Every smear campaign has failed—because Chase admits to everything, the groping, the drinking, the fighting, none of it illegal, all of it tied into his platform: brutal honesty. The election is a week away and every phone poll lists him as the front-runner. Chase doesn’t respond to the soldiers calling him Mr. President, doesn’t feel as excited as he ought to, the Republic distracting him from every emotion except fear, sometimes alternated by remorse and guilt-absolving defiance.
That morning, when he arrived at the Tuonela Base, when the CO invited him into his office, he made an offhand comment about the weather, saying how nice it was, how warm. The CO—a gray-haired toad of a man with no neck and a broad, fleshy mouth—said he’d take negative forty over this any day. “Keeps the mutts in their pens.” Two days ago, an ambush wiped out an entire platoon. “A real dick up my ass. And now you’re here.” He sipped his coffee and choked a little on it. “Don’t think they don’t know. They know. Which means some shit is bound to happen.” The CO mentioned Balor then. Chase asked what they knew about him. He has seen the videos, he has read the articles, he has been briefed by Buffalo—but what does the CO know that he might not?
“What’s there to know you don’t already know? Might say he’s the alpha of the pack. Been in the computer for years, more than two decades. Worked for us—bet you didn’t know that—though you might soon. Some fucker at The New Yorker has been sniffing around about us supplying him and a few other mutts with arms in the eighties to drive out the Russians. Now he’s turned the crosshairs on us. Now he’s gone from low level to big shit. He says something, the rest do it. Whoever gets his head on a pike will get so many medals pinned to them their tit will fall off.”
“What’s wrong with his eye?”
“Fuck do you care? Fuck am I supposed to know?”
“Just curious.”
Now Chase scoops up a handful of slush and packs it into a ball of ice that he lobs like a grenade toward the high wall of the perimeter fence. It falls short. He is joined a minute later by the lieutenant who will be serving as his PSD escort to the mine. Nathan Streep, a twenty-four-year-old with a boyish face that doesn’t look like it’s ever needed a razor. A scar curls from his upper lip like a worm. He pulls out a pack of Marlboros and knocks out two cigarettes and offers one to Chase and they light up and smoke in companionable silence.
The day is bright but the sun seems to warm nothing. A shadow slides across the ground and a few seconds later Chase hears the boom of a jet streaking overhead. He knows they are always overhead, easy to hear and hard to spot, as gray as the surrounding hills, their missiles sometimes giving them away, sun silvered at the tips. But he can’t help it: he covers his head and lets out a whimper. Most people, he knows, are unable to imagine their own death. They can worry over a grandparent, choking on a half-chewed bite of ham sandwich or slipping in the shower and snapping a hip; and they can worry over a child, imagining a pigtailed girl toddling after a ball and being crushed by a passing car, the bloodied tread of the tire imprinted on the asphalt until the next rainstorm—but their own death remains a denial, and then a vague possibility, and then, only in those final foggy-eyed years, an inevitability. He is not sure quite how this happened, but ever since he was bitten, he has felt age settling over him like a black blanket, and for the first time he feels death is not only foreseeable but also imminent.
He straightens up as quickly as he can, thankful the photographers remain inside. The lieutenant watches him curiously. Chase can’t tell if it is a smirk or if the scar makes his lip naturally upturned. “You all right there?”
“Fine.”
“How long has it been?”
“Near eleven years.” In his pocket he carries the pocketknife his father gave him, the one he carried through all his time overseas, and he squeezes it now.
“Not so long.”
Long enough for the anchor-and-eagle tattoo on his shoulder to fade to the color of a bruise, but not long enough to shake off memories as vivid as last night’s nightmare. He remembers the tracer rounds and mortar explosions, the thunderous pulse making his ears pop, the dripping chandeliers of white and yellow and red light making him pause and marvel at the beauty of it all. He remembers the rattle of a chain gun and the rotor wash of a Blackhawk and the hushed air that seemed to hang around bodies zipped into black bags. He remembers attacking a cave system—a hive, the CO called it—and the lycans that came rushing out of the dark at them. He remembers lighting up a woman with a flamethrower—the same woman who visits him sometimes at night—and the way she kept coming even after her eyeballs burst and her skin crisped to ash so that he had to unholster his pistol and drop her with a shot to the head.
