Blueprints Of The Afterlife Part 17

I spoke up and said, "Look, I'm not sure who you people are but can someone tell me-"

The woman commanded me to shut the f.u.c.k up. Now my eyes were starting to adjust and I could see that Swan was a black woman about forty years old. You could have pa.s.sed any of these people on the streets of Berkeley and not looked twice. I wondered if this was some new offshoot of the Symbionese Liberation Army or some other kind of revolutionary group. I was scared, I really was. Hours before I'd been sitting in the comfortable house I shared with two of the kindest people I'd ever known, and now I was back together with Nick, wondering if my a.s.s was about to get handed to me.

Nick said, "He has 12.7 million in the bank."

Then me, dork that I am, trying to dig myself out of whatever hole it was that I'd found myself in, said, "I'd be happy to loan you folks some money to help, you know, your cause or whatever this is." I was thinking this might be a way to get me out the door.

"It's not money we need," Swan said, then leaned in close to me, staring so intensely I felt I was being audited. "Can you drive a stick s.h.i.+ft?"

A stick s.h.i.+ft?

A stick s.h.i.+ft, yeah, that's what she asked. Whether I could drive a stick. And I have to say I laughed. Suddenly this didn't seem like a revolutionary group. It was just a bunch of punks, probably dealing acid and worrying about getting busted. So I said, "What, they didn't teach you how to drive stick in the Kirkpatrick Driving Academy of Human Potential?"

The room erupted again, shouting. When Swan finally managed to shut everyone up, she said, "We never say that name around here. Now please answer my question. Can you drive a stick-s.h.i.+ft car?"

"Sure," I said. "Until recently I drove a manual VW bus."

Swan clapped her hands together. "Perfect!" she said. "Let's eat, what do you say?"

Suddenly everyone was being cordial and helping me with my coat, showing me to a place at a table. Swan sat on one side of me, Nick on the other. One by one the other members of the group introduced themselves. They all had animal names. Muskrat, Squirrel, Crow, Salmon, Bear, Owl, Horse. From upstairs came big bowls and platters of food, that good hippie food I'd grown to love. Emboldened by the sudden change of tone, I asked Swan who they were.

"We're the dropouts," she said. "Dropouts from that inst.i.tution you mentioned."

"So it does exist," I said.

She said, "Of course it exists. It's a foundation, an incubator designed to cultivate inventors. Those who have the potential to bring about paradigmatic change. It seeks to direct the course of history by coordinating the efforts of individuals who fit certain profiles. It brings these individuals together in the hopes that when they work collaboratively, the magnitude of the historical s.h.i.+fts they bring about will be greater than if these individuals had been working alone."

"Like gestalt theory."

Swan rolled her eyes and said, "Yeah, something like that."

"Why did you drop out?" I asked.

Swan avoided the question. "You do realize your life with Wyatt and Erika is over, don't you?" she said. "That you've chosen to pursue this path again, and that your efforts must now be synonymous with the efforts of the collective?"

I said sure, whatever. The hokey SLA mind-trick shtick wasn't working on me. Maybe if they'd had submachine guns shoved at my ribs I'd have felt differently but for now at least all I saw were young leftists eating hummus and talkin' 'bout a revolution. I'd been immersed among these types for years in the Bay Area. A lot of talk, little to no action. I knew I'd be able to return home anytime I wanted, regardless of what these blowhards were saying. For all I knew the Kirkpatrick Academy of Human Potential was one of those night-course places upstairs from a Korean grocery store offering certificates in "business studies." So I just went along with the game and said, "Yes, I know my old life is over."

