‘What’re you doing?’ she demanded again.
He answered this time, but his reply was neither reassuring nor informative: ‘I don’t know.’
She sensed a quality in his demeanor that was reminiscent of her desperate state of mind each time she found herself in the thrall of a mirage. Alarmed by the prospect of being driven at high speed by a man distracted by hallucinations or worse, she said, ‘Slow down, for God’s sake. Where are you going?’
Accelerating, he said, ‘West. Somewhere west. A place. Some place.’
‘Why?’
‘I feel the pull.’
‘The pull of what?’
‘The west. I don’t know. I don’t know what or where.’
‘Then why are you going anywhere at all?’
As if he were the simplest of men for whom this conversation had taken a philosophical turn no less beyond his comprehension than the arcane discoveries of molecular biology, Dylan rolled his gaze toward her, revealing as much white of the eyes as does a dog cringing in bewilderment from harsh words that it can’t understand. ‘It just… feels right.’
‘What feels right?’
‘Going this direction, going west again.’
‘Aren’t we driving straight back into trouble?’
‘Yeah, probably, I think so.’
‘Then pull over, stop.’
‘Can’t.’ An instant sweat slicked his face. ‘Can’t.’
‘Why?’
‘Frankenstein. The needle. The stuff. It’s started. Something’s happening to me.’
‘What something?’
‘Some weird shit.’
In the backseat, Shepherd said, ‘Manure.’
14
Weird manure indeed.
As though he were fleeing from a fast-moving fire or outrunning an avalanche of tumbling rock and ice and snow, Dylan O’Conner was flogged by a sense of urgency so intense that his heart jumped like that of a rabbit running in the shadow of a wolf. He had never suffered feelings of persecution and had never taken methamphetamine, but he supposed this must be how a man with paranoid delusions would feel if he mainlined a near-lethal dose of liquid speed.
‘I’m jacked up,’ he told Jilly, pressing the accelerator, ‘and I don’t know why, and I can’t get down.’
God alone knew what she made of that. Dylan himself wasn’t sure what he’d been trying to convey.
In fact, he didn’t feel that he was running from danger, but that he was being drawn inexorably toward something by the world’s largest electromagnet, which pulled him by the iron in his blood. His sense of urgency was matched by an irresistible compulsion to move.
The urgency had no apparent cause, and the compulsion related to no specific object. He simply needed to go west, and he felt constrained to race after the setting moon with all possible haste.
Instinct, he told Jilly. Something in his blood that said go, something in his bones that said hurry, a race-memory voice speaking through his genes, a voice that he knew he dared not ignore, because if he resisted its message, something terrible would happen.
‘Terrible?’ she asked. ‘What?’
He didn’t know, he only felt, as a stalked antelope feels the cheetah lurking a hundred yards away behind a screen of tall grass, and as a parched cheetah senses the presence of a water hole miles away across the veldt.
Trying to explain himself, he’d let up on the accelerator. The speedometer needle quivered at 85. He pumped it toward 90.
In this traffic, on this highway, in this vehicle, driving at ninety miles per hour wasn’t only illegal and imprudent, but foolish, and worse than foolish – moronic.
He wasn’t able either to shame or argue himself into reacting responsibly to the risk. Shep’s life and Jilly’s, as well as his own, were jeopardized by this monomaniacal determination to move and to move fast, faster, always west, west. On another night or even at an earlier hour this night, the mere recognition of his accountability for their safety would have caused Dylan to slow down, but now all moral considerations and even his survival instinct were overruled by this feverish compulsion.
Macks and Peterbilts, sedans, coupes, SUVs, pickups, vans, auto carriers, motor homes, tanker trucks raced westward, weaving back and forth from lane to lane, and without once slowing, Dylan plunged the Expedition through the gaps in traffic as expertly as an eagle-eyed tailor speed-threading a long series of needles.