Rob Thurman - Chimera

With a groan I straightened stiffly and rubbed a hand over my wet face. Through the tops of the trees I could see a sky the cloudy white of a freshwater pearl. The sun was the same color only a shade brighter . . . milky glass held to a fire. The rain, a warm drizzle, apparently had been drifting in for some time; my shirt was nearly soaked. At least it had warmed up to a more normal temperature for southern Florida. When I turned my head to check on Michael, I saw that he’d tossed his blankets aside. He was dry as a bone, the back windows still being intact. Shuttered eyes met mine as he pillowed his head on a folded arm. “You snore,” he said in the hush.

“And you like to point out the obvious. I guess that makes us even.” I ran a hand through snarled hair. The ponytail holder had disappeared sometime during the night. The first opportunity that came along I’d get it all cut off anyway. New car, new look; it was all part of the plan—the one I was making up as I went along. Disappearing wasn’t as easy a trick as my father had made it seem, not with this guy Jericho sniffing the trail. I was going to pull out all the stops. Drastically changing our appearance was the first step. Maybe I’d scrounge a dress and wig and change Michael to Michelle.

“So,” I said with a grin, “how do you feel about the color pink?”

Suspicion ripe in the narrowing of his eyes, he sat up and began to neatly fold the blankets. “In exactly the same way I think of making a bathroom of a tree.”

He was back in his “old man” phase. The child was bound to resurface at the next fast-food joint. The thought sobered me, not because I didn’t enjoy his amazement at experiencing things that I took for granted, but because it reminded me. I couldn’t begin to imagine the life that had produced such an odd dichotomy in what had once been a normal if precocious kid.

“Misha,” I started, ignoring the clammy sensation of the wet shirt sticking to my chest. “About this Jericho . . .”

“No.” The flat denial sliced knife sharp through the air as Michael doggedly doubled the second blanket.

I didn’t want to push him. I didn’t want to do anything but make things as easy as they could be for the rest of his life. Making up for the past ten years wasn’t practical or even possible, but it was an instinct difficult to fight. “Okay,” I said exhaling with wry self-deprecation, “I know I look like some kind of superhero here, but I need all the help I can get. I need to know who this Jericho is. What he’s capable of.”

He kept his eyes on the cloth in his lap, hands smoothing the material. Just as I thought he would ignore me entirely, he said without emotion, “Anything. He’s capable of anything.”

Progress, but it was a progress that made my stomach tighten into a fist. He didn’t look up as I reached over the seat and took the blanket. Shaking it back out, I used it to dry the passenger seat before inviting lightly, “Why don’t you hop on up here, kiddo? You’re giving me neck strain.”

Silently he obeyed. The rain had halted except for the occasional drop, and he was mostly dry when he sat beside me. I started the car and cranked up the fan anyway. “I’m sorry to push you on this. I wish it could come out in your own time, Michael, I do. But we’re in trouble here. I need to know anything that could help us.” Tapping a finger on the wheel, I spoke more to myself than to my brother. “Such as why didn’t they wait until we’d stopped for the night. It wouldn’t have been nearly as public as the shit they pulled yesterday.”

“They didn’t want to take a chance that someone might see what I . . . that someone might see me.” A brittle smile curved his lips. “Time is of the essence for them. Isn’t that what they say in all the movies?”

“They let you see movies?” I asked, distracted by the thought of strangely quiet children dressed in institutional white pajamas. They were lined up in chairs before a television screen with their hands clasped in their laps as they watched images of a world beyond their reach. It was a scene from a darkly sterile future, one that I hoped not to be around to see.

“Training.” The smile faded to a much smaller but more genuine one. “The only training I actually liked. And no one in the movies used a tree either.”

“You just didn’t see the right movies.” I returned the smile and was surprised—and pleased—to see his deepen, but a sudden movement had the emotion melting away and my hand jerking toward the gun tucked between the seat and center console. The overhead V of geese honked and flew on. Relaxing, I pulled my hand away, but the shared moment was gone. “Tell me about Jericho, Misha,” I urged quietly. “Tell me about the training.”

The kid didn’t have a nervous bone in his body from what I’d seen. His nerves, if not absent altogether, were knit of steel and titanium wire. But now I saw from the taut line of his spine and the tense clamp of his jaw that he wasn’t happy with the subject at hand. They were subtle clues, barely visible unless you were looking and looking hard, but they were there. “I’ve been at the Institute all my life.” The fleeting frown that came and went like heat lightning indicated that perhaps he wasn’t as sure of that statement as he would’ve been two days ago. “I’ve been with you a little more than twenty-four hours. I’m not sure what I should do.”

It was a hard-won admission of uncertainty from a shockingly self-contained boy. I treated it with the respect it deserved. “Would you go back to the Institute if you could?” It didn’t seem conceivable, but I knew better than that. Some animals and most people get used to their cages, whether the bars were made of iron or something less tangible. Swing the door open and let them smell the freedom. A few would make a break for it, but the majority would turn their backs on it. Try to drag them free of their trap and they would kick and scream bloody murder. Freedom is hard, and dependence is so very easy. It’s simple human nature. No one knew that better than I did. For the past ten years I’d lived in a cage built of bone, blood, and guilt, and I would’ve very likely have killed anyone who tried to force me out of it.

“Would you?” I repeated.

“No!” The answer was carried on an explosive burst of breath and it proved one thing instantly. Michael at seventeen was a stronger man than I had ever been. “No,” he went on more calmly, “I won’t go back. Not ever.”

“Then trust me. Tell me what I need to know.”

“Trust you?” The blackly amused cynicism that glittered in his eyes made me abruptly feel as if he were the older one. I was one day out of the family business, a grimly dark and violent business, and this kid had me feeling wide-eyed with dewy innocence. “Trust you,” he echoed, shaking his head as if he couldn’t believe I had the audacity to even say the words. Rolling down the window, he propped his elbow on the sill and his chin in his hand. “We had classes on that as well.”

Waiting him out, I started the car and jounced our way back to the road. He would tolerate only so much pushing; I would have to be patient. It was nearly fifteen minutes before he spoke again. Eyes still gazing out the window and hair whipping in the wind, he began to speak in a voice indifferent and detached. He may have been aloof to it all, but the more he talked, the sicker I felt.

The Institute was precisely that from his description—twisted and horrific, but with the goal of education all the same. It wasn’t what the students were being taught that triggered my gag reflex; it was the motivation behind it. Psychology and biology were part of a normal high school curriculum, but not the way they were presented there. They were teaching psychology to children to instruct them in manipulation and biology to illustrate the body’s vulnerability. On and on it went. Every class was presented in terms of attack or defense.