by Jon McGoran
I watched him walk up to the parking lot. When he disappeared around the front of the store, I let out a deep sigh. I could feel my shoulders slump.
I’d let myself hope Stan would act like a decent human being for once, that he would save Del and I would get my friend back. Now I didn’t see how that was going to happen. I turned and looked back at Del. With his pale gray skin and bloody lips, he looked like a clown from a bad horror movie. His breathing had quieted, so shallow now that it didn’t seem enough to keep him alive.
I was just turning back when Rex yanked open the door and jumped in. He didn’t say a word, just jammed the accelerator hard. His seat rocked back and he almost lost control of the car.
“What are you doing?” I said as he regained control.
“How’s he holding up?” he asked, ignoring my question and glancing back at Del.
“I don’t know,” I said quietly. But I did know. He was dying.
We drove in silence for a few minutes as I chewed on my thumb and tried to figure out what to do. Even if I could get in touch with my mom, I couldn’t see her giving me a thousand dollars to take Del to some sketchy garage somewhere or wherever this fixer was. She’d insist on taking Del to the hospital, for sure. I thought about asking Aunt Trudy. She seemed like the kind of person who might, but for all I knew, she was aware I’d been out all last night and had been freaking out, wondering where I was since morning. She could have a kitchen full of police and my mom, all frantically trying to figure out where I was and if I was okay.
I felt a sudden jolt of anger at Del. I knew he was suffering, and with Stan and everything I knew he’d been suffering long before the splice. But this all happened because he’d been an inconsiderate jerk. That whole thing with the cop, and now with the splice itself. He wasn’t just hurting himself, he was hurting other people. He was hurting me, that was for sure. And he was making me hurt other people too.
I took a deep, guilty breath and put those thoughts aside. There would be plenty of time to be mad at Del later. Right now, I needed to make sure he survived.
It occurred to me that Nina Tanaka might have access to the kind of money we needed. I was trying to sort through the massive jumble of reasons why that wouldn’t work, or at least not in time, when we crossed the Avenue out of the city again. A few blocks later, we pulled into the parking lot of an abandoned strip mall on a narrow triangle of land halfway between my house and Aunt Trudy’s.
It looked deserted, except for a faint light spilling from a back room in one store. “What are we doing here?”
Rex unfolded himself from the car and lifted Del out of the backseat. This time, he was totally slack.
“What are we doing?” I asked.
Rex didn’t reply, just started walking Del across the parking lot. I hurried to keep up with him.
“Rex, what are we doing?” I said again.
“We’re trying to save your friend, okay? We’re trying to get his splice fixed.”
We were approaching the storefront with the light in the back. Rex pulled the door open and called, “Doctor Guzman?”
He waited a second, listening, then called louder, “Doc?”
I heard a soft shuffling sound and saw movement in the light coming from the back. I thought about Simon, and my imagination conjured up a huge, horrible, misshapen creature.
A thin voice called out weakly, “Is that Rex?”
“Here for a favor, Doc,” Rex replied. “I think time is a bit of an issue.”
Guzman was a tiny man with large glasses and thinning, disheveled hair. He wore a lab coat over scrubs, but it looked like a bathrobe over pajamas. He waved us back, and we followed him through a ratty seating area with half a dozen chimeras, some looking sick, none looking happy. Everyone ignored us except for a girl with cheetah spots in her hair and a cluster of inflamed, painful-looking whiskers growing out of her face. She looked up at us, somehow both bored and anxious. The room reeked of regret.
We kept going, into another room in the way-back, this one bigger, with high ceilings, like a warehouse. There was a row of barber chairs, as well as old-looking medical machines and other equipment. A second-floor loft looked out over the whole thing.
Rex slid Del into one of the barber chairs.
“Eesh,” said Guzman, pushing his glasses up his nose and wrinkling his face at Del. “Who did this?”
“Malcolm,” Rex replied. His voice was thick with disdain.
Guzman looked up and poked a finger at Rex. “He’s a menace, that guy. He shouldn’t be allowed to practice.” He looked in Del’s eyes, felt his pulse. “I mean, what is this? What is this supposed to be?”
“A salamander,” I said softly.
He looked at me now, as if seeing me for the first time. “A salamander? Who the hell wants to be a salamander? And where does Malcolm get off thinking he’s ready for something like that? He can barely do birds, for Pete’s sake.”
He pulled open one of the drawers and started rooting around in it. “I can give you the friends-and-family discount, Rex, you know that, but I can’t do this for free anymore. You know that too, right?”
Rex nodded and pulled a wad of cash out of his pocket.
“Where did you get that?” I whispered.
Guzman turned and paused, like he was waiting to see what the answer was.
Rex scowled and wouldn’t look at me. “I called in a debt.”
“Thanks,” I said quietly.
Guzman took the money. He gave it a good look, roughly counting it, then he put it in his pocket and turned back to the drawer. He put a series of vials on the counter, then a handful of plastic-wrapped syringes.
“How long has it been?” he asked.
“Thirty-six hours,” Rex said. “Give or take.”
Guzman paused and gave him a disapproving look, then he shook his head. He stripped open one of the syringes, poked it into one of the vials, and held it up as he pulled the plunger.
