Carter Jergen winces at the memory of the gross slabs of meat and cheese Dubose consumed. In time, that festival of flesh is going to inspire a butt-horn serenade, and Jergen lacks a gas mask.
Because the masters of this revolution believe in granting perks to the agents who carry out their orders, especially as the cost of doing so is borne by taxpayers, they provide cool wheels. The pure-jazz vehicle recently assigned to Jergen and Dubose is a Hennessey VelociRaptor 6 × 6, an 800-horsepower bespoke version of the four-door Ford F-150 Raptor with new axles, two additional wheels, kick-ass off-road tires, and a long list of other upgrades. It is big, black, glossy, and fabulous.
Dubose is in possession of the keys, as he has been since they received the VelociRaptor the previous Friday evening.
“I’ll take the wheel this time,” says Jergen.
“What wheel is that?” Dubose wonders as he climbs into the driver’s seat and pulls the door shut.
Jergen rides shotgun.
3
LAURIE LONGRIN IN THE MYSTERY of her parents’ bedroom, the faintest thread of light under the door to the hallway, draperies closed at one of the three windows, the other two offering only swaths of the black Texas-prairie night, the stars too far away to aid her vision …
She helped with housework and sometimes cleaned here, so she knew the layout well enough to feel along the bed, past the bench at the foot of it, on which the quilted spread was folded at day’s end, and across an open area to a dresser.
Magically, the oval mirror in the dresser seemed to gather what feeble light the room contained, presenting less like a mirror than like a window into a deeply shadowed room in a parallel world, where everything had a subtle gloss and where a figure that might have been a girl or the ghost of a girl stood featureless and fearful.
What Laurie feared was failing to get out of there and up to safety before Janis Dern and Chris Whoever stopped talking about sex and death in the upstairs hall. When the vicious Dern beast returned to Laurie’s bedroom, that horrible creature would realize she had stupidly allowed her captive to escape, and she’d sound an alarm. A search of the house might begin simultaneously with a search of the immediate grounds.
To the left of the dresser was a door to the master bathroom. To the right, a closet door. In the blinding dark, her trembling fingers found the lever handle on the closet door, which would make a ratcheting noise if operated too fast. She eased the handle down from horizontal. The door, if swollen, sometimes stuttered against the jamb, so she pulled carefully on it.
In the walk-in closet, she closed the door and dared to switch on the light.
Standing tiptoe, she could barely reach the loop on the end of the cord that allowed her to pull down the trapdoor in the ceiling, to the back of which was fixed a folded ladder. The heavy springs on the trap protested, but she doubted that the sound could be heard through two closed doors and as far away as the hallway. The ladder automatically unfolded its three segments as the trapdoor opened.
She clicked the wall switch and, in blackness purified of light, climbed monkeylike on all fours. She scampered into the attic, felt blindly for the recall lever in the trapdoor frame, found it, and grimaced as the three sections of rungs accordioned upward with more noise than they had made when descending to the closet floor, although perhaps still not making enough racket to draw anyone’s attention. The ladder-loaded trap returned to its frame with a soft thump.
The attic had a finished floor of plywood. In this raftered darkness, which was high enough for her father to stand erect, boxes were stacked in rows: all of Christmas—except the tree—sealed in cardboard; excess books displaced from shelves downstairs; souvenirs of times and places that were too distant to be of current interest but too important to be discarded; Mother’s glorious wedding dress in a zippered vinyl bag inside a cedar-lined chest.…
With her arms held out to the left and right, her fingertips sliding along palisades of cardboard, Laurie inched blindly forward. Her father had installed this flooring when the house was remodeled, not long before her birth; he used the best materials and secured the plywood to the joists with screws instead of nails, but here and there between the plies were small voids that squeaked underfoot.
This center aisle pretty much aligned with the second-floor hall, where Janis Dern and Chris Hornydude might still be discussing his inexplicable lust for her and her cool indifference. If enough squeaking arose in the ceiling above them, they might decide that the cause was something more than mice.
The attic received a cleaning twice a year, but dust gathered there in the interim, and Laurie disturbed it in her passage. An unspent sneeze teased her nose, and she paused to pinch her nostrils shut until the urge passed.
Only she could hear her stampeding heart, though the pounding made it harder to judge how much noise she was making otherwise.
With the sneeze quelled, she began to move again, only to press her face through the silken strands of a spiderweb that masked her from brow to chin. Startled, she paused to wipe off those sticky threads, wondering if the eight-legged architect might even now be crawling through her hair.
Stay cool. Even if a spider was in her hair, it wouldn’t bite. If it did bite, the bite wouldn’t harm her unless the biter was a brown recluse. It wasn’t a brown recluse. She just knew it wasn’t.
Suddenly from below came the voice of the beast at a volume to rattle windows—“The little bitch, the little shit, she’s gone!”—followed by other voices and slamming doors and swift footfalls on the front stairs.
Confident that what noises she made would now be covered by the hubbub below, Laurie moved more quickly through the high dark, with her left hand still sliding along stacked boxes, but her right arm extended in front of her. She halted when her outthrust hand made contact with cold steel. She felt her way around the tight coil and entered the open spiral stairs.
The treads were padded with rubber, and the handrail kept her steady. She made only a little noise as she climbed into the round room at the very top and center of the house, where the encircling windows admitted the light of moon and stars. This space was ten feet in diameter, like an enclosed widow’s walk where the wives of fishermen went to keep a lookout for their menfolk’s boats at sea.
The sea in this case was the plain that stretched to every horizon, lush with tall grass, and when anyone climbed up here with dread in his heart, he came to monitor not fishing trawlers but the progress of fire. Some years the rains didn’t come but the sun did, and the wind did, and the sun and the wind made dry kindling of the grass across those thousands of acres. Nature nurtured, but it also afflicted. There were times when thunder seemed to announce a storm, but the sky proved to be filled with more bang and flash than with rain, the latter falling in barely enough quantity to chase the birds to their roosts for a few minutes, while the lightning spat fire onto the plain. If the wind was fierce, the vast fields of wild grass could raise walls of flame thirty feet high, even higher, and the fire front moved as fast as a train. Owning a quantity of horses and not enough transports to move them all at once, you wanted to monitor the burning plain from a high vantage point, to know in which direction and at what pace the blaze might be advancing.
The round chamber was mostly glass, but on a shelf between two windows stood one of the eight-line hybrid phones that also served as an intercom, featuring an indicator board with labeled buttons for nearly every room in the house and for each of the stables.