Chimera

Chapter 10

We dumped the van a few miles out. The two cars, nondescript blue with conveniently muddied license plates, were waiting where we had left them down a side road. A dirt trail was a better description, one filled with holes that rattled our bones before I put what was left of our ride into park. We moved quickly with the ever-present thought that time was ticking away faster than water swirling down a drain. Stripping off my black shirt, I revealed a long sleeve gray shirt. It was damned sedate compared to the stomach-churning spin of colors Saul seemed to prefer in his shirts, and I pretty much expected the automatically disparaging curl of his lip.

The all-black outfit might not attract the attention of a cop in the same way as would a gun resting on the dashboard, but the cat burglar look still might snag an extra glance. Lukas would be fine in his white scrub pajamas. From a distance it was indistinguishable from a T-shirt. If that hadn’t been the case, I had a duffel bag full of my clothes in the backseat. I could’ve given him a sweatshirt, although it would’ve swallowed him. Only one or two inches shorter than my five foot eleven, he was a much slighter build—not skinny, but definitely lean. If our babushka Lena were still alive, she would’ve been stuffing him with food, trying to fatten him up.

“Lukas, get in the car.” I wadded up the black shirt and tossed it onto the back floorboards.

He stood beside the van, watching as Saul and I moved around—always watching. By turns he seemed like a child, innocent and confused by the ways of the world, or an old man, uninterested and not particularly astonished by the turn of events. There were quite a few people in him, and not one of them was the Lukas I remembered; It was yet one more thing I simply didn’t have time to ponder, not now.

“Michael.”

I looked up from stashing my gun beneath the driver’s seat of the car. The sheer determination projected behind the response caught my attention when I thought nothing less than gunfire would have. “What?”

“My name is Michael.” From the obstinate set of his jaw I realized we’d reached a glitch in what so far had been a fairly successful run. “Test or not, call me by my name. Call me Michael.”

I hesitated at the car door, then took a step toward him, halting when he took the same telling step backward. I knew what to say, because, after all, it was the truth. Look, I know you have no idea what’s going on, I could tell him, but you have to trust me when I tell you that you are Lukas Korsak. You’re my brother, and I’ve come to take you home. P.S. Great jammies. See there? Easy as pie. Delusional I was not, and I didn’t need Saul’s murmur of “Not the time” to know better than to get into it all now.

“Okay, Michael it is,” I conceded, and was rewarded with a slight loosening of his wiry frame. I continued with a hard-won casual tone. “Could you hop in the car, Michael? We’re in something of a hurry here.”

His yes or no on that didn’t matter. I hadn’t come this far to have him go pelting off into the darkness like a jackrabbit. If worse came to worst, I’d bundle him up in a blanket with some duct tape and toss him in the backseat. His frame of mind right now couldn’t be counted on to be anything but a little askew. It would be nice if he made the right decision if only for future trust issues, but it wasn’t strictly necessary. I would do what I had to.

Studying me with fathomless eyes, his face gave nothing away as the scrutiny stretched on. Saul, an obviously budding diplomat, shifted his weight urgently, checked his watch, then growled, “Kid, it’s simple. You can go with him or wait for the nut ball ninja in the jockey shorts. Make the call already, would ya?”

As he bowed his head, Lukas’s lips thinned, and I heard his soft exhalation. “Simple.” There were myriad emotions in that echo. Most were so fleeting, I could barely get a feeling for the flavor of them, but none of them were childlike—incredulity, resignation, and the blackest of black amusement. There were more, but it didn’t matter. . . . Lukas had chosen his path. Without looking at either of us, he trudged across the dirt and climbed into my car.

Following him, I slid in behind the steering wheel and slammed the door shut. Saul leaned into the open window. His mask was still in place, but I could see his eyes, bloodshot from sleepless nights that had no doubt started the day he’d made his bargain with me. I hoped he enjoyed the money I’d given him. He deserved every penny and then some. “Thanks, Saul.” Inadequate didn’t even begin to cover that statement, but it was all I had left to my name. “I owe you, Skoczinsky.”

