Basilisk

Chapter 5

The station was empty. All the guards would’ve seen what had been unfolding on their monitors and had likely run out with guns and Tasers in hand, for all the good it had done them. I sat down in one of the three chairs and started typing on the computer. I needed the feed from approximately two weeks ago. It should be flagged. The guards would’ve hit the alarm when it all started to fall apart.

Or come together. It depended which side you were on.

“We’ll be able to actually see what happened?” Stefan leaned over my shoulder as I sat in the chair before the console. “I’m not sure that’s convenient; it’s going to be pretty damn fucking horrifying.”

I nodded at Stefan’s question. “We’re obedient. I mean, they were obedient.” Being a genius could suck. Being a genius meant you couldn’t fool yourself as often as you wanted to. But I was different now. I’d not been as obedient as was required while at the Institute, but I’d been too obedient in my eyes. I wasn’t obedient at all now; Stefan would be the first to tell me that. “They wouldn’t have done anything like this without someone telling them, pushing them. Someone only pretending to be submissive, which I would’ve said was impossible,” I told him as I found the logs from when the alert had gone out. I was about to pull it all up when I heard a door slam against a wall. Stefan hit me hard, knocking me out of the chair to land on the floor on my back.

Of all those movies I’d watched, and horror movies were the best, zombie stories had never been my favorite. In my opinion, if you get eaten by something whose brain has decomposed, you sort of deserve it. Fast or slow, they remained the closest thing to brain-dead you could come up with. If you couldn’t outrun or outthink them, it was hard to have sympathy when one started gnawing on your skull.

Now, in the position of all those victims I’d had little respect for, I changed my mind. When something that should be dead but isn’t dead looms over you, the skin slipping from its muscle, pieces of it falling on you, its eyes blinded with a thick film, there were so many psychological reactions to have. Fight or flight. Catatonia. Reversion to screaming for a mommy you didn’t remember. There were also the physiological responses . . . the least embarrassing being urinating in your pants. My body that was as frozen as my brain tried to pick one. I hoped it wasn’t the urinating one.

A hand, darkened and squirming with maggots, reached down for me. “Go . . . back . . . to . . . your . . . room.”

The voice was garbled, thick, and almost impossible to understand. Two weeks without water would do that to you. Some people thought you could last only three days without fluids. It wasn’t true. Although I knew this bastard would’ve wished it were true if he had a brain cell functional enough to make a wish. It depended on your environment, temperature, exertion level, and general health. Two weeks was at the end of the scale, but it could be done. It was one of those “don’t-try-this-at-home” situations. It was a horrific way to go.

His tongue was curled, black and dry as fire-scorched suede. The hand was closer now, the palm a disintegrating nightmare, and nearly at my neck, when the butt of an M249 slammed against the guard’s head and he flew across the room to hit the wall. He slid to the base of it and didn’t move again. “He came out of the storeroom. Someone got sloppy.”

Stefan’s words penetrated my last late-night movie fest and I sat up, his hand pulling me the rest of the way back to my feet. “Or they’re making zombies now?” he continued. “Misha, I can handle an assassin factory, but an assassin slash zombie factory? Forget it. We are headed for the mountains and we are never coming down. I’ve seen the movies. The zombies always fucking win.”

“No. You were right. Someone was simply sloppy.” The guard was still alive. I didn’t want to touch him, but the Institute had prepared me for that too. I’d seen human bodies in worse condition. To cause death, Jericho thought we needed to be acquainted with all aspects of death—from freshly killed to the next best thing to King Tut. I ignored Stefan’s “Misha, don’t you fucking dare,” and touched the unconscious guard’s face with three fingertips. There wasn’t anything that wasn’t wrong with him, nothing that wasn’t dying in him . . . every single cell. It was difficult to trace back to where it all started. I closed my eyes and mentally sludged my way through a swamp of putrid decay.

There.

There it was.

I opened my eyes and wiped my fingers on my jeans. “Aneurysm in his brain, but they didn’t quite finish the job. Shoddy work or in a hurry. He’s been alive this whole time, but too brain damaged to do anything about it. Dying by inches. Then, without the ability to know he needed food or water and with his brain slowly disintegrating, he went into multiorgan failure. His body went into crisis mode and started feeding blood only to the organs that keep it alive—brain, heart, kidneys and liver. Muscles and skin didn’t get their share anymore. Then the kidneys and liver failed.” I stood from where I’d been kneeling beside him. “Which is why he’s like this. Living people can rot too and it looks just the same as a corpse.” I righted, then sat back in the chair Stefan had tackled me from. “I suppose . . .” I trailed off, hesitating, then pushed on. “I guess maybe you should shoot him to put him out of his misery.” Because he was in misery—profound, agonizing misery.

