She didn’t dare answer.
“That’s when you do every last bit of dirtiness you can to the girl, short of squirting up her skirt. No, if you spill it on the ground well that’s not adultery, no ma’am, that’s just the sin of Onan and that has got to be at least one per cent less sinful, now don’t it? And sometimes one per cent is all it takes to get you into Heaven.” Mellowman laughed maniacally. “Shit, there was a time when crap like that actually mattered to me.”
“Are you… going to… rape me?” she asked. It was just a question. Her injuries wouldn’t let her summon up the rage she needed to turn it into an accusation.
Mellowman’s face fell all the same. “Aw, shit,” he said, and scuffed one boot on the floor. “Aw, c’mon, Muffin, you really think I’m like that? Me and Mike, we’re the laid-back type, real gentlemen, the two of us. We don’t pay for pussy, and we don’t beat up women just to get laid, at least not most of the time. Consensual sex is the best kind, we know that.”
He laughed for a moment, the sound banging off the roof of the cave.
“On the other hand, the Termite is probably too far gone to care. And he’s taking the first watch. You have yourself some pleasant dreams, now.”
He strode away, leaving her there in the dark.
She had most of the night to work out what she was going to do next.
She managed to roll over on her side and crawl a bit, just enough to get closer to the lamp. Not actually get into its light. It took her far, far longer than she expected to halve the distance. It took more effort than she thought she had left.
She was screwed, she understood that much implicitly. Whatever Mellowman had in store for her in the morning it wouldn’t be good. Maybe not as bad as having her brains blown out, perhaps not as bad as being buried unable to die. She wouldn’t like it, though, that much she knew.
Mael, she called out with her mind. Mael, help me, she screamed silently, but either the walls of the cave were blocking her telepathy or he just couldn’t hear her at all. There was no response.
She started crawling again. Managed to get far enough that the light played on her face.
She was on her own. Only one thing left to try.
“Hey,” she shouted. At least she tried to shout. What came out sounded more like a wet wheeze. Maybe she’d broken something while crawling. Maybe her body was just done. “Hey, somebody! Termite!”
That was all she could muster. She waited, waited to regain enough strength to wheeze again.
Something moved in the darkness. A flittering, skittish motion. Like the feelers of a cockroach feathering over a dried-up piece of potato chip.
It came again, this time followed by a noise like feet being dragged across rough concrete. Nilla thought she could see a blur of paleness in the distance. Soon enough it resolved into a shape, a humanoid form. It was the Termite.
“Y-y-you sh-sh-sh-ut up,” he said. He rubbed at his nose and his left eye. “J-j-just shut up.” He rubbed his eye again. Then his nose. She could see where he’d got his nickname. In the dark he positively glowed, his skin translucent and shiny under the grime. The splayed and broken brown palisade of his teeth looked like the mouthparts of an insect. With his wrist he smoothed back his hair, which was greasy enough to stay put. “I’ve got my orders.”
“What is he going to do with me?” Nilla asked.
“Sh-shut up, stupid.”
Nilla sucked on her lower lip. Fear was filling her up. Not fear of what was going to happen. Fear that what she tried next wasn’t going to work. If it didn’t—then she was truly out of ideas.
Then his eyes flicked downward. Into the shadows of her cleavage. She knew she still had a chance.
“Just sit and talk with me, please,” she said to him. She needed to bait the hook. “Are you going to hurt me?” she asked. She put what emotion she had left into the words, twisted them. Made them dirty. Like she wanted to be hurt but only in a very special way. Nilla licked her lips. There was no room in her soul for being disgusted with herself. This was just like when she’d eaten the boy on the golf course. Exactly like that. Sheer survival.
“Aw, no, n-no, I c-c-c, I can’t do this,” he whined, his body curling around the negation. He ran both hands over his scalp, tearing at his hair, clawing at his cheeks. He rubbed his nose and his eye again and turned away from her, only to turn around again quickly.
