Fear Nothing

previous sociopathic behavior has been identified and edited out. He's not a dangerous man anymore. He's one of their few successes.'
        I stared at him but couldn't read his true thoughts. 'He killed a transient and tore the guy's eyes out.'
        'No. The troop killed the transient. Scorso just found the body along the road and brought it to Sandy Kirk for disposal. It happens now and then. Hitchhikers, drifters… there's always been lots of them moving up and down the California coast. These days, some of them don't get farther than Moonlight Bay.'
        And you live with that, too.'
        'I do what I'm told,' he said coldly.
        Toby put his arms around his father as if to protect him, giving me a look of dismay because of the way that I'd challenged his dad.
        Manuel said, 'We do what we're told. That's the way it is here, these days, Chris. Decisions have been made at a very high level to let this business play out quietly. A very high level, Chris. Just suppose the President of the United States himself was something of a science buff, and suppose that he saw a chance to make history by putting the funds behind genetic engineering the way Roosevelt and Truman funded the Manhattan Project, the way that Kennedy funded the effort to put a man on the moon, and suppose he and everyone around him is now determined to cover this up.'
        'Is that what's happened?'
        'No one at the top wants to risk the public's wrath. Maybe they're not just afraid of being booted out of office. Maybe they're afraid of being tried for crimes against humanity. Afraid of being torn apart by angry mobs. I mean… soldiers from Wyvern and their families, who might've been contaminated - they're all over the country now. How many have they passed it to? Could be panic in the streets. An international movement to quarantine the whole U.S. And for no good reason. Because the powers-that-be think the whole thing might run its course without a major effect, peak soon and then just peter out.'
        'Is there a chance of that?'
        'Maybe.'
        'I don't think there's a chance of that.'
        He shrugged and with one hand smoothed Toby's hair, which was spiky and disarranged from the strap on the goggles that he'd been wearing. 'Not all the people with symptoms of change are like Lewis Stevenson. What's happening to them has infinite variety. And some who go through a bad phase… they get over it. They're in flux. This isn't an event, like an earthquake or a tornado. This is a process. If it had ever gotten to be necessary, I would've dealt with Lewis myself.'
        Admitting nothing, I said, 'Maybe it was more necessary than you realized.'
        'Can't have just everybody making those judgment calls. There's got to be order, stability.'
        'But there is none.'
        'There's me/ he said.
        'Is it possible you're infected and don't know it?'
        'No. Not possible.'
        'Is it possible you're changing and don't realize it?'
        'No.'
        'Becoming?'
        'No.'
        'You scare the hell out of me, Manuel.'
        The owl hooted again.
        A faint but welcome breeze stirred like a ladle through the soupy fog.
        “Go home,” Manuel said. “It'll be light soon.”
        “Who ordered Angela Ferryman killed?”
        “Go home.”
        “Who?”
        “No one.”
        “I think she was murdered because she was going to try to go public. She had nothing to lose, she told me. She was afraid of what she was… becoming.”
        “The troop killed her.”
        “Who controls the troop?”
        “No one. We can't even find the fuckers.”
        I thought I knew one place where they hung out: the drainage culvert in the hills, where I'd found the collection of skulls. But I wasn't going to share this information with Manuel, because at this point I couldn't be sure who were my most dangerous enemies: the troop - or Manuel and the other cops.
        “If no one sent them after her, why'd they do it?”
        “They have their own agenda. Maybe sometimes it matches ours. They don't want the world to know about this, either. Their future isn't in undoing what's been done. Their future is the new world coming. So if somehow they learned Angela's plans, they'd deal with her. There's no mastermind behind this, Chris. There're all these factions - the benign animals, the malevolent ones, the scientists at Wyvern, people