“Yeah, like that’s news.” Once again I could hear the grin. “Send me a stripper-gram every year on my birthday and we’ll call it even.”

Saul had given me all the help I could pay for. Even more, he’d given me all I could ask for, and he’d given me a friendship I thought I was beyond. In our world it was nothing short of goddamn amazing. “Stay low, Saul. For a while at least.” It wasn’t much of a good-bye, but I’d never developed the talent for that—not with the practice I’d been given.

“You’re preaching to the choir, Korsak,” he drawled, and slapped the top of the car. Here he could use my actual name for the last time, as this was most likely also the last time he’d see me. “Now get out of here before you drain my will to live with that god-awful boring shirt.” With that and a short two-fingered salute, he turned and walked away. Pushing my hair behind my ears, I started the car and put it in motion. I didn’t look back to see Saul get into his own car. If I had faith in anything, it was in his competence when it came to survival. I simply drove, into either a new life or the dark mirror version of an old one; I wasn’t sure which.

“Fasten your seat belt,” I said absently as I kept an eye out for pursuit. “Michael,” I added belatedly. Jesus, all of a sudden I was a soccer mom—perhaps the most lethal soccer mom in the tri-state area.

There was the quiet snick of the latching mechanism and I spared a glance for my brother, sitting detached and classroom straight in the passenger seat. “Are you all right?” I asked with quiet concern. If there were a more stupid question to be asked, I couldn’t think of it at the time, but it was sincerely said and sincerely felt. Lukas appeared to realize that. At least I hoped he did, maybe so much so that I was fooling myself into seeing something that wasn’t there.

“This is no worse than the other tests.” A long strand of brown hair fell across his forehead to the straight and uncompromising line of his brows as he looked at me, then away. His gaze lost out of his window, he queried evenly, “What will my punishment be? For failing?”

This test bullshit was turning into a broken record, a damn perturbing one. A disturbing piece to an ugly puzzle, it made me wonder for the thousandth time what was going on in that compound. What had happened to Lukas and the others? “Why do you think you failed?” It was the only question that wouldn’t lead to a cascading domino of others that neither of us was ready for.

For the first time I saw my brother’s composure falter. I could still see only the back of his head, but his shoulders jerked once before he managed to relax them with an effort that was obvious in the tense line of his neck. “Why, Michael?” I prodded, the name unwieldy and strange on my tongue. I was going to have to use it for a while, and the best way to do that was to start thinking of him as Michael in my mind. It hurt. God, did it . . . voluntarily giving away one of the few slices of Lukas I’d had left. I just had to keep in mind I had the real thing now—physically. Mentally I would work on, no matter how long it might take.

“I didn’t hurt you.” He was barely audible, and I wasn’t sure I heard him correctly until he said it again, more loudly and more strongly. “I didn’t hurt you.”

I couldn’t believe it. A skinny kid and he thought he could hurt me. Worse, he thought he should. My road to Hell was paved not with good intentions but with indifference. The things I had ended up doing weren’t the result of making bad choices, but rather of making no choices. I had no one to blame but myself. I could, however, blame someone when it came to Luk . . . Michael. I didn’t know if I’d killed those men I had shot during the rescue, but with a savage passion I suddenly wished I had.

“You didn’t fail any test,” I stated firmly. “There is no test, Michael. I’m here to help you, nothing else.” He didn’t reply, and I let it slide for the moment. “You hungry? There’re some candy bars in the glove compartment. Help yourself.”

I didn’t expect him to immediately go for it and he didn’t. It was almost fifteen minutes before he would even look away from the side window and face the front again. His face was smooth and unruffled. I knew that he wasn’t frightened of me; I had my suspicions that he wasn’t frightened of anyone except the man who’d invaded the van. I was relieved he didn’t feel threatened by me, but I did wonder at it. You didn’t have to know me to think I was one scary son of a bitch. You only had to look at me. The scar, the gallows behind my eyes—Prince Charming they did not make. It was strange, damn strange, that he wasn’t more wary, but for now I was grateful.

