I.
A story on the internet had the governor of Texas strangling a woman in her Honda Civic in the middle of the night.
The woman, Tamara Klein, really was dead. A police officer shined his flashlight into her car thinking she was another kid who’d passed out on her way home from the bars. Some nights, both sides of entire blocks of downtown Austin were lined with cars with fashionably dressed young adults with political science or computer engineering degrees unconscious behind the wheel. It was just after 4 a.m. on a Thursday. Tamara was slumped over, her head pressed against the driver’s side window. Her tangled brown hair was bunched against the glass. The officer didn’t see the lurid violet marks on her neck until he leaned over and shined his light through the front windshield.
That was the story’s grain of truth. It was documented in the officer’s report. But the lavender tie with little Alamos all over it in the back seat was the detail that propelled the story. It wasn’t in the report. The governor wore such a tie throughout his campaigns and at bill signings, meetings with legislators, Rotary Club luncheons, and fundraisers.
The post said Austin homicide investigators found some skin flakes on the tie that weren’t Tamara’s and ran a DNA test, which identified the governor. They panicked. They made the flakes and the test results disappear, and the police chief delivered the tie in a pastel blue box to the governor’s office with a note that said, “With love and respect, Austin PD.”
Readers from Texas saw the tie taut between the governor’s fists as he grunted, cussed, and killed Tamara Klein. They saw the governor’s tan, sweaty face grinning over her head rest, his silver hair matted to his forehead. As the story spread from one website to the next, another detail was added: after Tamara got in her car, he sprang up from his crouch in the back seat, called out, “Hi! I’m your governor!” and pounced on her.
Jane Quelesq, a crisis communications consultant, had written the original post as she stood in a line of customers that connected one Starbucks to all the other Starbucks in Austin’s downtown like dendrites. She couldn’t say why she was doing it. She just felt compelled to write it. She assumed it was another of the mysteries of grief.
Jane had read and watched what little news coverage there’d been about Tamara’s murder and had gotten a copy of the incident report from the Austin Police Department because she’d felt close to Tamara. She’d met her at a party in a condo on the top floor of a new skyscraper. The light was blue, and people stood around in groups of three or four, including in the bathrooms. Every room had a small white cube speaker on a white barstool in a corner, each one playing a different Hank Williams song at high volume. Cocaine dusted the floors like a light snow. Jane was following the tracks of a woman with small feet and kitten heels when she crashed into Tamara. Her frizzy hair was like a small dark cloud enveloping her head and her eyes like large circles colored in black. Jane gasped. Tamara took her hands, leaned in close to her face, and said, nodding toward the bathroom she’d just come out of, “Don’t go in there,” and shuddered in a theatrical way and smiled. Jane noticed a small smear of something dark on Tamara’s forearm, which Jane assumed was blood.
These parties, in the high palaces of tech CEOs and populated with the best of software engineers, lawyers, artists, venture capitalists, and the governor’s acolytes, were shot through with menace. Jane had moved to Austin only a year ago and had already witnessed three stabbings at these parties, one of them fatal. The police were never called, and the hosts didn’t bother to have the blood mopped up. After a while, people tracked it throughout the condo and by the end of the night a pink paste of blood and cocaine was caked on the soles of their shoes.
The governor showed up at the one of the parties Jane attended. He wore a floor-length cloak of ratty, dusty fur. He whispered in corners with his acolytes and app makers. Then he walked around the condo inspecting each room, smiling approvingly. The crowd buzzing around him grew from room to room until everyone at the party was following him. He finally stopped in front of the master bedroom, summoned the condo’s owners, the CEO and his wife, and took them inside where, as Jane later heard through the grapevine, he impregnated them both.
II.
At the time of Tamara Klein’s murder, the governor was sitting with his pollster at a small table in the smallest room, barely bigger than a utility closet, in the maze of rooms that was the interior of Club Shivers. The hallways reeked of panic sweat. They drank whiskey and gossiped about the sex lives of lawmakers. After a while, they turned to the new poll results. David slowly opened his navy-blue binder, went over the top-line numbers, and then delved into the territory, which he imagined as a broad, flat plain at dusk, where the governor’s desires to gain more power and to make Texas a harder, cleaner state mixed with his supporters’ dirtiest dreams and bloodiest fantasies. It was the soft, unstable ground where the governor’s people told him where he must lead them, and where he came to understand how far he could nudge them where he wanted them to go, which was never far.
“They love the prisoner leasing program, really love it – 72 percent approval,” David said. “So let’s expand it.”
The governor’s eyes were closed, and he nodded. It went on like that for a few minutes until he cut David off.
“I think it’s time we hit the road,” the governor said. “Let’s get out of town for a week or so and raise some money.”
He didn’t need the money. His campaign accounts were so flush he’d stopped paying attention years ago to how much they held, not long after he’d told a wildcatter during his first term, “Just me getting out of bed in the morning is worth $20,000 to you.” He didn’t talk like that anymore, and he never asked for money. And his donors never talked about giving it. His fundraisers were now about tribute, the price that must be paid to keep the system expanding into the future. Nobody needed to discuss that necessity.
Besides, the governor wanted to get out for a while because Austin was feeling a little tight on him.
“Let’s start in Corpus,” he said and then reeled off a few more small cities and towns that other state politicians never bothered with.
David wrote it all down in his pocket notebook. He had long ago stopped worrying about the absence of big cities on the governor’s itineraries. The locations didn’t matter for raising money. The artificial intelligence and internet barons, oilmen, automakers, windmill builders, and luxury hotel owners would come to him. They’d fly in to whatever one-runway municipal airport they had to and maybe stay over in a seedy hotel with stained carpets, surrounded by roughnecks and Texas National Guardsmen, so they could shake the governor’s hand and give him checks. He insisted on checks – no electronic transfers, no giving through some internet portal, and no cash. Whenever donors pressed bills into his palm, he stared at it like it was a smear of mud, so they stopped.
