Demons (29 page)

There was a burst of cynical laughter from the state security men in the next room, as someone tossed off a witticism in Turkic. The sudden sound seemed to push Melissa to the edge of some inner furnace she hadn’t known was there. She felt she would fall in, incinerate in her terror for Marcus, her sense of abandonment by the forces that had guided her life till now. Nyerza patted her shoulder. The thin, dark man in khakis and wire-rims remained standing by the door, watching quietly.

But I am here at the place we have journeyed so far to be at,
she told herself.
We are safe for now. There is help for Marcus here. Perhaps.

Or perhaps the old man was just another charlatan. There were so many.

Then he opened his eyes and gestured for Melissa to come and prop the boy up. She knelt awkwardly beside her son and lifted his limp head and shoulders. Marcus moaned and opened his eyes a crack. The old man held the open jar to the boy’s mouth, tipped in a spoonful or two—and the boy recoiled, coughing, shaking his head, making a face.

“No—it’s—
no!
”—

“You will drink it, boy, yes,” the old man said gently. “You drank something that was bad for you; now drink something good, even if it tastes bad. That is often the way of it.”

“No! Mama, it’s going to make me throw up.”

“What is this stuff, please?” Melissa asked.

The old man shrugged. “Herbs. Some good quality, infused. A long story.”

“This is more response than we’ve had from Marcus for some time,” Nyerza pointed out. “After a few sips.”

She nodded slowly. “Marcus? Please? We don’t have time to get to a hospital.”

Marcus tried to squirm away from the jar, covering his mouth. “No!”

“Okay,” said the mustachioed old man. He gestured to the younger man—his assistant, Melissa supposed—and spoke a few words in his own tongue. The assistant smiled and brought from the fireplace an old-fashioned bellows. Marcus’s eyes widened as the old man went on. “Okay, boy—your name is Marcus, yes?—we put the medicine here, in this pumping thing, and—” he made two duck-quacking sounds close together “—it goes up your behind. We don’t need your cooperation for such. Now, Hiram, bring the butter. We will use it to get the instrument in. Turn the boy over.”

He said all this with a straight face, but Melissa hoped desperately that he was bluffing.

Whether he was bluffing or not, it worked. Marcus shook his head, popped his mouth open wide. Keeping his poker face, the old man put the jar to the boy’s lips, and Marcus drank. He gagged, choked, but swallowed half the dark brew. “That is enough, I think,” said the old man. “Hold the boy up against you in your arms. Pray for him. He will sleep.”

Marcus shuddered deeply, and closed his eyes. He began to relax against her.

The dervish winked again at Melissa and gestured to his assistant. The two of them bustled out, taking the jar with them.

Melissa looked at Nyerza in puzzlement.

Nyerza chuckled. “So the old fellow fooled you, too, out on the road?”

She nodded. “I guess he did.”

He whispered, “He knew if he seemed to want us here, the government’s thugs would take us away. But if he demanded that they take us away, they would bring us here. He’s used to dealing with them. He is the man we have come here to see.”

Ash Valley, California

Stephen was standing at the edge of a muddy pool, watching Death as it floated, slowly turning, on the stained surface of the water. There were two dead mallards, a male and a female, floating on their sides, their eyes milky, tucked nose to tail with each other, turning in an eddy as if deliberately doing a grotesque imitation of a yin-yang symbol. Flies clung to them like swamped sailors on a life raft. But looking closer, he realized that most of the flies were dead, too.

The clouds shifted, and the light with them, so the wetlands pool mirrored the thin cloud cover, looking like the interior of an abalone shell. And in the reflection the two dead birds seemed to float in the sky like some forgotten ancient symbol of cosmic decay.

Stephen shook himself.
Get a grip, Stevie boy—focus!
He turned to look for Dickinham and Glyneth.

They were about fifty feet away, hunkered down at the pool’s edge with the sampling equipment, both of them wearing rubber gloves that protected them up to their elbows, preventing contact with the contaminated water.

Glyneth glanced up at him as he walked over, her expression sadly amused. “It seems the stuff works,” she said dryly, turning to look at the water where two red-winged blackbirds, three dragonflies, and a stiff frog floated, half tangled together in an association they would never have tolerated in life. The animals weren’t long dead—only since the rain had flushed the fields above the floodplain that morning—and there was just a slight odor of rot plus another scent, perhaps from the faintly iridescent, oily slick that clung around them.

“Yes, it works, a treat!” Dickinham said without irony, clearly pleased as he used the grabber to place a dead dragonfly into a test tube. He put the tube into a red-plastic case, like a fishing tackle box, that he’d set on a low boulder by the rushes.

“Is there something I can do?” Stephen asked dutifully.

“Today, just observe,” Dickinham said. “The job has to be done with the right toxics protocol, or you can accumulate the Dirvane on yourself, make yourself . . . queasy. Tomorrow you can help us with the osterizing scanner.”

“Osterizing scanner?”

“It cuts things up, purees ‘em like a blender—animals, plants—and tells you what their chemical components are.”

“Ah. Crocker said you’d be checking to see if the stuff breaks down prematurely,” Stephen said.

“Right.”

Looking at the dead animals, Stephen added, “Looks to me like it doesn’t break down soon at all. It’s definitely sticking around and doing its job.”

“Not sure, though, if it’s staying at the levels of concentration we want to see.”

“What sort of pest are we aiming at here?” Glyneth asked, straightening up from her sample collector. “Mosquitoes or Mothra?”

“Oh, a broad spectrum,” Dickinham said absently, using a touch pen to write something on a digital clipboard. “Kinda like one of those heavy-duty broad-spectrum antibiotics but for agricultural pests and not bacteria. Of course, I’ve always thought of unnecessary bugs and animals as just, you know, the bigger disease organisms of agriculture. Well, come on. Let’s head up into town, get some lunch.”

