He was right. I would. I wouldn’t kill, but you didn’t have to kill to fight and try to escape. “You’re stronger.” Peter stood, arms lazily resting on the metal as he bent over as if to get a closer look at me in the dim light that struggled through the paper-covered windows. With our vision, it was an act to make me associate him more with humans, therefore harmless, than with chimeras. It was a good move to put me off my guard. Trained powers of observation can be used against you. Lifelong associations of one thing to another are difficult to break. “You’re a better chimera, but are you good enough to join us and be accepted into the family?”
“Where is the rest of the ‘family’?” I asked in a detached tone, letting him know his trick, good or not, wasn’t working.
Calm. Cold. Being Jericho. The first naturally enhanced chimera, born with increased healing and strength. He couldn’t kill. That was his gift to us. Despite his genetic inability to dole out death, he had remained the ultimate chimera in his mind. He feared none of us . . . until the end. And at that he was far more proud of his Wendy creation than wary of her. Jericho had been living, breathing ice. I would be too.
“Here, there. Around.” He rocked back on his heels. “Dull and boring as things were waiting for you to slog along behind us, we thought we’d help you out and give you a chance to catch up. That pathetic bag of bones in Wyoming wasn’t worth our time, of course. So the next time we stopped, I thought it would be interesting to find something more spry. I love that word—‘spry.’ The definition of walking around when nature should’ve already taken you down. A very optimistic word. Before I killed her, I asked that nice, spry lady at the gas station when we came into town where the most dangerous people hung out.” He laughed, derisive and sated all in one. “And here they are—with their guns and their knives. They were like us in a way. They liked to kill too. Murder, rape, and they couldn’t wait to teach us some manners when we came knocking at the door.”
He reached down and picked up a gaudy red plastic rose I’d dismissed earlier as unimportant. He must have gotten it at the same gas station where he’d killed the woman who gave him directions. He tossed it over the rail to land on one of the bodies. “But these dangerous people were writing checks their antisocial tendencies couldn’t cash. They said they were, how’d they put it, ‘pure evil motherfuckers who were going to fuck up our baby-ass shit.’ ” He imitated a deeper, hate-filled, older man’s voice perfectly. “They give out the label sociopath so easily here in the real world. No one has to truly earn it. Isn’t that a shame? It devalues the meaning and the purpose . . . our meaning, our purpose.” He sighed, pulling on a pensive mask, but the glee leaked through. He took a step upward and then one more. “It won’t stay that way. Give us time and we will change the word and the world. Mass murder with a lollipop for these ignorant, oblivious wastes of genes. Are you up for that, Michael?”
At his first step I’d raised the tranquilizer gun. “No one is here but you, are they?”
“No,” he smiled. He pulled a black cord necklace out from under his shirt. Attached to it was a tiny cloth bag. It would hold Wendy’s chip perfectly.
“And you don’t want me for your Manson Mein Kampf family dream-come-true, do you?”
“He catches on.” He applauded once. “Want you? Hardly. You’ve changed, but not enough. And even if you had, this isn’t what it’s all about. We never wanted you, Michael. We want to punish you. You’ve done a very bad thing and you have to pay. And, Michael, you are going to fucking pay and pay and pay.” He was moving up again at a run, but Stefan, who’d had his gun up long ago, had already pulled the trigger. The cartridge hit Peter in the upper leg. He didn’t stagger, much less fall. My cartridge hit the wall he disappeared behind.
Damn, I was certain the dosage would be high enough to knock him out. I started after him, weaving between cots, and then skidded to a stop. Stefan heard it at the same time I did. Half a step behind me, he grabbed my arm and ran, yanking me along with him. He didn’t need to. I was as fast, and running over the top of bodies and their various crushed organs didn’t faze me. Stefan, despite his mob background, flinched slightly but didn’t let it slow him down either. We hit the right wall of the room simultaneously with the semitrailer that crashed through the front of the building. Stefan was knocked to the floor by a falling piece of ceiling. I was thrown forward by the slam of an upended cot against my back.
