lights were not sufficient to entirely define the vessel, I was sure
that I had never seen anything quite like it in these parts.
It made me uneasy, though not uneasy enough to go home and hide under my
bed.
The waves were tasty, six to eight feet from trough to crest.
The off shore flow was just strong enough to carve them into modest
barrels, and in the moonlight, the foam glimmered like mermaids’ pearl
necklaces.
Sasha and Bobby paddled out to the break line, and I took the first
watch on shore, with Orson and Mungojerrie and two shotguns.
Though the Mystery Train might not exist any longer, my mom’s clever
retrovirus was still at work. Perhaps the promised vaccine and cure were
on the way, but people in Moonlight Bay were still becoming. The coyotes
couldn’t have crunched up the entire troop, a few Wyvern monkeys, at
least, were out there somewhere, and not feeling kindly about us.
Using the first-aid kit that Sasha had brought, I gently cleaned Orson’s
abraded pasterns with antiseptic and then coated the shallow cuts with
Neosporin. The laceration on his left cushion, near his nose, was not as
bad as it had first looked, but his ear was a mess.
In the morning, I would have to try to get a vet to come to the house
and give us an opinion about the possibility of repairing the broken
cartilage.
Although the antiseptic must have stung, Orson never complained.
He is a good dog and an even better person.
“I love you, bro, ” I told him.
He licked my face.
I realized that, from time to time, I was looking left and right along
the beach, half expecting monkeys but even more prepared for the sight
of Johnny Randolph strolling toward me. Or Hodgson in his spacesuit,
face churning with parasites. After reality had been so thoroughly cut
to pieces, perhaps it could never again be stitched back together in the
old, comfortable pattern. I couldn’t shake the feeling that, from now
on, anything could happen.
I opened a beer for me and one for Orson. I poured his into a bowl and
suggested he share some of it with Mungojerrie, but the cat took one
taste and spat with disgust.
The night was mild, the sky was deep with stars, and the rumble of the
point-break surf was like the beating of a mighty heart.
A shadow passed across the fat moon. It was only a hawk, not a gargoyle.
That creature with black leather wings and a whiplike tail had also been
graced with two horns, cloven hooves, and a face that was hideous
largely because it was human, too human to have been plugged into that
otherwise grotesque form. I’m pretty sure drawings of such creatures can
be found in books that date back as far as books have been printed, and
under most if not all of those drawings, you will find the same caption,
demon.
I decided not to think about that anymore.
After a while, Sasha came out of the surf, panting happily, and Orson
panted back at her as though he thought she was trying to converse.
She dropped on the blanket beside me, and I opened a beer for her.
Bobby was still thrashing the night waves.
“See that ship out there? ” she asked.
“Big.”
“We paddled a little farther out than we needed to. Got just a little
closer look. It’s U. S. Navy.”
“Never saw a battleship anchored around here before.”
“Something’s up.”
“Something always is.” A chill of premonition passed through me.
Maybe a cure and a vaccine were forthcoming. Or maybe the big brains had
decided the only way to cover up the fiasco at Wyvern and obscure the
source of the retrovirus was to scrub the former base and all of
Moonlight Bay off the map.
Scrub it away with a thermonuclear brush that even viruses couldn’t
survive.
Might the wider public believe, if properly prepared, that any nuclear
event obliterating Moonlight Bay was the work of terrorists?
I decided not to think about that anymore.
“Bobby and I are going to set a date, ” I said. “Gotta get married now,