to be, I couldn’t kill him in front of Ariel anyway. That would be a much bigger complication than the police.
That meant we ran. If only two hours had passed since Raynor had kidnapped me from the motel in Springerville, we were still in Arizona. All we had to do was find a phone and have Stefan and Saul come get us. However, in the ambient light of a sickle moon, it looked as if we were in a popular Arizona attraction, the Petrified Forest. There weren’t a lot of phones there. Petrified or otherwise.
Chapter 10
Ariel leaped over fallen stone tree trunks with as much grace and style as if it were an event in the Olympics and she were being judged. All tens. She also didn’t stumble a single time. Considering we were away from the highway lights and going by the limited light of the moon, that was impressive. I didn’t stumble either, but chimeras had excellent night vision and mine had only become better as I matured, the same as everything else.
“You have great night vision,” I said as we ran, neither of us winded so far.
“You have no idea. My brother, not the hacker, but my other brother, is a pilot. His vision is twenty-ten. My whole family is freakishly talented, apart from my sister. She’s four and tells everyone she’s an alien or a visitor from an alternate dimension, depending on her mood. She collects toy horses, then covers them up with little blankets for bedtime, except she covers them all up—including their heads. Her room looks like a fluffy pink horse morgue. She also wants to design shoes made out of human hair. She doesn’t say where she’s going to get the human hair, though, so when I go home to visit, I tend to lock the door. By the way, I was going to ask if that was a ferret in your pocket or were you just happy to see me, but I already saw the hard-on, so I’ll just go with nice ferret.”
I grinned. With Ariel, there was no point in being embarrassed or you’d spend every minute of the day bright red. “Thanks. His name’s Godzilla.”
“The ferret or your penis?”
“I’ll let you guess.” I stopped to get my bearings. Looking up at the position of the stars, I started running again, bearing to the right.
“With my night vision and the ability to visually measure to within approximately one centimeter, do you really want me to?” She was laughing again. Not many people laughed after being kidnapped, being involved in a car wreck, and having to use yoga skills to choke out an evil son of a bitch.
Godzilla poked his head farther out of my jacket pocket and chirped curiously. “I think I’d rather you didn’t. Godzilla, meet Ariel. Ariel, meet Godzilla. He bites pretty much every chance he gets. I think the Visitor Center is this way. We can call for help.”
I didn’t say call my brother. I’d been careful not to give out any details about Stefan or to mention that he even existed when e-mailing or talking to Ariel. I’d been taking a risk with her from the beginning by investigating the genetics issue, and growing to know each other hadn’t made the risk any less. I hadn’t been willing to add Stefan into that mix. When she asked about family, I told her my parents were dead and my sister had been in the Peace Corps but died in a plane crash in Africa. That tended to limit questions and made me as sympathetic an orphan as a grown man could possibly be.
“It is? How do you know? Have you been here before? You know, when you weren’t running from a crazed psychopath with deep, dark, and mysterious designs on you that you haven’t bothered to explain yet?”
Since I’d met Ariel online, I’d noticed she never used one word when five hundred would do. Just as she never wore one color when there were at least seven right at hand. “Yes, I’ve been here before.” I picked the question that could get me in the least amount of trouble. And saying, no, but I had memorized the maps of every state we’d passed through so far in case escape routes were needed wasn’t something I was willing to offer. It wasn’t as if I could pass it off as an interesting hobby.
“So, if we find the Visitor Center”—she sailed over another petrified tree—“and we break in to use their phone, who are we going to call? That guy’s government, the kind of government that the government itself barely knows exists. He can eat police for breakfast and make prisoners disappear forever. The police can’t help us with whatever bizarre thing you’re involved in. Oh, hey, my little sister would kill me if I didn’t ask: Are you an alien? This is just like all the movies where peaceful aliens come to Earth and the evil government tries to dissect them. Although I highly doubt any alien would come here. I believe in aliens. Trillions upon trillions of galaxies; we can’t be the only intelligent life out there. But with all our fighting, wars, disease, poverty, and reality TV, we’re like the meth–central, white-trash trailer park of our corner of the Milky Way. No alien would stop here to gas up. And who could blame them?”
There’d been a question in there somewhere. Now, what had it been again? Right. Whom were we going to call. “I have a friend who lives close to here. I’ll call him.”
It turned out I didn’t have to call Stefan. He pulled into the Visitor Center at the same time we made it in. He didn’t look pleased. He didn’t look pleased in the way Rabid Zombie Werewolves from Mutant Hell—it was a real movie; I’d seen it—weren’t pleased. He opened the door of the SUV and stepped out. There was the subtle motion of him putting his gun in the back of his jeans that no ordinary person would notice, twenty-ten vision or not. “What the fuck happened?” he demanded. He could’ve said more, considerably more. Out of nowhere it was my Internet friend from New York. I was in the middle of a park instead of asleep in my motel bed. I’d left everything behind, including my phone . . . everything except Godzilla. He had a bubbling volcano full of questions and he couldn’t ask any of them in front of Ariel.
I had some too, the main one being how he had found me.
“This is your friend? Is he psychic or what? How’d he know where we’d be? And why’s he so angry? What a temper. I don’t know that I’d be friends with someone with that kind of temper.” That was a good one with the way she’d done her best to break my ribs in Raynor’s car. “And could someone kick in the door to the Visitor Center? I have to use the ladies’ room, and I don’t want to go around back and get my ass stung by a scorpion.”
Saul stepped out of the other side of the vehicle. I pointed at him. “He’ll kick it down for you. That’s Bubba, my other friend.”
It was almost worth Raynor’s being left alive to kidnap and plot to see the contortions Saul’s face went through when he was labeled with the fake “Bubba.”
“Yeah, sure, chiquita,” he said dubiously. “I’ll kick it down for you.” It took him a few tries, but once they were inside and I heard the bathroom door slam, both Stefan and I went at it.
“Raynor’s alive. I was out putting money in the vending machine,” I started to explain—I supposed we’d have to leave money to pay for the Visitor Center door too; being a good citizen was frequently frustrating—“and he shot me in the head with a rubber bullet. I woke up, chained, in a car going north. He’s building a new Institute in Montana and was taking me there. One of his goons stumbled across Ariel in Cascade. She was worried about me and had tracked my IPS, although I bounced it around the globe a few hundred times. She’s apparently as smart or smarter than I am.” Which everyone lately appeared to be. “He thought she’d be insurance on my good behavior. She figured out he’s government of some kind. She thought my name was Bernie, but she heard him call me Michael. We escaped when she choked him out with her legs—she takes yoga—while he was driving. The car flipped and we escaped. She doesn’t know I have a brother. I said I’d call a friend from the Visitor Center for help. That’s it.” My short time in person with Ariel had taught me how to spit out a lot of information in very little time. It was useful.
I pointed at him. “You. Go. How’d you find me?”
He stared at me. I remembered when he used to have to look down to meet my eyes. Now that we were the same height, the stare was somehow more intense and as ferociously amber as one of those Rabid Zombie Werewolves.
Shit. I’d been so busy explaining what had happened that I’d forgotten
“We’re on the run and you were shot in the head when you went outside without me,” he said, his voice unnaturally calm for what I knew of my brother.
“A rubber bullet. He might as well have hit me with a Tic Tac.” That wasn’t quite true, but downplaying it was my best hope.
