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He followed the track to the creek bed, fully expecting to find a wrecked vehicle pitched over the bank, but there was nothing there. The track ended at the bank. The water wasn't deep enough to cover anything large enough to make a trail like that. He played the flashlight around the bank and stopped it on a single deep track in the mud. He blinked and shook his head to clear his vision, then looked again. It couldn't be.
"Anything over there?" Robert was coming across the grass toward him.
Theo jumped down onto the bank and kicked the mud until the print was obliterated.
"Nothing," Theo said. "Must have just been some burning fuel sprayed out this way. "
"What are you doing?"
"Stomping out the last of a burning squirrel. Must have gotten caught in the flames and ran over here. Poor guy. "
"You really need to come see me, Theo. "
"I will, Robert. For sure I will. "
Eight
The Sea Beast
He knew he should return to the safety of the sea, but his gill trees were singed and he didn't relish the idea of treading water until they healed. If he'd known the female was going to react so violently, he would have re-tracted his gills into the folds beneath his scales where they would have been safe. He made his way down the creek bed until he spotted a herd of animals sleeping above the bank. They were ugly things, pale and graceless, and he could sense parasites living in every one of them, but this was no time to be judgmental. After all, some brave beast had to be the first to eat a mastodon, and who would have thought that those furballs would turn out to be the tasty treats that they were.
He could hide among this wormy herd until his gills healed, then perhaps he'd take one of the females on a grateful hump. But not now, his heart still ached for the purring female with the silvery flanks. He needed time to heal.
The Sea Beast slithered up the bank into an open space among the herd, then curled his legs and tail under his body and assumed their shape. The change was painful and took more effort than he was used to, but after a few minutes he was finished and he quietly fell asleep.
Molly
No, this wasn't what she had planned at all. She had stopped taking her meds because they had been giving her the shakes, and she'd been willing to deal with the voices if they came back, but not this. She hadn't counted on this. She was tempted to run to her kitchen area and gulp down one of her blue pills (Stelazine - "the Smurfs of Sanity," she called them) to see if it could chase the hallucination, but she couldn't tear herself from the trailer window. It was too real - and too weird. Could there be a big, burnt beast lumbering out of the creek? And if so, had she just watched it turn into a double-wide trailer?
Hallucinations, that was one of the five symptoms of schizophrenia. Molly kept a list of all the symptoms. In fact, she'd stolen a desk drawer version of the DSM-IV - The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the book psychiatrists use to diagnose mental illness - from Valerie Riordan. According to the DSM-IV, you had to have two of the five symptoms. Hallucinations were one; okay, that was a possibility. But delu-sions, no way; she wasn't the least bit deluded, she knew she was having hallucinations. Number three was disorganized speech or incoherence. She'd give it a try.
"Hi, Molly, how the heck are you?" she asked.
"Not well, thank you. I'm worried that my speech may be disorganized," she answered.
"Well, you sound fine to me," she said, by way of being polite.
"Thanks for saying so," she replied with genuine gratitude. "I guess I'm okay. "
"You're fine. Nice ass, by the way. "
"Thanks, you're not too bad yourself. "
"See, not disorganized at all," she said, not realizing that the conversation was over.
Symptom four was grossly disorganized or catatonic behavior. She looked around her trailer. Most of the dishes were done, the videotapes of her movies were arranged chronologically, and the goldfish were still dead in the aquarium. Nope, nothing disorganized in this place. Schizo 1, Sanity 3.
Number five, negative symptoms, such as "affective flattening, alogia, or avolition. " Well, a woman hits her forties, of course there's a little affect-ive flattening, but she was sure enough that she didn't have the other two symptoms to not even look them up.
But then there was the footnote: "Only one criterion required if delusions are bizarre or hallucinations consist of a voice keeping up a running commentary on the person's behavior or thoughts. "
So, she thought, if I have a narrator, I'm batshit. In most of the Kendra movies, there had been a narrator. It helped tie a story together that was supposed to take place in the nuked-out future when, in fact, it was being filmed in an abandoned strip mine near Barstow. And narration was easy to dub into foreign languages because you didn't have to match the lips. So the question she had to ask herself, was: "Do I have a narrator?"
"No way," said the narrator.
"Fuck," said Molly. Just when she'd settled into having a simple personality disorder, she had to learn to be psychotic all over again. Being schizo wasn't all bad. Being diagnosed schizo ten years ago had gotten her the monthly disability check from the state, but Val Riordan had assured her that since then her status had changed from schizophrenic: paranoid type, single episode, in partial remission, with prominent negative symptoms, persecutory-type delusions, and negative stressors (Molly liked to think of the negative stressors as "special sauce") to a much more healthy, p
ost-morbid shizotypal personality disorder, bipolar type (no "special sauce"). To make the latter you had to fulfill the prerequisite of at least one psychotic event, then hit five out of nine symptoms. It was a much tougher and more subtle form of batshit. Molly's favorite symptom was: "Odd be-liefs or magical thinking that influences behavior and is inconsistent with subcultural norms. "
The narrator said, "So the magical thinking - that would be that you believe that in another dimension, you actually are Kendra, Warrior Babe of the Outland?"
