Fear Nothing

Page 46

Orson returned to the kitchen with this inadequately tacky item in his mouth, and Bobby accepted it, trying to look unimpressed with the dog’s feat.
The twelve-by-eight-inch pillow featured a needlepoint sampler on the front. It was among items that had been manufactured by—and sold to raise funds for—a popular television evangelist. Inside an elaborate border were eight words in scrollwork stitching: JESUS EATS SINNERS AND SPITS OUT SAVED SOULS.
“You didn’t find this tacky?” Sasha asked disbelievingly.
“Tacky, yes,” Bobby said, strapping the loaded ammo belt around his waist without getting up from his chair. “But not tacky enough.”
“We have awesomely high standards,” I said.
The year after I gave Bobby the pillow, I presented him with a ceramic sculpture of Elvis Presley. Elvis is depicted in one of his glitziest white-silk-and-sequins Vegas stage outfits while sitting on the toilet where he died; his hands are clasped in prayer, his eyes are raised to Heaven, and there’s a halo around his head.
In this yuletide competition, Bobby is at a disadvantage because he insists on actually going into gift shops in search of the perfect trash. Because of my XP, I am restricted to mail order, where one can find enough catalogs of exquisitely tacky merchandise to fill all the shelves in the Library of Congress.
Turning the pillow over in his hands, frowning at Orson, Bobby said, “Neat trick.”
“No trick,” I said. “There were evidently a lot of different experiments going on at Wyvern. One of them dealt with enhancing the intelligence of both humans and animals.”
“Bogus.”
“Truth.”
“Insane.”
“Entirely.”
I instructed Orson to take the pillow back where he’d found it, then to go to the bedroom, nudge open the sliding door, and return with one of the black dress loafers that Bobby had bought when he’d discovered that he had only thongs, sandals, and athletic shoes to wear to my mother’s memorial service.
The kitchen was redolent with the aroma of pizza, and the dog gazed longingly at the oven.
“You’ll get your share,” I assured him. “Now scoot.”
As Orson started out of the kitchen, Bobby said, “Wait.”
Orson regarded him expectantly.
“Not just a shoe. And not just a loafer. The loafer for my left foot.”
Chuffing as if to say that this complication was insignificant, Orson proceeded on his errand.
Out over the Pacific, a blazing staircase of lightning connected the heavens to the sea, as if signaling the descent of archangels. The subsequent crash of thunder rattled the windows and reverberated in the cottage walls.
Along this temperate coast, our storms are rarely accompanied by pyrotechnics of this kind. Apparently we were scheduled for a major hammering.
I put a can of red-pepper flakes on the table, then paper plates and the insulated serving pads on which Sasha placed the pizzas.
“Mungojerrie,” said Bobby.
“It’s a name from a book of poems about cats.”
“Seems pretentious.”
“It’s cute,” Sasha disagreed.
“Fluffy,” Bobby said. “Now that’s a name for a cat.”
The wind rose, rattling a vent cap on the roof and whistling in the eaves. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought that I heard, in the distance, the loonlike cries of the troop.
Bobby reached down with one hand to reposition the shotgun, which was on the floor beside his chair.
“Fluffy or Boots,” he said. “Those are solid cat names.”
With a knife and fork, Sasha cut a slice of pepperoni pizza into bite-size pieces and set it aside to cool for Orson.
The dog returned from the bedroom with one loafer in his mouth. He presented it to Bobby. It was for the left foot.
Bobby carried the shoe to the flip-top trash can and disposed of it. “It’s not the tooth marks or the dog drool,” he assured Orson. “I don’t plan ever to wear dress shoes again, anyway.”
I remembered the envelope from Thor’s Gun Shop that had been on my bed when I’d found the Glock there the night before. It had been slightly damp and stippled with curious indentations. Saliva. Tooth marks. Orson was the person who had put my father’s pistol where I would be sure to find it.
Bobby returned to the table and sat staring at the dog.
“So?” I asked.
“What?”
“You know what.”
“I need to say it?”
“Yeah.”
Bobby sighed. “I feel as if one honking huge mondo crashed through my head and just about sucked my brain out in the backwash.”
“You’re a hit,” I told Orson.
