Fear Nothing

32

With all that had happened during the previous night and with all that loomed in the night to come, I didn’t imagine that we would make love. Sasha couldn’t imagine not making love. Even though she didn’t know the reason for my terror, the sight of me so fearful and so shaken by the thought of losing her was an aphrodisiac that put her in a mood not to be refused.

Orson, ever a gentleman, remained downstairs in the kitchen. We went upstairs to the bedroom and from there into the timeless time and placeless place where Sasha is the only energy, the only form of matter, the only force in the universe. So bright.

Afterward, in a mood that made even the most apocalyptic news seem tolerable, I told her about my night from sundown until dawn, about the millennium monkeys and Stevenson, about how Moonlight Bay was now a Pandora’s box swarming with myriad evils.

If she thought I was insane, she hid her judgment well. When I told her of the taunting by the troop, which Orson and I had endured after leaving Bobby’s house, she broke out in gooseflesh and had to pull on a robe. As she gradually realized fully how dire our situation was, that we had no one to whom we could turn and nowhere to run even if we were allowed to leave town, that we might already be tainted by this Wyvern plague, with effects to come that we could not even imagine, she pulled the collar of the robe tighter around her neck.

If she was repulsed by what I’d done to Stevenson, she managed to suppress her emotions with remarkable success, because when I was finished, when I had told her about even the fragment of the doll’s face that I’d found on her bed, she slipped out of her robe and, although still stippled with gooseflesh, brought me into her light again.

This time, when we made love, we were quieter than before, moved more slowly, more gently than we had the first time. Although tender before, the motion and the act were more tender now. We clung to each other with love and need but also with desperation, because a new and poignant appreciation of our isolation was upon us. Strangely, though we shared a sense of being two condemned people with an executioner’s clock ticking relentlessly, our fusion was sweeter than it had been previously.

Or maybe that isn’t strange at all. Perhaps extreme danger strips us of all pretenses, all ambitions, all confusions, focusing us more intensely than we are otherwise ever focused, so that we remember what we otherwise spend most of our lives forgetting: that our nature and purpose is, more than anything else, to love and to make love, to take joy from the beauty of the world, to live with an awareness that the future is not as real a place for any one of us as are the present and the past.

If the world as we knew it was this minute being flushed away, then my writing and Sasha’s songwriting didn’t matter. To paraphrase Bogart to Bergman: In this crazy future tumbling like an avalanche straight at us, the ambitions of two people didn’t amount to a hill of beans. All that mattered was friendship, love, and surf. The wizards of Wyvern had given me and Sasha an existence as reduced to the essentials as was Bobby Halloway’s.

Friendship, love, and surf. Get them while they’re hot. Get them before they’re gone. Get them while you’re still human enough to know how precious they are.

For a while we lay in silence, holding each other, waiting for time to start flowing again. Or maybe hoping that it never would.

Then Sasha said, “Let’s cook.”

“I think we just did.”

“I mean omelets.”

“Mmmmmm. All those delicious egg whites,” I said, ridiculing her tendency to carry the concept of a healthy diet to extremes.

“I’ll use the whole eggs today.”

“Now I know it’s the end of the world.”

“Cooked in butter.”

“With cheese?”

“Somebody’s got to keep the cows in business.”

“Butter, cheese, egg yolks. So you’ve decided on suicide.”

We were doing cool, but we weren’t being cool.

We both knew it, too.

We kept at it anyway, because to do otherwise would be to admit how scared we were.

The omelets were exceptionally good. So were the fried potatoes and the heavily buttered English muffins.

As Sasha and I ate by candlelight, Orson circled the kitchen table, mewling plaintively and making starving-child-of-the-ghetto eyes at us when we looked down at him.

“You already ate everything I put in your bowl,” I told him.

He chuffed as if astonished that I would make such a claim, and he resumed mewling pitiably at Sasha as though trying to assure her that I was lying, that no food whatsoever had yet been provided him. He rolled onto his back, wriggled, and pawed at the air in an all-out assault of merciless cuteness, trying to earn a nibble. He stood on his hind feet and turned in a circle. He was shameless.

With one foot, I pushed a third chair away from the table and said, “Okay, sit up here.”

Immediately he leaped onto the chair and sat at eager attention, regarding me intently.

I said, “Ms. Goodall here has bought a fully radical, way insane story from me, without any proof except a few months of diary entries by an obviously disturbed priest. She probably did this because she is critically sex crazy and needs a man, and I’m the only one that’ll have her.”

Sasha threw a corner of buttered toast at me. It landed on the table in front of Orson.

He darted for it.

“No way, bro!” I said.

He stopped with his mouth open and his teeth bared, an inch from the scrap of toast. Instead of eating the morsel, he sniffed it with obvious pleasure.

“If you help me prove to Ms. Goodall that what I’ve told her about the Wyvern project is true, I’ll share some of my omelet and potatoes with you.”

“Chris, his heart,” Sasha worried, backsliding into her Grace Granola persona.

“He doesn’t have a heart,” I said. “He’s all stomach.”

Orson looked at me reproachfully, as if to say that it wasn’t fair to engage in put-down humor when he was unable to participate.

To the dog I said, “When someone nods his head, that means yes. When he shakes his head side to side, that means no. You understand that, don’t you?”

Orson stared at me, panting and grinning stupidly.

“Maybe you don’t trust Roosevelt Frost,” I said, “but you have to trust this lady here. You don’t have a choice, because she and I are going to be together from now on, under the same roof, for the rest of our lives.”

Orson turned his attention to Sasha.

“Aren’t we?” I asked her. “The rest of our lives?”

She smiled. “I love you, Snowman.”

“I love you, Ms. Goodall.”

Looking at Orson, she said, “From now on, pooch, it’s not the two of you anymore. It’s the three of us.”

Orson blinked at me, blinked at Sasha, stared with unblinking desire at the bite of toast on the table in front of him.

“Now,” I said, “do you understand about nods and shakes?”

After a hesitation, Orson nodded.

Sasha gasped.

“Do you think she’s nice?” I asked.

Orson nodded.

“Do you like her?”

Another nod.

A giddy delight swept through me. Sasha’s face was shining with the same elation.

My mother, who destroyed the world, had also helped to bring marvels and wonders into it.

I had wanted Orson’s cooperation not only to confirm my story but to lift our spirits and give us reason to hope that there might be life after Wyvern. Even if humanity was now faced with dangerous new adversaries like the members of the original troop that escaped the labs, even if we were swept by a mysterious plague of gene-jumping from species to species, even if few of us survived the coming years without fundamental changes of an intellectual, emotional, and even physical nature — perhaps there was nevertheless some chance that when we, the current champions of the evolutionary game, stumbled and fell out of the race and passed away, there would be worthy heirs who might do better with the world than we did.

Cold comfort is better than none.

“Do you think Sasha’s pretty?” I asked the dog.

Orson studied her thoughtfully for long seconds. Then he turned to me and nodded.

“That could have been a little quicker,” Sasha complained.

“Because he took his time, checked you out good, you know he’s being sincere,” I assured her.

“I think you’re pretty, too,” Sasha told him.

Orson wagged his tail across the back of his chair.

“I’m a lucky guy, aren’t I, bro?” I asked him.

He nodded vigorously.

“And I’m a lucky girl,” she said.

Orson turned to her and shook his head: No.

“Hey,” I said.

The dog actually winked at me, grinning and making that soft wheezing sound that I swear is laughter.

“He can’t even talk,” I said, “but he can do put-down humor.”

We weren’t just doing cool now. We were being cool.

If you’re genuinely cool, you’ll get through anything. That’s one of the primary tenets of Bobby Halloway’s philosophy, and from my current vantage point, post-Wyvern, I have to say that Philosopher Bob offers a more effective guide to a happy life than all of his big-browed competitors from Aristotle to Kierkegaard to Thomas More to Schelling — to Jacopo Zabarella, who believed in the primacy of logic, order, method. Logic, order, method. All important, sure. But can all of life be analyzed and understood with only those tools? Not that I’m about to claim to have met Bigfoot or to be able to channel dead spirits or to be the reincarnation of Kahuna, but when I see where diligent attention to logic, order, and method have at last brought us, to this genetic storm…well, I think I’d be happier catching some epic waves.

