Chimera (33 page)

CHICAGO,
ILLINOIS: APRIL 13, T+39:53

“Hee. Ha heh. Ha.”

Tyrone Jameson had been a trauma nurse for
twenty-two years. He'd seen his share of horrors in that time, working in the ER
at Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta. He'd seen people come through the doors who
looked like they were chopped in pieces—and who had eventually walked out again
under their own power. He'd seen people gone out of their mind on drugs take
gunshot wounds to the face and not even feel it.

This asshole took the cake.

“Ha. Heh . . . ha,” the man said. He
swung his injured foot off the bed and put it down on the floor. Put his weight
on it.

The man screamed—and laughed at the same time.

“Jesus, buddy, just—just lie down for me, okay?
Will you do that for me?” Tyrone asked, his hands reaching to grab the guy's
shoulders and push him back down onto the bed.

The look the patient gave him made Tyrone's blood
turn to icy slush.

“Ha.”

The jerk had lost two toes. The front half of his
foot looked like hamburger when he came in. Now it was encased in a hard cast
and a metal brace just to keep the foot from falling off. And he was putting
weight
on it.

And laughing about it.

“Hee hee ho,” the man said, standing up on wobbly
legs. He grabbed for his shirt, which was hanging on a chair next to the
bed.

“Look, I can see in your face, you think you're
some kind of badass tough guy,” Tyrone said, not sure what to do. He should call
for security, get some orderlies in here and a doctor to sedate the man. But he
was scared. He was honestly scared of what his patient would do to him. “But if
you try to walk out of here, you're going to undo all the good the surgeon did.
You're going to wreck that foot permanently.”

He could only watch as the man got dressed, one
painful button at a time. He never stopped laughing.

As he headed for the door, clearly intending to
check himself out against medical advice, Tyrone just shook his head. “You need
to lie down, buddy. You need to spend the next six weeks in that bed. Or you're
doing yourself a real disservice.”

“Ha. Hee. Can't wait,” the patient said. He turned
around to give Tyrone a nasty look. “I've got a body to find, and burn. And then
I've got to kill a bunch of people. Ha. Hee ha hee. It's going to be a full
day.”

Tyrone shook his head. “No, seriously.
Seriously—”

The man's smile was worse than his laugh. It was
the kind of smile you would expect to find on a corpse.

“Doesn't it hurt?” Tyrone asked, because he
couldn't find any other words.

“Hee ha ha ha! Like you can't imagine,” the patient
admitted. “Now. Where—hee ha hee—do I go to find a taxi out of here?”

CHICAGO,
ILLINOIS: APRIL 13, T+40:07

“The chimeras. Well,” Ellie said, “that is
quite an interesting thing to be asking about. You do understand I'm absolutely
forbidden to speak of that with anyone? I signed more than one nondisclosure
agreement.”

“I wouldn't ask if the need wasn't great,” Chapel
told her.

“I have no doubt,” Ellie said. “And I'm sure you
know more about security clearances and needs to know and the like than I do.
One hates to break the law, though. You're in some kind of trouble, Captain, I
can see it in your eyes.”

Julia glanced over at him in surprise.

“I'm beginning to think so, ma'am. I'm beginning to
think my own people are using me as a pawn in a game I can't see yet. And since
those same people don't seem to want me to talk to you about this, I'm thinking
I definitely need to know whatever information you have. I understand your
reluctance, but I have to insist.”

“Hmm,” Ellie said, watching him closely.

“There are lives at stake,” Chapel tried.

“Of course,” Ellie said. “There always are.”

Chapel saw in her eyes that she was waiting for him
to say the right words. She wanted to talk to him, but she wasn't going to give
up what she had for free. He took a deep breath. He was making a big leap of
faith, he knew. But he needed this information. “The chimeras are loose. They've
left their camp and are at large, with a list of people they want to kill. Your
name is on that list. Julia—Dr. Taggart here—wasn't on that list, but they tried
to kill her anyway.”

“They are quite dangerous, yes,” Ellie said, still
giving nothing away.

