animals . . . they were never found.”
The man-size barn door opened, and Toby stepped into the threshold.
“Daddy?” Shuffling as much as walking, he came to his father and
hugged him fiercely. He grinned at me. “Hello, Christopher.”
“Hi, Toby.”
“Hi, Orson,” the boy said, letting go of his father and dropping to his
knees to greet the dog.
Orson liked Toby. He allowed himself to be petted.
“Come visit,” Toby said.
To Manuel, I said, “There’s a whole new troop now. Not violent like
the first. Or at least . . . not violent yet. All tagged with
transponders, which means they were set loose on purpose. Why?”
“To find the first troop and report their whereabouts. They’re so
elusive that all other attempts to locate them have failed. It’s a
desperation plan, an attempt to do something before the first troop
breeds too large. But this isn’t working, either. It’s just creating
another problem.”
“And not only because of Father Eliot.”
Manuel stared at me for a long moment. “You’ve learned a lot, haven’t
You?”
“Not enough. And too much.”
“You’re right-Father Tom isn’t the problem. Some have sought him
out.
Others chew the transponders out of each other.
This new troop . . . they’re not violent but they’re plenty smart and
they’ve become disobedient. They want their freedom. At any cost.”
Hugging Orson, Toby repeated his invitation to me: “Come visit,
Christopher.”
Before I could respond, Manuel said, “It’s almost dawn, Toby.
Chris has to be going home.”
I looked toward the eastern horizon, but if the night sky was beginning
to turn gray in that direction, the fog prevented me from seeing the
change.
“We’ve been friends for quite a few years,” Manuel said.
“Seems like I owed You some pieces of the explanation. You’ve always
been good to Toby. But You know enough now. I’ve done what’s right
for an old friend. Maybe I’ve done too much. You go on home now.”
Without my noticing, he had moved his right hand to the gun in his
holster. He patted the weapon. “We won’t be watching any Jackie Chan
movies anymore, You and me.”
He was telling me not to come back. I wouldn’t have tried to maintain
our friendship, but I might have returned to see Toby from time to
time.
Not now.
I called Orson to my side, and Toby reluctantly let him go.
“Maybe one more thing,” Manuel said as I gripped the handlebars of my
bike. “The benign animals who’ve been enhanced-the cats, the dogs, the
new monkeys-they know their origins. Your mother….. well, maybe You
could say she’s a legend to them….. their maker . . . almost like
their god. They know who You are, and they revere You. None of them
would ever hurt You. But the original troop and most of the people
who’ve been altered . . . even if on some level they like what they’re
becom “Go home,” Manuel said. “It’ll be light soon.”
“Who ordered Angela Ferryman killed?”
“Go home.”
“Who?”
“No one.”
“I think she was murdered because she was going to try to go public.
She had nothing to lose, she told me. She was afraid of what she was
.
. .
becoming.”
“The troop killed her.”
“Who controls the troop?”
“No one. We can’t evenfind the fuckers.”
I thought I knew one place where they hung out: the drainage culvert in
the hills, where I’d found the collection of skulls. But I wasn’t
going to share this information with Manuel, because at this point I
couldn’t be sure who were my most dangerous enemies: the troop-or
Manuel and the other cops.
“If no one sent them after her, why’d they do it?”
“They have their own agenda. Maybe sometimes it matches ours. They
don’t want the world to know about this, either. Their future isn’t in
undoing what’s been done. Their future is the new world coming. So if
somehow they learned Angela’s plans, they’d deal with her. There’s no
mastermind behind this, Chris. There’re all these factions-the benign
animals, the malevolent ones, the scientists at Wyvern, people who’ve
been changed for the worse, people who’ve been changed for the