use Mona’s head or shoulders as a stepping-stone, until finally the blazing, merciless New Mexico sun greets them in a triumphant blast.
“What sort of car was that fucking doctor driving?” Mona asks in a rasp.
“Erm,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “A black Lincoln, I think?”
“Good,” says Mona. She stands. “The way down is over here.”
“Do you intend to catch up with them?”
“Yeah.”
“I am not an expert in automotive matters, but I believe you’d need a car of your own to do so.”
“I know.”
A grunt as Mrs. Benjamin extends one wobbling, swollen foot toward a rocky purchase. “Do you have a car of your own?”
“No. We’ll just have to… I don’t know, figure it out.”
“I can’t imagine that there is anything nearby. You will have to do some very good figuring.”
Mona stops. “No, I won’t.”
“Why not?”
She points. “I just have to ask her.”
Waiting at the start of the road, just before the broken, locked doors of Coburn, is Mona’s 1969 cherry-red Dodge Charger. A skinny teenage girl is standing beside the passenger door, looking very awkward, which, after all, is a very easy thing for a skinny teenage girl to do.
Gracie clears her throat and waves to them. “Hello,” she says.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
Mona drives.
She drives unwisely, stupidly, recklessly; she chooses to ignore fenceless bluffs and sharp turns and loose gravel roads; her foot knows only the most extreme angle the gas pedal can occupy, and refuses to release it any. On the whole, she cares not a fucking jot for physics, friction, or the limits of air bags or seat belts: all she cares about, all her weary, brutalized, angry mind can think about, is speed, speed, speed.
That, and the sight of that mottled, bloody little face as it wrinkled up and squawked, its tiny cry almost dead in that lead-walled room.
I have a daughter. I have a little girl.
She’s real.
I think she’s real…
Behind her, Gracie is trying breathlessly to explain how Mr. First directed her to where the Charger was hidden, and how he produced (she keeps stressing that he “produced”) the keys; and Mrs. Benjamin just keeps saying, “That’s good, dear,” and, “Why, how nice of him,” and so on. Mona asks how in the hell the doughnut got replaced with a real tire, and Gracie professes ignorance; though she does say that First is fond of fixing things for her and other people, when no one is looking.
Mona can hardly listen. She feels horribly confused. Her daughter is alive, and real, and though she feels a huge swelling of hope, it does not feel… honest.
I wonder what her name is. What I named her.
And again, she remembers the sight of her own face, shorn of all the years of drunken wandering, staring about the nursery as she wondered where her little girl was…
My head hurts.
Mona thanks fucking Christ that Wink is so small, because there’s only one street that cuts all the way through town, all the way across to the other side. So there’s only one way the doctor and her baby could have gone.
But as they come plummeting down from the mesa, the Charger’s wheels shrieking and the engine sometimes threatening to leap out of the hood, she notices something is different now.
The color seems to be leaching out of the sky: it is no longer the bright, electric blue that Mona first found so striking about New Mexico, but a hazy yellowish red, like the color of bloody pus. There is something wrong about the light, too: it feels like a thin gray wash, too weak to project any real shadows.
The yards and streets of Wink are just ahead. But the town appears to be crawling with activity.
The doors of the houses and buildings—nearly all of them—are open. And people are either walking out to stand in their yards, or they are already there.
It is as if everyone has come outside to wait for something. And there is a sound that is audible even over the roar of the Charger’s engine—a low, loud buzz, like a dozen propeller planes starting up.
“Something’s wrong,” says Mona.
“Yes,” says Mrs. Benjamin softly. “Something is wrong.”
Mrs. Benjamin knows this sound. She knows it better than almost any sound. Was this not the tremulous, terrifying note that always rang through the skies when they approached? And always she was in the vanguard, the most dangerous, the most frightening, the most intimidating of all of Mother’s children…
It was a way of saying to new worlds: We are coming. We are here.
And now she hears it