. Martinez told us H4H was originally started to oppose efforts by groups that were fighting to win legal rights, or personhood, for animals—meaning that animals had some kind of rights, so there was a distinction between, say, a chimpanzee and a brick, and limits to the messed-up things people could do to animals. The H4Hers tried to make it sound like these groups were trying to give animals the same rights as people, which they weren’t, and everyone knew it. So it was an obscure fight, and H4H remained an obscure group. Then, about ten years ago, when splicing really started to become a thing, this bazillionaire named Howard Wells took over and transformed H4H into an anti-chimera group—and a pro–Howard Wells group.
Not that Wells needed the publicity. He was already a household name. He’d founded a bunch of big companies, and the first one, WellPharm, was one of the biggest drug manufacturers in the country. But he really got famous when he got into tech. He created Well-Plant, which made super-expensive high-tech implants that securely streamed music, data, voice, and text; recorded video; and performed high-level computing, like the Secure Web on steroids, all inside your skull. Very cool stuff, if you could afford it.
Also very creepy, if you asked me.
It was Wells who came up with the idea for GHA, which said that once someone got spliced, once their DNA was anything less than one hundred point zero zero zero zero percent human, they were no longer legally a person.
That was crazy. I mean, if I squinted really hard, I could kind of see where Wells and H4H were coming from—splice in enough animal genes and at some point, maybe someone wasn’t entirely human anymore—but saying that anybody who had any kind of splice is no longer a person? Saying they deserved to be discriminated against? That was just wrong. I might have thought splicing was idiotic, but I didn’t hate chimeras.
The H4Hers really, really did, though. They blamed chimeras for everything that was wrong with the world—crime, unemployment, disease, and more—all totally made up and based on nothing.
The whole GHA thing was so out there that no one took it seriously at first. But late this past summer, against all predictions, Wells’s buddies got it passed in the Pennsylvania state house. Suddenly, bills just like GHA were being introduced all over—and H4H was a big deal across the country. So was Wells.
He seemed to be enjoying the notoriety. His face was everywhere—tanned and handsome, with his signature shiny black WellPlant embedded over his left eye. He was already a hugely successful businessman, but the pundits were speculating that as the leader of H4H, Wells seemed to have set his sights on something else. A lot of people thought he was going to run for governor, or even president.
The Holovid cut to a packed church basement where people were making signs and singing songs. The reporter, a young woman in a purple dress, was pressing her earpiece tightly against her head as she stood next to a guy in a white H4H shirt and a matching hat.
“I’m reporting live from Church of the Eternal Truth, where Humans for Humanity is gearing up for tomorrow’s march. With me is Philadelphia H4H chapter president Gus Joyner. Mr. Joyner, can you tell us why tomorrow’s rally is so important to you?”
Joyner was nodding the whole time she was talking, like he couldn’t wait to say his piece. He looked intelligent enough, but his eyes had an odd gleam. “We’re going to show the governor, and the whole world, that we are not going to rest until we have saved humanity from the ungodly taint of chimeras ruining our way of life.” He pronounced chimeras with a sh sound instead of a k sound.
“I believe they’re called kimeras,” the reporter said, correcting him.
Joyner scowled at her and pulled the microphone back. “These mixies are thieves and vandals. They spread disease. Look at the flu that killed millions, right at the same time this whole splicing thing began.”
This time the reporter pulled the microphone back, looking into the camera with a forced smile. “Of course, we all know that scientists have proven the virus from the flu pandemic originated decades before the splicing phenomenon began, so there is absolutely no connection between the two.”
Joyner put his face next to hers and shouted, “And they’re a burden on taxpayers and they’re an abomination before God!”
“Man, that guy’s really off the rails,” Del said as the guy kept going.
“Yup,” I said. “But look at that crowd. There’s a lot of people out there who feel the same way he does.”
When they finally cut back to the studio, the anchor segued to a report on the status of the Genetic Heritage Act along with a holo-clip of Howard Wells appearing at the state capitol with a bunch of his H4H pals from the legislature.
Del was getting worked up watching it, especially when the anchor-woman explained that while it was highly unlikely he would sign it, the governor could receive the GHA legislation as early as that week.
I took the remote away from him and changed the channel until I found an old Batman movie that was just starting. Del gave me a dubious look, but we watched the movie in silence, letting it calm us both down.
Halfway into it, I turned to him and asked, “What are you going to do?”
Del rubbed the bridge of his nose and sighed. “I’ll think of something,” he said. “Next year I’ll be eighteen, and I can move out. It’s not so far away.” He glanced in the direction of his house, his father. His eyes flared hot for a moment. Then they came back to meet mine. “I’ll be fine.”
I glanced at his arm, then looked back at the Holovid.
The way his dad was getting, I couldn’t see Del lasting another year in that house. But I didn’t have any other ideas, either. It wasn’t like Stan would let him just move in with u
s, even if that were an option.
Del leaned forward to take off his boots. When he sat back, he was right up next to me. Touching.
I could feel the heat coming off him. We sat there, eyes ahead, pretending to watch the movie. He rested his hand on mine, and I let him.
EIGHT
I woke up slowly with a feeling of warmth and security that was slowly penetrated by the strangely distant sound of my alarm. With a jolt, I realized that it was morning and I was in the wrong place. Del’s arm was around me, and my head was on his chest. The clock on the mantel said seven twenty. I jumped up with a yelp. “Crap!”
Del jumped up, too, startled and confused.
“We fell asleep,” I said, pointing at the clock.
He raised a hand to rub his eyes, but winced at the pain, then looked at his arm, at the bandage around it. He stared at me for a second, thinking, then looked down at the bloodstain on the front of his shirt. “I need a clean shirt,” he said.
We both looked out the window. Stan’s car was gone. I was surprised he hadn’t come over at some point, banging on the door and demanding Del come home. Maybe he was freaked out about what he’d done, figured he needed to cool off or give Del time to get over it.
“Okay, go get one,” I said. “I’m going to brush my teeth. We can still make the bus.”
Del half smiled, like maybe he was relieved but disappointed. Then he nodded. “I’ll meet you at the bus stop. But if I’m late, don’t wait for me.”
I cocked my head at him. “We’ve got time,” I said. “Just hurry up and grab your stuff.”
I brushed my teeth, splashed water on my face, tied back my hair, and changed into fresh clothes. Four minutes later I was standing on the grass between our houses, looking at my watch and waiting for Del to come out. He didn’t. I waited. And I worried.
The mail drone zipped by, high overhead. No packages for the Merricks today. I heard the bus approaching, then passing by.