For Sasha, apocalypse was no cause for insomnia. As always, she slept deeply.

Although exhausted, I dozed fitfully. The bedroom door was locked, and a chair was wedged under the knob. Orson was sleeping on the floor, but he would be a good early-warning system if anyone entered the house. The Glock was on my nightstand, and Sasha’s Smith & Wesson.38 Chiefs Special was on her nightstand. Yet I repeatedly woke with a start, sure that someone had crashed into the bedroom, and I didn’t feel safe.

My dreams didn’t soothe me. In one of them, I was a drifter, walking alongside a desert highway under a full moon, thumbing a ride without success. In my right hand was a suitcase exactly like my father’s. It couldn’t have been heavier if it had been filled with bricks. Finally, I put it down, opened it, and recoiled as Lewis Stevenson rose out of it like a cobra from a basket, golden light shimmering in his eyes, and I knew that if something as strange as the dead chief could be in my suitcase, something even stranger could be in me, whereupon I felt the top of my head unzipping — and woke up.

An hour before sundown, I telephoned Bobby from Sasha’s kitchen.

“How’s the weather out there at monkey central?” I asked.

“Storm coming in later. Big thunderheads far out to sea.”

“Did you get some sleep?”

“After the jokesters left.”

“When was that?”

“After I turned the tables and started mooning them.”

“They were intimidated,” I said.

“Damn right. I’ve got the bigger ass, and they know it.”

“You have a lot of ammunition for that shotgun?”

“A few boxes.”

“We’ll bring more.”

“Sasha’s not on the air tonight?”

“Not Saturdays,” I said. “Maybe not weeknights anymore, either.”

“Sounds like news.”

“We’re an item. Listen, do you have a fire extinguisher out there?”

“Now you’re bragging, bro. The two of you aren’t that hot together.”

“We’ll bring a couple of extinguishers. These dudes have a thing for fire.”

“You really think it’ll get that real?”

“Totally.”

Immediately after sunset, while I waited in the Explorer, Sasha went into Thor’s Gun Shop to buy ammunition for the shotgun, the Glock, and her Chiefs Special. The order was so large and heavy that Thor Heissen himself carried it out to the truck for her and loaded it in back.

He came to the passenger window to say hello. He is a tall, fat man with a face pitted by acne scars, and his left eye is glass. He’s not one of the world’s best-looking guys, but he’s a former L.A. cop who quit on principle, not because of scandal, an active deacon at his church and founder of — and largest contributor to — the orphanage associated with it.

“Heard about your dad, Chris.”

“At least he’s not suffering anymore,” I said — and wondered just what had been different about his cancer that made the people at Wyvern want to do an autopsy on him.

“Sometimes, it’s a blessing,” Thor said. “Just being allowed to slip away when it’s your time. Lots of folks will miss him, though. He was a fine man.”

“Thanks, Mr. Heissen.”

“What’re you kids up to, anyway? Gonna start a war?”

“Exactly,” I said as Sasha twisted her key in the ignition and raced the engine.

“Sasha says you’re gonna go shoot clams.”

“That’s not environmentally correct, is it?”

He laughed as we pulled away.

In the backyard of my house, Sasha swept a flashlight beam across the craters that had been clawed out of the grass by Orson the previous night, before I’d taken him with me to Angela Ferryman’s.

“What’s he have buried here?” she asked. “The whole skeleton of a T-Rex?”

“Last night,” I said, “I thought all the digging was just a grief reaction to Dad’s death, a way for Orson to work off negative energy.”

“Grief reaction?” she said, frowning.

She’d seen how smart Orson was, but she still didn’t have a full grasp on the complexity of his inner life or on its similarity to our own. Whatever techniques were used to enhance the intelligence of these animals, it had involved the insertion of some human genetic material into their DNA. When Sasha finally got a handle on that, she would have to sit down for a while; maybe for a week.

“Since then,” I said, “it’s occurred to me that he was searching for something that he knew I needed to have.”

I knelt on the grass beside Orson. “Now, bro, I know you were in a lot of distress last night, grieving over Dad. You were rattled, couldn’t quite remember where to dig. He’s been gone a day now, and it’s a little easier to accept, isn’t it?”

Orson whined thinly.

“So give it another try,” I said.

He didn’t hesitate, didn’t debate where to start, but went to one hole and worked to enlarge it. In five minutes, his claws clinked against something.

Sasha directed the flashlight on a dirt-caked Mason jar, and I worked it the rest of the way out of the ground.

Inside was a roll of yellow pages from a legal tablet, held together by a rubber band.

I unrolled them, held the first page to the light, and at once recognized my father’s handwriting. I read only the first paragraph:

“Bingo,” I said.

Rolling up the papers and returning them to the jar, I glanced at the sky. No moon. No stars. The scudding clouds were low and black, touched here and there by a sour-yellow glow from the rising lights of Moonlight Bay.

“We can read these later,” I said. “Let’s move. Bobby’s alone out there.”

33

As Sasha opened the tailgate of the Explorer, shrieking gulls wheeled low overhead, tumbling inland toward safer roosts, frightened by a wind that shattered the sea and flung the wet fragments across the point of the horn.

With the box from Thor’s Gun Shop in my arms, I watched the white wings dwindle across the turbulent black sky.

The fog was long gone. Under the lowering clouds, the night was crystalline.

Around us on the peninsula, the sparse shore grass thrashed. Tall sand devils whirled off the tops of the dunes, like pale spirits spun up from graves.

I wondered if more than the wind had harried the seagulls from their shelter.

“They’re not here yet,” Bobby assured me as he took the two pizza-shop boxes from the back of the Explorer. “It’s early for them.”

“Monkeys are usually eating at this hour,” I said. “Then a little dancing.”

“Maybe they won’t even come at all tonight,” Sasha hoped.

“They’ll come,” I said.

“Yeah. They’ll come,” Bobby agreed.

Bobby went inside with our dinner. Orson stayed close by his side, not out of fear that the murderous troop might be among the dunes even now but, in his role as food cop, to guard against the unfair distribution of the pizza.

Sasha removed two plastic shopping bags from the Explorer. They contained the fire extinguishers that she’d purchased at Crown Hardware.

She closed the tailgate and used the remote on her key chain to lock the doors. Since Bobby’s Jeep occupied his one-car garage, we were leaving the Explorer in front of the cottage.

When Sasha turned to me, the wind made a glorious banner of her lustrous mahogany hair, and her skin glowed softly, as if the moon had managed to press one exquisite beam through the clotted clouds to caress her face. She seemed larger than life, an elemental spirit.

“What?” she said, unable to interpret my stare.

“You’re so beautiful. Like a wind goddess drawing the storm to you.”

“You’re so full of shit,” she said, but she smiled.

“It’s one of my most charming qualities.”

A sand devil did a dervish dance around us, spitting grit in our faces, and we hurried into the house.

Bobby was waiting inside, where the lights were dialed down to a comfortable murk. He locked the front door behind us.

Looking around at the large panes of glass, Sasha said, “I sure wish we could nail some plywood over these.”

“This is my house,” Bobby said. “I’m not going to board up the windows, hunker down, and live like a prisoner just because of some damn monkeys.”

To Sasha, I said, “As long as I’ve known him, this amazing dude hasn’t been intimidated by monkeys.”

“Never,” Bobby agreed. “And I’m not starting now.”

“Let’s at least draw the blinds,” Sasha said.

I shook my head. “Bad idea. That’ll just make them suspicious. If they can watch us, and if we don’t appear to be lying in wait for them, they’ll be less cautious.”

Sasha took the two fire extinguishers from their boxes and clipped the plastic presale guards from the triggers. They were ten-pound, marine-type models, easy to handle. She put one in a corner of the kitchen where it couldn’t be seen from the windows, and tucked the second beside one of the sofas in the living room.

While Sasha dealt with the extinguishers, Bobby and I sat in the candlelit kitchen, boxes of ammunition in our laps, working below table level in case the monkey mafia showed up while we were at work. Sasha had purchased three extra magazines for the Glock and three speedloaders for her revolver, and we snapped cartridges into them.

