Basilisk (23 page)

“That was minor? You're kidding, right? Two explosions and not-quite-good-enough chlorine gas is minor?” Saul sat up in the back and rubbed his chest as if it should ache. He took his hand away and frowned as if surprised that it didn't.

“Chimeras can kill with a touch, but other people, nonchimeras”—humans, in other words—“kill in other ways. The Institute taught us all the ways there are to accomplish that, to be on our guard against the weaker . . . I mean, normal people.” Chasing daily after those genetically the same as me, if not mentally, made it easy to forget who was normal and who was not. “They didn't get into specifics on how to make those types of weapons. We didn't need to make them—we just had to know what we might be up against. But give one of us chimeras the Internet and we don't have to be in the same state to kill you. We specialize in assassinations that look like natural deaths. Peter isn't interested in whether they look natural or not now. He's free. They all are. Free to kill in any way they like.”

“Like a buffet.” Stefan exhaled, leaning back in his seat. “They've found new toys to play with and after a virtual lifetime of solitary confinement, why wouldn't they want the different and the new? If it weren't for the trying-to-kill-us part of all this, it would be hard to blame them.” His eyes flicked to the rearview mirror to watch the burning foundation of what was left of the house behind us. “You said you had a way to find them despite their removing their chips. I don't doubt your genius, kiddo, but how?”

“There were only twelve chips in that mug.” I took a hand off the steering wheel and for the first time in my life ruffled his hair, wavy and thick as a dog's undercoat, in mockery of what he'd done to me more than a time or two when I was younger. Turnabout was fair play. I wanted to see how he liked it. “I'll teach you about counting sometime. I might get you up to twenty if we try really, really hard.”

“I'd call you a shit again, but it's not helping with your behavior, so it's a waste of breath I could use. And both hands on the wheel.” He didn't swat my hand, though, which was considerate in view of how many times I'd swatted him. “Are you telling me, in your own thoughtful way, that one of them kept a chip? Why?”

“I think Peter is curious about me. With my escape—with me went Jericho. That will make him more curious. Jericho was our creator. It's almost unbelievable he could die. Peter wants a look at me, to see if the outside world has changed me to make me more like him.” I turned off the gravel road onto a paved one. It was empty except for us. “That doesn't mean the chip is in one of them—one of them could be carrying it in a pocket for all I know. They could be rid of it in seconds. They might've split up, too, although I don't think that's likely. Peter's charisma, his ‘family' brainwashing, and his intelligence are vital to keep them all from going wild and getting noticed. They want to kill and they will kill, as often as possible, but they don't want to be revealed for what they are for the first time ever and possibly put down. They need guidance. Peter is doing that.”

“Sounds like a fun guy.” Saul had his phone in hand in the back. “I'd better call nine-one-one before that shit burns down all of Wyoming.”

I ignored him. He could save Wyoming, which made him the good citizen of the hour. However, I had other things on my mind. “This is a guess, Stefan. All of it. Keep that in mind, okay? I can't predict Peter. He's not the same as other chimeras and not the same as me. He's—what do they say?—a mystery. He's a mystery.”

“A goddamn, arson-loving mystery,” Stefan corrected.

“That too,” I agreed.

“And same as you said, nothing like you,” he added.

“I know.” Or I hoped, and hope was the best you could do sometimes.

 

I drove for an hour after talking Stefan through recalculating the tracker to focus from a mass of chips to only one—it had Wendy's ID code because the universe sucked that way—before I noticed the cop behind us. He was far back but closing fast. With the explosions, I'd avoided the interstate in case of the state police, Hazmat, or fire trucks. What had happened at the house would bring in the federal responders on top of the state and city ones. It was best to stay out of sight. But it turned out a deputy had better sight and intelligence than I'd given the locals credit for.

Instead of joining the circus that had to be surrounding what would be left of the house and building by now, he was out trolling the local country roads for any suspicious vehicles. And with our stolen Utah license plate, we were out of place, off Laramie's beaten tourist track, and that definitely was worth investigating.

