The shovel she used still has a neon-yellow $19.99 price stickered to it. She was in a fog when she roamed the store, a Bi-Mart at the end of the block, not looking for anything except what she needed: a wheelbarrow to transport his body, a shovel to bury him. She left Ella and Sam where they lay on the porch. She could muster the energy for only one funeral. Now that is done. Now, she supposes, she needs to return to the store. Several times a day she pumps up her back bicycle tire and needs a patch kit for the leak. Ammo, if she can find any. Nuts, granola bars. A new jacket, the one she stole from REI rotted through from the toxic rain.
Finally she stands. For a long time she wavers in place, like a risen corpse, before stumbling down the hill. It feels good to have a job. A purpose. It makes her not think about killing herself. It helps clarify her mind, propel her body. She will leave the graveyard. She will collect her supplies. And then she will, to the best of her ability, find Balor and put a bullet through his eye.
She is near the gated entrance to the cemetery when she hears it—the distant noise of dogs barking accompanied by a high-pitched and unmistakably human scream.
She gave up on her Glock after it jammed twice. She prefers the reliability, the heft and power, of the .357 Smith & Wesson she pried from a corpse at a kitchen table, a suicide outside Portland, his hand curled so tightly around the stock she had to break his fingers. Everywhere she goes, she takes the revolver with her, carried in a belt holster so that she has a yellow callus along her hip. She withdraws it now.
The graves—marked mostly with crosses, rounded and squared headstones, punctuated by the occasional crypt—rise up the hill. At its summit she spots movement. Someone running. A girl. She wears a white T-shirt several sizes too big, so that she at first appears a billowing phantom. She darts between the graves, zigzagging down the hill.
The barking grows louder. Claire spots them, a tide of dogs—white and gray and brown—plunging down the hillside, chasing the girl. The distance between them closes. Thirty yards, twenty yards, ten. The girl is almost at the bottom of the slope when she risks a look over her shoulder. The dogs are nearly upon her, their barking more frenzied, maddened by the near taste and smell of her.
She realizes the futility of running any farther and clambers up the side of a marble crypt. A Doberman launches itself into the air and snaps its jaws at her dangling feet. But she is too quick. The crypt is six feet tall and topped by a crouching angel and the girl climbs onto its winged shoulders.
This whole time Claire has remained statue still, as if her exhaustion or apathy has created an unbridgeable separation between her and the girl. She came here to say good-bye. Not for this. Not more trouble. But the sight of the girl, maybe ten years old, long black hair falling to either side of her head, surrounded by yapping dogs that tense their hindquarters and flatten their ears and howl for her blood, makes her guts boil with anger. She cannot stop herself. She throws herself toward the crypt, pumping her legs, cocking her revolver.
Now that the girl is out of reach, she watches the dogs calmly, as if they are stuffed animals and not something she needs to fear—until one of them, a big standard poodle, stands up on its hind legs as if to push the crypt over. She screams.
This sends the dogs into convulsions, exciting them even more. They jitter and prance and wag their whole bodies and bawl like some kind of mob hungry for an execution. Claire counts twenty of them—Rottweilers, Dobermans, German shepherds, Labradors, even a wiener dog. Their coats are knotted and filthy and speckled with burs.
Claire skids to a stop ten yards away. “Hey,” she says. “Hey, dogs!” At once the whole horde turns to look at her, panting, hesitantly wagging their tails. She wonders if two instincts—loyalty and hunger—fight inside them like a Siamese monster. She doesn’t know what to say, so she says, “Bad dogs.”
At this some of them peel back their lips, showing their teeth, while others whine and stutter-step forward, as if she were an old friend they hardly recognize.
There are more dogs than there are bullets in her revolver, Claire realizes. She wonders if she can summon the strength, the desire, to transform. She doubts it. With the sweat drying on her skin and her back spasming and her nails rimmed with half-moons of dirt and Matthew only an hour in the ground, she feels impossibly empty.
The poodle, a mud-caked mess of hair, moves toward her, looking at once ridiculous and terrifying.
“Sit,” she says. “Sit. Stay. Roll over.” But the poodle keeps coming.
