14

December 9, night

Joe Sindesky had given up trying to get comfortable. He had a comfortable bed, he had taken all his pills, and it was even warm enough in here since his grandson had brought him that space heater. He didn’t have to yell at the cheap bastards who ran this retirement home to turn up the heat. His arthritis was bothering him only like a house on fire, not like a forest fire, and he sure as double hell was tired enough to sleep.

He was hoping to die in his sleep, the way Margie had. And he hoped it was going to be soon.

But lately he’d been tormented by the old memories. He might have to start taking that Zoloft stuff again. He was remembering Anzio, and Omaha Beach. Especially the beach, how he’d had to abandon his own cousin, Little Benjy, just leave him to die—Benjy who he’d pledged to his aunt to look after, and he’d even pulled strings to get him put in his outfit. Joe’d had to leave Benjy writhing on the sand bleeding to death from a 9mm round in the bread-basket, because Joe was a sergeant and he was expected to move the platoon up onto the beach. They had to protect those engineers who were going to bust open the bunker, and he’d had “the mission first, the mission no matter what” drilled into his head over and over, and it was ten times as strong because this was fucking D day for god’s sake, but Little Benjy, all of eighteen, was screaming, Please, don’t leave me, Joey.

“Shut the fuck up, Benjy,” Joey muttered, “it’s sixty goddamn years later and I’m tired of hearing it.”

But I bled to death all alone. You weren’t even there to hold my hand. Maybe you could’ve carried me on your back.

They’d have nailed me, I moved that slow, carrying somebody.

You see? It was your own ass you were worried about, not the mission, Joey.

“Shut the fuck up,” Joe said again, getting carefully out of bed and crossing the little studio room to the closet. He moved slowly because it hurt to move fast, but mostly because if he tripped in the semidarkness, with only the nightlight on so he could go to the head if he needed to, why, he’d have cracked a hip, at least, and be stuck in bed, in misery, till he died. A man just didn’t heal good at his age.

As he pulled the photo album down, he wondered yet again why God kept them alive so long past their use—yet let so many nice kids die young. He felt despair tighten over him, familiar as an old, ill-fitting coat.

He had lived with despair a good long while now. It was like the way they lived with humidity in New York, like the way people lived with the dryness in Arizona. Despair was part of the atmosphere of his life, something he accepted. Only, tonight, maybe it was just too much to accept. Maybe the time had come.

He’d have done himself a while back—he had enough nerve for that anyway—except Father Enzena said it was a mortal sin. Or was it a venal sin? He couldn’t remember. Maybe he hadn’t heard clearly. It was hard to tell what that goddamn Filipino priest was saying in his mushy Tagalog accent.

Oh, you got used to the Flips, they were okay; he just wished they’d speak clearly, because you felt like a fool, fiddling with your hearing aid all the time.

He could go over to Berkeley; they had an Irish priest over there, but they were all liberal sons of bitches, giving their blessings to gay marriages. Always in hot water with the diocese. How could you trust a priest like that?

He hobbled over to the chair beside his bed with the photo album and opened it toward the back where there were more pictures of him and Margaret together.

There was Margie in her elegant sun hat. She loved those fancy sun hats.

He suddenly felt himself weeping: it just came over him all of a sudden. He missed her, had missed her for thirteen years, though she was crazy senile at the end—but it was more than that. It was feeling that he had no purpose without her, and without work. That was what made him want to cry.

He couldn’t manage a garage anymore; the figures confused him; he got the billing mixed up. He had done some volunteer work, but it was so hard to get around now. And a lot of people just treated him like he was a grumpy old busybody.

So what did that leave you? You were in a waiting room, is all it was, and what was in the next room? Death. You were waiting to be erased from the world. Until then, all you had was playing cards with Mrs. Buttner and that old bald-headed yahoo with the big age spots on his head, could never remember the guy’s name. That was about it. What the hell kind of life was that? And TV nowadays embarrassed him. My god, those Victoria’s Secret commercials made you ashamed to watch TV with your grandchildren. You could tell the kids and grandkids were all just putting in time, when they came to visit.

