She liked this man and thought he would prove courageous and competent in a crisis. But even with a more powerful weapon than he possessed, he would be no match for this thing, whatever it was.
“Remember the elk?” she said.
“Yes, of course.”
“Herds of elk. Controlled as if they were one. What’s to stop it from bringing three grizzlies down from the hills and charge the house with them all at once? Imagine those huge creatures smashing their way from room to room. You couldn’t squeeze off shots fast enough to stop them all, if even one of them.”
With an expression like that of a man whose stomach had soured and sent a gout of acid into his throat, Wyatt put his unfinished mug of spiked coffee on a nearby table.
“It said it’s forbidden to harm people, didn’t it?”
“Unless there’s a righteous reason to execute us. Whatever it is, maybe it was rational once, and maybe it actually had the ethics it talked about, but it’s not rational anymore. It’s insane, and it thinks all of us, the human species, has earned a reckoning.”
“When Jimmy called you just another parasite, he said you were proof that . . . proof that someone was right. What was that name?”
“Asher something. I think . . . Ondine or Oppenheim.”
Entering the passcode in his phone, Wyatt said, “Let’s see if he’s somebody.”
Her memory offered her alternate syllables. “Wait. Optine or Optime. That’s closer. I don’t know how it’s spelled.”
“There aren’t that many options,” he said.
He went to a chair and sat and worked with the phone.
Coffee mug in both hands, Joanna remained at the big window, watching as storm light flickered through the thrashing willows and, with a stage magician’s finesse, conjured bear shapes out of the pockets of the night.
After a few minutes, Wyatt said, “Got him. And it’s not good. He’s a member of the Restoration Movement, apostle of Xanthus Toller but more radical.”
72
The bear seemed to know Colson and Ophelia’s destination. It repeatedly disappeared deeper into the forest, as though it had lost interest in them, only to be waiting for them a quarter mile farther along the trail, discovered by a sweep of the Tac Light or revealed more dramatically by the flaring sky.
Ophelia had always admired nature from a distance. She liked a good wilderness documentary immeasurably more than she liked the wilderness itself. She didn’t know about bears, and she didn’t want to know about them, but she suspected that the way this bear behaved was unique for its kind. Staying as much as possible at Colson’s side or trailing close behind him, she got the crazy impression that the bear did not mean to attack them, that it only wanted to scare them, keep them on edge, and distract them from something else. She knew that she was attributing humanlike intentions to the grizzly, and she knew that this was foolish, but her gut told her that the bear was a trickster, and minute by minute she became more convinced of this.
She was miserable, soaked, chilled, and if her sneakers weren’t coming apart at the seams, they felt as though they were, so that she stumbled with increasing frequency. She figured she was going to wind up with pneumonia, and not the walking type, but the type that landed you in an ICU with a tube down your throat and a ventilator breathing for you. All she wanted was out of the forest, out of the rain, out of this nightmare night. Nevertheless, when they came to that place along the ridge where the trail descended through the woods to the ranch land in the west, she halted Colson and pulled him close and shouted above the many voices of the storm.
“The bear is gone. But it’ll be back. It doesn’t want to eat us. It wants to distract us. We gotta not let it, gotta stay sharp.”
She thought Colson might react to her devious-bear theory as though she’d been driven mad by the ordeal they were enduring, but he regarded her without a trace of condescension. “It’s weird, all right. It’s not acting like a bear.”
“There were these crows in the church,” she said, “before you showed up. There was something damn weird about them. This bear is strange in the same kind of way. Don’t laugh, but maybe it’s here to distract us, so we walk right into Optime and wind up in the corpse soup under the church. Doesn’t make sense, but I’m not crazy.”
He knew nature a lot better than she did. He probably knew more about bears than the bears knew about themselves, because toothy predators were among the things that thirteen-year-old boys found fascinating. Yet he didn’t second-guess what she said, but instead folded the crows into his calculations, as if it was reasonable to assume Optime was an evil Doctor Dolittle with whom animals conspired.