They walked, quickly at first and then slower as the heat pressed down on them in earnest. For the most part the ground was flat and barren, the soil dry, what little vegetation clung to the earth brown and dead and desiccated. Here and there it dipped where rain had rutted it, plates of dried mud peeled up separately from one another.
The next time she looked back, it was waiting at the forest’s edge. They must have been almost a mile away then, but the size of it made distance hard to judge. A landslide of flesh, white and pink and brown and scabby red, banners of wet hair hanging like moss from limbs that coiled around dead tree trunks. Delicate fronds waved among the branches as the thing heaped itself higher, cresting like a wave but never quite breaking for all that it strained toward them.
It doesn’t want to be out in the sun, Jo realized. She thought of her Oba-chan’s melanomas near the end, those dark, raised moles where the skin had died and replicated over and over and over until whatever engine drove it came apart in a rush of flames and screaming metal. Was that thing, that alien or monster or demon or whatever the fuck it was, afraid of getting skin cancer? The others looked back, following her stare.
“Oh God,” Shelby sobbed, burying her face in John’s chest as he wrapped his arms around her. “No, no.”
A voice cut through Jo’s thoughts. Her mouth hung open, drying out. Drool dripped from her chin. Come back, Jo! Please, come back! It has us! It won’t let us go! Please help us. Flesh parting like a sigh. A green eye opening in the raw meat beneath, gazing at her through its thick eyelashes. Help me, Jo.
She staggered back, retching. Hair the color of wheat and honey wriggled out of the ground and caught at her legs, caressing her, wrapping itself in wet, clinging coils around her shins and ankles. Loose earth shook from the tresses as she struggled. Someone had her under the arms. They were pulling her, yanking her back. The earth from which the hair had sprung began to part, solid wedges of dirt rising as something beneath pushed its way to the surface, plump lips puckering, milky slime dripping from a cat’s rough tongue.
Only you can give me what I need.
And then, like a soap bubble popping, the voice was gone. No hair. No silky wet caress. Just the distant bulk of the Cuckoo at the edge of the wood, a vast serpentine thing coiled tight around a huge dead pine, fronds and feelers blooming from its fat segmented sides and shapeless head. It loosed another scream, raking empty air with scythe-like forelimbs. Shelby was still crying. Malcolm’s face was ashen, his hands trembling. Jo stared at the bloated thing, John still holding her up, until at last it uncoiled itself slowly from its perch and squirmed away into the wood, trees swaying and crackling as it brushed against them or used their trunks to anchor its progress.
None of them spoke until the sound of its retreat had faded into the distance, replaced by the hiss of the wind scouring the open flats. “It has her,” Shelby said, and Jo knew it had spoken to the others, had uncoiled the dirty tendrils of its mind and offered them its luscious, dripping gift. They had felt their own version of it last night, she realized, the dying embers of whatever telepathic fire it had worked so hard to bank in their minds giving them a single moment outside of aloneness, a little chemical byblow of its attempt to digest them into its protozoan bulk. Union, pure and true and beautiful.
“We have to go,” said John, his voice cracking.
Slowly, one by one, they turned and walked away from the memory of that sandy hair, those green eyes, the bruises and split lips and bloody teeth. Each of them, in their own way, left the ghost of Nadine and all the others behind.
They were out of water by the end of the first day. Jo thought maybe they should walk at night, avoid the sunlight that had left them all red and peeling, lips cracked, hair stiff, but the cold was worse, the ground riddled with gopher holes and squat dwarf cacti bristling with two-inch spines. A short while after sunset they stopped in their tracks, the sound of ragged breathing suddenly unbearably loud in the absence of their footsteps, and sank down to the dirt to bolt their MREs—a brownish paste masquerading as veal cutlets in tomato sauce—and collapse into exhausted, dreamless sleep.
In the morning Jo woke so sore she almost cried just getting to her feet. Her shoulder where Celine had clawed her throbbed and burned and the joints of her knees were swollen. She’d started her period sometime in the night and her underwear and the crotch of her jeans were soaked through and drying to an itchy, iron-stinking crust. At least her head had finally stopped aching, even if her stomach was in knots. She shuffled over to where Felix and John were poring over the atlas, spread out on the dirt and anchored at the corners by stones.
“We just need to keep heading for that rise,” croaked Felix, pointing toward a brown smear on the horizon where the flat, endless hardpan rose slightly into a small hill. He cleared his throat, tapping a finger against a faded illustration on the map. “My uncle’s a surveyor; these lines mean elevation. The town should be a little way past it.”