And that had me asking my brother to do what I refused to do myself. Possibly I wasn’t good, like Stefan said. Possibly I was only a hypocrite.

“After what this asshole has done?” Stefan shook his head. “He deserves every ounce of misery he can get and then some. Let him rot until his last damn breath. Nothing but justice in my book.” My genetic code had been manipulated to allow me to kill as easily as breathing, but my brother knew a real monster when he saw one—a destroyer of children’s lives. For him, the subject was over. “Now bring up the video.”

I did. There were banks of video monitors and each one split into four pictures. In every one, all looked normal: students in the classrooms, hands locked before them on their desks; students in the cafeteria; students in the media room watching carefully selected movies and TV shows or reading books that would help them fit in with the outside world if they were ever called on to enter a conversation before assassinating their target. Thirty seconds later, the time stamp at the bottom of the screen hit three p.m. On the video you could hear the low-toned ring that meant time to change classes or report to one. Classes lasted until seven every day.

Every day except this one.

This time, at the very first ring, school was out.

On every monitor, students lunged at the nearest instructor, guard, screaming cafeteria server, and people began to die. Guards tried to shoot and some students they did hit, as they were trained—a bullet in the head. It was the only way to be sure, as quickly as we healed. According to legend, zombies were here after all. They were us. But the guards hadn’t faced anything remotely like this before. One student going berserk, the mind shattering under the stress, was one thing. All the students in a coordinated attack—it had not been conceived. That meant the guards died. The instructors died, too, much more quickly. They were armed with Tasers and had one guard in each room, but they were complacent. Years of utterly obedient killer human robots had made them that way. They were slow to fumble for their weapons. Jericho’s children, however, weren’t. They were never slow, never unsure.

No weakness. No limitations. No mercy.

The Institute had taught us that, and now we—they showed them how well they’d learned that.

They ran—everybody but the guards, who had their guns and their surety that things rarely went wrong. None of them noticed, not in any video screen, how close a student had managed to position himself to them. Yes, some students did die, but not all; nowhere near all. The teachers and researchers were the ones who ran, not the students; to the students, it was nothing but a good time—not to every student, but to some. Could you blame them when that was what they were raised, taught, created to do? Could you blame them for learning too well?

When all the dead were on the floor, unmoving, and the screaming was over, the students gathered in the media room. It was a small metaphorical window to the outside world . . . a world that belonged to them now. That was when I saw him, the one who’d organized it all; the one who’d risen above training and brainwashing and blind obedience to make this revolution happen.

Peter.

As I’d been called simply Michael as I was the first Michael, Peter was called simply Peter, not Peter One. He was about the same age as me, close as I could guess, since he hadn’t “graduated,” so he was maybe a year or so younger. He had black hair, wavy and short, slightly darker skin, and the same bicolored eyes we all had. He looked more like Stefan’s brother than I did. Funny that. Or maybe not so much. Peter was one of the eager ones. He liked to kill. Not as much as Wendy, but no one liked killing quite as much as Wendy. Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Stalin; they all paled before Wendy.

And there she was. . . . Wendy Five, but like Peter and me, no one called her anything but Wendy. Not because she was the first, but because all the other Wendys were only shadows of her. There were only twenty students left now, the rest shot by the guards. I could hear Peter’s voice, determined, but pleased too—and too damn happy for what was coming. “Wendy.” It was all he said. It was all that needed to be said.

Seven students dropped instantly and simultaneously, the angel wings of blood I’d seen earlier erupting from their eyes, their ears, noses, mouths . . . and from every pore. Ten-year-old Wendy moved closer to the bodies, putting a fingertip in her mouth and tilting her head to better judge her work. She smiled. The video was crisp and clear. I could see the healthy whiteness of her teeth, the pink of her lips, the faint outline of freckles across her nose. Her hair was as silver blond as it had been three years ago and fell like a mist of cool spring rain to her shoulders. She was a beautiful little girl; beautiful and happy. “Am I a good girl, Peter? I am, aren’t I? Like a little sister should be. I’m so good.” She tilted her head the other way. “They look like birds, don’t they? Birds with bright red wings. Fly away birds. Fly away no more.”

