28

Lake Garner / White Lake

Boundary Waters Canoe Area, Minnesota

Still Thursday, 20 September

Seven-thirty, half an hour after sunrise, and the only thing the sun’s done so far is brighten the fog. There’s fog all over the place. Even Lake Garner looks like it’s inside a cloud. White Lake looks like the Canyon That Time Forgot.

Reggie’s handing out coffee, like he’s done all four days, I think because he hasn’t had enough else to do. His earnest and willowy guides are too efficient. Along with everyone else, he seems skittish about the fact that Bark still hasn’t turned up.

“You okay?” I say.

“You mean am I worried about Del’s goddamned dog? No. She’s probably joined a pack of moose.” He shoots a guilty look, though, over at Violet and Palin’s young relation Frodo, who are sitting on a boulder looking desolate. “I’m fine. Canoe trips and lake monsters aren’t really my thing—weirdos in amphibious boats neither—but at least we’re halfway done with the canoe part. All I need to do is make it back.”

“Reggie, what happened to all the hunting equipment Chris Jr. ordered that didn’t get delivered till after he died? Like the hooks and stuff?”

He shrugs. “Returned it. Never thought I’d be out here to use it.”

I take two cups of coffee over to Violet and Frodo, but Frodo’s already drinking a hot chocolate, so I keep one and sit down next to Violet. She leans into me, consciously or not I can’t tell, although when’s the last time you unconsciously leaned into someone?^[65] Either way it’s nice.

Reggie’s guides cook pancakes while we all wait for the fog to blow over, or burn off or whatever it’s supposed to do. No one talks above a whisper. There’s a wet hush in the campsite that, for an hour, gets broken only by sporadic bird calls.

When the hour’s up, though, a noise from the direction of White Lake rips into us like we’re inside Godzilla’s throat in THX.

Naturally, everyone goes apeshit, scrambling into a panicked blur that’s for some reason difficult to look at. Rather than try, I wonder about the timing. Assuming the noise was set off by a human being—foghorn? laptop hooked up to a Marshall stack?—then why set it off now? Why not give us a day or two to poke around White Lake, for verisimilitude? Or else why not just get it over with last night?

I turn to ask Violet her opinion, but she and Frodo are gone. Not just up from the rock: out of my sight, even though it doesn’t feel like enough time has passed for that to have happened. Then again, I’m not sure my brain’s working properly. A man with what looks like a rifle case goes by, and it takes me so long to process his face that he’s gone before I realize it was Fick. Or that he was running.

Then the entire concept of time starts to seem fucked up. Why are memories so low-quality that remembering Violet sitting next to me is worthless compared to experiencing it at the time? I mean, granted, meat is not the ideal recording medium. But meat seems to do all right patching the sensation through in the first place.

Violet, though. I miss that woman. In fact I’m having the strangest feeling about her. Like we’ve just spent five thousand years as statues on either side of the same ancient Egyptian doorway, wishing we could go inside the pyramid and screw.

Someone yells “Guys, stop!” It’s Reggie—surprisingly, I can identify voices right away. Teng and his guys go by, but without quite seeming three-dimensional. More like they’re animated Colorforms stuck onto different layers of glass, the trees behind them like slow-motion fountains. Which I suppose is what they are.

All right, I think. Enough of this.

From my jacket pocket I take out a disposable syringe and one of the two vials of Anduril—four doses total—that I stole from Dr. McQuillen’s medicine cabinet.

Anduril’s an antipsychotic from the sixties. Said to hit like a hammer but to work, and with fewer metabolic side effects than the shit they give crazy people now. Also said to cold-stop LSD.

It can lock your muscles up, though, which is why you have to take it with an anti-parkinsonian agent. Which I also stole two vials of.

I should have premixed the syringes. Making one up now is taking a seriously long time. I’m not sure why I didn’t. Or why I didn’t steal all the Anduril McQuillen had. I really need to learn to trust my instincts.

Finally I get a syringe together. Since, at this moment, coordinating an injection into my shoulder seems harder than working in an office for fifty years, I jab the short needle into the top of my thigh through my jeans.

Depressing the plunger causes the needle to spring back up into the syringe. That’s why I couldn’t premix it—self-retracting needle! Amazingly fucking brilliant, modern syringe design is. Like the Unabomber used to say: technology will eventually kill us, but each small instance of it will be charming.^[66]

“Reggie!” I shout as I load up another syringe. “What the fuck have you done?”

