Fear Nothing

the bike with one hand and keep the Glock in the other until you're back on hard ground and can ride again. Then ride fast.”
        I patted my jacket pocket, which sagged with the weight of the pistol. One round fired accidentally at Angela's. Nine left in the magazine. “But they're just monkeys,” I said, echoing Bobby himself
        “And they're not.”
        Searching his dark eyes, I said, “You have something else that I should know?”
        He chewed on his lower lip. Finally: “Maybe I am Kahuna.”
        “That's not what you were about to tell me.
        “No, but it's not as fully nutball as what I was going to say.” His gaze traveled over the dunes. “The leader of the troop… I've only glimpsed him at a distance, in the darkness, hardly more than a shadow. He's bigger than the rest.”
        “How big?”
        His eyes met mine. “I think he's a dude about my size.”
        Earlier, as I had stood on the porch waiting for Bobby to return from his search of the beach scarp, I had glimpsed movement from the corner of my eye: the fuzzy impression of a man loping through the dunes with long fluid strides. When I'd swung around with the Glock, no one had been there.
        “A man?” I said. “Running with the millennium monkeys, leading the troop? Our own Moonlight Bay Tarzan?”
        “Well, I hope it's a man.”
        And what's that supposed to mean?”
        Breaking eye contact, Bobby shrugged. “I'm just saying there aren't only the monkeys I've seen. There's someone or something big out there with them.”
        I looked toward the lights of Moonlight Bay. “Feels like there's a clock ticking somewhere, a bomb clock, and the whole town's sitting on explosives.”
        “That's my point, bro. Stay out of the blast zone.”
        Holding the bike with one hand, I drew the Glock from my jacket pocket.
        “As you go about your perilous and foolish adventures, XP-Man,” Bobby said, “here's something to keep in mind.”
        “More boardhead wisdom.”
        “Whatever was going on out there at Wyvern - and might still be going on - a big troop of scientists must have been involved. Hugely educated dudes with foreheads higher than your whole face. Government and military types, too, and lots of them. The elite of the system. Movers and shakers. You know why they were part of this before it all went wrong?”
        “Bills to pay, families to support?”
        “Every last one of them wanted to leave his mark.”
        I said, “This isn't about ambition. I just want to know why my mom and dad had to die.”
        “Your head's as hard as an oyster shell.”
        “Yeah, but there's a pearl inside.”
        “It's not a pearl,” he assured me. “It's a fossilized seagull dropping.”
        “You've got a way with words. You should write a book.”
        He squeezed out a sneer as thin as a shaving of lemon peel. “I'd rather screw a cactus.”
        “That's pretty much what it's like. But rewarding.”
        “This wave is going to put you through the rinse cycle and then down the drain.”
        “Maybe. But it'll be a totally cool ride. And aren't you the one who said we're here to enjoy the ride?”
        Finally defeated, he stepped out of my way, raised his right hand, and made the shaka sign.
        I held the bike with my gun hand long enough to make the Star Trek sign.
        In response, he gave me the finger.
        With Orson at my side, I walked the bike eastward through the sand, heading toward the rockier part of the peninsula. Before I'd gone far, I heard Bobby say something behind me, but I couldn't catch his words.
        I stopped, turned, and saw him heading back toward the cottage.
        “What'd you say?”
        “Here comes the fog,” he repeated.
        Looking beyond him, I saw towering white masses descending out of the west, an avalanche of churning vapor patinaed with moonlight. Like some silently toppling wall of doom in a dream.
        The lights of town seemed to be a continent away.

----

    Four
        

    DEEP NIGHT

----

    21
        
        By the time Orson and I walked out of the dunes and reached the sandstone portion of the peninsula, thick clouds swaddled us. The fog bank was hundreds of feet deep, and though a pale dusting of moonlight sifted through the mist all the way to the ground, we were in a gray murk more blinding than a starless, moonless night would have