Demons

by John Shirley

  He said all this with a straight face, but Melissa hoped desperately that he was bluffing.

  Whether he was bluffing or not, it worked. Marcus shook his head, popped his mouth open wide. Keeping his poker face, the old man put the jar to the boy’s lips, and Marcus drank. He gagged, choked, but swallowed half the dark brew. “That is enough, I think,” said the old man. “Hold the boy up against you in your arms. Pray for him. He will sleep.”

  Marcus shuddered deeply, and closed his eyes. He began to relax against her.

  The dervish winked again at Melissa and gestured to his assistant. The two of them bustled out, taking the jar with them.

  Melissa looked at Nyerza in puzzlement.

  Nyerza chuckled. “So the old fellow fooled you, too, out on the road?”

  She nodded. “I guess he did.”

  He whispered, “He knew if he seemed to want us here, the government’s thugs would take us away. But if he demanded that they take us away, they would bring us here. He’s used to dealing with them. He is the man we have come here to see.”

  Ash Valley, California

  Stephen was standing at the edge of a muddy pool, watching Death as it floated, slowly turning, on the stained surface of the water. There were two dead mallards, a male and a female, floating on their sides, their eyes milky, tucked nose to tail with each other, turning in an eddy as if deliberately doing a grotesque imitation of a yin-yang symbol. Flies clung to them like swamped sailors on a life raft. But looking closer, he realized that most of the flies were dead, too.

  The clouds shifted, and the light with them, so the wetlands pool mirrored the thin cloud cover, looking like the interior of an abalone shell. And in the reflection the two dead birds seemed to float in the sky like some forgotten ancient symbol of cosmic decay.

  Stephen shook himself. Get a grip, Stevie boy—focus! He turned to look for Dickinham and Glyneth.

  They were about fifty feet away, hunkered down at the pool’s edge with the sampling equipment, both of them wearing rubber gloves that protected them up to their elbows, preventing contact with the contaminated water.

  Glyneth glanced up at him as he walked over, her expression sadly amused. “It seems the stuff works,” she said dryly, turning to look at the water where two red-winged blackbirds, three dragonflies, and a stiff frog floated, half tangled together in an association they would never have tolerated in life. The animals weren’t long dead—only since the rain had flushed the fields above the floodplain that morning—and there was just a slight odor of rot plus another scent, perhaps from the faintly iridescent, oily slick that clung around them.

  “Yes, it works, a treat!” Dickinham said without irony, clearly pleased as he used the grabber to place a dead dragonfly into a test tube. He put the tube into a red-plastic case, like a fishing tackle box, that he’d set on a low boulder by the rushes.

  “Is there something I can do?” Stephen asked dutifully.

  “Today, just observe,” Dickinham said. “The job has to be done with the right toxics protocol, or you can accumulate the Dirvane on yourself, make yourself . . . queasy. Tomorrow you can help us with the osterizing scanner.”

  “Osterizing scanner?”

  “It cuts things up, purees ‘em like a blender—animals, plants—and tells you what their chemical components are.”

  “Ah. Crocker said you’d be checking to see if the stuff breaks down prematurely,” Stephen said.

  “Right.”

  Looking at the dead animals, Stephen added, “Looks to me like it doesn’t break down soon at all. It’s definitely sticking around and doing its job.”

  “Not sure, though, if it’s staying at the levels of concentration we want to see.”

  “What sort of pest are we aiming at here?” Glyneth asked, straightening up from her sample collector. “Mosquitoes or Mothra?”

  “Oh, a broad spectrum,” Dickinham said absently, using a touch pen to write something on a digital clipboard. “Kinda like one of those heavy-duty broad-spectrum antibiotics but for agricultural pests and not bacteria. Of course, I’ve always thought of unnecessary bugs and animals as just, you know, the bigger disease organisms of agriculture. Well, come on. Let’s head up into town, get some lunch.”

  Unnecessary bugs and animals? Stephen thought. One of the first things he’d learned in college was that they were almost all necessary, in some way, to the food chain, the biosphere. But he’d since learned to be skeptical of making such assumptions at West Wind. Its scientists delighted in pointing to the resilience of nature. Sometimes, though, he worried about it. Very quietly.

  Dickinham picked up his red-plastic case and headed away from the water, trudging up the muddy trail between the terraces of rice fields above the wetlands. Stephen started to follow, then held back, distracted by a rattling among the rushes and swampy reeds. With an inexplicable feeling of gladness, he turned to peer at the rushes, watching them shake as something tried to thrash its way free. “Something, anyway,” he murmured. He didn’t say the rest aloud: Something, anyway, had survived here.

  Then the reeds across the muddy channel began to dance—and a dog, a mud-spattered retriever, splashed blindly out of the rushes, coming from the island of mud on the farther side. There was something desperate in the way it thrashed toward them, its head making unnatural, spastic movements, jaws now and then snapping at the air. The frantic animal made it to the open water but seemed to bog down anyway, though a large retriever like this should have been able to swim comfortably. There was red foam, he saw, trailing from its muzzle, and its eyes had the milky glaze he’d seen on the ducks.

