by Philip Webb
“There!” he hisses.
Hidden in shadow between the empty team poles, I see several figures. They are all kneeling, heads bent forward, as if praying.
“Hello?”
No answer.
“I really don’t like,” whispers Luis.
“Me, neither.”
I sniff at the air, and there is no smell of blood or death, but I already know there is nothing to be done for them.
“We should go,” I decide.
“Shouldn’t we check at least?” hisses Kelly. “There’s kids there. We can’t just ride on and leave them.”
“They’re dead, Kelly.”
“How come they’re kneeling like that?”
It’s not until we reach within ten paces or so of them that all doubt is removed. The patch of ground around them is frozen, ice crystals twinkling in shadow. Their hands dangle from sleeves stiff with frost. Mini icicles hang from their hair. A man, a woman, and two children no older than five.
“Jesus!” breathes Kelly. “It ain’t that cold, huh? What in hell happened to them?”
Their eyes gaze at the ground, and they are white as cataracts.
We stare at the family in silence. It hits me then, in that moment, a feeling so sudden and raw, about my family — my mother long dead, Pa missing, and now my aunt shot down in cold blood. The hurt is a shock — why do I feel these things now, after they have happened? These dead pioneers are nothing to me and yet, seeing them, I feel my own loss, as if it is fresh. I glance at the others — perhaps Luis will be thinking of his own family all slaughtered, and Kelly, of those loved ones she last saw in Valentine, abducted, probably dead.
Luis steps toward the frozen bodies.
“Don’t touch them!” I cry.
Luis throws his hands up, annoyed. “Hey, ¡calma! I only look!”
“Don’t even step onto the ice.”
“You figure that’s Zone handiwork?” asks Kelly.
The sight of the dead children is awful. It is as though they waited for death to come … Why are they kneeling? They begged, even prayed for their lives.
“Not the Zone. Visitors,” I answer at last.
“What? You mean, the aliens?”
“They are in the guise of outlaws. The Jethro Gang. They are trying to find me.”
“You sure is them?” asks Luis.
“You’re being hunted by aliens?” Kelly is for a moment incredulous. But then it is as if she registers all the other madness that has happened to her today. She looks at the clothes in her hands — the clothes of dead people. I think she will drop them in disgust, but she wraps the poncho around her shoulders with a dignity I do not expect of her.
I peer in all directions — across the windblown cemetery toward the town and back the way we have come.
Luis bends to the dirt by the side of the road. “Many tracks, Megan. Riders, they stop here …”
“Christ, how many of ’em are we up against here?” says Kelly.
“Which direction?”
“Is hard to see. I think they split. Some north through graves, some south maybe back to Marfa. Is not so clear.”
“We have to get to the mountains, away from the roads.”
“Damn right,” says Kelly. “There’s dozens of packhorse trails up there …”
I turn to her. “You cannot come with us.”
“What? You’re gonna leave me here?”
“I told you we would direct you off-Zone.” I put my rifle into her hands and fetch her a calfskin of water from my pack. “Keep in sight of the roads but not on them — once you reach Alpine over the border, it will be safe enough for you. From there you can get a bus farther east …”
“Hey, so that’s it? You’re just gonna dump me on a Greyhound? Adios and good luck?”
I point at the settler family, as still as stones. “Kelly, Visitors killed those people. If I had to guess, they were questioned first. About me. About whether they’d seen me come through here.”
“I ain’t running off to Alpine or Fort Stockton or wherever.” She stands her ground, glaring at me.
“You don’t understand …”
“No, you don’t understand! If my folks is anyplace it’s in this crazy-ass country, this Zone. So I’m staying while there’s still a chance they’re alive out here.”
Luis shakes his head. “Is dangerous for you, is dangerous for us. Is like tormenta in the Zone …”
“Yeah, but you ain’t leaving it, are you? So I ain’t, neither. Goddamn it, you owe me! If it’s so dangerous here, you can show me the ropes. Three heads are better than one.”
