Devoted, page 10
“Would you go to Mars with a group of damn fools who think they can colonize it tomorrow?” Verna asked.
Drying a colander, Megan said, “I wouldn’t go to Mars even with the greatest group of geniuses who ever lived. I like having air to breathe.”
“I saw on TV this Chinese billionaire wants to get a colony going on Mars in seven to ten years, so if an asteroid hits the earth or nuclear war wrecks the planet, humankind won’t all be destroyed. Hell, there’s about enough water on Mars to flush a toilet twice, but he thinks it could be a swell place to live.”
“Some people, if they get enough billions,” Megan said, “it seems to give them a little too much self-confidence.”
“I’ll guard against that when I make my first billion.” Verna set the last dish, a mixing bowl, in the drying rack. “The meat loaf and potatoes should be ready in a few minutes. I’ll put them out to cool and then be off.”
“Give my best to Sam.”
“He threatened to fix the lawn mower himself this afternoon. I want to get home while he still has both hands.”
As Verna snatched up a large plastic bag by its knotted neck, to take it outside to the trash can, Megan hung the damp dish towel on its rack. “See you Friday.”
“Tell Woody I made the muffins specially for him. Have a couple yourself, skinny as you are.”
“I bet they don’t have good muffins on Mars.”
As she opened the back door, Verna said, “They don’t have shit on Mars.” She paused before stepping outside, turned to Megan, and said, “I haven’t breathed a word to you about the painting you’ve been working on, Woody and the deer, but now it’s almost done . . .” She hesitated. “I’m no fancy art critic, so maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about.”
“Most fancy art critics don’t know what they’re talking about, either. You’ve got eyes. So tell me. I won’t be offended.”
“Well, I’ve got to say it’s a damn good thing you came back to Pinehaven. You healed your heart here and came into the fullness of your soul. You couldn’t have painted anything that good if you were somewhere else.”
“Thank you, Verna. That’s very sweet.”
“I wish your mother had lived to know Woody and to see that painting, how it brings a chill along your spine, a good chill.”
Sarah Grassley had died of leukemia when Megan was fifteen. Her father remarried five years later and lived now in Florida with his new family. She wasn’t estranged from him, wished they were closer, but he was a man with a limited supply of affection. He seemed able to deal with her only as if he were an uncle rather than her father.
Verna took the trash outside, leaving the door open behind her.
Not having connected with Woody in a while, Megan went upstairs to make sure that everything was all right with him.
27
After the action in the wild grass with Justine, Lee Shacket finds himself following the wet scent and the slithery susurration of a stream that flows through the meadow. He kneels on its bank.
He is satiated. His limbs are heavy, and his thoughts are slow, and he has never felt more complete.
In the fading light, the sliding water doesn’t make a good mirror. His reflection is faint and distorted, and his eye sockets appear to be empty.
With one hand, he smooths the water, as though he can still its rippled surface and see himself more clearly, but this doesn’t work.
He washes the blood out of his hair, from his face. He cups his hands and scoops from the stream and drinks. At first, the water has the flavor of blood, but then it acquires a lesser taste.
He strips off his black leather sport coat. After shrugging out of the shoulder rig, he puts it aside with the pistol. He discards his spattered shirt.
He’s gotten blood on his T-shirt and jeans, though not much. Anyway, the T-shirt and jeans are black, so the stains don’t show.
Besides, the scent appeals to him. Semi-metallic. Not like any other smell. It’s the exciting odor of power, dominance, triumph.
In his great triumph, he wants to leave the meadow for the woods and find a safe place and curl up there and sleep.
He stands now on the bank of the stream, staring across it and into the trees, into the shadows coiling around the trunks and up into the branches, a serpentorium of shadows.
Darkness is gathering within and without him. He senses that it’s different from all other darknesses that have come before it. This will be a generous and welcoming darkness, one in which he will at last feel at home and never again be a victim.
In time there will be Costa Rica and all the money to have anything he wants—anything, anybody—but right now he feels the need to give himself to the arms of darkness and sleep.
Then he sees the pistol in the holster, lying at his feet, and he is reminded of Megan Bookman, remembers how she treated him back in the day and earlier this afternoon on the phone.
He can’t tolerate being disrespected like that. If you allow yourself to be disrespected, you’re weak. The weak inevitably become prey. Prey dies. Prey dies by tooth and claw.
Leaving the holster behind, pistol in hand, he retrieves his black sport coat and sets out across the meadow.
He thinks he’s going to his car, the Dodge, but somehow he finds himself standing over the dead woman, Justine.
A sort of manic glee overcomes him at the sight of her ravaged corpse, a sense of immeasurable superiority. A wet, snickering laugh escapes him.
Who was she, after all?
Just another hot girl.
So easy to take, to break.
