King of the Mutants (13 page)

This guy put the pomp in pompous. I didn’t know what kind of magical spell he had on Freddie, or why they were even friends, but it wasn’t going to stop me from taking advantage of his “hospitality.”

I turned on the shower and went back in the bedroom to investigate the closet, overflowing with clothes. Immediately, I found the coolest jacket I’d ever seen. I had to have it because not only was it awesome, it was just long enough to conceal my tail. It was black with a silver-studded skull and cross bone on the back. Total rock star. I placed the coat on the bed. I also found a pair of black jeans that appeared to be my size, and a couple of killer t-shirts with cool graphic patterns on them. I didn’t want to overdo it and take too much like a beggar, but the truth was, I did need a few things. I found a pair of scissors in the bathroom vanity and quickly customized my new jeans.

I gathered the crusty fish burger shirt and set it in the hallway, opting not to have Gertie wash my shorts or jeans. I would wash them by hand and hang them up to dry overnight. I didn’t need any questions as to why there were holes on the back of my pants.

Freshly showered and dressed in my cool, new-but-used threads, I finally made it to the study at two in the morning. A massive room, it resembled a museum, or what I assumed one would look like—polished marble floors, large paintings on the walls, and huge twinkling chandeliers. The curtains were parted so I could see the room had an impressive view of Central Park.

Freddie was lounging on a brown velvet couch, also dressed in fancy clothes, looking extremely out of place and more than uncomfortable. They sipped champagne from crystal glasses and laughed at Ashby’s obnoxious jokes—or, rather, Freddie fake laughed. It was painful for me to watch him try to fit in. With a sigh, I sat down next to Freddie. Ashby shot me a sinister smile and that ever-familiar tingle shot to the tip of my tail like an electrical bolt.

I had to learn the rules to whatever game he was playing…and fast.

HOW TO MEET YOUR MAKER

Sleep did not come easy for me that night. I had a horrible nightmare about mutant kids. As my name was chanted over and over, cries of pain and torture echoed in my ears. I woke up sweating profusely, my sheets soaked through. I stayed motionless, trying to figure out the significance of the spine-chilling vision. What did it mean? Was I just having bad dreams because Darling had put that whole King of the Mutants thing in my head?

I yawned and stretched my arms out wide. My back cracked from the base of my neck to the tip of my tail, adjusting itself, and I felt great. The sun shone brightly outside and crept into the room. Besides being at Ashby’s, it had all the makings of a beautiful day. I sat up and looked toward the window.

A creepy man sat in the green leather armchair, watching me intently.

I rubbed my eyes with the palms of my hands. He had to be a figment of my imagination—a left over hallucination from my nightmare. I shook my head to clear it and focused back on the chair.

The creep met my shocked gaze. I frowned.

Really old, at least forty, the man was dressed like he was going to play a game of tennis—white shorts, a pink collared shirt with an alligator on it, and a white sweater wrapped around his shoulders. His platinum blond hair laid almost shoulder length, slicked back over his ears. His soulless eyes pierced right through me—one blue, the other a greenish brown—kind of like that spaceman rocker David Bowie.

“Good morning, Maverick,” he said a little too fervently for my tastes. “Sleep well, hmmm?”

My teeth rattled. “Who are you and what the heck are you doing in my room?”

The man uncrossed his legs and picked up one of the stuffed ducks off the floor. He stroked its head like it was alive. “No, Maverick, the real questions we have to ask ourselves are: one, what are you doing in New York, and two, why are you looking for me?”

Guttural and phlegm-y, a touch of a German dialect was mixed in with his thick New York accent—it was pretty disconcerting and didn’t match the man’s physical attributes. Thrown off by his intrusion
,
all I could do was repeat myself, my voice cracking. “Who are you?”

“Why, Maverick, you’re an intelligent boy. I should think it would be perfectly clear to you who I am.” He threw the stuffed mallard over his shoulder, leaned forward, and met my petrified gaze. “I’m Doctor Wolfgang Greizenheimer.”

What? This man did not look like a crazed scientist at all. All this time I pictured a crazy lunatic with wild gray hair working in a dark room with a hunchback peering over his shoulder. Now in front of me, practically breathing down my neck, a man who looked like he was heading off to the Hamptons to play a game of croquet sat before me, twiddling his long, manicured fingers.

“I asked you, Maverick, how did you come to learn about me?”

