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 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 in more
pizza, lavishing all his
“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.
theatrically expressed an charm on Sasha.
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-spinningpopping 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