by Jon McGoran
“Hello?” I called again, louder. There was no answer. To my right, the stairs ascended into shadows. As I went through to the dining room, I could see a chemlight stick on a windowsill in the kitchen. A torn net curtain stirred in the breeze coming through a cracked window, making the light dance around.
“Del?” I called out, taking another step toward the kitchen.
Empty plastic bottles littered the countertop. The sink was full of dirty beakers, and plastic bags and tubing with traces of liquid tinged with red, like something mixed with blood.
I had just stepped into the kitchen when a raspy voice behind me said, “What are you doing here?”
I jumped and turned. A figure stood in the shadows of the living room, some sort of chimera. I didn’t know if it had followed me in or come down the stairs. I hadn’t heard a thing. Squinting, I could make out its shape, but I couldn’t quite tell what it had been spliced with. For a horrible instant I thought it was Del, but I knew it wasn’t. This one seemed somehow ancient.
“I’m looking for my friend,” I told him, trying hard to keep my voice steady.
He moved closer, tall and broad, but stooped to one side. His skin was patchy, but in the dim light I couldn’t tell if it was scales or fur or something else. “Del? He’s not here,” he said, stepping forward again. His face was hideous and covered with growths. It got worse when he smiled. “He was here. But he’s gone.”
“Did he get . . . spliced?”
“Not here.”
“Do you know where he went?”
“Nah.” He took another step toward me. “My name’s Simon,” he said. “I could be your friend.”
“No, I better go.” I stepped backward, away from him, further into the kitchen. The back door had a two-by-four nailed across it. I was trapped. Simon seemed to know it, too. His smile grew, and he licked his bumpy lips with a bumpy tongue.
“But you just got here.” He was already blocking the doorway to the dining room, inching closer, looming over me. I scanned the counter for a knife, a weapon of any kind. There was nothing.
Most of the drawers were open, and even in the murky light I could see they were empty. The one right next to me was closed, and I realized my one dim hope was that there was something in it I could use as a weapon. I reached out to yank open the drawer, but Simon slammed it with the back of his fist, splintering the wood. I jumped to my right to slip around him, but he stepped in front of me, laughing.
“Come here, little one,” he rasped softly, looking down at me, blocking the light.
Then a large hand clamped onto the back of his neck, and he vanished.
I heard a crash as he landed hard in the dining room. I couldn’t move at first; I was just trying to catch my breath. I heard scrambling coming from the other room, then that raspy voice muttering curses, countered by a low, rumbling growl. There was a heavy, muffled thud followed by quiet. A moment later a different massive figure stood in the doorway. It was one of the chimeras from the squat that first morning, the dog or wolf, the one who seemed to be in charge.
“Are you okay?” he said, his voice so deep I could feel it in my chest again.
I nodded.
“I’m Rex,” he said.
“Jimi.”
He nodded, then stepped out of the way. “Let’s get out of here.”
“He’ll be fine,” Rex said as he led me back through the dining room. I was staring at Simon, lying in a heap on the floor. “He’ll have a headache when he wakes up. That’s all.”
I started to shake as we stepped through the front door. There’d been a moment when I didn’t think I’d make it back out. A breeze picked up, and I realized I was soaked with sweat. I turned to Rex. “Thanks,” I said. “For in there.”
He nodded. “What were you doing?”
“Looking for a friend.”
“Del,” he said.
I looked up at him and nodded. “Do you know where he is?”
He shook his head.
“Someone told me he was going to get spliced around here,” I told him.
“And you were trying to stop him?”
I nodded. “No offense.”
He shrugged. “It’s not for everyone. Let’s get you back to the city.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. The panic from being threatened by Simon was still subsiding, but having seen the squalor and the horror of what could happen, the panic about finding Del returned ten times worse. “I have to find Del.”
Rex took a deep breath and looked down at me as he slowly let it out. “I can look around, see if I can find him.”
“Really?” I studied his face in the moonlight. It still didn’t seem entirely human. But it was close. Standing this near to him, I saw in his eyes a strength and compassion I hadn’t noticed before. I didn’t know him, and he was one of them, but I felt I could trust him.
He nodded. “But you have to promise me you won’t do anything stupid like go into a house like that on your own again. Maybe Simon was messing with you, but probably not.”
“Okay, understood. So where are we going?”
“I’m going to ask around. You’re going to go home.”
“No, I need to find Del. Now, before it’s too late.”
“You need to go home. So when I find him, I can find you.”
“Where are you going to look?”
“I know people you don’t know.”
“Why can’t I come with you?”
He sighed. “Because you just can’t.”
“But you don’t even know where I live!”
He smiled. “Like I said, I’ll find you.”
“But I’ll be at school tomorrow, and then I’m going to stay with my aunt in Perkins Park. I don’t even know where.”
“Hardly anyone lives in Perkins Park anymore. I’ll find you. As soon as I know anything.”
“Del hasn’t thought this through—”
He held up a hand. “That’s a conversation you can have with him.”
I nodded reluctantly.
He gestured toward the Avenue, then we both started walking. I felt a lot safer with him towering over me than I had on my own.
