Dawsey, gonna stay in your room tonight, or are you going to find some more kids to kill? Dew asked.
I thought killing babies was your gig.
Dew shook his head. A G.o.dd.a.m.n baby-killer reference. Hed walked right into it, sure, but even drunk, that kid really knew how to push his b.u.t.tons.
You know what? Dew said. Im too old and too tired for this. Im going to bed. You go drink yourself into a coma. Just dont die on me, or Ill get into trouble.
He walked to his room, keyed in, then shut and locked the door behind him, leaving Dawsey standing in the snow.
Perry nodded. Dont die on me. Thats all he was to these people, an a.s.set. A freak. He keyed into his room, shut the door, then fell on the bed. He dropped his beer. It spilled on the carpet. That was okay, he had two more. He rolled to his back and stared at the ceiling. It was spinning pretty good. Without looking away from the ceiling, he felt for another bottle, found it and twisted off the top. He upended it. Most of the beer splashed on his face or landed on the bed, but some of it went into his mouth, so it wasnt all bad.
I got some more, Bill, Perry said. I killed those motherf.u.c.kers.
Bill didnt answer. He never answered direct questions. He just piped up unexpectedly from time to time, told Perry to get a gun, to kill himself.
Bill. Why the f.u.c.k did Margo have to bring him up? Perry drank to forget Bill. Well, it didnt work. Nothing Perry ever did worked. Except when he wanted to hurt someone. To kill someone. That worked every time.
What the f.u.c.k was Dews problem, anyway? Pretending to get all p.i.s.sed about that family. Why didnt Dew and the others understand? Those people werent human anymore. They were weak. They didnt have discipline. That meant they needed to die. If one of them, any of them, was even trying to cut out the triangles, then Perry would let them live. Maybe. But it didnt matter, because so far no one had fought.
No one but him.
Why? Why was he special? He knew why: because his drunken, f.u.c.ked-up, wife-and child-beating father had toughened him up with a strap.
Perry set the beer bottle on the bed to the right side of his face. He tipped itthis time more made it into his mouth than onto the bed. His face was all wet and sticky.
He didnt feel a thing for the infected. Not a thing. That freakin toddler had rushed him, for crying out loud. They werent just infected, they were stupid.
That was the last thought to go through Perrys mind before he pa.s.sed out for the second time that night.
THE BACKYARD OF CHUY RODRIGUEZ
Chuy Rodriguez lived at the corner of Hammerschmidt and Sarah streets in South Bend, Indiana. Chuy had a wife, Kiki, and two kids: John, sixteen, and Lola, fourteen.
In their backyard stood a spa.r.s.ely leaved oak tree suffering from some kind of bark rot. The tree had another three years, maybe five, and Chuy was already dreading how barren his backyard would look when he had to cut it down.
Chuys tree, however, wasnt really the point of concern. For that you had to look directly above the tree.
Some forty miles directly above it.
If you could look up there, even with a very high-powered telescope, you might not notice a little blur, like a tiny heat shimmer. That shimmer came from visible-light wavelengths. .h.i.tting an object, sliding along its surface, then continuing on their way with almost their exact original trajectory.
This object wasnt truly invisible. Were it some ma.s.sive thing taking up half the horizon, everyone would have spotted it by now.
Since it was just a bit bigger than a beer keg, however, no one noticed.
This object was inanimate. Cold. Calculating. It had no emotions. If it did, when it felt the Marinesco gate vanish in a ground-rending explosion, it probably would have said, Awww f.u.c.k, not again.
The objects shape had once been quite smooth and polished, like a teardrop with a point on both ends instead of just one. But that had been at launch, before the long journey that brought it into a geostationary orbit above Chuy Rodriguezs diseased oak tree.
s.p.a.ce isnt really empty. Its got stuff in it. Stuff like dirt, rocks, ice, various bits and piecesonly those pieces are spread really, really far apart. If you travel far enough through that not-so-empty s.p.a.ce, youre going to run into that stuff. Depending on how fast youre going, hitting even a teeny speck of dust can cause quite a bit of damage. The double-teardrop rock had been engineered to take that damage and keep on flying. The engineering worked, mostly, but the objects pitted and cracked exterior bore witness to a design adage true anywhere in the universeyou cant test for everything.
It had come so close to completing the mission. Once again, however, stopped before the gate could open . . . once again, stopped by the rogue host.
Stopped by the sonofab.i.t.c.h.
Its mission was simple in concept. Travel straight out from the home planet and search for signals that indicated sentient life. s.p.a.ce, as mentioned before, is big. Searching s.p.a.ce for a suitable planet would require an investment far greater even than the economy-breaking project that had launched this object so long ago. There was one way, however, to narrow the search for planets that sustain lifefind planets that already have it.
It did that by tracking broadcast signals.
Broadcast signals meant several things. First, they meant a planet that could support advanced biological lifepredictable ranges of gravity, density, temperature, gases and liquids. Second, broadcasts meant a predictable range of resourcesodds were, a planet of nothing but silica and sulfur could not create technology capable of sending signals into s.p.a.ce. Finally, and perhaps most important, broadcasts indicated a large population capable of performing technically advanced tasks.