Chimera

by Rob Thurman

  “What about Wendy?”

  “Wendy’s the first of her kind.” Weariness peeled his face like an apple, leaving pale vulnerability in plain sight. “She’s the only one of us who doesn’t need to touch. For her they keep tranquilizer darts, and even that might not work. But Wendy likes it there, and she likes what she’s being groomed to do. She doesn’t kill because they make her. She kills because she wants to.”

  It was a grim end to an even grimmer conversation. I had more questions, but they could wait. Michael had had enough for the night whether he realized it or not. “Yeah? Well, I like what I can do too. And that’s boss your scrawny butt around.” Standing, I picked up the pair of sweatpants he liked to sleep in. He had laid them out with anal-retentive neatness on the bed in preparation for bed. I wadded them in hand and tossed them in his direction. “Bedtime.”

  He caught them as he wavered between dignity and indignation. “I’m not a child.”

  But he was, and one so wounded that I was amazed he managed to be the bright, inquisitive, and fundamentally good person he was.

  “Would my hanging you by your ankles until you begged for mercy prove any different?” I grinned wickedly.

  “You wouldn’t dare.” He meant it too. He still harbored the suspicion that at some level I feared what he could do to me if he chose. As if he would do to me what he refused to do to those who tried to attack him. In so many ways he was damned brilliant, but in other ways he had serious catching up to do. Trusting me and trusting himself—he’d get there. I’d make sure of it.

  I didn’t actually have to follow through on the threat. Once I was close enough to swipe at his ankles, he gave in and went to get ready for bed. His heavy step was enough to let me know the push had been necessary. He wouldn’t admit it, but talking about his friend—perhaps the only friend he had ever known—had taken a lot out of him. It had drained me, and I’d only been doing the listening. One childhood mistake had led to years of pain that couldn’t be forgotten or erased.

  It was my mistake and Michael’s pain.

  The sound of brushing teeth brought me out of my self-pitying funk. “Be sure to floss,” I called out as I moved to set up the first aid kit on the table by the window.

  Leaning through the door, he said indistinctly around a mouthful of foam, “Once again, I’ve got to ask. You were in the Russian mob? Really?”

  “Believe it.” I unscrewed the top of the antibiotic cream. “I threw guys down and committed vicious dental hygiene on them against their will. They called me the Flosser. Don’t make me do the same to you.”

  “Mmm hmm. Frightening.” With complete unconcern, he disappeared back into the bathroom.

  If he hadn’t been exhausted, the remark would’ve been much more biting, I knew. He was coming along. He truly was. I changed my bandage with now-practiced hands. The wound, too, was coming along. Not with the speed Michael would’ve shown, but for your average person who got shot in the side, it was doing well enough. As for my head, it still ached, but not as fiercely. I’d put away the pain pills that morning. A little pain was worth enduring to keep your edge. The dizziness and nausea had mostly faded as well. They only popped up once or twice a day at the most, usually in the face of Michael’s enormous and not particularly selective appetite. That kid would eat anything, and I did mean anything—the more grease the better.

  By the time I finished cleaning up, Michael was in bed with the ferret paws up on the pillow beside him. Walking over, I switched off the lamp. “ ’ Night, Misha.”

  He was already gone, one hand tucked under the pillow. Except for the rat, it was a warm and homey scene straight from the past. We hadn’t shared a room when we were younger; the age difference was enough that I wanted my own. But there were times I’d walk in and find Lukas asleep in my bed with one of my comics clutched in his hand. Kid brothers . . . What could you do?

  Pulling the covers up over his shoulders, I sat on the edge of the opposite bed and watched him sleep. It probably wasn’t a first for him. He’d as much as said the Institute either watched or listened to him, John, and the other children at night while they slept. I was still thinking about the lost John and wondering. He had the Never Never Land name, but it was also Jericho’s. And then there was the resemblance Michael had mentioned. Could it be that Jericho had done his malicious work on his own flesh and blood, his own namesake? That might explain the abolishment of the John designation. That was a definitive sign of personal interest, personal offense.

