Chimera (The Korsak Brothers #1)(32)
“Isn’t that enough?” He didn’t want to look past age-regressed features or the light hair of childhood. He wanted to hold on to something familiar, no matter how horrible the familiar was. It was understandable, the fear, but I wasn’t going to allow him to overlook the more obvious similarities. “That and the age. How many seventeen-year-old kids in southern Florida are running around with those eyes and are lacking parents? Go on, Misha, take a guess. How many?” It was a coincidence even too great for him to deny . . . or so I thought.
He hesitated, then turned the frame over again, the picture safely hidden against his legs. Our history was dismissed just that quickly. “I don’t know that I’m seventeen.” Strangely, it seemed as if he’d been about to say something else at first. What did finally come out was meant to be logical, I could tell, but it had more of a stubborn ring to my ears. It made the corner of my mouth twitch upward until the meaning of those obstinate words hit me.
“What do you mean by that?” I demanded. The semi was still ahead of us, ambling along, slowly and placidly, like an elderly elephant on Prozac. “Are you saying you don’t know how old you are?” I didn’t know why that surprised me. The Institute undoubtedly didn’t spend much on birthday cakes or clowns with balloons . . . unless the clown was hiding a hypodermic in one Day-Glo orange glove.
“No, I don’t.” He pushed up a sleeve that had slid down over the heel of his hand. “Nearly old enough for graduation, that’s all I know.”
“Graduation? What . . .” I wasn’t able to finish. The widening of Michael’s forward-facing eyes had me jerking my attention back to the road in front of the car. The back of the truck had opened to reveal five men, four of whom were wearing disturbingly familiar tan pants. It was hard to believe that I’d come to a point in my life where the sight of a pair of khakis or passing the Gap gave me the same surge of adrenaline than a hit attempt on my former boss once had. Marginally worse than the pants were the guns pointed in our direction. HK assault rifles were serious weapons, and I wondered if the concern was to get Michael back alive or simply get him back period.
The fifth man answered my question by pointing at us and saying something I couldn’t hear through the glass. It was our pal from the van. He was dressed this time and not in goddamn khakis either. A dark gray suit and black shirt set him apart from the others almost as much as the ferocious intelligence in his dark eyes. Then I decided to stop with the fashion assessments and try avoiding a shitload of bullets instead.
Yanking the wheel to one side with one hand, I took the car into the emergency lane. With my free hand I grabbed Michael’s shoulder and shoved him down into the small space between the seat and the dashboard. “But they’ve already seen me,” he protested, wincing as I crammed him pretzel fashion onto the floorboards.
“It’s not about the seeing. It’s about the shooting.” I rapped as the driver’s side mirror was torn away by a bullet. “Keep your ass down.” I wasn’t about to let it get shot off, not on his first full day of freedom. Ducking low behind the dash, I felt frantically for the gun under my seat. “How the f*ck did they find us?” I muttered to myself. It certainly hadn’t been by a trail of cookie crumbs. Sugar-shark Michael would’ve taken care of any one of those, no matter how small.
The windshield shattered into gummy green safety glass. It showered over my shoulders and rained down on the brim of my hat. Straightening, I rested my hand on molded black plastic that had long lost the new car smell and pulled the trigger of my 9mm. One of the men spun around, his white shirt blooming crimson on the right side of his chest—lipstick red, but it wasn’t the kind of kiss anyone would welcome. Jamming the gas pedal flat to the floor, I tried to take the car up past the truck. I saw the lips of the obvious leader, in all things including couture, move as he spoke into the mouthpiece of a slim headset similar to those worn by SWAT. The truck immediately swerved and cut me off.
Swearing, I tried the other side. Most of the cars around us had braked or halted altogether at the gunfire, but I still managed to send one oblivious driver yammering on his cell phone spinning out of control into the median. As the truck began a move to counter mine, I rethought my plan. “Hang on, Misha,” I gritted as I twisted the wheel and the car into a one-eighty.
“Not really necessary,” came the exasperated response. He was packed down there tightly enough that it was unlikely anything less than the Jaws of Life would pry him free. Beneath the irritation I heard the same dread that had first surfaced in the van. He might not be afraid of me, but Michael was afraid of someone. Sooner or later, I would find out why. When I killed that child-stealing, malevolent son of a bitch, I wanted to know each and every reason to equal each and every time I pulled the trigger.
Dodging haphazardly stopped cars with white-faced, gaping drivers, I stuck mainly to the emergency lane as I sent us speeding the wrong way up the interstate. Once or twice I had to detour into the main lanes if some shaking motorist was already hogging the side strip of gravel. Behind, the semi had stopped and the four men who were still mobile had jumped out onto the asphalt. Either they had a car that had been pacing them or they would commandeer the nearest one at gunpoint. I wanted to be at the last exit we’d passed before that mystery was solved. Barely two miles away, I began to run into moving traffic just as we reached it. If I had thought I could have made it across the median, I would’ve made the attempt, but the chances of getting bogged down in stagnant water and thick mud that grew reedy swamp grass was high. This was a low-slung machine we were traveling in, not an SUV. Political correctness—it’ll get you killed every time.