Fear Nothing (33 page)

I have a sense that this meticulous eradication is only partly explained by their desire to prevent anyone from ascertaining the purpose of the place. Although I’m operating strictly on intuition, I believe that as they scrubbed away every trace of the work done here, they were motivated in part by
shame.

I don’t believe, however, that this is the chemical-biological warfare facility that I mentioned earlier. Considering the high degree of biological isolation required, that subterranean complex is surely in a more remote corner of Fort Wyvern, dramatically larger than these three immense floors, more elaborately hidden, and buried far deeper beneath the earth.

Besides, that facility is apparently still operative.

Nevertheless, I am convinced that dangerous and extraordinary activities of one kind or another were conducted beneath this hangar. Many of the chambers, reduced only to their basic concrete forms, have features that are at once baffling and—because of their sheer strangeness—profoundly disquieting.

One of these puzzling chambers is on the deepest level, down where no dust has yet drifted, at the center of the floor plan, ringed by corridors and smaller rooms. It is an enormous ovoid, a hundred and twenty feet long, not quite sixty feet in diameter at its widest point, tapering toward the ends. The walls, ceiling, and floor are curved, so that when you stand here, you feel as if you are within the empty shell of a giant egg.

Entrance is through a small adjacent space that might have been fitted out as an airlock. Rather than a door, there must have been a hatch; the only opening in the walls of this ovoid chamber is a circle five feet in diameter.

Moving across the raised, curved threshold and passing through this aperture with Orson, I swept the light over the width of the surrounding wall, marveling at it as always: five feet of poured-in-place, steel-reinforced concrete.

Inside the giant egg, the continuous smooth curve that forms the walls, the floor, and the ceiling is sheathed in what appears to be milky, vaguely golden, translucent glass at least two or three inches thick. It’s not glass, however, because it’s shatterproof and because, when tapped hard, it rings like tubular bells. Furthermore, no seams are evident anywhere.

This exotic material is highly polished and appears as slick as wet porcelain. The flashlight beam penetrates this coating, quivers and flickers through it, flares off the faint golden whorls within, and shimmers across its surface. Yet the stuff was not in the least slippery as we crossed to the center of the chamber.

My rubber-soled shoes barely squeaked. Orson’s claws made faint elfin music, ringing off the floor with a
tink-ting
like finger bells.

On this night of my father’s death, on this night of nights, I wanted to return to this place where I’d found my Mystery Train cap the past autumn. It had been lying in the center of the egg room, the only object left behind in the entire three floors below the hangar.

I had thought that the cap had merely been forgotten by the last worker or inspector to leave. Now I suspected that on a certain October night, persons unknown had been aware of me exploring this facility, that they had been following me floor to floor without my knowledge, and that they had eventually slipped ahead of me to place the cap where I would be sure to find it.

If this was the case, it seemed to be not a mean or taunting act but more of a greeting, perhaps even a kindness. Intuition told me that the words
Mystery Train
had something to do with my mother’s work. Twenty-one months after her death, someone had given me the cap because it was a link to her, and whoever had made the gift was someone who admired my mother and respected me if only because I was her son.

This is what I wanted to believe: that there were, indeed, those involved in this seemingly impenetrable conspiracy who did not see my mother as a villain and who felt friendly toward me, even if they did not revere me, as Roosevelt insisted. I wanted to believe that there were good guys in this, not merely bad, because when I learned what my mother had done to destroy the world as we know it, I preferred to receive that information from people who were convinced, at least, that her
intentions
had been good.

I didn’t want to learn the truth from people who looked at me, saw my mother, and bitterly spat out that curse and accusation:
You!

“Is anyone here?” I asked.

My question spiraled in both directions along the walls of the egg room and returned to me as two separate echoes, one to each ear.

Orson chuffed inquiringly. This soft sound lingered along the curved planes of the chamber, like a breeze whispering across water.

Neither of us received an answer.

