CHAPTER FIVE Lake Stannous, California
CHAPTER SIX Spent River, Oregon
EPILOGUE SHEVA2 + 1 LONE PINE, CALIFORNIA
SHORT GLOSSARY OF SCIENTIFIC TERMS
“America’s a cruel country. There’s a whole lot of people would just as soon stomp you like an ant. Listen to talk radio. Plenty of dummies, damned few ventriloquists.”
“There’s a wolf snarl behind the picnics and Boy Scout badges.”
“They want to kill our kids. Lord help us all.”
—Anonymous Postings, ALT.NEWCHILD.FAM
“Citing ‘severe threats to national security,’ Emergency Action this week has requested of the U.S. Justice Department the authority to hack and shut down SHEVA parent Web sites and even e-journals and newspapers guilty of spreading inaccurate information—‘lies’—against EMAC and the U.S. government. Some parent advocacy groups complain this is already the norm. Mid-level Justice Department officials have passed the request along to the office of the attorney general for further legal review, according to sources who wish to remain anonymous.
“Some legal experts say that even legitimate newspaper sites could be hacked or shut down without warning should approval be granted, and the granting of such approval is likely in itself to be kept secret.”
—Seattle Times-PI Online
“God had nothing to do with making these children. I don’t care what you think about creationism or evolution, we’re on our own now.”
—Owen Withey, Creation Science News
CHAPTER ONE Spotsylvania County, Virginia
Morning lay dark and quiet around the house. Mitch Rafelson stood with coffee cup in hand on the back porch, dopey from just three hours of sleep. Stars still pierced the sky. A few persistent moths and bugs buzzed around the porch light. Raccoons had been at the garbage can in back, but had left, whickering and scuffling, hours ago, discouraged by lengths of chain.
The world felt empty and new.
Mitch put his cup in the kitchen sink and returned to the bedroom. Kaye lay in bed, still asleep. He adjusted his tie in the mirror above the dresser. Ties never looked right on him. He grimaced at the way his suit hung on his wide shoulders, the gap around the collar of his white shirt, the length of sleeve visible beyond the cuff of his coat.
There had been a row the night before. Mitch and Kaye and Stella, their daughter, had sat up until two in the morning in the small bedroom trying to talk it through. Stella was feeling isolated. She wanted, needed to be with young people like her. It was a reasonable position, but they had no choice.
Not the first time, and likely not the last. Kaye always approached these events with studied calm, in contrast to Mitch’s evasion and excuses. Of course they were excuses. He had no answers to Stella’s questions, no real response to her arguments. They both knew she ultimately needed to be with her own kind, to find her own way.
Finally, too much, Stella had stomped off and slammed the door to her room. Kaye had started crying. Mitch had held her in bed and she had gradually slipped into twitching sleep, leaving him staring at the darkened ceiling. He tracking the play of lights from a truck grumbling down the country road outside, wondering, as always, if the truck would come up their drive, come for their daughter, come to claim bounty or worse.
He hated the way he looked in what Kaye called his Mr. Smith duds—as in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. He lifted one hand and rotated it, studying the palm, the long, strong fingers, wedding ring—though he and Kaye had never gotten a license. It was the hand of a hick.
He hated to drive into the capital, through all the checkpoints, using his congressional appointment pass. Slowly moving past all the army trucks full of soldiers, deployed to stop yet another desperate parent from setting off another suicide bomb. There had been three such blasts since spring.
And now, Riverside, California.
Mitch walked to the left side of the bed. “Good morning, love,” he whispered. He stood for a moment, watching his woman, his wife. His eyes moved along the sleeve of her pajama top, absorbing every wrinkle in the rayon, every silken play of pre-dawn light, down to slim hands, curled fingers, nails bitten to the quick.
He bent to kiss her cheek and pulled the covers over her arm. Her eyes fluttered open. She brushed the back of his head with her fingers. “G’luck,” she said.
“Back by four,” he said.
“Love you.” Kaye pushed into the pillow with a sigh.
Next stop was Stella’s room. He never left the house without making the rounds, filling his eyes and memory with pictures of wife and daughter and house, as if, should they all be taken away, should this be the last time, he could replay the moment. Fat good it would do.
Stella’s room was a neat jumble of preoccupations and busyness in lieu of having friends. She had pinned a farewell photo of their disreputable orange tabby on the wall over her bed. Tiny stuffed animals spilled from her cedar chest, beady eyes mysterious in the shadows. Old paperback books filled a small case made of pine boards that Mitch and Stella had hammered together last winter. Stella enjoyed working with her father, but Mitch had noticed the distance growing between them for a couple of years now.
Stella lay on her back in a bed that had been too short for over a year. At eleven, she was almost as tall as Kaye and beautiful in her slender, round-faced way, skin pale copper and tawny gold in the glow of the night-light,