Oh, shit, he was crying again.

Well. Fuck that Filipino priest. The real reason he’d held off was because he had been afraid the saints wouldn’t let him see Margaret in the next world. But he had to admit it—

Had to admit he’d stopped believing in a next world. What did priests know? Literally dozens of them arrested on child molestation out in Boston. Even more in Ireland. If they hadn’t been molesting, they’d been tolerating it. How could you trust a bastard like that? Child-molesting priests, homosexual priests, they had to be liars, and that would include about heaven.

He’d been raised Catholic, but being a practical man, a nuts-and-bolts man, he’d really never been able to believe in anything he couldn’t see.

Sure. It was all a scam. He’d always suspected that. Not that he’d want his grandkids to stop going to church. But then again, if you couldn’t trust the fucking priests to keep their hands to themselves . . . Oh, the hell with the whole fucking thing.

He had the .32 in his drawer, under some papers. They didn’t know about it, of course. Residents weren’t supposed to have firearms. People got crazy senile and paranoid in their old age, and they really shouldn’t have firearms, no. So he’d had to smuggle it in.

Feeling a real sense of purpose now, and silently laughing at the irony of it, Joe got up with a grunt and hobbled over to the little rolltop desk. Dumped out the pencil box, found the little key he’d hidden at the bottom, and fumbled at unlocking the drawer. The lock took a minute, what with the shaking of his crooked fingers, but finally he got it unlocked and got the pistol out.

He held the gun in his hand and admired it. He’d had it for fifty years. He’d kept it in good repair. He made sure the safety was off. He cocked it and raised it to his mouth.

“Hello, Joe, whatya know?” said a voice from the doorway. “Is this good timing or what?”

Joe was so startled he almost pulled the trigger. But he managed to ease off. He didn’t want anyone to have to see him blow his brains out.

He lowered the gun and squinted at the dark figure in the doorway. He hadn’t heard the door open, but then that figured, with his ears being as bad as they were.

“Who’s there?”

The figure reached to turn on the lamp atop the dresser. Joe recognized him. It was Garraty.

“Why, Garraty.” Joe glanced at the clock. It was one in the morning. “How’d the hell you get in? They don’t allow no visitors at this hour. Place is all locked up. Security guard and the whole business.”

“Well, I’ll tell you.”

“Speak up, dammit.”

Garraty spoke a little louder, closing the door behind him. “I was just saying, Joe, I did in fact have to kill that security guard. Ran into him when I jimmied the back door. He was a foul-mouthed little punk anyway. I can’t imagine you feel sorry about him.”

Joe blinked. “You say you killed him? Oh!” He chuckled because it was expected when someone was pulling your leg. But he didn’t feel like laughing. “Damn, you had me there. I don’t remember that kind of sense of humor from you, Garraty. Well, hell, I’d make small talk and ask how your missus is but—”

“She’s better than she’s been for twenty years.”

“—but I figure you must’ve noticed this gun.”

“I did,” Garraty said. “Seems I got here at the perfect time. Just a moment later and boom!—a terrible waste.”

Joe felt a warm pulse of hope. Maybe there was another way. Maybe somebody gave a damn. Maybe . . .

“Now, look,” Garraty went on, “we go way back. Elks together for twenty-five years at least since I moved out here. I know what time of day it is, Joe. I understand how you feel. I’m here to tell you I’ve got something better than putting a bullet in your head.”

Joe groaned in disappointment. “Oh, no. You’re born again, ain’t you. Is that all it is? I hate that stuff. Goddamn it there, Garraty, I’m Catholic. I was just now thinking it’s probably a lot of bullshit, but it’s my family’s bullshit, and what do I want your bullshit for?”

“I’m not born again—not the way you mean. I’m not a Christian, Joe. It’s not religion I’m talking about. Nope. It’s better than that. It’s real, you see. Let me show you something.”

