Where the Rock Splits the Sky

by Philip Webb

  I take soundings. The pages of the Rand McNally have somehow migrated inside. Perhaps I have stared at them so many times they are ingrained. Or perhaps they sit redundant over my thoughts now. Because with each mile north, I feel it — a gathering grip in the very air, so sharp that it practically sings. We are moving to its heart now. The place where the Zone begins and ends.

  The streets of Kayenta are the same as any number of other lost towns of these once united states. Wide strips of empty concrete. A motel painted swimming-pool blue. Traffic lights that swing from curved steel gibbets. The sidewalks and burger stops and convenience stores are relics of a complacent way of being that cannot return, I think, even if people came back. How would they forget enough of what has happened to their world? The human race has been shaken from its slumber, snatched to the brink of ruin.

  Normal is no more.

  A herd of wild mustangs linger by the bridge. They shy from us into upstream shallows.

  An enormous recreational vehicle stands across both lanes in the middle of the bridge. Black lines of rubber mark the wild braking that brought it to a halt. Its two decks are clad in rustic planking that make it look more like a log cabin on wheels than a vehicle. Nothing has been plundered. It is as it was when its occupants fled — coolers and mountain bikes and fluffy dice. The signs of this unknown panic long since over haunts me with dread. We are so far in-Zone that no one dares to trespass, even to scavenge.

  On the far side of the river, we encounter the first of the traps. To me it is apparent — a sinkhole in the road so thick with flies that it’s hard to make out what it contains. But as we approach, it is clear the others have not registered it at all. I have to grab Kelly’s reins before she rides straight into it. Not even her horse balks, which puzzles me, until I realize only Cisco among our horses is untouched by the Visitor brand.

  “Hey!” snaps Kelly.

  “Believe me, there are dangers you cannot sense. Dismount and you may see it.”

  Luis jumps back in alarm as soon as his boots touch the ground. “¡Jesús! What is it?”

  “Last line of defense. This is the core of the Zone.”

  The stench is epic but not identifiable — dark, industrial, poisonous. The flies hover but do not settle onto the glinting filth below, as if they are intoxicated and repelled in equal measure.

  “Should we ditch the Visitor horses?” asks Kelly.

  I take a few moments to think it through. My instinct is clear. “No, it may be a trick to get us to do just that. Walk them for a while instead. I should go first.”

  “Be my guest. Man, this place is really booby-trapped, huh?”

  “I would not think any tracker has reached this point and survived. Except my father.”

  Kelly looks at me askance. She perhaps senses that my reading of the Zone has reached another level. I wonder at the secrets I harbor then. She and Luis will surely know before the day is out anyway — what I really am. I tell myself I must concentrate on the perils at hand. But would they even be here with me if they knew?

  Several miles farther north, we come to a top-heavy tower of boulders, again set in the middle of the road. Like the town of Valentine, it denies gravity. The blocks grind against each other, shifting uneasily.

  “Who goes first?” asks Luis.

  “Wait.” I snap a branch from a dead tree and get ready to cast it. “Ride when I say. And ride fast!”

  As soon as I toss the branch, the tower convulses and the rocks crash down. They agitate in their craters, eroding corners with sudden tremors.

  “Now!”

  The rocks whirl and blur as we scramble past so that the air is filled with flakes and splinters. At the next bend, I feel we are clear, and as I look back, the boulders have silently reassembled into their tower. If Luis and Kelly had abandoned their horses at the pit, the boulders would have blocked their passage.

  It is Kelly who first spots it — a wound in the indigo sky. It emerges as a crooked fracture when we are still perhaps twenty miles from Monument Valley. The fissure dwindles as it rises, disappearing into a hairline as thin as gossamer. Where the rock splits the sky.

  It is an effort to tear my eyes from it as we progress ever closer. The road bends slightly to the east on the final approach, and when we are close enough to make out the three buttes of Monument Valley, I realize the sky is not wounded at all. It is a solid structure, a kind of tower that dwarfs the natural rocks, hovering above them, apparently anchored in nothing but roiling air. The base of the structure is so thick it spans the entire area around the three buttes. It spirals as it rises, slanting and sprouting from the central core. At unimaginable altitudes I can make out filigree platforms, frayed buds. The stem courses with electric flashes that light the valley floor.