“After I left here last night,” I said, “I visited Roosevelt Frost.”

Bobby looked at me from under his eyebrows. “He and Orson have a broly chat?”

“Roosevelt tried. Orson wasn’t having any of it. But there was this cat named Mungojerrie.”

“Of course,” he said drily.

“The cat said the people at Wyvern wanted me to walk away from this, just move on.”

“You talk to the cat personally?”

“No. Roosevelt passed the message to me.”

“Of course.”

“According to the cat, I was going to get a warning. If I didn’t stop Nancying this, they’d kill my friends one by one until I did.”

“They’ll blow me away to warn you off?”

“Their idea, not mine.”

“They can’t just kill you? They think they need kryptonite?”

“They revere me, Roosevelt says.”

“Well, who doesn’t?” Even after the monkeys, he remained dubious about this issue of anthropomorphizing animal behavior. But he sure had cranked down the volume of his sarcasm.

“Right after I left the Nostromo,” I said, “I was warned, just like the cat said I would be.”

I told Bobby about Lewis Stevenson, and he said, “He was going to kill Orson?”

From his guard post where he stared up at the pizza boxes on the counter, Orson whined as if to confirm my account.

“So,” Bobby said, “you shot the sheriff.”

“He was the chief of police.”

“You shot the sheriff,” Bobby insisted.

A lot of years ago, he had been a radical Eric Clapton junkie, so I knew why he liked it better this way. “All right. I shot the sheriff — but I did not shoot the deputy.”

“I can’t let you out of my sight.”

He finished with the speedloaders and tucked them into the dump pouch that Sasha had also purchased.

“Bitchin’ shirt,” I said.

Bobby was wearing a rare long-sleeve Hawaiian shirt featuring a spectacular, colorful mural of a tropical festival: oranges, reds, and greens.

He said, “Kamehameha Garment Company, from about 1950.”

Having dealt with the fire extinguishers, Sasha came into the kitchen and switched on one of the two ovens to warm up the pizza.

To Bobby, I said, “Then I set the patrol car on fire to destroy the evidence.”

“What’s on the pizza?” he asked Sasha.

“Pepperoni on one, sausage and onions on the other.”

“Bobby’s wearing a used shirt,” I told her.

“Antique,” Bobby amended.

“Anyway, after I blew up the patrol car, I went over to St. Bernadette’s and let myself in.”

“Breaking and entering?”

“Unlocked window.”

“So it’s just criminal trespass,” he said.

As I finished loading the spare magazines for the Glock, I said, “Used shirt, antique shirt — seems like the same thing to me.”

“One’s cheap,” Sasha explained, “and the other isn’t.”

“One’s art,” Bobby said. He held out the leather holder with the speedloaders. “Here’s your dump pouch.”

Sasha took it from him and snapped it onto her belt.

I said, “Father Tom’s sister was an associate of my mother’s.”

Bobby said, “Mad-scientist-blow-up-the-world type?”

“No explosives are involved. But, yeah, and now she’s infected.”

“Infected.” He grimaced. “Do we really have to get into this?”

“Yeah. But it’s way complex. Genetics.”

“Big-brain stuff. Boring.”

“Not this time.”

Far out to sea, bright arteries of lightning pulsed in the sky and a low throb of thunder followed.

Sasha had also purchased a cartridge belt designed for duck hunters and skeet shooters, and Bobby began to stuff shotgun shells into the leather loops.

“Father Tom’s infected, too,” I said, putting one of the spare 9-millimeter magazines in my shirt pocket.

“Are you infected?” Bobby asked.

“Maybe. My mom had to be. And Dad was.”

“How’s it passed?”

“Bodily fluids,” I said, standing the other two magazines behind a fat red candle on the table, where they could not be seen from the windows. “And maybe other ways.”

Bobby looked at Sasha, who was transferring the pizzas to baking sheets.

She shrugged and said, “If Chris is, then I am.”

“We’ve been holding hands for over a year,” I told Bobby.

“You want to heat your own pizza?” Sasha asked him.

“Nah. Too much trouble. Go ahead and infect me.”

I closed the box of ammo and put it on the floor. My pistol was still in my jacket, which hung on the back of my chair.

As Sasha continued preparing the pizzas, I said, “Orson might not be infected, exactly. I mean, he might be more like a carrier or something.”

Passing a shotgun shell between his fingers and across his knuckles, like a magician rolling a coin, Bobby said, “So when does the pus and puking start?”

“It’s not a disease in that sense. It’s more a process.”

Lightning flared again. Beautiful. And too brief to do any damage to me.

“Process,” Bobby mused.

“You’re not actually sick. Just…changed.”

Sliding the pizzas into the oven to reheat them, Sasha said, “So who owned the shirt before you did?”

Bobby said, “Back in the fifties? Who knows?”

“Were dinosaurs alive then?” I wondered.

“Not many,” Bobby said.

Sasha said, “What’s it made of?”

“Rayon.”

“Looks in perfect condition.”

“You don’t abuse a shirt like this,” Bobby said solemnly, “you treasure it.”

At the refrigerator, I plucked out bottles of Corona for everyone but Orson. Because of his body weight, the mutt can usually handle one beer without getting sloppy, but this night he needed to keep a totally clear head. The rest of us actually needed the brew; calming our nerves a little would increase our effectiveness.

As I stood beside the sink, popping the caps off the beers, lightning tore at the sky again, unsuccessfully trying to rip rain out of the clouds, and in the flash I saw three hunched figures racing from one dune to another.

“They’re here,” I said, bringing the beers to the table.

“They always need a while to get up their nerve,” Bobby said.

“I hope they give us time for dinner.”

“I’m starved,” Sasha agreed.

“Okay, so what’re the basic symptoms of this not-disease, this process?” Bobby asked. “Do we end up looking like we have gnarly oak fungus?”

“Some may degenerate psychologically like Stevenson,” I said. “Some may change physically, too, in minor ways. Maybe in major ways, for all I know. But it sounds as if each case is different. Maybe some people aren’t affected, or not so you’d notice, and then others really change.”

As Sasha fingered the sleeve of Bobby’s shirt, admiring it, he said, “The pattern’s a Eugene Savage mural called Island Feast.”

“The buttons are fully stylin’,” she said, in the mood now.

“Totally stylin’,” Bobby agreed, rubbing his thumb over one of the yellow-brown, striated buttons, smiling with the pride of a passionate collector and with pleasure at the sensuous texture. “Polished coconut shell.”

Sasha got a stack of paper napkins from a drawer and brought them to the table.

The air was thick and damp. You could feel the skin of the storm swelling like a balloon. It would burst soon.

After taking a swallow of the icy Corona, I said to Bobby, “Okay, bro, before I tell you the rest of it, Orson has a little demonstration for you.”

“I’ve got all the Tupperware I need.”

I called Orson to my side. “There are some throw pillows on the living-room sofas. One was a gift from me to Bobby. Would you go get it for him, please?”

Orson padded out of the room.

“What’s going on?” Bobby wondered.

Sitting down with her beer, Sasha grinned and said, “Just wait.” Her.38 Chiefs Special was on the table. She unfolded a paper napkin and covered the weapon with it. “Just wait.”

Every year, Bobby and I exchange gifts at Christmas. One gift each. Because we both have everything we need, value and usefulness are not criteria when we shop. The idea is to give the tackiest items that can be found for sale. This has been a hallowed tradition since we were twelve. In Bobby’s bedroom are shelves on which he keeps the collection of tasteless gifts that I’ve given to him; the only one he finds insufficiently tacky to warrant space on those shelves is the pillow.

Orson returned to the kitchen with this inadequately tacky item in his mouth, and Bobby accepted it, trying to look unimpressed with the dog’s feat.

The twelve-by-eight-inch pillow featured a needlepoint sampler on the front. It was among items that had been manufactured by — and sold to raise funds for — a popular television evangelist. Inside an elaborate border were eight words in scrollwork stitching: JESUS EATS SINNERS AND SPITS OUT SAVED SOULS.

“You didn’t find this tacky?” Sasha asked disbelievingly.

