Chapter Text
It is nearing midnight, almost five days after Emily left the empty town in the middle of the emptier sands. The dunes faded on the third day, melting into a jumble of scree-studded hills and rocky cliffs and rough hard earth, interspersed with hardy desert shrubs and cacti. Small pebbles shift and roll underfoot, sliding against each other as she zigzags her way down a hillside, and each step brings with it a small cloud of dust.
The moon provides enough light for Emily to walk (or rather, hike) by, even on the uneven rocky ground. She's become practically nocturnal now, moving from dusk till dawn, then curling up under her thin emergency blanket, shiny side up to reflect the pounding sunlight and try to keep herself from being cooked. In daylight, the heat is almost unbearable, and sunburn constantly threatens. So Emily sleeps the day away, and drinks when she needs to, and then packs up and moves on under cover of darkness.
She kind of likes hiking at night. There's a certain meditative quality to it. Stars shine brightly overhead with no human light to block them out. The moon drifts serenely overhead, and the repetition of her footsteps on the moonlit land forms a rhythm of peaceful emptiness to time her breaths to. One, two, three, four. Left, right, left, right. Step by step. On and on. And slowly, as she walks, the nighttime desert comes alive.
Little desert squirrels scurry from crevasse to crevasse, stopping to nibble on a plant or stuff their faces full of seeds. Jackrabbits hop leisurely among the sparse, coarse grasses, then bound away when she gets too near. The yip of a coyote echoes from rock to rock, somewhere in front of her, and another coyote answers. The lizards and snakes are busy sleeping, well away from the cold of a desert night, but the occasional green hummingbird that darts across her path more than makes up for it. Once in a while, a bighorn sheep bleats in the distance, and sometimes, at dawn or dusk, she catches a glimpse of a vulture circling high in the sky, riding the warm air currents with ease. Grasshoppers blend in with the stony soil until they move, and as always, each sunrise is met with the rough rasping caws of the crows. There is more life out here than she'd ever imagined, between succulents clinging to the rock outcroppings and escarpments and the creatures that take shelter among them.
And yet.
Even this far out in the desert, the silence still haunts her. It follows in her footsteps, mile after mile, slinking along behind her and waiting for a chance to crawl in and claim her as its own. Watching. Lingering. Echoing in each uncertainty, in every restless moment.
It haunts her.
Even at night.
***
It is just after dusk on the sixth day when Emily notices the clouds gathering in the sky in front of her. She's packing up the emergency blanket, crouching beside the stunted Joshua tree that had given her a small sliver of shade in the burning heat of the afternoon. Most of the water bottles in her pack are empty by now, but they're lightweight, so she keeps them around in the hope that she'll be able to find somewhere to refill them. She's hungry, really hungry, the handful of nuts she's munching on barely taking the edge off, but the hunger is welcome compared to the listless, restless emptiness she'd been trapped in, back at the old store six days behind her. She swallows, takes a drink, and zips up her pack.
When she looks up, the clouds on the horizon look lower, darker, hanging on the edge of the sky and rolling inexorably forward like an avalanche in slow motion. In the five minutes she's spent packing up, they've already moved visibly closer, heavy, towering, grey, harbingers of the storm-- and Emily reminds herself that a storm out here could be nothing more than lightning, dry crackles and flashes that set the bone-dry juniper bushes alight-- but she still can't keep herself from hoping.
She hears the rain before she feels it, the rumbling drum of droplets upon dry earth standing the hairs of her arms on end. There's almost no light left in the sky, but she can still make out the darkened line where the torrent begins to fall. Quickly, she takes all the empty water bottles out of her pack and opens them, lining them up on the ground with their mouths gaping at the sky. The pack is covered with the emergency blanket and wedged in the fork of the Joshua tree in the hopes of keeping it relatively dry, and then she steps back and waits for the rain to come.
The storm rolls in like an avalanche, slamming into the earth around her with a sharp dusty beat. The drops sting as they slam into her skin, cold and careless in their embrace, soaking through her shirt in seconds. She loves it: the feeling of cold water rolling across her shoulders, down her back, through her hair, wetting her to the bone. She's missed this, she really has. She tilts her head back, squeezing her eyes shut, and opens her mouth to shout in relief, almost in prayer -- one more open mouth in the line of bottles gaping at the sky.
The rain lasts an immeasurably long yet inconsolably short amount of time, and then it's gone, just as quickly as it came. Emily can't help but laugh as she gathers the bottles and screws their lids on, joy and exhilaration coursing through her veins. None of the bottles are more than half full, some much less, having tipped over under the onslaught of water, but it's enough to give her a few more days. The pack (along with her little food and spare clothes) is still mostly dry and it doesn't take long to put everything back in it. Then she shoulders it, turns west again, and starts walking.
***
On the ninth day, some time before dawn, Emily comes to a road. She doesn't see the sun-bleached asphalt until her feet notice the change from the crumbling, dusty flats to the raised hardness of blacktop. Then she looks down and finds herself toe to toe with a dotted yellow line that runs off on either side of her, north to south. To her left, the road recedes to a razor-thin vanishing point, a hundred miles distant. To her right, it crests a small rise and disappears from view.
