by Philip Webb
“What? I’ll take my turn. I ain’t a kid.”
Luis stares into the flames, reluctant to cross swords with anyone, especially Kelly.
“This isn’t the same as just staying awake. You must guard against shifts in the Zone as well as physical intruders.”
She sighs in a bored way. “Holler if I see a flying town, yeah?”
“It is considerably more taxing.”
“I was kidding, Megan. Can you really not tell the difference? OK, I’m all ears.”
“You must disappear.”
“What? Now you’re kidding, right?”
Luis smiles, his eyes intent upon me, remembering perhaps when I tried to teach him these tracker skills on small forays at the edge of the Zone.
“No, disappearance is the aim. Metaphorically speaking. Look and listen and smell and touch everything around you. Remember everything you can, down to the tiniest detail. That is called setting up a perimeter.”
“You know there really is only one job for you when you grow up. Headmistress …”
“You need to be able to picture the perimeter even with your eyes closed. Keep patrolling it in your mind. Not just the outer limit but the whole area you have marked out. It is easier in an enclosed space like this valley, but in open country the wider the perimeter, the earlier the warning.”
“Warning — like of what?”
“Animals, winds, smells — they will leave and enter your perimeter. You must just keep them all under scrutiny. Zone dangers are not always apparent in the physical world — in fact, the most deadly are certainly not obvious.”
“Then how the hell am I meant to spot them?”
“If you have set the perimeter up correctly, you will feel the onset of Zone perils. As a quickening of the heart, or a racing of the mind. Your senses will tell you, even if you cannot articulate what is wrong. You must be outside of petty concerns, the grumbles of your belly, the itch in your toes, or you will not notice the change until it’s too late. That is why you must disappear. You must leave your skin behind — be out there in the Zone, at least as far as the perimeter.”
“You still ain’t said what I’m meant to do if the horrors come knocking. Sure, if a mountain lion sniffs round the horses, I clash pans, wave round a stick, pick up a rifle. But what if I get the heebie-jeebies?”
“Wake me up. Quietly. Quickly. Act on anything you feel is strange. Promise me.”
“What happens when crap meets fan? Then what?”
“I cannot say. No two Zone perils are the same. They may be inside dangers or outside, or both. We can only react. Promise me — dismiss no instinct of fear, however small. False alarms are inevitable.”
“Cross my heart and hope to die. How long’s a watch?”
“Three hours. It’s hard, but you have Luis — you can share the burden of the perimeter.”
“So if you’re traveling on your own, how can you keep an eye on things?”
“The best trackers set the perimeter up and patrol it in their dreams.”
“Eh?”
“I was kidding. They do critter sleep.”
“They what?”
“Their brains shut down about seventy-eighty percent. They sleep with their eyes open. With their backs to a wall. Like hunted animals.”
“You mean they don’t sleep.”
“They enter a state of semiconsciousness but their senses are on alert for changes in the perimeter. It is not easy and it is not restful. Trackers age beyond their years. Some go mad from lack of genuine sleep. But it is possible. Horses sleep standing up. Birds sleep on the wing. I am not adept. But I will practice awhile when it is your turn to watch.”
As the flames of our campfire haze the air, I set up my perimeter. Kelly grumbles for about one minute about how the sunlight will keep her awake forever. Then she is instantly asleep, lying in her poncho as if poleaxed.
Luis flicks the elastic on his eye mask. I tell him his bargain with Kelly won’t last, that she’ll see she’s been duped. Sleeping in the Zone is easy — it’s staying alert that’s hard. He shrugs with a smile, and it is as if we are just camping out on the edge of Marfa — no cares.
“I trust you, Megan. Watch safe.”
Eye mask down, he sings a rambling ditty in Spanish, but even before it is finished he, too, is asleep. I watch him for longer than I should, his gentle breathing, his arms sprawled out on the open ground, and I’m amazed suddenly that he is here, in this wild place, in my care. I enclose Cisco and the Appaloosa into my protective sphere, taking note of their jostling arrangement. Sometime into the watch, I have the valley so corralled in detail that I can afford briefly to think of the sheriff of Marfa. I pray for him to pull through despite the pain he must be suffering.
