Sinsemilla looked surprised. “You have? When?”

“Before birth. You were reading him even back then, over and over again, and I just absorbed it all through the placenta.”

Sinsemilla took this declaration seriously and was delighted. Her expression brightened. “Cool. That’s so cool.” Then a sly look found fox features in her face and brought them to the fore as if she were undergoing a moon-driven transformation. She leaned across the table and whispered, “You want to know a secret?”

This question alarmed Leilani. The impending revelation surely involved whatever the mother and the pseudofather had been murmuring and whispering about all the way from Santa Ana to San Bernardino, to sun-baked Barstow, to Baker and beyond. Anything that tickled them could not be good news for Leilani.

“I’m making a little piggy right now,” Sinsemilla whispered.

On some level, perhaps Leilani knew immediately what her mother meant but simply couldn’t bear to contemplate it.

Reading her daughter’s blank expression, Sinsemilla gave up the whisper and spoke slowly, as though Leilani were thickheaded. “I’m making … a little piggy . . . right now.”

Leilani couldn’t keep the revulsion out of her voice. “Oh, God.” ‘ “This time, I’m going to do it right,” Sinsemilla assured her.

“You’re pregnant.”

“I used a home-pregnancy test two days ago. That’s why I bought thingy, my little snaky fella.” She indicated her left hand, where the bite was now covered by a large Band-Aid. “He was my gift to me for being preggers.”

Leilani knew that she was dead already, still breathing but as good as dead, not on her birthday next February, but much sooner. She didn’t know why this should be true, why her mother’s pregnancy meant that she herself was facing an earlier execution date, but she had no doubt that her instinct could be trusted.

“When you were such a baby about poor thingy,” Sinsemilla said, “I thought you brought bad luck. Killing thingy, maybe you jinxed me, and maybe I wasn’t knocked up anymore. But I gave myself another test yesterday and”—she patted her belly—“piggy’s still in the pen.”

Nausea brought a sudden flood of saliva to Leilani’s mouth, and she swallowed hard.

“Your daddy, Preston, he’s wanted this for a long time, but I wasn’t ready till now.”

Leilani looked toward the driver’s seat, toward Preston Maddoc.

“See, baby, I needed time to figure out why you and Luki never developed psychic powers even though I gave you, like, a magic bus full of truly fine psychedelics from my blood to yours while you were in the mommy oven.”

The back of the pull-down sun visor featured a makeup mirror. Even at a distance of sixteen or eighteen feet, Leilani was able to discern Maddoc’s eyes repeatedly shifting focus from the highway to the mirror in which he could see her and Sinsemilla.

“And then it just hit me—I have to stay natural! Sure, I was doing peyote, you know, cactus buttons, and I was doing psilocybin, from mushrooms. But I also did some DMT and plenty of LSD, and that shit is synthetic, Lani baby, it’s man-made.”

Pain throbbed in Leilani’s deformed hand. She realized that with both hands she was twisting the paperback that she’d been reading.

“Psychic power comes from Gaea, see, from Earth herself, she’s alive, and if you resonate with her, baby, she gives you a gift.”

Without realizing what she’d been doing, Leilani had broken the spine of the book, crumpled the cover, and wadded some of the pages. She put the book aside and held her aching left hand in her right.

“But, baby, how can you resonate when you’re being strummed with both the good natural hallucinogens like peyote but also hammered by chemlab crap like LSD? That’s where I went wrong.”

Maddoc wanted to make a baby with Sinsemilla, knowing full well that throughout pregnancy she’d be heavily consuming hallucinogens, resulting in a high likelihood of yet another infant with severe birth defects.

“Yeah, went way wrong with the synthetic crap. I’m enlightened now. This time, I’m going to use nothing but pot, peyote, psilocybin—all natural, wholesome. And this time, I’m going to get myself a miracle child.”

Dr. Doom wasn’t also Mr. Sentimentality. He didn’t get weepy on anniversaries or while watching sad movies. You couldn’t imagine him playing with children, reading fairy tales to children, relating to children. The desire to have a child with anyone, let alone with this woman under these circumstances, was out of character for him. His motives were as mysterious as his furtive eyes glimpsed in the mirror on the sun visor.

Sinsemilla drew the damaged paperback across the table and began to smooth the rumpled pages as she talked. “So if Gaea smiles on us, we’ll have more than one miracle baby. Two, three, maybe a litter.” She grinned mischievously and winked. “Maybe I’ll just curl up on a blanket in the corner, like a true bitch, with all my little puppies squirming against me, so many tiny hungry mouths competing for just two tits.”

