Any words issuing from this creature would have stiffened the fine hairs on the nape of Amity’s neck, but the inconsistent quality of its voice made what it said even more horrific, as though it must be two spirits in one husk, simultaneously aggressive and fearful, needful and wary. The raw guttural sound rose almost to a thin whine of anxiety on the word you.
“Get behind me,” her father said, and Amity didn’t hesitate to obey him.
23
Flutters of lightning purling down the foyer windows, shudders of thunder vibrating the bones of the house with greater force than before, drumrolls of rain beating across the roof . . . The hallway lights pulsed as if the power might fail.
The nightmare voice grew more insistent, sharp with suspicion. “Who is it you? Why here? Dada-mama wants you here?”
Jeffy found the beast grotesque in its uniform, an affront to creation, yet nonetheless terrifying, a hideous product of genetic engineering that revealed the depths and the cruelty to which the science and culture of this timeline descended. In his mind’s ear, he heard again the officious prick in the library: Buy the girl an approved animal, something that honors the genius of the state. And here before them loomed the sinister product of a government in rebellion against everything—against economic sanity, against the righteous limits of authority, against freedom and human dignity, against nature itself and beauty and hope and the very idea of transcendent meaning. What was this pitiful and perhaps pitiless creature to those who owned it? Was it part pet and part guard ape, a kind of ersatz child for a childless couple, but also a slave? What strange desires preoccupied it, and what fears constrained it from acting on those desires? How deeply surrealistic and dark might be the landscape of its twisted mind?
It ventured closer, within a few feet of Jeffy, peering up at him with lantern eyes, its dark lips peeling back from teeth like the blades of chisels. “Who is it you? Tell now! Tell now who is!”
Lacking a weapon, scanning the hall for one and seeing nothing suitable, Jeffy said, “A friend. We’re friends of dada-mama. Who are you?”
Scowling, chewing on its lower lip, the creature considered what it had been told, but it did not reply. Its stare was as hard and shiny and dark as polished obsidian.
Inevitably, Jeffy thought of news stories from the past decade, incidents involving chimpanzee attacks on people who kept them as pets. The animals were uncannily quick. Far stronger, pound for pound, than any human being. Capable of sudden rages for which their previous benign behavior had not prepared their human companions. One man had been blinded, and his testicles had been torn off. The friend of a woman who kept a hundred-pound chimp had all her fingers bitten off, her eyes gouged out, and her face torn off in less than two minutes of unimaginable terror.
“Me is name Good Boy. Me loves dada-mama.” It cocked its head at Amity where she sheltered behind Jeffy. “Good Boy think you not
belongs here.” The creature hissed its judgment so venomously that Jeffy steeled himself for an attack.
At the back of the house, a window shattered.
Good Boy’s attention at once shifted from Jeffy and Amity to the kitchen. Its nostrils flared and it bared its formidable teeth. With a fierce shriek, the monster flung itself past them, slammed through the swinging door and out of sight.
Jeffy grabbed his daughter’s hand, and they dashed into the foyer.
A pane in the front door shattered, clear blades of glass slicing through the air, chips like sleet glittering in arcs. As the sparkling debris splashed on the floor, the rataplan of rain grew louder. A man reached inside to feel for the deadbolt thumb turn.
Before the police could force entry, Jeffy and Amity raced up the stairs, desperate for a fourteen-second haven.
A shrill, inhuman cry arose from the back of the house, Good Boy in a bestial rage. No men cried out in response and no shots were fired, because the objects of the miscreation’s fury were not the authorities but instead the two intruders who, in its excitement and bad judgment, it had allowed farther into dada-mama’s house.
When they reached the landing and started up the second flight of stairs, Jeffy heard the creature slam through the swinging door between the kitchen and the hall, and then the slap of its feet on the wood floor. By the time they crossed the topmost step, he could tell by sound alone that Good Boy was gaining on them, keening as it came, and he dared not look back.
Just past the head of the stairs were a door to the left and another to the right. He pushed Amity into the room on the right, followed her. A bedroom. No lock, just the simple latch bolt that a twist of the knob would open. He braced his back against the closed door, which wasn’t flimsy Masonite but a solid-core construct, so it might withstand assault.
An instant later, Good Boy crashed into the far side, yattering incoherently, rattling the knob, pounding hard, now squealing like a soulless thing that fed on the souls of others. A sudden silence. It hadn’t retreated, merely backed off. Abruptly it challenged the barrier again, threw itself across the hall with tremendous force, the door quaking-cracking as if with the impact of three hundred pounds instead of at most a hundred. Heedless of injury to itself, the fiend cried out not in pain but in fury at the failure of the attempt, and then it tried again.
The door bucked, and Jeffy was jolted harder than before, an inch-wide gap opening along the jamb. Good Boy’s shrieks were louder and more ferocious, but Jeffy pushed back with everything he had, closing the gap. And here came Amity with a straight-backed chair taken from the vanity. She knew what needed to be done, and she had the courage to do it. She was no coward, never had been. She tilted the chair, jammed the headrail under the knob, bracing the door, a kid with the right stuff.
As Jeffy stepped away from the fortified barrier, men shouted to one another, and footsteps boomed on the stairs. Police and their black-clad overseers were coming fast. In spite of the chair, they would break down the door because they were trained how to do it, break it down or shoot their way into the room. They wouldn’t care if he and Amity were wounded. This wasn’t the America where law enforcement had rules of engagement and answered to police-review boards, where the vast majority of those who became cops did so to serve and protect; this was an America where fascists didn’t pretend to be antifascists, didn’t conceal their faces behind black masks, operated openly and boldly; this was an America ruled by brute intimidation, harassment, and violence.
Trembling, his emotional compass just one degree south of panic, mentally cursing himself for having consented to Amity’s request to see her mother—who was not in fact her mother, but a stranger, a Michelle from a different Earth, another planet—Jeffy fumbled in the wrong jacket pocket for the key to everything.
Agitated voices in the hallway. The doorknob rattled.
He found the right pocket, the fearsome device.
Amity stayed at his side, her left hand on his arm.
Someone kicked hard, and the chair clattered against the knob, but the door held.
Jeffy pressed the home circle on the device.
The screen remained black. Maybe four seconds. That’s what it had previously taken to activate. Just four seconds.