Monster Nation(87)

Vikram opened it without comment. When he saw the image Clark sat down carefully and folded his hands in his lap.

'This one gets my vote,' Vikram said, and Clark had to agree.

'The dead are just standing there. They look like they are waiting for something,“ Vikram said, blowing up one corner of the image until the screen showed nothing but corpses, standing in a perfect semicircle, looking, well, contented. He zoomed back to check another feature of the image, rotating it through three dimensions. ”What are those? Dinosaurs?'





Monster Nation





Chapter Four


Sheldrake is a crackpot, of course. Canalized pathways? Morphic resonance? It's all chemical! I don't know why I waste my time with this nonsense. Cell differentiation stimulated by a biological field that can't be directly detected? Come on! [Lab Notes, 4/9/03]

Up through Nevada, deep into denied territory. Nilla traveled farther in one night in the Space Van than she had since her re-awakening. Hundreds of miles. There was no traffic.

'Things were good in Vegas, we had an operation,' Mike told Mellowman once. Nilla had nothing to do but listen to the two of them bicker, that and stare out the back of the van at stars and night. 'We had some protection. This road leads to' I don't know, hell. Hell on earth.'

'Here be dragons,' Mellowman agreed. 'And some people like dragons. Some people will pay anything for just one quick gander at a dragon's left butt cheek.' He shifted in the back of the van, duck-walking across Nilla's field of vision. His eyes were bright red, almost glowing, which wasn't surprising considering the ratio of pot smoke to oxygen in the van.

'Where are you taking me?' Nilla creaked.

Mellowman seemed to have found a new method for coping with her refusal to die, it seemed, and that was simply to ignore her. 'Besides,' he said, but not to her. 'Vegas is on the way out.'

'What are you talking about? The Chamber is keeping people safe!'

'The Chamber,' he told Mike, his tone growing imperial, 'is made up of *s like me and I know I'm running out of ideas. More people getting sick every day'more of these things getting loose. No. Vegas is on its last legs. If we want to make something happen, something real, the east coast is where we need to be. Maybe we even need to go further. I bet they'll just love our act in London. You ever been to Paris? It's the City of Lights. I can take you there if you'll just shut up and do what I tell you.'

'You think it'll stop here? You don't think we'll take it to Europe with us?'

'I'm doing what feels right. I'm going on instinct. That's what I've got, which is what has taken me this far and let me survive, and even build something, in a world that wants to kill me every time I turn around. And you know what, Mike? Lately my instinct is talking to me about heading east, and how I can do that. Lately it's been telling me I got to travel light. That I gotta trim the dead wood. How do you like that? I will include you in my plans because you know how to brew up the shit. Assuming you stop arguing with me.'

There was a long pause before Mike answered. 'You want to be alone with him, with the Termite?' he finally said, sounding like he had surrendered something. 'He's a hell of a driver and he digs graves faster than anyone I know but he's not much for conversation. Not to mention what's going to happen when you run out of scooby snacks. You think he's tweaking now''

Mellowman laid down on a piece of foam rubber that was almost large enough to serve him as a mattress. 'You got a point there, I suppose. Now shut up. I want sleep. Mellowman wants sleep!'

'Sure. Sure thing,' Mike said. Nilla couldn't see his face from where she sat.

Silence after that, for a long time. The sound of wheels on concrete, which after a while stops being a sound at all and becomes something different, more fundamental, less liminal. Nilla started listening for the jingle of the keys in the ignition, or the sound of Mellowman's heavy breathing. He never snored, though occasionally he muttered something dark and foul in his slumber.

She wasn't allowed to sleep. She wasn't allowed to just zone out. It seemed that whatever fate had let her live through so much wasn't in the business of being kind.

She heard Mike come across the floor toward her just fine when the time came. When he was sure that Mellowman was fast asleep, most likely. He spoke to her in a dry whisper. 'I know you're dead. Undead. I know you're not like the others, though. What the hell are you?' He didn't seem to expect a straight answer from her. Perhaps he thought she was some kind of spy, that she would refuse to give him that kind of information. If she'd known, though, she would have told him everything.