Chapter 16

The sky came back as she drove.

Stars poked through the thinning smoke, and a pale shadow resolved into the cool white curve of the moon. Around her the valley gave way to bluish dunes, which in turn gave way to scrubby foothills. When she reached a tall green sign that declared, You Are Leaving Death Valley, she parked on the side of the road and went to sleep right there in John’s lap. His heat was her blanket. She woke with a clear head and cracked open a can of green beans from the back of the truck. Normally she hated green beans, especially when they had been cooked soggy, but this particular batch tasted so good to her that she finished by drinking the juice from the can. Afterwards, she stripped off the clothes she’d been wearing since leaving John’s house. They smelled like fire and desert, like sickness. She walked to the sign and threw them back into Death Valley. You can keep them, she thought. Then she stood in the road, naked, letting the clean night wind run over her skin and through her hair. When she started to shiver, she returned to the truck and put on a chambray shirt (much too big for her) along with a pair of jeans that stayed on only once she stole John’s belt off his waist and gave the leather an extra notch with the staple gun.

Sweat beaded John’s forehead. The hollows of his cheeks trembled with his breaths, which had grown quick and shallow. It wasn’t the typical breathing of a sleeping man. No, these breaths were his fever talking, and if it could raise its voice enough to change the way he breathed, then perhaps he wasn’t sleeping quite as deeply as he had been.

Mariah thought of those fleeting moments out in the desert when he had almost seemed awake. The warning squeeze of his fingers on her stomach before she found the plane. The long stare after she woke from her nightmare. The name, his daughter’s name, whispered longingly in the dark.

Mariah touched her lips to his ear. “John, if you can hear me, if you’re in there, there’s a house waiting for you. A blue house by the ocean. It’s a long, long way from here, and you are not going to get there if you don’t wake up. You understand? If you ever want to see your Lana again, you will wake yourself up.”

John’s chest heaved outward with such explosive force that his ribs let out an audible groan. His eyelids shot open and Mariah saw his pupils, hard and black and—she could have sworn—focused. Then his chest sank in, and his eyelids closed themselves. Mariah stared at him, her heart galloping inside its cage. He’d heard her. He’d heard her. And his answer hadn’t been soft. No, it had been loud. Still, the state he was in . . . it wasn’t good. He might be able to rise from whatever dreams were holding him down, but his fever wouldn’t be shaken off through willpower alone. He would need medicine for that. Antibiotics. And those she didn’t have. First things first, though, she needed to find out where the fever was coming from. Where it had started.

Mariah went around to the passenger seat to start her inspection. It didn’t take long, now that she was out of the desert and her head was beginning to feel like her own again. His right hand was all right (if something in its shape could ever be considered all right). No obvious swelling or redness, except for some dried blood. The same went for the stapled inside of his forearm. The other side—the back side—was a different story. When she peeled it from the shirt she’d used as a bandage, lifting it so that she could have a look, the smell nearly made her gag. It was like opening a dumpster where a raccoon had gotten trapped and died. The skin down there was hot, moist. She ran her fingers over a small oozing gash and brushed a shard of glass. The shard came out readily, helped along by a warm gush of pus. Mariah covered her mouth and turned the other way. She’d been so concerned with keeping the inside of his forearm clean after her rushed job with the staples that she had forgotten there was another side of that forearm to worry about. It was as simple and as stupid as that. And what had gone unseen had festered.

“I’m sorry, John. I’m so sorry.”

She gave the area a massage, forcing out the discharge while trying to imagine she was doing something else instead . . . like, say, squeezing the last bit of toothpaste from a bottle, and on that subject, when was the last time she had brushed her teeth? On a scale of minty fresh to could-kill-a-small-animal-in-a-single-puff, how bad was her breath right now? Later. Worry about that later. Having done what she could with her fingers, she dug around on the floor for the hydrogen peroxide and dumped the last of it straight on the infected gash. There wasn’t enough. Not even close. He needed to bathe in the stuff. Back in his lap, listening to his arm foam angrily on its throne of old shirts, she keyed the ignition and headed down the road as fast as the pickup could manage. Which wasn’t fast. If she goosed the speedometer a hair over twenty, the truck threw a temper tantrum and pitched its hind end side to side. Equally troubling was the noise the flat tire was making. Its steady glugluglug now had a sharp, screechy undertone that she didn’t care for one bit, and every so often she watched a shred of rubber tumble off in the rearview mirror. Meanwhile, the needle on the fuel gauge continued its inexorable crawl back down to the red. Whoever said death and taxes were the only two certainties in life had gotten it wrong. There was a number three on the list, and it was an empty tank of gas.

The foothills flattened into stubbly brown desert, the road picked up a second lane, and a little while later she met another sign, welcoming her into Nevada. There was no fence, no crossing station, only that slightly crooked waypost stuck in the gravel shoulder. Goodbye Golden State, she thought, Hello Silver State. It struck her that she would probably never set foot in California again, and she was surprised to find she felt no sadness over the fact.

She was rambling on, and it was good.

It was good.

✽✽✽

The pickup truck limped along until Mariah came to a lonely crossroads with an arrow pointing north (or what she figured was north) to someplace called Amargosa Valley. But she liked the road she was on already. It had been kind to her. She decided to stick with it a bit longer. A few miles after the junction, an opportunity arrived in the form of a banged-up Nissan that had been donated to the weeds.

Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

Mariah pulled over to see if there was any gas left in the tank, taking one of the fuel jugs with her. Wrapped around the neck of the jug was a thin plastic hose that she had barely noticed until this moment. Remembering the last vehicle she had encountered, and the family inside, she circled the car at a wary distance. One of its windows was cracked open, which might have been a little thing before but was now enough to send her on her way. And in a hurry, too. There was no guarantee that the radio would have turned on if she had allowed herself to step closer . . . but then, there was no guarantee that the radio wouldn’t have turned on, either.

Mariah drove on. Stars silvered the sky, so many the night seemed to hold more light than darkness. Soon she began to see other lights. Human lights. They were few and far between, but they were there, and that made her glad in a way she could not explain. John also seemed to feel the change—or perhaps the change was in him. Whatever the reason, he became restless. The fingers on his good hand curled and released, curled and released, and occasionally he let out a low, grinding moan. That also made her glad, too. No sound in the world was further away from a smile.

“Go ahead and moan, John. Moan all you want.”

The needle on the fuel gauge dipped into the red, then fell even further. Mariah waited for the engine to choke out its last dry breath. Any moment now. Any moment. But it wasn’t the gas that gave first. It was the flat. The last bit of skin hanging onto the tire tore loose, and sparks kicked up from the naked rim. She hit the brakes and dragged the truck to a stop across the double yellow line. Looks like I’m going on foot from here, she thought.

That was okay, though.

Not too far down the road, half-realized under glowing streetlamps, waited a neat cluster of houses. In their midst stood a big square building. If she were in a city, Mariah might have thought it was an apartment complex or a municipal center, but out here, in a sleepy little place like this, it could only be one thing.

A school.

✽✽✽

Mariah Nowak walked into town much as John had strolled into the dead-end burg of Sheridan not so long ago. However, unlike John, she went by road and she carried just one fuel jug. Gasoline was number three on the list of things she hoped to find. Number two on the list was a jack. The first thing . . . well, the first thing wasn’t a thing.

It was a person.

Passing by the school, she saw its name, Heritage, emblazoned across the towering cinderblock wall above her. Windows looked into a brightly lit hallway full of lime-green lockers. In the middle of the hallway was a wide set of doors whose handles had been looped through with heavy chains and bolted shut with a padlock. Perhaps Mariah should have been alarmed by that, or unsettled at the very least. But the place itself didn’t give off a menacing air. Neither did the town, which was cute and tidy and snug. After the vast sprawl of the desert, it was the town’s snugness she noticed most of all. The place slipped around her like a warm sweater. She liked it from the beginning.

Maybe that explained why she felt no real concern when she heard the crunching. It carried down the block, a sound like teeth chewing on ice cubes, but bigger. Much bigger. Mariah leaned around the corner to take a peek. Standing in the next intersection was a kid in black shorts and a red polo. He had a heavy-duty red axe, the kind firefighters use to knock down doors, and he was swinging it at an enormous pile of televisions, smashing them in with the business end of the blade. There must have been fifty TVs stacked on the asphalt altogether, everything from flat-screens to chunky CRTs. Nor was that all. Around the intersection lay smaller heaps still waiting to be visited by the kid and his not-so-little friend. Desktops, laptops, iPads, phones—if it was electronic, it had been invited to the party.

The boy’s bony arms rose and fell, rose and fell, the axe trembling precariously whenever his hands reached their high point. The thing fit him about as well as John’s clothes fit Mariah; it was a wonder he could get it up over his head at all, much less aim it with any accuracy. Screens cracked and splintered as they were caved in, but the kid himself made no sound, didn’t even seem to be breathing all that heavily.

Mariah watched him in secret down the lamp-lined road, not knowing then that this was a moment she would remember, this moment before meeting him, the boy whom she would fiercely and unreservedly come to love. She stepped out from behind the corner and walked partway down the block before stopping again. It wouldn’t do to go closer. No, going closer would not be wise.

Most of the TVs were dark, but a few in the pile flickered weakly. That shouldn’t have been possible, not with their cords unplugged, but what was possible and what was true did not always intersect as Mariah had begun to learn. On those flickering screens, some turned upside down, others tipped sideways, a small figure stood in darkness. Stood upright, regardless of the screen’s orientation. She could make out nothing of the figure beyond its shape, but between each swing of the axe she could hear the sad, seesaw whisper of a song. Only . . . if the weeping boy was singing his lullaby, then how was the boy with the axe still awake?

Mariah decided to ask him.

“Hey!” she called out, with no success.

Great. As if one unresponsive man in my life wasn’t enough. She tried again, this time raising her voice into a full-fledged shout, and again had no luck. What then? Throw something at him? Could she even throw that far? Did she even have anything to throw? She was still lingering there, debating the best way to get his attention without moving toward him and putting herself at risk, when one of the televisions rolled off the pile. The kid turned to chase after it, axe raised, and froze as he saw Mariah. His mouth fell open and he started running toward her—running just like that, axe held high. A few strides in, he seemed to realize that this wasn’t the most reassuring way to approach a stranger, and he paused to set down the axe and pocket his rubber gardening gloves. Mariah took her first close look at him as he did. His clothes were dirty and his hair was tangled, one stop short of a rat’s nest. In summation, a mess. But a friendly mess. A welcoming mess. Tired bruises underlined the excitement in his eyes. The relief.

He stopped a few feet shy of her, a polite distance, and she realized he was breathing hard after all. He was just doing it quietly, through his nose instead of his mouth.

She smiled at him. “Hello.”

He smiled back but said nothing. Then he pulled out a pencil and a pad of sticky notes and she understood.

Oh.

Oh.

When the boy finished writing, Mariah took the slip of paper from his outstretched fingers and held it up beneath the streetlamp to read.

I’m Marcos.

What’s your name? :)