By the light of the moon

and a car thief.'
    'I think he was telling the truth about this.'
    'He's a lying sack of excrement,' she insisted.
    Shep said, 'Lucence, refulgency, facula,' or at least that's
what it sounded like, although Jilly wasn't entirely sure that
those collections of syllables were actually words.
    Dylan shifted his attention from Jilly to something beyond her,
and when she heard the roar of engines, she turned in search of the
source.
    Past the parking lot lay a street. An embankment flanked the far
side of the street, and atop that long slope, the interstate
highway followed the east-to-west trail of the moon. Traveling at a
reckless speed, three SUVs descended the arc of an exit ramp.
    '—light, illumination, radiance, ray—'
    'Shep, I think you've started repeating yourself,' Dylan noted,
though he remained riveted on the SUVs.
    The three vehicles were identical black Chevrolet Suburbans. As
darkly tinted as Darth Vader's face shield, the windows concealed
the occupants.
    '—brightness, brilliance, beam, gleam—'
    Without even a token application of brakes, the first Suburban
exploded past the stop sign at the bottom of the exit ramp and
angled across the heretofore quiet street. This was the north side
of the motel, and the entrance to the parking lot lay toward the
front of the enterprise, to the east. At the stop sign, the driver
had shown no respect for the uniform highway-safety code; now, with
gusto, he demonstrated a lack of patience with traditional roadway
design. The Suburban jumped the curb, churned through a
ten-foot-wide landscaping zone, spitting behind it a spray of dirt
and masticated masses of flowering lantana, briefly took flight off
another curb, made a hard four-tire landing in the parking lot,
about sixty feet from Jilly, executed a sliding turn at the cost of
considerable rubber, and raced west toward the back of the
motel.
    '—effulgence, refulgence, blaze—'
    The second Suburban followed the first, and the third pursued
the second, chopping up additional servings of lantana salad. But
once in the parking lot, the second turned east instead of
continuing to pursue the first, and sped toward the front of the
motel. The third streaked straight toward Jilly, Dylan, and
Shep.
    '—glint, glimmer—'
    Just when Jilly thought the oncoming SUV might run them down, as
she was deciding whether to dive to the left or to the right, as
she considered again the possibility that she might puke, the third
driver proved to be as flamboyant a showman as the first two. The
Suburban braked so hard that it nearly stood on its nose. Upon its
roof, a rack of four motorized spotlights, previously dark,
suddenly blazed, swiveled, tilted, took perfect aim, and shed
enough wattage on its quarry to bake the marrow in their bones.
    '—luminosity, fulgor, flash—'
    Jilly felt as though she were standing not before a mere earthly
vehicle, but in the awesome presence of an extraterrestrial vessel,
being body-scanned, mind-sucked, and soul-searched by
data-gathering rays that, in six seconds flat, would count the
exact number of atoms in her body, review her entire lifetime of
memories beginning with her reluctant exit from her mother's birth
canal, and issue a printed chastisement for the deplorably frayed
condition of her underwear.
    After a moment, the spots switched off, and ghost lights like
luminous jellyfish swam before her eyes. Even if she hadn't been
dazzled, she wouldn't have been able to get a glimpse of the driver
or of anyone else in the Suburban. The windshield appeared not
merely to be tinted, but also to be composed of an exotic material
that, while perfectly transparent to those within the SUV, appeared
from the outside to be as impenetrable to light as absolute-black
granite.
    Because Jilly, Dylan, and Shep were not the quarry of this
search – not yet – the Suburban turned away from them.
The driver stomped on the accelerator, and the vehicle shot
eastward, toward the front of the motel, once more following the
second SUV which had already rounded the corner of the building
with a shriek of tires and had vanished from sight.
    Shep fell silent.
    Referring to the lunatic doctor who had warned that violent men
would follow in his wake, Dylan said, 'Maybe he wasn't a lying sack
of excrement, after all.'

9
    These were extraordinary times, peopled by ranting
maniacs in love with violence and with a violent god, infested with
apologists for wickedness, who blamed victims for their suffering
and excused