“But I want it so much,” Nilla said. And she did. She made herself want it. Want him to come closer. To touch her.
The Termite blinked his eyes rapidly. He rubbed at his nose, at his left eye. He reached over and grabbed her breast, hard, hard enough to make her gasp in pain.
It was the best she was going to get. She reared up like a snake and sank her teeth deep into the flesh of his arm. She aimed for the vein there and found it without trouble. He screamed, screamed like a stuck pig, screamed for help, for his mother, the pain in him lighting up the cave like neon. He screamed and screamed and reached for something on his belt. Something dangerous. A gun. He screamed and brought up the gun and started firing wildly, more noise, light in huge orange flashes, and still he screamed, and fired, and fired, and fired until his gun went dry.
It didn’t matter. Before he got off his first shot Nilla had already stolen enough from him. Enough life. She banked her energy. Made herself invisible. It felt like it wasn’t going to work but combined with the darkness in the cave, well. None of the shots hit her.
She was already up, up on shaky feet, moving toward the entrance of the cave. Behind her the Termite kept screaming.
At the entrance she found Mellowman. She had hoped she would. He was going to ruin all of her plans, though, by doing one smart thing. He had heard the screams and the gunshots—how could he not—and he looked deeply concerned. But not panicked. Instead of rushing into the cave, guns blazing, he was pushing the gate closed. He already had the key to the padlock out and ready. He was going to do the smart thing, and seal her inside the cave with the Termite.
Had she wasted a moment more on the Termite, had she stopped to take more of his life force, she wouldn’t have made it. She pushed and stumbled and snagged herself badly as she squeezed into the narrow opening left in the gate. Mellowman grunted and she knew by the way he tensed up that he could feel the resistance her body made. He could feel that something was holding the gate open, even if he couldn’t see it.
“Muffin?” he asked. He started to grin. He had grasped immediately the strange particulars of the situation. Crazy girl, probably undead, can make herself invisible. He stepped into the gate, blocking her escape, knowing that if he didn’t stop her at that moment she would probably get away.
Still the Termite screamed.
Nilla thudded against Mellowman’s chest, the coarse weave of his baja shirt rough against her cheek. He smelled like stale smoke. His arms went around her, tentative at first, then closing with sudden conviction, trapping her.
“I’ve got you, Muffin. And I’m never going to let you go,” he said. He wasn’t looking at her but it didn’t matter.
She would have preferred it if he was looking at her. She wanted him to see her. But it didn’t matter.
He was almost a head taller than her. Nilla’s face fit easily into the crook of his neck. Her lips could feel the pulse of his jugular vein—it was right there.
She tore his throat out and drank the blood that poured down over her mouth.
Chapter Six
Subtle energies, discrete communication. So many months gone to this foolishness. Am I just looking for a way to keep my mind occupied? The neoplasm is an ostrich egg, we can see it right through the skin and here I am growing bluegrass in Dixie cups. The world’s most expensive high school science project, I… I need some rest. [Lab Notes, 1/1/04]
She came trudging out of the cave to find the Space Van pinging softly in the starlight. Folding patio chairs had been set up around the open back, and a tiny hibachi gave off a cheery glow from the tailgate. Morphine Mik
e was drinking a beer, his back up against the dusty metal of the van.
Mellowman’s energy popped and crackled inside of her. She felt like an overdone potato in a microwave. She hadn’t felt so strong since she’d eaten the bear.
The tight muscles across Nilla’s stomach rumbled for a moment and something tiny and metallic squeezed its way out of her skin. The puckered exit wound it left behind closed up and healed over as she watched. She bent down and picked up the piece of buck shot. She was full of them, still, and her body was rejecting them one by one. She would probably be shedding them for a week.
It didn’t matter. Mellowman was dead and she… wasn’t.
