Twenty-two

Theo

The walls of Molly's trailer were plastered with movie posters. He stood in the middle of the living room among the scattered videotapes, magazines, and junk mail and slowly turned. It was her, Molly. She hadn't been lying all this time. Most of the posters were in foreign languages, but every one featured a younger Molly in various states of undress, holding weapons or fighting off bad guys, her hair flying in the wind, a nuked-out city or a desert littered with human skulls and burned-out cars in the background.

The adolescent male part of Theo, the part that every man tries to bury but carries to his grave, reared up. She was a movie star. A hot movie star! And he knew her, had in fact put handcuffs on her. If there was only a locker room, a street corner, or a second-period study hall where he could brag about it to his friends. But he didn't really have any friends, except for Gabe maybe, and Gabe was a grown-up. The prurient moment passed and Theo felt guilty about the way he had treated Molly: patronizing her and condescending to her; the way many people treated him when he tried to be something besides a pothead and puppet.

He kneeled down to a bookshelf filled with videotapes, found one labeled KENDRA: WARRIOR BABE OF THE OUT

LAND (ENGLISH), and slipped it into the VCR and turned on the television. Then he turned off the lights, laid his guns on the coffee table, and lay down on Molly's couch to wait. He watched as the Crazy Lady of Pine Cove battled mutants and Sand Pirates for half an hour before he drifted off to sleep. His mind needed a deeper escape from his problems than the movie could provide.

"Hi, Theo."

He came awake startled. The movie was still casting a flickering light over the room, so he couldn't have been sleeping that long. She stood in the doorway, half in shadow, looking very much like the woman on the television screen. She held an assault rifle at her side.

"Molly, I've been waiting for you."

"How'd you like it?" She nodded toward the television.

"Loved it. I never realized. I was just so tired..."

Molly nodded. "I won't be long, I just came to get some clean clothes. You're welcome to stay here."

Theo didn't know what to do. It didn't seem like the time to grab one of the pistols off the table. He felt more embarrassed than threatened.

"Thanks," he said.

"He's the last one, Theo. After him there aren't any more of his kind. His time has passed. I think that's what we have in common. You don't know what it is to be a has-been, do you?"

"I think I'm what they call a never-was."

"That's easier. At least you're always looking up the ladder, not down. Coming down is scarier."

"How? Why? What is he?"

"I'm not sure, a dragon maybe. Who knows?" She leaned back against the doorway and sighed. "But I can kinda tell what he's thinking. I guess it's because I'm nuts. Who would have thought that would come in handy, huh?"

"Don't say that about yourself. You're saner than I am."

Molly laughed, and Theo could see her movie-star teeth shine in the light of the television. "You're a neurotic, Theo. A neurotic is someone who thinks something is wrong with him, but everyone else thinks he is normal; a psychotic thinks something's wrong with her. Take a poll of the locals, I think I'd come out in the latter category, don't you?"

"Molly, this is really dangerous stuff you're messing with."

"He won't hurt me."

"It's not just that. You could go to jail just for having that machine gun, Molly. People are getting killed, aren't they?"

"In a manner of speaking."

"That's what happened to Joseph Leander, and the guys working the drug lab, right? Your pal ate them?"

"They were going to hurt you, and Steve was hungry. Seemed like great timing to me."

"Molly, that's murder!"

"Theo! I'm nuts. What are they going to do to me?"

Theo shrugged his shoulders and sat back on the couch. "I don't know what to do."

"You're not in a position to do anything right now. Get some rest."

Theo cradled his head in his hands. His cell phone, still in the pocket of his flannel shirt, began ringing. "I could sure use a hit right now."

"There's some Smurfs of Sanity in the cupboard over the sink - neuroleptics Dr. Val gave me, antipsychotics - they've done wonders for me."

"Obviously."

"Your phone is ringing."

Theo pulled out the phone, flipped it open, hit the answer button and watched as the incoming number ap peared on the display. It was Sheriff Burton's cell phone number. Theo hit disconnect.

"I'm fucked," Theo said.

Molly picked up Theo's .357 Magnum from the table, held it on Theo, then picked up Joseph Leander's automatic. "I'll give these back before I go. I'm going to get some clean clothes and some girlie things out of my bedroom. You be okay here?"

"Yeah, sure." His head was still hung. He spoke into his lap.

"You're bumming me out, Theo."

"Sorry."

