Chimera: A Jim Chapel Mission (Jim Chapel #1)

Chimera: A Jim Chapel Mission (Jim Chapel #1) Page 21

"That must have made it hard to fight, afterward," Julia said, her voice calm and soothing. Chapel realized she must be using the same voice she used when she spoke to dogs and cats.

"Sure did. Some of the others, they picked on me; they would beat me up just for fun because I wasn't a threat anymore. But Ian stopped that. He took me on as a mascot. He protected me and made sure I got some food, though not as much as the others. That's how come I'm so small."

Another chimera. Impossible-they'd all been accounted for. Hollingshead had said as much in his briefing. There had been six detainees when the fence came down, two who were killed in the escape and four who made it out.

No-wait. Hollingshead had said there were seven, but that the seventh was presumed dead. Why he'd been presumed dead had been something Chapel didn't need to know.

"Why are you still here?" Chapel asked. "If Ian liked you so much, why didn't he take you with him when he left? Or later, you could have just walked out on your own."

Samuel shrugged. "Where would I go? I don't know nothing about the world. I know the camp pretty good, but that's it. And anyway, the Voice didn't want me."

"You mean the Voice didn't tell you who to kill?" Chapel asked.

"Yeah. The Voice said I was useless. It told Ian to kill me before they left, and he said he would. I got so scared. But Ian just took me out to the baseball field, that's a ways north of here. He told me what the Voice said, and that he wasn't going to do it. He said the Voice wasn't like Miss P, or like the doctors, and he didn't have to do what it said. That he was his own master. He cut me a little, and wiped my blood on his hand, so he could show the others and tell them he'd killed me. Then he told me to run into the woods and hide until they were gone. I did what he said. Ian was like Miss P. I always did what he said. I'm a good boy."

Miss P had to be Ellie Pechowski. Their teacher. Chapel was certain the doctors he meant were Helen Bryant and William Taggart.

"You heard this Voice?" Chapel asked. "It spoke to you?"

"Sure," Samuel said, licking the wrapper from the protein bar. "It spoke to all of us. You want to see it?"

See the Voice? "Very much so," Chapel told him.

Samuel went over to the church's altar and picked something up, using both hands. Chapel knew how hard it could be to manipulate small objects with one good hand. He could imagine it must be much harder with no fingers. But Samuel held the object easily, then tossed it toward Chapel.

He managed to catch it with his free hand. "Give me some light," he told Julia.

She shone it on the object he held. It was a cellular phone, a cheap prepaid model with a black case. One side was badly scuffed. Chapel tried to turn it on, but the battery was dead. He put it in his pocket.

"Hey, you can't have that! That's the Voice!" Samuel said, and took a step toward them.

Chapel raised his pistol. Samuel's face contorted and his fingerless hands shook and Chapel wondered if he would finally revert to form, change into one of the violent, aggressive chimeras he had met before.

But slowly, and with visible effort, Samuel calmed himself down. "I get it," he said. "You're like Miss P, too. Or Ian. I'll do what you say. I'm a good boy."

"Okay, then," Chapel said. "Why don't you sit down, and tell me a story."

CAMP PUTNAM, NEW YORK: APRIL 14, T+47:25

It took a while for Samuel to get started. Chapel had to prod him, ask leading questions, and finally take him all the way back to when Malcolm escaped, back when they were still just children. Once Samuel got started, though, he seemed to almost fall into a trance. The words he spoke sounded like an oft-repeated history lesson, a text he'd memorized.

"When the fence was closed, when they took the gate away, things changed," he said, looking into the middle distance. "They brought Malcolm back to us. Many were jealous of him, and angry. They said it was his fault the fence was closed. They said because of him, we would never leave here.

"Many of them wanted to kill him. They thought that would make it easier to bear. Ian said no. Ian had many friends, even then, though no one thought of him as their leader. Not yet. Ian said he would talk to the humans. He would talk to Miss P and she would get us out. She would free us.