I rouse the others at four-thirty in the morning, waiting until they are alert enough to take on the watch. I try for the critter sleep but I am too far gone. I listen to Kelly and Luis, envious of their mild bickering, grateful that they are here with me.
An hour later, Kelly shakes my shoulder. It is a smell that has alarmed them though it has abated. They cannot name it and I cannot pick it up even though I stay awake with them for twenty minutes. The horses do not seem unduly perturbed, although that is no guarantee of safety. I sleep again. And dream of the shoot-out at the jailhouse. In this version, the sheriff does not come to my rescue. The outlaw Visitor walks through the bars as if they do not exist. And within his eyes I see fires. As distant as bonfire beacons. Pa calls me. But he is far away — not in the jailhouse. He calls from a place where the golden flames live. Not a warning but a beckoning. And I must be quick.
I wake with a terrible start, as if my legs are mid-stride.
Things are instantly wrong.
The perimeter is all out of kilter.
Luis is trying to calm the horses.
Kelly points southward, the direction we have journeyed from. The sky is a breathtaking black. Impossibly, clouds are spilling in from two opposite sides of the mountain range.
“Ain’t no ordinary storm, that’s for sure …” Her voice is drowned by thunder.
And spiking down from the clouds comes a bolt the shape of lightning. But it casts no light.
It is black, like a fault in the sky, like a crack to the dark side of the Earth.
“If that ain’t hellfire, then I don’t know what is.” Kelly is mesmerized, as I am.
I scramble up the scree to get a better view of the storm. It is huge and it is coming this way.
Another black fork tears down the sky. It leaves a mark on your eyesight, like real lightning. Great swathes of rain move across the plain — and at this distance they are truly startling, like the skirts of the Northern Lights, but dark and impenetrable.
I count the seconds to the thunder rolls. They bounce around the peaks like trapped stampedes.
Kelly joins me on the outcrop. “We gotta get outta here, Megan.”
“What was that smell? Do you remember now?”
“Are you crazy? We’ve gotta go!” She pulls my arm.
“No, it’s important. The smell, Kelly — it was a warning.”
“It weren’t nothing. Pretty faint. I only caught it for a moment.”
“Just you, or Luis also?”
“Both of us, same time. I dunno. It was like it didn’t belong here. But then it was gone.”
“What do you mean, it didn’t belong here?”
“Just weren’t what you’d expect, I guess. Felt out of place.”
I watch Luis down in the valley floor. He is trying to settle the horses — they jitter about, starting this way and that. The storm dismays them but it has not struck terror into their hearts. Neither are they comforted by Luis, and that feels wrong. They are afraid of something else.
“Isn’t it strange that you cannot identify the smell?”
“Jesus, Megan. Are you even awake yet? That storm’s gonna be here five minutes tops and it’s laying down black light! That reads bad in anybody’s book, don’
t it?”
“We cannot outride it. There is another danger …”
“What? Worse than the storm out of Revelation? Can we just go?”
She does not wait for my reply, just bounds back down the scree toward the camp.
“Kelly, stop!”
But she either does not hear me, or she chooses not to.
I take one last look at the thunderhead. Zone weather is often outlandish, sometimes deadly. But it is usually a consequence of something else. Threats are oblique here. I try to read my quivers but the messages are crossed, contradictory. It would seem the only sensible course — to flee in the face of such raw and dark power. But … my dream of Pa. I have to come to the danger, to face it, not to run. The wind kicks up in restless squalls. Curtains of rain cloak the foothills — they are so thick I cannot see through them.
Kelly yells at me from below, frantically waving her arms. Luis is struggling to keep both horses in check. If I were alone, I would sit the storm out, but things are slipping from my control.
