Jane kicked through the ruins and back to the pea-gravel lawn. She holstered her pistol and gave the Airbus guys two thumbs up.

Luther thumbed them, too, and waved them off.

The chopper hovered for a moment, but then it turned in place and faced north and buzzed away.

They watched it until it was no bigger than a fat housefly. Then they sprinted for the Suburban.

4

WITH ONE HAND, the father held his bitten chin together. That was the worst of it. Lesser bites in his left trapezius muscle, left cheek, left brow at the arc of the eye socket, right thumb, right forearm. None of the wounds was mortal. Only the reconstruction of the chin might leave him disfigured. But the pain must have been severe.

Holden was beefy, self-confident, unaccustomed to being afraid, but he was scared now, and angry. On his feet, swaying, he muttered curses at his attacker, even though the man lay dead on the pool deck, his bullet-deformed head half empty.

The son kept trying to call 911 with an iPhone. “They don’t answer.” He was shaken, shaking, frightened by the very fact that his father was afraid. “There’s nobody there. We need an ambulance. Why isn’t anyone there?”

Bernie took the phone from the teenager and wiped the blood-spotted screen on his shirt and entered the three digits. Two rings. An automatic pickup was followed not by a 911 operator’s voice or any version of please hold, but by an electronic twitter and a series of clicks. And then silence.

“Is there someone who can drive you?” Bernie asked the boy.

“My mom.”

The mother was already running toward them from the office.

To the father, Bernie said, “Hold the chin, apply pressure, but with an ice pack if you have one. You want to minimize the bleeding and the swelling. You understand?”

“Yes.”

The boy shouted at his mother to bring the car. “The hospital! We gotta get Dad to the hospital!”

Bernie realized that he didn’t have the burner phone on which Jane would call him. He’d left it in the motor home. He turned away from the Hammersmiths and shoved the pistol under his waistband and concealed it with his Hawaiian shirt and hurried along the pool decking.

He was almost to the end of the pool when the full importance of what had happened abruptly settled upon him, and his heart began to pound. He had intervened in a violent assault and shot a man—a thing, something like a golem but not made of mud, a golem without a soul that had once been a man with a soul. He had shot him to death. Yet somehow he’d remained calm throughout the confrontation. He had not been afraid, only concerned about doing what needed to be done.

Now his heart knocked hard, though not because he was worried about the consequences of what he’d done, which he wasn’t. These events—the insane attack, the shooting, the failure of the 911 system—had something to do with Jane and her boy. She’d said her enemies would be here in force and seal off the valley as best they could. But suddenly it seemed they hadn’t just sealed it off. They had also transported the valley out of the world as Bernie had always known it, out of the real world into the darkest corner of the Twilight Zone where anything could happen but nothing good could be expected.

As Bernie approached a large Winnebago, one of the other motor homes currently in the park, a deeply tanned barrel-chested man in sandals and khaki shorts stepped out of it. He gestured toward the farther side of the pool. “What’s going on? What the hell happened over there?”

“Crazy man,” Bernie replied. He kept moving. “Big fight. Somebody shot somebody.”

“Oh shit.”

Before boarding the Tiffin, Bernie disconnected it from the park’s power supply. By the time he took the .45 from his waistband and put it on the console box and got behind the wheel and started the engine, the Winnebago was roaring past on its way out of the park. A minute later a Thor Motor Coach decamped, and behind it a Fleetwood.

Shivering in the outflow of air-conditioning, which wasn’t very cold, Bernie picked up the burner phone and stared at it, hoping.

5

PASSENGER AS ALWAYS, Carter Jergen is being driven through the quivering thermals that rise from the sun-scorched blacktop, the wasteland flat and sere and daunting to all sides, like a dreamscape in which emaciated horses bearing dead riders will appear in a long, ghastly procession, as they do sometimes in his sleep.

The four-door six-wheel VelociRaptor is a big vehicle, but it’s a subcompact compared to the Valleywide Waste Management übertruck, which could demolish it in the equivalent of a head-butting contest. The V-Raptor is the very essence of cool, yes, but driving cool wheels when you go off a cliff won’t buy you a soft landing.

Having conceived of his mortality while touring the scene of slaughter in the kitchen of the Corrigan house, Carter Jergen is hour by hour becoming more obsessed with the prospect of his death, which previously had seemed no more likely than going to bed here in California and waking up on the moon.

He doesn’t want to find the dumpster-lifting truck and endure the demolition derby that might ensue. He doesn’t want to come face-to-face with Arlen Hosteen, because Hosteen has gone through the forbidden door and fallen down the forbidden stairs and is just an older version of Ramsey Corrigan, the teenage mutant death machine. After having been enthusiastically in the hunt for Jane Hawk, Jergen does not any longer want to find her, either. Now that he’s able to conceive of his death, he’s increasingly concerned that Jane Hawk will deliver it to him. He’s surprised by the transformation he’s undergoing, but he’s pretty close to embracing a live-and-let-live attitude, and it doesn’t feel half bad.

“Maybe we need to step back and rethink,” he says.

“Step back from what?” Dubose asks.

“The brink.”

“What brink?”

“Jane Hawk.”

“She’s a brink? She’s not a brink. She’s a dumb bitch who’s been damn lucky.”

“She could be a brink,” Jergen insists. “We’ve been racing after her full tilt for so long, we could suddenly find ourselves airborne with a long drop and nothing below but rocks.”

Radley Dubose doesn’t bother to reduce speed when he looks away from the road and pulls his sunglasses down his nose with one finger and peers at Jergen over the frames. “You’re too young to be going through a midlife crisis, Cubby.”

“I have a bad feeling.”

“Well, I have a good feeling.”

“I’ve never had a bad feeling like this before.”

Dubose repositions his sunglasses and looks at the road again and says, “Maybe you need testosterone shots.”

This is when Dubose receives a call from the Desert Flora Study Group. The Valleywide Waste Management truck—and probably Arlen Hosteen with it—has been spotted by the Airbus crew conducting low-altitude surveillance. The truck plowed into a house approximately one and a half miles from the VelociRaptor’s current position. FBI agents—Arcadians, of course—are already on the scene.

6

TRAVIS HAD BEEN HUDDLED on the floor behind the driver’s seat, below window level. At his mother’s instruction, he now sat on the seat long enough to thrust his legs into a roomy gray duffel bag she provided, pulled it up to his shoulders as if it were a sleeping bag, and then returned to the floor, where he curled in the fetal position. Head toward the front of the vehicle, back to the port-side door, he faced the transmission hump that separated his half of the backseat from Cornell’s. He was small enough to fit nicely in that footwell.

Jane leaned through the open door and kissed his cheek. She pulled the duffel bag over his head and partly closed the drawcords at the top, leaving a large enough opening for air to enter.

“Are you okay, sweetie?”

“I’m good.”

The gray bag was emblazoned with a red cross in a white circle.

“Now, you’re just bandages, honey, lots of bandages and medical supplies. If we’re stopped, you don’t move.”

From within the duffel, he said, “Not a finger.”

“You’re a brave boy.”

“I’m an FBI kid.”

When Jane looked up from the Red Cross bag, she met Cornell Jasperson’s stare. His eyes glistened with torment.

He whispered too softly for Travis to hear, “I won’t let him die, won’t let him, won’t let him.”

The white plastic zip-ties around his wrists and ankles had been cut and mended with white tape. They looked secure, but they could be pulled apart with ease.

“Just play it like I explained,” she whispered, “and we’ll all make it.”