She gulped and choked on a shriek, keeping it inside of her but just barely. There'up on a hill above the hospital. Just a silhouette, a man-shaped darkness framed against the first orange smudge of the rising sun. She squinted hard and saw a naked man, his skin covered in blue curlicues and arabesques. Tattoos. He didn't look like one of the dead. He looked perfectly healthy. He had a thick bushy beard and his hair was pulled back in a tight pony-tail. He wore nothing but a piece of rope around his neck and a band of fur around one bicep.
The man looked right into her head and she knew he was not just aware of her but psychically inside of her. He was probing her, studying her. She sensed some things about him, reciprocity for what he was taking from her. Not words, nothing so complex'just buzzing, distorted sensations, feelings, images. He was old, very old, and very much undead like herself, he let her know. He was a friend.
He turned away from her and pointed at the sun. She understood.
In a moment all of it was gone. He was gone. She was standing on wet grass, alone, defenseless. Hunted. She had something, though. There was somebody else'somebody like herself out there. She had no idea if she could trust him or not but what did it matter?
She had a direction. East. Go east, the naked man had been telling her. She had to go somewhere. Go east. Okay, she thought.
Okay.
END OF PART ONE
Monster Nation
Chapter One
DIESEL FUEL RESERVED FOR AUTHORIZED USERS ONLY! Please forgive the inconvenience. [Sign posted at aPetaluma,CA , gas station 3/23/05]
Dick woke up different. Simplified.
Silvery moonlight lit up the world. It dripped from the branches of the trees and played on the surface of the snow. Dick was a shadow in the lee of that light. There were other shadows surrounding him. One huddled near him, her long white hair dyed with blood. She curled tight around a treasure that glowed dimly like a dying ember. It had a knob of bone protruding from one end. It had fingers on the other. It was a human arm, but Dick was beyond concerns of taste or decorum. He tried to grab it away from her only to find that he had no hands anymore. His shoulders ended in gore-caked nubs. The female shadow's prize was part of Dick's body. His arm.
The sheep had the other one. They were working hard at grinding it down to paste so they could swallow it. It would take them hours to finish it.
This was immaterial to Dick. There was light and there were shadows and he was one of the latter. He was no longer capable of feeling loss or regret.
Only hunger.
The Homeland Security Advisory System today raised the level of threat awareness toOrange , or High for the following areas:Anaheim ,Glendale , andOakland . The level of threat awareness has been raised to red, or Severe, for the following areas of the Southland:Atwater , Brentwood,CenturyCity , Granada Hills, Los Feliz' [DHS bulletin for the media, issued 3/26/05]
Back toColorado . Four days had passed and so little had been accomplished. They had tightened the cordon where they could but the pathogen was already out.
A staff car took Bannerman Clark and Vikram Singh Nanda out toCommerce City , where the new detention facility had sprung up like a ring of fungus after the first rain of spring.Commerce City : not so much a town as a zone, a sprawling ex-prairie north ofDenver full of chemical tanks and dusty weeds and long-haul truck agents and rusting railroad tracks. Ancient farmhouses that had been spruced up with particle board and unpainted dry wall and turned into light manufactories. The prettiest thing inCommerce City was a petroleum cracking plant, a stack of steel intestines that was lit up at night like a carnival.