He picks up the hand again and takes the thumb in his mouth. He sucks on it, then bites down. She does not react, though she wants to scream, to pull away from him. With blood on his lips, he says, “Just a taste of what’s to come.”
She is of no use to the Resistance. She has done nothing to terribly wrong them. Her capture and punishment have everything to do with this one man. This little man made big by his wretched desire. He tells her she is filthy. She is disgusting. She is so vile that he cannot maintain an erection. He tells her she is the reason—she and her wretched niece—they are the reason he is pocked with scars. Scissors, bullets, knives. All instruments of torture he will look forward to introducing her to. His voice softens when he says, “Don’t think I’m going to kill you. That would be too kind. You’re going to be around for a long time, my pet.”
His face hangs over her for a long time, studying her, waiting for some response.
“I know you can hear me,” he says.
A part of her can’t, the part of her that no longer feels alive, and a part of her can, the part of her that remains coiled and ready to spring once given the chance.
* * *
Chase feels extraordinary. He feels better than he has in years. For too long he has felt outside himself, as if he were watching a show on the television across the room, only distantly aware that he was the lead actor fumbling through his lines. Now he is so conscious, hyperattuned to the mottled texture of the wall, the pebble stuck to the tread of his shoe, the rank cloud of perfume trailing a woman down the hall. His belly has shrunk and tightened. The veins are beginning to rise out of his skin again. He grows a beard, despite Buffalo demanding he shave, telling him that the public believes a man with a beard is a man with something to hide. Instead of slumping often into a chair, he paces or runs in place or shadowboxes or pounds out push-ups. He cannot sit still.
The other day, in the West Wing, he met with the secretary of agriculture about food security. He had that dreamy glow about him that comes from two beers on an empty stomach, and he crossed his feet on the desk while she sat across from him smelling like honey and wearing a powder-blue power suit with a black lace bra blooming from her blouse. “The conversation so far has been about oil and uranium. Food and water need to be on the agenda. We’ve lost thousands of hectares of farmland in Oregon and Washington.”
He held a pen in his hand—a big-barreled fountain pen—and he spun it and rolled it between his fingers. He knew she thought he was an idiot. Somehow she looked down her nose at him even when seated. And she explained policies and probabilities with the voice of a kindergarten teacher speaking to a special student, telling him China had 20 percent of the world’s population, but only 7 percent of the arable land, their population outpacing their ability to be self-sustainable with grain production. The Chinese have bailed out Bank of America and Northwestern Mutual. Now they are ramping up their efforts at offshore land acquisition. They have purchased thousands of hectares in Africa and now want to do the same in the U.S. “Don’t allow it,” she said. “Enforce restrictions.” And, on top of that, he needed to put forth a conservation act that would stop suburban sprawl and preserve that land. With fuel costs out of control, locally grown food was no longer a luxury; it was a necessity.
He nodded and smiled and somehow carried on a reasonable conversation with her even though he was about to propose to Congress a revision of the Foreign Investment and National Security Act of 2007 that would lessen oversight on mergers, acquisitions, and takeovers in its specific support of offshore land acquisition by foreign agricultural companies and even though he could only think about what her pearl earring would taste like if he took her ear into his mouth.
The pen spun over and under his fingers—from his thumb to his pinky and back again—and he said, “Thank you. Thank you very much.”
They needed the bailout—he didn’t know what else to do—with an acre of Iowa farmland up to twenty thousand dollars—and he needed to get laid—he could not think about anything else—even days later, during an autoworkers and union leaders rally in Dearborn, Michigan, when he tells the crowd about his 447-billion-dollar jobs package, about fast-tracking economy-boosting initiatives, rolling out infrastructure projects and cutting payroll taxes and social security taxes, taxing capital gains, limiting deductions for the wealthy, and while he speaks, he can only concentrate on the redheaded woman in the front row wearing the Harley-Davidson tank top, so that afterward, when she emerges from the crush of photographers and hand shakers, he allows her to get closer than the Secret Service agents permit, her hand around his neck, her mouth at his ear.
