1

“I’ll tell you what you want. Anything…anything you want…”

He’d dismissed what surrendering might mean. He didn’t care anymore. Norris had walked down those stairs, wearing penny loafers today, their heels tapping each riser with the clocked intonation of a hammer nailing shut a coffin. And that’s what this basement had become. He could smell the sewage in the pail, and he could smell the infection on his arm, could somehow taste it, like thousands of bugs crunching between his teeth or drowning in his spit. Norris had come down carrying a silver platter of food, his usual accoutrement, a dichotomy against Ned’s soiled pants, his sweaty face and knotted hair, the dingy musk and gloom of a basement whose windows had been mostly covered now by canvas after Norris had mentioned somebody was caught lurking in his yard. His neighbor had brought it up, and Ned was convinced it was Cole. Which made it harder to proceed in finally seeking his own freedom at Cole’s expense. It doesn’t matter, he thought, his legs numb, his wrist chafing and itchy, his stomach gargling at the thought of what Norris might be bringing, at the smell above what was in the pail, beyond everything, like some sort of grasp at a chance outside this horrible place. You have to live. Despite what this prick has already done to you, has already made you in the world above: a murderer. You have to live because you have to prove you aren’t guilty of any of it. That you’ve been made a puppet in some sick game, that Norris Serkis is insane, that he’s the monster in this town. And you have that proof. You do. You have that proof, if only you could find a way out of this fucking mess. He looked at the pail for a moment and quashed the urge to retch. He’d gotten on the lid tight enough, but his hands were wet and sticky, were filthy after grabbing what he needed to. Norris had brought down a wet towel during his last visit: We’re civilized, Ned. You mustn’t resort to your primitive urges, he’d said, watching Ned wash off the remainders of what still clung to his free hand, between his fingers.

“I’ll tell you who Cole is…what he’s paid me to do…” His words were so weak now. His throat was dry. He saw a glass of orange juice on the tray and knew Norris was bringing him breakfast. Without the natural light coming into the basement, without access to those natural beams offered to him by the windows, he no longer had a concept of time. And that was more crushing than what he thought were the bedsores, worse even than the tingling through his toes that was starting to wane, to prove his own limbs were a part of this grand mutiny that was keeping him a prisoner as his reputation was being forever tarnished. Norris had brought him the Post showing him the Greenbelt Murder. He longed to feel the humid tang of that grove, to feel the slick grass underfoot, to feel the swipe of branch against his sides as he splayed his fingers through the overgrowth; to consider these were the thoughts married to the assumption made by the article, that he’d murdered another Creeker, was to assume his idea of freedom, that very idea he’d so taken for granted, was now the very spring of his machinations. Cole Moore wrote that exposé as well. He’s a sensationalist like the lot of them, and maybe that’s what his whole point’s been: to frame you for a long line of crimes to embolden and bolster his career. That he’s working with Norris and those horrible people in the council. So you have every fucking right to give him up. To give in. You do.

Or was that just cognitive dissonance? He didn’t know anymore. He didn’t know what was up and what was down, what was morning and what was night. He was lost and abandoned. Or forsaken. He figured he liked that term better. Because it carried a merit of truth, and because it merged his identity with something important. Something sacred. What was happening in Reedy Creek at the hands of the council, it was evil. He was an agent against that conspiracy. Wasn’t he?

Norris set down the tray and kneeled in front of Ned. He touched Ned’s hair, pushing aside strands to reveal his face. The plate sizzled with peppers and goat cheese, with bacon and mushrooms, all glazed under a honey drizzle. There was another long-stemmed rose, maybe? He wasn’t sure. It propped out of a crystal vase, magnificently white and in full bloom, set upon a napkin, its pleats perfectly folded and aligned. As if Norris had the sort of compulsion or will to repeat patterns until they were meticulous. A skill that would take both incredible patience and madness.

“Please…” Ned whispered. “You win. I can’t…I can’t do this anymore. My hand…my wrist…it hurts so much…” He wasn’t crying. But he was certain he would start. The tears were there. Waiting. He’d already imagined trying to gnaw off his hand above the wrist, to chew and chew, to ignore the pain and just watch the cuff finally free fall with the weight of his dismembered paw, his flesh and blood like gristle between his teeth. He imagined the sound his hand would make, disconnected from him, as it struck the furnace: the wet thud of something like fruit, and he nearly vomited.