I’d known the building was structurally unsound by looking at it when we arrived, but I’d underestimated its instability. Perfect for an explosion, I’d thought, and it was a meth lab. I’d been on the alert for trip wires, any evidence that the lab upstairs would be blown. But that would’ve been a repeat of the last attempt on our lives—the establishing of a pattern. Patterns were to be avoided; they ignited suspicion in the authorities. Bought and paid-for indentured assassins were taught to avoid that. But I knew to listen and watch for other traps as well. I was facing down my own who’d received the same training as I had. The instant I heard the full-throttle roar of an engine, I knew. That Stefan knew too didn’t surprise me. The longer we were together, the more I saw how similar our lives had been in the things we’d been taught to do and the things we’d actually done.
It sucked for us both.
It sucked more when the building collapsed on top of us.
“Get away from him, you son of a bitch. Touch him again, and it’ll be the last thing you ever do.”
Stefan. . . .
Only Stefan could put that much grim promise in the word “ever.”
Hazy . . . everything was hazy, lazy, dazy, wavy. No . . . no z’s in wavy. It was dark and bright and red and dark again. The rapid switch didn’t improve the hazy, lazy, dazy any.
“Sir, we’re trying to help him. He could have a crush injury to his chest. That can be fatal, do you understand? He has a pneumothorax—one of his lungs is deflated. He probably has blood building up around his heart. We have to stabilize him now or he’ll die. You got that? He’ll die. Now, get the hell back. Lenny, where the hell are the cops? We need them on this guy.”
Cops. That would be bad. That had the haze fading faster as I felt my adrenaline increasing on its own, doing what a chimera’s body was built to do. I helped it with what I’d learned in the past years. I increased the adrenaline tenfold. That much would be detrimental and lethal to a human; to me, it was fuel accelerating the healing.
“Jesus, he’s going into some serious sinus tach. What the fuck? Four hundred and fifty beats? Jackie, the cardiac monitor is screwed. Get the backup monitor!”
We chimeras would not be good for the mental health of EMTs, paramedics, or any other medical personnel because we made all their medical knowledge useless. I knitted the hole that had been torn in my lung back together, causing massive numbers of cells to rush to meet one another. The three broken ribs would have to wait. I flooded my system with endorphins to dull the pain. There was some small amount of blood around my heart. I had my blood vessels reabsorb it. Opening my eyes, I lifted a hand and pulled the irritating endotracheal tube used to intubate me out of my throat and whacked the EMT on the head with it. It wasn’t very polite of me, as he was trying, in his mind, to save my life, but the only thing he could do was slow the process down and do more harm than good. Stefan knew that, which was why he was threatening to beat the shit out of my would-be angel of mercy.
Said angel of mercy was a balding, chubby man, and I’d left a red mark on the top of his shiny head with the tube. I felt guilty about that until I heard more sirens in the distance. Cops. Either the cops weren’t enthusiastic about coming to this part of town for a truck running into a building, or any other reason, or the fire station was closer. I sat up on the gurney and put my hand out. Stefan, covered in dirt and blood, instantly clasped my arm and lifted me to my feet. The ribs twinged, but that was all. I might’ve overdone it with the endorphins, nature’s morphine. I gave Stefan a loopy smile. “Did a building fall on me?”
“N
o.” He had his arm around my shoulders and was helping, if helping was half carrying, me to the SUV waiting for us two buildings down. It hadn’t seemed far when we’d parked. It seemed a half-hemisphere walk now. I vaguely noticed his other arm was pointed behind us as he crabbed us along sideways. He was holding his gun on the EMTs. None of them was inclined to die to take me to the hospital for a Snoopy Band-Aid. “You were hit by a semi and then a building fell on you. You are incapable of doing things the easy way, aren’t you?”
“Hit by a semi and lived.” My grin stretched wider.
“Clipped,” Stefan elaborated. He had no grin or smile.
I ignored him. “I’m indestructible.” The s in indestructible was slurred, but I didn’t mind. I was the king. I told Stefan so. “I’m the king. All hail the king.” I decided I felt too good to walk and gave up. Forget the cops; napping on the sidewalk sounded like a great idea. We were about ten feet from the SUV when I decided that. Stefan half lifted me with one arm and carried me like a sack of potatoes the rest of the way, which was no way to treat the king, while Saul opened the door to the backseat from inside. He put his hands under my shoulders and eased me in while Stefan slammed the door behind me. Saul jumped behind the wheel and Stefan reappeared at the other side of the SUV, climbed in, and lifted my head to rest in his lap.