“I’m not out for vengeance,” I declared. “That’s behind me.”

Nothing.

“I don’t even intend to go to outside authorities anymore. It’s too late to undo whatever’s been done. I accept that.”

The echo of my voice gradually faded. As it sometimes did, the egg room filled with an uncanny silence that felt as dense as water.

I waited a minute before breaking that silence again: “I don’t want Moonlight Bay wiped from the map—and me and my friends with it—for no good reason. All I want now is to understand.”

No one cared to enlighten me.

Well, coming here had been a long shot anyway.

I wasn’t disappointed. I have rarely allowed myself to feel disappointment about anything. The lesson of my life is patience.

Above these man-made caverns, dawn was rapidly approaching, and I couldn’t spare more time for Fort Wyvern. I had one more essential stop to make before retreating to Sasha’s house to wait out the reign of the murderous sun.

Orson and I crossed the dazzling floor, in which the flashlight beam was refracted along glimmering golden whorls like galaxies of stars underfoot.

Beyond the entry portal, in the drab concrete vault that might have once been an airlock, we found my father’s suitcase. The one that I had put down in the hospital garage before hiding under the hearse, that had been gone when I’d come out of the cold-holding room.

It had not, of course, been here when we had passed through five minutes ago.

I stepped around the suitcase, into the room beyond the vault, and swept that space with the light. No one was there.

Orson waited diligently at the suitcase, and I returned to his side.

When I lifted the bag, it was so light that I thought it must be empty. Then I heard something tumble softly inside.

As I was releasing the latches, my heart clutched at the thought that I might find another pair of eyeballs in the bag. To counter this hideous image, I conjured Sasha’s lovely face in my mind, which started my heart beating again.

When I opened the lid, the suitcase appeared to contain only air. Dad’s clothes, toiletries, paperback books, and other effects were gone.

Then I saw the photograph in one corner of the bag. It was the snapshot of my mother that I had promised would be cremated with my father’s body.

I held the picture under the flashlight. She was lovely. And such fierce intelligence shone from her eyes.

In her face, I saw certain aspects of my own countenance that made me understand why Sasha could, after all, look favorably on me. My mother was smiling in this picture, and her smile was so like mine.

Orson seemed to want to look at the photograph, so I turned it toward him. For long seconds his gaze traveled the image. His thin whine, when he looked away from her face, was the essence of sadness.

We
are
brothers, Orson and I. I am the fruit of Wisteria’s heart and womb. Orson is the fruit of her mind. He and I share no blood, but we share things more important than blood.

When Orson whined again, I firmly said, “Dead and gone,” with that ruthless focus on the future that gets me through the day.

Forgoing one more look at the photograph, I tucked it into my shirt pocket.

No grief. No despair. No self-pity.

Anyway, my mother is not entirely dead. She lives in me and in Orson and perhaps in others like Orson.

Regardless of any crimes against humanity of which my mother might stand accused by others, she is alive in us, alive in the Elephant Man and his freak dog. And with all due humility, I think the world is better for us being in it. We are not the bad guys.

As we left the vault, I said “Thank you” to whoever had left the photograph for me, though I didn’t know if they could hear and though I was only assuming that their intentions had been kind.

Above ground, outside the hangar, my bicycle was where I’d left it. The stars were where I’d left them, too.

I cycled back through the edge of Dead Town and toward Moonlight Bay, where the fog—and more—waited for me.

FIVE

NEAR DAWN

30

The Nantucket-style house, with dark wood-shingle siding and deep white porches, seems to have slid three thousand miles during an unnoticed tipping of the continent, coming to rest here in the California hills above the Pacific. Looking more suitable to the landscape than logic says it should, sitting toward the front of the one-acre lot, shaded by stone pines, the residence exudes the charm, grace, and warmth of the loving family that lives within its walls.