Then he did a handstand, right there in the middle of the room. Without any visible effort, no tremble in his arms. Joe just stared.

“I’m dreaming, is what it is,” Joe muttered.

“No, you’re not,” Garraty said, flipping down to his feet again. “I’m young again inside, Joe. Eventually, if I cared to, I could make the outside look young, too. So I’m told. I could do it, anyway, if it helps the All of Us. But I don’t think whether I look old or young is important anymore. I don’t care about that. I don’t need sex, and if you don’t need sex, why do you need to look good? Vanity? I’ve got something better than vanity. I’ve got life and power. You can have ’em, too.”

Joe looked at Garraty and considered. Finally said, “You were in bad shape, last I knew. Something happened to you, sure. But why’d you come to me?”

“I’ve been assigned to you, Joe. We’re recruiting the older folks first. They’re much easier than the younger ones. We still have to attune for the brain chemistry of the younger ones, and we haven’t got the thinking power to work that out yet. That’s a big thinking. We tried a couple of the young ones, and they sort of worked and sort of didn’t. One of them was in hand, for a while, but he got troublesome, and the other one is just wandering around in the woods, converting animals and keeping an eye on things in his own half-assed way. We’re working on a test to sort out which kid’s susceptible.”

He paused. Smiled oddly. “Then, too, Joe, there’s a temporary shortage of the communion wafer.”

“The what?”

“That’s what I call it, anyway. It’s the special material that integrates the All of Us through the nervous system of the people we convert. It has to be manufactured. We still haven’t got enough, and we had to build the mechanism to manufacture it. So we can’t convert everyone, all at once. But pretty soon we’ll have a new system. The stuff will be able to make itself more easily. After the launch, Joe, very soon. And then everything will speed up.

“So what you want to do, Joe, is get in on the ground floor here.”

“Sounds like this new world of yours has got a lotta bugs in it,” Joe said, stalling. “You can’t do everyone, you got problems with the kids.”

“Sure, but we’re getting the bugs worked out. Then we’ll start again on the younger ones, don’t you know. Hell, even some of the middle-aged ones, they can resist a bit—and there are complications. They have to be reset.”

“What’s that, ‘reset’?”

“Why, sometimes it means they’ve got to be killed, Joe.” Garraty’s smile never faltered. “The rest of the time we just need to restore them to status—if the person was already with us.”

“Killed! You really did kill that security guard!” Joe felt a long slow chill slither through him.

“Certainly. He just wasn’t suitable for conversion, for various reasons. Some people are like cats; we have trouble with cats, too. Cats—we don’t care for ’em. Wrong brain chemistry. Hard for us to utilize, and the little buggers seem to sense us. Anyhow, when it comes to people, we prefer voluntary recruitment because the process is quicker, more foolproof. Of all the various systems modeled, voluntary recruitment is the most cost efficient.

“We’ve had to do a lot of experimenting, Joe. Some of the early formats were . . . a mess. But as you see, we’ve almost got it down to an art form now. The changeover can happen in a minute or two now.”

Joe was trying not to look at the door. “And you’re saying I don’t have to take that last trip to the cemetery?”

“Funny you should say that. You have to go there in one sense. But not to die. We’re using the cemetery, see. Central’s there. It turns out to be the place where there’s the best insulation against electromagnetic fields from the outside. We have a risk problem with—” He broke off, seemed to be listening. “No need to go into that with you. Well, you ready to be rejuvenated, Joe? What do you say?”

Joe shook his head. “Garraty—or whatever you are—you can kiss my ass. I figured what you are, more or less. And I’ll tell you something. I ain’t much—but I ain’t ever going to be that.”

“Joe, what else have you got? A choice between the misery of old age, isolation, endless loneliness—and oblivion? Old age is a bitch, Joe. I remember when I realized I was getting old. I was in my early fifties. It’s like being told you have a terminal disease, and seeing the first symptoms of that disease come on you. That’s how it felt. But not now, not the way I am now. This way, Joe, you live pretty much forever.”

