Work Done for Hire

1.

I spent a couple of hours getting the damned bicycle carrier attached to the back of my old van. My own fault for buying it “as is”; it was missing a couple of bolts the previous owner probably hurled away in frustration.

Kit didn’t mind the delay. She was going over last year’s notes in Calculus III. I asked her whether that was in preparation for Calculus IV and she said “I wish,” and told me the name of the course it was a prerequisite for. Three words, and the only one I understood was “analysis.” Though I doubted it had anything to do with Freud.

We probably wouldn’t need the carrier anyhow, this weekend. The plan was to bike up to Cedar Rapids, twenty-four miles on MapQuest, spend the night at a motel, and come back Sunday morning. Then I’d take a longer ride during the week, maybe to Des Moines and back, get a feel for it.

I’ve been riding a bike since I was a kid, a year-round thing in Daytona, but haven’t done a really long trip since my sophomore year, when a bunch of us spent the summer biking and staying in hostels in Holland and then England.

Since moving to Iowa I’ve grown a little flabby. Maybe more than a little. Doesn’t take much energy to stare out the window at the snow and wish you were somewhere else. I tried skiing my first winter and fucked up both knees badly enough to need a wheelchair. Not anybody’s vehicle of choice for ice and snow. A diet of beer and potato chips, seasoned with onion dip and self-pity, set me on the road to the 200-pound mark. Hit 203 before I got up on crutches.

Seem stuck at 190 now. Hoping to lose fifteen or twenty pounds biking, before winter sets in. Help get into the character, too.

Scrubbed the grease off my hands but decided against a shower. We’d want one when we got to the motel, anyhow.

Kit was hunched over her computer, which was on the low coffee table in the living room. Half a dozen books were spread around on the couch and table. She picked up a paper notebook and scribbled something down, not looking up when I came into the room.

“With you in a minute,” she said.

“Want a beer?”

“Got tea.”

I followed my nose into the kitchen. She’d put last night’s soup on a back burner overnight, and the smell made me ravenous. It wasn’t even eleven, though. Popped a beer and sat down at the kitchen table with a magazine and a 100-calorie bag of pretzels.

The bag had sixteen pretzels in it. A penny’s worth of food and a dime’s worth of plastic for half a dollar. But the principle was valid; if I had a regular box of pretzels I’d keep at them till I could see the bottom. Leave a few so I technically wouldn’t have eaten the whole box.

Hunter would swallow the box whole. Cardboard, plastic, good roughage.

How often does he eat, anyhow? Big predators like lions kill a big animal, gorge themselves, and sleep. Maybe he should do something like that. But what do big ocean predators do? I think sharks have to keep moving. Do killer whales and porpoises sleep after they eat, floating in the waves? I’d look it up when Kit got off the machine.

My own computer was being random, files disappearing and reappearing. So it was resting until the VA check came. The guy at the Apple Store said I’d need a rebuilt hard drive, which would suck up about a third of the check. But the uncertainty was driving me batfuck. So I was a madman writing about a lunatic on a mentally deficient machine. There’s a recipe for a best seller.

So what’s the appetite of a hugely fat person really like? Myrna the Mountain must’ve been well over three hundred pounds, fattest girl at GHS, but nobody ever saw her eat anything but salad. She said she had “fat genes,” which generated obvious jokes.

Maybe when she wasn’t eating lettuce she went after hikers on deserted trails.

Kit came in and opened the refrigerator. “How come you put the bike carrier on?”

“Had some time to kill.” And it would save me 4.2 miles, biking from my place to here and back. It would make a difference, 48 miles instead of 52. Don’t want to overdo it. “How often do you think a four-hundred-pound person would eat?”

She brought out a soda water and a pie pan with one wedge left. Key lime with whipped cream topping, graham cracker crust.

She laughed. “You should see your face—you, too, could be a four-hundred-pound guy! Split it with you?”

“I’ll pass.” Try not to drool.

“Maybe he’d eat all the time. If he ate like three huge meals a day, it would put stress on his digestive system. Didn’t we used to be foragers?”

“Speak for yourself.”

“You know what I mean, humans… roots and berries, nibble all the time?

“Yeah, but we’re set up to be omnivores,” I said. “If you kill a large animal, you can’t just eat a nibble at a time. It would spoil.”

“Wild animals don’t mind a little rot. Remember that grizzly bear.” We’d taken a helicopter ride over Yellowstone, and saw a bear that the pilot said had been eating on the same moose for weeks. He said that if we were on the ground, the smell would knock us over. She took a bite. “Yum… rotten moose pie. Maybe key lime.”

“I guess this guy doesn’t live on human flesh. He’d have to be killing people left and right.”

“Well, I don’t know,” she said, stacking lunch meat and cheese. “He weighs four hundred pounds and looks like a creature from outer space. Maybe he doesn’t just walk into a Hy-Vee and buy a side of beef. Maybe he does have to eat people.”

“Or farm animals,” I said. “That wouldn’t draw as much attention.”

“You ought to have him break into a zoo and eat a camel. Half a camel.”

“Speaking of—”

“No. And I won’t buy any more.” Saturday night she’d come home with half a pack of Camels, and we shared it in an orgy of resolution-breaking. I could still feel the narcotic rush.

“You can’t be virtuous all the time.”

“So look up something really dirty in your Kama Sutra. Something that doesn’t cause cancer.” She held up the mayonnaise jar. “And doesn’t use condiments.” We’d used mayonnaise once, and she complained it made her smell like a sandwich. So people will know where you hid the salami, I said, and she did have to laugh.

She didn’t like to talk about sex, but was willing to do anything. Better than the opposite, I knew from experience. Lynette of recent memory. A modern kind of celibacy, I guess; talking dirty and being squeaky clean. All talk and no action, my father would have said.

I wondered where he and his girlfriend were now. It’s not fair for old people to have so much fun. Or, be honest, it’s creepy to think of your own dad fucking a girl not much older than you. Fucking anybody.

“Earth to Jack.” She set the sandwich in front of me. “You’re daydreaming again. About your novel?”

“No, nothing.” I drove the image from my mind. “The bike carrier, we might need it. Like if one of the bikes breaks down, one of us could pedal back to pick up the car, then come collect it.”

“Oh, right. Good.” She took one bite and got up to punch the little boom box by the fridge. “New Flash Point CD.”

We shared a lot of musical likes and dislikes, but I didn’t get her passion for Flash Point. Retro wannabes, what a combination. I nodded and concentrated on my sandwich.

“Maybe he’d like them rotten,” she said. “The corpses. Like the French, they hang ducks and geese.”

“What did they do?”

“Who do?”

“What did the ducks do, the French want to hang them?”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, I’m not. Who would hang a fucking duck?”

She laughed. “They like hang them in a shed. Let them rot to improve their flavor.”

What an image. “Tell me you just made that up.”

“I swear to God and Gastronomique. Go Google it.”

“Oh, I believe you. What do they do with fish? Fuck them blind?”

“Not raw.”

“’Course not. The bones.” I put some more mustard on my sandwich. “Maybe he would, you know? He’s got the big freezer, but maybe he’d stack them around for a while at room temperature first. The trailer’d smell like a dead moose, but he’d like it that way.”

She nodded, munching. “That would make a good penultimate scene. Antepenultimate. The FBI men are closing in on Hunter’s trailer, and they go, ‘What’s that godawful smell?’”

“He’d remember it from the war,” I said, and had to stop and swallow twice.

“You all right?”

I coughed and swallowed again. “Yeah. Nothing.”

“You remember it. Don’t you?”

“Sure. But it’s not like a big thing.” The first time, it wasn’t. They’d been dead so long they’d dried out, and we didn’t smell it till we were right on them. But the next was a woman and two babies, bloated up and burst, and as soon as we smelled them we heard the flies, and followed the sound, and if it hadn’t been for the X-rays, the demo squad, we might have snagged a trip wire in the sand and gotten claymored all over the fucking desert.