Three. A remnant of that flash migraine blurs my mind for a moment. What is it about three? Maybe Kelly needs to be with us. But taking a novice — it’s too risky.
“I’m not listening to this.” I mount Cisco. “I told you fair and square when we met — you cannot come; we have urgent business to attend to.”
“Like what? How come you ain’t leaving the Zone anyhow?” she challenges.
“I have neither the time nor the inclination to tell you about our private affairs.” It comes out colder than I was aiming for.
“Well, ’scuse me for asking, Miss High ’n’ Mighty. The way I see it, you got the time but not the trusting.” She marches off ahead of me and it’s clear she’s dead set on heading straight into the mountains, with or without us.
Luis looks at me and shrugs. We can’t very well force her to leave the Zone. I hang back for a moment, feeling bad, watching all the anger and hurt in the way she strides.
“Wait up, Kelly. I’m sorry. Look, if we could help you, we would.”
She whirls to face me. “I know you think I’m deadweight ’n’ all. That I’m out of my depth here. But I was offering to help you, team up. Whatever it is you’re up to. When I know what I need to about Zone surviving, then I’ll be out of your hair.”
That throws me. It is clear she will not be swayed from her course. But if she goes it alone, she will be dead within a day …
“Not a little tempted?” she asks. “Figure we all did pretty good getting off Valentine in one piece together.”
I wonder if we would have been stranded on the falling ruins had it not been for Kelly and her vehicle skills.
“I believe you are a worthy partner,” I begin. “But we, Luis and I, are looking for my father missing these last two years.”
Two years since I saw him. I smart at the sting of his absence as if it were yesterday. He told me to leave those three kestrel eggs be. He showed me how to use his camping stove. He used to hate my aunt’s Bible readings. I thought I had forgotten those things.
Kelly stares at me.
“Our paths are not the same,” I mutter at last.
“How do you know? I’m looking for my family, same as you. Maybe your pop is one them abductees …”
“He’s not. He is alive and well somewhere out there, and I mean to find him.”
“What makes you so sure he’s alive?” Her question is not unfriendly.
“Virgil Bridgwater is the most respected tracker of the entire Zone — no one knows it like he does.”
“Destino,” mutters Luis at my side.
Destino — fate. I do not believe in fate, but many trackers, including Pa, consider the Zone to have a purpose. And it acts, it is said, in mysterious fashion — it is in general hostile, but there are stories, rumors really, that benign forces operate here, too. Perhaps fortune occurs only to lull the unsuspecting traveler, to lure him to destruction. But still … A tracker should be alert to all Zone happenings, good or ill.
I stare at Kelly then. Is it more than mere coincidence that we have come across her? She has appeared on our path after an abduction twenty years ago. Why now? The wolves, it could be argued, drove us into the gloom that obscured the town from view. And I think also about what my aunt said — how the Visitors intend to take this world from us. If she is right, then how would it benefit Kelly to flee east? I planned to come into th
e Zone alone. But now I have companions — first Luis, then Kelly. We three …
“I know my father is alive,” I say to her at last. “He may know how to save us, if we can find him.”
“Save us?”
“The Visitors surely seek to overrun all these habitable lands, to take this world for their own kind.”
“Can’t we put up a fight? I mean, how many of them are there?”
“No one knows. They show themselves only rarely. But perhaps the true threat has not revealed itself yet.”
“What do you mean?”
“The sun and the Earth are … moving. To some new destination.”
“What? How?”
“It is a mystery. There have been three jumps since Visitation. We cannot tell from here because the sun is still too bright. But on the dark side, there have been new configurations of the stars. They happened in the blink of an eye. We are streaking through the heavens in leaps and bounds.”
I wait for her to absorb this news, watching as she begins to imagine what this might mean, what horrors.
“And we’re going where?”
I shake my head. “After each jump, it takes months to pinpoint our new position in the Milky Way.”
“Dragged to the slaughter, eh? To wherever they’re all at.”
