by TAYLOR ADAMS
James dug his feet in and spat a glob of syrupy blood. He wanted badly now to confront the man, stupid idea as it was, because it would at least be something. Maybe if he dealt with a small problem here at the gas station, the huge one would feel smaller. He’d once heard that the crisis of modern masculinity was that so many problems existed today which couldn’t be solved with a punch to the face. As punching faces wasn’t James’ strong suit, he had figured this made him well adapted to the modern world. He was sensitive, intelligent, and a terrific listener – but none of this helped Elle or their dead unborn children. Right now, he just wanted to punch a face.
He heard his father’s words, utterly dark and alien even inside his own head: Be polite, be courteous, but have a plan to kill everyone you meet.
The fuel pump clicked. All done.
Elle’s smile evaporated. “Do you really believe all the optimistic crap you say?”
“I do,” he lied.
He crumpled the receipt and slammed the door hard enough to rattle the glass. She wiped her eyes with her palm. He gunned his soccer mom Toyota, skidded back onto the highway and floored it. Then he rolled down his window (“James, what are you doing?”) tooted the horn, and flipped the Soviet Cowboy a cheery one-finger salute.
“Yep,” he said with a lump in his throat. “I just did that.”
She gasped. “Please drive fast now.”
With a stomach full of swallowed blood, he watched the man shrink into a stick figure in the rearview mirror. He had swiveled around on his seat to watch them leave. The mysterious walkie-talkie (shit, James had forgotten about the radio) was back out in his hand. It was too far to read an expression, but James imagined a smug grin on that weathered face, and he hoped he hadn’t just made the biggest mistake of his life, in a county with a police force of two.
Why did I do that?
“Honey . . .”
He saw the speedometer pushing a hundred and tapped the brakes. “And . . . that’s the story of how I got us murdered.”
“If he follows us,” she said, “I’m going to punch you.”
The Soviet Cowboy didn’t, which was somehow worse. They had blown Mosby’s outer limits and were two miles into the badlands when the Toyota’s radio, which had caught only electronic slush for the last forty miles, registered a crackle-snap of writhing static. And under it, a human voice.
2
William Tapp’s radio hissed, signaling a connection.
He was eating Cheetos, lifting them to his mouth with a pair of medical forceps to avoid contaminating his fingers with orange dust. This one was number eighteen (he couldn’t help but count things, by force of habit). Usually the bags contained somewhere in the ballpark of one hundred and thirty Cheetos, but lately the average had dropped to around one hundred and fifteen, and even one hundred and four in one bag last year. He chalked it up to the tough economy.
A verdict on the California couple in the yellow Toyota?
He hadn’t decided yet.
Before answering his headset, he let a nineteenth Cheeto sit on his tongue un-chewed, where it would soak and swell into a mushy glob to be swallowed whole.
* * *
James and Elle heard only two fragments of conversation, mid-sentence and stilted, like channel-scanning an old analog television. The first sounded like “four hours left.” The second was “black eye,” spoken as one word. Then the garble reached a sharp peak and the anomaly passed like blue-sky lightning, leaving them in stunned silence.
Elle twirled the volume dial. “Was that . . . ?”
“No.” James was certain the voice didn’t belong to the Soviet. It was wrong. It was thin, weedy, produced by scarred vocal chords and a compact chest. The speaker also seemed to have something in his mouth, occupying his tongue, like a piece of candy. He remembered once hearing that Abraham Lincoln had a raspy little voice famously at odds with his grand persona, and for some reason this was exactly what the radio voice sounded like. Yep, Abraham Lincoln. The ghost of history’s favorite Republican just came on 92.7 FM and scared the hell out of them.
“Could be talk radio,” James said weakly.
“Four hours left,” Elle said. “Until what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where will we be in four hours?”
“Arizona.” He checked the GPS unit cradled on the dash. “It’ll be getting dark by then. We’re just a half hour from the interstate and from there it will be a straight shot over the Rockies. We’ll leave this nightmare factory of a place far, far behind. Deal?”