“Jack, you’re pale.” She touched the back of my hand and I jerked it away in reflex.

I rubbed my face with both hands. “Fucking shit.”

“Tell me.”

“No, really. I’m all right.” I took a bite and tried to smile and chew at the same time.

“If you don’t talk to me about it, who are you going to talk to?” I shrugged, or cringed. “You stopped going to the VA shrink.”

“She just gave me pills.”

“And you didn’t like the pills, I understand. I didn’t like what they did to you. But you do have to talk to someone.”

“Okay. I will.”

“Promise?”

“Yeah. I’ll open up. Let it all out.”

Into the book.

Twenty-six miles turned out to be more in practice than it had seemed in theory. The idea of Iowa being flat was also a theoretical premise not borne out by fact. At the nineteen-mile mark there was a forlorn-looking motel, the Tidy Inn, and we turned into it after a two-word discussion.

The owner was a fat woman with sparse yellow hair, in a faded floral print dress at least a size too small. I had to pay her in cash, and if we’d wanted a phone, that would’ve been another $50 cash deposit. I wondered when she’d last had a customer who didn’t bring his own.

The room was too large for its small bed and desk and chair. It had a stale smell and was dark as night. Kit kept me from turning on the lights when we unlocked the door. She’d unclamped the strong headlight from her handlebars. She crept over to the bed and pulled the covers over as she snapped it on. No bugs went scurrying for shelter. That should have comforted me, but instead I worried that she might not have been fast enough. Armies of bedbugs waiting to carry us off into the night.

One welcome surprise was an old-fashioned bathtub sitting on claw feet. It was big enough for two, a little crowded. She filled it up with steaming water, only a little rust-colored, while I did a quick maintenance routine on the bikes and brought them inside.

She was already undressed, standing in the water, and lowered herself down with an expression of bliss. “Oh, my aching butt.”

I peeled off my Lycra bicycle togs and slipped in facing her, interlacing legs. The hot water was a relief, technically for the perineum rather than the butt proper, but she knew that. “Oh, my pulsating perineum” might be misconstrued.

I tickled her with my toe. “What do you want to do tonight?”

“Something besides that. Maybe trim your toenails.” I jerked back. “Kidding.” She put my foot back in place, gently, and then leaned forward while she reached behind her back to run some more hot water into the tub.

“Besides the obvious, we might try to find something to eat.” We’d packed an emergency dinner of beans and franks, but there might be a roadside café or, more likely, a fast-food joint.

“Should’ve asked Dragon Lady,” I said. “Wonder how close we are to the Amanas.” The Amana Colonies were a cluster of pseudo-Amish towns that featured home-cooking restaurants.

“Ask her when we’re cleaned up.” She took the little bar of soap and started to work on me. After a couple of minutes we dried off hastily and moved to the squeaky bed.

Afterwards, she fell asleep with her head on my shoulder, her breath tickling my neck. Her body still glowing from the tub and sex.

As often happens, I was miles from sleep, no matter how tired I was from the neck down. Should think about the book. Hard to put myself into the head of an inhuman flesh-eating monster with this cute flesh doll cuddled up alongside me. My deflated dick shrank even more at the thought.

I looked down at her body and had a terrible instant of transport. In front of a mosque, a civilian body carelessly ground under tank treads, bare legs unaffected, relaxed. Don’t go there. Don’t go back there.

CHAPTER FIVE

Stephen Spenser wasn’t impressed by money, having grown up surrounded by rich people he didn’t like. But there was a comfortable talismanic feel to the tight roll of C-notes, held with a fat rubber band, that rode in his left front pocket. Faded torn jeans, to go with his faded flannel shirt and well-worn tennis shoes.

The bicycle was a marvel of camouflage, or misdirection; a sturdy ancient Schwinn with a flaking paint job and a touch of rust. But the running gear and brakes were brand-new Campy and Shimano, the tires were Gators, and the seat cost more than the frame. It was comfortable and stopped on a dime and got forty miles to the gallon of Heineken.

It had two big reed baskets, one of which held his travel bag, carefully chosen after a couple of hours’ browsing in pawn shops and thrift stores. It was beat-up khaki nylon, scuffed but strong, with lots of compartments and a lock. The middle part held a week’s worth of clothes and dehydrated meals, and side pockets held wallet and change and a notebook, along with hardware like a bottle opener and flashlight and Swiss Army knife. What had really sold him on this one was a side pocket under a Velcro flap, large enough for a Glock 9-mm and two spare clips.

Under his shirt he carried a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special .38 Airweight—the kind of gun a private eye always had in the movies. But Steve knew too much about guns to rely on it alone. And Hunter was doubtless a big man. In Alabama he’d left three footprints in mud while he was carrying a two-hundred-pound victim. A police lab report said that it would take at least five hundred pounds to drive his size fourteens that deep. To kill him with a .38, you’d have to hit him in the eye or right down the ear, and Steve didn’t want to get that close while the beast was still alive.

He recited the LAPD mantra: “Two in the chest, one in the head.” The first would get his attention, the second would kill him, and the third would kill him again. If he were human.

At Mr. Steinhart’s insistence, he had a radio beacon Superglued to the underside of the seat. It used two hearing-aid batteries and would run for more than a year. If he were killed and the bike tossed somewhere, the cops could track it from fifty miles away. They might even find his body nearby.

If he were actually following the Southern Tier Trail, he’d start in the middle of St. Augustine. But Hunter wasn’t going to nab anyone off a city street, so he studied the bus route and had the Greyhound drop him and his bike off at Molasses Junction.

It was like a scene out of The Grapes of Wrath. Bare dirt from horizon to horizon, a steady north wind, cold in the bleak sunshine, blowing needle-sharp sand into his face. He’d be headed west, so only his right ear would fill up with dirt.

The only building at the Molasses Junction crossroads was a general store. He locked his bike up, feeling foolishly urban, and carried his bag inside the dark dusty place. Mostly bare shelves. With the dust storm rattling the windows, it all felt like a set from a Woody Guthrie movie. With himself a fugitive from a Humphrey Bogart noir flick, armed to the teeth with no target in sight.

A tired old woman came out of a back room, wiping her hands on a bloody rag. Actually tomato guts. Behind her he could see a canning setup boiling, and a case of empty catsup bottles.

“What you want, somethin’?” She wasn’t really that old. Her face was creased with fatigue, the lines stark in deep sunburn, maybe kitchen heat. Her body was not old, curves and muscle straining tight jeans and tank top. She turned halfway to adjust a Slim Jims display and not incidentally reveal that she was wearing a snub-nosed pistol in a butt holster. Probably smart in an isolated place like this. But the opposite of sexy.

He considered buying a box of .38 Special rounds to establish fellow-feeling, but decided against it. “Just a Coke, um, and a Slim Jim.”

“In the machine there.”

It was the kind of cooler he hadn’t seen since he was a little boy, a big red icebox with a sliding top; inside, bottles of drinks racked in ice-cold water. He pulled out a twelve-ounce Coke in a heavy returnable bottle, also a time trip. There was a bottle opener at the cash register, which clanged and made satisfying greased-metal sounds. He got a quarter change for his dollar, and a finger-touch of warm flesh. “You need somethin’, just holler.” He watched the .38 swivel back to the stockroom.

A good place to begin an adventure. Sex and guns and Mother Nature outside playing the noir witch. Forget Arlene and the evaporating check and weepy Mom and dear old Dad.

Just you and me, monster. I’m coming to get you.

2.

I was able to finish most of a chapter while she slept. She envied me for being able to get along on five or six hours’ sleep; I envied her for being able to stay down for ten. She was always more rested than me, but then I theoretically had more time to work. An extra forty-hour week every ten days. If only I could get paid for reading trash fiction and watching TV, I’d be a wealthy man.

But this particular morning, I did write, and was pretty happy with it.

So was Kit. She read through it while we had motel-room instant in paper cups.

“Would they really have to shoot him in the eye, or the ear? I mean in the real world.”