“You poor, poor thing,” Norris said, looking the officer up and down. There was contempt in his eyes, and concern. Ned thought the concern was worse. It was teasing.

“Please…”

“You don’t understand, do you?” Norris stroked Ned’s face again, his fingers so gentle, so smooth.

“Please…” Ned reiterated.

“Ned. Don’t be silly. I haven’t let you live because you have information I want. I need. No.” His smile was devious and playful. “I like our conversations. Your honesty. You are my little Petiot.” He chuckled. “And I like cooking for you. I don’t often get the chance to cook for others. It is such an expression of one’s artistic soul. Do you believe that? That a chef is on par with a sculptor for what he can do with a tuber?”

Ned looked at that plate, looked at the arrangement of the foods, and how the honey drizzle didn’t tarnish the peppers as they sat secluded like red and green ornaments beneath the mottled sprinkle of cheese; he didn’t believe it was art but a sign of madness, yes, because this man could conduct himself to act within civil strictures as he spoke to a prisoner who’d recently pissed himself.

Norris licked his lips. “You are as much a part of this experiment as any of us, Ned. I know you think you are holding onto something that is keeping you alive. Your allegiance to Cole is rather remarkable, and that you’ve persisted this long is an act of conviction they will write elegiacs about in the future. But you’ve never had any control here. I hope you understand that. And I apologize that I’ve strung you along to believe you were sitting on something I wanted to know. I already know everything, poor boy.” Norris pushed the platter toward Ned, between his numb legs, and sat on the floor across from him, nudging toward the meal with his head. “I’m thankful for you, if anything. I know I haven’t said it enough, but I am. Thank you. You have been my muse. My blank canvas. Reedy Creek is reeling at what it’s learned and seen of my most recent work. But to be honest, my dear friend, Cole Moore is here because this isn’t the first time I’ve expressed myself. No. You would not expect a man like Cole to be in a place like this, but here he is. And he’s been watching us. Watching me. Because he is not very happy with me. No, he is not. He hasn’t been happy with me since his name was Scott Cole. A worldly man, this one, with many names. But Scott believes I’ve done something to slight him. My reasons would not presume to include him in the big picture, but he sees things differently. As he should, I suppose. You see, Ned, you’re part of a rivalry that has deep roots. I do not think Cole has been honest with you, and that is unfair. Because here you are. He used you to punish me. Maybe he believes himself smarter than I am. But he is not.”

Ned listened to all of this with confusion. Norris called his bluff. He did not know much about Cole beyond what his own role implied in his, albeit brief, servitude. You have been played, you idiot. You have. He probably knew you were a faggot too, and he used his charm to trick you. And look at you now. Your goddamn pecker got you into this mess as well.

“It is upsetting, regardless. It is sad to know that I have to murder poor Cole just as I murdered his father.”

2

“What have you gotten me into?”

Cole had made a pot of coffee and Allen sat down at the table and took his mug. He was blunt and direct. He was looking at Cole’s research on the bulletin board, newspaper articles tacked into the cork and connected by strings of yarn. Names like Perkins, Wilson, Miller, and others even like Handelman and Phillips, attached to stories showcasing bizarre accidents that had led to death. Poor Coriander had fallen getting out of the shower and broken her neck on the tub; and a guy named Stu Phillips, with something called cerebrovascular disease, was found at the bottom of his stairs with shattered legs and had been impaled on cutlery he was carrying when he lost his footing. A fork was in his stomach, deep enough so that the entirety of its tines had ruptured his bowels, and a butter knife had been lodged between his ribs and had likely punctured a lung. Cole had described all of these incidents, including for the car accidents Allen was involved in cleaning up over the summer, as strategic illusions, and that somebody had orchestrated each of them as a result of outlying medical issues. Cancer, heart disease. Terminal. “The council,” Cole had said, crossing his legs and gesturing to the board of evidence. “All of this. It’s the council’s doing.”

“I followed Norris to Deer Park. Same address you followed the fat kid to. I mean, that’s one coincidence, right? I tried to talk to Mrs Golding, but she wouldn’t let me in. Was adamant I needed a warrant. I saw Norris go in through the backyard. I tried to warn her, and then I heard her husband scream and I found the guy dying. Bleeding from a stab wound…but that’s not even right, because it was a trench. Like something a fuckin’ pathologist would do to a cadaver. The big ‘Y’. It felt like I was holding in the guy’s heart with his robe. I could feel each new hot burst of blood.”