“Tacky, yes,” Bobby said, strapping the loaded ammo belt around his waist without getting up from his chair. “But not tacky enough.”

“We have awesomely high standards,” I said.

The year after I gave Bobby the pillow, I presented him with a ceramic sculpture of Elvis Presley. Elvis is depicted in one of his glitziest white-silk-and-sequins Vegas stage outfits while sitting on the toilet where he died; his hands are clasped in prayer, his eyes are raised to Heaven, and there’s a halo around his head.

In this yuletide competition, Bobby is at a disadvantage because he insists on actually going into gift shops in search of the perfect trash. Because of my XP, I am restricted to mail order, where one can find enough catalogs of exquisitely tacky merchandise to fill all the shelves in the Library of Congress.

Turning the pillow over in his hands, frowning at Orson, Bobby said, “Neat trick.”

“No trick,” I said. “There were evidently a lot of different experiments going on at Wyvern. One of them dealt with enhancing the intelligence of both humans and animals.”

“Bogus.”

“Truth.”

“Insane.”

“Entirely.”

I instructed Orson to take the pillow back where he’d found it, then to go to the bedroom, nudge open the sliding door, and return with one of the black dress loafers that Bobby had bought when he’d discovered that he had only thongs, sandals, and athletic shoes to wear to my mother’s memorial service.

The kitchen was redolent with the aroma of pizza, and the dog gazed longingly at the oven.

“You’ll get your share,” I assured him. “Now scoot.”

As Orson started out of the kitchen, Bobby said, “Wait.”

Orson regarded him expectantly.

“Not just a shoe. And not just a loafer. The loafer for my left foot.”

Chuffing as if to say that this complication was insignificant, Orson proceeded on his errand.

Out over the Pacific, a blazing staircase of lightning connected the heavens to the sea, as if signaling the descent of archangels. The subsequent crash of thunder rattled the windows and reverberated in the cottage walls.

Along this temperate coast, our storms are rarely accompanied by pyrotechnics of this kind. Apparently we were scheduled for a major hammering.

I put a can of red-pepper flakes on the table, then paper plates and the insulated serving pads on which Sasha placed the pizzas.

“Mungojerrie,” said Bobby.

“It’s a name from a book of poems about cats.”

“Seems pretentious.”

“It’s cute,” Sasha disagreed.

“Fluffy,” Bobby said. “Now that’s a name for a cat.”

The wind rose, rattling a vent cap on the roof and whistling in the eaves. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought that I heard, in the distance, the loonlike cries of the troop.

Bobby reached down with one hand to reposition the shotgun, which was on the floor beside his chair.

“Fluffy or Boots,” he said. “Those are solid cat names.”

With a knife and fork, Sasha cut a slice of pepperoni pizza into bite-size pieces and set it aside to cool for Orson.

The dog returned from the bedroom with one loafer in his mouth. He presented it to Bobby. It was for the left foot.

Bobby carried the shoe to the flip-top trash can and disposed of it. “It’s not the tooth marks or the dog drool,” he assured Orson. “I don’t plan ever to wear dress shoes again, anyway.”

I remembered the envelope from Thor’s Gun Shop that had been on my bed when I’d found the Glock there the night before. It had been slightly damp and stippled with curious indentations. Saliva. Tooth marks. Orson was the person who had put my father’s pistol where I would be sure to find it.

Bobby returned to the table and sat staring at the dog.

“So?” I asked.

“What?”

“You know what.”

“I need to say it?”

“Yeah.”

Bobby sighed. “I feel as if one honking huge mondo crashed through my head and just about sucked my brain out in the backwash.”

“You’re a hit,” I told Orson.

Sasha had been fanning one hand over the dog’s share of pizza to ensure that the cheese wouldn’t be hot enough to stick to the roof of his mouth and burn him. Now she put the plate on the floor.

Orson banged his tail against table and chair legs as he set about proving that high intelligence does not necessarily correlate with good table manners.

“Silky,” Bobby said. “Simple name. A cat name. Silky.”

As we ate pizza and drank beer, the three flickering candles provided barely enough light for me to scan the pages of yellow lined tablet paper on which my father had written a concise account of the activities at Wyvern, the unanticipated developments that had spiraled into catastrophe, and the extent of my mother’s involvement. Although Dad wasn’t a scientist and could only recount — largely in layman’s terms — what my mother had told him, there was a wealth of information in the document he had left for me.

“‘A little delivery boy,’” I said. “That’s what Lewis Stevenson said to me last night when I asked what had changed him from the man he’d once been. ‘A little delivery boy that wouldn’t die.’ He was talking about a retrovirus. Apparently, my mother theorized a new kind of retrovirus…with the selectivity of a retrotransposon.”

When I looked up from Dad’s pages, Sasha and Bobby were staring at me blank-eyed.

He said, “Orson probably knows what you’re talking about, bro, but I dropped out of college.”

“I’m a deejay,” Sasha said.

“And a good one,” Bobby said.

“Thank you.”

“Though you play too much Chris Isaak,” he added.

This time lightning didn’t step down the sky but dropped straight and fast, like a blazing express elevator carrying a load of high explosives, which detonated when it slammed into the earth. The entire peninsula seemed to leap, and the house shook, and rain like a shower of blast debris rattled across the roof.

Glancing at the windows, Sasha said, “Maybe they won’t like the rain. Maybe they’ll stay away.”

I reached into the pocket of the jacket hanging on my chair and drew the Glock. I placed it on the table where I could get at it more quickly, and I used Sasha’s trick with the paper napkin to conceal it.

“Mostly in clinical trials, scientists have been treating lots of illnesses — AIDS, cancer, inherited diseases — with various gene therapies. The idea is, if the patient has certain defective genes or maybe lacks certain genes altogether, you replace the bad genes with working copies or add the missing genes that will make his cells better at fighting disease. There’ve been encouraging results. A growing number of modest successes. And failures, too, unpleasant surprises.”

Bobby said, “There’s always a Godzilla. Tokyo’s humming along, all happy and prosperous one minute — and the next minute, you’ve got giant lizard feet stamping everything flat.”

“The problem is getting the healthy genes into the patient. Mostly they use crippled viruses to carry the genes into the cells. Most of these are retroviruses.”

“Crippled?” Bobby asked.

“It means they can’t reproduce. That way they’re no threat to the body. Once they carry the human gene into the cell, they have the ability to neatly splice it into the cell’s chromosomes.”

“Delivery boys,” Bobby said.

“And once they do their job,” Sasha said, “they’re supposed to die?”

“Sometimes they don’t go easily,” I said. “They can cause inflammation or serious immune responses that destroy the viruses and the cells into which they delivered genes. So some researchers have been studying ways to modify retroviruses by making them more like retrotransposons, which are bits of the body’s own DNA that can already copy and slot themselves into chromosomes.”

“Here comes Godzilla,” Bobby told Sasha.

She said, “Snowman, how do you know all this crap? You didn’t get it by looking at those pages for two minutes.”

“You tend to find the driest research papers interesting when you know they could save your life,” I said. “If anyone can find a way to replace my defective genes with working copies, my body will be able to produce the enzymes that repair the ultraviolet damage to my DNA.”

Bobby said, “Then you wouldn’t be the Nightcrawler anymore.”

“Goodbye freakhood,” I agreed.

Above the noisy drumming of the rain on the roof came the patter of something running across the back porch.

We looked toward the sound in time to see a large rhesus leap up from the porch floor onto the windowsill over the kitchen sink. Its fur was wet and matted, which made it look scrawnier than it would have appeared when dry. It balanced adroitly on that narrow ledge and pinched a vertical mullion in one small hand. Peering in at us with what appeared to be only ordinary monkey curiosity, the creature looked quite benign — except for its baleful eyes.

“They’ll probably get annoyed quicker if we pretty much ignore them,” Bobby said.

“The more annoyed they are,” Sasha added, “the more careless they might get.”

Biting into another slice of the sausage-and-onion pizza, tapping one finger against the stack of yellow pages on the table, I said, “Just scanning, I see this paragraph where my dad explains as much as he understood about this new theory of my mother’s. For the project at Wyvern, she developed this revolutionary new approach to engineering retroviruses so they could more safely be used to ferry genes into the patient’s cells.”