No one answers.

No one’s around.

I can hear voices from White Lake, though.

I lumber around the trees to the spit. Three of the canoes are out on the water, abreast, headed away from me into the fog. The guides rowing hard, everyone else standing up. Without luggage, three boats are enough for the whole party.

And their guns.

Reggie’s shouting “Put down the goddamn firearms!”

I run down the beach until I’m ahead of the canoes. Glare at Reggie as I pass him.

From the front the situation’s even worse. Just the variety of guns is astonishing. Fick, Mrs. Fick, and Teng have variations on straight-up deer-hunting rifles, although Teng’s is stainless steel. Teng’s bodyguards have TEC-9s. I didn’t think they still made TEC-9s. Tyson Grody’s bodyguards have various handguns—two each—though Grody is trying to jump and pull their gun arms down. Palin’s guards have vicious-looking Skorpion submachine pistols.

Palin herself has a sword.

Reggie Trager’s following the armada along the beach, coming toward me as he jumps up and down waving, yelling “Stop!”

I don’t see Violet anywhere. Or Frodo. I’ve chosen them and Wayne Teng’s brother to receive the other three doses of antipsychotic, Violet because she’s Violet, Frodo because she’s young, and Teng’s brother because he’s been through enough shit already. Right now the brother’s kneeling in one of the boats, staring ahead with his face slack.

Then one of Teng’s bodyguards points and shouts something that has to mean “Look! There it is!”

Because look: there it is. Even with the LSD starting to abate.

William the White Lake Monster.

Or, as it resembles from my angle and through the fog, three humps of ribbed black plastic vent hose, twenty inches or so wide, waving cheaply and being made to move across the lake by means you can’t see but can guess from the bubbles coming up through the water.

“WAIT,” Reggie says. “DON’T—”

“No!” Tyson Grody screams.

Everyone who can opens fire. It’s louder than the foghorn, or whatever that was.

The two rear humps go flying off, split open and flailing. Two gloved hands dart up from the water in a surrender motion, then jerk back under when a finger gets shot off.

The tourists and their various paid protectors keep shooting—even the ones in back, who don’t have a clear line of fire through the people ahead of them. Grody’s yelling and waving his hands in front of the people in his canoe, which is brave as fuck, but he’s got enough sense to stay too low to actually stop anyone.

People keep shooting even after a rowboat comes around the bend with Miguel and a couple of other guys standing in it like George Washington, pointing guns back at the tourists. At one point Palin hurls the sword, end over end. Not a bad arm on that woman.

“GOD DAMN IT, MIGUEL,” Reggie yells right next to me, just before Miguel and Co. release a single fusillade of bullets. Which, depending on whom you later believe, is aimed either at or above the heads of the people shooting at whoever was working the fake monster.

A silence comes down. Except for the sound of a dog barking: sure enough, Bark is swimming out toward Miguel’s boat. Intermittently visible through the fog, she looks a lot more like a lake monster than the tubing did. I don’t know why the people in the canoes hold fire.

For a moment, everyone but Grody, who’s crouched down weeping, remains standing. Then Wayne Teng bends abruptly at the waist and goes headfirst into the lake, and the counter-roll topples everyone else in his canoe off the other side.

I dive into the water. The cold makes me saner immediately, though at surface level I can barely see through the fog. When I reach Teng, his bodyguards are struggling to keep his face above the water. I consider trying to get him up into one of the canoes, but that would be close to impossible—we’d just capsize another boat. I jerk my thumb toward shore and start to pull Teng with me.

“Call for a MedEvac! Don’t let anybody drown!” I yell, like there’s someone who’s going to listen to this and act on it.

I try to find where Teng’s been shot. It isn’t difficult: blood’s pumping out of his lower left pelvis like a Jacuzzi nozzle, hard enough to break the surface of the lake. If it’s coming from the iliac artery, which it probably is, he’s got almost no chance. The artery’s elastic, and the severed ends you’d have to pull back together are probably retracted into his chest and calf by now.

I push into the wound with one fist, using my other hand to support his weight. As I kick us toward the shore, I try to ignore the fact that when water sluices into Teng’s mouth, he doesn’t choke or blink his eyes.

Then, when we’re about twenty feet from the beach, the real White Lake Monster rips into Teng from behind me, and tears him out of my arms.