Genesis Alpha Read online

  Cars line our street, like when someone’s hosting a really big party, a wedding reception or something. As we turn into the driveway, faces fill the view.

  Reporters. Behind them, neighbors, friends, strangers.

  Dozens, maybe even hundreds of curious people.

  Mom gasps. Dad curses. We drive into the garage. I stare out the back window as the garage door closes, marveling that none of the shouting people enter the garage with us. I guess they can’t. There must be a law against it, and most people don’t break the law.

  Mom mutters as she leaves the car, hiccups, like she’s sobbing. Dad slams the car door, pulls mine open, puts his arm around my shoulders as we follow Mom into the house. I hear the phones ringing and wonder what would happen if I went back out there, exposed myself to the reporters and the vultures. Would they tear me apart? I’ve often seen celebrities or politicians on TV, surrounded by a throng of reporters, pushing and shouting, and I’ve wondered what would happen if the person just stood there, not saying anything, just waiting, like a statue of a disconnected character in Genesis Alpha. Would they shout and jostle forever? Or would they eventually fall silent and wait to see if he’d say something—anything?

  I guess I could give it a try now if I wanted to.

  Mom and Dad stride around the house, pulling all the curtains. They don’t turn on any lights. “The basement,” Mom says, grabbing my arm when I pass her on the way up to my room. “Don’t go upstairs yet, honey. They’ll see you through the window. Let’s not give them the satisfaction. They’ll give up and go away.”

  “It’s just our fifteen minutes of fame,” Dad says when we’ve settled down in the basement where our home entertainment system is. There are no windows there. No phones, although from upstairs we hear the sharp beeping of several. Our three house phones. Our cell phones, too. Even mine started ringing nonstop back at the jail. I switched it off.

  Mom is crying. Dad is silent. He has his arm around her, but he’s not saying anything to comfort her. That’s strange. Dad rarely runs out of words. He’s a college professor, and he loves to teach. He talks all day, and then he comes home and talks some more.

  “We’ll get this straightened out,” he says at last. “Let’s not go to pieces. Max needs us.”

  Mom digs a tissue out of her pocket, one of many she ripped out of the tissue box on the police detective’s desk. She blows her nose. “You’re right. Max needs us.”

  “The lawyer will fix this. You heard what they said—they have no real evidence. Of course they don’t. It’s all circumstantial—the poor kid was in the wrong place at the wrong time. They can’t hold him for long. With any luck we’ll have him home tomorrow.”

  Mom nods. She looks around. “Could be worse,” she says philosophically, and I realize after a few seconds she’s talking about the house, not Max’s situation. The police had a warrant. They were at our house while we were gone. Searching for evidence that Max did what they say he did.

  I ignore Mom’s shout not to leave the basement and run up to my room. The door is ajar, and I never leave it open. I always shut the door when I’m gone, to keep the cats out. I don’t mind them there when I’m at home, but if I’m gone, they can mess with my computer, knock the cables free or walk on the keyboard. Click once managed to shut down Genesis Alpha when I was in the middle of a mission, his paws hitting just the right keys. Ever since, the cats are not allowed on my desk.

  I push the door wider, look around. My room is always messy. Very messy. Max would shake his head when he was home from college. Max is neat. He’s organized. I’m not, and Mom keeps moaning over the state of my room, comparing it to Max’s room when he was my age. I don’t mean to be messy. It just happens that way, and it just seems so much trouble to keep things in order. Even when I try to be neat, my room turns chaotic all by itself.

  I step inside, and I notice dust. Not ordinary dust. Gray powder sprinkled on my desk, my keyboard, my windowsill, the door. Everywhere. Fingerprint dust.

  I sag against the door when I see the state of my room, and it drifts shut at my back. They’ve gone through everything, they’ve put their filthy hands on everything I own. They’ve opened my drawers, flipped through my magazines, rifled through my clothes, lifted up my mattress. All my secrets must be in a police file by now.

  My gaze falls on my desk. The keyboard is there. The monitor is there. The mouse, my headphones, the speakers.