She nodded with colorless cheeks.
He accelerated. “You okay?”
“Who . . . who just leaves a functioning vehicle out here?” Her voice was dull, zombie-like. “With forty bucks in a money clip, ten miles out of town, when it’s a hundred degrees out?”
James had forgotten about that lovely episode. There were plenty of possible explanations, but all of them were only possible and not particularly convincing. He focused on the road instead, which rose and fell in lazy humps. The terrain became rough, like crumpled paper, as they approached the foothills, with odd pillows of plateaued earth jammed together to form stair steps. The only reminders they weren’t on Mars came from the yucca trees dotting the landscape like hunched scarecrows. If you watched them long enough, you’d swear you saw a few walking.
Elle watched the scenery pass. She had slipped into one of her trances; into what he had once called her photographer’s thousand-yard stare. The Sacramento Journal had once named her number two on a list of twenty local artists to watch. James had hung that framed page in the dining room back in California, and it was now brown-boxed with everything else they owned, in the back seats, gently rattling. It had been published four years ago. She had since dumped her cameras on Craigslist.
“Don’t worry,” James said. “I’ve seen a lot of horror movies. Nothing bad ever happens in deserts.”
She chuckled.
He thumbed the radio dial and made sure it was all the way off. Usually when you get a signal bleed, it’s a local television affiliate. Maybe that was it. Part of him wanted to keep scanning for more, just in case there were more tantalizing clues, but really it was just a distraction. What mattered now was driving, moving forward, and not stopping until they reached Flagstaff, Arizona as per schedule. They would be there by now, he realized grimly, if they hadn’t veered a hundred miles into the nuclear wasteland for Elle’s stupid tourist trap Gore Museum.
“Oh, hell,” she said.
He saw it, too. A red roadblock appeared at the end of a half mile straightaway, shimmering behind curtains of air and boiling puddles of sky. In another thirty seconds the mirages dissolved and the largest signboard turned legible, flanked by highway barrels: ROCKSLIDE DETOUR. He almost punched the steering wheel but stopped himself; he needed to at least appear calm for Elle’s sake. He had put her through enough today.
“It’s official.” She crossed her arms. “I hate this place.”
“At least there’s a detour road,” he said. “So we don’t have to turn around and drive past the guy I just gave the finger.”
“Dare you to.”
“I’ll do you one better.” He whined the brakes and approached the rockslide barricade. “Every town we pass, I’ll find the scariest person there and flip them off. By the time we get to our new house, we’ll have a conga line of murderers following us.”
“Our new house,” she said with a flickering smile. “Honest to God, nothing sounds better.”
He touched her hand.
The house wasn’t theirs yet. Neither were the jobs.
He twirled the wheel and skidded right onto the detour. After hours of buttery asphalt, hitting a dirt road was a teeth-chattering shock. The route itself seemed fine enough – just a winding access road walled off by sandstone faces and scree piles – but he knew he’d feel different if the Toyota broke down all the way out here. Obviously the rockslide on the pass gave them no choice, but he still
felt like a character in the first act of a horror movie, pelted with popcorn by an exasperated audience: Don’t go in there, you idiots!
He stomped the gas and accelerated.
Elle craned her head to watch the rearview mirror, as if expecting that black jeep to materialize behind them. “Four hours left,” she whispered cryptically, like a fortune-teller. “Black eye.”
He drove faster.
* * *
After ten minutes of serpentine bends, the landscape opened up again and the sightlines suddenly stretched forever. They were on the rim of it – a mile-wide fishbowl of descending plains and oxidizing rock forming a walled horizon on all sides. It looked like a matte painting of an ancient caldera. Their detour road shot straight in and down like a hairline fracture, bisecting the valley and crossing a darkened riverbed on the bottom. Then it crawled up the opposite side. Some detour, he thought. We’ll be in Mexico by the time it loops back.
Elle jolted forward as if she had been electrocuted, making stabbing motions with a pointed finger, and James punched the brake. “What?”
