Dronet presented their guests, who were seated, brought drinks (a cranberry spritzer for Mr. Wisher, a diet Coke for Schott), and there was a friendly, congratulatory buzz of light conversation as everyone waited for the meeting to come to order.
“Well?” Jorgenson said to Schott and Wisher. “We’ve all looked at the data. I see no reason not to announce Aristotle’s success.”
Wisher opened a briefcase, extracted a slim sheaf of papers. “Very impressive, yes.” He paused, as if he needed to scan the columns of figures again. In reality, every number had been checked and rechecked, every conclusion reconsidered and extrapolated by minds far colder than any Advanced Systems personnel could have imagined. “The average grade point is 3.7, up from 2.7 in the control group. IQ points average about seven points higher—”
“Which means,” Jorgenson said, “that while the process doesn’t increase intelligence, it does enhance focus. A student given Aristotle can be relied upon to score at the upper levels of his potential. We’re not changing genetics here.”
Wisher nodded, and stood, walking around the room slowly. “When you first contacted us with your situation, it seemed … well, incredible. You can imagine why we want to be as certain as possible that there are no mistakes, no repercussions. After all, there was the problem in Washington.…”
Jorgenson waved his hands, seeming to pooh-pooh the idea. “Claremont? That was years ago. We have monitored the children since that time, and they are doing quite well.” He shuffled a stack of papers, searching for something. “See here.”
Schott smiled. “Oh, no. We don’t have any problem with your figures. The concern is more one of public image. There are corporate concerns, family concerns…” He smiled broadly, and gestured expansively. In the moment that Schott gestured, and all eyes were on him, Wisher slipped a thumbnail-sized adhesive pad onto the back of a television monitor. Anchored to the pad was a tiny black metal rectangle.
Jorgenson nodded understandingly. “We understand. You knew the man himself. He was friend to you, and mentor, leader. Of course you would have these thoughts. But this is such an exciting development.”
One of the other men, a black man who looked like a barrel with arms, cleared his throat. “This is about the children, and only the children. We have the preliminary data. We are tracking them now, and things look excellent. We need to disseminate the information.”
“Which is,” Park/Wisher said, “impossible to do without revealing names and procedures, some of which will raise eyebrows.”
“What are you asking us to do?”
Schott laid his hands flat on the table. “Let’s not wait months. A few weeks. Say—until the middle of July. Give us time to prepare the family, to confer with the editors and board members. If this needs to be spun, we spin it. But we agree. It’s about the children.”
The others harrumphed and shifted uncomfortably in their seats. One of them, a small blond man wearing a checkered shirt, said: “Listen. I agree with you that we have a winner. Grades, behavior, general health, all indicators are up, but these are external indicators. We need better testing, and that will be difficult to get, unless we go public. In order to go public, we have to be very, very certain that we aren’t liable for lawsuits…”
“That’s absurd,” one of the women complained. “We’ve done nothing wrong.”
“That’s not the point. We agree that the Washington incident was merely an illusion, a coincidence having nothing to do with our project. Several of the children were being abused at home: the physical traces were discovered, and the prosecutors lumped all of the evidence together and tried to make a case. Nightmares, ugly dream drawings, bruises, genital trauma … that poor school caught hell. The point is that, merit or no, a lawsuit will prevent us from going national. Who is going to back us if someone is screaming sexual abuse?”
Wisher finished his circuit of the room, and sat down again. “Believe me, whatever concerns we have right here in this room, the media will blow them up a hundred times larger, regardless of our motives, and regardless of the ultimate worth of our efforts. Give us a little time.”
“I think we all want the same thing,” Schott said soothingly. “We’re so close now. Just a little longer.”
There was a bit more discussion, followed by agreement. Wisher and Schott made their goodbyes, and left the boardroom, and then the building.
In the car, Schott pushed an AC adapter into the cigarette lighter, and clipped it to a device as large as a transistor radio. He attached an earphone to the box, and slipped its button-sized speaker into his left ear.
“Reception?” Wisher asked tightly. He seemed almost mechanical now.
“Very good,” Schott said blandly. “A thousand yards, easy.”
“That’s all we need.” He paused. Then: “What are they talking about?”
Schott touched the ear button, nesting it more carefully. He squinted his eyes, and listened: “… wonder about that one reduction series Wisher asked us to run, identifying the fifty children at greatest risk. Unstable families, arson convictions, reports of animal torture or bedwetting. Strange stuff. What do you make of that…?”
“Just stat stuff,” Schott said, closing his eyes. “Crime statistics. Unemployment rates.” Almost a full minute passed as he listened. “Risk factors on the kids. Everything our tame shrink identified as critical points. The boss was right about these researchers. They’re sharp. Give them enough time, they’d put it all together.”
“Jesus,” Wisher said. His voice was tired and worn. Almost as if overcome with the wonderment of it, he asked: “And we have to kill them all, don’t we.” It wasn’t really a question.
“Can you think of any other way? You’ve looked at it. You tell me another way. Fifty kids now, or maybe a thousand innocent victims down the road.”