“They say people who kill people for a living don’t like .38s. The army stopped using them in the Spanish-American War, the Philippine part. The enraged Moro natives would absorb several shots and just keep coming.”

“Pretty tough customers.”

“Well, they tied leather thongs around their balls before they went into combat. The leather got wet and constricted, and the pain drove them mad.”

“That’s got to be bullshit,” she said. “Racist bullshit. They couldn’t walk.”

“Hey. I read it in a book. That’s why the army changed from the .38 to the .45. The .45 bullet was big enough to knock them down.”

“But they don’t use the .45 anymore. You said you had a 9-mm in the desert. That’s got to be smaller.” She rubbed her chin. “Forty-five hundredths of an inch is like twelve millimeters. Way smaller.”

“Yeah, I guess. But it knocks them down better.”

“Goodness. Smaller is better. Where will it all end?”

“A tiny little bullet, obviously, that moves at the speed of light. A photon.”

“Have to be a heavy photon.”

“I’m sure they’re working on it.” I should’ve paid attention in physics. How could a photon weigh anything, if it always moved at the speed of light? If it didn’t move at the speed of light, it wouldn’t be a photon.

“So is the monster really from another planet?”

“He thinks he is.”

“Yeah, but you know. Don’t you?”

“Right now he’s Schrödinger’s Cat. And I haven’t opened the box.”

“Ah.” She took a sip of coffee. “So you don’t know yet.”

I wagged a pedantic finger at her. “That’s not what I said.”

She squinted at me while wheels turned—she was the one who first told me about the paradox: Mr. S’s cat is in a box, presumably soundproof, with a gun pointed at its helpless little head. The gun will go off if the trigger is struck by an alpha particle from an alpha-particle generator that the cat’s sadistic owner purchased at the local quantum hardware store. Schrödinger’s point was that because of the quantum nature of elementary particles, there was only a probability, not a certainty, that the alpha particle had done its job. You couldn’t tell whether the cat was alive or dead without opening the box—which takes the problem out of the quantum universe and into the real world.

Of course in the real world, there would or would not be a smoking hole in the box and cat brains all over the place. But that’s not what scientists mean by “real.”

“That’s cute, Jack. You mean it literally?”

I shrugged.

“So right now—in your mind—the monster is both a human and an alien.”

I almost didn’t say anything. I trickled a little bit of rum into my coffee. “Until I open the box,” I said.

I had a WeatherCard but hadn’t charged it, and of course didn’t bring the adaptor, but the morning sky was seamless blue and the weekend forecast had been good when we left home. So we filled our water bottles and pedaled off into deepest darkest Iowa, which is to say sunny rolling hills with wildflowers anthropomorphically nodding approval as we cruised by on our modest quest. Then the smallest grey cloud peeked over the western horizon, and then it loomed, and then all hell broke loose, lightning and thunder and a screaming gale pelting us with fast fat drops.

Lightning blasted a copse of trees not a hundred yards in front of us, while I was looking at it and trying to decide whether to stop there for shelter. Then Kit’s bike slipped on gravel and she went down hard. Gloves protected her hands, but her left knee was torn and the shoulder hurt.

The bike was all right but she couldn’t ride it, left leg stiffening. She couldn’t even push it, really.

Neither of our cell phones got a signal. “Let’s just lock it and leave it here,” I shouted over the wind. “If somebody steals it, they steal it.”

She nodded, her face screwed tight. “You go on for help. Or back to the motel?”

“No! I’m not leaving you.”

We compromised by hiding the bike behind a sign and piling all her stuff on the back of mine, which I then trundled back toward the Tidy Inn while she limped alongside.

I wasn’t much of a companion, pushing the double load through pelting rain and grit. I sort of wasn’t there, going into a kind of zen state familiar from the desert: you can get through anything, one minute at a time. When the minute’s up, do another minute. Go blank, stay blank.

So she startled me when she cried out “There! There it is!” A dim red VACANCY sign flickering in the gathering gloom. Only two hours and twenty minutes of trudge.

The cruddy place did look a thousand percent more comfortable than it had the evening before. The old crone got all maternal and taped up Kit’s leg. She let us have the same room for ten dollars off, since it hadn’t been made up yet. I could’ve collapsed into a pile of dirty laundry and slept for a week.

Kit filled the tub while I worked over the bike a little with paper towels and WD-40. Slipping into the water was pure heaven. Almost literally, like dying quietly and drifting off to a somnolent reward. We both fell asleep and woke up in cooling soup. While the tub drained we scrubbed each other with the hand shower attachment, more giggles than hygiene.

We carried lightweight emergency meals, dehydrated ramen or rice with mystery meat—just add hot water and pray—but decided to have regular food whenever it was available. So when we checked in we’d made a call to one of the Amana Colony restaurants, the Wheel, that did home dinner deliveries. I got dressed enough to open the door at eight, and a teenaged boy brought in armloads of Styrofoam boxes—the minimum order, a family dinner for four. Famished, we tore into the mountain of roast pork and sausage, mashed potatoes, green beans, beets, yams, and all. We didn’t open the container of pickled ham, the place’s specialty, saving it for tomorrow, wrapped up along with a loaf of fresh bread and some butter.

The motel TV only had network, so we lay in bed and watched mind-rot for a while. I fell asleep in the middle of the first sitcom, and when I woke up the room was dark except for the luminous clock, 4:44, a lucky-looking number. Kit snored quietly while I set up the laptop on the desk, angled so the light wouldn’t bother her. I made some instant with hot water from the tap and sweetened it with rum, and let the screen take me into Hunter’s world.

CHAPTER SIX

Hunter kept his police-band radio going all night while he sat on the steps of the dark trailer and peered out into the night with infrared goggles. He saw a fight between an owl and a weasel, but no human activity. If anybody was missing Lane Jared, PhD, they hadn’t told the police.

You should know as much as possible about the things you eat. From his flat sharkskin wallet, Hunter could tell that Dr. Jared was thirty-two, single, and perhaps did not drive; he had a “non-driver’s license,” a state ID, issued in Atlanta, and his leg muscles were so tough and stringy that if he owned a car he had probably only pushed it around for exercise.

He had a membership card for a vegetarian co-op, which no doubt was why he tasted so bland. Not enough poisons. He was either gay or complex; a hidden pocket in the wallet held a much handled photo of a plain-looking young man wearing only a smile and an erection. It also hid three tightly folded hundred-dollar bills; otherwise, Jared had only a single, a fiver, and a ten. No credit cards. An eight-year-old university ID showed him with a Rasputin-style black beard; the head freezing in Hunter’s cooler was clean-shaven and going grey.

Most of the wallets Hunter collected from his meals were full of documents like membership cards and business cards and receipts. Dr. Jared was parsimonious in that regard. He wished now that he’d talked with the man awhile. He’d said he was a minister; was that a lie? Probably not. Maybe he was a Christian who believed in transubstantiation, and eating him would be a kind of perverse sacrament. It would have been fun to discuss that with him.

He would probably just scream, though, or get all weepy, like the last female. How could this happen to me? She asked that over and over. Perhaps you were a bad girl. Though you didn’t taste bad. Lots of good fat.

When the sun came up, Hunter lumbered around the perimeter of his camp checking the alarm devices. Monofilament stretched at toe height. When he first set it up, touching the lines would ring little chimes. Now the system was more sophisticated; lights on a computer map inside would show where the intruder was.

If it was just one, he could shoot him from the dark. If it was a group, he would arm the trailer’s timer and drive off in the van. The trailer would blow up after five minutes. The van would unroll two mats of nails on the gravel road to slow down pursuers, and where it intersected the state road, he’d buried a hundred-pound crate of dynamite topped with buckets of rusty nails.

Still, he might be caught. He hadn’t decided whether to be taken alive. An autopsy would immediately reveal that he wasn’t human, which would displease his masters. If he were captured, he would have a good chance of escaping before they found out the truth. But in the process of escaping, he might reveal his superhuman strength.

