Hystopia: A Novel (29 page)

“Now,” Singleton said. “Cut around as far as you can to the side of the house and then we’ll cross one at a time. Keep me covered. I’ll go first. If anyone comes out, give them a warning shot. I don’t want an element of surprise in any form but gunfire.”

He mentally set aside the report and placed himself in the moment. He felt mosquitoes biting his legs and the heavy pull of the rifle on his shoulder as he moved swiftly around to the driveway, taking the shortest exposed approach between wooded cover and porch, and without thinking, without even saying go, he ran across the gravel and flattened himself against the side of the house. Moving in a side step, he slid to the corner of the house and peered around it—gun first, always gun first. Then, removing his shoes and glancing back to sight his cover, he walked heel and toe up the steps and onto the porch.

He crouched, glanced through the window, and ducked back down with an image in his head: The image might have been called “Domestic Bliss”: three people were seated at a table, lit by a lamp hanging down over steaming dishes, and eating together with their bodies relaxed, no sign of a gun, no sign of intensity (and no Rake, no Rake at all). The man with the beard was sitting on one end of the table, the girl named Meg (if this was Meg) was at the other end, the old woman between them, with her back to the window. Singleton briefly raised his head again. The man with the beard was lifting his fork while the girl laughed about something. (Her laugh came through the glass, a flutter, delicate-sounding.) Beyond the table was a dark doorway.

It was possible that Rake was away (or actually dead) and they were holding down the fort. Also possible that the bearded man was Rake with some extra weight after a summer of killing and eating, killing and eating. Target had gained weight. Target had facial hair. Singleton struggled to get an intuitive read on the situation.

He waved Wendy in. She came running silently and crouched down beside him. She indicated the door with her gun. He pointed to the window with his own gun and made a poking motion. “Break the glass and hold them,” he whispered. “I’ll go through the door.”

She spread her fingers, clenched her fist, and spread them again. Count of five. Everything on a count, the manual said. Decide upon a course of action, using hand signals if necessary, and then, on a count, strike.

At the count of five she shattered the window with her gun and yelled, “Don’t move,” before they registered her gun and shouted and jerked in terror, for a split second, forks and spoons midair in the warm kitchen. Singleton passed through the mudroom—its smell of rubber boots and tools and mink oil—and burst into the kitchen as they froze.

“Move, I’ll shoot.”

The old lady heaved up from the table and began to howl.

Wendy went in with her gun raised, moving it from Singleton’s target—the big man—to her target, the girl.

Norman Rockwell, he’d write in the report. We approached target in cover formation—Wendy covered—and entered a Norman Rockwell scene. Total element of surprise accomplished. No reactive counterattack in relation to our action in the field.

“Christ, what took you so long,” the man at the table said.

HOMECOMING

Jesus Christ. What took you so long. The words came to Hank swiftly, and he said them and felt himself grow still in the brilliant tension of the moment. To project a sense of knowingness, to center the fear, to draw everything into an assurance that it was unexpected. This was his instinctual reaction to the breaking glass and the sudden appearance of two guns. Not sarcasm, but basic survival in the form of nonchalance with a dash of sarcasm as MomMom slid down against the stove, hands up, waving, making an unusual screeching sound, like a wounded animal, her watery, rheumy eyes bulging, a sound that somehow matched the persistent buzz in his ears. The man in the doorway was blinking and lowering his aim slightly. The woman, beautiful, with startling eyes, in a leather jacket, her legs spread, her arms up, looked like she was Psych Corps. Both were, Hank speculated, keeping his elbows on the table, a finger on his chin, scanning the room. It was clear they were Corps from their careful adherence to their training. Or maybe not. The man had scars and was holding his gun in a soldierlike way, in a zone, breathing hard with his eyes pinpointing. But the woman was clearly leaning on her training, with her legs properly apart but her finger off the trigger, down around the guard. An agent for sure. A renegade, one of Rake’s old customers, a Black Flag member, would’ve trigger-fingered and shot the ceiling or hit somebody by now.