  Useless.

  Below the desk there’s an empty space, a rectangle of darker carpeting.

  They’ve taken my computer. The police have seized my computer.

  My heart speeds up at the thought of what this means. I’ll miss out on tonight’s battle. We’ve been planning an organized attack on the Blue Bandits gang all week, making detailed plans about who does what and when. My friends expect me there, they’re counting on my new Nasarus battle cruiser with the cloaking device, they’re counting on me to do the reconnaissance. I’m the only one who can properly stealth, and now I’ll let them all down.

  Sudden rage boils in my chest. I’m furious at Max.

  But it’s not his fault.

  I push open the door to Max’s old room, balance on the threshold as I look around, feeling dizzy when I see the devastation. It’s been ripped apart even worse than my room. They’ve left his computer magazines in a mess on the bed, torn his movie posters down, pushed the furniture away from the walls, even cut his mattress open.

  His old computer is gone too, of course. Not that it makes a difference. It’s four years old and probably wouldn’t be fast enough for Genesis Alpha.

  I trudge back downstairs. There’s nothing for me in my room now that my computer is gone. Just to be sure, I check Dad’s study. It’s supposed to be Mom’s office too, but she doesn’t use it often. She says she prefers to leave work behind at the lab.

  Their two computers are gone too.

  My parents are still in the basement, together on the sofa, their arms around each other. I keep my mouth shut about the mess upstairs and throw myself into an easy chair in the corner, where Mom used to read to me when I was little. Max would sit there when we watched TV on weekends, just the two of us. He’d sit in the chair and I’d lie on the floor in my pajamas, and if I started to doze off, he’d turn up the volume until I woke up again.

  “How can they believe he did this?” Mom whispers. She’s staring at Max’s picture hanging on the wall. His high school graduation picture. “Max . . . our Max. How could they suspect him of something like this?”

  “It happened. Someone did it.”

  Mom’s hands push into her face, her knuckles burrowing into her eyes. “Of course someone did it. But we’re talking about Max, Jack. Our little boy. Do you know what that murderer did? How could anyone think Max would ever do something like that?”

  “They don’t know him like we do. All they know is that someone did it. Someone’s son. Someone’s little boy.”

  “Not our son!” Mom yells. Dad holds up a hand and she lowers her voice, but not by much. “Monsters come from bad homes, from bad people, they’re bad seeds . . . None of that applies to Max! How can they think that? We gave him a good home, we raised him well . . . he was always a good boy.”

  Dad opens his mouth, and I hold my breath, only breathe again when he closes his mouth without saying anything. Dad is notorious for always playing the devil’s advocate, getting everybody riled up because they think he has strange views. He always has to see many sides of each story. This time, that’s a bad thing. “Of course,” he says. “Of course he’s innocent. I just meant that they can’t know.” He shrugs. “I mean, every family thinks their own is innocent.”

  “Well, he is. Max is innocent. A person who does something like this—it has to be a psychopath. Okay. Let’s just examine that. There are signs, aren’t there?” Mom is on her feet again, pacing. “Of psychopaths? There are some signs in childhood.”

  “Yes. The triad. Bed-wetting. Setting fires. Cruelty to an
imals.”

  “Max did wet the bed for a long time, but he was ill. That doesn’t count. He never set fires.”

  “He liked to play with fire. He loved to play with matches, remember?”

  “What child doesn’t go through a phase like that? He never set fires without permission.”

  “Right.”

  “He never hurt animals.”

  “No, not that we know of.”

  Mom breeds Abyssinian cats. We’ve had cats and kittens in the house as long as I can remember. There’s always at least one in every room. Or maybe it just seems that way because they tend to follow us around. They like company.

  Mom scoops Click from the floor, hugs him too tight. “What do you mean, ‘that we know of’?” Her voice rises hysterically. “What do you mean, Jack?”