She lifts the revolver. It feels incredibly heavy in her hands. The poodle lowers its head and begins a hunch-shouldered charge. Saliva swings from its teeth when it opens its mouth to bite her. She puts a bullet in its leg and it screams in a terribly human way before collapsing and rising again and limping fast and far from her, leaving behind a trail of blood.
At the sound of the gunshot—a whipping crack that bottoms out and echoes away—the other dogs scatter, diving down rows of graves. They bark and yowl as they thread their way back up the hill, disappearing into the trees that thicken toward its top.
The wiener dog is the only one who lingers, peeking from behind the crypt. Claire holsters her gun and lifts her arms and says, “Yaaaaah!” and the dog releases a tiny stream of pee before trotting off to join its pack.
Claire looks at the girl and the girl looks at her, looks away, and then gets brave enough to maintain a stare. Brown eyes, broad cheekbones, skin the color of upturned earth. Under the giant T-shirt she wears jean shorts, Velcro tennis shoes. Claire raises her hand—the universal sign for hey—and the girl does the same. They each manage a small smile. “Speak English?” Claire says.
Her expression does not change and Claire sees in it the same thing she saw in the wiener dog: a mixture of fear and loneliness that at once makes the girl want to rush forward and back away.
“Down,” Claire says. “Abajo.” Or is it derriba? She can’t remember. High school seems ten thousand years ago. She motions with her hand. “Down. Down. Before they get brave and come back.”
The girl doesn’t move, except her eyebrows coming together to form a silent question: is Claire dangerous?
“No estoy peligroso,” she says. “No kidding. I’m a good guy. Yo estoy su amiga.”
“I’m not stupid,” the girl says with a soft accent. “I can speak English.”
“You a lycan?”
The girl gives her eyes a theatrical roll and says, “I’m Latina,” and Claire thinks, this is why I hate kids.
“We need to get going.”
Except to sneeze into her hands, the girl does not move.
It would be so much easier to walk away, to abandon the girl. Why should she care? Why should she even go on breathing? A part of her wants to whistle the dogs back and lay bare her neck for them to maul.
“Where are your parents anyway?” Claire immediately regrets asking and in her chest gets this jab of dread when the girl scrunches up her face and starts breathing heavily like kids do before they really lose it.
“Forget it.” Claire holds up her hands and twiddles her fingers and says, “Come on. Come on already.”
After a hesitant moment, the girl scoots her butt toward the edge, dangles her legs, and falls into Claire’s arms.
Chapter 54
THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED in the seconds after the plane exploded in the belly of the Hanford nuclear facility. The electrical circuit board surged and spit fire. The turbines ceased spinning; the coolant water stopped flowing. The heat spiked. The power surged and caused a steam explosion that caused the containment vessel’s caps to evaporate. The control rods and graphite insulating blocks melted. And the radioactive core ignited, creating a blast as powerful as two nuclear bombs that mushroomed upward and pinwheeled cars through the air and burned to ash anything living within a hundred miles and made the moon glow an angry red.
The president declared the Pacific Northwest, and then the West Coast, and then the Plains, a state of emergency. He ordered the citi
zens of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and western Montana to evacuate. He did not acknowledge that the polls had just closed, that the media had called the race hours ago. That he had lost. For the moment, that was an irrelevance, as freeways clogged with people driving as fast and as far away as they could.
Clouds boiled over the open reactor. Helixes of flame played across the sky. Lightning uncurled and lashed the ground like white whips. A hot wind blew east and spiked the atmospheric radiation as far away as Michigan.
The same night as the explosion, a video was released on the Internet. In it, Balor and the Resistance claimed responsibility for the attack and declared the Pacific Northwest their own sovereign territory. Lycanica, he called it. He asked others to join them there. And he asked all lycans already in the region to savage their neighbor and in doing so make them a fellow citizen—and to remain in Oregon, despite the radiation, for the greater good.
Five months later, an estimated five million are dead.