As Kelly sees me leave the outcrop, she breaks into a run toward the horses. All too late I see the true danger. At the campfire we were three — watching over each other, strong somehow. But now we have allowed ourselves to be separated.
“Kelly! KELLY!”
She does not heed me. I lose my footing near the tail end of the slope and crash through the remains of our camp. Tin plates flip up into the wind like giant coins. The storm is already upon us. Flight is pointless.
I yell at them to stop, but the wind is deafening, ripping through the valley now, sweeping the grasses flat in violent swirls. Kelly leapfrogs over the hind legs of the Appaloosa and clean into the saddle. It is a reckless way to mount a horse in this weather, and it bolts immediately. Luis holds on to Cisco just barely. I watch Kelly barreling straight down Powell Road. And I know she’s riding headlong into disaster.
I see the whites of Cisco’s eyes as I mount him, and for a moment he is crazed — just tossing every which way. Luis roars a question at me that I cannot hear. But it can only be one thing. Do we follow or not? My quivers say no. But how can I leave her? Without Kelly, I would not even be here.
I help Luis into the saddle behind me, then as we charge away after her, the rain hammers in.
“¡Buena decisión!” he calls out to me. Good call. But is it?
I am sodden in seconds. We have not reached the first bend before I see muddy white torrents spilling over parapets on either side of me, filling the road. Forget Revelation, this is Genesis. Another bend, then a longer, flatter stretch. Luis clings to my waist and yells encouragement to Cisco. Ahead, I can just make out Kelly. Is her horse slowing?
My quivers are going haywire. A wave of rain pummels down so hard I lose sight of everything, and in that moment I sense a shift in the Zone. I feel it as a dread worse than the storm — a closing off. We have passed some kind of boundary, a point of no return. The rain thrums into my jacket and turns in an instant to hail — stones the size of cobnuts.
Kelly has pulled up. The Appaloosa circles and shies from the road beyond. As we reach her, the sound of hail becomes truly deafening. Like the mountains above us are being reduced to gravel. I look up and back just in time to see the black lightning up close. It seems to split the valley in two — a vision of night that this land has not seen since Visitation. And as the sky heals up, the rain gives a taste I did not expect. Salt. A mineral tang like cold blood.
Kelly yells above the hail. “Rotten fish!”
“What?”
“The smell!”
Now I catch it. She points to the ditch alongside the road. It is choked with dead fish — heads and tails and spines that look half eaten.
Abruptly the hail stops just as Kelly is shouting. “I DON’T LIKE THIS! LET’S … get out of here.”
“We can’t — the way back will be barred. I felt it as we came through.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just that!” I snap at her. “This is a one-way valley. You come in, you can’t go back the same way. The horses will refuse. We’d have to leave them here.”
“We can try.”
“We cannot try! I told you to wait, but you would not listen. This is what happens when you panic here, when you make rash decisions on your own.”
Luis tugs at my arm.
A great shadow falls over the road.
And from above comes a new sound. Thrashing.
I duck as a salmon hits the road beside me and writhes weakly.
The temptation to look up is unbearable. The thrashing becomes a roar.
“Get down!”
And an avalanche of fish engulfs us.
The road runs silver and red — a seething, thumping torrent of creatures, as though vomited from the heavens. They slap and gape and die in a sliding heap that rises to Cisco’s hocks. He is rooted, beset by fears from every direction, slithering in fish guts, bowed by the sheer weight of the deluge.
It lasts for a full minute, then as suddenly as it began, it ends. A few small fry join the massacre. Luis lifts a squid gingerly from his hat. It is his way of brazening out the fear — this comic gesture. A good way, I think. Any distraction is welcome to keep panic at arm’s length. The stench is epic — a rising tide of destroyed shoals.
The horses stand stunned.
Kelly stumbles through the sludge of scales and entrails. “Jumpin’. Jesus. Christ.”
She looks at me and laughs.
And something enormous plummets down between us. It splits as it lands, showering us with gunk. We all jump and crouch at the same time, our screams gagging in our throats. A swordfish. Bigger than Cisco.
