When a second blast followed, Ophelia said, “Who the hell is the freak shooting at?”
“Maybe someone who’ll shoot back.”
Bringing the flashlight to bear once more on the numerous items scattered across the table, she said, “So where’s that GPS messenger you talked about? What’s it look like? Can we really call for help?”
55
At the end of the ride in the GTO, Leigh Ann was surprised to be alive, though even more surprised to be in an agreeable state of anticipation.
Only the previous day, her life had been smooth, with no sharp edges, and she liked it smooth. Kenny seemed to be a guy who valued smoothness in all things, who glided through life as though he was charmed, which is why she’d gone to bed with him. She’d been looking for a soul mate in smoothness for a long time, but the men of Seattle and environs were a prickly lot: overworked, stressed out, impatient that high technology hadn’t yet transformed the flawed citizens of this world into right-thinking demigods.
Although Kenny might be more smooth than not in his mind and heart, he had taken her for a bumpy ride that promised to get still bumpier. A life of sudden sharp turns, ascensions followed by abrupt plunges, had a certain appeal, like a roller coaster, though she would have preferred that her house hadn’t burned to the ground.
The prospect of trading smooth sailing for stormy seas was less unnerving if you were safely in the company of people who seemed able to navigate those stranger tides. Kenny had done a good job so far, and Leigh Ann was beginning to think she might be a deft hand at the helm in a crisis, and Ganesh Patel impressed her as a captain who’d be relaxed on the bridge even in a category-five hurricane.
They met the triple-threat genius not in the waterside offices of Patel Intel in Des Moines, Washington, on the eastern shore of Puget Sound, but instead at a private-aircraft terminal at Sea-Tac International.
When they arrived, a Gulfstream V jet stood fueled and ready on the tarmac. It couldn’t have been prepared so quickly. Ganesh had already been slated to fly to a medical conference in San Diego. His reputed genius for friendship was confirmed by the fact that he at once canceled that trip, filing a new flight plan and manifest. Instead of going to San Diego, he was accompanying them to Helena, Montana, and from there by car to Rustling Willows, where his friend Wyatt Rider was said to be in some kind of trouble.
Ganesh was waiting at the foot of the boarding stairs, as if he weren’t the owner of the jet, but merely the steward who would make them comfortable and serve them during the flight. He was thirty-five, with black hair and black eyes, dressed all in white except for a pair of red sneakers. Standing in the gathering gloom of the clouding afternoon, tall and slim, with perfect posture, he was an emphatic human exclamation point.
After hugging Kenny, Ganesh took one of Leigh Ann’s hands in both of his. “Dear Miss Bruce, I have arranged for a good clothing store in Helena to stay open late, so you’ll have a chance to get whatever you need before we set out from there for Rustling Willows. We’ll have dinner on the plane, martinis to start if you would like, followed by a fine cabernet. I hope you’re not vegan.”
“I’m not,” she said, and she knew that whatever storm might be breaking over that faraway ranch, the journey there would be as smooth as a gondola ride on a sheltered canal.
56
After he takes a few more selfies with the shotgun-blasted sign, Asher Optime gets one in which he looks as handsome and formidable as he knows that he truly is. This heroic image will be suitable for posters and giant portraits on the sides of tall buildings when the day comes that the enlightened elites of the entire world, who know themselves to be a pestilence, will honor him as the legendary revolutionary named Z.
Under a bipolar sky—dour with thunderheads across the north, festive with gold-orange light to the south—he returns to the rough track that serves as the main street of abandoned Zipporah. Around him, the moldering edifices groan and keen and rattle in the rising wind, their graveclothes of pale dust tattering away on the surging gusts. In this eerie light, the shadows of the buildings appear to tremble, as though about to tear loose and blow away, leaving the structures forever unable to cast their distorted silhouettes upon the earth.
Asher looks forward to a solitary dinner of simple fare, a generous measure of Scotch whisky, and a few hours of composition during which he will commit to the pages of his journal further analysis of human corruption and irrefutable arguments for the eradication of the species.
In front of the former saloon, he stands gazing at the sky as gradually the light dies, wondering if he will live long enough to be the last man on Earth and how he’ll know if in fact he is the last. He also wonders what would be the ideal way for the last man to end his life, by what method, what instrument, in order to honor and emphasize the sacredness of the proceeding. Self-crucifixion is too difficult and not practical with just two hands. Biting on a shotgun barrel is too crude for an event of such importance to the fate of the planet. Hanging himself seems pathetic, as does slitting his wrists. Throughout human history, millions of depressives hanged themselves and carved themselves in sad, solitary circumstances; but Asher Optime will be dying for his principles and with great joy. He supposes he could resort to whisky and drink himself to death, which would be fittingly symbolic of humanity’s self-indulgent and feckless nature. However, the process would no doubt involve violent regurgitation, and he is loath to leave an unsightly, vomit-soaked corpse. Disgraced samurai were said to have disemboweled themselves in a ritual of great solemnity, but Asher is behaving honorably rather than dishonorably by effectuating the necessary genocide of the human horde. Monks protesting whatever monks protested were often known to set themselves on fire, which would be a sufficiently dramatic and romantic end if he could obtain a prescription for a powerful painkiller and enough hallucinogens to endure the flames with minimal awareness of them. Well, he has plenty of time to think about this. Years and years. The world won’t be cured of the disease of humanity in a matter of days or weeks.