by Philip Webb
I think of him hiding from the killers as they gun down his family. But I do not see how his confession concerns me.
“The ones I seek,” he says, waiting for me to understand. “They are in the Zone, they are of the Zone. Visitors.”
“I know this.”
“I have no craft, no feeling for the Zone. Except what I have learned from you.”
And then the dime drops. These past years he has been my friend, from the first day that I met him in the sharecrop plots around my home, he has been waiting for me to lead him into the Zone. Not to help me search for my father. Not to keep me safe. Not because he likes me. But because he wishes vengeance. I think of my hopes — unrealistic perhaps — that there is a way for us all to overcome the threat of Visitation, that my father somehow holds the key to life. But it is clear now, Luis has never shared that hope — perhaps he does not even expect to live once vengeance has been served.
“I have been your passage to the Zone,” I say at last. “That is all.”
The message of this place sinks in. Secrets unveiled in the darkness. The hurt is actually more than I can bear, though I continue to hold his gaze in the feeble light. I am stunned, for a moment, that I could really feel this much. What a pitiful fool I have been. All this time, my eyes have been on these treacherous lands, dreaming of my father, picturing the moment we might be reunited. And all this time I have relied on Luis, taking his loyalty for granted. The naïveté of it astounds me suddenly. It is as if I have been riding through the pages of a child’s picture book — playing the heroine. I have honed my skills as a tracker and yet I am blind. Even those closest to me are a mystery.
“You planned to take your own route, once your Zone knowledge was strong enough.”
“I am sorry,” he whispers. “It is a Zone danger when intentions are not true, when the heart is hidden — you taught me this and I wanted to tell you many times, but I could not.”
“Why tell me now?”
“Because we will not leave this place. You must know the truth.”
I clutch his fingers and know without doubt that I would rather the truth had remained hidden.
Overhead, I hear the bucket chain rattling as it begins its descent.
I think suddenly of the sermon he has delivered to save our lives. 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. His conscience must have plagued him, so that he sought solace at the chapel in Marfa. And indirectly those teachings have saved him, and us.
“You did not kill the Visitor, the one from Brokeoff,” I say at last. “When you had the chance. You threw away the gun …”
He drops his head in shame. He is torn between his pledge for revenge and his disgust of it. I see it now — that his heart is more divided than ever.
“It was not among those who killed my family.”
“So, what, you’re going to search the whole Zone until you find them?”
He does not answer.
I drop his hand.
I do not know where I find the strength to say it. I do not even know if it is true. “I don’t care.” Why should he not follow his own path as I am following mine?
“Megan …”
I pray that the tears in my eyes are from the fumes. Never have I cried. I saw it as weakness. But it is a freedom, like laughter. And a pain like no other. “You are still my friend,” I manage. “We will find a way out of this place. Then you can choose where your path lies. With me or alone.”
I turn away then, thankful for the dark. He does not break the silence. Together we work: drag, dig, fill, drag, dig, fill … The times we wait for the bucket are the worst. What hurts the most is that I have grown up in this dreadful hole, so suddenly, in minutes. And that my instincts of people have proven so poor.
We emerge from the mine wretched and stinking, but though it has been backbreaking work, I have no thoughts of rest. I speak nothing to Wesley Carmichael — the man is eager to crow over us, anticipating the breaking of our wills, and I refuse him the satisfaction. If I am to die in this filthy backwater, I will do so with my head high and my eyes clear.
Thankfully, there is a well where we can wash the worst off. The rain has stopped and there are golden breaks in the cloud, fault lines to the furnace behind. Thunder is now just a faraway warning — like the growl of a wary hound. Some Carlsbad residents offer up rags and blankets and scraps of wire for us to make shelter. This flotsam and jetsam of garbage is no doubt a sacrifice here, where a fencing staple is precious, and I thank them, though I have no heart to build a home. I would rather sit open to the sky than give in and make roots. They stare at us — men with beards to their knees and women with stony eyes, perhaps remembering their own struggle against reality upon arrival here. Luis hunches over the shelter makings like someone absorbed in a puzzle, and I leave him then to wander through the camp.
