I said, “Boosted Jimmy right out of his bedroom, through a window.”
“So Lilly called you?”
“I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, biking by right after the abb did the deed.”
“How’d you get from there to here?”
“Orson’s nose.”
I told him about the abb, the kidnapper, whom I’d encountered under the warehouse.
He frowned. “You said yellow eyes?”
“Yellow-brown, I guess.”
“Shine-in-the-dark yellow?”
“No. Brownish yellow, burnt amber, but the natural color.”
Recently, we’d encountered a couple of men in whom radical genetic changes had occurred, guys in the process of becoming something more or less than human, who appeared for the most part normal but whose otherness was betrayed by brief but detectable flashes of animal eyeshine. These people are driven by strange, hateful needs, and they are capable of extreme violence. If Jimmy was in the hands of one of these, then the list of outrages to which he might be subjected was even longer than the savageries that a standard-issue sociopath might have in mind.
“You recognize this abb?” I asked Bobby.
“You say about thirty, black hair, yellow eyes, built like a fireplug?”
“Neat little baby teeth.”
“Not my type.”
“I never saw him before, either,” I said.
“Twelve thousand people in town.”
“And this isn’t a dude who’s a beachhead,” I said, meaning we wouldn’t have seen him hanging out with surfers. “So he could still be local and we wouldn’t know.”
For the first time all night, a breeze sprang up, a gentle onshore flow that brought to us a faint but bracing scent of the sea. In the park across the street, the oaks became conspiratorial, plotting together in whispers.
Bobby said, “Why did this abb bring Jimmy here of all places?”
“Maybe privacy. To do his thing.”
“I’d like to do my thing, Cuisinart the creep.”
“Plus the weirdness of this place probably feeds his dementia.”
“Unless it’s more directly connected to Wyvern.”
“Unless. And Lilly’s worried about the guy on the news.”
“What guy?”
“Kidnaps kids, locks them away. When he gets three or five or whatever from one community, then he burns them all at once.”
“Stuff like this is why I don’t listen to news these days.”
“You’ve never listened to news.”
“I know. But I used to have different reasons.” Looking around at the night, Bobby said, “So where would they be now?”
“Anywhere.”
“Maybe this is more ‘anywhere’ than we can handle.”
He hadn’t looked at the rearview mirror recently, so I turned in my seat to check things out behind us.
Bobby said casually, “Saw a monkey on the way in.”
Taking the air freshener off my ear and looping its string over the mirror again, I said, “Just one? I didn’t know they traveled alone.”
“Me neither. I turned a corner in Dead Town, and there it was, running across the street, caught in the headlights. This little freakin’ dude. Not your ordinary evolutionary link, missing or otherwise.”
“Different?”
“Maybe four feet tall.”
Apparently, there were refrigeration coils in my spine.
All the rhesuses we had seen thus far had been about two feet tall. They were trouble enough. At four feet, they would constitute a different magnitude of threat.
“Major head,” Bobby said.
“What?”
“Four feet tall, big head.”
“How big?”
“I didn’t try to measure it for a hat.”
“Give me a guess.”
“Maybe as big as yours or mine.”
“On a four-foot body.”
“Top-heavy. And misshapen.”
“Grisly,” I said.
“Hard-core grisly.”
Bobby leaned forward over the steering wheel, squinting through the windshield.
About a block away, something was moving. About the size of a monkey. Slowly and fitfully approaching.
Putting one hand on the shotgun, I said, “What else?”
“That’s all I saw, bro. It was way fast.”
“Something new.”
“Maybe soon there’s gonna be a bunch of that.”
“Tumbleweed,” I said, identifying the approaching object.
Neither of us relaxed.
With the moon down, it was easy to imagine that the park across the street was swarming with phantasmagorical figures under—and high in—the massive oaks.
When I described my encounter with the gang that had almost caught me in the bungalow, Bobby said, “Thirty? Man, they’re busy breeders.”
I told him about their use of the flashlight and the manhole hook.
“Next,” he said, “they’ll be driving cars, trying to date our women.”
He finished his beer and handed the empty bottle to me, which I planted upside down in the ice chest.
From somewhere along the street came a soft, rhythmic creaking. It was probably just one of the shop signs swinging on its mountings, disturbed by the breeze.
“So Jimmy could be anywhere in Wyvern,” Bobby said. “What about Orson?”
“The last I heard him barking, I think it was coming from here in Dead Town somewhere.”
“Here on Commissary Way or over in the houses?”
“I don’t know. Just this direction.”
“Lot of houses over there.” Bobby looked toward the residential streets on the far side of the park.
“Three thousand.”
“Say like four minutes a house…Take us nine or ten days, searching around the clock, to go through all of ’em. And you don’t do day work.”
“Orson’s probably not in any of the houses.”
“But we have to start somewhere. So where?”
I didn’t have an answer. Besides, I didn’t trust myself to speak without my voice cracking.
“You think Orson is with Jimmy? We find one, we find both?”
I shrugged.
