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About the Book

Monster Nation is a novel posted in blog format, concerning the opening days of a strange new epidemic and the end of the world. The novel is complete as of March, 2005 and commenting is closed (to prevent spam) but you may still contact us via email, or post a comment at the bottom of this page.

Monster Nation is the second volume in a trilogy. The first volume, Monster Island, is still available. Monster Island tells the story of what happened to New York City after the rise of the dead.

If you'd like to contact us, please don't hesitate to post in the comments below, or email us at contactmonster@hotmail.com And if you enjoy the novel, please help us spread the word by telling your friends and linking to us; we're always looking for new readers.

Thanks, and welcome,
David Wellington (Author)
Alex Lencicki (Publisher)

Monster Island and Monster Nation are now available for the ipod.

Hello everyone.

This is the part where I bring down the lights, have a seat on my simple wooden stool, and bring the mood down for a moment to talk about something very close to my heart: the book you just read.

This was a very different kind of book from what I'm used to writing. It was much, much more difficult and a little more fun. It was also very therapeutic. I'm coming off the most eventful year of my life as I'm writing this. A lot of great things happened. I got married for one, and had the best day of my life surrounded by our two families. A lot of dark things happened, too, though. I've taken solace in these pages, turning to my writing as a way to get my demons out. I don't know if it shows or not. I think on the whole this was a darker book than "Monster Island", but I suppose that's up to the readers to decide.

I hope you enjoyed coming along on this tour of my psyche. I definitely enjoyed having you. Normally the acknowledgements page comes at the start of the book--but this is not a normal book. I'd like to thank everyone who read "Monster Nation", whether you read it on your cell phone, your PDA, your computer, or printouts you clutched in shaking hands as you read under the covers on a moonless night. I especially want to thank those who commented on the chapters. Adrian Padden, of course, was the sexiest cheerleader of all, yet again. Alnjo tried to keep him (and me) honest. The Laura(s), Digbeta, igame3d, Feral Fish (who started a fan site!), Marbo/Marbotty/Marb-something, Don, Donny D, DavidKaye929, Mendoza, Mel, Jacqui, Carlos, Shadowfusion99, Timmy, Baglegod, liam, Saketini and everybody else I'm forgetting, thank you so much. You kept me going, you kept me writing when I just wanted to curl up and go to sleep forever. Your role in this project has been far more dynamic and far more valued than you know.

There were two people who provided information without which I could not have read this book:

Raul Gallego, provided information on topics military, architectural, and religious. Then there was Clint Freeman, who knew more about Florence, Colorado and its famous prison than I had room to fit into the book.

There are those who say a book like this is only as good as its research. If you enjoyed "Monster Nation" you owe these two men a round of applause.

Also, let us never forget Alex Lencicki, of course, our intrepid publisher. And webmaster. And Halo 2 instructor (the man is unstoppable with an energy sword). And friend. Alex went so far past the call of duty this time I nearly lost sight of him. During the last few months Alex made this story available on cellular phones, PDAs, and now, of all things, iPods. Alex Lencicki is no Johnny Halfways.

I would like to thank my wife, Elisabeth, who put up with all of this when she really didn't have to. Thanks, Pepper. Just one more to go.

Speaking of which.

"Monster Planet."

Well. Give me a little time. I've been working on a bunch of side projects. There are some "Monster Universe" short stories out there floating around in the process of getting published. I'm in school, I have a full time job, and I'm moving to a new apartment.

Let's meet back here in three months. Call it Monday, May 23rd. I reserve the right to change that date if necessary, but I'll do my best to stick to it.

I know it's a long time, but it will be worth it, I promise. "Monster Planet" is going to finish this thing in style. Think running gun battles between the living and the dead. Think mysteries uncovered and solved, think legends made and broken, think bizarre new dead characters with bizarre new powers. Think Nilla and Dekalb and the Russian Boy. Think Ayaan. Think Sarah. Think Gary. Think the end of the world.

Think how much fun we still get to have together.

-Dave Wellington

The rattling of the chains, the droning of the fan irritated Dekalb. He wanted to brush the sounds away like buzzing flies. He didn’t have the strength to lift his hands. “Did you hear something before?” Dekalb demanded. The mummies swiveled him around until he was looking at Gary. “Or maybe it was a smell, something foul in the air.”

The skull on the floor didn’t move its lower jaw but it spoke all the same.

She picked up the thick bunch of cables in one hand and cut it with her hatchet. That killed the cancer woman, of course, her system couldn’t function without the constant input of energy from the Source…

“Shut up for a second,” Dekalb hissed. His own voice was less than a whisper. It was the movement of a gnat’s wings, with no strength behind it. “There’s something different. Something… bad.” His eyes went to Gary’s skull again. The lower jaw… something was wrong with it.

So what Clark wanted, which was just vengeance, revenge for humanity, was achieved and she left, which makes you kind of wonder. Was she good or evil? Or maybe she just wanted to make up her own mind about things…

That jaw—it hadn’t been there before. When Dekalb had still been alive, when he had taken Gary’s head away from the fortress in Central Park, he had left the jawbone behind.

Gary had grown back an entire body part while he told his story.

Dekalb’s eyes were clouded with decay, his vision poor at best. He looked closer. Had the skin on Gary’s head smoothed out, erasing the old burn scars? Were those—had he seen movement in the empty eyesockets?

So she found Mael again and he told her, her name was Julie. He could be pretty generous when you did what he wanted. Maybe I was too hasty in eating him. He could have taught me so much more…

A rumbling vibration shook the room. A vast emergent noise—a whale turning over in the darkness below the ocean. A mountain falling down in another country. Except it wasn’t a sound at all, was it? Dekalb felt it on the back of his neck.

The energy—the dark energy. It was rising, moving. Something—something dead was moving. Something undead. Dekalb peered between the blades of the turning fan, studied the wedges of yellow and purple light he could see, the featureless sky beyond his hiding place. Nothing there—the thin texture of stratospheric clouds, the soundless sky where no airplanes flew anymore, where no one went, cold and frozen and lifeless and empty as the day the earth began.

She kept coming east, but of course, you know what she must have found here. She never saw Mael Mag Och again, at least not that he remembers…

“I said shut up!” Dekalb croaked, summoning enough energy to look over his shoulder.

Gary looked back at him with bloodshot eyes.

Shivers of fear stabbed out of Dekalb’s dry adrenal glands, making his kidneys ache. It was impossible. It was impossible but it was real. Somehow Gary was healing himself. Rejuvenating himself. The whole time while Dekalb had been absorbed in fanciful stories of invisible dead girls and armless freaks Gary had been making himself over and anew.

“What have you done?” Dekalb wheezed.

The skull on the floor rolled its eyes. You’re imagining things, old man. Come lie down again and I’ll tell you another story.

Dekalb summoned the mummies to take him down from his hooks but he didn’t want to lie down on the catwalk again not with that… thing looking at him.

The mummies did his bidding. While Dekalb sat propped up against a girder they searched the supply closets. One of them returned with the necessary tool. She stepped up behind the skull and raised her arms, rotten linen spilling away from her body, softened grey skin showing underneath.

I think you’ve really lost it this time, Dekalb. There’s nothing to—

She brought the sledgehammer down, brought its five pound head down on the skull, shattering the bones, spilling dry dark brain matter across the floor. The bloodshot eyes spun comically in their sockets and ended up pointing in two random directions, neither of them looking at Dekalb.

It had been totally necessary. Dekalb knew it in his bones. He felt guilt burn in him, and it felt like his hunger had returned.

Beyond that, much larger if not so well-defined, he felt loneliness creep into the room like twilight. Dekalb did not sleep, none of the dead did, but he had allowed himself to become so decrepit and dilapidated that his brain could wander for hours at a time, whole days when it chose to, lost not in thought, no, not in anything so conscious and concrete but instead wandering through mist, through grey nothingness. It was a kind of unconsciousness. He shut himself down, then, to get away from the loneliness, the weakness of his body, the guilt. He returned to himself in time, just as he always had before. Days had passed, he thought. The mummies couldn’t tell him—their sense of time was numbed by their sense of immortality. Yet it looked like the light had shifted enough for it to have been days. It was time, time to return to himself. Time to figure out what came next.

In his half-sleep his body had tumbled down across the catwalk and the lattice of metal there had cut into his cheek, making an obscene checkerboard of his face. The mummies came forward, two of the strongest, and they re-arranged him, re-positioned him on the floor. They let him look at the skull.

It didn’t look as bad as he’d thought before. It didn’t look so bad at all, really, though you could see the cracks where the hammer came down. The eyes still pointed in random directions.

Except when one of them swiveled around and focused on Dekalb’s face.

Dekalb was well beyond the ability to shriek, or else he would have.

“I’m sorry that it’s dead. I know you would prefer it alive.”

Vronski put down a plate in front of Nilla. A dead rat lay on its side there, one glazed eye pointed in her direction. She ate it without thinking too much about it. She was too busy trying not to look at Charlotte.

The paleontologist had prepared a Lean Cuisine for himself. Apparently Charlotte didn’t eat any more, so instead he had placed a vase full of cut flowers where her plate should go. As Nilla tried not to watch Charlotte slowly and methodically tore the petals off the flowers and crumpled them between her fingers.

Charlotte was still alive. Vronski had assured Nilla of that fact at least three times. It was hard to believe him. Boils and eruptions covered the skin of her one remaining arm, which emerged from under a pendulous roll of ill-defined flesh. When she moved Nilla could almost make out the shape of a human being in the mass.

The paleontologist’s wife had been a lawyer, once, he had told her. Now she was an abomination. Pancreatic cancer had blossomed inside of her, spreading to every part of her body. It should have killed her. Vronski had kept her alive at the cost of apocalypse, but in the process he had kept the cancer alive as well. Apparently there had been no choice.

The cancer outweighed what was left of Charlotte, probably by a factor of three to one. Its abstract tissue draped over her back and down her sides. It dragged on the floor behind her. It obscured her breasts and hips and it completely hid her face. It mostly looked like fat tissue covered in thin, translucent skin, but in places it had tried to form itself into pieces of a human being. A row of perfectly-formed teeth emerged from the smooth expanse where Charlotte’s shoulder must be. Patches of hair had broken out here and there on her back and there were fingernails growing in places that weren’t fingers. A single closed eyelid could be seen on her stomach.

A thick bundle of black cables drooped from under the roll of flesh and snaked its way out of the room. It connected Charlotte’s nervous system directly to the Source. Without those cables, Vronski explained, she would die instantly. The human parts of her were incapable of supporting the cancerous parts without direct stimulation.

“I kept her alive,” he said, over and over. The culmination of his life’s work.

He had tried his best to give her back a face. To this end he had bought a porcelain domino mask—the kind found in little girl’s bedrooms around the country—and tied it around where her head should be with a length of pink ribbon. From time to time it would begin to slip down and Vronski would patiently get up and readjust it.

He had not bothered to put any clothes on her, though Nilla imagined it would take a tent’s worth of cloth to cover her swollen bulk.

