In one of their emails—which dated back almost two years—his father wrote, “I was thinking about that time we tried to buy beer. You remember that? We glued on beards we bought from the Halloween store. The guy at the liquor store took one look at us and said get lost. We were so depressed. We were so sure we were going to be able to pull it off. I can’t stop thinking about those beards. Those stupid glue-on beards. What if the body doesn’t have the same careful eye as that guy at the liquor store? We know it doesn’t.”
To stimulate an immune response, to get the body to recognize lobos as an infection, his plan was to develop a vaccine that attaches prion proteins to a live modifier, an altered and attenuated strain of salmonella.
Neal took it away from there, and Patrick saw that the “Breakthrough!” message his father sent him corresponded directly with the first successful inoculation of an infected dog.
The vaccine is ready. It has not gone through human trials, but it is ready. Waiting for him in the Ghostlands.
Malerie has that special shade of hair, sometimes red and sometimes brown, depending on the light. Back in high school she was good to look at, but out here, with nothing but men and wild dogs to keep everyone company, she is beautiful. She has apologized to him endlessly over the past few days. “I’ve done a lot of growing up since then,” she says. So has he. Those were different times, and he can’t help but feel inclined to forgive her and enjoy the hard bud of her body, her Eastern Oregon drawl like a mouthful of honey, their conversations about everything—about love. “I thought I loved Max,” she says, “but I was wrong. I don’t think I’ve ever really been in love. Like, movie love. Like, can’t-think-straight head-over-heels love.” She has not seen Max since graduation, and good riddance. After the courthouse square bombing, she says, he became even more dangerous, obsessive.
“How about you? You ever been in love?” she said.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.”
In the barracks, in her private quarters, a square concrete cell with a sink and a bed and a bookshelf, she lies on top of Patrick, naked. He is bigger now, strapped with muscle, and he jokes that he might put her in his mouth like a piece of candy. She fingers the gummed-up scar along his shoulder. She lays an ear to his chest so she can listen to his heart. “Everybody always says they want life to be like in the movies,” she says and rakes her fingers through his chest hair. “Now it is. Now life is like a movie. But it’s the wrong movie.”
He says, “You said it,” but he isn’t really listening. He is too busy with his own thoughts, all mangled in his mind. He runs a finger up her spine, into her hair, then back down to her lumbar vertebrae, where her shoulders narrow into her neck. He circles the spot and she hums and says, “I like that.”
He wants to say, “You shouldn’t,” but doesn’t. This circle he traces is a sort of bull’s-eye. Here you put your knife if you want to paralyze someone. As much as it horrifies him, every part of her body he considers both a soft, curved, perfumed thing—and a target. Which gives him a sick feeling at the bottom of his heart he recognizes as both the beginnings of affection and the opposite of it.
“Sometimes,” he says. “Sometimes I feel like I’ve got this filter, and all the stuff that’s supposed to go in and out, between the world and me, it gets muffled.”
He has never told anyone this before, but it is true. He doesn’t know whether it is the death of his father, his time in the Republic, the impossible devastation of the Hanford explosion, or some combination of them all, but emotionally, he hasn’t felt anything in a long time. A song on the radio that might have nodded his head, tapped his foot—or a scene in a movie that might have jacked up his heart rate—nothing. Food is filling and sex is emptying.
Malerie traces a fingernail around his nipple until it hardens into a point. “I need you to do something for me,” he says.
She pinches the nipple and he swats her hand away and she says, “Anything.”
Normally, in a combat zone, he only gets nights and weekends off, but to keep morale up, the brass is handing out liberty time. “I’ve got a few days libo coming up. I want you to sneak me into the Ghostlands.”
She sits up in bed; her breasts swing. “What on earth for?”
“That’s my business.”
“Fuck you, it’s your business.”
“Hey, you owe me, right?”
“I don’t owe you that much.”
“You owe me. You said it yourself. You owe me.”
“You’re going to end up dead or we’re both going to end up in the brig.”
“You owe me.”
Chapter 56
OF COURSE THERE ARE other ways into the Ghostlands besides the perimeter checkpoints. Looters have cut the wire fencing. Undocumented Mexicans too. Like pioneers following a trail west to begin anew and take whatever there is to take from the place, mine the ground, plant their crops, hammer together structures to protect them from the elements, to shelter them when they bear their children.
Then there are the freedom fighters—like Max and the Americans—who have tunneled under the perimeter so that they can go hunting. Max writes a blog called AngryAmerican. On it he posts music videos by Toby Keith, rants about closed borders, the effectiveness of torture, the need for lycan internment camps, the worthlessness of the dollar next to the euro. His bio reads, “I’m pissed.” His contact info is listed and every now and then he will receive an email calling him a villain or a hero. Some want to know how to join the fight. Some want to prove him wrong, to convert him. He loves how violent the liberals can get with their language. “I want to see you hang,” one wrote, “alongside the president. And as your faces turn blue and your eyeballs burst and dribble down your faces, I will laugh.”