“Maybe this is one time we should tell Ramirez what we know,” Bobby suggested.
Manuel Ramirez was the current chief of police in Moonlight Bay. He had once been a good man, but like all the cops in town, he had been co-opted by higher authorities.
“Maybe,” Bobby said, “in this case, Manuel’s interests are the same as ours. He’s got the manpower for a search.”
“He’s not just corrupted by the feds,” I said. “He’s becoming.”
Becoming. That’s the word some of the genetically afflicted use to describe the physical, mental, and emotional changes that are taking place in them—but only once those changes have passed the subtle stage and reached a crisis.
Bobby was surprised. “He tell you he’s becoming?”
“He says he isn’t. But there’s something wrong with him. I don’t trust Manuel.”
“Hell, I don’t entirely trust me,” Bobby said, which put into words our greatest fear—that we might not merely become infected with the retrovirus but that we might start becoming something less than human without being aware of the changes taking place.
I sucked down the last of the Heineken, jammed the empty bottle into the ice chest.
“We gotta find Orson,” I said.
“We will.”
“Crucial, bro.”
“We will.”
Orson is no ordinary dog. My mother brought him home from the Wyvern lab when he was a puppy. Until recently, I didn’t realize where fur face had come from or how special he was, because my mom didn’t tell me and because Orson was good at keeping his secrets. The intelligence-enhancement experiments were conducted on monkeys and on hardcase lifers transferred from military prisons, but also on dogs, cats, and other animals.
I’ve never given Orson an IQ test; pencils aren’t designed for paws, and because he lacks the complex larynx of a human being, he isn’t capable of speech. He understands everything, however, and in his own way he makes himself understood. He is smarter than the monkeys.
I suspect he possesses human-level intelligence. At least.
Earlier, I suggested that the monkeys hate us because we gave them the ability to dream but not the means to fulfill their dreams, leaving them lost outside the natural order. But if this explains their hostility and thirst for violence, why should Orson, who is also outside the natural order, be so affectionate and good-hearted?
He is trapped in a body that serves his enhanced intelligence less well than the monkeys’ bodies serve them. He has no hands, as they have, and his vision is comparatively weak, as is that of any domesticated breed of canine.
The monkeys have the communal comfort of the troop, but Orson endures in a terrible solitude. Though more dogs as smart as Orson might have been created, I’ve yet to encounter another. Sasha, Bobby, and I love him, but we are too little comfort, because we can never truly share his point of view, his experience. Because he is, at least for now, a singularity, Orson lives with a profound loneliness that I can perceive but never fully comprehend, loneliness that is with him even when he is among his friends.
Maybe his basic doggie nature explains why he doesn’t share the monkeys’ hatred and rage. I think dogs were put in this world to remind humanity that love, loyalty, devotion, courage, patience, and good humor are the qualities that, with honesty, are the essence of admirable character and the very definition of a life well lived.
In good Orson I see the hopeful side of my mother’s work, the real potential of science to bring light into an often dark world, to lift us up, to stir the spirit and to remind us that the universe is a place of wonder and infinite potential.
She did, in fact, hope to accomplish great things. She aligned herself with a biological-weapons project solely because this was the only way to obtain the high level of funding needed to realize her design for a gene-splicing retrovirus, which she believed could be used to cure many illnesses and inherited disorders—not least of all, my XP.
You see, my mom didn’t destroy the world without good reason. She did it trying to help me. Because of me, all of nature is now poised on the brink. Maternal love became the wellspring of ultimate terror.
So…you want to talk about your conflicted feelings for your mother?
Orson and I are her sons. I am the fruit of her heart and womb. Orson is the fruit of her mind, but she created him as surely as she created me. We are brothers. Not just figuratively. We are bound not by blood but by our mother’s passions, and in that sense we share one heart.
If anything were to happen to Orson, a part of me would die—the purer part, the better part—and die forever.
“Gotta find him,” I repeated.
“Faith, bro,” Bobby said.
He reached for the key in the ignition, but before he could switch on the engine, a sound arose, louder than the soft million-tongue flutter of leaves in the breeze, swelling by the second.
Bobby put one hand on the Smith & Wesson in his lap.
I didn’t draw my pistol because I knew what I was hearing. The beating of wings. Many wings.
Like wind-torn shingles from Heaven’s roof, the voiceless flock came out of the night, tumbling down in a clatter and whirl of wings more than half a block away, then flying parallel to the pavement, following the street, streaking in our direction. The hundred birds I’d seen earlier were surely part of this apparition, but another hundred had joined them, perhaps two hundred.
Bobby decided against the revolver and snatched the shotgun from between the seats.
“Ice it down,” I told him.
He gave me an odd look. Usually, he’s the one advising me to stay cool.
Seventeen years of friendship ensure that he takes me seriously, but he chambered a round in the shotgun nevertheless.
Spread the width of the street, the flock swept over us, no more than six feet above our heads. I had the sense that they were flying with astonishing precision, arranged in formations so orderly as to be uncanny. An aerial view of the entire swarm might reveal patterns intriguing because of their unnatural degree of complex order—but also disturbing because they would seem simultaneously meaningful and indecipherable.
