Chameleon Uncovered

by BR Kingsolver

  “And drop me near the old mall,” Mike said. “They don’t know me, and with proper clothing, no one will give another vamp a second glance.”

  “You don’t want to get caught in there if the authorities start bombing the place,” I said.

  “No, I’ll stay for thirty-six hours max, and then leave.” He looked at Devon. “If you decide to go in earlier, I’d appreciate a warning.”

  “That I can do for both of you. If you find him, where do we set the extraction point?”

  Another hour of planning ended with Devon providing me with gas and explosive mini-grenades, a riot gun, and an extra pistol and clips. My purse converted to a backpack, and I stuffed it all away. He wanted to wait until dark to drop us in, but Mike spoke against that.

  “I see better at night, and so do the lycans. The mutie community is mostly nocturnal. We want to be in place before everyone wakes up.”

  The aircar hovered over a five-story building about a mile from an old park. Out of an apocalyptic landscape, the building was the tallest object in sight. I rode a rope attached to a winch down to the roof, and the car rose straight up until it disappeared from sight.

  As soon as I entered the doorway leading downward, I blurred my image. From that point on, I planned on staying invisible.

  The house Miriam described was near the old park. According to Devon, the park had a terrible reputation—overgrown, crime infested, and a favorite lycan hangout. The entire area around it looked like the ruins of an ancient urban battlefield. The only exceptions were the large houses immediately surrounding the park. When built, they were the homes of an ethnic-African ghetto aristocracy. Devon told me that top members of the city’s mutant crime hierarchy held most, if not all of them. I noticed he didn’t use the word owned.

  All of the Chamber’s intelligence, and what we’d learned from Miriam, said that Gustav Alscher had fought through to become the top dog. I wondered if controlling people using empathy was his only mutation. Of course, having a prophet, or clairvoyant, such as Carly, might have helped. Exactly how much and how clearly did she see the future? Did she anticipate me going in after Wil?

  It was late afternoon, and very few people were out on the streets. I saw a couple of lycans and a troll, along with a few normal-looking people. That morning, a fierce storm had blown through, but the rain had stopped by the time I hit the roof. Low clouds promised a dark night and the possibility of more rain.

  As I approached the houses around the park, I noticed a lot more people, especially lycans. Most were just lounging about, but a lot of them were armed. I stopped across the street from a few guys sitting around a table, playing cards and drinking beer. Two of them had been in the mall the night Alscher kidnapped me and I killed Horseface.

  Mike had sounded just like my dad, telling me over and over that I might be walking into a trap. I knew that, and Alscher knew I was a chameleon. In any case, he should be preparing for an assault by the security forces. Anyone with half a brain would expect reprisals for killing kids, but I had doubts about Alscher’s sanity.

  And always nagging in the back of my mind was the knowledge that Carly could see me. If Alscher was smart, he would have her where he kept Wil. The thing was, Alscher couldn’t see me. He couldn’t truly understand my abilities. The more I thought about it, the more my head spun in circles. I took the whole line of thought and shoved it away before the distraction immobilized me.

  Slipping past the card players, I noticed they all had weapons. Not just small revolvers, but assault rifles and heavy-caliber automatic pistols. The kind of firepower to meet an incursion by Devon’s forces, and very nasty if turned on Wil and me. Being invisible and being invulnerable were two entirely different things.

  I passed the houses and entered the park, where I had to proceed very slowly because I couldn’t see fifty feet ahead of me. The obstacles included overgrown bushes and trees, waist-high grass, dry now in winter, and tangles of rose bushes so thick as to cause some major detours. I just hoped I didn’t step on a sleeping lycan. Or a snake. I didn’t know if Chicago had snakes, but the idea of a snake as big as the rats…

  I forced myself not to think about such things. It was bad enough that I kept seeing what looked like the entrances to dens, either lycans or rats or something else.