Buffalo has followed him to Michigan. They have three more stops over the next two days in Flint and Ann Arbor and Kalamazoo. In the limo, after the rally, Buffalo clicks on an overhead light and snaps open a copy of the Wall Street Journal and from behind it asks, “What did that woman say to you?”
Chase unstrangles his tie and unbuttons his long-sleeve and tosses them aside. He wears an old white T-shirt with deodorant-stained pits and a hole torn in the belly. Once he arrived in D.C., his wardrobe was no longer his own, his closet and bureau stuffed with pinned shirts and neatly folded triangles of underwear. He hasn’t worn his old clothes for a long time, until now, and the smell of the shirt, of mildewy sweat, reminds him of the breath of some deep, dark place. He likes it.
“She said I was a fool. She said I was a wayward knight. She said I was Don Quixote. She said all it took was somebody to appeal to my elevated sense of worth and importance and I would do whatever they told me to do even if that meant spearing windmills and calling them dragons. That was what she said.”
The pages of the newspaper wither into a crumpled mess. “You just stood there? That whole time? And let her say that to you?”
“Well, to tell you the truth, it was sort of an interesting insult, so I thought I’d stick around to see how it ended.”
“How did it end?”
The rally took place at the Ford Motor Company headquarters and the limo and the police escort leave its gates now and pass through the throng of protesters outside. Their screams can be heard through the windows and over the hiss of the air-conditioning. They make their hands into fists and their mouths into toothy ovals. Their signs read IMPEACH WILLIAMS and THE DEATH OF AMERICA. A noosed doll in a blue suit dangles from a streetlamp.
Chase feels that old familiar anger uncoiling inside him. He wants to kick open the door, break their signs over his knee, piss in their mouths. Instead, he puts his hand on the door as if it needs holding shut and snaps off a line at Buffalo: “She said I could be my own man if only I cut loose that fat leech attached to my ass.”
Now they are past the protesters and cruising the empty, pitted streets of Dearborn, the sky as gray as the concrete stacked all around him. When Chase looks from the window to Buffalo, he sees that his adviser’s eyes have narrowed into slits, his mouth into a white puckered ring. “I see.”
Chase’s anger fades all at once, as if he were a house whose pipes have emptied of hot water. The sight of Buffalo shrinking away from him is too much. His old friend. Maybe his only friend, who is only trying to help.
This past week, it has been difficult to keep calm, to control his pulse, his adrenaline. He nearly crushed a ringing phone with his fist. He nearly knocked over his chair and ripped off his clothes and leapt out a window during a briefing. He nearly pressed one of the interns up against the wall when he saw the way she fit into her skirt. He looks now from the stop sign on the corner to the smudge on his shoe to a fly battering the window to the brown sphere of Buffalo’s eye. He is studying Chase.
Ever since he flushed the Volpexx, Chase has worried his secret would glow red hot and come sizzling out of his chest and reveal his risk, what would amount to betrayal, the possibility that he might come unleashed at any moment and alert the world to his condition. “Sorry,” he says.
* * *
At the center of the fountain is an elev
ated platform on top of which stand stone figures holding hands. Their faces are morose but resilient, chins raised, mouths pinched. Normally their empty eyes would gush tears and splash full the pool below them. But the memorial went dry a long time ago. This is Pioneer Courthouse Square, where the Christmas tree once burned like a torch and dozens lost their lives and where a few hundred lycans now gather.
Magog shakes bags of charcoal into the fountain until it is heaped full. Then he empties three bottles of lighter fluid and sparks a match. A circle of flame rises with the sound of a hundred fists striking a pillow. The high flames lick and blacken the legs of the stone figures before retreating to an orange glow among the whitening coals. Magog uses a shovel to stir them. Then he arranges several grates, upon which he lays venison and mutton and beef, steaks and chops, seasoned with a dry rub he scoops from a metal bowl and applies liberally. Meat sizzles. Smoke spices the air.
