By the light of the moon

that the dangerous crossing of the
median had been motivated by Shep's reminder – 'Fries not
flies' – that he had not eaten dinner. The older brother's
impressively deep commitment to the younger was admirable to a
point, but a return to that burger bistro under these circumstances
represented a colossal leap from the high ground of responsible
stewardship into a swamp of reckless devotion.
    'What're you doing?' she demanded again.
    He answered this time, but his reply was neither reassuring nor
informative: 'I don't know.'
    She sensed a quality in his demeanor that was reminiscent of her
desperate state of mind each time she found herself in the thrall
of a mirage. Alarmed by the prospect of being driven at high speed
by a man distracted by hallucinations or worse, she said, 'Slow
down, for God's sake. Where are you going?'
    Accelerating, he said, 'West. Somewhere west. A place. Some
place.'
    'Why?'
    'I feel the pull.'
    'The pull of what?'
    'The west. I don't know. I don't know what or where.'
    'Then why are you going anywhere at all?'
    As if he were the simplest of men for whom this conversation had
taken a philosophical turn no less beyond his comprehension than
the arcane discoveries of molecular biology, Dylan rolled his gaze
toward her, revealing as much white of the eyes as does a dog
cringing in bewilderment from harsh words that it can't understand.
'It just... feels right.'
    ' What feels right?'
    'Going this direction, going west again.'
    'Aren't we driving straight back into trouble?'
    'Yeah, probably, I think so.'
    'Then pull over, stop.'
    'Can't.' An instant sweat slicked his face. 'Can't.'
    'Why?'
    'Frankenstein. The needle. The stuff . It's started.
Something's happening to me.'
    'What something?'
    'Some weird shit.'
    In the backseat, Shepherd said, 'Manure.'

14
    Weird manure indeed.
    As though he were fleeing from a fast-moving fire or outrunning
an avalanche of tumbling rock and ice and snow, Dylan O'Conner was
flogged by a sense of urgency so intense that his heart jumped like
that of a rabbit running in the shadow of a wolf. He had never
suffered feelings of persecution and had never taken
methamphetamine, but he supposed this must be how a man with
paranoid delusions would feel if he mainlined a near-lethal dose of
liquid speed.
    'I'm jacked up,' he told Jilly, pressing the accelerator, 'and I
don't know why, and I can't get down.'
    God alone knew what she made of that. Dylan himself wasn't sure
what he'd been trying to convey.
    In fact, he didn't feel that he was running from danger, but
that he was being drawn inexorably toward something by the
world's largest electromagnet, which pulled him by the iron in his
blood. His sense of urgency was matched by an irresistible
compulsion to move .
    The urgency had no apparent cause, and the compulsion related to
no specific object. He simply needed to go west, and he felt
constrained to race after the setting moon with all possible
haste.
    Instinct, he told Jilly. Something in his blood that said go , something in his bones that said hurry , a
race-memory voice speaking through his genes, a voice that he knew
he dared not ignore, because if he resisted its message, something
terrible would happen.
    'Terrible?' she asked. 'What?'
    He didn't know, he only felt , as a stalked antelope feels
the cheetah lurking a hundred yards away behind a screen of tall
grass, and as a parched cheetah senses the presence of a water hole
miles away across the veldt.
    Trying to explain himself, he'd let up on the accelerator. The
speedometer needle quivered at 85. He pumped it toward 90.
    In this traffic, on this highway, in this vehicle, driving at
ninety miles per hour wasn't only illegal and imprudent, but
foolish, and worse than foolish – moronic.
    He wasn't able either to shame or argue himself into reacting
responsibly to the risk. Shep's life and Jilly's, as well as his
own, were jeopardized by this monomaniacal determination to move
and to move fast, faster, always west, west . On another
night or even at an earlier hour this night, the mere recognition
of his accountability for their safety would have caused Dylan to
slow down, but now all moral considerations and even his survival
instinct were overruled by this feverish compulsion.
    Macks and Peterbilts, sedans, coupes, SUVs, pickups, vans, auto
carriers, motor homes, tanker trucks raced westward, weaving back
and forth from lane to lane, and without once slowing, Dylan
plunged the Expedition through the