  Eventually, I worked my way in behind the large house Miriam identified as Gustav’s. Most of the houses in the area showed some activity, but that one had some outstanding attributes. Gustav must have hired my father’s decorator. I thought the piles of sandbags around the heavy machineguns were an especially nice touch.

  That level of paranoia made me wonder about electronic security. I spent the next two hours carefully scouting the perimeter of the house and yard, looking for laser projectors and electric wires. Tripwires, pressure plates, or even something as crude as landmines or other booby-traps, could seriously derail my mission.

  Other than a single tripwire circling the property, I couldn’t find anything. My luck held as I slowly inched my way across the back yard past all the guards, then through a back door when no one was looking that direction. I found a set of stairs off the kitchen leading down. The basement was Miriam’s best guess for where they’d be keeping Wil.

  Creeping down a set of dark stairs, I came to the bottom and found a small space with two locked doors. The smell of decomposing human was overwhelming, and I switched out my normal filter mask for a gas mask. It took about five minutes to get through three locks and open the door to my left. Two of the men inside were dead, and had been for some time. The third man was a vampire and he was barely alive. It appeared the three of them had been locked up together and forgotten. Vampires were tough, and the evidence showed he was the likely cause of his companions’ deaths. Neither of them were Wil.

  The other basement room was thankfully empty of corpses. It had the unique ambiance of a torture chamber, with plenty of dried blood and a number of tools and devices that I wished I’d never seen. My sympathies for the poor, downtrodden revolutionaries faded fast.

  Back up the stairs. It took another half-hour of inching my way through the house, dodging the attentions of the people wandering in, out, and around, to discover that I was in the wrong place.

  I stood in a hallway and heard Gustav say into a phone, “I don’t care. I want a guard on him twenty-four hours a day. Yes, one outside the room and two inside. Tom, they’re going to try and break him out. I don’t care what happens outside, those guards stay put.”

  It took me another hour to get out of the house, across the yard, then back across the park. I contacted Mike to tell him about overhearing Gustav talk about Wil.

  “I’m pretty sure they’re keeping him at a house near the mall,” Mike told me. “The place is crawling with armed men.”

  It was well past dark and a lot of the night dwellers were out on the street. Wanting to make better time, I assumed the illusion of a vampire woman and openly headed for the old mall at a jog.

  Chapter 26

  If I hadn’t seen Mike’s disguise when he donned it, I probably would have walked right past him. Using only the cosmetics I had in my purse, he managed to turn himself into a man looking a hundred years older. He had gray hair, appeared shorter, and walked with a limp. A couple of rips and a lot of dirt rubbed into his clothes, and he blended into the local scene as naturally as the roaches.

  “Hey, sailor. Looking for a good time?”

  He jerked around and laughed after seeing me. “Now, that is your most attractive persona to date,” he said.

  I sat down beside him on a crumbling pile of bricks that had once been a porch. “Where’s this house you told me about?”

  “Down the street there. See the guys on the front porch?”

  They were hard to see in the twilight, but I could see their outlines. It was the house where I had been kept prisoner.

  “See the boarded-up window on the second floor?” I asked. “That was the room where they held me.”

&nb
sp; “So, assuming he’s in there, how are we going to get him out?”

  “You’re as bad as Dad is, always asking hard questions. This would be a good time to reveal that you have a teleportation mutation.”

  He chuckled. “I’ve been around the back, and there’s another contingent of guards there. Compared to the night we picked you up, there are a lot more people with guns wandering around.”

  “Gustav is expecting us. I think we’re going to have to just kill everyone and then run and hope they don’t catch up to us.”

  Mike stared at me. “Gosh, Libby. That’s brilliant. It’s too bad you were born so late. Napoleon would have treasured your genius.”

  “It’s a gift,” I said, feeling my face flush. “You have any better ideas?”

  After staring at the house for a couple of minutes, he gave a deep sigh. “Unfortunately, no. Do you think you can get inside before all the shooting starts? It would help if you can secure the hostage before they kill him.”

