Chimera (31 page)

He dug his fingers into the chain link, desperate for any kind of purchase. One sharp end of broken chain link dug into his palm, and the pain blasted up his good arm but he refused to let go, refused to even slacken his grip. He felt greasy blood smear his fingers and knew he'd made a mistake.

The chain link began to tilt outward, a whole section of fence collapsing under his weight. He scrabbled to climb up as it bent and twisted, but he couldn't make any headway—it was giving way faster than he could climb up.

Below him the section of fencing slammed against the side of the mountain, draping over the protruding rocks and stunted trees there. Chapel fought with his panicking brain, trying to convince it that the fence was now a climbing wall, that it gave him plenty of hand- and footholds to let him climb back up, onto the mountaintop.

He did one foolish thing and glanced behind himself. There was nothing beneath him but empty air and blazing lights, nothing but empty space between him and the tree-lined lower slopes of the mountain far below. It was not the kind of fall a human body could survive.

Look up, damn you,
he told himself, and he forced his head to crane around and peer back up at the night sky and the top of the mountain. He told his artificial fingers to lock on to the chain link, then used his good hand to reach for a grip higher up. His fingers were sore and trembling and they were slippery with blood, but he forced them through the mesh of the fence, forced them to find purchase.

Carefully, slowly, he lifted his right foot and kicked at the fence to find a place to brace it, to support his weight.

Above him, Malcolm walked to the edge and looked down at him.

“You're tough, for a human,” Malcolm said.

Chapel couldn't help himself. “Your brother said the same thing right before I killed him,” he said, through gritted teeth. He forced the toe of his shoe into a gap in the fence. Pushed himself upward a few inches.

At this rate, some time next week he should reach the top.

Malcolm looked away from him, and Chapel worried the chimera would just leave him there and go finish off Funt. That wasn't acceptable.

“Mind giving me a hand?” he asked the chimera. “So we can finish this like tough guys?”

“No, I don't think so,” Malcolm told him. He had something in his hands. What was it? It looked like a black plastic box, about eight inches long. What the hell was it? “At Camp Putnam, the fences are electrified. If you touch them, they can burn your hand. We used to dare each other to go up to the fence and grab it with both hands. Somehow that was worse—if you had both hands on the fence, you couldn't let go. You could feel the electric fire running through your body, but your fingers wouldn't let go. You had to trust your brothers would knock you off the fence with a piece of wood.”

“That's some kind of messed-up trust exercise,” Chapel gasped. He lifted his left foot, but it just slid off the fencing every time he tried to get a toehold.

“Some brothers would do it. Some of them would save you. Others wouldn't. They would just sit there and watch while you cooked like a bird. It was an important lesson to learn. We were brothers, but we were not friends. We did not owe each other anything, even our lives. A chimera can only really trust himself. So when you told me you would help me, you would protect me, that's what I heard. Don't worry. I won't let you cook alive.”

“Is there a point to this?” Chapel asked.

Malcolm held up his plastic box. Chapel saw now it had two metal prongs sticking out of one end. As he watched a spark jumped between them.

It was a stun gun. Capable of delivering fifty thousand volts of electricity to anything it touched.

“No,” Chapel said. “No, Malcolm—”

“A man in a stupid hat tried to use this on me, down below.” Chapel thought of the park ranger who'd failed to radio in. “It didn't work. I'm guessing it must work on humans, or he wouldn't have been carrying it. You're tough, for a human. But humans just aren't much, in the end.”

Malcolm lowered the stun gun and touched its prongs to the fence.

STONE MOUNTAIN, GEORGIA: APRIL 13, T+36:21

Chapel had been tased before. It had been part of his training, a ritual everyone in his Special Forces program had to go through. You had to know what it felt like, so if it happened in the field you would be ready.

Except there really was no good way to ready yourself. There was nothing you could do to brace against it. Nothing you could do to stop it taking over your body.