They had made it back to the main road now. They paused at the stop sign, and Wisher leaned his head against the steering wheel. When he looked back up his face was calm, and flat again, impassive, but for just a moment there had been a crack in his calm, and underneath it had been something as bright and hot as a flow of lava. Fear? Pain? Anger?
“No,” he said. “It just seems like there’s no end to it.”
“Then buck up, soldier. Keep your focus. I don’t like this any better than you do.”
Wisher took the main road down, and then returned to the freeway. “I’ll do this,” he said quietly. “I’ll do what I have to do, but then…” His voice wandered off.
“Then what?” Schott said.
“I don’t know,” Wisher said. “I don’t know what comes after. I’ll do what I have to do, but then…”
Schott watched his friend for a few seconds, and then turned and looked out the front window at the traffic. “After it’s over, Chuck,” he said. “Until then, keep focused.”
Wisher nodded, and drove on.
16
A rainy night in Claremont.
Most of the town seemed to revel in its rurality, but the main strip was raucous with card casinos, C&W-themed bars and even what passed local muster for a nightclub. Baja Bug VWs, trucks and SUVs were parked up and down Main Street. Their owners might have been going to gamble, or heading to the town’s largest movie theater, the Rialto, (newly refurbished!), or to one of the local party spots. Traveling further down the streets, there were darkened windows of the banks and pawn shops and payday loan services that had made such inroads in this section of town. Traveling another block or so brought you to a section where most of the businesses were closed for the night. It was darker here, less inviting. On this block, you would find a bar with rain-streaked, blacked-out windows. The sign above the door read: THE SADDLE SHOP. MEMBERS ONLY.
A few pickup trucks and cars were pulled up tight outside the Saddle Shop. It was well off the nighttime’s beaten track, but from time to time a man entered or exited the building, his coat pulled tightly around him.
They were usually between nineteen and forty yea
rs of age. Almost all were phenomenally muscular. If you were to follow one in after a car pulled up, you might notice that his swagger increased as he reached the Saddle Shop’s front door, even before he could hear the music blaring from within.
The music was loud, insistent, driving, vital. Its beat cut right through any notions of romance, to a core of animal sexuality that practically washed the room in male hormones.
The room was packed belly to butt with men. Most were dressed similarly to men who might have entered any other doorway along the street: as farmers, truckers, cowboys, construction workers. They had the bodies to match. No beer bellies here, no scrawny legs, no deskbound bad backs. These men put as much careful care into their appearance as the women in the Logger Lounge three blocks north.
There were no women in the room, but the men danced. In corner tables there was low, intense conversation. In the shadows at the back of the bar, and sometimes at the bar itself as the night wore on, there was considerable hot, sweaty physical contact, although there was no actual sex. Sex, however, was mere minutes away, in a drive up any of the unlighted roads leading to the hills, or down around the rivers, or in the apartments or sprawling ranch houses all over town. No need to risk undue legal attention.
Creased black leather molded around sculpted chests and arms and backs. The air swam with sweat and an unmistakable, undeniable stink of maleness.
The men drank, and danced. A song extolling the virtues of raw animal copulation blared from the loudspeakers. The men arm-wrestled, and talked low or loud, and watched each other with slitted eyes as they figured the evening’s moves.
Then the front window exploded, glass shards spinning into the dance floor as if a bomb had exploded in the street. A brick spun through the room, bounced off a table and rebounded onto the head of one of the construction workers. It slid to a stop against the wall under a poster of a bare-chested Brad Pitt.
The music died, and the room went deadly silent.
Brando, owner and bartender, walked around from behind the bar and crossed the room. No one else moved.
He hefted the brick. It was covered with plastic. Slipping off the rubber band, he unpeeled the wrapping.
The front door slammed open and a tree-trunk of a man named Hogie ran out. A few seconds later he reentered, shrugging his massive shoulders. “Nobody out there, Brando. Gutless assholes ran.”
Brando’s face was red with rage, but he was terribly silent. He hefted the brick again, and then with a careful hand, unwrapped a note nestled beneath the plastic. His eyes moved over the paper, reading it twice, and then passed it to one of the others.
“I’ll kill ’em,” he said quietly. “They’ll wish their mamas had chosen the coat hanger.”
17
The Allan Street bridge spanned the Cowlitz River, separating the old town of Allantown from the newer burg of Claremont. Over the years, Allantown and Claremont had grown larger, merging to the point that there was no dividing line save the river that ran under the Allan Street bridge.
Allan Street had become increasingly run-down over the years. The Chamber of Commerce office of Allantown was only staffed half the time. The old Deluxe theater tried to reinvent itself as a theater pub, then ran free broadcasts of sports and WWF wrestling spectaculars in an attempt to lure people into its pizza-and-beer bar, finally succumbing to the fall of the entire neighborhood.
Some said that it was all to the good, that the decreased values of the property made it easier to buy up the buildings with an eye to constructing a second bridge, one that would be four lanes wide instead of two, facilitating faster travel between the fusing halves of town.
But for now, the nights here were dark and quiet, most of the traffic passing a quarter mile to the north along the Prosper Street bridge. Here, shadows engulfed a once busy district even as early as eight in the evening. By midnight, no one passed this way at all.
