Listen, listen. Any sound a threat. Silence a threat. Sound and silence both feed fear. Fear fuels more fear.

Smell water. A drop falls from shiny curve, falls into white hollow space. Another drop. Another.

Fumble with shiny things. One turns. Water comes. You drink. Cool, wet, good. Make water stop.

Moving through shaded spaces, threat at every turn, unbearable threat, unbearable.

Sit in a corner, back to the corner, shaded spaces in front, listening, wondering, fearing. Threatened and alone.

Fear breeds fear, breeds anger, breeds rage.

Bright broken web threads glimmering inside your head.

Crawling things seeking inside your head. Crawling and faintly whispering far away. Many threatening whispers far away.

Icy fear, blistering rage. You shake with both. No cure for fear except rage, and rage seething into fury.

Threatening whispers beget enraged whispering of your own. You whisper a challenge, an invitation to come here, come find you, come be killed, kill or be killed, come to the different trees, the blue place. Kill, kill, kill.

20

CORNELL JASPERSON KNOWS MORE about dogs now than he did a few days earlier, and one thing he knows is that they don’t necessarily pee a lot, but they pee to a pretty rigid schedule.

The last time Cornell took Duke and Queenie out to pee, first thing that morning, the sound of a low-flying twin-engine airplane in this usually quiet valley had for some reason triggered an intense anxiety attack from which he had needed hours to fully recover.

He didn’t want to take the dogs out again, because maybe the plane was still up there. If he had another anxiety attack, it might be even worse than the first one. Maybe he would collapse outside and be unable to get back into his library, leaving the boy alone and frightened. When he collapsed, maybe he would lose control of the dogs and never see them again and have to tell the heartbroken boy that the dogs had run away, and the boy would hate him and would never eat sandwiches with him again and would never ask him to read aloud again, so then Cornell would have to live alone like before, which was what he had always thought he preferred until recently.

Although he didn’t want to risk walking the dogs, the dogs insisted on being walked. There was no getting out of it.

He wouldn’t take them without leashes, as he had done before, just in case the unusual airplane was passing inexplicably low and the imaginary ants started crawling all over him and he had to get inside quickly.

The boy clipped the leashes to their collars, so that Cornell wouldn’t have to chance the dogs touching his bare skin.

“I could take them out,” the boy said.

“No. You’re a lot safer here. I’ll be back soon. I’ll make a new kind of sandwich. Little bags of potato chips. Good muffins for dessert.”

“Sandwiches with sweet pickles on the side?” the boy asked.

“Yes. Precisely. And cola ‘canned under the authority of the Coca-Cola Company, Atlanta, Georgia, 30313, by a member of the Coca-Cola Bottlers Association, Atlanta, George, 30327.’ ”

The boy laughed softly. “I like you.”

“I like me, too, though I’m a walking nutbar. Umm. Umm. And I like you, Travis Hawk.”

Cornell let the dogs take him outside, and he held the leashes tightly while they smelled the ground and the weeds and each other and then more ground and weeds before taking turns peeing.

The day was too hot and too bright, everything flat in the hard light. Quiet. At the moment no airplane was growling through the sky immediately overhead.

But then the scream shrilled through the day. He had never heard anything like it. Maybe the dogs hadn’t heard anything like it, either, because they raised their heads and pricked their ears and stood very still.

The scream came again, a little muffled, half like a person screaming and half like an animal. The first time, the screamer had sounded miserable and frightened. But the second time there was rage in the cry, too, a scary ferocity.

It seemed to come from the little blue house in which Cornell had lived while building his library for the end of the world.

The dogs were focused on the house, and they started to pull Cornell toward it. He struggled to hold them back. When the third scream cleaved the day, it was so chilling that the dogs changed their minds about wanting to investigate the source.

Cornell wasn’t seized by anxiety. He cautioned himself not to be his worst self, to be his better and calmer self. Not that he always listened to himself at times like this, though sometimes he did. He turned the dogs away from the house and walked them back to the barn that wasn’t a barn.