“Is she… is she even aware of us?” Nilla asked, dragging her gaze away from Charlotte to look at the thing’s husband. “Can she smell us or something?”

“Please don’t,” he hissed.

After dinner he agreed to take Nilla down to look at the Source. On the way she passed quite close by Charlotte. She noticed the mask had been broken at some point and very carefully glued back together.

"There have been some psychological adjustments we had to make," he whispered, but said no more.

Vronski lead her down two flights of stairs into a room at the very bottom of the museum. It had been used once as a workshop and laboratory and it was still full of crates full of carefully-packed fossils. Vronski offered to show her his best specimens—he claimed to have a nearly intact archaeopteryx—but Nilla was far more interested in the room’s other contents. Namely, the Source.

Various items surrounded it—what looked like tikis carved out of wood and shrunken heads mounted on sticks, while elaborate patterns of colored powder lined the floor, but the room was also stuffed full of scientific apparatus. A complicated looking device collected the energy of the Source and sent it through the black cables to where Charlotte waited upstairs. Vronski tried to describe how that worked but Nilla didn’t care at all. The Source demanded all of her attention.

It was difficult to say how large it might be—it radiated life energy so strongly that when Nilla closed her eyes it looked like a blazing star. She could feel its power, quite literally—it pushed at her. It blew her hair back. It was beautiful, far more beautiful than a dead thing like herself deserved. Probably it was more beautiful than anything on Earth deserved. It was constantly in motion, its shifting, shimmering rays twisting through the air as if they were threads of gossamer billowing in a pleasant breeze.

It was the beginning, the start of all things. You could feel as much, if you reached out a hand toward it. It made you. It shaped you. From a center that was also an edge it reached out to every cell, to every twisted coil of protein. It spoke the language of chemicals binding together and combining, recombining, a language as softly spoken as pine needles falling on snow. It knew your thoughts. It gave you your thoughts and your feelings.

“I’m sorry,” Vronski said.

She looked up at him. “For what?” she asked.

“It’s just—you’ve been standing there for fifteen minutes now and I’d kind of like to get on with things. If you don’t mind. You can go back to looking at it after you’ve killed me.”

Fifteen minutes? She had barely started gazing on the Source.

“I’m still considering what I should do,” Nilla said, collecting herself. And she was. She had choices, or at least a choice, for the first time since… well, the first time she could remember. She could kill the man who had started the Epidemic. In the process she would insure that nobody else could ever take the Source away from her—that her unlife would go on forever. Mael would like that. Alternatively, she could do what Captain Clark had wanted. She could shut this thing down. End her own existence, yes. End all the death and pain and horror too.

She thought of the creature upstairs that Vronski called his wife. Vronski had started the Epidemic in order to maintain her life, long past the point where anyone would think she would want to keep it. Nilla’s choice was sort of the same. Prolong her own, largely miserable, existence, or choose death. Actual death.

She stalled. “What is this?” She asked. “How did you make it?”

“It’s a field, a kind of biological field. It’s similar to the Earth’s magnetic field. Life couldn’t exist without it. I didn’t make it. It was always there, I just… well. I’m sure you don’t want all the details. Imagine a balloon full of air. I stuck a needle in the balloon and now air is rushing out. Except this balloon won’t ever deflate—it’s constantly being filled back up with new air. This is a singularity, you see, a biological singularity. It’s pumping out the raw energy of life itself. Ordinarily that power is used by the cells of living things, both as an energy source and a repository of patterns, a complete set of blueprints for every biological process. The cells control it and manipulate it via a feedback loop we don’t really understand. I’ve liberated some of the energy from that system, to keep Charlotte’s body from failing. Unfortunately I had no control over how much I liberated. It grows, it wants to grow. It keeps growing, spreading from one biological cell to the next. You, and the others like you, are the result.”

“I can’t believe this. You fucked with the life force? Talk about playing God. What are you, some kind of mad scientist?”

Vronski shrugged uncomfortably. “I kept her alive. She’s still alive.” He raised his hands and lowered them again. “I would have killed myself a while back. I know what I did, and how wrong I was. But then who would look after Charlotte? She’s always bumping into things, and cutting herself by accident and she needs someone to tend to her little boo-boos. I love her, you see. I love her so very, very much.”

He looked less human in that moment than his wife. He looked like a part of a person, an idea that never got thought over. A fragment of intention with nothing to back it up. He was a mad scientist alright, but not in the traditional sense. He was a scientist, and he was mentally ill. That was all.

“Okay.” Nilla had made her decision. “Well, that’s over with now. You and I are going to shut this thing down. I don’t care how difficult that is or what it will do to her, just show me how.”

He looked up with a strange expression on his face. Incomprehension, from a man used to understanding things intuitively. “Shut it down?”

“Yeah. We end this, I fall down dead, the world goes back to normal. How do I begin, do I do this?” she asked. She knocked over one of the tiki statues. Picked it up and threw it against a wall until it broke. “How about this?” She grabbed an oscilloscope off a wheeled cart and dropped it to crash in pieces on the floor. “Stop me when I’m getting warm.” She found a hatchet on one of the lab tables and started breaking equipment.

“I don’t think you understand,” he told her. “This is a breach made in one of the most basic elements of nature. This is a self-reinforcing singularity. It provides its own power, it, it increases in size without any kind of input!”

“So?” Nilla shouted. “So what?”

“So… you can’t shut it down. That isn’t physically possible. You can’t stop this now. You can’t stuff the air back into the balloon.”

Nilla let her arm drop. She stared at him. Into him. He was telling the truth. He wanted someone to stop the Source. He needed it, though it meant losing his wife. But it couldn't be done.

He turned away from her and picked up a fossil from a lab bench. A trilobite—something extinct and yet still beautiful. “I imagine you’re going to kill me now, which frankly, I’m fine with. I mean I deserve it. I deserve worse.”

“Yeah.” Nilla thought of all the people who had died to get her this close. Shar and Charles. Mellowman, Morphine Mike. The Termite. Captain Clark and all of his soldiers. The man in the truck who bit her on the neck. Every single person she’d met since her reawakening was dead along with others, so many others, so many millions of others. What this man had done was beyond evil. “Yeah. You do deserve worse.”

She picked up the bundle of black cables that ran across the floor. With the hatchet she cut through them all in one stroke.

They heard a tiny shout from upstairs, a sudden yelp of pain, but nothing like speech. Then something large and heavy collided with the floor.

Vronski’s blue eyes quivered in their sockets and sweat broke out on his forehead.

Nilla dropped the hatchet and walked away, away from the scientist, away from the museum, away from the mountains. Somewhere in Kansas she stopped in the middle of a highway because Mael was trying to talk to her. She turned around to see him standing naked behind her, looking apologetic.

“Your name was Julie,” he told her, and then he vanished in thin air.

END OF MONSTER NATION

Something was burning—Bannerman Clark felt the heat on his leg. He felt the hairs there crisp and curl and melt. There was only a little pain, in his chest. He looked down and wished he hadn’t. A jagged piece of steel transfixed him to the side of the broken helicopter. He was like a butterfly mounted in a case. Best to not try to move, he decided. Best to just wait it out. The heat on his leg kept getting more intense and he could smell his flesh burning, but still, there was no pain.

There had been a moment after he pushed the girl out of the hatch, a single moment when it looked as if the pilot might actually get them down safely. That Vikram might actually kill the armless dead man. That they could continue the mission.

Something slithered nearby.

There had been a moment and the moment had passed. The pilot had started screaming and then he had unbuckled himself from his seat, trying to get away, trying to get away from the murderous corpse. It had only taken a few seconds after that for the helicopter to smack into the side of the mountain.

The slithering thing drew closer. Clark opened his eyes, though he didn’t want to. He had some idea of what he was going to see. A dead person, a hungry dead person coming to eat him. He just wasn’t sure who it would be.

It was Vikram. The Sikh Major’s face was crumpled in on one side, he was missing an eye. One whole side of his body didn’t seem to work. He didn’t say a word as he hauled himself closer. His mouth was open, his teeth very white.

Vikram had a knife on his belt. A kirpan, more of a short sword. It was one of the religious objects he was supposed to keep on his person at all times. Clark could take that knife and destroy his friend’s brain with it. That was the very least he could do.

Assuming he could lift his arm. Assuming that Clark wasn’t completely paralyzed.

Vikram dragged himself an inch closer. Almost in range. Time to find out.

Something’s out there… I saw it today, again, working its way through the trees. I called out but it didn’t answer. Something is climbing up the mountain but I don’t think it’s human what is it? What is it? [Lab Notes, 3/21/05]

Nilla stopped screaming. She opened up her eyes. She was lying in something wet, something cold and white.

Snow.

Her neck could be broken. She’d hit the side of the mountain pretty hard. Sitting up could be the worst thing she could do for herself—she might tear her spinal cord.

Of course, it wasn’t like anyone was coming to rescue her. Clark hadn’t been trying to kill her. He’d been trying to save her. He knew the helicopter was going down. Nilla had heard it crash and clatter and fall and slide for what seemed like hours while she lay inert on the hard, cold ground, looking straight up.

She sat up.

Her bones still worked. Her ribs hurt like a motherfucker, but her legs, and her arms, and yes, her neck were all still intact. She had fallen a hundred feet out of thin air to collide with the stony limb of a mountainside and it looked like she had made it okay.

There were some benefits, she guessed, to already being dead.

She tried to get her bearings. Trees surrounded her on every side, conifers with a dusting of snow on their needles. Straight up, between the treetops, she could see stars and the faintest sliver of a crescent moon. If there was a way to know which way was north based on the position of the moon, Nilla couldn’t remember it. She was lost. Lost and alone in the middle of the wilderness in the middle of a continent full of dead things. If her neck had been broken she couldn’t have been in worse shape. She sat down and tried to think about what to do next.

That was when she noticed the light. It wasn’t normal light, of course, or she would have noticed it right away. It was more watery, more indistinct. She could see it better with her eyes closed. Well. There you go. It was the same kind of light she saw when she looked at living people. Golden. Perfect. Pretty much every fiber of her being was agreed. Getting closer to that light was a good plan.

Her mind, strangely enough, agreed. She had come to find the source of the Epidemic. The energy that kept her from dying like she ought to. She was one hundred per cent sure that this ethereal light that radiated right through the trees was the Source.

She got back to her feet and started walking. Climbing, in places, her hands clumsy but strong enough to grab at rocks and exposed tree roots. Her feet dug into the slippery ground, kicking through a rime of years-old snow, through the accumulation of fallen pine needles beneath, into frozen dirt under that. She hauled herself bodily up slopes, then ran, headlong, recklessly, down the other sides. She clambered over ridges of bare rock carved knife-thin by eons of wind. She crouched under endless tree branches and smacked her forehead on those she didn’t see and had bushel after bushel of freezing snow dumped down the back of her thin cotton shirt.

