He’d never mention in his operation report that they had fallen asleep, but he might mention that seeing Hank and Meg curled up together on the couch asleep had given him the sense that they were telling the truth when they said Rake wasn’t a threat.
What he really wanted, he realized, was to write a fictionalized report that matched what he’d been hoping for: to be upon the dunes with Wendy, hiding, scoping out the target, aiming, waiting, drawing a deep breath, holding it, and then taking a kill shot to end the matter once and for all. He’d been hoping for a way into violence, for an apex of all narrative lines leading to Rake. He’d imagined that face exploding with the impact of a shell. He’d imagined a beautiful purge of inner tension.
THE FURY UNITES
In the days that followed, as they tried to gain each other’s trust, the man named Hank kept stopping to lift his nose to the air, like a dog. He claimed to be able to tell as much from the scent as from the radio reports. Smell was a spectrum to be broken apart and analyzed: lots of burning rubber and cut lumber from buildings in Detroit and Flint and Bay City (Bay City buildings had a spice to them, like oregano, because their lumber was old and seasoned), and then the tires stacked by gang members as barricades (a bitter scent, nothing to ever smell if you could help it), and then of course gasoline and oil and tar, and finally the more natural (and even lovely, in a sick way) smell of forest fires, which according to his nose were moving up the state and would probably hit the top of the mitten in a few weeks.
Wendy gave him pitying looks and told him to stop writing the fucking report. Something had shifted in her demeanor. In bed the second night, she refrained from touching him, rolling away, sleeping on her side. He ran his hand along her hip and she slapped it away.
What? Nothing. What’s wrong? Silence. When she fell asleep he put his hand back on her hip and left it there until he drifted off, only to wake deep in the night to the sound of motorcycles down the road, and then, when they were gone, the distant shush of the waves and the buzz in his ear. Wendy was breathing quietly, an almost inaudible shush. Put something in the report about bonding between Wendy and Meg, some indication that they had found a mutual point of commonality, both of them having lost lovers in Vietnam. Something about the afternoon chat, over tea, at the kitchen table, sharing stories while he listened from the hallway, pressing his back against the cool plaster (no, he’d leave that out), catching words, the name Steve Williams (a.k.a. Zomboid), something about the beach, the clink of the cups against the saucers. In the process of interrogation she and Meg had formed a silent alliance.
Early one morning, jittery with exhaustion, Singleton drove into town to use a phone outside the tavern. When he left, Wendy was still asleep, far over on her side of the bed, hugging the edge, breathing softly.
“We got to the target,” Singleton said to Klein. “We believe, although we’re not sure, that he is dead. You were wrong, sir. Or perhaps you were right.”
“Son, I want you to envision me deep beneath a mountain, behind a ten-ton door, in a bunker,” Klein said. “Because that’s where I am right now. We had all incoming calls rerouted out here. I’m deep underground.” His voice indeed sounded attenuated by the lines slung from pole to pole across the Great Plains, following the railroad right-of-way. Lines humming in a perpetual wind, twanging against the glass insulator bulbs. “Couldn’t hold on in Flint. We not only had too many failed enfolds out there but we also put too much trust in the treatment without understanding that the things we didn’t understand were just as important as those we did. Now we’re undertaking a review of the entire program, top to bottom.”
“I’m formally resigning,” Singleton said. “I want to get that in before the connection is cut.”
“You can’t resign, because I’m having you processed for administrative adjudication, son. Believe me, it’s the best thing that ever happened to you. I filled it out yesterday. But the papers are going up this morning.”
“Yes, sir, sir,” Singleton said. The parking lot at the tavern had a single bike parked near the door. Black streamers hung from the handlebar grips, fluttering.
“And now that you’re not my charge, now that you’re AWOL and on the run, I can give you an order man to man, from me to you. Father to son, so to speak, although of course I’m only taking a paternal role in theory. I assume you’ve had some time to think about your own real father,” he said. Klein’s voice faded for a moment and again Singleton imagined drooping lines along the right-of-way. “… hereby order you to interrogate the girl Meg. Get what you can from her. Use any means necessary—”
The connection clicked off with seeming finality. Holding the phone, Singleton watched a man in a leather jacket with Black Flag tags stumble out the tavern door and across the parking lot, singing to himself in an Irish brogue, his voice loud in the morning quiet. Singleton reestablished a dial tone, put some coins into the slot, and read numbers from his palm. The ringing signal, he heard at his end, presumably took the form, on the other end, of a clapper striking a bell in the belly of a black phone. He was about to hang up when Wendy’s father answered. The voice of a thousand smoked cigars. A throat that needed to be cleared every few minutes.
“Headquarters,” it said.
“It’s me, Singleton. How goes it down there? You surviving?”
“We’re alive,” Wendy’s father said. Another man came out of the tavern drunk. He flopped down on the sidewalk and sat with his legs crossed and his head bowed into his open hands. “We’re in the fray but it’s looking good. We held off the first wave. Nothing like a man in a wheelchair with a gun to confuse matters, and it didn’t hurt that I covered him with the big gun. Mostly kids and a few disgruntled locals but no vets, thank God. The vets aren’t in this one, because they came — most of them — for treatment.”
“So the violence is dying down?”
“Not at all. All of our scouting reports — and by that I mean what I hear on the radio — indicate that a counterattack is gathering.”
“Well, be safe. Please pass word to Steve Williams that we’re thinking about him.”
“He still prefers to be called the Zomboid.”
“OK, pass word to the Zomboid.”
* * *
“I’m being processed for administrative adjudication, which is a fancy phrase for court-martial,” he told Wendy when he got back to the house. Everything was quiet. MomMom was upstairs still sleeping, and Hank and Meg had taken a hike to the beach to look around for signs of Black Flaggers. She was in the kitchen, at the table, smearing jam on a slice of toast, leaning into the task, not looking up, keeping her head down as he explained that her father was OK and things were quieting down.
“They’re not quieting,” she said, softly. “And there’s not going to be a court-martial, because we’re not going back there for a long time.”
“I’m not sure about that. If this entire thing was meant to be part of our treatment, especially if it was Klein’s idea, then maybe we can go back and beat the rap.”
“It’s pretty clear. It isn’t exactly open to interpretation. The safe house wasn’t safe. The target isn’t a target. Now here we are.”
“But he’s in a bunker. Who knows what he really meant. He was cryptic.”
“Cryptofascist might be what you mean.”
“He told me to interrogate Meg.”
“I’ve already done that. It’s pretty simple. Rake took her out of the Grid because she probably had some connection with someone in his past — I didn’t get that far. She lost her boyfriend over in Nam and had a breakdown and was selected for treatment.”