“I’m so glad we’re following the map of a guy who built a fallout shelter in the middle of nowhere and then slipped in the shower and died,” said Malcolm. He squatted not far off, picking at the wrapper of an MRE. “I can’t wait to fall into some fucking sinkhole he forgot to chart.”
“Shut up,” snapped Jo. She took a step toward him, suddenly unable to stand the sound of his whining for another second. “If you don’t have anything useful to say, just shut up. Shut up. Can you even do it? Can you do anything but fucking run your mouth?” She pushed him. He fell back on his ass and it felt good to see his eyes go wide. He scuttled back from her on his rear, heels kicking dust. “Shut up!” she shouted, catching his shin with a glancing kick. “Do something or shut up!”
He whipped something at her, a rock the size of a walnut. A bright, infuriating pain like being flicked by a giant just above her eyebrow. She staggered back. She felt raw flesh when she probed the wounded spot, and her fingers came away sticky with blood. She squeezed her eyes shut, fighting down an urge to scream and throw herself on Malcolm, to claw his face and gouge his eyes. It wasn’t his fault he was a stupid fucking clown. When her pulse finally stopped hammering, she looked down at him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. His voice was small.
The others stood around them, tense and tired, John with tears in his eyes. Jo swallowed. “Me too,” she forced out. It was still so cold. For a moment they all stood there, saying nothing, as though they were trying to find the thread that would take them forward out of this huge, flat void of broken earth and empty sky. Those who could eat did so.
Gabe was almost done pissing by the time Jo thought to shout at him to stop, to finish in one of the canteens.
In case they needed it.
Every step found a new way to hurt John. A grinding, burrlike pain in his heel. A molten sting as torn blisters shifted between shoe and foot. A dry, feverish stiffness as his calves cramped, and the gummy chafing of the skin under his belly, which shifted each time he swung one leg ahead of the other. His head ached. His mouth was dry and cottony. He kept thinking about a hot summer day when his mother had taken him out for homemade strawberry rhubarb ice cream from the little place a few miles from his grandfather’s cabin on Lake Superior. He could still taste the tart, sweet ice flavor on his tongue. He could still see the tears in his mother’s big blue eyes—his father had been sleeping on the couch for months by then, and had for years until her diagnosis—and the soft weight of her belly in her lap. He knew even at nine that she didn’t think of herself as beautiful, but to him the sun rose and set with her smile. Mama’s boy, his father had called him more than once, lip curling in disgust.
Phillip Bates said it again the day he found John’s magazines, all those muscular, sweat-slicked bodies so unlike John’s own—I’ve been patient with you, learned to live with the laziness, the lying, the mama’s-boy theatrics, but I’ll be damned if I raised a queer—and now his son realized that he’d just been guilty. He hadn’t been able to love her, his soft round wife with her wavy golden hair and ruddy cheeks, the product falsely advertised by the thin, hollow-cheeked woman in their wedding photo, and he hated that John hadn’t minded at all, that his fat wife and his fat son had adored each other, had even sometimes been happy in spite of the cold, looming presence of his martyred disapproval.
It felt strange, to realize something like that out here where it didn’t matter at all, where it couldn’t shield him from the dust and grit the hot wind drove across their path or prevent the sun from crisping his face, his arms, the back of his neck. His skin was hot and tight. What a joke, a fat boy thinking about ice cream as his body started shutting down. How’d that old chestnut go? I love you like a fat kid loves cake. He’d heard that one a lot at the fat camp his father and Sheila had sent him to a few years back. Sometimes it had snuck into his thoughts as he lay in his bunk at the end of the day, heartsick and crying for his mother, who’d been buried just a few months earlier. I love you like a fat kid loves cake. I love you like a fat kid loves cake.
It was so dumb on its face, so bluntly simple in its cruelty, that he hadn’t figured out until the humiliation of his final weigh-in the deeper, more insidious barb it had hooked deep inside him, tangled up in bone, impossible to remove: that he could never again hear the words “I love you” without finishing the sentence in his head.
Like a fat kid loves cake.
They had to drink it, of course. By noon they were all practically delirious, so dehydrated they could barely cry, and so when the canteen came around Gabe tipped it back without hesitation and swallowed a mouthful of acrid piss. It wasn’t as bad as he’d feared, really. He’d tasted it before while sucking cock, a little trace of bitterness in the gamey bouquet of an unwashed groin. At least the hunger was easier to bear. It made him feel good. Special, almost. Like he was sacrificing something for the greater good by leaving his unfinished MREs scattered across the desert. Maybe he’d never get a chance to be a girl, not really, but at least when they found his body out here his collarbones would be standing out like the prows of battleships.
