by James Abel
In America, nothing was coordinated anymore. Not politics. Not justice. Not friendship or even safety.
Route 80 grew more congested as he approached Pittsburgh. He’d dismantled his GPS to discourage electronic tracking, in case the federals figured out who he was. His hand-scrawled directions exited him onto two-lane Pennsylvania State Route 8N in Hampton Township, and then, as his heartbeat rose in anticipation, past fast-food restaurants and signs saying 2 FOR 1 BURGERS and new subdivisions with names like Indian Lakes and suburban Hardies Road. He entered a public parking area for North Park. On a pleasant summer dusk the seventy-five-acre lake shimmered. Canoes formed silhouettes against the sinking sun. Joggers enjoyed trails. Picnickers cheered a softball game. A poodle fetched a Frisbee, veering around riders on road bikes. No one challenged the lone man with a knapsack walking casually into the state forest, carrying a plastic container swarming with vectors.
The picnic area was just as he remembered, hidden from the main trail. It abutted the blue lake, and mosquitoes were out at this time of day. No one else was by the shore as he knelt down, and opened the container as easily as if it contained potato salad. He watched his mosquitoes fly out. It was like seeing a swarm of bombers take off from a military field. The wings were the jet rotors. The vectors would hone in on human sweat or perfume like a smart bomb is programmed to veer toward targets.
The swarm dissipated, going this way and that, a few lighting on a lily pad, some heading off toward the trail, others drifting sideways on a breeze toward joggers who had appeared and retreated into the forested path.
Tom wedged the container into a muddy nook filled with cattails. There were still a few sluggish insects inside. He stood and brushed off his pants, and ten minutes later he was back in the Subaru, his radio tuned to an all-news station as he left the park. “FBI sources in Chicago confirmed that the two men killed in a standoff—and who made a threatening phone call to Washington—had ties to a jihadist group.”
Tom smiled. The diversion had worked!
“A car registered to one of the men was found with a booby trap inside. Fortunately the bomb did not blow up. It had been rigged incorrectly.”
Tom grinned because the bomb had intentionally been rigged not to work, so the agents would find planted “evidence” left in the glove compartment of the car.
“Maps identifying future targets were found in the car. A massive manhunt for associates of the Illinois attackers is under way throughout the Midwest.”
Tom laughed. No attacks were planned there.
Reaching I-80 again, he felt a small stab on his wrist and observed a mosquito there. Not one of his. It was bigger. A tiger mosquito. He let it feed. Then it was sucked out the window by a breeze.
In two days people in Allegheny County would start to get sick, among them, he hoped, some of the special people who had caused him to choose Pittsburgh as a target.
Tom headed east and south. He carried dried camping food, granola bars and jerky, fresh water in gallon containers, and an empty bottle to piss in, if he decided to avoid stops. Four hours later he pulled off the road in West Virginia, ate a ham sandwich, used the public restroom, and slept six hours, curled on the front seat.
Refreshed, he headed off again.
Even if the police find the bodies in New York, no one will connect me to the outbreak. I am sorry I had to kill you, Rebeca. I will pray for you.
The radio announcer said, “In other news, White House spokesman Jack Ickel today announced ‘mission accomplished’ in Tunisia in the effort to contain Islamic militants. Ickel said local governments are now strong enough to mop up on their own. Military aid will be diverted to humanitarian purposes.”
Tom pounded the dashboard in jubilation. They gave in! They actually gave in! Hobart Haines was right!
He had promised Kyle Utley to stop the attacks if the U.S. capitulated. Now the plan’s succeeded on multiple levels. Panic and death. Profit for the cause. And now that Washington gave in we can blackmail them or bring them down by releasing the information.
Back in Brazil, Dr. Cardozo was trying to create more vectors. If that happens we will send teams to hit the enemy in Germany and France, London and Russia!
The promise to Kyle Utley had always been a lie.
I’m not going to stop until all vectors are out.
• • •
He’d rejected Washington as a target. He preferred to sow fear in other cities, to have America blame their leaders for the problem, not sympathize with them. He skirted the capital on the maze of surrounding highways, a man-made capsid of tar protecting human bacteria. The D.C. Beltway spilled him onto I-95 in Northern Virginia, last stretch of East Coast megalopolis.
