Chimera Read online

  “ . . . Right. Well, this woman, who didn’t even tell me her name, she showed me the place they had the chimeras living. Camp Putnam, they called it. They were all living in a sort of dormitory there. It looked pretty much like a summer camp, except all the kids were exactly the same age and size, and they all kind of looked alike. And instead of hot little counselors in tight T-shirts and short shorts, they had soldiers carrying M4 carbines. The kids didn’t seem to think it was weird. They’d never known anything else, your mom told me. They’d been there their whole lives.”

  “Hold on,” Chapel said. “Julia—your parents moved away from the Catskills in, when, 1995?”

  “We moved to our house, yeah. For the first couple of years Dad only came to see us on the weekends, and Mom would commute to and from work. She had to get up really early so I had to get myself ready for school in the morning.”

  “But if the camp was operational then, why wouldn’t they want to live closer to it?” Chapel asked. “If that was where they worked—”

  “Did you want to hear the rest of my story?” Funt asked.

  “Yes. Sorry,” Chapel told him. “Just trying to keep the facts straight.”

  Funt snorted in derision and went on. “Good luck with that. This was the weirdest case I ever saw, and I only got little glimpses of it. Your mom took me to see the fence around the camp. At the time it was just a normal cyclone fence, twelve feet high. They were already building a new one when I was there. Much bigger, and with barbed wire on top. Your mom told me the fence was electrified. They didn’t think the chimeras would dare climb it. In this one case, they were wrong. Malcolm had gone right over it. The guards caught him when he landed on the other side.”

  “They caught him?” Julia asked. “But—”

  “They caught him. They couldn’t hold him, though. Three soldiers, heavily armed. He killed all three of them, snapped their necks, and ran off into the woods. He was ten years old at the time.”

  STONE MOUNTAIN, GEORGIA: APRIL 13, T+35:48

  “He was . . . ten?” Julia asked, her face pale even in the darkness that had settled over the top of Stone Mountain. “In 1996, he was ten . . . they were all . . . ten?”

  “Yeah,” Funt said. “That significant, somehow?”

  “Just . . . to me. No. I mean, no—it’s not significant. Please, go on.”

  Chapel shot her a glance, but her face wasn’t giving anything away. Maybe she had some secrets of her own.

  Funt shrugged and went on. He took off his ranger hat and rubbed his arms. “I had my case, anyway. This weird mutant kid had escaped from the camp and I had to track him down. I tried not to think too much about what he’d done to those soldiers, or what the other one, Ian, had done to those cinder blocks. I worked it like any other missing persons. I asked a lot of people a lot of questions, made a lot of phone calls, wore out some shoe leather. I’m guessing the details aren’t too important, not now. I spent three weeks looking, and every day Agent Banks from the CIA would call me and bitch me out for not finding Malcolm. Eventually I tracked the kid down to a house outside of Philadelphia. Nice place, just on the edge of farmland. No fence, just a real big lawn he could play on. It was owned by a family called the Gabors. They’d found him walking along the side of a country road outside of Utica, New York, while they were on vacation. Figured he was a runaway so they took him in, raised him like their own. Hippie types—Mr. Gabor worked for a nonprofit feeding homeless people. The Mrs. was a lawyer, but the bumper sticker on her car said No Blood for Oil, so she wasn’t exactly the rich kind of lawyer. I’m guessing they were nice people.”

  “You’re guessing? You didn’t talk to them?” Chapel asked.

  “Nope. What I know about them I got from their daughter. She was a student at Villanova. She came home for Thanksgiving and found them in their bed. Her mom had been strangled. Looked like her dad tried to put up a fight. He was in pieces.”

  “Oh, God,” Julia said. “Don’t—please don’t explain what you mean.”

