Rob Thurman - Basilisk

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.”