Chapter 17 #2
“True.” His pale eyes drift toward the kitchen window and stay there, cast colorless by the equally colorless desert light. “I can teach you to shoot, if you want. Go out back, shoot some empty cans.”
He tips the rest of the soda into his mouth and flicks the can onto its side. It rolls disconsolately across the table.
“Maybe next time.”
Brian laughs, sort of, and taps his forehead. “Sure, I get you. Stranger danger.”
I should probably protest, but I don’t quite have it in me. “How do you know Uncle Bill?”
He itches one of his thick red arms. “Found him through the map. Just like everyone else.”
I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean. After a second of silence, he slaps his hands on his thighs and clears his throat with a snap like a pocketknife unfolding. “Right. Never mind. Your mom is Bill’s crazy sister.”
I can’t help rising to the bait. “Did Uncle Bill say that?”
“No. Nobody said anything.” He frowns like he’s probably lying, and mutters something that sounds like “Crazy behavior is crazy behavior.”
“Nobody’s crazy.” My eyes catch on my reflection in his toaster, my face stretched long and formless like taffy on a pull. “She’s sick. Did Uncle Bill tell you that?”
His eyes gleam. “Sick? Sick how?”
I shift in my chair. In the toaster, my face scrunches into a copper-colored tomato as my neck warps and narrows. So easy to get your jaws around. I don’t have to tell Brian anything if I don’t want to.
“Brain stuff. She doesn’t always know what she’s doing. It’s fine.”
Brian’s brows rise. “Yeah, sounds fine.”
When I don’t respond, he shrugs. “Well, let’s head down, I’ll get you stocked up.”
I stand. My water glass is still mostly full. “Down?”
“To the basement.” Brian shoves his way out of his own chair with a squeak. “What, you think I’d set everything up here, where just anyone can look in the window and see?”
I decide not to mention how he said all his neighbors moved away.
As I follow him through the living room, he pauses to flick some dust off a plastic woodland fairy with flowing brown hair and huge tits, part of the fantasy menagerie on the mantel.
“Hey,” he says suddenly. “You ever seen a car wreck?”
I remember the little girl and her mother and their flipped car. “I see a lot of people who get in them.”
Suspicion sparks in his eyes. “Highway patrol?”
“Nurse. Emergency department.”
He relaxes. “Oh. That’s good. Then you’ll be fine.”
I fix my eyes on the faded spots of the couch’s floral upholstery. My mom loves rose prints like this one. Not the flowers themselves—They smell like cough syrup, and thorns? So annoying, who came up with those—but her closet overflows with flowery designs and tiny rosettes.
I miss her. Or I’m worried about her. It’s hard to tell the difference.
On my way in, I was too busy noticing Brian to notice what he had in his entryway.
Now that I’m used to his gas-station-meets-country-grandma-meets-bushcraft weirdo aesthetic, it’s hard not to notice that one thing doesn’t fit: a painting not much bigger than a sheet of printer paper, framed in silver and hung on a door that looks like it should lead to a coat closet.
On it, two hyena-like creatures twist around each other, each one’s bared fangs aiming for the other’s throat.
It’s designed almost like a coat of arms, with a motto inked underneath. Defend and advance.
I haven’t smelled blood anywhere in the house. Another thing I should have noticed earlier.
A broken-in suede bomber jacket hangs by its collar on the doorknob, but Brian nudges it aside to reveal a thick combination lock that he opens seemingly by touch. Past the door is a set of uneven concrete stairs. Naked bulbs dangle from the ceiling.
He’s one of us, I remind myself. He’s going to help me.
The air shifts from desert stifling to sterile cold on our way down.
It’s just a concrete room down there, with a big utility sink, a banged-up trash can, and a steel door set into one wall.
The same insignia from upstairs is burned into the door, so large that the hyena creatures’ heads are bigger than my own.
Brian pulls a bundle from a plastic bin balanced on the side of the sink. “Put these on.”
I recognize the rubbery blue of nitrile gloves. A surgical mask is tucked between them.
“Got a hairnet around here somewhere too,” he mumbles.
I pull on the gloves too fast and the elastic snaps back, a bite at the inside of my wrist. The mask smells papery to the point of sweetness, drowning out any other lingering smells that might reach me down here.
It’s a familiar scent, the mask, one I anchor myself to at work if a trauma patient rolls in unexpectedly, but smelling it here feels strange.
Brian hands me a hairnet, then dons one himself and reaches for the keypad set into the concrete next to the door.
The keypad wails, the door disengages with a sterile hiss, and I don’t know exactly what I’d expected to see behind it, but I know that I didn’t expect this.
“Jesus Christ.” It escapes me before I can fully understand what I’m looking at.
The space runs the length of the house, maybe even longer, but it’s got more in common with a hospital lab than the dusty rabbit warren upstairs. No doors, just scrubbed-down walls and support pillars, shelves and sinks and storage. All clean. All sterile.
All white, except for the specimens.
Twenty, thirty tanks—empty aquariums, I realize, as I step closer—each filled with a lump of tissue and flesh and pinched-off vascular systems. Plugged into water pumps and toy motors and lab parts, some shuddering like plates of Jell-O, some pulsing with tiny heartbeats.
Only they aren’t hearts. They aren’t any organ I recognize.
The room smells like wet paint and antibacterial spray, and even through my surgical mask the blood and the flesh and the mutant tissue smells so good I have to dig my nails into my palms to keep from falling to my knees.
Above his mask, Brian’s pale eyes flash with malicious satisfaction. “You thought I was just some survivalist nut, didn’t you.”
“Of course not,” I lie. But how could I have expected this?
It’s not the false rise and fall of lungless torsos that disturbs me, or the way the sutures can’t quite hold some of the pieces together, leaving tissue bulging out between them like a pink stomach pressed to prison bars.
It’s the single-minded calculation of it.
How long ago did he plan this lab out? How many days has he worked toward it, piece by tiny piece?
“Took me years to get set up,” Brian says, like he read my mind. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
It’s true. I can’t help but admire how uniform his sutures are.
As I drift after him, my gaze catches on a stack of textbooks. These are very different from the books upstairs. Smith’s Recognizable Patterns of Human Malformation. Biomaterials for Artificial Organs. Principles of Tissue Engineering, third edition.
Brian says something else, but the mask muffles it.
“Evolution,” he repeats. “Right?” He shuffles around the tanks, removing lids, swirling pinkish liquid with a slender metal rod.
“We’re not like them. Sure. But the question is why, right?
Why. Now, I’m not saying anyone made us.
What I’m saying is, what are we going to make of ourselves? ”
I watch as a mass the color and texture of raw chicken breast inflates, the glistening membrane around it growing translucent as it swells. Then, abruptly, it deflates again. Brian stops and turns, faster than I would have expected of someone his size.
“Us.” He digs a thumb into his chest. “We’re what’s next. We’re stronger, we’re better adapted. We’re evolution in progress.”
“Are we?” Our entire lives, all our choices, revolve around ensuring we’re able to feed. Every day. Every single day. And there’s always the chance that tomorrow something changes, your uncle disappears, and your lifeline is gone.