I think Swan could tell I was bulls.h.i.+tting her but she continued. "Have you ever met a slave, Luke?" she asked. The question took me aback, coming from a black person. I stammered out a no. She said, "Really? You've never been to a mall? You've never watched shoppers with their carts piled with soda and microwavable food? You've never stayed in a hotel where a fifty-year-old Mexican mother of six scrubs your s.h.i.+t stains off the toilet bowl? You've never watched TV for five hours straight?" She went on to explain their theory, sort of a pseudo-Marxist vision of the gemeinschaft and the gessellschaft, the ruling cla.s.s and the undercla.s.s, the proletariat and the elite, the haves and have-nots, the first world and the third. According to Swan, Mr. Kirkpatrick, whose name she refused to utter, had founded the academy as a method to ensure that those in power stayed in power, that those enslaved remained enslaved. The dropouts were the students who refused to go along with this philosophy and had instead allied themselves with the undercla.s.s, struggling for equality. Or maybe it was the other way around. It was all a little fuzzy. I asked her about Dirk Bickle. She said Bickle was one of Kirkpatrick's agents, traveling the world in search of candidates to ensnare in the program.

There was a noise upstairs, the front door opening. Everyone in the bas.e.m.e.nt got excited, saying, "They're home! They're home!" I started to ask Swan who they were talking about but she motioned for me to be quiet and listen. I heard the door close, people's voices. I mouthed "Who is it?" to Nick. He whispered back, "The Millers."

I whispered, "You guys are hiding in the bas.e.m.e.nt of a family's house?"

Swan shushed me. A couple pairs of footsteps creaked overhead. A girl's voice. Swan said in a low tone, "They're our test family. Jim and Helen Miller. They have two daughters, aged nine and six and a half, Melissa and Gina. Would you like to observe them?"

I said sure, why not, and followed Swan upstairs. We came up from the bas.e.m.e.nt as Helen Miller was coming through the front door with a bag of groceries. I made a little startled jump, but Helen Miller walked right past me like I wasn't there. Like one of those movies where the unseen dead observe the living. She put the groceries on the kitchen island and Jim walked into the room, gave her a kiss, and asked her how her day had been. Then Melissa came through the door, carrying her sheet music from piano cla.s.s. Swan and I stood off to the side in the kitchen watching this whole scene go down. Was it some weird brand of street theater? Were these actors? They absolutely ignored us, going about their business in what was ostensibly their home, the bas.e.m.e.nt of which was occupied by some fringe anarchist movement. I wondered if I was the target of an elaborately staged practical joke. I actually looked around the room trying to find cameras.

"The reason I asked you if you can drive a stick is that we need someone to steal the Millers' Mazda," Swan said. "The rest of us can only drive automatics. You'll take Frog with you. He knows where you need to go."

You have to remember that this was a day in which I'd met Chewbacca, gotten puked on, run into Nick after years of not knowing his whereabouts, and enjoyed some vegetarian fare with people with animal names in the bas.e.m.e.nt of a painted lady outside Berkeley. I was seriously questioning my sanity. Swan seemed to recognize that I was going through some variety of psychic crisis and laid her hand on my shoulder. "You're not crazy," she said as the Millers removed a ca.s.serole from the microwave and sat down to eat. She told me that I was already involved, whether I wanted to be or not. There'd been a time, she said, when I had my life to myself, when I was merely curious about the academy, but now, after helping decipher the doc.u.ment Erika had channeled and by writing a pseudo-academic paper on the Bionet and qputers as a lark, I had entered the labyrinth. I was a fly, she said, a fly crawling down the throat of a Venus flytrap, my path heading in one relentless direction. That was my new name, she said. I was no longer Luke Piper. My name was Fly. I watched the Millers talk about baseball scores and weather reports, their silverware clinking on their plates. And even though I was standing in the same room, I was no longer part of their world, if I ever had been. This was what I had been yearning for all along: a secret mission, a purpose so mystifying I might only learn of its nature in the process of fulfilling it. I had no choice in the matter. I asked Swan where I could find the car keys.

And you took the car.

