They drive through Old Mountain, a place that has transformed from mill town to luxury outpost for Californians looking for a second home or a place to retire. His mother tells him they came for the skiing, the fly-fishing and mountain biking and horseback riding. “Fifteen years ago, when I first moved here,” she says, “fifteen thousand people. Now? Two hundred fifty thousand in the metro.” Making it one of the fastest-growing communities in the country and creating fault-line abrasion between the old and the new.
The mill is long gone, the industrial district replaced by condos, organic coffeehouses, boutique clothing stores, a brickwork river walk. There are few intersections, everything a roundabout that makes Patrick feel dizzy and lost.
She points out the section of town where the lycans used to live—before the Struggle, when lycan segregation was mandatory in housing, schools, bathrooms, restaurants—a collection of quaint one-story bungalows that now, his mother says, cost three hundred thousand a pop.
The road inclines as they drive up the side of a butte—into a neighborhood that is a carbon copy of his mother’s. These faux-rustic developments are all over town, as far as Patrick can tell, many with golf courses spilling greenly through them. They have names like Elk Ridge and Bear Hollow, and every house seems to come with a river-rock chimney and rough-hewn pine pillars flanking the front porch.
The sky is a pale and depthless blue. A gusty September breeze sends leaves skittering across lawns, and one of them catches on Patrick’s shoe—a round leaf, as gold as a coin, as though money indeed grows on trees here—when he steps out of the car next to the Century 21 sign staked in the front yard.
From the car trunk, his mother retrieves a broom, a Dirt Devil, and a paper bag full of cleaning supplies. They roll down the windows for the cat.
The family moved out last week. She vacuums the footprints from the carpet, massages away the divots from where tables and couches stood. She Windexes the fingerprints smeared across the storm door and arranges scented candles throughout the house to light before the showing. She clips flowers from the garden and fits them in a short vase on the kitchen island. He yanks the cheatgrass flaming up between the four cement squares of the driveway. He sweeps the stone entryway, the tile bathrooms, the oil-spotted garage. He lifts a window and clambers across the roof and cleans out the pine needles clogging the gutters.
When they finish, an hour later, he asks if she does this for every house and she says she does, more or less. He asks if it really makes that big of a difference, a candle sputtering in the bathroom, and she says absolutely. “Because appearances matter.” She snaps her seat belt into place and readjusts the mirror and feathers her hair with her fingers. “That’s the world we live in.”
* * *
From the day Chase took the oath of office, he refused police escorts. They cost taxpayers too much, thirty-eight million in California the previous year. Besides, he claimed, he could protect himself. For the past month, ever since Chase began to regularly appear on the lecture and talk-show circuit, Augustus forced a compromise and hired a private security detail from Lazer Ltd., mostly thick-necked, thin-waisted ex-military. Chase calls them babysitters and refuses their protection except during speaking engagements. Augustus tries to get him to reconsider, telling him the worst can happen when you least expect it.
The worst has happened. Four men, all wearing tracksuits, pick up Augustus in a black Chevy Suburban and drive at a perilous speed to the Kazumi Day Spa, honking their way through red lights, screeching their way around corners. It’s an unlisted address, but Augustus knows the way and directs them from the backseat—telling them to hurry, goddammit, hurry—even as he leans into a turn and braces an arm against the window to keep his balance.
They find the front door locked and use a metal battering ram to splinter it from its hinges. One man remains posted at the entrance while the others, their Glocks unholstered, charge inside. They give the all clear and Augustus walks into the dim entryway. The lights are off, the hallways and rooms empty—except for one barricaded door. They shove at it and a crack of orange light appears and only then does Augustus tell them, “Stop.”
The men step away and wait for him to tell them what to do. “Stay here,” he says and shoulders past them and puts all of his weight against the door until the bureau slides away and allows him entrance. He hurries the door closed before the men can spot Chase, curled up on the floor—dizzy and naked and shivering from blood loss, but alive.
There is blood smeared across the wall and soaked into the carpet that squelches underfoot. “I’m here,” Augustus says, not daring to touch his friend, not knowing how long the disease can live once exposed to the air.