“It’s what most people believe.”
“How long we got?”
Luis shrugs. “One year? One hundred? Tomorrow?”
“And your pa, what does he believe?”
I tell her then, about him disappearing into the Zone to search for its secrets, the scrawled map that may lead us to him, the outlaw Visitors on my trail who murdered my aunt, our escape from Marfa.
For some while, she is silent, perhaps in shock at the world she has arrived so suddenly into. It is clear that nothing is how she remembers it.
I show her the map. “The Mavis Pilgrim is a stagecoach route — it is important somehow. But these other places, this graveyard, these rocks — I know nothing of them.”
“You mean you don’t know where you’re headed?” She looks at us in mild disbelief.
“Not exactly,” I admit. “The stagecoach route is north of here between the towns of Hope and Truth or Consequences. There is a tracker at White Sands, a man versed in the ways of the Zone, who may help us decipher the map further.”
She snatches the paper from my hand to peer more closely at it. “About as clear as algebra,” she mutters.
Luis darts a glance at the wagon as if it may harbor lurking Visitors. “They maybe come back, Megan. Vamos, eh?”
“Wait up,” says Kelly. “This last one …”
“Sun and two rocks,” says Luis flatly. “Where is this?”
“Not a sun, butt muncher. A spider. And look — two pillars, one shorter than the other where the cemetery’s at, see?”
“So? Without a name, it could be anywhere in the Zone.”
She grins at me. “I been there. Two vacations. Like the first one wasn’t boring enough. Hiking with my dad. Why we couldn’t go to Disney World like a normal family, I ain’t exactly sure. Trailing round in the sun, looking at Injun crap that’s about a hundred years old or whatever. Boy oh boy, another sacred mountain, gee, another holy burial ground …”
“Kelly, just tell us where it is.”
“Spider Rock, Canyon de Chelly, Arizona. Trust me, it’s a dump.”
Luis smiles. “Destino.”
From Cisco’s saddlebags I produce my Rand McNally atlas of the Zone. It is fashioned from pre-Visitation road guide pages taped together, filled with notes of what I know about the country ahead.
“Which way, kemosabe? Hey, I can’t believe I’m going back to Spider Rock. Vacation number three …”
I face her suddenly, unsure where my temper has come from. “This is no vacation, Kelly. And you’d better stop thinking it is. We are only at the very margins of the Zone here. We will be fortunate indeed to emerge from this country with our sanity intact, even more fortunate to remain alive.”
I spare a final look for the settler family. We cannot even risk giving them a Christian burial.
“There are not just rattlesnakes and scorpions and outlaws and Visitors here, but sinkholes of the mind. The Zone preys upon you — it sows doubt and prejudice and hate and demonic visions. Every step you take from here on in, take it with respect or not at all.”
I wrap up my atlas carefully.
“Does that mean I’m coming?” says Kelly at last.
My outburst is born of fear. Fear that in bringing Kelly along, I am making a foolish mistake, one that a seasoned tracker would never make. But the Zone has given me a message and I cannot ignore it. Perhaps Kelly is the meaning of three. And she has earned a chance. I hold out my hand and she swings up into the saddle behind me.
“The deeper into the Zone we go, the more dangerous and unpredictable it will become. You take your lead from me.”
“Roger that. But I gotta tell you, I’m hungrier than Henry the hungry hound here. You got any Hershey bars? Fruit by the Foot? Twizzlers? Man, I could destroy a patty melt. With double fries. Maybe a McFlurry. Do people eat that stuff now? I’ll bet there ain’t a single wide-load left in America now. Not one. Hey, do you even know what I’m talking about?”
From Fort Davis we ride into the mountains. Their slopes are measled with trees, rising to a sky studded with pink clouds. We trot through dry grasses, past worm-ridden fences collapsing into the undergrowth.
