Chimera m-4 Read online

  “What?” Ethan said, the tartness in his voice beautiful to hear.

  “It’s Renee,” I said. “Are you all right?”

  “So far. Their hospitality is a little lacking, though. How’s Aaron?”

  “He’s fine. Pissed and worried.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “I’d say it makes about forty of us.”

  Landon cut off the call without so much as a warning. “That’s enough of that.” He put the phone away. “Satisfied?”

  “For now.”

  “Why are we here, Landon?” Thatcher asked.

  “Whatever happened to a friendly chat among fellow Metas?” Landon replied. “Isn’t that the big party line right now? Unite all Metas so that humans stop fearing us? Stop murdering us?”

  “That’s the plan, yes.”

  “So what are you going to do with the Metas who don’t want to be on the cheerleading team?”

  “It’s a choice, not a requirement.”

  “Some choice, when the alternative is being hunted.”

  “You’re only being hunted because you’re a thief,” I said. “You’ve broken into a dozen warehouses and stolen goods that don’t belong to you. Meta or not, that’s a crime.”

  Landon rolled his eyes. “Blah, blah, thief, blah, blah, crime. You have no idea why we do what we do.”

  “So explain it to me. I am all ears.”

  His gaze flickered down to my breasts. “I’d say you’re all—”

  “Watch it, junior.”

  “All talk.” Landon blinked innocently. “I hear your powers are on the fritz. That why you carry a gun?”

  “Partly.” I put my hands on my hips. “I also really like having something long and hard in my hands.”

  His eyes widened briefly. He didn’t move, but he mentally backed down. Landon was obviously used to being the big dog on campus, unchallenged. I may have lost my sex appeal when I lost a good amount of my skin, but my sharp tongue hadn’t gone anywhere. Some men were so easy to take down a few pegs.

  Thatcher, for his part, looked momentarily impressed. “Leaving you and your mother was the hardest decision I ever had to make,” he said to Landon. Bless him for getting the conversation back on track. “The War was coming to a head. I thought distancing myself was the best way to protect you both from my enemies.”

  “From the Rangers, you mean,” Landon said.

  “Them, and the human police, the National Guard, everyone who was fighting us. And from Specter.” He swallowed hard. “When they told me you’d both died . . . it almost killed me, Landon, thinking I’d failed you both.”

  “You failed us when you left us behind to go murder children.”

  My entire body jerked at that cold accusation.

  Thatcher flinched. “We never wanted to hurt those kids. We didn’t have a choice. Specter could have killed any one of us with a thought, at any time, if we disobeyed him. All I wanted was to survive and come home to you and your mother.”

  Landon took a step toward Thatcher, one hand clenched into a fist, lips curled back in a sneer. “Could you really have come home and given me a hug, knowing you’d murdered someone else’s child in order to be there?”

  “I’d have held you tighter because of it. I have spent every single day these last fifteen years regretting every life I took, every person I hurt. I can’t take any of it back, Landon, but I can try to be a better man.”

  “A better man? Being a better man is trying to put your son in prison?” This time Landon’s glare landed on me.

  “I’m not helping them arrest you,” Thatcher said. “But you sent me a personal invitation to this little party, so here I am.”

  “I wish I could say the vintage Father’s Day card was my idea. It did get your attention, though.”

  “It got the attention of the whole prison.”

  “Look,” I said. “Landon, you said I have no idea why you do what you do. Why don’t you explain it to me? That’s why we’re here, isn’t it? Besides giving your father a verbal ass-kicking for everything you think he’s done wrong?”

  Landon gave me a poisonous look that I met with my own hard stare. “Equal distribution of goods,” he said.

  “You’re going to have to explain that one.”

  “Come on, Flex, you’ve been around. You see how bad things are in the rural areas. One chain controls over eighty percent of the manufactured food distribution in this country, and that food goes only where the company’s shareholders say it goes. Independent grocers are struggling to feed their communities at insanely jacked-up prices. We’re keeping people from starving.”