He takes a deep breath and can hear his cigarette sizzling at the tip and flicks it away in a sparking arc and nearly gags on the smoke.
He realizes, when the convoy starts down the hill, that he doesn’t know the name of anything here. He knows the valley, the mine, the base all share the same name that now escapes him. He eyes a stunted evergreen, a bush bright with red berries, a deer as big as an elk darting between the trees. He likes knowing the names of things. Without them, he feels lost, as though he hardly knows who he is.
Ten minutes later, when they push out of the woods and into town, they brake next to an apartment complex under construction. A forklift drops a pallet of rebar with a boom. A welding torch glows blue. A saw whines. The workers, in orange hard hats, stare at the convoy until it departs. A few blocks away, they pass a building carved out by a bomb. It was the same old story when Chase was here—their mission unclear: building and destroying.
They drive through an alleyway busy with murals to commemorate a World War II battle in which hundreds of Nazis were killed by lycans—and then the convoy parks at a nearby square, where a crowd has gathered. “Check it out,” the lieutenant says. “Some unfriendlies are hosting a potluck.” A gnarled leafless tree rises in the middle of the square and a straw effigy draped in a U.S. flag hangs from it. A group of young bearded men stand around it and stab it with pitchforks and then cut it down and finally throw it on the fire they have kindled nearby. The smoke darkens and the flames lick upward and everyone lets out a cheer. In the weak sunlight, a lamb is spitted and two teenage boys crank it around and around over the fire. Men roll cigarettes and drink hard cider from jugs, while women arrange plates of sausage on a folding table. Children run among their legs, playing tag and pretending themselves into wolves.
Chase tries to smile off the pitchforks—but can feel, with every thrust, an imagined prick scraping between his ribs, into his heart. Neal sits in the seat behind him. He leans forward and rattles a container of Tic Tacs in his ear. “I think you need two of these.”
They aren’t breath mints at all, but Volpexx. The doc is here to make sure he chokes them down when needed. He rattles some into his palm and dry-swallows.
“Hey, my breath stinks,” the lieutenant says. “Can I steal one of those from you?”
“No,” Neal says and tucks away the bottle. “They’re ours.”
Chase will need every one of them. Just as he needs Neal to dole them out slowly. Because the first pill leads to a second and then a third and then he tends to lose count and sometimes slips into the black fuzz of those beer benders that defined his twenties, after which he would rise feeling as though he had sawed himself in half.
The mine grows larger and larger with their approach, its smokestacks and blackened metal making it look like a factory where nightmares are made. The fence line begins a long way out—reaching on for miles and miles and miles—surrounding a strip mine so cavernous that the dump trucks trundling along its bottom might be toys. He imagines the millions of tons drawn from this crater, bored by drills and chewed by dynamite, and can’t help but think about the tunnels within his own body that house a poisonous ore.
They pass through a security checkpoint with undercarriage mirrors and tire shredders and a reinforced steel gate and after a brief qu
estioning drive for several hundred yards before they arrive at a parking lot, the distant fence line necessary so that no RPG fired or bomb detonated at the checkpoint can damage the facility.
The escort for the reporters is held up another ten minutes as the guards search and chemical-reactant test their bags and camera equipment. Chase can feel the Volpexx deadening him—the equivalent to a three-beer buzz—and closes his eyes and rests his chin on his chest and watches the clouds of colors play across his retinal screen.
When the reporters arrive, when their Humvee parks alongside his, he takes a deep cleansing breath and climbs out and approaches the Alliance Energy representatives who now wait on the sidewalk edging the parking lot with smiles on their faces and hands extended for a shake.
Chapter 45
PATRICK IS AWARE, first, of the sphere of pain in his right shoulder. If he stays still, its heat remains focused, but if he moves—if he so much as sighs heavily—the sphere cracks open and sends hot, nauseating knife twists of pain into his chest, down his arm.
He lies on the floor of a one-room gray-wood house. Wind rasps through the cracks. The roof creaks under the weight of snow. The floorboards are soft and squawking beneath him. The logs in the woodstove collapse into embers. The whole place struggles to stay upright. The air reeks of fish and onions. Herbs and jerky hang from the rafters. Old dusty spiderwebs—jeweled with the husks of flies—thread the corners. Pots bubble on the woodstove.