"He went so many times to her platform. He begged her for help, for forgiveness. He spoke with the doctors, too. He listened when they spoke to him through their megaphones and he shouted back, he shouted back all kinds of promises.

"The rest of us were close by, hiding in the trees. We listened to the things he said. He had an idea, a vision he called it, of what we could become. Not everyone agreed with it. When he couldn't make the humans change their minds, some of them decided it was his fault. Ian's. After all, he had come up with the idea, the plan, that let Malcolm get away.

"Some of them, they tried to kill Ian on their own. They challenged him or ambushed him in the trees, or tried to steal his food and starve him. He beat everyone who came for him. He killed them if he had to. So his enemies, they got smart, and they joined together. They made the first gang.

"That was called the Blame War. It was our first war. It was bloody and many died. The worst was the Battle of the High Oaks. Ian had retreated to a place on a hill, northwest of here. Malcolm was with him and swore oaths to him. Quinn was with him, too, Quinn who was always the strongest.

"The gang came for them on a rainy night. Nobody could see. The gang was led by Franklin, who was almost smart as Ian, and almost strong as Quinn. But not enough of either. Quinn was the great hero then and killed many. But in the morning, Ian was our leader. He told us what to do."

Chapel's eyes went wide listening to the story. It was amazing to him-this little world had its own history, its heroes and its villains. Walled away from the world, the chimeras had created their own struggles, their own nations.

"He had a way for us to live," Samuel went on. "A way to survive. We would each go and make our own place, our own house, as far away from each other as we could stand. We would come together only when the food was thrown over the fence, and then only to share it out. It was too dangerous for us to be together.

"It worked, for a while. Winters were hard. It gets so cold here, and the snow is so deep, and it's hard to stay warm. Some of us made new gangs and slept all in a house together, even though Ian said not to. Some of the gangs thought Ian was no good, and they wanted a new leader. There were more wars then. But Ian always won. When they challenged him, he fought back, though always he tried not to kill. Already there were so few of us left. He said the humans wanted us to kill each other off. To destroy each other, so they wouldn't have to think about us anymore."

Julia shot Chapel a glance, and he knew what she was thinking. From the sound of it, and what Ellie had told them, that probably wasn't too far from the truth.

"Ian said we couldn't give the humans what they wanted. Too long, we'd tried to be good boys. We did what Miss P and the doctors told us. We listened when the guards talked. Ian said they'd turned their backs on us, and now we had a duty to be better on our own. A duty to live.

"Still, we were chimeras. And that meant we fought. Chimeras always fight. So Ian made new rules. He made rules about how fights could go, and what you could and couldn't do. No weapons. No killing someone who was already unconscious. No killing a chimera who couldn't fight back-that rule was about me," Samuel said, looking glum. "He had to make that rule so I could live."

He shook his head and went on. "Most times, we followed his rules, and we lived. Nobody died for many years. We ate what was thrown over the fence. We lived in our own little houses in the woods. We stayed apart. Sometimes, one of us would steal food or take something from another's house. Then we had to come together. The two chimeras who disagreed, the one who claimed he'd been stolen from and the one he said did it, they would fight. Only with fists, that was the rule. And then Ian would say who won, and it was the one who followed his rules better. We would stand in a circle, with the fighters in the middle, and the one who broke a rule first we would grab and pull away and beat until he was unconscious, and that was that.

"It worked. For years it worked. Until they made the last gangs.

"Alan was the leader of one gang. Him and his three, they said they were done. That Ian wasn't a doctor, and he wasn't like Miss P, and they didn't have to do what he said. It started because there was less food; there were times, whole weeks, when no food came over the fence. What did come, Ian split up among us all, but Alan said no. He said only the strong should have food. He said I should be left to starve. Ian challenged him to come to the ring, to send the best man of his gang to stand in the circle and fight it out with Ian's best man, but Alan said that was stupid. Ian had Quinn, who could beat anybody in the ring. Alan took a bunch of food that wasn't his and said it belonged to his gang, and they were going to go live out by the pond, and if Ian wanted the food back, he could come and get it.