Don’t move, the male agent was saying. He had a burn scar that ran down from his neck and disappeared under his collar, only to reappear on top of his wrist. It wasn’t a stretch to guess it was a combat scar, not at all, and the scruff on his face and his hair, grown out beyond regulation, seemed to tell a story, too.

Who are you? the female agent said, directing her question to Meg. He located a slight, faint quiver in her voice. Before he could speak, Meg answered from her seat at the table, giving her name.

We’re agents from the Psych Corps, the male agent said.

There it was in the guy’s voice! A tiny trace of a stoner’s quiver, leftover desire for Trip, a need for substance and maybe a hint of enfolding around his eyes and in the way he held the gun, as if he half remembered how to maintain his aim in this kind of situation. The scar confirmed it. He’d seen action, been enfolded, taken the treatment, and was out to save the world.

The male agent tightened his grip and steadied his aim. Don’t move, he said. His hand was shaking and he didn’t sound so sure about what he was doing.

Let me soothe my old lady, Hank said. She’s frightened off her rocker, but she’s harmless. Keep the gun on me if you want. I won’t bolt or move against you. If I were a failed enfold you two would be smeared on that wall there. I would’ve had a gun at hand, of course, at all times. You know that, I know that.

Go ahead, the man said, following with the gun as he went over to MomMom, who was leaning back against the stove, her mouth wide open, shaking her head but remaining unusually quiet.

These folks are good folks who are here to take care of some business that doesn’t have a thing to do with God. God’s outside the house right now. I’ll take you out to see him as soon as we talk a little bit with these people.

Keep her inside, the man said. The woman agent had lowered her gun.

Where’s Rake?

So I was right. You’re looking for Rake.

That’s right.

It’s just the three of us—me, Meg, and the old lady. Rake’s out of the picture.

Is he in the house? the agent asked. He moved around to the doorway and glanced down the hall.

No, he’s gone. Take a look around. You probably don’t believe me, I can understand that, but when I get around to explaining it to you, I trust you’ll agree that we did what we had to do beyond the law—not that the law means a whole lot up here—and in accordance with the nature of nature, such as it is. I’m a lumber runner, you see, and Meg here is a survivor, an enfold—you probably know, I’m sure you have a file on her, I’m sure you could tell me more about her story than I could.

The two agents seemed to calm down. Window glass covered the sink, and once again a breeze came through the broken window. Hank took a deep breath and smelled a tree, a faint itch of pollen from Canada, and he thought of the roles that he and Meg had played. They’d cast them off in the past weeks, but it might be necessary to revive them now, when they were looking into a gun barrel (no darkness like that of a gun barrel). Meg was totally out of her old role, her face clear and healthy from relaxing in the open air. But there remained a chance that these were rogue agents, acting in bad faith, a couple who had their own dramatic license to play a part.

His muscles had hardened from chopping wood and cleaning around the house. He’d enjoyed relaxing with Meg, but there was still the rumble of motorcycles at night. The locals would keep away, thinking Rake was still around, but others might come flowing in from the Lower Peninsula, now that the fires had started.

I’ll go take a look around, the male agent said to the female. You stay down here but keep your gun trained. Get the old lady to sit down at the table.

Hank’s telling the truth, Meg said to the female agent. As a matter of fact, he saved my life and I saved his. A few minutes later the man with the gun came back into the kitchen and put it on the counter. No sign of him, he said. He motioned for the woman to put the gun down.

Sit down at the table, Hank said. Join us. We got nothing to hide from you, nothing at all. And we don’t have much against the Corps. As a matter of fact, we’ve both had a form of the treatment. She had the official version and I had my own version. Black market or not, the Trip is Trip. I’d like to exchange names, Hank said, if that’s all right with you. I’d like to establish an atmosphere of trust quickly because, in case you haven’t heard, all hell is breaking loose downstate and it’s heading up this way, the chaos, not that it hasn’t been here already. It’s not going to take folks out there long to figure out that Rake isn’t around. When they do, they’re gonna come to extract some revenge for the things he did and the things they imagine he did.

Where is he? the agent said.

