Rob Thurman - Basilisk

“I’m more worried about how they found us,” he continued. “We torched the Institute car. We stole a new one. We swapped out license plates on it. How . . . Ah shit. We didn’t steal Saul new license plates. That mall parking lot was full of cameras. He could’ve tagged us by looking at the security tapes. I didn’t think anyone would go to the trouble, though. Hell, I didn’t know he had more men to begin with. Raynor was acting as if he was off the radar on this one. He may be the only one in the government who knows about the Institute. Jericho was smart that way. But if I had thought he had any more men, I would’ve guessed they’d assume you and I took out Raynor. And Raynor would’ve told them at least enough when he first came after us that they’d know we’d been on the run a long time—long enough to be too smart to steal a car from the same place we’d killed their boss.”

And the motel, cheap and sleazy as it was, definitely had cameras too. They probably made half their income off private detectives buying eight-by-ten glossies of cheating spouses, had a Web site with PayPal, and ran specials on double prints. That would be how the guy and his friends, if he had any, knew which car was ours and which one to plant the bomb under. They would’ve seen us on tape getting out of it. Mr. Fried-and-Crispy would’ve seen it was Saul who’d killed his boss on the mall security tapes, but Saul was nothing more than an inconvenience compared to what I was capable of. “So that guy was either smarter than we think or we’re more stupid than we think,” I said thoughtfully.

“Or just smart enough, Goldilocks,” Saul added. “Now, get this damn rat off my head before I toss him out the window. We have to find a place to dump the truck and get a new one.”

When my fingers brushed his head as I retrieved Godzilla, I made him impotent for approximately a day. He most likely wouldn’t notice and it improved my mood tremendously. “Try for a blue one,” I said ingenuously. “In feng shui, the color blue aids in success.”

Saul snorted. “You are one weird dude.”

Saul had no idea what I was, despite what Stefan had told him. Seeing is believing and he hadn’t seen. That meant he couldn’t accept it, not in his gut where it mattered. He couldn’t truly believe. If he stayed Stefan’s friend, it would remain that way, which was best for everyone all around. It was certainly best for Saul’s continued sexual activity and potentially receding hairline.

We stole another SUV before leaving St. George, hitting a quiet neighborhood where everyone still slept. Then we stopped at several different places—neighborhoods and the 24/7 places like porn warehouses and big-box stores for a stack of different license plates. No more mistakes this time. Then we were on the I-15 to Laramie via Salt Lake City. The sun was coming up. Back in Cascade Falls, I’d be getting up about now, eating breakfast, going to work after stopping down by the river to deliver Ralphy his catered Alpo. The air would be brisk with a cool bite as I’d get a chocolate-cheesecake Danish from the bakery to top off breakfast. I’d say hi to the people I saw and give them the appropriate smile. Sometimes it didn’t feel like the practiced one.

It felt real.

“You know what I miss about Cascade?” I asked Stefan suddenly.

“Everything,” he answered without taking a second to think about it.

“You too?” I could all but smell the paint fumes from his clothes when he’d come home from work—the gingerbread man.

“Me too.” He tapped on the window glass lightly with a raw knuckle. It was an unconscious habit of his. “Sorry I ruined things for us there, Misha. Sorry I lost us our home.”

“It’s not your fault. It’s Raynor’s.”

“There is that.” He tapped again. “And maybe we both got a little sloppy, but goddamn it, I think we were entitled to a little sloppy. That’s what having a home is all about—relaxing. Not being on guard every second of the day.”

“Not that I don’t feel for you guys, but there are thousands of shit-kicker little towns across the country to find a new home in. How about we concentrate on the pack of killer kids roaming the country?” Saul suggested. “What are we going to do when we find them in Laramie? Tranq them on the sidewalk in front of God and everyone, wait around to see if this cure of Mikey’s works, all while the police are arresting us for assaulting a bunch of children and teenagers? Dora the Explorer could locate a better plan than that up her ass.”

My jaw tightened over the “Mikey”—I should’ve taken his hair too—but he was right. We did need a plan to get them away from people and out of sight. “Leave that to me. I’m working on it,” I said.

At the same time, Stefan stated, “We’ll find them first, see exactly where they are and what they’re doing, and then figure something out.”

“I think someone just staged a coup on your ass, Korsak,” Saul commented.

Stefan folded his arms as he wedged himself more comfortably in the corner of door and seat and considered me. “Huh. I think he might be giving it a shot.” He didn’t say anything aloud about my drug-dealing plan that hadn’t gone precisely as calculated or the landing that had caused the cut on his forehead, but the quirk of one eyebrow and the corner of his mouth said it as clearly. But I also thought I saw faith there. Brothers gave you second, third . . . more chances than you deserved. I wasn’t letting Stefan down.

I rolled on my side, used a sweatshirt someone had left in the back as a pillow, and said, “Wake me up for breakfast. I’m starving.” I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep, but instead I planned. Stefan was right in that my plans did need some refinement, but I thought he knew he’d be wrong in thinking any of his would work better . . . not with Peter and the rest of the chimeras. Hence the faith. We didn’t think in the same way that normal people did, because we weren’t normal people. We weren’t people at all. It made us unpredictable. In the end, only a chimera could think like another chimera. And with Peter showing every sign of being more intelligent than I was, I was going to have to work especially hard to do that. We were all brilliant—Jericho’s work had made certain of that, but I hadn’t seen signs that Peter was exceptional above the rest of us while I’d been his classmate. Somehow I’d missed it. He had fooled us all.

Peter, Peter, prisoner eater. . . .

Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater . . . It was a nursery rhyme, we were told. Targets and those between you and your target told them to their children. It was a fact we needed to know to appear ordinary and we were given three examples to memorize, which we did in one reading as required, before moving on to the next subject—how to mimic the neurotoxic effects of blowfish poisoning if you happened to have a target in Japan.

I’d been around twelve then—two years older than Wendy was now. Peter had been close to the same. It was hard to tell in the Institute. There were no birthday parties. The Playground, yes, but no parties . . . not the kind of parties, at least, that anyone outside the Institute would recognize as a celebration. I hadn’t told Stefan that the Basement wasn’t the only place where we were “rewarded” for exceptional work. The Institute knew it was important in raising genetic assassins to equate death with reward. Death equaled reward equaled incentive equaled eager students—a simple psychological loop.

On the nursery rhyme day, Peter had asked the Instructor if it wouldn’t be better to kill several other people in the target’s entourage along with the target by using imitative blowfish poisoning to increase the authenticity of the diagnosis. I had thought the same myself. I couldn’t help it. It was a logical and effective way to throw off any signs of foul play. But I hadn’t said it; I’d only thought it. Peter wasn’t like me, however. Peter was a good, enthusiastic student, and he said it loud and proud. That brought him a reward and the rest of us a chance to watch and see what we were missing by not trying as hard as Peter.