Unnecessary bugs and animals?
Stephen thought. One of the first things he’d learned in college was that they were almost all necessary, in some way, to the food chain, the biosphere. But he’d since learned to be skeptical of making such assumptions at West Wind. Its scientists delighted in pointing to the resilience of nature. Sometimes, though, he worried about it. Very quietly.

Dickinham picked up his red-plastic case and headed away from the water, trudging up the muddy trail between the terraces of rice fields above the wetlands. Stephen started to follow, then held back, distracted by a rattling among the rushes and swampy reeds. With an inexplicable feeling of gladness, he turned to peer at the rushes, watching them shake as something tried to thrash its way free. “Something, anyway,” he murmured. He didn’t say the rest aloud:
Something, anyway, had survived here.

Then the reeds across the muddy channel began to dance—and a dog, a mud-spattered retriever, splashed blindly out of the rushes, coming from the island of mud on the farther side. There was something desperate in the way it thrashed toward them, its head making unnatural, spastic movements, jaws now and then snapping at the air. The frantic animal made it to the open water but seemed to bog down anyway, though a large retriever like this should have been able to swim comfortably. There was red foam, he saw, trailing from its muzzle, and its eyes had the milky glaze he’d seen on the ducks.

“Jeezus,” Stephen whispered, taking a step back. “Is it rabid?”

Glyneth shook her head, pointing at the dead birds. “Were they all rabid? No.”

As he and Glyneth watched, the dog whimpered and coughed, paddled in a circle, clearly confused, more and more weakly with each motion of its legs—and then it shuddered, ceasing to swim . . . and sank.

Instinctively, Stephen started toward the water, as if to wade in after the distressed dog—but, quickly peeling off a tainted rubber glove, Glyneth caught up with him and gripped his elbow. “Uh-uh, no—don’t go in that water.”

He hesitated, watching the water bubbling where the retriever had sunk, as the dog drowned.

“What was it doing out here?” he wondered aloud. “We’re quite a way from any houses.”

“Dirvane 17 attacks the central nervous system. I guess it got a dose somewhere, got confused, wandered out here,” Glyneth muttered, her voice hoarse.

The dog suddenly bobbed to the surface of the murk, onits side—rigid, its jaws open, head twisted to one side—and began to slowly drift in circles, looking as if it were already locked in rigor mortis, though it could only just have died. It turned in the syrup-slow eddy, beside the dead mallards and the dead frog and the dead dragonflies.

Stephen tore his sickened gaze away, and trudged with Glyneth up the muddy path. He didn’t allow himself to run.

“You’re not hungry?” Dickinham asked, with surprise, as they pulled up to the drive-up order window of Burger Urge.

“No, still, um, full from breakfast,” Stephen said.

“I mean, if you’re worried about the local produce, these fast-food people ship everything in.”

“No, I just . . .”

“Can I help you?” the talking plastic burger on the ordering sign asked them.

“Yes,” Dickinham replied briskly. “An Urgent Burger, a double strawberry shake, fries, and—Glyneth?”

“Just some coffee.”

They got Dickinham’s food and drove the rented Hydrogen Hummer over to the little park that occupied the center of town. There they sat in the hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered Humvee, Dickinham and Stephen in front, Glyneth in back. Dickinham ate and made vague small talk about West Wind. The car filled with the smell of salty carbohydrates and meat.

Stephen looked around, able to see most of downtown Ash Valley from their vantage point. There wasn’t much: small shops in a square around the little half-block park, with its tall fir trees, rusty swing set, and child-tramped dirt. There were two basketball hoops, bent from people jumping up to dunk and dangle; the concrete court was humped and cracked by tree roots.

The shops were touristy, for people on their way to Mount Shasta, and there were some fast-food places—Wendy’s and Burger Urge and a Soylicious and a Japanaquick. Surprisingly few people showed themselves on the streets; a small boy wobbled vaguely down the center line on his bicycle, his eyes equally vague. A single car passed through—moving quickly, for a small town—and, as Stephen watched, tensing, the electric sedan almost hit the boy, but it veered crookedly around him.

The boy on the bicycle didn’t react.

A concrete-block rest-room building stood in the park, and someone had done an elaborate spray-paint graffito of a demon, one of the seven clans, on the back wall in Day-Glo red and green: a Gnasher, if Stephen remembered the mythology rightly. Someone else had tried to blot it out with a red Christian cross, like a religious version of a cancel sign over it.

“What the hell is that?” Dickinham growled rhetorically.

“Um,” Stephen began, “I suppose it’s left over from—”—

But Dickinham wasn’t listening; he’d meant something else. “What
are
those idiots doing here,” he muttered, getting out of the car. He paused, then turned to them long enough to snap, “You wait here, you two, please—I gotta have a word with . . .” He let it trail off and slammed the door loud enough to make Stephen jump.

Glyneth and Stephen exchanged puzzled glances, then watched as Dickinham strode across a corner of the park to a large solar-enhanced white van, its rear toward them. It was parked in an alley beside a hardware store. “So that’s what he was talking about,” Stephen murmured, as Dickinham banged on the back doors of the van. They were opened by two men, who glared out at him. “Some kind of company car.”

“I don’t think that’s a company car, exactly,” Glyneth said.

The two scowling white men wore nondescript green jumpsuits and shiny black shoes; they had identical buzz cuts. A third man—red-faced, long-haired, bearded, shabbily dressed, looking drunk—tried to push his way out of the van. The two men pushed him farther back in. There was something odd about the drunk man’s eyes.