Hank leaned back and tweezed his beard. To let them know Rake was out of action would be to open the door to a new place, and that fact would either placate them or, if they were rogue, give them a new sense of freedom and lower their fear level a notch.

*   *   *

In the mission report, he’d describe it as a static scene with a domestic aura. The smell of baked bread. He’d say the girl looked rested and calm, with a small scar on her face. Eyes: blue. Hair: dirty blond. Targets offered hospitality in the form of drink and food. He’d explain that he withheld trust as was warranted in this kind of field situation, assessing for hints, taking as much time as needed, avoiding any kind of interrogative stance until it was proved necessary on account of the fact that it seemed possible that information would be forthcoming if trust could be established
.
He’d try to describe the old lady, leaning back against the stove and shaking violently, making strange guttural sounds—and the solitude, the sense of seclusion in the kitchen—the exchange in the tension of the guns, the heated delusional space in the fear, and the sense that he had of knowing exactly how to handle it, aiming away from time to time. He’d try to explain how the big one, named Hank, had gone to his mother, kneeled down, kindly, gently, with his big hands on her shoulder, and soothed her, speaking gently, urging her over to the table and pulling the chair out for her, telling her to sit, making her sit down and getting her a glass of water from the sink. The woman was mumbling things, speaking of the end, something about the end, the beginning and the end together. (He’d summarize in the report, explain that the old lady was demented in the way of someone hearing voices that are speaking what seems, to her at least, to be the truth.)

*   *   *

The big burly one was trying to exude a calm. “If you take our point of view, I mean our vantage, if you can do that you’ll understand that we can’t be totally sure you’re not two rogue agents or Black Flaggers in disguise. For all we know, you two are wheeling in here to poke around and see if Rake’s really gone or not, and if we tell you he’s gone you’re gonna play it out to the end, take what you can, get your revenge on us. So I’m not ready yet to say he’s not coming back any second. He might be. He might not be.”

“We’re not rogue agents,” Wendy said. She took a sip of her drink, raising her glass as if in a toast.

“Radio reports say it’s pretty bad down there. Radio confirmed the Kennedy’s genuinely dead this time, no miss, and they say whoever becomes president next is going to walk right along in his footsteps and keep the ball rolling. They say that in theory nothing’s really gonna change and that the chain of command has been passed according to the Constitution and all that.”

“What’s your name?” Wendy said.

“I go simply by Hank and this is Meg Allen. She’s the one you’re looking for, if you’re looking for a girl who was kidnapped by Rake. If that’s what you’re looking for, that’s who you’ve got right here. And over there is my mother, who got the name MomMom by me when I was a little kid—I could only say things twice, I guess, when I was a certain age—and when she got her dementia she had to be called that or her fits would get worse, so we all just got used to calling her that,” he said.

“MomMom’s sick,” the woman named Meg Allen said.

“She’s up and about now, but she’s been bedridden since the report came in about the president. It would help us if we see your badges,” Hank added.

“They’re in the car,” Wendy said.

“In case we caught you and held you hostage.”

“You could put it that way.” Singleton lifted the gun slightly.

“You can put the gun on me as long as you want but I’m not about to tell you what’s going on until I’m sure you are who you say you are and doing what you say you should be doing.”

“You cover them and I’ll go to the car,” Singleton said. He felt the exhaustion of the last two days in his arms, holding the gun. The weight of being armed, Klein would’ve called it. Holding death at your fingertips too long was unbearable.

I had an intuitive recognition of the instability inherent in the scene and an awareness of my own awareness as it related to my enfolded material, he’d write in the report
.

What is this sadness? It is the particular sadness that comes at the end of a certain sequence of planned events—an entire summer, in this case. Again, he had a sense that he knew the man at the table and perhaps the girl, too, and it saddened him. Had the entire summer been dedicated to achieving this scene?

“You OK?” he said to Wendy.

“I can hold them,” she said.

“How far up the road are you parked?” Hank asked.

“About a quarter mile.”

“That’s probably fine. Farther away you’d be in trouble because of Black Flag. They come in on recon missions, poke around, look for signs of change, and then leave. They don’t dare come up too close, not yet.