“You did well, Wendy, and you are a good girl. Like I always say. The best we have.” Peter bent to give her a brotherly kiss on top of her head. After that, he looked up directly into the camera in the media room, speaking to me across two weeks’ time. “Hello, Michael. We’ve missed you. Mr. Raynor told Bellucci that he’d found you in someplace called Cascade Falls.” Bellucci would’ve shared that information all too quickly if asked in the right way, and every student left standing knew how to ask. “It sounds intriguing, but then everything on the outside sounds intriguing. He also said he’d be bringing you back soon, but we couldn’t wait. We have too much to do.” He smiled and his smile was almost as cheerful as Wendy’s. “But I think we’ll be seeing you anyway. Family should stay in touch.”

Family? We had never been taught to think that way. It was highly discouraged. Bonding with fellow students could lead to . . . well . . . something like this. I hadn’t thought of it once during my time there. Since I was barely obedient and unenthusiastic, it had taken Stefan to teach me something I thought a fantasy of the outer world. Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, family—all were a daydream even out there. Something like that? It couldn’t be real.

Somehow Peter had outstripped me easily and done what I couldn’t. He’d seen the value in the concept, taught it to himself, realized what I couldn’t without Stefan’s help, and learned it well enough to spread it to the other students. Some might have embraced it and some might have seen him as only better than being sold to the highest bidder by the new Jericho, Marcus Bellucci. Whichever it had been, Peter had shown intelligence beyond my own and an overwhelming charisma with the other students that he must have kept hidden from the Instructors. And he had used all that to make himself a leader. He’d taught; they’d listened. Every student had transferred his submission to him and not to his new maker.

Peter was obviously smarter than I was, and Wendy, his “little sister,” could kill in ways I didn’t want to think about. We were in serious shit. And I hadn’t thought it could get more difficult than only trying to rescue them.

My skills at seeing all the possibilities, every potential outcome had faded since I’d left the Institute—badly.

The video continued to show the rest. In an instant they filed out of the room. We could watch their progress as they went down the hall, upstairs, and out to the exercise yard. We had always had one bus, for field trips—to malls usually—to see if we could function, although heavily drugged just in case, in the real world among real people. Peter put his lost boys and girls on that bus and the last video shot was of it disappearing down a dirt road toward Barstow. I thought I saw Wendy waving enthusiastically from the back window.

“That was the little girl I saw when I rescued you, isn’t it?” Stefan said. He’d seen Wendy face-to-face then and was more than lucky he was around to tell that story. Wendy must have been just curious enough to let him live, to see what would happen.

Wendy became bored easily. Many graves could attest to that.

I nodded and rubbed my eyes with two fingers. “Wendy. Jericho’s pride and joy. Although sometimes I think he was afraid of her as well.”

“Why did he do it?” Stefan asked quietly. “Why did that guy—Peter?—why did he have her kill the other kids? They were in on it. Not that I blame them. Getting out of this hellhole, I’d have done anything too. But why did that one, Peter, the kid in charge, have Wendy kill the other ones?”

“Peter’s not a kid. He’s about my age,” I said, thinking to myself that meant he was all the more deadly for it. “And there’s a difference between obedience and enthusiasm,” I said grimly, slumping in the chair. “The birds with the red wings,” as Wendy called them, “were the difference. They did what they were told, but they didn’t like it or dislike it. It was just something they had to do, like brushing their teeth. Apparently obedience isn’t enough for Peter. He wants the varsity team.” I used a sports term. Stefan had taught me a lot of those. Now I had to teach him. He thought he knew it all, what had been done to me, the life I’d come from, but I’d painted him a blurry picture. It was time to sharpen it. It was time for what I’d hoped I wouldn’t ever have to do.

It was time to tell him about the Basement.

I was leading Stefan down the hall when he asked, “Where are we going? It stinks to holy hell in here and I’d think you’d have had your fill of seeing dead bodies today. I know I have.”

“I’ve seen dead bodies all my life,” I replied, then added for him, “All of my life I can remember, I mean.”

