Images of violence occurring elsewhere in the now, prey being slashed, beheaded, gutted. The rutting frenzy of Others mounting their prey before they kill it.
Such images stir passions of your own, passions as cold as they are intense, but always fear endures even in passion. I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
A sudden sound injects new fear into the now. A familiar sound, yet you cannot name it or imagine its source. The word engine passes repeatedly through your mind but means nothing to you, and by its very meaninglessness further irritates.
You uncoil from the corner, weave upright in shadows, stand listening.
Move through shadowy spaces into a space with more light. To a clear shape through which light falls.
Others are here. A female moves away through dead weeds, toward a big place shaped dark against the day.
Nearer is a large white object that stirs in you a memory of moving effortlessly fast—fast, faster—through varied landscapes.
These memories are confusing, disturbing, but fragile. They dissolve in a fog of forgetfulness.
What remains is a certainty that this white object is the source of the sound that drew you from the corner where you coiled.
A male Other is busy at this source of the sound. The male is not aware of you.
You stand to one side of this clear shape through which light falls, so you can’t be easily seen. You watch the male. You watch.
A thing happens that excites you. Water gushes, arcs, and the white object becomes black.
Like day becomes night, white becomes black. But no one makes day into night. Day makes itself into night.
This male Other frightens you. Can he make day into night? Can he wash away the light forever? Such power terrifies you.
No cure for fear except rage, and rage seething into fury.
You look around in growing desperation.
Urgent, urgent.
Things you grip pull open other things, revealing spaces within. Spaces full of familiar items, but you have no names for them, can imagine no purpose for them.
Until you find the space full of sharp things. A row of sharp things. You know what to do with one of these. Yes, you know just what to do.
7
CARTER JERGEN IS CERTAIN that he and Dubose will find Minette Butterworth, wild and naked, within five minutes of driving into the barrens behind the Atlee family’s wrecked house. That expectation is not fulfilled.
These sun-hammered wastes don’t offer many places to hide. Here and there a zigzagging declivity has been cracked into the land by an earthquake. A few shallow washes mark the paths of flash floods that on rare occasions overwhelm the Anza-Borrego with tarantula-drowning downpours. The desert scrub is too sparse to provide cover. An occasional cluster of trees, perhaps sustained by an artesian well within reach of their roots, might conceal a woman who’d gone through the forbidden door and fallen into a psychological abyss; but none of them does.
In this part of the valley, houses are far apart. In her new incarnation, however, the former Minette Butterworth seems to be as fast as an instinctive predator. She might have homed in on another residence and made it to that cover in a few minutes.
When Jergen pictures her—and others like her—bursting in on an unsuspecting family, the catastrophe under way abruptly expands to terrifying dimensions in his imagination.
Unable to find any sign of the feral woman in the open desert, they now need to move from house to house, seeking the place—and the people—she might at this moment be destroying.
As he returns to the county highway and pilots the VelociRaptor down-valley, Dubose holds forth as though for a rapt audience. “Like the girls whose pasts and personalities are flushed out of them so they can be remade into eager sex toys for the Aspasia clubs, those men transformed into rayshaws for security duty have no more inner life than machines.”
Raymond Shaw is the brainwashed assassin in The Manchurian Candidate. When the late Bertold Shenneck created brain-screwed and programmed men to serve as obedient and fearless security agents at his gated estate in Napa, the great scientist thought it was amusing to call them rayshaws. Except for their expressionless faces and a disturbing deadness in the eyes, they are able to pass for normal: neatly dressed, quiet, eerily polite. They are more focused on their duties than even the most highly trained, dedicated, and fearless bodyguards could ever be. When a threat to their master manifests, they are swift and brutal in response, for they harbor no slightest compunction about killing any trespasser.
As Dubose waxes on about the viciousness of rayshaws and their incapacity for doubt or remorse, Jergen finally interrupts. “And your point is what?”
“My point, Cubby, is that I’ve thought the last thing I would ever want would be to have a gladiator moment with a rayshaw as my opponent. But having seen what Ramsey Corrigan did to his family and what our fair Minette did to her husband, old Lucky Bob, I’d go toe to toe with any rayshaw before I’d want to be locked in a room with that bitch and no weapon but my bare hands. A rayshaw is just a meat machine with sophisticated programming, but she’s something else altogether. She’s a slaughtering zombie, purely demonic.”
Jergen suspects that Dubose is playing some stupid Princeton sport with him, some psychological game intended to maneuver him into a panic room of the mind, so that he will say something that can be mocked.
Nevertheless, he asks, “If she’s a purely demonic, slaughtering zombie, then why are we being so dumb that we’re chasing her?”
“Because such is our fate, Cubby. A man can’t escape his fate, especially not men like us, dedicated revolutionaries who have bound over our fortunes to the cause, reaching for the brass ring of total power, knowing that if we miss it, we will be destroyed, crushed and thrown away as if we never lived. Such is the hard bargain we made with destiny, a bargain few men have the courage to make.”
Exasperated by this grandiose speechifying, Jergen says, “Well, I don’t see myself at all that way.”
Dubose turns upon Jergen a smile of genteel pity. “I know you don’t, Cubby. That’s why from time to time I give you these little pep talks. To encourage you to better understand yourself and the heroic enterprise on which you’re embarked.”
8
TRAVIS HAD HIS BAGS PACKED and standing by, but as it turned out, Cornell Jasperson had packed a bag, too.
Like a benign gargoyle that had come alive and climbed down from its high perch on some Gothic building, the big man stood before Jane in a beseeching posture. He swayed from side to side, scuffing the floor with his shoes, holding his hands against his chest as though to contain the hope in his heart for fear it would escape him. “I need to go with the boy, please and thank you. I need to go with the boy. I need to go with him. The boy.”
Jane had known that Travis could not be asked to abandon the dogs in spite of the difficulty they would pose during any escape from Borrego Valley. He had lost too much already. He no doubt felt guilty about Gavin and Jessie, though he had no responsibility for the sacrifice they had willingly made. Even though he had known Duke and Queenie for only a few months, the bonds between a boy and his dogs were such that, after what he had already been through, forcing him to leave the German shepherds behind would break something in him that might never be repaired. She’d made preparations for the dogs, but not for a gentle giant with a personality disorder, who couldn’t be touched without suffering a disabling anxiety attack.
“Umm. Umm. I’m pretty sure I can be a better burden,” said Cornell. “Umm. What I meant to say is a better person. If you take me with you, I’m pretty sure I’ll betray well. Behave well.”