Monster (27 page)

She made it to the mall by twenty after four
. The shells
were stacked behind the counter. She had pic
ked a bad
week to buy them. After all, a girl her age had
killed two
people with a shotgun only the week before. The
guy at
the counter looked as if he had just got out of the
army.
He had a blond crew cut, square shoulders, a rod up
his
spine
–
the whole bit. He wanted to know what she wan
ted
the twenty boxes of shells for.

“
They're for my grandfather,
”
she said.

“Is he with you?” the guy asked.

“No.”

“What does he shoot?”

“
He target-
practices
, mainly. Is there a problem?
I
’m
eighteen. I have ID.”

“
I'd like to see it,
”
the guy said. Angela showed h
im her
licence. He studied it closely
–
he seemed to be memor
izing
her name.
“
You're from Chicago?
”
he asked.

“
I
moved here last June,
”
she said.

The guy bli
nked. Something had struck him. “
H
ey, is your grandfather Mike Warner?”

She
smiled, althoug
h it was forced beyond belief. “
Yeah
. Do you know him?”

The guy slapped his knee. “
Hell, he used to go out with
my sister.”

Angela
winced.
“
Your
sister? How old is your sister?”
The
guy h
ims
el
f couldn't have been thirty.

“
She's
younger than me.
” He chuckled. “
He was a great
guy, t
hough. She really liked him. How's he doing?
”

She swallowed. “
Oh, h
e's still up to his old tricks.”

“He
bought himself a shotgun?
I
don't think he had one
when
he was dating Dorothy.
”

“He hasn't had it long.”

The
guy began to stack up the bo
x
es of shells on the counter. He wasn't worried about her anymore. Twenty
boxes
.
“
Tell him hello for me. The name's Sam.
Tell him Dorothy
still says he was the best
.”

Angela had to lower her head.
“
I
will.
”

Bef
ore Sam finished ringing up her order she added a hu
ndr
ed feet of rope, a t
ube of glue, and a razor-sharp huntin
g knife. She had nothing at home to cut open the
shells;
all the stuff in the kitchen was dull. Besides, she
thought,
the knife might come in handy.

She drov
e
around Balton for half an hour but couldn't find
any more
five-gallon water bot
tl
es. At a supermarket she
bought
eight two-and-a-half
gallon containers
–
they were
much
more common
–
and also picked up a plastic funnel.
She had
decided how she would get enough gasoline
.

The
r
e were three stations in Point.
She had a fifteen-
gallon
tank in her Camry. She could fill up the tank, drive
it
home, and angle it up on s
ome rocks to drain the gasoline directl
y into the bottles with the help of the
funnel,
leaving herself just enough fuel to get back to a
station.
Sixty gallons
–
four tankfuls. Then she'd be set
.

The
thought of revenge drove her on, but she felt
terrible anxiet
y about the evening. The stakes were high
– how high
she didn't like to guess. The death of the com
munity?
The end of the human race? Jesus. There were
a dozen thing
s
that could go wrong
.
As she drove
back
towards Point
s
he resolved
that
if she had to
–
if it
looked
as if even one of them would escape
–
she would
forget
the fuse, put her lighter directly to the gaso
line, and
be the first to go. Kevin would just have to forg
ive her.
She knew how much he
’
d miss her. She thought a
bout him a
lot as she worked, and about Mary
,
too. Great
people –
she'd been lucky to meet them. She wished she
could
go to Kevin for help now, but she vowed to he
rself that
he wouldn't be brought into it. He'd never beli
eve her
and would just end up being killed.

Angela filled up at the station closest to her hou
se. At
her grandfather's place she easily steered the left
side o
f
her car up on to the rocks. The stones worked as
w
ell as j
acks and left the bottom of the gas tank exposed, able to slide one of her empty fiv
e-
gallon bottles under the bottom cap on the tank. Then she ran
into
a problem
–
or rather, she
realized
she was going to hav
e a problem before it materialized. Once she took off the cap,
how was she supposed to stop the flo
w of
gasoline while she posi
tioned the next bottle? She debate
d the issue for severa
l minutes without coming up with
a brilliant solution. She was still extremely worried ab
out
spilling gasoline close to the house.