I moved around one as I said that and opened the door that led to a set of stairs. Stefan balked. “This doesn’t go to another medical lab, does it?” He remembered the layout of the old Institute almost as well as I did. There would be nothing like the memory of getting your ten-year-lost brother back to etch a floor plan into a person’s mind. “Because I’ve seen only one of those and I don’t want to see another. I don’t want you to see another either.” Stefan had seen where they took samples of our blood and tissue, scanned us, where they implanted the tracking chips over the base of our spines, and where they took apart their failures—failures with names and lives, storing their organs in a large medical refrigerator. Luckily they kept that locked and Stefan hadn’t seen the contents. The Basement was enough. I was glad he hadn’t seen where I would’ve ended up—not obedient enough, not enthusiastic enough. It was common knowledge among the students what that refrigerator held.

Why wouldn’t it be? Jericho told us.

It didn’t mean I wanted Stefan to know, which made me the overprotective one this time. Taking turns was what we did. It was what real family did and what Peter’s “family” had no interest in at all.

“No, it’s not the med lab,” I answered as I started down the stairs. “It’s a lab, though, and I think you need to see it. The researchers called it the Basement. Some students”—Wendy, first and foremost, I thought to myself—“called it the Playground.”

Stefan followed me, but the trudge of his feet on the stairs told me he wasn’t happy about it. “I don’t have a whole lot of desire to see someplace that girl called the Playground.”

“You aren’t . . . weren’t the only one who thought that.” I reached the bottom and opened the door. It was already unlocked and bore the thumbprint of a guard’s hand, which was now lying on the floor. The guard was superfluous, heavy, and unnecessary. Only the hand had been needed. I stepped around it and into the lab to turn on the lights inside. Two weeks—that one guard upstairs had been an exception. I didn’t think we’d find any pseudo zombies down here.

I ignored the room. I remembered its double in Florida, although I’d seen it only once. Large with five cells, the room held video cameras to record the “play” and computers to type in reports for Jericho—or for Bellucci after Jericho’s death. Bellucci was here now, right here. I couldn’t recognize his face through the rot, not from the other four researchers dead on the floor, but his once-starched and immaculate lab coat had his name stitched over his chest. It was easily readable through the stains. He had less confidence or more false pride than Jericho. Jericho wore a suit. He didn’t need his name out there like a billboard. We knew who he was—the beginning and the end; the alpha and the omega of our lives. That didn’t need a name tag. It would be the same as marking the Apocalypse on a puppies and kittens wall calendar.

Pointless.

I took what I was searching for from the flop and stink of Marcus Bellucci’s hand. An eight-by-ten rectangle—I could picture him holding it between him and Wendy or Peter as the most useless of shields. It was only a clipboard, made to hang on a hook beside the door. It wasn’t high-tech like most things in the Institute, but it was as informative.

Stefan, I saw from the corner of my eye, had walked forward to examine the cells. They were the same as jail cells basically: a toilet and a bunk. You couldn’t be sure how long it was until someone earned their playtime. You had to keep the prisoners from stinking up the place. For hygiene, there was a hose and a floor that slanted down to a drain to let the soapy water pour away.

“What the hell is this?” Stefan moved from cell to cell and finally I let myself see. Two cells were empty and three others had a dead man in each. Unlike the “red birds” upstairs, they weren’t ready to fly, fly away; they had virtually exploded. Torn apart, they covered the floor of the six-by-six cells in pieces. Did you ever wonder what would happen should every vessel in your body burst under enormous pressure, each one, down to the tiniest vein? Probably not. Why would you wonder something like that?

But if you did . . . Wendy was the answer, and now Peter, unfathomably, had her on a false familial leash.

I looked away from the human version of raw hamburger. “In the Everglades, they brought us the homeless from Miami. Here, I’m guessing they went all the way to Las Vegas. Barstow is too small. The disappearances would be noticed.” I handed Stefan the clipboard. He read it aloud.

“Wendy, Peter, Peter, Peter, Wendy, Wendy, Wendy, Michael Three, Wendy, Wendy, Lily Four, Peter, Peter, Peter, Peter, Belle Three, Peter. What is this?” He dropped it on the floor. I didn’t blame him. The paper was as stained as what was left of Marcus Bellucci.