He toes the slumped body of the transformed lycan. Her hair, tacky with blood, has the look of seaweed plastered across the beach at low tide. “Bitch,” he says, “you really fucked things up.” The governor attacked in a whorehouse. Half-dead and likely infected. His political career finished. Augustus brings back his foot and considers kicking her face but doesn’t, not wanting to dirty his shoe.
Instead he covers her body with towels so that the others won’t see her. Red splotches soak through immediately. He pulls a terry-cloth robe off a hook and tucks it around Chase. No one can know about this or everything will be ruined. There is only one choice. He opens the door and tells the men to get a makeshift stretcher for Chase, and then, once they get him to the car, “Burn the place. Burn it to the ground.”
* * *
Patrick’s mother needs to make a stop on the way home. Just for a minute. To drop something off. “The cat,” she says. “I hope that’s all right.”
They drive past several car dealerships, where dozens of American flags snap in the breeze, and past the dump, where crows and seagulls darken the sky, and here, his mother says, pointing to an abandoned whitewashed cinder-block building, is the old school where the lycan children went. Its windows are thorned with broken glass, its front door yawns open, and a pine tree twists through its roof.
Another mile and they turn off into Juniper Creek, a wooded neighborhood on the outskirts of town, every driveway curling away from the road into an acre lot. Browned pine needles rain down on the windshield. Patrick can see the house, twenty yards ahead, a ranch home with a lava-rock exterior that makes it appear as though it is rising out of the ground.
Then his attention is lost to movement all around them. Out of the bushes, from behind trees and under the front porch, come dogs. More than a dozen of them. They kick up dust when they tear toward the car. Among the assorted mutts, Patrick spots a German shepherd, a Rottweiler, and a wiener dog. They bark furiously, surrounding the car, pacing it as it crawls up the driveway.
His mother does not seem to notice them, humming along with the radio. She shifts into park, kills the engine, and swings open her door before Patrick can tell her, “No!”
The barking ceases, replaced by whimpers and soft cries for attention. His mother speaks to them in baby talk and ruffles their ears and pats their backs.
“Who lives here?” Patrick says.
“A friend.”
She doesn’t invite him to join her, doesn’t ask for his help with the carrier she removes from the backseat. “Back in a flash,” she says when she starts toward the house, not bothering to nudge a hip against the driver’s-side door and close it. Some of the dogs follow her, darting in front of her, begging for her attention, all tongues and tails—excited by the scent of the cat—and others remain with the car, including the Rottweiler, who observes Patrick from the open door, panting, licking its chops.
A minute passes before Patrick says, “Good dog?” and the Rottweiler considers this encouragement enough to leap onto the front seat, its face inches from his. All Patrick can focus on is its mouth. Its breath smells like old hamburger. Its gums are a spotted black, its teeth the size of his thumbs.
He does not breathe when he raises his hand, so slowly, to pet the dog. It sniffs his hand once, gives him a
lick, then nudges—with its cold, damp nose—his hand upward for a scratch behind the ears.
It isn’t long before Patrick stands outside the car with his arm cocked and a stick in his hand. The dogs surround him, their eyes on the stick. “Ready?” he says, and they yap and their paws drum the ground. He hurls the stick and it flies end over end into the woods and the dogs go ripping away, their paws kicking the ground hard enough that Patrick can feel the tremor in his chest like a furious heartbeat. A moment later the German shepherd appears, smiling around the stick, the rest of the pack trailing behind.
Patrick throws the stick, now damp with slobber and dented with tooth marks, a good twenty times. The dachshund grows tired and stays behind after the last toss, and Patrick picks the dog up and cradles it in his arms. He can’t believe he felt afraid, a few minutes ago, when they first drove up. The dachshund licks him, a tongue worming from a snout run through with white hairs. Harmless. But when Patrick peels back the skin, he exposes the jagged line of teeth hidden inside this tiny old dog.
At that moment the front door swings open and his mother starts down the porch midconversation. “Which will be good, I think,” she says. “So I’ll see you soon.”