Urban congestion dropped away. Thick forest rose up on both sides of the highway, and traffic sped up to seventy-five miles an hour. He took the Richmond bypass and three hours later crossed into North Carolina. The road went from six lanes to four. Everything looked more rural. A grassy median strip separated northbound lanes from south. Billboards jutted above pine forest, showing ads for log cabin homes; a shop that sold fudge; Pilot brand gasoline. He smelled pine sap and pig farms and freshly mowed grass. Visit the mothballed battleship North Carolina in Wilmington, he was advised. A gray state police car passed, lights flashing, its trooper ignoring Tom, not even glancing at the biggest threat he’d ever be near.
An hour and a half later Tom exited I-95 at the I-40 cloverleaf turnoff and steered west toward Tennessee.
Six hundred fifty thousand people lived in Memphis, on the Mississippi bluff. The rock and roll birthplace. The barbecue capital of the U.S. In summers, vacationers swelled the population on any given day to over a million.
Tom saw the Colorado license plate on the mobile home in front of him; the white and green, the outline of the Rocky Mountains. His head began to hurt. His gaze drifted down to the familiar, proud red bumper sticker.
I TOOK THE COLORADO CHALLENGE!! I FOUND COLORADO CALM!!
From inside that camper ahead, a small boy looked out at Tom from the back window. He made an imaginary pistol with his fingers. He “shot” at Tom. He looked about six.
Tom couldn’t believe his reaction. After all these years he realized he was crying. He felt the tickle of a single tear on his cheek.
He did not want to look at that kid. He sped up and passed the camper. That boy was heading toward Memphis. The boy’s parents might stop there to enjoy a meal, view, motel. That halt might kill them.
Tom pressed down on the accelerator, and the mobile home receded in his rearview mirror.
He thought, drying the tears with a wrist itching from the mosquito bite, that the kid had looked familiar.
He’d looked like Hodge.
The world condensed for Tom. Some people mark past years by seasons, by jobs, or by marriage. Tom divided his youth into periods corresponding to the men with whom his mother had slept at the time.
Tom thought back, transported.
• • •
Five-year-old Tom Fargo lies in his single bed in the two-room pine cabin and smells wood fire, ponderosa pine, and aspen forest outside, and a whiff of rum from the bedroom, behind the closed door. Mom and Doug are fighting in there. Mom’s boyfriend drinks heavily some nights. And when Doug gets loud, so does Mom.
“You have no self-control. Like a goddamn dog!” Mom screams.
Tom lays wide-eyed, terrified. Doug has never hit him, or Mom, but he is big and scary when angry. Normally everyone likes Doug, especially women. “They give bigger tips,” Doug says with a wink when he and Tom are alone.
Tom’s bed is in the living/dining room in the company cabin. They all live just outside the Pike National Forest, one hundred feet from a ring of larger cabins housing clients who pay a lot of money to come here for two weeks at a time.
“Switch off the computer and reconnect with nature. Join
us for a once-in-a-lifetime experience led by professional guides! Hear your heart beat in the magnificent Rockies! GET COLORADO CALM!” the brochure says.
But Colorado calm is for clients, not their guides, Doug and Mom. Tom’s mom is a petite twenty-two-year-old from Denver, who got pregnant when she was sixteen, barely finished high school, and left home. Doug, twenty-five, is charming, funny, a storyteller with clients. In public, Mom and Doug are always smiling. But inside the cabin where they live for six months a year—the other six they live in Mexico—fights erupt.
“I saw you kiss that slut,” Mom screams at Doug.
“So what? We agreed to do what we want. It’s not like we’re married, babe! Or like I’m his father!”
“Tom, don’t tell clients about the fights,” Mom pleads with Tom.
Mom is “excitable,” Doug explains when they’re hiking, alone. Mom “doesn’t understand guys.” There are no other kids around, and Tom is too young to go to school. Doug is usually fun. He shows Tom how to love the forest, how to start a campfire, track a bear, fish for trout, find healthy mushrooms. How to climb freestyle on rocks.
“Guys stick together! Let’s pick some wildflowers for your mom! It’s that cranky time of month for her. Someday you’ll understand.”
