CORKY LAPUTA, PLEASED TO BE PROVING THAT Robin Goodfellow was as daring and as formidable as any real agent of the NSA, had always intended to leave the estate in one of the actor’s expensive classic cars. The complication of a blown tire would not force a change of plan; it qualified as a mere annoyance.
The ride was rough, the steering wheel pulled stubbornly in his hands, but as a connoisseur of chaos and a master of disorder, he met this challenge with the delight familiar to any child who had fought to. control a vehicle in the bumper-car pavilion at a carnival. Every twitch and wobble gave him a thrill.
He needed only to nurse the Buick out of the gate and three blocks to the street on which he had parked the Acura. From there, the drive home would be quick. Within half an hour, the pampered boy would be introduced to Stinky Cheese Man, would understand the horror that he was about to inherit, and would begin his long ordeal as well as his own career as a media star.
If anything went wrong en route, if for the first time chaos failed to serve Corky, he would kill the boy rather than surrender him to anyone. He wouldn’t even use young Manheim as a trade for his own survival. Cowardice had no place in the valiant lives of those who would [583] usher in the collapse of society and raise a new world from the rubble.
“Anyone stops me,” he promised the kid, “I’ll blow your brains out—pop, pop, pop—and make you the biggest object of worldwide mourning since Princess Di.”
He made the corner of the house. At some distance to the left lay the reflection pond at the center of the turnaround in front of the mansion. He was still traveling on the tributary driveway, which would join the main drive in fifty or sixty yards.
Just beyond the reach of the headlights, something so strange occurred that Corky cried out in surprise, and when the twin beams revealed the true nature of the obstacle ahead, terror seized him. He jammed his foot down on the brakes so hard that he put the car into a spin.
 
Moloch said that he would blow Fric’s brains out, but Fric had more immediate worries because the itching between his shoulders was real this time, not imaginary, and it quickly spread to the back of his neck.
He had expected to suffer an attack the moment that he’d been spritzed in the face, but perhaps the drug that Moloch administered had, as a side effect, delayed the asthmatic response. Now here it came, and with a vengeance.
Fric began to wheeze. His chest tightened, and he couldn’t get enough breath.
He didn’t have his inhaler.
As bad, maybe worse: He remained semiparalyzed, unable to claw himself up from a slack-limbed slump into a full sitting position. He had to be more upright to use the muscles of his chest walls and of his neck to squeeze out every trapped breath.
Worse still: The feeble effort he made to sit upright instead caused him to slide farther down. In fact he seemed about to slip off the seat. [584] His legs buckled and twisted upon themselves, folding into the knee space in front of the dashboard, and his butt hung off the edge of the seat. From the waist to his neck, he was lying flat on the seat, his head tipped up against the back of it.
He felt his airways narrowing.
He wheezed, sucked, snorked for breath, drew in little, squeezed out less. That familiar hard-boiled egg settled in his windpipe, that stone, that blocking wad.
He could not breathe on his back.
He could not breathe. He could not breathe.
Moloch stomped the brakes. The car fishtailed, then spun.
 
On the driveway, running toward Corky as he sped toward them, were Roman Castevet, whom he’d killed and stored under a sheet in the cold locker at the morgue, and Ned Hokenberry come back to retrieve the locket that contained his third eye, and anorexic Brittina Dowd as naked and bony as he had left her on the floor of her bedroom but not burnt, and Mick Sachatone in Bart Simpson pajamas.
He should have known them for mirages, should have boldly run them down, but never had he seen the like of this, nor dreamed that such a thing was possible. They were not transparent but appeared to be as solid as a fireplace poker or a bronze-and-marble lamp.
Tramping the brake pedal, he jammed too hard, and perhaps pulled the wheel without intention. The Buick whipped around so sharply that the pistol on his lap was flung to the floor at his feet and his head rapped the side window hard enough to crack it.
At the end of the 360-degree pivot, his four victims had not vanished during the rotation, but loomed right there, and all flung themselves at the car, shocking from Corky a scream that sounded too girlish for Robin Goodfellow. One, two, three, four, the angry dead burst against the windshield, against the cracked side window, eager [585] to be at him, but burst, not real after all, merely figures of rain and shadow, plumes of cast-up water that splashed into shapeless sprays, flowed away, were gone.
A full turn didn’t drain the Buick’s momentum, and they spun another ninety degrees, colliding with one of the trees that lined the driveway, thereby brought to an abrupt stop as the passenger’s door sprung open and the windshield dissolved.
Laughing in the face of chaos, Corky reached down past the steering wheel, feeling for the Glock on the floor between his feet. He touched the handgrip of the gun, grasped it, brought the weapon up to shoot the boy.
The driver’s door opened with a shrill protest of buckled metal, and Ethan Truman reached in for Corky, so instead of shooting the boy, he shot the man.
 
