He can feel a grenade shake the canyon walls and reverberate through his bones. He can hear a spray of rounds, from one side, and then another, like thunderclouds calling to each other. He can hear the whang of bullets ricocheting off metal. He can hear Decker calling his name, telling him to assemble forward. He waits until his breathing settles and then bursts from behind the Humvee. He moves his legs as fast as he can, but he cannot sprint in the snow, every step a sliding uncertainty.
At the top of the canyon, near the blue cutout of the sky, he observes what looks like a lightning bolt. He takes three more steps before the thunder catches up with him. The ground opens up—a volcanic burst of flame that makes snow into steam. Patrick feels like a child picked up and hurled through the air. The strength of the explosion rips off his helmet and one of his boots. The world jars black when he hits the ground ten feet away and then fades back to white.
For a long time he lies there, loose limbed, unable to move. He sees the sky and he sees a snow-mantled cliff and he sees upon it what he first believes to be a tree, the inky spill of it against all that blue. He wonders vaguely how it has survived on such a barren purchase.
Then the tree moves. It lifts not a branch, but an arm, signaling to those below—and then draws away from its vantage point, vanishing from sight, the tree that is not a tree, a lycan clad in black, a smear of darkness on a sunlit day.
The gunfire continues—for how long, Patrick doesn’t know. He does know that it will all be over soon. He knows, too, that if he is still alive in a few minutes, and if the lycans choose to survey the bodies and rummage through their pockets and salvage equipment, then he will be dead. His rifle is nearby but he cannot reach for it, cannot even feel his hands, cannot muster the energy or the will to flop his arms in the direction of the weapon. Something is wrong with his shoulder. He feels something hot and red there and imagines it as a planet, a spinning ball of toxic gas.
He registers in flits and flashes the cold creeping into his skin and the smell of blood and gun smoke all around him. Shock. That’s what this is called, but recognizing the word does not antidote him. His vision wobbles. He believes he might have a concussion, though the letters won’t come together properly in his head and he thinks, concession, commotion, conception? He has a conception?
His mind grows blurrier by the minute, like a window frosting over. He wants to tell someone, anyone, see, see, not such a miracle anymore, am I? But he has no audience. At one point, he realizes the canyon is encased in shadow, the sun lower in the sky. Getting close to night. Night is when he sleeps. At the threshold of waking and dreaming, his last thought is how pillowy the snow feels and how much he would like to have a little rest.
Chapter 43
EVERYTHING IN western Washington is draped in moss and smells of earthworms. Rain falls more often than not. Cars are rust flecked from the salt breeze coming off the ocean. In September, Miriam found a motel outside Tacoma that didn’t ask questions and let her pay by the week in cash. The walls were paneled with pine and the carpeting stained and the overhead lamps darkened with dead moths. Smoking was permitted. Lawn chairs and Old Smokey grills sat outside of three of the seven rooms. This was a place people lived, among them a toothless man she suspected of cooking meth and a whore with dishwater-blond hair who wore the same purple miniskirt every day.
The federal detention center is located twelve miles south of Seattle. No fencing surrounds it. No guard towers loom along its perimeter. Because the inmates remain indoors, in total isolation. It is located in an oddly public place, nearby a Rent-A-Wreck and the Bull Pen Pub and an All Star Grocery where she regularly parks her Ramcharger and sits looking at the FDC, an institutional gray building that resembles nothing so much as a medieval castle that could not be stormed.
There is a Starbucks on every corner of the city and she taps into their free Wi-Fi and does her research. The facility was built in 1997 and meant to accommodate 677 prisoners. Some are sentenced and some are awaiting sentences. Their crimes range from crypto-anarchy to wire fraud to aircraft theft to bank robbery to domestic terrorism. A phone call from a pay phone revealed that Jeremy was not listed as an inmate, but that means nothing.
She does not trust and does not have the patience for the red tape she will have to go through to request blueprints, so she researches the architect and finds him easily through a Google search and one night breaks into his firm and steals the plans along with three computers to make it look like a proper robbery.