There was a pedestrian lane along the bridge, sheltered from the motorized portion by a low wall. The pedestrian lane was a grille rather than solid concrete, and the rain ran through it to the darkened currents of the Cowlitz below.
This dreary night, there were two small forms crouched behind the low wall, boys who were supposed to be home in bed.
Patrick stole a glance at his watch. He was shivering, and not entirely due to the evening cold and wet. A truck rumbled up on the bridge, vibrating it to its foundations, its headlights sweeping across the cobblestone, brighter and colder than the eyes of God.
He crouched tighter, lower, and then jumped again at another sound behind him.
“Jeez,” Frankie said sourly. “If you got any froggier, you’d turn green.”
“I just don’t like this,” Patrick said. “If my mom takes a good look in my bedroom, I am like so screwed.”
“This’ll be good,” Frankie said. “This’ll be really good. Hey, Pat … break out the snacks.” Beneath a plastic drop cloth he held his father’s Sony video camera, complete with infrared night vision. “Let’s get ready to rumble,” he said. “I am ready for fight night.”
“Jesus,” Patrick said. His voice complained, but his eyes were excited. “You are so sick.” Patrick wanted to be here, and he didn’t. His stomach was tied in a knot, had been ever since he’d thrown the brick through the painted-out window of the Saddle Shop, whipping around the corner on his bike at mach speed.
“If you think it’s so sick, why are you here?”
“To keep you out of trouble,” he said.
“Shhh,” Frankie said. “Someone’s coming.” The roar of approaching motorcycles built and then died away. Kickstand sounds, and then some low, confident laughter.
The boys shut up, and peered down through the grill. A cluster of shadowy shapes, perhaps eight of them, moved down to the bottom. They were big, solid, and Patrick instantly recognized them from the trailer park. He had seen them outside Cappy’s trailer for months, laughing and joking, and going about their terrible business. He didn’t know them by name, except for one who he had heard called Flanagan, a mountain of tattoos and earrings and long greasy hair, and the one called “Torque.”
Flanagan was the only one who spoke. The rest were quiet but almost seemed to vibrate with a kind of crazy energy. “Think they’ll show, Torque?” His voice was just audible through the traffic. The rain had decreased to a mist.
“Torque” Marcello worked at the Li’l Car garage out on River View road. He was skinny, and looked something like a forties-era Sinatra after sandblasting, his features too vague and uncoordinated to have any impact. Marcello had a kind of crazed, jittery energy. His voice was a gravelly baritone, and he was never seen without something at the corner of his mouth: a cigarette, a toothpick, a segment of plastic straw. He had a younger brother named Toby who had flunked two grades, and was the oldest kid in their school, an aggressive little thug who strutted the halls like Godzilla.
These two easily dominated the other six. “Who the fuck can say? Karate assholes might think they can kick their way out of this, but it’s gonna be a nasty surprise.”
Torque spit, pulled a slender stick out of his pocket, inserted it in his mouth, and twirled it.
Flanagan shrugged the shoulders of his windbreaker, and held a palm up, satisfied that the rain seemed to have decreased. “Fire that up,” he said. There was a brief, bright flare of flame, extinguished by a gust of wind. Then a second flare, and the sweet stink of smoke rising up through the air, detectable even twenty feet away.
Laughter. “Assholes got good weed, though.”
More nasty chuckles followed that.
Patrick rolled over to his left. Frankie had the Sony trained down through the grill. “Are you getting this?” Patrick said in a dead whisper.
“Every word,” Frankie said. “Do you think we might be able to enter this in some kind of contest? America’s Sickest Home Videos?”
Patrick silently mouthed the words shut up, then said in a voice softer than a whisper, “Do you want them to h
ear you?”
As if in answer to them, down below, Torque inhaled deeply, and then looked around. “Did you hear that?”
“What?” Flanagan said.
“I thought I heard a voice.…”
Up on the bridge the kids froze, terrified, and ready to flee. Suddenly, there were voices. A dozen voices.
Flanagan flexed his shoulders. “This is it,” he said confidently. “Finally forced those pansies out.”
Almost on cue, the rain picked up again, harder and colder now.
One of the others nodded his head enthusiastically. “Gonna stomp the shit out of…” He focused his eyes on the figures emerging from the shadows, heading down the side of the embankment from Allan Street. “Those hippies,” he said, and there was something almost like reverence in his voice as he finished the words, something that was in terrible contrast to the expression on his face, which suddenly seemed very like a little boy’s.
Emerging from the rain, a dozen strong, came the men of the Saddle Shop. The smallest of them dwarfed Flanagan and his crew, made them look frail and utterly vulnerable.
There was a long moment in which the two groups stared at each other, and no words were spoken. Then Flanagan said what all of them had to be thinking. His voice was high and wavering, and filled with terror and loathing. “Shit, man. It ain’t the hippies—it’s the faggots!”
Even atop the bridge, Patrick imagined he could hear Torque swallow. “Now, hey,” he said lamely. “We ain’t got no beef with you—”
Brando smiled like a butcher eyeing his favorite turkey on Thanksgiving eve. “We got one with you. Which one of you uncle fuckers threw this?”
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