"Meaning? "
"Seize the beer." I took an icy bottle from the cooler and passed it to him, hesitated, and then opened a beer for myself.
"Not wise to drink and drive, " I reminded him.
After taking a long swallow, I said, "I bet God likes beer. Of course, He'd have a chauffeur." The twenty-foot-high levee walls rose on both sides of us. The low and starless sky appeared to be as hard as iron, pressing down like a kettle lid.
"Transport where? " I asked.
"Remember your wristwatch."
"Maybe it needs repair."
"Mine went nuts, too, " he reminded me.
"Since when do you wear a watch, anyway? "
"Since, for the first time in my life, I started feeling time running out, " he said, referring not solely to his own mortality but to the fact that time was running out for all of us, for the entire world as we knew it. "Watches, man, I hate them, hate everything they stand for.
Evil mechanisms. But lately I start wondering what time it is, though I never used to care, and if I can't find a clock, I get way itchy. So now I wear a watch, and I'm like the rest of the world, and doesn't that suck? "
"It sucketh."
"Like a tornado." I said, "Time was screwed up in the egg room."
"The room was a time machine."
"We can't make that assumption."
"I can, " he said. "I'm an assumption-making fool."
"Time travel is impossible."
"Medieval attitude, bro. Impossible is what they once said about airplanes, going to the moon, nuclear bombs, television, and cholesterol free egg substitutes."
"For the sake of argument, let's suppose it's possible."
"It is possible."
"If it's just time travel, why the pressurized suit? Wouldn't time travelers want to be discreet? They'd be super-conspicuous unless they traveled back to a Star Trek convention in 1980."
"Protection against unknown disease, " Bobby said. "Maybe an atmosphere with less oxygen or full of poisonous pollutants."
"At a Star Trek convention in 1980? "
"You know they were going to the future."
"I don't know, and neither do you."
"The future, " Bobby insisted, the beer having given him absolute confidence in his powers of deduction. "They figured they needed the protection of the spacesuits because ... the future might be radically different.
Which it evidently is." Even without the kiss of the moon, a faint silvery blush lent visibility to the riverbed silt. Nevertheless, the April night was deep.
Way back in the seventeenth century, Thomas Fuller said that it is always darkest just before the dawn. More than three hundred years later, he was still right, though still dead.
"How far in the future? " I wondered, almost able to smell the hot, rancid air that had blown through the egg room.
"Ten years, a century, a millennium. Who cares? No matter how far they went, something totally quashed them." I recalled the ghostly, radio-relayed voices in the egg room, the panic, the cries for help, the screams.
I shuddered. After another pull at my beer, I said, "The thing ..
.
or things in Hodgson's suit."
"That's part of our future."
"Nothing like that exists on this world."
"Not yet."
"But those things were so strange ... The entire ecological system would have to change.
Change drastically."
"If you can find one, ask a dinosaur whether it's possible." I had lost my taste for the beer. I held the bottle out of the Jeep, turned it upside down, and let it drain.
"Even if it was a time machine, " I argued, "it was dismantled.
So Hodgson showing up the way he did, out of nowhere, and the vault door reappearing ... everything that happened to us ... How could it have happened? "
"There's a residual effect."
"Residual effect."
"Full-on, totally macking residual effect."
"You take the engine out of a Ford, tear apart the drive train, throw away the battery no residual effect can cause the damn car to just drive itself off to Vegas one day." Gazing at the dwindling, vaguely luminous riverbed as if it were the course of time winding into our infinitely strange future, Bobby said, "They tore a hole in reality.
Maybe a hole like that doesn't mend itself."
"What does that mean? "
"What it means, " he said.
"Cryptic."
"Styptic." Perhaps his point was that his explanation might be cryptic, yes, but at least it was a concept we could grasp and to which we could cling, a familiar idea that kept our sanity from draining away, just as the alum in a styptic pencil could stop the blood flowing from a shaving cut.
Or perhaps he was mocking my tendency acquired from the poetry in which my father had steeped me to assume that everyone spoke in metaphor and that the world was always more complex than it appeared to be, in which case he had chosen the word solely for the rhyme.
I didn't give him the satisfaction of asking him to elucidate styptic "They didn't know about this residual effect? "
"You mean the big-brain wizards running the project? "
"Yeah. The people who built it, then tore it down. If there was a residual effect, they'd blow in the walls, fill the ruins with a few thousand tons of concrete. They wouldn't just walk away and leave it for assholes like us to find." He shrugged. "So maybe the effect didn't manifest until they were long gone."
"Or maybe we were hallucinating everything, " I suggested.
"Both of us? "
"Could be."