  “Nothing. I meant nothing.” Dad exhales noisily. “I’m sorry. I keep saying the wrong thing right now, I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

  “Max loves the cats. Our very first cat was for him. Remember? He’d wanted a pet for so long, and when he was in remission, healthy enough to enjoy it, we finally got him one. He loved that cat. Remember? Remember how devastated he was when Moritz died?”

  Dad nods. “It will be okay, Laura. You heard what they said, it’s just circumstantial evidence. They have no real proof. All they need is someone to step forward with an alibi, and Max will be released. Even without that, they don’t have enough to hold him for long. He’ll be fine. Everything will be fine.”

  Click has escaped from Mom. He jumps into my lap, settles down there, and starts to purr. My parents keep talking, and most of the time they don’t seem to notice I’m even here. They know I’m here. I’m not hiding. But they don’t notice me. They try to include me in the conversation, pat me on the shoulder when they notice me, but then the attention drifts off me and back to Max. I think that’s how it will be until things are back to normal, until Max is back at college and the real killer is in police custody. Max has grown. He’s locked inside a cell, but he’s here too, filling every square inch of our minds.

  Mom’s staring at another picture now, hanging beside the graduation photo. Max, when he was sick, just before I was born. He was dying. They didn’t know if he could wait for the cure, if he could survive until I was born, but he hung on, day by day. I gave Mom a hard time for months. She felt weak and nauseated and tired. Sometimes she and Max would be throwing up together. She needed sleep, and she couldn’t always stay with Max overnight, like she’d done so often before. But whenever she said good-bye to him and went home to bed, she was terrified she’d never see him again.

  He’s white in the picture. As white as the bedclothes he’s lying in. There’s no hair on his head, and he’s thin, so his face looks old. He’s got big circles under his eyes, and he looks exhausted.

  Max hates that picture. Mom and Dad like having it around to remind themselves of the miracle. The miracle of Max’s cure. They used to have it upstairs in the living room, next to a picture of Max a year later, healthy. But Max hated it, and one day he tore up the picture. Mom had another made and kept it in their bedroom instead. When Max went off to college, the picture went up on the basement wall. They take it down and put it in a drawer whenever they’re expecting Max home, but he knows about it. Sometimes they forget to take it down, or he comes home unexpectedly. He hasn’t torn it up yet, though. He leaves it alone, but he doesn’t like it.

  “If Mom and Dad want to remember that time, fine,” he once said in disgust, staring at the frame. “I don’t see why. It was horrible.” He walked closer to the picture, reached out to take it but hesitated. Then he gestured at the picture instead of touching it. “I feel like that person died, you know. He’s not me. He’s just a sick little kid who died in that hospital bed and never grew up.”

  “Don’t you remember?” I asked.

  Max looked at me, but kind of through me, like he was thinking about something else. “Yes, I remember. I remember lying there and thinking about death. They’d explained it to me, you know. Death. Because I knew I was dying. They tried to keep it from me, but I’d known for a long time there was very little hope. When I wanted to know what would happen to me after I died, they told me I’d go to heaven.” He shook his head. “Imagine that.”

  “Weird,” I said. It’s weird because our family is not religious.

  Max shrugged. “I guess they thought it would be too cruel to tell a little kid he would be buried in the ground, disappear into dust. So they gave me the gift of religion.” His voice was heavy with irony. “Then you came along, Josh. You were better than religion. You cleansed me. They killed all the bad stuff inside me and replaced it with your perfect little baby cells. It was poison, you know. The chemotherapy, the radiation. They gave me poison, so they’d kill as much of me as they could without killing me off entirely, and I got your cells instead of mine.”

  “They killed the cancer. Not you.”

  “The cancer. And a lot of other stuff with it. My hair, for one thing. And who knows what else? That’s why I was so sick most of the time. It wasn’t because of the cancer itself, it was the chemo and the radiation. It didn’t cure me, and it just left me more sick.” He shrugged. “Sometimes I wonder why they bothered.”

  “The treatment slowed the cancer down. Else you’d have died before . . . before they found a cure,” I said, feeling like I was defending myself, justifying my existence.