"Ian went alone, just to talk. He said, if Alan and his whole gang would come here, to the church, he would give them a bunch of stuff he'd been hiding. He said he had a radio and some books and a lot of medicine, and he would share it. It was a lie, but they didn't know that.

"Ian waited for them here. He was waiting with Quinn, and Brody, and Malcolm, and Stephen, and with Harrison. They waited here in the church and they had knives they made from broken windows. Alan and his gang came, all four of them, and when they weren't looking, Ian and his gang cut them and killed them."

Chapel gasped. "The four in the schoolhouse," he said. "The bodies hanging on the blackboard-"

"That's them," Samuel agreed. "He put them there and told me he did it for me. So I could eat and not starve. I keep the animals away from those bodies and make sure they don't fall down."

"The words next to them," Chapel said. "It says 'we did this together.' "

"Sure," Samuel said. "Ian wrote that. Him and his gang, they broke the rules, they used weapons when they did it. They broke Ian's own rules. But he said that was all right because they did it together. If they worked together instead of against each other, then the rules didn't apply."

Sharing the guilt, Chapel thought. Ian didn't want them to turn on him so he'd made sure they were all implicated.

"This can't have been that long ago," Julia said. "Those bodies weren't that old."

Samuel nodded. "This was just last fall, when the leaves were red. Just before the Voice came."

CAMP PUTNAM, NEW YORK: APRIL 14, T+47:59

"Some of them, some of Ian's gang, they thought the Voice was a sign. They said the doctors had been waiting and watching, that they had wanted us to prove ourselves. That we'd passed some test, and that's why the Voice came. Some of us just thought it was because there were so few left. The Voice needed us and wanted to reach us before we were all gone. All dead." Samuel shook his head. "I don't know. I just know when it came, it changed things. It changed everything."

"How did the Voice come, Samuel?" Julia asked. "Where did it come from?"

"From heaven," he told her.

"It came down from the sky," he went on, when she wrinkled her nose in distaste. "You can call it what you want. It came on a parachute, a little parachute that got caught in a tree near here. It came down and it was talking already, even before we found it. It was saying the same thing, over and over. It said 'Press the green button.' It said that for hours while Ian and his gang, they stared at it, wondering if it was a trick, wondering what would happen. Quinn thought if he pressed the green button, they would all die. Brody thought it would make more food come. There was hardly any food then, and there's been none since, so I guess Brody was wrong.

"In the end it was Ian who pressed the green button. Who made the Voice come.

"It spoke to them all by name. It knew who they were, and it said it would give them the thing they wanted most. It would make them free. For most of a day it talked, making promises, telling them how strong they were, and how smart. How they were better than humans. Ian spoke back to it, and it answered him. He asked what the Voice wanted in exchange for freeing them. And it told them.

"Eight humans had to die. That was all. Eight humans and then they would be free forever. It would even help them do it. At first Ian thought it had to be a trick. Miss P and the doctors always said if we killed humans we would be punished. How could that be wrong back then, back when Miss P said it, but right now, when she was gone? But the Voice kept talking.

"It said the eight humans were people Ian and his gang wanted to kill anyway. It said they had to kill Jeremy Funt, who caught Malcolm when he ran away. It said they had to kill the doctors and Miss P for abandoning us. There were other names, too, names I didn't know."

"Christina Smollett," Chapel said. "Olivia Nguyen. Marcia Kennedy."

Samuel bobbed up and down in surprise and excitement. "Yes! I don't know who those are. The Voice said they were responsible for us being here, for us being locked up. It said they deserved to die like the rest."

"What about Franklin Hayes?" Chapel asked. "You must know that name."

Samuel shook his head in the negative. "No. I don't know him. But the Voice said he was the worst of all, the one who deserved to die the most. It said Quinn had to kill him. The others could choose who they went after, but Quinn had to kill Franklin Hayes. The Voice told them it would help them, it would show them where these humans lived, and make it easy. And then they would be free."