She should have been exhausted after the first quarter mile. Every step should have been harder, a brand new agony. But it wasn’t. If anything the mountaineering got easier. Her body felt better, stronger, healthier with every step she took. At one point she felt her neck spasm and shake and she thought maybe physical collapse had finally caught up with her but no. It was the bullet, the bullet the Indian soldier had fired at her on the prison’s rooftop. Underneath it the muscle fibers and nerves and blood vessels wriggled as they wove themselves back together. The inert leaden mass of the bullet popped out of her neck with an agonizing little sputter and fell to smack her hard on the bones of her wrist. She yanked her arm back in pain but even the pain disappeared after a moment.

The light that came through the trees—it was better than heroin. It was better than sex with a loving partner. It was better than a drink of water after three days of wandering in the desert.

It was nearly morning when she came out over a final lip of rock and saw the valley below her and the Source beneath it. Cold blue light the color of hallucinations lit up the sky over Bolton’s Valley, the place Captain Clark had shown her in a photograph. The place Jason Singletary had shown her with his mind.

She wasn’t the only dead person to have found the place. A crowd of them—maybe two hundred in all—stood below the ridge. Their battered and torn bodies looked relaxed there. Their ragged faces were turned upward to catch the light. It was tempting to join them. It was even more tempting to move closer, to go into that flaring beacon.

Nilla found herself elbowing through the crowd without really thinking about it. When one of the corpses coughed and cleared its dry throat she wasn’t even surprised.

“Lass. Please don’t go any farther.”

Nilla turned to face what had been a middle-aged woman. She had been plump, with chin-length hair pulled back in a simple black band. She had very little skin left on her face, and no eyes. Nilla understood, looking at her, that she could still see the light of the Source.

It was Mael who spoke through the woman, of course. “Why?” Nilla demanded. “Are you worried that I’ll go up there and turn this thing off, like Clark wanted? I haven’t actually decided what I’ll do yet. I haven’t decided who I am. Good Nilla, bad Nilla. I kind of want to find out, though.” Nilla closed her eyes and felt rays of sparkling warmth shoot through her, healing her, feeding her. Oh, she wanted to find out so very much. “I’ve got more important things to do.”

“Indeed, lass? And what’s more important than the end of the world? Answer me that. Or don’t. I’ve little left to teach you, but there’s this: don’t go another step.”

“Christ, next you’re going to tell me your God doesn’t want me up there.”

The woman shook her head. “Teuagh is no god. He is my father. He is the father of us all. When I was alive a child did what his father told him. I used to think I was like a father to you.”

“Really? Because I thought we had more of a Bruce Willis and Cybil Shepard thing going on. Wow, now that I think about it that’s kind of creepy. Well, listen, you can’t stop me. If I want to go up there I will.”

“You don’t ken it yet, Nilla. I’m not trying to stop you because I’m afraid of what you’ll do. I’m simply afraid you’re going to hurt yourself. There’s so few of us now. You, some fellow in New York who figured it out on his own. A lad in Russia who doesn’t even know where he is. I’m just trying to protect a very scarce resource, that’s all.”

Nilla opened her mouth to rebuke him but then she saw charred corpses in the broken field ahead of her. She took a step closer and felt the warmth of the Source grow hot. Another step and it was painful. “Oh,” she said. The same energy that fed her could burn her to a crisp if she got too close. Yet moving forward meant getting closer.

But then she just had it, as if her body knew what to do even if her mind was oblivious. She banked her energy—subtracted her darkness—made herself invisible. The one thing she could do that nobody else could manage. The one thing that set her apart. Instantly the warmth was gone. She stepped forward, and again, until she was even with the burnt and disfigured bodies sprawled across the rocks.

Nothing happened.

Singletary had been right. She was the only one who could go to the Source. She started to climb.

It was a far easier ascent than what had come before, though every step knocked loose showers of pebbles and dirt, eroded bits of hillside that went skittering down, pattering, pittering away from her. The handholds were stable, if the footing wasn’t. In a few minutes she had reached the top of a ridge. A green-painted stegosaurus stood watch there, sculpted out of concrete. Just as Singletary had shown her.

Dinosaurs. Statues of dinosaurs. A tyrranosaur loomed over the site, while human-sized velociraptors leered out from around corners. In the middle of it all stood a dilapidated building with a sign posted next to its door.

The door opened and a man stepped out. A living man. He was mostly bald, with tiny blue eyes, intensely blue eyes. Nilla walked over to him and took the hand he extended. He had no trouble seeing her, even though she was invisible. She must be invisible—if she let her energy show, even for a moment, she would have been incinerated.

“I always imagined one of you would come. Please. We should go inside.” He lead her into a dark building full of glass display cases. Some of them were empty and collecting dust. Others held dark fossils half-buried in matrices of brown or red stone. Educational plaques hung on the walls.

“Are you Dr. Vronski?” Nilla asked.

“I was,” he told her. “I mean… I was a paleontologist, before all this, well, you know, started. I’m the one, by the way. I’m the moron who killed off the human race.”

Nilla didn’t know how to reply to that. Then she thought of something. "How can you see me? I'm invisible."

He burbled pleasantly, as if something had tickled him. “After a while I learned how to see it. The singularity. It's like living next to an invisible star for months and months, eventually you start wondering where all the light is coming from. You’re like a shadow against that light. You know, like on a dark night, you can see a tree because its silhouette blots out the stars behind it. Come on, please, this way. You’re going to kill me, right? Kill me and eat me? It’s far less than what I deserve. Here.” He lead her to the top of a stairwell. “Maybe you’d like to see it first, though. The singularity. Or maybe… something to eat.”

Nilla looked down the stairs. There was someone else down there—or maybe two people, standing very close together. They moved into the light and her mouth fell open in true horror.

“This is my wife, Charlotte.” He looked at her eyes and whispered, “please don’t say anything about her appearance. She’s very sensitive.”

“He’s going to come out of there any second now,” Clark promised, but he knew he was wrong. Together with Vikram he stared at the stairwell hatch leading down into the prison. Sergeant Horrocks was supposed to be emerging from that door at any moment, leading what was left of the troops.

It had been seven long minutes since his last call. There had been a lot of noise back then, a lot of shooting and screaming coming up from below. All of that had since stopped.

“Any second,” Clark repeated, and Vikram muttered in acquiescence. Behind them the Pave Low helicopter spun its rotor uselessly. There was only so long that they could wait—fuel for the aircraft was at a premium.

“Ah, Bannerman—here he is,” Vikram announced, as a human shape appeared in the stairwell door. “Nothing to worry about, I—” Vikram fell silent for a moment, then let out a terrified shriek. He raised his sidearm and fired three rapid shots into the doorway. The bullets collided with dead flesh and sent the figure there spinning.

“That was so totally unnecessary,” the shadowy figure said.

It was the girl. She stood up and stepped onto the starlit helipad. A bullet hole in her neck oozed crusty powdered blood, dried up so long ago it wasn’t even shiny. She prodded the wound with one undead finger.

It was so easy to forget that she wasn’t one of the living. That she wasn’t exactly what she appeared to be, a helpless, innocent survivor of this horror. Clark had to remind himself from time to time that she was part of the Epidemic, not a victim of it.

“What did you do with Sergeant Horrocks?” Clark demanded.

The girl frowned. “Older guy, white hair, three stripes on his arm? He didn’t make it. None of them did. I watched them go under, Captain. I would have tried to help but, well, your men were trying to shoot me at the time. If they could have focused on their enemy, well—”

“That’s exactly what they were doing.” Clark stood up straighter than before and stared at her with his best command face. “So. Are you going to eat us now, or did you have something else in mind?”

The girl’s face soured and she threw him a mock salute. “I thought we would get in that helicopter and fly out to that mountain you were so excited about. You know, what we were supposed to do in the first place.”

“You don’t honestly expect me to take you with us,” Clark sputtered.

“I think you need all the help you can get. Listen, Captain—I don’t know anything about military tactics or politics or epidemiology or anything. I lost whatever expertise I may have had when I died. But I do know my destiny is up there. I’ll walk if I have to, but I’d prefer to catch a lift with you two.”

Clark felt a sinus headache coming on. He had no answers. He had no information. His chain of command was broken and his direct superior had turned against humanity. According to every order of warfare that he knew that meant it was time to fall back and call for evac. Yet fate had put him in the position of being the one who had to decide the entire future of the human race.

“Oh, hell,” he said, sounding prissy even to himself. “Mount up already. We’ve got no time to lose.”

It was all too true. Their destination, Bolton’s Valley, was nearly a hundred miles away even as the crow flew. The pilots assured him they could reach the Epicenter with the fuel onboard but it would be a close thing. Once they had completed their mission they would have to find alternate transport out of the area of operations.

Assuming they survived. Clark kind of doubted they would. As long as they got close enough to the switch, as long as they managed to turn this thing off, that would be enough.

He imagined it—the Epicenter—as some kind of science fiction death ray contraption. A big telescoping raygun with fins and flanges and control panels sticking out of a hatch carved into the mountain. He imagined it had two buttons that controlled it, conveniently labeled ON and OFF. He imagined pushing the latter and then going back to Denver, to the Brown Palace, and finally having that juicy, rare steak that fate had stolen away from him. He imagined taking a room upstairs, a room with tasteful wallpaper and gauzy curtains on the windows and a big, soft bed with a white coverlet. He imagined going to sleep for a very long time and then waking up to find that humanity had rebuilt after the dead stopped rising, that while he slept everything had been cleared away, tidied up, made whole again. He imagined that the population of the United States would have replenished itself and that there was no one left who even remembered the Epidemic, that there were no wounds anymore, no physical scars, no emotional traumas. No nightmares.

Except, he knew, that he would still remember. He would remember the face, and the name, of everyone who had died. He would remember them for the rest of his life.

Perhaps it was better if he didn’t come back.

“It is still a lovely world, is it not?” Vikram asked, jolting Clark out of his reverie. He hadn’t even noticed the helicopter lifting away from the prison. He hadn’t realized that they’d already swung way out across the mountains, that they were running fast, about a hundred feet up, following a ridgeline that probably marked the Continental Divide. Maybe an hour had passed and he’d been lost in his own thoughts. So close to the end and he’d wasted all that time.

He looked down, though, and saw trees clothing the rugged sides of the mountains, aspens and firs and loblolly pines. He saw water snaking between the peaks, the stars wavering in the depths of creeks and rivers. Oh, Vikram was so very, very right.

Then he looked over at the girl. She sat very still in her crewseat, buckled in and motionless. Her chest didn’t move with breath, her eyes didn’t blink. You could tell she was dead, if you paid attention. If you actually looked. She had the waxy skin of a corpse. She had the eyes that didn’t really focus anymore, not on anything in particular.

She turned her eyes to look back at him. “You think you’re going to find a way to end the Epidemic. You know that’s probably bullshit though, right?”

Clark nodded. He couldn’t stop looking at the girl. “Yes. I also know that it’s my job to find out. Because maybe, just maybe I can stop it. At the very least I can perform the final duty of any soldier who watches his country die.”

“What’s that?”

“I can take our communal revenge on whoever did it.” Enough. Clark wanted to change the subject. “So who told you about the mountain?” Clark demanded of her. “Who said you were the only one who could go there?”

