ensure that it be true.
Pia Klick would understand that concept.
Maybe Bobby would understand it now, too.
Dodging furniture and dead monkeys, crunching glass underfoot, I ran to the window. Silvery whips of cold, windblown rain lashed past the jagged fragments of glass still prickling from the frame. I crossed the porch, leaped down the steps, and raced into the heart of the downpour, toward Sasha, where she stood thirty feet away in the dunes.
Carl Scorso lay facedown in the sand.
Soaked and shivering, she stood over him, twisting her third and last speedloader into the revolver. I suspected that she had hit him with most if not all the rounds that I’d heard, but she seemed to feel she might need a few more.
Indeed, Scorso twitched and worked both outflung hands in the sand, as if he were burrowing into cover, like a crab.
With a shudder of horror, she leaned down and fired one last round, this time into the back of his skull.
When she turned to me, she was crying. Making no attempt to repress her tears.
I was tearless now. I told myself that one of us had to hold it together.
“Hey,” I said gently.
She came into my arms.
“Hey,” she whispered against my throat.
I held her.
The rain was coming down in such torrents that I couldn’t see the lights of town, three-quarters of a mile to the east. Moonlight Bay might have been dissolved by this flood out of Heaven, washed away as if it had been only an elaborate sand sculpture of a town.
But it was back there, all right. Waiting for this storm to pass, and for another storm after this one, and others until the end of all days. There was no escaping Moonlight Bay. Not for us. Not ever. It was, quite literally, in our blood.
“What happens to us now?” she asked, still holding fast to me.
“Life.”
“It’s all screwed up.”
“It always was.”
“They’re still out there.”
“Maybe they’ll leave us alone — for a while.”
“Where do we go from here, Snowman?”
“Back to the house. Get a beer.”
She was still shivering, and not because of the rain. “And after that? We can’t drink beer forever.”
“Big surf coming in tomorrow.”
“It’s going to be that easy?”
“Got to catch those epic waves while you can get them.”
We walked back to the cottage, where we found Orson and Bobby sitting on the wide front-porch steps. There was just enough room for us to sit down beside them.
Neither of my brothers was in the best mood of his life.
Bobby felt that he needed only Neosporin and a bandage. “It’s a shallow wound, thin as a paper cut, and hardly more than half an inch from top to bottom.”
“Sorry about the shirt,” Sasha said.
“Thanks.”
Whimpering, Orson got up, wobbled down the steps into the rain, and puked in the sand. It was a night for regurgitation.
I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I was trembling with dread.
“Maybe we should take him to a vet,” Sasha said.
I shook my head. No vet.
I would not cry. I do not cry. How bitter do you risk becoming by swallowing too many tears?
When I could speak, I said, “I wouldn’t trust any vet in town. They’re probably part of it, co-opted. If they realize what he is, that he’s one of the animals from Wyvern, they might take him away from me, back to the labs.”
Orson stood with his face turned up to the rain, as if he found it refreshing.
“They’ll be back,” Bobby said, meaning the troop.
“Not tonight,” I said. “And maybe not for a way long time.”
“But sooner or later.”
“Yeah.”
“And who else?” Sasha wondered. “What else?”
“It’s chaos out there,” I said, remembering what Manuel had told me. “A radical new world. Who the hell knows what’s in it — or what’s being born right now?”
In spite of all that we had seen and all that we had learned about the Wyvern project, perhaps it was not until this moment on the porch steps that we believed in our bones that we were living near the end of civilization, on the brink of Armageddon. Like the drums of Judgment, the hard and ceaseless rain beat on the world. This night was like no other night on earth, and it couldn’t have felt more alien if the clouds had parted to reveal three moons instead of one and a sky full of unfamiliar stars.
Orson lapped puddled rainwater off the lowest porch step. Then he climbed to my side with more confidence than he had shown when he had descended.
Hesitantly, using the nod-for-
“Jesus,” Bobby said with relief. I’d never heard him as shaken as this.
I went inside and got four beers and the bowl on which Bobby had painted the word
“A couple of Pia’s paintings took some. buckshot,” I said.
“We’ll blame it on Orson,” Bobby said.
“Nothing,” Sasha said, “is more dangerous than a dog with a shotgun.”
We sat in silence awhile, listening to the rain and breathing the delicious, fresh-scrubbed air.
I could see Scorso’s body out there in the sand. Now Sasha was a killer just like me.
Bobby said, “This sure is live.”
“Totally,” I said.
“Way radical.”
“Insanely,” Sasha said.
Orson chuffed.
34
That night we wrapped the dead monkeys in sheets. We wrapped Scorso’s body in a sheet, too. I kept expecting him to sit up and reach out for me, trailing his cotton windings, as though he were a mummy from one of those long-ago movies filmed in an era when people were more spooked by the supernatural than the real world allows them to be these days. Then we loaded them into the back of the Explorer.
Bobby had a stack of plastic drop cloths in the garage, left over from the most recent visit by the painters, who periodically hand-oiled the teak paneling. We used them and a staple gun to seal the broken windows as best we could.
At two o’clock in the morning, Sasha drove all four of us to the northeast end of town and up the long driveway, past the graceful California pepper trees that waited like a line of mourners weeping in the storm, past the concrete