I’d have to pick a whole new name, he thought. Buy new clothes. Hormones, somehow. And then what, spend my life saving up for someone to cut my thing apart and shove it up inside me?
He tried to make it a hateful thought, a lash of punishment thrown back over his shoulder, but just the idea of it brought such a wave of relief that he almost stopped in his tracks. That was exactly what he wanted. His whole life he’d been creeping along with the weight of his manhood crushing him as flat as a cockroach, dirty and untouchable even when a lover was inside him, when someone blushed and smiled just at the sight of him. It was like the minute he’d slipped out of his mother the doctors caught him in a trash bag full of putrid sludge and tied it off, trapping him inside for the rest of his life.
Shelby was a few paces ahead of him. He wondered if she’d felt this way, if she still felt this way. How long did it take to slip out from under their burden and start life as something new? He watched her hips move, her ass swaying from side to side. She looked like a girl. A real one. A sudden spasm of misery cramped his stomach; he would never look like that, those curves, that hourglass shape. Shoulders too broad, hips too narrow, chest too wide. He would be a cheap knockoff of a woman, a slouching scarecrow in garish lipstick and blue eyeshadow.
He found himself wishing he was home in Idaho again, walking somewhere in a shaded wood. It was so much easier there to feel safe, to feel unseen and anonymous. Here there was no escape, nowhere to hide or shelter or rest, just the unrelenting emptiness stretching away on all sides, heat haze shimmering at the horizon, and the sun staring down at them like the eye of God. A formless little nothing in a plastic bag full of filth, writhing as it drowned. He wanted to lie down in the dirt and curl into a ball. He wanted Shelby to hold his head against her chest and whisper that he was a good girl, he was pretty, he was good and sweet and perfect. He wanted his mother, though the thought of her touching him as she hadn’t since the lake made him sick to his stomach. He wanted her to tell him it would be all right.
She sent me here to die, he thought. They both did. They’re home now with Mackenzie and they’re not thinking about me at all. They don’t care that it’s been three weeks. They don’t care that I haven’t called. They want me to go away so they can go back to being perfect, so she can forget the lake and try again with a fresh kid. She’d never do it to Mackenzie. She’d never do it to her little girl.
Her only daughter.
They stopped to eat as their shadows lengthened, spilling dark over the rocks and soil. Gabe’s legs felt like overcooked spaghetti. His spine ached and his head felt curiously empty, as though his thoughts were draining out his ears to dribble on the sand. Ham and scalloped potatoes. It tasted like ashes. A swig of piss to wash it down. This time he swilled it through his teeth to ease the rasping dryness in his throat.
“Are you going to finish that?” John croaked.
Gabe felt a surge of selfless euphoria as he handed the plastic packet to the other boy. Now it wasn’t his decision. He had to go hungry, because someone else needed his share. In a perverse way it comforted him to watch John eat, to see those soft, round shoulders move as the other boy scooped grayish paste into his mouth. His bulk was reassuring, every calorie poured into it one more that separated them, that assured Gabe he would never look that way, never have to drown in a body like that, wrists creased like a baby’s, heavy rolls spilling over the waistband of his shorts.
You’re being cruel.
They started walking again not long after. For a while they went in silence, Jo leading them and Shelby at the rear, their shadows slithering huge and dark and spindly beside them. It seemed impossible that just a day ago they’d all been in each other’s arms. Maybe it had been a dream. Maybe all of it had been one long and terrible nightmare, and any minute now he’d trip or pinch himself and wake up back in his bunk at a good old regular American torture camp for troubled teens. In another few weeks they’d drive him home and his father would say gruffly that he liked the short hair and his mother would make a comment about his color, and then at some point he’d climb into the bath and slit his wrists with a broken Coke bottle and they’d find him there, face slathered in clownish makeup, staring at nothing while flies cleaned their forelimbs on his glassy, open eyes.
There’s no place like home, he thought bitterly. The rise in the distance didn’t seem any closer. His feet hurt. His head had started to swim, and his sunburns were peeling. By sunset he knew he’d look like one of Francis’s lizards midmolt. He wondered if he’d still have pee in his stomach when the coroner cut him open, assuming anyone found their bodies out here. The desert was probably full of half-grown bones. He was still mulling that unsavory thought when Malcolm, his voice hoarse and ragged, started singing.
Great big globs of greasy, grimy gopher guts
