Chapter 44NEAL STANDS in the open doorway of the toolshed. Everyone keeps saying that the day is unseasonably warm, that he should be grateful, that the winds in the Republic are sometimes so severe that a minute of exposure can freeze a finger and snap it off at the knuckle. To him, thirty-five degrees is cold enough. His eyes peer out beneath a wool hat with a pom-pom on top. Otherwise his body is wrapped completely in a down parka and scarves and mittens and boots. Chase tells him he looks like the Michelin man. Chase is always calling him something. Tubs. Doc. Captain Curry. Neal wouldn’t mind stabbing the fool in the eye with the syringe he keeps in his pocket—capped, but ready with a 30 cc dose of sodium thiopental strong enough to knock Chase out. Just in case his emotions get the best of him and the pills can’t contain the animal. That’s what Neal is here for—to take care of a man who can’t take care of himself. Everyone calls him doctor but here he is merely a nurse. It is insulting, and he would not have come except for two men he is indebted to: Augustus, his leering benefactor; and Keith Gamble, his longtime collaborator, his friend.They arrived several days ago and his mind still hasn’t adjusted to the time change, his days feeling like nights, his nights days. He checks his wristwatch—he is always checking it to ascertain the time, as if he has trouble believing in the sun’s place in the sky. Another hour and their convoy will roll out of the base and head to the Tuonela Mine, where he and Chase will meet with diplomats and executives before holding a press conference.He steps out of the wind and into the shed’s dim interior. A lightbulb hangs overhead, but when he pulls at the string, nothing happens. His eyes adjust and he spots the desiccated carcass of the wolf that makes the workbench above it appear like a squared shrine.The lab conditions are laughable. But the value of Keith’s work has always been conceptual more than practical. So many conversations with him began with the phrase What if? Kirk and Spock. That’s what people called them, and that’s how they dressed up one Halloween. Keith was the dashing rogue and Neal was the wearying bore. Wearying bores did well in biochemistry. Wearying bores could tolerate the endless stream of data, the endless pile of grant applications, the political hurdles, the pompous lunacy of academics—everything Keith referred to as bullshit. When his friend first became a brewmaster, Neal told him it was a waste, a waste of his great talent. But he was wrong. This—Keith’s death in the Republic—that was the waste. There is nothing of use to him in the toolshed. He is here to say good-bye. He pulls off his mittens and slowly fingers the beakers and vials, flips through the notebooks, the binders, their pages yellowing along the edges. Everything is coated in dust that his fingertips streak through.“It’s just like you described it, old friend.” * * *There is another video circulating online. The second Balor has released. Augustus clicks on it eagerly. He has watched the other—with the door to his office closed and the sound lowered, as if he were indulging in some pornographic fetish—more than thirty times. He can play it in his head now—can see Balor, the tic at the corner of his eye, the rise and fall of his shoulders as he breathes heavily—can hear the screaming and meat-mouthed feeding—as if it is happening to him.He cannot say why he is so fascinated, but when he stares at the screen, he grips the mouse tightly in his hand and from it a tingling signal seems to run up his arm and into his chest and rush the blood through his body. This is his enemy. This is what Augustus has committed thousands of hours to eradicating. Balor believes the video empowers him, but Augustus believes the opposite: every new hit and post might as well equate to a vote for Chase Williams. The video strengthens them, fortifies their posture.A part of Augustus cannot help but wonder about the soldier Balor tore to pieces. He was not a person—he was food, though not even that, since hunger was secondary. The man was an implement and Balor was using him. He does not see Chase in quite the same way—they are friends, after all, the closest of friends—but the connection does not escape or bother him.The wall behind Balor appears paneled with wood. There is no overhead light, what must be a table lamp throwing shadows sideways across his face. An insectile hum, maybe a generator, nearly swallows his voice. A hint of a smile plays across the corners of his mouth. He is smiling at Augustus. He is smiling at everyone who stands in his way as if ready to swing a scythe through them. “Do you know how much money it would take to destroy the United States? I do not mean to interrupt or injure the economy. I do not mean to blow up a bridge and make people feel sorry for those who died or blow up a landmark and make people feel hot with patriotic fever. I mean destroy. Do you know how much money it would take?” Here he runs a tongue across his lips. “It would take thirty thousand dollars. I will show you. Soon. Soon.”