by Philip Webb
Poor Kelly has keeled over and is being dragged through the mire at the side of the road. I’m too plain scared to stop now in case the sleep overtakes me. I wonder at how I have resisted it at all, given the state of my companions. Perhaps the rest I took at the Drunken Steer is now paying dividends. Or my Zone sense has saved me. I cannot tell. The horses stumble, their heads stooped. Slumber presses overhead and to the sides of my passage, tipping me into horrible jerky naps. I bite my tongue and pinch myself blue. Thoughts run away even as I force my eyes wide open. Thank the Lord for the rain at least. I take off my hat and let it course cold down my collar. I tie myself to the pommel in a tangle of knots that would make a cowboy laugh, but perhaps it will keep me from falling.
The grasses all about are beaten down by the rain, heads heavier than stalks. For a terrifying mile I am unable to summon a reliable likeness of my pa. But then in a moment of absurd triumph, I conjure his face. It is just a snapshot, pre-Visitation, before I was born. It is one that I treasure, somewhere in my expedition pack. He is caught in laughter, in rude health, facing someone off camera, sharing a joke that must remain forever hidden now. His head thrown back to the impossible blue glare of a Texas sky. It is his carefree ways that I miss above all else — how he would, on a whim, take me into the off-Zone countryside and show me what he knew about nature, beetles and toads and birds. Just the adventure of the outside. For days and nights under the sky. With him alone it was easy somehow to be just me. No one else could ever make me feel like that — happy in my own skin. These dreams and visions I’ve had in the Zone — if they come from anyone, they must come from him! I imagine them cast from his spirit, these messages, traveling through rock and tree and air, through the fabric of the Zone. But do they come to me from a living man, or a ghost?
Awake! Focus.
Somewhere along that road, with steep shoulders of rock to my left and barren scrub to my right, I realize with an awful jolt where I am being driven. It is a place laid down in almanacs of Zone tracking. It is marked on my Rand McNally in red ink. No-go. One of the great static danger areas of the Zone that must be avoided at all costs. Carlsbad. I have paid it no mind, for our course was set to go nowhere near it, but the rolling banks of sleep on either side give me no choice.
As a test I coax Cisco southward — perhaps I can find a route clear in the desert. But even a few yards shy of the line, I feel the onset of coma. I am hemmed in. Maybe the roaming sleep is a feature of Carlsbad — an outlying satellite of its main peril, snagging unsuspecting travelers to their demise. For it seems too coincidental that these forces are tugging us to a place that Zone trackers would sell their souls to avoid.
For miles and miles I fight sleep. Strangely, it is the dread of Carlsbad that keeps me awake. There are no accounts of the dangers there. None have returned to tell the tale. Pre-Visitation, it was a haunt of tourists drawn to the caverns, home to a colony of ten million bats. But now? The Zone is a consummate keeper of secrets.
If I could get Cisco into a canter, I might break free, but he is locked at crawling pace, and anyway I have Kelly to think about, bumping across the country like a hay bale. But any hopes I have of outrunning the situation are dashed when I spot a family of javelina charging from cover ahead. They squeal and scatter but they are taken by the sleep, plowing their snouts into the mud just a stone’s throw from me. I am in a moving bubble, but I must stay within it to survive.
The path of that bubble brings me first away from, then back to the mountains. We veer sharply from the highway and into a pass, beyond the crumbling structures of White’s City — an old stopping point before the caverns. Here lie the ruins of an America long gone — motels and gift shops and fake wigwams and concrete posts that previously bore neon and blaring signs. It is the America Kelly once knew, where she took uneventful family vacations. Native American lands overrun by white men and overrun yet again by Visitors.
I check that the rifle and revolver are both loaded and try to wake Luis again and again, but he will not be roused.