“Get us the hell out of here, Saul.”
“Yeah, like you had to tell me that, oh great master criminal. Jesus.” I could feel the SUV already moving and moving fast from the screech of tires. “What is it with these damn little psychotics and destroying buildings? I nailed one in the chest as he was coming out the back. He had black hair, about eighteen. I think it was that Peter kid. He came out the second-floor window, flipped up over to the roof, and then jumped to the next building. Like goddamn Spiderman. He was weaving, though. I was going to go after him, but then Rome fell. I think you need to juice up your tranq-cure, kid.”
“You’ve no . . . idea.” The sun through the window sparkled in a thousand colors. I didn’t know there were a thousand colors. “He grew up, same as me. Stronger now. He’s not a rhino anymore. He’s four or five rhinos. Up the dose. Definitely. Up. Up, up, and away.”
Stefan’s thumb gently peeled back my eyelid. “Been practicing, huh?” I had said that, hadn’t I? Before we’d gone into the pawnshop. “On the healing, I’m guessing. Not even chimeras can fix a deflated lung and blood pooling around your heart in minutes. And somehow you’re doped to the gills, though I didn’t let that guy give you anything. Your pupils are huge.”
“That’s the adrenaline for healing and the endorphins for . . . I’m hungry.” I tried to sit up. Stefan held me down easily with a hand on my forehead and one on my chest. I wasn’t simply hungry. I was starving. I’d pushed my body to extremes I’d hoped I had in me but hadn’t been completely sure about until now. It took massive amounts of energy to do what I’d done, and I needed to replenish it. But when I tried to explain, replenish sounded more like plenrish. I said it several more times until it was less of a word and more a mouthful of oatmeal. That only made me hungrier. Oatmeal . . . Ariel liked oatmeal with brown sugar, cinnamon, and maple syrup. Ariel was hot. Not just hot . . . what’d they say . . . yeah . . . smoking hot.
Did Ariel think I was hot?
“Am I hot?” I asked Stefan. “Smoking hot? Think Ariel thinks I’m smoking hot?”
“Yeah, you’re the sexiest motherfucker on the planet, Misha.” There were so many emotions behind the blood on his face, but right now I could read only two of them. Exasperation. Worry. Too much worry. “Now enough with the endorphins. You must have more in you than you’d find swimming around in fifty marathon runners combined. Cut back on them enough to be lucid, would you?”
The sirens behind us were louder and closer. Who needed to be lucid to know that wasn’t good? “Shit.” Stefan twisted his head. “I made it through the mob years without having to shoot at a cop once. Doesn’t it goddamn figure? Think I can hit the tires of three police cars?”
“Gun.” My tongue felt thick, but I could do the little words. Cake of piece. Or something like that. “Micro. Wave. Gun.”
“Okay, that I approve of. Beats pipe bombs by a mile. Where the hell is it?” He leaned over me, careful not to rest any weight on my chest, and dug around in my duffel bag. “Damn it!” I saved my sympathy. He’d packed the bags when they’d come after Raynor, Ariel, and me.
“Forget? Old. Senile. We need a drugstore . . . adult diapers.”
“Misha, seriously. Dial down the damn endorphins. Jesus, finally.” He yanked the microwave gun out of my backpack, rolled down the window, and, holding me against him with one hand as we rose up off the seat, he leaned out and fired. “Christ, it worked.” As if anything I built wouldn’t work. He fired two more times and there were no more sirens. Easing back inside, he dropped the gun in the floorboards.
“Way to save our ass, kid,” Saul said from the front. “You done good.”
“Always do good. I’m brilliant. The most brilliant genius to. . . .” I lost my train of thought and then caught a more important one. “Still hungry.”
“Saul, emergency kit.” Stefan lifted his hand from my chest and caught the bag that sailed back. Stefan didn’t go anywhere with me, on the run or living our once peacefully mundane lives in Cascade, without food. I didn’t know if chimeras in general required more calories than humans or if it was merely me, but I outate Stefan three times over.
Outate.
Which reminded me again.
Food.
Now.
Hungry.