“Jesus.”

“And Norris saw me. He knew I’d followed him. And he did this for me. Do you get that? This guy nearly died because I tailed the doc, and he looked at me as I kneeled down next to the vic, as he’s bleeding out, stuck like a pig, and Norris just stopped in the yard to look at me. To let me know he knew I was there, and to…I think, to blame me for what happened. Like I got in the way of something.” He took another sip of his coffee and decided it was the last thing he needed right now. “What have you gotten me into, Moore? What is this? I mean, you’ve been researching this shit for how long? You’ve been in the Creek for how long? You obviously know more than you’re letting on.”

Cole had already told him his suspicions. About the council. About the cameras. About the private financing by the man he called the Saudi, who lived next door in the bungalow with the handicapable ramp to the front door; he did not know for what reasons, but he knew the head of the council, Paul Holdren, held several meetings with the man who rarely left the place, and when he did it was to be pushed in his chair into the Creek’s many littered groves and greenbelts to witness a little greenery sorely missing in Arabia’s dry butthole. Always listening to his headphones. But what he knew about the project under the surface here was just conjecture. For a long time the council arranged accidents for terminally ill patients; but the new murders, the murders being pinned on Ned Stevenson, those were just an extension of what the council had already been doing. How and why, he did not know. He could not know. But he knew it wasn’t Ned. He knew following Norris would have proven that one truth.

“How?” Allen asked. He watched Cole with a patient curiosity, like a young boy watching a magic act as each subsequent trick was revealed. And maybe Cole was a little like a magician. He had a ton of tricks and secrets under his sleeve.

“Because this isn’t the first time I’ve seen this, Allen. The bodies, their sins written in blood.”

Allen leaned forward.

“I followed Norris to Reedy Creek. Him and Paul Holdren. Because I want to see the bastards burn for what they did.”

Allen shifted in his seat. He was in plainclothes. A civilian right now. And maybe that was partly because Norris had seen him in uniform; that strolling around with his cop mask proved far more threatening and he was protected in his seeming anonymity. But that was a pipedream. He knew that now.

“I…” He stopped, not sure how to start. There was so much to say. Allen could see that. “Seven years ago I found my father tied to a tree. Like a lynching. But he was…” Cole closed his eyes and looked away. “He was tied to the trunk of this old sycamore by his own entrails. Forensic report would say it was mostly his small intestine. Strung tight around the throat. His head was tipped to the side…his eyes open. He was gutted. Like a fucking fish. His arms were tied to a branch above him with rope. It looked like he was praying, and maybe that was the symbol. He was shirtless. Bleeding everywhere. The ground beneath him…it was…” Cole stifled a grunt. He’d balled his fists. “Somebody had written on him. Across his bare chest, above…above what happened to him here,” he gestured to his stomach and Allen understood. “They used his own blood as ink. TREE FUCKER, it said. TREE across his collarbone, and FUCKER, just a little smaller…smaller letters, and dripping into the…into the wound below. Like candle wax.”

“My God,” Allen whispered.

“You always have your suspicions, you know. My father was the chairman of a group called Project Gaia. It’s mostly disbanded now. After what happened in Washington. It was an Environmental Caucus, my father always called it. A step in the right direction in focusing efforts on sustainability. But there was a splintered faction that had radicalized. It was led by Paul Holdren. My father was terrified of Paul. Paul was a people person. He was what most would understandably call a leader because he could sell an idea, no matter its lunacy. And he was convinced putting out a strategic hit on Norman Borlaug would help to re-settle focus on the Overpopulation catastrophe versus putting donor money into research programs on the reusability of resources to reduce wastes. Even if it was just a stunt.”

“Who is Norman Borlaug?”

“A biologist who facilitated something called the Green Revolution through his research and cultivation of…high-yield and disease-resistant wheat. He’s credited, I guess theoretically, with saving over a billion people from starvation.”

“Sounds like a hero.”

“Not if your intent in the movement is to prove man is the problem, not the solution. Paul Holdren’s a thinker who puts moral certainty into the action of a forced Reductivist Movement, something he coined, I think, and something he brought with him into Gaia to move focus and resources away from academic research to radical action.”

“So you believe Norris killed your father…”

“And staged it as an anti-environmental terrorist act, done maybe by corporate hires, anti-greeners. I don’t know. But it spurred the movement to elect Paul as acting chairman in the interim. Because he was a leader. My father was lynched as leverage for Holdren to cede control.”