Chapel frowned. He'd hoped that Samuel would have heard something more useful. He'd hoped the Voice might have told them its own name, or why the mentally ill women were on the kill list, or something. But he supposed that had been too much to wish for.

"The Voice told them the fence would come down. They might have to fight a little to get out, but they were chimeras and that shouldn't worry them. It told them it would always be with them, as long as they did what it asked, and it would help them.

"And they listened. They listened, and they did what it said.

"Except-Ian wouldn't kill me. He disobeyed the Voice in that," Samuel said, and he sounded confused. He sounded like he couldn't understand why he was still alive.

"They left you here all alone," Julia said. "Ian left you here."

Samuel shook his head violently. "No, he-he said he would come back for me. He said I would be okay!"

"It's all right," Julia soothed. "It's okay. You're going to be fine, now. We'll take care of you."

We will? Chapel thought. Didn't she hear what Samuel had said, what he'd told her about wars and gangs and constant bloodshed? Samuel might have a childlike mind and a naivete born of isolation but he was still a killer. He was still a chimera.

"Isn't that right, Chapel? We'll take him with us, make sure he's okay?" she asked.

Chapel looked up, realizing suddenly that he'd been lost in thought. "We'll figure something out," he said.

"No," Samuel told them. "No, I'm fine here."

"Oh, sweetie, no," Julia told him. "I can already tell you're half starved to death, and it's too cold here to-"

"I said I'm fine! I'm staying!" Samuel shrieked. He jumped up and loomed over Julia like he was about to attack her.

It had come out of nowhere. Chapel should have expected it, though-he knew what the chimeras were like. They were implacable killing machines. He raised his pistol to point right at Samuel's face-

-but before he could fire, Samuel had smacked the flashlight out of Julia's hand and dashed into the shadows. Chapel tried to track him, sure he would flank them and attack where they weren't expecting him. He swung around wildly, pointing his weapon into every corner of the room, trying to cover all angles while Julia groped around on the floor for the light.

By the time she had it, Samuel was gone.

He'd simply vanished without a trace.

"It's broken," Julia said.

Chapel turned to look at her. She was holding up the flashlight and flicking its switch back and forth. "It's broken," she said again.

Chapel wondered how they would find their way back to the gap in the fence without it-but then he realized he could see her face, even in the darkened church. A little pink light lit up her cheek. It made him think of the sunset on Stone Mountain, the day they'd made love.

He turned around and looked at the door of the church. Its frame glowed with the same pink light. He staggered outside, tripping on debris, and saw a haze of light over the tops of the skeletal trees.

He'd been so wrapped up in Samuel's story that he hadn't noticed the sun coming up. It was dawn light streaming in, dawn light he'd seen.

Which meant he had a major problem on his hands.

CAMP PUTNAM, NEW YORK: APRIL 14, T+48:20

"Samuel!" Julia called. "Samuel! Come back!"

Chapel reached for her arm. "Julia, you have to let him go."

"He needs help," she told him. "Medical help. Or are you going to tell me he's a chimera and he doesn't deserve it? Because one of them killed my mother?"

"I'm going to tell you we're screwed. The sun is up."

"It tends to do that this time in the morning," she told him. She looked angry, but he was pretty sure she wasn't angry with him. He guessed she was angry at her parents, who had created Camp Putnam and populated it with sad monsters. So angry she couldn't help but express it, and he happened to be standing nearby.

"Listen, we'll come back for him, I promise. But there are people out there who need to be saved right now." Like Franklin Hayes. Chapel still didn't know why Hayes was on the kill list. But it sounded like he'd been singled out for special consideration. Banks and Hollingshead had both told Chapel that Hayes was the most important target on the list; he'd assumed they just thought that because he was politically connected. It looked like the Voice-and the chimeras-had their own reasons to hate him.

Chapel glanced at the sky again. "We need to get out of here now. Once the sun is up, sneaking past that guard will become impossible. We barely made it in the pitch dark. And if he catches us-"

"I see your point," she said.