“I heard what you did this morning,” he said as we approached the Avenue. “With Ruth. And with that cop. You saved them both.”
I guessed Ruth was the bird chimera. “Well, I don’t know—”
“I should have been there,” he said, his voice solemn.
We walked the last twenty yards without speaking. When we got to the Avenue I turned and said, “Well, thanks again—”
But he was already gone.
FOURTEEN
I was a little old for imaginary friends, but as I stood there on the wedge of concrete between the darkened zurb streets and the blurred wall of speeding traffic, I wondered if I had a new one.
Something about Rex’s presence had made me trust him, but now that he was gone, that trust was wearing off. Maybe it was because I knew he couldn’t trust me. Despite what I’d told him, I had every intention to keep looking for Del. The only problem, I realized, was that I had no idea where else to look.
I wondered if I should tell Stan what was going on. But then what? He had already disowned Del, and after what he had done over a stupid tattoo, I couldn’t imagine what he’d do if he knew Del was getting a splice.
I racked my brain, trying to think of any kind of lead, but there was nothing. Only Rex.
The traffic stopped as the crossing light turned green. I looked around one last time. Then I ran home, trying to keep ahead of all the images of the horrible things that could be happening to Del. I didn’t slow down until I burst through the back door and into the kitchen, slamming into the jarringly normal scene of my mom cooking dinner.
She looked at me suspiciously. “Long run,” she said, dicing celery for some chicken dish she liked to make.
I hated cooked celery.
“Yeah,” I said, extra sullen. It was bad enough she was sending me to live with Au
nt Trudy—now she was feeding me cooked celery.
I slipped through the kitchen, and by the time she said, “You know, I’m only—” I was heading up the stairs.
When I was safely in my room, I put on my headphones and opened my biology textbook. Then I took out a notebook and pretended to study while I tried to come up with a list of places Del could be, people who might know where he was, things I could do to find him.
My mom knocked on the door, like I knew she would. I ignored her, and when she opened the door I lifted one headphone and looked up at her, annoyed.
She looked like she wanted to say something, but I wasn’t in the mood to help her get it out. “Dinner’s in ten,” she said finally.
I nodded and let the headphone clamp back onto my ear.
Then I looked down at my notebook. Apart from a few hundred little dots from where I’d been tapping the pen, the only mark on the page was the word Rex. I added the words Sly, Ryan, Ruth, and after a long pause, Simon. I didn’t expect help from any of them—definitely not Simon—but those names were the only leads I had.
Kevin opened my bedroom door without knocking, his eyes narrowing as I quickly flipped the notebook closed.
“Food time,” he said.
When I got downstairs, I was relieved to discover that Malik was eating with us. Malik was almost as much of a meathead as Kevin, but the two of them talking nonstop took the pressure off my mom and me.
They ate twice as fast as I did, but three times as much. They were on their fourth helpings when I declared I was finished and asked to be excused. My plate was empty apart from the discarded celery. I was determined to get out of the room before I was stuck in there alone with my mom.
“Sure, honey,” she said, looking at me with a pained expression that I found gratifying. “You need to get your stuff ready for tomorrow,” she added quietly.
Kevin and Malik stared at me, mumbling and snickering. I felt a momentary, overwhelming hatred for them, and then the mortifying threat of tears.
As I turned to go, my mom said, “There’s a suitcase in the—”
“I have a suitcase,” I said.
“It’s just a couple weeks,” she called after me.
When I got to my room, I closed the door and sat with my back against it. And I let the tears come. When they finally stopped, I felt like all the energy had been drained out of me and replaced with sadness. I couldn’t find my suitcase, but I had a couple totes and a duffel bag. They would do.
As I dug them out from under my bed, I tried to recall what I could of Aunt Trudy. I mostly had vague impressions of her from when I was younger. She had seemed nice, although a little goofy. I remember her trying to cheer me up after my dad’s funeral, back at the house, after Del and Nina had left. She cornered me in the back room and we talked about my dad for a bit. Then she insisted we talk about something else, asking me what toys and movies I liked. Somehow, she got me to laugh, just for a minute. Then she was out of the picture again, until she moved back to Pennsylvania a year ago and came over for that awful dinner. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what had made it so awkward, but I took a guilty pleasure in wondering if maybe my Mom just had that effect on people.
I packed up my school stuff, then moved on to clothes. Once I had all the practical stuff taken care of, I grabbed my favorite blanket. It was a microthermal soft fleece my dad had gotten me when we lost power for a week and had to camp out in the living room. He taught us a card game called Casino, and I remember playing for hours and hours wrapped in that blanket, feeling safe and warm while laughing at my dad’s stupid jokes.
Next, I took the bobblehead snowman Del had given me a few Christmases ago. And finally, I grabbed the family photo from when I was seven that I kept on my dresser.
I took a long look at it. Things had changed so much since then. My mom had been young and easygoing and happy. Kevin had been rambunctious instead of obnoxious. I was laughing in the photo—I laughed a lot back then. And my dad was so . . . alive. Six months later, he’d be gone.