I want to be alone with my thoughts, and to gaze out at the perimeter — fallow lands, out of reach.
The settlement is larger than I expected — spreading out along ramshackle spokes and crowded gullies, quieting down under a soft quilt of blue smoke. The boundaries are stark, butted up against wild, unharvested brush.
Carlsbad consists of perhaps a hundred families. There is an exhausted evening calm — people murmuring by their fires and coughing. No one is strong enough to laugh or bicker.
I scout about halfheartedly for Kelly. Something tells me she is safe and making her own way in the place. I find a vantage point on the weathered tilt of a boulder — somewhere she will see me when she is ready. And then I gaze down into the shadows, the snakes of mud between hovels, out to the road where Cisco lies in deadly sleep. I make out the three horses, heaped against each other — a strand of mane stirring in the breeze. At least they will be warm for now, roped together. I wonder how long they have got. Another couple of days until they will be too weak to stand anyway? I wonder if I have the strength to watch my beautiful horse rot down to bones. Perhaps if I rushed with all my heart across that ground, I would reach him in time to lie by his head before the sleep took me. The road to the first bend seems scattered with those who had the same idea, who could no longer bear Carlsbad.
But I have not the merest intention of giving in now, while there is still hope. My pa is out there somewhere in the maelstrom of forces that is the Zone. I cannot abandon him. My mind feels bright and hungry somehow. The light is restless, sunset pools that fill and shrink with the cloud tide. The Zone appears to rush by, less than calling distance away. If I could just bridge that gap, I would be steeped in its currents again. This is the message from the guano mine, I know it — there are tracker clues to be gleaned from the shape of the land, or in the very nature of this predicament, if only I am sharp enough to spot them.
For some hours I probe every vista, watching for inspiration, willing an answer to present itself to me from the rocks themselves. There will be a way. But my workings on the problem are too haphazard, too knotted. I think the solution must be simple, staring me in the face, so clear that a child could see it. What is so frustrating, though, is the feeling that my mind already knows it somehow. All the pieces have been presented to me already. The bats, the cave, the patterns that repeat themselves here over and over. That is why the denizens of Carlsbad cannot see it — they have become so jaded with the view that they have abandoned hope. It is an itch I cannot pin down long enough to scratch!
Across the sky comes the first tendril of returning bats — a winding airborne river. The path darkens and swells, rippling across the skyline, but it keeps its shape — like rope. Hawks I have not noticed before launch from trees nearby. They wait until the bat river becomes a black fall into the cavern before diving into the throng with their talons, feasting on the wing. If only, I think. If only we were bats — we could just fly from here …
I am so engrossed in this spectacle that I don’t notice Kelly. She places her palms over my eyes and bu
rsts out laughing. This is unexpected. She’s almost delirious.
“Kelly, are you all right?”
“Got something to show you!”
She drags me off the boulder and leads the way through the camp.
“What is it?”
But she will not say.
We stand at the threshold of a hollow in the rock, close to the edge of the settlement. She is breathless with excitement, but I sense something else, too, in her eyes — a wild, barely suppressed anxiety, that somehow this is all too good to be true.
She pulls back the tent cover.
A man looks up, eyes squinting at the light. A deep scar runs through the bridge of his nose. At first I think he is ancient, though in truth he can be no more than forty years old. An odd silence follows as Kelly fidgets, barely able to contain herself, and the man stares back, finally smiling. It is an unsure grin, as though he has not smiled for years.
Beneath the smears of dirt, the tawny matted hair, the red rims of his eyelids, he is a fine-looking fellow. He has beautiful hazel eyes. And then it hits me.