I picked the keys up off the kitchen island, went out to the curb with Nick, got in the driver's seat of the Miata and backed out. Just like that. As we left the neighborhood I asked him where we were going. He told me Arizona, to someplace far from civilization. We left the Bay Area like we were escaping the looming wave of a tsunami, both of us laughing, suddenly embedded in these lives where there was no distance between impulse and experience. f.u.c.k, I can't tell you how liberated I felt! To just leave. And the farther away from the city we got, the more Nick emerged from his sh.e.l.l, like he needed to be outside the blast zone of those crazies to get back his old personality. I still had so many questions for him but figured I'd give him whatever time he needed to regain my trust. Finally, over burgers at some roadside place, at around midnight, he told me something that made me take this trip more seriously. "Your friend," he said. "The girl? Erika? She visited the seed s.h.i.+p today."

I asked what he meant. He described a project the academy was working on, to build a s.p.a.ce s.h.i.+p that would contain the basic ingredients needed to terraform a hospitable planet. He called this the seed s.h.i.+p. According to Nick, the drug Squid gave Erika operated as a delivery method to the s.h.i.+p through time. After she'd erroneously received the transmission about the future of life in the universe, her writing had been misplaced on the seed s.h.i.+p. So the dropouts had to send her there to retrieve it. The whole thing sounded completely nuts to me but I couldn't explain how he could have known details about Erika's trip unless he'd been spying on us. Which he had, actually, though he never got close enough to see Erika tripping or hear her version of the trip. When we'd received the drug from Chewbacca at the park, Nick had been watching us and followed us home. He'd been a.s.signed this duty by Swan, who wanted to make sure everything went all right with Erika. He'd watched the house from the cafe across the street and followed me when I went to do my errand.

Why did he follow you?

He needed to get confirmation that Erika's trip had been a success. And he needed to get the key that she'd vomited up.

He knew about that?

Yeah. That's when I started getting really freaked out. He asked me about the key and I said I didn't know anything about a key, even though it was in my wallet. He seemed to believe me. We got back on the road and drove through the night. I asked him why the academy existed. He said it existed to perpetuate life in the universe, that this calling was ancient, and that there were certain races spread throughout the universe who were responsible for keeping life going. He called them the stewards. There were thousands if not millions of steward races out there. Some stewards succeeded, others failed, but all were driven by the imperative to seek out conditions suitable for sustaining life. That's how we got here, on earth, he told me. Earth life was created billions of years ago by a long-extinct steward race. They set evolution in motion, and intervened on a few occasions, like when they initiated the messiah program.

Jesus?

Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha. They all encouraged humanity to evolve at a pivotal moment, with religion providing the societal framework that spurred improvements to the cerebral cortex and rational thought, technology-all the means by which humanity would one day come to possess the power and responsibilities of a steward race. But there was a complicating factor. Humanity would have to push itself to near extinction to reach that point. The technologies we needed to evolve into a steward race were the same as those that would recover our destroyed planet. It was true. We were ecologically doomed, past the point where our half-a.s.sed gestures could do any good. We were all going to die in a big way. And Nick wasn't talking about little old nuclear warheads. We hadn't yet seen the worst, he said. We were about to enter a period of history when we would witness horrors that could only be described through metaphor. Global warming was part of it. Nuclear war was part of it. Genocide was part of it. Islamic and Christian radicalism were part of it. Overconsumption and superviruses were part of it. But they were only small parts of it. These dark days were just around the corner, Nick a.s.sured me, but afterward there would be survivors. And these survivors would claim the mantle of a steward race to spread the beauty of life through the universe. After the period of darkness there would rise a new age. An afterlife. The reason the dropouts split from the academy, he said, was because they disagreed with Mr. Kirkpatrick about the urgency of the moment. According to Nick, Mr. Kirkpatrick's approach was to patiently wait for the great unraveling to take place. The dropouts wanted this new age to start now. They wanted to kick-start it.