“G-g-g-grumbling,” was all I could stutter out. I gathered up the sheets and held them up to my chin, wanting this man to disappear. My words choked up in my throat. Nothing I said made sense.

“Are you trying to tell me Burt Grumbling told you about my existence?” Greizenheimer glared at me. “Erroneous! I don’t believe you. I know the man is stupider than a box of rocks, but I don’t think he’d dare risk the consequences of telling my secrets.”

He got up from the chair and paced in front of my bed like a caged animal waiting to pounce. “Maverick, Maverick, Maverick, I am very displeased with you,” he hissed. “I heard you were very loquacious and all you’re doing is acting like a blithering idiot. Snap out of it. I mean you no harm. I simply want truthful answers.”

No, that was me. I was the one who wanted answers. This man wasn’t going to intimidate me. I’d just needed a couple of moments to prepare myself mentally after being completely taken off guard.

“Fine,” I screamed at the top of my lungs. “I’ll tell you everything you want to know but I need a few answers first, starting with this one. Why were you watching me sleep?”

Freddie ran into my bedroom. “I heard you screaming from next door. What’s going on in here?” His body flinched and he pointed at Dr. Greizenheimer with a shaky hand. “Who the heck is that?”

“My, my, my, if this just isn’t the perfect family reunion,” said Greizenheimer. “I never thought the two of you would meet. Isn’t life full of unexpected surprises? Maverick, I bet you never knew you had a big brother?”

Brother? This guy was definitely on the crazy pills. Freddie and I were not related. We’d only just met.

“What are you talking about Doctor Greizenheimer?” I said loudly for Freddie’s benefit. He needed to know whom we were up against.

“Oh, just call me Daddy,” hissed the preppy psychopath. “Now, Freddie’s mom put up quite the fight when I came to claim him a few years ago. Ahhh, Isabella Finch,” he said with remembrance, looking toward the ceiling. “It was a shame she had to die like that with so much pain, so much blood. Oh well, sometimes experiments just don’t go the way you thought they would.”

Freddie squealed, “You! You killed my mother the night I was—” His eyes bugged out wide in a moment of shocking realization. “Oh my God, I was here at Ashby’s!”

“Depends on how you look at it, Freddie. She was used for an extremely good cause. And children, who cares about mothers? Fathers are what are most important. And I am the father to both of you. Where on earth do you think you got your good looks from?” He sneered at me. “Maverick, your mother, Celeste Mercury, died in childbirth, and after that, you were my first success. Younger than all of them.”

Freddie’s gaze darted back and forth between Greizenheimer and me. My brain was on overload. I was having a tough time digesting all the A-bombs that had pretty much exploded in our faces. The news that Freddie was my half-brother blew my mind. And at the same time, I was sorry to hear about his mom, extremely confused, and more than shocked to learn this psycho was my Dad.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so I did a little of both.

Ashby swaggered into the room, all cocky. He slapped Freddie hard on the back, nearly knocking him over. “I gave the good Doc here the rich kid pinky swear I’d keep an eye on you back then, Freddie,” said Ashby, snickering. “We weren’t expecting the cops to show up as quickly as they did the night your mother died. You could have ended up as part elephant boy—a trunk, huge ears, the whole nine yards. Who says child services doesn’t do their job?”

Greizenheimer snorted. “I didn’t think little Freddie here would have survived the two-year incubation period, Ashby. He’s the runt of my litter. In fact, that’s why I alerted the state to his whereabouts—anonymously, of course.” He rubbed his hands together and turned toward me. “Now you, Maverick, on the other hand, you were freakishly strong—”

“Did I use to be a normal human?” I bit down on my bottom lip hard, not quite sure if I really wanted the answer.

“As normal as they come. In fact, it was I who raised you until you were almost two and a half years old,” said Greizenheimer. “Of course, for most of that time you were in the incubation program, changing into the horrible specimen you are today.”

It couldn’t be true. Stuff like this only happened in the movies.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. You’re insane! I was at Grumbling’s for as long as I can remember. Not only are you liar, you are so not my dad,” I said, my voice cracking.

Greizenheimer chuckled like a crazed maniac. “But I am your father. Don’t you think that if I can alter a person’s genetic make-up after what they were supposed to be had already been decided upon, I could wipe out memories and implant new ones? I didn’t become insanely wealthy by playing with tinker toys!”

