Chapter 1: The Day of Days

My name is Logan Evans. I was thirty-one years old on that day of days. I grew up on a farm in southwestern Washington state near the town of Pine Hill, far from the beaten path. My father was Jack Evans, and my mother was Sally Shoemaker Evans.

My parents had been sweethearts from the day they started grammar school together. I must have heard it a thousand times from people who knew them that everyone had known they’d be married someday and that the two of them would live happily ever after. And that was before my father was made the advertising manager of a national footwear chain headquartered in Beaverton, Oregon, and where he helped them make his company into a household name in every country on Earth.

It’s a truism — many people who are clinically insane are brilliant at something else. That was my father.

My father was paranoid; he was the ultimate conspiracy theorist. My grandparents should never have let him read catastrophe science fiction stories. In college, my freshman psych professor told us that a neurosis is a mental condition that doesn’t significantly affect your life, while a psychosis is the same condition if it does. By that definition, my father was mildly neurotic about work, the government, and the like. And totally psychotic about the future.

At age twenty-two, he married my mother and promptly got her started on a family — me. That was 1978. My mother doesn’t remember exactly what day it was, but she did blame herself because one day she told my father she worried about bringing a child into such a dangerous world. Oil shocks, inflation, stagflation, the Cold War — all weighed on her mind, and she communicated her unease to my father.

My father responded in the true fashion of a tin-foil hat-paranoid. He bought a piece of property out in the country, well away from anyone. It was a hundred and sixty acres of mostly forest, but forty acres of it was pasture. For those of you who don’t have a grip on acreage, that’s a quarter of a square mile — a piece of ground that was nearly square, a half mile on a side.

He proceeded to build a house on the property, telling my mother that it was for our family’s future, but he wanted to take pride in the fact that he was doing a lot of the work himself. He would, he assured her, let her help with the interior, but the layout and whatnot was going to be his. He bought the land when Mom was three months pregnant, and we moved in when I was four months old.

It was a huge house, two levels, each five thousand square feet in size, plus an attached three-car garage. A few hundred feet off to one side was a steel-frame barn a hundred feet long and forty feet wide.

The first time my mother saw our house was a few days after I was born, and she’d been stunned by the size more than anything else. She had spent her confinement looking at pictures of drapes and carpet, furniture, and fittings. At least she didn’t have to worry about complications of pregnancy — my father worried her about how he was going to pay for the house and the medical bills.

My father was a lot of brilliant things, but an inspired home designer he wasn’t. The two levels of the house were rectangles, a hundred feet on the long side, and fifty feet on the shorter side. The garage was a square, fifty feet on a side. Upstairs in the house, there was a kitchen, a dining room, a twenty-by-twenty bathroom, and the thirty-by-thirty master bedroom and bath on the west face of the house, while the east side of the house was a living room thirty feet by fifty, which included a huge fireplace and another bedroom.

Downstairs there was a “stove room” that was thirty feet on a side, a laundry room, a storage room, and six bedrooms that were paired, the pairs sharing a bathroom. To sum it up, there were nine bedrooms, six bathrooms, and more space than you could shake a stick at.

When my mother asked my father why we had so many bedrooms, he grinned evilly and promised her that he had been counting the days until they could “christen” the house, and that day had finally come.

God is capricious, if there is one. Me? I’ve always had my doubts about whether or not there is a God. Ten days after my mother and I had moved into the new place, my father woke one morning feverish and not feeling well. In that, I’m like my father — I just won’t go to the doctor because I’m not feeling good or have a degree of two of fever. The men who would be digging the pond were due, and he wanted to be there for that, so he went and did what he thought he had to do.

But, like me, my father was only a little obtuse. At one in the afternoon, one of the workmen told my father he was covered in spots, as if he had measles. My father studied himself in the side mirror of his truck and decided that he did have measles. Plus, by then, he felt really terrible.

He sent one of the workmen to tell my mother and then drove himself to the hospital, beckoning one of the emergency room attendants to his pickup and explaining that he thought he had measles and didn’t think it would be good for him to just walk in the emergency room and sit down. The nurse hastily agreed, and moments later, he was whisked inside, safely secure from infecting anyone else.

That night, his temperature spiked at one hundred and five degrees Fahrenheit. My mother was devastated because the doctors wouldn’t let her near him, since she was nursing a child.