  “I’d prefer not to, myself,” Funt said. “I don’t even like thinking about what I saw in that bedroom. It was a classic rage killing, from the look of it. What you’d expect if a six-foot-four linebacker came home and found his wife in bed with the mailman. A little more brutal than that, maybe. The daughter was in hysterics, of course, but she gave me the info I needed to find Malcolm. He was in his favorite place, the place he always went to, she said, when he was angry or confused, which happened a lot. He was in this tree fort in their backyard. He was still there when I got to the house. Just sitting up there, staring down at me. He’d been crying. I asked him why he’d done that to his foster parents. Why he’d killed them. He told me. Seems he had been given a cat for a pet, and the cat disappeared. He didn’t tell me where it went and I didn’t ask. I wasn’t in Missing Pets. His foster mom and dad got pretty upset about the whole thing, though, so they must have known what happened to it. He asked if he could have another one, and they said no. Absolutely not.”

  “What does that have to do with the parents’ murder?” Julia asked.

  “You’re not listening. That was the whole reason. They wouldn’t let him have another cat. So he killed them.”

  “What? That’s insane,” Chapel said.

  “Yeah. Exactly. The chimeras—they’re ninety-nine percent human. But that one percent makes a serious difference,” Funt told him. “They don’t think like us. They look like us, but they don’t feel like us. To them everything is serious. Deadly serious. When they get frustrated, or upset . . . even just confused, it makes them angry—and when they’re angry, nobody is safe. They’re not human. They’re monsters.”

  Chapel felt a chill run down his spine. “What did you do?” he asked.

  “I asked him to come down from his tree house. I told him I would find him some new parents to live with, that everything was going to be okay. Working in Missing Persons you learn how to talk to kids who are so scared they can’t see straight. You learn how to calm them down. You also learn how to get them to climb into a stranger’s car. I got Malcolm buckled in and I drove him straight to the local police station. He started freaking out then, but I thought I could handle him. Then Dr. Taggart—your dad—showed up, and Malcolm went ballistic.

  “One of the cops at that station ended up on an early pension. Maybe he learned to walk again. I didn’t have a chance to follow up. As for me, I was in the hospital for a long time with a broken pelvis and two broken legs. I came real close to putting a bullet in Malcolm’s head. Instead, your dad put five tranquilizer darts in him and eventually he fell down and went to sleep. It was the last I ever saw of him.”

  “You told him he would be safe,” Julia said.

  “That’s right. I lied to him,” Funt told her. “I betrayed him. I feel bad about that every once in a while. Then I think about the five people he killed, and what he did to that cop, and to me. He looked like a kid. He sounded like a kid. When he got angry, he was a demon out of hell. I have no idea what they did to him at Camp Putnam when he got back—for all I know they ran Nazi-style experiments on him night and day. Honest to God, I can’t say for sure if I think he deserved it or not.”

  STONE MOUNTAIN, GEORGIA: APRIL 13, T+36:02

  Chapel shook his head. Some of this was new information, but he didn’t see how much of it helped him. “So the CIA . . . created the chimeras, and then just warehoused them in this camp. But why? Why create them in the first place? What were they supposed to do? What were they supposed to be?”

  “You think they’d tell me things like that? I only got to see the camp so I would know how dangerous Malcolm was. How tough my job was going to be,” Funt said.

  “Okay. Okay.” Chapel scrubbed at his face with his hands. He felt soiled just from hearing Funt’s story. “Then—”

  “The whole time,” Julia said. Both men turned to face her, but it was clear she was
talking to herself. She had her arms wrapped around her chest and was bending over slightly at the waist. She looked like she might throw up—or start screaming. She shivered violently, and Chapel took his coat off and put it around her shoulders, but it didn’t seem to help. “The whole time I was growing up. The whole time,” she repeated. She stared into Chapel’s eyes. “I was sixteen years old when all that happened. My dad was teaching me how to drive. Then he went and shot a boy full of tranquilizer darts and took him back to prison. My parents—I thought I knew who they were, but—oh God. When I was six, they were just being born. Or made, or grown in vats, or whatever. When I was in first grade, learning to read, my parents were giving birth to little monsters. Chapel. Chapel!”

  “I’m here,” he said, and reached for her, but she shoved him away.

  “Chapel, they’re my brothers. Maybe not in, you know, a genetic way. But in every other way that counts. My brothers!”

  “No,” he said. “No. You can’t think like that.”

