CARTER JERGEN IS NOT one to regret his life choices, although now that the revolution has brought him to this desolate ass-end of nowhere, he wonders if he should have taken longer than three minutes to join the Techno Arcadians when his aunt Deirdre had given him an invitation. Charming Aunt Deirdre is his favorite relative, a dazzling intellectual, a self-made businesswoman worth $700 million, childless, and certain to have included him in her will. Now it seems as if he would have been wiser if he had declined her invitation and instead had killed her in some manner that would not have incriminated him.
Through the windshield, Jergen regards the lightweight Toyota pickup that is on its roof beside the highway, crushed, tires blown, and on fire—although the flames are subsiding. A blackened, partly fleshed skeleton hangs upside down in the driver’s seat like a large, charred, melted campfire marshmallow.
Radley Dubose places a call to the Desert Flora Study Group. He asks about the Airbus H120 that he earlier ordered into the air to search for Minette Butterworth and for signs of chaos related to the people who were brain-screwed the previous night. He inquires if the flight crew of that aircraft might have noticed anything unusual on this length of county highway.
Apparently, the helo pilot and copilot have reported in excess of a single disturbance, because Dubose does more listening than talking for perhaps four minutes. He punctuates the Desert Flora Study Group agent’s report with “Huh” and “Really” and “Shit,” and “Not good, compadre, not good.”
When Dubose terminates the call, Jergen says, “If together we can devise an accidental death for my aunt Deirdre, I would split with you what’s likely to be a minimum hundred-million-dollar inheritance. Maybe a great deal more.”
Dubose is disapproving, though not of homicide. “Let’s avoid being distracted by such mundane concerns as money. Not with the revolution at stake. Do you recall that one of the fifty people injected last night was a Mr. Arlen Hosteen?”
“I’ve got enough on my mind without having to remember the names of fifty losers.”
“Arlen Hosteen,” Dubose says, “is the owner of Valleywide Waste Management, the local trash-collection firm. He sometimes services one of his company’s routes himself when a driver is sick. He seemed a good enlistee in the hunt for the Hawk brat. No one thinks twice about a garbage truck pulling up to house after house, so he has a chance to give each place a lookover, check trash cans at curbside to see if any contents suggest the presence of a small child in a family that doesn’t have kids.”
“Brilliant,” Jergen says sarcastically.
“Not as it has turned out, I’m afraid. Hosteen is driving an immense trash-collection truck with front-loading arms that can lift the heaviest dumpster with ease. It’s like a tank.”
“So he’s gone through the forbidden door, has he? Just like Minette.”
“He has obviously deteriorated mentally, but evidently not as much as she has. And by all reports, he’s not naked.”
“That’s something to be thankful for.”
Dubose drives onto the highway once more. “The Airbus crew saw Hosteen rampaging, but they haven’t stayed on him because other more disturbing incidents require their attention.”
“More disturbing than Hosteen? How many other incidents?”
“Six. Not to worry. We’ll find Hosteen and shut him down.”
“In his garbage-truck tank? That won’t be easy.”
“You may remember, I met your aunt Deirdre. Killing Hosteen in his truck will be a lot easier than killing that ballbuster.”
14
JANE ON THE MOVE. Heckler in a two-hand grip, just under her line of vision. A short, narrow hall served the bedrooms and study.
When she stepped into the living room, she saw that the old, weathered, desiccated front door had cracked loose of its hinges; it hung askew, fixed to the frame only by its deadbolt. Having kicked in the door, a fortyish man, pale and disheveled and sweating profusely, looking both angry and bewildered, stood just inside the room, maybe fifteen feet from her, holding an iron pry bar that had an angled neck and lug wrench at one end.
Keeping the Heckler’s front sight on the intruder, positioned so that peripheral vision might alert her to movement in the hallway to her left, Jane said, “Put it down.”
He was costumed neither in black leather nor in a vest made from human nipples, nor with a necklace fashioned from the teeth of his victims, in neither a leather mask nor a hood imprinted with the face from Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream, as movies routinely portrayed existential threats like this. He wore a blue-and-yellow-striped polo shirt, white slacks, and white topsiders without socks, a mundane monster for an insipid age when imagination had gone digital and the true horrors of the world were so disturbing that a lot of people found it easier to fear imaginary threats.
Ignoring Jane’s command, he said, “Was you? Was you, is you the bitch, bitch? The bitch in my head, you?”
He must be on one drug or another, maybe an entire apothecary. His blue eyes were wide and lunatic, yet as clear and alert as the eyes of a hunting owl. Anger contorted his face; not anger alone, but also perhaps some neurological disorder. Every muscle from hairline to chin and ear to ear moved not in concert but in disjunctive arrangements, producing a shifting kaleidoscope of grotesque expressions. Although every look was unnatural in the extreme, they all conveyed rage, hatred, and demented lust.
“Put down the crowbar,” she repeated.
He took one step toward her and raised his voice, loud and menacing. “Is you? Is you? Is you whisper sex me, sex me, kill me, kill you, kill you, sex me, kill, kill, whisper inside head?”
The whispering room.
He was one of the adjusted people, and something was very damn wrong with his program.
Maybe because the pry bar looked almost as long as a Taser XREP 12-gauge shotgun, she thought of Ivan Petro on Monday, coming for her from out of the oak trees. She thought of the hammer with which she’d been pounding the burner phone, of how she hadn’t dropped it before drawing her gun but instead had thrown it. Life was raveled through with inexplicable patterns that could never be understood but could be recognized by anyone who acknowledged their existence, so Jane knew what this creature was about to do even before he knew. Insane as he might be, he still wasn’t going to charge into a pistol pointed at him; he would throw the pry bar.
Whoever this man might have been, he was no longer that person. He was enslaved by a nanoweb, but also coming apart psychologically under the control mechanism’s influence. What she had to do next was an act of mercy, not murder; and if she hesitated to grant him that mercy, he would smash her face, crack her skull.
He drew back the iron bar. She shot him in the chest. The bullet convulsed him, but he threw the weapon. Half a second after the first round, the second didn’t just tear through his throat. The .45 hollow-point removed his throat, took out the spine, so his head wobbled like one of those bobble-head figures that people put on the dashboards of their cars. His empty body collapsed with so little sound that it seemed as if the greater part of his substance had been the mind and soul no longer contained in the package of flesh and bone. His pitch was feeble. The pry bar went wide of her and bounced along the floor—just as the naked woman erupted from the hallway and slashed hard with the butcher knife to cut deep.
15