There was a noise behind him and he spun around. There was a form hunched in the driver seat of a late-’90s pickup, dark and motionless. He raised the Beretta and edged closer. A rat leaped from the shattered driver window and scurried under the truck. He tried the latch and it clicked open. Inside was a human body, its skin a thick pelt of green moss, dappled with dark nodules. Mushrooms grew from the eyes and mouth in strange bouquets, like something left in a compost bin. The corpse wore a polyester jumpsuit with the name “Buddy” embroidered on the breast.
Joe fished a pack of cigarettes from Buddy’s front pocket and lit it one with a lighter from the case. A sense of well-being filled him as he inhaled. He blew the smoke out into the repair bay and leaned against the bed of the pickup, just staring at the corpse.
“Ain’t no way to die, Buddy,” he said, and took another drag. “But I thank you for the smoke all the same.”
Outside there was a scream.
Joe dropped the cigarette and ran back through the minimart with the pillowcase in one hand and the pistol in the other. Another scream. The minivan jostled in its frame. He could see Jeanie inside, shielding Cora with her body. A large stag swiped at the van repeatedly with a heavy rack of antlers. It reared and attacked the side window as if trying to break the glass and then bounded stiffly into the air, landing with its eyes dark and mad. Joe dropped the pillowcase and raised the Beretta. The animal took notice. It pranced around the front of the van and lowered its antlers to the ground, steam piping from its heaving snout. Joe inched closer and curled his finger around the trigger.
He never had a chance to fire. The engine roared and the minivan leaped forward, knocking the animal onto its ribcage. The stag kicked its feet, trying to right itself but the tires spun and smoked and the beast couldn’t get clear of the front bumper. Joe ran to the van, slid the door open and jumped inside. Jeanie was in the driver seat, her teeth clenched and her hands gripping the wheel as if she were wringing the life from it.
Joe wrapped his arms around Cora.
“Let’s go,” he said.
Jeanie threw the transmission into reverse with her foot all the way into the pedal. The stag slumped and then began to right itself, but she already had the vehicle in drive and swerved out onto the main road with the animal lost in a cloud of tan dust.
Jeanie gunned the minivan down a straightaway, her knuckles white on the wheel. “Find anything good in there?” Her voice was cool, and she said it without taking her eyes off the road.
Joe peered at the rear window. He thought he could make out the pillowcase still lying in the dirt. He sighed, and then slid a roll of lottery tickets into the cup holder of the center console.
“Maybe we’ll get lucky,” he said softly.
Jeanie whipped her head around with a piercing look, and then turned back to the road without saying a word. She glanced at the stack of lottery tickets a few times. After a moment she started to laugh. Her laugh grew sort of wild and then Joe started laughing too.
“Why are you laughing?” asked Cora.
“We could win the lottery,” said Jeanie, still laughing.
“That’s good, right?”
Joe reached over the driver seat, squeezed Jeanie’s shoulder and hugged Cora with the other arm.
“Yeah,” he said. “That would be great.”
They drove along a cinder-colored highway through a forest of tall pines. The ridge on the other side of the valley was charred and barren from a recent wildfire. Near the town of Hume they passed a wood-paneled station wagon headed the other direction, crowded with old and young alike. The car slowed as it passed, their faces sharp and wide-eyed and pressed against the glass. A dog glowered in the rear window like a gargoyle.
“Where are they going, Daddy?” Cora said.
“The other way. Back where we came,” said Joe.
“Back home?”
“No. Somewhere else.” He handed her a canteen and twisted off the top. “Home isn’t safe.”
Cora drank a few sips and then wiped her mouth.
“Because Mother Nature wants us all to die now,” she said, staring into the passing trees.
“Nature doesn’t want us all to die,” said Jeanie. “It just wants balance.”
“Because we unbalanced it?”
No one replied at first, as if her words had landed somewhere and needed time to disembark.
“Yes,” said Jeanie. “We did. Not you or me or your father, but all of us. It’ll take some time, that’s all.”