The courthouse square is edged by a long line of folding tables. Here are stacks of plates, cups of silverware, bowls of chips and pretzels and candy. Soda. Beer. Apples. Muskmelons. Some of the lycans sit on benches or along the tiered steps. Others huddle in groups. Mostly men dressed in T-shirts, denim, their hair and beards long, their skin as tough and hard as roots. They wear backpacks slung over their shoulders. Their teeth gnash down on chips and snap into apples. Their throats surge when they guzzle Coors and Cokes. Maybe it is the hour of the day—with the sun directly overhead—or maybe it is the bodies all pressed together or the coals brightly burning in the fountain, but the square seems to grow warmer by the second. Their clothes darken with sweat. They drink and then they drink some more. Their conversations grow louder, tangled up with laughter. It has been a long time since they felt normal, since they stood in the open air without worrying about a plane rushing overhead or an arrow whistling from an open window.
All around them stretches downtown Portland, the streets like silent, empty canyons walled in by skyscrapers. The windowsills are mudded with swallow nests and the sidewalks spotted with bird shit. Pollen streaks windows. When the wind blows, dirt flies from sills and awnings like brown banners.
In the square, a drink is spilled, words exchanged. Two men circle each other with their arms out and their backs hunched. Their beards are as black as oil. They tremor into a state of transformation. They leap, drag each other to the ground. Fists thud. Teeth bite. Claws slash. No one makes a move to interfere. It ends soon after it begins, with the winner clamping his mouth around the neck of the other and chewing his way through it, the dying body quaking beneath him as if in a state of frantic sex. The quarrel is over. Laughter and conversation resume. The body remains among them, bleeding out on the bricks.
Balor knows that the Ghostlands are pocketed with good people, with farms and communes run by those who do not want any part of what he has built. And he knows they are not here today. He is surrounded by criminals, animals. Here for food and here for trouble. Which is why he feels no remorse for what will become of them. Soon.
By the time the meat is ready, the lycans are loose and drunk, nearly frenzied with hunger. They eat with abandon. Balor walks among them, shaking hands, grasping shoulders, laying his palm flat against cheeks. They ask him, won’t you eat? And he says soon, soon, but he wants first to make certain everyone is satisfied.
Eventually he situates himself at the heart of the amphitheater and waits there with his hands held before his heart until everyone goes silent. He thanks them. Not only for coming today, but for making such sacrifices, for serving a cause larger than themselves.
A spearhead of geese glides through the skyscrapers that surround them. Their reflections glimmer along the windows and their shadows stream across the square. Balor squints after them and smiles and then says that he is reminded of a story. The story is about a mother goose and her goslings. They were paddling across a pond one day when an osprey circled overhead. It began to dive. At that moment, the mother goose separated herself from her brood. She splashed and cried out noisily, crooking her neck and beating her wings unnaturally so as to appear injured. The osprey changed its course and bulleted into the mother goose and tore her to shreds. The water went red. The goslings lived. The goslings lived because of her sacrifice.
He speaks slowly, letting each word hang in the air before moving on to the next, and by the time he is finished, the coals in the fountain have reduced to ash and most of the lycans in the square now lie silent in various postures of death. They clutch their bellies or their silverware or the meat-speckled bones they gnawed on only moments before.
“Thank you,” he says, so quietly he can barely hear the words himself, “for your sacrifice.”
Magog rattles open the door to the semitrailer, revealing its empty black bed, and they begin to gather and load the bodies.
Chapter 62
PATRICK BLASTS down the middle of the highway, following the meridian through Bend, Redmond, Sisters. He swerves to avoid a dead horse, abandoned cars, fallen branches, mud and scree the spring rains dragged down chutes and across the road.
He guides the bike up and over the Cascade Range and eventually the road levels out in the Willamette Valley, where streams cut through the woods and pool in lowland marshes that give way to blackberry tangles, birch thickets, farmland overgrown with alfalfa and vineyards tangled with weeds, busy with birds that delight in the grapes.