“See him?”
“See who?’
“Tell me I’m not crazy. Do you not see him?” Her voice pitched.
He squinted in the white-hot sunlight and followed her index finger straight ahead. He had brought the Rav4 to a complete stop, which made him anxious – the Soviet Cowboy could be pursuing them in his ass-ugly black jeep right now. That was the real concern. That walking shadow of a man could appear behind them at any second, his engine bellowing like a monster truck, unencumbered by witnesses out here.
He sighed. “All I see is desert, hon.”
“Just look. You’ll see him.” Her voice was a whisper under the loping motor. He noticed her finger was trembling. Something about the way she said him spooked him, too. Like she was talking about the devil or something. The Toyota’s windows creaked and popped around them, shattering the stillness, as if the outside air was depressurizing. That smell was back, too. Over the last hundred miles he had noticed these badlands possessed a unique odor – the gunpowder of cracked rock mixed with the coastal stink of tidewater. He whiffed it again under the recycled air and felt nauseous.
“You need glasses,” she said, which wasn’t untrue.
“I see him.”
He or she (or it) was a tiny humanoid figure several hundred yards downhill in the crater, following the road, back turned. Head hunched, arms straitjacketed forward, dwarfed by the open land. A hitchhiker, maybe, although James couldn’t fathom how anyone could be stupid enough to walk alone out here. The sun would suck the moisture from your mouth in an hour. In two hours, your eyelids would be sandpaper. In three: waist-deep in dementia and courting death.
He ran his tongue over his sore and swelling lip. Could this be the truck guy?
“Shady Slope Road,” Elle said.
“What?”
She pointed at a piece of driftwood propped beside the road. The letters had been burnt into the bleached grain with a poker or hot iron. The handwriting was strangely childish, with exaggerated loops and crushed spacing as the wood tapered.
She sniffed. “That’s not ominous at all.”
“Nope.”
Well, he decided, we sure as hell can’t turn around.
So he hit the gas and continued down the detour path now identified as Shady Slope Road, which was the opposite of shady and barely a road. The man became centered in the windshield and slowly grew as they passed the crater’s edge and began their descent. It reminded James of a rollercoaster – that last moment of calm on the summit of the first rise, and then the point of no return. They dropped and the road turned nasty. Broken slogs of earth churned, rocked the suspension, and vibrated the pedal under his foot. Rocks pinged off the chassis. In the back seat, the bookcase settled noisily.
James found himself focusing on the distant man and not the road. Already he could feel his bleeding heart pumping away. What if the guy really needed help? He could be stranded. It would be morally wrong to just drive past him without offering help. Right? He remembered the deputy’s words and choked on a nervous laugh: That’s a long way to walk just to take a leak, buddy.
“Mount St. Helens-esque,” Elle said.
He ignored her.
“You didn’t laugh,” she said. “You always laugh.”
Back in Sacramento, they’d had no idea that their neighbor was a meth cook (meth chef?) until they woke to smoke curling under their bedroom door. The lab had detonated in such a convenient way as to send a lateral fireball directly into their living room, which the fire marshal later likened to Washington state’s iconic 1980 volcanic eruption. There was actually nothing funny about it – the mustached old man had simply remarked post-investigation that the triggering blast was “Mount St. Helens-esque” – but for some reason James had giggled until his eyes watered. She had, too. Pitch-black belly laughs. They must have looked crazy; two twenty-somethings laughing their asses off over an accident that had destroyed their home and killed their neighbor. Sometimes awful and hilarious occupy the same weird space.
He let it in and grinned. “The explosion appears . . . Mount St. Helens-esque.”
She snorted.
Another pothole banged under them. The engine made a popping noise, like a steel cable snapping. The boxes and furniture in the back seats shifted and creaked. He feathered the brakes and hoped a tire hadn’t been punctured. Not out here, not now.
He rolled to twenty yards behind the guy, still pacing with his back turned. He wore jeans and an ashen yellow jacket – and then James saw something else, something stenciled on the man’s back in white letters, which turned his blood to ice.
