Chimera

Chapter 17

In the tenth grade I played football. I wasn’t particularly good or bad, but I was quick. Outrunning slow-witted assholes who wanted to rip me to shreds had come in handy later in life while working for Konstantin. But there had been one occasion, one game where I hadn’t been quite fast enough. For that, I’d paid the price, and it was one that the three-hundred-pound gorilla who sat on my head was more than happy to collect. It was a feeling I would never forget. A giant fist had tightened on my head until I thought I could hear the literal cracking of bone. The pain was so intense that it froze the air in my lungs, turned thoughts into congealed mud, and sent jagged shards of glass splintering through my brain.

I would have given anything to be experiencing that cakewalk again.

“He needs a doctor.”

Insistent; the words were very insistent, with a calm that sounded stretched to a jaw-locking tightness. There was a pause as I floated in an ocean of black agony, and then came more words. “I can’t put him on. Are you even listening to me? Do you need the Merriam-Webster dictionary definition of unconscious?”

Lukas. It was Lukas’s voice, and from the sound of it he was giving someone hell. Now who . . . ah. Random neurons collided with a spark. Saul. I’d told him to call Skoczinsky if he ended up on his own. Apparently the situation we were in was close enough to qualify.

I levered up eyelids that fought me every millimeter of the way. The slice of dusty yellow light that rewarded me was a cheerful ice pick drilling through the liquid mush that used to be my brain. Hissing with pain, I tried to cover my eyes with a clumsy and uncooperative hand.

The conversation continued unchecked as my heroic efforts went unnoticed. “He’s been shot and he hit his head. He may even have a skull fracture, and the first aid I know doesn’t cover that.” I could guess how those biology and anatomy lectures went at the Institute. Here’s the best location to inflict damage; don’t worry about fixing it. It won’t ever be an issue.

From the feel of the surface slick and cool beneath me, I was still in the backseat of the car. And from the sound of Lukas’s rigid annoyance, he was right by my head. He was probably standing in the open door with his back to me, but I wasn’t about to shift the watermelon substituting as my head to see, so I did the next best thing.

Holding up my hand, I croaked, “Phone.”

Instantly Lukas popped into my view, his face directly over mine. From what I could see of the god-awful purple and gold shirt, it was stained to a darker color, almost black, from blood—my blood. He might disparage his medical skills, but it was obvious he had tried. “Stefan.” His face brightened fractionally. “You’re awake.”

“More . . . or . . . less.” Every single word was a molten lava of misery. “Phone.”

He hesitated, then put the cell phone in my hand. “Better you than me.”

Stubborn paranoia meeting paranoid stubbornness; talk about your rock and a hard place. Lukas and Saul were born to butt heads. I fumbled the phone to my ear. “Saul?”

“That is one smart-ass little shit, Korsak.” Saul’s voice, slightly tinny, stung my ear. “Are you sure you don’t want to toss him back?”

“He’s not . . . fish.” I wanted to be amused. I settled on queasy. “Saul, we’re in trouble.” True enough, and the last thing I wanted to do was involve Saul. He’d done more than enough already, gone far above and beyond. Dragging him deeper into this mess was not the way to thank him. Unfortunately, I didn’t see any way around it, not if Lukas and I were going to survive.

“Yeah, I gathered that from the Boy Wonder.” He exhaled and I heard the sound of a hand rubbing over a face. “Tell me, Smirnoff. How bad are you, really?”

“I’m not dying.” At least I didn’t think I was. My eyes were beginning to focus with glacial speed. Through the car windows I could see a low, squat building and weeds as high as a man’s waist. It looked as if Lukas had done a good job of finding us somewhere off the beaten path. “But Lukas is right. Think I need a doctor. Someone who can keep his mouth shut.”

Saul’s network of subcontractors was numerous and far-reaching. If anyone could come up with the name of a competent and ethically flexible physician, it would be him. “That’s a tall order. Let me think a second. Where are you anyway?”

“North. Close to the state line.” My legs were already bent and I used the leverage to try to push myself up. I managed to rise up on one elbow, but the effort had me soaked in sweat. “I don’t know how they keep finding us. It’s been twice now. They come out of nowhere.”

“They haven’t been trailing you?”