Mike was agitated. He wanted to get in the van and rocket away, just get out of there and head back to Las Vegas. She could tell by the way he kept looking at the road. He would have heard the screams, of course. He would know what was happening.
She stepped closer to him. Into the red light of the hibachi. She let her dark energy flow back into her, the cool flame spreading through her limbs like tingling shadow. It felt like pins and needles all over. He yelped a little when she appeared in front of him with no warning.
“You’re… you’re dead,” he said. It might have sounded like wishful thinking but that wasn’t it. It was merely him completing a line of reasoning. One that Mellowman had worked through in the space of a heartbeat. Morphine Mike, with his degree in environmental chemistry, was just now figuring it out. Not all dead people are alike.
“Yes,” she said. The darkness inside of her coiled and bent. It was laughing, laughing at him. Laughing at the living.
She had so many people inside of her now… literally, and figuratively. Jason Singletary was in there. So was Mael Mag Och. It was as if by losing herself, her memory, she had made herself a vessel to be filled up by others. Like being possessed, perhaps, or suffering from multiple personal disorder. There were many of her now. This Nilla, the one who stepped closer to Mike and leaned in, pushing up hard against the envelope of his personal space, was the darkest of the lot.
Bad Nilla. Evil Nilla. She could just eat him up.
He swallowed a gulp of beer. Dropped the can onto the sandy soil where it fizzed noisily for a moment like a flame going out. “Mellowman? The Termite?”
She smiled, showing him her teeth. Were there flecks of skin and meat stuck between her incisors? She didn’t care. She contemplated telling him to go see for himself. Tricking him, locking him up in the cave with the Termite. Let them starve to death and see which one ate the other first.
The dead don’t drive, though.
“They’re not going to be problems for us anymore. Can we go, or do you need to sober up, first?” she asked. She put a finger under his chin. It was necessary, she knew, to establish the hierarchy here. He had to know who was in charge. She found the pulse point of his neck and tapped it rapidly. In time with his heartbeat.
She felt so good. So strong. When he asked which way to drive she fastened her seat belt and told him to go east.
They were fifteen miles down the road, well on their way to Salt Lake City, when a helicopter flew by so low over them that the Space Van rocked on its wheels. “Shit!” Mike squeaked, the curse spurting out of him as he struggled with the steering wheel. He slammed on the brakes and pulled them over onto the shoulder.
“What are you doing?” Nilla demanded. “Get back on the road.”
“They saw us!” Mike bit his lower lip. “Maybe we can abandon the van. Maybe we can go into the desert on foot—it’s cold at night, though, so we’ll show up on IR. Shit!”
“What are you talking about? That was just a helicopter. They probably have bigger things to worry about than us.”
Mike shook his head. “Look, you have got to understand what’s happening. This was Mellowman’s plan. The military is offering to pay for your capture. They offered a ludicrous amount of money. Enough to make it worth it to him not to kill you. He was supposed to meet them halfway, back at the cave, and collect the bounty. I don’t know if they just showed up early for the meet and found his corpse or maybe they had the place under surveillance already. Either way they are not going to just let us go.”
The military. Nilla remembered the man in the Army uniform, the one who had nearly supervised at her execution. “Get back on the road,” she said. “Turn off the headlights. There won’t be any traffic.”
“No fucking way! We’re already caught. All we can do is surrender and hope they don’t shoot us on principle.”
She grabbed his forearm and put his wrist in her mouth. She crunched down, hard, but not hard enough to break the skin.
Mike got the message.
They burned out onto the highway accelerating as hard as the Space Van could, rolling from side to side like a boat. Without the headlights the van might as well have been plummeting forward into interstellar space. Nilla grabbed a map out of the glove compartment and studied it by the illumination of a Zippo lighter she found underneath it. “Okay,” she said, “okay, we can do this—I’ve outmaneuvered them before. North of here is the Bonneville Speedway. Sure—the Salt Flats, right?” She could remember the rocket cars setting land speed records, but she couldn’t remember her name? She would dwell on the disparity later, she decided. “There have to be some buildings there. Something with cover. Take a left up ahead.”