“Bring it on,” Augustus says and starts the video again. * * *Chase doesn’t eat much for lunch, not because the chow hall is serving Jell-O and green beans and gray mushy chicken cubes, but because his nerves have left his stomach in a twist. He excuses himself and waits outside, next to the convoy of Humvees parked and idling in the mud like prehistoric beetles. The cold air hones him, chases away the nausea.He knows what the media are reporting. The Patriot Act amendment, the vaccine hearings. The hard-line, no-compromise rhetoric. The pending trial of Jeremy Saber. The good-gosh down-home campaigning of his running mate, Pinckney Arnold, who drives from small town to small town and gives stump speeches and kisses babies and shakes hands and sings “God Bless America” with his hand over his heart. The publicity photos of Chase and Neal roaring across the Atlantic on a Curtiss Commando transport with several hundred newly deployed soldiers. All of it has worked. Just like Buffalo promised.Every smear campaign has failed—because Chase admits to everything, the groping, the drinking, the fighting, none of it illegal, all of it tied into his platform: brutal honesty. The election is a week away and every phone poll lists him as the front-runner. Chase doesn’t respond to the soldiers calling him Mr. President, doesn’t feel as excited as he ought to, the Republic distracting him from every emotion except fear, sometimes alternated by remorse and guilt-absolving defiance.That morning, when he arrived at the Tuonela Base, when the CO invited him into his office, he made an offhand comment about the weather, saying how nice it was, how warm. The CO—a gray-haired toad of a man with no neck and a broad, fleshy mouth—said he’d take negative forty over this any day. “Keeps the mutts in their pens.” Two days ago, an ambush wiped out an entire platoon. “A real dick up my ass. And now you’re here.” He sipped his coffee and choked a little on it. “Don’t think they don’t know. They know. Which means some shit is bound to happen.” The CO mentioned Balor then. Chase asked what they knew about him. He has seen the videos, he has read the articles, he has been briefed by Buffalo—but what does the CO know that he might not?“What’s there to know you don’t already know? Might say he’s the alpha of the pack. Been in the computer for years, more than two decades. Worked for us—bet you didn’t know that—though you might soon. Some fucker at The New Yorker has been sniffing around about us supplying him and a few other mutts with arms in the eighties to drive out the Russians. Now he’s turned the crosshairs on us. Now he’s gone from low level to big shit. He says something, the rest do it. Whoever gets his head on a pike will get so many medals pinned to them their tit will fall off.” “What’s wrong with his eye?”“Fuck do you care? Fuck am I supposed to know?”“Just curious.”Now Chase scoops up a handful of slush and packs it into a ball of ice that he lobs like a grenade toward the high wall of the perimeter fence. It falls short. He is joined a minute later by the lieutenant who will be serving as his PSD escort to the mine. Nathan Streep, a twenty-four-year-old with a boyish face that doesn’t look like it’s ever needed a razor. A scar curls from his upper lip like a worm. He pulls out a pack of Marlboros and knocks out two cigarettes and offers one to Chase and they light up and smoke in companionable silence.The day is bright but the sun seems to warm nothing. A shadow slides across the ground and a few seconds later Chase hears the boom of a jet streaking overhead. He knows they are always overhead, easy to hear and hard to spot, as gray as the surrounding hills, their missiles sometimes giving them away, sun silvered at the tips. But he can’t help it: he covers his head and lets out a whimper. Most people, he knows, are unable to imagine their own death. They can worry over a grandparent, choking on a half-chewed bite of ham sandwich or slipping in the shower and snapping a hip; and they can worry over a child, imagining a pigtailed girl toddling after a ball and being crushed by a passing car, the bloodied tread of the tire imprinted on the asphalt until the next rainstorm—but their own death remains a denial, and then a vague possibility, and then, only in those final foggy-eyed years, an inevitability. He is not sure quite how this happened, but ever since he was bitten, he has felt age settling over him like a black blanket, and for the first time he feels death is not only foreseeable but also imminent.He straightens up as quickly as he can, thankful the photographers remain inside. The lieutenant watches him curiously. Chase can’t tell if it is a smirk or if the scar makes his lip naturally upturned. “You all right there?”“Fine.”“How long has it been?”“Near eleven years.” In his pocket he carries the pocketknife his father gave him, the one he carried through all his time overseas, and he squeezes it now.