We arrived in Phoenix and drove another few hours into the desert, I don't even know where really. Nick told me where to go. Up into the hills somewhere, onto a mesa. I was exhausted and didn't know what to believe anymore. Finally Nick told me to pull over. We got out of the car and Nick popped the trunk, inside of which were a couple backpacks, food, water, bed rolls. He told me we needed to hike a ways before we got to where we were headed. I followed him, sweating, fatigued, wis.h.i.+ng I was back in San Francisco with Wyatt and Erika. I hadn't even told them I'd left. They were probably worried about me. As the day wore on I began to suspect Nick was putting me on. We started arguing. I accused him of being in a Scientology-lite cult. Nick just kept walking, a few paces ahead of me. I wanted to go home. This was old now. This wasn't an adventure anymore. I was complaining when we crested a little hill and came upon the encampment.

Encampment?

That's what you could call it. It was the weirdest thing. Out in the middle of nowhere and there's a refrigerator standing there. The encampment was this little circle of things around the coals of a fire pit. A tire, a pile of stuffed animals, a pile of books.

"What the f.u.c.k is this place?" I said.

Nick said, "This is where the Last Dude makes his stand."

That's when he shot me.

NEETHAN.

The red polyfiber carpet traced a path through the forest of impossibly ancient redwoods. Neethan F. Jordan, his beard almost completely filled in, hiked with walking stick in hand, his clothes soaked through with sweat, his necktie now tied around his head as if he'd stepped out of a commercial in which office workers comically erupt in a Lord of the Fliesstyle social conflagration. His breath banged its tin cup against the insides of his ribs. Up ahead, hovering about eight feet above the carpet, glowed an incandescent heart about the size of three basketb.a.l.l.s put together into a really big basketball. The heart thudded, bobbed a bit in the air, and radiated s.h.i.+mmery rays of light like one of those Mexican El Corazon tattoos. Neethan approached the glowing object and positioned himself beneath it, then jumped, his head getting swallowed momentarily in the hologram-like whatever-it-was. There was a noise, a pleasant chime in his ears, after which he understood that he had been granted an extra life.

Up ahead floated a Nike Air sawed-off shotgun. Neethan jogged to it, jumped, and made contact with the holographic weapon. In an instant he heard the chime and looked down to find the shotgun in his hands. Why the h.e.l.l did he need a gun? He pressed on through the trees, watching the sky through the pixelly boughs.

They appeared in short order: undead folks in shabby clothes. Coming out from behind trees and bushes, ambling toward him wielding little more than chunks of wood, moaning, attempting some kind of slow-motion attack. Neethan pumped the shotgun and aimed for the head of the closest one. The undead guy's cranium exploded in a confetti-like atomization of brain and skull fragments, leaving the spurting stump of a spine protruding from the neck. It fell to its knees and then the body simply vanished. A lady zombie, looked like an ex-receptionist, lurched at him with a bad limp. He shot this one in the chest, and for a moment glimpsed the path ahead through the gaping hole his buckshot had created. This zombie vanished, too. A demographically balanced array of flesh-eating zombies began to appear on the trail in greater frequency, shuffling, arms outstretched, mouths hanging open, skin falling off bones, eyeb.a.l.l.s missing, hair slimy and thin and black over their green faces. Neethan spied a box of ammunition sitting on a tree stump and aimed for it. When the blast hit, the shotgun automatically reloaded. The zombies started coming faster, more frantically, more enthused about feasting on his brain. The quicker he could pump the shotgun and squeeze off a sh.e.l.l, the quicker they seemed to come, until at last one of them was able to take a swipe at his face at close range.

A curtain of red fell over Neethan's vision.

For a sliver of a moment, pa.s.sing so quickly he didn't register what was happening until much later, all was darkness and silence. As dark and silent as if he had spelunked the depths of a cave and then, reaching the deepest, darkest place in the cave, stuck his head down his own throat and disappeared inside his own body. A darkness final and unremitting, a darkness that offered no acknowledgment that there could ever be any illumination, an absolute black, a blackness so extreme it coated him and penetrated his skin, rendering everything that might have color when exposed to light completely transparent and thus now only a vessel for this categorically absolute absence of light.