They used to ask for favors in those situations. Now it never occurred to them to do so.
The meeting was over. David put away his binder and notebook and walked with the governor out of the labyrinth to the black Escalade waiting at the curb. The driver was a Texas Ranger who, apart from being excellent behind the wheel, was famous in law enforcement circles for his ability to identify people whose hearts were set against the governor. As Maxwell told it, they looked to him like they were a little blurry, as if they were underwater. He drove the governor past the silver Honda with Tamara’s body slumped against the door. A few blocks further north, they passed her murderer.
By the time the governor was checked into a hotel in downtown Corpus Christi three weeks later, a few hundred of his supporters were lovingly calling him “Lady Killer.”
III.
The governor was staying at the Omni in downtown Corpus Christi. He was meeting early the next morning with a small group of oil refining executives at the port authority. Dozens of babies from homes within a couple of miles of Refinery Row, a riot of hot metal, gas flares, and smoke that stretched for miles on U.S. 37 heading into Corpus, had been born with scaly webbed feet. The families and outside environmental activists were protesting and getting some sympathetic media attention, even though the kids were growing up to be world-class swimmers. The plan the executives would pitch to the governor was for Texas Rangers to beat protesters and petition signers with clubs until they stopped moving and to shoot a few key organizers in the back of their heads in a ravine out in the country. They’d already found the perfect spot – out of the way, but not so deep in the brush that it would take other troublemakers years to get the message.
The governor couldn’t sleep. He rarely slept for more than a few hours at a time anyway. So at 2 a.m. he got the keys to the Escalade from Maxwell and left. The night desk clerk, a woman in her fifties with an eye patch, followed his unhurried stride through the lobby and snuck a picture of him on her phone. She’d heard the story about the governor and the girl from her son, and if another one wound up dead that night, she’d sell her photo to CNN.
He rolled down the Escalade’s windows because the wind was up and he liked the smell of the Gulf at night. The tang that the water exhaled was sharper then. He also liked being on the edge of his state at night, with the Gulf of Mexico behind him reflecting the moonlight and the darkness of Texas ahead of him. Satellite photos of Texas at night showed five swarms of yellow dots. What the governor saw was the unmappable darkness around them.
He drove west, past the many rows of slow-turning turbines planted outside of Corpus Christi to catch the winds on the coastal plain, like white giants swinging their arms in a strange appeal to the stars. Gas flares raged miles from the highway, like small tears in the thick black fabric that covered the landscape, revealing the inferno underneath.
The governor drove for an hour, making it about halfway to San Antonio before he pulled in to at a dimly lit rest area. He sat at one of the sticky picnic tables, his back to the highway.
A stunted live oak near the cinderblock restrooms shuddered violently and then shivered in the breeze and said in a deep, gurgling voice, “Where are you?”
“Here I am!”
“‘Lady Killer’ is a winning name. Accept it.”
“I will.”
“You’ve got a couple dissidents on the executive committee trying to get something going against you: Leichman and Johnston. Make an example of them. And hire Karsten for the next campaign.”
“I will.”
The live oak stopped shivering and sagged a little.
Twenty miles outside of Corpus, one of the department of transportation’s digital message boards flashed the message, “Texas was waiting for you, governor.”
IV.
Jane had taken Tamara to her apartment after the party. In the morning, they exchanged numbers and talked over cups of bitter coffee at the table in the corner of Jane’s tiny kitchen.
Tamara said she’d moved to Texas from California a few years ago as part of the great witch migration. She grew up in Texas — in Alamo Heights, an island of wealth surrounded by the poor city of San Antonio — but had driven in 2014 to San Francisco to join a coven of more than 600 witches after graduating from Rice with a political science degree.
In 1983, California decided to atone for its past marginalization of witches by subsidizing their housing. (Truth be told, it had never been all that bad for witches in California — some verbal abuse from cops who within a few days of the incidents could no longer maintain erections and found that nothing helped.) But the rental assistance got to be less and less as the witches blended in, until they didn’t get a cent from the state. The cost of living became unbearable. Worse, the witches had grown tired of themselves. As they flocked to the Bay Area, they mocked the bitter old queens who clogged the bars and convenience store aisles whining about how boring and expensive the city had become. Now they were bitter old witches saying roughly the same thing in the same way. And there was this shameful fact, which Tamara told Jane that morning: surrounded by so many witches, it was hard to feel special. So the coven started breaking up. Witches began moving to Austin — at first in ones and twos, and then in caravans. The first migrants sent word back that Texas was cheap and came on like an inexplicable kind of lust, one that endured.
Jane saw Tamara again just a few times. She didn’t want to learn too much about her. Knowing any more than the contours of Tamara’s life would spoil it for Jane. So she decided to be the small, cold moon in the orbit around her lover.
Two weeks after their first night together, Jane found a small package on the roof of her car, directly over the driver’s seat: a taco wrapper tied at both ends with twine. She undid the knots and opened the greasy wrapper. Inside was a fat slice of raw liver and a few dozen dark blue beads.
Jane received a new offering every two or three weeks until Tamara’s murder. She never asked Tamara about them, and saved them all in her refrigerator.
V.
The governor called the dean of the University of Texas school of medicine and directed the ancient thoracic surgeon to send over his best epidemiologist. Dr. Felix Salinas’s job for the next several months would be to find out what percentage of Texas’s population the governor had sired. The governor also wanted a breakdown of his progeny by sex. Felix was given two supercomputers, a staff of 15, an unlimited budget, and a suite of offices in a building with no signage a block from the governor’s mansion.