Up a winding valley road. Clouds stream over the summits of rock. The rain peters out and there against a gray sky I see the first spiral of bats — a great black funnel, like slow-motion smoke. The exodus is mesmerizing — twisting and eddying through the air in nervous shoals. I come to a kind of open-air amphitheater cut into the rock. Above me the bats are a whisper of papery wings. Scattered amongst the steps are skeletons — horse and human, some more recent than others.
The sleep evaporates as I reach the lip of the cavern. Luis stirs, and behind me I hear Kelly cry out.
“What’s going on?” mumbles Luis.
“Trouble.”
Cisco pulls up, sniffing the air warily.
Sharp tang of ammonia and smoke and boiled meat.
There are scruffy vegetable patches clinging to the soils around me.
I do not like this place.
For a while, I cannot make much out in the shadows of the overhang — it is too gloomy. But then I notice that there are people waiting there. They stare at us, not offering any kind of greeting. Their grimy faces are half starved and sullen. The men lean on rakes, not moving except to brush away the flies. The women peer from the openings of a few threadbare tents. The children have bowlegs and the potbellies of famine. Some are naked to the cold.
I should feel fear, and I do, but it hovers only on the surface of my mind, not deep where it can rule me. Is it fear or just the semblance of fear, like the emotions Visitors conjure to seem human? I make sure these inhabitants can see my rifle, but I already know that to be armed in this place will do no good. It is a sinkhole in the Zone, surrounded by the sleep. These people are marooned here and their savage faces tell me there is no escape. We are just the latest castaways, and if we are to survive we must live by their rules.
A man with the bloodied lips and black teeth of scurvy finds the strength to hail us.
“Well, looky here. What the tide’s washed up. The Zone provideth, the Zone taketh away.”
It is the way the man does not look at me, only at the shifting trio of horses, that makes my mind up. I stuff my revolver for safekeeping into one of Cisco’s saddlebags. I dismount slowly with Luis and wait for Kelly to free herself of the lariat, then I raise the rifle and fire it. My screams drive the horses into a commotion, and when one bolts, they all bolt, roped together into a chaotic blunder across the amphitheater. They make it as far as a spillage of boulders up on the old road, slowing and knocking into each other before collapsing. Their breathing calms as the sleep takes them.
I fling the rifle as far as I can into the weeds where it cannot be fired again.
The camp is in shock.
Kelly swears under her breath. “Megan, tell me you ain’t mad. Tell me you didn’t lose it out there.”
“You see any horses in this place?” I demand, willing her to understand. “They have no need of them.”
“But the horses’re gonna die up there.”
“Better that than be butchered and eaten here. Anyhow they’re not going to die.” But even as I say the words, I wonder whether I really believe them.
As one, the people of this cavern edge closer. Their eyes burn with hunger and fury.
It is Luis who surely saves us from a lynching. He springs onto a rock ledge at the mouth of the cavern and, to the astonishment of everyone gathered, takes his dagger and slashes a cross in blood across his chest.
His appeal to them is fervent and real. It could only have been delivered in his native Spanish, for his English is too halting and spare. I have never heard him speak this way. It is both a plea and a warning.
“Listen to me,” he tells them. “We have been sent for a reason, to deliver you from this place. A great storm of Zone forces has driven us at God’s beckoning to this haven of bats. We have braved much danger and tribulation to be here. To harm us would be to violate God’s purpose.”
Those who understand Spanish murmur translations to their companions.
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Someone cries, “Ain’t no God’s purpose round about here.”
Luis continues almost in a fever, eyes wide, plucking words from I know not where. He explains that it is true that God’s will finds no sanctuary here, in this forsaken trap of the Zone, but this is why we have come.
“The bats here travel as much as twenty miles in a night, feeding on the fly. Before Visitation, they would consume a vast weight of insects contaminated with pesticide poison that did them no immediate harm but remained deposited in their bodies like a chemical time bomb. Only once they began their long migration to caves in Mexico for the winter would the pesticide they had consumed take its toll. For as they flew south, the weakest ones used up their reserves of fat, releasing the poison at last into their blood. And when it reached their brains, they would drop out of the sky to their deaths.”