  Personal rage.

  That was telling. He did have emotion. It was doubtful that any of them were the good kind, but they did exist and that could reveal weaknesses in him. Another thing it revealed was that if Jericho would kill his own family, the things he would do to us were worth avoiding—very much so. That wasn’t news to me, by any means, but it was an unpleasant reminder.

  Didn’t life just love to hand those out?

  Chapter 21

  “ No luck?”

  I looked up from the cell phone in my hand to see Michael sitting balanced on the overlook wall. We were currently stopped at a national forest in Georgia, and I couldn’t have pried Michael away with a crowbar. He was in awe of the massively tumbling waterfall below. The breathtaking sight along with the rushing sound and rising rainbow mist enthralled him. It was something to see, I admitted, and the view Michael was getting was even more spectacular because he was seeing it for the first time. It wasn’t just the waterfall, but everything that went along with it: wild, green nature in general. Institute field trips had consisted of places where people—victims—congregated. This was something entirely new and pictures in books hadn’t done it justice. Leaning so far over the edge that I’d had to restrain the urge to grab a handful of his shirt, my brother had watched the violent storm of water for nearly a full hour. Hair gone damp and floating on the wind, he finally was able to tear himself away long enough to watch my last futile call.

  “No. Reception here is for shit.” It was true, but there was a bigger truth behind it. I could have had a tower up my ass and it wouldn’t have made a difference. Anatoly wasn’t to be found. We hadn’t kept the closest contact since I’d graduated college, just the occasional call or holiday visit, but he had made it clear that if I needed him I’d be able to track him down. That I was finding it so difficult wasn’t a good sign. The feds must be hot on his heels for him to go under this deep.

  “Who are you trying to call?” With face flushed from the chilled air, he was bundled in a jacket with the sky behind him in a brilliant blue backdrop. Except for an unusual inner stillness and eyes too old for his face, he looked like any other kid on vacation.

  “Didn’t I tell you?” I asked, surprised. At the shake of his head I stretched out my legs and lay back on the picnic table. “Jesus, talk about your scrambled brains.” The sun was distant and its warmth nonexistent, but I closed my eyes anyway and pretended I was back in Miami soaking up the rays—or maybe in Key West. It would be in the seventies there, almost perfect. I might be the first generation out of the home country, but cold had never been a friend of mine.

  “Did that happen before or after you hit your head on the car?”

  “Punk-ass kid,” I said with sleepy equanimity as the light glowed red through my eyelids. “I’m trying to reach Anatoly. Our father,” I amended, opening my eyes to slide my gaze his way.

  “Anatoly.” A sneakered foot sketched a triangle in the dirt, as precisely equilateral as if he’d used a ruler. “You don’t call him Dad? In the movies . . .” He stopped himself, having already learned the hard way that movies weren’t as accurate as they could be.

  “When I was younger.” Much, much younger. I hadn’t exactly lived the Brady Bunch family life, particularly after the kidnapping. We had our share of dysfunction, same as anyone else. It hadn’t been too noticeable before Lukas was taken, with merely a father who worked far too much and secrets a child couldn’t penetrate. Later, I’d either become more cynically awa
re or Anatoly had tried less to hide his business. If my brother had still been around, I don’t think I would’ve ended up in that same business. I hadn’t cared enough to stop it from happening and my father had seen it, oddly enough, as a way of keeping me safe. In his realm, he felt he had control.

  “He’s used to being in charge. I guess it’s rather like having a father who’s a general in the army. He’s a boss first and a parent second. That’s not to say he didn’t—doesn’t—love us. In fact, he thought the sun rose and set in you. The day you were born he passed out Cuban cigars as if they were candy and named you after his father.” The memory was so fresh that I could all but see the blue balloons floating, cheerfully proclaiming “It’s a Boy!” for anyone who cared to know. “It didn’t matter that you were practically a carbon copy looks-wise of Mom and her side of the family. He saw something in you, something special.”

  And he hadn’t been wrong.