Then he regained consciousness, if one wanted to call it that, standing again on the trail with the shotgun in hand, a few paces back from where he'd last fallen, and as he progressed the same zombies came out from the same hiding places and he blasted them again, sweeping the weapon back and forth. The path took a turn to the right and around the corner floated a new gun, looked like a machine gun manufactured by Dell. He shot this gun with his current gun and the new gun materialized in his hands. Turning this gun on the zombie onslaught, he trudged toward the tree line to a bluff overlooking the vast Pacific. When he felt confident that all the zombies had been vanquished and none would sneak up behind him, he sat on the forest floor and gazed out to the sea, a masterpiece of color and texture. Waves individually curled and dissolved, each one bound up in vast equations, sunlight bouncing off the rippling and roiling surfaces. Who had spent the insane amount of time it took to code all these waves? Who but those few who interfaced with the qputers could pull off something as magnificent as a to-scale simulation of an entire ocean?

The red carpet slithered down a path demarcated by a driftwood hand rail, then veered north. From where he stood on the bluff, Neethan saw the carpet stretch for miles along the beach. Gulls dotted the backdrop amid clouds migrating eastward. In the woods at his back, the zombies stirred, lurching from their hiding places to confront some new armed interloper. Neethan made his way down the path to the beach. It certainly smelled like the Pacific Ocean, an olfactory hallucination of decaying kelp and expired crustaceans. He followed the path, a red wound slicing along the western border between California and the rest of the planet. After a couple miles of this he grew weary and lay down to rest his head on a log. He closed his eyes and with the static hiss of ocean waves surrounding him, fell into a nap.

Sometime later, sensing he was being watched, he opened his eyes to see a man's face hovering over him. More specifically it hovered high in the air, peering out of clouds. The face was as ma.s.sive as a mountain, each stubbly whisker the size of a stump in a clear-cut. The face looked to be in its midthirties, Caucasian, a little heavy around the jowls but with a strong, angular jaw. Brown hair messed up with some sort of beauty product, blackheads cl.u.s.tered around the nose.

Neethan raised himself up on his elbows. "Who are you?"

The face didn't respond, maintaining its placid expression. Neethan realized the hot blasts of wind he was feeling every few seconds were breaths from this giant's nostrils.

"Who are you!" he repeated. Still no answer. Unnerved, Neethan stood and continued walking, with the giant, celestial head at his back. He'd never been stared at so intensely. It felt as though dental drills were boring into his shoulder blades.

"Leave me alone!" Neethan cried out.

Still the head persisted, following along it seemed, his eyes trained on Neethan's path. Frustrated, Neethan fired a couple blasts in the head's direction, but the buckshot fell far short. What could the head want? Maybe it just wanted him to continue his walk along the red carpet, which Neethan would have done regardless. Maybe it had appeared in a supervisory capacity, to ensure his safe travel to the Pacific Northwest. Or maybe it was simply a spectator, a curious ent.i.ty observing his choices. Whatever it was, it made Neethan's skin crawl.

The head belched and the sky was overcome with the stench of garlic.

"Jesus Christ!" Neethan yelled, shaking his gun. The head appeared to smile slightly, amused at the pip-squeak anger of this minuscule being trudging along a red carpet on a beach with the paparazzi nowhere in sight. Soon it eclipsed the sun and became an indistinct black ma.s.s. When night came completely, the moon cast the head in a blue glow. It appeared to close its eyes and drift into sleep.

Neethan couldn't tell how far he'd traveled on the beach but his body told him it was time to find a place to stay for the night. He struggled toward a concentration of lights in the distance and came upon a charming seaside town where a motel, the Lamplight Inn, flickered its VACANCY sign. Veering off the carpet, he stumbled across the parking lot to the motel's office, where a balding, middle-aged, heavyset man in a white T-s.h.i.+rt sat scribbling something in a notebook. Neethan pushed open the door and asked if there were rooms available. The man's voice came out filled with static, like there was something wrong with his audio. About every third word he spoke cut out.

". . . have . . . -ble . . . looking for . . . view room?"