“You don’t have proof,” Allen said, thinking for a moment. “That’s why you’re here. That’s why you have this…all of this. Because you don’t have proof. But you’re…you’re compiling it.”

“It isn’t substantive. It’s a theory. It makes sense. Everything I’ve told you, it makes sense, but without a smoking gun, it just amounts to a conspiracy.”

“Why Norris?”

“What happened to my father. The ME…the Medical Examiner, he told me the staging, and that’s what he called it—the staging—of my father’s body, the incision, the dexterity with which the assailant removed what he needed to tie the body to that tree, it was intentional, procedural. Done by somebody who knew where to look for what he needed. An amateur would have left everything, every goddamn organ in the dirt, probably collect a horde of, I don’t know, wolves or dogs to make off with the evidence. Serkis was in medical school. Had done his residency. He wasn’t a surgeon, but he’d practiced anatomical incisions on cadavers, so he’d know. He would. He was radical from the get-go. He’d staged a storming of the ROTC as an undergrad with some Black Panthers. Beat the shit out of some campus security. He was heavily invested with actionable members of the SDS. His records are all a red flag. That’s why Paul used him. Uses him. He’s muscle. But he’s intelligent muscle. I…I sent Ned Stevenson on his tail. But Norris was onto us. Already onto him. Everything happening right now, from the General to the greenbelt, and to whatever you stopped from happening at Deer Park—that’s all Norris. He’s the council’s foot soldier.”

“And he’s aware of me now. Jesus.” Allen only trembled.

“You have the shield, Allen. The badge.”

“So did Ned.”

Cole was silent for a moment. “That’s the shit in a nutshell. When I saw those bodies in the General, when I broke through the barrier, it fucking hit me, Allen. Norris is thirsty again; he just doesn’t go back to the same watering hole. You know the last thing I ever said to my father?” Cole tapped the table and looked at the bulletin board, looked at the strings and connections of a town being buried without its even knowing. “I told him he was being paranoid. About the vocal opposition in the movement. I told him he was being paranoid and that he should just concentrate on what he believed would change the world. And I’ve followed those motherfuckers ever since. When Holdren was ousted as chairman after a publicity stunt, I followed him here. While he was building his dream team.”

“Publicity stunt?”

“He planned a group suicide. Fashioned after the Jim Jones spectacle at Jamestown. Poisoned the drinks at a function that would have left a thousand people dead. Most have called it a hoax because not one person took a sip. Rumors say they were forewarned. Evidence was flushed down the drain, so to speak, so the press blurted hoax and moved on, but it didn’t sit well. If this place is any proof, these deaths, I don’t think it was fake at all. I think he failed, or somebody got in the way. Like we are. Like we have to. Holdren argued on his way out that examples have to be made by those enacting the regulatory policies; if you’re combatting overpopulation, you take your own life as evidence of the issue’s severity. He said true believers have principles.”

“He’s turned my fucking home into a secret ballot, and he’s choosing who lives or dies,” Allen said. “He isn’t principled. He’s a coward.”

“That’s what my father always said.”

Allen wished he’d worn his pistol. He wished he’d been in uniform; the authoritative act of taking control, of wresting it away from miscreants, required the symbolism of the badge. He stood anyway, his jeans just a little tight at the thighs and his stomach bulging just a little over his belt. “Alright, Moore. I don’t like this. Any of it. But alright.” He nodded his head. “Let’s shut these fuckers down.”

3

“Cole knows about everything. About what you’re doing. He’s…he’s pieced it all together.”

“Is that right?” Norris said. It wasn’t really a question. “It would be silly of him to have come all of this way and not do his due diligence. And do you, Ned, do you know what we’re doing here?”

Cole had told him enough. Maybe not the whole story, and a part of him believed that was just Cole protecting him from things he didn’t need to know. He was given the surface, the sort of details he required to likely keep sane and do his job while he shadowed certain people. Like Trevor Kramer. The taste of the bacon, of the honey and salt, filled his mouth and for now a lingering part of him just cared about indulging; the thought of what the council might have really been doing didn’t matter to him, because the moment he learned what happened beneath the surface, the moment he found out what Cole knew, his life could be gambled against the information. And things weren’t looking good to start with.

