‘I knew I should’ve gone to the cops. Should’ve filed a stolen-vehicle report like a good citizen would. Now I look suspicious.’
‘Doodoo. Diaper dump.’
‘If Frankenstein was right,’ Dylan warned, ‘maybe the cops can’t protect you. Maybe these people can pull rank on the cops.’
‘Then I guess we’d have to go to – who? The FBI?’
‘Maybe you can’t escape these guys. Maybe they can pull rank on the FBI, too.’
‘Who in God’s name are they – the Secret Service, the CIA, Santa Claus’s elf gestapo out making their who’s-been-naughty list?’
‘Cow pie. Waste.’
‘Frankenstein didn’t say who they were,’ Dylan reported. ‘He just said if they find the stuff in our blood, we’ll be as dead as dinosaurs and buried where our bones won’t ever be found.’
‘Yeah, maybe that’s what he said, but why should we believe him anyway? He was a mad scientist.’
‘Evacuation. Voidance. Toilet treasure.’
‘He wasn’t mad,’ Dylan averred.
‘You called him a lunatic.’
‘And you called him a salesman. We’ve called him a lot of things in the heat of the moment—’
‘Potty packing. Outhouse input. Excreta.’
‘—but given his options,’ Dylan continued, ‘considering that he knew those guys were on his tail and were going to kill him, he took the most logical, rational action available to him.’
Her mouth opened as wide as if she were assuming the cooperative position for a root canal. ‘Logical? Rational?’ She reminded herself that she didn’t really know Mr. Dylan O’Conner. In the end, he might prove to be more peculiar than his brother. ‘Okay, let me get this straight. The smiley creep chloroforms me, shoots Dr. Jekyll juice or something into my veins, steals my fabulous car, gets himself blown up – and in your enlightened view, that behavior qualifies him to coach the university debating team?’
‘Obviously, they’d pushed him into a corner, time was running out, and he did the only thing he could do to save his life’s work. I’m sure he didn’t intend to get himself blown up.’
‘You’re as insane as he was,’ Jilly decided.
‘Dejecta. Bulldoody.’
‘I’m not saying that what he did was right,’ Dylan clarified. ‘Only that it was logical. If we operate under the assumption that he was just nuttier than a one-pound jar of Jif, we’re making a mistake that could get us killed. Think about it: If we die, he loses. So he wants us to stay alive, if only because we’re his… I don’t know… because we’re his living experiments or something. Consequently, I have to assume that everything he told me was meant to help us stay alive.’
‘Filth. Dung. A withdrawal from the bowel bank.’
Immediately to the north and south of the interstate lay plains as black as ancient hearthstones stained by the char of ten thousand fires, with isolated mottlings as gray as ashes where moonlight and starlight glimmered off the reflective surfaces of desert vegetation and mica-flecked rock formations. Directly east, but also curving toward the highway with viselike relentlessness from the northeast and the southeast, the Peloncillo Mountains presented a barren and forbidding silhouette: hard, black, jagged slabs darker than the night sky into which they thrust.
This wasteland offered no comfort to the mind, no consolation to the heart, and except for the interstate, it provided no evidence that it existed on a populated planet. Even along these paved lanes, the lights of the oncoming and receding traffic made no conclusive argument for a living population. The scene possessed an eerie quality that suggested the science-fiction scenario of a world on which all species had perished centuries before, leaving their domain as morbidly still as a glass-encased diorama through which the only movement was the periodic bustle of perpetual-motion machines engaged in ancient programmed tasks that no longer held any meaning.
To Jilly, this bleak vastness began to look like the landscape of Hell with all the fires put out. ‘We’re not going to get out of this alive, are we?’ she asked in a tone entirely rhetorical.
‘What? Of course we will.’
‘Of course?’ she said with a rich measure of disbelief. ‘No doubt at all?’
‘Of course,’ he insisted. ‘The worst is already behind us.’