walls.
Along this temperate coast, our storms are rarely accompanied by pyrotechnics of this kind. Apparently we were scheduled for a major hammering.
I put a can of red-pepper flakes on the table, then paper plates and the insulated serving pads on which Sasha placed the pizzas.
“Mungojerrie,” said Bobby.
“It’s a name from a book of poems about cats.”
“Seems pretentious.”
“It’s cute,” Sasha disagreed.
“Fluffy,” Bobby said. “Now that’s a name for a cat.”
The wind rose, rattling a vent cap on the roof and whistling in the eaves. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought that I heard, in the distance, the loonlike cries of the troop.
Bobby reached down with one hand to reposition the shotgun, which was on the floor beside his chair.
“Fluffy or Boots,” he said. “Those are solid cat names.”
With a knife and fork, Sasha cut a slice of pepperoni pizza into bite-size pieces and set it aside to cool for Orson.
The dog returned from the bedroom with one loafer in his mouth. He presented it to Bobby. It was for the left foot.
Bobby carried the shoe to the flip-top trash can and disposed of it. “It’s not the tooth marks or the dog drool,” he assured Orson. “I don’t plan ever to wear dress shoes again, anyway.”
I remembered the envelope from Thor’s Gun Shop that had been on my bed when I’d found the Glock there the night before. It had been slightly damp and stippled with curious indentations. Saliva. Tooth marks. Orson was the person who had put my father’s pistol where I would be sure to find it.
Bobby returned to the table and sat staring at the dog.
“So?” I asked.
“What?”
“You know what.”
“I need to say it?”
“Yeah.”
Bobby sighed. “I feel as if one honking huge mondo crashed through my head and just about sucked my brain out in the backwash.”
“You’re a hit,” I told Orson.
Sasha had been fanning one hand over the dog’s share of pizza to ensure that the cheese wouldn’t be hot enough to stick to the roof of his mouth and burn him. Now she put the plate on the floor.
Orson banged his tail against table and chair legs as he set about proving that high intelligence does not necessarily correlate with good table manners.
“Silky,” Bobby said. “Simple name. A cat name. Silky.”
As we ate pizza and drank beer, the three flickering candles provided barely enough light for me to scan the pages of yellow lined tablet paper on which my father had written a concise account of the activities at Wyvern, the unanticipated developments that had spiraled into catastrophe, and the extent of my mother’s involvement. Although Dad wasn’t a scientist and could only recount — largely in layman’s terms — what my mother had told him, there was a wealth of information in the document he had left for me.
“‘A little delivery boy,’” I said. “That’s what Lewis Stevenson said to me last night when I asked what had changed him from the man he’d once been. ‘A little delivery boy that wouldn’t die.’ He was talking about a retrovirus. Apparently, my mother theorized a new kind of retrovirus…with the selectivity of a retrotransposon.”
When I looked up from Dad’s pages, Sasha and Bobby were staring at me blank-eyed.
He said, “Orson probably knows what you’re talking about, bro, but I dropped out of college.”
“I’m a deejay,” Sasha said.
“And a good one,” Bobby said.
“Thank you.”
“Though you play too much Chris Isaak,” he added.
This time lightning didn’t step down the sky but dropped straight and fast, like a blazing express elevator carrying a load of high explosives, which detonated when it slammed into the earth. The entire peninsula seemed to leap, and the house shook, and rain like a shower of blast debris rattled across the roof.
Glancing at the windows, Sasha said, “Maybe they won’t like the rain. Maybe they’ll stay away.”
I reached into the pocket of the jacket hanging on my chair and drew the Glock. I placed it on the table where I could get at it more quickly, and I used Sasha’s trick with the paper napkin to conceal it.
“Mostly in clinical trials, scientists have been treating lots of illnesses — AIDS, cancer, inherited diseases — with various gene therapies. The idea is, if the patient has certain defective genes or maybe lacks certain genes altogether, you replace the bad genes with working copies or add the missing genes that will make his cells better at fighting disease. There’ve been encouraging results. A growing number of modest successes. And failures, too, unpleasant surprises.”
Bobby said, “There’s always a Godzilla. Tokyo’s humming along, all happy and prosperous one minute — and the next minute, you’ve got giant lizard feet stamping everything flat.”
“The problem is getting the healthy genes into the patient. Mostly they use crippled viruses to carry the genes into the cells. Most of these are retroviruses.”
“Crippled?” Bobby asked.
“It means they can’t reproduce. That way they’re no threat to the body. Once they carry the human gene into the cell, they have the ability to neatly splice it into the cell’s chromosomes.”
“Delivery boys,” Bobby said.
“And once they do their job,” Sasha said, “they’re supposed to die?”
“Sometimes they don’t go easily,” I said. “They can cause inflammation or serious immune responses that destroy the viruses
“Here comes Godzilla,” Bobby told Sasha.
She said, “Snowman, how do you know all this crap? You didn’t get it by looking at those pages for two minutes.”
“You tend to find the driest research papers interesting when you know they could save your life,” I said. “If anyone can find a way to replace my defective genes with working copies, my body will be able to produce the enzymes that repair the ultraviolet damage to my DNA.”
Bobby said, “Then you wouldn’t be the Nightcrawler anymore.”
“Goodbye freakhood,” I agreed.
Above the noisy drumming of the rain on the roof came the patter of something running across the back porch.
We looked toward the sound in time to see a large rhesus leap up from the porch floor onto the windowsill over the kitchen sink. Its fur was wet and matted, which made it look scrawnier than it would have appeared when dry. It balanced adroitly on that narrow ledge and pinched a vertical mullion in one small hand. Peering in at us with what appeared to be only ordinary monkey curiosity, the creature looked quite benign — except for its baleful eyes.
“They’ll probably get annoyed quicker if we pretty much ignore them,” Bobby said.
“The more annoyed they are,” Sasha added, “the more careless they might get.”
Biting into another slice of the sausage-and-onion pizza, tapping one finger against the stack of yellow pages on the table, I said, “Just scanning, I see this paragraph where my dad explains as much as he understood about this new theory of my mother’s. For the project at Wyvern, she developed this revolutionary new approach to engineering retroviruses so they could more safely be used to ferry genes into the patient’s cells.”
“I definitely hear giant lizard feet,” Bobby said. “Boom, boom, boom, boom.”
At the window, the monkey shrieked at us.