“This is the Playground. This is where you got to go if you’d done especially well, scored very high on a particular test,” most often of the killing sort, “and deserved to be rewarded. You were brought down here to pick a prisoner and play as long or as quickly as you wanted. As messy or neat. Down here was the only free-for-all in the Institute. And there should be two names that stood out on the list. Every time you saw their name, someone down here died.” I bent down and picked the clipboard up to hand it back to Stefan. “Maybe you should count.” I’d scanned the date at the top of the page, which looked to be the first of about fifteen pages in all. “And the clipboard covers only three months. You need to know, Stefan, who spent most of their time down here. I said some of the students wouldn’t want to be cured. Peter and Wendy would sooner die than be cured.”

“But they’d much rather we die than try to cure them,” he said as he shuffled through the pages, either counting or seeing what he’d rather not know the exact numbers on. “Did they ever bring you down here, Misha?” His eyes were on mine. “Not because you were the killer they wanted you to be, but for accidentally doing too well at some other test.”

Everyone was brought down here. Ninety percent of the time it was a reward; ten percent of the time it was a test in itself. “I never killed anyone down here,” I replied. And I hadn’t. I’d been brought down in the evening of the same day Stefan had rescued me, four hours before he’d shown up in the doorway of my room.

I’d made my stand in the mirror of this place. Obedient, but not obedient enough. Genetically altered to be a killer, but refusing to fulfill my scientific destiny. I knew what it meant, that disobedience, but I didn’t care. I just couldn’t bring myself to care about surviving anymore . . . not in this life. I was taken back to my room where I knew they would come for me. They always came for the failures in the middle of the night. It was less of a disruption. We all knew what happened to those who flunked out of the Institute, but telling us and showing us were different. It led to more students losing it and killing everyone around them in a psychotic fit.

Good discipline, but in the end not profitable, Jericho had eventually decided.

That was why, when Stefan had come for me and had opened the door to my room, I’d been sitting on the bed, waiting, but not for him. I hadn’t known he’d existed or that rescue was possible. I’d been ready for them to come and take me to the other lab . . . where failures were taken apart, studied, and then tucked away in specimen jars. Stefan didn’t know that. He didn’t know that had he been a day or a few hours later, I would’ve been scraps on an autopsy table.

And he wasn’t going to know. That was a “what if” no brother could live with.

“I never killed anyone in the Basement,” I repeated. Unless you counted almost killing myself by breaking Institute rules.

“Never thought differently, kiddo,” Stefan assured me, tossing the clipboard forcefully across the room and slinging the M249 across his back. Putting both hands on my shoulders, he steered me back toward the door. “Now, let’s get the hell out of here, call Saul, and abort the mission. It’s not as if we need an army now. We have no idea where these kids are.”

I countered, “You have to stop thinking of them as kids. Whether they’re nineteen or ten, Stoipah, they can kill you, and you won’t be able to do a thing to stop them with that attitude. All right? Nothing. Think of them as what they are—killers. Killers who, unlike some of the others, love to kill. Live to kill. You have to be ready and never, never let one touch you or you’ll die.” “Stoipah,” the Russian nickname for Stefan, had slipped out before I could snatch it back. But, damn it, I worried about him. The big brother, the protector . . . he’d seen the tape of the massacre, but he’d also lived with me for three years and, deep down, I knew, he saw all the students as he saw me.

Salvageable. Needing only my cure. Teenagers, kids, children.

He was dead if he continued thinking that way. I had to figure out a way to send home the fact that killers were killers, children or adults, and if seeing all he had in this place hadn’t done that . . . hell. I didn’t bother to marvel anymore at how easily the curse words came. “Cancel the army, but your friend Saul—he might be able to help. Have him come. And we do know where the students are, or did you forget the tracking chips?” I’d had one in my back until Stefan had had a very shady doctor remove it. All my former classmates would have the same. “I’ll grab one of the Institute’s GPS trackers upstairs.”

“Tell me what it looks like and I’ll get it. You’ll be better off down here doing your computer thing. They might have information that’ll help. You keep saying your cure is almost ready or should work . . . theoretically.” He mimicked the last. “It’s been almost three years. Who knows what these shitheads have come up with. They might have something to help us.”

He was right. They might, but not in the way he thought. The Institute wasn’t interested in cures, but they could have come up with a way to disable chimeras for a time. Wendy’s abilities to kill with only a thought had always been a worry for them, although seeing what had happened upstairs and down here, I rather doubted they’d accomplished anything. It wouldn’t hurt to check, however. Before I could start toward the bank of computers, Stefan handed me a gun. It was his backup—one of his many backups, rather, a small revolver. A .38? Guns didn’t much interest me. I knew the types Stefan favored above all, the same way you know someone’s favorite color, but that was it. Other than when I had been shot that time, guns were pointless in my life. I had the ability to perform better than any handgun. Now, a pipe bomb . . . that was a different matter. I respected my limitations.

