“Well, I’m the baby,” she said. “And I’m going to college on scholarship, which is the only way that he’d let me go. Otherwise it would be secretarial school. I hate to say it, but my dad is a bit—well, more than a bit—sexist. My two older sisters married men my dad approved of—men like himself. One married a farmer down in Southern California. They grow avocados and artichokes. The second married a contractor who builds big modern houses in San Jose. And my two brothers: the one runs a feed store—I told you that—and the other is a doctor . . . and he got drafted. His wife, Bonnie, lives with us. She’s a doctor too, and I think that drives my dad crazy, that my mom is effectively raising their baby while Bonnie works.” She glanced over at me, and smiled. “I’m talking a lot. Your turn.”
“I don’t have much to say. I have a dad who . . . well, he’s an asshole. Not like your dad—a man of principles. You can say that your dad is sexist, but my dad is a cheat and a liar. I worked with him at his furniture store, and he cut every corner and raised prices and gouged people when they needed something. The only way he gets away with it is because he’s the only shop in town, and he makes all of his profit off the old-timers who never realized there are other stores in the greater Los Angeles area. I swear, he once sold a desk, and then, when the customer was writing the check, he explained to her that the drawers were an extra five dollars each. I’ve tried to find some way to describe him, and the only thing I can come up with to adequately do the job is just to call him an asshole. He stays out late, and when he finally comes home, well . . .”
She was quiet, and I was beginning to wonder if she had been listening, but she finally spoke.
“That’s why you don’t drink.”
“What?”
“You don’t drink. Because your dad’s a drunk . . . and an asshole.”
I paused. “Well, yeah.”
“Does he hit your mom?”
“What?”
“Does he hit your mom? You don’t have to answer.”
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t like that she could see right through me. But she was right. “Yes.”
“And you?”
“Sometimes.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, and reached over to take my hand.
“It’s—” I said, and then stopped. “It’s okay. I got out of there. I’m not going to be like him. I have to be different. I have to do something real.”
“Well, it’s a good thing that you fell in with us.”
We drove in silence for most of the rest of the way. I fell asleep and dreamed of furniture until she woke me up as the caravan drove through Susanville, the town where she was born. Her ranch was still 45 miles past it, on a turnoff that was obscured from most of the houses and buildings by a small row of hills. Mary went on and on about this water pump and that orchard and I just listened and wondered what lay ahead.
We came to a turnoff with an archway made of three large logs—one standing on each side of the road and one laid across the top. The words GOLDEN PINE RANCH were carved into the crossbeam. A few of the other cars were already there.
“This is it!” Mary said excitedly. She climbed from her seat and ran over to the padlocked gate.
Beyond the gate, I couldn’t see much more than tall green and yellow grass, sloping upward until the crest of the hill got obscured by forest: tall, straight white firs, short and stubby western junipers, and crooked and droopy gray pines. It reminded me of my time with the Forest Service.
Mary unlocked the gate and swung it open. I drove her Buick through after everyone else had gone in; then she closed the gate and put the lock back in place and mashed it closed with the butt of her hand.
“The house is out of sight of the road,” she said, getting in the passenger seat, “or else I’d worry about bringing so many cars in here. The neighbors aren’t close, but they all drive this road.”
We drove over a ridge, the road taking a gentle turn around a cluster of trees.
“Those are some of the tallest gray pines I’ve ever seen,” I said. Mary smiled wistfully.
“I don’t know much about them, but they have huge pinecones. We used to collect them when I was a kid.”
The ranch house was everything I was expecting: a large, gabled house with a wraparound porch. The siding was planks of red cedar, and the railings and window casements were painted white. There was plenty of space in front to park all the cars, and I was the last one to pull into a parking spot.
Everyone got out and stretched. One of the guys—Bruce, maybe 25, his muscled arms covered in tattoos and a well-trimmed goatee on his chin—called out for a beer, and people began unloading their cars. Mary led me to the front door and unlocked it.
“This is where you grew up?”
“Yep,” she said. “Until I was twelve.”
“Cool place.”