She shrugged and looked out the window. “A man named Jason Singletary. He had a gift, a… kind of a power. He was psychic, if you have to hear me say it.”

“Psychic,” Clark said. The word came out of his mouth and hovered in the air like a grim little cloud. It sounded a lot like other words he knew now. Like “undead”, or “magic.” It sounded like one of the things that had gone wrong with the world.

The pilot broke the silence that followed. “We’re approaching the site,” he said. “Should be visible in a few minutes.”

Before he’d even finished his sentence fragment the hatch to the cargo compartment started rattling.

"What was that?" Vikram asked, sounding only a little panicked.

The pilot and the copilot exchanged long, meaningful looks. "Maybe you should check it out," the pilot said. The door kept rattling.

The copilot unstrapped himself and came aft, walking with the motion of the helicopter, one hand on the ceiling to brace himself. “What have we got back here, just rations and some light munitions, right?” he called back to the pilot. “Anything that might come loose?”

It was like a dream, a particularly horrible dream, where you know what is about to happen but you are so plagued by self-doubt and general anxiety that you don’t dare open your mouth to say it, because that would make it real.

The co-pilot reached for the handle on the side of the hatch and even before he had turned it all the way the hatch exploded inward, spilling two hundred pounds of meat into the crew compartment. There was blood, and torn flesh, and screaming, but in that first awful second Clark couldn’t connect the dots, couldn’t make sense of what was happening. Only when he heard Vikram calling his name did he really know.

A man. A dead man. A dead man with no arms.

A dead man with no arms, his torso riddled with bullet holes, his face distorted by damage and hunger, his body as dry and tough as beef jerky, had stowed away aboard the helicopter when it left the prison. The dead man had killed the copilot in one incredibly swift, incredibly brutal motion and now he had his teeth deep in Vikram’s calf. Some of the blood slicking down the floor belonged to his best friend.

The dead girl was up, standing on her chair. She looked horrified and Clark felt a quick irrational burst of desire—he wanted to tell her everything was alright,

A better plan came to mind a moment later. He was standing next to an exterior hatch with an emergency release. He pulled up on the red handle and the door fell away into blackness, cold air bellying in so fast and hard it knocked everyone down. The dead man slipped away from Vikram. The girl fell off her crewseat. Clark grabbed her arm and hauled her up to stand next to him.

The dead man didn’t bother getting up. He just got his teeth into Vikram again and kept chewing. Vikram drew his weapon and started firing at the dead man’s head but the helicopter was rolling, pitching, yawing—nobody could fire accurately under those conditions, and Vikram was no marksman.

The pilot kept looking over his shoulder, shouting something back at them. Questions. He wasn’t paying enough attention to flying the aircraft. “Soldier!” Clark yelled at him, “see to your duties!” Then he turned to the girl.

“This psychic,” he said to her. “He told you—you were the only one. The only one who could go to the Epicenter. He told you that, he was sure of that?”

The girl’s eyes were very wide. He shook her and she nodded. It was what he needed to hear.

Grabbing her by the arms he yanked her forward and shoved her out of the helicopter, out through the external hatch, out into the roaring sky.

In a disused kitchen full of dust and spiders Nilla tripped over a fat woman whose legs had been gnawed down to splayed fragments of bone. The corpse kept trying to get up, to pull herself up to a standing position by grabbing at a table above her. She would get a few inches off the ground and then fall back again with a sputtering creak, only to try again, and again.

Nilla picked up an institutional-sized can of beets and bashed the dead woman’s head in. Then she sat down on the floor next to the twice-dead corpse and tried to think of what to do next.

She felt tired, so tired. At least part of that had to do with the light. The emergency lights in the prison were everywhere and they were bright enough to let you see where the doors and exits were. The light came at weird angles, though, and it was dim enough that as you approached someone in the halls they looked like nothing more than a dull shadow. It was impossible to know if they were alive or dead.

Nilla. Nilla, speak with me. I can get you out of here if you’ll speak with me.

Mael’s voice had softened. Once his intrusions into her head had been buzzing, clattering torrents of noise. Now they almost sounded like her own thoughts. It was hard to resist him, harder than it had ever been before. He was figuring her out, learning her buttons, her triggers. He was going deep, inside of her mind, and she wasn’t sure she could extract him anymore without hurting herself in the process.

And was that such a bad thing? She had to wonder. She was pretty sure he was crazy, but at least in the middle of his insanity there was a place for her.

Why do you hide from me, lass? I thought we were finally getting on alright. Just say something, will you? Say something so I can figure out where you are. Then I can get you to safety.

She kept her mouth shut. She just wasn’t sure, yet. There was so much of her, so much she couldn’t see. There had been a complete human being, somebody with a personality all her own, with likes and dislikes and beliefs and attitudes and, and, and… memories. There had been memories and now they were hidden from her. That person had just stopped. When she died, that person had stopped functioning. Those memories had been barred from her, hidden behind a wall she couldn’t seem to break down.

Were those things lost forever? Would she ever get her memories back? Mael promised her a name. He had implied there was more. She knew better than to trust him completely, though. For all she knew he had nothing and whatever name he gave her would just be made up. Imaginary.

Lass. Don’t you know I’m your friend? Don’t you know it by now? I’ve done so much for you. Is this how you repay me?

Jason Singletary could have told her the truth, but he was dead now. Twice dead. She and Dick had devoured his body between them. It was the closest thing to mercy that she had possessed to give him.

She thought maybe that she had started over. That dying had relieved her of the burden of having a past. Or maybe it gave her a duty—a duty to rebuild her humanity.

Maybe she had been brought back for a reason, but not for Mael’s reason. Jason Singletary had certainly thought so. She was the only one, he’d said, who could go to that place. That place in the mountains, that place at the end of the world.

The place Captain Clark had shown her, in a photograph.

She stood up slowly and dusted off her pants. She left the kitchen. She took the next left turn just because she recalled that when you were lost in a maze you were supposed to take every left turn. That much she could remember.

The corridor beyond was long and dark and cold. At its far end she saw a rectangle of pale light. She moved toward it. She was drawn toward it. “I’m here, Mael,” she said out loud. Because she owed him that much. “I’m going to find my own way for now, though, if you don’t mind.”

Nilla—finally! I’d thought you must be dead. Well, I blasted well do mind, actually. We have things to do. Turn right at the next junction. That’s an order, lass.

“I’ve been thinking,” Nilla said. “I’ve seen what your dead people do to the living people. It looks pretty cruel to me. It looks pretty… unnecessary. If he just wanted to kill them all off, why didn’t your pal Teuagh just melt the ice caps or set off all the nukes or whatever? Why raise the dead? It’s so messy, so… inefficient. Are you telling me he couldn’t think of anything better?”

I don’t question his ways.

“Which just means you don’t know.”

Mael’s voice returned a little louder, a little harsher. She had gotten to him, she decided. If only just a little. That was a kind of victory in itself. If you’re going to tell me now that you don’t believe in the father of clans, I wish you would just save your breath.

“It’s not like I’m going to need it for anything else. Mael, I need some time to think. Some space. I want you to know, it’s not you. It’s me.”

His reply smacked into her ribs hard enough to make her squeak in surprise and pain. Something—something dead had come at her hard and fast. It wasn’t Dick: it had arms, arms that wrapped around her waist hard, unfeeling arms that would crush her if she didn’t do something.

Nilla did something.

Twisting to her side she dropped to the floor like a bag of flour, slipping down through the ring of those crushing arms. At the same time she kicked out with one leg, crushing a kneecap with the heel of her shoe. Unfeeling, the dead thing came at her again, surging through the darkness, enormous and stinking and ragged, torn and ravaged muscles convulsing, striking, descending to smash her to pieces.

Nilla reached up, felt hair, and grabbed. The dead thing swiveled and scratched and struck at the air but Nilla held it away from herself and avoided the worst of its attack. Heaving and grunting she hauled the dead creature toward the doorway, toward the light. She had to be fast and she pushed her muscles to obey her, to give her some kind of coordination as she pulled on the dead thing’s blood-matted hair. As she got its head under her armpit. As she heaved one more time and shattered its skull against the doorframe.

The dead thing collapsed like a bag full of meat. Nilla dropped it and stepped into the light, her body screaming at her, every muscle in her arms and back wrenched by the exertion. Then she looked down at the thing she’d killed.

Shar looked back up at her.

It was her, it was definitely her. How she had died, Nilla had no clue. It really didn’t matter. She had died and come back and Mael had been clever enough to make her one of his puppets. Nilla pressed one knuckle against her upper lip, trying not to vomit. When she stopped shaking she looked at the ceiling. As if he were there, somewhere, in the sky. The way someone else might have looked up to talk to God.

“This is it, then. It’s all you have to offer. Dead things struggling in the dark. Hurting each other. Fuck it, I’m done.”

He didn’t speak to her again. Maybe he knew better, or maybe she’d switched off whatever part of her brain listened to him. Beyond the doorway stood a stairwell that lead upward. At its top a door opened onto black air. When Nilla’s eyes finally adjusted she saw stars. Clouds. The night sky. To her left a pulsing heartbeat, a throbbing pulse of noise. She looked over and saw the spinning blades of a helicopter.

“There are some victories that cost more than defeat,” the Civilian lectured. Wearing only a hospital gown and a thick bandage around either wrist he should have looked absurd, or at least pathetic. His newfound power to strangle Clark’s life force probably helped there. “Then there are just plain old defeats. I never got that shit about captains going down with the ship. Even the rats aren’t that stupid, right? So back in the first days of the Epidemic, when this Druid guy came to me and said, look, humanity’s a done deal, it’s gone, finito, a real non-starter, but that maybe, just maybe there was a way for me to save my own neck, well. You know you have to listen to that. Look, give me your gun. I’m going to have power over the dead. He promised. You know, fuck dental, ruling the undead with an iron fist is the ultimate fringe benefit.”

Clark handed over his firearm. He had little choice. The Civilian could kill him before he could get off a single shot.

“I was a little leery when, you know, he said I had to die and then crawl my way back from the grave. That’s going to have a chilling effect on most negotiations. Turns out it was the easy part. I was going to come back anyway. Staying sharp, though, holding onto my faculties the way your blonde girl did, that took some work. It’s all about maintaining oxygen flow to the brain.”

“The girl,” Clark said, still kneeling on the infirmary floor. He could feel his calves ping as they complained about their cut-off circulation. “What does she have to do with all this?”

“Surprisingly little. God am I sick of hearing about Nilla! My new boss is obsessed with her, too. What is it, the blonde hair? The tits? No, Bannerman, she’s just a pawn in this game. A pawn that everyone thinks is a queen. Fuck her, alright? Let’s stay on-message here.” The Civilian smiled warmly at him. “I like you, Bannerman. I like you a lot.”

“I… like you, too,” Clark tried, warily.