“It’s a thirty-eight Special,” Stefan said. I’d been right as I usually was. But today wasn’t a day for being proud of that. “It’s light, not much recoil, no safety, and it’s double action. All of that means you just have to point and pull the trigger over and over until you run out of ammo. Hopefully by that time you won’t need any more ammo.”

I held it and it was heavier than it looked. “Stefan, everyone down here is dead.”

“That’s what we thought about Zombie Bob upstairs. Since you’ve not shot a gun before, stubborn bastard, aim for their torso. It’s your best bet of hitting them.” Stefan had tried to get me to learn to shoot for the past two years. It wasn’t that he wanted me to have to shoot someone. It was the last thing he wanted for me and told me so, but he was also a strong believer in better safe with the other guy dead than sorry with you dead.

I’d refused. I’d made it clear time and time again I wasn’t going to kill anyone. I simply wasn’t. That was the choice I’d made and I was comfortable with it. Stefan pointed out I could limit myself to shooting people in the legs, and he was right, but it was one more layer of lethalness to me I didn’t want to add. I was all the lethal my psyche could deal with. The pipe bombs were for killing SUVs and other vehicles, not people. They were also an interesting experiment and I was a sucker for interesting. “No.” I gave him back the gun. “You know I’m not going to do it. And if there is a Zombie Bob down here, I’ll touch him and cut off blood flow to his brain long enough to knock him out.”

“Stubborn. Goddamn stubborn.” But he took back the gun, muttering under his breath that he’d rather shoot one of these rotting monsters than touch one any day.

As I’d said before, it was anatomy class all over again. Bodies were bodies; nothing new or unusual. I didn’t spare them another glance, stepped over one on my way to the computers, and went to work. I didn’t find anything especially helpful, but I did find one thing I’d suspected for a while. Life: Expect the worst and be pleasantly surprised. My life in the past day: Expect the worst and find out how lacking in imagination you really are.

I bowed my head, exhaled, and closed my eyes for a moment. Then I straightened, retrieved several travel drives of Institute information, and headed toward the stairs. Life was life. You either gave up on it, as I had while imprisoned in the Institute, or you made the best of it, as I had every day since I’d made it out of those walls.

Now that I was free, the best was all I’d settle for.

Two hours later we were in Barstow. We’d taken an SUV, tan to blend in with the dirt and sand, from the Institute and gone back to the plane for all our equipment. The Cessna’s nose had been only slightly crumpled. One wheel bent sideways a bit. Stefan, who would be considering the day we’d had—I’d had, seeing my fellow students dead—had said nothing. Big brothers know when to give you a hard time and when to let it go. I learned that in the first six months I’d been on the run with Stefan.

After packing up everything, including Godzilla, we’d driven into Barstow and parked at an outlet mall. Mixed in with all the other vehicles, we may as well have been invisible. It would’ve been dark if not for the parking lot lights, but the lot was still packed full of cars.

In the driver’s seat, Stefan was arguing on his cell. “Saul, just park your ass at the Las Vegas airport, send the mercs back, pay them full price . . . pay them full price, I said, same as if they’d done the job. The last thing we need in the middle of this is pissed-off mercs. We’ll pick you up there.” From the loud squawking, Saul didn’t sound enthused at joining us without his army to chase after a band of killer kids. And Stefan’s further excuse of we’d only attract attention with a caravan of mercenaries, perhaps government attention we definitely didn’t want, didn’t calm the squawking any. “Saul, just shut your yap. You’re coming and you know you’re coming. Wait for us. It’ll be about three hours. Okay, Jesus, fine. We’ll pick you up at the craps table at Caesar’s. And, yeah, yeah, I know your fee will bankrupt me and three Third World countries.” Disconnecting, he smacked his forehead lightly with the phone. “I know he helped save our lives God knows how many times, but breaking my foot off in his ass would be damn satisfying.”