The first floor was almost entirely open, with huge tree-trunk posts holding up the floor above. There was a kitchen to the left, and a massive dining table. It almost fit all of us—there were 18 chairs.
John came in from behind us. “Who wants to go shooting?” he asked.
I’d only fired a gun once—people as low on the totem pole as I had been in the Forest Service only carried pepper spray for dealing with rabid raccoons. Game wardens and the occasional park ranger had pistols. The only thing I’d ever shot before was a .22 rifle at Boy Scout camp. Even there, we only got five bullets. Most of that merit badge was about gun safety and maintenance.
“Come here, Mike,” Mary said, and the three of us walked into a dark room. She opened the blinds, and the light revealed a large gun safe in the corner of the bedroom.
“This is my parents’ room,” she said, walking to the safe and bending down to turn the combination lock. She turned the dial one way, then the other, and back, and the safe opened silently to reveal eight guns.
“Can you handle a little kick?” John asked me.
“I guess.” This all seemed a little off. “You guys like to shoot guns a lot?”
John laughed.
“You’ll get the hang of it. Great stress reducer. Let’s take the M14. And the 30.06,” John said, pulling the rifles out of the safe.
Mary took one for herself that John referred to as a Winchester 94. “I got this when I turned ten,” she said.
Thirty minutes later I was at the gun range. We’d gone up a canyon a short way to a spot where the winding dirt road spread out into a wide meadow. There were six of us—John, Mary, me, and three of the people I hadn’t met before today: Molly, a tall, redheaded Berkeley student with an English accent; Larry, a twentysomething full-time bass player for a record studio; and Walter, an unkempt, thick-bearded man who rarely talked, and who had been at John’s side since we’d arrived at the ranch. I couldn’t guess his age—his beard covered so much of his face. But almost everyone in this group was pretty young in general, so I assumed he was maybe somewhere in his thirties.
The gun range was big, with trees marked by orange spray paint that designated the distance—50 to 500 yards.
Walter set up the targets: bottles on fence posts, paper bull’s-eyes stapled to trees, and beer cans placed on fallen logs.
“This is a good gun,” John said to Mary as he inspected the M14. “This is the civilian version of the gun I used in Vietnam. Big bullets. The new M16s are a mess. Jam like crazy, and not as much stopping power. I knew guys who gave up on their guns and used Soviet AK-47s that they took from dead VC.” He sounded so cool, like a badass. I bet John had amazing stories from the war—I hoped he’d tell them at some point this weekend.
Walter came back from the range, and John handed the M14 to me. “You know how to shoot?”
“More or less.” This gun weighed a ton, and I found it hard to sight the targets. This was nothing like the .22 I’d shot as a kid.
“Pick an easy target, one at fifty yards,” John said. “Now, get down on one knee—sit on the side or heel of your right foot. No, don’t rest your elbow
on your knee—just get the elbow as low as you can while aiming. You still want that arm to take the full weight of the gun. It feels a little uncomfortable at first, but it gives you better balance—the recoil’s not as bad.”
I did what he said, folding my right leg under my body. It was weird to be holding such a big gun, but part of me felt like maybe I looked as cool as John.
“Okay, good, now bring the gun up to your face, and press your face into the stock—yeah, like that. Now put your finger on the trigger. Don’t pull on it—that will pull the gun away from your target. So just press the trigger. And do it gently: press until you feel it start to resist, and when you fire, well . . . how to describe it? Surprise yourself with the shot. Don’t anticipate it and tense up—if you do that, when you press the trigger, you’ll flinch and miss. All right, now fire when ready.”
I lined up my sights on a beer bottle and, following John’s advice, I pressed down on the trigger.
The gun jumped, kicking back into my arm more than I expected. And, when I looked down the field, I could see the Budweiser still sitting there.
John grinned at me. “A little bit of a jolt, right? Try it again.”