"Identical hallucinations? " I had no adequate answer, so I said, "Styptic."
"Elliptic." I refused to think about that one. "If the Mystery Train was a time travel project, it didn't have anything to do with my mother's work."
"So? "
"So if it didn't have anything to do with Mom, why did someone leave this cap for me in the egg room? Why did they leave her photo in the airlock on a different night? Why did someone put Leland Delacroix's security badge under the windshield wiper and send us there tonight? "
"You're a regular question machine." He finished his Heineken, and I shoved our empty bottles into the cooler.
"Could be that we don't know half of what we think we know, " Bobby said.
"Like? "
"Maybe everything that went wrong at Wyvern went wrong in the genetic-engineering labs, and maybe your mom's theories were entirely what led to the mess we're in now, just like we've been thinking.
Or maybe not."
"You mean my mother didn't destroy the world? "
"Well, we can be pretty sure she helped, bro. I'm not saying your mom was a nobody."
"Gracias."
"On the other hand, maybe she was only part of it, and maybe even the lesser part." . s After my father's death from cancer a month earlier a cancer I now suspect didn't have a natural causei had found his handwritten account of Orson's origins, the intelligence-enhancement experiments, and my mother's slippery retrovirus. "You read what my dad wrote."
"Possibly he wasn't clued in to the whole story."
"He and Mom didn't keep secrets from each other."
"Yeah, sure, one soul in two bodies."
"That's right, " I said, prickling at his sarcasm.
He glanced at me, winced, and returned his attention to the riverbed ahead. "Sorry, Chris. You're totally right. Your mom and dad weren't like mine. They were way ... special. When we were kids, I used to wish we weren't just best friends. Used to wish we were brothers so I could live with your folks."
"We are brothers, Bobby." He nodded.
"In more important ways than blood, " I said.
"Don't set off the maudlin alarm."
"Sorry. Been eating too much sugar lately." There are truths about which Bobby and I never speak, because all words are inadequate to describe them, and to speak of them would be to diminish their power.
One of these truths is t
he profound depth and sacred nature of our friendship.
Bobby moved on, "What I'm saying is, maybe your mom didn't know the full story, either. Didn't know about the Mystery Train project, which might be as much or more at fault than she was."
"Cozy idea. But how? "
"I'm not Einstein, bro. I just drained my brain." He started the engine and drove down river, still leaving the headlights off.
I said, "I think I know what Big Head might be."
"Enlighten me."
"It's one of the second troop." The first troop had escaped the Wyvern lab on that violent night well over two years ago, and they had proved so elusive that every effort to locate and eradicate them had failed.
Desperate to find the monkeys before their numbers drastically increased, the project scientists had released a second troop to search for the first, figuring that it would take a monkey to find a monkey.
Each of these new individuals carried a surgically implanted transponder, so it could be tracked and ultimately destroyed along with whatever members of the first troop it found. Although these new monkeys were supposedly unaware that they had been put through this surgery, once set loose they had chewed the transponders out of one another, setting themselves free.
"You think Big Head was a monkey? " he asked with disbelief. "A radically redesigned monkey. Maybe not entirely a rhesus.
Maybe some baboon in there."
"Maybe some crocodile, " Bobby said sourly. He frowned. "I thought the second troop was supposed to be a lot better engineered than the first.
Less violent."
"So? "
"Big Head didn't look like a pussycat. That thing was designed for the battlefield."
"It didn't attack us."
"Only because it was smart enough to know what the shotgun could do to it." Ahead was the access ramp down which I had traveled on my bike earlier in the night, with Orson padding at my side. Bobby angled the Jeep toward it.
Recalling the sorry beast on the bungalow roof and the way it had hidden its face behind its crossed arms, I said, "I don't think it's a killer."
"Yeah, all those teeth are just for opening canned hams."
"Orson has wicked teeth, and he's no killer."
"Oh, you've convinced me, you absolutely have. Let's invite Big Head for a pajama party.
We'll make huge bowls of popcorn, order in a pizza, put one another's hair up in curlers, and talk about boys."
"Asshole."
"A minute ago, we were brothers."
"That was then." Bobby drove up the ramp to the top of the levee, between the signs warning about the dangers of the river during storms, across the barren strip of land to the street, where at last he switched on the headlights. He headed toward Lilly Wing's house.
"I think Pia and I are going to be together again, " Bobby said, referring to Pia Klick, the artist and love of his life, who believes that she is the reincarnation of Kaha Huna, the goddess of surf.
"She says Waimea is home, " I reminded him.
"I'm going to work some major mojo." Mother Earth was busily rotating us toward dawn, but the streets of Moonlight Bay were so deserted and silent it was easy to imagine that it was, like Dead Town, inhabited only by ghosts and cadavers.