Joe swallowed. His mouth was suddenly so dry, it was hard to do. “Forever?”

“Well, there’s a little something called entropy that will eventually take its toll—in maybe ten thousand years.”

“Ten thousand!” It made him tired just to think of it. “Ten thousand years? You’ve gotta be kidding.”

“Maybe longer. If you join us, all pain ends for you, Joe. All sickness. All weariness. All sadness. All uncertainty, gone. It’s all over with. You get to be part of something beautiful, growing like the patterns in a snowflake. You’d be useful again! If only you could see it the way I do, you’d say yes in a hot second.”

“But, I wouldn’t be me anymore.”

“That’s only partly true. They leave you a vestige. It’s enough. How much were you ever really yourself anyway? People kid themselves about that, Joe. Why, one moment they’re in a good mood, then they’re angry and hurt. People are as changeable as fog in a wind, Joe. Wisping this way and that. That ain’t real anyhow.”

“Speak for yourself. Tell me something. You folks are from, what—outer space?”

Garraty shook his head, smiling. “Not at all. Right here on earth. We’re not alien creatures, not at all. What we are—all you need to know is, we’re part of something grand now. My missus and I are happy as hell in it. Lots of your friends, too, Joe. Why Harry Delveccio just joined us, and he’s going great guns.”

“Harry! He’s one of you?”

“He is. Happy as a goddamned clam. Was him who suggested you.”

“Whatever he is now suggested me. Harry would never do that. So you, whatever you are, you’re all one thing, really, eh?”

“Yes and no—but more yes than no.”

“It’s like—” Joe felt his heart squeeze in his chest. “It’s like something’s eating the town. One person at a time.”

“We don’t literally eat human flesh—though we would if we ran out of other fuels—oh, I see. A figure of speech. Yes, people are . . . consumed into the overall organism, digested, in a way, made part of the All of Us. But it’s not as if they’re eaten.”

“Bullshit. You’ve been eaten. You’re eating my town.”

“Call it what you like. After you, I’m going to be going from room to room here, converting. We need the framework, dontcha know. So what do you say, Joe? The easy way? The way that wastes the least energy, works fastest? All you have to do is open your mouth and close your eyes and blank your mind and—think yes.”

Joe snorted and shook his head. He leaned a little forward as he said it. “No.”

“You mean that? The other way is slower and it starts with a reset. Hurts like hell, and it’s so inconvenient to the All of Us.”

“Inconvenient to the All of Us.” Joe was pointing the gun at Garraty now. “Fuck the All of Us. I don’t think you’re going to be recruiting anywhere here tonight, goddamn you, you misbegotten coldhearted son of a bitch.”

Garraty smiled—and then he had Joe’s gun in his hand.

Joe felt the gun go. It was a bullwhip crack, the way Garraty’s hand moved. Joe’s hand still stung from it.

“This can’t be, this ain’t what I—” Joe began.

It was almost inexpressible. He had allowed himself to visualize a bunch of ways it would end for him, but this sure as hell wasn’t one of them.

Then again, maybe it wasn’t so strange. Really, it was just another way for the world to go on rolling right over him.

But there was no reason for him to take it sitting down. He’d taken it sitting down all his life, watching television, dying a little more each night in prime time. The hell with that.

Garraty smiled blandly. And Joe knew Garraty was about to kill him.

Joe stood up and lurched at him, hands balled into fists—and Garraty stopped him dead, grabbing him by the throat. Joe felt like a small boy in a big man’s hand.

Garraty put the gun aside, on the bureau, then he brought his free hand over to Joe’s head.

Joe got off a yell or two, but that was something the night nurses had learned to ignore; old folks yelled in the night all the time, what with one thing and another. And of course the security guard wasn’t around to hear it.