“He's sniffed us out.” Stefan had swiveled in his seat when he saw my quick look at the rearview mirror. “Smart cops can screw your shit up, especially when you don't have the Family's money looking out for you. Damn.”

“Your boss paid off policemen?” I asked. “Like in the movies? As in
The Godfather
?” The same as the movies—it shouldn't have left a type of celebrity tingle down my spine, but I forgave myself. I was going through serious movie withdrawal these past two days.

“In his day, he paid off policemen, police chiefs, judges, senators.” Stefan turned a forbidding look on me. “Do not be getting any ideas, Misha. You're already full of enough of them to be Lex Luthor. Now pull over and let's deal with this guy. Saul, don't kill him.”

“What am I? An idiot?” came the answer from the backseat. “It's hard to run a business from death row. No, thanks.”

I pulled the SUV over just as the sheriff's department car turned on its light and sirens. When the deputy climbed out of the car, his face was blank, but I could see a twitch of displeasure in his jaw. He hadn't gotten to play with his toy car nearly as much as he would've liked to. I already had my fake license in hand. . . . The registration and insurance from the glove compartment wouldn't match, but I expected to take care of our cop problem before it came to that. Or so I thought.

The deputy had drawn his gun and had run from his car to ours, shouting, “Get out of the car! Get out of the vehicle, all of you, hands behind your head, and lie flat on the ground! Do it now!”

“Fuck,” Stefan muttered, and, cop or not, he slid his hand inside his jacket for his gun. He'd have good intentions; that was my brother—following those good intentions all the way to an internal Hell, though those intentions had saved me. He'd doubtlessly try for a leg shot, but you never knew what would happen when you were trying
not
to kill someone and you were both armed.

I had planned to touch the deputy's hand when he took my license and put him to sleep. I'd say it was now time to improvise, but chimeras didn't improvise. We moved to plan four. Plans two and three were based on a less aggressive and less intelligent deputy—balls and brains, irritating. I'd already rolled down the window and had to keep my voice low as to not be heard by the Law Enforcer of the Year outside. “Stefan, I have diabetes.” I didn't ask if he got it or understood. My brother was smart too.

I opened the driver's door and stepped out. I wavered a little, hands up but too floppy and uncoordinated to cup behind my head. My license fell from fumbling fingers into the dirt where we were pulled off the road. “I . . . I don't feel so . . . where . . . I? What's going on?” As soon as the “on” left my mouth, I bent and projectile vomited,
Exorcist
style. Linda Blair would've given me a ten out of ten for style and a record-breaking eleven for velocity. The splatter of my lunch on his shiny mirror-bright shoes distracted the deputy as I fell to the ground, to the side of my recycled lunch—that much into
The Exorcist
I was not—and began having a full-blown seizure. I flailed, convulsed, foamed a little at the mouth for veracity, and decreased the circulation to my lips to turn them temporarily cyanotic blue.

Stefan came boiling out of the car. “He's diabetic! He's going into ketoacidosis. That's a diabetic coma, you dumb country shit. Help me hold him down.” He yelled back at the car, “Jack, call nine-one-one!”

The deputy had seen a lot of faked illnesses in his day; that was the nature of being a cop. Fake pregnancies, fake grandpa's-having-chest-pain, fake kidswallowed-the-dog's-squeaky-toy, all to get out of a speeding ticket. But he had never seen anyone who could vomit and turn cyanotic at the drop of a hat. He was smart, though. He didn't drop his gun, but he stepped closer—close enough that one of my flailing hands smacked his leg. Cloth didn't stop the touch. It was too flimsy an armor. He went down, loose-limbed and easy as Godzilla did for his afternoon ferret nap. Stefan grabbed the gun from his hand as he fell, explaining, “No need for baby to accidentally shoot us as he goes sleepy-time. Good job, Misha.” No
Good job, Misha, except for risking your life when I could've risked mine instead and probably gotten shot in the process.
Not even a
Good job, kiddo.
I couldn't imagine I appeared proud while at the same time wiping the foam and traces of vomit off my mouth . . . but I was. Proud as hell. It was good to be the little brother, but it was also good to be an equal—a partner.