A man stands in the doorway, watching them. He wears a dress shirt tucked into khakis. He is tall and eerily lean and bald except for a silver horseshoe of hair. He gives an almost imperceptible nod, a slight dip of his chin, which Patrick does not return.
* * *
Chase shivers in and out of consciousness. His skin is as pale as the bone peeking out of his shredded arm. Every heartbeat brings an electric surge of pain. He is lying on a blue tarp, he realizes. A blue tarp in a white room. Not a hospital; they can’t risk a hospital. His head rolls to the side and the tarp pops beneath him and he recognizes the couch against the wall, the tacky white leather couch, as Buffalo’s. His living room.
Buffalo. Chase can hear him, dimly. It’s a comforting sound. Like when, as a child, on long car trips, he would intermittently wake to the murmur of his parents talking in the front seat. He strains his neck to observe his friend pacing back and forth with his handheld pressed against his ear. His voice is panicked, hurried. Chase wants to tell him to take it easy, but then the darkness of sleep once again overtakes him.
Chapter 13
THE GRAY-EYED BOY named Max lives in old town. A neighborhood of Old Mountain untouched by all the new development, every house on his street a one-story shoebox with a concrete-slab porch and a mature maple tree planted left of the cracked driveway. Three cars and a truck are parked out front, all Chevys. The streetlamps buzz and telephone lines crisscross the moonlit sky. Before Patrick can knock, the door cracks and in the crack hangs the craggy face of a man—Max’s father, Patrick guesses—who waves him in, says the boys are downstairs.
The basement is pine paneled and smells vaguely of mothballs. Mounted on the wall, three trophy bucks, a lacquered rainbow trout, and a shelf busy with beer steins and age-tarnished softball trophies. A gun cabinet stacked with rifles and shotguns. Minor Threat plays from a laptop set on top of an ancient minifridge. When Patrick thumps down the stairs, a dozen faces turn toward him, some nodding along with the music, some still and expressionless. Everyone wears their head shaved, so at first it’s difficult to distinguish between them, and then one steps forward and comes into focus: Max. “We’re glad you came,” he says.
Patrick notices for the first time the tracheotomy scar, like a bright red worm nesting in the cup of his neck. The air is dry and the carpet shag, so that a spark snaps between them when they bring their hands together to shake, a jolt that makes Patrick blink fast and stutter out his thanks. One by one, the boys in the room introduce themselves—this one chinless, this one rashed over with acne, this one freakishly muscled, the tendons jumping from his neck like piano wires—and their socks sizzle across the carpet and their hands emit tiny blue balls of light.
They don’t linger but return to whatever previously occupied them, darts, foosball, something on the laptop. A wood-paneled TV set squats in the corner, the image of a soldier frozen on the screen, his teeth gritted. A video-game console nests in a black tangle of wires. Two of the boys punch their controllers and the screen comes to life. Patrick recognizes Call of Duty: Lycan Wars, a shooter game set in the Lupine Republic, your level-by-level mission to kill as many lycan insurgents as possible while collecting stores of energy and weapons—a silver chainsaw, a Gatling gun that rattles out ammo with a sound like a shuffled deck of cards.
A few times a month, Max says, they make an effort to get together. Nothing formal. Just a chance to hang. Feel connected. Patrick doesn’t know what to say—doesn’t know if he should ask what exactly connects them, makes them a group—so he simply says, cool. Their talk turns to school, how Patrick is liking it, how Max believes one teacher is worthless and another is smart but clouded by his liberal agenda. His eye contact is unrelenting. He taps his middle finger into his opposing palm to punctuate his sentences.
“You want a drink, by the way?” Max says, and Patrick says sure and wonders for a second if that means a beer before noticing that everyone in the room is sucking on a pop, Coke, Squirt, Dr Pepper. The minifridge is stocked full and Patrick cracks a Coke and Max snaps his fingers and says, “Before I forget.” His voice rises to address the room. “Guys. Heads up. Listen up.” The volume of the music lowers, the video game pauses, heads swivel in their direction. “Next Wednesday, four o’clock, don’t forget, we’re stopping by Desert Flower, the old folks’ home on O.B. Riley. Groundskeeping first. Then card games. And, Dan, you’re going to play the piano at dinner.”
