Seize the Night

they'd blow in the walls, fill the ruins with a few thousand tons of concrete. They wouldn't just walk away and leave it for assholes like us to find.”
    He shrugged. “So maybe the effect didn't manifest until they were long gone.”
    “Or maybe we were hallucinating everything,” I suggested.
    “Both of us?”
    “Could be.”
    “Identical hallucinations?”
    I had no adequate answer, so I said, “Styptic.”
    “Elliptic.”
    I refused to think about that one. “If the Mystery Train was a time travel project, it didn't have anything to do with my mother's work.”
    “So?”
    “So if it didn't have anything to do with Mom, why did someone leave this cap for me in the egg room? Why did they leave her photo in the airlock on a different night? Why did someone put Leland Delacroix's security badge under the windshield wiper and send us there tonight?”
    “You're a regular question machine.”
    He finished his Heineken, and I shoved our empty bottles into the cooler.
    “Could be that we don't know half of what we think we know,” Bobby said.
    “Like?”
    “Maybe everything that went wrong at Wyvern went wrong in the genetic-engineering labs, and maybe your mom's theories were entirely what led to the mess we're in now, just like we've been thinking. Or maybe not.”
    “You mean my mother didn't destroy the world?”
    “Well, we can be pretty sure she helped, bro. I'm not saying your mom was a nobody.”
    “ Gracias .”
    “On the other hand, maybe she was only part of it, and maybe even the lesser part.”
    After my father's death from cancer a month earlier—a cancer I now suspect didn't have a natural cause—I had found his handwritten account of Orson's origins, the intelligence-enhancement experiments, and my mother's slippery retrovirus. “You read what my dad wrote.”
    “Possibly he wasn't clued in to the whole story.”
    “He and Mom didn't keep secrets from each other.”
    “Yeah, sure, one soul in two bodies.”
    “That's right,” I said, prickling at his sarcasm.
    He glanced at me, winced, and returned his attention to the riverbed ahead. “Sorry, Chris. You're totally right. Your mom and dad weren't like mine. They were way … special. When we were kids, I used to wish we weren't just best friends. Used to wish we were brothers so I could live with your folks.”
    “We are brothers, Bobby.” He nodded.
    “In more important ways than blood,” I said.
    “Don't set off the maudlin alarm.”
    “Sorry. Been eating too much sugar lately.”
    There are truths about which Bobby and I never speak, because all words are inadequate to describe them, and to speak of them would be to diminish their power.
    One of these truths is the profound depth and sacred nature of our friendship.
    Bobby moved on, “What I'm saying is, maybe your mom didn't know the full story, either. Didn't know about the Mystery Train project, which might be as much or more at fault than she was.”
    “Cozy idea. But how?”
    “I'm not Einstein, bro. I just drained my brain.”
    He started the engine and drove down river, still leaving the headlights off.
    I said, “I think I know what Big Head might be.”
    “Enlighten me.”
    “It's one of the second troop.”
    The first troop had escaped the Wyvern lab on that violent night well over two years ago, and they had proved so elusive that every effort to locate and eradicate them had failed.
    Desperate to find the monkeys before their numbers drastically increased, the project scientists had released a second troop to search for the first, figuring that it would take a monkey to find a monkey.
    Each of these new individuals carried a surgically implanted transponder, so it could be tracked and ultimately destroyed along with whatever members of the first troop it found. Although these new monkeys were supposedly unaware that they had been put through this surgery, once set loose they had chewed the transponders out of one another, setting themselves free.
    “You think Big Head was a monkey?” he asked with disbelief. “A radically redesigned monkey. Maybe not entirely a rhesus. Maybe some baboon in there.”
    “Maybe some crocodile,” Bobby said sourly. He frowned. “I thought the second troop was supposed to be a lot better engineered than the first. Less violent.”
    “So?”
    “Big Head didn't look like a pussycat. That thing was designed for the battlefield.”
    “It didn't attack us.”
    “Only because it was smart enough to know what the