“MPR,” Elle said. “What does that stand for?”
He swallowed. “I don’t know.”
She hadn’t noticed the bumper sticker back on the truck earlier today. He didn’t like withholding information from her, but couldn’t bring himself to tell her.
MPR.
Also strange was that Deputy Doogie Howser’s mysterious walking man didn’t turn around to acknowledge the car idling behind him. He must have heard them approaching. He must have heard the lope of the motor, those gunshot potholes, the crunch of gravel under rubber, something. He just kept pacing alongside Shady Slope Road in his lonely stupor, head low, face obscured, holding a small object forward in a slightly quivering hand. James couldn’t see it.
“What’s he holding?”
“A cell phone.” Her angle from the passenger seat was better. “Looks like he’s trying to get a signal.” She pulled her own phone from her purse, a battered old Samsung relic, and flipped it open.
“No bars?”
She shook her head.
No 911. Great.
Growing impatient, James gave the horn two short bursts and one long one. When the man still didn’t react, he felt his stomach flutter in that weightless way it did during airplane takeoffs.
Elle asserted her mastery of the obvious: “This isn’t right.”
He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and exhaled through his teeth. This guy was trying to operate a cell phone but ignoring a car horn? It didn’t make sense, but neither did leaving a perfectly functional pickup on the side of the highway, all the way back on the other side of Mosby, Nevada. All he knew was that if he swerved around this walking mystery and sped on past, it could very well be a death sentence to this man. Back in Sacramento he’d heard of old folks dying in their seats on the bus and going unnoticed all day, traveling the same boulevard loop for hours. He wondered if he’d ever sat next to one.
He cranked the Toyota into park.
Elle’s jaw dropped. “James—”
“I have to know he’s okay.”
“Seriously?”
He unbuckled his seatbelt. “Seriously.”
“I’m glad I married the last idealist left on earth,” she muttered.
“There were more idealists like me,” he said. “They just all died stopping to help
stranded motorists who turned out to be serial killers.”
“You’re not going to flip him off, right?”
“Got your pepper spray?”
She fished it from her purse – a thin, black canister with a red button.
“Okay, Elle. I’m going to talk to him but I’m going to leave the engine running.” He studied the man through the bug-splattered windshield and reminded himself, again, that it would be morally wrong not to check. The guy’s safety wasn’t even on his mind anymore. It was more selfish than that – stubborn curiosity. Too many little hints had been dropped today, and now he just had to know what was going on out here.
He opened the door. “If . . . if anything happens to me, Elle, don’t stay. Just drive.”
“Wait,” she said.
He stood half-in, half-out. “Yeah?”
“I just have to get this off my chest, in case you die.”
“What?”
“James, I have had . . . so many affairs . . .”
He closed the door.
He’d heard that one before. That was a sure sign Elle was getting anxious – when she started repeating her jokes.
He started walking, and his footsteps on the packed dirt sounded like breaking eggshells. The air was tiring to breathe. It felt strangely dense, over-pressurized, but he was certain this valley couldn’t be far below sea level, if it was below sea level at all. His right eardrum popped juicily, and he felt his wife’s eyes on his back. A few paces ahead, the man sensed him and halted on crooked legs.
Silence.
James found it oddly chilling that they were both now aware of each other. This was a milestone. There was no turning back. The man bowed his head, showing bristled gray hair around a bald patch the size of a poker chip, burnt lobster red by the sun. He wobbled as if he was turning around to face James, and then didn’t.
He just stood there. Like a department store mannequin facing a wall.
Great idea, James.
He noticed a small bulge on the man’s right hip and wondered if it was a holstered firearm. With his luck, it would be. James hated guns. He hated everything about them. The mechanical efficiency of their designs, their springs and pistons and calibrated clicks, snicks, and snaps, even their elegant Porsche curves – he hated it all because guns illustrated better than anything else mankind’s myopic genius for engineering death. As he saw it, his father had been killed by a gun and nothing else.
