Chimera (9 page)

The prongs of the Taser imbedded themselves in the ebony chest before I had a chance to get another word out. As the current hit, the three hundred thousand volts dropped our unwanted visitor instantly. His gun discharged and blew a hole in the metal ceiling as he fell balanced precariously on the back edge. I took the van over one more hard bump and the man was gone, tumbling slack and limp out of the back. “Should’ve saved a bullet for that asshole,” Saul muttered. He dropped the Taser on the floor and clambered into the back to pull the doors shut. “Who’d he think he was? Superman? Jesus.” On the way back to the passenger side seat he paused to study Lukas. “You doing okay, kid?”

In my peripheral vision I saw the brown head tilt until it rested against the window glass as Lukas said bleakly, “I failed the test, didn’t I?”

I shook my head as Saul’s gaze slid my way. I had no idea and this wasn’t the time to delve into it. Shrugging philosophically, Skoczinsky patted the white-covered shoulder. “Hang in there, buddy. We’re here to help you.” Settling back into his seat and replacing the empty clip in his MP5, he murmured, “Too bad we couldn’t do the same for the others.”

“We didn’t have a choice.” It was true, but it tasted bitter coming out of my mouth. It was a surgical strike, in and out, and the only chance we’d had. Trying to shepherd a group of children out would’ve taken more than twice the time and double the firefight. That was assuming the kids all cooperated, and one little girl came instantly to mind to refute that theory. My hand still vaguely ached as I did my best not to think about the weirdness of that. If we’d stayed any longer, we would’ve faced at least triple the force and against that all our fun little toys might not have meant squat. “Make the call.”

After fastening his seat belt, Saul used a cell phone, disposable, paid for with cash, and untraceable to us, to call 911. Reporting a fire in a building full of children, he gave the address and then tossed the phone out of the open window. It was the quickest way to get a whole lot of people to the compound and fast, but I still had my doubts there would be a child left there to find. It would be fifteen minutes, maybe twenty, before the fire trucks would arrive this far out—not long, but I had the dark feeling it would be long enough for the people running that place.

“No one’s behind us yet, but it won’t be long.” Saul twisted his neck to watch out the back window. “Can’t this piece of shit go any faster?”

“Maybe if we lightened the load by dumping your bony ass.” Pessimistically, I put more pressure on the gas pedal and was rewarded by a slight surge of the engine and rattle of the van body. With one hand on the steering wheel, I used the other to skim off my mask. “Burn that, would you? It has a nice helping of my DNA on it.” I touched a finger to the still-wet blood on my jaw. Luckily it was the side of my face that was already scarred. Not much more damage could be done there. “Chances are they’ll guess who I am soon enough, but better safe than sorry.” If they were the ones who had originally taken Lukas, they were bound to know something of his family. And who else besides his family would come looking for him?

Fishing for his lighter, Saul set the mask on fire and let it slip out of the window to follow the cell phone. It was a small comet trailing sparks as it was swallowed by the night. As he pressed the button to raise the window, I looked into the mirror again to see Lukas tilting his head to get a look at my face. The fleeting warmth I felt at the first sign of normal curiosity in him melted to nothingness as I saw the complete lack of recognition in his eyes. I don’t know what I’d expected. He had no memory of his own name. Seeing my face so changed from my fourteen-year-old self wasn’t likely to trigger a recollection, but . . . shit, hope springs eternal.

Turning my head, I said lightly to him, “Don’t worry, Lukas. You always were the pretty one in the family.”

He didn’t return my forced smile but only leaned back in his seat as Saul sniped, “Speak for yourself. If pretty’s in this van, he’s sitting right here. Clooney’s got nothing on me.”

The chuckle that hung like an aborted sneeze in the back of my throat was unexpected. There were no two ways about it; I was going to miss Saul. Hurtling down the road in a shot-up van with a brother who didn’t know me from Adam and with pursuers who couldn’t be far behind, I should’ve had nothing but anxiety, desperation, and the black and red sketched images of fallen bodies in my thoughts. We weren’t friends, Skoczinsky and I, I’d told myself a few times before, offhandedly blaming it on an inner lack in us both. Maybe that was true, or maybe I was fooling myself and any deficiency lay solely with me. If Saul and I weren’t friends . . . well, I suddenly wished like hell we were. I was going to miss the son of a bitch.

