“Oh, God,” Julia said. “Don’t — please don’t explain what you mean.”
“I’d prefer not to, myself,” Funt said. “I don’t even like thinking about what I saw in that bedroom. It was a classic rage killing, from the look of it. What you’d expect if a six-foot-four linebacker came home and found his wife in bed with the mailman. A little more brutal than that, maybe. The daughter was in hysterics, of course, but she gave me the info I needed to find Malcolm. He was in his favorite place, the place he always went to, she said, when he was angry or confused, which happened a lot. He was in this tree fort in their backyard. He was still there when I got to the house. Just sitting up there, staring down at me. He’d been crying. I asked him why he’d done that to his foster parents. Why he’d killed them. He told me. Seems he had been given a cat for a pet, and the cat disappeared. He didn’t tell me where it went and I didn’t ask. I wasn’t in Missing Pets. His foster mom and dad got pretty upset about the whole thing, though, so they must have known what happened to it. He asked if he could have another one, and they said no. Absolutely not.”
“What does that have to do with the parents’ murder?” Julia asked.
“You’re not listening. That was the whole reason. They wouldn’t let him have another cat. So he killed them.”
“What? That’s insane,” Chapel said.
“Yeah. Exactly. The chimeras — they’re ninety-nine percent human. But that one percent makes a serious difference,” Funt told him. “They don’t think like us. They look like us, but they don’t feel like us. To them everything is serious. Deadly serious. When they get frustrated, or upset… even just confused, it makes them angry — and when they’re angry, nobody is safe. They’re not human. They’re monsters.”
Chapel felt a chill run down his spine. “What did you do?” he asked.
“I asked him to come down from his tree house. I told him I would find him some new parents to live with, that everything was going to be okay. Working in Missing Persons you learn how to talk to kids who are so scared they can’t see straight. You learn how to calm them down. You also learn how to get them to climb into a stranger’s car. I got Malcolm buckled in and I drove him straight to the local police station. He started freaking out then, but I thought I could handle him. Then Dr. Taggart — your dad — showed up, and Malcolm went ballistic.
“One of the cops at that station ended up on an early pension. Maybe he learned to walk again. I didn’t have a chance to follow up. As for me, I was in the hospital for a long time with a broken pelvis and two broken legs. I came real close to putting a bullet in Malcolm’s head. Instead, your dad put five tranquilizer darts in him and eventually he fell down and went to sleep. It was the last I ever saw of him.”
“You told him he would be safe,” Julia said.
“That’s right. I lied to him,” Funt told her. “I betrayed him. I feel bad about that every once in a while. Then I think about the five people he killed, and what he did to that cop, and to me. He looked like a kid. He sounded like a kid. When he got angry, he was a demon out of hell. I have no idea what they did to him at Camp Putnam when he got back — for all I know they ran Nazi-style experiments on him night and day. Honest to God, I can’t say for sure if I think he deserved it or not.”
STONE MOUNTAIN, GEORGIA: APRIL 13, T+36:02
Chapel shook his head. Some of this was new information, but he didn’t see how much of it helped him. “So the CIA… created the chimeras, and then just warehoused them in this camp. But why? Why create them in the first place? What were they supposed to do? What were they supposed to be?”
“You think they’d tell me things like that? I only got to see the camp so I would know how dangerous Malcolm was. How tough my job was going to be,” Funt said.
“Okay. Okay.” Chapel scrubbed at his face with his hands. He felt soiled just from hearing Funt’s story. “Then—”
“The whole time,” Julia said. Both men turned to face her, but it was clear she was talking to herself. She had her arms wrapped around her chest and was bending over slightly at the waist. She looked like she might throw up — or start screaming. She shivered violently, and Chapel took his coat off and put it around her shoulders, but it didn’t seem to help. “The whole time I was growing up. The whole time,” she repeated. She stared into Chapel’s eyes. “I was sixteen years old when all that happened. My dad was teaching me how to drive. Then he went and shot a boy full of tranquilizer darts and took him back to prison. My parents — I thought I knew who they were, but — oh God. When I was six, they were just being born. Or made, or grown in vats, or whatever. When I was in first grade, learning to read, my parents were giving birth to little monsters. Chapel. Chapel!”
“I’m here,” he said, and reached for her, but she shoved him away.
“Chapel, they’re my brothers. Maybe not in, you know, a genetic way. But in every other way that counts. My brothers!”
“No,” he said. “No. You can’t think like that.”
“How can I not?” she asked him. “How can I think about them any other way?”
He started to answer, though he honestly had no idea what he was going to say. Before any words could come out of his mouth, though, a great booming noise ripped through the air and he jumped in surprise. It was followed by a deafening fanfare, and then a haze of light burst over the top of the mountain.
“What the hell?” Chapel asked. He let go of Julia long enough to run over toward the visitors’ center and see what was going on.
Then the fanfare resolved into music — familiar fiddle music. It was the Charlie Daniels Band, singing about Georgia. The light came from powerful floodlights that were illuminating the carving on the side of the mountain.
The nightly laser show had begun.
Down at the bottom of the mountain, hundreds, maybe thousands of tourists would be staring in awe up at the carving as the lasers animated the generals and made it appear their horses were galloping across the stone. They were probably gaping in surprise and delight, looking up toward where Chapel, Julia, and Funt stood at the summit.
“Come on,” Chapel said. “Right now?”
Nearby someone laughed. Chapel spun around, half expecting Laughing Boy to step out of the darkness. But the figure that moved into the haze of light now was taller than Laughing Boy, and more heavily muscled.
“Funny story, huh?” the figure asked.
“Who—” Chapel began, but he already knew who it was.
“I never heard his version before. Real funny.” The haze of light turned red for a moment, then died down to a less diffuse glow. Chapel’s eyes adjusted to the sudden darkness, and he could make out the details of the newcomer’s face.
His eyes were black from side to side, with no white showing at all.
Malcolm had arrived.
STONE MOUNTAIN, GEORGIA: APRIL 13, T+36:09
“No fucking way,” Funt shouted. “Why did you bring him here?”
Chapel could only shake his head in disbelief.
“Nobody else knew where I was going to be,” Funt insisted. “I didn’t tell anyone. So you must have told him he could find me here! You sold me out, Chapel!”
“No! I didn’t tell anyone,” Chapel protested.
Except Angel, of course.
He couldn’t imagine that she would have told Malcolm where to find Funt. That was just impossible. But her systems had been compromised once before, by the CIA — and the CIA had been trying to kill Funt for years.