  “How can I not?” she asked him. “How can I think about them any other way?”

  He started to answer, though he honestly had no idea what he was going to say. Before any words could come out of his mouth, though, a great booming noise ripped through the air and he jumped in surprise. It was followed by a deafening fanfare, and then a haze of light burst over the top of the mountain.

  “What the hell?” Chapel asked. He let go of Julia long enough to run over toward the visitors’ center and see what was going on.

  Then the fanfare resolved into music—familiar fiddle music. It was the Charlie Daniels Band, singing about Georgia. The light came from powerful floodlights that were illuminating the carving on the side of the mountain.

  The nightly laser show had begun.

  Down at the bottom of the mountain, hundreds, maybe thousands of tourists would be staring in awe up at the carving as the lasers animated the generals and made it appear their horses were galloping across the stone. They were probably gaping in surprise and delight, looking up toward where Chapel, Julia, and Funt stood at the summit.

  “Come on,” Chapel said. “Right now?”

  Nearby someone laughed. Chapel spun around, half expecting Laughing Boy to step out of the darkness. But the figure that moved into the haze of light now was taller than Laughing Boy, and more heavily muscled.

  “Funny story, huh?” the figure asked.

  “Who—” Chapel began, but he already knew who it was.

  “I never heard his version before. Real funny.” The haze of light turned red for a moment, then died down to a less diffuse glow. Chapel’s eyes adjusted to the sudden darkness, and he could make out the details of the newcomer’s face.

  His eyes were black from side to side, with no white showing at all.

  Malcolm had arrived.

  STONE MOUNTAIN, GEORGIA: APRIL 13, T+36:09

  “No fucking way,” Funt shouted. “Why did you bring him here?”

  Chapel could only shake his head in disbelief.

  “Nobody else knew where I was going to be,” Funt insisted. “I didn’t tell anyone. So you must have told him he could find me here! You sold me out, Chapel!”

  “No! I didn’t tell anyone,” Chapel protested.

  Except Angel, of course.

  He couldn’t imagine that she would have told Malcolm where to find Funt. That was just impossible. But her systems had been compromised once before, by the CIA—and the CIA had been trying to kill Funt for years.

  But that meant—

  A gunshot roared across the top of Stone Mountain, drowning out the blaring music that came from below. Chapel spun around and saw Malcolm looking down between his feet.

  “Can’t see very well in the dark, can you, Funt?” the chimera asked. “I can.”

  “Wait,” Chapel said. “Just wait.” He held his hands up, outstretched, toward the chimera. “It doesn’t have to be like this. You’ve been manipulated, Malcolm. You were sent here like a heat-seeking missile.”

  “I don’t know what that is,” the chimera told him.

  “Just—just take my word for it. They made you come here. You’re doing somebody else’s bidding.”

  “You’re talking about the Voice,” Malcolm said, nodding.

  “Sure—the—the voice. What voice?”

  “The Voice on the telephone. The one that told us we would be free, and then the fence came down. The one that told us where to find the ones we wanted to kill. The Voice doesn’t make us do things,” the chimera said, smiling. “It helps us. It helps us do the things we want to do.”

  Like killing Funt. Malcolm had a very good reason to want him dead. Just like the chimera in New York had good reason to want to kill Helen Bryant, the woman who made him, the woman who locked him away in an armed camp for twenty-five years.

  Malcolm wasn’t being manipulated. Used, yes. But he was only being used to do a thing he wanted anyway.

  Revenge was a powerful motivator. In Special Forces training they’d taught Chapel it could break through almost any disincentive—you could torture a man, you could take away everything he loved, but in the end you were only making him more resolved. They’d taught him that the way to fight terrorists wasn’t to punish them, but to convince them you were really on their side.

  “They’ll kill you when you’re done,” Chapel told the chimera. “You do understand that, don’t you? They’ve already sent men to kill you. But I can keep you alive. I can protect you.”

  “I’m going to kill Jeremy Funt, now, mister. It was nice talking,” Malcolm sneered, “but maybe you’ll shut up until I’m done.”