The Civilian pulled away the chair that had been barring the door to the ICU. The door slid open silently and snicked against the magnet on the far wall, sealing itself open. The smell of blood and death billowed out of the enclosed room. “No you don’t. Nobody likes me, and with good reason. I’m an asshole. Because I had to be, to help preserve, you know, freedom. My country needed me to be an asshole. You, on the other hand, are likeable. You’re honest, and dependable, and smart, and you try to do your best, always. That’s so commendable. No way am I going to just throw away a resource like that. So I’m going to take you with me, as my servant or something. I’m even going to hook you up to a respirator when I kill you to make sure you don’t lose that beautiful brain of yours. Not all of it, anyway. I can’t really let you be smarter than me, that wouldn’t make a lot of sense. You’ll probably experience some slurred speech and—wow—no more operating heavy machinery for you, but you won’t be one of these drooling slobs you see all over, either, and that’s something. So come on. I have the bed all ready for you—the respirator’s hooked into the emergency power. We’re going to live forever, Bannerman. You and me, side by side, wonk and wonklord.” The Civilian stepped out of the ICU and held out a hand for Clark to take.

“No, no, I don’t think that’s going to happen,” Clark said, slowly rising to his feet, shaking out his numb legs.

The Civilian rolled his eyes and lifted one hand as if he planned on choking Clark from afar. Before he could use his power Vikram Singh Nanda shot him twice in the back of the head. The Civilian collapsed in a tangle of limbs, completely dead.

There was a good reason why the flanking maneuver was considered a classic.

“Are you alright?” Vikram asked, picking up Clark’s pistol from where it had fallen when the Civilian dropped it.

“I’m fine.” He looked down at the corpse between them. “Thanks.” It was all he needed to say, for the time being. He stepped over the body and into the ICU. The equipment there looked ready to use, just as the Civilian had promised. Clark ignored the waiting hospital bed and found a security terminal. He paged through the menus and re-activated the emergency lockdown. An error message appeared when the screen refreshed.

He tried again but he hadn’t made a mistake, he knew it. The Civilian had changed the password and it had died with him. There was no way to shut the ten thousand doors.

Clark flipped open his cell phone and called Horrocks. The phone rang twelve times before it was answered.

“Sir,” Horrocks reported, “I’m pinned down in a sally port and we’re seeing heavy action right now, we have—have—please hold on a second, sir.” Clark heard gunshots on the other end. “I have taken significant casualties. I cannot hold this section of the D Wing for very much longer, sir.”

“I want you to break contact as possible,” Clark ordered. “We’ve lost too much time. I want you to retreat to the roof, to the helipad. We’re going to abandon the facility. I will see you there and provide further orders when we arrive.” He ended the call once Horrocks had confirmed the order and turned to face Vikram.

“I suppose we should get out of here before the walking dead show up.”

Vikram agreed.

The malignancy—oh, for the days when I could call it a “neoplasm” with a straight face!—is like a football now, or some horrible fetus growing inside her. Some nights while she’s sedated I place a hand on its smooth edge and imagine I can feel it kicking. I’ve been working for so long with no result… I should take a break. [Lab Notes, 8/17/04]

A dead girl, maybe fifteen years old, pushed down the hall, one side pressed up tight against the cream-painted cinder blocks. She left a trail of blood from behind her, blood which had soaked through her hair, ruined her clothes. She didn’t seem to care.

Nilla balled her hands into fists and then let go of them again. The pain in her left hand—she wondered if she’d broken it while getting out of her manacles—brought her into perfect focus. Time to take stock.

There was shooting everywhere—it came to her from every darkened corridor, every pool of emergency lighting. Smoke filled one hallway. She was pretty sure the prison was on fire.

The dead moved through the prison like they owned the place. And she was one of the dead. She walked as calmly as she could past the dead teenager—the girl didn’t even reach for her, didn’t waste a moment’s energy on Nilla—and stepped through a doorway.

The armless freak blocked her path.

He didn’t look all that great. Skin had peeled away from most of his naked chest, long strips of it dangling around his waist. His face had puffed up and turned black with rot and his eyes looked like frosted glass. The smell of him would make animals run away.

He wasn’t quite used up, though. He grinned down at her in the darkness, really grinned—how was that possible? There wasn’t enough left of his brain to feel any satisfaction in intimidating her.

The grin slid into leering territory as she studied it.

“Fuck off,” she told him. Something cold and sharp throbbed in her chest—maybe her dead heart going into cardiac arrest. “Just… leave me alone. Get out of the way.”

The grin opened and he made an obscene sucking noise. “Nnnnnuggghhh,” he told her, and she took a step back in extreme shock. He coughed and tried again. “No,” he said, finally.

The explanation leapt to her mind and she felt foolish. “Mael, stop playing games.”

“Fancy you saying as much,” Mael said through Dick’s mouth. The words were slurred, turned sideways by the corpse’s swollen tongue and pulverized in his broken teeth but she understood him just fine. “You, who’s been playing me for a fool this whole time. I have plans for you still, I think we have a real future together, but for just now I think it’s best if you sit tight.”

“Bullshit. This place is going to hell—I want out!” Nilla exclaimed.

“If you were to be hurt, I would feel just—” he said, but he didn’t finish. She had started to duck under and around Dick’s left side and Mael had to lean over to try to stop her. Which was exactly what she’d wanted him to do. She brought her feet up and slid across the monster’s craning back and was behind him before he could even straighten up again.

She didn’t waste any time after that. A corridor opened up before her, long and straight and pierced with pencil-thin windows. She dashed down it, or rather lumbered with as much alacrity as she could muster. She could feel the weight and mass of Dick behind her as Mael propelled his stolen corpse in pursuit, she could sense him back there with the hairs on the back of her neck but she refused to turn. She reached a doorway at the far end of the corridor and skidded through. She tried slamming the door shut behind her only to find that it was held open by some kind of magnetic stopper. While she tried to figure out how to release the mechanism she heard Dick smash into a wall not ten feet away.

She turned to head deeper into the maze-like prison but had to stop in her tracks. A soldier was standing in the doorway just ahead, staring at her, breathing hard. His eyes were very wide.

“Ma’am, it’s alright, I can protect you,” he said. “I promise we’ll get out of here together.”

Dick stumbled out into the hallway and wobbled on his feet for a second, trying to get his bearings perhaps. The soldier raised his rifle to his eye and fired three rounds in one quick burst. The noise was huge in the narrow corridor, the muzzle flash blinding. Holes popped open in Dick’s chest and neck and face and he spun around and fell to the floor.

The soldier was smart enough not to head over to Dick’s body and check it for signs of unlife. Dick lay crumpled, his head down and away from the soldier, his legs splayed out before him. The soldier took aim again and unloaded half a clip into the dead man’s back. “Shit,” he screamed, and fired again. In the shadowy hallway he couldn’t seem to land a head shot.

He stepped closer, then closer still. He raced up and kicked Dick’s remaining shoe and then danced back, but nothing happened. Licking his lips he stepped closer until he was looming over Dick’s collapsed form. He raised his weapon to his face, ready to blow Dick’s head off once and for all. “Ma’am, stay back,” he shouted at her.

Dick sat up with enough force to knock the rifle butt right into the soldier’s eye, making him scream loud enough to hurt Nilla’s ears. Not half as loudly, of course, as when Dick sank his incisors into the soldier’s thigh and tore off a thick gobbet of flesh.

Nilla didn’t stick around to watch.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

Mael Mag Och raised his hands in mock exasperation. “Saving your skin, lass. You got yourself in a bit of a pickle, didn’t you? That big fellow, the one with the vaccine, he was going to do your head in. So I did the only thing I could, which was to bring you here. Now I’m making it possible for you to get out of this place. Show me some kindness, lass. Show your best friend in the wide dark world a bit of love, won’t you?”

“I almost talked my way out of here on my own. I could have, if you’d given me a chance.” Nilla pulled and tugged at the chain that secured her to the wall but there was no give in it at all. She tried folding her hand, touching her pinky to her thumb, but still it wouldn’t fit through the manacle around her wrist. “Now they’ll probably just shoot me because they assume I’m the one who cut the lights.”

Mael Mag Och swung his legs over the side of the table and got to his feet. He walked behind the bar as he spoke to her. “I’m here to rescue you, lass, but that’s not the only reason I came winging to your side in this dank and fetid prison. This soldier of yours is against us, and he’s a smart one.”

“You’re afraid of him?” Nilla asked. It was impossible. But if it was true…

Mael laughed. He ran one hand over the bar as if he were wiping it with a rag. “He’s not a threat. Our victory is assured. He could set back my plans by a few weeks, perhaps, if he put his shoulder to the right wheel.”

Nilla strained against the manacle. It started to come off but it looked like it might take the skin of her hand with it. Jesus, that would suck, she thought. When you were dead you had to be careful about these things. “How did you manage this, anyway? Is Dick around here somewhere bashing in electrical panels with his face?”

“Dick’s close by, but no, lass, this was an inside job.”

She sat down and tried to relax. She had gotten herself out of bondage before. At the hospital, back when she thought she was still alive, she had crawled out of four point restraints. She looked at the manacle. Studied it. Maybe… maybe if she twisted her hand thusly while tugging gently, like so… “An inside job? You were able to infiltrate somebody dead into this place?”

”Oh, ho, lass, now that would be a treat of a thing to do. Yet perhaps not all my good servants are dead, hmm? At least, they don't all start out that way.”

“I hate it when you get all cryptic,” Nilla told him, her eyes narrowing. The manacle fell to the floor with a noisy crash. She was free.

The Hindu notion of the oversoul is obsessing me today, it sounds so much like the photon monobloc. Everywhere and everywhen, eternal and omnipresent, creating of itself a new definition of time and space. Roasted a chicken tonight for dinner, though she wouldn’t take any. I saved the bones… has it really come to that? I suppose it has. [Lab Notes, 3/16/04]

The dead came lumbering through the halls of Florence-ADX and they devoured whatever crossed their path. Soldiers, unable to get their weapons up in time. Survivors, defenseless, who could only raise their arms across their faces, who could only crouch down, trying to make themselves small, trying to get away.

Sergeant Horrocks lead a surgical counter-offensive deep into the heart of the prison, looking for a defensible position from which to start pushing back the enemy. He had twenty years of experience running raids and building firebases. He set up barricades of heavy furniture, filing cabinets, anything that wasn’t bolted down. He designated free fire zones and detailed squads to maintain various positions and hold them to the end.

Clark listened to the preparations on his cell phone as he and Vikram crossed the prison from one end to the other, headed for the infirmary. “Will they stand a chance, do you think?” Vikram asked. He had his pistol in his hand, low but ready.

“These kids are young but Rumsfeld plugged them right into hell in Iraq with nothing but the uniforms on their backs and they made it. They up-armored their own vehicles and they wrote whole new chapters in the book on guerilla warfare. If anyone on earth can survive this, it’s my company.” Clark gritted his teeth at the thought of not being beside them. It was no foolish urge toward heroism, but instead a deeply inculcated and endlessly reiterated desire to protect his troops. No officer could function without that drive. He forced himself to accept that by securing the prison terminals and locking the doors down he was serving a higher purpose than he would if he waded into the fray and got himself killed.

Of course if he couldn’t go to help the troops, he couldn’t ask them to come assist him, either. Clark and Vikram were on their own.