  “Jeezus,” Stephen whispered, taking a step back. “Is it rabid?”

  Glyneth shook her head, pointing at the dead birds. “Were they all rabid? No.”

  As he and Glyneth watched, the dog whimpered and coughed, paddled in a circle, clearly confused, more and more weakly with each motion of its legs—and then it shuddered, ceasing to swim . . . and sank.

  Instinctively, Stephen started toward the water, as if to wade in after the distressed dog—but, quickly peeling off a tainted rubber glove, Glyneth caught up with him and gripped his elbow. “Uh-uh, no—don’t go in that water.”

  He hesitated, watching the water bubbling where the retriever had sunk, as the dog drowned.

  “What was it doing out here?” he wondered aloud. “We’re quite a way from any houses.”

  “Dirvane 17 attacks the central nervous system. I guess it got a dose somewhere, got confused, wandered out here,” Glyneth muttered, her voice hoarse.

  The dog suddenly bobbed to the surface of the murk, onits side—rigid, its jaws open, head twisted to one side—and began to slowly drift in circles, looking as if it were already locked in rigor mortis, though it could only just have died. It turned in the syrup-slow eddy, beside the dead mallards and the dead frog and the dead dragonflies.

  Stephen tore his sickened gaze away, and trudged with Glyneth up the muddy path. He didn’t allow himself to run.

  “You’re not hungry?” Dickinham asked, with surprise, as they pulled up to the drive-up order window of Burger Urge.

  “No, still, um, full from breakfast,” Stephen said.

  “I mean, if you’re worried about the local produce, these fast-food people ship everything in.”

  “No, I just . . .”

  “Can I help you?” the talking plastic burger on the ordering sign asked them.

  “Yes,” Dickinham replied briskly. “An Urgent Burger, a double strawberry shake, fries, and—Glyneth?”

  “Just some coffee.”

  They got Dickinham’s food and drove the rented Hydrogen Hummer over to the little park that occupied the center of town. There they sat in the hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered Humvee, Dickinham and Stephen in front, Glyneth in back. Dickinham ate and made vague small talk about West Wind. The car filled with the smell of salty carbohydrates and meat.

  Stephen looked around, able to see most of downtown Ash Valley from
their vantage point. There wasn’t much: small shops in a square around the little half-block park, with its tall fir trees, rusty swing set, and child-tramped dirt. There were two basketball hoops, bent from people jumping up to dunk and dangle; the concrete court was humped and cracked by tree roots.

  The shops were touristy, for people on their way to Mount Shasta, and there were some fast-food places—Wendy’s and Burger Urge and a Soylicious and a Japanaquick. Surprisingly few people showed themselves on the streets; a small boy wobbled vaguely down the center line on his bicycle, his eyes equally vague. A single car passed through—moving quickly, for a small town—and, as Stephen watched, tensing, the electric sedan almost hit the boy, but it veered crookedly around him.

  The boy on the bicycle didn’t react.

  A concrete-block rest-room building stood in the park, and someone had done an elaborate spray-paint graffito of a demon, one of the seven clans, on the back wall in Day-Glo red and green: a Gnasher, if Stephen remembered the mythology rightly. Someone else had tried to blot it out with a red Christian cross, like a religious version of a cancel sign over it.

  “What the hell is that?” Dickinham growled rhetorically.

  “Um,” Stephen began, “I suppose it’s left over from—”—

  But Dickinham wasn’t listening; he’d meant something else. “What are those idiots doing here,” he muttered, getting out of the car. He paused, then turned to them long enough to snap, “You wait here, you two, please—I gotta have a word with . . .” He let it trail off and slammed the door loud enough to make Stephen jump.

  Glyneth and Stephen exchanged puzzled glances, then watched as Dickinham strode across a corner of the park to a large solar-enhanced white van, its rear toward them. It was parked in an alley beside a hardware store. “So that’s what he was talking about,” Stephen murmured, as Dickinham banged on the back doors of the van. They were opened by two men, who glared out at him. “Some kind of company car.”

  “I don’t think that’s a company car, exactly,” Glyneth said.

  The two scowling white men wore nondescript green jumpsuits and shiny black shoes; they had identical buzz cuts. A third man—red-faced, long-haired, bearded, shabbily dressed, looking drunk—tried to push his way out of the van. The two men pushed him farther back in. There was something odd about the drunk man’s eyes.

  “You see that license plate?” Glyneth asked casually. “That sequence—G-two-four-four—that’s typical of certain kinds of government vehicles. Pentagon research.”

  Stephen looked at her. “How do you know that?”

  She shrugged. “I did some checking once, about military research programs, for a paper I was writing. The information cropped up on the Internet. I almost went in to government research chemistry instead of private.”

  She said it, then looked quickly away, and Stephen thought, She’s lying.

  But that lie had been seamlessly delivered. Why was he so sure of it?

  He heard a slam, and glanced out the window to see that the back doors of the van were closed now, the van moving away down the alley, and Dickinham was returning. He opened the passenger-side door and reached past Stephen to the glove compartment. “Just need my cell phone a second . . . here it is.” He hit a speed-dialed number and put the phone to his ear. “Crocker? Why are the boys in green here already? Well, it’s broad daylight, for one thing, and they’re taking subjects for—” He paused, seemed to feel Stephen listening. Shot a cold look at him, then closed the car door and walked away, talking on the cell phone, gesturing vigorously.

