They’d been loose for two to three years. Plenty of time to breed.

Orson was on the floor, surrounded by this quartet of goblins, which now began to shriek at him again. He was turning worriedly in a circle, trying to watch all of them at once.

One of the troop was at such a distance and angle that I didn’t have to worry that any stray buckshot would catch the dog. Without hesitation, I blew away the creature on which I had a clear line of fire, and the resulting spray of buckshot and monkey guts would cost Bobby maybe five thousand bucks in redecorating costs.

Squealing, the remaining three intruders bounded from one piece of furniture to another, heading toward the windows. I brought down another one, but the third round in the shotgun only peppered a teak-paneled wall and cost Bobby another five or ten grand.

I pitched the shotgun aside, reached to the small of my back, drew the Glock from under my belt, started after the two monkeys that were fleeing through the broken window onto the front porch—and was nearly lifted off my feet when someone grabbed me from behind. A beefy arm swung around my throat, instantly choking off my air supply, and a hand seized the Glock, tearing it away from me.

The next thing I knew, I was off my feet, lifted and tossed as though I were a child. I crashed into a coffee table, which collapsed under me.

Flat on my back in the ruins of the furniture, I looked up and saw Carl Scorso looming over me, even more gigantic from this angle than he actually was. The bald head. The earring. Though I’d dialed up the lights, the room was still sufficiently shadowy that I could see the animal shine in his eyes.

He was the troop leader. I had no doubt about that. He was wearing athletic shoes and jeans and a flannel shirt, and there was a watch on his wrist, and if he were put in a police lineup with four gorillas, no one would have the least difficulty identifying him as the sole human being. Yet in spite of the clothes and the human form, he radiated the savage aura of something subhuman, not merely because of the eyeshine but because his features were twisted into an expression that mirrored no human emotion I could identify. Though clothed, he might as well have been naked; though clean-shaven from his neck to the crown of his head, he might as well have been as hairy as an ape. If he lived two lives, it was clear that he was more attuned to the one that he lived at night, with the troop, than to the one that he lived by day, among those who were not changelings like him.

He held the Glock at arm’s length, executioner style, aiming it at my face.

Orson flew at him, snarling, but Scorso was the quicker of the two. He landed a solid kick against the dog’s head, and Orson went down and stayed down, without even a yelp or a twitch of his legs.

My heart dropped like a stone in a well.

Scorso swung the Glock toward me again and fired a round into my face. Or that was how it seemed for an instant. But a split second before he pulled the trigger, Sasha shot him in the back from the far end of the room, and the crack I heard was the report of her Chiefs Special.

Scorso jerked from the impact of the slug, pulling the Glock off-target. The floor beside my head splintered as the bullet tore through it.

Wounded but less fazed than most of us would have been once shot in the back, Scorso swung around, pumping out rounds from the Glock as he turned.

Sasha dropped and rolled backward out of the room, and Scorso emptied the pistol at the place where she had stood. He kept trying to pull the trigger even after the magazine was empty.

I could see rich, dark blood spreading across the back of his flannel shirt.

Finally he threw down the Glock, turned toward me, and appeared to contemplate whether to stomp my face or to tear my eyes from my head, leaving me blinded and dying. Opting for neither pleasure, he headed toward the broken-out window through which the last two monkeys had escaped.

He was just stepping out of the house onto the porch when Sasha reappeared and, incredibly, pursued him.

I shouted at her to stop, but she looked so wild that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see that dreadful light in her eyes, too. She was across the living room and onto the front porch while I was still getting up from the splintered remains of the coffee table.

Outside, the Chiefs Special cracked, cracked again, and then a third time.

Although it seemed clear now that Sasha could take care of herself, I wanted to go after her and drag her back. Even if she finished Scorso, the night was probably home to more monkeys than even a first-rate disc jockey could handle—and the night was their domain, not hers.

A fourth shot boomed. A fifth.

I hesitated because Orson lay limp, so still that I couldn’t see his black flank rising and falling with his breathing. He was either dead or unconscious. If unconscious, he might need help quickly. He had been kicked in the head. Even if he was alive, there was the danger of brain damage.

I realized I was crying. I bit back my grief, blinked back my tears. As I always do.