Luis looks at them, stalling for breath or inspiration, judging the mood of his audience. They are attentive but grow impatient for the point.
“Come on, keep on going,” whispers Kelly.
He tells them if men feed upon evil, it will store in their hearts, and when they are tested, it will spread into their bloodstreams and kill them.
“You people are trapped here by the world that has stopped turning,” he cries in biblical Spanish. “You are being challenged by God. Through the Zone, He watches, to see if your hearts are filled with poison. But if you spare us, you will see your reward on Earth and in Heaven.”
The blood blooms across his shirt.
As they stare at us I cannot tell what they will do. It is as though they are waiting for a further sign. But Luis is spent.
The only sound comes from the corkscrew of bats overhead — a chatter of beating wings.
The man who hailed us speaks up then. “Well, seems we is blessed by these here outsiders. What we gone done with our manners, huh? Come now, you must be weary from all your travelin’. I’m Wesley Carmichael and I’m what makes for a chief round here.”
He offers a damp hand and appraises every part of me apart from my eyes. It is as though he is assessing my strength or the meat on my bones.
No one in the community moves.
“Come now,” growls Wesley Carmichael. “Let’s be offering these folks some of that famous Carlsbad hospitality!”
He leads us down a path beneath a sharp overhang.
“Where’d all that fire and brimstone come from?” Kelly mutters to Luis.
Luis looks dazed. A sideways glance at me. “Chapel in Marfa. The priest … he preach this story of bats.”
I, too, have been there for Sunday services when my aunt insisted. It is something all townsfolk are expected to do, but religion has made little impression on me. However, Luis, it seems, has absorbed these sermons — his performance just now could not have succeeded otherwise. It makes me realize — I do not know him as well as I’d imagined.
Wesley leads us toward a cauldron set upon a fire of dung bricks. A tiny crone picks up a net of black shapes and smacks it against the cave wall. It’s not until I get closer through the fumes and steam that I see the stunned bodies of bats in the netting — their pug faces like a hoard of miniature demons.
She stares at me through her cataracts and guts the bats one by one with a practiced swipe of her cleaver, then tosses them into the pot.
“Great,” mumbles Kelly. “Bat stew cooked on a bat-shit fire by an old bat.”
I nudge her in the ribs, because I feel sure that Kelly’s humor will not be appreciated in this place.
“Thanks all the same,” says Kelly, aiming an injured glare at me. “But I just ate at the last town.”
“Might as well get used to it, sugar,” snaps the crone. “Bats is all we got. Exceptin’ turnips. And they done shot with maggots this year.”
Kelly refuses, but I don’t know where the next meal is coming from, so I dig in. The broth is salty and littered with lumps of contorted leather that I do not examine closely.
Wesley Carmichael talks to us in a way that manages to be both friendly and menacing. His hand is never far from a machete he keeps tucked in his belt and there are two sullen and watchful men who hover nearby. They look better fed than the other inhabitants of Carlsbad — one is armed with an ice pick, the other has a club bristling with nails. It is clear to me that we have earned some kind of reprieve but dissent is not an option.
After the meal, Carmichael splits us up. Kelly is carted off to help till the vegetable plots and mend bat nets, whilst Luis and I are given a shift in the guano mines. Perhaps it is a punishment for our indiscretions — me for scaring the horses to safety, Luis for stealing his chiefly thunder.
At the end of a path, deep in the cavern shadow, we are shown to a rusty bucket on a chain dangling over a drop into nothingness. Wesley hands us shovels and a lantern with a candle.
The bucket is just big enough for Luis and I to squeeze into. We hold hands as we tip into the gloom, chain creaking over the toothed wheels of an old winch. The lantern flame whips a weak light across the walls. The bat exodus is almost over, but out of the depths come a few stragglers, wheeling up in panic.