Molly was gone from the room for only five minutes, in which time Theo tried to get a handle on what had happened. Molly returned with a duffel bag slung over her shoulder. She was wearing the Kendra costume, com-plete with thigh-high boots. Even in the dim light from the television, Theo could see a ragged scar over her breast. She caught him looking.

"Ended my career," she said. "I suppose now they could fix it, but it's a little late."

"I'm sorry," Theo said. "I think you look beautiful."

She smiled and shifted both of the pistols to one hand. She'd left the assault rifle by the door and Theo hadn't even noticed. "You ever feel special, Theo?"

"Special?"

"Not like you're better than everyone else, just that you're different in a good way, like it makes a difference that you're on the planet? You ever feel that way?"

"I don't know. No, not really."

"I had that for a while. Even though they were cheesy B movies and even though I had to do some humiliating things to get into them, I felt special, Theo. Then it went away. Well, now I feel that way again. That's why."

"Why what?"

"You asked me why before. That's why I'm going back to Steve."

"Steve? You call him Steve?"

"He looked like a Steve," Molly said. "I have to go. I'll leave your guns in the bed of that red truck you stole. Don't try to follow, okay?"

Theo nodded. "Molly, don't let it kill anybody else. Promise me that."

"Promise to leave us alone?"

"I can't do that."

"Okay. Take care of yourself." She grabbed the assault rifle, kicked open the door, and stepped out.

Theo heard her go down the steps, pause, then come back up. She popped her head in the door. "I'm sorry you never felt special, Theo," she said.

Theo forced a smile. "Thanks, Molly."

Gabe

Gabe stood in the foyer of Valerie Riordan's home, looking at his hiking boots, then the white carpet, then his boots again. Val had gone into the kitchen to get some wine. Skinner was wandering around outside.

Gabe sat down on the marble floor, unlaced his boots, then slipped them off. He'd once been into a level-nine clean room at a biotech facility in San Jose, a place where the air was scrubbed and filtered down to the micron and you had to wear a plastic bunny suit with its own air umbilical to avoid contaminating the specimens. Strangely, he'd had a similar feeling to the one he was feeling now, which was: I am the harbinger of filth. Thank God Theo had made him shower and change before his date.

Val came into the sunken living room carrying a tray with a bottle of wine and two glasses. She looked up at Gabe, who was standing at the edge of the stairs as if ready to wade into molten lava.

"Well, come on in and have a seat," Val said.

Gabe took a tentative step. "Nice place," he said.

"Thanks, I still have a lot to do on it. I suppose I should just hire a decorator and have done with it, but I like finding pieces myself."

"Right," Gabe said, taking another step. You could play handball in this room if you didn't mind destroying a lot of antiques.

"It's a cabernet from Wild Horse Vineyard over the hill. I hope you like it." Val poured the wine into stemmed bubble glasses. She took hers and sat down on the velvet couch, then raised her eyebrows as if to say, "Well?"

Gabe joined her at the other end of the couch, then took a tentative sip of the wine. "It's nice."

"For a local cheapie," Val said.

An awkward silence passed between them. Val made a show of tasting the wine again, then said, "You don't really believe this stuff about a sea monster, do you, Gabe?"

Gabe was relieved. She wanted to talk about work. He'd been afraid that she would want to talk about something else - anything else - and he didn't really know how. "Well, there are the tracks, which look very authentic, so if they are fake, whoever did them studied fossil tracks and replicated them perfectly. Then there's the timing of the rat migration, plus Theo and your patient. Estelle, was it?"

Val set down her wine. "Gabe, I know you're a scientist, and a discovery like this could make you rich and famous, but I just don't believe there's a dinosaur in town."

"Rich and famous? I hadn't thought about it. I guess there would be some recognition, wouldn't there?"

"Look, Gabe, you deal in hard facts, but every day I deal with the delusions and constructions of people's minds. They are just tracks on the ground, probably like that Bigfoot hoax in Washington a few years ago. Theo is a chronic drug user, and Estelle and her boyfriend Catfish are artist types. They all have overactive imaginations."

Gabe was put off by her judgment of Theo and the others. He thought for a second, then said, "As a biologist, I have a theory about imagination. I think it's pretty obvious that fear - fear of loud noises, fear of heights, the capacity to learn fear - is something that we've adapted over the years as a survival mechanism, and so is imagination. Everyone thinks that it was the big strong caveman who got the girl, and for the most part, that may have been true, but physical strength doesn't explain how our species cre-ated civilization. I think there was always some scrawny dreamer sitting at the edge of the firelight, who had the ability to imagine dangers, to look into the future in his imagination and see possibilities, and therefore sur-vived to pass his genes on to the next generation. When the big ape men ended up running off the cliff or getting killed while trying to beat a mas-todon into submission with a stick, the dreamer was standing back thinking, 'Hey, that might work, but you need to run the mastodon off the cliff.' And, then he'd mate with the women left over after the go-getters got killed."