In his first meeting with Felix, the governor told him about a fundraiser a few years ago where the hostess, a thirty-something insurance executive, took him to an upstairs bathroom that was painted the palest shade of pink he’d ever seen and fucked him greedily. The governor prefaced the next part of the story by acknowledging it was an educated guess – but he also said he knew the character of his seed pretty well. After they decoupled, a few drops of semen spilled onto the ceramic tile floor. Neither of them noticed and went back downstairs. The insurance executive’s sister was visiting from out of town and staying in the guest room next to the bathroom. His sperm started a march that must have taken days. Two months later, the executive’s sister called her bawling, saying it was impossible, just impossible, there had been no one.
That was the governor’s way of imparting how complex Felix’s task would be.
In fact, the data was a swirling mess that Felix couldn’t make any sense of, though he worked at it incessantly. He pushed himself beyond exhaustion and became suicidally depressed. He wanted to die by carbon monoxide poisoning — not by any other method. His small townhouse had a car port, not a garage, so he tried several times to rent a storage unit big enough to park his old Saab in. But the smell of desolation he emitted was unmistakable, and no manager would rent to him.
He finally just made up the numbers and presented them to the governor during a Sunday afternoon walk around the Capitol grounds as the two of them boiled in the April heat. He said 8.7 percent of the state’s population was the product of the governor’s loins. In another 10 years, his projection put it at 18.7 percent. In 20 years, it would be just above 30 percent.
Felix was surprised to see sadness in the governor’s eyes. He thought he would be proud to rack up such numbers.
But Felix’s results confirmed what the governor had suspected – that the program of human sacrifice he was planning wouldn’t spare his daughters. He would inevitably strangle girls of his own blood.
He understood of course that it had to be that way.
VI.
The governor grew up on a ranch outside Cotulla and ran for mayor of the town when he was 21 and starting law school in San Antonio. He campaigned on one thing: the eradication of Bigfoots. They were nine-feet tall, fanged and covered in black, matted hair. Their few patches of leathery skin that showed were crowded with prison tattoos. They prowled around the edges of man camps in South Texas, waiting for drunk roughnecks to stumble into the scrub to piss. Then they’d break their necks, eat them and take their jobs, their trucks, their wives or girlfriends, and their kids. Sometimes one or two Bigfoots would come into Cotulla at night and hide behind restaurants’ dumpsters, waiting for cooks lugging grease traps. He offered voters $500 for each carcass and promised that a portion of the city budget would be devoted to the same purpose. The incumbent, Mayor Ed Schmeckel, stole his platform, offering $600 per carcass to be paid for out of a state grant with poorly defined rules for its use. But it was too late. His challenger won in a landslide. The mayor-elect showed up late at his election night party wearing new Wranglers, a Western shirt, scuffed-up work boots and a cape covered in scraggy dark hair that fanned across the floor as he strode into Mabel’s Diner. “I bagged this one myself!” His supporters’ roar reached Crystal City 40 miles away.
His people were almost as excited when, as majority leader in Texas House of Representatives, he forced through changes in the way the body chose its speaker. His way of doing it had lawmakers forming lines on opposite sides of the House chamber’s center aisle on the first day of each biennial session. Anyone who wanted to be speaker and was a member of the majority party would walk down the aisle from the back of the room to the rostrum in front. The representatives along the way would pound him with briefcases, purses, backpacks, hardback copies of Robert’s Rules of Order. The objects had to be ones the lawmakers normally would bring to the chamber. No bats or clubs. Whoever made it to the front would move on to the next round. The beatings became more severe as the candidates advanced. The one man who made it to the rostrum after all the others had collapsed became speaker, and he alone held power. The committees he appointed were extensions of his will. Nothing happened in the Legislature for the first month or so because it would usually take that long for the speaker to heal.
His supporters wanted him to be a dirty bomb spewing radiation across Texas, and he was. But the murder of Tamara Klein unsettled them.
As the story took root, his supporters scoured her social media and found enough of her smart liberal girl posts and pictures of her in midriffs and dresses with plunging necklines to cheer what he had done and not feel weird about it. But they wondered in subreddits and Signal chats what they’d missed in the governor’s character. It hadn’t occurred to them that he was capable of something like this. This turn of his took them by surprise — they hadn’t asked for it. They turned the known facts of his life over and over fruitlessly looking for clues. And then one of them had an insight: it was a gift, the governor’s gift to them. It wasn’t psychopathy, it was love and generosity. It was the governor’s sacrifice to them.
That idea raced through the governor’s base and lit it up.
David followed its progress, took notes, and thought about it for hours in the quiet of his office down the hall from the governor. Finally he picked up a sheet of stationary and scribbled a rough profile of the right kind of girl.
VII.
Allen: “Really?”
David: “Really. The governor was very clear about that: he’ll do it. No hired hands. He said he has to be the one, that God has taken an interest.”
Allen: “OK, then is the idea to livestream it? I mean, is the point of him doing it himself to be seen doing it? Because if so, that would be very problematic from a legal standpoint.”
David: “I don’t think he’s worried about that. God told him to hire us, so I think the route it’s taking in the governor’s mind is that we’ll work out the details.”
Allen: “God told him to hire us a long time ago. Has He checked up on how we’re doing? Maybe He’d think it was time to shake things up, try a new approach.”
David: “Funny.”
Allen: “Look, I understand the governor is looking at the big picture. The bond between the base and the governor consecrated in blood — I mean, brilliant. But I’ve done a lot of reading and talked to a couple experts. Each step in human sacrifice is complicated and requires hours and hours of planning and many, many people to execute. Yes, we can get the money from our donors, but where do we hide an operation that size?
And then just think about how this program might develop over time. Think about the Aztecs. An entire system of government set up to keep the sacrificial blood flowing, instead of the other way around. War-making for no other purpose than to procure sacrifices. A whole priesthood whose priests held a dangerous amount of power because of human sacrifice.”