I obeyed his guidelines and finally hit it on my third shot, the glass bottle shattering. He clapped and laughed, and set down two boxes of ammunition on the rock in front of me. “Knock yourself out.” With that, he walked away and began shooting with his own rifle. Mary was shooting too—her gun had a scope, and she was firing at the far targets. I stood and watched her for a minute, just taking it all in. I knew I was staring, but she was the best shot I’d ever seen. That wasn’t saying much, though—this was all new to me.
Over the next hour, I got better and better at hitting the short-distance targets, and moved on to the long ones, which I missed frequently. We’d run out of cans and bottles by then, so we began aiming at whatever was left—pinecones, stumps, and the orange spray-painted markings on trees. By the time I’d spent all my ammunition, my arms and shoulder ached as if I’d been in a fight. I’d been part of a boxing league when I was a sophomore and junior—it was the one thing my dad had supported me in. Shooting through two boxes of M14 ammo made me feel like I was back in the ring.
When the sun started to set, we headed back to the ranch house. We had a big dinner of steaks and potatoes that Bruce had cooked while we were shooting. Everyone talked and laughed. It felt the way big family dinners are supposed to feel—the way I’d always wanted to feel with my own family. After dinner, we all gathered around a campfire out behind the house, near the banks of a stream. There were logs in place for sitting, and I took a seat next to Tommy. I would have sat by Mary, but I was feeling like I’d been with her all day, and I didn’t want to come on too strong.
“All right, guys,” John said as we were all sitting. “Let’s get this going. You’ve all been working for a month, since the last time we met here, so let’s hear what you’ve found.” He turned to me. “Mike, I know you’re new to the group and don’t really know much about us yet, or what we do. Just watch and listen for now, okay?” What we do? I nodded—what else could I do? Everyone had turned to look at me, and it was like I forgot how to talk for a second. “So,” John said. “Let’s hear it.”
Tommy raised his hand. “I’ve been studying the pyramids at Giza. Found a lot of really weird things. Things that don’t seem to have a ready explanation.”
John pointed at him and said, “Go for it.”
“First, you all know what pi is—the mathematical constant that is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter? People have known about the number for a long time, but there are weird places it shows up. For example, the Great Pyramid: if you take the perimeter of the pyramid and divide it by twice its height, you get pi. Why is that?
“And another thing,” he continued. “The pyramid, like most monumental architecture built in ancient times, was built perfectly north and south, east and west. But the mind-blowing thing is that it wasn’t built using a compass. I mean, the first compasses didn’t show up until two thousand years later anyway, but even so, the pyramid doesn’t point to magnetic north, like it would if they used a compass. It points to true north. How is that even possible?”
What the hell were these guys talking about? Was this some kind of study group? With the Forest Service I’d never witnessed anyone who was camping, fishing, and target shooting who then met around the fire to talk about ancient archaeology.
Barbara, a pretty girl about the age of Kat—22 or so—with a round face and dimples, spoke. “I’ve been reading about the Aztecs, and they have this weird connection to the pyramids in Egypt. First, at Teotihuacan, there’s the Pyramid of the Sun, and its base is almost identical to the main pyramid at Giza. I mean, within inches. It’s crazy. And then there is the Temple of Quetzalcoatl and the Pyramid of the Moon. And those three line up almost perfectly with the three pyramids in Egypt. It’s uncanny. How would two cultures, separated by the Atlantic Ocean and three thousand years, have any knowledge of each other?”
“Well, I’ve been looking into Atlantis,” Larry said, “and there’s—”
“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “Stop.” I hadn’t meant to say anything out loud, but the words just came flying out. “What are we talking about? Ancient architecture? Why do you guys care about the circumference of ancient buildings? Is this a study group or something?”
Everyone was quiet, waiting for John to answer. Mary looked at me and gave me a sympathetic, almost pitying smile.
“Mike,” John finally said. “This is Endgame.”
CHAPTER FOUR
“What the hell are you talking about?” The words came bursting out again. I hadn’t realized how nervous and tense I’d been getting until now. I’d thought the end of the world—I’d thought Endgame—was just a bunch of drunk talk. A few too many beers and talk of war turns to talk of the apocalypse. But this was getting way too real for me way too fast. I felt like I had stumbled into some weird cult.
