Monster Nation(37)

She guided his hand to her breast and let him cup it. He immediately tweaked her nipple in a way she normally would have found more irritating than arousing but it just didn't matter. He was human and male and if he reacted to her she could be normal again.

He swallowed hard and moved closer to her, as if unsure of what to do next. Was he a virgin? Nilla was pretty sure she wasn't. She would use every whorish trick she could think of if she could just have this simple reassurance. She reached across the space between them and brushed the backs of her fingers across the front of his jeans.

Nothing. She felt nothing down there'no hardness at all. He looked down at her breast like someone who couldn't understand what he was seeing. 'So cold,' he said, his voice small and afraid.

She winced backward and it was the signal he'd been waiting for. He rushed out of the room, his sodas rolling across the floor where he'd dropped them. Nilla went to the door and shut it, locked it tight and fastened the chain.

She wanted to break down, to cry, but that was a human response and her body refused to let her have even that. She wanted to cut herself to pieces but there was nothing sharp at hand. She looked around the objects of the room'bed, tv, lamp, nightstand, Gideon's bible'and none of them made sense, they'd been torn out of context and left hanging in a meaningless space. It was too much.

She undid all the locks on the door and ran out into the night, down the stairs and across the parking lot. The dark trees there accepted her without a murmur.





Monster Nation





Chapter Eight


PLEASE BE ADVISED: Foreign nationals will not be allowed into the United States unless they carry up-to-date and authorized medical papers. Otherwise you are subject to incarceration! [Signage posted at Customs, John F. Kennedy International Airport, 4/1/05]

'He knows talent when he sees it, yes, that is that,' Vikram said, clutching a nylon handloop as the Blackhawk lifted up and banked away from the prison.

'He's hedging a bet.' Back to California. Bannerman Clark hated flying. Washington to Denver on another empty airbus. Blackhawk to Florence to pick up Vikram'now officially attached to Clark's nascent Action Team'and take the two of them back to DIA. Then a military transport, probably an old DC-10 judging by Clark's recent luck, then another helicopter to spirit them off to a place called Kern County where someone might possibly have seen the blonde girl, according to a tip phoned in on the APB.

It didn't matter. None of the wasted time or the jet lag or the bad food or the recirculated air mattered. 'I looked him up in Nexis when I got airborne out of DCA. He's an up-and-comer, playing at being a young Turk at the tender age of fifty-two. He's angling for a Cabinet post. He wouldn't meet with me in the Pentagon'I didn't ask why but I can guess. He wants to keep me on the books but off the charts.'

'He has you for his wild card. This man, he is playing games while the house is on fire?'

Clark laid one finger alongside his nose. 'Don't forget we're talking about DoD civilians here. Armchair generals.' He need say no more. For the last thirty years Vikram and Clark had been touring the world at the whim of men with Big Ideas and Foolproof Plans. Soldiers and even entire countries were just tokens on a game board when you looked down on them from those lofty heights.

'I'm his wonk, he calls me. His idea man. Somebody with experience in a brand new way of war. After September Eleventh people like him wrote their own ticket because they were ready for the new paradigm. He hopes to do the same here.'

'He is making political capital out of this horror.'

Clark sighed and lifted both hands. 'Twas ever thus. 'I can't help but thinking there's more to this than I get, but then I never understood politics. This guy most certainly does. If we can find this girl and if she is what I think she is this man will be appointing Cabinet posts, not filling one.'

'Unless we are eaten, all of us, before then.'

'Yes, that would spoil his gambit.' Clark tried to laugh and found he couldn't.

CALIFORNIA, INFECTIOUS DISEASE OUTBREAK: This is a notification of the Presidential declaration of a major disaster for the State of California (FEMA-1899-DR), dated April First, 2005, and related determinations. [FEMA/DHS Federal Register Notice, 4/1/05]

Under a rising sun that looked like a ruddy impostor now a freight train full of emergency medical supplies shouldered its way westward through raw cuts in the mountain side, its rusted cars rattling and swaying on the tracks as it cut through switchbacks, its horn a plaintive subsonic tone that seemed to rise up out of the ground like vapor in the heat of day.