yellow flow.
He drank more water, more broth, blundered back to bed and collapsed as if bludgeoned. His dreams were memories: ice spray whipping in a glittering veil off a hillcrest under moonlight as he crested it on his skis, gray slush on a city street, a canoe and big mosquitoes and white birch trees. A chocolate bar forgotten in one hand as he stared at a textbook and suddenly he understood what that theorem meant, the multilayered elegance of it clicking home in his mind. Ruth's shy smile…
But all with a sense of wrongness. It faded as he woke, coughed, and wrinkled his nose at the smell of stale ancient sweat that filled the room. Flies buzzed near the ceiling. He hadn't noticed those before, but now his eyes tracked them for minutes at a time.
For three days he kept up the pattern, sleeping, eating what he could-he graduated to crackers as well as broth-sleeping again. When he was stable enough for a shower the relief was inexpressible, though going back to the smelly sheets was hard for the moments it took to tumble into unconsciousness.
'You say you don' want the maid,' the manager of the motel said; he was a short, thickset dark man in a stained T-shirt.
'That was then. This is now. Now I want the room cleaned,' Peter said.
The office had a tall, dirty glass wall that turned it into a solar furnace. The air-conditioning unit in a side window rattled and wheezed, laboriously dumping the heat back out into the environment and leaving a slight smell of mildew in the cooler air. Peter reached carefully into his hip pocket and took out his wallet, then fanned another three hundred dollars onto the desk.
'Okay,' the man said.
'And that covers the next week.'
'Maybe you should pay extra,' the manager said.
'Maybe I should pay less. Maid service is part of the standard charge.'
There was open contempt in the motel operator's gaze; he might as well have said junkie aloud. After a moment he shrugged and swept up the money.
'Okay, one more week.'
'Is there anyplace in town to get something to eat?'
'This isn't like the city, mister,' the man said. 'Hell, it ain't even like it's a town.'
Peter managed to smile; his lips weren't so dry and cracked now.
'The place I grew up was about this size. Just a lot colder and greener.'
'There's Teresas. The truckers stop there. Out past the gas station.'
'Thanks.'
'De nada.'
Of course, probably Teresa's your cousin or your aunt.
Heat hit him like a club as he pushed open the nonfunctioning automatic door and walked out of the little patch of shade flanked by the dry twigs of something dead in two concrete planters. It must have been at least a hundred, but it felt good, as if it were sinking into his bones and driving out lines of ice crystal there. He walked cautiously into the white light, a dozen steps at a time and then a moment's rest.
The little sun-faded Arizona hamlet held the one run-down motel, a scattering of old crumbling adobes, and some trailers and double-wides sandblasted by years of the desert winds, along with a few spindly bushes that were trying to be trees, their silvery gray leaves turning in the slight hot breeze. Beyond was nothing but rock and sand, occasional tufts of reluctant hardy vegetation, and things that glinted in the brilliant sunlight and might have been old broken bottles or flecks of mica in the rocks.
It also held a gas station-cum-convenience store, and beside it a blocky white single-story structure labeled, T RESA'S. He supposed that had originally been, TERESE'S, and it was definitely a restaurant. A bell tinkled as he pushed through the screen door; from the silence he guessed that it wasn't air conditioned, but it was oddly cool. After a moment he felt his mind function again; the wall had been three feet thick. This was adobe, and excellent thermal insulation.
The big surprise was that it didn't smell. Well, not of anything but food; the interior was plain, and some of the furniture looked like it dated to the eighties or even earlier, but it was dim and cool, and his stomach clenched in anticipation at the prospect of solid food, helped by the smells of spices and frying meat and onions. Everything seemed reasonably clean, though. Presumably truckers stopped here, or maybe smugglers. He sat at one of the plastic-topped tables and panted a little, exhausted by the brief walk. There was sweat under the straps of his light knapsack; the damp patches felt cool with evaporation for a moment as he sat and controlled his breathing.
'I'll have…' he croaked.
The waitress could have been Mexican or Indian, in her thirties and built like a rain barrel. She looked at him incuriously.
'A burrito. And a glass of water. A pitcher of water, please. Just a little ice.'
She waited expressionlessly until he put a twenty by his plate, even though he was clean and he'd thought he looked much better once he shaved. Evidently much better still didn't mean acceptable.
The food came fairly quickly, which wasn't surprising, since he and the waitress were the only humans visible. There was a cat in one corner, but it was firmly asleep on a mat, stretched out to 'sleep thin.' Nothing moved, except the overhead fan in its eternal slow revolution, giving off a slight squee and wobble with each turn.
'Careful, careful,' he muttered to himself when the plate arrived.
It was a long time since he'd had much solid food. Peter swallowed painfully, aware that he'd been nearly drooling; it was as if he were an old rusty outboard engine that had finally caught and was stuttering and letting out clouds of blue smoke but turned the propeller nonetheless. The thought made him smile a little. Despite years in the Southwest, his mind still used Land O' Lakes visual metaphors!
One bite, and he almost moaned with pleasure. Chewing, chewing, making himself go slowly and not bolt it and overburden his shrunken stomach. The burrito was Mexican-style, not surprising this close to the border, smaller and thinner than the American variety, and holding only barbacoa- style pork and onion and refried beans. A pause while he monitored his stomach; it was going to stay down. He finished and licked his fingers, and then just sat sipping at his water for twenty minutes, feeling relatively good for the first time since the symptoms started to hit.
'Okay, work,' he muttered to himself. 'You're supposed to be a logical thinker. At least about physics. At least, you used to be.'
His hands still wobbled a bit as he slid his workpad computer out of the knapsack on the chair beside him. A gentle tap to the screen projected the virtual keyboard onto the table. He slid the foot down to put the image at the right angle and adjusted the distance. The battery had a three-quarter charge.
'I should have remembered to leave it plugged in. Hell, am I fit to do anything right now? Doc Duggan said the withdrawal was rough but there usually wasn't any permanent damage. Usually is sort of an unpleasant word. And I sort of liked Duggan, we had things in common, but she's a renfield. She works for them. How trustworthy was what she said?'
Although she hadn't been born into the Shadowspawn-worshiping cult, like most of the inhabitants of the town of Rancho Sangre Sagrado. Some of those people were all right, if you stayed away from their…well, not quite a religion, but nearly.
The Shadowspawn are creepy enough if you know that what they do isn't really supernatural. I mean, they do drink blood and they can assume other shapes and move things with their minds and affect how chances turn out…
Jose Villegas, one of his fellow lucies, had been a decent guy, what they'd called a regular Joe in his grandfather's day, though he'd been born and raised there. Others, like the household manager Theresa, were rabid weasels, as bad as Shadowspawn in their way-maybe worse, given that they didn't have all the king-predator genes pushing them. A lot of them were really screwed up in one way or another, functioning neurotics with weird forms of denial. He suspected that suicide was a major health problem there.
'Okay, Peter, think logically.'
He stared at the screen as the system logged onto the Web-the area had phone reception, and that was all it needed.
'I can't be Peter Boase again.'