“It’s just up there,” he said, drawing to a stop a dozen yards from the infirmary. What he expected to find inside he just didn’t know.

That was no way to run an operation. He gestured for Vikram to head down a side passage, to a side door. A classic flanking maneuver. The Sikh Major nodded his understanding. For all of Clark’s failures it was good to know that one person on the planet still trusted him implicitly. He watched Vikram Singh Nanda’s turban disappear around a corner of the hallway and then he pushed forward to the open door of the infirmary himself.

Inside long shadows lay draped across a double line of beds. Over each cot a set of ballistic nylon restraints hung down from the ceiling, the buckles undone, the Velcro catches dangling open. The aisle between the beds was packed with wheeled carts full of supplies and equipment. The far end of the room was an enclosed space walled in glass—an intensive care unit. Clark thought he saw some motion there. He kept low, crouched down to avoid anything that might jump out and try to devour his face.

Something was definitely moving behind the glass. Clark found the door of the ICU room, found the brushed aluminum handle, tried pulling down on it. It started to move, gratingly, but then stopped. Out of ten thousand open doors he’d found the only one that was locked.

Or perhaps barred. He slowly straightened up to his full height, intending to peek through the glass and see what was obstructing the handle.

An intercom unit squealed into life. “Hey there, wonk,” the Civilian said.

Clark slipped the safety back on his pistol. He stood up and looked at his patron through the glass. The DoD man looked pale but unhurt. The Civilian’s sudden appearance had surprised Clark, but it shouldn’t have. The ICU looked like it would stand up to undead attack pretty well. If you were going to hide somewhere it made a great choice.

“I’m glad to see you’re safe. I tried to call you,” Clark suggested.

“Yeah. I was busy.” The Civilian turned around and went to sit on a surgical table. “Have you got anything to eat?”

Clark frowned a little. Why was the Civilian wearing a hospital gown? And what was wrong with his wrists? They were wrapped in thick gauze. Had he tried to commit suicide in some oxycontin-fueled haze? “We’ll sort out provisions later. Right now I need to lock down the prison. I’m assuming you were the one who overrode my original attempt.”

“I’d congratulate you on your detective work if you, me and Singh Nanda weren’t the only ones with the authorization code.” He studied Clark’s face. “Yeah, this is going to be a hard sell, but you and me, we’re loyalty oath types, right? Tried and true, red state good old folks to the core. So when I tell you the doors have to stay open you’ll just get in line behind me.”

“I’m not sure you understand. People are dying here, right now. Every second those doors are open somebody else dies.”

Instead of answering the Civilian stared hard into Clark until he felt as if he was pinned in place, transfixed by that gaze. He tried to laugh it off, surely this was just some trick, some kind of hypnotist’s trick but laughing didn’t help. Clark had trouble breathing. He tried clawing at his uniform collar but it didn’t help. He had a hard time standing up. Unable to really stop himself, he fell down on the floor, hard.

“I’m inside of your head, Bannerman. He told me there were incentives and wow, did he not lie. This is so goddamned cool.”

“He? He who?” Clark gasped.

“This dead Scottish guy. His name wouldn’t mean anything to you. He’s like, the C-in-C of the dead or something, and I’m going to be his SecDef. Pretty cool, huh? He taught me how to do this to you.”

The Civilian’s eyes were lit up like two lighthouses spearing out light at Clark through a sudden fog that had come up out of nowhere, a buzzing, rattling fog that got inside his head, he couldn’t think, he couldn’t, he couldn’t stand up there was nothing, there was nothing in the world except those eyes, those glowing eyes and the Civilian’s voice…

“I literally have the power to cloud your mind, do you get it? It’s easy. It’s the easiest thing I ever did and you have no defense against it. I’m squeezing your life energy right now, that’s all. I’m cutting off the force that makes you alive. This is what dying feels like.”

Instantly the fog was gone. The Civilian looked as he always had and the room, while dimly lit, was clear of haze.

“Okay. I think this contest is over, and I think I got a mandate. Do you want a recount, Bannerman?”

The fog started coming back.

“No,” Clark said. “No, I don’t think that will be necessary.”

Clark clipped the NODs over his face and switched them on. Peering out through a four-inch-wide window he could make out a little of what was happening. Out by the main gate of the prison a crowd of survivors had gathered. They were beating on the gate with their fists, their mouths wide with shouts and pleas that he couldn’t hear. Someone was screaming—a real, in extremis scream—but it was far away and it didn’t trigger his fear reactions. It sounded like someone was watching a slasher film on a television in another room. “We let them in, of course,” he said, because Horrocks had asked him what the soldiers at the gates should do. “They don’t have a chance out there on their own.”

Horrocks hurried away, taking his troops with him, leaving Clark alone in the observation balcony above the interrogation rooms. He could still hear the screaming.

Calm. He had to stay cool, calm, collected. The prison’s emergency generators were up and running. Lighting in the corridors and pods was at a reduced level but it was holding up.

The first thing to do was to establish a secure perimeter.

Easy. The supermax prison was one of the most hardened facilities on the continent. He remembered assistant warden Glynne’s introduction to the place. There were ten thousand doors in Florence-ADX, he’d been informed, and all of them could be remotely controlled.

There was a master shutdown switch in the operations room. Simple. Get everyone inside that he could, save as many of the people from the shantytown as possible, then hit the switch. Seal the prison off. Then he could worry about why the power had gone out. Then he could worry about what happened next.

Get to the operations room, and hit the master shutdown switch.

Easy.

He forced himself to start walking.

He flipped open his phone and dialed for Vikram. Told his old friend to meet him in the Ops Room. He had a feeling they should stick together at this point. He called the Civilian as well but got no response. Made another call, to the MP station, told them to secure the girl. He had a sneaking feeling she had something to do with the power outage. Why? Why did he think that? She was chained to a wall—she could hardly have sabotaged the prison’s main generators from inside the Pub. Then again, why had he thought she would be able to tell him anything about the Epicenter? He’d been so sure of her key role in the Epidemic, but for the life of him, he couldn’t have explained why. Just a feeling, a gut feeling.

He’d made a lot of mistakes and gotten a lot of people killed for his gut feeling. It was time to get rational again. To think like an engineer again.

Fine. Logic. Logic dictated that the generators hadn’t gone down on their own. Logic dictated that the prison was under attack. He could still hear screaming. Was it closer?

Vikram was already in the Ops Room when he arrived, looking concerned, his beard matted to one side where he’d probably been sleeping on it. He had a sidearm strapped to his belt. Clark’s hand involuntarily went to his own weapon.

“The troops are letting in the people from outside. The story they tell is not good,” Vikram told him. The Major started up one of the computers. It would drain emergency power but not much of it and it would let them see what was going on. Vikram called up some views from surveillance cameras around the facility. The main courtyard was clear, swept by searchlights that showed nothing. The helipad on the roof looked fine.

The western fence was mobbed by the dead.

Their faces were blanks in the low-light view, their hands pale blobs that picked and tore at the barbed wire. Clark couldn’t see their wounds or their blank expressions but he recognized instantly the way that they moved, the slow, remorseless march, the dragging but unrelenting way their arms lifted and fell and pulled and ripped and beat.

“Where did they come from? How did they gather so quickly? We expected a few of them at a time, not an army. The dead don’t surge, Vikram. The dead don’t surge. That takes conscious planning.” Which normally they didn’t have. Yet they’d shown some measure of it when they escaped the detention facility in Denver. The girl locked down in the pub showed plenty of it herself.

This was a directed attack. A raid.

“Get some men with crew-served weapons up on that wall. I don’t think the infected can get through the wire but I don’t want to give them time to try.” Clark rubbed at his face. “Get the Stryker crews mobilized, I want to cut this off from the rear before it can turn into something significant. Are all of the survivors inside the gate?”

Vikram peered into a computer monitor and puffed out his cheeks before answering. “Yes. All of them that still live. They say the dead attacked their shantytown, first.”

That would explain the screaming. It was definitely closer now.

“Fine.” Clark went to a boxy terminal bolted to the wall by the door of the room. It looked like an antique next to the ruggedized laptops and industrial strength cabling that Vikram had installed in the Ops Room. It was the control terminal for all of the prison’s facilities and systems. Clark booted it up and paged through a main menu until he found what he wanted: !!!EMERGENCY LOCKDOWN!!!

“Step away from that door,” he called. Vikram was a good ten feet from it but he stepped away anyway, like a good soldier. Clark hit the ENTER key and an alarm sounded throughout the entire prison for two seconds. Moving silently on electromagnetic servos the door swung shut and clicked three times. It was locked tight. The clicking seemed to go on for minutes as nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine other doors throughout the facility shut themselves and locked automatically.

For a long time Vikram and Clark just looked at each other and waited for something to go wrong. Nothing did.

“There. We’re safe,” Clark announced. “Now we just have to decide what to do next.”

The two second alarm sounded again and the door of the Ops Room ghosted open.

Clark’s heart started beating very fast. Too fast.

“Bannerman,” Vikram began, but Clark held up a hand for patience.

He studied the terminal in front of him. He hadn’t touched anything. He called up an activity log and saw that nine seconds after he’d given the order to lock the prison down, someone else had given the order to release the doors again. All of the doors, including all the gates. Even the exterior gates. There was nothing to stop anyone or anything from just walking into the prison.

It could have been a glitch but of course, it wasn’t.

There were security terminals all over the prison, and any one of them could have undone Clark’s lockdown but it wasn’t just a case of someone pushing a random button on a terminal. It wasn’t just a simple matter of a few keystrokes to undo an emergency lockdown in the system. It required someone to input an authorization code and then to manually set all the prison’s systems to “all clear”. You had to know how to do it and you couldn’t do it accidentally. Clark checked the activity log again.

“Someone’s in the infirmary. Someone who wants the doors open.”

Vikram chewed nervously on his lower lip until it looked red and sore. “Perhaps,” he said, his eyes very wide, “perhaps we should go there and discuss this with them.”

It was the worst idea Clark had ever heard. He couldn’t think of anything else to do. “Right,” he nodded. He removed his weapon from its holster.

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 asshole, 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.”

She looked at him, not the picture. Eventually he sighed.

“That’s where it comes from. The Epidemic. In a couple of days I’m going to lead a raiding party up there and we’re going to storm it. Maybe blow it up. I’d like to think that will be enough to end this. I’d like to have some confirmation, and I’m hoping that you can provide it. Do you recognize the place in that photo?”

Alright, she thought. Give him an inch, see how much he takes. She looked down. She’d never seen the place in the picture before. It meant nothing to her. It looked like a cluster of one-story buildings—too big for houses, maybe hunting lodges or something—on top of a mountain. There were strange shapes, animal-like, maybe reptilian, scattered around the building. Sculptures. Sculptures of dinosaurs, in between snow-covered peaks.

Snow-covered mountains… the fire.

She looked again.

A perfectly semi-circular expanse of ground around the buildings stood out, because it was empty. Beyond a certain limit the picture was full of bodies. Thousands of them, dead bodies, standing, facing inward. It was as if the undead had gathered to storm the buildings only some magical force was keeping them at a distance.

