Luke gripped Clayton’s shoulders. His brother thrashed, suddenly furious.
“I said, I can’t. For Christ’s sake, Lucas, please don’t—”
But Luke wasn’t to be denied. His hands slipped lower, pinning Clayton’s arm to his side—Clayton issued a kittenish moan of protest—while his other hand brushed against the stump of his wrist…
Luke saw it then. No shock, no horror. His mind accepted the fact dully. In a way it made total sense.
The rope, the tube, the…
—umbilical cord—
…ran out of a fresh hole in the wall, a hole that had been obscured by the generator. The cord was bright red, same color as Alice’s eyes. It was attached to Clayton’s stump; thick bands wrapped the flesh of his forearm like tropical creepers.
Luke’s fingers had sunk into that livid, twitching rope. They’d gone in without resistance, as if into warm mud. He glanced at Clayton, terror leaping up his throat; Clayton stared back with a look of ineffable sorrow and perhaps, finally if too late, understanding.
“I’m sorry,” he said simply.
Luke tried to pull his fingers free. But he couldn’t; they were stuck in a warm, fleshy Chinese finger trap. He glanced at his brother, their eyes locking—
Luke felt his consciousness traveling into Clayton’s eyes, into his body, up his brainstem, and into his brain itself. His mind entered Clayton’s somehow; a hidden latch lifted, a secret trapdoor springing open. Luke’s mind was swallowed into Clayton’s own; a chilly metallic veneer settled over his thoughts—the way Clayton must see the world.
Next Luke was rocked by a vision of searing clarity that swept over him like a tidal wave, obliterating all consciousness.
A MEMORY. A shared one, but now Luke was seeing it from his brother’s perspective instead of his own.
They were kids again. Luke was eight years old—except he wasn’t Luke, not right now. He was Clayton, nestled inside Clayton’s body somehow, staring across the kitchen table at… well, himself. Their mother sat at the head of the table. It was night, blackness painted to the windows.
“I’ve got a job for you, my little soldiers,” she said slyly.
She put a small pot on the table. Beside it, a hacksaw and two paintbrushes.
Luke remembered this night. Oh yes, he remembered it well.
Clayton and Luke donned their boots and warm sweaters. It was so odd, watching the world through his brother’s eyes—a little like being strapped into an amusement park ride that he had no control over.
“You sure this is such a hot idea, Clay?” Luke heard his young self whisper once they were alone in the backyard, out of their mother’s earshot.
Luke felt the words forming in Clayton’s mouth before he spat them out.
“Shut up, dummy.”
They stole into their neighbor’s backyard. The branches of Mr. Rosewell’s crabapple tree stretched over the fence into their yard; its hard, inedible fruit always fell on their lawn. Their mother had asked—really, she’d ordered—Mr. Rosewell to trim its branches, or better yet hack the awful thing down. Mr. Rosewell, a retired mailman with a buzz cut who’d recently lost his wife, said to hell with that. They’d stared at each other over the fence; then their mother had spun, graceless in her bulk, and waddled back into the house.
The boys knelt at the base of the tree. Clayton spun the lid off the pot. Their mother had bought it at the local hardware store that afternoon; its label bore a picture of a wilted, cronelike tree.
Clayton notched thin cuts in the tree with the hacksaw. Luke watched his younger self cast worried glances toward Mr. Rosewell’s porch, as if in expectation the old mailman would step through the screen door, shotgun in hand.
The boys spat on the paintbrushes and painted the tree with whatever foul poison lay inside that pot. Then they dashed back to their house, eyes fairly shining with their deviltry.
“The two most precious boys in the whole world,” their mother said. She’d baked a “celebration pie.” Lemon meringue, Clayton’s favorite. Trapped inside his brother’s head, Luke could feel the sugary meringue dissolving on Clayton’s tongue.
The memory took a weird lurch forward. Suddenly it was daytime. Luke was staring at the crabapple tree through Clayton’s eyes. Its leaves were wilting. Gravity was treating it cruelly—punishing it, shoving it hard to the earth. Clayton picked up one of its fallen apples and took a bite. It was revolting, like sucking on a busted-open battery. Luke tried to get a grip on his brother’s mind, searching for something—a shred of pity for the tree, perhaps, which shouldn’t have had to die so horribly. He got nothing but a chilly backwash, as if he’d touched the insides of an industrial freezer.
The memory lurched again, the scene shifting. Clayton was in his basement lab now. A key rattled in the lock. He turned to see their mother filling the door frame. She wore her housecoat—the ratty one with the bleached-out stripes that gave her body the look of a moldering circus tent. The one she wore all day and night that stunk of her crazy sweat and bones.
“Go away.” Clayton’s voice was preternaturally calm, but Luke could feel an intense heat cooking at his brother’s temples. “Leave me alone.”
Their mother smiled. The most feral, cunning expression Luke had ever seen, her head cocked coyly to one side. The look of a predator who’d boxed in its quarry. She turned, carefree, and locked the door. Then she untied the sash on her robe, her back still turned. She did something with her hips, a lewd little shimmy; Luke felt the hairs standing up on Clayton’s arms. She slipped the robe off one shoulder—the salacious movement of a peep-show worker—and turned to look over that same shoulder, pinning her son in a flat and viperish stare.
When she faced him again, the robe was open a few inches. Her body was obscenely enormous, bulging in thick rolls down to the shadowy delta between her legs. A smell wafted off her: not her normal stink, the one a body develops when deprived of sunlight and clean air, when all it does is sit on a cracked chesterfield and shovel porridge between its spittle-wet lips, a smell not unlike the stink that wafts off a mildewed shower curtain—no, this was raw, throttlingly hormonal. The smell of arousal.
“Come here, boy,” she said softly. “Come to your mama.”
Luke felt it seeping out of Clayton’s skull—a jumpy, rabbity tick-tick-tick that made him think of cockroaches roasting and sputtering in a hot pan. That jumpy pop and crackle washed all through Luke’s piggybacking mind, too—it was fear, or the closest approximation to that emotion his brother could feel.
Their mother advanced, limping slightly. Clayton backpedaled, his hip knocking a flask off the lab bench, where it shattered on the floor.
“Tsk-tsk. Clumsy boy. You’ll have to pay for that in trade.”
Her body was a sheet of suffocating flab but her arms were oh-so-strong. Luke felt his brother’s heart pounding as he fought back wildly, aiming a knee at her wounded hips; she only laughed and pulled him closer—his struggles were nothing compared to that of the residents at the Second Chance Ranch. The heat of her body was weirdly narcotic; Clayton went limp, exhaling into the shelf of her enormous breasts, lips sputtering as he gasped for air.
“It’s okay,” their mother cooed, one hand fussing with Clayton’s trousers. “You like it, remember? If you didn’t like it, you wouldn’t get so… so…”
The scene fried out in a stinking puff of smoke. Next: Clayton was back in the lab. Alone. The pot of tree killer sat on the bench. Clayton was concentrating on it intently. Luke could feel his furious focus. Clayton opened the lid and tapped a small amount of the pale blue powder onto the bench; it looked like pulverized robin’s eggs. He opened other jars and vials containing compounds Luke knew nothing about. Mixing, measuring…