If I lived that long.

“Lukas, get in the car.” I wadded up the black shirt and tossed it onto the back floorboards.

He stood beside the van, watching as Saul and I moved around—always watching. By turns he seemed like a child, innocent and confused by the ways of the world, or an old man, uninterested and not particularly astonished by the turn of events. There were quite a few people in him, and not one of them was the Lukas I remembered; It was yet one more thing I simply didn’t have time to ponder, not now.

“Michael.”

I looked up from stashing my gun beneath the driver’s seat of the car. The sheer determination projected behind the response caught my attention when I thought nothing less than gunfire would have. “What?”

“My name is Michael.” From the obstinate set of his jaw I realized we’d reached a glitch in what so far had been a fairly successful run. “Test or not, call me by my name. Call me Michael.”

I hesitated at the car door, then took a step toward him, halting when he took the same telling step backward. I knew what to say, because, after all, it was the truth. Look, I know you have no idea what’s going on, I could tell him, but you have to trust me when I tell you that you are Lukas Korsak. You’re my brother, and I’ve come to take you home. P.S. Great jammies. See there? Easy as pie. Delusional I was not, and I didn’t need Saul’s murmur of “Not the time” to know better than to get into it all now.

“Okay, Michael it is,” I conceded, and was rewarded with a slight loosening of his wiry frame. I continued with a hard-won casual tone. “Could you hop in the car, Michael? We’re in something of a hurry here.”

His yes or no on that didn’t matter. I hadn’t come this far to have him go pelting off into the darkness like a jackrabbit. If worse came to worst, I’d bundle him up in a blanket with some duct tape and toss him in the backseat. His frame of mind right now couldn’t be counted on to be anything but a little askew. It would be nice if he made the right decision if only for future trust issues, but it wasn’t strictly necessary. I would do what I had to.

Studying me with fathomless eyes, his face gave nothing away as the scrutiny stretched on. Saul, an obviously budding diplomat, shifted his weight urgently, checked his watch, then growled, “Kid, it’s simple. You can go with him or wait for the nut ball ninja in the jockey shorts. Make the call already, would ya?”

As he bowed his head, Lukas’s lips thinned, and I heard his soft exhalation. “Simple.” There were myriad emotions in that echo. Most were so fleeting, I could barely get a feeling for the flavor of them, but none of them were childlike—incredulity, resignation, and the blackest of black amusement. There were more, but it didn’t matter. . . . Lukas had chosen his path. Without looking at either of us, he trudged across the dirt and climbed into my car.

Following him, I slid in behind the steering wheel and slammed the door shut. Saul leaned into the open window. His mask was still in place, but I could see his eyes, bloodshot from sleepless nights that had no doubt started the day he’d made his bargain with me. I hoped he enjoyed the money I’d given him. He deserved every penny and then some. “Thanks, Saul.” Inadequate didn’t even begin to cover that statement, but it was all I had left to my name. “I owe you, Skoczinsky.”

“Yeah, like that’s news.” Once again I could hear the grin. “Send me a stripper-gram every year on my birthday and we’ll call it even.”

Saul had given me all the help I could pay for. Even more, he’d given me all I could ask for, and he’d given me a friendship I thought I was beyond. In our world it was nothing short of goddamn amazing. “Stay low, Saul. For a while at least.” It wasn’t much of a good-bye, but I’d never developed the talent for that—not with the practice I’d been given.

“You’re preaching to the choir, Korsak,” he drawled, and slapped the top of the car. Here he could use my actual name for the last time, as this was most likely also the last time he’d see me. “Now get out of here before you drain my will to live with that god-awful boring shirt.” With that and a short two-fingered salute, he turned and walked away. Pushing my hair behind my ears, I started the car and put it in motion. I didn’t look back to see Saul get into his own car. If I had faith in anything, it was in his competence when it came to survival. I simply drove, into either a new life or the dark mirror version of an old one; I wasn’t sure which.