“Not just them. Somebody helped them escape.”

“Ah,” Ellie said, leaning forward. “Now that's
interesting.”

Chapel nodded. “I intend to find out who it was.
And make sure they're punished,” he told her. “Somebody is using the chimeras,
somebody has turned them into his personal death squad. I won't let him get away
with it.”

She smiled, and he knew he'd won her over. She sat
back and looked up at the ceiling as if gathering her thoughts. “Have you met
any of the chimeras? Ian, perhaps?”

“Not Ian. Malcolm and another one, who I'm told was
named Brody,” Chapel said.

“Oh, my. Oh, my my. The look on your face tells me
something,” Ellie said, leaning back on the couch. She took a deep sip from her
teacup full of whiskey. “That's the look of a soldier. Are they . . .
ah?”

“Yes,” Chapel said.

“At least they're at peace, then. For once in their
lives.” Ellie sighed deeply. “I was their teacher. I disciplined them when need
arose, and I daresay I was stricter than they would have liked. But I did care
for them. You can't not love your students, even the stupid ones.”

Julia gasped in shock.

“Oh, young lady, did you think a teacher wasn't
allowed to call someone ‘stupid'? Part of our job is to evaluate them, you know.
And there were a few of the boys who were stupid, quite as dumb as the
proverbial rocks. Others were brilliant. They all possessed what we used to
refer to as
animal cunning
.”

“You were a teacher with UNESCO, weren't you?”
Chapel asked, prodding her to go on.

“Oh, yes, back in the eighties, back when I thought
I could still save the world by teaching it not to end sentences in
prepositions. I was rather more idealistic back then. I specialized in children
with developmental and emotional issues. That was why the Defense Department
wanted to hire me. That and my security clearance.”

“I'm sorry,” Chapel said. “You worked for the DoD?
I thought the chimeras were a CIA project.”

“I wouldn't know anything about that. I know the
man who recruited me was wearing a uniform, that's all.”

Chapel nodded. No need to jump to conclusions. “So
the DoD approached you about a teaching assignment. When was this?”

“Nineteen ninety,” Ellie said.

“So they would have been pretty young,” Chapel
said. “Did anyone ever tell you why they were created—or why they were
detained?”

“Absolutely not. Before you ask, yes, I
did
wonder. I burned with curiosity about that for a
long time, but when you ask the same question a hundred times and are routinely
told you don't need to know the answer, you eventually give in and stop asking.
I'm sure you can understand that.”

“Yeah,” Chapel said. “Yeah, I can.”

“Captain, the word ‘yeah' does not belong in the
English language. The word you want to use is ‘yes.' As in, ‘yes, ma'am.' ”

Chapel felt himself blush. “Yes, ma'am.”

Ellie frowned and picked up her teacup again. “I
think this will be a very long night if I make you guess which questions to ask
and then tell you what I think you should know. Why don't I just go through the
story as I remember it?”

“All right,” Chapel said.

Ellie knocked back her cup in one gulp and
began.

CHICAGO,
ILLINOIS: APRIL 13, T+40:12

“It was 1990 when they first approached me. A
captain of the navy whose name I don't remember—I never saw him again—came to my
school on Roosevelt Island in New York. He asked if I had any experience
administering intelligence tests, specifically culture-neutral IQ tests. I
explained that I had been doing just such a thing for more than ten years. I
asked why he wanted to know, but of course he didn't answer. A few months later,
during my summer break, I was asked to come up to the Catskills for a weekend
and to bring anything I needed to administer such a test to a group of two
hundred children, all of them four years old, all of them boys. In exchange I
would be paid handsomely for my time, but I had to agree not to tell anyone
where I was going or why.

“Back then I was just a little older than you are
now. Still young enough to think an adventure sounded fun, rather than
exhausting. So I went. I was certainly not expecting what I saw. Camp Putnam was
about a hundred acres of ground enclosed by an electric fence. There were guard
towers and quite a number of soldiers. Inside the fence were the boys. They were
adorable, and even when I noticed what was so strange about their eyes, I
couldn't help but feel they were the healthiest, most curious bunch of
four-year-olds I'd ever met. I'm sure I asked a thousand questions that day, but
I did not receive any answers, as you can imagine.