  Max laughed. He grabbed me in a rough hug, his arm tight around my shoulders as he ruffled my hair. “You’re right, Josh. And they found me a cure. They found me you. Thank you.”

  The next morning, when I open my eyes, everything is normal for a moment. Like always, I wake two minutes before the alarm clock rings and stare up the ceiling, wondering how long it takes two minutes to pass this time. It’s not always the same. Sometimes two minutes pass in a flash, sometimes they take forever.

  So for a little while the world is the same as always and the seconds tick by. Then I remember nothing is normal anymore, and the world tilts upside down and I’m in my bed, looking down at the ceiling and feeling dizzy, wondering where Max is right now and what kind of a ceiling he’s looking at.

  Still, there’s school, even in a world where nothing makes sense, so when the alarm goes off, I drag myself out of bed and get dressed. Go downstairs where Dad sits at the kitchen table. His hand is wrapped around his coffee mug like always, but instead of the morning paper, he’s reading a scientific journal. Or rather, pretending to read. I see he’s only pretending because there’s nothing but ads on the open pages.

  “Morning, Josh,” he says when I sit opposite him. He flattens the journal so the spine creases and the journal stays open. He pushes his glasses up on his nose and looks at me. “How are you coping this morning? Could you sleep?”

  I make a face, like always when Dad uses shrink-speak on me. Which happens on a regular basis. Like every day, even when my big brother hasn’t just been accused of a terrible crime. “I’m fine, Dad.” I reach for the cereal and dump a small portion in my bowl, as small as I think I can get away with. Dad gets on my case if I don’t eat breakfast. He keeps telling me the brain thrives on glucose, and that it’s so needy it uses twenty percent of the energy we consume. I must be the only kid in the world to get a neurochemistry lecture every time I try to skip breakfast. “Your brain needs glucose,” Dad will yell as I run past the kitchen. “Don’t you dare leave the house without breakfast!”

  “But I’ll miss the school bus,” I’ll whine, but Dad will just point to a kitchen chair.

  “You’ll miss more than that if your brain is running on empty. Eat!”

  In short, my dad’s a total breakfast nazi. My brain needs glucose, but I’m not allowed to eat sugarcoated cereal for breakfast. Go figure. I glance around for the morning paper—I usually steal the middle sections from Dad, just to give my eyes something to do while I shovel the cereal into my mouth—but it’s nowhere to be seen.

  “You might
as well go back to bed if you like,” Dad says, and I look up. “I already phoned your school and told them you wouldn’t be in today.”

  “Huh?” It’s hard to be articulate with a mouthful of dry cereal.

  Dad slams his palm down on the journal, clenches his fist. He pulls the morning paper from the floor at his feet, slams it on the table. “There is no way I can protect you from this, Josh. I wish I could, but I can’t.”

  I look. Max’s picture, on the front page. Not surprising, but still weird to see his face there.

  Then I see it.

  My picture.

  My picture.

  Taken yesterday, though the window of our car.

  I stare at my own grainy face for a while before my eyes are drawn to the headline: DESIGNER BABY SAVED KILLER’S LIFE.

  Oh, boy.

  I pull the paper closer for a better look. The article is long. It continues inside the paper. I glance at the subheadings, and it’s pretty predictable, nothing I haven’t seen before. The ethics of designer babies. The risks of playing God. Max’s arrest is new fuel for those who think I shouldn’t exist—if I hadn’t been “created,” a killer wouldn’t be alive—and Karen wouldn’t be dead.

  “There was a reason this man got sick as a child,” someone says in an interview, speaking of my brother. “It was part of a divine plan. And we interfered. We slapped the hand of God when He reached out to save this girl. . . .”

  So it’s my fault.

  I stop reading. Push the paper away, and Dad takes it, tosses it on the chair with the rest of this week’s papers, ready for the recycle bin.

  “I’m sorry.” Dad rubs his hands over his face. He looks tired, like he hasn’t slept. “So you see, it’s probably not a good idea for you to go to school today. Not with all this mess going on and the press on our case. I already talked to the principal—she’s going to have your teachers e-mail you assignments this week.”