“They’re Three Musketeers,” I coaxed. “You used to eat those by the pound.” I’d bought them at the drugstore the day before. They had been on the bottom row in their cheerfully shiny wrappers. It was ludicrous and a little pathetic, but bending over to pick them up was one of the harder things I’d done in my lifetime. Two candy bars that should’ve weighed literally nothing—why were they the fucking Edmund Fitzgerald in my hand? I’d almost dropped them back into their cardboard container.

I had bought them anyway, fighting against the superstitious certainty that I’d also just bought myself some bad luck. And now I watched as Michael finally opened the glove compartment and took out one of them. He turned it over cautiously in his hands as if he were defusing a bomb before ripping the wrapper neatly. The bite was just as neat and economical. A trace of surprise showed in the quirk of his eyebrows as he chewed and swallowed. It was as if he’d never tasted one before. He ate the rest of the candy bar quickly, and as an encore he polished off the second in fewer than four bites.

“Good?” I ignored the ripple of unease that passed through me. It was his favorite snack; yet he obviously didn’t remember it. Everything of Lukas was gone, large or small . . . gone. “Guess you didn’t get too much of the sweet stuff in that prison.” Moving my eyes from the stranger sitting next to me, I shifted my attention back to the road and reminded myself that it wasn’t forever. We’d get those memories back or we’d make new ones, whatever it took.

“You talk a lot.”

I couldn’t help the jerk of the wheel beneath my hands. It was the first genuinely unprompted comment that my brother . . . that Michael had made that didn’t involve the mysterious “tests.” “Yeah?” That was not a statement that normally would have applied to me, but in this situation he was right. I didn’t know what to say. How did you talk to a kid you couldn’t know, no matter how much you wanted to, and who’d been plucked from bizarre circumstances that you didn’t understand?

“It’s a sign of insecurity. All the more classic psychology textbooks say so.” He peered into the glove box once again. There was no sign of disappointment on that inscrutable face when no more chocolate was to be found, but I knew better. He was a teenager. Raised in a combination of a school, prison camp, and laboratory, that might be true, but some part of him was still a teenager, no matter how suppressed or denied.

“And what do you know about psychology, junior Freud?” Guiding the car with one hand, I dug under my seat. Bypassing cold metal, I pulled out a box of Double Stuf Oreos. We might be on the road for a long time and I’d stocked up on instant sources of cheap energy. Tossing them into his lap, I instantly heard the rustle of cellophane as he opened the package.

“He’s not the type of psychology we study. His way of thinking isn’t useful.” There was the soft crunch of a cookie. “But I’m sure he would’ve had something to say about the size of your gun.” There it was again, the mixture of child and man. The ravenous inroads he was making into the Oreos was the picture of a hungry Little Leaguer after the big game. The psychological point of view combined with a swipe worthy of Saul himself put him in the range of a cynical and caustic forty-year-old.

Bemused, I felt my lips curve. “Keep up with the sarcasm and I’ll take my cookies back.” I didn’t mean it of course. If anything, I was happy, fucking delirious to see a hint of humor in him. It made him seem a little less than a galaxy length out of reach.

“I wasn’t being sarcastic,” he said seriously, flattening my cheer instantly. “The weapon is obviously an attempt to overcome your insecurity in many areas.” Fingers prying the next cookie from its row, he finished matter-of-factly, “You’re vulnerable. You should watch that.”

Now what the hell could you say to that, I thought, nonplussed. And my 9mm was a perfectly normal-sized gun, no bigger than . . . shit. Cutting off that train of non-productive thought, I frowned with confusion. “Aren’t you at all curious, L . . . Michael? I swoop in and drag you off in a scene straight out of a movie. Don’t you have any questions about that?” Just one normal question to let me feel as if I had some control over the situation?

“No.” Finally done with the cookies, he’d placed them carefully on the floor by his feet. “Either this is a test and you’ll lie or you’re an enemy and you’ll lie.” He rested his head back on the seat. From the corner of my eye I watched as he closed his. “Or you’re a crazy man and you really do think I’m your brother. It’s still lies, only then you’re lying to yourself.”

