Francis passes by the window again, still fingering the popped zit and speaking now on his cell phone. She does not feel particularly surprised at his presence here: he has always felt to her more shadow and bone than flesh and blood. He is an informer. She can hear his voice more clearly and makes out the words imminent and campus shutdown.
That is enough to send her racing into the night. Midway across campus she observes the windmill. Even now, from several hundred yards away, she can hear the hum, along with the blades whir-whir-whirring as they cut the air. A red light blinks a warning.
Chapter 51
THE EXECUTION WILL take place at eight p.m.—the very minute the presidential polls close.
The tribunal that convicted Saber deliberated less than an hour before recommending he be put to death. The defendant’s remorseless courtroom monologue—in which he questioned who the real monster was and demanded that lycans rise up against the American war machine—only convinced the tribunal that they made the right decision. The judge was permitted to reduce the death penalty to life without parole, but he did not. He imposed the sentence—and now, on this November evening, with ice in the air and stars in the sky, with no possibility of an appeal or stay of execution, the sentence will be carried out.
After the verdict was imposed, Jeremy was transferred thirty miles south of Denver, to the supermax detention center, a white-roofed, brick-walled structure with a lake of asphalt around it that spreads into brown-grass plains.
The crowd began gathering earlier that day, soon after the president released a statement that said, “Saber met the fate he chose for himself nearly a year ago. The matter will soon be concluded, and then our country can move on.” At first a few dozen people appeared, and then twice as many, and then twice as many more, every few minutes another vehicle pulling in, until the visitors’ lot was full and the cars and trucks began to park along the road they followed in from US 67. Some wore William Archer sweatshirts and some carried signs that read RESISTANCE NOW and BETTER DEAD THAN DRUGGED.
By lunch the guards had arranged themselves in a wall between the protesters and the facility. They wear riot gear—black hard-shell armor, goggles, helmets, pistols at their belts—and they hold their rifles diagonally before their chests. And by dinner a long line of squad cars, with their blue and red lights flashing, pressed through the crowd and parked in a defensive line and asked everyone, through a loudspeaker, to disperse. No one did.
At seven thirty, they begin to stomp. One foot and then the other. As if they are trying to kick their heels through the asphalt they stand upon, as if they are trying to crack the very shell of the earth. They know the noise can be heard for many miles, can be heard through the cement walls, can be heard by Jeremy Saber when he is escorted by the priest and the two guards down the long hall to the glass-walled execution chamber, his ankles and his wrists bound by hinged cuffs. Their stomping keeps its cadence, like the drumbeats that precipitate war, and when a few minutes later Jeremy is strapped into the chair and a stream of drugs is administered through a needle in his right leg, the noise will still be in his heart.
* * *
He found them online. Or maybe they found him. He was mouthing off in one of those Internet chat rooms when he got the request for a private chat and then one thing led to another and here he is, however many months later, piloting a Cessna single-engine Skyhawk through a rain-swept sky. It is a little hard to process.
His name is Marvin. No one ever remembered his name. He hated that. Hated that he was so forgettable. “You look like the most ordinary person in the world.” That’s what a girl named Tiffany once told him. He remembered her name. He hated her and for a long time imagined different ways to kill her—pushing her in front of a school bus, slamming her head repeatedly into her locker, strangling her with an athletic sock. He hated her and he hated school. He hated his stupid teachers and the stupid students and the stupid books in which the letters kept moving, crawling all over each other like ants.
But they remembered his name. They treated him like he was somebody. They gave him things. An Xbox, they gave him that. They gave him a gun, a Hardballer .45. For his eighteenth birthday, they gave him a woman. That was nice. Except that she wouldn’t kiss him even though she would let him do everything else. So he ended up just putting his mouth over hers and breathing into it. There have been many since then, most recently a black-haired woman whose sharp face makes him think of a bird. They keep her wrists and ankles handcuffed to a steel frame bed. He doesn’t mind that she spits, that she tries to bite him when he lies with her. He doesn’t mind that at all.
He trained for two months—the medical exam, the forty hours of flight time—and when he learned that it cost three thousand dollars he said he couldn’t possibly pay for that and they said not to worry. They would take care of him. He would never have to pay for anything again. That was nice. He had trouble reading the books, so they read the books to him. That was nice too, being read to. It made him feel like he was their child, like they were his parents. He could remember what he needed to remember—about ground check and throttling to two thousand rpm and checking your magnetos and suction and oil pressure and all that—but he had trouble putting the letters down. They had a copy of the test and they made him practice it over and over again until he got it right. When he got it right, they told him he was smart and he liked that. It was nice. He had never smiled so big in his whole entire life.
Everyone talks about Balor. Balor this, Balor that. He isn’t sure what to believe, but he likes to believe it all. That Balor punched a hand through a chest and tugged out a heart and took a bite of it like an apple. That Balor could rip a tree from its roots. That Balor could see things with his dead eye that others could not, could see right into your soul and know whether you believed or did not believe, so you had better believe. And he, Marvin, believed.