David: “This isn’t Mexico in the early Sixteenth Century. You’re ignoring technology we can leverage to keep the scale of the operation manageable. We don’t have to approach this like Moctezuma. Tech can help us identify candidates, learn their habits and where they go, and surveil them without layers of staff.”
Allen: “Well then, why can’t we use AI to produce exactly the sacrifice we want without all the complications?”
David: “Because this is about authenticity. It is in fact the ultimate demonstration of authenticity. And the governor won’t accept anything that falls a millimeter short of that.”
Allen: “But this is all based on a fallacy. The governor didn’t strangle that girl.”
David: “The governor’s supporters believe with all their hearts that he sacrificed that girl for them. And so he did, in reality. The governor has already initiated the program.”
Allen: “Got it.”
David: “Good.”
Allen: “The girls — do you find it a little awkward that the first sacrifice was white?”
David: “Tamara Klein was a liberal — don’t forget that. But yes, of course. But that’s my own opinion –“
Allen: “So how about a Black girl next and then a Brown girl? The trick is they can’t be working poor or lower middle class. Hits too close to home –“
David: “Hold on. The governor has very clearly defined ideas of who the sacrifices should be. Yes, the next few should be candidates of color. But after that, they have to be daughters of the base. He said it has to be that way.”
VIII.
Jane was horrified by the market she’d tapped.
She’d made up the story about the governor killing Tamara Klein in a haze of mourning. Why? To hold him responsible for her lover’s murder? That didn’t make sense. Or maybe it did. Jane couldn’t say. The roots of why she’d done it were invisible to her.
She imagined the people who’d twisted her story — into a sacrifice the governor made to the glory of his supporters — as coming together to form a naked man who was as tall as an office building. You could tell the giant was made up of individuals, who were connected by their genitals in every imaginable position, only if you got dangerously close to him.
The governor strangled a young woman in her car on a side street in downtown San Antonio, six blocks from the Alamo. It was 1:30 a.m. and Lydia Gutierrez was going home from a bar where she’d been drinking with co-workers. She was his first victim. It was fives months after the murder of Tamara. God placed a “Re-elect the Governor” bumpersticker on the rear fender of Lydia’s old Mazda because He wanted to be helpful.
The governor’s base knew about it within hours thanks to a photo of the bumpersticker helpfully attached in a Signal chatroom to a link to a short news story on Lydia’s murder. Her mother later told reporters that Lydia wasn’t very political but that she was a Democrat.
That morning Jane was pacing around her office thinking about how to reposition the duck-feet children of Corpus Christi. She was working for several environmental justice groups that were targeting the oil refiners who were responsible for the kids’ deformities. The problem for the enviros was that the children kept breaking state and national swimming records and winning acclaim. They’d had a group appearance on “Good Morning America” during which George Stephanopoulos beamed as though they were his own children. The refinery owners pressed their advantage by calling them “water babies,” which stuck. How to recast the children as the victims of appalling industrial pollution without taking away from their accomplishments and coming off as maudlin? Jane was starting to get a headache, so she sat at her desk and, without really thinking about it, checked in on the Signal chatrooms she’d been compulsively monitoring since her story took off. She found the photo and the news story.
She shook violently and vomited coffee and the remnants of two doughnuts into her waste basket. Then she drove around Austin for a couple of hours trying to figure what to do. She didn’t come up with a plan, but she did buy a handgun — a petite, silvery Beretta that set her back nearly $800.
IX.
The governor’s driver picked him up around the corner from Lydia Gutierrez’s car. As the governor climbed into the backseat of the rented sedan, Maxwell saw in the dome light that she had dug deep, meaty furrows into his forearms. He thought about blood smeared on the head rest, drops of it on the floor mat in the back, and the skin under her fingernails. The clean-up crew was going to have a stressful four minutes.
Maxwell normally would have started chattering at this point because of how upsetting a man’s first murder can be. It was usually best not to let him brood on it in silence. But the governor of course was different. He was a holy man, somewhere between Jesus and the rest of us, guided by different lights. Maxwell decided to stay quiet until the governor wanted to talk.
Just outside San Antonio, he was staring at a concrete plant a half-mile or so off Interstate 10, lit up by floodlights like a newly discovered shipwreck on the ocean floor. He asked Maxwell what he prayed to God about.
“That He’ll protect me, my family, friends, and you from harm. My prayers are pretty basic.”
“That’s a harder prayer than it sounds. It means staying on the lookout for cancer cells, which are surprisingly hard to tell from other cells, and watching what’s in the hearts and minds of everyone on the road around each and every person you prayed for. But if you’re good, God will do it for you. In fact, He’d do a lot more if you asked him to. Take the earthquake in Laredo last year. Most of the people who died didn’t have enough faith or they misunderstood God and what He was willing to do for them. He was their servant in the truest sense. If they’d prayed for His protection when it started to shake, He would have suspended them in the air when they started to fall through the cracks that opened up in the streets and sidewalks. Or he would have held up a building long enough for them to get out of it. But they didn’t know their own power. They wobbled and they died because of it.”
No one else was on the highway, not even truckers, and the wind started picking up and got stronger and stronger until it felt like the sedan wasn’t subject to gravity and friction but was shooting through space. The governor and Maxwell were laughing crazily. Each digital highway sign they passed under said, “We love our governor. He does what he has to do, always.”
Maxwell dropped him off at the mansion a little after 4 a.m.
He woke up with sore shoulder and neck muscles, his forearms covered in dried blood and scabs, and three texts from God on his Apple Watch, each with the same message: “Go to your balcony. I’m the closest oak tree.”
X.
In his first term, the governor waged a guerrilla war against Texas’ big cities. His people slipped thousands of amendments into thousands of bills, all with the objective of pushing up the cities’ costs and slashing their revenue. San Antonio was the first to buckle. One of its bigger problems was that it could no longer afford to keep all of its streetlights on.