“I definitely hear giant lizard feet,” Bobby said. “Boom, boom, boom, boom.”

At the window, the monkey shrieked at us.

I glanced at the nearer window, beside the table, but nothing was peering in there.

Orson stood on his hind legs with his forepaws on the table and theatrically expressed an interest in more pizza, lavishing all his charm on Sasha.

“You know how kids try to play one parent against the other,” I warned her.

“I’m more like his sister-in-law,” she said. “Anyway, this could be his last meal. Ours, too.”

I sighed. “All right. But if we aren’t killed, then we’re setting a lousy precedent.”

A second monkey leaped onto the windowsill. They were both shrieking and baring their teeth at us.

Sasha selected the narrowest of the remaining slices of pizza, cut it into pieces, and placed it on the dog’s plate on the floor.

Orson glanced worriedly at the goblins at the window, but even the primates of doom couldn’t spoil his appetite. He turned his attention to his dinner.

One of the monkeys began to slap a hand rhythmically against the windowpane, shrieking louder than ever.

Its teeth looked larger and sharper than those of a rhesus ought to have been, plenty large enough and sharp enough to help it fulfill the demanding role of a predator. Maybe this was a physical trait engineered into it by the playful weapons-research boys at Wyvern. In my mind’s eye, I saw Angela’s torn throat.

“This might be meant to distract us,” Sasha suggested.

“They can’t get into the house anywhere else without breaking glass,” Bobby said. “We’ll hear them.”

“Over this racket and the rain?” she wondered.

“We’ll hear them.”

“I don’t think we should split up in different rooms unless we’re absolutely driven to it,” I said. “They’re smart enough to know about dividing to conquer.”

Again, I squinted through the window near which the table was placed, but no monkeys were on that section of porch, and nothing but the rain and the wind moved through the dark dunes beyond the railing.

Over the sink, one of the monkeys had managed to turn its back and still cling to the window. It was squealing as if with laughter as it mooned us, pressing its bare, furless, ugly butt to the glass.

“So,” Bobby asked me, “what happened after you let yourself into the rectory?”

Sensing time running out, I swiftly summarized the events in the attic, at Wyvern, and at the Ramirez house.

“Manuel, a pod person,” Bobby said, shaking his head sadly.

“Ugh,” Sasha said, but she wasn’t commenting on Manuel.

At the window, the male monkey facing us was urinating copiously on the glass.

“Well, this is new,” Bobby observed.

On the porch beyond the sink windows, more monkeys started popping into the air like kernels of corn bursting off a hot oiled pan, tumbling up into sight and then dropping away. They were all squealing and shrieking, and there seemed to be scores of them, though it was surely the same half dozen springing-spinning-popping repeatedly into view.

I finished the last of my beer.

Being cool was getting harder minute by minute. Perhaps even doing cool required energy and more concentration than I possessed.

“Orson,” I said, “it wouldn’t be a bad idea if you sauntered around the house.”

He understood and set out immediately to police the perimeter.

Before he was out of the kitchen, I said, “No heroics. If you see anything wrong, bark your head off and come running straight back here.”

He padded out of sight.

Immediately, I regretted having sent him, even though I knew it was the right thing to do.

The first monkey had emptied its bladder, and now the second one had turned to face the kitchen and had begun to loose his own stream. Others were scampering along the handrail outside and swinging from the porch-roof rafters.

Bobby was sitting directly opposite the window that was adjacent to the table. He searched that comparatively calm part of the night with suspicion equal to mine.

The lightning seemed to have passed, but volleys of thunder still boomed across the sea. This cannonade excited the troop.

“I hear the new Brad Pitt movie is really hot,” Bobby said.

Sasha said, “Haven’t seen it.”

“I always wait for video,” I reminded him.

Something tried the door to the back porch. The knob rattled and squeaked, but the lock was securely engaged.

The two monkeys at the sink windows dropped away. Two more sprang up from the porch to take their places, and both began to urinate on the glass.

Bobby said, “I’m not cleaning this up.”

“Well, I’m not cleaning it up,” Sasha declared.

“Maybe they’ll get their aggression and anger out this way and then just leave,” I said.

Bobby and Sasha appeared to have studied withering sarcastic expressions at the same school.

“Or maybe not,” I reconsidered.

From out of the night, a stone about the size of a cherry pit struck one of the windows, and the peeing monkeys dropped away to escape from the line of fire. More small stones quickly followed the first, rattling like hail.

No stones were flung at the nearest window.

Bobby plucked the shotgun from the floor and placed it across his lap.

When the barrage was at its peak, it abruptly ended.

The frenzied monkeys were screaming more fiercely now. Their escalating cries were shrill, eerie, and seemed to have supernatural effect, feeding back into the night with such demonic energy that rain pounded the cottage harder than ever. Merciless hammers of thunder cracked the shell of the night, and once again bright tines of lightning dug at the meat of the sky.

A stone, larger than any in the previous assault, rebounded off one of the sink windows: snap. A second of approximately the same size immediately followed, thrown with greater force than the first.

Fortunately their hands were too small to allow them to hold and properly operate pistols or revolvers; and with their relatively low body weight, they would be kicked head over heels by the recoil. These creatures were surely smart enough to understand the purpose and operation of handguns, but at least the horde of geniuses in the Wyvern labs hadn’t chosen to work with gorillas. Although, if the idea occurred to them, they would no doubt immediately seek funding for that enterprise and would not only provide the gorillas with firearms training but instruct them, as well, in the fine points of nuclear-weapons design.

Two more stones snapped against the targeted window glass.

I touched the cell phone clipped to my belt. There ought to be someone we could call for help. Not the police, not the FBI. If the former responded, the friendly officers on the Moonlight Bay force would probably provide cover fire for the monkeys. Even if we could get through to the nearest office of the FBI and could sound more credible than all the callers reporting abduction by flying saucers, we would be talking to the enemy; Manuel Ramirez said the decision to let this nightmare play itself out had been made at “very high levels,” and I believed him.

With a concession of responsibility unmatched by generations before ours, we have entrusted our lives and futures to professionals and experts who convince us that we have too little knowledge or wit to make any decisions of importance about the management of society. This is the consequence of our gullibility and laziness. Apocalypse with primates.

A still larger stone struck the window. The pane cracked but didn’t shatter.

I picked up the two spare 9-millimeter magazines on the table and tucked one into each of my jean pockets.

Sasha slipped one hand under the rumpled napkin that concealed the Chiefs Special.

I followed her lead and got a grip on the hidden Glock.

We looked at each other. A tide of fear washed through her eyes, and I was sure that she saw the same dark currents in mine.

I tried to smile reassuringly, but my face felt as though it would crack like hard plaster. “Gonna be fine. A deejay, a surf rebel, and the Elephant Man — the perfect team to save the world.”

“If possible,” Bobby said, “don’t immediately waste the first one or two that come in. Let a few inside. Delay as long as you can. Let them feel confident. Sucker the little geeks. Then let me open on them first, teach them respect. With the shotgun, I don’t even have to aim.”

“Yes, sir, General Bob,” I said.

Two, three, four stones — about as hefty as peach pits — struck the windows. The second large pane cracked, and a subsidiary fissure opened off that line, like lightning branching.

I was experiencing a physiological rearrangement that would have fascinated any physician. My stomach had squeezed up through my chest and was pressing insistently at the base of my throat, while my pounding heart had dropped down into the space formerly occupied by my stomach.

Half a dozen more substantial stones, whaled harder than before, battered the two large windows, and both panes shattered inward. With a burst of brittle music, glass rained into the stainless-steel sink, across the granite counters, onto the floor. A few shards sprayed as far as the dinette, and I shut my eyes briefly as sharp fragments clinked onto the tabletop and plopped into the remaining slices of cold pizza..

When I opened my eyes an instant later, two shrieking monkeys, each as large as the one that Angela had described, were already at the window again. Wary of the broken glass and of us, the pair swung inside, onto the granite counter. Wind churned in around them, plucking at their rain-matted fur.