A place up in the mountains. A guilty man. A fire that would burn the world.

Jason Singletary had seen this photograph. Or he’d seen what it depicted. He’d tried to force his vision on her.

“You say it started here? How?” she demanded.

“We don’t know. I’m gathering intelligence from every source I can find—including you. I saw a look of recognition on your face just now. Talk to me.”

There was definite steel in his voice but Nilla didn’t know what to tell him. “I’ve never been there. I don’t know what you’ll find. But…”

It was his turn to wait without speaking.

“I think I’m supposed to go there. Maybe you’re supposed to take me there. I’m the only one who can do it.” Singletary had been very clear on that last point.

“I see.”

“No, listen, I was chosen for this. Maybe I was created for this, I don’t know…” she considered telling him about Singletary, and about Mael Mag Och. She knew it would sound crazy, though. She grew agitated as she thought through her options. She picked up her chain and stood up abruptly. “You have to take me there, or, or you can just let me go, and I’ll go there myself.”

He nodded at her and then quickly, methodically, closed his briefcase with a double click.

She felt as if she’d been sleepwalking. No, she felt as if she’d been in a bad dream, a dream where she’d forgotten something horribly, terribly important, something she had to do and that she had forgotten and now it was coming due. When Singletary had been trying to tell her about this she’d been distracted, she’d wanted to find her name so badly. Now she realized she should have paid more attention.

“You have to let me go,” she said.

“Not a chance.” He stood up and headed for the door. “I saw what you did to those men at Jukebox Cave. You’ll never be free again, not if I can help it.”

He didn’t slam the door shut behind him but he might as well have. Nilla stared at it, at the door, for a very long time. Then she yanked at her chain, trying to get loose.

Not a chance.

They brought her another meal—pork chops—a little later. She ate them, of course, but they didn’t really taste of anything. She was still sucking little bits of the grayish-pinkish meat out from between her teeth when the lights went out.

Oh God, she thought. They didn’t know that she didn’t sleep. Or maybe they did know and they just wanted to torment her, to force her to abide by a normal human day/night schedule. But then the room’s emergency lights came on, a pair of wan halogen bulbs tucked away in a corner of the ceiling.

Nilla stood up and tried to reach the door, intending to signal to her captors that something was wrong. The chain wouldn’t let her reach, though.

Hello, lass, Mael said, startling her. She looked to her left. He was reclining on top of one of the cafeteria tables. Naked, hairy, tattooed. He looked out of place in the Olde English Pub, to put it mildly.

“You—what did you,” Nilla sputtered. She looked up at the emergency lights and then back at her benefactor.

He winked in reply.

“I’ve been looking for this girl since the Epidemic began,” Clark said. “Now you find her and you forget to tell me for most of a day?”

The Civilian stared straight ahead. He was strapped so tightly into his crewseat that maybe he couldn’t turn his head. “I can be a wrathful god sometimes, Bannerman. But sometimes I throw my favorite pet a bone. You don’t ask questions, not of me.”

Clark knew to back off. This fury was new—he was used to the Civilian’s cynicism but his anger was new and growing. Unfortunately that left him with his own thoughts for company.

So close—and something had to go wrong. Well, something always went wrong, that was the general rule of warfare. Clark had even made room for something going wrong in his plans, bringing along far more men and materiel than he should have needed to pick up one prisoner. Still.

This was a monumental cock-up.

The Civilian had presented Clark with the opportunity of a lifetime. An individual associated loosely with the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce had captured the girl. He was willing to turn her over to Clark in exchange for free passage east—with a military escort—and fifty thousand dollars. The Civilian had set everything up. Those were all the details Clark had—and all, it seemed, the Civilian was willing to give him. It should be enough, the Civilian insisted.

Only when they arrived the girl was gone, having apparently murdered all of her captors. They didn’t know how long it had been since she’d escaped. They didn’t know which way she went. They didn’t know where she was headed. But she knew they were coming for her and would therefore be on her guard.

“There’s two dead in here, sir,” the soldier said, leaning in through the open door of the helicopter. Clark closed his laptop with a click and nodded. He looked past the soldier and saw the entrance to a cave. An iron-barred gate swung open on its hinges. “One of them looks like a drug overdose,” the soldier continued. “The other body is partially consumed.”

Clark breathed out a long sigh of dissatisfaction. To get so close… “I take it there’s no sign of any females. That’s not a question that needs an answer.” The girl had literally been right there, right there no more than an hour prior, probably even less. Clark was almost ready to stage his offensive on the mountain location, the Epicenter. He had the troops, he had the supplies. Until he understood the girl’s place in the Epidemic, until he knew what she meant, he would never be psychologically ready, though. You didn't go to war without all the facts. The girl was one last question and he needed an answer. “You don’t have any good new for me, do you? She didn’t leave anything behind that might help us find her?”

“No, sir,” the soldier responded. No one had expected there would be. “Except… permission to add something, sir.”

“Granted, of course.”

The Guardsman bit his lower lip. “There’s no vehicles here, sir. I don’t know how these two bodies could have got here without a vehicle. Maybe somebody dropped them off, but I wouldn’t want to be stuck out here so far from town without a way out. Not with dead people wandering around loose out here, and all. Sir.”

Clark actually smiled at the young man. Not very professional but he couldn’t help it. He jumped down from the helicopter body, slapping the Guardsman on the shoulder, and jogged into the AO. Soldiers were busy sealing up the bodies in type II human remains pouches and sifting through the sand looking for forensic evidence. This had been a standard mopping-up exercise following a failed rendezvous. It was about to turn into something quite different.

He came up on a group of soldiers near the cave mouth and asked if any of them were hunters. One of them was, an eighteen-year-old female from Littleton who used to go hunting with her grandfather. “Do you see any tracks around here, the kind a vehicle might make?” he demanded. It wasn’t necessarily the kind of thing a deer hunter would know how to look for but he needed data right away.

“Maybe, something, I guess… there are some tire tracks, they’re pretty vague, right through here, sir,” she said, and waved back and forth with her hands. Indicating a path between the cave and the highway. At his nod she trotted downfield and then came right back, slightly out of breath. “It looks like somebody peeled out. There’s rubber on the road, headed east.”

“Sergeant Horrocks,” Clark shouted, and the Platoon Sergeant lifted his shaggy white head to look. “Get these soldiers ready to move out—we have a target to chase.” He didn’t stick around to observe as his staffer made order out of chaos. He needed to be back in the helicopter—back where he could be on top of things.

A car or a van or a truck—a ground vehicle. It would stick to the roads and there was only one road nearby of any consequence: the highway. The bodies they found in the cave had still been warm, even on a cold night.

They still had a chance.

Ten minutes later and a hundred feet up in the air The Civilian upended a tiny silver flask into his mouth and peered out through the helicopter’s windows at the darkness below. “I can’t see ass,” he said, irritably.

The copilot leaned back to face the two of them. “Sirs, we had visual confirmation of the target vehicle on the highway but it’s gone now. It must have gone off-road, sirs.”

“Get the ground teams in place. Sweep this area with infra-red and image enhancement.” It wouldn’t find her, of course. She was dead and wasn’t generating any body heat, so IR imaging would be useless. As for night vision goggles, well, they helped you see things in the dark but not things that could make themselves invisible.

Thank God he had an ace up his sleeve. This was going to be next to impossible as it was.

Adrenaline shot through the muscles of his back, making them ache a little. He hadn’t been this excited since the fall of Denver.

“So what exactly is she going to do for you once you find her?” the Civilian asked.

“I’m hoping she can tell me.” An imaging window opened on Clark’s laptop, piped through from the infra-red cameras. “Put us down at this location, specialist,” Clark said, pushing forward between the crew seats of the pilot and copilot. “It looks like the target vehicle has come to a complete stop.” The van lay on its side, dressed up in false colors where it was warm and cold. It looked wrong, broken.

When the helicopter’s passenger door slid open the cold night air of the Utah desert bit at Clark’s face and hands. He ignored it and stepped out into the darkness. He threw a hand signal at the pilot and listened to a flare being shot from a vehicle maybe half a kilometer away. One of his Hum-Vee’s. A few seconds later the desert lit up with sizzling white light that reflected dazzlingly from the abandoned van’s crumpled roof.

The vehicle was cooling rapidly in the night air. Its engine pinged from time to time. There were piles of broken glass around the windows, mounds of black charred foam rubber where the seat cushions had caught flame. Footprints in the sand. Heading northeast—the same direction the van had been traveling. Clark peered out into the harsh light of the flare and saw something out there. It looked like a body. He prayed the girl hadn’t been killed in the crash.

He took a crowd-control bullhorn from his belt and switched it on. “Nilla,” he said, and the name rocketed around the desert, bounced off hills a kilometer away. “Nilla, I know you’re here somewhere. You have to stop running.”

All around him in the shadows his vehicles were spreading out, taking up position. They would form a pretty tight perimeter when they were deployed properly. But did it matter? If she was invisible she could walk right past any barricade they made.

“Nilla, I know you’re afraid of me. I know the last time we met was traumatic. Believe me, it scarred me, too.” A Stryker rolled up behind him and came to a stop. Soldiers fanned out on his hand signal, scoured the desert ahead. A pair of soldiers with their M4 rifles at the ready reached the body he’d seen and threw back a thumb’s down. So at least it wasn’t the girl.

“Nilla. I only want to stop this thing. I want to stop the killing, the violence.”

One of the soldiers screamed. He jumped up and down, grasping his arm. Clark was too far away to see if there was any blood but he knew what it meant. The soldier’s battle buddy dropped to the ground and waved his rifle around but the girl was invisible. If she was an enemy, if she was too scared to listen to reason—it would be simplicity itself for her to kill one of his men.

He had to complete this before anyone got hurt. He turned to wave at the Stryker and his secret weapon stepped out of its rear hatch, escorted by two of his biggest troops. Beside them and their bulky body armor the teenaged girl looked even younger than she actually was.

The troops brought her to him and he placed an arm around her shoulders. This would be the tough part. “Nilla, I’m sure you remember Shar. I don’t want to hurt anyone. But I will if I have to.” He removed his sidearm from its holster and placed the barrel a few inches from Shar’s forehead. It took real effort on his part to point the weapon at an innocent but he managed. "You could have killed her before, but you didn't. I'm guessing you don't want to watch her die right now."

“Please, Nilla,” Shar screamed. She wriggled under his arm and he held her closer.

Nothing. Another of Clark’s soldiers cried out but not because he’d been attacked. Something had brushed against him. Was Nilla making a run for it? He could have miscalculated how much of her humanity was left. He could easily have miscalculated that.

Clark cocked the pistol. The sound of the well-oiled mechanism drawing back echoed in the still desert night.

“Don’t,” someone said, no more than a dozen yards away. Someone female. “Please.”

“Show yourself,” Clark demanded.

She did, not so much fading into existence as suddenly standing out where before she’d blended into the shadows. She looked different from how Clark remembered her—healthier, strangely enough, as if she had prospered while the country suffered and died.