Arriving at the Buick in the moment that it crashed to a stop, Ethan slammed his pistol down on the roof and left it there because he didn’t want to shoot into the car, not with Fric in the line of fire. Heedless of the risk, he yanked open the tweaked door and reached inside. The driver thrust a handgun at him—thhhup—and he not only saw the muzzle flash but also smelled it.
He felt no consequence in the instant of the shot, too focused on the struggle for the gun to be able to assess whether he’d been hit or not. He swore he felt the second shot part his hair, and then he had the pistol.
At once flinging the weapon away into the dark, he would have dragged the driver out of the Buick, but the bastard came without coaxing, barreling into him. They both went down harder than gravity required, Ethan on the bottom, rapping the back of his head against the quartzite cobblestones.
 
[586] On impact, when the door flew open, Fric found himself sliding off the seat, out of the Buick, onto the puddled pavement. Flat on his back, the worst of all positions when he couldn’t breathe.
Rain falling in his eyes blurred his vision, but he worried less about the blurring than about a crimson tint that seeped across the night, making rubies of the raindrops.
His thoughts clouded to match his vision—too little oxygen to the brain—but he was clearheaded enough to realize that the effect of the crap he had inhaled might be wearing off. He tried to move, and could, but not with any grace or control, rather like a hooked fish flopping on a shore.
On his side, he had more ability to clench and relax his neck, chest, and abdominal muscles, which he must do in order to force out the stale air condensed like syrup in his lungs. More ability, but not enough. If paper were a sound, it would not be as thin as his wheeze had become, nor a human hair as thin, nor a film of dust.
He needed to sit up. He couldn’t.
He needed his inhaler. Gone.
Although the world was crimson to him, he knew that he must look blue to the world, for this was one of the really bad attacks, worse than any he’d known before, an occasion for the emergency room, for the doctors and nurses with their talk of Manheim movies.
No breath. No breath. Thirty-five thousand dollars to refurnish his rooms, but no breath.
Funny thoughts crowded his head. Not funny ha-ha. Funny scary. Red thoughts. So dark red at the edges that the red was really black.
 
Currently not in a mood to teach the deconstructionist theory of literature, but in a mood to deconstruct anything in his way, with a wolfish fury howling in his skull, Corky needed to gouge eyes, to chew at the face below him, to tear with teeth, to claw and rip.
Cracking his jaws for the first bite, he realized that Truman had [587] been stunned when he rapped his head on the pavement, that his resistance was not as strong as expected. In his savage frenzy, Corky dimly realized, too, that if he succumbed to the animalistic urge to finish this by tooth and nail, something would snap in him, some last organizing restraint, and he would be found hours hence, still bent to the savaged body of his victim, his snout and jowls in the fleshy ruins, searching for grisly morsels as a pig for truffles.
As Robin Goodfellow, who had not actually received training to be a lethal weapon but who had read his share of spy novels, he knew that a sharp blow with the heel of his hand to an enemy’s nose would shatter nasal bones and drive the wicked splinters into the brain, bringing instant death, and so he did this, and cried with delight as Truman’s blood answered the blow with a bright spray.
He rolled off the useless cop, rose, turned toward the Buick, and went looking for the boy. Corky leaned down at the driver’s door to peer inside, but Fric had apparently gotten out through the sprung door on the passenger’s side.
The semiparalytic inhalant would not yet have worn off entirely. The brat couldn’t have crawled far.
Straightening up from the driver’s door, Corky saw a handgun on the roof of the Buick, in front of his eyes.
Rain gleaming like diamond inlays on the checking of the grip.
Truman’s weapon.
Find the boy. Shoot him but only in the leg. To keep him from going anywhere. Then hustle back to the garage for another set of keys, another getaway car.
Corky could still salvage the plan, for he was the son of chaos as surely as Fric was the son of the biggest movie star in the world, and chaos would not fail its child as the actor had failed his.
He rounded the car and saw the boy on his side, kicking at the sodden ground, hitching forward like a crippled crab.
Corky went after him.
Although Fric proceeded by the strangest form of locomotion that [588] Corky had ever seen, making a thin whistling sound that suggested the stripped-gear-popped-spring protest of a broken windup toy, the kid had gotten off the driveway, onto the grass. He seemed to be trying to reach a stone garden bench that appeared to be an antique. Approaching, Corky raised the pistol.
 
William Yorn, diligent groundskeeper, monitored every tree and shrub for disease and treated his green wards at the first sign of mold or blight, or pestilence. Occasionally, however, a plant could not be saved, and a replacement was then ordered from a tree broker.
Large trees were replaced with the same specimen in the largest available box size. The new beauty was either delivered by truck and then swung into place by a rented crane or flown to the site by a big logging-industry helicopter with dual sets of rotors and positioned from the air.
Smaller specimens were planted with strategies and tactics less military in nature, and in the case of the smallest of the new trees, a lot of hand labor proved sufficient to get the job done. In some instances, a tree would be small enough to require staking to guide its growth for a year or two and to give it resistance to the wind.
While some in positions equivalent to his still used tall wooden stakes to prop these slender new trees, Mr. Yorn preferred one-inch and two-inch steel poles, in eight- and ten-foot lengths, for they would not rot, provided sturdier support, and could be reused.
After wrenching an eight-foot pole from the ground and tearing the stretchy plastic ties securing it to the tree, Ethan staggered after the crazy son of a bitch in the storm suit, swung the steel at his head as hard as he knew how, and clu............