The engine whines and the propeller spins in a gray blur. He cruises along at eighty ktas with his hands tight around the yoke, trying to hold steady and correcting against light turbulence, keeping his eye on the directional and elevation, everything thrown off by the heavy payload he’s carrying. Yesterday, they unbolted the seat and filled the belly of the plane with C-4. A postdoc chemist made the C3H6N6O6 in their basement lab, where they mixed the powder with water to make a slurry and then polyisobutylene to bind it and then they sucked out the water by drying and filtering and then added a plasticizer to make it gummy and the end result wasn’t so different from a bunch of gray Play-Doh. Marvin watched all this and understood it because science is something he understands so much better than those dumb novels and poems and plays his dumb English teacher is always assigning and talking about breathlessly as if they mattered and people didn’t spend all their time watching TV anyway.
At the moment of ignition, the C-4 releases nitrogen and carbon oxides that expand at more than twenty-six thousand feet per second and knock flat and rip to pieces anything and everything within its reach. Less than a pound of C-4 can reduce several people to meat. A little more than a pound can open up a truck like a soup can. In the fuselage behind him, he has more than five hundred pounds of clay. That’s a lot. That’s enough to tear a hole in the fabric of the universe.
They taught him all of this. They taught him so much. They taught him how to veer off his flight plan—from SeaTac to Tri-Cities—after about twenty minutes, when he neared the Columbia River, the timing such that the explosion ought to correspond roughly with the execution. They taught him to cut his lights. They taught him to ignore air traffic and snap off his radio. They taught him to bring the plane down to ten thousand feet and then five thousand and then two thousand feet and press the nose downward and aim for the black mouth of the Columbia Generating Station, at the Hanford nuclear reservation.
They taught him to ignore the fear that might take hold of him—his heart crashing, his body like a drum—and to remember that it would all be over soon. And then he would be in the newspaper. Then h
e would be a hero. Everyone would know his name. Even Tiffany.
The explosion will have two phases. First, the gases will expand like a terrible wind, but in doing so they will suck everything out of the heart of the explosion, which makes a vacuum. Second, after the initial blast, everything will rush back and create another energy wave. He likes the idea of that. He likes the idea of everything rushing toward him. All that energy channeled inward. For the next few days, months, years, he will be the center of the world.
He asked if many people would die, and they said yes. And he asked if even babies would die, and they said yes. “Sometimes,” they told him, “terrible things must be done.” Did he understand? He did.
He banks left and makes a yawing motion with the rudder and tries to eyeball the red blinking lights of the power plant over the nose of the plane. Once east of the Cascades, the rain lifted and he can clearly see the Columbia, a great black snake, and the gridwork of electricity next to it, the Tri-Cities, and then, closer by the second, the tiered stacks of buildings and the six steaming cones of the reactors that squat like giant mushrooms. He pitches the nose and reduces power and steadies the throttle as he heads toward them.
* * *
They are headed toward darkness. A black bank of clouds piles up on the Cascades. Though it is a moonless night, Claire can discern them from the way they blot out the stars. This is November 6, Election Day, and the clock reads 7:50 and a crumpled Burger King bag lies at her feet and she and Matthew are a few hours out of Spokane, just north of Yakima, crossing the scablands of eastern Washington on their way to Seattle. When she thinks about what is ahead and behind her, when she thinks about Jeremy’s execution, the burger she ate goes sour, and she fights the urge to empty the surge in her stomach.
“Why are you doing this?”
“You’re in trouble. I want to help.”
“Is that your thing? Girl in danger?”
“Maybe.”
She makes a show out of rolling her eyes, though he can’t see her except by the glow of the dash.
She remembers one time, on a road trip to northern Minnesota with her parents, along Lake Superior, she squatted behind some dunes to pee. After she zipped up she noticed that three white butterflies had already drunk from the moist spot she left in the sand. They were beautiful, but as they drank greedily she wondered if their wings shuddered from pleasure or from poison. She cannot help but feel this way about the two of them, about whatever it is they have, which can’t possibly be sustainable. She is toxic. No good comes to anyone close to her.
He keeps jogging through the radio stations, mostly sermons and country songs, hunting for something about the election or the execution. She feels torn in too many directions at once and can only concentrate on the road ahead, on Miriam, on the possibility of finding her. She hears something over the radio, the buzz of a horsefly. Somehow it has survived the cold and stubbornly clings to life. It drones past her head, a greenish blur, and batters the windshield, looking for a way out. Matthew leans forward in his seat and swats at the windshield, missing, sending the fly into a wild buzzing panic. “Leave it,” she says.
Outside the window she can make out a browned-grass ditch and then miles of shorn wheat fields punctuated by the clustered lights of farms. The state is so divided, like Oregon, the high desert soon giving way to rain forest, where mushrooms and ferns press upward from the mossy earth. She looks forward to getting there, the greening of a world otherwise gone dun and gray. She reaches out and takes his big hand in hers. “Tell me things are going to turn out okay.”
“Things are going to turn out okay.” He squeezes her hand—and the pressure seems to send all the blood to her chest.
It is then, in a white flash, that the horizon explodes.
Part III
Chapter 52
PATRICK IS LOOKING for the woman named Strawhacker. Her eyes are scarred with cataracts, so gray they might have been spun by spiders. But she can see—that’s what people say. She can see things others cannot.