The pain was intense, worse than any kick in the groin, maybe worse, Chapel thought, than getting shot. It felt like your entire body was on fire all at once, like you'd been thrown into a furnace. Worse than that—like you were being burned alive from the inside out. Every muscle in his body twitched and cramped. His spine arched and his teeth slammed together, cutting deep into the side of his tongue. His eyes squeezed shut, and tears burst from under their lids.

It was a horrible violation for a man used to being in total control of his own flesh. He barely managed not to soil himself.

It was all over in a fraction of a second. But after that came the realization. The horror.

His good fingers had let go of the fence. His feet were kicking at air.

He didn't dare open his eyes. The fall would be brief and the sudden impact would probably kill him instantly. A human body falling hundreds of feet had plenty of time to reach terminal velocity. There would be little left of him but a stain on the ground when he hit bottom.

Goodbye, Julia,
he had time to think.
I hope you—

Funny.

Definitely weird.

He didn't feel like he was falling. There was no sensation of weightlessness, no rush of air past his face.

He opened his eyes and saw he hadn't fallen at all. Looking up, he saw that he was dangling, limp as a rag doll, by one hand. His prosthetic hand.

Of course. The silicone skin that covered his robotic hand was an excellent insulator. The burst of electricity couldn't get through even a thin sheet of the rubbery stuff. The fingers were locked in place, holding him up.

He would have laughed—except he found he could barely breathe.

The clamps on the end of the arm, the clamps that held it on his body, were designed to tighten automatically when needed, squeezing tighter with the more weight the arm tried to lift. At that moment the arm was holding his entire one hundred and eighty pounds. The clamps had compressed so tightly they were crushing his rib cage, making it difficult for him to draw breath.

The arm hadn't been designed for this. It had never been meant to hold so much weight on its own. He had to get his good hand up there, had to grab the fence—

Up above Malcolm screamed in rage and hit the fence again with the stun gun. Chapel barely had time to yank his fingers back from the chain link.

It was then he started to smell burning rubber. He looked up and saw the fingers of his artificial hand were smoking. Molten silicone was rolling down the back of the hand, dripping down his shirtsleeve.

If the silicone melted until the metal finger actuators beneath were exposed, he would have no protection from the electric shocks. The current running through the fence would zap the arm's circuit boards and microchips and short it out. If that happened, the fingers were designed to automatically release anything they were holding. They would go limp, and he would fall.

He couldn't let that happen. “Malcolm!” he shouted, sucking in a deep breath so he could actually be heard. “Malcolm, listen to me!”

The chimera stared down at him with wide black eyes.

“What the hell are you, human?” Malcolm demanded. “Or are you human? Maybe you're like me. Maybe . . .” He shook his head, failing to finish his thought. He grabbed at his hair and pulled until clumps of it came loose.

He was getting frustrated. Which for a chimera could only mean one thing—he was getting even more dangerous than he'd been before.

“Malcolm,” Chapel called, “wouldn't you rather kill me with your own hands? Wouldn't that be more satisfying?”

“Shut up!” Malcolm shrieked, his voice suddenly high pitched with rage. “Shut the fuck up! I'm going to eat you, do you understand? I'm going to tear off your flesh and eat it! I'm going to trample Funt until he's paste! Then I'm going to take your woman and I'm going to fu—”

The chimera's head jerked to one side. His black eyes blinked several times. A dark spot appeared on the front of his shirt and started to spread.

He didn't say anything, or make any sound at all. As quickly as it had possessed him, the rage seemed to have flowed back out of him. He raised one hand to touch the spot on his shirt, and his fingers came away dark. A scowl curled across his face.

Then his left eye exploded outward in a miniature cloud of blood.

STONE MOUNTAIN, GEORGIA: APRIL 13, T+36:28

It took as long for Malcolm to fall over as a tree takes to fall in the forest. Chapel could only stare upward, watching in surprise as the chimera died. Malcolm slumped to the ground in a heap, one hand flopping forward over the fence, as if he were reaching out a hand toward Chapel, a final gesture of reconciliation.

Blood rolled down his fingers and dripped on the mountain below.

