Then her phone vibrates in her hand. She takes the call, her voice hushed. He’s all right. He’s not been hit.
“Four of them are down,” he says, his voice as quiet as hers.
“Dead?”
“Or as good as. Plus two I got earlier.”
Shaped by hard experience, Nina has become something of a church lady at heart, a homebody, a cookie baker, a tinkerer in the garden, crunching numbers for a living, not a lover of excitement, a seeker of peace and simple pleasures, who values the lives of others hardly less than she values her own. So she is surprised to feel a bloodthirsty thrill travel through her at the news that Michael, amazing Michael, has killed six. Surprised but not in the least dismayed. She’s aware of the original and accurate translation of the commandment—Thou shalt not murder—and it is Aleem and his kind who transgress all interdicts that make civilization possible. If there are none who will stop their kind, kill their kind, then they will murder, murder, murder until no one is left to be their victims. The violent will bear it away.
“One ran,” Michael says, “went around the side of Whole Fruit. The eighth man I haven’t seen yet. Stay where you are till I get them.”
“Or they get you.”
“This isn’t their turf. They don’t know who I am, where I came from. Their cars, their phones, now this—they’re panicked.”
“They don’t panic.”
“They panicked all their lives. Cowards afraid they’ll fail if they have to live by hard work and meet the world each on his own.”
“Maybe. But they’re still dangerous.”
“Not so much when they aren’t in a pack. Stick where you are, Nina. It won’t be long, and we’ll be on the road.”
He terminates the call.
Nina has held the phone a little bit away from her ear, so John could hear the full conversation. He says, “I want to be like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like him.”
“You’re already on your way.”
“I don’t mean the Singularity thing.”
“I know what you mean, honey.”
“He’d still be what he is without that. It’s not what matters.”
She reaches out in the darkness to touch her son’s face.
“What do you think?” he asks.
“About what?”
“About him.”
She says, “He’s something.”
“He is, isn’t he?” John says, hope piquant in his voice.
Nina says nothing more. She knows the leaning of her heart, which has occurred unexpectedly during this wild day; however, there is a time to every purpose, and now isn’t the time for that. If a thing isn’t ready to be, then wanting it too intensely is an affront to the ordained order of the world. For thinking so, she could be accused of being superstitious, but she thinks so nonetheless. She allows herself only a silent plea: Deliver him from evil.
THE WINE OF VIOLENCE
Patrolling the highway on foot to prevent Nina and the kid from getting into town from the southern portion of the orchard, Orlando Fiske has felt left out of the action, if there is any action after the breakdown of their vehicles and the weirdness with their phones. Masud Ayoob patrols the north section, a few hundred yards away, and from time to time they confirm each other’s presence by a two-fingers-in-the-mouth whistle so loud that it shrills through all the weather noise even at a distance. Orlando continues to whistle now and then, though it’s been a while since Masud whistled back. This concerns him, but he doesn’t know what to do about it. If he heads north to check on Masud and as a consequence Nina and the boy slip past him and find help, Aleem will kick the shit out of him. Orlando is a team player, a do-what-you’re-told guy. He’s not comfortable taking the initiative.
On the other hand, he’s also a guy who likes action, who needs it almost like a junkie needs his junk. Orlando has a low boredom threshold. He likes gangbanging because there’s always something going down, turf to protect. Skimming dealers needing an arm broken or a finger cut off. Runaway whores who have to be found and brought back and made to understand what a different future they’ll have if somehow they get a splash of acid in the face. Fools who’ve got to have money wrung out of their veins after they borrowed at 20 percent a month. Orlando and Masud are wide-spectrum enforcers, teaching hard lessons to those associates and customers in several businesses that the gang finds most important to its bottom line.
There was a time when Orlando mourned the end of the workday and endured his hours of rest feeling forlorn and forsaken. He has never needed more than five hours’ sleep a night, which leaves at least eight to fill before setting out in the company of Masud with a list of enforcements for the day. For many years, Orlando didn’t know what to do with himself when he wasn’t on the job. TV doesn’t offer much of interest. He has no hobbies; he once decided to learn to play the guitar, but the effort so frustrated him that eventually he took a hammer to the instrument. Although the face nature formed for him had made even his mother wary of Orlando by the time he was six, and although his long-armed short-legged rough-jointed body lacks athletic grace, he has been able to get girls to fill some of the lonely hours, girls who would trade sex for drugs, but they were never choice specimens, and sometimes he got not only pleasure from them but also an infection.
His life changed three years earlier, when Alana came into it. He was thirty-four then, and Alana was twenty-five. She was fresh, as pretty as any girl he’d ever seen, sexy but not slutty—totally mobile, as the homeys say—meaning that she could be taken anywhere without embarrassment, not that Orlando went anywhere he couldn’t also take a slut. They met through a dating service, Enchantment Now, and Orlando’s face didn’t frighten her off, even though it was actually his photo. Written for him by his mother, his what-matters-most-to-me statement attracted Alana two hours after being posted: I hope to meet a woman who works hard like me, keeps no secrets, and goes to church. If you are a homebody like I am, if you drink in moderation but shun the phony party scene, if what you want most of all is to fill the lonely hours with someone who cares deeply for you, please consider me. His mother thought—and still thinks—that he worked in a bank, verifying the details in loan applications. He felt awkward on the first date with Alana and thought it didn’t go well, but the next day she called him and arranged a second date. They’ve been together ever since, and it’s a beautiful relationship.
Alana is a fine cook, and he enjoys helping her prepare dinner in the cozy kitchen of his Craftsman-period bungalow. Many evenings, she reads novels to him, and though he has never been much of a reader, he listens with delight. The stories she chooses are always gripping and sometimes move him to tears, which he never knew he could produce until she read Little Women. They play board games and 500 rummy. They take long walks and talk about things that he never imagined would interest him, but they do. The sex is great, better than he’s ever known, and she’s never given him an infection. Alana is a ninth-grade English teacher, but she’s very ambitious. Last year she was awarded California Teacher of the Year. She earned a master’s degree in school administration. She intends to be an assistant principal in two more years, when she’s thirty, school principal by the time she’s thirty-two, superintendent of the entire district by the time she’s thirty-six, and California secretary of education in her early forties. Superintendent and state secretary are the positions in which an officeholder oversees the largest sums of public funds in the education system, with so little effective oversight that tens of millions can be siphoned off with little risk of discovery. Alana intends to retire at fifty if not sooner.