Bullets of Rain (21 page)

    Head on paws, Blitz watched the open bedroom door for at least half an hour after Art had begun the soft, metered respiration of deep sleep.

    

    

    The generator in the garage was an industrial rig that could produce seventy-five hundred watts continuously for eight hours on just over three gallons of gas. It was housed in a wall bay resembling a refrigerator turned on its side, with rubber-insulated double doors to prevent carbon monoxide leakage, and vented to the outside world by air intakes Art had designed after the horns he'd seen on the forecastle of a hovercraft. The gennie's tubular frame reminded him of a Harley chassis. It could power up via battery-fed push button, or, if that failed, a lawn-mower-style cable pull. The exhaust was mufflered, and the heavy doors reduced the noise rating of its chugging operation to nothing. There were two twenty -gallon military fuel drums in reserve, not counting what could be unstrapped or siphoned from the Jeep if things got tight.

    Art hit transfer switches to feed fire to selected sectors of the house. His satellite dish was incapacitated, probably stolen by the Wind, but he needed to check his computers, which had been set to stack stormwatch updates from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration until the signals got compromised; there would be a backlog of listings. He could conserve use of his lights and alternate with candles and lanterns. Anything with a motor pulled more power, such as the heating system or the refrigerator, so once his interior doors were all closed or braced, he really only needed to heat one room at a time. The fridge could be turned to maximum cold, opened only when necessary, and spelled according to the timeshare needs of his available power. Except for the rollers for the window shutters (which could be cranked manually), the house's security system was on its own independent circuit, juiced by a car battery. He regretted that the solar panel array had not yet been enabled; the cells would have stored more than a day's worth of extra power already. He checklisted himself around the house, unplugging everything that was nonessential.

    The last online bulletin from the NOAA had specified gale-force winds in excess of eighty miles per hour, then the DSL line had ceased to function. The range of the weather service radio in the garage was only about forty miles, but past the crackle Art learned the hurricane specs had jumped from ''watch'' to "warning," which meant that people who lived inland had probably evacuated already. The danger of flash floods was stressed by a public advisory from the National Hurricane Center. No one wasted time talking about how rare such a combination of conditions was in the Pacific Northwest, but Art knew the coastal population had increased dramatically at other points along the line… and few of these people had ever experienced the kind of storm this had already become. Some of them lived in mobile homes, for god's sake. If they hadn't cleared out, Art hoped they were used to flying.

    Coffeed and dressed, holding his own against the fury outside, he felt three steps closer to civilized. Blitz refused to do his doggie business outdoors, and under these conditions, Art couldn't blame him. He provided a spread of newspaper in the garage and cleaned up after his buddy, flashing back to the puppy period, and the endless regimen of housebreaking. Then he decided to fill some of the haunted air in the kitchen with music from a boombox formerly shelved in the office. Something by Holst or Mahler; something cosmically weighty.

    Only the gods, seated around their breakfast plinth in Olympus, knew how Price's party was handling the storm this morning.

    It seemed a week since he had actually eaten, even though his steak blowout was still in transit through his GI tract. He assembled a ham and cheese sandwich on whole wheat, not accustomed to eating this early in the day. It seemed tasteless, mere fuel, and chewing it was a chore. Time was blurring. The bloc of processed ham still had a mouth-size chunk bitten out of it. Art regarded it as if some stranger had done it. It was messy. He finally sliced away the section to square the stack. Better. He took care not to wolf his snack. Blitz's expression said etiquette did not faze him. He was rewarded with a skinny strip of 98 percent fat-free meat with a bite out of it.

    Art could not help wondering at the current status of all the people he had just met. Twenty-four hours ago, none of it had happened, except for Derek's visit, followed by Suzanne's. Was Dina still holed up in suicidal despondency? Was Suzanne's maniac boyfriend turning a new leaf, even as Suzanne herself was schizzing out? Were there Zebra People aprowl somewhere on the beach right now, as oblivious to the weather as Green Berets, or cliqua on crack? Was Shinya, the little Japanese girl, still on the lookout for her lost date-that-wasn't-a-date? She had seemed so young and open that the thought of her being manipulated by Price caused Art's heart to ache. This was the sort of drama Art had tried to subtract from his life.

