By the light of the moon

scared or
lonely, or lost. They don't know why they're here or what's the
purpose, the reason, so they wind up half dead inside.'
    'I suppose you know the purpose, the reason,' she said.
    'You make me sound smug.'
    'Don't mean to. Just curious what you think it is.'
    'Everyone has to figure it out for himself,' he said, which was
in truth how he felt. 'And you're one who will because you want
to.'
    ' Now you sound smug.' She looked as if she might whack
him with the bottle, after all.
    Shepherd picked up one of the three pats of unwrapped butter and
popped it in his mouth.
    When Jilly grimaced, Dylan said, 'Shep likes bread and butter,
but not in the same bite. You don't want to see him eat a
mayonnaise-and-bologna sandwich.'
    'We're doomed,' she said.
    Dylan sighed, shook his head, said nothing.
    'Get real, okay? They start shooting at us, what rules will Shep
have about how we're allowed to dodge the bullets? Always dodge
left, never right. You can weave but you can't duck – unless
it's a day of the week that has the letter u in it, in which
case you can duck, but you can't weave. How fast can he run while
reading, and what happens when you try to take the book away from
him?'
    'It won't be that way,' Dylan said, but he knew she was
right.
    Jilly leaned toward him, her voice lowering, but gaining in
intensity what it lost in volume: 'Why won't it? Listen, you've got
to admit, even if it were just you and me in this mess together,
we'd be on a greased slope in glass shoes. So then hang a
hundred-sixty-pound, butter-munching millstone around our necks,
and what chance do we have?'
    'He's not a millstone,' Dylan said stubbornly.
    To Shep, she said, 'Sweetie, no offense, but if we have any hope
of getting through this, the three of us, we've got to face facts,
speak the truth. We lie to ourselves, we're dead. Maybe you can't
help being a millstone, but maybe you can, and if you can, then
you've got to work with us.'
    Dylan said, 'We've always been a great team, me and Shep.'
    'Team? Some team. You two couldn't run a three-legged sack race
without the sack ending up on somebody's head.'
    'He ain't heavy—'
    'Oh, don't say it,' she interrupted. 'Don't you dare say it,
O'Conner. don't you dare, you hope-drunk lunatic, you
power-of-positive-thinking nutball.'
    'He ain't heavy, he's my—'
    '—idiot-savant brother,' she finished for him.
    Patiently, quietly, Dylan explained: 'No. An idiot savant is
mentally defective with a low IQ, but with an exceptional talent in
one special field, such as the ability to solve complex
mathematical problems at lightning speed or to play any musical
instrument upon first picking it up. Shep's got a high IQ, and he's
exceptional in more ways than one. He's just... some kind of
autistic.'
    'We're doomed,' she repeated.
    Shepherd chewed another pat of butter with enthusiasm, all the
while staring at his plate from a distance of just ten inches, as
though he, like Dylan, had discovered the purpose of life, and as
though that purpose were meat loaf.

19
    Each time the door opened and a customer entered,
Dylan tensed. The SUV crowd couldn't have tracked them this fast.
And yet...
    The waitress brought the second round of beers, and after Jilly
drew cold comfort from a swallow of Sierra Nevada, she said, 'So we
hole up somewhere around the Petrified Forest and... You said what?
You said think ?'
    'Think,' Dylan confirmed.
    'Think about what, besides how to stay alive?'
    'Maybe we can figure out how to track down Frankenstein.'
    'You forget he's dead?' she asked.
    'I mean, track down who he was before they killed him.'
    'We don't even have a name, except the one we made up.'
    'But he was evidently a scientist. Medical research. Developing
psychotropic drugs, psychotropic stuff , psychotropic
something, which gives us a key word. Scientists write papers,
produce articles for journals, give lectures. They leave a
trail.'
    'Intellectual breadcrumbs.'
    'Yeah. And if I think about it, I might remember more of what
the bastard said back there in my motel room, other key words. With
enough key words, we can go on the Internet and winnow through the
researchers working to enhance brain function, related areas.'
    'I'm no tech whiz,' she said. 'Are you?'
    'No. But this search doesn't take technical expertise, just
patience. Even some of those stuffy science journals run photos of
their contributors, and if he was near the top of his field, which
it seems he must've been, then he'll have gotten