He would have laughed — except he found he could barely breathe.
The clamps on the end of the arm, the clamps that held it on his body, were designed to tighten automatically when needed, squeezing tighter with the more weight the arm tried to lift. At that moment the arm was holding his entire one hundred and eighty pounds. The clamps had compressed so tightly they were crushing his rib cage, making it difficult for him to draw breath.
The arm hadn’t been designed for this. It had never been meant to hold so much weight on its own. He had to get his good hand up there, had to grab the fence—
Up above Malcolm screamed in rage and hit the fence again with the stun gun. Chapel barely had time to yank his fingers back from the chain link.
It was then he started to smell burning rubber. He looked up and saw the fingers of his artificial hand were smoking. Molten silicone was rolling down the back of the hand, dripping down his shirtsleeve.
If the silicone melted until the metal finger actuators beneath were exposed, he would have no protection from the electric shocks. The current running through the fence would zap the arm’s circuit boards and microchips and short it out. If that happened, the fingers were designed to automatically release anything they were holding. They would go limp, and he would fall.
He couldn’t let that happen. “Malcolm!” he shouted, sucking in a deep breath so he could actually be heard. “Malcolm, listen to me!”
The chimera stared down at him with wide black eyes.
“What the hell are you, human?” Malcolm demanded. “Or are you human? Maybe you’re like me. Maybe…” He shook his head, failing to finish his thought. He grabbed at his hair and pulled until clumps of it came loose.
He was getting frustrated. Which for a chimera could only mean one thing — he was getting even more dangerous than he’d been before.
“Malcolm,” Chapel called, “wouldn’t you rather kill me with your own hands? Wouldn’t that be more satisfying?”
“Shut up!” Malcolm shrieked, his voice suddenly high pitched with rage. “Shut the fuck up! I’m going to eat you, do you understand? I’m going to tear off your flesh and eat it! I’m going to trample Funt until he’s paste! Then I’m going to take your woman and I’m going to fu—”
The chimera’s head jerked to one side. His black eyes blinked several times. A dark spot appeared on the front of his shirt and started to spread.
He didn’t say anything, or make any sound at all. As quickly as it had possessed him, the rage seemed to have flowed back out of him. He raised one hand to touch the spot on his shirt, and his fingers came away dark. A scowl curled across his face.
Then his left eye exploded outward in a miniature cloud of blood.
STONE MOUNTAIN, GEORGIA: APRIL 13, T+36:28
It took as long for Malcolm to fall over as a tree takes to fall in the forest. Chapel could only stare upward, watching in surprise as the chimera died. Malcolm slumped to the ground in a heap, one hand flopping forward over the fence, as if he were reaching out a hand toward Chapel, a final gesture of reconciliation.
Blood rolled down his fingers and dripped on the mountain below.
Eventually Chapel remembered he was about to fall to his death. He stuffed the fingers of his good hand into the chain link, and some of the strain was taken off his artificial arm and he could almost breathe again.
Julia popped her head over the side. “Chapel?” she asked. “Are you—”
“Make sure he’s dead!” Chapel called up.
She nodded and disappeared for a moment. Chapel heard two more gunshots. When she came back, she was holding Funt’s pistol and the barrel was smoking.
“Can you climb up?” she asked. She looked from side to side. “This fence isn’t going to hold much longer.”
In that case, Chapel told himself, the answer to her question had better be yes.
He shoved one foot into a gap in the fence and pushed himself upward. His artificial fingers had partially fused to the chain link, but he was able to pull them free. Semiliquid silicone came loose in long thin strands. The fingers were gummed together and deformed but they still worked, it seemed.
“Hang on,” Julia said. She pulled off her pink hoodie, then tied one end of it to a fence post that was still holding in the rock. When she lowered the other sleeve down to him, he could almost reach it.
It took him far too long to climb up and grab it. The chain link groaned and started to tear away from its posts, and for a bad, long moment he was certain it would give way. Eventually, though, he managed to clamber up to a point where he could wrap his good arm around a fence post and, with Julia’s help, roll back onto the level ground on top of the mountain.
Julia stared at him as if he would disappear if she looked away even for a moment. She reached up and brushed hair out of her face with one hand, leaving a streak of blood on her cheek.
“Blood,” Chapel managed to say, pointing at it.
Chimera blood. Full of the virus.
She understood at once. “Oh, God — I checked Malcolm’s pulse with those fingers. I didn’t even think…” Shaking her head she grabbed up the hoodie and used it to scrape the blood off her face and hands.
Would it be enough to protect her? Chapel didn’t know. If she hadn’t gotten the blood in any cuts or scrapes, if it hadn’t got in her mouth—
There was nothing to be done for it.
“Funt,” Chapel said. He was still getting his breath back. He didn’t know if he could sit up quite yet. “Is Funt alive?”
Julia nodded. “He’s in shock, though. I did what I could for him. That’s why it took me so long to shoot Malcolm.”
“That’s the second person you’ve shot today,” Chapel said, with a weak smile. “You’re a quick learner.” He started to close his eyes.
“I’m getting better at it. Chapel? Chapel, what do we do now?”
“We have to get out of here.”
“Definitely. Funt needs medical attention. More than I can give him up here. And the park rangers will probably show up any second. I know I don’t want to have to explain to them what happened.”
“My phone,” Chapel said. Very carefully he reached into the inside pocket and found the smartphone. He touched his ear and found his hands-free set was long gone, probably knocked out of his ear when Malcolm threw him at the fence. He dialed Angel and she picked up almost at once.
“I’m here, baby.”
“Angel, we need to be extracted, as soon as you can—”
He stopped talking because the sound of the music coming from the bottom of the mountain was drowned out just then by the rotor noise of a helicopter coming over the far side of the summit. It was a civilian chopper, but it showed no lights.
“Anything else I can do for you?” Angel asked.
STONE MOUNTAIN, GEORGIA: APRIL 13, T+36:31
The chopper seemed to take forever to land — the top of Stone Mountain was too rough for it to just set down on its skids. Eventually the pilot found a safe spot, and the aircraft settled to the rock.
The same second it put down, two men wearing Tyvek suits and surgical masks came running over to put Malcolm in a body bag. They didn’t even look at Chapel, but Julia grabbed the arm of one of them and asked if he had any alcohol wipes. He handed her a bottle of rubbing alcohol from his kit, and she poured it liberally over her fingers, then scrubbed at her face with the stuff. “We have a wounded man over there,” she said, pointing at where Funt lay, dressed as a park ranger, on the bare rock.
“Sorry, ma’am, we’re just cleanup. But there’s a stretcher in the bird,” he told her. She started to protest, but Chapel grasped her shoulder and then ran to the chopper. The pilot was already pulling the stretcher out of the back compartment. “I have orders to take you wherever you want to go,” he told Chapel. “But I’ll need to file a flight plan before we take off.”