Exercise time. Hunter squatted over a truck axle, red with rust except for the two places where he gripped it, and smoothly he lifted it over his head. He pressed and curled it silently fifty times and let it drop.

Breathing a little hard, he crossed the clearing to where an ancient live oak had grown a stout limb about eight feet off the ground. He grabbed it and did twelve pull-ups, the tree groaning in protest, and then reversed the position of his grip and did twelve more. Then he did three with his right arm alone, grunting.

He could not run like a human, not in this gravity and atmosphere, but he staggered around his property three times in a well-worn figure eight path.

It made him hungry. He had a few cuts that had gone straight into the refrigerator’s meat compartment. He took out two arm steaks and smeared them with chopped garlic in olive oil, then sliced an onion and fried it up in butter. Seared the steaks on both sides and lowered the heat to braise them in red wine with some rosemary. He took the jug of Gallo burgundy and sat on the steps, drinking from it while attacking a large can of Sam’s Club potato chips.

Once each minute, he would stop chewing and listen. He could hear birds and animals going about their business and the quiet simmer of the steaks under the heavy cast-iron skillet top. The smell of rosemary and garlic and sweet flesh was intoxicating.

A large car or small pickup whispered by on the state road, more than a mile away. A human would not have heard it, he was sure; nor could a human smell the cooking so far away. Hikers were his only worry.

It smelled so good, we had to come and check.

You must join me, then.

3.

I finished the short chapter and quietly got dressed. Peeked through the blinds and it was full daylight outside.

“Time to?” Kit muttered, half asleep.

“Sleep,” I said. “I’m gonna go back and get the van.”

“I could come with,” she said, half sitting up.

“No way. Get some rest.” She grunted and fell back with a thump, and mumbled thanks into the pillow.

I pedaled off into the bright cool morning. This was going to be the pattern of my life, I realized, a lark married to a dove, and I liked it. Almost all my writing, I did while she slept through the morning. True, I wasn’t much of a party animal at night, but neither was she. Our nights often ended with me snugged next to her while she read a book or watched TV or a movie on her pad, but I think she liked that. Part of her independence from the conventional world. Her parents’ world.

The morning sun had dried everything off and it was perfect bicycling weather. A slight breeze at my back, a hard smooth bike lane. I pushed it up to twenty and kept it there, enough to break a nice sweat.

I stopped once to carry a turtle across the road, feeling kind of stupid. He’d probably just turn himself around and get squashed on the way back. Turtles bothered me more than most roadkills, though. The pathos factor. They thought they had everything covered, and then these mammals evolved to where they had eighteen wheels and hurtled along at ninety miles per hour. Your shell might just as well be tissue paper. Be patient; we’ll evolve up over the road and leave you alone again.

The turtle was once my “totem animal.” In high school, a friend had read about the idea, or come up with it on his own—that we should all adopt some species of animal that stood for what we wanted to be. Among all the ferocious and fast and clever menagerie my friends allied themselves with, I was the lone turtle. Slow, careful, observing everything. Safe within my shell.

I wasn’t much different now. Faster, at least to the outside observer. A slow brain, that tried not to miss anything.

That had been my big beef with the army, at least in training. Everything fast, by the numbers, hup-toop-threep. Until I found my niche.

A sniper doesn’t do anything fast. Watch and wait, wait and watch, don’t move. Total zen, except for the bit at the end. You squeeze the trigger and someone a half a mile or more away falls over dead.

I read a library book by a woman who had interviewed all kinds of combat veterans. Before my war, but she had guys from the Gulf and Vietnam and even WWII, and she came up with an unsurprising generalization: the farther away you were from the person you killed, the less fucked up you were by the killing. Seems pretty obvious. You choke some poor bastard to death with your bare hands, it’s going to bother you more than squeezing a trigger a half mile away from him.

I don’t remember whether she talked to the guys who pushed the button on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Pretty remote, but times a hundred thousand? Maybe they had bad dreams. Worse than mine.

I didn’t usually see the results of my “sniper craft,” as they called it. They’d drag them away, or there’d be a pile, your victim one among many. Twice I was sure, though. One guy looked like TV, lying back with his eyes closed, a dark wet spot on his chest. The other had the top of his head popped off, like if he’d worn a helmet he might have been okay. My big moment of fame in the platoon—confirmed-kill head shot, a raghead sniper.

I never told anybody I hadn’t aimed for the head. It was a long shot, about five hundred meters, and the bastard was prone, aiming at some of our guys off to the left. I had a solid braced position, and aimed about four feet over his chest. Maybe a breath of wind caught the bullet. “Head shot,” my spotter said. “You da man.” I made E-5 the next week, for one week. Then got busted back for boozing.

Then got the stripe back and lost it again, I’m still not sure how. I supposedly got into a fight and knocked out some E-8 asshole. But I didn’t get into fights, not then, and I don’t know how I was supposed to’ve knocked out a bruiser a head taller than me without even hurting my knuckles. But it was his drunken word against mine. So we both got busted, but I had to clean out latrines for a week. Officer latrines, so of course it didn’t smell bad at all.

My supposed head shot, though. The bullet hit his head about two inches above the ear, and it was like a sledgehammer. Blood and brains everywhere, bone chips. But if the wind had gone the other way I would have hit him in the butt, or not at all.

What did all this have to do with Hunter, I wondered as I pedaled along. I was a hunter then, in the broadest sense of the word. Civilians who do it for fun sneak around with a high-powered rifle like mine, looking for woodsy “targets of opportunity,” though theirs don’t shoot back. Less sporting, if you ask me.

I didn’t like the actual sniper-ing much, but was surprised to find that I loved the shooting itself, burning up ammo on the rifle range, trying for smaller and smaller groups. In sniper school I often got the day’s best MOA—number of hits within a minute of arc—which was good for a half-day pass on the weekend. Take a cab to a scummy bar off base and try to pick up some girl who didn’t have a financial motive.

I never did pay for it, neither stateside nor in the desert. Maybe I pretended it was virtue. But I was a virgin when I got drafted, and had a grim anti-fantasy about doing something stupid, and the whore laughing at me.

Which of my regrets about the army was strongest—killing people? Following orders from idiots? Wasting three of my most productive years?

Maybe it was not getting laid. Being too shy or scared, when really I was in a horny guy’s heaven. Some of those hookers in Columbus were stunning, but the ones who peopled my fantasies were ordinary cute girls who looked like the coeds I’d spent so much undergraduate time and energy not fucking.

After combat, it was easy. Just ask the damned girl! What’s she going to do, chuck a grenade at you? And combat veterans my age and education were pretty rare still, that early in the war. I learned to play that mystique pretty well, the year between army “separation” and the night Kit ignored my bashed-in mouth and rescued me from my wicked ways.

It was not yet noon when I pulled into the English & Philosophy Building parking lot. I called Kit and discussed possibilities, then drove out to the Coralville Strip and got a two-foot-long loaded submarine to split.

Funny how driving a route you’ve just biked seems to take about the same length of time. The bike ride had been almost three hours and the trip back was not even thirty minutes. But I enjoy biking along in a meditative state; driving, I had to put it on cruise control to keep from speeding out of boredom. Plus a little submarine hunger, even though I’d shortened my half by a couple of bites.

She or a maid had made up the bed, and she was sitting in the lone chair, reading. She had showered and changed her bandage, a less dramatic single wrap of gauze. We went outdoors to a picnic table to attack the sub.

She rode the length of the motel parking lot and decided that discretion was the better part of valor, though I think being a mathematician, she might express that differently. “D >> V”?

We drove back to my place because I had tools and a workstand, and we drank wine while I cleaned and adjusted her bike. I even tuned the spokes on her rear wheel, ping-ping-ping, a process she’d never seen, which delighted her.

She picked up a family portrait that was sitting on top of my nailed-together bookcase. “Hear from your dad recently?”