Our first conversation in ten years was considerably different from our last regarding sidekicks and sand-castles, heroes and horses. Right then I was more than ready, cowardly enough, for the grown-up in Michael to be gone and the child to reappear. The child I could handle, but this unwavering brick wall of a young man—I wasn’t sure I could. I wasn’t even sure I could see him . . . truly see him at all, not as he really was. That would involve letting go of the vision of a seven-year-old tag-along who had shadowed me silently into adulthood. I didn’t think I would ever be willing to do that.

Beside me I could see him chew his bottom lip, leaving a smear of chocolate. The motion didn’t last long, not with this self-possessed kid. His mouth relaxed as his jaw conversely tightened. He was tired; with the night he’d had it wasn’t any surprise. The one thing, the only thing, he needed now was to rest. No one had accused me of having a soft heart . . . not the ex-girlfriends and not the men who’d ended up on the wrong side of my fists or gun. But this was my brother, no matter what he thought. For him I had a number of emotions. They were ancient ones and rusty from disuse, but they were there and chief among them was a mile-wide protective streak.

“Go to sleep, Michael,” I directed, not ungently. “It’s a long drive.” Especially when you had no idea where you were going. I’d picked a direction and gone with it, not that I had much choice in that. There weren’t many options this far down in the state. For now I was simply running. Determining the destination would come when I was positive there was no pursuit.

He opened his eyes to give me a searching glance. There was no fear, but there was no trust either. “Come on, Freud,” I assured with rueful patience. “You’ve been kidnapped, shot at, and fed cookies. What else could possibly happen? Take a nap already.”

From the skeptical narrowing of his eyes I realized he thought that argument lacking, but he slid down in the seat, twisted onto his side as much as the seat belt would allow, and rested his head against the door. It wasn’t long before I heard the deep and regular respiration of sleep. Looking away from the road, I took in the sight of his loose shoulders and the lax line of his spine under the white cloth.

He was here. He was really here. I could stretch out a hand if I wanted and lay it on his arm. I could touch him, flesh and blood that held genetic hands with my own. I could, but I didn’t. He might have woken up or he might have disappeared . . . a soap bubble popping under reality’s touch. I wasn’t willing to risk either option.

I drove for nearly half the night. Around four a.m. I pulled off the interstate and checked us into a cheap little motel. Shabby and run-down, it had about twelve rooms and a night desk guy a few short chromosomes away from Norman Bates. He grunted, took my money, and didn’t bother to ask for the fake ID I was prepared to fork over with the registration. Within ten minutes Michael and I were behind a locked door and at the visual mercy of ancient shag carpeting and orange and turquoise striped bedspreads. I dumped the duffel bag on the bed nearest the door and asked, “You want something to drink? There’s a machine outside.”

He shook his head and sat on the other bed, his toes digging curiously into the long strands of the carpet. His toes were uncovered. Frowning, I switched on the bedside light for a better look. Was that . . . ? “Ah, shit.” Kneeling on the floor in front of him, I took his ankle firmly in one hand and lifted his foot for a better look. He was in bare feet, not that I’d given that consideration even once as we’d run across dirt and sand, gravel, and shards of rock. The sole of the foot I held was crisscrossed with cuts and abrasions and colored a dark rust by dried blood.

Giving a pained hiss under my breath, I demanded, “You should’ve said something. Jesus.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that his hand was hovering by my head. It was palm down in a fairly harmless position, so I ignored it. He very likely felt threatened; I would’ve in his shoes. This time I moved more slowly as to not startle him further and his hand slowly dropped back to his side. Lifting his other foot with painstaking care, I saw that it was in the same shape.

“Why?” he asked blankly.

He had no idea, literally none, as to why he should’ve called attention to his discomfort. “Because hurting you was never part of the plan,” I snapped despite myself, guilt and self-annoyance bubbling up within. “And neither were feet that look like roadkill.”

Setting the foot down gently, I headed straight into the bathroom and started water running in the tub. Taking one of the tiny shampoo bottles, I dumped the contents in as well. After seven inches of warm and soapy water filled the bottom, I turned off the tap and went back out to retrieve Michael.