  “Something confidential,” Glyneth murmured. “We speak no evil if we hear no evil, I guess. We learn not to see it. I wonder if we can feel it.”

  Stephen looked at her. “What do you mean?”

  “Just thinking out loud. Anyway, there was a rumor going around the observatory . . .” She looked at him blankly. “The rumor is that Dirvane 17 wasn’t really developed as a pesticide.”

  “What, then?”

  “I’m not sure. The people who were hinting about it were pretty mysterious themselves. But, you know, lots of pesticides are chemically related to nerve gas. Some of them were basically nerve gas first: Diazinon, for example, which people’ve used since the last century, is an organophosphate—one of the neurotoxins developed during World War II. I thought maybe . . .”

  Stephen stared at her, then turned to peer around at the interior of the Hummer.

  She raised her eyebrows. “What are you looking for?”

  “Cameras, maybe one of those flying cams . . . they make them so small now.” He turned back to her, a little sheepish. “I thought you had to be pulling my leg, and Winderson was going to appear again, projected into the car—‘You bought that one too, huh, Stephen?’ Or maybe he’d just be watching.”

  She stared, then shrugged and turned to watch Dickinham, who was returning. “I wasn’t kidding, but I was just speculating. I mean—people talk. I don’t worry about it. This job is all about going with the flow.”

  “Go with the flow? But—people would be dying in the streets if Dirvane 17 were nerve gas. They—they’ve sprayed the stuff all around the town.”

  “I don’t think it’s nerve gas exactly. They also experiment with— Actually, we shouldn’t be talking about this.” She changed the subject. “So, how do you like your new office?”

  “What office would that be?” Stephen asked, as Dickinham got back in, looking grim.

  “Oh, that’s right,” Glyneth said blithely. Her manner changed around Dickinham. She smirked at Stephen, “You haven’t seen your executive suite yet.”

  “No need to be sarcastic, young lady,” said Dickinham, buckling his seat belt. “It’s just a cubby in the building attached to the observatory, Steve. Just temporary, but this whole operation out here is temporary.”

  “So what was up with the van?” Stephen asked.

  Dickinham waved dismissively. “Just . . . one of our teams, jumping the gun.”

  “It looked like there was someone—the guy with long hair—trying to get out?”

  Dickinham started the vehicle but didn’t put it into gear. “Him? Oh, he’s one of the local yokels, ran into the D17 seepage pond. We’re going to detox him just to be on the safe side. Wouldn’t want anyone . . . you know. He was drunk, is all—not really trying to get away. Listen—hand me my fries, will you? And, uh, when we get back, speaking of detoxing, we all ought to go through the regimen—special shower, the whole trip.”

  “Special shower?” Glyneth said, straight-faced. “That sounds kinky.”

  Dickinham snorted and shook his head. “One in every crowd.”

  “Have we been exposed to anything dangerous?” Stephen asked, trying to sound as if he weren’t really worried about it.

  “No, no . . . It’s in the nature of a drill. Part of the experience you’re supposed to be getting . . . all part of the program . . . We—” He broke off.

  A group of people marched toward them through the park. They were led by a man in a long black coat and muddy boots, who was gesticulating wildly: a man with a bubble instead of a head.

  As they got closer, Stephen saw that the bubble was a transparent helmet, like the toy space-suit helmets little kids sometimes wore. But this wasn’t a toy. He’d seen other models before, in highly polluted areas. There was a filtration unit located just below the chin; toxins were separated from air, excessive water vapor was vented, keeping the inside of the helmet from misting over. There was a voice-amplification device of some kind so you could hear the wearer clearly.

  “Is that one of those new helmet cell phones?” Glyneth asked.

  Stephen knew what she meant. People who wanted cell phone privacy sometimes wore helmets. Heads-up displays showed e-mail and the like.

  “No,” Stephen said. “I’m pretty sure that’s an air-filtration helmet.”

  The man also wore rubber gloves. The five people trailing along with him—two old women, an elderly Hispanic man, a young te
enage couple—wore gloves and other, more-compact filtration masks.

  The man in the helmet seemed to notice the hydro Hummer, and he changed course, making a beeline for it. “It’s that lunatic, Reverend Anthony,” Dickinham muttered.

  “If he’s a lunatic, perhaps we should beat a strategic retreat,” Glyneth suggested.

  “No. I want to know what the son of a bitch is up to.”

  Stephen glanced at the frowning Dickinham. Why should he care what some street crazy was doing?

  Reverend Anthony stopped, about five feet away from the car, his back to the part of the cloudy sky that hid the sun. The brightness leaking through the clouds transformed his bubble helmet into a halo as he glowered through the glass at them. He had thinning red hair, a wide, flexible mouth, weariness-smudged blue eyes—a big-boned face that had once been pudgy, Stephen supposed, now looked gaunt. When he spoke, he exposed gapped teeth, and he pointed with a rubber-gloved hand.