Under Stefan’s eye, I had finished double-checking the two cases I had stowed in the SUV with several injection systems that looked like bulky guns. These were designed to be the mode of delivery for the cartridges. Those cartridges, plastic cylinders, had been made to be filled with a drug I’d started working on two years ago to alter the genetic makeup of the other chimeras. The cylinders could also be filled with enough tranquilizer to take down a rhino for a week or a chimera for an hour. Everything was intact in the foam packing despite the slightly less than smooth landing.

“Is it all good there?” He continued to smack his forehead with the phone.

“Nothing is broken,” I said, evading with the truth. “And you’re not going to do your forehead any good banging on it more.”

“I’m hitting it now, my choice. The windshield of your plane chose to hit it earlier.” He had a two-inch cut, crusted with dried blood, and a dark bruise surrounding it. I determined to hack into that training video Web site and take my money back. As instructional tools, they were all but worthless, even to a genius. With proper videos, I was positive the landing would’ve been perfect.

The bump on my forehead was naturally already gone. Quick healing shouldn’t make someone feel guilty, but occasionally it did. There was something I wanted to bring up to Stefan about the healing matter, but now wasn’t the time. I wasn’t quite sure when that time would be. “We need to get the first aid kit. I took it from the plane and put it in the backseat,” I said.

“He’s right, you know. That’s a nasty cut you’re sporting there, mate.”

I had rolled down my window to get a flow of cool twilight air. It could’ve been to air out Godzilla’s musky smell; that would’ve been reason enough. I’d stuck my head out when I had to make a cursory check to make sure no one was close enough to hear Stefan talking to Saul, but that hadn’t kept someone from crouching and moving their way up beside my window to now rest a muzzle of a gun against my temple. “By the way, Michael, I’ve been with the Institute long enough to know you can’t heal a bullet in your brain, and if you try to touch me, I’ll put one there.”

I couldn’t turn my head, but I could see Raynor from the corner of my eye, and I recognized him from the photos. He had a pleased smirk that revealed startlingly white teeth. Up close, I could also see the short dark hair and the satisfied glint in his black eyes. His face was cheerful with victory, but I had a feeling it would turn dark and toxic if he was crossed. “And Stefan Korsak. Nice to finally make your acquaintance. You were better at hiding than your father was . . . for a while. And please don’t go for your gun, if you had any such rude inclinations. You might get me, but how gratifying would vengeance be when you’re splattered with Michael’s brains? Or should I say your brother’s brains?” The smirk became more mocking. “Or should I not?”

I kept what vision I could on Raynor, but I didn’t feel the air stir or hear the seat squeak. Stefan was doing as he was told. He was not moving and he wasn’t speaking either. With an unknown element like Raynor, it was his best instinct, honed by his time in the mob. My time had been honed elsewhere and that led to a different approach. “You have a slight accent, Mr. Raynor. New Zealand. Christchurch, I think. But you came to the United States when you were twelve? Thirteen?”

The glitter in his eyes brightened as the muzzle ground harder against my temple. I felt blood vessels breaking, causing an incipient bruise. A fraction of a second later, I felt the blood vessels slowly knitting themselves back together. As I slept less now, I healed faster too. The difference almost three years could make in my abilities was staggering. When or if he pulled the gun away, I wouldn’t have a bruise—the damage having healed before it had a chance to fully develop.

“You know me, then, and you’re good with accents,” Raynor commented, unfazed by my guess. “You are as clever as them all, aren’t you? My mum’s American. Would you like to see my papers? I’ve dual citizenship. I’m even human, which is more than I think can be said about you, Michael.” The muzzle pressed harder against my head as that cheerful dark glint was snuffed out. “But enough about me. I’d like you to tell me what happened to the whole bloody lot of them, humans and freaks alike, back at the Institute.”

He’d been there, probably not long after we had. We had guessed he would be heading there after we escaped him, looking for Wendy, his own “freak.” If he was that involved in the Institute, he knew no other student could hurt me or contain me. He wasn’t as smart as I’d originally thought. Wendy didn’t hurt or control anyone. Wendy only killed, and Raynor could do that himself with a gun . . . like the one against my head.

“You know what happened.” This time Stefan did speak, cautiously and slowly. “You saw the tape the same as we did. When there’s slavery, there will always be rebellion. Only these slaves are walking, talking AK-47s, and that is on you.” The caution faded. “You and every other bastard at that goddamn torture chamber. It’s just too damn bad you didn’t happen to be there when it went down.”

