She climbs over the fence into the impound lot. It's brightly lit and full of wrecked vehicles, snowcapped ghosts of a dozen different traffic accidents, making the Expedition easy to find. It's the only one that hasn't sustained some kind of career-ending automotive trauma. She opens the driver's side door, hears the familiar chime. The keys are in the ignition, tagged with an orange piece of cardboard with her name and the date of impound written on it.
She needs to get out of here, but there's one other thing that she has to do first.
Leaving the door ajar, she walks around to the back of the Expedition and lifts the hatch, lowering her eyes swiftly for a look inside.
Marilyn's body is missing.
Is this a surprise? Not really. From what Yates told her, it sounded like they'd taken it out already. And under any other circumstances, on any other night, that fact alone would've been a sufficient explanation for why it was no longer here.
But Sue notices that the other body, the Engineer,is still here-or movedback here, anyway-wrapped in his shroud of plastic garbage bags. The question arises: Why is he here while Marilyn is gone?
And the answer surges up from the animal part of her brain. The Engineer is her passenger, just as he's been her passenger for all these years, riding along in the back of her mind through whatever else was going on in her life. Because, she thinks, it is like Phillip says, the past is never done with us, not in any substantial way, and anybody who tells you otherwise hasn't taken a good look into their backseat lately.
But Marilyn, where is Marilyn?
As she climbs back into the driver's seat, from the corner of her eye Sue catches a shadow-flicker of motion off to the right, on the far side of the chain-link fence, twenty, maybe thirty yards away. The high-powered sodium lights end abruptly at the fence's perimeter, as if they don't have any interest in illuminating whatever lies beyond, but she can still make out a shadow of something trundling its way over the snowy hillside where it gives way to the access road. It's a human-sized shadow, but it doesn'tmove like a human, or even an animal; it lumbers and flops its way along with the innate clumsiness of something stiff and inanimate being dragged across the snow, kicking up clouds of white powder as it advances blindly forward. Like an anchor dragging the ocean floor.
Sue's eyes chase the shadow over the snow between two pine trees, where it vanishes momentarily in a pool of darkness, then reappears on the other side, right outside the police station. There's a vehicle waiting in the lot. She can see the beams of its headlights-and then the shadow steps into their glare. From here Sue can see the source of the shadow with undeniable clarity.
It's Marilyn.
For a moment the woman who was her daughter's nanny stands wavering in the headlights, hunched stupidly forward, jaw slack, arms dangling at her sides. She looks very old, very dead. Her hair is a greasy ruin of kinks and angles, mashed unevenly against one side of her skull, and dried blood covers her cheeks and neck like a beard, staining the entire front of her sweater.
Then with a slow shuffling of feet, Marilyn turns herself until she's facing Sue. She's twitching her head up and down with little sniffing gestures.
Is she smelling me? Sue wonders. Searching for my scent?
She can't help but stare. Even from this distance she's aware that the vacancies of Marilyn's eye sockets are not entirely empty anymore. There's a dark gleam inside them, moving slightly, as her head jerks up and down, as if some alien optic instrument were incubating deep inside Marilyn's skull.
Her new eyes, Sue thinks. Her route eyes. They're growing back.
Releasing Sue from that horrible myopic gleam, Marilyn turns and slumps her way toward the embrace of the headlights. And though she's moving more slowly now it's the same tree-stump stumble, lunging forward and then catching herself, as if the tendons and ligaments aren't connected right anymore.
Then she stops again and turns herself back toward Sue.
What's she doing? It's like she's waiting for somebody to join her. But who else is here except for-
All at once a hand grabs her from behind.