“Still boning what’s-her-name in Chicago, I guess. I did get an e-mail day before yesterday that went to a couple hundred of his closest friends. He’s opening in Chicago next week. Probably go up.” Dad was a sometime actor, though most of his money came from teaching drama in adult ed, a sure road to big bucks.

“That would be a good gesture,” she said carefully. “It wouldn’t bother you if what’s-her-name was there?”

“No, no. She’s all right. I guess collecting fossils is a legitimate hobby.”

She studied the picture. “I don’t know. I’d say he looks pretty good. He looks like you.”

“Not anymore. He has a bushy white beard now, and horn-rim glasses. Not as much hair. Closer to Lear than Hamlet.”

“Hamlet’s overrated. Who wants a worrywart?

“Careful, there. I played Hamlet in high school.”

“No, really? I’ve known you all this time and I didn’t know that?”

“Wasn’t a big deal. I’d already decided not to follow in Dad’s footsteps.”

“Trotting in front of the footlights. Was he disappointed?”

“Funny, no; not at all. He was all for me getting a doctorate and teaching. It was Mom who wanted me to act.”

She laughed. “While your dad was cheating on her with actresses?”

“Funny business.” I shrugged. “She might’ve known back then; maybe not. It didn’t all come out until the divorce.” Five years ago.

“Did your dad ever say… did you know?”

“Oh, hell, yes. Not in so many words, just a wink or a raised eyebrow now and then. And when he was happy he really showed it. By the time I was sixteen I could tell that his being happy didn’t have much to do with what was going on at home. Then Mother caught them together, I think by accident.”

“‘There are no accidents.’ Who said that?”

“Schiller? Maybe the captain of the Titanic.”

“Was it what’s-her-name?”

“No, not even an actress. She was a tech person, a lighting engineer. Not even pretty—that annoyed the hell out of Mother.”

She traced her finger over the glass of the picture. “Your mother’s more than pretty. Glamorous.”

“Yeah, I guess. Little life lesson there.”

“I’m glad you’re not attracted to beautiful women.”

Nothing safe to say to that. I touched her nose, then kissed her gently.

She giggled while we were kissing. “Sorry! I can be so awful!”

“Naw. You just need an editor sometimes.”

She stood up and pulled her T-shirt off in one cross-arm jerk, and then stepped out of her shorts. “So come edit me. If you’re done with the bicycle.”

I wasn’t, quite. But it could wait.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Relaxing after a big meal, Hunter sometimes let his mind wander back to other times and places.

His home planet, Vantor, was beautiful but not pleasant, a hard place to grow up—if you lived long enough to grow. Of his twelve littermates, all male, only one other lived to become adult.

There had been four, but on the eve of their tenth birthday they went into the pit together, and only two were allowed to come out. He could still taste his brothers’ blood, and feel it splashing on his face.

He would not dishonor that memory by eating humans raw. Their taste was insipid anyhow, and needed cooking with spices and herbs. Especially the taste of their sexual parts, pallid and tame. They fought fiercely over that part, the last birthday, thinking it gave strength and courage.

After the tenth, they didn’t count birthdays. You lived until you died, and that would be a long time.

He was not sure how he had gotten to Earth, or what his purpose was here. He was content to wait, and hunt, and eat.

He sat there unmoving through the night, neither asleep nor awake. At first light, he took a shovel with a sharp square blade and cut out a rectangle of turf. He carefully squared out the hole, depositing the dirt on a canvas drop cloth. When the hole was handle-deep, he went into the trailer and brought out the inedible remnants of the luckless jogger. Before covering it with dirt he undressed, straddled the hole, and evacuated generously into it. Then he filled the grave, stamping the soil down tightly, and carefully replaced the turf. He saturated the area with his alien urine, which he knew contained butyric acid. No bloodhound would come near it.

He went back into his trailer and turned the heat up to a comfortable hundred degrees. Then he carefully eased himself onto the oversized recliner and opened up his paperback book: The Pawns of Null-A, by A. E. Van Vogt.

He had read it before, but that was all right. He didn’t read for information.

4.

Kit stared at the last page and set it down carefully. “So he eats this guy’s balls and then shits on his bones and pisses on his grave. Couldn’t you be a little less tasteful?”

“Well, actually, it’s his brother’s balls.”

“Oh, okay. That’s all right.” She laughed. “Keep it in the family.”

I had to laugh, too. “Hey, if you can’t appreciate good literature, you don’t have to expose yourself to it.”

“It’s not me who’s exposing myself. Are you going to let your mother read this? Your shrink?”

“I wouldn’t show it to the shrink. Mother would say, ‘Can’t you sex it up a little? Have him jerk off into the grave?’”

“No wonder you’re such a delicate soul.”

“Everything I am today, I owe to dear old Mom.”

I loaded up on carbs with a double stack of pancakes—or used the bike as an excuse to stuff myself, take your pick—and then Kit drove me back to where the weather and road had stopped us the night before. The plan was for her to keep the van while I completed the loop to Des Moines and back; if I ran into trouble she would come rescue me.

I wasn’t going to rough it; I had a map with all the motels on the route and their phone numbers, so when I decided to quit for the day I could call ahead. (That seemed prudent because there weren’t all that many places to stay.)

When she dropped me off and drove away, I felt a guilty glow of freedom. Four or five days of being a carefree bachelor, the wind at my back and nothing in front of me but the road.

The carefree feeling ended with a bang after an hour and ten minutes. I had somehow managed to run over a nail more than two inches long. It wasn’t even the same color as the road, cruddy with rust. But sharp enough to blow me out.

I was carrying two spare tubes, but repaired the flat one out of prudence and pessimism, remembering one day I managed to have three flats in three hours. All of them less dramatic than this one, relatively slow leaks, which can take longer to fix—not obvious where the hole is. Or it turns out to be the valve, unfixable.

I let the glue on the repaired tube rest and pumped up a new one and was on my way—twenty minutes to fix the tube, change the tire, and be back on the road. Short of my best by five or six minutes, but I wasn’t in a hurry.

I should have been. Of course the weather couldn’t last. I slogged through a driving rain until I fetched up on the shores of the Angel Bless Motel. A flashing neon cross would normally repel me like a vampire, but the rain had weakened my resistance.

I was suddenly on the set of a Hitchcock movie that never got made. I staggered dripping into a small Victorian room, a half-dozen cut-glass lamps giving a warm glow to the complicated floral wallpaper. Smiling older hostess wearing a full skirt and an apron. She didn’t say the only room left was #13, which might have sent me back out into the rain. But she did insist on showing me around the six glass cases along the walls, her late husband’s life work. Lots of miniature trains and airplanes and hundreds of butterflies pinned to velvet. She had been a widow for nine years, four months, and seven days.

The room she led me to had only one butterfly, a big purple one pinned under glass, hanging over the bed like an invertebrate crucifix. There’s a sad irony to a moth-eaten butterfly.

I set the coffeemaker to just heat some water, and took as hot a shower as the motel’s plumbing and budget would allow. A quick ramen dinner, and then I made weak tea with just a pinch of sugar. I didn’t want to stay awake.

The TV’s depth axis was shot, so rather than watch crap in two and a half dimensions, I flipped through the various books on my notebook and settled on Down the River, a collection of short stories by recent Iowa graduates. I had a paper copy at home, a contributor’s freebie, but the only story I’d read in it was my own, checking for typos. Mildly curious about the competition, I got halfway through the second story before I turned off the notebook and the light.

It was still raining when I woke up. Not cold or windy, so I guess if I were a serious cyclist I’d just man up and pedal out into it.

Instead, I made a double-strong, double-sugar cup of coffee with ReelCreme™ and took the motel’s chair out under the eaves and sat looking at and listening to the rain, not thinking about the novel or anything in particular. Then I went back inside, made another cup, and unrolled the notebook and its keyboard.