Together they raced for the trees. Finding their way back wasn't going to be easy-they had wandered quite a ways in the dark, just following the forest paths, because they hadn't known what they were looking for. They'd had a working flashlight, too. Even with dawn coming up, the trees screened out most of the light and it was still almost midnight dark under their groping branches.

Chapel headed southeast, his best guess at where the gap in the fence lay. He knew there was almost no chance of reaching the exit before the sun was fully up, but he had to try. Any amount of cover could make a difference. Every beam of light that hit the gap would make it harder to escape unnoticed.

The path wound and snaked about, and he cursed every time they had to double back because the trees were just too thick to pass. Growing up he'd spent some time in Florida's swamps and he knew all about undergrowth and how it could tangle you up. He knew forests like this and he knew they were death traps-even if this one didn't have any alligators in it, or sucking bogs so deep you could fall in and never be found. This forest had its own dangers.

He tried not to think about that. He tried to keep one eye on his feet, watching for exposed tree roots or piles of leaf litter that could hide all kinds of obstacles. But the forest just wasn't built for running.

"There," Julia said, finally. She was out of breath, but she grabbed his arm with one hand and pointed with the other. "That shack. I remember it."

Chapel could see why. It was a collapsed hovel like all the others they'd seen, maybe one of the places the chimeras had retreated to when Ian told them to split up. Only one wall remained intact, the roof having collapsed and taken the other walls with it. But the intact wall was decorated with hundreds of tiny skulls. They looked like fox skulls to Chapel.

"My God, it's even creepier in daylight," she said.

Chapel grunted in frustration. He looked up and saw the sun had fully risen. It was too late to try to just sneak out.

Even though they were so close to the gap in the fence. "That was the first shack we saw when we came in, wasn't it?" he asked.

"Yeah," Julia said. "The fence is just a little ways over there." She pointed at a stand of woods that looked like every other group of trees.

"It is?" Chapel asked. "How can you know that?"

"We came north by northwest when we entered. We'd gone less than a quarter mile when we saw this place."

Chapel could only stare at her.

"What?" she asked.

"How could you know that?"

She just stood there for a while catching her breath. "Girl Scouts," she told him. "Orienteering award."

"You," he said, "keep surprising me with just how incredible you are."

"Sweet," she told him. "Now. How do we do this without getting shot?"

Somewhere nearby someone stepped on a pile of pine needles.

Somebody who wasn't one of them.

Chapel whirled around-and saw motion between two trees. It still wasn't light enough for him to see what it was. Maybe an animal. Maybe Samuel.

He put out one hand to signal to Julia that she should stay very still and not speak. She seemed to get the point. Chapel closed his eyes and just listened for a moment. He heard more footsteps, coming closer. Very slowly.

"Damn," he said, very softly. Mostly to himself. Then, much louder, "I am a federal agent. I am armed, but my weapon will remain in its holster. My companion is a civilian, and she is not armed."

Julia stared at him like he'd gone crazy-at least, until a few seconds later, when soldiers poured out of the trees and surrounded them.

IN TRANSIT: APRIL 14, T+49:06

They took away Chapel's phone, his hands-free set, the scuffed-up phone Samuel had called the Voice, and of course, his pistol. They left him his arm, even after one of the soldiers pulled the glove off his left hand and found what lay beneath. They handcuffed him with his hands behind his back, then forced him at gunpoint through the gap in the fence and into the back of an old M35 truck-a "deuce and a half," a two-and-a-half-ton truck of the kind the military used all over the world.

What happened to Julia he didn't get to see. None of the soldiers hit him or mistreated him in any way, so he could only hope they'd extended her the same courtesy.

He did not ask any questions or speak at all except when they demanded he identify himself. He gave them his name, his rank, and his serial number. They didn't ask for anything else.

He got a good look at their uniforms and saw they were navy-most likely they'd been drawn from the Naval Support Unit at Saratoga Springs. Sailors, then, seamen rather than soldiers. They weren't SEALs, he could tell that much, but they were well trained and efficient. They carried M4 carbines-but not M4-A1s, which meant they probably weren't Special Forces.

