Chimera Read Online Free PDF Page A

what he thought was luggage that
had fallen into the aisle.
    It wasn’t luggage. It was his fourth squad member.
Looking down, Charles saw the man was still alive but broken like a porcelain
doll. His mask was gone, and his face was obscured by blood.
    Lieutenant Charles looked up at the man who had
neutralized his entire squad and for a moment—a split second—he stopped and
stared, because he couldn’t do anything else. The man’s eyes. There was
something wrong with the man’s eyes. They were solid black, from side to side.
Charles thought for a moment he was looking into empty eye sockets. But no—no—he
could see them shining—
    He didn’t waste any more time. He brought his
carbine up and started firing in tight, controlled three-shot bursts. Just like
he’d been trained. Charles had spent enough time on the firing range—and in real
life, live fire operations—to know how to shoot, and how to hit what he aimed
at.
    Human targets, though, couldn’t move as fast as the
thing in front of him. It got one foot up on the armrest of a train seat, then
the other was on the headrest. Charles tried to track the thing but he
couldn’t—it moved too fast as it crammed itself into the overhead luggage rack
and wriggled toward him like a worm.
    Suddenly it was above him, at head height, and its
hands were reaching down for him. Charles tried to bring his weapon up, putting
every ounce of speed he had into reacquiring his target.
    The thing was faster.
Its hands tore away Charles’s mask, and then its thumbs went for his eyes.
    IN TRANSIT: APRIL
12, T+4:41
    Laughing Boy had a car waiting right outside
the fitness center, a black Crown Victoria with Virginia plates. Chapel got in
without a word, and the two of them headed straight for the Pentagon.
    Chapel didn’t ask for the man’s name. CIA told you
what you needed to know and they didn’t like it if you asked them questions. He
resolved to keep calling the guy Laughing Boy, if only in his head.
    They had a long drive together during which neither
of them said more than ten words. Mostly they were about whether there would be
much traffic on I-95. Fort Belvoir was just south of Mount Vernon, only a few
miles from the Pentagon—it wasn’t a long ride—but you always hit a snarl of
traffic when you approached the Beltway that surrounded the District of
Columbia. Half the country seemed to be trying to get into D.C. to do some
business or just see the sights. The Pentagon was still in Virginia,
technically, but that didn’t make things any easier. As the car slowed down to a
crawl outside of Arlington, Chapel got impatient and started drumming on his
side of the dashboard with his artificial fingers.
    Laughing Boy seemed to find that very funny.
    There wasn’t a lot, it seemed, that didn’t amuse
Laughing Boy. He never stopped laughing the whole time they were in the car
together, though as he focused on his driving it dropped to a kind of dry
giggling that grated on Chapel’s nerves. When they got to the Pentagon’s parking
entrance, he pulled the car into a reserved spot but before he got out he
reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a bottle of pills.
    â€œGotta show due respect, right?” Laughing Boy
asked, with a hearty guffaw. He popped three pills in his mouth and dry
swallowed them. The effect was almost immediate. He grimaced and rubbed at his
chest and sweat broke out on his head, slicking his crew cut. Eventually he
recovered and looked over at Chapel with a grim smile. “Can’t take those when
I’m driving.”
    Chapel got a quick look at the pill bottle before
Laughing Boy put it away. The pills were something called clozapine—Chapel had
no idea what they were for, but he did notice that Laughing Boy stopped laughing
after taking them.
    Thank heaven for small
favors, he thought.
    The two of them headed inside through the