Monster Nation(42)

He did not know how many times he had done this before, or how many bodies of water he was yet to visit. Someone else, some other force kept track of those things.

Time to move on to the next errand. Dick pushed his face into a crack in the rock and dug out some spiders with his tongue. Just enough to give him strength. Then he headed forward, once again into the excoriating sunlight.





Monster Nation





Chapter Eleven


STAY TOGETHER! Know your group number by heart! [Signage posted at Evacuation Centers in Los Angeles, CA, 4/2/05]

Nilla couldn't help herself. She knocked on the door of the little apartment behind the motel's registration desk. No one answered, of course. She stepped inside into a faint smell of mildew and a lot of dust that jumped up out of her way everywhere she moved.

She found a dresser in the cramped bedroom and touched the smooth wood of its drawers for a moment before opening them. It wasn't so much that she felt bad about stealing another person's clothes, though there was that. It was more the lack of familiarity. She couldn't remember her own dresser, if she had one. She couldn't remember her own bed, the smell of the sheets, whether they were starchy or silky or even what color they were. It felt less like she was intruding on someone else's domain than as if she were inventing each gesture'the first time she ever opened a drawer, the first time she ever pulled on a pair of simple cotton boxer shorts. Things she must have done thousands, tens of thousands of times before in her living life.

Every single thing was new. Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe her life had been tragic and horrible. Maybe even that didn't matter. Maybe getting a second chance, one where you didn't have to be aware of the old life you'd lost'maybe that was something valuable and good by itself.

The clothes in the dresser were men's clothes. Maybe the man on the tree, the one who blew out his own brains with a shotgun'

The airy light coming in through the apartment's windows wouldn't let her dwell on thoughts like that. The little apartment was too cozy, the day too bright. She brushed the image right out of her head. It wasn't hard. She felt good, amazingly good. Maybe not as exultant as she'd felt in the middle of the night with her hands steeped in the blood of the bear. But good.

She zipped up a pair of low-riding jeans around her hips and buttoned down a soft white cotton shirt, rolling up the sleeves because they were too long. She caught her reflection in a mirror hung behind the door and had to stop a while and just take it all in. Her skin was clear. Pale, still, but' her eyes were big and warm and bright. No dark circles, no bags, not even crow's feet. Her hair looked like it had just been styled. She pulled up the shirt to check her abdomen, standing on tiptoe to see it in the mirror'a man's mirror, it only showed her from the neck up'and saw there was no discoloration there anymore. Even the wound on her belly had settled down to a few thin lines of scar tissue that looked old and well-healed where they bisected her tattoo. The only real injury she retained was the one that started it all'the circle of tooth marks on her neck and shoulder where she'd been bitten to death.

'How about that,' she breathed, a smile folding her lips. Pinkish lips, not blue. She laughed out loud, just a single ha but it was natural, spontaneous.

She looked great. She sniffed her armpits'nothing.

She was still admiring herself in the mirror when she heard a door slam nearby and someone come clattering out onto the motel's breezeway. Charles and Shar.

Now what was she going to do about them?

It is imperative, especially now, that facilities for worship and religious observance are made available for the use of relocated persons. In the interest of saving space a standard multi-faith chapel may be erected, as long as it follows military guidelines on diversity and tolerance. [FEMA Supplementary Notice No. 74: Relocation Camps: Facilities, issued 4/2/05]

From the Bakersfield checkpoint cars were standing three miles back, most of them with their motors switched off. The marines from Twenty-Nine Palms were Iraq veterans and they knew how to perform a vehicular search quickly and efficiently. They also knew the danger of letting anything at all slip by uninspected.

'Sir, with all due respect.' First Lieutenant Armitrading, United States Marine Corps bit off what he was about to say. He gestured at the soldiers arrayed around the checkpoint. They wore the new ACUs with digital camoflauge, something the Marines had invented and the other service branches were starting to adopt. The grey and black uniforms looked pixilated up close, as if the Marines were characters from some truly violent video game. 'I get five thousand thumb-suckers a day through here, headed for the camps at California City. Most of them are blonde.'