As he slurped last night’s mormon tea from his thermos, liquid spilled onto the arm of his coat. Strange that his hands never shook while he held a gun.
“Hello, Ben,” he said into the receiver.
“Nice work last night, Harve,” said Ben. “Good spotting. You saved some lives there, buddy.”
Although Harvey knew better than to trust his brother’s sincerity, he could not repress a surge of pride. “I watch the weather, Ben. I can see it coming five miles off. And I look for the coyotes. They track the eetees. They keep a watch on them. The coyotes—”
“Sure, Harve,” Ben said. “Sure. I’ve never doubted it. You’re the best spotter we have.”
“Well, thanks, Ben.” Harvey seized the moment to describe how, two days ago, the coyotes had used telepathy to trick a van-load of eetees over the edge of the road to their deaths. As long as Ben was de facto dictator of Lewis County, for everyone’s good Harvey had to try to warn him what was happening out there in the parched mountains.
But Ben cut him off before he’d even reached the part about the eetee heads. “Harvey, Harvey, you sound pretty stressed. What about you come in and let Dr. King give you something for your jitters? You tell me all the time how jittery you get, keeping watch day and night. I’ll tell you honestly I’m worried, Harve. Come in before you mistake Susan for an eetee, or do something else we’ll all regret.”
What a lying fuck Ben was. Ben just wanted Dr. King to trank him stupid with Ativan. If Ben were truly worried, he wouldn’t force Harvey and Susan to stay out here in this horribly vulnerable spot, where Harvey was exposed to bad weather two or three times a week. That was what made him so jittery. But it was always, “Sorry, Harve, you can’t expect anyone in town to just give you food or gasoline or Clorox, or repair your phone line when the eetees cut it, not when supplies are dwindling by the day. We all have to contribute to the defense of Lewisville. Manning your observation post—the closest we have now to the ship—is the contribution we need from you.”
What Ben really wanted was for the eetees to rid him of his troublemaker brother. And on the day the weather finally killed Harvey, Ben would send a whole platoon of deputies out to De Soto Hill to take over Harvey’s house and deck. Ben would equip them with the eetee weapons and tools he kept confiscating from Harvey. Can’t hoard these, Harve, my men need them. Lewisville needs ’em.
Ben’s invitation to visit Dr. King, though: Harvey couldn’t afford to pass that up. Although the timing of the offer was a little too perfect…
“Ben, I’d rather have a couple of deputies to spell me than a pass for a doctor visit. What about it?”
“You know how short I am of manpower.” Ben sighed. “I’ll work on it, but in the meantime why don’t you come on in?”
“Okay,” Harvey said. “Okay, Ben, I’ll stop by Dr. King’s. If I can get Susan to stand watch for me. You know how she is these days. I don’t think it’s a good idea to leave the observation post that long, do you? How can you be sure eetees won’t come in daytime?”
There was a moment of silence at the other end. Then Ben said goodbye and hung up.
Harvey swallowed a few more gulps of mormon tea, feeling the ephedrine buzz now, and returned outside for recon. First he checked the weather. No fear-clouds on the horizon that he could detect. But lingering jumpiness from last night’s raid, and the scare Susan had given him on waking, might obscure an approaching front.
His video monitors showed him the view toward Lewisville, from the north and front side of the house. At this distance the town was a tiny life raft of houses, trees and grain elevators adrift on the rolling sea of golden wheat. The deck itself gave him a 270-degree view west, south, and east: over the highway and the sweep of fields below De Soto Hill, and of course toward the pine-forested mountains and that immense wreck.
Harvey cast around for the Nikons, only to discover that Susan had usurped his most powerful binoculars and was gazing through them toward the mountains. Anger stirring in him, he picked up the little Minoltas. Through them, the world looked quiet enough. The only movement was a hawk floating across the immaculate blue sky. But Harvey never trusted the quiet. The eetees might avoid the desiccating heat of daytime, but they were always stirring around up there. Plotting the next raid. And the coyotes—
If only he could spy into those mountains as easily as the eetees’ fear-storms roared into his own head.
The nape of Harvey’s neck began to twitch. “Do you see something?” he demanded. “Are the coyotes—”
“I’m looking for Fred,” Susan said coldly, without lowering the binoculars.
“Fred is gone.” Now the anger boiled in Harvey’s gut. “You should be watching for eetees, not pining after your lost dog.”
“Fuck your eetees! Fred is out there somewhere. He wouldn’t leave us and never come back!”
Her voice had turned flat and uncompromising, and Harvey knew one of her rages was coming on. But he could not rein in his own fury.
“If you care so much,” he said, “why did you let him loose?”
Susan finally turned to stare at Harvey. She was breathing hard. “I didn’t let Fred out.”
“Oh, so the coyotes unbuckled his collar?”
Deep red suffused Susan’s face. “Fuck you,” she screamed, “and fuck your coyotes!” She slammed the binoculars onto the deck, she reached toward the rifle—
Harvey grabbed his shotgun and aimed. How stupid to leave his rifle propped against the railing, out of reach—
Susan threw the rifle onto the deck, and then the tray holding the remains of his midnight snack; she kicked over his lawn chair and the tripod for his rifle, and upended the box of shotgun cartridges he’d been packing with rock salt. “Shoot me, Harvey!” she screamed. “Shoot me! I know you want to!”
Harvey snatched up his rifle but did not shoot. At last Susan stopped her rampage. She stared with fierce hatred through her tangled, greasy hair, panting. “I didn’t let Fred out, you moron. You did.” Then she flung herself in her own lawn chair and picked up a tattered and yellowing issue of last summer’s Lewisville Tribune.
The shakes took Harvey. While he waited for the waves of fever cold to recede, he gritted his teeth and said to her, “I’m going to do my rounds now. Just keep an eye out, okay, Susan? That’s all I ask? Watch for eetees, who want to kill us and steal our water, and not for your dead dog?”
When she did not answer, he heaved open the glass door again and stalked into the house. Susan might as well be using a weather-maker, the way she kept terrifying him. Harvey was jumpy enough today. He just had been lucky that last night’s raider had probably stolen its weather-maker from a higher-ranking eetee and wasn’t skilled in its use. And by now Harvey had learned to keep his distance and rely on his rifle and sniper’s night-scope. So the lightning strike of blind terror had fallen short. Harvey had caught only the peripheral shockwave—although that that had been horrible enough.
Weather-maker was what Harvey called the weapon. Other people called it a fear gun. Dr. King and Joe Hansen, putting their heads together, had suggested that the gun produced (as quoted in a bulletin distributed by the sheriff’s office) “wireless stimulation of the amygdala, mimicking the neurochemical signature of paralytic terror.” But no one had yet been able to figure out the insides of those whorled red pendants, and no one could do with them what the eetees did, not even Harvey, who was so hypersensitive from repeated exposure that the weapon affected him even when he wasn’t its target. Even when they weren’t being used. (When Dr. King told him that human researchers had for years been able to produce a similar if weaker effect with a simple electrode, Harvey had, next time he was alone, checked his scalp for unfamiliar scar tissue. But if Susan or Ben had had such an electrode implanted, they had also concealed the traces well.)