The city manager determined that if he shut off 8,000 streetlights, he could afford the electric bill. He convened a commission of neighborhood leaders, church fathers and mothers, academics, and business and nonprofit executives to decide which parts of the city to darken. It took them 45 minutes to decide to start turning off the lights on the outskirts of the city – to the south, east, and west. That’s where San Antonio’s population thinned out and where some of the poorest of the poor lived next to the bitter, ragged families whose ranches had been stolen generations ago by speculators and chewed up by the city.
When the streetlights were cut off, the dog- and cock-fighting rings that had always operated there got to be so big that some Saturday nights the fights broke their boundaries and overlapped, always to the detriment of the roosters. And the owners of the pit bull-breeding operations also cut loose. Their puppy mills got to be so prolific that the fringes reeked of sour dog breath and the background noise was a low growl.
The bonfires of mattresses, sometimes with people still on them, started up the second night without streetlights. And a new sport was born – driving a burning car into somebody’s house to see if you could escape unhurt.
The police stayed away. Their reasoning was sociological and sound. If a community had no streetlights, it would quickly collapse into lawlessness, and those who could provide light and protection at night would have all the power. And they’d soon have their own legal code and enforcement mechanisms. A few dozen patrol cars wouldn’t stop that process. Nor should they.
But the city manager, mayor, and city council were aghast. They decided to keep the lights off on the fringes because the savings were pretty good, but they’d try to make up the rest of the money somewhere else in the budget. The streetlights would stay on in the rest of the city.
The governor kept a close watch on the fringes. Sometimes he’d ask Maxwell to get his ancient F-150, the one he drove around Cotulla when he was its mayor, out of the garage and drive him to San Antonio. They’d spend a Saturday night drinking Dos Equis in the truck cab on a narrow street close to the action. They’d gossip, tell stories and watch people come and go, flowing around the truck, and the carcasses of dogs and roosters pile up on the roadside, which was lighted with fire barrels. Late at night, the governor would take Maxwell to one of the cock fights. He loved it, and Maxwell was always struck by how he loved it – watching without moving, not even seeming to breathe, electrified.
Since nobody expected to see the governor at a cock fight, the men, women, and children at the ones he attended didn’t see him.
One night, as the governor was walking with Maxwell back to the truck, still in his revery, he bumped hard into a skeletal man in a blue-plaid western shirt. He caught the man by the shoulder as he stumbled backward. The man thanked him for keeping him upright and said something about how hard it was to see with nothing but firelight, especially after a pint of whiskey.
The governor struck up a conversation about the fight they’d just watched. The man, who introduced himself as Paul, said he knew the guy who’d made the silver spurs for the winning rooster, a silversmith who lived in Atascosa County.
“In a mansion,” Paul said. “He got rich when a couple men from the Space Company showed up at his house one night and asked to see the different kinds of spurs he made. So he laid them all out on his dining room table. One of the men picked up the one with a single big, gut-tearing barb. He was seriously admiring the craftsmanship. Then he made eye contact with his partner, and they both nodded. The other guy handed him a piece of paper with a drawing and specifications of something that looked kind of like a spur. They gave the guy a tryout, and now he makes all the small silver pieces they need for their rockets.”
The governor and Paul kept talking. He learned that Paul was a tourist barge pilot on the San Antonio River. His job was to tell the history of the River Walk and the city, and by extension the state of Texas.
“I have a lot I want to talk to you about, but it’s getting late and Max and I have to get back to Austin. Write down your number here.”
Paul knew who the governor was, and the governor knew that Paul was a man of consequence.
Years later, the governor’s body would be found in the scorched shell of his F-150 a few yards from where he had his first conversation with Paul.
XI.
Weeks after Jane threw out the offerings Tamara had left on top of her car, she began questioning — was Tamara a metaphorical witch or a real one? Jane had believed Tamara entirely when she said over coffee their first morning together that she was a witch with a coven. It explained the shock wave that hit her when Tamara emerged from the bathroom at the CEO’s party and met her eye. But now she didn’t know.
Jane was haunted by the face of the governor, relaxed and smiling, hovering over the headrest in Tamara’s car, his chin obscured by the halo of her lover’s frizzy auburn hair.
Wasn’t clairvoyance one of a witch’s gifts? No, probably not, Jane acknowledged, but still, shouldn’t she at least have been able to stop him? Shouldn’t a witch have it in her to prevent such a death? And if she was a witch, what good was having supernatural power if you could still be murdered like any other woman?
And why didn’t Tamara check the backseat before she got in the car?
Jane most often struggled with these questions as she drove to and from the shooting range outside of Austin where she rehearsed the assassination of the governor.
She got a gun club membership and went to the range once a week, on Saturday afternoons, because she’d never fired a gun before she bought the Beretta and she had to become a very good shot. She’d have only one moment to kill the governor before she was filled with bullets. (Imagining her death was like watching a TV show. She still had to get used to the idea.)
At the range, as she stared down the barrel at the paper silhouette of a human 20 yards away, she thought only about the governor’s body. She tried to recall everything she knew about it: its height, heft, waist width, the set of its shoulders, its long neck, its slightly oblong head.
The first time Jane hit a target, she squinted at the bullet hole she’d drilled into the silhouette’s left shoulder. Blood began trickling out of the hole. She steadied herself, assumed the proper stance, her feet firmly planted 36 inches apart, wrapped her hands correctly around the grip, and fired again, hitting the heart. Blood erupted from the hole in rhythmic spurts and soaked the bottom half of the target within half a minute. She later shot the forehead. At the end of her hour, as she rolled up the targets to take home and a range attendant power-hosed the blood off the concrete floor, she noticed the edge of the hole in the head was encrusted with gray matter.
She papered the walls of her apartment with her targets. When they completely covered her living room and bedroom, she began studying the governor’s public calendar.
She believed the dried blood and brains were his, but they were somebody else’s.
XII.
