Chapter One
TonguesOfFire92: I read you can send care packages of clothes, and foodstuffs if they’re in cans, or dry foods like soda crackers, Pepperidge Farm Goldfish, beef jerky, you know. I’ll try to find the link, those poor starving Californians really need our help. [Christian Love: Singles Chat Room Transcript, 4/8/05]
Ears flicking back and forth, nose up and into the night breezes, the kit fox trotted to the back of a creosote bush and pawed at the ground. Something didn’t smell right but she was hungry after a long day curled up in her den and she needed to hunt. She looked up, around, her black eyes drinking in the tattered dribs and drabs of starlight available. Far, far away from city lights this night, this moonless desert, was one of the darkest places on the surface of the earth.
The vixen dipped her head and sniffed at the ground, at a narrow pit in the sandy soil. Grains of mica and dust spilled down into the hole as she nosed it. In an instant, far too fast for human eyes to discern, her forepaws were inside the hole, her claws sunk into the tiny body of a shrew. She hauled the animal up to her mouth and set out for the safety of her own den where she could feast at her leisure.
Without bothering to make herself visible again Nilla reached down and scooped up the fox with her numb, chapped hands and shoved her face deep into the animal’s throat. She had bitten through the jugular vein and consumed the fox’s slight flicker of golden life before the animal could even begin to fight.
She made a point of destroying the fox’s skull before she threw away its remains. She felt guilty enough about the bear she had consigned to a life of wandering undeath. When she was done she sat down hard on the sand and let her brain relax, let herself become visible again. Every time in the past she had used her trick Mael Mag Och had appeared to tease her with riddles but not this time. She waited an hour but he never showed. That saddened her—she would have been glad for his company. Loneliness gnawed at Nilla, though she was hardly alone.
For one thing she had the desert all around her. Death Valley had failed to live up to its name. It might be a dangerous place for unprepared campers but it was hardly dead: in fact it crawled with life, with animals in startling abundance. They didn’t exactly announce themselves and with normal human eyes she rarely caught sight of them. With her eyes closed, though, the desert sparkled with their energy, like a vast field of stars but far more active and mobile. She would sit and watch for hours sometimes, especially at night as the life-lights of the desert played out their endless game, chasing each other, devouring each other. Predators were big bright blotches of light that flowed toward and absorbed the smaller, dimmer sparks of prey animals. The shrubs and cacti around her flickered dimly but under the ground their massive root systems, ten times as large as the parts they showed above the ground, made a tapestry of interwoven bright radial lines and curves, a fabric with a radiant warp and a luminous weft. It was the most beautiful thing Nilla had ever seen.
For another thing she couldn’t say she was alone because she was being followed. Followed and watched by the armless dead thing that had killed Charles. She had become aware of his continued presence during her first torturous afternoon in the valley, when she had walked so far and so hard she wore holes in the fabric of her too-tight jeans and her lips had split open with dehydration. The sun had started playing tricks on her early and had never let up—she saw heat shimmers in every direction that looked like pools of water rippling on the horizon, felt the shadow of every wisp of cloud on her back like a blast of icy breath. He stood at the top of a rise, his face distorted by glare, his ravaged body full of darkness in her life sense. She would have liked to write him off as yet another hallucination but she couldn’t. She knew he was there. She was pretty sure he had instructions to follow her, though how anyone could make a dead man do their bidding was an open question.
He dogged her footsteps no matter how far or how fast she moved. On foot she was slightly more mobile, more agile and with better balance, but he had longer legs. He never approached more than five hundred feet from her but he never receded over the horizon either. As she headed east, walking night and day, stopping only to feed her body or to give her mind a momentary rest, he was never too far behind.
She stopped looking back, eventually. His presence became a fixed thing, a necessary piece of the environment. If he had stopped or turned away she would have felt it, she knew. She ignored him the best she could and kept trudging.
More of the same. Bushes no higher than her knee, some as low as her ankle. Soil cracked and broken by evaporation gave way to sharp-edged sand dunes gave way to rock scoured billiard ball smooth by trillions of individual grains of sand, each of them rolling, tumbling, microscopic jagged edges catching on the tiny defiles in the stone, tearing and breaking, wearing the rock face smooth a nanometer at a time over eons.
After three days she came to the place where the desert ended and the mountains began again. She bore no illusions about what lay ahead—she still had the map she had taken from Charles’ car and she knew there was another desert on the far side of this new mountain range. Not just another valley but a high plateau of desert that went on forever. Still she was glad to be climbing upward, even when her legs complained, even when her thighs burned with the unrelenting effort. Getting up into high country meant the nights were cooler, the daytime sun less punishing.
In the absence of anything else the mind grows to fill the landscape it observes and in turn it takes on the aspects thereof. After days of walking nearly non-stop she had learned to stop thinking about every individual thing she saw, the swaying branches of every Mormon tea bush, every tiny yellow flower of a brittlebrush. Instead she had come to understand everything as process. In constant motion she began to see the world in terms of movement and change, and any change for the cooler, the wetter, or the rockier was for the better.
She used her hands and feet to pull her way up the Amargosa mountains and into Nevada. There was nothing to mark the border—she had to guess, based on what sense she could make of the map in a place with no unique landmarks. She was well off the paved roads that cut Death Valley into quadrants and the gas station map had very little physical detail to guide her.
Did it matter? If you walked across the country, from one ocean to the other, did it matter at any point what state you happened to be in? She had been holding Nevada in her mind as a goal, an escape—a place where she would be safe from the military and the police and everyone else who wanted to destroy her. Had anything really changed, though? Surely the people of Nevada hated the walking dead as much as the Californians. The desert was providing for her, it was a safe place for her. Maybe she should just stop. Maybe she should ignore Mael Mag Och’s offer, forget about finding her name, just live underneath the cottonwoods, spend the rest of time getting more and more crusty and dry, eating kit foxes and tortoises and coyotes in the smell of sagebrush and baking rock. Maybe she should stay there forever.
She stopped to ponder that and just to sit down for a second. Her feet were killing her. Perched on a rock her body stopped complaining so loudly and her mind began to settle, to gather itself back up. Returning to concrete thought she slowly became aware that the armless corpse was gone. She felt his disappearance as a sudden shock of absence, the way she might have felt on having a tooth knocked out of her head.
Why had he gone? Where had he gone? She spun around, searching the high ridge then closed her eyes and tried the same search again but… nothing. He was gone. She turned and faced eastward—maybe he had gotten ahead of her somehow? No. No, but there was something. She stood at the top of a wandering canyon, the imprint of some ancient mazy river. At the head of the canyon stood a simple wood-frame house. Smoke dribbled out of the chimney to be torn apart by a gusting wind.
People. Living people. Who had somehow scared off the armless freak.