Doug’s a six-foot-four, shaggy-haired, muscled giant who smells of moss, mushrooms, and marijuana, wears T-shirts outside even when the temperature drops to forty degrees, and says he used to be a Navy Seal.
The clients love Tom. “You’re our mascot,” they say. They’re a mixed bunch: out-of-shape Chicago lawyers, troubled teens whose parents pay the $5,000-a-week fee, adventure seekers, singles, honeymooners, all worked to exhaustion by Doug and Mom each day. Like they’re paying money to go to a military boot camp.
“Climb that rope faster! Pick up the pace!”
The clients dangle from harnesses in trees, run rapids in kayaks, eat trout they cooked over open fires on sticks. Millionaires pick up trash and run miles carrying full packs. Doug and Mom are a perfect unit when working. At night, Tom hears Mom moaning or screaming and Doug grunting and farting. One time Tom walked in and the bedroom door was open. Mom and Doug formed a gigantic humpbacked shadow in firelight, jerking like campground dogs when they mate.
“You said you loved me, Doug!”
Mom crying and packing her duffel bag in the middle of the night finally. “Get dressed,” she orders Tom. Mom driving them away in their rusty fourteen-year-old Civic. “Don’t treat women like Doug does when you grow up, Tom! Promise!”
“I promise, Mommy.”
“Can you believe he slept with Cindy Carnahan? She’s twenty years older than him! No more asshole men for me!”
• • •
Guru Shahid is short and chubby and thickly dark haired all over, and he has shiny blue eyes that are always smiling at six-year-old Tom through round wire-framed glasses. Shahid was reincarnated—he says—after living a thousand years ago, in India. Guru Shahid smells of curry and onions, and so does Mom’s bed when he climbs out of it some mornings in the ashram, a converted horse farm on the outskirts of Colorado Springs. Shahid is able to levitate—that means float—in the air, he says, but not when anyone is watching.
“Your mother has an old soul,” Shahid tells Tom. “She lived in ancient Egypt as a princess! I was lowly, a bakery cook for the Pharaoh. I loved your mom from afar.”
“Shahid sees the real me,” Tom’s mom says.
With a revolving cast of thirty people, who have donated their worldly goods to Shahid, Tom and Mom tend the community vegetable gardens and go on Dumpster dives in town for food, because, Shahid says, “Supermarkets throw tons of useful food away. It is crime to waste it.” Tom is especially good inside Dumpsters, because he is agile. Food search parties go into town at night from the ashram. The adults lift Tom over the top of the Dumpsters and tell him to watch out for an occasional rat in there, and only take food that has not rotted badly.
Guru Shahid is the only one in the compound permitted to own money, but this is because he needs to “do business with outsiders,” he says. His face is rapt when he lectures the group, explaining that truth is a mix of Buddha, Siddhartha, and Kurt Vonnegut novels. Shahid receives messages from an ancient voice that calls itself “The One” and comes to him behind the barn, he says. The voice says that a great war is coming. And that only people who know “special secrets” will be saved. The voice tells Shahid that it is important to throw off “the shackles of technology,” so Shahid walks around the compound naked on Tuesday nights, when he sleeps with Tom’s mom. On other nights, he sleeps with other women, or, sometimes, men.
Then one night Tom wakes up to see Shahid standing by his bedside. Shahid’s eyes are shinier than usual, and he licks his lips. The matted hair on his chest seems sweaty in the moonlight. His eyes look tiny with the glasses off. Shadid’s hand is touching Tom’s neck when the door bangs open and Tom’s mother begins to scream.
“Liar! Pervert!” Mom packs up the car.
“Where are we going?”
“I don’t know. He was a fraud. He’s from New Jersey, not India! I can’t believe I ever listened to him!”
“How come your stomach is getting bigger?” Tom asks as they drive off. “How come you were throwing up this morning? Are you sick?”
“Not sick,” Mom says. “There will be three of us now. You’ll have a brother or sister. Won’t that be great?”
• • •
Actually, soon there are more of them. Gunther is a ski instructor in Breckenridge, where Mom gets a job in a folk art shop, selling Navajo ceramics and western paintings to tourists; real Ed Zorensky originals of cowboys in Wyoming. Navajo rugs and ceramics. Hopi beads. Tom helps out sometimes, after school. “You have a knack for selling,” Mom says. “You have an eye for art.” He is now twelve. Gunther and Mom have been together for three relatively calm years.