She turns north, toward the rise, and keeps walking.
***
Emily sees the car just after sunrise.
She's been pacing along the road for a couple hours now, steady footfalls on the gradually lightening pavement, following the faded paint of the dotted yellow line. Her shadow walks next to her, long and dark and aging with the dawn, pointing left in a constant affirmation that west is there, and always will be. The road twists and turns gently, winding its way above sagebrush and thistles but mostly heading north. It is still cool out, morning hanging comfortably in the air, but she knows the heat will come soon enough. So she walks north, and as she walks, she scans the roadsides for any scrap of shade that she could make her camp in.
At first, she thinks the car is just another boulder, albeit one possibly big enough to camp in the shade of. As she gets closer, it resolves into a pale blue sedan, well-rusted and squatting defunct by the side of the road. A crow is perched on top of it, pecking at the roof with a bored, listless air. When it sees her, it squawks and flutters away, flapping a few yards down the road and then stopping to watch her with beady eyes.
Emily ignores it and heads toward the car. Maybe there's water, she thinks, ignoring the part of her brain that wonders why the car was left all the way out here. She doesn't want to consider how it got here. She doesn't have to. She just has to look and see if there's something to drink--
A half-mummified corpse grins at her through the driver's window.
She turns away and fights back the urge to vomit. God, she should have been expecting that. There was no way the car got out here without a driver.
The crow hops closer.
Emily glares at it. "You could've warned me," she says. Her voice sounds rusty and harsh in the dry desert air.
The crow simply looks back at her, as if to say I'm here, aren't I? Isn't that warning enough?
Emily laughs. "You're a little feathery asshole," and the crow squawks, indignation or impatience or probably just Emily personifying things. She laughs again and turns back to the car--
There are two Gatorade bottles in the backseat.
The door is locked, of course, so Emily looks around for an appropriate rock to break the window with. It doesn't take long, there are rocks all around, but she is feeling very impatient about this. She only has one water bottle and some salted almonds left in her pack. The Gatorades are a blessing.
The smell that washes out when the glass shatters is absolutely overpowering. Emily doubles over and stumbles away, sitting on a rock on the far side of the road and coughing. She stays there for a while, waiting for the smell to clear, and it's five minutes later before she realizes the crow is gone.
The smell doesn't seem to be getting much better, but she holds her breath and heads for the backseat anyway, opening the door and grabbing the Gatorades and then bolting back to her rock. One of them has been opened, orange and only half full, but the other one (light green) is untouched. She puts them in her pack and gets ready to set up camp. There's a shrub here by her rock, and the two mean she should at least get a little shade for most of the day. Apart from the faint stench of decomposing flesh, it's a nice spot.
She's halfway through making her emergency blanket into a shelter when she hears the cawing. It's too much for one crow, voices overlapping in a cacophony of squawks, and when she looks up she's not surprised to see at least twenty crown flying in from the west.
She is careful to avert her eyes as the crows alight on the car and hop inside. She has grown desensitized to a great many things, but there are still some sights she will never be entirely accustomed to, and this is one of them.
The crows finish their meal eventually and flap away westward again, back toward where they came, and Emily finds herself thinking--
If they came from there and went back to there, they must have a reason for going there.
Maybe-- just maybe-- if she follows them, she will come to water.
***
By the time night comes and Em is able to pack up and head on, Gatorade is all she has left. She hasn't sweat that much, but her body needs fluids, no matter how few she actually has. She drinks the Gatorade sip by sip as she walks, conserving as carefully as she can, savoring the sweetness and coolness that soothes the scratching in her throat. She has to make it last as long as she can. Still, it's gone by sunrise, and a headache begins to build.
She keeps walking.
She can't stop now, can't afford to set up camp and wait the day out. She's losing fluid, drying up from the inside out, and she has to stay on her feet, head forward, search for any sign of water in this parched, baking land.
She keeps walking.
Left, right. Left, right. Step by step. The headache pounds. Left, right. Each step raises dust. It catches the wind and gets in her eyes, her nose, her mouth, making her cough and choke. Left, right. Left, right. Westward, step by step. Foot by foot. Day by day. On and on. As the crows had done.
Left, right. Left, right. Forward. On and on. A long shadow beginning to stretch in front of her, pointing westward. Away from the slowly rising sun. Toward that dark line splitting the dust just before the horizon.
West, where the crows had come from.
West, where the crows had gone.
The sun beats down. It crushes her shoulders. It scorches the ground and burns her feet. She stumbles. She wants to stop. She can't stop. She's afraid to stop. If she stops she might not be able to get back up again.
Left, right. Left, right. Step by step. The horizon moves closer. Her family stands up out of the dust, comes and walks beside her. We walked through a desert once, they whisper, and she says back, yeah, but that was just a hike and there was a parking lot at the end of the trail with our minivan and suitcases and a cooler full of snacks and lemonade, we weren't lost in the desert, and her father laughs, we were always lost, and her mother says, the whole world is a desert, and Emily says back, now it is, but it wasn't then--but she stumbles, loses sight of them as her knees hit the ground, and when she looks up they're gone.