"So nerds rule," Val said with a smile. "But if fear and imagination make you more highly evolved, then someone with paranoid delusions would be ruling the world." Val was getting into the theory of it now. How strange to talk to a man who talked about ideas, not property and personal agendas. Val liked it. A lot.

Gabe said, "Well, we didn't miss that by far with Hitler, did we? Evolution takes some missteps sometimes.

Big teeth worked pretty well for a while, then they got too big. Mastodons' tusks got so large they would snap the animal's neck. And you've probably noticed that there are no saber-toothed cats around anymore."

"Okay, I'll buy that imagination is an evolutionary leap. But what about depression?" Talking about mental conditions, she couldn't help thinking about what she'd done to her patients. Her crimes circled in her mind, trying to get out. "Psychiatry is looking more and more at mental conditions from a physical point of view, so that fits. That's why we're treating depres-sion with drugs like Prozac. But what evolutionary purpose is there for depression?"

"I've been thinking about that since you mentioned it at dinner," Gabe said. He drained his wineglass and moved closer to her on the couch, as if by being closer, she would share in his excitement. He was in his element now. "A lot of animals besides humans get depressed. Higher mammals like dolphins and whales can die from it, but even rats seem to get the Blues. I can't figure out what purpose it serves. But in humans it might be like nearsightedness: civilization has protected a biological weakness that would have been weeded out by natural dangers or predators."

"Predators? How?"

"I don't know. Depression might slow the prey down, make it react less quickly to danger. Who knows?"

"So a predator might actually evolve that preyed on depressed animals?" Right and it's me, Val thought. If I haven't been preying on depressed people, what have I been doing? She suddenly felt ashamed of her home, of the pure materialism of it. Here was an incredibly bright man who was concerned with the pure pursuit of knowledge, and she had sold her integrity for some antiques and a Mercedes.

Gabe poured himself another glass of wine and sat back now, thinking as he spoke. "Interesting idea. I suppose there could be some sort of chemical or behavioral stimulus that would trigger preying on the depressed. Low serotonin levels tend to raise libido, right? At least temporarily?"

"Yes," Val said. That's why the entire town has turned into horndogs, she thought.

"Therefore," Gabe continued, "you'd have more animals mating and passing on the depression gene. Nature tends to evolve mechanisms to remain in balance. A predator or a disease would naturally evolve to keep the depressed population down. Interesting, I've been feeling especially horny lately, I wonder if I'm depressed." Gabe's eyes snapped open wide and he looked at Val with the full-blown terror of what he had just said. He gulped his wine, then said, "I'm sorry, I..."

Val couldn't stand it anymore. Gabe's faux pas opened the gate, and she stepped through it. "Gabe, we have to talk."

"I'm really sorry, I didn't mean to..."

She grabbed his arm to stop him. "No, I have to tell you something."

Gabe braced himself for the worst. He'd fallen out of the lofty world of theory into the awkward, gritty world of first dates, and she was going to drop the "Don't get the wrong idea" bomb on him.

She gripped his arm and her nails dug into his bicep hard enough to make him wince.

She said, "A little over a month ago, I took almost a third of the people in Pine Cove off antidepressants."

"Huh?" That wasn't at all what he'd expected. "My God, why?"

"Because of Bess Leander's suicide. Or what I thought was her suicide. I was just going through the motions in my practice. Writing prescriptions and collecting fees." She explained about her arrangement with Winston Krauss and how the pharmacist had refused to put everyone back on the drugs. When she finished, to wait for his judgment, there were tears welling up in her eyes.

He put his arms around her tentatively, hoping it was the right thing to do. "Why tell me this?"

She melted against his chest. "Because I trust you and because I have to tell someone and because I need to figure out what to do. I don't want to go to jail, Gabe. Maybe all my patients didn't need to be on antidepressants, but a lot of them did." She sobbed on his shoulder and he began to stroke her hair, then pushed up her chin and kissed her tears.

"It'll be okay. It will."

She looked up into his eyes, as if looking for a hint of disdain, then not finding it, she kissed him hard and pulled him on top of her on the couch.