John stared at me for several seconds. I had no idea what was going through his brain.
Mary stood up. “Can I take you for a walk?”
I looked from John to her, and then one time more.
“I think that’s a great idea,” John said. “But, Mike, I want to make it clear that you’re welcome back to the fire anytime you want so we can talk more about this.”
Mary took my hand, and we left the group and headed back into the house. She led me by the hand out to the front porch, where there was a porch swing. She sat down.
“I thought we were going for a walk.”
“It was a very short walk. Now we can sit here and watch the stars. You don’t see skies like these anywhere near the city.”
I sat down, and her fingers intertwined with mine.
“Do you like the ranch?” she asked.
I paused. “Sure. It’s really nice.”
“Some people like it and some people don’t,” she said. “Larry back there hates that we come out here for retreats. He says all that we’re talking about could be done in someone’s living room, but I think Zero line is different from that.”
“Mary,” I said. “What is all this? I honestly don’t have any idea what I’m doing here.”
“You’re sitting on the porch swing, talking to me.”
I held up my hand, our fingers still interlaced. “I don’t want to ask this, I really don’t, and I hope you won’t be offended.”
She smiled in the moonlight. “Go ahead.”
“Is this a cult?”
She laughed softly.
“No,” she said. “It’s not a cult. Not exactly.”
I looked down at our hands. “I feel like there are a lot of things I should ask you next, but there’s only one thing on my mind right now.”
“What, Mike?”
“Are you pretending to like me so that I’ll join this group?”
She laughed, loud enough that the people around the campfire probably hear
d it.
“No,” she said, still giggling. “No. I’m not pretending. I like you.”
“You latched on to me as soon as I came into the bar.”
“Mike, don’t you know?” she said. “You’re kind of cute.”
I laughed quietly and shook my head. “I’m cute?”
Her smile widened. “Yes.”
“I don’t understand what’s going on here. I don’t understand what Endgame is about. I don’t know why we’re talking about the end of the world. I don’t know why we’re talking about pyramids. When is someone going to be straight with me?”
“We are being straight with you,” Mary said, letting go of my hand and standing up. She walked to the porch’s guardrail and leaned out to look at the stars. “Here’s the thing that you need to understand. Endgame is crazy. I mean, really, really insane. It’s hard to wrap your head around. I’ve been involved with Zero line for about a year, and it took a lot of convincing and an open mind, because it makes you really question the way that the world works. It makes you question the history books. It makes you question church. It makes you question science. But I’ve seen enough that I’m convinced.”
She turned around to face me. “And then, when I was convinced, I felt—I feel—the need to spread the news. It’s like, if you found out that a dam was going to burst, what would you do? Would you just run away?”
She paused, and I thought that she was thinking, but after a minute I realized that she was waiting for me to respond.
“No,” I said. “I wouldn’t run away. I’d warn everyone I could.”
“Exactly,” she said.
“So explain it to me.”
“Let’s go back to the others,” Mary said. “But I want you to know this: I haven’t told everyone else. I haven’t told my parents. I haven’t told my sisters, or Bonnie, or any of my family. They wouldn’t get it. I love them, but they wouldn’t get it. They are too closed-minded.”
“But you told me.”
“Yeah. I hope you know what that means. I haven’t recruited anyone to the ZL. But there’s something about you—I just wanted to tell you so bad. You have the right mind. I knew from the first moment we talked and you told me how important Berkeley was to you. I remember—and this is stupid, but just listen—Bonnie told me once about why she married my brother Hod. She said she was eating Thanksgiving dinner. They’d only started dating a few weeks before. But at dinner she had a butterflake roll. And as she was eating it, she thought, ‘This is delicious. I wish Hod was here to have one.’ She said that was the first time that she really knew they had a connection—because she realized how much she liked him. That’s kind of how I feel about this. We’re still going to tell the world that the dam is breaking—and I’m totally mixing my metaphors here—but you’re the one I wanted to share the butterflake roll with.” She put her hands to the sides of her face. “Am I making any sense at all?”