Chimera Read online

  Ian didn’t mind that. The futility. Not too much, anyway.

  He skidded down a steep hillside, grabbing at tree branches to check his fall. Powdery snow flicked down across his shoulders, danced off his scalp. At the bottom of the slope was a trickling stream. He thought of Samuel and how his fingers had turned black, how they’d died on his hands and had to be taken off. Ian leaped over the stream, not wanting to get his feet wet in that cold, cold water. Even he had limitations.

  On the far side of the stream the ground rose again, toward a narrow ridgeline high above. From the trees up there he would be able to see for miles. He would be able to see where he had to go next.

  Except . . .

  That was the one thing that burned inside him. The question. Dr. Taggart had given him so many answers. He’d explained almost everything. Why Ian had been created. Why he had then been spurned. It made sense. It all made such perfect, crystalline sense in his mind, a graph with clear data points forming a straight line headed . . . headed toward somewhere. Somewhere he couldn’t yet see.

  He climbed the slope on all fours, grabbing at anything his hands could seize to help him gain more ground. He moved faster than any human could. Any bear. He was so strong. They’d given him that. They had made him strong, and fast. They had made sure the sun glaring on the ice would not hurt his eyes.

  They were going to give him a world. A whole world where he would be king.

  The last question was like a spiky thing, a worm with sharp-edged armor burrowing through his brain. There had to be an answer. There had to be a final point on the graph, a place where the line came to its end.

  But how could he find it now, without Dr. Taggart? Who could tell him what came next? He had worked and fought and bled all his life for freedom. What was he to do with it now?

  That was the one thing he minded. And it was tearing him apart.

  Just before he reached the ridgeline he stopped. He was about to stand up, to make himself visible on that high ground. But his instincts, the instincts of some predator who had given him some small portion of his DNA, made him stop. He crouched low, cutting down his profile. Making himself invisible against the dark trees.

  Perhaps he had heard something in the distance. Something so quiet his conscious mind did not register it. He lowered his third eyelids. He held his breath.

  And then he saw it. Movement, very far away. Just now becoming visible. Something—several somethings—moving across the white land.

  Others. Other humans, coming this way.

  DENALI NATIONAL PARK AND PRESERVE, ALASKA: APRIL 15, T+84:16

  Another concussion, Chapel thought.

  But no. This didn’t feel the same. He’d had chimeras hit him before, and it had been enough to lay him out. This felt like he’d gotten the bad end of a fight in a bar. It felt like he’d fallen off a bicycle and did a face-plant. It did not feel like he’d been hit by a truck, or a jackhammer.

  Ian had pulled his punch. He had been trying not to kill Chapel, just stun him a little and buy himself time to get away.

  Thank heaven for small favors, Chapel thought and slowly, very slowly, he sat up. He’d been lying in the snow long enough for the flakes to gather on his legs and start to build up a thin blanket there. He shook himself to clear the snow away.

  He touched his face, and his fingers came away bloody. He definitely had a broken nose. Well, that was survivable. He used his arm to get up to his feet. He felt shaky, still weak from losing all that blood back in Colorado. He felt like all his joints had been loosened by all the hits and injuries he’d taken over the last few days.

  “Damn it!” he shouted, and his voice echoed around the snowscape, knocking small cascades of white off the nearby trees and rocks.

  Ian was going to get away.

  It took a while for the echoes of his voice to die down. For silence to return to the rocky woods. Except, it wasn’t quite silence. There was a sound in the distance, a rumbling, droning sound.

  Chapel thought Ian must have left a trap for him. The chimera must have rigged an avalanche, or maybe he’d just set it off himself by shouting like that. He looked up, all around him, looking for where the waterfall of snow and ice and rocks would come from. But as he listened he realized he wasn’t hearing an avalanche at all. Instead the sound he heard was more like a swarm of bees, coming closer.

  Snowmachines. More than one. Moving toward him at high speed.