December 10, morning

Helen Faraday prided herself on not suffering fools. She’d been serving the Lord as a lay minister at the Quiebra Church of Jesus the Annointed for eighteen years, devoting all her spare time to it. It was she who’d seen to it that the previous minister, Reverend Dalbreth, was hounded out after he was found sleeping with a married lady, and it was she who told Mrs. Lambert that her son Eli had been feeling up that Pakistani girl in the baptismal room after hours—leading to a confrontation, which led to Eli running away to become a heroin addict in the city now, which just showed that character will out. Certainly she wasn’t going to accept Reverend Nyeth’s young wife building some kind of sick Internet-porn device in the church basement. She’d heard Mary Nyeth making a sexy joke to another of the church’s ladies, and she’d seen her holding those little Bible-study boys a bit too close if you know what I mean, and it was very likely she was some kind of child-porn person. Of course, Helen couldn’t come out and say that without proof. But she would get her proof today.

So here she was early in the morning, before anyone else, going down the stairs into the old Witnessing Room. They didn’t use it anymore, since that incident a couple of years ago where that confused widow Mrs. Runciter had become convinced the Angelic Tongues were telling her the church was overrun by demons, and she tried to attack the minister and had to go to the hospital, and the laying on of hands had put her in that screaming fit that never did end.

Remembering the incident made Helen a bit nervous about descending the rickety stairway, flashlight in hand, into the dark church basement, where the skinny hysterical Judy Runciter had writhed and made blood foam from her mouth as she pointed at each of the church leaders in turn and screamed “Satan sucks through you, Satan sucks through you! Aghibia-habya-meleth-takorda-sha-bababba!” over and over again.

Mrs. Runciter had smashed the lightbulb and begun clawing at them in the dark, and no one had ever replaced the light down here, after they’d all run screaming upstairs. The Baptists coming out of the church next door that Sunday had thought it all quite smirkily funny as the Church of Jesus the Annointed members milled frantically in the parking lot.

Helen paused, hearing the stairs creak under her. She was a trifle overweight, enough that she was a tad worried about these stairs collapsing, and she could hear herself breathing, so strangely loud, through her mouth. The air seemed musty and cold and heavy.

She swung the flashlight beam around as she reached the bottom stair, and there was the old braided rug, and the upright piano, both of them coated in dust, and a trail of footprints leading through that dust. The footprints went from the stairs to the low stage at her left, where a cobwebby purple curtain stood, slightly parted. Beyond it was the machine that mumbled to itself, said things that were like what she supposed the Internet had to be. Babbling that made no sense. And she’d seen Mrs. Nyeth down here, standing over the machine.

She crossed to the low stage and stepped up on it, pushing through the curtains. There was the workbench set up against the wall behind the curtains, the plastered wall painted with a cartoonish mural of Jesus leading two smiling children into a rainbow-arched heaven.

Her flashlight found an entirely different sort of contraption on the workbench now, something like a satellite dish but not exactly. It didn’t give out a sound like the other machine had, as she played the flashlight over its parts. The only sound was the creaking . . .

. . . of the basement stairs.

She turned and saw both the Nyeths coming down here: Mrs. Nyeth, a slight red-haired figure in a brown shift and little flat shoes, leading the way; Reverend Nyeth, a man in a turtleneck sweater, with a high forehead and a perpetually purse-mouthed, skeptical look, following with his flashlight.

Helen switched off her own flashlight and retreated into the dim back corner of the stage area, near the curtain.

“Well, whatever it is you have to show me, Mary,” the reverend was saying, “I don’t see why it couldn’t wait till I put a lightbulb in down here.” He paused to look around. “It’s absurd, you know, not using this space just because someone lost touch with her common sense.”

“I agree, Charles,” Mary Nyeth said. “I have been using it, in fact. As for a lightbulb, the new models won’t need them, and you’ll be one of the new models.”

“I’ll be what?”

“Never mind. I’ll show you, right in here.”

Helen held her breath and tried to make herself small as Mary Nyeth stepped through the curtain and showed the contraption on the workbench to her husband.

“What the dickens is that thing? Where did it come from?”