What would Hunter do in the rain? Not a scene from the movie, but what the hell.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Hunter liked the sound of rain drumming on his metal roof. The fact of the rain, though, was a little annoying. He had eaten one frozen meal and wanted a fresh one, but there wouldn’t be many joggers out.

Not many potential witnesses, either.

No diversions left. He was tired of reading, and television was earnest documentaries and Saturday morning cartoons, which offered sufficient violence but no appetizing consequences.

With no particular destination in mind, he got in the van and headed north, playing a Jacksonville radio station on the radio but not hearing the music, listening for weather updates. He got gas in Georgia, filling up at a place that was too ramshackle and open to have surveillance cameras. He did have to go inside to pay, and considered the risk/benefit ratio of killing the dimwitted clerk and emptying the register.

The boy was skinny and sallow and smelled bad, which may have saved his life. And there could have been a hidden camera amidst the chaotic jumble of merchandise behind him. Hunter bought eight Super Red Hot sausages and, unseen back in the van, ate them like a sword-swallower, one after the another, while he studied the map.

The rain had let up when he stopped, but now it continued with redoubled force. He took a left turn and then angled down a county road that pointed into Alabama.

He came upon his prize only fifteen minutes down the road. A large woman on the gravel margin hunched against the force of the rain, working on an upside-down bicycle. He slowed down and waved at her, blinking his lights. She waved back and he pulled off the road in front of her, and backed up.

He rolled down the window as she came up, wiping the water from her long hair. She was big, not quite half his size, and he salivated at the thought of all that delicious fat.

“Golly, thanks, mister—” He flung the door open with such force that she sprawled almost to the middle of the road. But she was standing, staggering, by the time he heaved himself out of the van. He took two ponderous steps and dropped her with a punch to the solar plexus.

Faster, now. He grabbed her wrist and roughly dragged her to the back of the van. Locked. Stupid of him.

The driver’s-side door was still open. He lumbered back to it and stretched to reach the keys in the ignition.

Sudden sharp pain in his back. He turned and she was standing there with a narrow-blade knife, a switchblade stiletto, staring at the color of his blood.

The wound was not serious. He backhanded her so hard her neck snapped.

She was limp but still alive as he tied her up and manacled her in the back. She managed some incoherent growls and moans, too soft to annoy him or attract attention, so he didn’t bother with the duct tape.

“Be happy,” he called back. “You’re out of the rain.”

Decisions. Maybe leave Georgia for this one, so as not to have the same group of state police studying his spoor. Drive on into Alabama, or maybe all the way through to Mississippi.

No. The need was growing in him. Alabama would do.

He was across the border in thirty minutes, and stopped at a McDonald’s for a bag of small burgers and ten orders of fries. He gulped it all down, driving one-handed but with intense care, before he left the interstate. He had memorized the map and the Googlemaps screen that showed the nameless dead-end dirt road that was his tentative destination.

At the first small road he pulled over to the shoulder to check on his quarry. He was too big to crawl through the van, so he chanced opening the rear doors. Her eyes were closed, but when he forced her mouth open and poured in some water, she coughed and gagged.

“That’s good. It won’t be long now.”

“Please,” she croaked. “Do… do whatever you want… .”

“Don’t worry. I will.” He eased the doors shut and went back toward the front of the van, but she started to scream. Annoying.

He went back to the rear doors, swung them open, and hit her head twice on the metal floor, just hard enough to stun her.

“Please. You only cause trouble for yourself.” He tore off a piece of duct tape and smoothed it over her mouth. Then he tore off a small piece and closed one nostril. “Wouldn’t that be an awful way to die?”

Before getting back into the van, he stepped into the forest, studying the loam. The van would leave tracks when he went off the road. If it rained harder, they would be obliterated, but the forecast called for the rain to taper off and stop in a couple of hours.

He studied his memory of the Googlemaps images. The topographical map showed a ridge to the east, and a gravel road in a few miles that ran up it. He would drive up there and check the soil and underbrush.

In the small cooler between the seats he’d stashed alternating quarts of beer and Coke. Took a Coke to be on the safe side. Wouldn’t do to be stopped in the middle of nowhere and forced to kill a state trooper. Two, probably.

He almost missed the unmarked gravel road and reversed back up to it. He drove up the rise and pulled over, out of sight from the paved road, and stopped to listen for a couple of minutes. No traffic; no sound but the ticking of his engine and the patter of raindrops.

He drove on slowly for about a mile and a half. The road ended at the grey ruin of a clapboard shack with a collapsed roof. Saplings grew out of the interior. The front door was missing and there was no glass in the windows.

Still, some indigent might have sought shelter there. He quietly shucked a shell into the 12-gauge and eased heavily out of the van, alert.

His eyes adjusted to the gloom inside the cabin. Sound of a rat or squirrel scurrying away. No other signs of life except spiders and millipedes. Woodsy smell with a touch of mildew.

The exposed beams under the part of the roof that was intact were strong enough to support his weight. He went back to the van and brought out the chains and hook and large cooler.

When he returned for the woman, her eyes were open, unblinking. She didn’t resist when he handcuffed her wrists together, and then her ankles.

Should he rape her? He had done that to the first two women, and one man, but there was no special joy in it, and it proved nothing; he already had total control over them, so sticking a protuberance into an opening was a trivial exercise. Besides, if he were interrupted and had to leave body parts behind, the fluid they found in her vagina would not be human in chemistry or biology.

He hung her up by the heels and stooped to remove the duct tape. “Don’t scream. There’s no one around to hear you, and you’ll just annoy me.”

She winced when he jerked the tape off, then worked her jaw and said, “This is the weirdest dream I’ve ever had.”

“It’s not a dream, Cooper.” He’d looked in her wallet. “It’s not even a nightmare.”

“I refuse to believe that. You’ll kill me, and then I’ll wake up.”

He almost smiled. “That’s a new way of coping. None of the others have said that.” He unrolled her Lycra shorts and left them bunched around her knees. “Most girls your age shave around the pubic region. The bathing suit part, at least.”

“I’m sure you’re an expert.” Her voice was conversational but quaking. “You can say ‘cunt.’ Under the circumstances.”

“Heavens, no. I don’t know you well enough.” He sliced her T-shirt from neck to waist and then cut both sleeves to remove it. She was wearing a red sports bra. He snapped the elastic but left it alone.

“How many… how many others?”

“Twelve; you’ll be lucky thirteen. The newspapers call me Hunter. You haven’t heard of me?”

“I—I never read the paper. Or watch the news.”

“Oh. Is it too depressing?” He made small nicks over each kneecap and watched the blood trickle down. “If you read the newspapers, you might have thought twice before bicycling alone out in the woods.”

“My boyfriend and parents know where—”

“I’m sure they do. We’ll be in another state before they get around to calling the police. You’ll be in quite another state.” He wiped one stream of blood with his forefinger and tasted it. “Type O, I believe?”

“Look. If this is a gag—”

“There may be gagging.” He stuck out his tongue and licked the trickle of blood from the other leg in one slow sweep. Then he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You are delicious.”

He went outside and came back with a large plastic bucket with a lid. He pried off the lid and put the bucket on the floor underneath her head. Then he sat down cross-legged, facing her eye to eye.

“Carolyn Cooper. You must bike a lot.”

“No. Yes.” Tears were running down her forehead.

“Your thighs and calves are very muscular. But not too lean. Do you go to school?”

She shook her head no.

“Church? Do you go to church?”

“You… United Southern Baptist.”

“Southern Baptist. So you’ll be in heaven soon.”

She cried harder and tried to wipe her nose on her shoulder. He held up a Kleenex and said, “Blow.” She wouldn’t.

“I bet you’re still a virgin. Are you?”

She nodded slowly. “And yet you say ‘cunt.’ How people have changed since I was a boy.” He reached up and she cringed away, and so started to swing and bob, a complex pendulum.

He waited until she stopped. “What if I promised to let you go if you let me make love to you? Have sex. Here on the floor?”

She glared at him and shook her head, just an inch, back and forth.

“If you don’t, I’ll kill you.”