"Fucking narrator again," Molly said. "You're not going away, are you? I don't need this symptom. "
"You can't really say that your 'magical thinking' affects your behavior, can you?" the narrator asked. "I don't think you can claim that symptom. "
"Oh hell no," Molly said. "I'm just out practicing with a broadsword at two in the morning, waiting for the end of civilization so I can claim my rightful identity. "
"Simple physical fitness regimen. Everyone's trying to get into shape these days. "
"So they can hack apart evil mutants?"
"Sure, Nautilus makes a machine for that. Mutant Master 5000. "
"That's a crock. "
"Sorry, I'll shut up now. "
"I'd appreciate that. I really don't need the 'voices' symptom, thanks. "
"You've still got the monster-trailer hallucination outside. "
"I thought you were going to shut up. "
"Sorry, that's the last you'll hear from me. Really. "
"Jerk. "
"Bitch. "
"You said. . . "
"Sorry. "
So without voices all she had to deal with was the hallucination. The trailer was still sitting there, but admittedly, it just looked like a trailer. Molly could imagine trying to tell the shrink at county about it when they admitted her.
"So you saw a trailer?"
"That's right. "
"And you live in a trailer park?"
"Yep. "
"I see," the shrink would say. And somewhere between those two little words the judgment would be pronounced: crazy.
No, she wasn't going to go that route. She would confront her fears and go forward, just as Kendra had in The Mutant Slayer: Warrior Babes II. She grabbed her sword and left her trailer.
The sirens had subsided now, but she could still see an orange glow from the explosion. Not a nuclear blast, she thought, just some sort of accident. She strode across the lot and stopped about ten feet away from the trailer.
Up close, it looked - well, it looked like a damn trailer. The door was in the wrong place, on the end instead of the side, and the windows were frosty, as if they'd iced over. There was a thin patina of soot over its entire length, but it was a trailer. It didn't look like a monster at all.
She stepped forward and ventured a poke with her sword. The aluminum skin of the trailer seemed to shy away from the sword point. Molly jumped back.
A warm wave of pleasure swept through her body. For a second she forgot why she had come out here and let the wave take her. She poked the trailer again, and again the pleasure wave washed over her, this time even more intense. There was no fear, no tension, just the feeling that this was exactly where she should be - where she should always have been. She dropped her sword and let the feeling take her.
The frosty layer on the trailer's two end windows seemed to lift, revealing the slitlike pupils of two great golden eyes. Then the door began to open, not from side to side, but splitting itself in the middle and opening like a mouth. Molly turned on her heel and ran, wondering even as she went why she hadn't just stayed there by the trailer where everything felt so good.
Estelle
Estelle was wearing a leather fedora, a pair of dark sunglasses, a single lavender sock, and a subtle and satisfied smile. Sometime after her husband had died - after she'd moved to Pine Cove and started taking the antide-pressants, after she'd stopped coloring her hair or giving a damn about her wardrobe - Estelle had vowed that no man would ever see her naked again. At the time, she considered it a fair trade: carnal pleasures, of which there were few, for guilt-free cookies, of which there were many. Now, having broken that vow and lying in her feather bed next to this sweaty, stringy old man, who was teasing her left nipple with his tongue (and who didn't seem to mind that said nipple was leading her breast over her arm rather than jutting skyward like the cupola on the Taj Mahal), Estelle felt like she understood, at last, the Mona Lisa's smile. Mona had been getting some, and she had her cookies too.
"You are some storyteller," Estelle said.
A spidery black hand crawled up her thigh and parked an index finger moistly on her pleasure button - just settled there - and she shuddered. "I didn't finish," Catfish said.
"You didn't? Then what was all that 'Hallelujah, Lord, I'm comin home!' followed by the barking?"
"I didn't finish the story," Catfish said, his enunciation remarkably clear, considering he didn't miss a lick.
Harmonica player, Estelle thought. She said, "I'm sorry, I don't know what came over me. "
And she didn't. One minute they were sipping spiked tea and the next there was an explosion and she had her mouth locked over his, moaning into him like a saxophonist playing passion.
"You didn't see me fightin you," Catfish said. "We got time. "
"We do?"
"Sho', but you gonna have to pay my way now. You done chased the Blues off me and I feels like they ain't never comin back. I'm out a job. "
Estelle looked down to see Catfish grinning in the soft orange light and grinned herself. Then she realized that they hadn't lit any candles, and she didn't have any orange lights. Somewhere in the tussle between the kitchen and the bedroom, amid the tossing of clothes and groping of flesh, they had turned the lights out. The orange glow was coming through the window at the foot of the bed.
Estelle sat up. "The town is on fire. "
"It is in here," Catfish said.
She pulled the sheets up to cover herself. "We need to do something. "
"I got an idea a somethin we can do. " He moved his spidery fingers and her attention was taken away from the window.
"Already?"
"Seem soon to me too, girl, but I'm old and this could be my last one. "
"That's a cheery thought. "
"I'm a Bluesman. "
"Yes, you are," she said. Then she rolled over on him and stayed there, off and on, until dawn.