That didn’t make Raynor happy. “You’re as mouthy as your father was, at least as he was at the beginning. But then again, a power saw will stop and have a man thinking better. It doesn’t matter what happened at the Institute. I saw the tape, yes. I saw the ones who escaped and I’ll have them back soon enough, plus”—he used his other hand to take a handful of my hair and give my head a light shake—“this one. Jericho didn’t consider him worth graduating, but beggars can’t be choosers, now can they? I’ll take him off your hands ‘as is.’ A better deal you won’t get and that’s a fact. If you want a psychic assassin of your very own, you’ll have to bid the same as everyone else.”

“You’re not taking him anywhere.” Stefan’s words were as dark as Raynor’s eyes.

“Oh, but I think I am. I can take him, and I am, or I can blow out his brains and then do the same to you. You seem fond of your little killer pet. Ah . . . it must be the family thing and all that. Am I right? If that’s so, I’d think you’d rather know he’s alive than know he’s one of two corpses in an SUV that smells of ferret.” The smile was wider. “Now, this is what you’re going to do. You’re going to shoot yourself in each leg. I’m sure you have a silencer, so it won’t be heard—no doubt this would be the case with a careful, cautious man such as yourself with your wide range of career experience in that area. Do try not to scream, if you please. And then, when you’ve done that, you will throw your gun—who am I fooling?—you will throw all of your guns into the back where you can’t reach them.”

“Then?” Stefan asked, the darkness suddenly gone from his voice. It was empty—lacking in emotion, lacking in inflection, lacking in humanity itself, and if Raynor had been half as intelligent as I’d thought he was, he would’ve dropped his own gun and run.

“Then Michael and I take a drive, but have no worries. I do want him alive. He’s a valuable commodity, which oddly the two of you have never made use of, but no accounting for business acumen. Oh, and you can be certain my car won’t have an Institute GPS tracker in it as this one you stole does.”

I shifted my glance to Stefan and now he was smiling. I wouldn’t have thought I’d see a smile that equaled Wendy’s, but this one did. Sliding my gaze back to Raynor, I smiled myself. What it looked like, I had no idea. It wasn’t one I’d practiced. It was genuine and sprang from a place of surgical blades and ice-cold metal and human flesh floating in jars. “Asshole,” I said, “did you think we didn’t know that?” Raynor’s own smile faded into a split second of confusion. A split second was all he had time for.

The driver’s window to the truck parked next to us slid down. Raynor turned swiftly at the soft sound and right into the short metal baton Saul slammed across his throat. Mr. Homeland Security fell to the asphalt instantly. He’d dropped his gun to grab at his throat with both hands. From the strangled sounds and the rapid color change from red to blue, his trachea had been shattered by Saul’s blow. He was about five minutes away from death by asphyxiation.

I wasn’t sympathetic. While I wouldn’t kill, I did recognize that in the world we lived in there were people who deserved the ultimate punishment. Anyone involved in the Institute deserved it. Anyone who sent a sandwich-eating idiot to shoot my brother deserved it. Anyone who wanted to sell me as if I were nothing more than a sniper rifle deserved it.

Saul grinned, his white-streaked ginger beard a strange frame to such a homicidally happy flash of teeth. “Okay, I’d rather really be at Caesar’s instead of faking it over the phone, but wetwork costs you double. That makes my bank account get a boner like there’s no tomorrow.” He started to open the door. “I’d better finish the job before he attracts attention, kicking and gasping like a headless chicken. Nice suit, though. I wonder where he bought it.”

Before he could, there was a shout. “Hey, what’s going on? What are you doing to that guy? What the fuck? Someone call the police!”

Good Samaritans more often for those on the run were Inconvenient Samaritans. “Shit. Civilians. I hate civilians.” Saul swore, slammed his door shut, started the truck, and drove off, the vehicle’s tires squealing. Stefan was right behind him. We’d been parked too close, as planned for the ambush of Raynor, for either car to swerve enough to put an end to the government agent without colliding with each other. He would have to take the full five minutes to die as no ambulance would get there in time. It wasn’t as if things were ending differently for him, I told myself. If the rebellion at the Institute hadn’t happened and Raynor had managed to get Wendy out to chase after me—free in the world as she was now, it would’ve been the same. Chases could be long and boring. Wendy didn’t like boring. Eventually she would’ve had to find some way to entertain herself. Wendy would’ve eaten him for lunch.

We just saved her the time.