No further screams issued from the little blue house during the time that Cornell took to get into his library and out of the too-hot too-bright day, which had suddenly become also too strange.

Cornell had been expecting the boy’s mother to come today, and he had been hoping she would not get here until late, until after lunch and reading-aloud time, maybe not until after dinner. But now he wished she were here already.

21

TORRENTIAL WIND-DRIVEN RAIN rushes in from the Gulf of Mexico as if that entire body of water will be drawn into the thunderheads and purified of its salt and thrown down onto the lowlands of Texas in some dire judgment that will require an enormous ark and animals boarded two by two.

Egon Gottfrey in the Rhino GX, westbound from Beaumont to Houston, powers through flooded swales in the pavement, the tires casting up dark wings of dirty water. The wipers can’t always cope with the downpour. Frequently the windshield presents the world as cataracted eyes might see it: misty, bleary, the buildings distorted into the grotesque structures of some alternate universe.

Nevertheless, Gottfrey drives fast, exceeding the posted limits, not in the least concerned about a collision, considering that the traffic with which he shares the road is as much an illusion as is the highway itself. Anyway, he can see clearly what he most needs to see: the truth of the conspiracy that misled him, who helped Ancel and Clare Hawk, and where Jane’s in-laws have taken refuge.

He has a long drive ahead of him, especially in this weather, but triumph awaits him at the end. Maybe he will get to Ancel and Clare too late to wrench from them young Travis’s location while it still matters, but it will never be too late to inject and enslave them.

1

MOST OF THE LONG-EXISTING campgrounds in Borrego Valley were open in season only, and not all were motor-home friendly. A new facility, Hammersmith Family RV Park, had booked the Tiffin Allegro by phone, with the promise of a three-day cash deposit on arrival.

The white Chevy Suburban, which the motor home was towing, had to be unhitched and left in a lot immediately outside the campground prior to check-in, because the spaces allotted to RVs weren’t large enough to accommodate additional vehicles. In that blacktop parking lot, where thermals rising off the pavement smelled faintly of tar, Jane and Luther transferred their weapons and other gear from the Tiffin Allegro to the Suburban.

Bernie hadn’t slept well since getting Jane’s call on Monday, not because he feared for himself, and not just because he feared that she would be killed. He also dreaded that he might even see her being killed, whereupon he would be so emptied of all hope for this world that he might curse Adonai, the sacred name of God, which was never a good idea. He said, “The longer I don’t get a call from you, the more I’m going meshugge.”

“You’ll be fine,” she said. “You always are.”

“You take care of each other.”

“That’s the plan,” Luther said, as he climbed in the driver’s seat of the Suburban. He pulled the door shut, started the engine.

Jane said, “Did you put it on? You don’t look like you did.”

“It’s silly. I’m not in the action, but I’ll put it on.”

“There’s nothing silly about it. These bastards have quietly locked down this valley. Before we’re out of here, it might be something worse than a street fight. It might be even more intimate than that, the equivalent of a cage fight.”

“I’ll wear it already. But it’s heavy.”

“It’s not heavy. It’s level two, not level four, not hard plates of Dyneema polyethylene or ceramic like on a battlefield. It’s fine-weave chainmail and Kevlar, very light, light enough. Under a roomy Hawaiian shirt, nobody knows. And you promised me.”

“So I’ll wear it! Now make like a real granddaughter and give me a hug.”

Hugging him, she said, “You better wear it.”

“You’re such a noodge. A promise is a promise with me.”

“If I don’t call in two hours, be ready to split. If I don’t call in two and a half, get the hell out of here.”

Bernie felt a tightness in his chest, as if he might have a cardiac episode, which he wouldn’t because he had no heart problems and because this wasn’t the time or place for a responsible person to drop dead. “It’s not like I spent my life abandoning people, so why should you think it’ll be easy for me?”