“How much time?”
“I don’t know.”
By evening, the pine forest had given way to old and tired oak trees that splayed from the hillsides like the hands of the dead. They pulled off the highway at a crossroads where some pioneer-era general store rotted alone in the dark. Joe untied the ladder from the roof rack and tilted it against the weathered eves of the old building.
“Can’t build a fire up here,” he said. The piston in his prosthesis groaned as he climbed the ladder. “But we got plenty of room and it’s far enough from the tree line.”
A coyote yipped somewhere in the distance and Cora clambered up the first few rungs with her eyes wide.
“Can we use the lantern, Daddy?”
“Yes, but only for a bit. I’ll let you sleep with the flashlight though.”
“Okay. Promise we’ll be safe?”
“Cross my heart.”
The girl fell asleep not long after dark. She lay nestled in the blankets with her breath deep and steady while Jeanie and Joe watched the sky blacken and the galactic core pierce the horizon like some strange frond unfolding in the void. They lay silent for a long while.
“Do you believe it?” Joe whispered. “That nature’s just trying to make some correction?”
“Maybe. I don’t know,” she said. “It’s the simplest answer. Doesn’t nature always find balance?”
They were silent again. Joe watched a satellite sweep across the dome of the sky.
“I wish I believed in balance,” he said. “It would make this all worth it somehow. I just think chaos is more regular. You know, maybe a system forms here and there like a bubble, and everyone thinks it’s perfect. Maybe it is for a while. But then it pops and there’s nothing left but the chaos that was waiting the whole time.”
“Like what you saw overseas?”
“Yeah, like that. The bubble just popped and everything filled with . . .” His voice trailed off and he shook his head.
“With what?”
“Chaos. Mayhem.”
She found his hand in the dark and held it as they fell asleep.
“Mommy,” Cora said, shaking Jeanie awake. “Daddy’s choking.”
Jeanie launched to her knees and grabbed Joe by the shoulders. The moon was now overhead and she could see a bright froth trailing from the corner of his mouth. His eyes were white and upturned. He was gasping for breath.
“Find the flashlight,” she told Cora.
“I don’t know where is,” she cried, scooping the blankets in a pile. She lifted them and shook, and a small Maglite clattered on the wooden roof. Jeanie grabbed it, flipped on the light and shined it at Joe.
Around his wrist was a tight loop of vines that grew from the rotten gutters of the old building. They had bored into his radial artery and anchored to his wrist with a pulsing green sac like some kind of kelp pod. Jeanie screamed and tore at the vines and sliced them off with the bowie knife. She stabbed at the sac but it kept pulsing like some angry heart. Joe arched his back and kicked out his legs.
“Joe! Just hold on, honey,” Jeanie pleaded.
“Don’t die, don’t die,” Cora sobbed.
Jeanie groped for the propane lantern and twisted the filaments from the canister. She stabbed at the canister valve with the bowie knife until it began to hiss.
“Stand back, Cora,” she said.
She flicked a cigarette lighter and a blinding stream of fire poured from the valve, jolting the shadows all around them
. Cora tumbled to her side as Jeanie leveled the stream of fire over the pulsing node on Joe’s wrist. The thing quivered and shrank from the heat and then detached, tumbling away as it sizzled against the old dark wood.
Joe gasped and choked. His eyes rolled back to center and he reached out to Jeanie with his hand shaking. She threw the canister down to the road and held him there while he tried to breathe. Cora grabbed his hand and wept, her tears falling in the webs of his fingers. The glow from the road faltered and darkened, and Joe’s breath stopped.
“No baby, no, don’t you dare,” said Jeanie.
Joe’s head fell to the side. A single vine emerged from his mouth and searched the contours of his jaw line before lying still against his cheek.
They sat there for a while, listening to the sound of rustling all around them. The building was creaking as if it were shifting off the foundation.
“We have to go,” said Jeanie.
