Burning Paradise

Dowd led them to the rear of the garage. He pulled away a tarp that covered a white unmarked delivery van, some years old. The dust released by this gesture hung in the air and tickled Cassie’s throat.

Dowd applied the key to the driver’s-side door of the van. It slid into the lock and turned. He pulled the door open.

“Well, then,” he said. “Well, then.”

The van hadn’t been open in quite a while. Stale air with tang of vinyl upholstery gusted out. “It looks like any old van,” Cassie said.

“It’s what’s in back that matters.”

“So what’s in back?”

Eugene Dowd pocketed the key. “We’ll talk about that later.”

Dowd escorted them up a flight of stairs to the loft he used as an office and bedroom—a few chairs, a table, an ancient refrigerator, sink and hot plate, a mattress on the floor—and asked if they wanted lunch. Cassie looked at the unwashed plates stacked on a sideboard. “Don’t worry, girl,” Dowd said. “All’s I got to offer you is ca

Thomas said he was hungry, and Cassie had to admit that she was, too: hungry enough to accept a chicken salad sandwich, as cold as Dowd’s wheezing refrigerator could make it. Thomas took the same, as did Leo and Beth. Dowd offered them Cokes and took a bottle of beer for himself.

He levered the cap from the bottle. “So, Leo—I bet you could have opened the door of that van even without a key, isn’t that right?”

“I don’t know. What do you mean?”

“Don’t be bashful. Your daddy told me you got hauled into juvie court one time for vehicle theft, attempted.”

“It was stupid. I was showing off.”

“That’s why they let you go with a fine and a lecture?”

“I guess my father told you that, too. Is he here?”

“Your old man? No.”

“Then where is he?”

“Werner Beck doesn’t post his whereabouts with me, at least not on a regular basis. But since you showed up without him, I doubt the news is good. I was told you wouldn’t come here without him unless something unexpected happened.”

“So how do you know my father? And what’s so special about that van?”

“Well, Leo, it’s a kind of a long story. Which I expect you need to hear. It was your father who come to me, by the way, not the other way around. I was living in Amarillo, this was most of ten years ago. Had a little one-room apartment, making ends meet with federal Work and Welfare checks. Your old man just knocked at the door one day and introduced himself. He said he’d seen a story about me in a local paper and he wanted to know if it was true.”

“If what was true?”

Dowd ran his thumb along the label of the beer bottle and looked off into the dim cavern of the garage. “I need to start at the begi

“Leave and go where?”

“A place I dearly hoped I’d never see again. But life shits on hope.” He took a long drink. “Isn’t that the truth?”

14

INTERSTATE 80 PASSED THROUGH THE college town of Montmorency, Pe

But the town had another distinguishing feature: Montmorency had been the home of the late Winston Bayliss, according to the ID Ethan had collected from the dead sim’s wallet.

He had been surprised when Nerissa suggested they drive by the address listed on Bayliss’s driver’s license. “It’ll take us out of our way.”

“Only a little.”

“I thought you wanted to get to Werner Beck as soon as possible.”

“I do. But this might be important.”

“Why? What’s the point?”

She shrugged and looked away.

“It might also be dangerous,” he added.

“Everything we’re doing,” she said, “is dangerous.”

Last night he had talked to Nerissa—more or less for the first time—about their plans.

She had left Buffalo in a furious but unfocused state of mind, determined to enlist Ethan in the hunt for Cassie and Thomas. He understood that. And he understood the guilt she must be feeling. The careful precautions she had put in place after the murders of 2007 had backfired, badly. Cassie and Thomas had left home under the impression that a full-scale second-wave attack was underway. Following protocols, they had gone to the nearest Society member, who happened to be Leo Beck. Leo (and Leo’s girlfriend, a young woman named Beth Vance) had left town, most likely to find Leo’s father. Nerissa was tormented by the idea that Cassie and Thomas might believe she was dead, and she was reasonably afraid that co

Ethan also knew she had never cared for Werner Beck. She had met him at a couple of Society gatherings. “Even in a community of paranoids,” she said at one of those meet-ups, “this guy is scary-paranoid.”

“He’s right about a lot of things,” Ethan had said. “He’s produced more valuable research than anybody else.”

“He thinks the Society is the vanguard of some kind of human insurgency. We’ll be lucky if he doesn’t get us all arrested.”

“Maybe he is a little crazy. But he’s smart, and he has deep pockets.”

“And you think that’s a good combination?”

So Nerissa was worried about Cassie and Thomas coming under the influence of Werner Beck, more so since the sim’s baleful confession. And Ethan more or less agreed with her. Find Cassie and Thomas, let Nerissa protect them, leave Beck to fight his own wars—fine. Ethan was on board with that. But afterward?

Everything had changed. The dead sim was hardly a reliable source of information, but the attack at the farm house suggested that at least some part of what it had said was true: there was internal conflict in the hypercolony. And although the Society survivors had tried to remain hidden, they had self-evidently failed: the simulacra had obviously known exactly where to find them. So going back into hiding wasn’t an option. They had never really been in hiding.

So, even assuming he and Nerissa successfully reco

Should there be any such attacks. If the sim was to be believed (which of course it was not), the hypercolony was dying. If the hypercolony’s death resulted in a global communications collapse, the consequences would be catastrophic, at least in the short run. And while such a disaster could be overcome, there remained the question of how the world would fare without the hypercolony’s subtle suppression of human bellicosity.

Ethan and Nerissa were facing the same problems, and it seemed to Ethan that they could help each other out, but that was hardly a plan—it was barely more than a wistful thought. He had been married to this woman for five years and physically separated from her for seven. And although in many ways she was still the woman he had loved and married, in other and significant ways she had changed. He no longer knew what to expect from her. Their old, easy intimacy had evaporated. She was nine-tenths a stranger to him.