“It’s a transmitter, Charles. It boosts a certain carrier wave. I made that transmitter myself.”

“You made it? Come now.”

“Lots of people have been making them. Haven’t you seen them around town?”

“Now that you mention it—Mary, what’s going on? Will you tell me, in heaven’s name?”

“Just relax. It won’t hurt, not so much, if you relax.”

Then Helen watched as little Mary Nyeth took her larger, more powerful husband by the throat and bore him down backwards, the reverend struggling and calling, “Mary, what? Mary! What—don’t!”

And she watched as Mary knelt on her husband’s chest and extruded a bristly, living metal stalk from her mouth and forced it down his throat from her own.

Helen didn’t scream—she only just managed not to scream—but she knew Mary must have noticed her pushing through the curtain and fumbling through the darkness to the stairs, clawing her way up them on her hands, and barking her knees and shins.

She got out the side door and to the little parking lot—some corner of her mind was amazed she could move as quickly as that—and she got to the minivan she used to take the kids to Vacation Bible School and was driving away before Mary came out, staring after her.

And Helen thought, Mrs. Runciter was right after all.

But she daren’t say that to the police. She’d have to get them to come out here with some other story.

When she got home, breathing hard, slick with sweat under her dress, she dashed right to the phone on the kitchen counter and called 911.

“Yes, hello?” Her own voice sounded shrill in her ears. “I want to report . . . an attack. A woman attacked her husband at the church. She forced some kind of metal thing down his throat.”

“And your name?”

“Helen Faraday.” Oh, Lordy, her mouth was dry. She felt faint, dizzy.

“Stay where you are and we’ll send someone over.”

“No, please, send someone to the church.”

“Certainly. Just stay where you are.”

The line went dead, and Helen hung up. Then it occurred to her that they hadn’t asked what church or which people.

She found that she was afraid to call back, though she wasn’t sure why. Well, the police would be here in a few minutes. She would tell them which church. And who.

Mrs. Nyeth killed the Reverend Nyeth, at the Church of Jesus the Annointed, she would say.

But was that woman Mary Nyeth? It was hard to think of her as Mary Nyeth now.

Helen allowed herself some of the rosé wine she kept for special occasions, and she was almost calmed down when it came to her that she had seen a lot of those transmitter things around town—things like the device this demonic woman was building in the basement.

Why should it be a surprise that the devil was using technology? Porn had exploded across the Internet, television had become hideously sexy, and people babbled on cell phones when they should be praying.

Then something more occurred to her. The transmitters were everywhere in Quiebra, so this must be some kind of citywide conspiracy. How far did it go? How could they get away with it, without the help of—

A sharp knock came on the door. A new wave of panic swept her from her stool at the counter, sending her dashing to the back door. She would go through the back gate into that little dirt alley between the houses and get away from there.

But the police were outside the back door, too, and they didn’t bother with an explanation. There was a white officer named Wharton, from his name tag, and a Chinese-looking one named Chen. They just grabbed her by her forearms and dragged her screaming into the back of the police van in the alley. It was one of those big black-and-white vans, and there was a short, dark-skinned, sorrowful-eyed Hispanic man in there, cuffed to a metal post.

She struggled and yelled, “Someone help me!” and almost pulled loose. Then one of the officers—she wasn’t sure which—hit her, once, just above the right ear, with some kind of truncheon, and she fell sick and dizzy to her knees, close by the Hispanic man. They grabbed her wrists roughly and cuffed her, then climbed out, without saying a word. She felt hot wet blood running down her ear, onto her shoulder.

They slammed the back doors of the van with a steely clang and got in the front, started the engine. And drove the van away.

“I’m sorry they’ve hurt you,” the Hispanic man said.

She looked up at him—wincing at the pain the movement caused— and she burst into tears. He nodded sympathetically as she wept and the van drove on and on.

After a couple of minutes, she swallowed her sobs and asked, “Where are they taking us?”

