Fear Nothing (48 page)

“Chris, his heart,” Sasha worried, backsliding into her Grace Granola persona.

“He doesn’t have a heart,” I said. “He’s all stomach.”

Orson looked at me reproachfully, as if to say that it wasn’t fair to engage in put-down humor when he was unable to participate.

To the dog I said, “When someone nods his head, that means
yes.
When he shakes his head side to side, that means
no.
You understand that, don’t you?”

Orson stared at me, panting and grinning stupidly.

“Maybe you don’t trust Roosevelt Frost,” I said, “but you have to trust this lady here. You don’t have a choice, because she and I are going to be together from now on, under the same roof, for the rest of our lives.”

Orson turned his attention to Sasha.

“Aren’t we?” I asked her. “The rest of our lives?”

She smiled. “I love you, Snowman.”

“I love you, Ms. Goodall.”

Looking at Orson, she said, “From now on, pooch, it’s not the two of you anymore. It’s the three of us.”

Orson blinked at me, blinked at Sasha, stared with unblinking desire at the bite of toast on the table in front of him.

“Now,” I said, “do you understand about nods and shakes?”

After a hesitation, Orson nodded.

Sasha gasped.

“Do you think she’s nice?” I asked.

Orson nodded.

“Do you like her?”

Another nod.

A giddy delight swept through me. Sasha’s face was shining with the same elation.

My mother, who destroyed the world, had also helped to bring marvels and wonders into it.

I had wanted Orson’s cooperation not only to confirm my story but to lift our spirits and give us reason to hope that there might be life after Wyvern. Even if humanity was now faced with dangerous new adversaries like the members of the original troop that escaped the labs, even if we were swept by a mysterious plague of gene-jumping from species to species, even if few of us survived the coming years without fundamental changes of an intellectual, emotional, and even physical nature—perhaps there was nevertheless some chance that when we, the current champions of the evolutionary game, stumbled and fell out of the race and passed away, there would be worthy heirs who might do better with the world than we did.

Cold comfort is better than none.

“Do you think Sasha’s pretty?” I asked the dog.

Orson studied her thoughtfully for long seconds. Then he turned to me and nodded.

“That could have been a little quicker,” Sasha complained.

“Because he took his time, checked you out good, you know he’s being sincere,” I assured her.

“I think you’re pretty, too,” Sasha told him.

Orson wagged his tail across the back of his chair.

“I’m a lucky guy, aren’t I, bro?” I asked him.

He nodded vigorously.

“And I’m a lucky girl,” she said.

Orson turned to her and shook his head:
No.

“Hey,” I said.

The dog actually winked at me, grinning and making that soft wheezing sound that I swear is laughter.

“He can’t even talk,” I said, “but he can do put-down humor.”

We weren’t just doing cool now. We were being cool.

If you’re genuinely cool, you’ll get through anything. That’s one of the primary tenets of Bobby Halloway’s philosophy, and from my current vantage point, post-Wyvern, I have to say that Philosopher Bob offers a more effective guide to a happy life than all of his big-browed competitors from Aristotle to Kierkegaard to Thomas More to Schelling—to Jacopo Zabarella, who believed in the primacy of logic, order, method. Logic, order, method. All important, sure. But can all of life be analyzed and understood with only those tools? Not that I’m about to claim to have met Bigfoot or to be able to channel dead spirits or to be the reincarnation of Kahuna, but when I see where diligent attention to logic, order, and method have at last brought us, to this genetic storm…well, I think I’d be happier catching some epic waves.

For Sasha, apocalypse was no cause for insomnia. As always, she slept deeply.

Although exhausted, I dozed fitfully. The bedroom door was locked, and a chair was wedged under the knob. Orson was sleeping on the floor, but he would be a good early-warning system if anyone entered the house. The Glock was on my nightstand, and Sasha’s Smith & Wesson .38 Chiefs Special was on her nightstand. Yet I repeatedly woke with a start, sure that someone had crashed into the bedroom, and I didn’t feel safe.

My dreams didn’t soothe me. In one of them, I was a drifter, walking alongside a desert highway under a full moon, thumbing a ride without success. In my right hand was a suitcase exactly like my father’s. It couldn’t have been heavier if it had been filled with bricks. Finally, I put it down, opened it, and recoiled as Lewis Stevenson rose out of it like a cobra from a basket, golden light shimmering in his eyes, and I knew that if something as strange as the dead chief could be in my suitcase, something even stranger could be in me, whereupon I felt the top of my head unzipping—and woke up.

An hour before sundown, I telephoned Bobby from Sasha’s kitchen.