  Lukas had been born special, but not the kind of special that Jericho embraced. His was a rare but completely natural special, a shining quality that made a father beyond proud, a mother doting, and a seven-year-old boy think his new baby brother was the best kid in the world, even if the butterball didn’t do anything but eat and poop.

  “Anyway,” I forged ahead before Michael could comment on how our father loved Lukas, not him. “Anatoly’s on the run from the government. They have more indictments against him than they did Capone. But if we could find him, he knows more about going under the radar than I ever will, not to mention the money he has socked away in off-shore accounts. That kind of cash would take us far from here—far enough.” Sitting up again, I turned off the phone. “And he’ll want to see you . . . to see his son. He won’t be able to believe I found you.” Even in my imagination, I couldn’t picture that scene in my head. “He just . . . won’t believe it.”

  “Why not?” The triangle disappeared beneath the erasing scuff of a sole. “Why wouldn’t he believe? Wasn’t he looking for Lukas too?”

  How do you tell a boy his father had given up on him long ago? And he had. Anatoly had lost hope with a speed that had seemed shocking to a fourteen-year-old kid. It still seemed just as shocking to a twenty-four-year-old man. So, how do you tell a boy that? How do you tell him he was assumed dead by everyone but me?

  You don’t.

  “I think he trusted the authorities to do their job. More than I did at any rate,” I temporized. “Weird as shit, I know, considering his occupation, but the FBI did write the book on missing kids. It’s what they do. And I’m sure he had his contacts working day and night for a long time.” I didn’t remember if that had been the case or not, but it must have been. The first few weeks after Lukas had been taken were still hazy to me. Emotional trauma, I guessed, but there hadn’t been any therapists to verify my self-diagnosis. Anatoly, old-school Russian and old-school mob, didn’t believe in that kind of thing. Still, whether I remembered or not, I knew Anatoly would’ve pulled out all the stops for his missing son . . . whether he had hope or not. He loved Lukas. Criminals could love. They killed, they stole, but they were capable of love—in their way. It was a mental litany I’d repeated doggedly more than once or twice during my teenage years. Some days I had even believed it.

  “But you kept looking yourself—personally. Long after a lot of people would’ve given up.” This time it was a circle he traced, as geometrically perfect as a soap bubble. “Why?”

  It was a difficult question with an easy answer. I searched because he was my brother, but that wasn’t the whole truth. I also searched because I had been the one to lose Lukas, and “personally” wasn’t the word for the way I took that. “I’m smelling more Freud here, kiddo,” I dissembled as the wings of a bird beat overhead. “There’s a leather couch and two hundred bucks an hour in your future; I can see it now.”

  I may as well have been talking to the wind for all the notice he took. “You blame yourself.” He may have been watching me. I didn’t know; I didn’t look. “You think it’s your fault.”

  This was a topic that needed no discussion. I’d discussed the hell out of it with myself for the past ten years. Yeah, I had it down to a real art. Putting the phone in my pocket, I didn’t so much change the subject as ignore it altogether. “You finished that last book in the car, didn’t you? Find out anything that could help us out?” This time I did meet his eyes and with a gaze as bland as oatmeal and impenetrable as a vault.

  He studied me for a long moment, then, to my relief, let the matter drop. I had the uneasy feeling, however, that we’d be circling back to it soon enough. “Yes, I’m done. I’m not sure it’ll be helpful or not, though.”

  “We’ll never know until you spit it out.” I swung my arm in a classic director’s gesture to point at Michael. “Go.”

  And go he did.

  He’d learned a lot from those few books, enough that he could’ve taught an introductory course in genetics. It was something I could see with astonishing clarity. Blazer and tie, chalk dust on his hands, and an unquenchable passion for knowledge etched on his lean face, he would be a college professor who had the freshmen girls hanging their panties on his office doorknob; my brother, the intellectual stud muffin.