  “What on God’s Earth is that?” breathes Kelly.

  “No wonder the Navajo believed it meant the return of their White Shell Woman.”

  “Yeah, pretty much blows away them other monuments.”

  Luis hands me the spyglass and points to the platforms. “Lost towns,” he says simply.

  He’s right. When I focus the view, I see the uprooted edges of suburbs, drooping highways, the ripples of streets. These are the casualties of abduction, hoarded in the heavens. This is where Kelly came from.

  The tower casts a twisting shadow eastward like a scar, ten miles, twenty miles? Perhaps it only peters out with the curvature of the Earth. I try, and fail, to comprehend its scale. A thing made of vertigo. It stands over the land like a monstrous totem, or a tether holding the Earth in a slipknot, and yet its appearance seems as nothing to its presence.

  This is where the Zone radiates its power. You feel it in strange jumps of the air, moments that seem to judder into reverse as you pass through them. A jackrabbit hurtles over the scrub in crazed leaps. Weird snatches of sound break out of nowhere — rushes of water or forest fire or radio crackles. I swear that, just in a space of a blink, Cisco’s mane changes white-silver and back again. Soft glows wink at the edge of my vision, but when I chase them down, they vanish.

  Kelly says, “You know, just one time, I’d like things to be way-back-when. Like boring. I kinda miss that. Not worrying that a Seven-Eleven is gonna explode in my face or something.”

  I turn to her, but it’s as though her voice has issued from the vacant air, because she is riding some way ahead of me. This is how the Zone plays its tricks.

  I pick up the pace as we ride ever closer — the plain is so open I feel we are exposed. With the sun at our backs, cantering shadows stretch before us. I spur Cisco into a gallop, perhaps the final one he has strength for. Each stride feels like the last before a cliff edge. There will be no return from this place if I falter. And as we ride, I feel the Zone close around us, as a parting sea thunders back to claim its dominion.

  The air over and between the butte summits warps and contracts so that the rocks seem to writhe, as sinuous as bonfire updrafts. I imagine its forces running untrammeled around the circumference of the Earth, under and over the crust, through a mantle of molten rock — the noose that pulls us to a grim fate.

  We slow to a trot in close formation as we approach the center of the valley, moving warily into the shadow of the tether’s mouth.

  The structure’s canopy looms over us, rising into a fathomless hollow. We pick a way between the bruise-colored tendrils that hang from its underbelly, sometimes reaching the ground in coarse knots.

  “Do you reckon it’s alive?” asks Kelly. She peers at one of the weird hanging ropes and leans out of her saddle a little to take a sniff.

  “Don’t touch!” cries Luis, snatching her back.

  “Hey, I’m just throwing it out there! You think I wanna touch it?”

  Below the very center of the tether base is the heart of the valley, the place where the monuments stand equidistant from us at the points of a triangle. Before us lies a vast heap of bleached white shells. There are millions of them, of different kinds, banked into a curved
beach — urchins and coral pieces, conches and razor clams, shattered and whole. They are dead, but they move — sliding over one another endlessly into new shapes. It is eerily quiet under the tether — not so much as a breeze stirs. Only the shells move — like the insistent scratching of countless buried claws.

  Kelly says, “You know, just one time, I’d like things to just be way-back-when. Like boring …”

  “I kind of miss that,” I mutter. “Not worrying that a Seven-Eleven will explode in my face. Or something.”

  We each frown at the other. Time has slipped gear. Sometimes-never-always.

  I climb down from Cisco and unravel Old Glory. White shell moccasins or obsidian knife? The moccasins are exquisitely made, sewn and shaped for pampered feet. What are they for? What was Pa trying to tell me? Perhaps they are an invitation …

  Luis calls out, “Company, Megan!”

  Closing in from every direction come riders. Perhaps thousands of them — the dead and shredded flesh of Navajos and bandits. An army of Visitors.

