Rob Thurman - Chimera

I took note of the now-empty coffee table and was duly impressed. Vanderburgh probably wouldn’t rush out to shoot at us as we drove down the street, but there was no need to leave him the option, and Michael hadn’t. “Let’s go, kid.”

“Okay.” He dropped the tape he was shifting from hand to hand and stood from his squat. As he walked toward me, he passed close to Vanderburgh—much closer than I liked and much closer than he normally would have. I’d noticed in the store and restaurants that Michael had a large sense of personal space—not surprising considering what he’d been through. That he was voluntarily violating it now made me wonder . . . until I saw his hand brush Vanderburgh’s robe below the tie. It was the lightest of touches with the most drastic of consequences.

The old man’s face went an unpleasant plum color and the portly figure of the former doctor fell to his knees with a choking gasp. Fat hands paddled desperately before settling on his crotch, cupping with exquisite care. “What?” Air whistled through his open mouth. “What—what’s happened?”

What indeed.

“Good-bye, Dr. Vanderburgh,” Michael offered politely before exiting from the front door. He didn’t look back at his handiwork, although I did. Vanderburgh had fallen onto his side and curled up, an obese and tearful fetus. He could cry the proverbial river; it wasn’t going to equal one of the tears of his victims.

Trailing after my brother, I closed the door behind us and cut off the pants and sobs issuing from behind us. “Misha.” I watched as he fished the keys from the pocket of his sweats.

“Mmm?” He inserted the key into the lock.

“All right, Mr. Casual. What did you do?” I demanded.

“Cut off the blood flow to his testicles. Permanently.” Opening the door, he looked at me across the top of the car. “You were right. He’s not a nice person. Not nice at all.” Then he disappeared behind the wheel.

The tape. Michael had seen something on that tape that had given him a glimpse at Vanderburgh’s blackened soul and that glimpse had given new meaning to the phrase “blue balls.” Once in the passenger seat, I took one of the pain pills. After swallowing, I said in the best big-brotherly tone I could manage through my pounding headache, “You really shouldn’t destroy a man’s balls.”

“No?” The car started, the sound only ratcheting up the pain in my head a notch.

“No.” I closed my eyes.

“Even if they deserve it?”

He had me there. “Well . . . yeah, the son of a bitch definitely did. There’s no denying that. But I don’t want you getting hurt in the process.”

“It doesn’t hurt me.” He sounded so certain, but I remembered just last night how he’d told me he and the others at the Institute couldn’t do anything good and how in the morning he expected me to discard him as tainted and leave him behind.

I rolled down the window an inch and let the cold air play over my face. I was getting tired, damn tired, and the twilight chill would help keep me awake. “Funny. You didn’t seem so sure of that when those assholes had you trapped in the bathroom.”

“That’s different.”

I opened my eyes the better to see in his face exactly what it was he was trying to say. “How so?”

“He hurts kids. Normal kids,” he amended. “Kids who can’t protect themselves.”

“Yeah, they can’t protect themselves like you can, but that doesn’t mean you’re not normal.” He rolled a darkly disbelieving eye in my direction but didn’t comment. “But that’s not what I’m talking about,” I added. “I want to know why you’d do something for faceless strangers that you won’t do for yourself.” It wasn’t as if there was much he could’ve done in the face of two guns, but even if the men had been unarmed, I still doubted he would’ve “laid on the hands,” so to speak. I’d seen his face. He wouldn’t have done it . . . not then anyway.

He shrugged with discomfort that wasn’t as concealed as he thought, but I didn’t let it go at that. “Misha. Give. Why wouldn’t you protect yourself? You wouldn’t have to kill, God no. But you could give a little of what you gave to the doc. So why not?” I could understand his never wanting to use what he had in him. I might think it unrealistic, but I would understand. To use it for others and not himself, though, that I couldn’t.

There was the squirt of cleaner on the windshield and the swish of wipers. He watched them with fascination before reluctantly bowing to the inevitable. “Because”—he paused—“because I’m beginning to wonder if I don’t belong in a cage after all.”

That woke me up quickly and thoroughly. Glaring, I reached over and thwapped him lightly in the back of the head. Startled, he looked over at me with wide eyes. “Say something stupid like that again and you’ll never see an empty calorie again as long as you live. No cakes, no candy bars, nothing. You’ll be cut off.”

He was smoothing the back of his hair as I talked and entertaining the thought of giving me a dirty look. I could see it as clear as day. “Don’t bother,” I warned. “Bottom line, kid. You don’t belong in a cage. No one but no one is going to say that, not even you. Got it?”

“Guess I had better, hadn’t I?” he answered with what seemed to be only mild irritation. After a few minutes of the only sound being the tires on the pavement, he said quietly, “I wouldn’t have given up. I wouldn’t have let them take me without a fight.” The dusky purple light filled the car, making him increasingly hard to see . . . as if he were fading away. “I just don’t know if I could hold that part of myself back once I started to use it in a situation like that. All the adrenaline. Fighting for my life.” I thought I saw his face work in the darkness. “I won’t risk killing again. I can’t. I still remember how it felt . . . with that man’s heart beneath my hand. How it pounded; then the muscle melted like wax. I could feel it scream and die even through his chest.” He stopped, and I wasn’t sorry he did. Hearing that wasn’t doing either of us any good right now. There would be time to talk about it later. When we were free and safe, we’d talk about a thousand things until he was at peace with every one of them.

“Then you don’t have to.” End of story. “Leave the violence to me, Misha. I’m already used to it.”

He had something to say about that; I didn’t have to see him to know the wheels were spinning in his head. But winter air and determination aside, I dozed off before he was able to get the words out. Against a concussion and a pain pill, consciousness was a lost cause. Michael woke me up when we stopped at a gas station and I cleaned up as best I could in the grubby bathroom. The paper towel dispenser was empty and I scrubbed away dried blood with wet toilet paper. There wasn’t much I could do about what was matted in my hair, but hopefully I would pass a brief inspection at the motel.

I did. It was a small, run-down place with only ten rooms and a small gravel lot. The guy behind the counter had blond dreads decorated here and there with rusty metal hoops. If he had noticed the condition of my hair, it would only have been to give me a thumbs-up. The room was even worse than the outside, but it didn’t matter. With a thin, rock-hard mattress and a dingy cracked ceiling, it was the Ritz-Carlton as far as I was concerned. I fell into bed as if it were feather stuffed and covered with silk sheets. I was gone in an instant, and I dreamed. Like Michael’s, my dreams were of horses. There was also the beach with churning waves and a sky as improbably blue as an Easter egg. There was no strange man; no gun. There were only horses that lived to canter into the water and boys who never learned to live without their brothers. They were good dreams.