We take it slowly. By the most direct path, Canyon de Chelly is around six hundred miles northwest of us. But it is not simply a matter of following trails, though the trails are plenty. The fastest route to a place in the Zone is seldom the wisest. It would be hard enough if all we had to think about were water and food for both horses and the three of us, weather, terrain, shelter, wild animals, lawless men, and Visitors. What worries me most is our lack of Zone experience.
There are special places of unmoving power — by and large known and avoided by trackers of even limited experience. These are marked on my atlas — the accumulated lore of people who have learned the hard way and were fortunate enough to tell the tale. But the Zone as a rule is never fixed. Laid over the conventional charts of hills and valleys, mesas and ravines, rivers and towns, there lies another set of contours. These shift and settle, flow and swirl, like weather fronts — sometimes sluggish, sometimes gathering into storms and floods. An invisible ocean that washes through the minds of humankind. There are currents to muddy your thoughts, to stir your fears, to sluice away the very essence of who you are.
At the moment, though, my reading of the Zone is quiet — ruling out none of the many different trails that open up before us into the Davis Mountains.
A cold easterly wind brings in damp air and clouds over the escarpments. We rise quickly into the wrinkles between slopes, grasses swishing at the legs of the horses. Bats carve through the air, picking off insects, banking so low we can hear their flight like the hiss of a switch.
We huddle nose to tail under darkening cloud, each of us host to private thoughts. Cisco ambles along picking at any succulent growth he can spy — I envy his ignorance of the whole adventure. I have many misgivings, the most immediate of which is that I must sleep eventually, and I am already tired. Kelly hums gently at my back — she has no idea that here, she is as vulnerable as a child. I must tell her some things or she may not even last the night. But I have to choose my moment. For now I concentrate solely on vigilance.
I watch mist envelop crags and crevices. I watch the sudden burst of crows from a dead tree. I listen to the furtive scratchings of rodents or snakes in the undergrowth. I smell the red dust and secretions from the torn buds of prickly pear. I touch the heads of grasses as they give way to Cisco’s patient plodding. These things are normal. I monitor the land, for this is the best way to sense a shift in the Zone. There are outward indicators, because animals sense these shifts, too, but really it is a way to tune your mind, to discipline it. Only th
en will you be ready when the quivers begin. If you retreat into daydream and comfortable memories, you will be undone.
Of course, daylight remains, but there are changes in pitch that herald the night. The call of the saw-whet owl, exactly as the name sounds. A throb of tree crickets. We make it to the head of Powell Ranch Road by the early hours. By now, Kelly’s demands for rest and food are insistent. I cannot blame her — I’m exhausted, too.
We make camp.
“I ain’t laid my head down since way before you even showed up at Valentine,” she complains. “It’s this damn sundown on freeze-frame — you never know when it’s time for bed. How in hell do you put up with it?”
“Bury your head down a hole. Or if you lucky like me …” Luis produces his coveted United Airlines eye mask.
“Gimme, gimme! Now you’re talking, bro!”
“What you give for it — one night only.”
“Anything. Name it.”
“Cooking and cleaning pans. For one week.”
Kelly lays upon him a torrent of good-natured abuse. But he will not budge.
“It ain’t worth a week, dude. Two meals max.”
“Nooo. You see. You try sleep with just shawl. Then you pay me two weeks! You see.” He flaunts the eye mask, stumbling about the camp in a show of blindness.
“Don’t be swindled,” I warn her. “You’ll grow accustomed to the light. Just tie your neckerchief across your brow.”
“Not the same!” he taunts.
A campfire is certainly a risk in open country, where people can spy the smoke from a distance, but here we are nestled in a steep-sided valley with cover from the mist.
Soon we have a little blaze, and some coffee brewing, and though it is bitterly cold, our spirits are up. Kelly puts in a down payment of one meal’s preparation for the eye mask. A skillet of beans and bacon bits. We take it in turns to mop up the juice with corn bread.
“I’ll take first watch,” I volunteer. “Luis, you’ll have to share with Kelly.”
He nods.