12.21

junkers every few feet. A pickup truck had crashed through the brick wall, directly into a store. The lawn area between the pavement and the beach was strewn with dozens of yellow T-shirts with the logo VENICE, WHERE ART MEETS CRIME printed across them.

Approaching the Freak Show just off the walk, Stanton saw something moving out front. On the steps, a two-headed iguana jerked back and forth. The glass doors to the building had been smashed in by looters, and the animals had gotten out.

The iguana scurried back up into the Freak Show building. Stanton followed.

Inside, everything was destroyed.

The room reeked of formaldehyde spilling out from broken preservation jars. A two-headed garter snake lay dead beneath an overturned pedestal. No trace of the other animals. Stanton ran to the small office in back. Neither Monster nor the Electric Lady was there. The laptop that his friend always had with him was smashed into pieces on the desk, and Monster’s windbreaker lay abandoned on the small cot.

* * *

STANTON FELT HOLLOW as he headed back home. Inside, there was an obstacle course of equipment and power cords hooked up to the portable generator they’d brought in. Drying racks and centrifuges sat on the floor, beside furniture half covered by plastic sheets.

Davies and Thane stood in the kitchen, sipping the last of the coffee from a machine hooked up to the generator. “Where’d you go?” Davies asked. “Quick surf? Ice cream cone? I hear the salted caramel is delicious at N’ice Cream.”

Stanton ignored him. “No one came by at any point when I wasn’t here, did they?”

Monster knew where Gabe lived from an Art Walk event Stanton had once invited him to. Maybe, if he’d been in trouble…

Davies shook his head. “Expecting trick-or-treaters? I suppose I must look like I’m dressed for Halloween.” He was wearing an old button-down and a pair of Stanton’s khakis while he washed his own clothes. Seeing Davies dressed down was like the final sign that the world had come undone.

Stanton turned to Thane. “You all right?”

“Ready to do this thing.”

“Speaking of,” Davies said, “got a tiny bright spot for you. I think the antibodies are finished sooner than we thought.”

The high-powered microscope in the dining room ran on a second electric generator. Stanton stared into the eyesights. After injecting the knockout mice with VFI, they’d placed antibodies the animals produced into a test tube with more of the diseased human prions, and the results were astounding. Every slide here showed protein transformation that was either slowed or halted entirely.

Davies motioned at Thane. “Now all she has to do is inject them into her friends’ IVs and not get caught.”

Thane’s condition for participating was that the test group consist of her sick friends and colleagues from Presbyterian Hospital. She knew she was taking a risk with their lives if the antibody didn’t work. She also knew it was the only chance they had.

“How long will it be until we know something?” she asked.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Stanton said. “The preparations won’t be ready for another twelve hours.”

Davies smiled. “Anyone want to go work on their tan?”

“And then?” Thane asked.

“If it works, we should see some results within a day,” Stanton said.

“And if it doesn’t?”

“Don’t know about you Yanks,” Davies said, “but if it doesn’t, I for one am going to find a way out of this godforsaken country.”

TWENTY

HE HAD DECIDED TO BUILD THEIR CITY IN THE VERDUGO MOUNTAINS because of its spiritual significance to the Tongva—the people of the earth—who ruled the L.A. basin for thousands of years before the arrival of the Spanish. On a twenty-acre plot, which he had convinced L.A. County to sell during the budget crisis, he and his daykeeper and their growing community of followers had quietly built fifteen small stone abodes, each capable of housing up to four members. They had won the necessary permits, befriended the regular hikers, and filed the documents of incorporation for a self-sustaining agrarian community twenty miles outside the city.

“We did this,” he’d told them just a month ago, while his daykeeper looked on with pride. “All of us. Together.” And he meant it. They had done it, even if some of the twenty-six men, women, and now two children born into the community didn’t realize their own part in the achievement. That day, a few of them had asked him to speak from the hilltop, rather than from the humble doorstep of his house. But he had just smiled. “There might be a king among us someday,” he’d told them, “but not today, and it’s certainly not me.”

Once he’d been a soldier. He’d spent most of his life in the deserts: Arizona, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia. The first time they’d sent him to Guatemala, he could barely breathe the wet air. Could barely handle being trapped beneath the teeming tree canopy that sucked up all the light. But then he had fallen in love with the place. Not with Guatemala City and its thieves and beggars; not with the soldiers he was sent to train, with their unearned swagger. He fell in love with the hidden world of the jungle.

At first, the indigenas were blurry figures on the sides of the rural roads, hardly looking up from their labor as he hurtled by in a military jeep. But then he explored the ruins of Tikal and Copan on his weekends off base. He read about the culture that survived the conquistadores and then centuries of men like him sent to destroy it. He began to understand the prophecies of their ancestors, how much they’d understood about the secret ways of the world. By the time he met the daykeeper, he knew what he had to do.

Because he had been a soldier, he understood the value of firm command, and he’d used it to bring his followers under his sway. But command could do only so much, he also knew. A soldier learned to follow his leader anywhere, at any cost. That taught men to win battles, but it did not make for enduring cultures. It did not teach habitual followers to become leaders and priests, to set the foundations of a city that would survive longer than he and the daykeeper. Their followers who pleaded with him to climb hilltops and give speeches did it because they needed orders. They needed someone to rule from above. They had built a city from scratch with their bare hands, yet they were terrified of building a civilization. They’d sacrificed so much for their beliefs—family, jobs, and more—and now a very frightening thing had happened: They’d been proven right.

He stared out the window of his little house in the mountains, maybe for the last time. After all the preparation, all the planning, these hills had turned out not to be the refuge they’d needed. Remote as it was, it was still in the quarantine zone, among the thousands dying in this city and the tens of thousands more who would be dying soon. He would have to lead his people to a place they knew only from books, and he knew not all of them would survive the journey.

He turned his eyes from the window and composed his expression so that even these senior members—the two men and one woman who now sat around this dining table—would see only inspiring certainty.

“Eighteen months of construction,” Mark Lafferty was saying. “And now we’re going to have to start all over again.”

Lafferty was a middle-aged structural engineer who’d grown up near Three Mile Island, which entitled him to a tragic outlook. He was useful, though. He’d supervised all this construction.

Instead of responding, their leader stood up with a flourish and paced the little room. They watched him appear to gather his thoughts. Sometimes it made him sad how easy it was to play on people’s desire for command. If he didn’t have the daykeeper to talk to, he’d be bored out of his mind.

“Mark,” he said, “look at the fantastic job you all did here. Imagine how much better you’ll do once you can use the original materials. Clay, wood, proper thatch. And we’ll have more room to grow down there too. Much