“Paul Holdren and I have a seasoned career together. I respect the man. I don’t respect many men, Ned. I don’t. It is odd indeed to find a human I care about. I am an idea man. I respect ideas. Because ideas can be perfect. They are art. They inform art.” He looked down at the half-eaten plate of bacon and peppers, at the glass of orange juice, and he dipped his finger into what was left of the glaze on the rim of the plate. He drew a circle on the concrete next to his leg. “This is our world. At peace when you glance at it from the outside; its distance, a speck in unwavering darkness, separates you from the problems inherent to what evolution decrees. Evolution spurs combat, as the stronger, the fitter, they climb over the weak, they scramble to survive. The weak die. It is only natural. In the past Nature decreed when one’s epoch was up; chance threw a stone at the planet, and those curious creatures only glanced up at the sky to watch the air compress against a meteor, something they didn’t understand, but something they feared. And the world was rid of them in that instant. Dominion is temporary. Except for us, Ned. Except for man. Our control has ceded the very yolk of power from Nature, to the point where what was once abundant to us is now considered a privilege: food, shelter. Those essentials are commodified because scarcity has deemed a very powerful and dangerous idea to take precedence; we look at the earth for her capital gains, and we screw and breed, and our progress and our medicines have ensured those babies will live to see eighty, maybe ninety or a hundred, all consuming from day one, because humanity is defined by its consumption. There are so many of us, Ned, so many people. Nature is going extinct now because in our hubris, in our history of progress, we thought it was our right to take and take and take until the world grew thin in sickness. Our factories spew smoke. Look here, in Reedy Creek, those stacks to the north are continuous beacons of sulfuric darkness, cloaking our horizon with the silt of disease, blurring it, the world around us now indefinite and mottled. That is our legacy, Ned. Our artistic legacy as we progress isn’t the oil paintings hanging in the Louvre, but the industrialized pistons of mechanization, the exhaust, the clogged arterial roadways that are like Gaia’s high cholesterol finally choking her, finally killing her, and the only thing she can do to fight back is to skew her climate. To boil us all alive. To flood us.”

“What are you talking about?” Ned whispered.

Norris smiled. “You’re a parasite, Ned. You are. Your mom is. Your father. All parasites. Because you all share the blame. What we are doing here in Reedy Creek is to define an idea. To prove we are aware and to prove we are willing to negotiate.”

“With who?”

“With her. With Nature. I know how that sounds. But you feel a right to life, do you not? Selfishness is inherent. Hell, I am the same. If you gave one the choice to live, he would surely take it. What your friend Cole has likely discovered is that we are not giving the choice. We are making it. We know about everything in Reedy Creek. About everyone. We know who deserves to live and who deserves to die.”

“Did Robert Wilson deserve to die? Clayton Miller? How about Sarah Darling, you fucking piece of shit?”

“That’s right. That’s right, Ned. You have to be emotional if you believe in something strongly. You do. Passion is required of those who make hard choices.”

“You’re a murderer,” Ned said. He stared at Norris, wanting so badly to kick out, to flick up that platter at his feet and hope to God its sharp edge slit the man’s throat or blinded him. But he was weak and tired now. And maybe for that reason alone he didn’t deserve to survive.

“No, I am a meteor. I am striking at those who have not earned the right to live, to consume, because they are taking from those who deserve. Robert Wilson indulged at the expense of others, and he became so fat, so corpulent that beyond the jokes uttered behind his back, there were health issues starting to show that would have drained resources needed for others. Clayton Miller was sick and getting worse; he lived on narcotics, the shit that killed Marilyn Monroe, and it would have surely gotten to him sooner or later. Sarah Darling was a whore, Ned. She fucked a man with a family just to get ahead in life, and look what her choice has meant for Thomas Halliburton’s wife and two children. Two bastards. They will grow up with photographs of the man and nothing else. Because he and Sarah broke a vow, and neither of them stopped once to think about it. Their selfishness prompted payback.”

“Payback? Fucking payback?” Ned nearly screamed. “You shot them both and pinned the murders on me. On me!”

“Reedy Creek’s experiment has to work with a villain, Ned. I am sorry to say you fit the bill. That doesn’t excite me, I hope you know. It really doesn’t. But it is nice to have company.” He patted Ned’s leg and smiled. It was a consoling smile and Ned thought again of using that platter to cut the doctor’s throat. To leave him drowning in his own blood. And then you can cut off your hand with the platter. If Serkis doesn’t have the key on him. You can, and you can get out of here. For good. You have the proof. You have everything you need to exonerate yourself.