All of her life, Leilani had lived in the cold tides of this deep strange sea called Sinsemilla, struggling against its drowning currents, riding out daily squalls and storms, as though she were a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a floating length of shattered deck plank, grimly aware of dark and murderous shapes circling hungrily in the

fathoms under her. During these nine years, as far back as she could remember, she had coped with every surprise and every writhing horror this sea threw at her. Although she hadn’t lost respect for the deadly power of the elemental force called Sinsemilla, although she remained wary and always prepared for hurricanes, her ability to cope had gradually freed her from most of the fear that had plagued her as a younger child. When strangeness is the fundamental substance of your existence, it loses its power to terrorize, and when you tread weirdness like water for nine years, you gain the confidence to face the unexpected, and even the unknown, with equanimity.

For only the second time in years and for the first time since Preston had driven away in the Durango with Lukipela into the late-afternoon dreariness of the Montana mountains, Leilani was seized by a fear that she couldn’t cast off, not a passing terror such as the snake had aroused in her, but an abiding dread with many hands that clutched her throat, her heart, the pit of her stomach. This new strangeness, this irrational and sick scheme to make psychic miracle babies, shook her confidence that she would be able to understand her mother, to predict the upcoming patterns in Sinsemilla’s madness, and to cope as she had always coped before.

“Litter?” Leilani said. “All your puppies? What’re you talking about?”

Still smoothing the rumpled pages in the paperback, looking down at her hands, Sinsemilla said, “I’ve been taking fertility drugs. Not that I need ‘em to make just one fat little piggy.” She smiled. “I’m as fertile as a rabbit. But sometimes with fertility drugs, you know, lots of eggs plop in the basket all at once, you get twins, you get triplets, maybe more. So harmonizing with Mother Earth through peyote and magic mushrooms, plus other healthy highs, maybe I’ll persuade old Gaea to help me pop out three or four wizard babies all at once, a whole nestful of pink little squirming superbabies.”

Although Leilani had long known the true nature of this woman, she had never been able to admit that one word above all others best described her. She had lived in denial, calling her mother weak and selfish, excusing her as an addict, resorting to evasive words like troubled, like damaged, even crazy. Sinsemilla was undeniably all those

things, but she was something worse, something far less worthy of pity than was any addict or a merely troubled woman. Beautiful, blessed with clear blue eyes that met yours as directly as might the eyes of an angel with no reason for guile or shame, flashing a smile warm enough to enchant the sourest cynic, she was defined by one word more than any other, and the word was evil.

For many reasons, until now Leilani had found it hard to admit that her mother wasn’t just misguided, but also wretched, vile, and rotten in the heart. All these years, she’d longed for Sinsemilla’s redemption, for a day when they might be at least a normal mother and a mutant daughter; but genuine evil, the pure cold stuff, couldn’t be redeemed. And if you acknowledged that you’d come from evil, that you were its spawn, what were you to think about yourself, about your own dark potential, about your chances of one day leading a good, decent, useful life? What were you to think?

As when she’d lost Luki, Leilani sat in the tortuous dual grip of fear and anguish. She trembled in recognition of the thread by which her life hung, but she also struggled to hold back tears of grief. Here, now, she surrendered forever all hope that her mother might one day be clean and straight, all hope that old Sinsemilla, once reformed, might eventually provide a mother’s love. She felt stupid for having harbored that naive, impossible little dream. In the instant, a termitic loneliness ate away the core of Leilani’s heart and left her hollow, shaking not only with fear, but also with a chill of utter isolation. She felt abandoned, deserted, forsaken.

She detested the weakness in herself revealed by a tremor in her voice: “Why? Why babies, why babies at all? Just because he wants them?”

Her mother looked up from the book, slid it across the table to Leilani, and repeated the interminable mantra that she had composed to express her satisfaction with herself when she was in a good mood: “I am a sly cat, I am a summer wind, I am birds in flight, I am the sun, I am the sea, I am me!”

“What does that even mean?” Leilani asked.

“It means—who else but your own mama is cool enough to bring a new human race into the world, a psychic humanity bonded to Gaea? I’ll be the mother of the future, Lani, the new Eve.”

Sinsemilla believed his nonsense. Her belief imbued her face with a beatific radiance and brought a sparkle of wonder to her eyes.

