Monster Nation(108)

She should have been exhausted after the first quarter mile. Every step should have been harder, a brand new agony. But it wasn't. If anything the mountaineering got easier. Her body felt better, stronger, healthier with every step she took. At one point she felt her neck spasm and shake and she thought maybe physical collapse had finally caught up with her but no. It was the bullet, the bullet the Indian soldier had fired at her on the prison's rooftop. Underneath it the muscle fibers and nerves and blood vessels wriggled as they wove themselves back together. The inert leaden mass of the bullet popped out of her neck with an agonizing little sputter and fell to smack her hard on the bones of her wrist. She yanked her arm back in pain but even the pain disappeared after a moment.

The light that came through the trees'it was better than heroin. It was better than sex with a loving partner. It was better than a drink of water after three days of wandering in the desert.

It was nearly morning when she came out over a final lip of rock and saw the valley below her and the Source beneath it. Cold blue light the color of hallucinations lit up the sky over Bolton's Valley, the place Captain Clark had shown her in a photograph. The place Jason Singletary had shown her with his mind.

She wasn't the only dead person to have found the place. A crowd of them'maybe two hundred in all'stood below the ridge. Their battered and torn bodies looked relaxed there. Their ragged faces were turned upward to catch the light. It was tempting to join them. It was even more tempting to move closer, to go into that flaring beacon.

Nilla found herself elbowing through the crowd without really thinking about it. When one of the corpses coughed and cleared its dry throat she wasn't even surprised.

'Lass. Please don't go any farther.'

Nilla turned to face what had been a middle-aged woman. She had been plump, with chin-length hair pulled back in a simple black band. She had very little skin left on her face, and no eyes. Nilla understood, looking at her, that she could still see the light of the Source.

It was Mael who spoke through the woman, of course. 'Why?' Nilla demanded. 'Are you worried that I'll go up there and turn this thing off, like Clark wanted? I haven't actually decided what I'll do yet. I haven't decided who I am. Good Nilla, bad Nilla. I kind of want to find out, though.' Nilla closed her eyes and felt rays of sparkling warmth shoot through her, healing her, feeding her. Oh, she wanted to find out so very much. 'I've got more important things to do.'

'Indeed, lass? And what's more important than the end of the world? Answer me that. Or don't. I've little left to teach you, but there's this: don't go another step.'

'Christ, next you're going to tell me your God doesn't want me up there.'

The woman shook her head. 'Teuagh is no god. He is my father. He is the father of us all. When I was alive a child did what his father told him. I used to think I was like a father to you.'

'Really? Because I thought we had more of a Bruce Willis and Cybil Shepard thing going on. Wow, now that I think about it that's kind of creepy. Well, listen, you can't stop me. If I want to go up there I will.'

'You don't ken it yet, Nilla. I'm not trying to stop you because I'm afraid of what you'll do. I'm simply afraid you're going to hurt yourself. There's so few of us now. You, some fellow in New York who figured it out on his own. A lad in Russia who doesn't even know where he is. I'm just trying to protect a very scarce resource, that's all.'

Nilla opened her mouth to rebuke him but then she saw charred corpses in the broken field ahead of her. She took a step closer and felt the warmth of the Source grow hot. Another step and it was painful. 'Oh,' she said. The same energy that fed her could burn her to a crisp if she got too close. Yet moving forward meant getting closer.

But then she just had it, as if her body knew what to do even if her mind was oblivious. She banked her energy'subtracted her darkness'made herself invisible. The one thing she could do that nobody else could manage. The one thing that set her apart. Instantly the warmth was gone. She stepped forward, and again, until she was even with the burnt and disfigured bodies sprawled across the rocks.

Nothing happened.

Singletary had been right. She was the only one who could go to the Source. She started to climb.

It was a far easier ascent than what had come before, though every step knocked loose showers of pebbles and dirt, eroded bits of hillside that went skittering down, pattering, pittering away from her. The handholds were stable, if the footing wasn't. In a few minutes she had reached the top of a ridge. A green-painted stegosaurus stood watch there, sculpted out of concrete. Just as Singletary had shown her.