“No.” As the arm supporting me began to shake, I felt two hands behind my shoulders bracing and easing me up to a sitting position. Twisting slightly, I leaned back against the seat and gave Lukas a grateful nod.

“The kid’s tagged then,” Saul said brusquely. “Hell, they microchip dogs and cats. It was only a matter of time.”

Tagged. Shit. That was the thought that had slithered away from me when I was stealing our latest car. I’d wanted to avoid anything with a GPS, but here I was hauling around my own walking, talking homing device. “Goddamnit.” And I’d thought my headache couldn’t possibly get any worse. “We’re screwed,” I said bleakly.

“Maybe not. If you can get to a doctor, he might be able to remove the chip as well as fix up your black and blue ass.” I could hear the distant sound of typing. “And I think I have the man for the job. Okay, his name is Lewis Vanderburgh, better known as ‘the Babysitter.’ He lost his license ten years ago and just got out of the joint last February.”

“The Babysitter?”

“Use your imagination,” he ordered curtly over a thick layer of disgust. “Needless to say he wasn’t too popular in the pen. He’s done some research for me, medical crap, and he needs the money. Picked up an expensive drug habit on the inside.”

“He sounds like a real winner.”

“When you can afford to be choosy, we’ll book you into the Mayo Clinic. For now it’s Dr. Degenerate.” He gave me the address. “Keep your eyes open and your back to the wall and you should be okay. He’s a monster, but he’s a weak one.”

Monsters, monsters everywhere. Speaking of which . . . “Saul, I need you to get some information for me.” I was fading, but this was every bit as important as finding a doctor. “Remember the scary son of a bitch from the van? His name is Jericho. I need for you to look up anything you can find about him and genetic research. Anything at all.” I couldn’t be more specific than that because I couldn’t tell him what had been done to my brother. I couldn’t tell anyone about that; not Saul and not my father. Protecting Lukas came first, even if that meant protecting him from the reaction of his own family.

“Jericho? That’s all you got?”

“That’s it,” I confirmed, closing my eyes against the dizzying sway of tall grass bordering the cracked and overgrown parking lot. “I’ll call you back tomorrow and see what you’ve dug up.”

An exasperated growl echoed in my ear. “You’d better not think this is some kind of freebie—you got that?”

I smiled, the barest twitch of my lip. “Never.”

Disconnecting the phone, I let it fall into my lap. I hung for a moment, suspended between consciousness and an endless somersault into the shadows of sleep. A touch on the back of my head brought me around. Opening my eyes, I saw a folded pad of cloth in Lukas’s hand. It had once been a white sock; now it was a makeshift bandage stained beyond repair. It was a practical choice; the material was absorbent if not precisely sterile. Then again, what better place to grow penicillin?

“The bleeding’s almost stopped.” He regarded me gravely. “I should check your bullet wound.”

I watched as he peeled up my sweatshirt with efficient hands meant to heal, not harm. “You did good, Lukas.”

“Michael.” He didn’t look at me as he said it, keeping his eyes on my injured side. I think he knew how painfully sharp the reminder would strike me.

Sharp it was. He had very probably saved my life and at the risk of his own, but that hadn’t changed a thing in his mind. He wasn’t budging on the belief that he wasn’t my brother. I’d come out of an unconscious haze with a lingering illusion that he hadn’t shared. It was hard to let the image go, but I had to suck it up and do it . . . for his sake. “Sorry.” And I was, sorry as hell, but not for calling him Lukas. “Chalk it up to brain damage.”

“Admitting you have a problem is the first step.” He visibly relaxed when he realized I wasn’t going to push him on the issue.

“I don’t think there’s a twelve-step program for stupidity.” But if he knew of one, I was certain he would tell me about it. I looked down at the ugly furrow of raw flesh that rode just under my ribs. The bullet had carved a path that was bloody and nasty to the eye, but in reality only about half an inch deep. Some stitches or gauze packing with a healthy dose of antibiotics should take care of it. As for my head, my choices were more limited—either ingesting massive painkillers or being taken out back to be shot like a lame horse.

“Flesh wound,” Michael murmured, more to himself than to me. “Lost a fair amount of blood.” There were patches of white beside his mouth. After the experiments that had been forced on him, I wasn’t surprised the sight of blood would be upsetting to him.

