Chapter Six
Subtle energies, discrete communication. So many months gone to this foolishness. Am I just looking for a way to keep my mind occupied? The neoplasm is an ostrich egg, we can see it right through the skin and here I am growing bluegrass in Dixie cups. The world’s most expensive high school science project, I… I need some rest. [Lab Notes, 1/1/04]
She came trudging out of the cave to find the Space Van pinging softly in the starlight. Folding patio chairs had been set up around the open back, and a tiny hibachi gave off a cheery glow from the tailgate. Morphine Mike was drinking a beer, his back up against the dusty metal of the van.
Mellowman’s energy popped and crackled inside of her. She felt like an overdone potato in a microwave. She hadn’t felt so strong since she’d eaten the bear.
The tight muscles across Nilla’s stomach rumbled for a moment and something tiny and metallic squeezed its way out of her skin. The puckered exit wound it left behind closed up and healed over as she watched. She bent down and picked up the piece of buck shot. She was full of them, still, and her body was rejecting them one by one. She would probably be shedding them for a week.
It didn’t matter. Mellowman was dead and she… wasn’t.
Mike was agitated. He wanted to get in the van and rocket away, just get out of there and head back to Las Vegas. She could tell by the way he kept looking at the road. He would have heard the screams, of course. He would know what was happening.
She stepped closer to him. Into the red light of the hibachi. She let her dark energy flow back into her, the cool flame spreading through her limbs like tingling shadow. It felt like pins and needles all over. He yelped a little when she appeared in front of him with no warning.
“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 fucking 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.
The Space Van rolled at least once as he panicked and she screamed but she couldn’t have said later how long it took for the vehicle to skid and slide and rock to a stop. She felt her soul leave her body, much as it had when she was restrained in the hospital bed, back when she thought she was still alive. She felt her soul careen back and forth inside the van, a bean inside of a maraca, a die inside a gambler’s hand. She saw bits of flaming map dance in the spinning cabin, saw Mike’s face turn to look at her, his mouth moving, forming words but she didn’t hear them.
Go limp, she told herself. Her limbs turned to loose rubber and bounced around inside the van, her body shook like a doll. Go limp.
Then the van smacked the desert on its side and slid about a hundred feet, showers of sparks flying up every time it grazed a rock. It finally came to a stop. Nilla bounced a little inside the protective webbing of her seat belt, but she was okay.
She stared out at the starlit desert beyond the shattered windshield. Everything had stopped. She looked down, down at where Mike sat in the driver’s seat. He wasn’t there. She searched her memory, trying to figure out how that could happen. She remembered he hadn’t been wearing his seat belt.
Carefully, trying to avoid the piles of broken safety glass that seemed to be everywhere, Nilla unfastened herself and climbed out of the wreck. A helicopter shot by overhead, very fast, while she stood there, craning her head back and forth, looking for Mike. She walked out onto the Salt Flats and the ground crunched beneath her feet.
Eventually she found him.
He had been thrown through the windshield in the crash and his body had gone skidding over the crunchy, perfectly smooth salt rime for over a hundred yards. Judging by the broken depressions in the soil he must have skipped like a stone on the top of a pond.
He wouldn’t be coming back. Shards of glass stuck out of his head like a bloody crown. Nilla felt her shoulders fall, a certain tension dripping away from her.
From behind she heard the sound of heavy trucks roaring toward her. Overhead two more helicopters came in slow and circled around her, their lights stabbing the desert, missing her entirely.
Nilla was still flush with energy. She went invisible.
