by Lucy Taylor
I check the number of full water bottles left in my pack, am shocked to discover there’s only one left and that it’s less than half full. I’ve been drinking water throughout the day, but my throat feels like I’ve gargled with sawdust and brine, and my lungs burn like I’ve inhaled the desert. Still, I’m not ready to turn back, a determination that’s strengthened when I find a bright gob of blood on the rubbery pad of a prickly pear cactus. From the looks of Hank’s tracks, it appears he’s faltering badly, leaning so heavily on the cane that it punches into the sand an inch or two deep.
Even as Hanks fades, so does the day. The shadows elongate and the sun blowtorches the horizon with bands of vermillion and deep mustard blue.
And the wind picks up, scouring my exposed skin and hurling huge, tangled masses of tumbleweed around like bizarre beach balls. Its bluster plays tricks with my hearing. A woman’s voice—plaintive and whimpering—plays counterpoint to its keening. A second voice joins in and initiates a fevered duo—my father raging about the temptations of demons and the abyss of the damned where fallen angels feed on their prey. It’s a rant as lunatic and mindless as the woman’s, but more disturbing for notes of threat and contempt underlying it.
The sky suddenly looks too big to be real, a painted backdrop meant to deceive me. The gritty wind, full of sadistic trickery, is bent on erasing Hanks’s tracks.
To the west, a cloud of bats rises up from a nest of creosote bushes and takes to the sky like a flurry of semaphores from the pen of a demented scribe. Instinctively I duck down and cover my head as their dark mass swarms by. The rush of their passing distracts me; the warring voices subside. My head clears, and in the distance, I see the stark outlines of the Joshua trees.
In the fading daylight, the grotesque trees appears eerie and blighted. Black, oval blooms freight their branches, giving some trees the appearance that they are ready to uproot from the earth under the weight of the vultures that roost in them. The stench of carrion wafts toward me, and a low murmur makes the hair stiffen on the back of my neck. It’s the voice of a woman begging for help. Pleading for water.
Then it changes, and Hanks cries for water.
The sound, unmistakably real this time, echoes from far back in the trees. I catch a glimpse of Hank’s khaki hat as it flies off his head, of a body tumbling and falling, hitting the ground amid puffs of sand and a cascade of stones. For a second, the wind and Hanks mourn in unison. Then silence.
I run toward him, but the sunset fires scalding light into my eyes, and my strides are unsteady and blundering. A shadow coiled beneath one drooping, heavy-laden tree brings to mind a fetally curved body. I grab for it and recoil as one hand disappears into flesh so decomposed that it slides off the bone in clumps of powdery fur, while the other grasps a jawbone missing most of its teeth—the scraggly remains of a coyote or fox. Other, larger bones, flecked with threadbare scraps of cloth, suggest deaths older and feedings more savage.
“Mr. Fitch?” The words, coming from behind me, aren’t so much spoken as spat, and I whirl around, arms raised but not fast enough, too late and too slow to block the knob of the cane before it staves in the flesh between my brows.
««—»»
“Well, finally. There you are.”
I don’t know how much time has passed, ten seconds or a day, but Hanks’s gravelly voice is edged with impatience and thwarted intent. The cane he brandishes is slick with blood and a caterpillar-like tuft of something I recognize to be one of my eyebrows adheres to a carved notch in the ivory.
I want to seize him by his wattled neck and wring the life from him, but when he squats down and turns his vexed gaze on me, I can taste his loathing and feel the spikes imbedded in his every word, and I shut my eyes.
“You didn’t hear what I was saying, did you? You were…elsewhere. No matter. I was speaking of the deserts of Norway and New England and Brazil. Can’t tell you their names, because they don’t exist yet. But they will. You’ll see. Oh, just give it time.”
I try to swallow, find my throat clogged. “I want…water.”
He sneers. “Oh, don’t we all!”
In the bruise-colored dusk, he hobbles back and forth, hunched and scowling like a traveler on a subway platform awaiting a long delayed train he knows in his heart never will come.
Suddenly he spins around and wags the cane a few inches away from my face; the sudden, violent motion in front of my eyes off-kilters a slice of my brain, blurs my vision and stymies my tongue. When I try to speak again, my parched throat produces only a feeble croak that elicits a look of disgust.
“You think you’re so unique, don’t you?”
He rolls up the right pant leg, reaches down and pops off the prosthesis, revealing a chewed stump of something oozing and raw, like what you’d see in some third world butcher shop. The charnel house smell of that suppurating stump makes me gag, but what’s worse is that Hanks doesn’t seem unduly discomforted. Like he’s been existing this way for a very long time.
