In addition, Yancy is a man of action in waiting. Initially, he intended to be a police officer. He opted instead to take this job as an armed security guard, because he could still have a gun, with much less risk of people shooting at him. He knows in his bones that the day will come when he’ll be caught up in action and adventure to match that of any Brad film; he just needs to be patient. Meanwhile, working the midnight-to-eight shift, when no one is coming to or going from Protean, he has a lot of time to read novels of action, everything from Westerns to contemporary novels with heroes who are halfway to seven feet tall and so hard bodied that the density of their chest muscles can stop a bullet.
On this occasion, he’s sitting in his guardhouse chair, sipping Classic Cinnamon Roll coffee brewed with the Keurig machine that the company provided. He’s reading a thriller in which the hero is going to take down six thugs in three minutes. The guy has already wiped out three in a minute and a half—five pages of ferocious action—when Yancy’s iPhone pings with a text message. It’s from Buck Duncan, the guard at the west gate: Got 2 take a dump. Watch my gate?
Yancy can watch the east gate through the guardhouse window. The video console in front of him allows access to any exterior camera at Protean that is in the vicinity of a motion detector and sends an alert, which almost never happens. When it does occur, the alert is always triggered by a night bird. Now he selects the four cameras related to the west gate, and the screen divides into equal quadrants to display them. He sends a text to Buck: Got it.
In the novel, where the alleyway is poorly lighted and mean, the hero hears the distinct sound of a handgun being drawn from a belt scabbard, followed by the reverberant toll of metal knocking the side of a nearby dumpster. He intuits that the fourth assassin is about to step out from behind the trash container, against which the creep accidentally rapped his weapon when drawing it. The hero drops and rolls—
The phone pings with a text message from Buck: Got what?
Yancy is not going to put down the book in the middle of this exciting paragraph. The hero has extraordinarily sharp reflexes; a full description of the moves he makes to evade the assassin’s first shot and then roll into a shooter’s crouch and then drill a round through his assailant’s left eye takes almost an entire page. There are still two more assassins to be taken down, but that’s another three pages, so Yancy puts the book aside and responds to Buck Duncan: Got your gate. So go take a dump.
The hero is out of ammo when the fifth assassin explodes into the alley through the kitchen door of a restaurant, squeezing off rounds as he comes, before he even knows his target’s position, counting on sheer volume of shots to get the job done. That is the kind of undisciplined action the hero would never take and of which he’s highly disdainful. So it’s no surprise—but exhilarating—when one of the hatchet man’s rounds ricochets back on him, wounding him in the shoulder and staggering him, so that the hero is able to draw his knife and go in for—
The phone pings.
“Damn it all, Buck,” Yancy mutters, but he sets aside the book again and checks the text message. Y r u telling me 2 take a dump? U off coffee, on booze?
Frowning, Yancy glances at the four video-display views of the west entrance to Protean. Then he looks at the guardhouse window in front of him. The big motorized gate is twenty feet away. For an instant, he has the impression that it’s moving, that it just rolled shut along the last few inches of its track, but that can’t be the case because only he can operate it.
NOTHING AT ALL AROUND ME BUT THE BEAST
Much of the land lies undeveloped, either publicly held or preserved in ranches, undulating so gracefully that the poetry of nature is evident even to those who care not for poetry and are indifferent to nature. Live oaks, California peppers, olive trees, and plentiful eucalyptuses stand testament to the tireless efforts of wind, sun, rain, seismic pressures, and humanity.
In swift and shrieking pursuit of a rabbit, excited by the scent of warm flesh and their knowledge of the blood therein, the coyotes abruptly give up the chase and scatter at the sight of the two moon-bright forms that lope in wolflike fashion through the wild grass. Hissing bobcats abandon the ground for trees. The interlopers pass under the limbs on which the big cats perch, and they sprint away like predators on the trail of prey, though they exude only a lifeless odor of their own.
Gog and Magog are guided by GPS and internal maps, by night vision and by the address Michael inserted in them. They don’t need his continuous guidance. For a moment, however, as he stands in the living room of the Chandra house, he is transfixed by the land as seen through the robots’ eyes. The Mil-Spec Generation 4 night-vision apparatus gathers available light, even infrared that isn’t visible to the human eye, and amplifies it eighty thousand times. The 120-degree field of view is presented in eerie green hues, the wavelength of light nearest 550 nanometers on the spectrum, which allows clarity at a lower power draw, conserving the batteries. The scene presented is so strange that it stirs in Michael a disquieting sense of looking through the apparent world at another and yet more ominous existence that lies beyond it.
Even as that thought occurs to him, an extraordinary thing happens. A quarter of a mile earlier, leaving Protean Cybernetics, Gog and Magog crossed the nearest highway; they are a mile and a half from the next two-lane back road, between towns and in rough terrain. They top a rise, and at the bottom of the hill stands an SUV, recently arrived and warm enough to project a strong heat signature. As the dog-form robots pass the vehicle, an eerie figure materializes beyond it, a tall man, all but faceless in this green light that favors shape over detail. He isn’t as bright as the SUV, though brighter than everything else in the night. In his arms, he’s carrying what seems to be the limp body of a woman. Michael takes control of Gog and Magog, halting them, turning them toward this apparition. Man and machines face off at a distance of fifteen feet. By its fabricated shape, which contrasts with the rambled wildness of grass and brush, one other object declares its significance—what appears to be a spade that has been spiked in the earth by its blade and stands erect.
After a frozen moment, the green figure, like a specter that might have risen out of dark waters deep in the hollows of the Earth and might now wither back into that sea of damnation, instead drops the body in its arms and pivots toward the SUV. The dead woman doesn’t strike the ground and lie in a pale greenness of tangled limbs, but disappears entirely into the grave that has been dug for her. The license plate of the SUV is fuzzy, the numbers and letters like smeared ink on the green background, but readable. Gog and Magog record it, and Michael burns it in his memory. Although no trial seems necessary to determine guilt, he doesn’t command the robots to shoot down the killer, and they return to the journey on which they were embarked as the engine of the SUV fires up and it wheels away from the open grave.
Before his death—or something like death—Michael lamented the evil that humanity condoned. Since his return to life, he’s come to see that the evil he previously recognized was like an ultrasound image of a suspicious mass; with his new gift, he has surgically opened the patient and has found that the cancer is more widespread than he ever imagined. If it is true, as some say, that a beast of supernatural nature is the prince of this world, then no task of greater importance exists than to bring hard justice to him and his legion of princelings in the name of the innocent and generations yet unborn. Since coming to life in a makeshift morgue, Michael has not been able quite to see the shape of his future, to understand how he can best use his power. The encounter at the lonely grave has clarified his intentions for him. If he survives this night, he has a good idea how to be the agent of truth that events have made him.