She blinks and she's standing again, then walking forward, her steps unsteady. It was a hallucination, she decides, and pushes on. Time passes, she staggers forward, weaves a little, but keeps heading west. The sun is folding her over, loading pound upon pound into her empty backpack. Her legs fold and she drops to all fours. Head down, bowed below the sun. She has to keep going. She can't stop here. She looks up--
--and Michelle is there, tugging at her shirt with non-existent fingers, begging, wide eyes and so many words Emily can't even hear. Emily blinks and reaches, her hand sliding right through where her eyes say Meesh's chest is. Get up, Meesh says, come on, move, you can't die here, come on, you've got to move, and Emily finally finds the energy to force herself vertical once more. Why does it matter so much, she asks, why can't I die here, and Meesh swears and says, someone's got to survive, and Emily laughs and says, but surviving is so much work and I'm feeling lazy today, I'll put it off till tomorrow, and Meesh lets go of her and steps back, says, but you have to, someone has to, you have to, and Emily is tired.
Why don't you do it then, she says, and Meesh sighs and shakes her head and says, it's gotta be you, who knows who else is left, she laughs, who knows if I'm left: certainly not you. And Emily is tired but she doesn't want to disappoint Meesh, even if it's not really Meesh at all--just a hallucination--so she says, okay, and Meesh hugs her except Emily can't feel it, and she whispers in Emily's ear, just keep walking, okay, I'll see you in heaven...
And she melts away into the cracked earth.
Emily keeps walking. Left, right. Left, right. Step by step. Gotta keep focus. She starts to count her steps. Left, right. Left, right. One, two, three, four... thirteen... twenty eight... ninety six... three hundred seventy five... she loses count around four hundred, but it doesn't really matter, she'd stopped focusing a while ago. She must be nearing a thousand steps, or maybe only six-hundred, although maybe as many as two thousand. Maybe less. Maybe more. It doesn't matter. It never did. Nothing really does anyway.
Ten or ten thousand steps go by and the dark line is close, wide, much closer than the horizon. It shakes with every step. Or maybe she's shaking with every step instead. She realizes something, someone, is next to her and turns her head to find her old friend Jessica there, still dressed in the Garden City High track uniform, just as young as the last time Emily saw her. Wanna race, she asks as she used to, I bet I can beat you this time, and Emily frowns, we haven't talked in ages, and Jess shrugs, when you run you don't have to talk, her voice both apologetic and accusing.
Emily sighs. Well, you're floating, she points out, that's an unfair advantage, I have to run on the ground, and Jess grins sharply, we've been running like this for seven years, you should know that me being three inches off the ground doesn't mean anything, and anyway this race here is more of a relay than anything else, and Emily smiles back, you were always good at those, and Jess laughs, of course I was, and she pulls out a baton and waves it, now I've carried this thing all the way so far, I think it's your turn. You just gotta take it to the finish line, she points toward the dark line, and don't drop it, okay?
That was one time and it wasn't my fault, Emily rolls her eyes, and anyway it didn't even count, and Jess laughs again, turning around to drift backwards, and Emily realizes that she's somehow still walking. But the whole state saw it, Jess teases, and Emily scowls, I liked you better alive, and then feels bad, but Jess giggles just how she used to and says, me too, and offers her the baton. Emily reaches out, puts her fingers to it, and it vanishes.
Now it's yours, Jess says, and whirls away on a breeze.
When she's gone, all that's left behind is silence.
Emily walks for a little more, then blinks and finds herself facedown on the ground. Her knees are stinging, and the palms of her hands leave red-brown smears in the dust. The pain barely registers. She's empty. Her head feels like someone's taking a sledgehammer to her temples. Her eyes don't want to open. She should get up and keep moving, she knows, but her legs aren't obeying her anymore. No matter how much she tells them to straighten out and get her walking again, they just won't move.
Kendy is next to her now, crouching, a hand on her shoulder. Just a little farther now, she says, almost there, just a tiny bit more... but Emily can't do it. She says so, and Kendy shakes her head, no, of course you can, you're so close, you can't give up now, you've come so far, there's water just ahead, and Emily raises her head, how do you know? and Kendy says, I can smell it.
Emily can't smell anything.
How do I get there? she asks, and Kendy smiles, just get up and head forward, straight like an arrow, you can't miss it. She holds out a hand, and Emily takes it. Her head pounds, and when she opens her eyes, Kendy is gone and she's walking again.
She looks ahead. The dark line is growing. That must be where the water that Kendy was talking about is. It was a dehydration-induced hallucination, but she can still believe in what it said. She needs water. Kendy said it has water. She's almost there. She's almost made it, just a few hours more--
She blinks.
It's in front of her. It runs before her feet, a stretch of negative stretching out for miles. It's real. She's real, and she's here. All she needs to do is take one more step and she'll be there, at the dark line, where the crows went and came from--
She steps.
Her foot finds air.
Several pebbles fall with her, knocked loose from the rim. A crow caws hoarsely, somewhere below, then above, and she swears she smells water--
--she hits the ground--
And then nothing.