A Higher Power

And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast?

-  Revelation 13:4

Twenty-three

Steve

What horrors can a dragon dream? A creature who has, in his own way, ruled the planet for millions of years, a creature for whom the mingy man mammals have built temples, a creature who has known no predator but time - what could he possibly dream that would frighten him? Call it the knowing?

Under a stand of oak trees, sexually satisfied and with a bellyful of drug dealers, the dragon dreamed a vision of time past. The eternal now that he had always known suddenly had history. In the dream he saw himself as a larva, tucked into the protective pouch under his mother's tongue until it was safe to venture out under her watchful eye. He saw the hunting and the mating, the forms he had learned to mimic as his mercurial DNA evolved not through generations, but through regeneration of cells. He saw the mates he had eaten, the three young he had borne as a female, the last killed by a warmblood who sang the Blues. He remembered the chan-ging, not so long ago, from female to male, and he remembered all of it in pictures, not in mere instinctual patterns and conditioned responses.

He saw these pictures in the dream, brought on by the strange mating with the warmblood, and he wondered why. For the first time in his five thousand years, he asked, Why? And the dream answered with a picture of all the oceans and swamps, the rivers and bogs and trenches and mountains beneath the sea, and they were all empty of his kind. As sure as if he were floating through the cold black at the end of the universe, where light gives up hope and time chases its tail until it dies from exhaustion, he was alone.

Sex does that to some guys.

Val

"Oh my God, the rat brains!" Gabe shouted.

It was a different response to lovemaking. Val wasn't sure that she might not be hurt, feeling vulnerable as she was, with her knees in the vicinity of her ears, a biologist on top of her, and her panty hose waving off one foot like a tattered battle flag.

Gabe collapsed into her arms and she looked over his shoulder to the coffee table to check that they hadn't kicked the wineglasses off onto the carpet.

"Are you okay?" she asked, a little breathless.

"I'm sorry, but I just realized what's going on with this creature."

"That's what you were thinking about?" Yes, her feelings were definitely hurt.

"No, not during. It came to me in a flash right after. Somehow the creature can attract mammals with lower than normal serotonin levels. And you've got, what, a third of the population running around in antidepressant withdrawal?"

She was pissed now, not hurt. She dumped him off her onto the floor, stood up, pulled her skirt down, and stepped away. He scrambled into his pants and looked around for his shirt, which lay in shreds behind the couch.

He had a tan that ended at the neckline and just below the shoulders; the rest of him was milk white. He looked up at her from the gap between the couch and the coffee table with a pleading in his eyes, as if he were looking up from a coffin in which he was about to be buried alive.

"Sorry," he said.

He wasn't looking her in the eye, and Val suddenly realized that he was talking to her exposed breasts. She pulled her blouse closed, and a battery of insults rose in her mind, ready to be fired, but all of them were mean-spirited and would serve to do nothing but make them both feel ashamed. He was who he was, and he was honest and real, and she knew that he hadn't meant to hurt her. So she cried. Thinking, Great, crying is what got me into this in the first place.

She plopped down on the couch with her face in her hands. Gabe moved to her side and put his arm around her. "I'm really sorry. I'm not very good at this sort of thing."

"You're fine. It's just too much."

"I should go." He started to stand.

She caught his arm in a death grip. "You go and I'll hunt you down and kill you like a rabid dog."

"I'll stay."

"No go," she said. "I understand."

"Okay, I'll go."

"Don't you dare." She threw her arms around him and kissed him hard, pulling him back down onto the couch, and within seconds they were all over each other again.

That's it, she thought, no more crying. It's the crying that does it. This guy is aroused by my pain.

But soon they lay in a panting sweaty pile on the floor and the idea of crying was light-years away.

And this time Gabe said, "That was wonderful."

Val noticed a wineglass overturned by her head, a cabernet stain bleeding over the carpet. "Is it salt or club soda?"

Gabe pulled away far enough to look into her eyes and saw that she was looking at the stained carpet. "Salt and cold water, I think. Or is that blood?" A drop of sweat dripped off his forehead onto her lips.

She looked at him. "You weren't thinking about that creature that doesn't exist, were you?"

"Just you."

She smiled. "Really?"

"And a weed-whacker, for some reason."

"You're kidding."

"Uh, yes, I'm kidding. I was only thinking of you."

"So you don't think I'm a horrible person for what I've done?"

"You were trying to do what you thought was right. How could that be horrible?"

"I feel horrible."