Everything has gone splendidly. Everything has gone exactly according to plan. Because of him. Because of him, a new nation has been carved out—with November 6 its Independence Day. It does not bother him that he is surrounded. Fencing, studded with military bases, corrals the borders of Washington and Oregon. Battleships patrol the coastline. Drones knife across the sky with a cut-paper whisper. Bombs sound like distant thunder. They reduce water towers, power stations, to smoldering craters. This is to be expected. So is the economic crisis—the S&P double downgrade, the stock market diving more than four thousand points—that will soon enough result in the retraction of the military. The Ghostlands, they must realize, are a lost cause. The Ghostlands, they will accept, are his.
He debated a long time where to headquarter. The capitol building would be too obvious, a mall or skyscraper too difficult to defend. They considered the Rajneesh compound in Central Oregon but decided it was too far from any resources. They considered a correctional institute in Salem, a squat, mustard-colored building, but he did not want any of his men to read into this a metaphor for what their life had become. He needed them happy. And he needed a city to loot. And he needed a defensible position. And that is why they chose the Pittock Mansion.
It is a twenty-three-room chateau—built in 1914 by Henry Pittock, the publisher of the Oregonian—in the West Hills of Portland. Forty-six acres surrounded by wrought-iron fencing that contains the sheep and goats and cattle that now wander the grounds. The walls are made from sandstone and will withstand gunfire. The fireplaces will keep them warm in the winter, the high ceilings cool in the summers. The outbuildings serve as storage for the gasoline they have harvested, for the iodine pills they crush into their meals and water to fight the radiation that brings sores to their skin.
He rolls down the hill now as part of a convoy—three black Expeditions tricked out with brush guards and bulletproof windows followed by a semi hauling a trailer. Despite the heat, he wears a tailored charcoal suit from Brooks Brothers. No tie. His long silvery hair carefully parted down the middle and tucked behind his ears. Next to him sits the giant, Morris Magog, crushed behind the steering wheel. The backseats have been folded down and upon them rest flats full of beans, rice, salsa, candy, granola bars, bags of chips, piles of fresh muskmelons to be distributed to all those who attend this afternoon’s gathering at Pioneer Courthouse.
He knows what they say about his eye. That he was wounded by shrapnel, that he was bitten by a snake, that he was poisoned by the military, that he was shot and the bullet passed through his cornea and nested in his brain. The truth is, when he was a boy, his vision began to fog over. Headaches plagued him daily. His mother took him to a doctor in his village, who examined him and told them it was a tumor and he did not have the ability to operate on it. His mother took him to a military hospital and begged their services. They turned her away, and when she would not leave, they struck her face with the butt end of a rifle and then kicked her when she fell. “But he will die,” she told them and they told her, “We know.” That was when his mother began to pray. She prayed when dawn broke and when night fell. She prayed before meals. She clasped her hands together and sometimes held him against her breast when whispering words he could not decipher, some desperate incantation to fight the nosebleeds and then the darkness that eclipsed his eye. One night he woke to find a white figure standing over his bed. There was only a smear where a face should have been. There were only tendrils where fingers should have been. It reached for him—it reached into him, into his face—and there he felt a needle jab of exquisite pain. When the hand retreated, it gripped something black and squirming. He believed this an extraordinary nightmare until the next morning when he woke and could see. Not perfectly, but he could see, his left eye like a dirty window. The doctor told him the tumor was gone. “I do not understand,” he said. “I must have been wrong.”
“By the will of God,” his mother said. By the will of God he lived. He was the will of God. He does not share this with others. He keeps it hidden, like the statue of a saint buried upside down in a backyard. It does not matter that his men believe in God—it only matters that they believe in him.
The Expedition follows the road down the hill and out the gates and through neighborhoods of tightly clustered bungalows, their yards waist-high with weeds and grass gone to seed. He spots snakes sunning themselves on the blacktop, bees swarming out of an open mailbox, a red-tailed hawk picking apart the purplish remains of a cat. He has helped make this happen: the world returning to its natural state.