The horses screech and tear free. They would be gone if they could get a sure footing in all the mess. Poor Cisco raises his head higher and higher in a desperate bid to escape. It takes me a full five minutes to calm him.
“Is this actually happening?” asks Kelly at last.
I pluck up the courage to glance at the sky, just in case there’s a whale on the way down. The clouds are dispersing.
Spasms of fear run through me, even as I try to master them. “It is really happening. And we are still in trouble.”
“You ain’t kidding. I hate fish.” She gags at the smell.
“Quiet!” My quivers are at full pitch. Why is the valley sealed off? Something about the fish.
Luis draws and cocks his rifle.
“No, wait!”
They lumber in from the slopes, out of shelters and outcrops high above, some leaping and shaking their shaggy pelts. They are starving. They have been waiting. The rotten remains of the last downpour have barely sustained them. Grizzlies. Dozens of them.
They bound into the feast, raking it up in their giant paws. We edge together.
“Don’t shoot, Luis. Not unless you have to.”
“Yeah, roger that,” says Kelly. “Like maybe they ain’t too bothered about us, huh?”
A gigantic male pads into the melee. His hide is scored with claw marks — one eye missing. He rears up to his full height and sends out a rasping cry to others. A challenge perhaps? Squabbles break out. We are close enough to hear the clash of teeth, their labored breathing.
The horses dart and rear, flashing the whites of their eyes. I try to keep Cisco close and call words of comfort to quiet his terror.
My Zone sense is clouded, but safety beckons. I feel it in quivers — now that the fish have fallen, the road ahead is clear, just for a while, as the bears sate their hunger.
“Keep together. Move slowly. With me.”
“Let’s hope they ain’t hankering for a different menu.”
“Is OK. We all smell fish. Not horse. Not human.”
Our retreat is delicate. They know we are here but they are preoccupied with territorial disputes, with gorging themselves on easier pickings. But they are everywhere, and it would only take one to rush us.
The slavering, the bellowing, the crunch of fish heads splitting open. It’s too much
for Kelly. She hands me the reins to the Appaloosa and heaves over to vomit. To her credit she manages it quietly, then makes a heroic effort to hold the rest of her supper down.
“Holy Moses. It’s like all your Fridays at once.”
A matriarch crosses our path.
“You’re too close to her cubs!” I hiss at Kelly.
“Hell, I’m just trying to stay away from the big ones!”
“Well, don’t. She will take us apart if we get too close to her young.”
We pull away from the main group and pick up speed as the fish haul thins out. Luis takes the rear, backing up with his rifle primed, but the bears do not follow. A mile farther down the road, we reach the storm’s limit — just a few fresh herring caught in the branches of trees, like glittering fruit.
Now that the danger has passed, my anger mounts.
“Cod alive! We was nearly kippered there, eh?” quips Kelly.
I don’t answer.
“Hey, lighten up, you mullets. Cod be worse …”
I round on her. “Kelly, you nearly got us killed back there.”
“Hey, you led us into these mountains in the first place.”
“Yes, and I would have led us safely out of them again if you hadn’t taken matters into your own hands. You never ever just charge off without taking the measure of the Zone around you. Ever.”
“The storm —”
“The storm was not the greater menace! The black lightning, the hailstones, the salt rain — the Zone wants you to be scared! Don’t you understand? It wants you to lose your head with visions of the Apocalypse. But it is just the displacement of a faraway sea. The Zone does these things. It is what counts as natural in these parts. But the real threat comes from the bears that know the fish are coming.”
“I think I know that already.” Her sulk is tinged with embarrassment.
“But you didn’t know it five minutes ago! Did you? The valley is a giant trap. One of the easier ones to predict. And we walked straight into it. The bears could not leave if they wanted to. That’s why they are starving. We were lucky it rained when it did or they would have eaten us alive.”
Luis puts his hand on my wrist. Gently. To tell me that I have said my piece.