“This is just a little cocktail of vitamins, stimulants, a few other things, wake him up a bit and give him enough strength so he’ll survive the rest of it—I hope.”
He tapped the syringe and wiped Del’s arm with an alcohol swab, then jabbed the needle in and pushed down the plunger.
Del took a deep breath that seemed to inflate his entire body. He raised his eyebrows and shook his head, like he’d sniffed smelling salts. But he didn’t open his eyes.
Guzman stood over him, looking concerned. Then took his pulse and looked at his eyes again. “This one’s in bad shape. You’re getting a great price,” he said as he crossed the room. “Better than friends-and-family.” He hit a switch on the wall and looked up at the loft, where a rectangular platform the size of a bed had begun to descend, gently swaying on its chains. As it got lower, I could see it had a clear plastic bubble over it.
“What is that?” Rex asked.
“Just got it,” Guzman said. “Lucky for your friend over there. It’s a hyperbaric bed.”
“A what?”
“For oxygen therapy?” I said.
He pointed at me. “Exactly. Very smart. Some of these poor schmucks are so weak, they don’t have the strength to change back. Like your friend here. Fifteen minutes in here can make all the difference.”
When the platform reached the floor, Guzman opened the clear plastic bubble top and motioned for Rex to put Del inside. Rex glanced at me as he did so, and I shrugged.
Guzman closed the lid over Del, then hit the same switch. The platform shuddered slightly with the added weight, creaking as it rose back up to the loft. Guzman climbed a metal ladder, reaching the top the same time Del did. He had to extend his arms through the metal railing to attach a pair of hoses to the side of the unit. He flicked a couple of switches on a panel on the wall and the hoses jumped and stiffened, filling with oxygen.
Guzman checked a couple dials, then shrugged and climbed back down.
“So what now?” Rex asked.
“I’ll give him twenty
in there, I guess. Then we’ll see if we can get started.” He turned to me. “You want a magazine or anything?”
I shook my head.
“Suit yourself. I have other patients to take care of, if you two want to make yourselves comfortable in the waiting area.”
I couldn’t imagine possibly feeling comfortable in that waiting area. Just then there was a banging at the front door and Guzman paused, his head tilted as he listened.
He craned his head to look down the hallway to the front. Flashing red and blue lights reflected along the walls.
“Aw, nuts,” he said, turning to us. “This will only take a moment.”
Rex looked at the back door, and then at me. “We’ll wait out back.”
THIRTY
Guzman hooked an arm around each of us and propelled us out the back exit.
Rex was looking over his shoulder as we hustled. It was the first time I’d seen anything remotely like fear in his eyes. That was frightening in and of itself.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“It’s just the police,” Guzman said. “Shouldn’t be a problem. Maybe the check bounced. Just give me a few minutes to clear it up.”
He opened the back door, and then we were outside in a dark alley. The door closed behind us. The flashing lights from out front reflected on the treetops at either end of the alley.
I felt trapped. “I don’t like this,” I said.
I expected Rex to tell me it was nothing. Instead, he said, “Me neither.” At one end of the alley, across the street, a cluster of evergreens crowded around a dilapidated garage. “Let’s wait over there,” he said. “Just in case.”
We hurried down the alley toward a stand of trees, and just as we pushed our way into the dense evergreens, a police cruiser roared up the alleyway, followed by a van. A pair of cops jumped out of each, right where we had been standing. One of the cops looked familiar—even from where we crouched I could see the scar across his nose and the WellPlant over his eye.
“That’s Cantrell,” I said. “The one who shocked Ruth and Pell. The one Del attacked.”
Rex’s face darkened, and I could feel him tense, but he stayed where he was.
The cops ran up to the back door and a rectangle of yellow light spilled out as they entered the building.
From our vantage point, we could see the police car parked out front, as well. None of them still had their flashing lights on.
“What are they doing?” I whispered to Rex.
“Don’t know. Fixing’s not technically illegal. I’ve never heard of fixers getting busted. Even the ones with Dumpsters full of . . . errors.”
I felt sick at the thought that Del could end up in the back of a trash truck somewhere. Rex seemed to read my expression.
He shook his head. “Don’t worry. Guzman doesn’t look like much, but he’s one of the best.”
A couple of seconds later, the cheetah from the waiting room sprinted out the back door with another girl. They were fast, but not fast enough. Cantrell came out a half second behind them, a stun gun in his hand. He fired twice and they both dropped, hitting the ground hard, their arms at their sides instead of extended to break their falls. As Cantrell cuffed their hands and feet with plastic ties, I felt a burning in my chest as I realized I was partly responsible for this. I tried not to think about how different things would be if I had just left him in the creek.
One of the other cops came out and opened the back of the van. Cantrell hauled in the cheetah girl and her friend. A moment later, a third cop walked Guzman out in cuffs, his glasses bent and a trickle of blood coming down the side of his face.
They put him in the back of the patrol car. Then they marched out the chimeras from the waiting room. Some looked unsteady as they were loaded into the back of the police van, like they’d been shocked.