"It's been a long time. I'm out of practice."

"No, not about this. About my patients. You really think something could be preying on them?"

"It's just a theory. There may not even be a creature."

"But what if there is? Shouldn't we call the National Guard or something?"

"I was thinking of calling Theo."

"Theo isn't even a real cop."

"He deserves to know."

They lay there in silence for a few minutes, staring at the spreading stain on the carpet, feeling the sweat run down their ribs, and listening to the beat of each other's hearts.

"Gabe?" Val whispered.

"Yes."

"Maybe we should go to couples' counseling."

"Should we get dressed first?"

"You were serious about the weed-whacker, weren't you?"

"I don't know where that image came from."

"There's supposed to be a good couples' guy in San Junipero, unless you'd rather go to a woman counselor."

"I thought we were going to call the National Guard."

"Only if it comes to that," Val said. Thinking, When we tell the shrink about this, I'm leaving out the part about the wine spilling.

Theo

Is there anything more irritating than people who have just been laid? Especially when you have not. Not for a long time.

Oh, it was obvious as soon as they came through Molly's front door, waking Theo for the second time that night: Gabe's grin looking like the oversized grill on an old Chrysler, Val Riordan wearing jeans and almost no makeup; the both of them giddy and giggling and blushing like children. Theo wanted to puke. He was happy for them, but he wanted to puke.

"What?" Theo said.

Gabe was obviously amped and trying not to show it. He put his hands in his pockets to keep from waving them around. "I" - he looked at Val and smiled - "we think that this creature, if it exists, may be attracted to prey with low serum serotonin levels."

Gabe bounced on the balls of his feet as he waited for his statement to sink in. Theo sat there, staring at him, with no discernible change in expres-sion from the weariness he'd worn since they came through the door. He guessed that he was supposed to say something now.

"Molly was here," Theo said. "The creature exists. It ate Mikey Plotznik, and Joseph Leander, and who knows who else? She said it's a dragon."

Gabe's grin dropped. "That's great. I mean, that's horrible, but it's great from a scientific point of view. I have another theory about this species. I think it has some specialized mechanism to affect its prey. Have you been horny lately?"

"There's no need to be arrogant, Gabe. I'm glad you two had a good time, but there's no need to rub it in."

"No no, you don't get it." Gabe went on to explain about Val Riordan's decision to take her patients off antidepressants and how the lowering of serotonin levels could lead to increased libido. "So Pine Cove has been full of horny people."

"Right," Theo said. "And I still can't get a date."

Val Riordan laughed and Theo glared at her. Gabe said, "The rats I found alive near this trailer, where we think the creature might have been, were mating when I found them. There are some species of carnivorous plants that give off a sex pheromone that attracts their prey. In some species, the behavior of the male - a display, a dance, a scent - will stimulate the ovaries in the female of the species without any physical contact. I think that's what's happened to us."

"Our ovaries are being stimulated?" Theo rubbed sleep from his eyes. "I gotta be honest with you, Gabe. I'm not feeling it."

Val turned to Gabe. "That's not very romantic."

"It's incredibly exciting. This may be the most elegant predator that the world has ever seen."

Theo shook his head. "I have no home, no job, no car, there's probably a warrant out for my arrest, and you want me to be excited over the fact that we have a monster in town that makes you horny so he can eat you? Sorry, Gabe, I'm missing the positive side of this."

Val chimed in, "It may be the reason that you've been able to quit smoking pot so easily."

"Pardon me? Easily?" Theo wanted to jump off the couch and bitch-slap them both.

"Were you ever able to go this long before?"

"She could be right, Theo," Gabe said. "If this thing affects serotonin, it could affect other neurotransmitters."

"Oh good," Theo said. "Let's open a detox clinic. We'll feed half of the patients to the monster and the other half will recover. I can't wait."

"There's no need to be sarcastic," Gabe said. "We're just trying to help."

"Help? Help with what? Bar fight? I can handle it. Skateboard theft? I'm on it. But my law enforcement experience hasn't prepared me for dealing with this."

"That's true, Gabe," Val said. "Theo's little more than a rent-a-cop. Maybe we should call the sheriff or the FBI or the National Guard."

"And tell them what?" Theo asked. Rent-a-cop? I'm not even that now, he thought.

"He has a point." Gabe said. "We haven't seen anything."

"That old Blues singer has," Val said.

Theo nodded. "We need to find him. Maybe he'll..."

"He's living with Estelle Boyet," Val said. "I have her address in my office."