Then comes the message from a man who wishes to remain anonymous and who works for the government and who wants to help Max in any way that he can. “I know,” he writes, “that you abhor the government for its interference and legion inefficiencies. As do I. I am not a politician, nor am I a bureaucrat. I am more like a missile or a handgun. I come to you as a weapon. And as a friend.”
Now, a few weeks and a few dozen emails later, here they are, in an abandoned Methodist church in the small town of Dorris, along the Oregon-California border. This is where they have been headquartered for the past two months. There was a time when Max believed that writing a letter and handing out flyers and speaking at farmers’ markets and marching on Washington made a difference, but that time is over. He believes in action. He believes in doing.
He has a dozen men who believe the same. They sit in the pews around him. Their heads are shaved. Their shirts are white, their pants khaki, their boots polished black. They do not cuss. They do not drink or smoke or befoul their bodies. They spend several hours a week throwing weights around and riding stationary bikes to thicken their bodies with muscle and ready them for the long-distance running and hand-to-hand combat sometimes necessary in the Ghostlands. The backs of their hands are inked with silver bullets.
A homemade banner hanging from the wall reads FELLOWSHIP. The stained-glass windows glow faintly with moonlight, all their fragmented colors reduced to blue. A kerosene lantern shines on the communion table. The candelabras—lit and set about the room—sputter.
In the basement, through the cinder-block wall, they have built a tunnel fifty feet long and six-by-six-feet square, the sidewalls framed by two-by-four studs. It runs underneath the perimeter fence. It is big enough for them to roll their dirt bikes through to the other side.
In the basement there is also a Ping-Pong table and they have laid upon it their instruments of change: shotguns, machetes, chainsaws, gasoline and matches, baseball bats with spikes nailed into them. Next to it, on the wall, where a quilt once hung, they have hammered scalps. Fifty at last count. Of every color imaginable, but all reddened along the edges. Their own kind of craft.
The Tall Man stands before them now, in a black suit, with his arms held out, like some ghas
tly preacher. He has brought them supplies. Grenades, Glocks, M4s and M16s, a Heckler & Kock PSG1 sniper rifle, and so many crates of ammo, which an hour ago they hauled rattling down the stairs. There is more where this came from. And there are of course conditions to their little arrangement, as he calls it. They will not advertise their presence in the Ghostlands and they will not speak out about any governmental assistance. Their discretion is of course very much valued. And should he call upon them, and he may or may not call upon them, but if he should, they will do as he says. He may have a target, some concentric circles drawn on a paper map he might send them toward to slash through, or he may not. Only time will tell.
His voice is a slow baritone, every word clearly enunciated and separate from the next, notes sprung from a bassoon. “For now, you need not worry about whether what you’re doing is legal. You need only worry about whether it is right. And it is right. I would not be here otherwise.”
Max sits in the front pew, his elbows on his knees, his hands knotted in front of his face, a position of prayer. “Every now and then we get a call. Otherwise, we keep doing what we’re doing. And you’re backing us.”
“You are doing good work. I want to help you to continue to do good work.”
“No government interference?”
“In this uncivil twilight, we make our own choices, we wear our true faces.” And what a face he has, like chewed gum mashed onto a hot sidewalk, a face Max finds equally disturbing and reassuring—reassuring because what you see is what you get. He wears, like he says, his true face. The world would be easier if everyone wore their true face. That’s why he likes John Wayne movies. The villain wears a black hat; the good guy wears a white hat. You know where you stand. But anybody can be a lycan. Your neighbor, your cousin, your waiter, that girl giving you the eye at the post office. They fool you. They wear masks that hide how hairy they are on the inside. Now, at least, they are caged. The perimeter fence cages them. In that way, the Ghostlands might be the best thing that ever happened to this country. The soldiers are turning people away, but Max says let them in, let them all in, and then shoot them where they stand and burn them and scatter the bones.
He wants the Tall Man—who appears to be grinning, though it is hard to tell, his mouth hanging open and swallowing a shadow—to leave. Leave them, leave the weapons. But the Tall Man does not. For a long minute he studies Max with his lidless gaze.
“We good, then?” Max says.
At that the Tall Man tucks his hands in his pockets and gives them all one last assessing look before saying, “Go raise some hell.”
Chapter 57
NEAL DESAI NOTES the time on his wristwatch, 3:20. Seven hours since the generator coughed out. The green glowing face of his watch fades to black. He wonders how long it will be until its battery runs out, until time goes still for him as it has for so many others. He wonders how many clocks stopped at the minute of the blast and how many melted until the numbers were indecipherable. He hopes that his wife and daughter died like this—quickly, in a time-stopping flash—rather than winding down slowly, like him.
He is so hungry. He is not sure when he last ate. Two days ago, three? When he let the last of the rations dissolve on his tongue. His body feels as though it is eating itself. His wristwatch and his belt are notched as far as they can go, his belly concave beneath the canopy of his ribs.