“It’s not that bad,” I reassured him. “I’ve done worse shaving.”

“Even I know that’s a cliché, and I’ve lived my life in a lab,” he said dryly, a little color returning to his face. Disappearing momentarily, he returned with a shirt hanging from his hand. He folded it and pressed it against my side, although the blood flow was now sluggish at best. “You found a doctor?”

“Yeah, and not too far. Saul came through.” It would be about two hours unless Michael had taken us farther than I’d thought. “By the way, where are we?”

“About twenty miles east. It’s some sort of abandoned storage locker facility.” He turned his head to take another look around. “I think. Things sometimes look different from the pictures and video at the Institute.”

Life itself must look different outside those walls; it had to. As I shifted position against the unrelenting ache in my head, I heard the scrape of cardboard against cloth. Rolling my shoulder, I fished in my jacket pocket and pulled out a battered apple pie. “I almost forgot. Here.”

He hung back in the open door for a second, then sat on the seat beside me. “Thanks.” Taking the pie, he quietly opened it and took a small bite. “Did your friend know how they found us?” he asked eventually after working halfway through the dessert.

“He has an idea. Remember that incision you were telling me about?” I didn’t wait for a response. It wasn’t as if he were going to forget it. “Saul thinks Jericho planted a tracking chip in you.”

“Oh. Like an animal.” He crumpled the cardboard and deposited it with stony care in the plastic bag we’d been using for trash on the trip. “Makes sense.”

It didn’t make the kind of sense I wanted to contemplate, but in Jericho’s eyes, yes, I could see that it would. I was hoping like hell that those same eyes were staring at a morgue ceiling right now. “Don’t worry, kiddo. It’s coming out. As soon as we get to that doctor, you’ll disappear off their radar. For good.”

He accepted it with a nod, then leaned back against the seat. There were smudges under his eyes and lines that didn’t belong on the face of a seventeen-year-old. He looked as tired as I felt and we still had a two-hour trip ahead of us. “But how about we sack out first? Sleep for about an hour. Neither of us is in any condition to drive.” I then added with the measure of pride he deserved, “Not that you didn’t do one hell of a job getting us here. Damn impressive for your first solo attempt.” His response to that wasn’t exactly what I expected. Then again, few of his responses ever were, but knowing what I knew now, that wasn’t surprising.

“It’s strange.” His eyelids fell. “You’re strange.”

“Yeah?” That wasn’t exactly news. “How so?”

“I don’t know.” His respiration began to deepen as the exhaustion took its toll. “From the beginning you’ve treated me the same as you would treat Lukas, the same as you would treat your brother.” He shrugged his shoulders minutely. “You’ve been so . . . patient. So harmless. Then today . . .” The words trailed away. Either he was at a loss for the rest or was losing the battle against sleep.

He’d seen me in action during his rescue, but that had been swiftly done and the majority under the cover of my darkness. Following that I’d been the big brother . . . a teddy bear. This morning, however, I’d become a teddy bear with teeth—teeth coated carmine red and anything but harmless. I was the guy who bought him apple pies, but I was also the one who shot men without hesitation. It was a dichotomy of darkness and light that would be hard for anyone, much less a kid, to absorb. And what made it more difficult was that the same duality lived inside him. His had been forced upon him while I had chosen mine, but it didn’t change the fact we both straddled that bloodred line.

We were brothers all right, in more than genetics.

“I’m here to take care of you, Michael. To be on your side.” I didn’t know if that reassured him or not. For that matter, I didn’t even know if he was still awake, but I repeated it all the same. “I’m here for you, nobody else.”

The here-and-gone glimmer under masking eyelashes let me know he had heard. “I guess neither of us is harmless,” he said softly. “The only difference is you use weapons and I am one.”

“Don’t get stuck on yourself, kid,” I contradicted, sliding down a little in the seat. “Compared to most people I know, you’re barely a fluffy hamster.”

He laughed. It was barely audible and smothered in fatigue, but it was a laugh and not half as somber as I expected. Then he rolled over onto his side and this time did slip into a peaceful sleep. I wasn’t far behind him.