    He sipped his extra-strong coffee and let one hand float down to rub Blitz's skull. The dog was sticking close by while the storm was afoot, unsure of the elemental chaos, looking to Art for solace and normalcy. There was an abundance of same-old in this house; Art disliked change. Perhaps that was a problem.

    He considered the world beyond his walls, specifically Price's party, since it was the freshest input. Predators and prey, all in display or retreat, bridging the gulf between what had been "normal'' forty years ago and the modern incarnation of Homo Psychopathical. People fed one another the same lines and suffered the same malfunctions, and Art had witnessed banality and exoticism in equal measure, a jostling crowd brandishing edginess and attitude in order to hide their self-doubts. Images were being shot down, then propped up, then disqualified, as Price deconstructed his guests. It was a passion play repellent in its nakedness, the kind of thing that had forced Art to lock himself into his fortress and ignore his phone, shred his documents, and find more simple humanity in his dog.

    The people at the party house wanted to be nomads, rootless hunter-gatherers. Responsibility was the tough part; it was the thing that had helped Art and Lorelle to marry in a world that had decreed wedlock outmoded. When two people decided to become a couple, the responsibilities piled on. On Derek's one-through-ten scale, a couple had to deal with six, seven, eight, the lovely commitment of "in sickness and health'' advising that, eventually, one partner would have to tend to the death of the other. The willingness to accept this responsibility, Art thought, was a good way to perceive who was special, and who was transient. Another clue was the sensation that you just weren't whole without your partner; you became literally incomplete, and the landscape became a bleaker place to survey. For people to meld in this fashion required time and tolerance, but when such an essential part was removed, the loss was not to be ignored or glossed over. When devices lost critical parts, they ceased to function, so the heartbreak that had incapacitated Art was not so strange. It was easy for people to leave, and often safer-no obligations, no commitment, wipe the slate, back to one. It was wrenching enough, when you left them. It was intolerable when they were torn out of you.

    The swing of the weather did not become important until you stuck in one place.

    It occurred to Art that he was just elaborately restating the tenets of the note he had discovered on the beach.
I heel tom between the things I heel I should do
, it read,
versus the things I know I must do
. The inadequate nourishment in his gut did a queasy Immelmann turn as the identity of the note's long-lost author suggested itself. Art had paper of this grade in the office. All manner of inks, pens, nibs.
I'd very beware of all the ways in which love can become a lie.
Wasn't that was a good, all-purpose warning against the things that had happened once he had dared to leave his home and take a chance on Price's party?

    He tried to pace his breathing, not ready to admit that he might have written this, and tossed it into the sea. A page of his makeup, torn out and discarded, relegated to the elements; a cunning edit of his own personality, shunned… but determined to come back to him all the same, therefore, undeniable. True fact overwhelmed willful ignorance the way paper wrapped stone in rock-paper-scissors.

    In an extreme structural crisis, the vent network on top of Art's house could be louvered to deflect the wind dynamically so as to actually hold the building down rather than batter against it. That was another backstop advantage of his basic plan, not yet required, because everything seemed to be nominal. When he peered out through one of the horizontal shutter slits, all he could see was rain blur against the Plexiglas, which pulsed subtly to accommodate the morphing flow of pressure. His revolutionary triangular pane design caused the emplacement to function like a snake's shifting, overlapping scalework. Presumably the superstructure would coast through an earthquake just as adroitly; Art wondered if and when that test might come.

    Nice, in a tilted way, it would be to have the high-strung presence of that guy Luther around, if just to shoot the shit about guns and have another voice to react to. Art had done more talking to strangers in the last day than he had spent across the previous month.