“I think, to the cemetery . . . or to a building near it.” He had no Latino accent. Central Californian. “From what I could find out, there’s a tunnel in an old barn there that goes under the cemetery.”

She saw then that he wore a police blouse, but it was torn open, buttons missing, and his T-shirt was stained with blood. “You’re— you’re a policeman, too?”

“They’re not police—not anymore. But I’m still a police officer. Yes. That’s why I said I’m sorry.” He spoke softly, so she could just make him out over the rumble of the van. He seemed to speak only as a kind of afterthought. She had the feeling he’d already given himself up for dead. “It was my job to stop them,” he went on. “Me and some others who found out. They haven’t taken over all the department, you understand. They don’t seem able to change everyone over at once. They have to make something—something they use in that changeover first, and that takes time. A few of the fellows at the station are left, and some of them only kind of half know. I was suspicious, called over to the Justice Department, Oakland PD. I called all over the Bay Area. I even tried to call Washington.” He chuckled sadly. “I thought I was talking to the Justice Department and the Oakland PD. Only, I wasn’t. They’ve taken over all the phone lines. They monitor cell phone output, too. Calls out to any kind of law enforcement office are routed back to . . . I don’t know what you call it, some kind of switchboard they control. And you’re not talking to who you think you’re talking to. If there’s anything in the call that’s dangerous to them, they arrange for you to be picked up. If it’s like a liquor store robbery, they switch it over to the real cops, I guess, and you wonder why you have to report it twice. I could have gone to Oakland in person, but they watch you too close for that.” He shrugged and swallowed hard. “Lots of people have been taken, the way you and I have, when they tried—tried to call for help . . .”

His voice trailed off. The van rumbled on, and she felt close to throwing up on the floor. She made urping sounds, but she kept it down.

After a time he added, “Yeah, they—they have the town pretty well sealed off, and they watch places that could be dangerous to them, outside town.” His voice broke, then. He turned his face away from her.

“What will they do to us?”

He didn’t answer her for a while. Then, as the van was pulling up somewhere, he said, “If they can convert you, they will. Or they’ll kill you and use you for parts.”

Helen started praying, then, and went into a kind of trance, even speaking in tongues, as the back of the van opened and they came and collected her and the Hispanic cop.

She kept waiting for God to intervene, as they dragged the two of them onto the red-stained wooden floor of the old barn, but—as they methodically cut off the little dark policeman’s head—she began to suspect that God wasn’t going to answer, this time.

December 10, afternoon

Ms. Santavo was a petite little woman, shorter than Adair, who wore ladies’ business suits that she had to have specially made for her. They didn’t make them in children’s sizes. She was actually half Vietnamese, half Filipino, if Adair remembered rightly, married to a Mexican guy named Santavo.

She had a psychology Ph.D., and maybe she was using it on Adair, here in her office at the high school, but it didn’t feel that way. Adair’d had several meetings with Ms. Santavo, back when she thought her parents were going to get a divorce and she hadn’t been able to concentrate on school stuff. Ms. Santavo had always been really nice and she’d done some kind of therapeutic talking-through that wasn’t really part of her job, just to try to help. Ms. Santavo was good at making Adair feel like an adult working things out with another adult.

On her desk, Ms. Santavo had a lot of those little toys for grown-ups you got at Earth Gifts and places like that—the miniature Zen sand garden, the baseball-size version of the globe with purple lightning jumping toward your hand when you touched it, the panel with colored sand that made artful-looking shapes when you turned it upside down and shook it, the frame with tiny magnetized diamond shapes of chrome that you could rearrange into any shape you wanted. Adair was playing with that one, absently, as they spoke after school.

“I know what you mean,” Ms. Santavo was saying, sipping a can of Diet 7UP. “I am not real likely to walk up to my own mother and say, ‘Mom, I think you’re acting very strangely’—not unless it’s really necessary. If she seemed to be developing Alzheimer’s, I might have to say something like that. It would be really hard.”

