Chapter Fifteen
IN THE BLOOD: A good-looking young woman named Marisol Gonsalvez wastes her time and ours by starring as an ass-kicking nun with, you guessed it, the stigmata. This mildly offensive gore romper is opening in “selected cities” which means it isn’t going straight to video, but it probably should have (**, rated R for excessive religious violence and graphic nudity, 81 min). [Roger Ebert, One Minute Film Reviews, suntimes.com, 3/22/05]
The gun had been used recently and it was hot and it stank with a sour reek that poured down over her face and made her gag with fear. The SWAT trooper stood as still as a stone with his finger on the trigger. She couldn’t see his eyes, hidden behind thick goggles. What was he thinking? Was he questioning this at all? He could wipe out her life—her undeath, she supposed—in a heart’s beat if he chose. If she died there with no memories of her past it would be like she hadn’t ever existed at all.
Maybe that would be for the best.
She was already dead. Did she really want to face a new un-life in a decaying body? A new time without any knowledge of who she was or what she might have lost?
Then one of the others, the one in the military uniform—she could see his eyes and they were full of sadness—had to spoil it all. “Who are you?” he asked, “what’s your name?” In the tone of voice you used when speaking to a frightened dog.
She sputtered out something, an answer, a negation and suddenly it was all too real. The possibility that she might have a name, lost out there somewhere but still intact, reawakened in her the sense of what she had to lose. She had something still, some breadth of time, and the fear of losing it could cripple her. Her brain rolled over inside her head as the dread overwhelmed her, completely took her over. Her body shook and spasmed and heaved as if she was going to cough up her own skeleton, spit it out on the ground. She felt something clotted and nasty leak from her, from her mouth, her nose, her eyes. She tried to cough it up.
She heard the gun click, heard a bullet inching through its oiled metal mechanism, getting ready for the shot.
With her eyes closed she could see the men like torches in a snowstorm. Their radiance, their golden tasty goodness glow that she wanted so badly to get close to, to consume. Their life force. She could feel the energy, the heat of it turned on her, focused on her and she knew they could sense somehow her own dark energy—that horrible perversion of life—God, she thought, if only she could hide that away from them, if only she could make them see her as one of them or even just see her as nothing at all, as invisible, transparent—
Something grated in her head, the bones of her skull sliding across one another like continental plates.
An icy shudder went through her. Her eyes shot open. She looked up and saw the men and every one of them had the same vacant look on his face.
“Where did she go?” the SWAT trooper asked. “I can’t see her!”
She had gotten her wish.
It couldn’t last: her body felt drained, her mind hazy, reeling, everything shifting its shape. In a moment she would lose all control and she would collapse and lose this magic she had somehow created, in a second they would see her. The man with the gun would see her again and nothing would stop him from shooting.
She had to escape.
Her hands were locked behind her with a loop of plastic, so she rolled over on her side and thrusted upward with her back, with her shoulder against the concrete until she was sliding upward onto her feet, a move she didn’t think human bones should allow but it worked for her. As fast as her feet could carry her (which wasn’t fast at all, damn it, she needed to move) she ran right toward the men, slaloming between them, careful not to touch them because that might just break the spell. Already they were starting to blink and look around, their eyes unfocused when they glided over her but that would change in a hurry. She had to get away… there, she saw a gap, a narrow space between two parked police cars, their red and blue light splashing across her white coat, run, run, run, okay, just a fast walk, anything, she squatted low, her body stiff and complaining, pushed her way into bushes. Behind her she heard shots fired, gunshots much louder than she expected and her torso winced painfully, her stomach clenching.
They were moving then, searching for her. She picked a direction and just moved, no conscious effort required, pure flight reflex taking over. But where to run to? Every direction seemed equally fraught with danger. Hide—she could hide. She found a hole to crawl into, a dry drainage pipe at the bottom of a ditch, wide enough for her to curl up inside. She tucked herself away, desperate to remain undiscovered. She scraped her zip tie against a piece of broken rebar until it snapped: the noise petrified her, made her think they would be on her in a moment.
They didn’t find her.
Dogs howled for her as she lay motionless and coiled. A helicopter buzzed overhead, its searchlight spearing the scrub grass right outside the mouth of her pipe, bleaching it of color. Men ran past with their guns jangling, excited for the kill, lusting for her blood. Hunger grew inside of her—it was the only way to measure the passage of time. She wanted to crawl out and away, to go look for some food but she didn’t dare. Instead she chewed on her fingernails, which just made her hungrier. She lost track of the seconds, the minutes, the hours. The night flew away from her on bat’s wings.
Dawn came, a hallucinatory vibrant blue on the grass that slowly turned to gray. There was silence around her. There had been for hours. She’d been waiting for something, some signal that it was safe to come out.
Nothing presented itself. Still. She couldn’t stay in the pipe forever. She had to get out. She had to get away. She harbored no illusion that the men had given up. They would still be looking for her. She was a monster. Something that had to be hunted down. She had to run as far and as fast as she could to avoid them. Definitely she had to get out of town. Where could she go, though? She might have family somewhere, people who would hide her, but she had no recollection of anyone. She didn’t know where she lived herself.
Stiff with cold and moisture she unraveled herself in the pipe and climbed out on all fours, every inch costing her jolts of pain up and down her spine. Once she was fully out of the pipe she stood up with infinite care and caution. The motion made her head buzz. Exhaustion and the ever-growing hunger made everything around her jittery and sharp. She rubbed at her eyes with her knuckles and something dark flared in her mind’s eye.
She gulped and choked on a shriek, keeping it inside of her but just barely. There—up on a hill above the hospital. Just a silhouette, a man-shaped darkness framed against the first orange smudge of the rising sun. She squinted hard and saw a naked man, his skin covered in blue curlicues and arabesques. Tattoos. He didn’t look like one of the dead. He looked perfectly healthy. He had a thick bushy beard and his hair was pulled back in a tight pony-tail. He wore nothing but a piece of rope around his neck and a band of fur around one bicep.
The man looked right into her head and she knew he was not just aware of her but psychically inside of her. He was probing her, studying her. She sensed some things about him, reciprocity for what he was taking from her. Not words, nothing so complex—just buzzing, distorted sensations, feelings, images. He was old, very old, and very much undead like herself, he let her know. He was a friend.
He turned away from her and pointed at the sun. She understood.
In a moment all of it was gone. He was gone. She was standing on wet grass, alone, defenseless. Hunted. She had something, though. There was somebody else—somebody like herself out there. She had no idea if she could trust him or not but what did it matter?
She had a direction. East. Go east, the naked man had been telling her. She had to go somewhere. Go east. Okay, she thought.
Okay.
END OF PART ONE OF MONSTER NATION