"Mojo? You're into voodoo now? " I asked Bobby.
"Freudian mojo."
"Pia's way too smart to fall for it, " I predicted.
Although she had been acting flaky for the past three years, ever since she had gone to Hawaii to find herself, Pia was no dummy. Before Bobby ever met her, she had graduated summa cum laude from UCLA. These days, her hyper realist paintings sold for big bucks, and the pieces she wrote for various art magazines were perceptive and brilliantly composed.
"I'm going to tell her about my new tandem board, " he said.
"Ah. The implication being there's some wahine you're riding it with."
"You need a reality transfusion, bro. Pia can't be manipulated like that. What I tell her isi got the tandem board, and I'm ready whenever she is." Since Pia's meditations had led her to the revelation that she was the reincarnation of Kaha Huna, she had decided that it would be blasphemous to have carnal relations with a mere mortal man, which meant that she would have to live the rest of her life in celibacy. This had demoralized Bobby.
An elusive squiggle of hope appeared with Pia's subsequent realization that Bobby was the reincarnation of Kahuna, the Hawaiian god of the surf. A creation of modern surfers, the Kahuna legend is based on the life of an ancient witch doctor no more divine than your local chiropractor. Nevertheless, Pia says that Bobby, being Kahuna, is the one man on earth with whom she could make love although in order for them to pick up where they left off, he must acknowledge his true immortal nature and embrace his fate.
A new problem arose when, either out of pride in being just mortal Bobby Halloway or out of pure stubbornness, of which he has some, Bobby refused to agree that he was the one and true god of the surf.
Compared to the difficulties of modern romance, the problems of Romeo and Juliet were piffling.
"So you're finally going to admit you're Kahuna, " I said, as we drove through pine-flanked streets into the higher hills of town.
"No. I'll play it mysterious. I won't say I'm not Kahuna. Be cool.
Wrap myself in enigma when she raises the subject, and let her make what she wants of that."
"Not good enough."
"There's more. I'll also tell her about this dream where I saw her in an awesomely beautiful gold-and-blue silk holoku, levitating over these tasty, eight-foot, glassy waves, and in the dream she says to me, Papa he'e naluhawaiian for surfboard." We were in a residential neighborhood two blocks south of Ocean Avenue, the main east-west street in Moonlight Bay, when a car turned the corner at the intersection ahead, approaching us. It was a basic, late model, Chevrolet sedan, beige or white, with standard California license plates.
I closed my eyes to protect them from the oncoming headlights. I wanted to duck or slide down in the seat to shield my face from the light, but I could have done nothing more calculated to call attention to myself other than, perhaps, whipping out a paper bag and pulling it over my head.
As the Chevy was passing us, its headlights no longer a danger, I opened my eyes and saw two men in the front, one in the backseat.
They were big guys, dressed in dark clothes, as expressionless as turnips, all interested in us. Their night-of-the-living-dead eyes were flat, cold, and disturbingly direct.
For some reason, I thought of the shadowy figure I had seen on the sloping buttress, above the tunnel that led under Highway 1.
After we were past the Chevy, Bobby said, "Legal muscle."
"Professional trouble, " I agreed.
"They might as well have had it stenciled on their foreheads." Watching their taillights in the side mirror, I said, "They don't seem to be after us, anyway. Wonder what they're looking for."
"Maybe Elvis." When the Chevy didn't double back and follow us, I said, "So you're gonna tell Pia that in this dream of yours, she's levitating over some waves, and she says, Papa he'e nalu."
"Right. In the dream, she tells me to get a tandem board we can ride together. I figured that was prophetic, so I got the board, and now I'm ready."
"What a crock, " I said, by way of friendly criticism.
"It's true. I had the dream."
"No way."
"Way. In fact, I had it three nights in a row, which weirded me out a little. I'll tell her all that, and let her interpret it any way she wants."
"While you play mysterious, not admitting to being Kahuna but exhibiting godlike charisma." He looked worried. Braking at a stop sign after having ignored all those before it, he said, "Truth. You don't think I can pull it off? " When it comes to charisma, I have never known anyone like Bobby, The stuff pours off him in such copious quantity that he positively wades in it.
"Bro, " I said, "you have so much charisma that if you wanted to form a suicide cult, you'd have people
signing up by the thousands to jump off a cliff with you." He was pleased. "Yeah? You're not spinning me?"
"No spin, " I assured him.
"Mahalo."
"You're welcome. But one question." As he accelerated away from the stop sign, he said, "Ask."
Dean Koontz - Seize The Night Page 22