All the windows were dark, but before long, light would appear in a few of them. Rosalina Ramirez would rise early to prepare a lavish breakfast for her son, Manuel, who would soon return from a double shift of policework—assuming he wouldn’t be delayed by the extensive paperwork associated with Chief Stevenson’s immolation. As he was a better cook than his mother, Manuel would prefer to make his own breakfast, but he would eat what she gave him and praise it. Rosalina was still sleeping; she had the large bedroom that had once belonged to her son, a room he’d not used since his wife died giving birth to Toby.

Beyond a deep backyard, shingled to match the house and with windows flanked by white shutters, stands a small barn with a gambrel roof. Because the property is at the extreme southern end of town, it offers access to riding trails and the open hills; the original owner had stabled horses in the barn. Now the structure is a studio, where Toby Ramirez builds his life from glass.

Approaching through the fog, I saw the windows glowing. Toby often wakes long before dawn and comes out to the studio.

I propped the bike against the barn wall and went to the nearest window. Orson put his forepaws on the windowsill and stood beside me, peering inside.

When I pay a visit to watch Toby create, I usually don’t go into the studio. The fluorescent ceiling panels are far too bright. And because borosilicate glass is worked at temperatures exceeding twenty-two hundred degrees Fahrenheit, it emits significant amounts of intense light that can damage anyone’s eyes, not just mine. If Toby is between tasks, he may turn the lights off, and then we talk for a while.

Now, wearing a pair of goggles with didymium lenses, Toby was in his work chair at the glassblowing table, in front of the Fisher Multi-Flame burner. He had just finished forming a graceful pear-shaped vase with a long neck, which was still so hot that it was glowing gold and red; now he was annealing it.

When a piece of glassware is removed suddenly from a hot flame, it will usually cool too quickly, develop stresses—and crack. To preserve the item, it must be annealed—that is, cooled in careful stages.

The flame was fed by natural gas mixed with pure oxygen from a pressurized tank that was chained to the glassblowing table. During the annealing process, Toby would feather out the oxygen, gradually reducing the temperature, giving the glass molecules time to shift to more stable positions.

Because of the numerous dangers involved in glassblowing, some people in Moonlight Bay thought it was irresponsible of Manuel to allow his Down’s-afflicted son to practice this technically demanding art and craft. Fiery catastrophes were envisioned, predicted, and awaited with impatience in some quarters.

Initially, no one was more opposed to Toby’s dream than Manuel. For fifteen years, the barn had served as a studio for Carmelita’s older brother, Salvador, a first-rank glass artist. As a child, Toby had spent uncounted hours with his uncle Salvador, wearing goggles, watching the master at work, on rare occasion donning Kevlar mittens to transfer a vase or bowl to or from the annealing oven. While he’d appeared to many to be passing those hours in stupefaction, with a dull gaze and a witless smile, he had actually been learning without being directly taught. To cope, the intellectually disadvantaged often must have superhuman patience. Toby sat day after day, year after year, in his uncle’s studio, watching and slowly learning. When Salvador died two years ago, Toby—then only fourteen—asked his father if he might continue his uncle’s work. Manuel had not taken the request seriously, and he’d gently discouraged his son from dwelling on this impossible dream.

One morning before dawn, he found Toby in the studio. At the end of the worktable, standing on the fire-resistant Ceramfab top, was a family of simple blown-glass swans. Beside the swans stood a newly formed and annealed vase into which had been introduced a calculated mixture of compatible impurities that imparted to the glass mysterious midnight-blue swirls with a silvery glitter like stars. Manuel knew at once that this piece was equal to the finest vases that Salvador had ever produced; and Toby was at that very moment flame-annealing an equally striking piece of work.

The boy had absorbed the technical aspects of glass craft from his uncle, and in spite of his mild retardation, he obviously knew the proper procedures for avoiding injury. The magic of genetics was involved, too, for he possessed a striking talent that could not have been learned. He wasn’t merely a craftsman but an artist, and not merely an artist but perhaps an idiot savant to whom the inspiration of the artist and the techniques of the craftsman came with the ease of waves to the shore.

