My heartbeat had jumped up to about a zillion miles an hour, making a lump of sickness that tasted like apple fritter in my throat.

And having something from a zillion miles away and a zillion years ago just puts today, tomorrow and next week and yesterday in some kind of perspective.

But no one else seemed to think it mattered that we had driven eight zillion miles for the express purpose of looking at a bare patch in an empty field.

I mean, when one is trapped in a cave with a white dragon, one would like a wall of snow to be about a zillion miles thick, and I had the unfortunate feeling that this one wasn't.

Late in the afternoon I climbed up the trail to the crest of the ridge west of camp and sat there for a while, watching the sun set across a zillion miles of rocky desert.

We have to sneak into a secret underground city here at the top of the world, a zillion miles away from civilization, and save a bunch of people being held captive by one of the dirtiest gangs on the continent!

"Wendy," Marissa said with a tired voice, "I'm not up to traveling eighteen zillion miles to look for a pathologist."

Instead of making investments that will sustain the company, you make trendy investments that will seduce stock buyers now - hey, let's string a zillion miles of fiber-optic cable!

"I can't say I'm going to miss being nine zillion miles from home," he added.

But he knows from long and harrowing memory that the distance from the starting gate for the Gotham to the starting gate for the Kentucky Derby is a zillion miles.