Bobby was crossing the living room toward me, one hand clamped to the stab wound in his shoulder.

“Help Orson,” I said.

I refused to believe that nothing could help him now, because even to think such a terrible thing might ensure that it be true.

Pia Klick would understand that concept.

Maybe Bobby would understand it now, too.

Dodging furniture and dead monkeys, crunching glass underfoot, I ran to the window. Silvery whips of cold, windblown rain lashed past the jagged fragments of glass still prickling from the frame. I crossed the porch, leaped down the steps, and raced into the heart of the downpour, toward Sasha, where she stood thirty feet away in the dunes.

Carl Scorso lay facedown in the sand.

Soaked and shivering, she stood over him, twisting her third and last speedloader into the revolver. I suspected that she had hit him with most if not all the rounds that I’d heard, but she seemed to feel she might need a few more.

Indeed, Scorso twitched and worked both outflung hands in the sand, as if he were burrowing into cover, like a crab.

With a shudder of horror, she leaned down and fired one last round, this time into the back of his skull.

When she turned to me, she was crying. Making no attempt to repress her tears.

I was tearless now. I told myself that one of us had to hold it together.

“Hey,” I said gently.

She came into my arms.

“Hey,” she whispered against my throat.

I held her.

The rain was coming down in such torrents that I couldn’t see the lights of town, three-quarters of a mile to the east. Moonlight Bay might have been dissolved by this flood out of Heaven, washed away as if it had been only an elaborate sand sculpture of a town.

But it was back there, all right. Waiting for this storm to pass, and for another storm after this one, and others until the end of all days. There was no escaping Moonlight Bay. Not for us. Not ever. It was, quite literally, in our blood.

“What happens to us now?” she asked, still holding fast to me.

“Life.”

“It’s all screwed up.”

“It always was.”

“They’re still out there.”

“Maybe they’ll leave us alone—for a while.”

“Where do we go from here, Snowman?”

“Back to the house. Get a beer.”

She was still shivering, and not because of the rain. “And after that? We can’t drink beer forever.”

“Big surf coming in tomorrow.”

“It’s going to be that easy?”

“Got to catch those epic waves while you can get them.”

We walked back to the cottage, where we found Orson and Bobby sitting on the wide front-porch steps. There was just enough room for us to sit down beside them.

Neither of my brothers was in the best mood of his life.

Bobby felt that he needed only Neosporin and a bandage. “It’s a shallow wound, thin as a paper cut, and hardly more than half an inch from top to bottom.”

“Sorry about the shirt,” Sasha said.

“Thanks.”

Whimpering, Orson got up, wobbled down the steps into the rain, and puked in the sand. It was a night for regurgitation.

I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I was trembling with dread.

“Maybe we should take him to a vet,” Sasha said.

I shook my head. No vet.

I would not cry. I do not cry. How bitter do you risk becoming by swallowing too many tears?

When I could speak, I said, “I wouldn’t trust any vet in town. They’re probably part of it, co-opted. If they realize what he is, that he’s one of the animals from Wyvern, they might take him away from me, back to the labs.”

Orson stood with his face turned up to the rain, as if he found it refreshing.

“They’ll be back,” Bobby said, meaning the troop.

“Not tonight,” I said. “And maybe not for a way long time.”

“But sooner or later.”

“Yeah.”

“And who else?” Sasha wondered. “What else?”

“It’s chaos out there,” I said, remembering what Manuel had told me. “A radical new world. Who the hell knows what’s in it—or what’s being born right now?”

In spite of all that we had seen and all that we had learned about the Wyvern project, perhaps it was not until this moment on the porch steps that we believed in our bones that we were living near the end of civilization, on the brink of Armageddon. Like the drums of Judgment, the hard and ceaseless rain beat on the world. This night was like no other night on earth, and it couldn’t have felt more alien if the clouds had parted to reveal three moons instead of one and a sky full of unfamiliar stars.

Orson lapped puddled rainwater off the lowest porch step. Then he climbed to my side with more confidence than he had shown when he had descended.

Hesitantly, using the nod-for-yes-shake-for-no code, I tested him for concussion or worse. He was okay.

“Jesus,” Bobby said with relief. I’d never heard him as shaken as this.