Sasha had been fanning one hand over the dog’s share of pizza to ensure that the cheese wouldn’t be hot enough to stick to the roof of his mouth and burn him. Now she put the plate on the floor.
Orson banged his tail against table and chair legs as he set about proving that high intelligence does not necessarily correlate with good table manners.
“Silky,” Bobby said. “Simple name. A cat name. Silky.”
As we ate pizza and drank beer, the three flickering candles provided barely enough light for me to scan the pages of yellow lined tablet paper on which my father had written a concise account of the activities at Wyvern, the unanticipated developments that had spiraled into catastrophe, and the extent of my mother’s involvement. Although Dad wasn’t a scientist and could only recount—largely in layman’s terms—what my mother had told him, there was a wealth of information in the document he had left for me.
“‘A little delivery boy,’” I said. “That’s what Lewis Stevenson said to me last night when I asked what had changed him from the man he’d once been. ‘A little delivery boy that wouldn’t die.’ He was talking about a retrovirus. Apparently, my mother theorized a new kind of retrovirus…with the selectivity of a retrotransposon.”
When I looked up from Dad’s pages, Sasha and Bobby were staring at me blank-eyed.
He said, “Orson probably knows what you’re talking about, bro, but I dropped out of college.”
“I’m a deejay,” Sasha said.
“And a good one,” Bobby said.
“Thank you.”
“Though you play too much Chris Isaak,” he added.
This time lightning didn’t step down the sky but dropped straight and fast, like a blazing express elevator carrying a load of high explosives, which detonated when it slammed into the earth. The entire peninsula seemed to leap, and the house shook, and rain like a shower of blast debris rattled across the roof.
Glancing at the windows, Sasha said, “Maybe they won’t like the rain. Maybe they’ll stay away.”
I reached into the pocket of the jacket hanging on my chair and drew the Glock. I placed it on the table where I could get at it more quickly, and I used Sasha’s trick with the paper napkin to conceal it.
“Mostly in clinical trials, scientists have been treating lots of illnesses—AIDS, cancer, inherited diseases—with various gene therapies. The idea is, if the patient has certain defective genes or maybe lacks certain genes altogether, you replace the bad genes with working copies or add the missing genes that will make his cells better at fighting disease. There’ve been encouraging results. A growing number of modest successes. And failures, too, unpleasant surprises.”
Bobby said, “There’s always a Godzilla. Tokyo’s humming along, all happy and prosperous one minute—and the next minute, you’ve got giant lizard feet stamping everything flat.”
“The problem is getting the healthy genes into the patient. Mostly they use crippled viruses to carry the genes into the cells. Most of these are retroviruses.”
“Crippled?” Bobby asked.
“It means they can’t reproduce. That way they’re no threat to the body. Once they carry the human gene into the cell, they have the ability to neatly splice it into the cell’s chromosomes.”
“Delivery boys,” Bobby said.
“And once they do their job,” Sasha said, “they’re supposed to die?”
“Sometimes they don’t go easily,” I said. “They can cause inflammation or serious immune responses that destroy the viruses and the cells into which they delivered genes. So some researchers have been studying ways to modify retroviruses by making them more like retrotransposons, which are bits of the body’s own DNA that can already copy and slot themselves into chromosomes.”
“Here comes Godzilla,” Bobby told Sasha.
She said, “Snowman, how do you know all this crap? You didn’t get it by looking at those pages for two minutes.”
“You tend to find the driest research papers interesting when you know they could save your life,” I said. “If anyone can find a way to replace my defective genes with working copies, my body will be able to produce the enzymes that repair the ultraviolet damage to my DNA.”
Bobby said, “Then you wouldn’t be the Nightcrawler anymore.”
“Goodbye freakhood,” I agreed.
Above the noisy drumming of the rain on the roof came the patter of something running across the back porch.
We looked toward the sound in time to see a large rhesus leap up from the porch floor onto the windowsill over the kitchen sink. Its fur was wet and matted, which made it look scrawnier than it would have appeared when dry. It balanced adroitly on that narrow ledge and pinched a vertical mullion in one small hand. Peering in at us with what appeared to be only ordinary monkey curiosity, the creature looked quite benign—except for its baleful eyes.