Darrel Ridge’s body was found inside his black Mercedes Benz SUV after the firefighters put out the inferno that had gutted it. The brittle, smoking frame, every inch of it exposed by the search lights attached to police cars and fire trucks, was sitting on the shoulder of the I-35 underpass in downtown Austin. Darrell was carbonized, a crude black statue of the writhing man he’d been a half an hour earlier. After scraping at his corpse for a few hours, the medical examiner said he died of natural causes, fire being one of this world’s four basic elements.
Darrel and the governor had grown up together on the ranch outside Cotulla. He was the governor’s first cousin — their mothers were sisters — but the boys looked so much alike that they usually passed for twins. The rumormongers said they had the same father, but that wasn’t true. The two sisters and their sons lived together on the ranch, which belonged to the governor’s father. Both men were away most of the time. Darrel’s father served as the Texas attorney general throughout most of his son’s childhood and lived a drunken bachelor’s life, which he kept crowded with prostitutes, in a condo a few blocks from the capitol building. The governor’s father had gotten bored with ranching and collecting oil and gas leases, and traveled around the state building a real estate empire, the foundation of which was insider tips from God. (God once told him: “Your boy — there’s something about him. He’s going to go places.”) His father lived in a suite on the top floor of the St. Anthony Hotel in San Antonio.
The two boys were constantly together. But no one, including their mothers, ever saw them talk to one another. Their families and ranch hands assumed they communicated by telepathy.
When the sons were 17, they drove the governor’s new F-150 to Austin for Darrel’s annual visit with his father, who’d been elected governor the year before. They were in the rotunda of the Texas Capitol when Gov. Ridge threw himself from the top of the dome and landed on a massive potted plant a dozen yards from the boys. He was naked except for the Lone Star flag he’d tied around his neck and on which he’d written in heavy black marker: “The Senate’s archaic cloture rule made me do this.” The boys were splattered with his blood. After the first shockwave broke, they made eye contact and their expressions went flat. They stripped to their underwear and wiped the blood off their skin with the soiled clothing.
Darrel’s death, which was believed to be connected somehow with the governor’s sacrificial offerings, threw Texas’s elites into a panic that they struggled to hide. They feared the system was turning inward and tearing itself apart. For a while, anything dark and deadly seemed possible.
The governor ordered state flags to fly at half-mast for a year and for Austin to be plunged into total silence for three days.
The fire left a broad scorch mark on the concrete wall of the underpass that looked like a human palm. The heat had cracked the surface of the concrete, opening fine white fissures across the palm. One morning, a fortune teller driving to an appointment in one of the rich suburbs that ring North Austin noticed the palm and pulled onto the shoulder. She walked 50 or so paces back to the palm and planted herself in front of it, bracing her body against the air displaced by cars and trucks hurtling past her at 80 miles an hour. She then read about the hard death of Texas.
XIII.
TO: OI Executive Committee
FROM: Allen Pike, Chairman of the Performance Review Committee
DATE: July 28, 2022
SUBJECT: Initial thoughts on how ceremonies are conducted
As many of you know, our Committee has been tasked with conducting a bottom-to-top review of Operation Iphigenia and making recommendations for improvement. We plan to submit our final report on Sept. 1. But we have some thoughts we’d like to share with you now, before the program shifts to selecteds from the governor’s base of supporters. We understand that could take place in a matter of weeks.
Important to note: what follows are not formal recommendations. Please consider this memo food for thought.
We have concerns about our reliance on strangulation as the act at the center of our ceremonies.
We recognize that our suggestions may be controversial. We suspect that some of you may even view them as heretical. But we say emphatically that our work is motivated by nothing other than the desire to serve and support the governor to the best of our ability. This program’s objective is to even further strengthen the bond between him and the people of the Great State of Texas. We’re offering advice that we sincerely believe will best help us achieve that objective.
We’ve used strangulation in five ceremonies so far, so we’re accustomed to it. We’re comfortable with how it works and how to “tidy up” post-event. But we believe we’re missing an opportunity to connect with the governor’s base at a much deeper level than we currently do.
But first, we want to acknowledge that there are two sound reasons for relying on strangulation. It was at the heart of the first ceremony, and there is a lot to be said for continuity. Also, it leaves considerably less DNA material than most other methods, which is not a small consideration given the extra-legal nature of this program.
But we also believe strangulation has significant downsides, all having to do with how the act is perceived.
A review of the history of human sacrifice shows that our method is an outlier. Indeed, the act of strangulation is much more closely associated with the crime of murder. What comes to mind when you hear the word strangulation? The Boston Strangler and the hit on Carlo Rizzi in The Godfather, when he was murdered by Clemenza in the front seat of a black Cadillac for his role in the killing of Sonny Corleone. It is true that the governor’s most fervent supporters understand the act for what it is: a heartfelt offering to the people of the Great State of Texas, his fealty and devotion to them made flesh. But those Texans who love the governor but are less emotionally invested in his administration may feel that OI has an unsavory, criminal feel to it. That, of course, is only our opinion, but we believe polling would show this to be the case. (We hope to hear from David soon about whether it will possible to put a survey in the field without attracting media attention. If so, we’d appreciate some input when it’s time to formulate the questions.)
SIDE NOTE ON THE “CRIME” FRAME: The following observation relates less to the manner of conducting the ceremonies than to their settings: vehicles parked on otherwise empty streets late at night. These scream “Crime scene!” The yellow police tape encircling the vehicles, broadcast via social media and the news media, of course reinforces that impression. For those who are unfamiliar with OI or are less committed to the governor than the overwhelming majority of Texans, this framing may result in a sense of horror and sympathy for the selected, not love for the governor or gratitude for the offering he’s making. In other words, cars are anything but the sacred spaces in which the most successful sacrifice programs have been conducted. We would suggest moving the ceremonial space to serene and isolated locations in parks, the banks of rivers or creeks, or any space in the nearby built environment that is reminiscent of an altar.