One of them looked toward the broom closet, where the shotgun was usually locked away. Since their arrival, they hadn’t seen any of us approach that cupboard, and they couldn’t possibly spot the 12-gauge balanced on Bobby’s knees, under the table.

Bobby glanced at them but was more interested in the window opposite him, across the table.

Hunched and agile, the two creatures already in the room moved along the counter in opposite directions from the sink. In the dimly lighted kitchen, their malevolent yellow eyes were as bright as the flames leaping on the points of the candle wicks.

The intruder to the left encountered a toaster and angrily swept it to the floor. Sparks spurted from the wall receptacle when the plug tore out of the socket.

I remembered Angela’s account of the rhesus bombarding her with apples hard enough to split her lip. Bobby maintained an uncluttered kitchen, but if these beasts opened cabinet doors and started firing glasses and dishes at us, they could do serious damage even if we did enjoy an advantage in firepower. A dinner plate, spinning like a Frisbee, catching you across the bridge of the nose, might be nearly as effective as a bullet.

Two more dire-eyed creatures sprang up from the porch floor into the frame of the shattered window. They bared their teeth at us and hissed.

The paper napkin over Sasha’s gun hand trembled visibly — and not because it was caught by a draft from the window.

In spite of the shrieking-chattering-hissing of the intruders, in spite of the bluster of the March wind at the broken windows and the rolling thunder and the drumming rain, I thought I heard Bobby singing under his breath. He was largely ignoring the monkeys on the far side of the kitchen, focusing intently on the window that remained intact, across the table from him — and his lips were moving.

Perhaps emboldened by our lack of response, perhaps believing us to be immobilized by fear, the two increasingly agitated creatures in the broken-out windows now swung inside and moved in opposite directions along the counter, forming pairs with each of the first two intruders.

Either Bobby began to sing louder or stark terror sharpened my hearing, because suddenly I could recognize the song that he was singing. “Daydream Believer.” It was golden-oldie teen pop, first recorded by the Monkees.

Sasha must have heard it, too, because she said, “A blast from the past.”

Two more members of the troop climbed into the windows above the sink, clinging to the frames, hellfire in their eyes, squealing monkey-hate at us.

The four already in the room were shrieking louder than ever, bouncing up and down on the counters, shaking their fists in the air, baring their teeth and spitting at us.

They were smart but not smart enough. Their rage was rapidly clouding their judgment.

“Wipeout,” Bobby said.

Here we go.

Instead of scooting backward in his chair to clear the table, he swung sideways in it, rose fluidly to his feet, and brought up the shotgun as if he’d had both military training and ballet lessons. Flame spouted from the muzzle, and the first deafening blast caught the two latest arrivals at the windows, blowing them backward onto the porch, as though they were only a child’s stuffed toys, and the second round chopped down the pair on the counter to the left of the sink.

My ears were ringing as though I were inside a tolling cathedral bell, and although the roar of the gunfire in this confined space was loud enough to be disorienting, I was on my feet before the 12-gauge boomed the second time, as was Sasha, who turned away from the table and squeezed off a round toward the remaining pair of intruders just as Bobby dealt with numbers three and four.

As they fired and the kitchen shook with the blasts, the nearest window exploded at me. Air-surfing on a cascade of glass, a screaming rhesus landed on the table in our midst, knocking over two of the three candles and extinguishing one of them, spraying rain off its coat, sending a pan of pizza spinning to the floor.

I brought up the Glock, but the latest arrival flung itself onto Sasha’s back. If I shot it, the slug would pass straight through the damn thing and probably kill her, too.

By the time I kicked a chair out of the way and got around the table, Sasha was screaming, and the squealing monkey on her back was trying to tear out handfuls of her hair. Reflexively, she’d dropped her.38 to reach blindly behind herself for the rhesus. It snapped at her hands, teeth audibly cracking together on empty air. Her body was bent backward over the table, and her assailant was trying to pull her head back farther still, to expose her throat.

I dropped the Glock on the table and seized the creature from behind, getting my right hand around its neck, using my left to clutch the fur and skin between its shoulder blades. I twisted that handful of fur and skin so fiercely that the beast screamed in pain. It wouldn’t let go of Sasha, however, and as I struggled to tear it away from her, it tried to pull her hair out by the roots.

Bobby pumped another round into the chamber and squeezed off a third shot, the cottage walls seemed to shake as if an earthquake had rumbled under us, and I figured that was the end of the final pair of intruders, but I heard Bobby cursing and knew more trouble had come our way.

Revealed more by their blazing yellow eyes than by the guttering flames of the remaining two candles, another pair of monkeys, total kamikazes, had sprung into the windows above the sink.

And Bobby was reloading.

In another part of the cottage, Orson barked loudly. I didn’t know if he was racing toward us to join the fray or whether he was calling for help.

I heard myself cursing with uncharacteristic vividness and snarling with animal ferocity as I shifted my grip on the rhesus, getting both hands around its neck. I choked it, choked it until finally it had no choice but to let go of Sasha.

The monkey weighed only about twenty-five pounds, less than one-sixth of my weight, but it was all bone and muscle and seething hatred. Screaming thinly and spitting even as it struggled for breath, the thing tried to tuck its head down to bite at the hands encircling its throat. It wrenched, wriggled, kicked, flailed, and I can’t imagine that an eel could have been harder to hold on to, but my fury at what the little fucker had tried to do to Sasha was so great that my hands were like iron, and at last I felt its neck snap. Then it was just a limp, dead thing, and I dropped it on the floor.

Gagging with disgust, gasping for breath, I picked up my Glock as Sasha, having recovered her Chiefs Special, stepped to the broken window near the table and opened fire at the night beyond.

While reloading, apparently having lost track of the last two monkeys in spite of their glowing eyes, Bobby had gone to the light switch by the door. Now he cranked up the rheostat far enough to make me squint.

One of the little bastards was standing on a counter beside the cooktop. It had extracted the smallest of the knives from the wall rack, and before any of us could open fire, it threw the blade at Bobby.

I don’t know whether the troop had been busy learning simple military arts or whether the monkey was lucky. The knife tumbled through the air and sank into Bobby’s right shoulder.

He dropped the shotgun.

I fired two rounds at the knife thrower, and it pitched backward onto the cooktop burners, dead.

The remaining monkey might have once heard that old saw about discretion being the better part of valor, because he curled his tail up against his back and fled over the sink and out the window. I got two shots off, but both missed.

At the other window, with surprisingly steady nerves and nimble fingers, Sasha fumbled a speedloader from the dump pouch on her belt and slipped it into the.38. She twisted the speedloader, neatly filling all chambers at once, dropped it on the floor, and snapped the cylinder shut.

I wondered what school of broadcasting offered would-be disc jockeys courses on weaponry and grace under fire. Of all the people in Moonlight Bay, Sasha had been the sole one remaining who seemed genuinely to be only what she appeared to be. Now I suspected that she had a secret or two of her own.

She began squeezing off shots into the night once more. I don’t know if she had any targets in view or whether she was just laying down a suppressing fire to discourage whatever remained of the troop.

Ejecting the half-empty magazine from the Glock, slamming in a full one, I went to Bobby as he pulled the knife out of his shoulder. The blade appeared to have penetrated only an inch or two, but there was a spreading bloodstain on his shirt.

“How bad?” I asked.

“Damn!”

“Can you hold on?”

“This was my best shirt!”

Maybe he would be all right.

Toward the front of the house, Orson’s barking continued — but it was punctuated now with squeals of terror.

I tucked the Glock under my belt, against the small of my back, picked up Bobby’s shotgun, which was fully loaded, and ran toward the barking.

The lights were on but dimmed down in the living room, as we had left them. I dialed them up a little.

One of the big windows had been shattered. Hooting wind drove rain under the porch roof and into the living room.

Four screaming monkeys were perched on the backs of chairs and on the arms of sofas. When the lights brightened, they turned their heads toward me and hissed as one.

Bobby had estimated that the troop was composed of eight or ten individuals, but it was obviously a lot larger than that. I’d already seen twelve or fourteen, and in spite of the fact that they were more than half crazed with rage and hatred, I didn’t think they were so reckless — or stupid — that they would sacrifice most of their community in a single assault like this.

