“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, coopted. 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.
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 dried past the graceful iveway,
California pepper trees that waited like a line of mourners weeping in
the storm, past the concrete Pietd. We stopped under the portico