  “I heard Gustav give orders for one guard outside the room and two inside. We’re assuming that’s the house. The other house I visited was guarded even heavier than this one, but that’s where Alscher was.”

  Blurring my image, I used the side railing of the porch to climb to the house’s roof. It was slow going, but I was mostly out of the direct view of the men on the porch or any passersby. Crawling along the porch roof, being extra careful of loose shingles, I made my way to the window I climbed out of a few weeks before.

  They’d nailed the boards back up, but not with any skill or precision. I slid a heavy-bladed knife under one and pried the corner loose as quietly as I could. A beam of light from inside showed through, but the gap wasn’t wide enough that I could see anything. I continued to loosen that board and the one next to it so they’d be easy to rip off. The third board—the one I hadn’t messed with before—was stuck on a lot better.

  I could get through the narrower opening, but I doubted Wil could. He outweighed me seventy or eighty pounds, and the man’s chest and shoulders were massive. After trying without success to get the board loose quietly, I decided that if he wanted to go out the window, he could kick it out himself.

  Momentarily unblurring my form, I turned and waved to Mike, then blended back into the background. Pulling the riot gun from my bag, I waited for my signal to charge in and probably get shot. I swore to myself that if the damned man inside didn’t say thank you, he would wish I left him there.

  I knew there were at least two armed men, and maybe more, waiting for me. The riot gun—a sawed-off semi-automatic ten-gauge shotgun with a twenty-shell magazine loaded with double-aught buckshot—was meant to even the odds.

  It felt as though I waited there forever, then a series of explosions sounded from the back of the house. Ripping away the loose boards, I dove through the window. Two men across the room from me leapt to their feet. I fired at the one directly in front of me, and the shotgun blew him backward, splintering the door behind him as he crashed into the hall. Swiveling the muzzle, I shot the other man as he raised his gun.

  An explosion behind and below me signaled that Mike was still on the job. A lycan with a pistol looked through the doorway, and I blew his head off.

  Wil lay on his stomach on the bed, his wrists and ankles bound with zip ties. I pulled out my heavy knife again and cut through them while trying to keep an eye on the door. Dropping a pistol with a couple of spare clips on the bed, I moved to the window and peered out.

  The porch roof had collapsed, and there were a couple of big holes in the porch as well. There wasn’t any place to land if we jumped out the window.

  Between the shotgun and all the explosions, I couldn’t hear very well, but it seemed as though a lot of people outside were doing a lot of shooting. The plan was for Mike to toss a bunch of grenades at the guards in the back and then in the front of the house, then some gas grenades inside, and hightail it for the extraction point.

  Wil was rubbing his wrists and ankles, trying to restore circulation. He tried to stand, swayed, and sat back down again. I handed him a gas mask and he put it on.

  “This has to be the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen anyone do,” he said. “But in case I don’t get the chance later, thank you. I didn’t know you cared that much.”

  “The Chamber’s paying me.”

  “Ah, I should have known.” I couldn’t see his mouth, but the skin around his eyes crinkled like it did when he smiled.

  “Can you walk yet?”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  “Can you use that pistol left handed?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  “Roll up your sleeve and give me your right arm,” I said, moving next to him. He did as I said, and I pressed my bare left arm against him. “Help me bind us together.”

  I had a couple of leather straps with velcro. One went around our forearms, the other around our biceps. I raised our hands over our heads, and worked our elbows up and down.

  “No matter what, as long as I’m uninjured and awake, do not lose touch with me. Skin on skin. Understand? Follow orders, and hopefully, we’ll get out of here intact.”

  He saluted with the pistol in his left hand. “Yes, ma’am, Commander Libby.”

  “That’s Princess Libby to you.”

  With a chuckle, he said, “Yes, Your Highness.”