I went inside and got four beers and the bowl on which Bobby had painted the word Rosebud. I returned to the porch.

“A couple of Pia’s paintings took some. buckshot,” I said.

“We’ll blame it on Orson,” Bobby said.

“Nothing,” Sasha said, “is more dangerous than a dog with a shotgun.”

We sat in silence awhile, listening to the rain and breathing the delicious, fresh-scrubbed air.

I could see Scorso’s body out there in the sand. Now Sasha was a killer just like me.

Bobby said, “This sure is live.”

“Totally,” I said.

“Way radical.”

“Insanely,” Sasha said.

Orson chuffed.

34

That night we wrapped the dead monkeys in sheets. We wrapped Scorso’s body in a sheet, too. I kept expecting him to sit up and reach out for me, trailing his cotton windings, as though he were a mummy from one of those long-ago movies filmed in an era when people were more spooked by the supernatural than the real world allows them to be these days. Then we loaded them into the back of the Explorer.

Bobby had a stack of plastic drop cloths in the garage, left over from the most recent visit by the painters, who periodically hand-oiled the teak paneling. We used them and a staple gun to seal the broken windows as best we could.

At two o’clock in the morning, Sasha drove all four of us to the northeast end of town and up the long driveway, past the graceful California pepper trees that waited like a line of mourners weeping in the storm, past the concrete Pietà. We stopped under the portico, before the massive Georgian house.

No lights were on. I don’t know if Sandy Kirk was sleeping or not home.

We unloaded the sheet-wrapped corpses and piled them at his front door.

As we drove away, Bobby said, “Remember when we came up here as kids—to watch Sandy’s dad at work?”

“Yeah.”

“Imagine if one night we’d found something like that on his doorstep.”

“Cool.”

There were days of cleanup and repairs to be undertaken at Bobby’s place, but we weren’t ready to bend to that task. We went to Sasha’s house and passed the rest of the night in her kitchen, clearing our heads with more beer and going through my father’s account of the origins of our new world, our new life.

My mother had dreamed up a revolutionary new approach to the engineering of retroviruses for the purpose of ferrying genes into the cells of patients—or experimental subjects. In the secret facility at Wyvern, a world-class team of big brows had realized her vision. These new microbe delivery boys were more spectacularly successful and selective than anyone had hoped.

“Then comes Godzilla,” as Bobby said.

The new retroviruses, though crippled, proved to be so clever that they were able not merely to deliver their package of genetic material but to select a package from the patient’s—or lab animal’s—DNA to replace what they had delivered. Thus they became a two-way messenger, carrying genetic material in and out of the body.

They also proved capable of capturing other viruses naturally present in a subject’s body, selecting from those organisms’ traits, and remaking themselves. They mutated more radically and faster than any microbe had ever mutated before. Wildly they mutated, becoming something new within hours. They had also become able to reproduce in spite of having been crippled.

Before anyone at Wyvern grasped what was happening, Mom’s new bugs were ferrying as much genetic material out of the experimental animals as into them—and transferring that material not only among the different animals but among the scientists and other workers in the labs. Contamination is not solely by contact with bodily fluids. Skin contact alone is sufficient to effect the transfer of these bugs if you have even the tiniest wound or sore: a paper cut, a nick from shaving.

In the years ahead, as each of us is contaminated, he or she will take on a load of new DNA different from the one that anybody else receives. The effect will be singular in every case. Some of us will not change appreciably at all, because we will receive so many bits and pieces from so many sources that there will be no focused cumulative effect. As our cells die, the inserted material might or might not appear in the new cells that replace them. But some of us may become psychological or even physical monsters.

To paraphrase James Joyce: It will darkle, tinct-tint, all this our funanimal world. Darkle with strange variety.

We know not if the change will accelerate, the effects become more widely visible, the secret be exposed by the sheer momentum of the retrovirus’s work—or whether it will be a process that remains subtle for decades or centuries. We can only wait. And see.

Dad seemed to think the problem didn’t arise entirely because of a flaw in the theory. He believed the people at Wyvern—who tested my mother’s theories and developed them until actual organisms could be produced—were more at fault than she, because they deviated from her vision in ways that may have seemed subtle at the time but proved calamitous in the end.