  Well, this was certainly new. “So you’re, what? Modern-day Robin Hoods? Robbing from the rich grocers and giving to the poor ones?”

  Landon smiled. “Something like that. We’re heroes to the people we feed.”

  “Robin Hood was a hero, too, but he was still hunted by the authorities.”

  “We aren’t the bad guys.”

  “Then who are you? Because you sure as hell aren’t the good guys. Breaking-and-entering, destruction of property, theft, not to mention you’ve recently added assault and kidnapping to your growing list of crimes.”

  “Your friend is fine.”

  “Oh, he’s fine, so that makes it okay?” This kid was tweaking my last nerve, so absolutely positive that his actions were justified no matter who got hurt along the way.

  “You couldn’t possibly understand.”

  “Junior, the depth of what I know that you couldn’t possibly understand would have you curled in a fetal position for a month.”

  Landon’s hand moved like he wanted to take a swing at me. Thatcher took a step sideways toward us, raising both his hands in a gesture of peace. “Look,” he said, “this kind of arguing is pointless. Landon, I have to ask you something.”

  “She’s dead,” Landon said.

  Thatcher blinked. “How—”

  “Oh, come on. You’ve wanted to ask since the moment I got here. Sorry, Dad, but Mom died in that fire for real.”

  “Why?”

  “Why didn’t the people who took me save her, too? She was human.”

  Thatcher looked sick. “They killed her. And they stole you.”

  “They freed me.”

  “From your mother?”

  “From an ordinary life. From being shunned and hated if anyone ever found out who my father was, or that I was a Meta, too.”

  “Who took you?” I asked.

  Landon paused, considering his words. “We knew him as Uncle.”

  “We?”

  “Bethany and me. Uncle raised us together. He educated us, trained us to survive, gave us the skills we needed to help others.”

  “He made you both professional thieves.”

  Landon shrugged. “Call it what you want.”

  “Were you trained in a facility?”

  “No, we moved every couple of months. It wasn’t safe to get attached to one place, or for people to remember us.”

  “Did this Uncle train any other kids?”

  “No idea. We left his care when we turned eighteen, and we’ve only had occasional phone contact for the last eight months or so.”

  Since all of our powers returned.

  “And you can save your breath asking,” Landon added. “I won’t give you a description or help you find Uncle. I’d never betray him, and neither will Bethany.”

  Challenge accepted.

  “What happens now?” Thatcher asked.

  “To be honest, I’d entertained ideas of killing you in this parking lot and ridding the world of one more child killer.”

  My fingers twitched as my heart rate sped up. I mentally calculated the time it would take to reach into my coat, grab my Coltson, and shoot.

  Thatcher, on the other hand, looked perfectly at ease. “And now?”

  Landon cocked his head to the side, considering. “I may be a lot of things, but I’m not a killer.”

  “I’m glad.�
��

  “That doesn’t solve our dilemma, though,” he said to me. “I still have your friend, and you want to arrest me.”

  “I’m not the police, Landon,” I said. “And so far, the police don’t have your or Bethany’s name. Our investigation is completely internal.”

  Landon stared. “Why?”

  “Because Trance, my boss, isn’t fond of outing Metas to local authorities. Until we understood what was going on, the investigation was need-to-know.”

  “Was?”

  “One of ours was kidnapped. It’s hard to tell if she’s changed her mind yet.”

  He looked pained. “These communities really do depend on us to survive. If we stop delivering food, they’ll starve.” He spoke with absolute conviction, and with a hint of fear. “They need us. I’ll give Ethan back if you promise to stop looking for us.”

  “I can’t promise that, Landon.”

  “What if I show you?”

  “Show me?”

  “I’ll take you both to one of the towns that I feed. You can see the people for yourself, see the difference we make to them. And you can see for yourself that Ethan is okay.”