  He spun around, looking for the lab buildings. They were invisible in the snow, too far away to see. He would never make it back to them in time.

  Cursing again, under his breath this time, he threw himself into the snow and used his one arm to cover himself, bury himself in its soft whiteness.

  DENALI NATIONAL PARK AND PRESERVE, ALASKA: APRIL 15, T+84:21

  “You did it for me?” Julia repeated.

  Even to her own ears her voice sounded like a tiny squeak.

  “We—your mother and I—did it all for you. Our daughter,” Taggart said.

  He wasn’t looking at her. He was staring at his hands, which lay folded in his lap. She knew him well enough to understand what that meant. Her dad was an excitable, boisterous man who talked with his hands, gesturing for emphasis because words wouldn’t come fast enough to keep up with all the ideas in his head. If his hands weren’t moving, it could only mean that what he had to say was breaking his heart.

  “It was 1979. The year the Soviets invaded Afghanistan,” he told her.

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “It was the end of the world. Everybody thought so back then; I mean, everybody in our circle. Fellow scientists. Intellectuals. The military people who asked us to help them only confirmed it. The Soviets were going to take over the Middle East and then India and the president would have no choice but to retaliate with nukes.”

  “Dad, that has nothing to do with me,” Julia pointed out.

  “Oh, you’re wrong. Because you’re not thinking about what else was going on in 1979. That was the year Helen got pregnant. We were so excited when we found out—we knew you would have red hair, we talked about it all the time. We argued about whether you would have my eyes, or her nose. You’ve never had kids.”

  “No,” Julia said.

  “Maybe you can’t understand, then. You can’t know what that’s like. When you start thinking about the future, not just in terms of your own life, of how many years you have left, but in terms of what your child’s life is going to be like. What kind of world she’s going to live in. What kind of world her grandchildren will have, and what their grandchildren will inherit. And there we were, looking at the future based on the best possible projections. And what we saw was the apocalypse. Civilization, gone. Agriculture, gone. No clean water, no food at all, people in chaos everywhere. That was the world you were going to grow up in.”

  “That’s nonsense. None of that happened.”

  “Because Gorbachev was actually sane, maybe. Or maybe because Reagan took a hard line with him. Who can say? We couldn’t know that at the time.”

  Julia put a hand over her mouth. She couldn’t believe this. “No,” she said. “No, that doesn’t get you off the hook. What you did was unforgivable.”

  “If you say so. It’s not my place to judge,” Taggart admitted.

  “It was criminal. Dad—you—you can’t just—”

  She was on the verge of breaking down and she knew it. If he said one more thing, one more word—

  “I don’t care if it was wrong. I loved my daughter and I wanted her to have a future, that’s all. I loved you, Julia, and I still do.”

  She opened her mouth; she wasn’t sure if she was going to say she loved him too or scream in rage or just howl in anguish, but she had to open her mouth to do it, and then—

  —closed it just as fast.

  “Julia, you don�
��t have to forgive me, it doesn’t matter,” Taggart said, “because—”

  “Shut up,” she told him.

  “No, you need to hear this,” he said.

  “No, you need to shut up,” she replied. She ran to the door of the laboratory shed and cracked it open. The sound she’d heard was much louder, then. It was definitely what she’d thought it was. The sound of snowmachines coming closer.

  “That’s not Chapel,” she said.

  Taggart got up from his stool and joined her.

  Together they watched as four snowmachines came roaring up the clearing toward the lab complex. The men on them were dressed in black parkas and goggles that hid their features.

  All of them were carrying guns. One of them carried a big shiny revolver. He used it to wave the others forward.

  “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,” Julia said. “Dad, they’re going to kill us. We have to fight them off.”

  “What, make a last stand like the French Foreign Legion?”

  “I have my pistol,” she said. “You must have some guns in here, right? You live in Alaska. You must own guns.”

  “I have a tranquilizer rifle,” he said. “Huh.”

