'Unh-uh, no way, I told you already, woman. I'm psycho-killer crazy. I'm mad gangsta dangerous. I'm a hard man, baby, hard enough for both of us. I'll keep you safe, Shar. I already told you that.'
He grabbed her around the shoulders with one arm and held her close, kissing the side of her forehead before he let her go again. He switched the radio on himself and they couldn't talk any more, not and be heard over the blare of hip-hop that came out of the speakers by Nilla's head. It made a strange soundtrack for what she saw out her windows'flat land covered in spotty green and yellow vegetation in the perfect rectangular fields of big truck farms. They passed the occasional abandoned oil derrick like a tired animal bending down for a drink of water and unable to get back up. Nilla saw a couple of houses that had collapsed down the middle. It looked like the ground itself had fallen away from beneath them. Nobody had bothered to repair them. She was a long way already from the bustling little town by the sea where she died and came back.
'There's a place to stop up ahead,' Shar said, sitting up in her seat. 'Are you still hungry?'
Nilla nodded hopefully. 'I don't have any money, though.'
Shar sat back down. 'Can we stop, Charles? Just for a minute? I need to pee?'
They rolled in over the sudden shockingly-blue ribbon of the aqueduct and into a tiny town bleached by sun into a uniform brownish-grey. There was no sign welcoming them to town but judging by the names of half the stores they had arrived inLost Hills,California . As they glided through the cracked streets Nilla got a bad chill down her back and she realized that everyone they passed was staring at them. They were normal people'she saw faces with bad acne scars, old women with hair like frozen cumulus clouds, mothers carrying babies and brushing dark hair out of their eyes to stare. She got another shock when she realized that it wasn't the car garnering all that attention. The eyes didn't track the counter-rotating hubcaps or the handmade spoiler on the back. They were looking in the windows. In the back windows.
At her.
They knew. The people of Lost Hills knew what she was. They could sense it. If she closed her eyes she could see them all, their golden auras, and she knew they were all looking back and seeing her darkness. Surely not as vividly, certainly not consciously but they could sense her energy just like she could sense theirs.
She wanted to get out, but she didn't want to leave the safety of the car. She wanted Charles to just keep driving, to speed up, even as he began to maneuver into a parking space onTulare Street . She wanted to make herself invisible'but that would surely spook Charles and Shar and she couldn't risk that, not when they were her only way out of town.
Charles switched off the ignition and the three of them got out. The stares intensified and on the corner a woman in a red cardigan called out something in Spanish. Nilla had no idea what she was saying. Well, at least she knew one more thing about herself than before: she couldn't speak Spanish.
They headed into a little convenience store'the sign out front said 'bodega' in amongst the signs advertising cheap cigarettes and powdered milk'a dim room with a low ceiling of stained acoustic tile and metal racks full of off-brand merchandise. The candy was all Mexican, the newspapers up front were full of words and even punctuation Nilla didn't recognize. The proprietress, a middle-aged woman in a blue print dress, could barely be seen behind an enormous lottery terminal and a display of artificial roses each sealed in its own plastic case.