All his life, he had allowed such girls to say no to him. He should never have let them say no to him. No isn’t a choice for them any longer.
A sudden exhilaration burns away his lethargy. His heavy-lidded eyes open wide to the wonder of what he is becoming.
He spits on her remains and spits again.
Without quite realizing what he is about to do, Shacket finds himself urinating on the corpse. His stream is strong and fragrant.
This kill belongs to him. Nothing else can want it, claim it.
He makes his way through the tall grass to the corpse of the man whose muscles availed him nothing. Shacket urinates again.
He is renewed. He zippers himself away. Like something that might live under bridges in expectation of passing children, he scampers up the long slope to the roadway, where the two vehicles wait.
In his Dodge Demon, powering forward, he leaves one state highway for another, heading north toward the great attractant, toward the woman who should always have been his.
Not much farther. He knows her address. He has seen her home from the air on Google Earth, also on Google Street View.
Ever since Jason died, Shacket has been keeping track of Megan, the ice-queen bitch. He knows what she needs better than she does, and he will wake her to the need to please him.
In half an hour, he reaches Pinehaven, passes through town, and continues on the state route until her house appears on the left. He almost swings into the driveway, but realizes that too bold an entry will be a mistake.
He continues past the house. In less than a quarter of a mile, he arrives at a lay-by. He pulls off the pavement and parks in the deep shade of ancient pines.
When he gets out of the car, he stands by it, inhaling the pleasantly cool air, the fragrance of pines, the forest mast. He can also detect the scents of small animals cowering in the underbrush; he can’t differentiate one from the other by species, although maybe one day he will.
With the highway to one side of him and the wilderness to the other side, he is a creature of two worlds. Perhaps some men, during a profound becoming such as this, would worry that they might soon belong in neither world. Shacket doesn’t doubt that he will belong in both, will dominate both.
The billions of programmed archaea that he inhaled in the Utah facility have swarmed through his blood, through his flesh and bone and brain, where they remain at work, inserting new genetic material into every cell in his body. What that material might be, he cannot say. But the particular group of researchers at Refine’s Springville laboratories had been identifying those useful genes in everything from fungi to insects to lower animals that they believed would enhance the human immune system and increase longevity.
They had the best of intentions, and intentions mattered.
They’re all dead now, gone to ashes because some damn fool panicked and pressed the doomsday button, convinced that a release of programmed archaea into the environment would precipitate some genetic plague. But archaea are not bacteria; they can’t replicate the particular genetic material they brought with them into Shacket. Whatever it might be, that material was a onetime cargo with which the scientists loaded them. If Shacket is infected with biological catastrophe, he can’t pass it on to others, nor can these redesigned archaea, which have been engineered to be short-lived and incapable of reproduction.
Anyway, there is no biological catastrophe. He is stronger than he has ever been. His hearing and sense of smell are growing more sensitive by the hour.
His sight in particular is improving. When he turns to stare into the forest, the details of that woodscape resolve out of the steadily deepening shadows as they might for a cat. Felines have a degree of night vision thanks to the many-layered mirrors behind their retina.
And what secrets of the night can be seen by the multifaceted, metallic-sheen eyes of certain moths that thrive in darkness?
Instead of a biological catastrophe, Shacket is a triumph of science, a man becoming more than a man, the only one like him in the world, ascendant.
Leaving the coat in the car, holding the pistol at his side, he crosses two lanes of blacktop and enters another arm of the forest.
Guided by inerrant senses he didn’t previously possess, he makes his way through the trees and onto a lawn at the side of the Bookman residence. The house stands perhaps a hundred feet away.
He surveys the windows, some curtained and some not. No faces at any of them, no movement beyond. A stillness upon the house.
Shacket crosses the yard and moves along the side of the house. He comes to the back porch just as a woman—not Megan, apparently the housekeeper—comes through the back door, carrying what appears to be a bag of trash.
She doesn’t look toward him, descends the steps, and bustles around the farther side of the residence. She is older and of little interest to him, except he will have to kill her if she sees him.
He doesn’t want to kill her if it can’t be done quietly, and it probably can’t. He wants Megan to become aware of him only when he slips naked into her bed and wakes her in the night.
The moment the housekeeper is out of sight, he swings over the railing, onto the porch. He crosses to the door that she left open and steps into the kitchen.
The room is bright and clean and warm. The air is redolent of cooking odors.
He hears the lid of a trash can clatter into place outside. The older woman will be returning.
A swinging door leads into the hallway. He eases it shut behind him, stands listening. All is quiet until the housekeeper returns and begins attending to whatever tasks remain at the end of her day.
This house is large, but it’s not so grand that live-in help is required. When the housekeeper leaves, there will be just Megan, the mute boy, and Shacket.
Then there will be consequences for the disrespect with which he has been treated.