When a deer bounds out between two houses and skitters to a stop in a driveway, he lays a hand on Magog’s wrist and tells him to stop. “Slowly.” He unholsters the 9-millimeter at his belt. The window hums when he opens it. He rests his elbows on the sill and closes his dead eye. The deer, a buck with the mere beginning of two velvety horns, stares back at him, twitches an ear, then startles backward when he fires. It makes it ten feet before collapsing. Its legs continue to kick as if dreaming their way to escape. He watches the animal until it goes still. “Throw it in the back,” he says. “We’ll spit it over the fire.” The giant swings open his door and climbs out and the vehicle shakes with his abandoned weight.
Balor holsters his pistol and closes the window and cranks the AC. He feels a pleasant heat spreading through him, a rush of endorphins that makes his mind buzz and his skin prickle. The equivalent, he supposes, of sex. He does not hunger for it the way the others do. He has never visited the woman they keep in the basement, though he is glad she is there to satisfy the others. He gratifies his appetite in other ways. The letting of blood, for him, like the letting of semen. An impulse that satisfies his hunger and his need to dominate and infect, to multiply.
Several hundred of his children will be in attendance today. He knows there are thousands of others spread across the Pacific Northwest and more trying to sneak their way past the border every day. He knows they are afraid. He knows some of them are sick. He knows that they are uncomfortable and inconvenienced by the lack of electricity and running water. He will tell them that their discomfort is only temporary. He will tell them his plans. He will shake every one of their hands and he will look into every one of their eyes and he will tell them not to worry for this is only the beginning.
Chapter 55
THIS SIDE OF THE MOUNTAINS, in the high desert of Eastern Oregon, dogs roam freely, broken glass sparkles in the streets, front doors swing open and shut with the wind, freezers leak lines of blood, bodies lay about in various states of decay, as rounded and wooden as their own coffins. As a cleaner, in a radiation suit straight out of Buck Rogers, Patrick and his squad clear roads of abandoned vehicles, drag corpses into piles and light them up with flamethrowers. The reasoning is unclear, the area uninhabitable. But orders are orders.
As is the case with Chernobyl, a concrete sarcophagus now encases the Hanford site, but the damage has been done. Radiation will cling to the Pacific Northwest for thousands of years. Whether a hundred or a thous
and or a million years, the president says, it doesn’t matter: the United States will reclaim Oregon and Washington one town at a time.
Nobody wants to go out on the wire. Everyone wants sentry duty at the Ontario checkpoint. Keeping the curious and the crazies and the lycan sympathizers out, treating with chemical showers all those who travel within. Hurricane fencing stretches off into the distance. The interstate leading up to the checkpoint is stacked with concrete blockades so that cars must crank their wheel one way, then another, then another, slowing to a crawl before reaching the first security post, twenty yards out. Exiting the Ghostlands takes four stages. First, every vehicle is searched, and then everyone, after which time they are photographed, fingerprinted, questioned—then sent to a dosimeter crew for radiation and blood tests—followed by several hours of detainment in a chain-link pen while their case is considered.
There was a time when the line of cars stretched off into the desert haze, but these days, most everyone who wants to flee has fled, except for the occasional lycan disenchanted after living too long without restaurants, Internet, electricity. Sometimes two or three days go by when no civilians pass through the checkpoint at all.
Everyone likes it this way, likes how peaceful and predictable sentry duty has become, with plenty of time for bullshit and magazines, darts, card games, almost like a vacation, the world so empty here, with the sagebrush flats stretching off into the distance. It is a stark, beautiful landscape, untroubling because it is composed mostly of nothing.
This has made the soldiers on sentry duty lazy, so Patrick is certain he can get away with his plan. And Malerie is going to help him, though she doesn’t know it yet.
From his father’s email account, he patched together hundreds of pages of correspondence with Neal Desai. He already knew they had gone to college together at UC Davis, both biochem majors, but that was the extent of it. He learned that his father had enlisted around the same time Neal began applying to graduate programs, that his father had taken the job at the brewery around the same time Neal accepted a postdoc fellowship. His father had been experimenting on dogs in his garage while Neal was training a lab of technicians how to inject prions into the brain of a rat. Their children—Patrick and a girl named Sridavi—were around the same age. And both men had a personal stake in their research: they loved the infected.
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