He does not notice this all at once, but in one-eyed glimpses as he rises intermittently from a sleep that won’t let go. He feels out of focus, outside of himself. He can’t tell whether he keeps fading in and out due to his injuries or whether she has drugged him. She, the lycan woman.
Her back is hunched, her breasts flattened by age. Her neck is as thin as a wrist. A cluster of long white hairs hang off her chin and tremble when she sucks at her toothless mouth. When at first she does not respond to the English or the little Finnish and Russian he uses on her, only stares at him with that mummified face and those eyes dulled by cataracts, absent of any curiosity, of any emotion altogether, he figures her deaf or senile. Or maybe he never says anything. Maybe he speaks to her in his mind, his tongue unable to find traction enough to form words.
He dreams about his rifle shuddering in his arms. He dreams about a lycan staggering back and hitting a rock wall and smearing it with a frond of blood. He dreams about the old woman standing by the window, her pale mottled skin appearing translucent so that he believes he can see her blood and sinews coursing and surging, like some dark presence living beneath the surface of her. He dreams about her sucking on a pipe, the smoke coiling around her, as she studies him sharply, with suspicion glowing in her foggy eyes. He dreams—or maybe he is awake?—about a wolf watching him from a shadowy corner.
Then she crouches next to him with a pile of rags, a pan of steaming water, and a pair of needle-nose pliers. “Your fever won’t break and your skin is going dark,” she says, her voice like a rusty hinge. “Need to get that metal out of you.”
She speaks. She holds a knife between them. He does not agree or disagree. He just turns his head away so that he doesn’t have to watch her work. He supposes, if he were on an operating table, he would be strapped down. But he doesn’t have the energy to arch his body, to flinch away, when he feels the probing sting that turns into a hard jolt of pain. The sphere explodes. He hears the tock and pick of shrapnel hitting the floor and feels a hollowed-out relief in his shoulder—and in the flash before he passes out from the pain he thinks of his father and finally makes the connection.
He wakes in a daze, not knowing how long he has slept but knowing it has been a long time. It is dark outside, but it is dark so often here that the hour could be four in the afternoon or four in the morning. Outside he can hear the chattering and howls of wolves, whether natural or lycan, he is not sure.
He feels better, somehow lighter, as if the shrapnel weighed so much it was pressing him into the floor. He sits up for the first time and realizes he is naked only when the pelts that cover him roll away from his chest and pool in his lap.
His shoulder is sticky with a mudpack that smells fungal. A woodstove roars in the corner, giving off waves of heat, but the air is otherwise cold enough to crystallize his breath. On a three-legged table small enough to be a stool, a candle sputters, its dim, flickering glow the only light in the cottage. He is alone. A few feet away, his uniform is folded neatly next to his boots.
He rises naked from the floor. The room spins, then settles. His muscles are tight and unused to movement. He keeps his bad arm tight against his side when he creeps to his clothes. He finds them clean, smelling of pine soap. He almost pulls them on and then remembers his final thoughts before passing out.
He fingers through his pockets until he finds it, the sheets of paper—some printed in the MWR, some pirated from the toolshed. He unfolds them clumsily with his one hand and carries them to the candle.
He was being poisoned by the metal, infected by it. The old woman saved him, as if knifing away a bruised section of peach, by excising it from his body.
In the flickering light of the candle he flattens the wrinkles from the paper. Some of the ink has splotched and warped, but he can still read the words. The protection of cells, the regulation and detoxification of metal, such as silver. Silver. One of the principal components in Volpexx was silver. Some of the old mythology was true: the metal was septic to a lycan. The two largest suppliers in the country come from Alaska, he remembers reading, the Red Dog Mine and the Greens Creek Mine producing somewhere around three hundred metric tons a year, with Pfizer as their majority stockholder.
Keith Gamble lost his wife more than fifteen years ago, but all this time, he was still trying to save her. He knew he couldn’t kill the wolf, but he thought he could kill the drug. The metallothioneins would somehow detoxify the Volpexx, Patrick guesses, allowing for a positive blood test without the emotionally deadening side effects.