Adair was thinking about what Ms. Santavo said, but her hands were shaping the magnetized metal pieces into an almost familiar outline. A woman with long hair, in rough silvery silhouette. “It’s not just . . . being afraid of how she’ll feel about it. Hurting her feelings. It’s . . . hard to explain. I don’t have any good reason. That’s what’s, like, freaking me out. Being afraid of them for no really good reason. That’s why I thought, maybe I should see a doctor. Maybe, there’s something wrong with my mind. Maybe. I mean, feeling like your parents aren’t human anymore. Both of them, not just my mom—that’s just sick, isn’t it?”

“Oh, you know what, before I’d jump to the conclusion that you’re sick, I’d check out the less drastic possibilities. Like that there might just be a misunderstanding about what’s going on. Look, let’s have your mom come in—talk to her, the two of us. What the heck, if that doesn’t work, we’ll see about doctors.”

Adair felt pinned to a board, like a butterfly. She felt like she had to say yes. But she didn’t want to. “Yeah, sure.”

Ms. Santavo picked up the phone, called Adair’s house. “Hello, this is Ms. Santavo, calling about Adair. No, she’s fine, I just wanted to know if we could arrange a time to meet, talk over some issues that seem to be bothering her? No, it’s not an emergency but I think the sooner the better.

“Well, sure, if you like. Okay. That’ll be all right. See you then.”

She hung up, frowning—and then remembered to smile for Adair. “So, a preliminary step—your dad wants to meet with me alone.”

“But you talked to my mom.”

Ms. Santavo shrugged and smiled. “Well, she seemed to have been anticipating the meeting. She said your dad planned to come, instead.”

Adair nodded. She felt like warning Ms. Santavo about something. But she didn’t. Because she wasn’t sure what the warning should be—or even why she wanted to make it.

It was 9:53 P.M., and Vinnie had come out to listen to the noise from the bar—the way he sometimes did at night, never going in, just listening—and he was disappointed. Usually he heard laughing, arguing, people whooping, television noise from the ESPN that was always on because it was a sports bar, and music. And, of course, the sounds of glasses clinking. But it was so quiet in there now.

Vinnie screwed up his courage and looked through the window. The bartender, Ross, a stout balding guy with fading blue tattoos on his forearms, was standing behind the bar with his hands in his pockets, looking up at a football game on the TV over the rows of bottles.

Except for Ross, the bar was empty. Where was everyone? Vinnie’d always felt a sense of communication and sharing with the people in the bar, even though they usually weren’t aware he was out here listening on the sidewalk.

He didn’t look at his watch. He knew without looking that it was exactly 9:59.

Instead he looked up at the streetlight. Moths fluttered around it. You didn’t usually see them much this time of year, but there they were. But they weren’t batting at the lamp the way they usually did, leaving strobe trails of randomness behind them. Now the strobe trails were all in precise patterns, like pictures of electrons circling an atomic nucleus.

As if sensing his puzzlement, two of the dusty white fliers detached from their mothy orbit and flew down at him like dive-bombing hawks—not like fluttery moths at all. They streaked down in straight trajectories. When he stepped back from them they stopped in front of his face, one moth in front of each of Vinnie’s eyes, hovering there in a way he’d never seen a moth do.

Looking into their little moth faces, he saw tiny little jointed metal sensors emerging from their eyes.

He thought he heard a voice, then. “This one for the All of Us?”

And another voice replying, “No. His programming is problematically atypical. Seven Meridian green, polarized. He is suitable only for parts.”

Somehow he was aware that they weren’t talking to each other. He was hearing something in his mind that the moths were hearing, too.

The moths were like remote eyes for the things that were talking.

One of the voices said, “Who shall we send?”

“They are busy with conversions. There is no urgency with this one. He is socially externalized.”

Socially externalized?

Angrily, Vinnie clapped his two hands together in front of his face, crushing the moths.

But he knew it wouldn’t help. Two more moths detached from their lamp orbit, dived impossibly hawklike down, on their altered, metal-threaded wings, and followed him home.