Before he reaches the front of the house and the main stairs, there is a side hall to the left. The walls here are decorated with Megan’s paintings, which tend to be large.
He has studied her art online. Initially, he wanted to like it. But he never could relate to it.
Now it seems even more absurd and childish than previously. He can’t comprehend her purpose or why anyone would purchase such art other than to burn it.
She obviously is not woke to the new world that is coming with unrelenting fury.
As technology races onward and with it enlightened thinking, as hidebound society is reshaped and outdated mores are consigned to the dustbin of history, as thrilling new social norms replace the old, as previous virtues come to be seen as mere weaknesses and raw power is rightly understood to be the sole remaining virtue, much will need to be burned. Shredded and burned, torn down and hammered into dust. A shining future cannot be built on a past of ignorance and error. To build a brighter tomorrow, it’s necessary to descend into a place darker than darkness, to clean the corrupt world with blood and destruction.
By the time he reaches the end of the hall, he is convinced that Megan’s paintings prove she is not woke to the better world that can be, will be.
Shacket will wake her to it.
Bella on the Wire
Bella was six years old. She was a yellow Labrador retriever.
She was always happy.
Even on those occasions when she was a little bit sad, she was at the same time happy on top of the sad. The sadness was secondary.
As far as she could recall, there had been only one period of unadulterated unhappiness in her life, and that had been related to an encounter with a skunk.
There was more intelligence of different degrees and kinds in nature’s creatures than human beings knew, but not in skunks.
Skunks were a stupid and dangerous species specifically because they didn’t need to be smart to survive.
Whenever she looked at herself in a mirror, Bella was always surprised by how big she was. Seventy pounds and not fat.
She’d always thought of herself as small. In a world of humans who stood high on two legs, it proved difficult to maintain a proper sense of her own dimensions.
She lived in Santa Rosa, a small city approximately fifty-five air miles north of San Francisco.
Although she’d never flown in an airplane or otherwise, Bella knew air miles. And a lot more.
She resided with Andrea and Bill Montell. Bill was an attorney. Andrea owned a bookstore where Bella was welcome.
She never annoyed the bookstore customers and never let on that some of them had literary tastes she found unfortunate.
Andrea and Bill had four children between the ages of seven and fourteen. In ascending order: Milly, Dennis, Sam, and Larinda. All were homeschooled.
They were a tightly knit, loving family. They all adored Bella, and she adored them, so it was a typical dog-human family situation.
Kids, bookstore, law office: Bella’s days were busy, filled with play and affection, walks with Andrea, runs with Bill, games with the kids, public relations work at the bookstore. Bella was never bored.
In addition, she had a secret life.
The Montells were aware that their dog was quite smart, but they didn’t have a clue as to the extent of her intelligence.
They knew nothing of the Mysterium.
They didn’t know she retrieved books from their library and read them at night.
When she was much younger, Bella decided that revealing her true nature would be unfair to the children.
To develop a healthy psychology and the right measure of self-esteem, every growing child needed to stand center stage, in the spotlight, from time to time.
Once Bella had revealed the truth of herself, the center stage would always be hers, no matter how she insisted on relinquishing it to each child.
Anyway, what was to be gained by openly being an intelligent dog in a world that had not yet found any use for such a thing?
She loved the Montell children. She wanted them to have normal lives, each with opportunities to be the center of attention.
Some other members of the Mysterium had shaped their lives as Bella had shaped hers.
Sometimes there was sadness in not openly being all that you should be, the person that you really were. But, again, there was happiness on top of the sadness.
Maintaining her secret had certain advantages, not least of all that she knew more about each child than Andrea and Bill knew, more than she would know if the kids realized how smart she really was.
When they were at risk of going astray, she had the canine wiles with which to subtly steer them back on course.
When that didn’t work, she had become clever at bringing the problem to the attention of Andrea and Bill without them always realizing who was the agent of revelation.
In addition to being one of five Montell siblings and their clandestine nanny as well, Bella was the editor of the Wire.
The Wire could be turned on and off like a radio. Not all members of the Mysterium were listening at all times.
However, it was possible to send an insistent message that would open even closed neural pathways and ensure that everyone received it.
Bella’s job was to gather important news and share it in a timely manner.
She had volunteered to remain open for transmissions during daylight hours.
She didn’t have to worry about spreading rumors and untruths. No member of the Mysterium had ever known a dog to lie.
On this Wednesday evening, as the Montell family sat for dinner in the dining room, Bella curled on a bed in the corner, pretending to sleep, when in fact she had big news to impart to her kind.
Bellagram. As reported two weeks ago, Rusty and Mandy, members of the Donald and Georgina Curtis family of Corte Madera, were pleased to announce five pups, by far the largest known Mysterium litter at that time. All remain healthy. Now all five are transmitting telepathically at a limited distance and are able to quick-learn language by the Wire.