“We can’t leave him,” said Cora, still holding Joe’s hand.
“It’s not safe, honey.”
“We can’t,” sobbed the girl. Her tears glistened on her cheeks.
“He’d want us to go. Let’s go now.”
When the sun rose they had travelled two hundred miles in the dark, stopping only once at a weigh station to empty the last gas can into the tank. By now the hills had flattened to a wide sandy pan dotted with endless sagebrush.
“Maybe he thinks we’re dead,” said Cora. She was sitting in the passenger seat with her feet on the dash and a pair of purple sunglasses on. It was the first thing she said since they started driving.
“Who thinks that?”
“Uncle Vernon.”
“Well, we’re not, are we?” said Jeanie.
“Daddy is. Maybe he is too.”
“I think Uncle Vernon is alive.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he lives in the desert, just like Daddy said. Things don’t grow well in the desert.”
Cora looked out at the desert scrub toward the bald hills on the horizon as if she were waiting for everything to dry up and die.
“Remember back home when you had me spray the weeds when they grew out of the cracks in the porch?” Cora said.
“Yes, I remember.”
“Maybe we should look for more of that stuff.”
“Weed killer?”
“Yeah, weed killer.”
“That’s a good idea,” said Jeanie.
They came across the town of Randsburg, a choked-out mess of pitted stucco shacks and crooked trailers. Many of the buildings were charcoal shells, burned to the ground as if sparked by nothing more than the noonday heat. The entire town looked like an extreme comment on spontaneous combustion.
There was a billboard ad for an Indian casino on the side of the road, and beyond it Jeanie noticed what looked like a junkyard. Two Winnebagos were parked out front. She slowed the van and parked it in the shade of the billboard.
“Why are we stopping?” Cora asked.
“We need gas.”
“I don’t see any gas stations.”
“Those RVs have big tanks. We can siphon the gas out like—”
“Like Daddy showed us?”
“Yeah, like that.”
Jeanie unhooked the gas can from the back of the van and slung the garden hose over her shoulder. She was wearing one of Joe’s sleeveless T-shirts, and she could almost feel her skin turning red in the baking sun. She had only taken a few steps toward the junkyard when Cora rolled the window down and called to her.
“I want to come,” she said.
“No,” said Jeanie.
“Please can I come?”
Jeanie looked at the girl over the top her sunglasses. She seemed so small in the van window.
“Fine. Just stay close.”
They walked together up the dirt path to the junkyard, past a broken-down modular home that squatted in the shadow of a desert willow. There was a garden of pinwheels and dead grass around the front door of the modular, and a faded American flag that billowed from a bracket by the door.
“Think someone lives there?” Cora said.
“No, nobody lives there.”
“How do you know?”
“All that dead grass blocking the door. Plus, no footprints anywhere.”
When they reached the Winnebagos, Jeanie set down the gas can and garden hose and pulled Joe’s Beretta from the waist of her jeans. She circled both vehicles, looking in the dirt for tracks. She leaned underneath the chassis.
“Still safe?” Cora said.
“Yes. Nobody’s been here for a while.”
Jeanie plumbed the filler housing with one end of the garden hose and started the siphon with the other end. There wasn’t a lot in the tank, but there was enough to fill half the gas can. She moved on to the other RV, but that one had a lock on the gas cap. It took some time to bust it with the bowie knife. By the time she got the siphon going she had lost sight of Cora.
“Cora?” Jeanie called. Gas was flowing into the can.
Cora didn’t respond.
“Cora?” She shouted this time.
There was a loud boom like a shotgun blast, and Cora screamed.
Jeanie ran around the side of the RV with her pistol drawn. The door to the RV was open and Cora was crouching beside it, still screaming. Jeanie scooped up the girl and drew her away from the door, the Beretta pointed at the opening.
“Are you hurt?”
“I don’t know,” said Cora, sobbing.
“Any blood?” Jeanie was patting her down while keeping the gun in the air.