She unrolls the blueprints on her butterfly-patterned bedspread and weighs them down with her mud-caked sneakers and paperback detective novels bought from grocery stores. She does not like what she finds. Every hallway and stairwell has alarm-triggered lockdown doors. The heating ducts are built with bars staggered through them to prevent the possibility of a crawl space. Every floor has a checkpoint, including the two that run belowground. The cells here are windowless and labeled high security. That is where he will be found.
Her mind plays through so many different scenarios. She imagines walking through the front door with a shotgun pressed to the throat of a hostage. She imagines short-circuiting the transformer to kill the electricity and then lighting a fire in the furnace ducts and sneaking in with the firefighters. She imagines following a guard home and duct-taping him to a chair and interrogating him about the layout and procedures of the center before donning his uniform and hoping she can somehow bluff her way inside.
She exercises every day—getting ready for what exactly, she doesn’t know. She only knows that she owes it to her husband, whom she no longer agrees with but of course still loves, to try to set him free. She has no doubt he is being tortured. She has no doubt he will be put to death. She thinks of him when she runs the hiking trails that thread the woods and when she dons a wet suit to swim in Puget Sound and when she uses the play structure at a local park for pull-ups—wide arm, close grip, underhands—and leg-lift crunches.
She can’t shake the feeling that she is being watched and carries a knife or a gun on her at all times and pauses often in doorways and on street corners. At night the motel window is like a liquid black eye that peers at her, and she draws the curtains over it and sleeps with a shotgun in the bed beside her like a lover whose oily smell and indention linger on the pillow.
One day the meth-head calls her sweetie and she gives him the finger and he calls her a cunt. The next morning she finds the Ramcharger’s front left tire slashed and she walks directly to his room and kicks open the door and finds him tweaking in the bathroom and smashes his face into the mirror and brings down the lid to the toilet tank on his back and tells him if he ever fucks with her again he will die.
She parks at the All Star Grocery and rolls down the window and studies the FDC, not knowing what she is looking for but not knowing what else to do. She imagines her husband somewhere in the belly of the building. The first thing he ever said to her was that he liked the way she smelled. It wasn’t a line. It was how he felt, his nostrils flaring. He has always been like that, direct and aggressive and hungry and pursuant. That is what made him such a good leader and a bad husband. She has followed him all these years. Even now she follows him, his priorities her own.
One time, when they were still dating, still students at William Archer, they were tangled up on a futon and he said he was going to make love to her and there was nothing she could do about it. She said to him, “Do you always get what you want?” and he said, “Most of the time,” and she said, “Me too,” and grabbed him by the shirt and dragged him toward her.
When he spoke at rallies or gave lectures, she felt as she did when he made love to her—as if some glowing ball of energy was swelling inside her, heating her—and from the rapture in everyone else’s eyes she knew they felt the same. Sometimes, though, she tired of the ideology. Sometimes she pined for a normal life, normal conversation—paint the porch this and mow the grass that—soccer games and park playdates, backyard barbecues with neighbors. When
their daughter died, that ball of light inside Miriam, that glow that sustained her over the years, unraveled into many strands that went black like burned-out lightbulb filaments.
Today she goes for a ten-mile run. A light rain mists the air. Wind comes off the sound and carries the smell of algae and dead fish. Crows gather in a tree barren of leaves and make its branches appear heavy with some black, poisonous fruit. They depart when she runs beneath them, their wings stirring the air, their shadows swirling all around her.
When she finally makes her way home to the motel, her lungs hot and her legs heavy, she keys the lock and checks the dusting of talcum powder on the floor. She keeps a tin by the door and every time she leaves she gives it a few shakes to see if anyone has tracked their way inside. Nothing.
