Fear Nothing

his life.
        Bobby felt that he needed only Neosporin and a bandage. “It's a shallow wound, thin as a paper cut, and hardly more than half an inch from top to bottom.”
        “Sorry about the shirt,” Sasha said.
        “Thanks.”
        Whimpering, Orson got up, wobbled down the steps into the rain, and puked in the sand. It was a night for regurgitation.
        I couldn't take my eyes off him. I was trembling with dread.
        “Maybe we should take him to a vet,” Sasha said.
        I shook my head. No vet.
        I would not cry. I do not cry. How bitter do you risk becoming by swallowing too many tears?
        When I could speak, I said, “I wouldn't trust any vet in town.
        They're probably part of it, co-opted. If they realize what he is, that he's one of the animals from Wyvern, they might take him away from me, back to the labs.”
        Orson stood with his face turned up to the rain, as if he found it refreshing.
        “They'll be back,” Bobby said, meaning the troop.
        “Not tonight,” I said. “And maybe not for a way long time.”
        “But sooner or later.”
        “Yeah.
        “And who else?” Sasha wondered. “What else?”
        “It's chaos out there,” I said, remembering what Manuel had told me. “A radical new world. Who the hell knows what's in it-or what's being born right now?”
        In spite of all that we had seen and all that we had learned about the Wyvern project, perhaps it was not until this moment on the porch steps that we believed in our bones that we were living near the end of civilization, on the brink of Armageddon. Like the drums of Judgment, the hard and ceaseless rain beat on the world. This night was like no other night on earth, and it couldn't have felt more alien if the clouds had parted to reveal three moons instead of one and a sky full of unfamiliar stars.
        Orson lapped puddled rainwater off the lowest porch step. Then he climbed to my side with more confidence than he had shown when he had descended.
        Hesitantly, using the nod-for-yes-shake-for-no code, I tested him for concussion or worse. He was okay.
        “Jesus,” Bobby said with relief. I'd never heard him as shaken as this.
        I went inside and got four beers and the bowl on which Bobby had painted the word Rosebud . I returned to the porch.
        'A couple of Pia's paintings took some buckshot,” I said.
        “We'll blame it on Orson,” Bobby said.
        “Nothing,” Sasha said, “is more dangerous than a dog with a shotgun.”
        We sat in silence awhile, listening to the rain and breathing the delicious, fresh-scrubbed air.
        I could see Scorso's body out there in the sand. Now Sasha was a killer just like me.
        Bobby said, “This sure is live.”
        “Totally,” I said.
        “Way radical.”
        “Insanely,” Sasha said.
        Orson chuffed.

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    34
        
        That night we wrapped the dead monkeys in sheets. We wrapped Scorso's body in a sheet, too. I kept expecting him to sit up and reach out for me, trailing his cotton windings, as though he were a mummy from one of those long-ago movies filmed in an era when people were more spooked by the supernatural than the real world allows them to be these days. Then we loaded them into the back of the Explorer.
        Bobby had a stack of plastic drop cloths in the garage, left over from the most recent visit by the painters, who periodically hand oiled the teak paneling. We used them and a staple gun to seal the broken windows as best we could.
        At two o'clock in the morning, Sasha drove all four of us to the northeast end of town and up the long dried past the graceful driveway, California pepper trees that waited like a line of mourners weeping in the storm, past the concrete Pietŕ . We stopped under the portico before the massive Georgian house.
        No lights were on. I don't know if Sandy Kirk was sleeping or not home.
        We unloaded the sheet-wrapped corpses and piled them at his front door.
        As we drove away, Bobby said, “Remember when we came up here as kids - to watch Sandy 's dad at work?”
        “Yeah.”
        “Imagine if one night we'd found something like that on his doorstep.”
        'Cool.”
        There were days of cleanup and repairs to be undertaken at Bobby's place, but we weren't ready to bend to that task. We went to Sasha's house and passed the rest