"I'm sorry," Neethan said, "you're cutting out. I'll take whatever room you think is best."

The man nodded, then looked out the window to the beach, craning his neck to observe the giant, sleeping head hovering in the sky.

". . . that head . . . to . . . ?"

"Come again?"

"Does . . . belong . . . you?"

"Oh," Neethan said, "I guess it does belong to me. It showed up after I came out of the redwoods, after I killed all those zombies."

"Who . . . he?"

"Who is he? I don't know. He's just some guy who's been following me. Right now he appears to be asleep. I have no idea what he wants. He won't speak. He just watches me. I don't care for it, if you want to know the truth. I feel like there's a built-in expectation involved with being watched like this. Why would he watch me if he didn't want or expect me to do something? Like a scientist, you know? A scientist doesn't observe something unless he has a hypothesis about it, right? So what's this gigantic head's hypothesis about me? What's it think I'm going to do? My path has been predetermined. I almost died in Death Valley. Fought zombies in the redwoods. Answered questions from the press in a thoughtful and polite manner. I can't tell what life this is, whether it belongs to me or is just being played for laughs by somebody else. I don't really care one way or the other, though. I've got my mission and I'm going to fulfill it."

The man behind the counter seemed to have stopped listening to him. He slid a room key across the fake-wood-grain counter and returned to his scribbled lorem ipsums. Neethan could have gone on for hours with this guy, chatting him up about music made by mentally handicapped people and the myriad challenges of international aid organizations, but this was a person programmed to hand out room keys and swipe credit cards and engage in only the amount of conversation needed to keep such transactions rolling along smoothly. If that meant asking about a guest's gigantic celestial head, then that's just what good customer service was all about.

Lonely and tired, Neethan slung his weapon over his shoulder and shuffled across the parking lot to his room, casting a quick glance at the head drooling into the sea as it slumbered. He opened the door to find the room illuminated by a gold coin the size of a medium pizza floating above one of the two twin beds. More money-just what he needed. He positioned himself under the glowing currency and poked his head up into it, hearing the familiar chime. How much money had he earned in this manner? How many extra lives had he racked up? He'd lost track. A few million bucks, maybe? Enough lives to sustain him through a variety of zombie attacks, if it came to that? Neethan smiled at the television waiting for him at the foot of the bed. He clicked it on with the remote, set his weapon on the nightstand, and stripped out of his clothes for some quality underwear-clad TV viewing/ball-cupping. He settled after a while on a show about the s.p.a.ce elevator some dudes had constructed off Maui. (A commercial for condoms, a commercial for legal services, a commercial for coffee in a can.) Here was an interview with an official spokesman for the project, a wind-whipped fellow in a rain suit, who said, "We really had a p.i.s.ser of a time contending with the Van der Waals forces, but hey, thanks to some heavy lifting brain-wise, we're all good," and, "It's a freaking s.p.a.ce elevator, man! Can you believe it?"

"What's the f.u.c.kin' point of this giant, like, s.p.a.ce station you dudes are building up there?" the interviewer lady person asked the spokesman on the deck of the sea platform.

"What we're building is nothing short of the first extraterrestrial terrarium, an O'Neil cylinder that'll rotate on its axis to simulate gravity and contain a sustainable f.u.c.kin' ecosystem, with a filament core providing energy and illumination and s.h.i.+t like that."

"So people are going to f.u.c.kin' live in it and s.h.i.+t?"

"People, or, you know, maybe just, like, f.u.c.kin' plants and s.h.i.+t like that at this point. It's actually not up to my group to determine how the interior is going to look, what's going to be on the inner surface. We're just building the sh.e.l.l right now. It's pretty f.u.c.kin' kick-a.s.s, though."

As the spokesman fielded questions and spat chewing-tobacco-related saliva into a paper cup, a climber platform slid down the carbon nanotube ribbon and docked with a great hissing of steam. The camera cut away for a close-up of the platform, from which a trio of technicians who were suited up in orange astronaut gear waved and thumbs-upped to indicate another successful delivery of payload.