“Yeah, Maverick, ever wonder why the rich get richer and more powerful and the poor get poorer and flippers and tails?” Ashby sniggered. “We control everything, you subhuman anomaly.”

Now I knew why Ashby was acting so strange the night before. That maggot. Turns out, I had a very good reason to distrust him. He’d been in on the plan; he’d known the whole time.

“Why? Why are you doing this?”

“Well, Maverick, since you’re not going to live…” began Greizenheimer.

“Are you nuts?” interrupted Ashby. “You can’t kill them here—”

“For the love of science, never interrupt me when I’m speaking! I’ll take them to my lab and dispose of them there!” yelled Greizenheimer. “Don’t forget it is I who is going to make you the most powerful man in the world…after me!” Ashby cowered when Greizenheimer’s eyes shot invisible daggers of disgust at him. “I give him a few super traits and he repays me with insolence.”

Greizenheimer ran his hands through his hair and straightened his sweater like he was oh so cool, calm, and collected. More like manic, psychotic, and insane. Freddie didn’t look much better. He sat rocking in the corner of the room, his head twitching, and his body jerking around like a freshly caught fish on a hook. He muttered, “You killed my mother,” over and over again.

I gulped. “How many kids have you done this to?”

“Oh, I don’t know fifty or a hundred, maybe two hundred. I can’t be sure because very few of them survive the process.”

“You have that many children?” I asked in disbelief.

“Silly boy, I’ve only fathered two. Just you and Freddie—”

“But w-w-where do you get the rest of the kids?”

“All over the place,” psycho-doc said with a laugh. “Ever check out the back of a milk carton?”

Everything seemed too farfetched to be true. It took a minute to process what Greizenheimer had said. But what I’d come to understand was that this lunatic kidnapped children, and put them in some kind of mutant incubation program. Some of them survived, some of them got away like Freddie, but most of them died. And it was all so he could experiment on people to give wealthy jerks like Ashby super powers?

The nightmare I’d had suddenly made total sense. Serafine’s vision about me becoming King of the Mutants was clear. It was up to Freddie and me to save the remaining kids in this creepy program and stop the doctor’s work.

Except my brother wasn’t exactly looking up to the challenge.

Freddie’s eyes bulged out of his head in anger as if he was being squeezed like that Bug Out Bob stress relief toy. His whole body trembled. His mouth twitched. He scrambled up off the ground and lunged toward Greizenheimer, doing this crazy windmill arm movement. He pummeled the crazed doctor repeatedly with his tiny fists.

Greizenheimer was totally taken by surprise. He held up his arms and tried to protect himself from the physical onslaught. And then Freddie did what I would have given my tail to do. He wound up his left arm and popped the doctor right in the eye. Freddie may have floated like a butterfly; but it was clear, when mad, he could sting like a bee.

Ashby raced to Greizenheimer’s defense. He jumped over my king sized bed like a horse, tackled Freddie, bringing my friend, no, my brother, to the ground. Freddie went limp in his death grip. Ashby threw an evil smirk in my direction. “Try anything stupid and I’ll bash your brother’s brain into a pulp.”

“See, see how strong and agile Ashby is?” said the Doc, trying to pull himself together. He smoothed out his hair. “Your new DNA, when altered by my brilliant experiments, has helped me isolate specific traits. He’s as strong as a gorilla, smart as a fox, and graceful as a gazelle.”

Ashby straightened his back, proud.

Greizenheimer’s mouth twisted into an evil smirk.

“You boys are really going to regret going head-to-head with me. Freddie may not have been strong enough when he was younger to survive the incubation period, but clearly things have changed. And now, I have new plans for both of you,” said Greizenheimer, eyeing Freddie wickedly.

My heart catapulted into my stomach.

“But—” began Ashby.

Greizenheimer cut him off before he could utter another word. “Ashby, I’ve made up mind. Take Freddie, their things, and that monstrosity of a dog to my Phantom, and no more arguments. We don’t want any evidence of their existence. I’ll destroy it all in the incinerator at the research center.”

Greizenheimer turned his undesired attention back on me. “Maverick, get dressed and meet me downstairs in the foyer. I’ll give you ten minutes, no more.” Before he left the room, he threatened, “And remember, if you don’t want Ashby to snap Freddie’s neck like a chicken’s, no funny stuff.”