Another part of him wanted Norris to keep talking. That each extra word was even more incriminating. This is the mother lode, Ned, the grand-spankin’ prize!

“But think of the excitement we’re giving these bored townies. Think of the entertainment. The thrill of wondering if they’re next, if psychotic Ned Stevenson will mutilate them if they’re found alone. It’s an element of escapism in a town bored to tears of farming, of the routine, of folks who look up at the planes they see overhead flying to greener pastures. Think about what you’re giving here.”

Ned thought Norris truly believed that. He did. He thought Norris actually believed he was performing a service in Reedy Creek, that the murders themselves worked toward whatever goal he and the council were attaining, but that the news itself of a serial killer was like a sort of reality TV that kept people on the edges of their seats.

“It won’t work. What you’re doing here. I don’t know what you plan on doing, how you plan on expanding this…this idea, because there has to be an end game. You wouldn’t just be testing out your project here if you didn’t have an idea where it might go. You’re planners…if this much thought went into this council of yours, went into the research to weed out who deserved to die and who didn’t. This isn’t spontaneous, you must have aspirations, and I’m saying it won’t ever fucking work because people can sniff out madness. And you, sir, smell like shit.”

Norris laughed. It was genuine. “It’s never been about the action, about the conduct, Ned, but the idea. You find a strong enough idea and you can convince just about anybody to do what you want. Context acts the pivot. If we’re talking about the environment, you stack your council with agreeable Greens, and the dominoes will fall where they may. Ideology is a game, Ned. And I know how to play it. We know how to play it. The council is in Reedy Creek to make difficult decisions about life and death that would otherwise not be made by a democratic governing body. We are here to challenge the mentality of complacency that will leave us a footnote in a history that can never be written because Nature will have robbed us of a future. Our idea is Global Warming. It is a new idea. It is powerful in its implications. But look at how the idea has convinced rational academics like Trevor Kramer to reduce people to a mere vote of yay or nay. That is what Clayton Miller’s and Robert Wilson’s lives were resorted to: a vote. One dissenting opinion and Wilson might just be choking down a burger right now, or Miller jerking off to Deep Throat on his La-Z-Boy. Have you heard of the Great Sparrow Campaign, Ned?”

Ned didn’t answer. He wasn’t sure what he was hearing. He wasn’t intelligent enough to argue with Norris. He knew that. Because Norris would have an answer, a rebuttal to everything. Everything.

“The Great Leap Forward was another idea. The collectivization of farms under the Maoist government in 50’s China. In 1958, Mao Zedong created an enemy in the large sparrow population; he convinced his people that these birds were pests, and that their consumption of grains and seeds cut into our consumption of the same, and that our primacy made this agricultural staple our right. The Great Sparrow Campaign sounds ridiculous in retrospect, but when you consider its implications and results, you begin to understand just how powerful an idea really can be: the Chinese chased these birds, scared them, terrified them, kept them in flight, banged pots and pans so that the entire countryside must have sounded like Hell’s Kitchen. They wanted to exhaust these poor sparrows, these thieving cretins that had taken from them, that had despoiled and plundered their consumptive right as humans, as consumers; and tire them they did, because as one fell from the sky, so did a million others. Tens of millions, Ned, until the earth suffocated beneath the feathery pelts of a flightless horizon. Would you do the same? Would you chase the sparrows from your land if it meant keeping your food, keeping your family from starving?”

“They’re birds,” Ned whispered. “Just birds.”

“Yes, but consider the tens of millions of Chinese killed by the Maoist Communists; the same idea, the same ideology, fathered far more bloodshed. People march in lockstep if their beliefs find an idea under which they find shelter. The Chinese killed the sparrows because they thought it would solve a long-term issue, but their perspective was rather short-sighted. Acting in accordance to one’s beliefs oftentimes blinds one to the ramifications. And wouldn’t you know, Ned, with the sparrows dead, the locusts came a-calling, and they were worse than the sparrows could ever hope to be; they swarmed over every crop, and the resulting famine starved many of those short-sighted enough to believe killing the sparrows would end their misery. Because they were convinced it would. Because an idea is powerful enough to frame a perspective.”

“Maybe you’re being short-sighted. Maybe you’ve…invited an enemy even more powerful than your fucking sick idea. And it will stop you.”