  “What is it?” she asked.

  Outside, the men were climbing off the snowmachines and spreading out to approach the buildings. She saw that they were making the same mistake she and Chapel had made when they first arrived. They were headed toward the biggest building in the complex, assuming that had to be where everyone was.

  “I have a sudden brilliant idea,” Taggart said.

  DENALI NATIONAL PARK AND PRESERVE, ALASKA: APRIL 15, T+84:33

  “Where the hell is Chapel?” Julia breathed, as she watched the CIA men swarm over the little complex. Any second now they would realize where she and her dad were hiding. They would come for them, with their guns, and—

  Taggart tapped a key on his keyboard, and his computer flashed a warning at him. He tapped the same key again.

  “It turned out to be quite simple, really. A single hormonal pathway that I could manipulate with a very small molecule, something easily synthesized. In the end I could put them into a denning state or wake them up any time I wanted, simply by misting them with a low dose of the chemical.”

  Julia stopped listening to him. Outside men started screaming, and something like hope burst inside her chest. Because she understood what her father had just done.

  In the big building, she realized, the three bears were waking up. And waking up angry—and hungry.

  The screams came from inside the big building and they didn’t stop. Julia shuddered to think what was happening in there. The man with the revolver—who was obviously in charge—waved more of his men inside, but they looked like they didn’t want to go. Julia could hardly blame them.

  The leader shot one of his men in the arm.

  That got their attention. Two more of them rushed inside the big building. That just left the leader and the wounded man standing outside.

  Two too many. Julia had killed Malcolm and shot Laughing Boy in the foot, but she knew better than to think that made her an expert gunslinger. She could hardly expect to get the drop on both those men without getting shot herself.

  But if she stayed inside the lab shack, she and her dad were going to die. The bears had bought them a few seconds of grace, but that was it.

  Behind her Taggart loaded a dart into his tranquilizer rifle. It was a big weapon, and it looked unwieldy.

  “Aim for the one standing next to the snowmachines,” Julia told him. That was the leader. “I’ll take the other one. You really think that dart will drop him?”

  “Every dart is dosed to take down a grizzly,” Taggart told her. “It might kill him, actually.”

  “I can live with that. Okay. When I say go, we go, right?”

  “If you’re sure about this,” he told her.

  “I have never been more sure about anything in my life,” she promised.

  Which was, of course, a lie. She didn’t believe this would work, not at all. But she had no other ideas.

  “Go,” she shouted and kicked the door open. She didn’t let herself think about what came next; she just started shooting, barely bothering to aim as she fired three shots in the direction of the wounded man. He looked up and even through his goggles she could see the surprise on his face.

  Taggart ran out of the lab shack holding his rifle like it was a club. She started to yell at him, to tell him to shoot, but then he brought the rifle up to his eye, aimed carefully, and squeezed his trigger.

  The dart bounced off the side of the snowmachine, a few inches away from the leader’s arm. The leader looked down and saw it glinting on the snow.

  Then he lifted his revolver and pointed it straight at Julia’s face.

  She froze in place, paralyzed by fear. Part of her brain was screaming at her to move, telling her how ashamed Chapel would be if he could see this, but her legs wouldn’t work. She barely had control of her hands. As if in slow motion she started to bring her own gun up.

  The leader aimed his revolver and started to squeeze his trigger.

  And then his hand exploded in a cloud of blood.

  “Over here,” Chapel shouted, firing round after round at the men staggering around the clearing. He was running toward her as fast as he could, his feet digging deep into the snow with every step. He waved toward the old, dirty snowmachine that was parked outside of the large building. He jumped on the back of it and pointed his pistol at the leader’s head.

  He needn’t have bothered. The leader was too busy just then, down on the ground searching for his severed fingers.

  “Come on,” Julia said, and grabbed her father’s arm. She dashed across the flattened snow between the buildings and jumped on the snowmachine. It started up as soon as she turned the throttle. She glanced down and saw the keys were in the ignition. She hadn’t thought to check before.