Stefan nodded at the deputy's car. “Don't forget that while you're on a roll. You're the computer genius. See if the car has a camera. Are we on video, can you erase it if we are, or do we need to blow the damn thing up?”

Computer genius? “I'm the
everything
genius”—I frowned—“and that seems either your or Saul's criminally inclined abilities are up to something that simple.”

Stefan grinned. “You're the newbie in this elite fighting force. I wouldn't want to take away that rite of initiation.”

“Initiation?”

“You know,” he said, his grin wider and, I thought, more evil, “where we make you do all the scut work while we sit back, drink beer, and criticize your technique. We all go through it. Saul peeled potatoes in the military. I mopped up the restrooms in the strip club. Good times, Misha. Welcome aboard.”

“Stop playing around, you jackasses.” Saul had his own window down now. “He could have called for backup. Let's get out of here before our secret weapon with a double-oh-seven in puke has to spray the entire sheriff's department.”

I was going to have to commit one way or the other on Saul's not being that bad or being a demon from Hell who deserved a thousand agonizing deaths.

But I had scut work to do and that decision would have to wait. While Stefan dragged the deputy off to a safe distance, I blew up the car with the three pipe bombs I had left. It was quicker and more efficient. I also ended up thinking that being a partner wasn't all chocolate pancakes, sex with a smart girl, and late-night movies. How fair was it that the genius had to be the cleanup crew, too? I continued to bitch to myself. I'd worked too hard for this. I'd ride out this “newbie” thing and then it would be all chocolate pancakes, sex with a smart
and
pretty girl, and late-night movies. And if I had to build a state-of-the-art smart and pretty Fembot to make that happen, I'd do it. The real thing was difficult to find while being on the run from killers or chasing killers or both. Maybe I'd give her a pink wig, the same color pink as Ariel's hair.

I'd better stock up on WD-40.

In minutes we were back on the road with yet another explosion in our rearview mirror. I drove several miles until we saw the first opportunity to steal another license plate—Wyoming this time—from an abandoned rust bucket on the side of the road. This time we were headed toward Tucson, Arizona, Wendy's chip beckoning the way. It wasn't a tingle that went down my spine this time. It was a chill.

Icy as winter's first breath and a dying man's last.

T
ucson was well over twelve hours away, which meant another motel stop in Springerville, Arizona. I could've admitted I could go on much less sleep these days and driven on, throughout the night if necessary, but there were other things I needed to do as well. A few hours at a motel to let Stefan and Saul sleep in beds instead of in a car with an increasingly agitated ferret would give me the time to do them. Godzilla wasn't claustrophobic. As with most ferrets, he liked tight spaces to squeeze his long slithery shape into and wreak havoc. But also as with most ferrets, he became bored easily. A change of scenery would give him new things to sniff out, investigate, and then obliterate like a furry missile of destruction. It would be good for him and good for me as I had something to create rather than destroy.

The motel room was the same as the other motel room. The bedspreads were orange instead of bile green, but the rest was identical. Even the landscape pictures over the beds were the same or similarly bad. One was a full moon with what was supposed to be a coyote but looked more like Tramp from that other Disney cartoon—the cheerful mutt they'd had the dogcatcher drag off to kill. God, I hated that Disney bastard. If I ever found his cryogenically frozen head, I was unplugging that unit pronto. Funny that it was only his nightmare creations that the Institute let us watch, cartoonwise, when we were in the younger group. The other picture was a dusty trail leading up a dusty hill with a dusty man riding a dusty horse. The man didn't resemble Butch or Sundance or Val Kilmer in
Tombstone
, so I had zero interest.

“So why the room with a microwave?” Stefan sat in the chair at the small table. He indicated the four bags of cheeseburgers, fries, burritos, refried beans, and two milkshakes—mine, all mine—with the small brush he was using to clean his gun. “If I know you and food, and, Jesus, do I, there won't be a crumb left to heat up.”