They’d been loose for two to three years. Plenty of time to breed.

Orson was on the floor, surrounded by this quartet of goblins, which now began to shriek at him again. He was turning worriedly in a circle, trying to watch all of them at once.

One of the troop was at such a distance and angle that I didn’t have to worry that any stray buckshot would catch the dog. Without hesitation, I blew away the creature on which I had a clear line of fire, and the resulting spray of buckshot and monkey guts would cost Bobby maybe five thousand bucks in redecorating costs.

Squealing, the remaining three intruders bounded from one piece of furniture to another, heading toward the windows. I brought down another one, but the third round in the shotgun only peppered a teak-paneled wall and cost Bobby another five or ten grand.

I pitched the shotgun aside, reached to the small of my back, drew the Glock from under my belt, started after the two monkeys that were fleeing through the broken window onto the front porch — and was nearly lifted off my feet when someone grabbed me from behind. A beefy arm swung around my throat, instantly choking off my air supply, and a hand seized the Glock, tearing it away from me.

The next thing I knew, I was off my feet, lifted and tossed as though I were a child. I crashed into a coffee table, which collapsed under me.

Flat on my back in the ruins of the furniture, I looked up and saw Carl Scorso looming over me, even more gigantic from this angle than he actually was. The bald head. The earring. Though I’d dialed up the lights, the room was still sufficiently shadowy that I could see the animal shine in his eyes.

He was the troop leader. I had no doubt about that. He was wearing athletic shoes and jeans and a flannel shirt, and there was a watch on his wrist, and if he were put in a police lineup with four gorillas, no one would have the least difficulty identifying him as the sole human being. Yet in spite of the clothes and the human form, he radiated the savage aura of something subhuman, not merely because of the eyeshine but because his features were twisted into an expression that mirrored no human emotion I could identify. Though clothed, he might as well have been naked; though clean-shaven from his neck to the crown of his head, he might as well have been as hairy as an ape. If he lived two lives, it was clear that he was more attuned to the one that he lived at night, with the troop, than to the one that he lived by day, among those who were not changelings like him.

He held the Glock at arm’s length, executioner style, aiming it at my face.

Orson flew at him, snarling, but Scorso was the quicker of the two. He landed a solid kick against the dog’s head, and Orson went down and stayed down, without even a yelp or a twitch of his legs.

My heart dropped like a stone in a well.

Scorso swung the Glock toward me again and fired a round into my face. Or that was how it seemed for an instant. But a split second before he pulled the trigger, Sasha shot him in the back from the far end of the room, and the crack I heard was the report of her Chiefs Special.

Scorso jerked from the impact of the slug, pulling the Glock off-target. The floor beside my head splintered as the bullet tore through it.

Wounded but less fazed than most of us would have been once shot in the back, Scorso swung around, pumping out rounds from the Glock as he turned.

Sasha dropped and rolled backward out of the room, and Scorso emptied the pistol at the place where she had stood. He kept trying to pull the trigger even after the magazine was empty.

I could see rich, dark blood spreading across the back of his flannel shirt.

Finally he threw down the Glock, turned toward me, and appeared to contemplate whether to stomp my face or to tear my eyes from my head, leaving me blinded and dying. Opting for neither pleasure, he headed toward the broken-out window through which the last two monkeys had escaped.

He was just stepping out of the house onto the porch when Sasha reappeared and, incredibly, pursued him.

I shouted at her to stop, but she looked so wild that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see that dreadful light in her eyes, too. She was across the living room and onto the front porch while I was still getting up from the splintered remains of the coffee table.

Outside, the Chiefs Special cracked, cracked again, and then a third time.

Although it seemed clear now that Sasha could take care of herself, I wanted to go after her and drag her back. Even if she finished Scorso, the night was probably home to more monkeys than even a first-rate disc jockey could handle — and the night was their domain, not hers.

A fourth shot boomed. A fifth.

I hesitated because Orson lay limp, so still that I couldn’t see his black flank rising and falling with his breathing. He was either dead or unconscious. If unconscious, he might need help quickly. He had been kicked in the head. Even if he was alive, there was the danger of brain damage.

I realized I was crying. I bit back my grief, blinked back my tears. As I always do.

Bobby was crossing the living room toward me, one hand clamped to the stab wound in his shoulder.

“Help Orson,” I said.

I refused to believe that nothing could help him now, because even to think such a terrible thing might ensure that it be true.

Pia Klick would understand that concept.

Maybe Bobby would understand it now, too.

Dodging furniture and dead monkeys, crunching glass underfoot, I ran to the window. Silvery whips of cold, windblown rain lashed past the jagged fragments of glass still prickling from the frame. I crossed the porch, leaped down the steps, and raced into the heart of the downpour, toward Sasha, where she stood thirty feet away in the dunes.

Carl Scorso lay facedown in the sand.

Soaked and shivering, she stood over him, twisting her third and last speedloader into the revolver. I suspected that she had hit him with most if not all the rounds that I’d heard, but she seemed to feel she might need a few more.

Indeed, Scorso twitched and worked both outflung hands in the sand, as if he were burrowing into cover, like a crab.

With a shudder of horror, she leaned down and fired one last round, this time into the back of his skull.

When she turned to me, she was crying. Making no attempt to repress her tears.

I was tearless now. I told myself that one of us had to hold it together.

“Hey,” I said gently.

She came into my arms.

“Hey,” she whispered against my throat.

I held her.

The rain was coming down in such torrents that I couldn’t see the lights of town, three-quarters of a mile to the east. Moonlight Bay might have been dissolved by this flood out of Heaven, washed away as if it had been only an elaborate sand sculpture of a town.

But it was back there, all right. Waiting for this storm to pass, and for another storm after this one, and others until the end of all days. There was no escaping Moonlight Bay. Not for us. Not ever. It was, quite literally, in our blood.

“What happens to us now?” she asked, still holding fast to me.

“Life.”

“It’s all screwed up.”

“It always was.”

“They’re still out there.”

“Maybe they’ll leave us alone — for a while.”

“Where do we go from here, Snowman?”

“Back to the house. Get a beer.”

She was still shivering, and not because of the rain. “And after that? We can’t drink beer forever.”

“Big surf coming in tomorrow.”

“It’s going to be that easy?”

“Got to catch those epic waves while you can get them.”

We walked back to the cottage, where we found Orson and Bobby sitting on the wide front-porch steps. There was just enough room for us to sit down beside them.

Neither of my brothers was in the best mood of his life.

Bobby felt that he needed only Neosporin and a bandage. “It’s a shallow wound, thin as a paper cut, and hardly more than half an inch from top to bottom.”

“Sorry about the shirt,” Sasha said.

“Thanks.”

Whimpering, Orson got up, wobbled down the steps into the rain, and puked in the sand. It was a night for regurgitation.

I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I was trembling with dread.

“Maybe we should take him to a vet,” Sasha said.

I shook my head. No vet.

I would not cry. I do not cry. How bitter do you risk becoming by swallowing too many tears?

When I could speak, I said, “I wouldn’t trust any vet in town. They’re probably part of it, co-opted. If they realize what he is, that he’s one of the animals from Wyvern, they might take him away from me, back to the labs.”

Orson stood with his face turned up to the rain, as if he found it refreshing.

“They’ll be back,” Bobby said, meaning the troop.

“Not tonight,” I said. “And maybe not for a way long time.”

“But sooner or later.”

“Yeah.”

“And who else?” Sasha wondered. “What else?”

“It’s chaos out there,” I said, remembering what Manuel had told me. “A radical new world. Who the hell knows what’s in it — or what’s being born right now?”

In spite of all that we had seen and all that we had learned about the Wyvern project, perhaps it was not until this moment on the porch steps that we believed in our bones that we were living near the end of civilization, on the brink of Armageddon. Like the drums of Judgment, the hard and ceaseless rain beat on the world. This night was like no other night on earth, and it couldn’t have felt more alien if the clouds had parted to reveal three moons instead of one and a sky full of unfamiliar stars.

Orson lapped puddled rainwater off the lowest porch step. Then he climbed to my side with more confidence than he had shown when he had descended.

