Monster Nation(111)

'I can't believe this. You f*cked with the life force? Talk about playing God. What are you, some kind of mad scientist?'

Vronski shrugged uncomfortably. 'I kept her alive. She's still alive.' He raised his hands and lowered them again. 'I would have killed myself a while back. I know what I did, and how wrong I was. But then who would look after Charlotte? She's always bumping into things, and cutting herself by accident and she needs someone to tend to her little boo-boos. I love her, you see. I love her so very, very much.'

He looked less human in that moment than his wife. He looked like a part of a person, an idea that never got thought over. A fragment of intention with nothing to back it up. He was a mad scientist alright, but not in the traditional sense. He was a scientist, and he was mentally ill. That was all.

'Okay.' Nilla had made her decision. 'Well, that's over with now. You and I are going to shut this thing down. I don't care how difficult that is or what it will do to her, just show me how.'

He looked up with a strange expression on his face. Incomprehension, from a man used to understanding things intuitively. 'Shut it down?'

'Yeah. We end this, I fall down dead, the world goes back to normal. How do I begin, do I do this?' she asked. She knocked over one of the tiki statues. Picked it up and threw it against a wall until it broke. 'How about this?' She grabbed an oscilloscope off a wheeled cart and dropped it to crash in pieces on the floor. 'Stop me when I'm getting warm.' She found a hatchet on one of the lab tables and started breaking equipment.

'I don't think you understand,' he told her. 'This is a breach made in one of the most basic elements of nature. This is a self-reinforcing singularity. It provides its own power, it, it increases in size without any kind of input!'

'So?' Nilla shouted. 'So what?'

'So' you can't shut it down. That isn't physically possible. You can't stop this now. You can't stuff the air back into the balloon.'

Nilla let her arm drop. She stared at him. Into him. He was telling the truth. He wanted someone to stop the Source. He needed it, though it meant losing his wife. But it couldn't be done.

He turned away from her and picked up a fossil from a lab bench. A trilobite'something extinct and yet still beautiful. 'I imagine you're going to kill me now, which frankly, I'm fine with. I mean I deserve it. I deserve worse.'

'Yeah.' Nilla thought of all the people who had died to get her this close. Shar and Charles. Mellowman, Morphine Mike. The Termite. Captain Clark and all of his soldiers. The man in the truck who bit her on the neck. Every single person she'd met since her reawakening was dead along with others, so many others, so many millions of others. What this man had done was beyond evil. 'Yeah. You do deserve worse.'

She picked up the bundle of black cables that ran across the floor. With the hatchet she cut through them all in one stroke.

They heard a tiny shout from upstairs, a sudden yelp of pain, but nothing like speech. Then something large and heavy collided with the floor.

Vronski's blue eyes quivered in their sockets and sweat broke out on his forehead.

Nilla dropped the hatchet and walked away, away from the scientist, away from the museum, away from the mountains. Somewhere in Kansas she stopped in the middle of a highway because Mael was trying to talk to her. She turned around to see him standing naked behind her, looking apologetic.

'Your name was Julie,' he told her, and then he vanished in thin air.

END OF MONSTER NATION





Monster Nation





Epilogue


The big fan chopped up what little light made it into Dekalb's spider hole. It pushed freezing air down on him, across him, dusty cold air that skittered across his swollen skin. The remaining fluids in his body had pooled in his back, in the back of his thighs, in the back of his head. The mummies lifted him up with metal hooks beneath his armpits, they hoisted him off the floor to try to get the liquids moving again.

The rattling of the chains, the droning of the fan irritated Dekalb. He wanted to brush the sounds away like buzzing flies. He didn't have the strength to lift his hands. 'Did you hear something before?' Dekalb demanded. The mummies swiveled him around until he was looking at Gary. 'Or maybe it was a smell, something foul in the air.'

The skull on the floor didn't move its lower jaw but it spoke all the same.

She picked up the thick bunch of cables in one hand and cut it with her hatchet. That killed the cancer woman, of course, her system couldn't function without the constant input of energy from the Source'