“You will anyhow. You godless bastard.”

He stared into her eyes, brow furrowed in thought. “It’s a complicated moral dilemma—for you, not for me—though you may be too upset to appreciate it right now.”

He held up one finger. “You refuse to have sex with me and I kill you. You go to heaven. If you were headed there anyhow.”

Two fingers. “You let me make love to you and I keep my word, and let you go. Technically, you sinned the sin of fucking—but is your God so petty he would send you to Hell over that? If so, I would posit that you don’t have a snowball’s chance of getting through life without doing something that will send you there.”

Three fingers. “You let me make love to you and I kill you anyhow. As you have suggested. I would concede that that could be bad. Go directly to Hell, do not collect two hundred dollars.” He laughed. “You’re looking at me as if I were crazy. Haven’t you ever heard of Monopoly?”

He shook his head at her crying. “There is a fourth, necrophilia. I could kill you first and then have sex with your remains. But that would be sick. I’ve never done that, not really. They were always alive when I started.”

He stood, set the blade on her abdomen, and pressed slightly. “The last time, I cut his throat and then opened him like this.” With his finger, not the blade, he swept down from pubic bone to sternum. She screamed.

He sat back down. It took all his strength to hold her head still while he replaced the duct tape.

“Please try not to pee. That doesn’t help anything.” Instead of cutting her throat, he just opened a carotid artery, which resulted in a mess. He must have saved only half the blood, the rest of it spurting all around as she struggled. By the time there was a regular flow into the bucket, the floor of the musty room looked like a macabre Jackson Pollock painting.

He wouldn’t do it that way again. It was nice to have the blood, but the out-of-control disorder was vulgar.

When he made the long ventral incision, she was so close to being dead that she hardly reacted, just flinching. Before he cut her down, he severed the intestines at ileum and rectum, and laid them out in a neat circle around the locus where she was hanging, which remedied some of the randomness. He separated the edible parts from the steaming pile of offal and sealed them in plastic bags, which he set on the block of ice in the cooler.

She was a little too large to fit into the cooler until he took out the ice block and jointed her. Then he split the ice into eight chunks and arranged them in various hollows, and propped the bucket upright inside her circled arms.

Before moving the ice chest, he took the shotgun and went out the cabin’s back door, and silently reconnoitered. The rain had stopped and the forest was utterly quiet.

He found the remains of a rabbit that had been torn apart, probably by a hawk, and smiled in empathy. He thought of what was inside the cooler and his stomach growled.

5.

The rain stopped abruptly just after 10:00. I finished the chapter I’d been working on, rolled up my gear, and punched the phone for automatic checkout. Figured I could cover half the distance to Des Moines before lunch if I poured on the coal.

Perfect weather and road. Cool fresh-washed air and pebbly asphalt that hadn’t gone through too many Iowa winters.

Sometimes the bicycle is a perfect place to think. Maybe the rhythm and slight exertion. But especially like this, with no distractions from weather or traffic—the mind roams and grazes. Not a mind-set for doing the taxes or solving scholarly problems, but good for free association and inspiration.

So what would Hunter be if I were writing the story free of constraints from the script? Like this last chapter. That went easily and was pretty interesting. Pretty good writing.

How close did the book really have to be to the movie?

Well, the movie didn’t actually exist yet, as a movie. They were supposed to start shooting July first, two weeks before the book was due. They were going to wrap the movie six weeks later, 15 August. That date was set in stone; another company would be moving into the studio the next day.

My contract required me to rewrite the novelization if there were “fundamental” changes between the script and the movie. I hadn’t minded agreeing to that clause—hell, if I had to write the whole novel over, it was still a fortune compared to real fiction.

But wait. Consider the obverse—what if I made fundamental changes to the story myself? And delivered before shooting started? If they liked it better, they might use that version, or some part of it.

They wouldn’t pay me any more—talk about fantasy!—but it could enhance my reputation. And if they didn’t like it, how much work would it be to return it to Duquest’s original inspired version?

Barb Goldman said I’d be lucky if the Great Man even saw the first page of the book. Most likely it would go to the “script girl” (of whatever gender) or some similar minion, who would write up a page or two about it, to be filed and forgotten.

But what if the report said, “Hey, this is really good! Somebody should send it up to Duquest before he starts to shoot!”

Doesn’t hurt to dream. With a free hand, what about the script would I change?

The action really wouldn’t have to be that different. Maybe a little more believable. I was already taking some liberties with the characters, who were pretty cardboard in the script, and I had the studio’s blessing for that. When I talked to Duquest’s agent on the phone, what he said he wanted, in so many words, was “really good writing, just not too literary.” Sort of like really good soup, but without any seasoning.

What does a Hollywood guy mean by “literary”? Big words? No problem. Complex characterization? Keep it subtle. Layers of meaning? They won’t worry about the cake if the icing looks pretty.

As I’d told Kit, but of course hadn’t mentioned to the movie people, that was the most interesting aspect of the job; the most challenging: writing two books simultaneously, a literary one and a commercial one. The hat trick was that both novels were made up of the same sequence of words.

Maybe that was kind of quantum-mechanical? Like a particle being in two places at the same time. Though I could never get my literal-minded brain around that one, quite.

With writing it’s simple to do two things at once. The Marquis de Sade’s “novels” are masturbation adjuncts but also exquisitely detailed maps of a deranged mind examining itself. Ulysses is a microscopic deconstruction of one day in Dublin, but the same sequence of words adds up to a daring experiment in the limits of the novel form.

So my job was simple wordsmithing in comparison: write a good novel that follows someone else’s story line—like Ulysses, both Homer’s and Joyce’s, to go from the ridiculous to the sublime.

In theory, I could write two different versions, literary and commercial. But that way lies legal madness. The book will be a “work done for hire,” and is the sole property of Ronald Duquest. Once I cash the check, I’m out of the picture. If I tried to copyright a book with the same story and title, but better words, the people who owned the commercial version would not be amused. It’s probably a good life rule not to piss off people who keep lawyers on the payroll.

The new bike was very pleasant for the first fifteen miles or so, but somewhere between twenty and thirty I started to wonder about the wisdom of my choice. The “commuter” bike was exactly that, and its cushiony ride would be perfect for going back and forth to and from work. The softness of the ride ultimately came from your own muscles, though, pushing against springs. A road bike’s ride might be harder on your butt, but all the energy you expended went to getting you from point A to point B.

Maybe I could put that in the book. Our hero gets an oversprung commuter bike with the guy’s money, but goes back the next day for one that’s more practical for the long haul. Not in the script, but a nice bit of verisimilitude for bike-savvy readers.

The author of the book, unlike the character, doesn’t have an employer with a fat wallet. Well, they do have billions, but not for the peons who humbly till the literary soil for them. Not for the comfort of their butts.

It was worth a few miles of daydreaming. I’d only spent $500 on this bike, leaving $49,500 for other stuff like rent. Minus Barb’s 15 percent. A decent road bike would run about $1,500, and they’d probably give me $400 trade-in. Call it a thousand-dollar investment, finally, out of the fifty I was getting for the book.

I almost had myself convinced, but a reality check came creeping in. How often, in real life, would I do even ten miles in a day, let alone fifty or a hundred? Going to the 7-Eleven for a six-pack, I’d rather have this comfy blue Cambridge than a sexy hard-riding racer. And it would be really stupid to buy both—where would I put them? I wouldn’t even leave my Salvation Army junker locked up overnight outside my apartment. Even if nobody was desperate enough to steal it, kids liked to demonstrate their budding manliness by stomping on spokes—and frames, if they were big kids.

Even the one bike dominated my so-called living room. Two would make it look like a bike shop.

I did have a get-thee-behind-me-Satan moment as I pedaled wearily into the suburbs of Des Moines. Two Guys Bike Shoppe had a signboard out front saying THIS WEEKEND ONLY ALL CAMPYS 25% OFF LIST!!! A Campagnolo would be just the right level of wretched excess—a Caddy, but not a Rolls.