Stefan had a ham sandwich half—unwrapped. I snatched it clumsily from his hand and took huge bites, swallowing without chewing. While I ate, I did what Stefan suggested and eased back on the endorphins, although I hated to see the rainbows in the streamers of sun disappear. They were nice. They reminded me of home. There they arched over the river and the dam almost every week. It was the reason the bridge that topped the dam was called the Bridge of the Heavens. It made more sense than a golden ladder.
But I wasn’t dead yet, so no Paradise for me.
As I finished the sandwich and eased back on the production of the endorphins, I began to notice things. The pain that stabbed my ribs was gone. A point against lucidity. Stefan was the other thing I noticed. When I’d woken up, I’d seen him covered in dirt, dust, and blood. He hadn’t been hit or clipped by a semi, but a building had fallen on him as it had on me. “Are you. . . . ?” I grimaced and braced my ribs with my hand. “Are you all right?” My body wasn’t close to full capacity yet. I couldn’t feel if he was hurt or not. My lingering damage took precedence and I couldn’t change that. The body’s self-preservation overrode what my mind ordered it to do. I raised my other hand and swiped at the blood-dust paste on his face to see the damage. There were several cuts and scrapes, but they weren’t bad. The blood was from them and his nose. It didn’t look broken, though. It was all superficial, but that was nothing compared to what could be going on inside him.
“I’m all right,” he assured me. “Sore and getting less and less male-model material all the time, but I’ll live.”
I wouldn’t be satisfied until I knew for myself. Lucid and determined, both made me inescapable. “More food,” I demanded grimly, opening my eyes. I went through three more sandwiches and two Gatorades in five minutes. It helped. My ribs were healing, but not instantly. Bone was slower to repair than anything else. After eating, I lay quietly, Stefan’s legs remaining my pillow. With my eyes shut, I concentrated on stretching my limits further. Damn stubborn bone. “Does your back or neck hurt? Your abdomen, chest, head?”
Stefan had explained while I was eating how part of the ceiling had dropped, one end resting on top of the semi and the other landing on top of him where he’d been flung to the floor. It had been what had shielded us from chunks of the second floor and saved our lives. There’d been barely enough room for him to grab and drag me with him as he tunneled through tangled co
ts and debris to crawl under the semi and out the hole it had knocked in the front wall. He also was filling Saul in on what had happened with Peter when I’d interrupted with my woefully inadequate attempt at a diagnostic.
“I’m fine, Misha,” he reiterated. “I’m a muscle-bound human. You’re a skinny chimera who lies like a dog.” He gave me a napkin to wipe his blood from my hand. Some of it, along with dirt and dust, had ended up on the sandwiches, but I was too ravenous and too set on feeding the healing process to care. “Of the two of us, who do you think is going to walk away?”
I wanted to snort, but I knew what my ribs would think of that. “I’m athletic, like a runner.”
I had the self-esteem to know that was true. The six and a half times I’d had sex, no one had any complaints about my body. In fact, they’d enjoyed the look of it and definitely enjoyed what I could do with it. I had read up on the subject beforehand. I wanted to do it right and from the reactions, I thought I had . . . excepting the half time, which had been my first. The books said that was normal too. “So what if I’m not a walking triangle of steroids,” I added. That, however, was completely untrue, but if I couldn’t have endorphins, I could sting my brother . . . and distract him. He was joking with me, but there was no humor in it. In less than twenty-four hours I’d been kidnapped, in a car wreck, hit by a truck, and had a building fall on me. As brothers went, I was high maintenance.
As an apology, when I asked for a candy bar, I broke off half and gave it to him. With my obsession with food, there was no higher gesture. He accepted it with all the gravity it deserved. Or he was mocking me. Either way, the graveyard shadows in his eyes receded and that was enough for me.
Godzilla, curled on my stomach, had been chirping nervously. As I was giving the ferret a peanut from the PayDay bar, Saul put down the visor against the searing Tucson light that sunglasses couldn’t handle and said, “I don’t get it. You said they killed all those gangbangers in there. That punk-ass teenage Jim Jones said this wasn’t about Michael’s being good enough to join up with their Sesame Street serial killer family after all. Why weren’t the rest of them there? Besides the one driving the truck?” Who had gotten away so quickly Saul hadn’t seen whether it was a girl or a boy. He hadn’t seen anyone period. “Why didn’t they stay put and try to kill us or, for God’s sake, give us a chance to do the same to them?”