“You’re Kelly’s brother,” I blurt out. And immediately my mind gallops through the possibilities — has he survived Valentine like his sister? Is he a broken abductee, human but lost? Or …
“The very same!” cries Kelly. “This is Lloyd. Can you believe it? What are the frickin’ chances? Took me a while myself. I mean, I was digging with him a whole two hours before I cottoned on. He was just a year older than me back in Valentine, but, see, he’s got older since I was on ice or whatever, so he’s stretched ahead of me, ain’t that right? And last time I saw him, he was all fancied up for a hot date, spit-shine on his boots and a white hat like a dude!”
Kelly runs out of steam a little while I try to reconcile the heartthrob of her memory with this disheveled man. She thumps him on the shoulder playfully, but Lloyd just stares back at me, his grin fixed.
“Well, come on, then, Lloyd, don’t just sit there like a prom queen! Invite us in or something. This is Megan, who I just bent your ears back about for the whole day and then some. Megan, Lloyd. Lloyd, Megan.”
I gaze at his eyes, trying to see any glint of golden fire, to know if he is Visitor or human. I glance at Kelly — surely she would know? Her own flesh and blood.
I hold my hand out. Something is badly wrong here. I think of Kelly’s hysterical introduction — is she just refusing to accept the worst? Is she still trying to decide if this is her brother or just the shell? Has hope just blinded her?
Lloyd continues to stare at me. His smile is set, like a question that hangs. But if I had remained at Carlsbad since Visitation, perhaps I, too, would be like this man — blank and diminished.
Just as the silence between us grows uncomfortable, a movement at the dark recesses of the cave catches my eye.
A woman steps unsteadily from the gloom. Lank red hair, welts on her arms, dazed eyes. A mist of defeat hangs over her.
“Christ, I nearly forgot!” exclaims Kelly. “Always reckoned these two had a thing going. This is Melissa Mumford. Partner in crime at the Taco Shacko, ain’t that right, Mumps? Cemetery shift. Always plotting our escape to the City of Angels, huh? In between getting our asses pinched and stealin’ each other’s tips.”
A slight frown passes across Melissa Mumford’s face as if this did indeed happen but she had forgotten. Kelly gazes at me pointedly, as if to say, This is the proof. Teenage sweethearts. Don’t you see? How could they be Visitors? They’re like us. They’re human.
Just when I think no one apart from Kelly will speak, her brother says, “We been here three years now.”
“And we’re gonna get you outta here, ain’t that true, Megan?”
Before I can answer, Kelly drops to her knees beside me. Something has cracked inside her as if now, after hours of trying, she has just realized that the chasm between her and these people is unbridgeable.
“And Mom?” Her voice wavers but in the demand there is anger, too. “Pop? How come you ain’t said nothing? They come with you? When d’you last see them? It’s all right now if it’s bad news. You can just tell me, can’t you?”
But they can’t. They have no understanding of family. They don’t remember anything about Valentine life or Kelly. She has filled in their memories for them, in the desperate hope they will recognize her. I see it in their faces now — so passive. They are not like the Visitors we have seen before — the outlaws, aping emotion and speech patterns in an effort to disguise their otherness. It is as if Carlsbad has drained them of the will.
They share a glance then, as if trying to recover some remnant of their previous existence. And perhaps there are wisps of memory — dry, like shapes in fossilized brains. A recognition does pass between them, I think. A charge. It reminds me of something … And as one they turn their empty gazes upon me.
Kelly edges away from them, no longer in denial.
I am riveted for a moment by their faces. Lloyd’s smile slackens at last.
Fragments of thought fly at me then, all at once, as though flushed from the places they’ve been hiding. Things that would go together if only I could focus: hawks hovering for the kill; a funnel of bats … so dense; Cisco galloping through his dreams out there beyond my reach; these human husks before me. How is it possible we have found them? From Kelly’s disappeared hometown? Here? Now? Kelly’s breathless question — What are the frickin’ chances? It cannot be chance. The Zone is not fertile ground for coincidence like this. It is a huge wilderness … almost boundless, and cruel. We were sent here. I think of Pa’s message — his smell coming to me so strongly in the cave. The clues to escape are all around. Bats … never straying from each other on their tight course to and from the cave. Hawks never alighting on dangerous ground. I feel then that I am looking the wrong way, that I should be facing the swarm behind me. So measured as they come home to roost! Not returning from all directions as you would expect … As though they are following a trail.
