talent, coordination, and belief in a benign, ordered universe.
“Tandem?” I said, switching off the flashlight as we crossed the front porch. “Since when have you traded wave thrashing for cab driving?”
“Since never. But a little tandem might be sweet.”
If he was going to do some tandem riding, he must have a partner in mind, a particular wahine. Yet the only woman he loves is a surfer and painter named Pia Klick, who has been meditating in Waimea Bay, Hawaii, trying to find herself, for almost three years, since leaving Bobby’s bed one night for a walk on the beach. Bobby didn’t know she was lost until she called from an airliner on her way to Waimea to say the search for herself had begun. She is as kind, gentle, and intelligent as anyone I have ever known, a talented and successful artist. Yet she believes that Waimea Bay is her spiritual home — not Oskaloosa, Kansas, where she was born and raised; not Moonlight Bay, where she fell in love with Bobby — and lately she claims that she is the incarnation of Kaha Huna, the goddess of surfing.
These were strange times even before the catastrophe in the Wyvern labs.
We stopped at the foot of the porch steps and took slow deep breaths to purge ourselves of the reek of death, which seemed to have permeated us as though it were a marinade in which we had been steeping. We also took advantage of the moment to survey the night before venturing farther into it, looking for Big Head, the troop, or a new threat that even I, in full hyperdrive of the imagination, could not envision.
Rolling off the loom of the Pacific, two strata of cross-woven clouds, as twilled as gabardine, now dressed more than half the sky.
“Could get a boat,” Bobby said.
“What kind of boat?”
“We could afford whatever.”
“And?”
“Stay at sea.”
“Extreme solution, bro.”
“Sail by day, party by night. Drop anchor off deserted beaches, catch some tasty tropical waves.”
“You, me, Sasha, and Orson?”
“Pick up Pia at Waimea Bay.”
“Kaha Huna.”
“Won’t hurt to have a sea goddess aboard,” he said.
“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.”
“Shitkicker 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.”
“Everyone 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
“Department of Defense,” I said, because my mom had possessed a DOD security clearance, although I’d never seen a badge like this in her possession.
“‘Initialize on entry,’” Bobby said thoughtfully. “Bet there’s a microchip implanted in this.”
He’s computer literate, but I never will be. I have no need for a computer, and with my biological clock ticking faster than yours, I have no time for one. Besides, while wearing heavy-duty sunglasses, I can’t easily read a monitor. Sitting for long sessions in front of a screen, you are bathed in low-level UV radiation no more dangerous to you than a spring rain; because of my susceptibility to cumulative damage, however, exposure to those emissions is liable to transform me into one giant lumpy melanoma of such peculiar squishy dimensions that I’ll never be able to