“Not so long.”Long enough for the anchor-and-eagle tattoo on his shoulder to fade to the color of a bruise, but not long enough to shake off memories as vivid as last night’s nightmare. He remembers the tracer rounds and mortar explosions, the thunderous pulse making his ears pop, the dripping chandeliers of white and yellow and red light making him pause and marvel at the beauty of it all. He remembers the rattle of a chain gun and the rotor wash of a Blackhawk and the hushed air that seemed to hang around bodies zipped into black bags. He remembers attacking a cave system—a hive, the CO called it—and the lycans that came rushing out of the dark at them. He remembers lighting up a woman with a flamethrower—the same woman who visits him sometimes at night—and the way she kept coming even after her eyeballs burst and her skin crisped to ash so that he had to unholster his pistol and drop her with a shot to the head.He takes a deep breath and can hear his cigarette sizzling at the tip and flicks it away in a sparking arc and nearly gags on the smoke. He realizes, when the convoy starts down the hill, that he doesn’t know the name of anything here. He knows the valley, the mine, the base all share the same name that now escapes him. He eyes a stunted evergreen, a bush bright with red berries, a deer as big as an elk darting between the trees. He likes knowing the names of things. Without them, he feels lost, as though he hardly knows who he is.Ten minutes later, when they push out of the woods and into town, they brake next to an apartment complex under construction. A forklift drops a pallet of rebar with a boom. A welding torch glows blue. A saw whines. The workers, in orange hard hats, stare at the convoy until it departs. A few blocks away, they pass a building carved out by a bomb. It was the same old story when Chase was here—their mission unclear: building and destroying.They drive through an alleyway busy with murals to commemorate a World War II battle in which hundreds of Nazis were killed by lycans—and then the convoy parks at a nearby square, where a crowd has gathered. “Check it out,” the lieutenant says. “Some unfriendlies are hosting a potluck.” A gnarled leafless tree rises in the middle of the square and a straw effigy draped in a U.S. flag hangs from it. A group of young bearded men stand around it and stab it with pitchforks and then cut it down and finally throw it on the fire they have kindled nearby. The smoke darkens and the flames lick upward and everyone lets out a cheer. In the weak sunlight, a lamb is spitted and two teenage boys crank it around and around over the fire. Men roll cigarettes and drink hard cider from jugs, while women arrange plates of sausage on a folding table. Children run among their legs, playing tag and pretending themselves into wolves.Chase tries to smile off the pitchforks—but can feel, with every thrust, an imagined prick scraping between his ribs, into his heart. Neal sits in the seat behind him. He leans forward and rattles a container of Tic Tacs in his ear. “I think you need two of these.”They aren’t breath mints at all, but Volpexx. The doc is here to make sure he chokes them down when needed. He rattles some into his palm and dry-swallows.“Hey, my breath stinks,” the lieutenant says. “Can I steal one of those from you?”“No,” Neal says and tucks away the bottle. “They’re ours.”Chase will need every one of them. Just as he needs Neal to dole them out slowly. Because the first pill leads to a second and then a third and then he tends to lose count and sometimes slips into the black fuzz of those beer benders that defined his twenties, after which he would rise feeling as though he had sawed himself in half.The mine grows larger and larger with their approach, its smokestacks and blackened metal making it look like a factory where nightmares are made. The fence line begins a long way out—reaching on for miles and miles and miles—surrounding a strip mine so cavernous that the dump trucks trundling along its bottom might be toys. He imagines the millions of tons drawn from this crater, bored by drills and chewed by dynamite, and can’t help but think about the tunnels within his own body that house a poisonous ore.They pass through a security checkpoint with undercarriage mirrors and tire shredders and a reinforced steel gate and after a brief questioning drive for several hundred yards before they arrive at a parking lot, the distant fence line necessary so that no RPG fired or bomb detonated at the checkpoint can damage the facility.The escort for the reporters is held up another ten minutes as the guards search and chemical-reactant test their bags and camera equipment. Chase can feel the Volpexx deadening him—the equivalent to a three-beer buzz—and closes his eyes and rests his chin on his chest and watches the clouds of colors play across his retinal screen.When the reporters arrive, when their Humvee parks alongside his, he takes a deep cleansing breath and climbs out and approaches the Alliance Energy representatives who now wait on the sidewalk edging the parking lot with smiles on their faces and hands extended for a shake.