Bobby ducked, but I gazed up into the dark churning cloud of wings and feathered breasts, trying to determine if there were species other than nighthawks in these multitudes. The poor light and the blur of movement made it difficult to conduct even a cursory census.
By the time the last of the enormous flock soared past, not a single bird had dived at us or shrieked. Their passing had such an otherworldly quality that I almost felt as though I had been hallucinating, but a sprinkling of feathers in the Jeep and along the blacktop confirmed the reality of the experience.
Even as the last small bits of fluffy down descended on the breeze, Bobby threw open the driver’s door and scrambled from the Jeep. He was still gripping the shotgun when he turned to stare after the departing flock, although he was holding the weapon in one hand now, muzzle pointed at the pavement, with no intention of using it.
I got out of the Jeep, too, and watched as the birds swooped up from the end of the street, arcing high across a sea of stars, disappearing into the blackness between those distant suns.
“Totally awesome,” Bobby said.
“Yeah.”
“But…”
“Yeah.”
“Feels a little sharky, too.”
I knew what he meant. This time the birds radiated more than the sorrow that I had felt before. Although the flock’s choreography had been breathtaking, even exhilarating, and although their amazing conspiracy of silence seemed to express and to inspire an odd sort of reverence, something dangerous lay under their performance, the same way that a sun-spangled blue sea could look so totally sacred even while great whites churned in a feeding frenzy just under the surface. This felt a little sharky.
Although the nighthawks had climbed out of sight, Bobby and I stood staring at the constellation into which they had vanished, as if we were in full-on early Spielberg, waiting for the mother ship to appear and bathe us in white light only slightly less intense than God sheds.
“Saw it before,” I told him.
“Bogus.”
“True.”
“Insane.”
“Maximum.”
“When?”
“On my way here,” I said. “Just the other side of the park. But the flock was smaller.”
“What’re they doing?”
“I don’t know. But here they come again.”
“I don’t hear them.”
“Me neither. Or see’em. But they’re coming.”
He hesitated, then slowly nodded and said, “Yeah,” when he felt it, too.
Stars over stars under stars. A larger light that might have been Venus. One, two, three closely grouped flares as small meteors hit the atmosphere and were incinerated. A small winking red dot moving east to west, perhaps an airliner sailing along the interface between our sea of air and the airless sea between worlds.
I was almost prepared to question my instinct, when, at last, the flock returned from the same part of the sky into which it had risen out of sight. Incredibly, the birds swept down into the street and past us in a helix, corkscrewing along Commissary Way, boring through the night in a whirr of wings.
This exhibition, this incredible stunt, was so thrilling that inevitably it inspired wonder, and in wonder is the seed of joy. I felt my heart lift at this amazing sight, but my exhilaration was constrained by the continuing perception of a wrongness in the birds’ behavior that was separate from the charming novelty of it.
Bobby must have felt the same way, because he couldn’t sustain the brief laugh of delight with which he first greeted the sight of the spiraling flock. His smile dried out a
s his laugh withered, and he turned to stare after the departing nighthawks with a cracking expression that was becoming less grin than grimace.
Two blocks away, the birds twisted up into the sky, like the withdrawing funnel of a fading tornado.
Their aerobatics had required strenuous effort; the beating of their wings had been so furious that even as the drum-like pounding diminished, I could feel the reverberations of it in my ears, in my heart, in my bones.
The birds soared out of sight once more, leaving us with just the whisper of the onshore breeze.
“It’s not over,” Bobby said.
“No.”
Quicker than before, the birds returned. They didn’t reappear from the point at which they had vanished; instead, they came from high over the park. We heard them before we saw them, and the sound that heralded their approach was not the drumming of wings but an unearthly shrieking.
They had broken their vow of silence, exploded it. Screeching, churring, whistling, screaking, shrilling, cricking, they hurtled down out of the stars. Their tuneless skirling was sharp enough to make my ears sting as though lanced, and the note of misery was so piercing that my soul seemed to shrivel around the cold shank of this wounding sound.
Bobby didn’t even begin to raise the shotgun.
I didn’t reach for my pistol, either.
We both knew the birds weren’t attacking. No anger resonated in their cries, only a wretchedness, a desolation so deep and bleak that it was beyond despair.
Plummeting behind this blood-freezing wail, the birds appeared. They engaged in none of their previous aerobatics, forsaking even a simple formation, swarming gracelessly. Only speed mattered to them now, because speed alone served their purpose, and they dived, wings back, using gravity like a slingshot.
With a purpose that neither Bobby nor I foresaw, they shrieked across the park, across the street, and rocketed unchecked into the face of a two-story building three doors from the movie theater in front of which we stood. They hit the structure with such brutal force that the pock-pock-pock of their bodies smashing against the stucco sounded like relentless automatic-weapons fire; combined with their shrill cries, this barrage nearly drowned out the brittle ringing of the shattered window glass.