Now here’s the thrust of our argument: we firmly believe that we must replace strangulation with the use of a knife or some other sharp-bladed object.
Blood must be shed in our ceremonies.
At first blush, this may seem to contradict what we’ve said so far about the need to overcome any sense that these ceremonies are criminal acts. We’re shocked at the sight of blood. It means that something extraordinary has happened — an accident or an act of violence. But we need to look past that initial shock and think about the role of sacrificial blood in history — and consider it specifically as food. The example we’re most familiar with is the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ, our ultimate sacrifice, transmuted into bread and wine in the Catholic, Episcopalian, Lutheran, and Methodist faiths. Transubstantiation energizes our spiritual lives. Or think about the Aztecs endlessly processing selecteds to try to sate the voracious hunger of their gods. Blood sacrifice is the act of harvesting energy, or “life force,” and transferring it from one being to another. In the case of Communion, that energy is transferred to Christians. In the case of Aztec sacrifices, it was given to Huitzilopochtli and the lesser gods. And in the case of the governor, it would be his offering to those who summoned him to power and give him strength — and in very little time we believe his base would accept it as nourishment.
We’ll leave it here for now. We ask you to please seriously consider these points. With OI about to move into a dynamic new phase, time is of the essence, so our Committee members have all agreed to make themselves available to meet with the Executive Committee if and whenever you’d like to discuss our suggestions.
Thank you for your time and attention.
XIV.
Darrel met a member of Tamara Klein’s coven at a hotel bar at 10 on a Monday night. The witch, whose name was Sheila Venable, looked around at the other tables. She could barely make out their occupants’ faces because the light was so dim. But each table had a lamp that cast a small circle of light, so Sheila surveyed hands. They were fidgeting with rings, cradling phones, holding other hands. A couple were pressed flat against the table. One was darting across the polished wood tabletop like a scorpion. Puppets, she thought.
“Are you worried about being seen here with me?” Darrel asked. “Because there are so many possible reasons for two people to be here at this time, four blocks from the Capitol Building in the stickiest part of the legislative session – so many reasons that people leave it be.”
Sheila smiled and said, “Is there a reason I shouldn’t be seen with you?”
Darrel had approached her at a party the previous Friday, in a guest bedroom of a clean-energy baron’s penthouse. She’d gone into the room to make a phone call and he’d followed her in.
He introduced himself as Darrel Ridge and said nothing else about himself though they were meeting for the first time. He seemed unwilling to use any more energy than he had to, like he was saving it for something that would take him too long to explain. But it didn’t matter — she knew who he was. Everybody did.
“You were friends with Tamara, and I wanted to say how sorry I am. What happened to her was terrible, really terrible.” He was standing next her and looking into a condo across the street where a naked man was sweeping up something in the living room.
Sheila controlled her face, but she wasn’t collected. Does he know about Jane? The question short-circuited her.
Darrel could almost have passed for the governor, they looked so much alike. But he differed from his cousin in one significant way: he lacked fixity. Where the governor’s eyes were always light brown, Darrel’s eye color shifted back and forth behind light brown, hazel, and light green. Where the governor’s masculinity was a fact, Darrel’s was arguable. Whether he looked like an attractive older man or a handsome older woman depended on the quality of light.
“Tamara was very special. A lot of us, her friends, are stilling struggling with the loss,” Sheila said.
“Yes, struggling with the loss. Terrible. Terrible loss. A tragedy, really.”
For Sheila, it was hard not to like somebody capable of that kind of mockery. He invited her to the Goliad to commiserate, and she agreed to meet him, despite her dry mouth and the tightness in her chest.
“How did you know Tamara?” Sheila asked after the server left the vodka and tonics.
“Her parents are big supporters of the governor. In fact, they were one of the first old-money families to really get behind him. The Kleins had a fundraiser for him in his first campaign for governor. They got as many of their rich friends to come as they could, and he stood in the middle of a hive they made around him in this palatial living room. He talked about scrubbing Texas clean of the fanged abortionists and sodomites, and atheist urbanites who protected them and looked down on the rest of us. He didn’t soften a single word for those people. The night ended with the governor ejaculating in Mrs. Klein’s mouth in the kitchen pantry and Mr. Klein pleading to host another fundraiser before the election. That was one of those times when I thought this must be what it was like being Hank Williams’ road manager. We stayed in touch with the Kleins, of course. So we heard about Tamara’s waywardness and her leaving for California. But I can’t say I was surprised when she turned up on the circuit here a few years later.”
Sheila had heard the story before from Tamara, except for the part about her mother and the pantry. What she remembered about her mother that night was her otherworldly pink crepe dress and the care she taken in choosing it and dressing. Tamara was nine years old and watching from edges of the gathering with a small group of playmates. She remembered thinking that the man in the center of the hive wasn’t human like the rest of them, that the parts from which he was made were somehow misaligned.
Sheila met Tamara when she returned to Texas from California. Sheila grew up in Uvalde and never went back after moving to Austin to attend the University of Texas on the dozen or so scholarships she’d cobbled together for tuition and room and board. (On her last night in Uvalde, she tried to make the water tower march menacingly around the town, but she was years from having that kind of power. It takes a long time before poor, precocious kids can avenge themselves on their hometowns, if ever.) She felt California’s pull but could never talk herself into migrating. She loved Texas’ capaciousness and its beauty. But the state of Texas, with its cruelty and hatred of her kind, was the enemy against which she would incite other witches to wage a guerrilla war. She visited San Francisco often, became a friend of the coven, and helped bring about the Migration. For a couple of years, she always had a few witches sleeping on her couch and living room floor. Tamara had been one of them.