As he sat gingerly on the edge of the tub, I had him roll up his pant legs and immerse his feet in the water. “Soak them for a while. I’ll be right back.” Out in the room I opened up the first aid kit and spread it out on my bed. I’d packed the kit before I’d packed anything else, but I had no idea I’d be using it so soon. Shaking out two ibuprofen into my palm, I took them back in the bathroom and handed them to Michael. Running a plastic cup of water, I offered that as well. “Take those. It’ll help with the pain.”

He studied the pills side by side in his palm while I held the cup. Finally, I nudged his shoulder. “Michael,” I prompted, “take the pills.”

“I don’t like pills.” He looked up at me, a mutinous set to his mouth. I could tell that if I’d pushed the issue, he would’ve given in and taken them. He was shockingly obedient for a teenager, at least in comparison to the one I had been. Still, I decided pushing was not the way to go—not on an issue so small. After seeing that basement room, it was easy to believe he had every reason to dislike pills or anything remotely medically related.

Sighing, I thought for a moment, then gave him a crooked smile. “Okay then, pick one.” His expression was understandably dubious, but I persisted. “Go on. Choose one. I’ll take it and you can take the other. They’re harmless, Michael. Honestly.”

The honesty didn’t matter, but my offer to take one did. Hell, I had a raging headache coming on anyway and I swallowed the indicated pill without complaint. Cautiously, Michael waited twenty minutes to see the result before he took his. He was many things, this kid, but stupid was not one of them. The warm water had sluiced most of the dried blood from his feet by then and I finished cleaning the rest of it with gauze and peroxide. Drying them with a towel, I slathered antibiotic ointment liberally on both soles and then presented him with a pair of clean socks from my bag. “Cover them up. God knows what you could catch off this carpet—Ebola, the plague, there’s no telling.”

He’d sat military straight on the bed while I’d performed the first aid and watched my every move. Furrowed brows said that care such as this wasn’t exactly what he was expecting, but he said nothing as he straightened and pulled on the socks.

“Go ahead and crash, kiddo.” I cleaned up the first aid kit and shoved it back in my bag. “We’ll sleep a few hours before we hit the road again.” It wouldn’t be much of a rest, but I wanted to make sure those assholes weren’t going to pick us up somehow. If they had government ties as we suspected, it would be easy enough for them to have a finger dipped into the local authorities’ pie as well. There could be an APB out for Michael at this moment. No one had seen my face or Saul’s, but it was safe to say they had an excellent description of my brother, both inside and out.

Once again I saw a glimpse of a shadowy and jaded humor as the last word passed my lips. “You really have no idea what I am, do you?”

I was going to have to adjust to his denial, at least for a while. Doing my best to massage out the pang of tension stabbing at the base of my neck, I answered with weary quiet. “You’re my brother, Michael. And I’ll prove it to you, I swear. Now get some sleep.”

Bicolored eyes were as opaque and vigilant as those of a wild animal, but he stood to turn down the blankets. Sliding under them, he pulled them up to his neck and shifted over onto his side. It wasn’t too long before he drifted off, his hair a brown tangle on the pillow. He was tired, I knew, but as had happened in the car, questions were passing through my head. He didn’t trust me; as far as I could tell he didn’t trust anyone, including those with whom he’d lived. Even factoring in exhaustion, it was unsettling how quickly he dropped off. It was as if he were so used to a life filled with menace and uncertainty that it was the norm for him.

I stood by the bed and watched him sleep for a long time. To look away seemed like the worst invitation to fate . . . as if he were only a dream conjured by nothing more than years of guilt. Stupid, but my gaze lingered on him as I turned off the lights and went over to recline in the garish orange chair by the window. I left the world inside the room and turned my attention to the one outside the window. If I wanted to keep my brother, I had to act like the professional I was. Arranging the blinds until a small space showed between each slat, I kept watch on the parking lot until the sun came up.

It was about then that I realized what Michael had said before he’d gone to bed. “You really have no idea who I am, do you?” That’s what I’d assumed he had said, but my assumption had been wrong. It hadn’t been the word “who” that sat in the middle of that sentence. No . . .

It had been “what.”