Rob Thurman - Basilisk

I opened the driver’s door and stepped out. I wavered a little, hands up but too floppy and uncoordinated to cup behind my head. My license fell from fumbling fingers into the dirt where we were pulled off the road. “I . . . I don’t feel so . . . where . . . I? What’s going on?” As soon as the “on” left my mouth, I bent and projectile vomited, Exorcist style. Linda Blair would’ve given me a ten out of ten for style and a record-breaking eleven for velocity. The splatter of my lunch on his shiny mirror-bright shoes distracted the deputy as I fell to the ground, to the side of my recycled lunch—that much into The Exorcist I was not—and began having a full-blown seizure. I flailed, convulsed, foamed a little at the mouth for veracity, and decreased the circulation to my lips to turn them temporarily cyanotic blue.

Stefan came boiling out of the car. “He’s diabetic! He’s going into ketoacidosis. That’s a diabetic coma, you dumb country shit. Help me hold him down.” He yelled back at the car, “Jack, call nine-one-one!”

The deputy had seen a lot of faked illnesses in his day; that was the nature of being a cop. Fake pregnancies, fake grandpa’s-having-chest-pain, fake kidswallowed-the-dog’s-squeaky-toy, all to get out of a speeding ticket. But he had never seen anyone who could vomit and turn cyanotic at the drop of a hat. He was smart, though. He didn’t drop his gun, but he stepped closer—close enough that one of my flailing hands smacked his leg. Cloth didn’t stop the touch. It was too flimsy an armor. He went down, loose-limbed and easy as Godzilla did for his afternoon ferret nap. Stefan grabbed the gun from his hand as he fell, explaining, “No need for baby to accidentally shoot us as he goes sleepy-time. Good job, Misha.” No Good job, Misha, except for risking your life when I could’ve risked mine instead and probably gotten shot in the process. Not even a Good job, kiddo. I couldn’t imagine I appeared proud while at the same time wiping the foam and traces of vomit off my mouth . . . but I was. Proud as hell. It was good to be the little brother, but it was also good to be an equal—a partner.

Stefan nodded at the deputy’s car. “Don’t forget that while you’re on a roll. You’re the computer genius. See if the car has a camera. Are we on video, can you erase it if we are, or do we need to blow the damn thing up?”

Computer genius? “I’m the everything genius”—I frowned—“and that seems either your or Saul’s criminally inclined abilities are up to something that simple.”

Stefan grinned. “You’re the newbie in this elite fighting force. I wouldn’t want to take away that rite of initiation.”

“Initiation?”

“You know,” he said, his grin wider and, I thought, more evil, “where we make you do all the scut work while we sit back, drink beer, and criticize your technique. We all go through it. Saul peeled potatoes in the military. I mopped up the restrooms in the strip club. Good times, Misha. Welcome aboard.”

“Stop playing around, you jackasses.” Saul had his own window down now. “He could have called for backup. Let’s get out of here before our secret weapon with a double-oh-seven in puke has to spray the entire sheriff’s department.”

I was going to have to commit one way or the other on Saul’s not being that bad or being a demon from Hell who deserved a thousand agonizing deaths.

But I had scut work to do and that decision would have to wait. While Stefan dragged the deputy off to a safe distance, I blew up the car with the three pipe bombs I had left. It was quicker and more efficient. I also ended up thinking that being a partner wasn’t all chocolate pancakes, sex with a smart girl, and late-night movies. How fair was it that the genius had to be the cleanup crew, too? I continued to bitch to myself. I’d worked too hard for this. I’d ride out this “newbie” thing and then it would be all chocolate pancakes, sex with a smart and pretty girl, and late-night movies. And if I had to build a state-of-the-art smart and pretty Fembot to make that happen, I’d do it. The real thing was difficult to find while being on the run from killers or chasing killers or both. Maybe I’d give her a pink wig, the same color pink as Ariel’s hair.

I’d better stock up on WD-40.

In minutes we were back on the road with yet another explosion in our rearview mirror. I drove several miles until we saw the first opportunity to steal another license plate—Wyoming this time—from an abandoned rust bucket on the side of the road. This time we were headed toward Tucson, Arizona, Wendy’s chip beckoning the way. It wasn’t a tingle that went down my spine this time. It was a chill.

Icy as winter’s first breath and a dying man’s last.

Tucson was well over twelve hours away, which meant another motel stop in Springerville, Arizona. I could’ve admitted I could go on much less sleep these days and driven on, throughout the night if necessary, but there were other things I needed to do as well. A few hours at a motel to let Stefan and Saul sleep in beds instead of in a car with an increasingly agitated ferret would give me the time to do them. Godzilla wasn’t claustrophobic. As with most ferrets, he liked tight spaces to squeeze his long slithery shape into and wreak havoc. But also as with most ferrets, he became bored easily. A change of scenery would give him new things to sniff out, investigate, and then obliterate like a furry missile of destruction. It would be good for him and good for me as I had something to create rather than destroy.

The motel room was the same as the other motel room. The bedspreads were orange instead of bile green, but the rest was identical. Even the landscape pictures over the beds were the same or similarly bad. One was a full moon with what was supposed to be a coyote but looked more like Tramp from that other Disney cartoon—the cheerful mutt they’d had the dogcatcher drag off to kill. God, I hated that Disney bastard. If I ever found his cryogenically frozen head, I was unplugging that unit pronto. Funny that it was only his nightmare creations that the Institute let us watch, cartoonwise, when we were in the younger group. The other picture was a dusty trail leading up a dusty hill with a dusty man riding a dusty horse. The man didn’t resemble Butch or Sundance or Val Kilmer in Tombstone , so I had zero interest.

“So why the room with a microwave?” Stefan sat in the chair at the small table. He indicated the four bags of cheeseburgers, fries, burritos, refried beans, and two milkshakes—mine, all mine—with the small brush he was using to clean his gun. “If I know you and food, and, Jesus, do I, there won’t be a crumb left to heat up.”

“Think of it as a science project. All those science fairs I missed out on, what I’m going to build would’ve gotten me an A and maybe laid by the hot science teacher.” At least with Saul around, my use of incorrect and sexually inappropriate language was improving in leaps and bounds. I grinned at Stefan’s bemusement, grabbed my bags of food, and spread it out over my bed, sharing with Zilla when he popped out of the bathroom, dragging one end of the toilet paper in his mouth. I could hear it unrolling as he ran. He passed over the carpet and under the low-hanging blanket, out the other side, up and over the bed, under again, and then back up to perch on my knee, turning my bed into a fairly accurate depiction of a Möbius strip. Spitting out the end of the one-ply, he accepted a French fry with a contented mrrrp .

“My science teacher was named Mr. Wilfred Wyatt, but knock yourself out. Do I want to ask what you’re going to make or be pleasantly surprised when it explodes, disintegrates the motel, or opens up a black hole and sucks in the earth?” He reassembled the Steyr with practiced ease but didn’t slide in the clip. With a curious and thieving ferret around, a loaded gun wasn’t a good idea. Stefan slept with the gun and clip under his pillow. He could jam the latter home in a fraction of a second and Godzilla didn’t have to face manslaughter charges. It was a win-win.