Gift shops in Moonlight Bay, Cambria, and as far north as Carmel sold all the glass Toby produced. In a few years, he might become self-supporting.

Sometimes, nature throws a bone to those she maims. Witness my own ability to compose sentences and paragraphs with some skill.

Now, in the studio, orange light flared and billowed from the large, bushy annealing flame. Toby took care to turn the pear-shaped vase so that it was bathed uniformly by the fire.

With a thick neck, rounded shoulders, and proportionately short arms and stocky legs, he might have been a storybook gnome before a watch fire deep in the earth. Brow sloped and heavy. Bridge of the nose flat. Ears set too low on a head slightly too small for his body. His soft features and the inner epicanthic folds of his eyes give him a perpetual dreamy expression.

Yet on his high work chair, turning the glass in the flame, adjusting the oxygen flow with intuitive precision, face shimmering with reflected light, eyes concealed behind didymium goggles, Toby did not in any way seem below average, did not in any way impress me as being diminished by his condition. To the contrary, observed in his element, in the act of creation, he appeared exalted.

Orson snorted with alarm. He dropped his forepaws from the window, turned away from the studio, and tightened into a wary crouch.

Turning as well, I saw a shadowy figure crossing the backyard, coming toward us. In spite of the darkness and fog, I recognized him at once because of the easy way that he carried himself. It was Manuel Ramirez: Toby’s dad, number two in the Moonlight Bay Police Department but now at least temporarily risen by succession to the top post, due to the fiery death of his boss.

I put both hands in my jacket pockets. I closed my right hand around the Glock.

Manuel and I were friends. I wouldn’t feel comfortable pointing a gun at him, and I certainly couldn’t shoot him. Unless he was not Manuel anymore. Unless, like Stevenson, he had become someone else.

He stopped eight or ten feet from us. In the annealing flame’s coruscating orange glow, which pierced the nearby window, I could see that Manuel was wearing his khaki uniform. His service pistol was holstered on his right hip. Although he stood with his thumbs hooked in his gun belt, he would be able to draw his weapon at least as quickly as I could pull the Glock from my jacket.

“Your shift over already?” I asked, although I knew it wasn’t.

Instead of answering me, he said, “I hope you’re not expecting beer, tamales, and Jackie Chan movies at this hour.”

“I just stopped by to say hello to Toby if he happened to be between jobs.”

Manuel’s face, too worn with care for his forty years, had a naturally friendly aspect. Even in this Halloween light, his smile was still engaging, reassuring. As far as I could see, the only luminosity in his eyes was the reflected light from the studio window. Of course, that reflection might mask the same transient flickers of animal eyeshine that I’d seen in Lewis Stevenson.

Orson was reassured enough to ease out of his crouch. But he remained wary.

Manuel exhibited none of Stevenson’s simmering rage or electric energy. As always, his voice was soft and almost musical. “You never did come around to the station after you called.”

I considered my answer and decided to go with the truth. “Yes, I did.”

“So when you phoned me, you were already close,” he guessed.

“Right around the corner. Who’s the bald guy with the earring?”

Manuel mulled over his answer and followed my lead with some truth of his own. “His name’s Carl Scorso.”

“But who is he?”

“A total dirtbag. How far are you going to carry this?”

“Nowhere.”

He was silent, disbelieving.

“It started out a crusade,” I admitted. “But I know when I’m beaten.”

“That sure would be a new Chris Snow.”

“Even if I could contact an outside authority or the media, I don’t understand the situation well enough to convince them of anything.”

“And you have no proof.”

“Nothing substantive. Anyway, I don’t think I’d be allowed to make that contact. If I could get someone to come investigate, I don’t think I or any of my friends would be alive to greet them when they got here.”

