By the light of the moon

nausea through her, and instead of executing the
butt-booting assault that she'd envisioned, she groaned. 'I'm gonna
puke.'
    Retrieving his Coke and peanuts, picking up his medical bag, the
stranger said, 'You'd better resist the urge. The effects of the
anesthesia linger. You could lose consciousness again, and if you
pass out while regurgitating, you'll wind up like Janis
Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, choking to death on your own vomit.'
    Oh, lovely. She'd simply gone out to buy some root beer. Such an
innocent undertaking. Not ordinarily a high-risk task. She had
fully understood the need to compensate for the root-beer
indulgence with a dry-toast breakfast, but she hadn't gone to the
vending machines with any expectation whatsoever that by doing so
she would put herself at risk of choking to death on her own
upchuck. Had she known, she would have stayed in her room and drunk
tap water; after all, what was good enough for Fred was good enough
for her.
    'Lie still,' the crackpot urged, not with any element of command
in his voice but with what sounded like concern for her. 'Lie
still, and the nausea and the vertigo will fade in two or three
minutes. I don't want you to choke to death, that would be stupid,
but I can't risk hanging around here, playing nursemaid. And
remember, if they get their hands on me and discover what I've
done, they'll come looking for anyone I've injected, and they'll
kill you.'
    Remember? Kill? They?
    She had no memory whatsoever of any such previous warning, so
she assumed that it must have been part of what he'd been talking
about when her brain haze, now gradually clearing, had been as
thick as London fog.
    From the door, he looked back at her. 'The police won't be able
to keep you safe from these people who're coming. There's no one to
turn to.'
    On the rolling bed, in this tilting room, she could not help but
think about the chicken sandwich, slathered with chipotle
mayonnaise, and the greasy French fries she'd eaten. She tried to
concentrate on her assailant, desperate to devastate him with words
in place of the boot that she hadn't been able to bury in his
bottom, but her gorge kept trying to rise.
    'Your only hope,' he said, 'is to get out of the search area
before you're detained and forced to have a blood test.'
    The chicken sandwich struggled within her as though it retained
some of its chicken consciousness, as though the fowl were
attempting to take a first messy step toward reconstitution.
    Nevertheless, Jilly managed to speak, and she was at once
embarrassed by the insult that escaped her, which would have been
lame even if she had pronounced it without confusion: 'Siss my
kass.'
    In comedy clubs, she frequently dealt with hecklers, cracked
their thick skulls, wrung their geek necks, stomped their malicious
hearts till they cried for mama – metaphorically speaking, of
course – using a dazzle of words as effective as the fists of
Muhammad Ali in his prime. In postanesthesia disorientation,
however, she was about as witheringly funny as chipotle mayonnaise,
which right now was the least amusing substance in the known
universe.
    'As attractive as you are,' he said, 'I'm sure someone'll look
after you.'
    'Pupid srick,' she said, further mortified by the utter collapse
of her once formidable verbal war machine.
    'In the days ahead, you'd be best advised to keep your mouth
shut about what happened here—'
    'Cupid strick,' she corrected herself, only to realize that she
had found a new way to mangle the same insult.
    '—keep your head down—'
    'Stupid prick,' she said with clarity this time, although the
epithet had actually sounded more withering when mispronounced.
    '—and never speak to anyone about what's happened to you,
because as soon as it's known, you'll be a target.'
    She almost spat the word at him, 'Hickdead,' though such
crude language, whether or not properly pronounced and clearly
enunciated, was not her usual style.
    'Good luck,' he said, and then he left with his Coke and his
peanuts and his evil dreamy smile.

7
    Having cut himself loose from the chair, having taken
a quick piddle – deedle-doodle-diddle – Dylan
returned from the bathroom and discovered that Shep had risen from
the desk and had turned his back on the unfinished Shinto temple.
Once he began to obsess on a puzzle, Shep could be lured from it
neither with promises nor with rewards, nor by force, until he
plugged in the final piece. Yet now, standing near the foot of the
bed, staring intently at