Neethan surfed and happened upon one of his own movies, Cop vs. Cop. He'd played one of the cops, the second one. Cop vs. Cop had macho written all over it, full of blood and scorn and torture, cattle prods, a burlesque of profanities. Onscreen and armed, he turned the squib-studded trunks of baddies into hamburger. Off-screen he fell asleep.

The next morning, the giant head was still sleeping when Neethan rejoined the red carpet and continued walking north along the coast. Seagulls had begun nesting in the head's eyebrows, pecking at its chapped lips. The clouds surrounding it had begun to rain, slickening its hair. Occasionally Neethan turned to see if it was awake yet but at noon its eyes were still closed. Neethan positioned himself under the nostrils, craning his neck to view the two hair-lined caverns. It took him a minute to realize he couldn't feel its breath anymore. The head was dead. Yet still it followed him, maintaining the same few hundred yards or so of distance. What could this possibly mean? Neethan wished it would go away. Maybe it could nod off into the ocean, sink to the bottom to be feasted upon by crabs, gazing up at the distant surface with eyes the size of sports stadiums.

If the mere fact of a gigantic head hanging behind him was upsetting, Neethan was even more upset that the head was now deceased. He found himself, as he crossed the border into Oregon, wis.h.i.+ng the head was still alive, even though it hadn't said a word to him. At least when it was alive he could believe it had some purpose for being. What purpose could it possibly have now? He stopped occasionally to gaze up at the graying flesh, trying to remember if he'd seen this face before. Was this some kind of punishment for something he'd done? Was the head's existence meant to be some kind of sign? He walked, it followed, its neck wreathed in clouds. At times the red carpet took him into the forests and hills along the coast but he could still see the head hanging there above the trees. It was in Oregon that the head began to smell. This attracted more than the usual number of gulls, who started snacking on the flesh. The sight disgusted Neethan. Meanwhile, he continued to pick up the occasional extra life and offed the odd zombie here and there. In the town of Tillamook he took on a pack of vampire/werewolf hybrids with a nail gun, dying a couple times in the process. No biggie.

When the carpet brought him to Cannon Beach, Neethan tumbled into a brew pub and ordered a pint of the local IPA. The bartender, a stout man with a head of curly gray hair who couldn't stop polis.h.i.+ng the bar with a rag, c.o.c.ked his head toward the window. "That head out there belong to you?"

"You could say that," Neethan said. "I don't know why it's following me. Don't worry. I'll soon be on my way, with the head behind me."

"Causing quite a stench," the bartender said.

"I'm really sorry. I would get rid of it if I could."

The bartender stopped his polis.h.i.+ng. "Say, wait-I recognize you. Don't tell me-" He uttered a few names of movie stars before he got it right. "You were in that gladiator movie."

"Gladiator Graduate School."

"Right. Great death scene. So what brings you to Cannon Beach?"

"I'm following the red carpet hoping it leads to me to some answers about my heritage. Apparently I'm an Indian. What's your name, by the way?"

"Axl Lautenschlager."

"This your family business?

"It's been in the Lautenschlagers going on five generations."

"Since the FUS, then."

"We survived three tsunamis and a plague of human-headed locusts."

"Nuts, man. Nuts."

"What do you think that head is up there for, anyway?"

Neethan shrugged. "When it was alive I kept trying to ask it, but it wouldn't answer. Then it died and now it's never going to tell me. But that doesn't negate the fact that it's still up there, blotting out the sun, rotting."

"Eventually it's going to just be a skull."

"Yeah, I guess. Then the wind will erode it and a couple thousand years from now there won't be anything up there at all."

Axl cracked his neck. "But if it really does stay up there that long, centuries after your death, folks will still be debating why it appeared."

"Not that I'm dying anytime soon. I've racked up 378 lives."

"Must've exterminated a lot of zombies on your way up here."

"You know it. What level am I on?"

"Forty-seventh."