Charles headed over to talk to her while Nilla and Shar roamed the aisles, looking for snacks. Nilla had a pretty good idea of what was going on and she kept her mouth shut. 'So excuse me, ma'am? Do you sell condoms? No? Ma'am, I need some help here. What about the flavored kind, do you have any of those?' The woman behind the counter couldn't conceal her horror at the question. For the first time since they'd entered the store she looked away from Nilla. 'What about those ones? They have little bumps on them, you know, excuse me, Ma'am? They're ribbed for her pleasure?'
'Boomps?' the woman asked, her eyes hard.
In the aisle just out of view Shar grabbed a link of plastic-wrapped salami and handed it to Nilla. 'In your pants,' she whispered, 'there's plenty of room. Five-fingered discount.'
'Yeah, bumps. Ribs, I guess,' Charles suggested. He held up his hands about a foot and a half apart from one another. 'In this size?'
'Boomps,' the woman said again. 'Ribs?'
'I think they call them French ticklers.'
Shar sputtered with laughter even as she handed Nilla a block of cheddar cheese and a bag of potato chips. She just couldn't help herself. It was all over as soon as the laugh came out of her, though. 'Thieves! They are thieves!' the woman shrieked. She started to crawl up onto her counter, clearly intending to seize them in the act of shoplifting.
'What do we do?' Nilla asked, but Shar had already dropped half the things she was carrying and was at the door. Nilla followed as close behind as she could, unable to move as fast as she might like both because she was, well, dead but also because her pants were full of cold cuts. Charles came up behind her and pushed her bodily into the door of the bodega until it flew open and they spilled out into the sunlight. The proprietress was still coming up and over her counter, her knees up on the smooth surface. They headed for the car, intending to make a clean getaway.
'Que estas haciendo? Ai! Malvado fantasma, es peligroso!'a man on the corner shouted and Nilla pulled up short, guilt flushing through her body. Shar and Charles kept running. The man came closer'an old, weathered guy in overalls and a baseball cap. What could she do? She felt pretty lousy about shoplifting but she would feel worse, she knew, if she were caught. The people of Lost Hills wouldn't give her a chance. They knew. She bolted for the car.
'Hice por ayudar,'the old man said behind her. She got maybe three strides down the road before she realized he'd been trying to warn her. Charles and Shar were behind the car, huddled in its shadow.
A crowd of men had gathered in the middle of the street. Some of them had farm implements'pitchforks, shovels, she saw a long-handled trowel'and others just had steel-toed boots. They had gathered around a girl who was maybe fifteen years old, lying curled up in the street, and they were kicking her to death.
No. Not death. When Nilla got closer she closed her eyes and saw the golden fires of the men in a ring around a huddled shape of fuming darkness. The girl was already dead. The blows the men rained down on her weren't stopping her from reaching for their ankles, trying to grab them and tear them apart.
No wonder the people of the town were so sensitive to her energy. The sickness had already come upon them.
Monster Nation
Chapter Three
The Under Secretary of Emergency Preparedness and Response has asked that all physicians and medical technicians register with their nearest Emergency Services Provider. [FEMA ListServ Message, 3/30/05]
The hunger swelled inside Dick, turned inside him, threatened to consume him. It was bigger than he was and he lacked any kind of willpower or ego to fight against it. Sometimes it seemed to speak to him in a low, moaning language more primitive than words. It told him what to do. It told him where to go. Up. Up into the mountains, up the winding course of the highway toward the light. What he would find there he couldn't know, but he couldn't resist the pull, either.
He lost one of his boots along the way, snagged under a protruding tree root. He pulled and pulled until the laces creaked, until the leather stretched and tore, until his foot came painfully free. He moved on, bouncing up and down with each step, up on the boot, down when his naked white foot hit the gravel, or the concrete, or the loose rocky soil. He didn't let this hobbling gait slow him down.