He lays a paternal hand on my shoulder. “We’re not so different, you and me. That woman you named Opal, the one you found near Stovepipe and chose to keep for yourself, I understand how that happened. No place lonelier than the desert, and a man has needs that a lap dance in a gentlemen’s’ club won’t satisfy. I took a woman once too for my personal use—she was a Berber girl from the Tenere whose family threw her out for being unchaste. Unlike you, though, I kept her tightly bound, so she couldn’t escape into the desert where some sheepherder could find her.” He exhales a snort. “A sheepherder, for God’s sake! Like such occupations even exist in this day and age!”
He hops backward, stork-like on the one leg, teeters a bit, then reattaches the prosthesis. “Didn’t surprise me I had to forfeit a limb. I took what didn’t belong to me after all. Bitch of it was, the leg was still attached when the birds ate it.”
The tears spurting through my lashes shame and shock me. They’re also precious drops of moisture that I try to capture on my tongue, a futile effort that makes Hanks’s eyes crinkle with contempt.
But the tears produce more tears and, after that, words that are old and dreadfully familiar. “I’m sorry, so sorry. I won’t do it again. I promise I’ll stop. I won’t kill anyone else!”
Hanks cocks his head, perplexed and peeved-looking. Then he stands up, his creased face sad, avuncular, and kicks me in the head.
When my vision clears, Hanks is bent over me, studying my face while a black ant the size of a paperclip navigates the ruts in his forehead.
“You misunderstood me,” he says, as though there’s been only a slight, inconsequential interruption in our conversation. “My purpose isn’t to stop you from killing. It’s what you do, and you’re good at it. Gifted even.” He gestures toward the trees with his cane and the vultures roosting there stir, hissing softly, their naked necks stretching and curving into question marks. “Not here, though. Not anymore. From now on, yours are the deserts of the interior lands, the hellscapes of your creation. Deserts so vast you can wander for eons before finding someone to kill. Or someone to fuck. But don’t worry. You won’t be alone. After you left her this morning, someone helped Opal take a sheet into the bathroom and showed her how to hang herself from the shower curtain. She could be free now, but she’d rather be angry. She wants revenge for what you did to her. And she’s still so very thirsty.”
He gazes around at the skeletal trees with their dark, restless fruit and lifts up the cane. At once the vultures hissing grows louder, unnatural, imperative. Some of them take to the air, swooping so low that I can feel the foul breeze from their passing rustle my hair. I know there is very little time.
“The people you met in the desert,” I blurt out, “Maisie and Claude, did they..?”
“Talk about you? Of course they did. But don’t worry about your mama and daddy too much. They were headed to their own desert anyway. You just sent them there sooner.”
Hanks grin is inhumanly wide. His mouth creaks open lik
e a rusty-hinged crypt and belches forth a bevy of soft, struggling things, tarry and mewling, that flee into the darkening sky and are plucked from the air by the vultures. They are the souls of the lost and the damned and I know one of them is my own.
“Safe journeys,” he says, before his face is obscured beneath a barrage of obsidian wings and stabbing beaks.
««—»»
When my screaming stops and I risk opening my eyes, the sun is still setting and constellations unknown to mortal astronomers swarm in the dome of a blazing red sky. I’m alone in a Joshua tree forest and, a few yards away, an assembly of vultures is squabbling over the remains of my foot.
Hanks is gone, but his cane lies within reach.
The birds bolt down their feast and take to the air, one by one, as a woman’s voice, familiar and piteous, cries out for water. She sounds as near as my heartbeat and as far away as the other side of the moon.
After a while, I pick up the cane and start hobbling along, knowing that I have all eternity to find her.
About the Author
LUCY TAYLOR is the author of seven novels, including Dancing with Demons, Spree, Nailed, Saving Souls, Eternal Hearts, and the Stoker-award winning The Safety of Unknown Cities. Her stories have appeared in over a hundred magazines and anthologies, including The Mammoth Book of Historical Erotica, The Best of Cemetery Dance, Twentieth Century Gothic, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and the Century’s Best Horror Fiction.
Most recently her work has appeared in The Mammoth Book of Horror presents The Best of Lucy Taylor, Danse Macabre, Exotic Gothic 5, and the Best Horror of the Year #5.
Taylor lives in New Mexico, where she volunteers with cat rescue organization, attends Buddhist retreats, and plots daring escapes to exotic and fantastical places.