Monster Nation(95)

They gave her some clean clothes and let her take a long, hot shower. They fed her a couple of hamburgers that came on a biodegradable brown tray. She ate the tray, too, when nobody was looking. A female soldier wearing riot gear offered to help her fix her hair and her makeup if she wanted. She declined. They were all very polite and kind and they never got closer than six feet to her.

At all times they kept her chained to a wall.

They kept her blind-folded, gagged and hog-tied for the entire ride to their base and nobody would tell her where she'd been taken but one look at the flaking paint on the walls, the endless series of locked doors, the narrow windows holding shatterproof glass suggested either a mental hospital or a prison. There were tie-downs and chain staples in every room, restraints built into every cot. Security cameras lurked in the corners and the doors all came in pairs so that she had to be buzzed through twice every time she moved from one room to another.

Eventually they locked her down in a staff lounge and left her there. Two long Formica cafeteria tables almost filled the room, leaving only a little space for a bar made of dented chrome. The carpet was burnt orange and speckled with tufts of hard plastic where someone had dropped a cigarette and it had fused the carpet fibers together. Horseshoe-shaped fluorescent lights buzzed down on her from a ceiling of crumbling white acoustic tile. Behind the bar someone had nailed up a line of wooden bubble letters:

YE OLDE ENGLISH PUB

There was a neon Coors sign near the door. In one corner of the ceiling a blank-faced motion detector clicked and displayed a green light every time she got up from her seat and wandered around the room. Eventually she got bored enough to try an experiment. Banking her energy down to nothing she stood in the middle of the room, quite invisible, and waved her arms.

Click. The green light flickered a little, but it burned strong and bright after a moment. Clearly her best and only trick wasn't going to get her out of there.

A door opened on the far side of the room, near the bar. The head *, the one who had asked her what her name was so very, very long ago, the one who had claimed he would kill Shar if he had to, walked in. He looked like he had a stick up his ass. He looked like he daily removed said stick, polished it, and reinserted it.

He sat down at one of the cafeteria tables, at least six feet away from her, and put his hat on the seat next to him. He looked at her without saying anything. He had brought a briefcase with him'now he put it on the table and flicked open its latches. 'Do you drink, Nilla? We have a wide selection of canned beers to choose from.'

Nilla stared back at him. If he was going to treat her like an animal in a zoo she was damned if she would talk to him. She wanted to channel the personality she'd had before, the dark Nilla who looked on humans as food and who found the end of the world ironically amusing, but that Nilla was gone. No, she'd pretty much blown that act when she demonstrated she still cared enough about Shar to save the girl's life.

She wasn't about to go soft, though. She made a hard line of her mouth and didn't move. Tried to look as dead as possible. The world hated her, people like this man had gone out of their way to prove it. She refused to let them see whether or not she cared.

'I'm not a big drinker myself,' he told her. 'I do like to come down here from time to time, though. It's nice. Cheerful. It lets me forget for a few minutes what's going on out there. All the people dying. all the parents losing their children, all the children who are so afraid. I am trying to stop the Epidemic, and I will do everything in my power to advance that aim. But even I need to relax sometimes. To get away and pretend it all doesn't exist.'

Nilla could feel her eyeballs drying out but she refused to blink.

He stood up and took something out of his briefcase. He walked closer to her, only hesitating once he came into biting range. She reached under the table and grabbed the chain that anchored her to the wall. He dropped a piece of heavy paper on the table before her.

With a flick of the wrist she smashed her chain against the underside of the table, making a noise like a gunshot. She bared her teeth at him, bugged her eyes out. Hissed.

He didn't flinch, which she had to admit impressed her. His nostrils did flare a little but he didn't jump. He didn't exactly waste his time about retreating to the far table, but he hadn't jumped.

She had met so many weak people. He wasn't one of them.

'Please look at the picture in front of you. I don't have as much time as I would like, so if you could stop playing games with me, I'd appreciate it. Look at the picture and tell me what you see.'