The patrol car with Guzman in it started moving, coming down the alley straight toward us.
“Get down,” Rex said, his voice quiet but urgent.
As we ducked down into the brush, the headlights lit up the branches above our heads. The approaching patrol car sounded like it was going to drive right into the trees and run us over, but at the last second, the headlights swept to the left as the car turned and sped away.
We got back up and saw the remaining cops still standing around, joking and laughing.
They closed the front and back doors and put crime-scene tape across both. Then the van drove away, and the cruiser out front did too.
I turned to Rex. “Where’s Del?”
He shook his head. “They must have missed him.”
“We need to get him out of there. I mean, we need to find someone else to help him, but also he was only supposed to be in that chamber for twenty minutes. I don’t know what’ll happen if he stays in too long.”
“Wait here,” he said as he got up. But I needed to know Del was okay. Rex gave me a dubious look as I followed him out of the bushes, but he didn’t try to stop me.
We slowed as we approached the place, looking around warily, listening for any approaching police vehicles. Our eyes met as we reached the back door, now sealed with police tape. Rex tried the knob anyway, but it was locked. He checked the front, but that was locked and taped too.
That left the rusty fire escape in the back. The ladder hung eight feet off the ground. Rex reached above his head and pulled it down with a screech of tortured metal. When he stepped on the first rung, it let out an ominous groan. I gently pushed him out of the way and started up.
It held my weight, but it still creaked. I looked down, wondering how hard I’d hit if the thing collapsed. At the top I climbed onto a small sub roof. There was a window, open about an inch.
I looked down at Rex, so far away he appeared almost normal-sized. He gave me a thumbs-up, and I returned it halfheartedly.
The window opened easily at first but got stuck a third of the way up and wouldn’t budge after that. I took a deep breath and then exhaled, making myself as small as possible. Then I wriggled my shoulders through and slid the rest of the way, tumbling onto the floor inside.
I was in a small office. As my eyes adjusted, I could make out the outline of a door. I pushed it open and found myself standing on the loft overlooking the room with the barber chairs, where Guzman had given Del the injection. A lantern was still lit downstairs, and in the light coming up from it, I could see the hyperbaric bed gently swaying on its chains beside the loft.
The plastic bubble was clouded with condensation. I reached for it through the railing, but my hands were sweaty and frantic, and the more I fumbled with the lid, the worse the swaying grew. Finally, I got the thing open. But it was empty.
THIRTY-ONE
How could it be empty?” Rex asked when I opened the back door and told him what I’d found.
“I don’t know, but it is. Del’s not in the chamber, and I don’t see him anywhere else. Maybe between the injection and the hyperbaric bed, he regained enough strength to escape.”
Rex shook his head. “We would have seen him.”
“Maybe the police got him.”
“We would have seen that too.”
We searched the place again more thoroughly, the three rooms on the first floor, the loft, the office, and a tiny out-of-order bathroom upstairs. We discovered a half-hidden door to a basement, which was pretty creepy, but all we found was a bunch of dirt and a battery generator with cables running upstairs.
With each empty hiding place, I could feel myself getting more and more frantic. I’d gone through so much to find Del, to save him. I’d come too close to have him snatched away again. But the longer we searched, the more that reality became undeniable. Del was gone.
“So what do we do now?” I demanded, after we had double-checked everywhere. We were standing outside the front door, both of us looking around, as if maybe we would just find him lying on the pavement out there.
Rex shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ll ask around—”
“
Ask around? Rex, he’s dying! We need to find him now.”
He held up his hands as if to defend himself. He opened his mouth to speak, but instead let out an empty sigh that deflated us both.
There’d been so much action and excitement and tension, all of it focused on saving Del, and now he was gone. It wasn’t just that I didn’t know what to do—after losing him, finding him, and now losing him again, I didn’t know what to think or feel, either. I was exhausted.
“Sorry,” I said. “I appreciate everything you’ve done. It’s more than anyone could ask.”
“It’s not that,” he said. “I just . . . I don’t know what to do next.” He looked around the parking lot again, as if checking one last time. Then he looked back at me. “Maybe we should go back to his dad. He’s a cop; he might have some pull.”
“No,” I said. “He wouldn’t help before, and he’s not going to help now. He said Del was dead to him. I don’t think those were just words. Besides, the police are already looking for Del because of what happened the other morning. Knowing he needs their help isn’t going to make them look any harder.”
Rex closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
“Do you know any other fixers we could take him to?” I asked. “Like Guzman?”
He let out a sigh. “I know of a couple. I could try to get in touch with them, but it’ll take some doing. And it’s not going to do any good if we don’t have Del.”
“I’ll find him.”
“How?”
“I’ll start checking the hospitals. The way he looked, that’s where he’s going to end up. Either the police will take him there or someone else will. If the police took him, they might not even know who he is. He could just be some John Doe.”
“What are you going to do if you find him?”
“When I find him, we’ll get him out and bring him to another fixer.”
Rex nodded slowly, like he was willing to go along but he didn’t for a moment think it would work. “Okay. I’ll reach out to the fixers I know. But Jimi, it’s all I can do for now. I have to find Ryan and Ruth too.”