Everyone nods and then the foosball table rattles and shudders and the video game and conversations start back up. Max raises his eyebrows and lowers his voice and says to Patrick, “Not what you expected, right?”
He’s not sure what he expected. Yelling maybe. A swastika flag. “You guys straight edge or something?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then what?”
“We call ourselves the Americans.”
They talk about immigration. They talk about guns. They talk about the viability of Chase Williams as a presidential candidate. And when they talk, Max seems to end every sentence with “right?”—in a prodding, corrective way—as if to make sure they share the same beliefs.
They talk about the attacks, and when Patrick says he doesn’t understand why now, why all of a sudden the seeming escalation in the size and strength of the Resistance, Max appears insulted. “It isn’t all of a sudden. This has been going on for years. This has been going on since our parents were our age, since the Struggle.”
He holds out a finger for the failed Times Square bombing, for the anthrax scare, for the mail bombs, for the mall shooting, for the subway gassing. “All of those were relative failures. A few headlines, a few dead bodies, and then everybody moves on to the next earthquake or tsunami news tragedy. This is just the first time the mutts have actually been able to pull something off, something big. And you, my friend, found yourself in the middle of it and somehow walked away alive. Which is pretty amazing. You’re part of history. You’re a walking emblem of their failure, our hope.” Max’s voice seems to grow louder with every sentence, and his head bobs on his shoulders like a balloon on a ribbon.
Patrick hates it when people talk about him as if he were an idea. That’s why he stopped meeting with reporters. He tries to change the subject, asking Max if he thinks the average lycan is dangerous, if it’s fair to lump them all together as part of the Resistance. “I can’t say I know that many lycans, but it seems like they’re living pretty normal lives. They don’t have much to complain about. They seem pretty happy, pretty safe.”
Max shakes his head with disappointment. He puts his arms on Patrick’s shoulders. “Listen to me. They are a public health risk and a biological abomination. Don’t ever forget that, okay?”
“Okay.”
Max releases him and Patrick drains the last of
his soda and shakes it to indicate he is going to get another. Max follows him to the minifridge and says, “Now I want you to tell me about your father.”
He cracks the can, slurps the foam. “What do you want to know?”
“Everything.”
Patrick doesn’t know what to say. His father wears Levi’s, motorcycle boots, white T-shirts ripped from clear plastic packs. His fingernails always carry bruises and crescents of dirt. Every few weeks he cuts his own hair in the mirror with a pair of clippers, shearing it down to a high-and-tight. In college, he was a biochem major, a gifted slacker. That’s where he met Neal—at UC Davis—where they went by the nicknames Kirk and Spock. Keith drove motorcycles and carried a knife on his belt and found himself bored in the lab, excited more by big ideas than by carrying them out—while Neal wore khakis, sandals with socks, the detail-oriented workman who went on to make a name for himself as a researcher in animal diseases.
Whereas his father eventually put his bad grades and chemistry genius to work at Anchor Steam Brewing. He drives a Dodge Ram and an Indian motorcycle. He has a diamond-shaped scar on his forehead from when he struck an open cabinet during a Christmas party. He fell to the linoleum with a shocked look on his face and blood welling from between his fingers, one of the most terrifying moments of Patrick’s life, when for the first time he saw his father hurt and embarrassed by the group of people hovering over him.
About halfway through college—he took six years to graduate—he ran out of money and signed on with the National Guard to pay his tuition, and today he serves as a staff sergeant with the California National Guard currently stationed at Combat Outpost Tuonela in the eastern Republic. He supervises a platoon of men, twenty-five soldiers of the seven thousand deployed from California. Years ago, he served a tour—back when Patrick’s grandparents were still alive—but that was before the conflict escalated, before the marches and rock-slinging riots protesting U.S. occupation, before newspaper headlines were inked in the blood of soldiers killed in IED blasts, tooth-and-claw street battles.
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