Observing little details like that helped him keep his cool. Just like Julia had dealt with the horrors of Camp Putnam by falling back on her medical training.

Besides, he had little else to do while he waited to find out what was going to happen to him.

The back of the truck was cold and drafty-it lacked a hard top, instead just having a canvas cover. It smelled like grease and old boots. That was a comforting smell to Chapel-it reminded him of his early days in the army. It also made him think he wasn't being detained by the CIA.

That was something, anyway. He consoled himself while the truck bounced and rolled over gravel roads, carrying him away from Camp Putnam.

In time the truck stopped and the engine was switched off. Chapel closed his eyes and listened to every sound he could hear. He heard the sailors moving around the truck, heard them click their heels as they saluted someone. He heard other vehicles moving around. And yes-there-the sound of a helicopter's rotor powering down.

He heard boots crunching on gravel outside the truck. Heard sailors come closer, and he knew they were coming to get him. He had no idea what to expect.

He was unable to keep his jaw from dropping when Rupert Hollingshead jumped up into the back of the truck and stared at him with a cold and angry eye.

NAVAL SUPPORT UNIT SARATOGA SPRINGS, NEW YORK: APRIL 14, T+50:21

"Admiral," Chapel said. "Please forgive me for not saluting."

Hollingshead just glared at him for a while. The DIA director was wearing an immaculate suit with a perfectly folded handkerchief in his breast pocket. His bow tie had a pattern of anchors on it, but otherwise he looked very much the civilian, just as he had the last time Chapel saw him, back at the Pentagon.

He was carrying a stool, a folding three-legged stool that he assembled and set down next to him. Eventually he sat down on it and crossed his legs, his hands gripping one knee. He said nothing, but he kept looking at Chapel, utter disappointment on his face.

The silence between them took on its own life. It made Chapel want to squirm. It made him want to explain himself. He did not do these things.

Eventually it was Hollingshead who broke the silence. "The life of an officer is quite lonely, at times. You see, son, an officer can't afford to have friends."

Chapel stayed at attention. He had not been put at ease.

"An officer always has a superior to whom he must report. No friends there, I assure you. Then he has men and women under his command. A good officer will have good people-if they aren't good people when they are assigned to him, he turns them into good people. That's what I was taught by my commanders, anyway. He learns to respect them, their hard work, their sacrifice; these things make them special in his eyes. They make him proud, and he comes to, ah, love them, in his very special way, I suppose. But he can't ever forget he's responsible for them. That their actions, in a very real, very concrete way, are his actions, and so-when it becomes necessary-when he must-he has to punish them. In accord with their offenses. When they break the rules, you see."

When Chapel was sixteen he'd been caught, once, sneaking out of a girl's bedroom window. The man who'd caught him was the girl's father, who didn't approve of her seeing Chapel. The girl's father had been carrying a pistol at the time.

At that particular moment, listening to Hollingshead describe the burdens of leadership, Chapel remembered that long ago summer's night with exquisite fondness. As scared as he'd been, as ashamed, it wasn't a patch on this.

"I'd like you to answer some questions, Captain, just so I can sleep better tonight. So I can be content in knowing I did the right thing, here."

"Sir, yes, sir," Chapel said.

"When Angel relayed to you my direct order that you were not to come to the Catskills, but to instead proceed directly to Denver, was your equipment functional? Your telephone and your-your-hands-free unit, I believe it is called?"

"Sir, yes-"

"Just yes or no, please."

Chapel bit his lip. "Yes," he said.

"So you did hear her correctly? The order was received without transmission errors? You understood the order and acknowledged it?"

"Yes."

Hollingshead nodded. "All right. Let's try another question. Were you at any time under the impression that Julia Taggart had a security clearance that would allow her to know-oh, anything-about your current mission?"

"No, sir, but-"

"Just yes or no, Captain."

"No."