“How’s the weather out there at monkey central?” I asked.

“Storm coming in later. Big thunderheads far out to sea.”

“Did you get some sleep?”

“After the jokesters left.”

“When was that?”

“After I turned the tables and started mooning
them.”

“They were intimidated,” I said.

“Damn right. I’ve got the bigger ass, and they know it.”

“You have a lot of ammunition for that shotgun?”

“A few boxes.”

“We’ll bring more.”

“Sasha’s not on the air tonight?”

“Not Saturdays,” I said. “Maybe not weeknights anymore, either.”

“Sounds like news.”

“We’re an item. Listen, do you have a fire extinguisher out there?”

“Now you’re bragging, bro. The two of you aren’t
that
hot together.”

“We’ll bring a couple of extinguishers. These dudes have a thing for fire.”

“You really think it’ll get that real?”

“Totally.”

Immediately after sunset, while I waited in the Explorer, Sasha went into Thor’s Gun Shop to buy ammunition for the shotgun, the Glock, and her Chiefs Special. The order was so large and heavy that Thor Heissen himself carried it out to the truck for her and loaded it in back.

He came to the passenger window to say hello. He is a tall, fat man with a face pitted by acne scars, and his left eye is glass. He’s not one of the world’s best-looking guys, but he’s a former L.A. cop who quit on principle, not because of scandal, an active deacon at his church and founder of—and largest contributor to—the orphanage associated with it.

“Heard about your dad, Chris.”

“At least he’s not suffering anymore,” I said—and wondered just what had been different about his cancer that made the people at Wyvern want to do an autopsy on him.

“Sometimes, it’s a blessing,” Thor said. “Just being allowed to slip away when it’s your time. Lots of folks will miss him, though. He was a fine man.”

“Thanks, Mr. Heissen.”

“What’re you kids up to, anyway? Gonna start a war?”

“Exactly,” I said as Sasha twisted her key in the ignition and raced the engine.

“Sasha says you’re gonna go shoot clams.”

“That’s not environmentally correct, is it?”

He laughed as we pulled away.

In the backyard of my house, Sasha swept a flashlight beam across the craters that had been clawed out of the grass by Orson the previous night, before I’d taken him with me to Angela Ferryman’s.

“What’s he have buried here?” she asked. “The whole skeleton of a T-Rex?”

“Last night,” I said, “I thought all the digging was just a grief reaction to Dad’s death, a way for Orson to work off negative energy.”

“Grief reaction?” she said, frowning.

She’d seen how smart Orson was, but she still didn’t have a full grasp on the complexity of his inner life or on its similarity to our own. Whatever techniques were used to enhance the intelligence of these animals, it had involved the insertion of some human genetic material into their DNA. When Sasha finally got a handle on that, she would have to sit down for a while; maybe for a week.

“Since then,” I said, “it’s occurred to me that he was searching for something that he knew I needed to have.”

I knelt on the grass beside Orson. “Now, bro, I know you were in a lot of distress last night, grieving over Dad. You were rattled, couldn’t quite remember where to dig. He’s been gone a day now, and it’s a little easier to accept, isn’t it?”

Orson whined thinly.

“So give it another try,” I said.

He didn’t hesitate, didn’t debate where to start, but went to one hole and worked to enlarge it. In five minutes, his claws clinked against something.

Sasha directed the flashlight on a dirt-caked Mason jar, and I worked it the rest of the way out of the ground.

Inside was a roll of yellow pages from a legal tablet, held together by a rubber band.

I unrolled them, held the first page to the light, and at once recognized my father’s handwriting. I read only the first paragraph:

If you’re reading this, Chris, I am dead and Orson has led you to the jar in the yard, because only he knows of its existence. And that’s where we should begin. Let me tell you about your dog….

“Bingo,” I said.

Rolling up the papers and returning them to the jar, I glanced at the sky. No moon. No stars. The scudding clouds were low and black, touched here and there by a sour-yellow glow from the rising lights of Moonlight Bay.

“We can read these later,” I said. “Let’s move. Bobby’s alone out there.”

33

As Sasha opened the tailgate of the Explorer, shrieking gulls wheeled low overhead, tumbling inland toward safer roosts, frightened by a wind that shattered the sea and flung the wet fragments across the point of the horn.

With the box from Thor’s Gun Shop in my arms, I watched the white wings dwindle across the turbulent black sky.

The fog was long gone. Under the lowering clouds, the night was crystalline.

Around us on the peninsula, the sparse shore grass thrashed. Tall sand devils whirled off the tops of the dunes, like pale spirits spun up from graves.