THE DESERT WAS NEW TO LUTHER TILLMAN, and he liked it about as much as he might like being forked onto a barbecue and broiled over charcoal. He had known hotter days than this, even in his home state of Minnesota, but there was something about the pale sky and the dry air and the dusty trees and the mostly barren earth that intensified the effect of the heat and, for him anyway, made ninety degrees significantly more oppressive here than it would have been in a different landscape.

He shrugged out of his black-denim jacket. He considered taking off his shoulder rig, but under the current circumstances, he would feel more naked without the pistol than if he stripped out of all his clothes.

The gear in the back of the Chevy Suburban included a forty-foot garden hose with a special nozzle and two identical one-quart bottle-like attachments, each filled with a custom-mixed solvent, that fed their contents into the water stream in a continuous measured flow.

He found the hose bib at the corner of the garage where Jane had been told it would be, tested the water pressure, and hooked up the hose.

The white paint was a special blend that Enrique de Soto had concocted and applied in Nogales. The solvent turned the paint to something like chalk, and the water washed it off, leaving the factory-applied black paint intact. There were also three large, white block letters on the roof of the vehicle, the same three repeated on the front doors—FBI—and these letters likewise were impervious to the solvent.

Come civilian, leave official. Once they had the boy, they didn’t want to risk being stopped by authorities between here and the motor home in the RV park. If a roadblock was encountered, an FBI vehicle could more likely be driven around it without being forced to stop.

Like some alchemist of ages long past, Luther washed the white Suburban to black while the sun, in a far less magical fashion, beat on his shaved head and glazed his face with sweat.

6

IN THE CORNER WHERE SHADOWS drift around and over you, there is no passage of time, for you know not time, but only the eternal now.

There is hunger in the now. Fear. Hatred. Hatred of all that is not you. Anything that is not you is a potential threat.

You are awake, eyes open, but dreaming. Dark dreams darkle down into ever deeper darkness.

In the now is desire, but only of the most primitive kind. For food. For prey. For violence that conquers threat and fills your mouth with the nourishing blood of the Other.

Within your head, whispers come, whispers go, words as meaningless as wind in dry grass or rats’ feet over broken glass.

Emotions come, sent by Others. Their fear and hatred inspire greater fear and hatred of your own.

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.”