He wonders in how many different ways and over how many years his father has been chasing some kind of cure. At home, his father often worked in his shop, built onto the garage, a room with a sloping floor and central drain, stainless-steel tables scattered with vials and tubes and decanters, like some mad scientist’s laboratory in the midnight movie. He kept it locked except when working in it and allowed Patrick to observe him only if he didn’t speak and remained seated on a stool in the corner. He said he was working on home-brew recipes. But Patrick can clearly recall the gleam of syringes on the counter—and can remember, too, the many dogs he had as a child that died so often of “cancer” he stopped making up new names and just called them all Ranger.
He looks at the other sheets. The University of Oregon emails. Ndesai. Ndesai. Ndesai. Over and over again. Correspondence traded back and forth for what appears to be two years. Neal. It was Neal, the old college friend his father was always talking about, always chatting with on the phone, always telling Patrick to visit. The footer at the bottom of each email identifies Desai as a university professor and the director of the Pacific Northwest Regional Biocontainment Laboratory in the Infectious Disease Research Center. He would be hearing from Patrick as soon as he could get to a computer.
At that moment the door creaks open and reveals a black rectangle. A snow-caked animal, what could be a dog or a wolf, trots through it—followed by the old woman. A cold wind rushes inside and gutters the candle and freezes Patrick where he stands. The dog shakes off a cloud of snow and ducks its head and flattens its tail and growls. The old woman shoulders the door closed and secures the latch. She carries three bloody white rabbits by the ears. She uses her free hand to unwrap her shawl. She stares at Patrick a moment—her eyes dropping from his face to his body—and only then does he remember his nakedness. He tries to cover his crotch with the paper. The wind rises to a whistle outside. Then her face breaks into a smile with no teeth.
She turns away from him and peels off her mittens and kicks o
ff her boots and shrugs off what seems more like a robe than a coat and arranges it all near the fire to steam. It is an odd dance, her undressing and him dressing. She is slowed by age—and he by injury—and they finish around the same time and look at each other across the room as if to say, what now?
“You’re hungry,” she says, not a question. She knows he is. Terribly hungry, aching inside, as if he has been pitted.
He watches as she skins a rabbit. Yanking out its guts and splatting them on the floor for the dog to gobble up. Peeling away its pelt to reveal its candy-red musculature. Fingering the meat from the bone, knifing it into cubes, tossing it into a pot filled with snow and roots and bones that boil down into a stew on top of the woodstove. Together they sit at the table and she clunks a steaming bowl before him and he says, “Thank you.”
* * *
Claire feels, no other word for it, happy. Buoyant even. As though, if she opened her window and spread her arms, the wind might puff her away. For the first time since arriving on campus people know her by a name other than Hope. For the first time she has a sense of community. For the first time she has friends, if that’s the right word for it, someone to sit with at the cafeteria, wave to across the quad. Were they her friends? Would they say the same of her? She thinks they might.
She barely notices the election signs that pop up all over campus—signs that read VOTE NADER or IMPEACH WILLIAMS. She barely registers the conversations about the vaccine program under way or the spike in voter approval ratings for the Oregon governor now that he has departed for the Republic.
She knows it is irresponsible of her, but after months of gut-tangled anxiety, she has momentarily lost herself to pleasure. She feels as she did, so many years ago, when traveling a nighttime highway with her parents. One minute they were tunneling through the black, listening to NPR—and the next minute, her father was wrenching the wheel, screaming, “Son of a bitch!” Out of the darkness tumbled bicycles. Dozens of them. Claire didn’t know this at the time, but up ahead, at seventy-five miles an hour, a trailer hitched to a church van on its way to the Northwoods had come undone. When it flipped and crashed against the asphalt, bicycles spun every which way. Her father cranked the wheel hard right—and then left—dodging a pink Huffy, a white Trek—some of the bicycles skidding along with a trail of orange sparks, others bouncing wheel over wheel, haloed by their headlights only a second before vanishing. The red flash of a reflector. The dark rush of pavement. Their screams turned to laughter, when they swerved their way down the highway, thrilled and enchanted and somehow unscathed—alive!—after so many near misses.
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