slicing along the western border between California and the rest of the planet. After a couple miles of this he grew weary and lay down to rest his head on a log. He closed his eyes and with the static hiss of ocean waves surrounding him, fell into a nap.
Sometime later, sensing he was being watched, he opened his eyes to see a man’s face hovering over him. More specifically it hovered high in the air, peering out of clouds. The face was as massive as a mountain, each stubbly whisker the size of a stump in a clear-cut. The face looked to be in its midthirties, Caucasian, a little heavy around the jowls but with a strong, angular jaw. Brown hair messed up with some sort of beauty product, blackheads clustered around the nose.
Neethan raised himself up on his elbows. “Who are you?”
The face didn’t respond, maintaining its placid expression. Neethan realized the hot blasts of wind he was feeling every few seconds were breaths from this giant’s nostrils.
“Who are you!” he repeated. Still no answer. Unnerved, Neethan stood and continued walking, with the giant, celestial head at his back. He’d never been stared at so intensely. It felt as though dental drills were boring into his shoulder blades.
“Leave me alone!” Neethan cried out.
Still the head persisted, following along it seemed, his eyes trained on Neethan’s path. Frustrated, Neethan fired a couple blasts in the head’s direction, but the buckshot fell far short. What could the head want? Maybe it just wanted him to continue his walk along the red carpet, which Neethan would have done regardless. Maybe it had appeared in a supervisory capacity, to ensure his safe travel to the Pacific Northwest. Or maybe it was simply a spectator, a curious entity observing his choices. Whatever it was, it made Neethan’s skin crawl.
The head belched and the sky was overcome with the stench of garlic.
“Jesus Christ!” Neethan yelled, shaking his gun. The head appeared to smile slightly, amused at the pip- squeak anger of this minuscule being trudging along a red carpet on a beach with the paparazzi nowhere in sight. Soon it eclipsed the sun and became an indistinct black mass. When night came completely, the moon cast the head in a blue glow. It appeared to close its eyes and drift into sleep.
Neethan couldn’t tell how far he’d traveled on the beach but his body told him it was time to find a place to stay for the night. He struggled toward a concentration of lights in the distance and came upon a charming seaside town where a motel, the Lamplight Inn, flickered its VACANCY sign. Veering off the carpet, he stumbled across the parking lot to the motel’s office, where a balding, middle-aged, heavyset man in a white T-shirt sat scribbling something in a notebook. Neethan pushed open the door and asked if there were rooms available. The man’s voice came out filled with static, like there was something wrong with his audio. About every third word he spoke cut out.
“… have… -ble… looking for… view room?”
“I’m sorry,” Neethan said, “you’re cutting out. I’ll take whatever room you think is best.”
The man nodded, then looked out the window to the beach, craning his neck to observe the giant, sleeping head hovering in the sky.
“… that head… to… ?”
“Come again?”
“Does… belong… you?”
“Oh,” Neethan said, “I guess it does belong to me. It showed up after I came out of the redwoods, after I killed all those zombies.”
“Who… he?”
“Who is he? I don’t know. He’s just some guy who’s been following me. Right now he appears to be asleep. I have no idea what he wants. He won’t speak. He just watches me. I don’t care for it, if you want to know the truth. I feel like there’s a built-in expectation involved with being watched like this. Why would he watch me if he didn’t want or expect me to do something? Like a scientist, you know? A scientist doesn’t observe something unless he has a
The man behind the counter seemed to have stopped listening to him. He slid a room key across the fake- wood-grain counter and returned to his scribbled
Lonely and tired, Neethan slung his weapon over his shoulder and shuffled across the parking lot to his room, casting a quick glance at the head drooling into the sea as it slumbered. He opened the door to find the room illuminated by a gold coin the size of a medium pizza floating above one of the two twin beds. More money—just what he needed. He positioned himself under the glowing currency and poked his head up into it, hearing the familiar chime. How much money had he earned in this manner? How many extra lives had he racked up? He’d lost track. A few million bucks, maybe? Enough lives to sustain him through a variety of zombie attacks, if it came to that? Neethan smiled at the television waiting for him at the foot of the bed. He clicked it on with the remote, set his weapon on the nightstand, and stripped out of his clothes for some quality underwear-clad TV viewing/ball- cupping. He settled after a while on a show about the space elevator some dudes had constructed off Maui. (A commercial for condoms, a commercial for legal services, a commercial for coffee in a can.) Here was an interview with an official spokesman for the project, a wind-whipped fellow in a rain suit, who said, “We really had a pisser of a time contending with the Van der Waals forces, but hey, thanks to some heavy lifting brain-wise, we’re all good,” and, “It’s a freaking space elevator, man! Can you believe it?”
“What’s the fuckin’ point of this giant, like, space station you dudes are building up there?” the interviewer lady person asked the spokesman on the deck of the sea platform.
“What we’re building is nothing short of the first extraterrestrial terrarium, an O’Neil cylinder that’ll rotate on its axis to simulate gravity and contain a sustainable fuckin’ ecosystem, with a filament core providing energy and illumination and shit like that.”
“So people are going to fuckin’ live in it and shit?”
“People, or, you know, maybe just, like, fuckin’ plants and shit like that at this point. It’s actually not up to my group to determine how the interior is going to look, what’s going to be on the inner surface. We’re just building the shell right now. It’s pretty fuckin’ kick-ass, though.”
As the spokesman fielded questions and spat chewing-tobacco-related saliva into a paper cup, a climber platform slid down the carbon nanotube ribbon and docked with a great hissing of steam. The camera cut away for a close-up of the platform, from which a trio of technicians who were suited up in orange astronaut gear waved and thumbs-upped to indicate another successful delivery of payload.
Neethan surfed and happened upon one of his own movies,
The next morning, the giant head was still sleeping when Neethan rejoined the red carpet and continued walking north along the coast. Seagulls had begun nesting in the head’s eyebrows, pecking at its chapped lips. The clouds surrounding it had begun to rain, slickening its hair. Occasionally Neethan turned to see if it was awake yet but at noon its eyes were still closed. Neethan positioned himself under the nostrils, craning his neck to view the two hair-lined caverns. It took him a minute to realize he couldn’t feel its breath anymore. The head was dead. Yet still it followed him, maintaining the same few hundred yards or so of distance. What could this possibly mean? Neethan wished it would go away. Maybe it could nod off into the ocean, sink to the bottom to be feasted upon by crabs, gazing up at the distant surface with eyes the size of sports stadiums.
If the mere fact of a gigantic head hanging behind him was upsetting, Neethan was even more upset that the head was now deceased. He found himself, as he crossed the border into Oregon, wishing the head was still alive,