He is not alone. He can feel the thing sitting on the counter, feel it as if it were alive. The vial. He hates it. It is the reason he spent so many thousands of hours in the lab. It is the reason he did not put a gun in his mouth and pull the trigger when the ground shook and the sky lit up and the alarms sounded, when he realized what had happened. It is the reason he has been holed up beneath the ground, waiting, waiting—for what, he no longer knows—his thoughts no longer coming together, frayed at the edges by hunger and isolation.
His whole life people have been telling him how smart he is, but he feels dumb now, too dumb to do it, to end it. For so long Sridavi has been his reason for living—the hours in the lab devoted to her, not to humanity, not to the alleged well-being of the nation, not to any political cause, or so he tells himself, now that she is gone. Now that he lives for the vial, the vaccine.
He was watching television when it happened. Jet-lagged from his time in the Republic. Weary of talking to reporters about the assassination attempt on Chase Williams. He only wanted to tune out. But every station played news of the election and no matter how many times he flipped the channel, he saw the same stupid smirk, heard the same celebratory speech. The idiot had been elected.
This was good for Neal, good for his research—he knew that—but he could not help but feel like an accomplice in some fool’s magic act, part of the illusion everyone wanted to believe in. The American people had sent a message—that’s what the talking heads said. The American people wanted change. The American people wanted to feel safe. Chase Williams meant security and—
From outside came a flash of light, as if a passing truck had clicked on its brights. Then the picture on the television lurched and froze and collapsed into darkness. Three lightbulbs sizzled, then exploded. A teacup shuddered off the counter and shattered against the tile.
He hurried out into the yard in time to see the moon lit red, like some new sun swung into orbit. The sky to the north churned with what could be clouds or could be smoke. His first instinct is to call out for his wife and daughter, but they are gone. Gone to Washington. The direction of the blast. Where Sridavi was supposed to be safe, to heal. He was alone.
By the time he discovered what had happened, by the time he shoved his revolver into the waist of his pants, by the time he packed some food in a duffel and ripped the cords from his computer and hurled them both into the car, it was too late.
The streets were jammed with cars. The night chaotic with honking, screaming. He heard gunfire. He saw pillars of smoke rising from fires lit by arson or short circuit. He didn’t have far to go—the lab only five miles away—but the streets were impassable and he had not filled up on gas, as he meant to the other day, so he worried his quarter of a tank might not be enough to get him through the gridlock. Brake lights colored the night red. He was laying on his horn—trying to blast the traffic unstuck, though he knew it was pointless—when he saw the first lycan.
Neal did not recognize him immediately for what he was. The man seemed drunk or mad or injured because of the swaybacked, loose-limbed way he moved. The streetlamps were dead, so it wasn’t until he stepped into the road, into the sweep of headlights, that Neal noticed the hair, the blunt snout, the blood-bathed teeth. He ripped open the door of a canary-yellow VW bug and climbed in to join the passengers, who flailed their arms and struggled too late with their seat belts.
Neal hit the door locks and glanced suddenly around him. He was in a commercial area and the sidewalks and parking lots were busy with people clustered in groups and hurrying along, all their faces dark and impossible to decipher. There was an alley up ahead that cut between a sandwich shop and a bookstore and he cranked the wheel and pounded the car up on the sidewalk. People dodged out of his way, some of them cursing him, throwing up their arms, knocking a fist into his windshield—and then he was in the alley, rushing past the Dumpsters and splashing through puddles left by yesterday’s rainstorm. His side mirror struck a pipe and ripped off.
When he cut through the other side, to a side street full of saltbox houses with chain-link fences, he spotlighted a long-haired lycan—whether man or woman, he couldn’t tell—hunched over a girl and feeding on the bowl of her belly. He took his foot off the brake and mashed it onto the gas and gritted his teeth against the heavy thud, the rise and fall of the left front wheel when he rocked over and crushed both their bodies.
He saw, in the labyrinthine route he followed to the lab, many more lycans tearing off their clothes and scrabbling about on all fours and tackling passersby. He cranked the radio dial and the few stations that came through told him what he alr
eady knew: this was an uprising. Later, the world would learn that many lycans were as afraid as Neal, as eager to escape, but right now there was the overwhelming sense that the world had gone feral.
The radio told him that the blast originated in the Tri-Cities area, that by all accounts the reactors were in a state of meltdown. He accepted then that his wife and daughter were dead—lost to a blast as severe as the sun’s breath—but did not have time to mourn them, all of his energy focused on the five feet of road unspooling ahead of him.
The Center for Lobos Studies was a galaxy of light. The emergency generators had kicked on when the blackout hit. The parking lot, as expected, was empty. Even the security guards had abandoned their posts, the booth at the gates vacant and brightly lit, a paperback novel laid open to the page its owner thought he would one day return to. Neal drove into the entry lane, his grille nudging the crossbar, before killing the engine. In the sudden silence he noticed he was breathing as if back from a hard run.
Over the past few months, there had been protests staged in the parking lot. Virtually every day, security ended up hauling someone away, someone waving a gun, a knife. More than once, Neal was evacuated due to a bomb scare. Some of them were animal rights protesters and some of them lycan sympathizers and some of them lycans. If this was an uprising, then the center would be in their crosshairs. Neal didn’t think he had much time.
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