Theo squinted into the flames. “I love Slim Jims,” he said forlornly.

Robert patted his shoulder. “It’ll be okay. I’ll order some for you, but you can’t tell anyone I’m carrying them. And Theo, when this is all over, come see me at the shop. We’ll talk.”

“About what?”

Robert pulled off his fire helmet and wiped back his receding brown hair. “I was a drunk for ten years. I quit. I might be able to help you.”

Theo looked away. “I’m fine. Thanks.” He pointed to a ten-foot-wide burned strip that started across the street and led away from the fire in a path to the creek. “What do you make of that.”

“Looks like someone drove a burning vehicle out of the fire.”

“I’ll check it out.” Theo got a flashlight from the Volvo and crossed the street. The grass was singed and there were deep ruts cut into the dirt. They were lucky this had happened after the rainy season had started. Two months earlier and they would have lost the town.

He followed the track to the creek bed, fully expecting to find a wrecked vehicle pitched over the bank, but there was nothing there. The track ended at the bank. The water wasn’t deep enough to cover anything large enough to make a trail like that. He played the flashlight around the bank and stopped it on a single deep track in the mud. He blinked and shook his head to clear his vision, then looked again. It couldn’t be.

“Anything over there?” Robert was coming across the grass toward him.

Theo jumped down onto the bank and kicked the mud until the print was obliterated.

“Nothing,” Theo said. “Must have just been some burning fuel sprayed out this way.”

“What are you doing?”

“Stomping out the last of a burning squirrel. Must have gotten caught in the flames and ran over here. Poor guy.”

“You really need to come see me, Theo.”

“I will, Robert. For sure I will.”

Eight

He knew he should return to the safety of the sea, but his gill trees were singed and he didn’t relish the idea of treading water until they healed. If he’d known the female was going to react so violently, he would have re-tracted his gills into the folds beneath his scales where they would have been safe. He made his way down the creek bed until he spotted a herd of animals sleeping above the bank. They were ugly things, pale and graceless, and he could sense parasites living in every one of them, but this was no time to be judgmental. After all, some brave beast had to be the first to eat a mastodon, and who would have thought that those furballs would turn out to be the tasty treats that they were.

He could hide among this wormy herd until his gills healed, then perhaps he’d take one of the females on a grateful hump. But not now, his heart still ached for the purring female with the silvery flanks. He needed time to heal.

The Sea Beast slithered up the bank into an open space among the herd, then curled his legs and tail under his body and assumed their shape. The change was painful and took more effort than he was used to, but after a few minutes he was finished and he quietly fell asleep.

No, this wasn’t what she had planned at all. She had stopped taking her meds because they had been giving her the shakes, and she’d been willing to deal with the voices if they came back, but not this. She hadn’t counted on this. She was tempted to run to her kitchen area and gulp down one of her blue pills (Stelazine—“the Smurfs of Sanity,” she called them) to see if it could chase the hallucination, but she couldn’t tear herself from the trailer window. It was too real—and too weird. Could there be a big, burnt beast lumbering out of the creek? And if so, had she just watched it turn into a double-wide trailer?

Hallucinations, that was one of the five symptoms of schizophrenia. Molly kept a list of all the symptoms. In fact, she’d stolen a desk drawer version of the DSM-IV—The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the book psychiatrists use to diagnose mental illness—from Valerie Riordan. According to the DSM-IV, you had to have two of the five symptoms. Hallucinations were one; okay, that was a possibility. But delu-sions, no way; she wasn’t the least bit deluded, she knew she was having hallucinations. Number three was disorganized speech or incoherence. She’d give it a try.

“Hi, Molly, how the heck are you?” she asked.

“Not well, thank you. I’m worried that my speech may be disorganized,” she answered.

“Well, you sound fine to me,” she said, by way of being polite.

“Thanks for saying so,” she replied with genuine gratitude. “I guess I’m okay.”

“You’re fine. Nice ass, by the way.”

“Thanks, you’re not too bad yourself.”

“See, not disorganized at all,” she said, not realizing that the conversation was over.

Symptom four was grossly disorganized or catatonic behavior. She looked around her trailer. Most of the dishes were done, the videotapes of her movies were arranged chronologically, and the goldfish were still dead in the aquarium. Nope, nothing disorganized in this place. Schizo 1, Sanity 3.

Number five, negative symptoms, such as “affective flattening, alogia, or avolition.” Well, a woman hits her forties, of course there’s a little affect-ive flattening, but she was sure enough that she didn’t have the other two symptoms to not even look them up.

But then there was the footnote: “Only one criterion required if delusions are bizarre or hallucinations consist of a voice keeping up a running commentary on the person’s behavior or thoughts.”

So, she thought, if I have a narrator, I’m batshit. In most of the Kendra movies, there had been a narrator. It helped tie a story together that was supposed to take place in the nuked-out future when, in fact, it was being filmed in an abandoned strip mine near Barstow. And narration was easy to dub into foreign languages because you didn’t have to match the lips. So the question she had to ask herself, was: “Do I have a narrator?”

“No way,” said the narrator.

“Fuck,” said Molly. Just when she’d settled into having a simple personality disorder, she had to learn to be psychotic all over again. Being schizo wasn’t all bad. Being diagnosed schizo ten years ago had gotten her the monthly disability check from the state, but Val Riordan had assured her that since then her status had changed from schizophrenic: paranoid type, single episode, in partial remission, with prominent negative symptoms, persecutory-type delusions, and negative stressors (Molly liked to think of the negative stressors as “special sauce”) to a much more healthy, post-morbid shizotypal personality disorder, bipolar type (no “special sauce”). To make the latter you had to fulfill the prerequisite of at least one psychotic event, then hit five out of nine symptoms. It was a much tougher and more subtle form of batshit. Molly’s favorite symptom was: “Odd be-liefs or magical thinking that influences behavior and is inconsistent with subcultural norms.”

The narrator said, “So the magical thinking—that would be that you believe that in another dimension, you actually are Kendra, Warrior Babe of the Outland?”

“Fucking narrator again,” Molly said. “You’re not going away, are you? I don’t need this symptom.”

“You can’t really say that your ‘magical thinking’ affects your behavior, can you?” the narrator asked. “I don’t think you can claim that symptom.”

“Oh hell no,” Molly said. “I’m just out practicing with a broadsword at two in the morning, waiting for the end of civilization so I can claim my rightful identity.”

“Simple physical fitness regimen. Everyone’s trying to get into shape these days.”

“So they can hack apart evil mutants?”

“Sure, Nautilus makes a machine for that. Mutant Master 5000.”