Tamara believed the governor had to be stopped, but she felt more strongly the demands of the old order of Texas wealth. She could disobey the rules her family lived by, but she couldn’t quite live without them. As a child, she spent most weekends during the dove- and deer-hunting seasons on the family’s 3,500-acre ranch outside Crystal City. The doves, bloody from the birdshot that had torn through them, told her the secrets of her family from the half-open leather bag she carried them in. “Our forebears watched yours and were carried away in this same pouch.” Her grandfather, his eyes dilated and his voice hoarse, taught her the rules of her class while sitting on a tree stump next to a barely contained bonfire. Orange cinders burned tiny holes in his flannel shirt, but he didn’t notice. Tamara couldn’t have been anything but a disappointment to Sheila, but Sheila loved her.
“Part of Tamara lived for a good party.”
“But you – it never looked to me like you cared for them. I saw you with her a few times in different palaces. You always seemed like more of her minder than her companion. And I always wondered, What is she protecting Tamara for? It never occurred to me that she needed protecting from anything. I guess I thought she was a capable witch.”
Sheila smiled politely. Darrel was moving the conversation into a higher register earlier than she’d expected.
“Did the governor ever meet her?”
“Of course. They were friendly – you must have known that. But they weren’t lovers or anything like that… And if you’re wondering if the governor had anything to do with her death, well, put it out of your mind. That’s craziness. Those conspiracy theories just show the sad state of our politics. I mean, you may not agree with the governor’s policies – and I suspect you don’t – but instituting a program of human sacrifice, starting with poor Tamara? That’s crazy. Also, it would probably be disqualifying if he ever wanted to run for president.”
“Is that why you wanted to meet? To put the word out to us that the rumors aren’t true?”
“No. I believe you and your people generally see things as they are, so you don’t need any help from me. The idea of sacrificing young women to satiate the appetite of the governor’s base is too horrific and insane. I’d embarrass both of us if I tried to convince you otherwise.”
In the dining room’s faint light, Darrel looked like a witch Sheila had met in her early days in Austin. At night she took the form of a hawk and watched over the city from the top of the UT Tower.
“Now let’s talk about Jane,” he said.
XV.
The offerings started appearing again on top of Jane’s car, but more frequently than when Tamara was leaving them. The new bundles were more of a production. They were rolled in squares of heavy canvas dyed indigo, not greasy taco wrappers, and tied at both ends with soft, thin strips of leather. They came with thick slices of liver like Tamara’s, but instead of blue beads, there were small silver coins, the heads and tails of which were indecipherable because they’d been nearly rubbed smooth. And judging from the smell, each offering was spiked with a few big shakes of gunpowder.
When Tamara was the giver, Jane tried to determine what they were: a charm, a message, or both. She could’ve reasonably included a curse among the possibilities, but she didn’t believe that was a real possibility. She bought and scoured dozens of books on witchcraft – they formed a pyramid next to her desk at home – but never got to the bottom of the offerings.
With the new ones, it was hard to miss the reference the witch was making with gunpowder. The bundles started arriving after Jane brought home the Beretta and came to understand weeks later that she’d bought it to shoot the governor. Or maybe the first one turned up after she bought the gun but before she knew why she’d done it. Did the witch reveal to her why she’d purchased the gun? Was that how her plan to kill the governor started? Jane couldn’t sort out that part. Her memory of those days was too fractured.
Jane’s plan ate up 73 pages of a wire-bound notebook with scribbles, drawings, hand-drawn maps, and daily affirmations. Every now and then, when was she finishing a pitch email or buying groceries at H-E-B, she’d think that planning to kill the governor was the only insane thing she did. But she couldn’t not plan to kill the governor. She was ravenous.
Sometimes she went cold with the sudden thought the governor hadn’t murdered Tamara and that she was somehow implicated in the strangulation deaths of the women after Tamara. But her shock and horror dissolved into a hot muddle in a matter of seconds.
Jane rarely thought of leaving Texas, for good or even for a vacation, even though her roots in the state were shallow. But once she’d set a date for killing the governor – Saturday, Aug. 19 – she decided to visit her elderly parents and sister in Oregon. She had a window seat on a 6:30 a.m. flight to Portland. Her seat mates were two crew-cut white boys in camouflage jackets with Texas National Guard patches. They smelled a little of gasoline, had scabs on most of their knuckles, and flashed chilling yellow smiles at her. They couldn’t have been older than 20. Jane had bought a ticket for the section just behind business class, so she distractedly watched the other passengers file on. She had seen many dozens of teens in baggy pajama pants and as many annoyed mothers, fathers, mid- and low-level executives, and salespeople when alarm started pricking her skin. How many passengers could this plane hold? She began counting and got to 600 before she had to stop. She turned away and looked at the tarmac for half an hour or so because she was afraid to see more passengers crowding down the aisle a little more than four feet away. The ground crew ceaselessly loaded luggage onto the plane. When she turned again toward the passengers, they all looked familiar. She’d already watched them pass by. Thousands of passengers had boarded by the time Jane grabbed her backpack from under the seat in front of her, pushed past the now-grinning boys, pulled her small suitcase out of the overhead bin, and threw herself upstream.
She looked for small openings between people, but as soon as she found one and tried to exploit it, the gap closed. She only had to make it nine rows and she’d be off the plane, but it took her more than an hour of pushing and twisting her body to get past two rows. By the time she reached the front of the cabin where the flight attendants gossiped and endlessly moved objects from one metal drawer to another, she had four broken fingers, two loose teeth, and a gash on her left cheek from the zipper on somebody’s windbreaker. Most of her bones throbbed and her vision was starting to fail. It took another hour to get through the door and the sky walk. She passed out in the terminal, crumpled against the side of the ticketing counter facing the waiting area. She dreamed of flying over the Davis Mountains in West Texas. They looked like brown bacteria erupting in a dirty yellow solution, and they were growing.
XVI.
Birds of Bad Omen 