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“Great, now what?” Armo said.
“Now,” Dekka said, looking at Simone. “We figure out how to take down the bug man. Without killing him. And I make a phone call to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Because somehow that’s my life now.”
From the Purple Moleskine
SOME DAY IN the future, if there is a future, I am going to need a long period of serious therapy. We have all of us become almost casual about things and events that could destroy our minds if we stopped long enough to think about them. Dekka talked about it a little, the lasting effects, the trauma, and Dekka knows about it in ways I’m just coming to understand.
And it’s not just the violence and the fear; the sheer weirdness makes you doubt everything. Malik and Francis pop into and back out of some impossible-to-imagine extra dimension. There’s a supervillain made out of insects that carry hyped-up, accelerated versions of every disease on this planet. I saw Williams. Dekka and Francis saw the poor men at the Pine Barrens. Speaking of which, the US government is now deliberately murdering people. And Twitter says Tom Peaks blew his own brains out in a sporting-goods store. And some old man with Alzheimer’s tore up a drugstore after turning into a massive beast. And, and, and, and, and, and each new “and” is like a nail being hammered into my brain, and I’m thinking, huh, I don’t feel it yet. But I know that you cannot keep doing this to yourself, living this way, and not pay a terrible price for it.
How many FAYZ survivors ended up drug-addicted, drunk, or ended their pain through suicide? A lot. I’m not arrogant enough to think I’ll be spared.
There’s no point mourning all we’ve lost. Our families. Friends. Familiar places that were ours. A world we mostly sort of understood. If I think about all that’s gone now I’ll just start crying. Even the simple belief that we are real, that we are the creations of a loving God or the results of billions of years of evolution, is lost. We’re someone’s game. Someone’s entertainment. We’ve lost everything. Everything except each other.
We all signed that Brownstone Declaration. My prose was not as elegant as Mr. Jefferson’s; sorry, I didn’t have a lot of time. The names on that sheet of paper, those people, are all I have now.
It’s beginning to dawn on regular people, too, that we are never, ever going to be able to find our way back to where we were. That world is gone. I don’t think I ever spent five minutes thinking about the concept of civilization before; it was just a word in a textbook. But that’s what is falling apart around us now: civilization. The whole network of systems that defined our world is coming down as we lurch uncontrollably toward some future dystopia.
There’s an old song I stumbled across on YouTube. I’m probably misquoting the lyrics, but it was something about how you don’t know what you have till it’s gone.
Civilization? I’m sorry I never paid attention to you. If I had, I’d probably have had a bunch of things to criticize. But now I’ve caught a glimpse of the future and it’s not good, Civilization. It’s not as good as what we had with you. Sorry it took your death for me to see that.
CHAPTER 21
The Desk Clerk
LATER HE WOULD learn just how it had happened. He would learn that Dekka had placed a call to the general in command of the deadliest military force in the world, reminding him that he had pledged his full support.
The general had then called the general in charge of US Southern Command in Mayport, Florida, who in turn called the US embassy in Tegucigalpa. Half an hour later a helicopter was en route from Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, to the country’s third-largest city, La Ceiba, a lovely resort town.
But he would learn all of that later. The eighteen-year-old had a pleasant brown face and neatly trimmed black hair, and dark eyes that seemed so much older than the rest of his face. He was the first to see three Honduran National Police vehicles, extended-cab Toyota pickups painted white and blue, skidding to a dramatic stop in the parking lot of the Quinta Real Hotel and Convention Center.
But this was not necessarily alarming. The National Police loved drama, and twice in the young man’s time working as a front desk clerk at the Quinta Real, police had come swooping in to make an arrest. So the desk clerk put on his pleasant talking-to-customers expression as five heavily armed men came stomping up to the front desk.
“Can I help you?”
They asked him to show his ID, so he did, frowning in puzzlement and beginning to worry.
“You are to come with us.”
“What? Why? Am I under arrest?”
“The Americans want you.”
He was not allowed to pack, just make a quick phone call to his mother to let her know that he would be out of town for a while. Then a helicopter landed right on the beach and took him on the hour-long flight to the airport, where he was hustled aboard a US Department of Defense Gulfstream C-37A.
Just under nine hours after he’d seen the first National Police vehicle, a confused, worried, bleary ex–desk clerk climbed down the airplane stairs at Teterboro and was hustled by two New Jersey state troopers to a waiting SUV.
An airman opened the door of the SUV and he climbed in.
“Well, hello there, Edilio.”
A slow smile spread across Edilio’s face. “Dekka,” he said. “I thought it might be you behind
this.”
They hugged awkwardly but with deep affection.
“I’m sorry to do this to you, Edilio,” Dekka said as the SUV sped back toward Manhattan. “But I—we—needed someone we could trust.”