“I did the job I'd been brought in for,
administering the tests. Julia, dear, your parents were really quite interested
in the results. They kept asking me if I would stay and tabulate the results
then and there. They offered me more money. It was summertime, when every
teacher needs more money, so I did as they asked. As it turned out, I ended up
staying at the camp for eight more years.

“The boys were incredibly healthy and most of them
had quite high IQs. They never seemed to get sick, and when they fell out of
trees or skinned their elbows, they healed with astonishing speed. The soldiers
played with them and treated them very well—at that time—but nobody, no one at
all had considered they needed to be educated. In the end I had to volunteer to
be their teacher. The prospect of these boys growing up in that camp, unable to
read, unable to do basic math, was just startling to me. I was under the
impression, you see, that they were orphans or something. That they were being
raised there by the military but that when they were old enough they would go
forth into the world, that they would get jobs and marry and have happy
lives.

“I sometimes think your father, Julia, hired me on
simply because it was easier to do that than to disillusion me.

“In many ways that was an idyllic time and I was
quite happy. The Catskills are a beautiful place, and I fell in love with
country living. In the summer I would hold class in a field of wildflowers deep
in the camp. In the winter we would all crowd into a cozy little schoolhouse,
the boys wrapped up in blankets around woodstoves. Beyond that—I was
electrified. It was an incredible opportunity for someone like me. There were no
televisions in Camp Putnam. No radios or newspapers. I could teach these boys to
become men, to become upstanding gentlemen without any of the distractions or
temptations of modern life. I imagined the papers I could write based on my
observations, the awards and grants I could win with the data I collected. I
will admit I was not above the scientific impulse that drove people like Taggart
and Bryant.

“That changed, though, in 1993. That was the year
of the first death.

“The boys had always fought among themselves. They
were quick of temper, though at the time we thought that was just a product of
their environment. Boys will be boys, we said. They squabbled over any little
thing that one of them had and the others lacked. If a guard gave one of them a
candy bar, we knew it would end in a fistfight as one of the other boys decided
it by rights belonged to him.

“When one of them—his name was Gerald—failed to
show up in my class one day, I assumed he was just playing hooky or that he was
sick. When he was gone for a week, I began to worry. Eventually Dr. Bryant took
me aside and explained. Gerald was dead. He had been attacked by three other
boys, and they had broken his neck. She made it sound like an accident. A
tragedy, but nothing unnatural. The three boys who killed Gerald would be
punished, she said, but I didn't need to worry about it.

“Three months later it happened again. Two boys
went into the woods, just playing, exploring, doing what eight-year-old boys do.
Only one came back. He refused to tell us what happened to his friend and so
guards had to go out looking for him. The missing boy's name was Marcus. They
found him impaled on a tree branch. When his friend, Tyrone, was questioned, he
admitted they had fallen out over whether Huckleberry Finn or Tom Sawyer was
smarter. It was a question I had asked in class that day, and they had debated
it at some length before Tyrone decided he could settle the question once and
for all. He had made a kind of spear out of the tree branch and he ran Marcus
through with it, puncturing a lung.

“I had plenty of training in dealing with
emotionally confused youths. I offered my services in helping Tyrone, but Dr.
Taggart said that wouldn't be necessary. I did not see Tyrone again. I assumed
he had been taken to another facility, separated for the safety of the
population. What actually happened to him is something I don't like to
contemplate.

“It became rapidly apparent, however, that we had a
real problem on our hands. The violence escalated each month. Fistfights turned
into boys throwing rocks at each other, which turned into horrible beatings and
boys using makeshift weapons against one another. The scientists tried all
manner of ways to settle things down, from putting drugs in the boys' food to
splitting them up into small groups and forbidding them from being alone with
each other at any time. The number of guards in the camp was doubled, and then
tripled.