  The more high-tech details went in one ear and out the other for all the foothold they gained in my brain, but I didn’t try to rein in Michael. Much of the miniature lecture was over my head, true, but I enjoyed his enthusiasm. Most of his inner self was so locked down that watching him cut loose, even over something as dull as science, was a kick. After tossing off esoteric terms such as polymorphism and pseudogenes with machine-gun rapidity, he finally began to slowly wind down. “It’s as we thought,” he summed up. “A customary chimera is simply a person with genes from their brother or sister intermingled with their own. No special powers. They’re ordinary people . . . like you.”

  To give him credit, there wasn’t any condescension in that statement. Considering all he could do, it was rather remarkable that he didn’t consider himself more than human rather than less. If I could get him to see that he was neither . . . that in the ways that counted he was as human as anyone, I would be content. “Ordinary like me.” I shook my head sadly. “How awful for them.”

  “I said ordinary, not normal. If they were like you, they’d be anything but,” he said straight-faced. “Anyway, I think you were right about Jericho. He must’ve been a mutation, the first chimera to have the healing ability and the increased intelligence. As for stronger and faster . . .” He frowned. “He is strong and fast, but I don’t think much more so than, say, an athlete. Nothing in the supernatural range, at least.”

  Thank God for small favors, I thought with relief. I thought he was probably right. Michael himself had seemed strong when he’d pulled me into the car after I’d been shot, but it could’ve been the strength of adrenaline.

  “I’m guessing he studied his own genetic makeup and found the mutation. He determined where he was different from other chimeras, and that was his starting point to making more like him. I can see that.” This frown was deeper than the first and ripe with confusion. “What I can’t see is how he made the leap. Altering a few replicating cells, that’s possible. Altering an entire person, I can’t begin to guess how he could do that. There’s gene replacement therapy, but the books didn’t really cover that in much detail, but enough to know the scientific world isn’t quite there yet. To treat a disease, yes. To remake a whole new person . . .” Shaking his head, he finished his thought, saying with self-disgust, “I’m smart, but I’m not that smart. I just don’t see how it could be done. It seems impossible.”

  “You’re smart enough. We just need better books,” I contradicted before bringing up a more difficult subject. “What I really want to know is whether Jericho’s process is reversible.” I saw his shoulders immediately tighten at the question as his face smoothed out to the mask I’d seen that first day in the Institute. “Not for you, Misha,” I clarified immediately. “You’re fine the way
you are. Hell, perfect in my book. I wouldn’t take that healing trick away even if I could. And as for the other, you wouldn’t hurt anyone who didn’t deserve it. I know that as well as I know anything in this whole goddamned world.”

  He remained silent, but his shoulders relaxed slightly. Standing, I walked over to him, scattering puffs of red dirt as I went. Sitting beside him on the rock wall, I said quietly, “It’s the other kids. I know some are like you, Peter, and John. But some are like Wendy. If someone can’t undo what Jericho did to them, they won’t ever be free.” Rescuing the children was a premature thought at best, but I wanted to keep it in mind. Even if it were possible, it could be a long time before anything could be arranged. Maybe years. Regardless, giving up on the kids without even thinking about what could be done for them seemed the worst sort of betrayal. And they’d been betrayed enough in their short lives. I didn’t know if I could help them, but I wasn’t going to forget them.

  “Just something to think about,” I added, bumping his shoulder with mine. “You ready to go? Grab lunch? You’re too skinny, kid. We need to fatten you up.”

  His lips curved. “Bab . . .”

  “Don’t even say it,” I warned, cutting him off with a scowl. “I’m nobody’s grandma, not even yours.”

  “Uh huh.” It wasn’t as literate as the majority of his responses, but combined with the amusement that softened his features, it got the point across.

  We were back in the car and on our way before Michael asked seriously, “You honestly wouldn’t change me if you could? You wouldn’t want me to be normal?”

  “You are normal.” I shot him a grin as I turned his previous words back on him. “Just not ordinary.”

  “That would make me extraordinary then, right?” Reassured, he slid quickly from uncertainty into the home base of cocky smugness; professor to teenager in less than sixty seconds flat.