She peels off her track pants and sweatshirt and stretches naked for a moment before walking to the bathroom and staring at her red-nosed reflection in the mirror. A hot shower will scald the chill out of her. The curtain is the same dark orange color as the carpeting. She drags it aside to crank on the water—and the tug of her arm reveals the giant crouched figure of Morris Magog waiting for her.
* * *
She is an old woman, a lycan, though it is hard to tell beneath the gray cover of her long coat and head scarf, her appearance more like a twisted branch or crooked pillar of stones. A few stray white hairs have escaped her trappings and blow around her face. She is slow moving, some of her steps crunching through the snow, some of them carrying her on top of the hardpack. She carries a quiver of arrows and an ash bow crossways over her shoulders. A large dog follows her—thick necked and long legged, with the sharp snout of a wolf—dragging behind it a sled mounded with snowy white rabbits, their bodies soon to be skinned and gutted and cooked, every last ligament and ribbon of meat harvested. They were killed by arrows or by snares and their bloodied furs match the battlefield that makes the woman pause and the dog whine.
She comes from a side channel that spits into this canyon and stands for a long time at its exit, surveying the wreckage. The Humvees and the MRAPs are still smoldering and she knows that whatever happened here happened not long ago. The canyon walls are pitted from bullets and RPG blasts, halos of black imprinted on stone. The wind shifts and the dog whines at the smell of cooked flesh, burned rubber. There are many bodies, a junkyard of broken bodies, all of them so still.
She goes to them. The snow glimmers with ejected shell casings. She withdraws a knife from some secret fold of her coat. At one body, and then the next, she does not bother struggling with buttons and snaps. She draws her sharp blade through nylon and canvas and hurries her way through pockets and belts, tossing some things aside and placing others in the sled. Bullets, matches, knives, first-aid kits, wipes, belts, canteens, binoculars. One soldier is missing half his head. Another seems to be smiling, with his belly and chest shredded by bullets. Another has tried to crawl to safety and a thick viscous slug’s trail of blood follows him to his resting place thirty yards away.
One of the soldiers lies flat on his back. The dog whimpers and huffs and paws at the snow near his head. His face is obscured by blood and soot and sunglasses. A boy. His shoulder is torn up—whether by a bullet or shrapnel, she doesn’t know. His helmet is gone. So is one of his boots. She crouches down and removes her mitten—leather, lined with rabbit fur—revealing a skeletal, leprously spotted hand. She snatches off his sunglasses. His eyes are half-lidded, telling her nothing.
She digs beneath his high collar and touches his neck to see if she can find a pulse. Right then his eyes snap open and closed so quickly that she would have missed it had she not been searching for some sign of life. She stands and looks around, looking to see if anyone is watching her. The sun flashes off her knife.
Chapter 44
NEAL STANDS in the open doorway of the toolshed. Everyone keeps saying that the day is unseasonably warm, that he should be grateful, that the winds in the Republic are sometimes so severe that a minute of exposure can freeze a finger and snap it off at the knuckle. To him, thirty-five degrees is cold enough. His eyes peer out beneath a wool hat with a pom-pom on top. Otherwise his body is wrapped completely in a down parka and scarves and mittens and boots. Chase tells him he looks like the Michelin man.
Chase is always calling him something. Tubs. Doc. Captain Curry. Neal wouldn’t mind stabbing the fool in the eye with the syringe he keeps in his pocket—capped, but ready with a 30 cc dose of sodium thiopental strong enough to knock Chase out. Just in case his emotions get the best of him and the pills can’t contain the animal. That’s what Neal is here for—to take care of a man who can’t take care of himself. Everyone calls him doctor but here he is merely a nurse. It is insulting, and he would not have come except for two men he is indebted to: Augustus, his leering benefactor; and Keith Gamble, his longtime collaborator, his friend.
They arrived several days ago and his mind still hasn’t adjusted to the time change, his days feeling like nights, his nights days. He checks his wristwatch—he is always checking it to ascertain the time, as if he has trouble believing in the sun’s place in the sky. Another hour and their convoy will roll out of the base and head to the Tuonela Mine, where he and Chase will meet with diplomats and executives before holding a press conference.