    He had slept with a loaded gun on his night table-the one he had been positive was in the Jeep, but turned out to be in the gun safe all along. Now it seemed paranoid and stupid. Unbidden, the joke rose-the one about the sleepyhead who keeps a revolver next to his bedside phone. When the phone rings, he picks up the gun and blows his brains out.
Hello? Bang.

    Sitting on the bed, he thought about unloading the weapon and checking it unnecessarily. Pointless busywork, that-another practice to fuel the mechanism of denial. When he spotted Lorelle's Egyptian box nearby, he remembered the capsule inside, the drug variously referenced as "party favors" (by Suzanne) and "house mix" (by Price). He dissected it on the granite countertop in the kitchen.

    He suspected the white, plastery powder to be coke, but his palate did not recognize the sting. It contained black flecks, like pepper polluting salt, at a ratio of about one to twenty. The particles were not greasy, like hashish, or clotted like dark heroin. They were inscrutably enigmatic. If Art pondered them long enough, he'd feel mocked. Or he could just swallow it and see what happened. What harm? Most of the people at the party had downed them, according to Price's manner about the dose he'd termed a "mild accelerator." On the other hand, Suzanne had taken them, and Art still could not figure out what had gone wrong with her yesterday.

    Art decided he could probably use a mild accelerator today.

    Impulsively, he scooped the grains together and dumped them into his mouth, where they lay on his tongue like sea salt, mildly acidic. He washed them down with coffee and they burned all the way to his stomach.

    "What the fuck," he told Blitz. "If I get obnoxious, you have permission to bite me." He felt a cheesy thrill, as though he was a teenager preparing crash space for an acid trip. "It's not like we have anything else to do right now."

    There was no rush, no metabolic shift, no plunging vertigo, no impact jolt at all. Just a fulminating undertow that made him thirsty and sent him to the fridge for seltzer. His vision and balance were fine. He realized that the grandest gag of all would have been for Price to supply a talked-up placebo to his suggestible guests-something that would excuse them from the responsibility of being even more suggestible, when Price started talking. Art sat for several minutes watching the clock, letting his blood cycle. Nothing strange happened.

    On calm days it was possible to walk far out on the jetty of tombstones, near the Sundial dish, and peer into the deeper parts of the ocean. The jetty terminated about where the sand shelf began to drop away beneath the water; under the right conditions, land creatures could stand dry and look down into a murky world of sea life. Presumably, the life-forms down there peered up at you at the same time, enjoying the inverted fishbowl effect. The microwave dish always loomed solid, its immobile tonnage like some Aztec relic, never moving when you looked at it, though you always had the sense it was abuzz with data, sending and receiving, coordinating satellites or tracking missile platforms or zeroing in on some space station. Then, when you were distracted, and looked back after looking away, you'd find the dish had tilted, sometimes so indistinctly that the sight nagged at you, insisted you were seeing things. From this vantage, on clear nights, you could watch the clarion lights of approaching planes, northbound, stacking up for landing patterns at San Francisco International. The days were often calm but rarely clear. Too moist, this far north.

    The burn had nested in Art's stomach, reminiscent of a double shot of liquor. Apart from craving an antacid, he noticed no change in the room, the walls, the colors, or the spider-headed tittle men coming out of the walls-just kidding.

    He still had his eye on the sweep of the clock's second hand when Blitz started barking. It was ten-fifteen in the morning.

    "Oh, what is it?" He teased the dog. "You're gonna get all jiggy now? You think you hear something? You're just seeing a doggie mirage. You're seeing a gigantic Monster Dog approaching out of the ocean. Dogzilla is coming, and boy, is he pissed."

    It stopped being fun. This was Blitz's intruder bark, for certain, and Art's hand sought his pistol while his ears tried to pierce the cacophony of the storm.

    
You are completely in control,
he told himself.
You are ready for anything. That was the whole point, wasn't it?

    Then the alarms tripped as somebody drove a car through his locked garage door, making the day more interesting in a big rush. The battering-ram impact shook the whole house.