Monster Nation(91)

'You're' you're dead,' he said. It might have sounded like wishful thinking but that wasn't it. It was merely him completing a line of reasoning. One that Mellowman had worked through in the space of a heartbeat. Morphine Mike, with his degree in environmental chemistry, was just now figuring it out. Not all dead people are alike.

'Yes,' she said. The darkness inside of her coiled and bent. It was laughing, laughing at him. Laughing at the living.

She had so many people inside of her now' literally, and figuratively. Jason Singletary was in there. So was Mael Mag Och. It was as if by losing herself, her memory, she had made herself a vessel to be filled up by others. Like being possessed, perhaps, or suffering from multiple personal disorder. There were many of her now. This Nilla, the one who stepped closer to Mike and leaned in, pushing up hard against the envelope of his personal space, was the darkest of the lot.

Bad Nilla. Evil Nilla.She could just eat him up.

He swallowed a gulp of beer. Dropped the can onto the sandy soil where it fizzed noisily for a moment like a flame going out. 'Mellowman? The Termite?'

She smiled, showing him her teeth. Were there flecks of skin and meat stuck between her incisors? She didn't care. She contemplated telling him to go see for himself. Tricking him, locking him up in the cave with the Termite. Let them starve to death and see which one ate the other first.

The dead don't drive, though.

'They're not going to be problems for us anymore. Can we go, or do you need to sober up, first?' she asked. She put a finger under his chin. It was necessary, she knew, to establish the hierarchy here. He had to know who was in charge. She found the pulse point of his neck and tapped it rapidly. In time with his heartbeat.

She felt so good. So strong. When he asked which way to drive she fastened her seat belt and told him to go east.

They were fifteen miles down the road, well on their way to Salt Lake City, when a helicopter flew by so low over them that the Space Van rocked on its wheels. 'Shit!' Mike squeaked, the curse spurting out of him as he struggled with the steering wheel. He slammed on the brakes and pulled them over onto the shoulder.

'What are you doing?' Nilla demanded. 'Get back on the road.'

'They saw us!' Mike bit his lower lip. 'Maybe we can abandon the van. Maybe we can go into the desert on foot'it's cold at night, though, so we'll show up on IR. Shit!'

'What are you talking about? That was just a helicopter. They probably have bigger things to worry about than us.'

Mike shook his head. 'Look, you have got to understand what's happening. This was Mellowman's plan. The military is offering to pay for your capture. They offered a ludicrous amount of money. Enough to make it worth it to him not to kill you. He was supposed to meet them halfway, back at the cave, and collect the bounty. I don't know if they just showed up early for the meet and found his corpse or maybe they had the place under surveillance already. Either way they are not going to just let us go.'

The military. Nilla remembered the man in the Army uniform, the one who had nearly supervised at her execution. 'Get back on the road,' she said. 'Turn off the headlights. There won't be any traffic.'

'No f*cking way! We're already caught. All we can do is surrender and hope they don't shoot us on principle.'

She grabbed his forearm and put his wrist in her mouth. She crunched down, hard, but not hard enough to break the skin.

Mike got the message.

They burned out onto the highway accelerating as hard as the Space Van could, rolling from side to side like a boat. Without the headlights the van might as well have been plummeting forward into interstellar space. Nilla grabbed a map out of the glove compartment and studied it by the illumination of a Zippo lighter she found underneath it. 'Okay,' she said, 'okay, we can do this'I've outmaneuvered them before. North of here is the Bonneville Speedway. Sure'the Salt Flats, right?' She could remember the rocket cars setting land speed records, but she couldn't remember her name? She would dwell on the disparity later, she decided. 'There have to be some buildings there. Something with cover. Take a left up ahead.'

'Where? I can't see anything!'

'A left!' she shouted when he started to veer into the right lane.

He turned hard, perhaps thinking she'd seen a turn he'd missed. The Zippo touched the map and the map went up in flames. The van took a guard rail hard and listed over to one side. They were going at least sixty, probably more.