Dick did not know why he'd been brought to this zone of naked blood-red rock. The sun was intense. It dried him, leached the moisture out of his most hidden orifices. He chafed, and blistered, and the skin of his thighs wore away in red patches but he didn't stop. The dead don't stop for pain.
The voice in his head that was no voice knew what needed to be done. Dick did not question his instructions. He marched with his two-step gait'bare foot, then the boot, bare foot, then the boot'and devoured the miles beneath him.
Dick lacked any kind of sense of time. He could not have determined how many hours or how many days passed when he finally came to the edge of a cliff and looked down on white, foaming water. His dry body cried out for the smooth kiss of the water and the thing that steered him agreed. Dick toppled forward and fell, an ungainly diver, into the hissing silver of the river, heedless of rocks, uncaring of his clothes. He surrendered himself to the current and for a while he drifted along the bottom, his toes brushing the stony riverbed, his eyes closed. When he opened them again he had washed up on the far bank and water poured from his wet clothing, rolling back down into the stream.
He did not know how many times he had done this before, or how many bodies of water he was yet to visit. Someone else, some other force kept track of those things.
Time to move on to the next errand. Dick pushed his face into a crack in the rock and dug out some spiders with his tongue. Just enough to give him strength. Then he headed forward, once again into the excoriating sunlight.
Monster Nation
Chapter Eleven
STAY TOGETHER! Know your group number by heart! [Signage posted at Evacuation Centers in Los Angeles, CA, 4/2/05]
Nilla couldn't help herself. She knocked on the door of the little apartment behind the motel's registration desk. No one answered, of course. She stepped inside into a faint smell of mildew and a lot of dust that jumped up out of her way everywhere she moved.
She found a dresser in the cramped bedroom and touched the smooth wood of its drawers for a moment before opening them. It wasn't so much that she felt bad about stealing another person's clothes, though there was that. It was more the lack of familiarity. She couldn't remember her own dresser, if she had one. She couldn't remember her own bed, the smell of the sheets, whether they were starchy or silky or even what color they were. It felt less like she was intruding on someone else's domain than as if she were inventing each gesture'the first time she ever opened a drawer, the first time she ever pulled on a pair of simple cotton boxer shorts. Things she must have done thousands, tens of thousands of times before in her living life.
Every single thing was new. Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe her life had been tragic and horrible. Maybe even that didn't matter. Maybe getting a second chance, one where you didn't have to be aware of the old life you'd lost'maybe that was something valuable and good by itself.
The clothes in the dresser were men's clothes. Maybe the man on the tree, the one who blew out his own brains with a shotgun'