Cora held out her palms and there were red scrapes where she had fallen in the dirt. “A little,” she said.
“Tell me what happened.”
“I just opened the door and it exploded.”
Jeanie crept slowly to the door of the RV and peered in from the side. A string was looped around the door handle and led into the darkness of the vehicle. She squinted into the shadows and saw a shotgun leveled at the door, anchored onto the opposing counter with silver duct tape.
“What was it, Mommy?”
“A trap. A gun tied to the door.”
“Was I shot? I felt wind on my head.”
“No. You got lucky. It was set for someone taller.”
Jeanie cleared the trap and untaped the shotgun from the counter. Inside the RV she found a mummified corpse covered in a crust of orange lichen. It was lying on a Formica table, its mouth agape, with green polyps crowding its lips and eyes. In the bunk above the corpse were six gallons of distilled water, a box of shotgun shells and three cans of chili con carne.
They loaded what they had found into the van and emptied the scavenged gas into the tank. The sun was now cooking the ghost town in a wave of hot, undulate air that blurred the road. It only took a minute or two before they passed the last shanty and were headed into the open desert.
“Did that man die the same way as Daddy?” Cora asked. She was looking in the side mirror as the town faded behind her. “Did nature kill him when he was sleeping?”
“I don’t know how,” said Jeanie. She reached across the cab for her hand. “It’s possible.”
“I thought it didn’t happen in the desert.”
“We’re not all the way there yet. When we get there, we’ll sleep in the dunes where there’s nothing but sand.”
“And during the day we’ll stay with Uncle Vernon?”
“Yes, he runs the visitor center. He’s a ranger, remember?”
“I remember. There were big palm trees and a rose garden out front. He baked us a loaf of raisin bread.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
Cora was scratching at her scalp and pulled something from the curls. She was rolling it around between her fingers. He noticed the blood.
“What is it, Cora?”
The girl shrugged.
Jeanie opened her hand and Cora dropped a shiny round ball into her palm.
“It’s buckshot, fr
om the shotgun,” said Jeanie. She checked her head for more, then after not finding any, squeezed her hand. “You got lucky.”
By mid-afternoon, the scrub had become sparse and only a few gray shrubs sat upon the land like piles of cigar ash. They turned off the highway onto a two-lane road that had been paved within the past few years.
“Will we ever go back for Daddy?” asked Cora. She was playing with a Lego mini-figure dressed as a pirate. “You know, after Mother Nature stops being mad at us.”
Jeanie’s eyes welled with tears, as if Joe’s death was something she could no longer bury.
“Yes,” she said. “We’ll go back for him.”
“Badger,” said Cora.
“What?”
“Badger. That’s the town he died in. I saw it on a sign.”
“Okay. We’ll go back to Badger when this is all over.”
“And we’ll cremate him? That’s what he wanted.”
“I know, honey,” said Jeanie. “I know.”
The road turned sharply south along a bend where a few Joshua trees angled to the sky like dark scarecrows and a sage-stubbled hill lobed at the sky. Jeanie suddenly pressed the brake with both feet and the tires smoked and skidded to a halt. A barricade of fence posts and barbed wire stretched across the road and into the desert on both sides.
“What is it, Mommy?”
“I don’t know. Just stay calm, and stay inside the van.”
“Okay.”
Jeanie reached behind the seat for the shotgun and checked both chambers. She handed the Beretta to Cora.
“The safety’s off,” said Jeanie. “You just point it and pull the trigger, okay?”
Cora held the gun like it was a piece of wood.
“I need you to say okay.”
“Okay,” said Cora.
Jeanie stepped out slowly, leveling the shotgun over the barricade. The sun was a white blot in the sky that bored into her skin as if through a magnifying glass. She stepped toward the jumble of wood in the road, and as she did so a man rose from behind the barricade with a pistol in his hand. Another man appeared on the other side of the woodpile. The long blade clutched in his fist glinted in the bright sun.
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