Rob Thurman - Basilisk

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.