“Maybe,” Norris laughed. “But Reedy Creek isn’t about the idea, Ned. No, what we’re proving here is what people, informed people, will do if pushed to it; there’s a hive mind in the campaign for righteousness. The idea is only the seed. An idea doesn’t act. It does not have the will to do. Reedy Creek is an experiment to prove one goal, Ned, and that is to see how far people will go to promote an idea. That if a belief is so fundamentally strong, one will proceed in removing all moral blockades to an action if there is a reason to do so shared among the likeminded. Look at what we’ve convinced a sheriff and best-selling writer to do.”

“This never ends well for people like you,” Ned said.

“Mao Zedong died of time, not of vengeance,” Norris retorted, though it carried an air of thoughtfulness. Maybe he believed there was a level of immunity or invincibility in his cloak and dagger tactics. And maybe he was right. “But you know I don’t care what happens to any of them. The council, or those we’re watching. I never have. They are like sparrows to me. Objects of nuisance, so distant to me they might as well be in flight. Do you know what I discovered when I murdered your friend Cole’s father? I enjoy this. I enjoy this game. It thrills me. Much like what you anticipated might happen when you came home with me, Friend of Dorothy. When the world was still your oyster. None of us are alone in our fascinations, Ned.”

4

Only his mother knew he had come here. She had remained on the Gaia board when Paul Holdren was elected chairman after his father’s murder. She understood, even then, just how flawed the stories had become, and how framed her husband’s murder had been in an effort to implicate corporate hired assassins. They will claim it was Big Oil. They always do. There are loons in petroleum, but the profit-minded are too busy with their bottom lines and what OPEC might have planned next to worry what a think tank might be planning or deploying to advertise sustainability. This was a hit job, plain and simple, to tar and feather a villain. She saw the act for what it was: the means to stoke the flames of radicalism and shuffle the leadership. It was an easier proposal if the acting chairman was the body found lynched to a tree by his own intestines.

Mariam Cole, who buried her husband in a closed casket, had been at the D.C. fundraiser that was bought and paid for by a Saudi Ambassador, a wealthy patron of American politics who was intrigued by the arguments of a group who would have once spited his country’s oil. “He was a man in a wheelchair,” she told him. “He and Paul were very friendly. You know something, Scott. If that man hadn’t spoken to me, that man with the disfigured face—Christ, I will always remember him, that face—our problems would have been taken care of. Because I have it on good authority that Holdren and Norris Serkis actually intended on poisoning the people in that room. The money spent on the affair, and the dignitaries invited, they were perfect opportunities to prove a point about federal bloat and overpopulation at the same time. But that man with the, well, the scarred face had spoken to a few people and the word spread. It wasn’t blamed on Holdren, no, most were convinced it was a planned hit similar to what happened to your father. The moment the hoax story hit the press, tied to Holdren as an actionable item around his philosophies, the Foundation knew it was time he stepped down. But we both know that’s all bunk. It wasn’t a hoax. He would have poisoned everybody in that goddamn room, and the smug prick wouldn’t have taken a sip. He would have watched. Because he is an agent of death. You always remember that. Death is his crutch. Without it, he cannot function. If that man with the scars hadn’t said anything that night, a thousand people would have died and Paul would have been stopped. I would have drunk to that. But evil men find windows. If there is a God, Scott, He doesn’t blind evil men to opportunity.”

Scott Cole, who was Cole Moore in Reedy Creek, the local journo, stood at his window watching through the blinds the man named Paul Holdren walk up to the front ramp of the bungalow next door. The Saudi’s assistant, Salim, opened the door and Paul entered. He watched this for some time, wondering if the men in that house knew they lived next to somebody so curious. Reedy Creek was a strange place. He was beginning to see more and more of that now. The boy went into the shed. And then he wasn’t there. Wherever death goes, he thought, ghosts follow. It seemed like an odd maxim, but he figured there was some truth to the sentiment.

Paul left nearly thirty minutes later. Cole watched him drive away. He did not snap any pictures. He didn’t think it mattered anymore. He thought about his father.

He heard his doorbell and was snapped out of his thoughts. His memories.

He opened the door and found somebody he never expected to see. Not at his home.

“Mr Moore. My name is Trevor Kramer. This is my son, Adam.” The boy nodded his head. “If you have some time, I’ve got a story to tell.”