By the time we are at the bottom, the cavern opening is just a coin of dim light far above. Between us we drag the bucket down a slippery path. It is an eerie place of cave pillars and dripping rock curtains. From the walls hooded phantoms and death heads appear to us in the stuttering candle flame. We crunch over dead bats — the young who have fallen from their roosts. At last we come to the guano pits — layers of compacted sludge that clog the spaces between stalagmites. A reek lies over the cave floor like a poisonous mist, stinging my eyes so badly I have to dig blind for the most part.
At one point I look up into the darkness and pain snatches my head. A silent semaphore of sickly light. A message? I fight for balance in the gloom. This forsaken hole … we are here for a reason. I see glimpses of hatchling creatures, millions of them, like the bats of Carlsbad, roosting in the crevices of a place, not here, but far away, deep in the Zone. They bide their time, growing in the dark. A nest of the Visitors before they take human bodies?
“Megan?”
“Hush a minute!”
Carlsbad, this cave, it is special. Why? My senses race through the shadows for an answer. It is like a miniature Zone! A zone within a zone. People are trapped in Carlsbad, stranded because they don’t understand this place, how they might escape it. But its secret is here, at the heart, and if I look hard enough, I will know it!
A smell surrounds me — one that I know so well. Warm, tobacco, old leather. “Pa?”
The smell is swamped by the reek of guano. The flashes of light vanish. The pain dissipates.
“Megan?” Luis takes my hand.
I cling to the residue of the message — what does it mean? Secrets unveiled in the darkness? Look for clues in your surroundings? Perhaps this place is a test — a way to learn mastery of the Zone.
My breathing steadies. “It is nothing. I am just tired.”
It occurs to me then. Why have I not shared these messages with my companions? Why don’t I want to share them with Luis now? It is not lack of trust, I decide. I think on it alone. Our journey is shared, but these messages are from Pa and they are just for me. The words of the Visitor return: You don’t know, do you? There is something I must confront. And I must confront it alone.
An hour later, we’ve hoisted the bucket on its hook and there is a brief chance to get our breath back as the payload is hauled up. Luis wipes my eyes gently with a handkerchief he has somehow managed to keep clean. I inspect the wounds he inflicted on his chest — they are not deep, but I am worried about infection in this filthy place.
I speak to him in Spanish, as I sometimes do when we are alone. “We must understand the Zone here if we are to escape.”
“Megan, these people have been trapped here for years, perhaps since Visitation. You saw the edges of the vegetable plots — they do not even consider venturing beyond them anymore.”
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��This is why they are still here — they have given up trying. They are like animals caged so long they cannot imagine freedom.”
“There are no Zone tales of Carlsbad — no one has ever returned …”
“There will be a way,” I insist. “If this is a no-go area, someone must have designated it that way — a tracker who discovered its secrets.”
He hangs his head. “I should not have given these people hope. They will turn on us if we cannot deliver them.”
“Don’t be ridiculous — you bought us time. It was a brave thing to do. Have faith.” I smile at him.
He pulls a lump of guano from my hair and grins. “Do you think Kelly would like it down here?”
“How long was she clean for after the fish storm? A few hours? They’ve probably got her shaping guano patties.”
Luis’s laughter echoes through unnumbered tunnels. It gives me a strange warmth, to know that I have made him laugh in this dismal predicament. But then, as his voice carries away, I realize why they have split us up — so that we will not be tempted to search these dark tombs for a way out. Kelly is being held for ransom. I wonder how desperate we would have to become that chasing into the cavern presents itself as an attractive option. Perhaps we will know after a week, a month, a year.
It is a thought that maybe Luis shares, because he takes my hand then. “Megan, I must tell you something,” he says solemnly. “I meant to say at the inn.”
He swallows. I tell him that he need not say, for I am suddenly afraid. Sadness enters his eyes. What could be so terrible?
“I have been … angry. Inside. Since my family …”
“I know …”
He shakes his head. “No, you do not know. I have sworn vengeance.”