Maddoc surely wouldn’t put any credence in this garbage, however, because the doom doctor wasn’t moronic. Evil, yes, he had earned the right to have his towels monogrammed with that word, and he loved himself no less than Sinsemilla loved herself. But he wasn’t stupid. He didn’t believe that fetuses carried to term in a bath of hallucinogens were likely to be the superhuman forerunners of a new humanity. He wanted babies for his own reasons, for some enigmatic purpose that had nothing to do with being the new Adam or with a yearning for fatherhood.

“Wizard babies by late April, early May,” said Sinsemilla. “I’ve been knocked up close a month. I’m already a brood bitch, filled up with wizard babies that’ll change the world. Their time’s coming, but first you.”

“Me what?”

“Healed, you ninny,” said Sinsemilla, getting to her feet. “Made good, made right, made pretty. The only reason we’ve been haulin’ ass from Texas to Maine to shitcan towns in Arkansas all these past four years.”

“Yeah, healed, just like Luki.”

Sinsemilla didn’t hear the sarcasm. She smiled and nodded, as though she expected Luki, fully remade, to be beamed back to them at their next rest stop. “Your daddy says it’ll happen soon, baby. He’s got a feeling maybe in Idaho we’ll meet some ETs ready for a laying-on of hands. North of a hunch, he says, and south of a vision, a real strong feeling that you’ll get your healing soon.”

The brood bitch went to the refrigerator and got a beer to wash down whatever baby-shaping cactus or mushroom snacks were medically appropriate for midmorning.

On her way back to the co-pilot’s chair, she ruffled Leilani’s hair. “Soon, baby, you’ll go from pumpkin to princess.”

As usual, Sinsemilla got her fairy tales screwed up. The pumpkin had been transformed into Cinderella’s coach. Mater was remembering the story of the frog that became a prince, not a princess.

Hula-hula, grass skirts swishing.

Sun god on the ceiling.

Sinsemilla giggling in the co-pilot’s chair.

The mirror. Preston’s twitchy eyes.

Beyond the panoramic windshield, the vast Mojave blazed, and sunshine seemed to gather in molten pools upon the desert plains.

In Nun’s Lake, Idaho, a man claimed to have had contact with extraterrestrial physicians.

In the Montana woods, Lukipela waited for his sister at the bottom of a hole. He was no longer her precious brother, but just a worm farm, gone not to the stars but gone forever.

When she and Preston were alone in a deepness of forest, as he and Luki had been alone, when they were beyond observation, beyond the reach of justice, would he kill her with compassion? Would he press a chloroform-soaked rag against her face to anesthetize her quickly and then finish the job with a lethal injection while she slept, sparing her as much terror as possible? Or in the lonely cloisters of ancient evergreens, where civilizing sunlight barely reached, would Preston be a different man than the one he played in public, perhaps less man than beast, free to admit that he took pleasure not from the administration of mercy, as he called it, but from the killing itself?

Leilani read the answer in the predator’s eyes, as he kept a watch on her by angled mirror. The quiet deaths that were arranged with genteel rituals as complex as tea ceremonies—like that of penguin-collecting Tetsy—didn’t fully slake Preston’s thirst for violence, but in the solitudinous woods, he could drink his fill. Leilani knew that if ever she were alone with the pseudofather in any remote place, her death, like Lukipela’s, would be hard, brutal, and prolonged.

He married Sinsemilla in part because in her deepest drug stupors, she seemed dead, and death stirred Preston as beauty stirred other men. Furthermore, she’d come with two children who, by his philosophy, needed to die, and he had been attracted to her because he possessed the desire to fulfill her children’s need. So was his purpose in breeding new babies really so enigmatic? Preston was fond of saying that death was never truly a tragedy but always a natural event, because we are all born to die, sooner or later. From his perspective, could any significant difference exist between children being born to die, as are we all, and children bred to die?

Chapter 50

ELSEWHERE, the California dream might still have a glowing tan; but here it had blistered, peeled, and faded. Once a good residential street, the neighborhood had been rezoned for mixed use. Depression-era bungalows and two-story Spanish houses—never grand, but at one time graceful and well maintained—now wanted paint, stucco patches, and repairs to crumbling porch steps. Some sagging residences had been torn down decades ago, replaced by fast-food outlets and corner minimalls. These commercial properties, too, were beyond their best days: bottom-feeding burger franchises you’d never see advertised on television; shabby beauty salons, themselves in need of makeovers; a thrift shop selling all things used. Micky parked at the curb and locked her car. Ordinarily, she wouldn’t have worried that her aging Camaro might be boosted, but the low quality of the other iron on the block suggested that her tired wheels might present a temptation.