He sees corn growing in straight rows, sees men in the fields with hoes, sees a woman riding a horse, sees a tractor trundling along with a gray scarf of exhaust trailing behind it. At the perimeter he interviewed lycans who spoke about living off the land, who claimed no allegiance to Balor, but this is the first he has seen of it.
He sits straight backed at first and then learns to yield to the road, feeling the asphalt as if he were walking along it, bending his body around turns, the handlebars like an extension of his body. The bike—its beetle-black sheen, its rounded muscular frame, its snarly muffler, its engine humming between his legs, its rich oil smell commingling with the swampy richness of Western Oregon—is a beautiful machine.
He softens the throttle when he enters Eugene. He sees everywhere the face of Chase Williams—on billboards and posters, tacked to trees and telephone poles, taped to the sides of buildings—sun faded and wind ragged and rain blotched. Bits and pieces of his smile fluttering along the gutters. Patrick drives the streets and kicks up behind him mud and leaves and sticks now littering the asphalt as if his bike were a horse divoting the earth with the pounding of its hooves, the neigh and nicker replaced by the Harley’s pop-pop-pop and grumble.
He consults his GPS one more time before finding the center and parking his bike on the wrong side of the street in front of a fire hydrant. Sometimes it feels good to be so wrong. He kills the engine. In the parking lot he spots the rag bundles of a few bodies he cannot decipher as male or female, gray-skinned skeletons.
Beyond the gate there is a mess of rubble from an office building carved out by what appears to be a bomb blast. From where he stands he can see into the building as if it were a rotten piece of honeycomb—gray, pockmarked—with birds buzzing in and out and with papers and desks and chairs spilling out of ragged niches and caverns.
He hears a ping. Something metallic—struck. He sees nothing and guesses it is a bird or the wind, a pebble knocked onto a car hood. Then he hears the noise again. And again. Coming together into a song he recognizes. He spots the man sitting at the base of an oak tree fifteen yards away. The man appears to grow from the nest of roots and he holds in his lap a guitar that looks as if it has been buried and then unearthed years later, the strings rusted and creaking like barbed wire strung across salt flats. He plays another minute, some country song, maybe Cash. When he stops strumming, when the notes still hang in the air, he stands.
“You don’t look like one of us.”
“What do I look like?”
“Like a big American hero guy.”
“I’m not that either.”
Patrick remembers his mother—he remembers Claire—he remembers the old woman who took pity on him in the Republic—he remembers that being a lycan does not automatically qualify someone as a threat. But this man’s smile cuts through his beard like a razor blade. The guitar, dangling from his hand, falls with a hollow bong that trembles around the edges. He begins to shudder all over and rolls his head back and emits a groan.
Patrick does not wait around for him to transform. He tugs the pistol from his belt and fires a bullet into his throat. The man’s hands rise to dam the blood pumping from him. An arterial spurt escapes his fingers. Patrick fires again, this time striking him in the chest. His body falls in a heap next to the guitar.
It is not Patrick’s first, nor will it be the last. That is the way of things now.
When he walks through the gates, when he follows the rubble-strewn pathways and pokes his head into the burned and bombed buildings, the urgency and purposefulness drain out of him. He’s too late. The air reeks of charcoal. And he cannot help but feel—with the heat of the Harley’s exhaust pipes still clinging to him—that he might be smoldering along with the rest of this place.
Pointless. He has come all this way—risked his life, court-martial—for no reason. It’s no wonder that vaccination, once a dominant headline, no longer makes the news or informs any political debate. They lost everything, probably the result of some institution remaining secretive with their intelligence so that they might secure a patent. His body aches from the long ride, his legs shivery, his lower back cramped. A fat black fly orbits his head and he waves it off in annoyance. He doesn’t know what he expected to find. Not a vault harboring some ready-made syringe. But not this either. Not ruins.
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