  Other than the leader, the rest of the men who’d come to kill them were down on the ground, dead or wounded. She didn’t have time to check each one. She saw that one of them had three big slashes across the front of his parka, exposing the white stuffing inside. She remembered the sleeping bears, how sweet they had looked when they weren’t dangerous, and she shuddered.

  She glanced back just once to make sure that both Chapel and her father were on the snowmachine. Then she put it in gear and roared out of the clearing as fast as she could go, even as bullets started whizzing all around her.

  DENALI NATIONAL PARK AND PRESERVE, ALASKA: APRIL 15, T+84:37

  Trees and rocks flashed by as Julia sped them down the trail toward the road. Chapel held on as best he could with one hand while constantly looking back, trying to see who was coming after them. He could hear nothing over the roar of the snowmachine’s engine, but he was certain they weren’t in the clear yet.

  Up ahead the trail headed down a steep slope toward a creek. It looked like the surface had frozen over. Chapel didn’t want to have to find out if it was solid or not.

  Behind him a black snowmachine came into view, the man driving it struggling to control his vehicle with one wounded hand while fumbling with a pistol at the same time. It was their leader, the one he’d shot before he could kill Julia. Apparently he’d gotten over the shock of his wound. Chapel had a bad feeling about that—he was pretty sure he knew exactly who that man was.

  “Into the trees,” Chapel shouted, “lose him in the trees!”

  Taggart shook his head. He couldn’t hear a word.

  Luckily Julia seemed of the same mind as Chapel. She powered away from the slope, then slid around in a tight bend until they were racing between trees, pine branches smacking off the windshield and making Taggart duck. It was all Julia could do to keep them zigging and zagging between trees and avoid a collision.

  Behind them the black snowmachine ap
peared, lifting up on one skid as it cut the turn too sharply. The driver rose up off his seat, bracing his pistol on the top of his windshield.

  Chapel saw a small animal trail up ahead on their left. “Left!” he shouted, over and over, but Taggart was shrugging and Julia didn’t seem to hear him at all. Instead she plowed straight on, weaving and darting through the trees. One branch was low enough to ruffle Chapel’s hair and dump a pound of snow down the back of his collar. The trees seemed to be growing closer together now, the room to maneuver between them even tighter. A bullet scored the paint on their machine, leaving a bright oval of silver as it exposed the metal beneath.

  Chapel reached for his pistol, hugging the machine with his knees so he wasn’t thrown clear. He swiveled around at the waist and fired wildly, not worrying about conserving ammunition. It didn’t seem like it mattered much now. With the snowmachine bucking and jouncing under him, he failed to hit the pursuer at all, but at least he made the man duck and kept him from shooting.

  “We’ve got to lose him somehow,” Chapel shouted, but no one bothered replying. It was painfully obvious to all three of them. They needed some kind of miracle, some lucky break, or they were all dead.

  Too much to hope for.

  Directly ahead he could see the trees gave way altogether. So did the ground. The snow ended abruptly and beyond was only sky. They were racing full throttle straight toward the edge of a cliff.

  “Julia!” he shouted. “Julia, look out!”

  She didn’t even turn around. Didn’t she see what he saw? How could she not? And meanwhile, behind them, the pursuer was lining up another shot. Chapel was pretty sure he wouldn’t miss this time.

  There was nothing he could do but watch as the world went into slow motion, as the cliff edge raced toward them and the gunman behind took careful aim. It was going to be close—it was going to be—

  The snowmachine hit the cliff edge and for a second, a sickening, horrible second, they were airborne. Weightless. Chapel saw the sky all around him, white and featureless. He felt Taggart rise up from the snowmachine’s seat, felt him start to come loose and go flying off on his own. Chapel hugged at the snowmachine with his knees, using every muscle in his swimmer’s legs, and tried to pull the scientist back down.