Hesitantly, using the nod-for-yes-shake-for-no code, I tested him for concussion or worse. He was okay.

“Jesus,” Bobby said with relief. I’d never heard him as shaken as this.

I went inside and got four beers and the bowl on which Bobby had painted the word Rosebud. I returned to the porch.

“A couple of Pia’s paintings took some. buckshot,” I said.

“We’ll blame it on Orson,” Bobby said.

“Nothing,” Sasha said, “is more dangerous than a dog with a shotgun.”

We sat in silence awhile, listening to the rain and breathing the delicious, fresh-scrubbed air.

I could see Scorso’s body out there in the sand. Now Sasha was a killer just like me.

Bobby said, “This sure is live.”

“Totally,” I said.

“Way radical.”

“Insanely,” Sasha said.

Orson chuffed.

34

That night we wrapped the dead monkeys in sheets. We wrapped Scorso’s body in a sheet, too. I kept expecting him to sit up and reach out for me, trailing his cotton windings, as though he were a mummy from one of those long-ago movies filmed in an era when people were more spooked by the supernatural than the real world allows them to be these days. Then we loaded them into the back of the Explorer.

Bobby had a stack of plastic drop cloths in the garage, left over from the most recent visit by the painters, who periodically hand-oiled the teak paneling. We used them and a staple gun to seal the broken windows as best we could.

At two o’clock in the morning, Sasha drove all four of us to the northeast end of town and up the long driveway, past the graceful California pepper trees that waited like a line of mourners weeping in the storm, past the concrete Pietà. We stopped under the portico, before the massive Georgian house.

No lights were on. I don’t know if Sandy Kirk was sleeping or not home.

We unloaded the sheet-wrapped corpses and piled them at his front door.

As we drove away, Bobby said, “Remember when we came up here as kids — to watch Sandy’s dad at work?”

“Yeah.”

“Imagine if one night we’d found something like that on his doorstep.”

“Cool.”

There were days of cleanup and repairs to be undertaken at Bobby’s place, but we weren’t ready to bend to that task. We went to Sasha’s house and passed the rest of the night in her kitchen, clearing our heads with more beer and going through my father’s account of the origins of our new world, our new life.

My mother had dreamed up a revolutionary new approach to the engineering of retroviruses for the purpose of ferrying genes into the cells of patients — or experimental subjects. In the secret facility at Wyvern, a world-class team of big brows had realized her vision. These new microbe delivery boys were more spectacularly successful and selective than anyone had hoped.

“Then comes Godzilla,” as Bobby said.

The new retroviruses, though crippled, proved to be so clever that they were able not merely to deliver their package of genetic material but to select a package from the patient’s — or lab animal’s — DNA to replace what they had delivered. Thus they became a two-way messenger, carrying genetic material in and out of the body.

They also proved capable of capturing other viruses naturally present in a subject’s body, selecting from those organisms’ traits, and remaking themselves. They mutated more radically and faster than any microbe had ever mutated before. Wildly they mutated, becoming something new within hours. They had also become able to reproduce in spite of having been crippled.

Before anyone at Wyvern grasped what was happening, Mom’s new bugs were ferrying as much genetic material out of the experimental animals as into them — and transferring that material not only among the different animals but among the scientists and other workers in the labs. Contamination is not solely by contact with bodily fluids. Skin contact alone is sufficient to effect the transfer of these bugs if you have even the tiniest wound or sore: a paper cut, a nick from shaving.

In the years ahead, as each of us is contaminated, he or she will take on a load of new DNA different from the one that anybody else receives. The effect will be singular in every case. Some of us will not change appreciably at all, because we will receive so many bits and pieces from so many sources that there will be no focused cumulative effect. As our cells die, the inserted material might or might not appear in the new cells that replace them. But some of us may become psychological or even physical monsters.

To paraphrase James Joyce: It will darkle, tinct-tint, all this our funanimal world. Darkle with strange variety.

We know not if the change will accelerate, the effects become more widely visible, the secret be exposed by the sheer momentum of the retrovirus’s work — or whether it will be a process that remains subtle for decades or centuries. We can only wait. And see.

Dad seemed to think the problem didn’t arise entirely because of a flaw in the theory. He believed the people at Wyvern — who tested my mother’s theories and developed them until actual organisms could be produced — were more at fault than she, because they deviated from her vision in ways that may have seemed subtle at the time but proved calamitous in the end.

However you look at it, my mom destroyed the world as we know it — but, for all that, she’s still my mom. On one level, she did what she did for love, out of the hope that my life could be saved. I love her as much as ever — and marvel that she was able to hide her terror and anguish from me during the last years of her life, after she realized what kind of new world was coming.

My father was less than half-convinced that she killed herself, but in his notes, he admits the possibility. He felt that murder was more likely. Although the plague had spread too far — too fast — to be contained, Mom finally had wanted to go public with the story. Maybe she was silenced. Whether she killed herself or tried to stand up to the military and government doesn’t matter; she’s gone in either case.

Now that I understand my mother better, I know where I get the strength — or the obsessive will — to repress my own emotions when I find them too hard to deal with. I’m going to try to change that about myself. I don’t see why I shouldn’t be able to do it. After all, that’s what the world is now about: change. Relentless change.

Although some hate me for being my mother’s son, I’m permitted to live. Even my father wasn’t sure why I should be granted this dispensation, considering the savage nature of some of my enemies. He suspected, however, that my mother used fragments of my genetic material to engineer this apocalyptic retrovirus; perhaps, therefore, the key to undoing or at least limiting the scope of the calamity will eventually be found in my genes. My blood is drawn each month not, as I’ve been told, for reasons related to my XP but for study at Wyvern. Perhaps I am a walking laboratory: containing the potential for immunity to this plague — or containing a clue as to the ultimate destruction and terror it will cause. As long as I keep the secret of Moonlight Bay and live by the rules of the infected, I will most likely remain alive and free. On the other hand, if I attempt to tell the world, I will no doubt live out my days in a dark room in some subterranean chamber under the fields and hills of Fort Wyvern.

Indeed, Dad was afraid that they would take me anyway, sooner or later, to imprison me and thus ensure a continuing supply of blood samples. I’ll have to deal with that threat if and when it comes.

Sunday morning and early afternoon, as the storm passed over Moonlight Bay, we slept — and of the four of us, only Sasha didn’t wake from a nightmare.

After four hours in the sack, I went down to Sasha’s kitchen and sat with the blinds drawn. For a while, in the dim light, I studied the words Mystery Train on my cap, wondering how they related to my mother’s work. Although I couldn’t guess their significance, I felt that Moonlight Bay isn’t merely on a roller-coaster ride to Hell, as Stevenson had claimed. We’re on a journey to a mysterious destination that we can’t entirely envision: maybe something wondrous — or maybe something far worse than the tortures of Hell.

Later, using a pen and tablet, I wrote by candlelight. I intend to record all that happens in the days that remain to me.

I don’t expect ever to see this work published. Those who wish the truth of Wyvern to remain unrevealed will never permit me to spread the word. Anyway, Stevenson was right: It’s too late to save the world. In fact, that’s the same message Bobby’s been giving me throughout most of our long friendship.

Although I don’t write for publication anymore, it’s important to have a record of this catastrophe. The world as we know it should not pass away without the explanation of its passing preserved for the future. We are an arrogant species, full of terrible potential, but we also have a great capacity for love, friendship, generosity, kindness, faith, hope, and joy. How we perished by our own hand may be more important than how we came into existence in the first place — which is a mystery that we will now never solve.

I might diligently record all that happens in Moonlight Bay and, by extension, in the rest of the world as the contamination spreads — but record it to no avail, because there might one day be no one left to read my words or no one capable of reading them. I’ll take my chances. If I were a betting man, I’d bet that some species will arise from the chaos to replace us, to be masters of the earth as we were. Indeed, if I were a betting man, I’d put my money on the dogs.

Sunday night, the sky was as deep as the face of God, and the stars were as pure as tears. The four of us went to the beach. Fourteen-foot, fully macking, glassy monoliths pumped ceaselessly out of far Tahiti. It was epic. It was so live.