That’s testament to the bizarre workings of the human mind.
“Do it, Nash,” she breathed in my ear. “Call The Shape.”
So I did.
26
It was coming.
The Shape was coming.
It was cycling itself into being, burning through the ether.
Gutting the fabric of this world.
I had called it and now it was coming. Right away I felt something in the air around me change…break open…twist in upon itself as if the very atoms were being realigned or shattered, turned inside out. The air was heavy. Heavy and thrumming and I could not move. Some yawning, pulsing electromagnetic field had seized me and squashed me flat, pushing me down to my knees at the altar of my god.
Expiation.
Sacrifice.
Burnt offerings.
I tried to forget that the woman tied to the fence had a name. I turned my face away, the air crawling with static electricity. The woman moaned, thrashed, cried out. But I did not hear her. I refused to hear her. All around, a humming and a crackling. A raw, cutting stench of ozone. And then the heat, the burning cremating heat of the living thermonuclear oven as it took on physical form.
Hungry.
Starving.
The heat…the blazing energy…the sound of a million, billion hornets buzzing…sawblades ripping into steel…a screeching…a whirring…the world shrieking out as it was disemboweled at the subatomic level. Then the woman- Marilynn, God yes, Marilynn-screamed. A single economical scream that lasted only seconds.
The Shape took her, consumed her.
I did not look.
But Mickey did. You could not have pried her eyes from it. She stared in rapt, almost erotic fascination at what was happening.
Marilynn…
I heard her melt with a crackling sound like burning cellophane. And then it was over and the world was just the world again. I opened my eyes. I made myself look as I made myself look every month on the night of the full moon.
Marilynn was a blackened scarecrow, still smoldering.
A pall of greasy black smoke hung in the air.
Burnt offerings.
She had been melted, reduced to a fused clot of bone and meat and marrow. A bubbling black slime that liquefied, smoking and popping, oozing down the fence into a pool of superhot irradiated refuse. The dry grass blazed where it made contact.
The stench of her burning flesh was still in the air.
I vomited.
And later, still feeling The Shape and knowing that it owned me, I looked up at the night sky, the pale moon brooding high above like a skull.
I opened my mouth.
And screamed.
DES MOINES, IOWA
1
Did I like it?
Did I get off making offerings to that monstrosity?
No, I did not. The guilt was thick on me like an infection, it was rotting me from the inside out. My dreams were sweaty, disturbing, goddamned ugly if you want to know the truth…people lined up, people I knew and didn’t know, people I’d admired and, yes, even loved, all waiting for me to decide who lived and who died. I’d wake up seeing their eyes, accusing and hating. I felt like a guard in Birkenau or Treblinka, deciding who went to the gas chamber and who didn’t. You think that was easy to live with? That it didn’t eat my guts out? You can’t do what I did without losing part of yourself and after I’d been doing it for a year, I couldn’t honestly remember the sort of person I’d been before.
But I didn’t do it alone.
My posse did it with me. A communal guilt. We were like soldiers doing a really terrible job…we just didn’t talk much about it. It made things go down easier that way. I had a lot of graves out there on my conscience, a lot of ghosts trying to claw their way out, and, Jesus, I had to keep them down. Some how, I had to.
2
The city was a cesspool of standing water, rubble, and unburied bodies. It looked like the mother of all battles had been fought here and maybe it had been. The buildings were shattered, blackened like charcoal, trees standing up like solitary masts, entirely devoid of limbs. Skyscrapers had been reduced to heaps of slag. No birds sang. Nothing grew. Nothing moved. There was only the stench of old death on the faint breeze, pungent and pervasive and secret. The way a tomb might smell.
“This place is dead,” Carl said. “Absolutely dead. Can’t you smell it?”
I could, but I didn’t mention the fact. Nobody else did either. They could feel it, all right, and they did not like it. The silence in the Jeep was heavy, almost crushing. They were waiting for me to tell them what this was all about or at least point them in the right direction. But I was clueless, absolutely clueless. Like every other city, every rawboned urban graveyard, we rolled in with no clear reason of why we had to go there other than the fact that I said so. I doubted if it was enough for my people because it sure as hell was not enough for me.
As we drove in up 94, I was thinking about Marilynn. She was the last thing I wanted to be thinking about, but I couldn’t forget what she had said.
Nothing there now but rats and corpses and big craters from the bombs, lots of fallen down buildings.
How right she was. But there was something else here, something important and I could feel it in my guts.
The city lay around us like some crumbled, exhumed corpse. Entire neighborhoods had been bombed to rubble while others were relatively unscathed. It made no sense really, but even those still standing were desolate and eerie, silent and forlorn like monoliths erected over the grave of mankind. Some buildings had walls blasted free and you could see the tiny cubicles within…offices, apartments, like cross-sections of a doll’s house. Many were nothing but twisted and mangled skeletal frames of girders waiting to fall and still others were marked by but a single standing chimney or facade. Roads were often cut by jagged crevices like fault lines, sewer piping thrust up through the pavement like the bones of compound fractures.
It was no easy bit navigating our way through.
Entire thoroughfares were blocked by rubble and mountainous debris or had fallen into the sewers below. I saw the huge bomb craters that Marilynn had talked about. They pocked the landscape like the craters on the dark