  Landon had just said the magic words. I couldn’t promise him that seeing this town would make us not report him and Bethany, but I could promise to look. To see his version of Sherwood Forest and pass along what I knew to Teresa. Landon and Bethany would probably still be hunted for their crimes, but I could play along for a while. And I knew Thatcher wouldn’t give up the chance to spend more time with his son.

  “All right,” I said. “We’ll go.”

  “I have two conditions,” Landon said.

  “Name them.”

  “First, you’ll be blindfolded for the trip. I can’t have you taking others back to the location.”

  I glanced at Thatcher, who nodded. “Okay, agreed. The other?”

  “You’ll have to leave your phones and coms here.”

  That condition I didn’t like as much. “I can agree to leave our communication devices behind if I can send one message first.”

  “What kind of message?”

  “I want to tell Trance to not worry or look for us, and that I’ll be in contact when I can.”

  Landon considered the request with a sour expression. “Fine. But I want to read the text before you send it.”

  “Okay.”

  I took out my phone and typed the message just as I’d said it, then showed the phone to Landon. After he hit send, he gave the phone a mighty toss toward the road. It cracked when it hit the ground. Our coms followed. Landon sent a haze of static electricity over each of us, probably checking for any other kind of trackers on our persons. He took my gun, too. He electrified the Sport and destroyed the tracker he found under the fender.

  The kid’s too smart for his own good.

  From the rear compartment of the Sport, he produced a spare blanket and used his telekinesis to tear it into wide strips, which he folded twice. Blindfolds. He had four strips, though, which meant—

  “You aren’t tying us up,” I said with a fierceness that startled Landon. “No arm restraints. Blindfolds only.”

  He opened his mouth as if to protest, then shut it. Nodded. Good, because if he’d insisted, I would have called the whole damned thing off. No one tied me up, not ever again. The pretzel job that Specter had done on me back in January had taken nearly a month to heal, and those long nights hopped up on muscle relaxants had brought back old nightmares. Nightmares of being tied up and tortured by people who were supposed to love me.

  Never again, goddammit.

  I ignored Thatcher’s speculative look as we both climbed into the backseat. Since Landon seemed to have no qualms about leaving his motorcycle behind, I assumed it was stolen, too, and I added motorcycle thief to his list of crimes. The kid was certainly filling out his rap sheet. And he seemed to like showing off, because instead of just using his hands, he used his powers to tie on Thatcher’s blindfold.

  My stomach flipped when the swatch of fabric hovered toward my own eyes. I didn’t like this, being driven blindly to an unknown destination by someone whose mental state I didn’t quite trust. Landon said he wasn’t a killer, but his actions at the warehouse early Saturday morning said he wasn’t above getting violent.

  I didn’t have a choice.

  The gray cotton descended over my eyes. Phantom fingers cinched it tight and tied a knot, casting the world into darkness.

  Nine

  The River

  Even with the radio on and tuned to a classic rock station, the trip seemed interminable. I couldn’t guess how long we were actually on the road. At least three or four hours, though, because eventually I became aware of the need to pee. We moved straight, up, down, around, and in every other direction it was possible for a Sport to go except backward. I kept my eyes shut against the scratchiness of the blindfold’s cloth, and the rocking of the vehicle nearly sent me to sleep a few times.

  Eventually the ride became slower, the turns more hairpin. Our elevation had changed, because my ears popped twice. At some point I got restless and began squirming in my seat, trying to wake up my sore butt and ward off the growing need to ask for a pit stop.

  “Landon?” Thatcher asked, breaking the complete silence among the three of us that had existed for hours. “Any chance we can stop for a minute?”

  “Why?”

  “I need to water a tree.”

  “Me, too,” I said. “Or I’m going to be watering the seat.”

  Thatcher made a noise that might have been a chuckle.

  “Fine, I’ll find a place to stop,” Landon said.

  He kept driving until I was tempted to ask if he’d forgotten that we had to pee, and then the Sport slowed. Turned. Gravel crunched under the tires, and we hit a few ruts that spiraled out my equilibrium. I hated not being able to see. He stopped, shifted, turned off the engine.