  I was nervous as hell, unsure what his reaction would be as I blurred us. My best friend Nellie and I discovered the trick when we were very young. We were the queens of hide-and-seek. I had never tried it with anyone else. As long as Wil and I maintained skin contact, my illusion included him.

  I heard a sharp intake of breath, then, “I can’t see you anymore.” He paused, then, “I can’t see me. Are we invisible?”

  Waving our arms back and forth between his face and the window, I asked, “Can you see the motion?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’re not invisible, we just blend into the background.” I stood and pulled him up with me. Moving in front of the window, I blocked it from his sight. “If someone is looking at us, don’t move. Don’t stand in front of a light or an open passageway.”

  “Got it.”

  “Don’t get in a hurry. We can’t do that anyway, tied together like this, but keep in mind that we’re practically invisible unless we move. So, we move very slowly. You cover the left flank, and I cover the right. We have to go about a mile to reach the extraction point. Everybody outside has guns and wants to kill us. If we don’t get out of here quickly enough, your people will kill us when they attack. Any questions?”

  “None at all. Sounds like a stroll in the park.”

  An involuntary shudder ran through me. “Thankfully, we don’t have to go through the park.”

  “How many times have you done things like this?” he asked, a note of incredulity in his voice.

  “You mean, snuck into an armed camp to rescue a hostage from a bunch of homicidal maniacs?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That would be never. Do you truly think I’m stupid enough to try something like this twice? If I get through this without dying, or at least peeing my pants, I’ll be shocked. Next time, you’re on your own.”

  The gas from Mike’s grenades was much thicker on the first floor and we didn’t encounter anyone until we opened the back door. I fired the riot gun three times to clear the area, and swiftly pulled Wil after me around to the side of the house where I stopped, our backs pressed to the wall.

  The gunfire had quieted, but my shots set off a new round of firing. Most of the mutants weren’t trained in any way at all, so giving them guns and no command structure wasn’t the brightest idea Alscher ever had. I didn’t know what they were firing at, and neither did they, but bullets whizzed around for the next five minutes. I wondered how many casualties they were inflicting on themselves.

  When the shooting died away, we started moving away from the house and the mall. The entire area was like a hornet’s nest, or maybe like Toronto’s entert
ainment district on New Year’s Eve, only with guns. The inhabitants of the area who weren’t armed seemed to be out for the entertainment, and a lot of drinking and partying was going on. Instead of worrying about the authorities, it seemed everyone was celebrating the bombing the previous evening.

  If I hadn’t had Wil to worry about, I might have morphed into another form and tried to sneak away. Unfortunately, he was very recognizable, and I couldn’t take the chance.

  We were sidling down an alleyway when my phone buzzed. I pulled it out and saw it was Devon calling.

  “Talk.”

  “I can’t hold off any longer,” he said. “My boss, Wil’s boss, has ordered the air assault to start at dawn.”

  “Got it.” I hung up and called Mike. When he answered, I asked, “Where are you?”

  “About a hundred yards from the extraction point.”

  “The assault is going to start at dawn.”

  “Okay. You all right? Need any help?”

  “No, I think we’re fine. Thanks, Mike.”

  “What’s up?” Wil muttered as we set off again.

  “Your boss is going to nuke this place in about three hours.”

  “Oh, okay. I thought maybe it was something we had to worry about.”

  We had to cross a broad boulevard at some point. I wished I had more knowledge of the area, and Wil admitted he hadn’t spent much time down there himself. It hadn’t seemed like much of a problem looking at a map. Unfortunately, the map didn’t show that we had to traverse a mutie entertainment district. Think of a bunch of dive bars, strip clubs, and hookers along a stretch of road half a mile long. Then downgrade your definition of dive bar about ninety percent. A lot of places had stills operating right out of the back door.

  The problem for us was a lot of light. Most of the bars had portable generators or gas lights, and at least a couple of places looked as though they’d hijacked an electric line somewhere. Combine that with a couple of thousand people wandering around, some of them armed, and we had a predicament.