Eventually Chapel remembered he was about to fall to his death. He stuffed the fingers of his good hand into the chain link, and some of the strain was taken off his artificial arm and he could almost breathe again.

Julia popped her head over the side. “Chapel?” she asked. “Are you—”

“Make sure he's dead!” Chapel called up.

She nodded and disappeared for a moment. Chapel heard two more gunshots. When she came back, she was holding Funt's pistol and the barrel was smoking.

“Can you climb up?” she asked. She looked from side to side. “This fence isn't going to hold much longer.”

In that case, Chapel told himself, the answer to her question had better be yes.

He shoved one foot into a gap in the fence and pushed himself upward. His artificial fingers had partially fused to the chain link, but he was able to pull them free. Semiliquid silicone came loose in long thin strands. The fingers were gummed together and deformed but they still worked, it seemed.

“Hang on,” Julia said. She pulled off her pink hoodie, then tied one end of it to a fence post that was still holding in the rock. When she lowered the other sleeve down to him, he could almost reach it.

It took him far too long to climb up and grab it. The chain link groaned and started to tear away from its posts, and for a bad, long moment he was certain it would give way. Eventually, though, he managed to clamber up to a point where he could wrap his good arm around a fence post and, with Julia's help, roll back onto the level ground on top of the mountain.

Julia stared at him as if he would disappear if she looked away even for a moment. She reached up and brushed hair out of her face with one hand, leaving a streak of blood on her cheek.

“Blood,” Chapel managed to say, pointing at it.

Chimera blood. Full of the virus.

She understood at once. “Oh, God—I checked Malcolm's pulse with those fingers. I didn't even think . . .” Shaking her head she grabbed up the hoodie and used it to scrape the blood off her face and hands.

Would it be enough to protect her? Chapel didn't know. If she hadn't gotten the blood in any cuts or scrapes, if it hadn't got in her mouth—

There was nothing to be done for it.

“Funt,” Chapel said. He was still getting his breath back. He didn't know if he could sit up quite yet. “Is Funt alive?”

Julia nodded. “He's in shock, though. I did what I could for him. That's why it took me so long to shoot Malcolm.”

“That's the second person you've shot today,” Chapel said, with a weak smile. “You're a quick learner.” He started to close his eyes.

“I'm getting better at it. Chapel? Chapel, what do we do now?”

“We have to get out of here.”

“Definitely. Funt needs medical attention. More than I can give him up here. And the park rangers will probably show up any second. I know
I
don't want to have to explain to them what happened.”

“My phone,” Chapel said. Very carefully he reached into the inside pocket and found the smartphone. He touched his ear and found his hands-free set was long gone, probably knocked out of his ear when Malcolm threw him at the fence. He dialed Angel and she picked up almost at once.

“I'm here, baby.”

“Angel, we need to be extracted, as soon as you can—”

He stopped talking because the sound of the music coming from the bottom of the mountain was drowned out just then by the rotor noise of a helicopter coming over the far side of the summit. It was a civilian chopper, but it showed no lights.

“Anything else I can do for you?” Angel asked.

STONE MOUNTAIN, GEORGIA: APRIL 13, T+36:31

The chopper seemed to take forever to land—the top of Stone Mountain was too rough for it to just set down on its skids. Eventually the pilot found a safe spot, and the aircraft settled to the rock.

The same second it put down, two men wearing Tyvek suits and surgical masks came running over to put Malcolm in a body bag. They didn't even look at Chapel, but Julia grabbed the arm of one of them and asked if he had any alcohol wipes. He handed her a bottle of rubbing alcohol from his kit, and she poured it liberally over her fingers, then scrubbed at her face with the stuff. “We have a wounded man over there,” she said, pointing at where Funt lay, dressed as a park ranger, on the bare rock.

“Sorry, ma'am, we're just cleanup. But there's a stretcher in the bird,” he told her. She started to protest, but Chapel grasped her shoulder and then ran to the chopper. The pilot was already pulling the stretcher out of the back compartment. “I have orders to take you wherever you want to go,” he told Chapel. “But I'll need to file a flight plan before we take off.”