  “Blindfolds stay on.”

  “Are you nuts?” I said. “How the hell do I know we’re not in the middle of a parking lot of people?”

  “We’re in the mountains at the head of an old hiking trail. I haven’t passed another car in over thirty minutes. I will take you down a ways so you aren’t visible from the road, and then I promise I’ll give you privacy.”

  I actively hated the idea. “And if I take off the blindfold anyway?”

  “All I have to do is put pressure on your carotid artery and you’ll sleep until we get where we’re going. I honestly don’t care if you piss on the seat.”

  Thatcher grunted.

  “Fine,” I said.

  Thus occurred one of the most humiliating experiences of my life—being led blindly down an uneven hiking trail, my hand on Landon’s shoulder and Thatcher’s hand on mine. Oh, did I forget to mention we had to pee together? Blindfolded or not, I was furious at being forced to do something so private in front of a near-stranger. And Landon seemed entirely too pleased with himself for our humiliation.

  During the walk, I tried to use my other senses to figure out where we were. A few birds tweeted nearby. Thanks to my foster parents, I could identify most North American bird species by both sight and sound. Two particular calls stood out—the whistling song of a yellow warbler and the raspy mew of a gray catbird. Not super helpful, since neither were local to any specific state or region. The only thing I could guess from those birds was that we hadn’t gone too far south, since they tended to stay north at this time of year.

  The scents of wet earth and pine also hinted at north or west, maybe Pennsylvania or West Virginia, possibly southwestern New York. Something else was in the air, an unfamiliar scent both metallic and oily that I couldn’t pin down.

  After about thirty paces, Landon stopped. “The trail is pretty wide here. No plants or anything, so don’t worry about poison ivy. You have two minutes.”

  He pulled away, and I stood there in the dark as his footsteps moved back in the direction we’d come. Thatcher’s hand stayed on my shoulder another few
seconds, and then pulled away.

  “I’ll back up a few steps and give you some space,” he said.

  “Your son is an asshole.”

  He didn’t disagree.

  The final leg of the drive didn’t last nearly as long as the first, but it was significantly more twisty. Twice, sharp turns sent me sideways into Thatcher’s shoulder, and he hit me once. I was about to complain about Landon’s lack of driving skills when the road changed from pavement to gravel. The gravel turned into a thump-thump-thump, as if we’d just crossed a wooden bridge, and then became gravel again. Landon slowed to a near-crawl.

  “You can remove the blindfolds,” he said. “We’re here.”

  I yanked off the offending strip of fabric and blinked hard against the sunshine. My eyeballs ached from the bright assault, and I squinted out the window at our mysterious destination.

  We were in a valley somewhere in the mountains, which rose up all around us in peaks of green and brown. A town right out of a history book sprawled out in the valley, a postapocalyptic blend of Old West mining town and Great Depression shantytown. Wooden buildings at least a hundred and fifty years old stood next to newly constructed shacks. The vehicles parked in driveways and along the roads were old, patched, most of them sport utilities, pickup trucks, or work vans of some nature. Everything seemed to be covered in a fine mist of gray.

  Curious faces peeked out of windows, and a few folks stepped onto porches to observe the new vehicle rumbling down what appeared to be their Main Street (such as it was). No one tried to stop us, but no one seemed eager to come up and say hello. Landon kept driving at his snail’s pace, past more homes and business fronts converted into homes. I saw no restaurants, no stores, no churches or communal gathering places—until we got to what looked like a park. It was filled with mismatched picnic tables, a few charcoal grills, and a planted garden that reminded me of the pictures I’d seen of the garden in Manhattan. On the edge of the park was a small brick building. The word MUNICIPAL had been crossed out and STORE painted over it.

  “This is one of the towns we deliver to,” Landon said. He parked near the store and turned off the engine. “The town leaders do their best to get legitimate food deliveries up here, but without us, the eleven hundred people who live here would have starved to death a long time ago.”