This is March—along the Idaho-Oregon border—where Patrick has been stationed the past few weeks at an FOB devoted to cleanup. Nearly five months have passed since, in the Republic, he came staggering back to Tuonela with his boots full of numbing snow, only to find most of the soldiers already departed. “Pack your ruck,” the guard told him. “We’re going home.”
“What?”
“The war is at home.”
His first assignment: a Nebraska tent city, outside Omaha, one of hundreds set up to accommodate the newly homeless and to quarantine the newly infected, many of them jeweled in sores and vomiting blood. Then the dead bodies started piling up. Then the riots began. For obvious reasons he hated it there, but the Nebraska sky bothered him more than anything. With no mountains to interrupt it, he felt blotted out, weighted down by its enormous size.
He requested a transfer into toxic cleanup and got it. It was the assignment no one wanted. They sent him home, to Oregon, to the place everyone else had fled, to join more than a hundred thousand cleaners already there. That’s what the military called the microbiologists and doctors and botanists and cleanup and construction crews: the cleaners. Many of them—some ten thousand—have since died from radiation poisoning, the gamma-ray intensity and the long-term exposure about as healthy as a shot of mercury to the jugular. Many more have vanished beyond the perimeter, presumed dead from lycan attacks.
This is where he needs to be. This is where he will find what he is looking for, what his father was looking for.
Tonight, in the high desert, the temperature hovers above freezing. Rain falls. Mud sucks at his boots when he tromps the streets of the FOB. The three-acre base was built around a deserted community center outside Ontario—fortified by Hescos and wrapped in hurricane wire—and he is headed outside the gates to a bar called the Dirty Shame. This is where he will find the woman, Strawhacker, who deposits herself there every evening to nurse whiskey and tell the fortune of any who seek her out.
Patrick feels like a fool but cannot help himself. Along I-84, near the security checkpoint, there is a gray-slatted barn that has become a billboard for the lost. Thousands of sun-bleached photos have been tacked to it. They streak in the rain and they flutter and tear away with the wind. People have written across them, in neat block letters, Need to find my daughter or Have you seen me? or Worked for Nike with emails and phone numbers listed. Patrick stapled a note there, too. Missing, it read. Beneath this are two names. Susan Gamble is one, Claire Forrester the other.
He has scanned the faces of the survivors—many of them lycans, sick from radiation or disenchanted with the Resistance after several months of living off the grid—who day after day still stagger through the checkpoint. He has tried calling his mother but only gets a recording that says, “This number is no longer in service.” He has tried emailing them both, but his messages go unanswered. He is not surprised. With few exceptions, once you step inside the Ghostlands—that’s what the media are calling it, the Ghostlands—you can no longer rely on electricity or phone service.
The wind rises and the rain blows sideways and he ducks under the dripping eaves of twenty plywood structures of the same boxy design, workspaces of the clerks, liaison officers, battalion, and company staff. SWA huts, GP tents. Then he passes the mess hall, as big as a barn, built as an extension off the community center kitchen. He can hear the KBR contractors inside, clattering pans, tocking their knives across cutting boards, getting ready for tomorrow’s breakfast. He holds his breath when he passes by a long row of Porta-Johns. They are stacked next to a tan tent the size of an RV, lit up from within, rowdy with laughter. He hears the snap and riffle of playing cards. Most of the sleeping quarters are like this, canvas topped with rows and rows of racks inside them, rucksacks and weapons littered everywhere. Generators groan. Lights sputter in the community center, home to the labs, offices for tactical planning.
He signs out at the gate and splashes a quarter mile along
a heat-cracked county highway to the Dirty Shame, a tavern built into the side of a hill, a long windowless rectangular box of railroad ties with a sawdust floor and a mirror behind the bar with a bullet hole in it. The electricity here can no longer be relied on, so the meager smoky lighting comes from lanterns and candles that sputter and dance when he creaks open the door and peels off his poncho and shakes away the rain and hangs it from an iron hook.
Shavings cling to the mud on his boots. The oven-warm air smells like the creosote and formaldehyde the ties were treated with, the smell powerful enough to make everyone dizzy, along with the beer foaming out of mugs and curling down wrists, the whiskey shots lined up on the bar and slammed back with a gasp. There are thirty or so people drinking tonight, some soldiers, some civilians, who in this tight space give off a lot of heat and noise. He works his way through them to the bar, where he orders a beer and pays without any trouble. ID doesn’t matter in a place and time like this.
So many of the rules no longer apply.
Not very far from here, the perimeter fence begins, nearly three thousand miles of hastily constructed hurricane fencing that is practically useless and encases most of Oregon and Washington, some of Idaho and Montana, the length of it staggered with checkpoints and FOBs. Beyond the perimeter, the noise of traffic roaring, televisions blaring, cell phones ringing, Muzak trembling from shopping-center sound systems, all of it has ceased, leaving behind a scary silence.
Coyotes slink through the aisles of Safeway. Elks plod along the streets of Portland. In the fields and in the streets are semis and tanks and planes, rust cratered, the grass growing around them, looking like dinosaurs, fallen and decaying.
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