By the Light of the Moon

'And you'll do us the favor of not watching us leave.'

'As far as we know,' said Travis, 'you took a running leap and flew away.'

Dylan had asked for three minutes because Marj and Travis would have difficulty explaining a greater delay to the cops; but if Shep had wandered off, they were ruined. Three minutes wouldn't be long enough to find him.

Except for the breeze in the olive trees, the street was quiet. In the house, Kenny's muffled shouts wouldn't carry to a neighbor.

At the curb, driver's door open, the Expedition waited. Jilly had doused the headlights and switched off the engine.

Even as they crossed the front lawn, Dylan saw Shepherd in the backseat, face illuminated by the reflected glow of a battery-powered book light bouncing up at him from the page he was reading.

'Told you,' Jilly said.

Relieved, Dylan didn't snap at her.

Through the dusty window at Shepherd's side, the title of the book could be seen: Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens. Shep was a fiend for Dickens.

Dylan settled behind the wheel, slammed the door, figuring more than half a minute had passed since they'd left Travis to watch the wall clock in the kitchen.

Legs folded on the passenger's seat to spare her jade plant on the floor, Jilly held out the keys, then snatched them back. 'What if you go nuts again?'

'I didn't go nuts.'

'Whatever it was you did, what if you do it again?'

'I probably will,' he realized.

'I better drive.'

He shook his head. 'What did you see upstairs, on the way to Travis's room? What did you see when you looked toward the window at the end of the hall?'

She hesitated. Then she surrendered the keys. 'You drive.'

As Travis counted off the first minute in the kitchen, Dylan executed a U-turn. They followed the route they had taken earlier on Eucalyptus Avenue, with its dearth of eucalyptuses. By the time Travis would have called 911, they had traveled surface streets to the interstate.

Dylan took I-10 east, toward the end of town where by now the Cadillac might have stopped smoldering, but he said, 'I don't want to stay on this. I have a hunch it won't be safe a whole lot longer.'

'Tonight's not a night for ignoring hunches,' she noted.

Eventually he departed the interstate in favor of U.S. Highway 191, an undivided two-lane blacktop that struck north through dark desolation and carried little traffic at this hour. He didn't know where 191 led, and right now he didn't care. For a while, where they went didn't matter, as long as they kept moving, as long as they put some distance between themselves and the corpse in the Coupe DeVille, between themselves and the house on Eucalyptus Avenue.

For the first two miles on 191, neither he nor Jilly spoke, and as the third mile began to clock up on the odometer, Dylan started to shake. Now that his adrenaline levels were declining toward normal and now that the primitive survivalist within him had returned to his genetic subcellar, the enormity of what had happened belatedly hit him. Dylan strove to conceal the shaking from Jilly, knew that he was unsuccessful when he heard his teeth chatter, and then realized that she was trembling, too, and hugging herself, and rocking in her seat.

'D-d-d-damn,' she said.

'Yeah.'

'I'm not W-w-wonder Woman,' she said.

'No.'

'For one thing, I don't have big enough hooters for the job.'

He said, 'Me neither.'

'Oh, man, those knives.'

'They were honking big knives,' he agreed.

'You with your baseball bat. What – were you out of your mind, O'Conner?'

'Must've been out of my mind. You with your ant spray – that didn't strike me as the epitome of rationality, Jackson.'

'Worked, didn't it?'

'Nice shot.'

'Thanks. Where we lived when I was a kid, I got lots of practice with roaches. They move faster than Miss Becky. You must've been good at baseball.'

'Not bad for an effete artist. Listen, Jackson, it took guts to come upstairs after you knew about the knives.'

'It took stupidity, is what it took. We could've been killed.'

'We could've been,' he acknowledged, 'but we weren't.'

'But we could've been. No more of that run-jump-chase-fight crap. No more, O'Conner.'

'I hope not,' he said.

'I mean it. I'm serious. I'm tellin' you, no more.'

'I don't think that's our choice to make.'

'It's sure my choice.'

'I mean, I don't think we control the situation.'

'I always control my situation,' she insisted.

'Not this situation.'

'You're scaring me.'

'I'm scaring me, too,' he said.

These admissions led to a contemplative silence.

The high moon, lustrous silver at its pinnacle, grew tarnished as it became a low moon in the west, and the romantic desert table it once brightened became a somber setting suitable for a last supper.

Brown bristling balls of tumbleweed trembled at the verge of the road, dead yet eager to roam, but the night breeze didn't have enough power to send them traveling.

Moths traveled, however, small white ghost moths and larger gray specimens like scraps of soiled shroud cloth, eerily illumined by the headlights, swooping over and around the SUV but seldom striking the windshield.

In classic painting, butterflies were symbols of life, joy, and hope. Moths – of the same order as butterflies, Lepidoptera – were in all cases symbols of despair, deterioration, destruction, and death. Entomologists estimate the world is home to thirty thousand species of butterflies, and four times that many moths.

In part, a mothy mood gripped Dylan. He remained edgy, twitchy, as if the insulation on every nerve in his body were as eaten away as the fibers of a wool sweater infested with larvae. As he relived what had happened on Eucalyptus Avenue and as he wondered what might be coming next, spectral moths fluttered the length of his spine.

Yet anxiety didn't own him entirely. Contemplation of their uncertain future flooded Dylan with a choking disquiet, but each time the disquiet ebbed, exhilaration flowed in to take its place, and a wild joy that nearly made him laugh out loud. He was simultaneously sobered by anxiety that threatened to become apprehension – and also intoxicated with the possibilities of this glorious new power that he understood only imperfectly.

This singular state of mind was so fresh to his experience that he wasn't capable of crafting the words – or the images, for that matter – to explain it adequately to Jilly. Then he glanced away from the empty highway, from trembling tumbleweeds and kiting moths, and knew at once, by her expression, that her state of mind precisely matched his.

Not only weren't they in Kansas anymore, Toto, they weren't in predictable Oz, either, but adrift in a land where there were sure to be greater wonders than yellow-brick roads and emerald cities, more to fear than wicked witches and flying monkeys.

A moth snapped hard against the windshield, leaving a gray dusty substance on the glass, a little kiss of Death.