What she eventually did was
slowly
unscrew the
cap.
Near the end of the cap strip the gas began to
trickle
out. She undid it just a tiny bit more. Better to be
patient
at this stage, she cautioned herself. The gasoline dribbled into her funnel and began to fill the bottle. It took
her
five minutes to empty five gallons. She retighten
e
d
the
cap while she reached for the next bot
tl
e, spilling
only a
few drops. They'd have to have noses like wolve
s
to
get
a
whiff of the stuff, she thought.

It was funny, but it was only then that she pa
used to
ask herself what
t
he
y
would be called if they were
to be
named by someone in the twentieth century. They cra
ved
human flesh but prefer
r
ed to eat people alive
–
that
made them ghouls or z
ombies. In a sense they were fro
m outer space – that made them aliens.
But they liked human blood
– she
liked human blood, for God's sake
–
and if the myths
and her
nightmares were true, they mutated into bat-like
beings.

“Yeah,”
she said
to herself as she resumed her t
ask
, “they’
re vampires
.
It's too bad they were here before there
were
crucifixes or garlic, or
I
could forget all about this
bomb
business and just get myself to the religious store
and the
supermarket.”

Ang
ela filled close to three bot
tl
es
–
she left herself
jus
t eno
ugh
gas to get round to the other side of the lake
– and we
nt searching for the next station. She kept an eye
in
her
rearview-mirror the whole time, on the lookout for
Nguyen
. She doubted he was
still
tailing her. What he had
seen a
t Mary's cabin had scared him
–
it would have scared
any normal
person into a mental hospital. And that thing
she had
done to him just before she left felt as if she had
locked his
brain neurons in a pattern she chose. It came
to her
then that
Jim
had been using the same power on
her fr
om
the start of his sedu
ction. She liked to think she hadn’t
come that close to screwing him on the first date
without
some
kin
d of supernatural influence. The goddam
n bloods
ucker. How come they didn't sell birth control to
protect
girls like her from guys like him?

Gee,
they might sell them soon. They might be the next big
market in birth control.
Keep
those
micro-organisms fr
o
m growing
in you, girls! Save money on your
at the same time!
Practice
safe
necking!
Wear Count Condoms! The only ones he
can’t
bite through
!

“I am
sick,
”
she muttered.

It
was also s
ick how he still had a sexual
hold on her
after a
ll he had done to ruin her lif
e a
nd the lives of those
she lov
ed. Even while she was in the middle of plotting his
dest
ruction her thoughts turned to his kisses, his touch,
his body. God,
she couldn't let her imagination run down
that yellow bri
ck road, or it would constantly be stopping
behin
d the
bushes for a quicki
e. What was craziest of all
was
that she didn't know if she was s
ti
ll a virgin. Had
they done it in the middle of the lake last night?
While
she was having her nightmare? Was she going to
have a
two-fanged baby in nine months that needed ten
blood
transfusions a day just to keep its colour?

Angela took care of her eight five-gallon bottles,
then
dumped the water from her two-and-a-halfers into the
lake
and started on them. They were harder to fill because
the
openings were smaller. But unlike the five-gallon bot
tles,
they had caps, which she replaced after they were f
illed. The bigger bottl
es she capped with tin foil.

Except for one
–
one that she had left only ha
l
f
-
f
ull.
She knew a thing or two about how gasoline exploded. It was the
fum
es
that caused ignition
.
Stick a match d
irectl
y into a gallon of gasoline and most
l
ikely the match
would go out.
Her half-empty bottle would be her deto
nator. She would tie the other bottl
es tightly round it with her rope and lead her trail of gunpowder to the top of It.
Bang, bang
–
they would all go off in the s
ame
second.

She got one question at the last gas station she
went
to, which had also been the first station she had vi
si
ted eighty minutes before. The guy wanted to know what
she
had done with her first tankful. Angela just smiled
.

“I
need a tune-up bad,
” she said. “Getting terrible mileage.”

She had no trouble carrying the bottles inside
and
stacking
t
hem in the co
rn
er of the basement. She
was
stronger. But the smaller bottl
es
–
they didn't
quite fit
with the big ones. She put them aside for a moment
while
she set to work on the shotgun shells
.
She would fig
ure
out what to do with them later.