“I’m not your dad, but I’ll always be here for you,” Gunther says in his thick German accent.
Gunther stays up with Tom at night and helps with math homework. Gunther knows how to cook fresh venison with lime and cilantro, chile rellenos with cheese, vegetable casseroles seasoned with fresh basil. Elk steaks.
“I thought you said meat was bad for you, Mom.”
“That idiot Shahid said it! Isn’t this London broil delicious?”
Gunther takes Tom skiing and teaches him how to carve turns in snow, how to keep his hands out front and downhill when they traverse deep powder.
“You are a natural athlete,” Gunther says. “When you and me and your mom go back to Germany, we will all live together and ski in the Alps. You will love it.”
“Will Hodge love it, too?”
Hodge is almost five, seven years younger than Tom. Tom’s little brother adores him and follows him everywhere, and Tom loves it. If Gunther teaches Tom something, Tom teaches Hodge. Everyone likes Hodge. Tom takes Hodge to the bunny hill and teaches him skiing. He shows Hodge how to track rabbits and read coyote and lynx scat. He helps Hodge with homework, especially on nights when Gunther and Mom have been drinking wine or smoking marijuana, and are laughing too hard or eating too much to help Hodge out.
Tom loves that Hodge is always asking him questions. Why is the pine tree green? What makes the sky blue? What happens to the dog after it dies? Why are some people taller than others?
Tom also runs Ms. Kelley’s art shop when Mom is away on buying trips. In school that year, he’s learning about Islamic terrorists. He’s assigned to read about Islam on the Internet. He stares at photos of thousands of men and women walking around a huge twenty-foot-high black cube in Saudi Arabia, on a pilgrimage, the website says. They look peaceful and happy and seem to have purpose. They don’t look like killers or terrorists. They look like a big family, going to a different kind of church. It looks nice.
Hodge and Tom sleep in a room in
single beds, and sometimes Tom looks over at the little lump in the next bed and feels a swelling in his throat. One time in school a bully—an older kid—hits Hodge, and Tom comes flying out of the crowd and knocks the kid down, pummels him until his face is bloody. Tom threatens to kill the kid if he ever touches Hodge.
“You’re the best brother in the world,” Hodge tells Tom. Nothing, no compliment, has ever filled Tom with as much happiness.
His last memories of Hodge begin on the day their next-door neighbor—a Denver real estate lawyer named Richard Gruntz—knocks on the door and announces that he’s got tickets to that night’s Nuggets game in Denver. He can take six boys along with his son Josh. Would Tom like to go?
“Only if Hodge can come.”
“He’s a little young to stay up that late, isn’t he?”
“I won’t go unless Hodge can.”
So Hodge can go. And Tom makes sure that Hodge gets a window seat because Hodge can get queasy on the road. It starts to snow on the way to Denver. There was a storm last night, too, and huge piles of drift lay on both sides of the mountain roads. The radio warns of ice patches. Hodge is staring out the window, excited about the game, when Tom catches sight of Mr. Gruntz pulling out his cell phone. Tom knows that a driver is not supposed to use a cell phone; Tom reaches to pat Mr. Gruntz on the shoulder to ask him to stop, but at that moment—as Gruntz looks down—the van skids, and by the time Mr. Gruntz looks up they’ve slammed into the guardrail, snapped through it. The van is plunging down into a ravine.
Tom screams, “Hodge!”
Hodge is snapped into his seat belt so when the van turns over the boy stays fixed in place. Windows shatter. The roof caves in. The mountain flashes past sideways over upside down, and the boys are screaming and Mr. Gruntz’s phone goes flying and the snowmelt stream at the bottom of the ravine is rushing at them faster, closer, and . . .
CRASH!!!
Tom hurts all over. He has never hurt this much. It is hard to see because something is wrong with his left eye. Something is in it. It’s hot and sticky. He’s terrified for Hodge. Mr. Gruntz has the front door open. His right arm seems to be hanging, not moving, but he’s getting the boys out of the van, which has started to smoke. Smoke from the vehicle mixes with mist rising from the stream, in which the half-smashed vehicle lies sideways.