I went past it a couple of blocks to a motel that was conveniently just behind a liquor store. A six-pack and a miniature of dark rum would take the kinks out fine. A burger and a couple of cookies for dinner, from the 7-Eleven beside it. It wasn’t dinner on the French Riviera with Duquest and his bevy of bimbos. But that might come in time.

CHAPTER NINE

He roasted a whole leg slowly, sawed in two to accommodate the oven, sealed up in heavy foil with herbs and spices and wine. After a few hours, timing by smell and touch, he used a long filleting knife to extract the bones for stock. He chunked the meat and browned it carefully under the broiler.

He wolfed a quarter of it down and then rested for a day. He checked his garbage-disposal map and dug a new hole for the cooked-out bones and burned her clothing on top of them, then relieved himself there before replacing the dirt and mat of humus and undergrowth. Three drops of butyric acid to keep away curious dogs and other digging animals.

Prudence dictated that he ought to change his location soon. This little patch of Alabama was perfect, but that perfection was a danger. People looking for him would eventually close in and be on his doorstep, by a process of elimination.

Where next? The challenge of living in a city had a perverse appeal. The probability of detection would be high, though; almost certain. He was prepared to face, and escape from, a squad car or two of country-bumpkin state troopers, but a city SWAT team would be formidable, and if he bested them there would be a small army after him, federal as well as state. He couldn’t afford to be tightly surrounded and observed in action. If they realized he wasn’t human, they would want to capture him alive and find out what he was. His masters would not like that.

He opened a third quart of Pabst Blue Ribbon and thought. Moving the trailer would be conspicuous and difficult. Burning it in place would be simple, but would draw investigators. If they found all the buried bones there would be trouble. He was too physically conspicuous to hide among humans, but he could find another place like this.

Maybe he should consider moving the trailer. It would be conspicuous on the road, but more conspicuous as a burned-out ruin. Fire inspectors might wonder why a hermit needed a big meat locker. If they checked it for DNA they would find out.

He considered burning on a monumental scale, a forest fire that incidentally consumed the trailer. That might not call attention to him if he planned it properly.

It would be unthinkable to abandon this place before he had a destination. Not very difficult to find, with time and resources. The past two homes, he’d arranged through the same Atlanta firm, a rural acreage broker who only worked online. Hunter’s Atlanta bank account was administered by computer and fueled by nighttime cash deposits.

Cooper’s purse had yielded an unexpected treasure: a roll of fifty hundred-dollar bills sewn into the lining. He had handled them only while wearing gloves. There was no pattern to the serial numbers; they were an assortment of five bills that looked and smelled brand new, with forty-five that had been in circulation. He crumpled them all up and soaked them in water with a little dirt, and dried them between sheets of newspaper.

It was interesting. Perhaps he should have talked to her longer. There was no way that money came from a regular paycheck, and details mattered. The more he knew about humans, the better his chance of eluding capture.

How long had he been doing this? He remembered recent events in microscopic detail, but only back to his first Alabama victim, six years ago. He had evidently not been programmed to “remember” anything before that. In a plastic envelope he had a birth certificate and a high-school diploma, along with drivers’ licenses from four states, with the same picture but different names.

He didn’t remember acquiring those documents, though he knew how he might buy replacements. They must have been with him when his masters brought him to Earth, probably just before his detailed memories began.

That had been in a run-down log cabin in a scrub pine swamp in Georgia. He had this old van and a cooler full of meat and a collection of fading memories, along with carefully sealed boxes of books and magazines.

He knew the meat was human but wasn’t sure how he had come by it. A memory of a lot of blood, and screams that stopped abruptly. From his aches he could tell he had been driving a long time. That was all.

He knew he wasn’t human; every human he’d seen was small and weak. He could deduce something of his heritage from the books and magazines, full of encoded references to his origin. The nature of his destiny unclear, ambiguous. He probably would have to die to fulfill it.

But he was not to die alone.

6.

“You got a new bike?” She was trying to smile, but her expression had an element of wide-eyed incredulity. Two new bikes the same month?

“Isn’t it a beauty?” I had rolled it up to her door, which she opened as I reached for the doorbell.

“But where’s the old one? I mean the old new one?”

“At a bike shop in Des Moines. I sort of traded it in—”

“Sort of? What, it was two weeks old?”

“This is sort of like a long test ride. I can take it back.”

“A hundred miles?”

I checked the cyclometer. “A hundred seven point two.”

“It is pretty,” she admitted. Sleek and classic, deep red lacquer. “How much?”

“A thousand dollars. Minus a penny.”

“Well, that was generous. How much you get for the old one? The old new one.”

“Three-fifty.” She pursed her lips and nodded. She probably thought that meant the total transaction had been $650; I didn’t elaborate. It was a thousand after the trade-in. A grand for a $1,350 bike was okay, even though a mathematical literalist, like Kit, might say it was actually $1,500, plus two weeks’ use of an increasingly clunky commuter bike. The Campy was like gliding on glass. I was still totally in love. But I hadn’t even had it long enough to add air to the tires.

“Can I try it?”

“Sure, go ahead.” She took it by the handlebars and looked down at the pedals and front chain ring, then the rear gear cluster.

“There’s no computer,” I said.

“Yeah, I see.” She frowned. “I had one like this when I was a kid, no computer.”

“Don’t worry about shifting. No hills around here.” I lowered the seat about an inch.

“Don’t you need magnetic shoes?”

“Works without ’em.” She mounted the bike not too ungracefully and wobbled off. By the end of the block she seemed to be in control.

She turned around the corner and was gone just long enough for me to start worrying. Then she came flying back around the same corner and stopped right in front of me with a little chirp of rubber, smiling.

“When you make your first million, buy me one?”

“Half million,” I said. “You approve?”

“It’s hardly like a bike at all. But why no computer shift?”

“Well, it adds weight, I guess a pound or so. One more thing to go wrong. It doesn’t take long to master the gears.”

“Lots of levers,” she said doubtfully. Only five, really, and you didn’t use the “overdrive” one until you were going twenty-five or thirty miles per hour.

“I’ll run you through them later. Tomorrow? I could use some air-conditioning.”

“Your place or here?”

“Airco’s off at mine, but…” I took out my phone and punched the home utility number and turned it on. “It’ll be cool in half an hour. Get some lunch at the Mill?”

“Sure. You put the bike on the car and I’ll get my stuff. Spend the night?”

“Twist my arm.”

“That would be different.” She went halfway down the walk and turned. “I’m, um, a little indisposed?”

Probably the yeast thing again. “That’s okay. I love you for your mind.”

“Sure, you do. Head, anyway.”

Actually, her mind was working well. After lunch we went back to my place and she read the most recent chapter.

“So is he really an alien? From where?”

“I’m glad you can’t tell yet.”

“But, like, do you know?”

I shook my head. “What do you think?”

She topped off her tumbler of wine. “Well, I have an unfair advantage. I do know the author.”

“I hear you’ve slept with him.”

“Not that well. He snores.” She riffled through the pages, mumbling, “Alien, human, alien, human…”

She set the manuscript down and tapped it three times. “I’m gonna take a chance and say ‘none of the above.’ Most of the rest of it, I’ve read several times, and this new part doesn’t change anything basic. He’s neither fish nor fowl. You can’t tell whether he’s a nut job who thinks he’s an alien or an alien who acts like a nut job. True?”

I leaned back and smiled at her.

“So are you a Cheshire cat or a Schrödinger one?”

I tried not to react to the good guess, but think my eyebrows shot up.

“It’s not that mysterious. I remember the conversation. But I wonder what you’re going to do with it. In real life, sooner or later you open the box, and the cat is either dead or alive.”

“But a story isn’t real life,” I said. “I could leave the box closed.”

“And the reader never finds out whether Hunter is an alien or not? I don’t think your average reader is going to like that.”

I shrugged. “Why should the reader know more about the story than I do?”