He steps out of the wind and into the shed’s dim interior. A lightbulb hangs overhead, but when he pulls at the string, nothing happens. His eyes adjust and he spots the desiccated carcass of the wolf that makes the workbench above it appear like a squared shrine.
The lab conditions are laughable. But the value of Keith’s work has always been conceptual more than practical. So many conversations with him began with the phrase What if? Kirk and Spock. That’s what people called them, and that’s how they dressed up one Halloween. Keith was the dashing rogue and Neal was the wearying bore. Wearying bores did well in biochemistry. Wearying bores could tolerate the endless stream of data, the endless pile of grant applications, the political hurdles, the pompous lunacy of academics—everything Keith referred to as bullshit. When his friend first became a brewmaster, Neal told him it was a waste, a waste of his great talent. But he was wrong. This—Keith’s death in the Republic—that was the waste.
There is nothing of use to him in the toolshed. He is here to say good-bye. He pulls off his mittens and slowly fingers the beakers and vials, flips through the notebooks, the binders, their pages yellowing along the edges. Everything is coated in dust that his fingertips streak through.
“It’s just like you described it, old friend.”
* * *
There is another video circulating online. The second Balor has released. Augustus clicks on it eagerly. He has watched the other—with the door to his office closed and the sound lowered, as if he were indulging in some pornographic fetish—more than thirty times. He can play it in his head now—can see Balor, the tic at the corner of his eye, the rise and fall of his shoulders as he breathes heavily—can hear the screaming and meat-mouthed feeding—as if it is happening to him.
He cannot say why he is so fascinated, but when he stares at the screen, he grips the mouse tightly in his hand and from it a tingling signal seems to run up his arm and into his chest and rush the blood through his body. This is his enemy. This is what Augustus has committed thousands of hours to eradicating. Balor believes the video empowers him, but Augustus believes the opposite: every new hit and post might as well equate to a vote for Chase Williams. The video strengthens them, fortifies their posture.
A part of Augustus cannot help but wonder about the soldier Balor tore to pieces. He was not a person—he was food, though not even that, since hunger was secondary. The man was an implement and Balor was using him. He does not see Chase in quite the same way—they are friends, after all, the closest of friends—but the connection does not escape or bother him.
The wall behind Balor appears paneled with wood. There is no overhead light, what must be a table lamp throwing shadows sideways across his face. An insectile
hum, maybe a generator, nearly swallows his voice. A hint of a smile plays across the corners of his mouth. He is smiling at Augustus. He is smiling at everyone who stands in his way as if ready to swing a scythe through them. “Do you know how much money it would take to destroy the United States? I do not mean to interrupt or injure the economy. I do not mean to blow up a bridge and make people feel sorry for those who died or blow up a landmark and make people feel hot with patriotic fever. I mean destroy. Do you know how much money it would take?” Here he runs a tongue across his lips. “It would take thirty thousand dollars. I will show you. Soon. Soon.”
“Bring it on,” Augustus says and starts the video again.
* * *
Chase doesn’t eat much for lunch, not because the chow hall is serving Jell-O and green beans and gray mushy chicken cubes, but because his nerves have left his stomach in a twist. He excuses himself and waits outside, next to the convoy of Humvees parked and idling in the mud like prehistoric beetles. The cold air hones him, chases away the nausea.
He knows what the media are reporting. The Patriot Act amendment, the vaccine hearings. The hard-line, no-compromise rhetoric. The pending trial of Jeremy Saber. The good-gosh down-home campaigning of his running mate, Pinckney Arnold, who drives from small town to small town and gives stump speeches and kisses babies and shakes hands and sings “God Bless America” with his hand over his heart. The publicity photos of Chase and Neal roaring across the Atlantic on a Curtiss Commando transport with several hundred newly deployed soldiers. All of it has worked. Just like Buffalo promised.
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