“Fasten your seat belt,” I said absently as I kept an eye out for pursuit. “Michael,” I added belatedly. Jesus, all of a sudden I was a soccer mom—perhaps the most lethal soccer mom in the tri-state area.

There was the quiet snick of the latching mechanism and I spared a glance for my brother, sitting detached and classroom straight in the passenger seat. “Are you all right?” I asked with quiet concern. If there were a more stupid question to be asked, I couldn’t think of it at the time, but it was sincerely said and sincerely felt. Lukas appeared to realize that. At least I hoped he did, maybe so much so that I was fooling myself into seeing something that wasn’t there.

“This is no worse than the other tests.” A long strand of brown hair fell across his forehead to the straight and uncompromising line of his brows as he looked at me, then away. His gaze lost out of his window, he queried evenly, “What will my punishment be? For failing?”

This test bullshit was turning into a broken record, a damn perturbing one. A disturbing piece to an ugly puzzle, it made me wonder for the thousandth time what was going on in that compound. What had happened to Lukas and the others? “Why do you think you failed?” It was the only question that wouldn’t lead to a cascading domino of others that neither of us was ready for.

For the first time I saw my brother’s composure falter. I could still see only the back of his head, but his shoulders jerked once before he managed to relax them with an effort that was obvious in the tense line of his neck. “Why, Michael?” I prodded, the name unwieldy and strange on my tongue. I was going to have to use it for a while, and the best way to do that was to start thinking of him as Michael in my mind. It hurt. God, did it . . . voluntarily giving away one of the few slices of Lukas I’d had left. I just had to keep in mind I had the real thing now—physically. Mentally I would work on, no matter how long it might take.

“I didn’t hurt you.” He was barely audible, and I wasn’t sure I heard him correctly until he said it again, more loudly and more strongly. “I didn’t hurt you.”

I couldn’t believe it. A skinny kid and he thought he could hurt me. Worse, he thought he
should
. My road to Hell was paved not with good intentions but with indifference. The things I had ended up doing weren’t the result of making bad choices, but rather of making no choices. I had no one to blame but myself. I could, however, blame someone when it came to Luk . . . Michael. I didn’t know if I’d killed those men I had shot during the rescue, but with a savage passion I suddenly wished I had.

“You didn’t fail any test,” I stated firmly. “There is no test, Michael. I’m here to help you, nothing else.” He didn’t reply, and I let it slide for the moment. “You hungry? There’re some candy bars in the glove compartment. Help yourself.”

I didn’t expect him to immediately go for it and he didn’t. It was almost fifteen minutes before he would even look away from the side window and face the front again. His face was smooth and unruffled. I knew that he wasn’t frightened of me; I had my suspicions that he wasn’t frightened of anyone except the man who’d invaded the van. I was relieved he didn’t feel threatened by me, but I did wonder at it. You didn’t have to know me to think I was one scary son of a bitch. You only had to look at me. The scar, the gallows behind my eyes—Prince Charming they did not make. It was strange, damn strange, that he wasn’t more wary, but for now I was grateful.

“They’re Three Musketeers,” I coaxed. “You used to eat those by the pound.” I’d bought them at the drugstore the day before. They had been on the bottom row in their cheerfully shiny wrappers. It was ludicrous and a little pathetic, but bending over to pick them up was one of the harder things I’d done in my lifetime. Two candy bars that should’ve weighed literally nothing—why were they the fucking
Edmund Fitzgerald
in my hand? I’d almost dropped them back into their cardboard container.

I had bought them anyway, fighting against the superstitious certainty that I’d also just bought myself some bad luck. And now I watched as Michael finally opened the glove compartment and took out one of them. He turned it over cautiously in his hands as if he were defusing a bomb before ripping the wrapper neatly. The bite was just as neat and economical. A trace of surprise showed in the quirk of his eyebrows as he chewed and swallowed. It was as if he’d never tasted one before. He ate the rest of the candy bar quickly, and as an encore he polished off the second in fewer than four bites.