Soldiers fell on her like a well-drilled football team, securing her hands and face, knocking her feet out from under her. She tried to make herself invisible again but Clark had warned them in advance and they didn’t let go.

“Oh, Jesus,” Shar said, sagging against him, her arms around his waist.

“You did very well,” Clark told her. He carefully lowered the hammer of his pistol, mindful of accidental discharge even though the safety was on. “I promise, that’s the last thing we’ll ask of you.”

“Yeah. Okay,” Shar said. “Just—don’t make me ride in the same car with her, okay? I never want to get this close to her again.”

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.

“We’re about five miles from the old Air Force base at Wendover. Just across the border into Utah.” Mellowman stood silhouetted against the bare purple light at the mouth of the cave. Inside wasn’t total darkness—a Coleman portable lantern painted a rough circle of yellow on the floor perhaps a dozen yards away. Nilla’s eyes weren’t in great shape, however, and she couldn’t make much out.

“Back during the war,” he went on, “World War II, I think, the airmen used to come up to these caves with girls they picked up in town. The girls didn’t want their daddies seeing what they were doing. It got to be such a popular passtime that they brought in a cement mixer and put down the floor your are currently drooling on. It’s tough to enjoy yourself with stalagmites poking you in the back. Somebody else figured they’d give the place an air of legitimacy by rigging up a jukebox in here, and that’s where the name came from. Jukebox Cave. They had some great parties, my grampa used to tell me. He was one of those guys. I’ve always loved this place. Can’t you feel it, the vibe in here? The feeling, that low-down, that dirty feeling. This is ground zero for getting it on. This is fuck heaven. I brought some girls here myself when I was a young Mormon, back when I used to have ninety-nine sex. You ever had a ninety-nine? You know what that is?”

She didn’t dare answer.

“That’s when you do every last bit of dirtiness you can to the girl, short of squirting up her skirt. No, if you spill it on the ground well that’s not adultery, no ma’am, that’s just the sin of Onan and that has got to be at least one per cent less sinful, now don’t it? And sometimes one per cent is all it takes to get you into Heaven.” Mellowman laughed maniacally. “Shit, there was a time when crap like that actually mattered to me.”

“Are you… going to… rape me?” she asked. It was just a question. Her injuries wouldn’t let her summon up the rage she needed to turn it into an accusation.

Mellowman’s face fell all the same. “Aw, shit,” he said, and scuffed one boot on the floor. “Aw, c’mon, Muffin, you really think I’m like that? Me and Mike, we’re the laid-back type, real gentlemen, the two of us. We don’t pay for pussy, and we don’t beat up women just to get laid, at least not most of the time. Consensual sex is the best kind, we know that.”

He laughed for a moment, the sound banging off the roof of the cave.

“On the other hand, the Termite is probably too far gone to care. And he’s taking the first watch. You have yourself some pleasant dreams, now.”

He strode away, leaving her there in the dark.

She had most of the night to work out what she was going to do next.

She managed to roll over on her side and crawl a bit, just enough to get closer to the lamp. Not actually get into its light. It took her far, far longer than she expected to halve the distance. It took more effort than she thought she had left.

She was screwed, she understood that much implicitly. Whatever Mellowman had in store for her in the morning it wouldn’t be good. Maybe not as bad as having her brains blown out, perhaps not as bad as being buried unable to die. She wouldn’t like it, though, that much she knew.

Mael, she called out with her mind. Mael, help me, she screamed silently, but either the walls of the cave were blocking her telepathy or he just couldn’t hear her at all. There was no response.

She started crawling again. Managed to get far enough that the light played on her face.

She was on her own. Only one thing left to try.

“Hey,” she shouted. At least she tried to shout. What came out sounded more like a wet wheeze. Maybe she’d broken something while crawling. Maybe her body was just done. “Hey, somebody! Termite!”

That was all she could muster. She waited, waited to regain enough strength to wheeze again.

Something moved in the darkness. A flittering, skittish motion. Like the feelers of a cockroach feathering over a dried-up piece of potato chip.

It came again, this time followed by a noise like feet being dragged across rough concrete. Nilla thought she could see a blur of paleness in the distance. Soon enough it resolved into a shape, a humanoid form. It was the Termite.

“Y-y-you sh-sh-sh-ut up,” he said. He rubbed at his nose and his left eye. “J-j-just shut up.” He rubbed his eye again. Then his nose. She could see where he’d got his nickname. In the dark he positively glowed, his skin translucent and shiny under the grime. The splayed and broken brown palisade of his teeth looked like the mouthparts of an insect. With his wrist he smoothed back his hair, which was greasy enough to stay put. “I’ve got my orders.”

“What is he going to do with me?” Nilla asked.

“Sh-shut up, stupid.”

Nilla sucked on her lower lip. Fear was filling her up. Not fear of what was going to happen. Fear that what she tried next wasn’t going to work. If it didn’t—then she was truly out of ideas.

Then his eyes flicked downward. Into the shadows of her cleavage. She knew she still had a chance.

“Just sit and talk with me, please,” she said to him. She needed to bait the hook. “Are you going to hurt me?” she asked. She put what emotion she had left into the words, twisted them. Made them dirty. Like she wanted to be hurt but only in a very special way. Nilla licked her lips. There was no room in her soul for being disgusted with herself. This was just like when she’d eaten the boy on the golf course. Exactly like that. Sheer survival.

“Aw, no, n-no, I c-c-c, I can’t do this,” he whined, his body curling around the negation. He ran both hands over his scalp, tearing at his hair, clawing at his cheeks. He rubbed his nose and his eye again and turned away from her, only to turn around again quickly.

“But I want it so much,” Nilla said. And she did. She made herself want it. Want him to come closer. To touch her.

The Termite blinked his eyes rapidly. He rubbed at his nose, at his left eye. He reached over and grabbed her breast, hard, hard enough to make her gasp in pain.

It was the best she was going to get. She reared up like a snake and sank her teeth deep into the flesh of his arm. She aimed for the vein there and found it without trouble. He screamed, screamed like a stuck pig, screamed for help, for his mother, the pain in him lighting up the cave like neon. He screamed and screamed and reached for something on his belt. Something dangerous. A gun. He screamed and brought up the gun and started firing wildly, more noise, light in huge orange flashes, and still he screamed, and fired, and fired, and fired until his gun went dry.

It didn’t matter. Before he got off his first shot Nilla had already stolen enough from him. Enough life. She banked her energy. Made herself invisible. It felt like it wasn’t going to work but combined with the darkness in the cave, well. None of the shots hit her.

She was already up, up on shaky feet, moving toward the entrance of the cave. Behind her the Termite kept screaming.

At the entrance she found Mellowman. She had hoped she would. He was going to ruin all of her plans, though, by doing one smart thing. He had heard the screams and the gunshots—how could he not—and he looked deeply concerned. But not panicked. Instead of rushing into the cave, guns blazing, he was pushing the gate closed. He already had the key to the padlock out and ready. He was going to do the smart thing, and seal her inside the cave with the Termite.

Had she wasted a moment more on the Termite, had she stopped to take more of his life force, she wouldn’t have made it. She pushed and stumbled and snagged herself badly as she squeezed into the narrow opening left in the gate. Mellowman grunted and she knew by the way he tensed up that he could feel the resistance her body made. He could feel that something was holding the gate open, even if he couldn’t see it.

“Muffin?” he asked. He started to grin. He had grasped immediately the strange particulars of the situation. Crazy girl, probably undead, can make herself invisible. He stepped into the gate, blocking her escape, knowing that if he didn’t stop her at that moment she would probably get away.

Still the Termite screamed.

Nilla thudded against Mellowman’s chest, the coarse weave of his baja shirt rough against her cheek. He smelled like stale smoke. His arms went around her, tentative at first, then closing with sudden conviction, trapping her.

“I’ve got you, Muffin. And I’m never going to let you go,” he said. He wasn’t looking at her but it didn’t matter.

She would have preferred it if he was looking at her. She wanted him to see her. But it didn’t matter.

He was almost a head taller than her. Nilla’s face fit easily into the crook of his neck. Her lips could feel the pulse of his jugular vein—it was right there.

She tore his throat out and drank the blood that poured down over her mouth.

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 assholes 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.

“You have some friends in high places, I’ll give you that. Getting you out of that shallow grave like that… it had to take some serious incentive. Or some serious threats. Somebody wants you really bad if they can talk Rick out of a thrill like that. Care to tell me about it?”

She shook her head, gently so as not to dislodge it from her neck. The vibration of the moving van made her feel as if she would fly to pieces at any moment. “I don’t know,” she said. “There’s this guy, he’s dead, but like me. His name is Mael Mag Och. He said he would try to help me. That’s all I know. He talks to me… he sends his thoughts into my head, like, like telepathy, and he told me he would try to help.”

Mike sat up and looked down into her face. “Mael Mag Och? What kind of name is that?” He leaned closer. “Do you think—I mean, what kind of a deal is he making with us?”

Nilla squinted. “Oh, he would never make a deal with you. You’re the one who makes the vaccine. You’re trying to stop us.”

Mike’s face folded in half down the middle. “No, that’s not… I guess you don’t know.” He looked over at the jar of iridescent red pills. “That stuff’s just a placebo. A sugar pill.” He stared into her eyes looking for comprehension. “It’s worthless, it doesn’t do anything. This is all a scam that Rick came up with. I have a degree in environmental chemistry, I knew how to make them. Them, and the stuff that keeps the Termite marginally sane. It was Rick’s idea to call it a vaccine. He called it a psychology experiment at first, he wanted to see if coming back from the dead was all in people’s minds. Either that or he was bullshitting me from the start. Listen. I need to get away from him. You need to just get away. Maybe you and I can make our own deal. Maybe we can help each other out.”

She lacked the strength to turn herself invisible. She lacked the strength to sit up for very long. She couldn’t imagine any way in which she could help him but she knew this was her big chance, her one long shot at getting away from Mellowman and the Space Van. Mael Mag Och would never broker a deal with a living human, of course, but maybe if she just lied, made something up…

In the end she lacked the energy to think up a convincing lie.

“I… I’ll try,” she said, finally, her voice very small.

Mike’s face froze, expressionless and cold. “I hope you try hard. Rick’s not like other people. He’s violently insane.”

He slid back across the floor of the van and didn’t speak to her for the rest of the night.

In the morning, with white light coming through the van’s window, pummeling her with its heat, the van slowed down and went off road. Nilla felt it jounce and shudder and throw her around like a rag doll before it finally came to a stop. When the door opened and she could see outside again she was looking at the entrance to a cave. Warning signs covered the entrance: JUKEBOX CAVE. OFF LIMITS! A barred iron gate covered the entrance sealed with chains and a heavy padlock.

Mellowman stretched and groaned as he got up from his narrow bed. He stepped out of the van and reached deep into the front of his pants as if he was playing with himself. Eventually he pulled out his hand and revealed a steel key, which fit the padlock perfectly. He wheeled the gate open and the van backed into the burnt orange darkness of the cave. This, Nilla realized, must be his special spot.

Darkness collapsed on top of her as the van pulled further inside.