Brock nods curtly to his Breath of Life flock, some of whom are clearing brush for another trailer pad. Four young boys swordfight with surveyors’ stakes. A woman tends threadbare late-autumn tomato vines. Another stands on her trailer deck, sliding burgers onto a propane grill.

“How many total parasites?”

“Fuck, Kasper, they’re my congregation,” says Brock.

“For a total of?”

“Eighty-seven,” says Juana, with a steely patience. “A new family of four next week will make it ninety-one when the trailer is ready. Isn’t that wonderful, Mr. Aamon?”

“All US citizens?”

“Almost,” says Juana.

“How many different races?”

“Depends how you define race,” says Brock. “We’ve got white, Black, Hispanic, Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, Asian, and a Maori couple. Some aren’t sure.”

“Show us which ones live in which trailers.”

Aamon’s demand hits Brock Stonebreaker hard. He’s surprised that Aamon would do something this ugly and Hitleresque. Sees that he’s underestimated the hatred in the man. Sees that he should never have let Kasper onto his property, into his church.

“You’re done here,” says Brock. “Get your ass off the property or I’ll kick it off myself. That would be nice. We could do it right here, Kasper. You and me, no guns or knives, just us.”

Aamon turns to his people, then back to Brock. Steps forward, leading with his beard. Gets right up in Brock’s face. Aamon has an inch and probably eighty pounds on him.

“This is what we expected,” Kasper says. “We’ve got friends here in Riverside County. Property owners, in fact. Good people. Patriots. So settle down, boy. We just want to know who we’re dealing with.”

Mahina draws her phone from her bright floral dress, points it at Aamon, who slaps it away into the dirt.

Brock knocks Kasper Aamon to the ground with a vicious hook, lines up a head kick but holds it.

Aamon is on his back, mouth open, out.

And the guns are out, too, all of them pointed at Brock in his lounge pants, Aloha shirt, and sheepskin boots, his dreads bristling, his fist cocked like Ali’s over Liston.

Mahina videos the Right Fighters as they surround Brock, who sees that they’re eager for mayhem but not sure what to do. Like the first rioters into the Capitol, he thinks. Two kneel over their leader, a young man and a braided, dark-haired woman who pours a plastic bottle of drinking water over Aamon’s bear-like face.

He gasps, sputters, and coughs. Wails in pain.

“Get out, simpletons,” says Brock. “The next time you show up we won’t be so friendly.”

Two big men lift Kasper Aamon by his armpits. He backpedals, his bootheels kicking up gravel.

“Next time you won’t know what hit you,” slurs Kasper. His jaw is already swelling; a trail of blood runs from one ear.

Brock and his people and his trailer-park citizens watch the Right Fighters guide their wobbly leader past the trailers, toward the cinderblock chapel, and into the big gravel parking lot. The boys with their stake swords watch, too, two of them calling out names and threats.

A moment later Brock sees Aamon’s red Suburban and another SUV raising dust down the dirt road toward the highway.

Knows they’ll be back and wonders when.

And how many Go Dogs he’d need to repel them.

“He is a danger and a monster,” says Mahina. “You must understand this now. No matter you drink beers with him in high school. No matter he was in your grandpa Pastor Mike’s church once. And Mike told you that he is worthy of forgiveness. Kasper Aamon loves hate. You love Breath of Life. Opposite people. Protect us here, Brock. Don’t let the snakes back in.”

“If we don’t believe a man can change, then our Mission is just a façade without meaning.”

“Don’t let evil win.”

“We let the Breath win.”

Later that day, exhausted by his three-hour sermon and his sudden violence over Kasper Aamon, Brock excuses himself from family and congregants, and makes the walk into the stout hills that shelter the eastern flank of his property.

Here, in a deep swale surrounded by manzanita and toyon, he sits cross-legged near a spring that feeds a tiny creek that trickles down toward the compound. At night this time of year, the swale is filled with the croaking of tree frogs, but now it’s quiet except for the occasional cricket and the pleasant chirping of the quail coveys hidden throughout this rough country.

Except for when he’s surfing a very large wave, this little spring is where Brock feels the Breath of Life at its strongest and most consistent.

A hot spot for the Breath of Life, valuable because …

The Breath of Life can be evasive.

The Breath of Life can be temperamental.

The Breath of Life is not always available.

He closes his eyes and lets the fall sun warm his eyelids. Lets in that burnished orange light.

The Breath of Life, he thinks: come into me again.

Time glides and thoughts dissolve, leaving him in the blackness of that three-wave hold-down at Nazaré, caught inside after a punishing wipeout. Leaving him with those three sixty-foot beasts thundering over him, and finally stomping out his consciousness.

Until Mahina breathed it back into him.

Now, when he regains his consciousness in the dream—and in the swale—it’s not Mahina’s voice but the ringtone on his phone that Brock hears.

It’s Marlon from Surfline again, texting that the rare early season swell heaving toward Mavericks is right on time for arrival six days from now. Right now it’s the purple blob on the map, denoting a potential storm-driven swell. They’re calling it FreakZilla, Marlon says, and it’s the biggest northwest swell he’s seen since the four-trawler destructo just outside the Pillar Point Harbor breakwater twelve years ago. Which turned Mavericks into an unrideable wind-blasted blowout with waves at seventy feet. The four-trawler swell had arrived at Half Moon Bay as a twenty-four-foot, eighteen-second-interval behemoth, and right now, FreakZilla is bigger, and faster.

So it looks like the Monsters is going to happen, soon.

Over and out, brah.

Brock messages his mom and brother:

Four-trawler time. Game on.

31

Of course, Bette Wu does show up whenever she wants, in this case just after sunrise at Oceanside Harbor where Casey is backing Moondance down the ramp into the bay.