A lot of people died that flu season. It was the last of the bad ones, but far from the worst. Ten years earlier there were a few that killed way more people. It was kind of weird when the subject of the flu epidemic came up in school, with everyone turning to look at the kids who’d lost someone. Part of me always wanted to hide under my desk when it happened, but part of me also wanted to stand on my desk and shout about what a great guy my dad had been.
It was hard to think about the epidemic objectively, but our teachers talked about it all the time, trying to get us to understand how much it had changed everything, in addition to taking away people we loved.
The worst of the outbreaks hit right when the seasonal storms were getting especially bad—torrents of rain in the spring, summer, and fall; tons of snow and ice in the winter. Everyone was running out of power, and the storms were bringing down more and more of the old utility lines every week. Fortunately, there was already a huge program in place to install super-expensive, super-efficient power transmission lines, the Super-E. I could vaguely remember utility workers digging up streets all around Philadelphia to get us connected.
The plan was to wire major cities across the country, and then get the zurbs squared away. But suddenly, there was no money left to do it.
Everyone was broke after the flu epidemic, and the real estate market crashed all over because there were so many houses available from people who died. But on top of that, all the rain and the rising water levels meant that a lot of the low-lying zurbs were constantly flooded. With the Super-E installation stalled at the edge of the city, the people who could afford it started just walking away from their homes in the zurbs and buying houses in the city, where there was not only electricity but working pumps to keep the flooding down.
As home prices rose in urban areas, they dropped even further in the zurbs. Suddenly, houses there were truly worthless. People abandoned whole neighborhoods.
Mr. Martinez said there was never an actual policy decision to cut off the zurbs, to leave them off the Super-E grid, but by the time they had the money to consider expanding the grid, the zurbs were pretty much empty. It just didn’t make sense. Some people did stay behind, making a go of it with solar and stuff, but they still couldn’t sell their houses. Even the ones in good shape were surrounded by so many empties, nobody wanted them. Aunt Trudy probably paid next to nothing for her place in Perkins Park.
I remembered my parents driving us through the zurbs when I was still pretty young. Things hadn’t gotten horrible yet. There were grownups washing their cars and gardening, and kids playing football and skateboarding in the streets. Hard to imagine that was the same place I had been walking through with Del.
I pictured Del, first as the little kid who used to come to the beach with us, then as the boy who that very morning had rewired my brain with a kiss. Now, just hours later, he was an emotionally damaged missing person, out there chasing a terrible mistake while I lay in my bed, unable to do anything to help him. Unable to do anything but hope that Rex could come through for me again, hope that he would find Del, hope that I could somehow save Del from his own self-destructive tendencies. I wondered if I’d ever see either one of them again.
I heaved a big sigh, then lay back on my bed and fell asleep, still holding the picture.
I awoke to my mom gently taking off my shoes. She smiled sadly when I opened my eyes. She tucked me into bed, and I let her. Then I went to sleep for real.
FIFTEEN
The next day, as I waited for the bus, I was half hoping Del would show up, too. When the bus arrived and he still hadn’t, the anxiety I had been holding at bay came over me in a wave. I didn’t want to get on, but I didn’t know what else to do.
I was supposed to be waiting to hear from Rex, waiting for some kind of lead. But what if I never heard anything? What if he couldn’t find me at Aunt Trudy’s? What if Rex was as gone as Del?
I found an empty seat and put my forehea
d against the window. As we drove, I realized the bus was taking the longer detour around the missing bridge, staying inside the city. A figure on the sidewalk caught my eye. It was a chimera, and he seemed to be in bad shape. He was dirty and disheveled. His coat was in tatters. He looked part bird or maybe some kind of reptile. His body and face were oddly asymmetrical. He looked older, too. I wondered if he was one of the early ones, or if he’d been older when he got spliced. Or if his splice had just made him that way.
It would be bad enough if Del became a chimera, but what if he ended up like that? Things did go wrong. All the time. It was still unusual to see chimeras walking around, and in less than twenty-four hours, I’d seen Simon and this guy, two chimeras with messed-up splices. Just like in all the cautionary tales. And even if Del didn’t actually end up getting spliced, there were a lot of shady things that could still happen. I’d heard stories of people getting rolled, robbed, left for dead, all sorts of stuff, by real genies and by scam artists pretending to be genies.
I craned my neck to watch the chimera as we drove by and came up with the best plan I could. Rex seemed truly willing to help me, but I hadn’t heard from him. So I’d give him today. If he didn’t make contact, I’d sneak away from Aunt Trudy’s. Try to find Sly and Ryan. See if they’d heard anything since our little encounter yesterday. And if I couldn’t find them, well, I’d just keep looking on my own.
I felt better having a plan, but it made the day drag on even more. It didn’t help that the kids and the teachers all seemed to be looking at me funny and acting weird. After lunch the vice principal sent for me. Generally speaking, Mr. Sciorra wasn’t so bad. He tried to be intimidating—and as the school’s disciplinarian, he was supposed to be—but he wasn’t fooling anyone.
“Dymphna Corcoran,” he said when I walked in. He appeared to be showing off that he knew my full name, even though he had my file right there in front of him.
“Jimi,” I corrected him.
He motioned to the chair in front of his desk and I sat down. “That’s quite a name. Dymphna.”