was just over the state line and I knew it. I felt it right down into my marrow.
As I stood under the cascading water, I thought about all that I had lost. I thought about Specs. I thought about Sean. But mostly I thought about my wife. I thought about Shelly and it seemed she’d been dead a hundred years. Her image was still in my mind. But it was no longer clear, no longer fresh, almost like an old photograph that was slowly fading.
And that scared me. It really did.
I remembered Shelly dying and I started to cry. I was happy that she had not died alone and unloved like so many others. I was glad that I held her hand as she passed. She was out of it by then and probably didn’t even know I was there, but I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that at all. I think she was aware. I think she died knowing I loved her.
You would have been such a good mother, I thought. Remember how we talked about kids, Shelly? Remember that? Oh, our children would have been so lucky to have you as a mother. You would have been so perfect. You were an angel in every way and I’m glad I told you so and I only wish that we’d have had kids so I could be telling them now how wonderful of a woman their mother was.
These were the things I was thinking.
I couldn’t seem to think much else. I stood there in a daze and somewhere during the process, I realized I was not alone. Mickey was standing there at the edge of the river, up to her ankles in the water.
“Mind if I join you?” she asked.
Well, I wanted to tell her to go away and leave me brood, but I didn’t and I honestly didn’t want to. “Sure. Come on in.”
Mickey stepped out of her shorts and her T-shirt and she was amazingly beautiful. Just long-legged, high breasted, her skin bronzed by the sun, long dark hair sweeping down one shoulder. I don’t think I’d ever wanted anyone as badly as I’d wanted her at that moment and she damn well knew it. She’d been orchestrating this since she joined us and I hated her for it. Almost as much as I hated myself for giving into it.
“Come here,” I told her and it was not a request.
I swept her into my arms and her flesh was cool from the water, but I could feel the heat blazing between her legs. I took hold of her roughly and she did not fight. Her tongue was hot in my mouth. We fondled and kissed like that for a moment and then I grabbed her by the hair and pulled her down, slid my cock in her mouth. I forced her head up and down on it and made her gag. When I was hard, I grabbed her by the hips, digging my fingers into the cheeks of her ass and she wrapped her legs around me.
There was nothing tender about it.
I brought her over to a waist-high shelf of rock and put her down. I spread her legs apart and slid into her. She was a fantasy fuck, there was no doubt about it. I took her like I hated her. I slammed into her and made her cry out. And when I came, I shoved her away from me. There was no love involved. It was brutal, violent.
And that’s exactly what she wanted.
By the time I was done and I stepped out of the water with her trailing behind, I knew one thing for sure: Janie had been watching us.
12
And she had been. I knew it. I could see the recrimination in her eyes, the way she looked at me like some squirming thing that had slid out from under a rock. Maybe it was my imagination. I don’t know. She’d been giving me the evil eye for so long it was hard to be sure.
That night I dreamed of The Medusa moving east to west like some immense malefic vacuum cleaner sucking up the last of the human race from decaying cities like dust from a carpet and leaving nothing but polished white bones behind.
It was getting closer and closer and I could not get away from it. I saw its face. And worse, it saw me. It called me by name.
And then hands were shaking me awake.
“Nash,” Janie said. “It’s just a dream. That’s all it is. Just a dream. You have to be quiet. I finally got Morse to sleep.” She told me this like he was some little kid she had to tuck in. Maybe he was.
I laid there, looking up at her, sweat running down my temples. “I saw it,” I told her. “It’s coming for us. It’s getting closer.”
She just nodded. “It’s been coming for a long time.”
“You’ve…you’ve seen it?”
“In my dreams. We probably all have.”
“Janie…”
“Go to sleep, Rick.”
“Stay with me,” I said. “Don’t leave me alone.”
She shook her head. “It can’t be that way anymore and I think you know why, don’t you? Go to sleep. When you wake up you can tell yourself it was only a dream.”
I never felt so alone before.
13
As we drove to Nebraska, Price and I spent a lot of time talking. He was a very intelligent man and there seemed to be little he did not know about. One night, sitting by a fire in a sheltered field off the highway, I told him about The Shape. He was part of it and I figured he needed to know.
It was just the two of us.
I was expecting him to laugh at the very idea. He was a scientist. An educated man. But he did not laugh…he looked very grim as I told him about The Shape. Afterwards, he went silent for a long time, lost in thought.
Being Price, he had a few theories on my friend.
He said that The Shape was the ultimate cosmic chaos, something born of nuclear fission and plutonium saturation from the very blast furnace of creation…something that was nothing until the radiation brought it into being, gave it body and mind and attitude, if you can dig that. A wraith essentially, a spook birthed from a thermonuclear womb, a supercharged flux of sentient radiation.
A brand new devil for a brand new world.
“The destruction of our old world, Nash, has given birth to a new one that is very frightening in all respects,” he said. “The biological mutations we’ve all seen are really minor in comparison to things like this Shape of yours and other things that may be coming to pass out there now. There’s nothing supernatural about any of it…but at the same time, it’s all so beyond our science and our meager simian powers of reasoning, that it seems almost godlike.”
“You haven’t seen The Shape,” I told him. “But when you do…well, let’s just say it’s enough to put you to your knees.”
“I believe it would be.”
The Devil of the new world, as it were, Price believed to be a random series of particles that became organized and cohesive and organic, for lack of a better word, as a result of massive fallout. And let’s face it, as crazy as that sounds, this particular bogeyman had been waiting to be born a long time. All the raw materials were there in barrels of radioactive waste, the cores of atomic reactors, and stores of unstable isotopes. Just laying there waiting, waiting to be born. Much like the inorganic chemicals of Azoic earth had waited to become life.
I had always wondered why The Shape only showed on nights of the full moon. Sometimes I could talk to him in my head on other nights, but only on the nights of the full moon would he show for his latest meal. I figured it was all impossibly esoteric and mystical, something supernatural that my poor little brain could never hope to understand.
But Price had a theory on that, too.
