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 underand 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
coopted 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
hard case 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