  “Maybe too much company,” mutters Kelly. “S’pose now ain’t the time to say I reckon I shoulda gone to Fort Stockton like y’all said.”

  The Visitors encircle us completely and dismount.

  Jethro emerges from the throng. The corpse tilts into the wind. It shakes its arm violently and fingers scatter to the ground. What emerges from the coat sleeve is an approximation of a human hand made from twisted fibers as thick as tendons. It moves toward me.

  “Stop!” cries Luis. He raises his rifle and fires a single round into Jethro’s chest.

  I grab the barrel of Luis’s weapon and point it to the ground. We cannot hope to win a gunfight.

  The Visitor stumbles and seems to contemplate this latest wound. The alien fibers retreat. Then the entire requisitioned body of Jethro Wells disintegrates. A new shape tips out of the remains, spilling and massing into a headless thing on five segmented limbs. One of the limbs reaches down to the discarded human remains and spikes Jethro’s head. It holds up the skull for me and hinges the jaw as a puppeteer might. I am so horror-struck that, as it scuttles toward me, I am powerless to respond, too scared even to run.

  Slits in the Visitor’s barrel-shaped body issue a command. “Fall before the White Shell Woman.”

  Yiska talked of the White Shell Woman — Navajo goddess, wife of the moon — but the dead sockets of the Jethro’s skull seem to point at me. For one awful moment, my mind, my nerve, everything deserts me. I am lost. Even my name holds no meaning.

  Kelly stares at the moccasins in my hands. “Feel free to fill us in here,” she says shakily.

  “But I don’t know. I mean … None of this … It doesn’t make sense.”

  Nothing feels true. I stare at my own fingers, the lines of my palms. My flesh just seems wrong. Empty somehow. Waiting for someone to claim it.

  Luis takes a step back from me.

  Marfa, Carlsbad, Spider Rock — over and over again the moments replay. The cold touch of Visitors, and how I am like them. How I just look human. From the outside. But what am I inside?

  All the riders around us dismount and drop to their knees.

  I cannot bear to watch my friends edging away. Only now do I really understand what I’m losing if they should go or die. I have loved them — I see that now. And they have loved me in return. But with every moment that passes unchecked, I become alone.

  “I am both,” I say at last.

  Kelly’s voice is hollow. “Both what?”

  Every fiber of me feels like a lie. I want to run and never stop. I want to scream and never take breath. But I will not escape the truth. I am not a person. I am just the semblance of one.

  “My father is human. My mother was Visitor.”

  My friends are speechless. Luis drops his rifle. Kelly shakes her head. The look on their faces can only be described as betrayal.

  “I did not know. I found out at Spider Rock.”

  “You are White Shell Woman?” stutters Luis. He will not meet my eyes.

  I think of shells. Only of shells. Husks to be filled with new life.

  Luis shouts my name, desperate for an answer. Am I her? Am I White Shell Woman?

  “I don’t know,” I murmur. “I don’t know.”

  A rushing sound fills the air, dry and brittle, like the sound of a million rattlesnakes. The white shell beach rises and collects itself, gathering into an airborne mantle. It coils and dumps itself into new shapes with the momentum of waterfalls. Beautiful strands sprout and loop, delicate as necklaces. Then, with the thunder of an entire shoreline breaking, a head made of shells turns to face us.

  “No,” says Kelly. “That is White Shell Woman.”

  The shifting curtain of shells mimics a woman’s face. No, not one woman. Many. Each face configures into the next, though the expression remains the same — eyes closed, in meditation or sleep.

  The kneeling Visitor army begins to chant — a worship without words to their mother and goddess.

  But then a frown convulses across that giant likeness.

  The lips do not part, but she speaks. A rush of tumbling shells made into a voice without feeling.

  Cease.

  The Visitor hoard stops chanting and lies on the ground in submission.

  You bring the Bridgwater child. But not alone.

  Hissing from the shells rises in pitch.

  The horses begin to snort and champ. I let go of Cisco’s reins. We are on the cusp of something terrible. At least I can save my horse — I picture him joining the wild herd at Kayenta. With a wild cry, I send him packing. He charges free, released at last from this madness. He sparks a stampede, and all the other horses break away in different directions.

