“Fuel? ”
“Sail.”
“Food? ”
“Fish.”
“Fish can carry the retrovirus, too.”
“Then find a remote island.”
“How remote? ”
“The sphincter of nowhere.”
“And? ”
“Grow our own food.”
“Farmer Bob.”
“Minus the bib overalls.”
“Shit kicker chic.”
“Self-sufficiency. It’s possible, ” he insisted.
“So is killing a grizzly bear with a spear. But you get in a pit with a
spear, put the bear in there with some tortillas, and that bear is going
to have Bobby tacos for dinner.”
“Not if I take a class in bear killing.”
“So before you set sail, you’re going to spend four years at a good
college of agriculture? ” Bobby sucked in a breath deep enough to
ventilate his upper intestine, and blew it out. “All I know is, I don’t
want to end up like Delacroix.”
“Every one ever born into this world ends up like Delacroix, ” I said.
“But it’s not an end. It’s just an exit. To what comes next.” He was
silent a moment. Then, “I’m not sure I believe in that like you do,
Chris.”
“So you believe you can ride through the end of the world by growing
potatoes and broccoli on an uncharted tropical island somewhere east of
Bora Bora, where there’s both insanely fertile soil and mondo glassy
surf but you find it hard to believe in an afterlife?
” He shrugged. “Most days, it’s easier to believe in broccoli than in
God.”
“Not for me. I hate broccoli.” Bobby turned toward the bungalow. His
face crinkled as if he could still detect a trace of decomposing
Delacroix. “This here is one evil piece of real estate, bro.”
Imaginary mites crawled between the layers of my skin as I remembered
the pendulant cocoons, and I had to agree with him, “Bad mojo.”
“Looks super-burnable.”
“Whatever they are, I doubt the cocoons are only in this one bungalow.”
In their sameness and orderly placement, the houses of Dead Town
suddenly seemed less like man-made structures and more like the mounds
of termite colonies or hives.
“Burn this one for starters, ” Bobby insisted.
Hissing in the knee-high grass, ticking-clicking in the dead twigs of
the withered shrubbery, buzzing and rasping in the leaves of the Indian
laurels, the breeze mimicked a multitude of insect sounds, as though
mocking us, as though predicting the inevitability of a future inhabited
solely by six-, eight-, and hundred-legged beings.
“Okay, ” I said. “We’ll burn the place.”
“Too bad we don’t have a nuke.”
“But not now. It’ll draw cops and firemen-from town, and we don’t want
them in our way. Besides, there’s not a lot of the night left.
We’ve got to get moving.” As we followed the walkway toward the street,
he said, “Where? ” I had no idea how to search more effectively for
Jimmy Wing and Orson in the vastness of Fort Wyvern, so I didn’t respond
to his question.
The answer was tucked under the passenger-side windshield wiper on the
Jeep. I saw it as I was rounding the front of the vehicle. It looked
like a parking ticket.
I plucked the item from under the rubber blade and switched on the
flashlight to examine it.
When I got into the passenger seat, Bobby leaned over to study my
discovery. “Who put it there? ”
“Not Delacroix, ” I said, surveying the night, once more overcome by the
feeling that I was being watched.
I was holding a four-inch-square, laminated security badge designed to
be pinned to a shirt or to a coat lapel. The photograph on the right
half was of Delacroix, although this was a different picture from the
one on the driver’s license we had found beside his body. He was
wide-eyed in this shot, startled, as though he had foreseen his suicide
in the flash of the camera. Under the photo was the name Leland Anthony
Delacroix. Listed on the left of the badge were his age, height, weight,
eye color, hair color, and social security number. At the top were the
words initialize on entry. Printed across the entire face of the badge,
in a three dimensional hologram that did not obscure the photograph or
the information under it, were three transparent, pale-blue capital