Amnesia Moon Read Online Free PDF Page B

you.”
    â€œCans? Clean out the stash?”
    â€œKellogg needs something to give the seal people. A peace offering. Hurry up.”
    â€œOkay, okay.”
    Melinda Self got in, and Chaos reached over and slammed her door. “Okay,” he said, waving the throng away from the car. “See you later.”
    He roared off, around the perimeter of the town square and back towards the reservoir. When he turned the corner, out of sight of City Hall, he cut down a side street and headed for the highway. The skin on the back of his neck prickled with fear, but nothing turned up in the rearview mirror.
    He circled under the overpass, half-certain he’d find an ambush on the other side. But the entrance ramp was empty. He didn’t look over at the girl until Little America was a mile or so behind them. She sat staring out her window, unperturbed. There was a fine beading of sweat on her nose. When she noticed him looking, she smiled and said: “We’re going the wrong wa>.”
    â€œI know,” he said. “If I go back now, he’ll kill me. You want to take a little trip?”
    â€œI guess so.”
    â€œYou going to miss your parents?”
    â€œI don’t know.” She smiled again and shrugged.
    â€œWe’ll send them a postcard.”
    â€œWhat’s a postcard?”
    â€œNever mind.”
    Another mile down the road he pulled over, stopped the car, and went around to the trunk. He took out a couple of cans of food, an opener, and a plastic jug of water, and tossed them onto the front seat. Melinda played with the opener and one of the cans. He took a big gulp of the water and started the car again.
    â€œI don’t want to stop too long,” he said. “They might be after us. I don’t know. But open up some food.”
    He had to show her how to use the opener, steering with his elbows for a stretch. They wolfed down one can together, then a second. He felt a wave of nausea pass through him afterwards and wondered briefly if this was all some bizarre trick and the food was poisoned or drugged and Kellogg would be driving out to drag them back as soon as they succumbed. The escape had been too easy. But no; the food was okay. It was his stomach, shrunken with hunger and seared by impure alcohol. He drank more water and held onto the wheel.
    The moon was up now, lighting the desert floor. The highway was a crumbling black stripe laid across the top of the world, giving way completely to sand in places, elsewhere asserting itself, rising over a rocky gorge or withered creek. The moon raced away from him as fast as he drove, a yellow mouth shrouded in mist. The girl fell asleep on the seat beside him, her arms curling over her chest, the breeze riffling her brown fur.
    He drove through the night, and the next day too, and didn’t sleep until the night that followed.

 
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    He lived in a house by a lake. There was a boat tied to the pier and a computer in the house. He was waiting for the woman he loved to quit her job in the city and come join him in the house. In the meantime they talked on the telephone every night. He sometimes wondered why she couldn’t stay in the house with him and do her work through the computer, but he supposed that was what she was paid so much for: being there, in the city. So he was patient.
    He spent his time on the boat or in the garden or in the house taking drugs. The drugs he liked kept him awake and nervous and only occasionally provided him with visions. More and more he shunned visions. He was happiest when the drugs kept him sharply awake and on the verge of some vast realization—but only on the verge. He didn’t want to use up the feeling he got from the drugs. That feeling was more valuable than any realization.
    When he went to the computer, he sensed that something was wrong. The computer called him Everett, the wrong name, he felt sure, though he couldn’t think of the right one.