“Good?” I ignored the ripple of unease that passed through me. It was his favorite snack; yet he obviously didn’t remember it. Everything of Lukas was gone, large or small . . . gone. “Guess you didn’t get too much of the sweet stuff in that prison.” Moving my eyes from the stranger sitting next to me, I shifted my attention back to the road and reminded myself that it wasn’t forever. We’d get those memories back or we’d make new ones, whatever it took.

“You talk a lot.”

I couldn’t help the jerk of the wheel beneath my hands. It was the first genuinely unprompted comment that my brother . . . that Michael had made that didn’t involve the mysterious “tests.” “Yeah?” That was not a statement that normally would have applied to me, but in this situation he was right. I didn’t know what to say. How did you talk to a kid you couldn’t know, no matter how much you wanted to, and who’d been plucked from bizarre circumstances that you didn’t understand?

“It’s a sign of insecurity. All the more classic psychology textbooks say so.” He peered into the glove box once again. There was no sign of disappointment on that inscrutable face when no more chocolate was to be found, but I knew better. He was a teenager. Raised in a combination of a school, prison camp, and laboratory, that might be true, but some part of him was still a teenager, no matter how suppressed or denied.

“And what do you know about psychology, junior Freud?” Guiding the car with one hand, I dug under my seat. Bypassing cold metal, I pulled out a box of Double Stuf Oreos. We might be on the road for a long time and I’d stocked up on instant sources of cheap energy. Tossing them into his lap, I instantly heard the rustle of cellophane as he opened the package.

“He’s not the type of psychology we study. His way of thinking isn’t useful.” There was the soft crunch of a cookie. “But I’m sure he would’ve had something to say about the size of your gun.” There it was again, the mixture of child and man. The ravenous inroads he was making into the Oreos was the picture of a hungry Little Leaguer after the big game. The psychological point of view combined with a swipe worthy of Saul himself put him in the range of a cynical and caustic forty-year-old.

Bemused, I felt my lips curve. “Keep up with the sarcasm and I’ll take my cookies back.” I didn’t mean it of course. If anything, I was happy, fucking delirious to see a hint of humor in him. It made him seem a little less than a galaxy length out of reach.

“I wasn’t being sarcastic,” he said seriously, flattening my cheer instantly. “The weapon is obviously an attempt to overcome your insecurity in many areas.” Fingers prying the next cookie from its row, he finished matter-of-factly, “You’re vulnerable. You should watch that.”

Now what the hell could you say to that, I thought, nonplussed. And my 9mm was a perfectly normal-sized gun, no bigger than . . . shit. Cutting off that train of non-productive thought, I frowned with confusion. “Aren’t you at all curious, L . . . Michael? I swoop in and drag you off in a scene straight out of a movie. Don’t you have any questions about that?” Just one normal question to let me feel as if I had some control over the situation?

“No.” Finally done with the cookies, he’d placed them carefully on the floor by his feet. “Either this is a test and you’ll lie or you’re an enemy and you’ll lie.” He rested his head back on the seat. From the corner of my eye I watched as he closed his. “Or you’re a crazy man and you really do think I’m your brother. It’s still lies, only then you’re lying to yourself.”

Our first conversation in ten years was considerably different from our last regarding sidekicks and sand-castles, heroes and horses. Right then I was more than ready, cowardly enough, for the grown-up in Michael to be gone and the child to reappear. The child I could handle, but this unwavering brick wall of a young man—I wasn’t sure I could. I wasn’t even sure I could see him . . . truly see him at all, not as he really was. That would involve letting go of the vision of a seven-year-old tag-along who had shadowed me silently into adulthood. I didn’t think I would ever be willing to do that.

Beside me I could see him chew his bottom lip, leaving a smear of chocolate. The motion didn’t last long, not with this self-possessed kid. His mouth relaxed as his jaw conversely tightened. He was tired; with the night he’d had it wasn’t any surprise. The one thing, the only thing, he needed now was to rest. No one had accused me of having a soft heart . . . not the ex-girlfriends and not the men who’d ended up on the wrong side of my fists or gun. But this was my brother, no matter what he thought. For him I had a number of emotions. They were ancient ones and rusty from disuse, but they were there and chief among them was a mile-wide protective streak.