Monster Nation(2)

How much of this recollection could she trust? It was pretty threadbare and frayed around the edges. All the sounds she heard when she went back to this place were low and distorted. Oceanic vibrations. She couldn't smell anything. The light seemed to hang in the air in individual packets, stray photons pinned in place.

Worst of all there were no words. No names or signs. She bopped right past a stop sign but in this sunny space it was just a blank red octagon. Stop, she thought to herself. Stop, stop stop! The word wouldn't manifest.

Palm trees. Rollerbladers and homeless people competing for sidewalk space. This wasCalifornia , unless a million movies had steered her wrong. No place famous, just seedy and a little run-down in a charming multi-cultural way. A four way intersection with a food market selling Goya products, a free clinic, a boarded up storefront with no sign and some kind of bar. What she might be doing there she had no idea.

Time started up and the light moved again: with the scene set the action was ready to begin. At the intersection a Jeep Cherokee slurped up onto the curb and smacked into a stone bench with the sound of tin foil tearing and rattling. The car rocked on its tires, its windows the color of oil on water. Time hovered and danced around the scene like a bumblebee in search of nectar. Cubes of broken glass spun languorously in the air while clouds raced overhead in a fractured time lapse. She was frozen in place, in shock, in mid-stride. How much time passed? A minute? Fifteen seconds? The driver's door opened and a man in a blue western-style shirt tumbled out.

The look on his face made no sense at all.

He staggered a bit. Grabbed at the bench, at the hood of his car. He was having trouble walking, standing upright.

Of course she went to help him. She was supposed to'why? What was she? A doctor? A nurse? The belly tattoo and the nose ring made her think otherwise. Massage therapist? The look on his face: slack. His jaw didn't seem to close properly and his eyes weren't tracking. Stroke? Seizure? Heart attack? She had to help. It was an obligation, part of the social contract.

He was dead when she got to him.

The man was dead but he was still moving. An impossibility, a singularity of biology. The point where normal rules no longer apply. The recollection began to break down at this point into raw sense-data. The synthetic fabric of his shirt where she touched it, the oils of his skin, the pure and unadulterated comfort of his arm as it crossed her back, holding her to him, hugging her'brother'father'boyfriend'husband'priest'something, some male presence, still welcome and good and wanted because she didn't know what was going on, just glad for the human contact in a scary moment when nothing quite worked the way it should.

The pain, intense and real, far more real than anything else in her memory, as thirty-two needles sank into her shoulder, into her skin, his teeth.

That's what she had. Everything else was torn away leaving ragged edges, bloody sockets. Her head was full of grimy windows she couldn't see through everywhere else she looked. Her memory was dead and rotting and it had left her only these few scant impressions. Everything else was gone.

For instance: she couldn't remember her name.

FIVE FOUND DEAD NEARESTESPARK : Police Chief Suggests Links to 'Meth' Production in High Country [Rocky Mountain News, 3/17/05]

Dick rolled to a stop on the shoulder and dug through old Burger King bags until he found the gas station map. It had a bad grease stain on it that spread slowly while he watched. Shit, there goesGunnison , he thought, chuckling to himself.

He hardly ever used the map'he'd grown up in these mountains and the prairies beneath them and there were hardly a handful of roads in theFront Range anyway. With a compass and a good idea of where he was headed he could usually get where he needed without straying too far. Still. There were a hundred canyons up in these mountains, little valleys like pockets on the sides of the big peaks, hollows lost in shadows or so overgrown with trees you couldn't see them from the road. He was somewhere near Rand, on the wild side ofRockyMountainNational Park , pretty far from anywhere civilized. The map showed a road or more precisely a track'a single dotted line branching off from 125 and zig-zagging up the mountain, ending nowhere in particular. He had missed it somehow. Not too surprising. March might have thawed out most of theGreat Plains but up this high snow still glinted in every declivity and overhang and lingered under the shade of every stunted tree. An unpaved road at this altitude could have literally disappeared since the map was printed, ground out of existence by the winter snow squalls or the run-off from spring freshets. Dick frowned and checked the GPS unit bolted to his dashboard, then looked again at the map. If he was reading the scale correctly he was within a quarter mile of the track but he had seen nothing as he drove by at twenty mph.