  A low moan rises from the Visitor army.

  You are weak.

  The transformation from face to tornado happens in a blink. Wind tears at our clothes and hair. The shells howl as they accelerate into a white storm. It arcs over our heads like a giant scorpion back. There’s nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide. All we can do is stand and watch.

  Visitor screams are lost in a hail of grit. Their bodies are annihilated into pink mist. The slaughter takes less than a minute.

  We stand, trembling. Awaiting our fate. But the carnage ends and the stained shells reassemble, the calm face dripping with meat. Nothing remains of her brood but tattered clothes and boots.

  She opens her eyes and gazes at me with a horrifying intensity. I am transfixed.

  You have come. The Zone is your home. You are strong. The first of a new kind. You bring to the mixed blood of a billion races … the blood of the human race. Your young will conquer. Now you will rule for me. This world and others beyond counting will be yours, my child.

  I cannot move. Inside, she is hollow, filled only with distant golden fire — the fire that drives her to conquer galaxies. I look at the white shell moccasins, shoes for a Navajo queen, and understand at last. Her time has come. Yiska was right — she is weak. I am to succeed her. I am to be the White Shell Woman when she is dead.

  Luis and Kelly stumble away from me. I have lost them.

  I feel the lure of the Zone. It runs through me. This wild and deadly place I love. It will spread to the ends of the Earth. She promises it will be mine.

  I watch my friends. They seem small. They keep their distance but they do not run.

  As I stand motionless, the tether’s tendrils begin to close around my body, over my legs.

  “Megan!” shouts Luis. My name sounds wrong. Like it belongs to someone else now.

  He wants me to run. But there is nowhere to run. The tendrils bind me. The Zone is all around us. She is both tether and Zone.

  Luis makes a step toward me but Kelly hauls him back. They are both crying now. Tears. I remember them in the dark. In the deep dark of Carlsbad. The sweetest pain.

  And I remember that I have a choice.

  I look up at the white shell face. And I drop the moccasins into the dust.

 
She sees my mind. That I can resist her. That I choose to be human. That I choose the love of Luis and Kelly — two mortal, frail beings. That against that, all the power she can bestow on me is nothing. A fury of golden flame spouts from her eyes.

  The tendrils quicken about me in loops and knots. More vines drop from the canopy, tumbling and writhing in their hunger to reach me.

  If I will not join her, then I will be taken.

  Kelly screams and Luis makes a run for it, but tentacles snatch their legs from under them.

  “Let them go!” I yell.

  I brandish the obsidian knife and slash out as the tentacles come for me. My blows are wild, opening up gashes of yellow ooze. I hack and thrust until my hands are slippery with alien blood, her blood. But still the tentacles rush in. She could destroy me, rip me limb from limb, but, when it comes, her embrace is almost forgiving. As a mother to a wayward daughter. Her flesh coils around my throat. I feel her skin, rough against mine, and thousands of tiny barbs fixing to my pulse.

  I sway there for a moment, too stunned to fight, my head thrown back toward the sky. Luis and Kelly wrestle in the air above. A maw opens for them in the canopy. The air ripples with heat, and the stench of clotted blood reaches me. I sense the countless lives lost here. This gigantic tether that binds the Earth is the hive where humans and Visitors are joined.

  The tentacles take their first draw of my blood. I feel it pump from my throat. A leachlike grip takes hold, hungry for more. But then, as my head starts to spin, the blood returns — a sudden tide of warmth. Not just my blood — hers and mine, blending and changing. A toxic swirl. Through it I feel her immense age. She is a taker of worlds. But she is sluggish now. At the end of her dominion. She needs a successor, she needs my blood, she needs me.

  The tentacles flex again. This time the pull on my bloodstream is so deep I feel my heart stutter. Every vessel in my body runs cold. Then the flush of new blood like a release, the breath that saves you from drowning. But this mingling is a kind of death. I know it. It bursts through me — a relentless rush. Like the urge to kill, again and again and again. I have perhaps only seconds before this exchange alters me forever. I will become the White Shell Woman — her cold spirit will live on through me.