Amazingly, though, the chimera obeyed him. Both hands came up and lifted above the chimera’s head. Chapel kept his eyes on the chimera’s face, looking for any sign he was about to be attacked.
“Chapel,” Julia said, “his hands!”
Chapel glanced upward and saw what she meant.
The chimera had no fingers.
CAMP PUTNAM, NEW YORK: APRIL 14, T+47:01
The chimera started to lower his hands, as if he were ashamed of them.
“Keep them where I can see them,” Chapel told him, and the chimera obeyed.
This made no sense. Based on what he’d seen for himself and what Ellie had told him, chimeras were impulsive and aggressive, unable to bear any kind of frustration or anger. This one acted like a human with a gun pointed at him.
“Chapel, he’s terrified. Don’t be such a man,” Julia said.
“Seriously?”
“Look at him. He’s half starved and he’s shivering.” Julia took a step forward. Chapel held out his free arm to stop her. At least she didn’t run over and give the chimera a hug. “What’s your name?” she asked.
The chimera looked at Chapel as if for permission to answer. When it didn’t come, he said in a halting voice, “I’m Samuel. Are you going to kill me?”
“No,” Julia said. “No. We’re not going to hurt you at all. We’re just trying to be careful. When was the last time you ate, Samuel?”
Now that he knew to look, Chapel saw the chimera’s cheeks were sunken, and he was much smaller than the chimeras he’d seen outside the camp. His wrists were like sticks coming out of the sleeves of his tattered shirt.
“It’s been a while. They used to throw food to us over the fence but… now I just get what I can catch, and it’s not easy,” Samuel said. “I can find some mushrooms, sometimes. But sometimes they make me throw up, and that’s worse than eating nothing. There’s tree bark, and every now and again I catch a fish. I have a net.”
Julia lowered the light and Chapel expected Samuel to bolt, but he didn’t. Julia rummaged around in her purse for a while, then brought out a half-eaten protein bar. “Here,” she said, but Chapel stopped her from walking over to hand it to the chimera.
“Throw it to him,” he said instead.
She tossed it underhand. He might be half dead with starvation, but Samuel was still a chimera. He caught it effortlessly between his two palms and tore the wrapper off with his teeth. He shoved half of it in his mouth all at once.
“I’m afraid that’s all I have. The other half was my breakfast two days ago,” she said, glancing at Chapel.
“That was when the fence came down,” Samuel said, nodding. “When Ian and the others left, to follow the Voice.”
“The Voice—” Chapel began, but Julia put a hand on his arm to stop him.
“Samuel, what happened to your fingers?” she asked.
“Frostbite. Six winters ago,” the chimera said, his mouth full of granola and molasses. “I got in a fight with Mark, which — no fooling — I won, I totally killed him, but I was beat up pretty bad. I fell asleep in the snow and didn’t wake up for three days. When I did wake up, I couldn’t feel my fingers or my toes. Ian cut them off for me with an axe, so I didn’t die from rotting.”
Jesus, Chapel thought. The fence would already have been closed off by then. There would have been no medical care in the camp at all. Samuel was lucky to have lived through that. If he hadn’t been a chimera, maybe he wouldn’t have.
“That must have made it hard to fight, afterward,” Julia said, her voice calm and soothing. Chapel realized she must be using the same voice she used when she spoke to dogs and cats.
“Sure did. Some of the others, they picked on me; they would beat me up just for fun because I wasn’t a threat anymore. But Ian stopped that. He took me on as a mascot. He protected me and made sure I got some food, though not as much as the others. That’s how come I’m so small.”
Another chimera. Impossible — they’d all been accounted for. Hollingshead had said as much in his briefing. There had been six detainees when the fence came down, two who were killed in the escape and four who made it out.
No — wait. Hollingshead had said there were seven, but that the seventh was presumed dead. Why he’d been presumed dead had been something Chapel didn’t need to know.
“Why are you still here?” Chapel asked. “If Ian liked you so much, why didn’t he take you with him when he left? Or later, you could have just walked out on your own.”
Samuel shrugged. “Where would I go? I don’t know nothing about the world. I know the camp pretty good, but that’s it. And anyway, the Voice didn’t want me.”
“You mean the Voice didn’t tell you who to kill?” Chapel asked.
“Yeah. The Voice said I was useless. It told Ian to kill me before they left, and he said he would. I got so scared. But Ian just took me out to the baseball field, that’s a ways north of here. He told me what the Voice said, and that he wasn’t going to do it. He said the Voice wasn’t like Miss P, or like the doctors, and he didn’t have to do what it said. That he was his own master. He cut me a little, and wiped my blood on his hand, so he could show the others and tell them he’d killed me. Then he told me to run into the woods and hide until they were gone. I did what he said. Ian was like Miss P. I always did what he said. I’m a good boy.”
Miss P had to be Ellie Pechowski. Their teacher. Chapel was certain the doctors he meant were Helen Bryant and William Taggart.
“You heard this Voice?” Chapel asked. “It spoke to you?”
“Sure,” Samuel said, licking the wrapper from the protein bar. “It spoke to all of us. You want to see it?”
See the Voice? “Very much so,” Chapel told him.
Samuel went over to the church’s altar and picked something up, using both hands. Chapel knew how hard it could be to manipulate small objects with one good hand. He could imagine it must be much harder with no fingers. But Samuel held the object easily, then tossed it toward Chapel.
He managed to catch it with his free hand. “Give me some light,” he told Julia.
She shone it on the object he held. It was a cellular phone, a cheap prepaid model with a black case. One side was badly scuffed. Chapel tried to turn it on, but the battery was dead. He put it in his pocket.
“Hey, you can’t have that! That’s the Voice!” Samuel said, and took a step toward them.
Chapel raised his pistol. Samuel’s face contorted and his fingerless hands shook and Chapel wondered if he would finally revert to form, change into one of the violent, aggressive chimeras he had met before.
But slowly, and with visible effort, Samuel calmed himself down. “I get it,” he said. “You’re like Miss P, too. Or Ian. I’ll do what you say. I’m a good boy.”
“Okay, then,” Chapel said. “Why don’t you sit down, and tell me a story.”
CAMP PUTNAM, NEW YORK: APRIL 14, T+47:25
It took a while for Samuel to get started. Chapel had to prod him, ask leading questions, and finally take him all the way back to when Malcolm escaped, back when they were still just children. Once Samuel got started, though, he seemed to almost fall into a trance. The words he spoke sounded like an oft-repeated history lesson, a text he’d memorized.
“When the fence was closed, when they took the gate away, things changed,” he said, looking into the middle distance. “They brought Malcolm back to us. Many were jealous of him, and angry. They said it was his fault the fence was closed. They said because of him, we would never leave here.
“Many of them wanted to kill him. They thought that would make it easier to bear. Ian said no. Ian had many friends, even then, though no one thought of him as their leader. Not yet. Ian said he would talk to the humans. He would talk to Miss P and she would get us out. She would free us.