The long and short of it was that he recovered — but his wigglers were all dead. No more sperm count, none ... zero, zip, nada. No more kids, nothing like that. His dreams of a huge family ended with me.

My father, already paranoid, pretty much went off the deep end after he got home from the hospital. He resigned his job, and after that, he rarely left the house. My mother assured him that as much as she’d wanted more children, she had a lovely son, and she was satisfied with that.

You might well ask, how did a 22-year-old fresh-from-business school man get the money for what he did? That’s because my father was a genius. Never forget that — it took me long enough to accept that fact, but it was certainly true.

He came up with a new ad campaign for the shoe company he worked for. He made the president of the company a bet — they knew how many shoes they sold every month — the number had been flat for two years. Give him one percent of the gross sales above that average, the second month of his ad campaign. Give him a half percent of anything over the usual in the third month and a tenth of a percent over the next year.

Like I said, he was a genius. There was a strong twitch upwards in the first month, then the talk shows, the news shows, and just about everyone in the country were talking about the ads. The second month’s sales were a billion dollars over the usual average. The third month, it was two and a half billion, and until that first year expired, long after he’d left, sales averaged a billion a month more than the year before.

One percent of a billion is ten million; a half percent of two and a half billion is twelve and a half million, and the rest of the year netted him a million dollars a month. You know — thirty-two plus million dollars. He’d spent, he told people, nearly a million on the house.

Thus, I grew up in a house where my father was a “recluse” in the modern vernacular, and my mother was a nurse’s assistant at a doctor’s office in Battleground, the nearest town of any size.

Me, I was in heaven! Forests, streams ... we had it all!

From the earliest age, I was out in the woods, exploring. By the time I was twelve, I’d built secret paths all over the property, including up to the top of the ridge and beyond.

As I said, we had a hundred and sixty acres, a half mile on each side. Nature, of course, doesn’t arrange things in neat little squares, and the government is not much more in favor of orderly arrangements. The northern half of the eastern boundary was formed by Swift Creek. Then the stream turned west, went a quarter of a mile before turning south again, now bisecting the property for another eighth of a mile, before entering our neighbor’s property.

The northern, western, southern, and half the eastern boundaries were lines on a map. The house was halfway up a hill, on a bench that ran along the flank of the ridge. There was a circular driveway in front of the house. With the exception of the bridge, which was reinforced concrete slabs on I-beams, the road was very hard-packed dirt.

Behind the house, about two hundred yards further from the creek, the main part of the ridge lifted up. It really wasn’t a ridge, not when you got up on top of it — it was more like a mesa, the remains of an ancient lava flow that was shaped like a tear drop, with the pointy end facing south and the rounded end, north.

The “mesa” was about six and a half miles long and tapered from a point a mile and a half south of the house, to the rounded end, five miles north. When I was born, we had a neighbor a mile away, south of us, where our dirt road turned east, heading for a paved county road, another mile further along. The county road was paved, and the junction was where the mailboxes were.

Growing up, I attended a school where half of the rooms were set aside for the lower elementary grades, two more classrooms were set aside for junior high, and the last quarter of the school was the high school. “One for all” was our school motto.

Did I mention that the school had just a hundred and sixty students, K-12, and only eight classrooms?

I lived a carefree and happy life. I was bright, and there was no real pressure from my parents beyond getting “good” grades, and what good meant was left unexplained. I was happy, and I was a typical country boy, I guess.

My first hint that there were things in life I didn’t understand was on my sixteenth birthday.

My father was up early on that July Saturday, intent on taking me for my driver’s license exam. I wasn’t sure how that worked because my mother had been the one who’d taken the time to show me how to drive. By then, I was more than familiar with my father’s reluctance to leave the house, and I understood what a big concession it was for him, so I was careful and had no trouble passing the test.

On the way home, he had me stop on the paved road a few miles from the house. There was rarely any traffic along the road there, and he got out of the car and carried two plastic gallon milk jugs, filled three-quarters of the way with spring water, not milk, and placed them near the center of the road, one behind the other. When he got back in the car, he gestured to the plastics. “How much blood does the human body have?”

I blinked. I’d had biology in high school, and I didn’t remember ever hearing that number, so I told him I didn’t know. “You’ll find out by tonight, you hear?” he told me.

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s less than two gallons, you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Run over the jugs, Logan. Go as fast as you can, but don’t miss.”

It was harder than I thought, and while it wasn’t as solid an impact as I’d expected, the jugs squished.