But I don’t turn. I cannot. Pa! It is the only explanation that makes sense. He has guided me here to this special place, this miniature zone within a zone. It is a test I must overcome. Some truth I must grasp. The key to our safe passage from Carlsbad is right before my eyes. So it must be for the wider Zone, isn’t that the message? Navigation depends on mastery, understanding of the Zone. If only I try hard enough to see. Here secrets are unveiled in the darkness. Of course … Kelly is no different from Luis. She came on this journey not for me, but to find her family. She could not stay in our room at the Drunken Steer because she was desperate to look for them, desperate for any clue to their whereabouts … She pushed and cajoled for us to go to Brokeoff in the first instance, to where people live. The poker game was just a chance for her to examine the locals of the saloon.
I lift my eyes again to Lloyd and I know now what I am reminded of. It is the same electric unease I felt in the presence of the Visitor back at Marfa — Jethro’s outlaw, the one known as Bud Haslett, striding through the sheriff’s office toward me.
The same terrible visions flash through my mind as they did that day and I can do nothing to control them. It is not just a warning. It is happening now. At the dark heart of the Zone. People all in a row, waiting, until light swallows them and they scream without sound, their mouths hinged back, jaws breaking right open, their faces unfurling like dreadful flowers …
“Megan?” whispers Kelly. “Megan?”
The urge to reach out and touch the Visitors is irresistible.
My outstretched fingers tremble.
The Lloyd Visitor lifts a hand.
The palm opens, like a greeting, like an acceptance. And the lines that fortune-tellers read just peel apart. Flesh petals. No blood. Just the forever twining of blue strands where bones and tendons should be. They glow slightly, illuminating the dust between us. Dry as grass. Slipping and twisting and weaving. A stream of elver flowing to the fingers.
“Jesus! Megan!”
Kelly tugs me back.
The Lloyd one is old. Incredibly old. I see it behind those stolen eyes, dead as baubles. The gold of fires — unimaginably far away.
The shining blue threads of its true being are cold. And as I touch them, a flame tears through my heart.
Visions blast into me. The Visitors hold nothing back.
I see who they are and what they have done.
Worlds uncounted have fallen to their kind. I see their distant homes in banded skies of russet and carmine, storms the size of the Earth that last a thousand years. They are angels of war. They are nothing like people. And we will not be spared. Not a single soul.
I am so cold. Thoughts plod around my brain in a senseless procession. I gaze into the fire of their eyes, these unknowable creatures, and remember the settler family at Fort Davis — all kneeling at the end of their lives. I am to be frozen, as they were.
I try to break away, but it is impossible now. I am caught in the thrall of blue fibers. They snake about my wrist, as strong as creeper vines that have grown there over centuries.
Kelly’s screams are desperate but they remain far, far away.
What is it that saves me? Surely not mercy. They don’t know what it means. It is their nature to occupy, to lay waste, to move onto unchartered worlds in relentless hunger. Like a disease.
Not mercy. Weakness? They withdraw suddenly as if repelled by something. They stare at me through slack faces. They know they cannot escape the sinkhole of Carlsbad. They have hidden these three years, cornered inside sick and starving bodies, trapped as helplessly as everyone else here, and now they will be exposed for what they are.
I stagger away from their touch. My arm flops numb and useless. Spikes of frost like chilblains dig about my shoulder. I snatch at the air, knowing I must breathe, but with each tiny lungful I feel only closer to suffocation.
Kelly drags me clear. She is yelling at me, at them. A terrified stream of obscenities. At last my chest opens and I draw down air — sweet and warm. The Visitors observe the commotion before them in complete detachment. As aloof and still as effigies in a tomb. Their otherness has left me stunned. It is as though I have been submerged in a world where every single living thing is prey.