Manuel didn’t reply, but his silence was all the answer I needed.

He might still be a baseball fan. He might still like country music, Abbott and Costello. He still understood as much as I did about limitations and still felt the hand of fate as I did. He might even still like me—but he was no longer my friend. If he wouldn’t be sufficiently treacherous to pull the trigger on me himself, he would watch as someone else did.

Sadness pooled in my heart, a greasy despondency that I’d never felt before, akin to nausea. “The entire police department has been co-opted, hasn’t it?”

His smile had faded. He looked tired.

When I saw weariness in him rather than anger, I knew that he was going to tell me more than he should. Riven by guilt, he would not be able to keep all his secrets.

I already suspected that I knew one of the revelations he would make about my mother. I was so loath to hear it that I almost walked away. Almost.

“Yes,” he said. “The entire department.”

“Even you.”

“Oh,
mi amigo,
especially me.”

“Are you infected by whatever bug came out of Wyvern?”

“‘Infection’ isn’t quite the word.”

“But close enough.”

“Everyone else in the department has it. But not me. Not that I know. Not yet.”

“So maybe they had no choice. You did.”

“I decided to cooperate because there might be a lot more good that comes from this than bad.”

“From the end of the world?”

“They’re working to undo what’s happened.”

“Working out there at Wyvern, underground somewhere?”

“There and other places, yeah. And if they find a way to combat it…then wonderful things could come from this.”

As he spoke, his gaze moved from me to the studio window.

“Toby,” I said.

Manuel’s eyes shifted to me again.

I said, “This thing, this plague, whatever it is—you’re hoping that if they can bring it under control, they’ll be able to use it to help Toby somehow.”

“You have a selfish interest here, too, Chris.”

From the barn roof, an owl asked its single question of identity five times in quick succession, as if suspicious of everyone in Moonlight Bay.

I took a deep breath and said, “That’s the only reason my mother would work on biological research for military purposes. The only reason. Because there was a very good chance that something would come of it that might cure my XP.”

“And something may still come of it.”

“It was a weapons project?”

“Don’t blame her, Chris. Only a weapons project would have tens of billions of dollars behind it. She’d never have had a chance to do this work for the
right
reasons. It was just too expensive.”

This was no doubt true. Nothing but a weapons project would have the bottomless resources needed to fund the complex research that my mother’s most profound concepts necessitated.

Wisteria Jane (Milbury) Snow was a theoretical geneticist. This means that she did the heavy thinking while other scientists did the heavy lifting. She didn’t spend much of her time in laboratories or even working in the virtual lab of a computer. Her lab was her mind, and it was extravagantly equipped. She theorized, and with guidance from her, others sought to prove her theories.

I have said that she was brilliant but perhaps not that she was extraordinarily brilliant. Which she was. She could have chosen any university affiliation in the world. They all sought her.

My father loved Ashdon, but he would have followed her where she wished to go. He would have thrived in any academic environment.

She restricted herself to Ashdon because of me. Most of the truly great universities are in either major or midsize cities, where I’d be no more limited by day than I am in Moonlight Bay, but where I’d have no hope of a rich life by night. Cities are bright even after sunset. And the few dark precincts of a city are not places where a young boy on a bicycle could safely go adventuring between dusk and dawn.

She made less of her life in order to make more of mine. She confined herself to a small town, willing to leave her full potential unrealized, to give me a chance at realizing mine.

Tests to determine genetic damage in a fetus were rudimentary when I was born. If the analytic tools had been sufficiently advanced for my XP to have been detected in the weeks following my conception, perhaps she would have chosen not to bring me into the world.

How I love the world in all its beauty and strangeness.

Because of me, however, the world will grow ever stranger in the years to come—and perhaps less beautiful.

If not for me, she would have refused to put her mind to work for the project at Wyvern, would never have led them on new roads of inquiry. And we would not have followed one of those roads to the precipice on which we now stand.