“They’ll probably get annoyed quicker if we pretty much ignore them,” Bobby said.
“The more annoyed they are,” Sasha added, “the more careless they might get.”
Biting into another slice of the sausage-and-onion pizza, tapping one finger against the stack of yellow pages on the table, I said, “Just scanning, I see this paragraph where my dad explains as much as he understood about this new theory of my mother’s. For the project at Wyvern, she developed this revolutionary new approach to engineering retroviruses so they could more safely be used to ferry genes into the patient’s cells.”
“I definitely hear giant lizard feet,” Bobby said. “Boom, boom, boom, boom.”
At the window, the monkey shrieked at us.
I glanced at the nearer window, beside the table, but nothing was peering in there.
Orson stood on his hind legs with his forepaws on the table and theatrically expressed an interest in more pizza, lavishing all his charm on Sasha.
“You know how kids try to play one parent against the other,” I warned her.
“I’m more like his sister-in-law,” she said. “Anyway, this could be his last meal. Ours, too.”
I sighed. “All right. But if we aren’t killed, then we’re setting a lousy precedent.”
A second monkey leaped onto the windowsill. They were both shrieking and baring their teeth at us.
Sasha selected the narrowest of the remaining slices of pizza, cut it into pieces, and placed it on the dog’s plate on the floor.
Orson glanced worriedly at the goblins at the window, but even the primates of doom couldn’t spoil his appetite. He turned his attention to his dinner.
One of the monkeys began to slap a hand rhythmically against the windowpane, shrieking louder than ever.
Its teeth looked larger and sharper than those of a rhesus ought to have been, plenty large enough and sharp enough to help it fulfill the demanding role of a predator. Maybe this was a physical trait engineered into it by the playful weapons-research boys at Wyvern. In my mind’s eye, I saw Angela’s torn throat.
“This might be meant to distract us,” Sasha suggested.
“They can’t get into the house anywhere else without breaking glass,” Bobby said. “We’ll hear them.”
“Over this racket and the rain?” she wondered.
“We’ll hear them.”
“I don’t think we should split up in different rooms unless we’re absolutely driven to it,” I said. “They’re smart enough to know about dividing to conquer.”
Again, I squinted through the window near which the table was placed, but no monkeys were on that section of porch, and nothing but the rain and the wind moved through the dark dunes beyond the railing.
Over the sink, one of the monkeys had managed to turn its back and still cling to the window. It was squealing as if with laughter as it mooned us, pressing its bare, furless, ugly butt to the glass.
“So,” Bobby asked me, “what happened after you let yourself into the rectory?”
Sensing time running out, I swiftly summarized the events in the attic, at Wyvern, and at the Ramirez house.
“Manuel, a pod person,” Bobby said, shaking his head sadly.
“Ugh,” Sasha said, but she wasn’t commenting on Manuel.
At the window, the male monkey facing us was urinating copiously on the glass.
“Well, this is new,” Bobby observed.
On the porch beyond the sink windows, more monkeys started popping into the air like kernels of corn bursting off a hot oiled pan, tumbling up into sight and then dropping away. They were all squealing and shrieking, and there seemed to be scores of them, though it was surely the same half dozen springing-spinning-popping repeatedly into view.
I finished the last of my beer.
Being cool was getting harder minute by minute. Perhaps even doing cool required energy and more concentration than I possessed.
“Orson,” I said, “it wouldn’t be a bad idea if you sauntered around the house.”
He understood and set out immediately to police the perimeter.
Before he was out of the kitchen, I said, “No heroics. If you see anything wrong, bark your head off and come running straight back here.”
He padded out of sight.
Immediately, I regretted having sent him, even though I knew it was the right thing to do.
The first monkey had emptied its bladder, and now the second one had turned to face the kitchen and had begun to loose his own stream. Others were scampering along the handrail outside and swinging from the porch-roof rafters.
Bobby was sitting directly opposite the window that was adjacent to the table. He searched that comparatively calm part of the night with suspicion equal to mine.
The lightning seemed to have passed, but volleys of thunder still boomed across the sea. This cannonade excited the troop.
“I hear the new Brad Pitt movie is really hot,” Bobby said.