  “No!” Funt screamed, and he fired again. The bullet ricocheted off the rock not three feet from where Chapel stood. He ducked reflexively. “No—you don’t want me. I never hurt you, Malcolm. But he”—Funt stabbed one finger in Chapel’s direction—“he killed one of your brothers! Kill him!”

  “Wow. You think you know me so well, don’t you, Jeremy Funt?” Malcolm said, stalking toward the ex-FBI agent. “You don’t know me at all. He killed Brody, yeah. The Voice told me as much. But you know what? Where I come from, if somebody’s strong enough to kill a chimera, that’s something to respect. Killing us is hard. Apparently fooling us is a lot easier. That’s the weakling’s way.”

  Funt raised his pistol again, but before he could pull the trigger Malcolm was running—leaping toward him. Chapel reached for his own sidearm and only then realized he didn’t have it. It was in Funt’s pocket.

  “No!” he shouted, as the chimera collided with Funt. The pistol fired, and a moment later fired again—Chapel could see the muzzle flares as explosions of light between Funt and the chimera—and then Funt’s arm flew up, bending in all the wrong places. The chimera stomped on Funt’s foot and the man screamed.

  “No,” Chapel shouted again, as he closed the distance between himself and the chimera. “No!” He locked his fingers together and swung both of his fists down, hard, into Malcolm’s left kidney.

  The pain of getting punched there was usually enough to incapacitate a grown man. It could cause massive internal bleeding and even death and was an illegal move in boxing and every martial arts competition for good reason. It was a nasty, low blow, and Chapel had been trained to deliver it with devastating precision.

  It made Malcolm stop what he was doing for a fraction of a second.

  Chapel figured that would have to be enough.

  Funt was down on the ground, scrambling away from the chimera like a crab, pushing with his heels and his good arm just to escape. His pistol was gone, probably knocked out of his hand when Malcolm broke his arm.

  Chapel decided to stop worrying about Funt, as just then Malcolm was turning around to face him—and smiling wickedly.

  “You really want some of this?” Malcolm asked.

  Chapel dropped into a defensive p
osture, his fists raised like they were going to have a nice, friendly boxing match.

  “Show me what you’ve got,” he said.

  The chimera came at him like a runaway train.

  STONE MOUNTAIN, GEORGIA: APRIL 13, T+36:12

  There was no way Chapel could stop Malcolm, or even slow him down. The chimera was just too strong, and he outweighed Chapel by a good fifty pounds. So he didn’t try to stand his ground. There was no way he could move out of the way of Malcolm’s charge, either—he was just too fast.

  So he twisted on the ball of one foot and let Malcolm hit him, but he rolled with the bull rush, twisting around to slide over the chimera’s back as he went past. Chapel landed on his feet, though not as firmly as he would have liked—the ground was too uneven to stick the landing.

  Still, he was suddenly behind Malcolm where Malcolm couldn’t see him.

  If he’d been fighting a human opponent, Chapel could have ended things then and there. He could have wrapped his good arm around his opponent’s neck and put him in a sleeper hold. Block the blood flow to the carotid artery, even for a few seconds, and a human body will simply shut down.

  He knew it wouldn’t be that easy. But he was out of other ideas.

  He brought his right knee up, hard, into the small of Malcolm’s back. The chimera didn’t even grunt in pain—maybe it felt like Chapel was tickling him—but he was ninety-nine percent human, which meant he had the same reflexes as a human being. He arched his back away from the blow, throwing his head back toward Chapel.

  Chapel threw his artificial arm around Malcolm’s throat and squeezed.

  The prosthetic arm was designed to respond to subconscious commands. Normally Chapel didn’t have to think about how the arm should move, it just acted like a real arm. He could override it, though. He could give it conscious commands and it would obey them, even in ways a real arm wouldn’t.

  He told his arm to squeeze, and it acted like a metal noose around the chimera’s neck. It tightened like a vise and stayed locked shut. A living arm could get fatigued. Its muscles were elastic enough to give way as Malcolm bucked and tried to break loose. Chapel’s prosthetic arm didn’t have those weaknesses.