“Where? I can’t see anything!”
“A left!” she shouted when he started to veer into the right lane.
He turned hard, perhaps thinking she’d seen a turn he'd missed. The Zippo touched the map and the map went up in flames. The van took a guard rail hard and listed over to one side. They were going at least sixty, probably more.
The Space Van rolled at least once as he panicked and she screamed but she couldn’t have said later how long it took for the vehicle to skid and slide and rock to a stop. She felt her soul leave her body, much as it had when she was restrained in the hospital bed, back when she thought she was still alive. She felt her soul careen back and forth inside the van, a bean inside of a maraca, a die inside a gambler’s hand. She saw bits of flaming map dance in the spinning cabin, saw Mike’s face turn to look at her, his mouth moving, forming words but she didn’t hear them.
Go limp, she told herself. Her limbs turned to loose rubber and bounced around inside the van, her body shook like a doll. Go limp.
Then the van smacked the desert on its side and slid about a hundred feet, showers of sparks flying up every time it grazed a rock. It finally came to a stop. Nilla bounced a little inside the protective webbing of her seat belt, but she was okay.
She stared out at the starlit desert beyond the shattered windshield. Everything had stopped. She looked down, down at where Mike sat in the driver’s seat. He wasn’t there. She searched her memory, trying to figure out how that could happen. She remembered he hadn’t been wearing his seat belt.
Carefully, trying to avoid the piles of broken safety glass that seemed to be everywhere, Nilla unfastened herself and climbed out of the wreck. A helicopter shot by overhead, very fast, while she stood there, craning her head back and forth, looking for Mike. She walked out onto the Salt Flats and the ground crunched beneath her feet.
Eventually she found him.
He had been thrown through the windshield in the crash and his body had gone skidding over the crunchy, perfectly smooth salt rime for over a hundred yards. Judging by the broken depressions in the soil he must have skipped like a stone on the top of a pond.
He wouldn’t be coming back. Shards of glass stuck out of his head like a bloody crown. Nilla felt her shoulders fall, a certain tension dripping away from her.
From behind she heard the sound of heavy trucks roaring toward her. Overhead two more helicopters came in slow and circled around her, their lights stabbing the desert, missing her entirely.
Nilla was still flush with energy. She went invisible.
Chapter Seven
The books I ordered from Amazon last week (on a whim, just
a silly whim!) have arrived. I should just send them back, this is just dumb. “The Lesser Key of Solomon?” The Greater Key was on back order. “The Alchymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz?” Huh? “Magick Without Tears?” Well, we could use a few less tears around here, though I could do without that superfluous “K”. [Lab Notes, 1/9/04]
“I’ve been looking for this girl since the Epidemic began,” Clark said. “Now you find her and you forget to tell me for most of a day?”
The Civilian stared straight ahead. He was strapped so tightly into his crewseat that maybe he couldn’t turn his head. “I can be a wrathful god sometimes, Bannerman. But sometimes I throw my favorite pet a bone. You don’t ask questions, not of me.”
Clark knew to back off. This fury was new—he was used to the Civilian’s cynicism but his anger was new and growing. Unfortunately that left him with his own thoughts for company.
So close—and something had to go wrong. Well, something always went wrong, that was the general rule of warfare. Clark had even made room for something going wrong in his plans, bringing along far more men and materiel than he should have needed to pick up one prisoner. Still.
This was a monumental cock-up.
The Civilian had presented Clark with the opportunity of a lifetime. An individual associated loosely with the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce had captured the girl. He was willing to turn her over to Clark in exchange for free passage east—with a military escort—and fifty thousand dollars. The Civilian had set everything up. Those were all the details Clark had—and all, it seemed, the Civilian was willing to give him. It should be enough, the Civilian insisted.
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