Chapter 18
SUNBAKED PAINT SINGES MY PALMS AS I SLAM THE trunk of Veer’s car closed.
I try not to wince. I didn’t wince when Brian extracted vial after vial from the lumps of tissue in his basement lab.
I helped him pack it in ice and hauled the cooler up the stairs balanced on my shoulder. I didn’t want him to carry it for me.
“Thanks,” I mumble, then clear my throat. Keep it polite. “I really appreciate it. I’ll try not to bother you again.”
“No problem.” Brian shrugs, squinting into the sun from under his baseball cap. “Just don’t make a habit of it. And don’t tell your mom how to find me.”
“Yeah. Even if I did, she…” I catch myself before I finish the sentence with wouldn’t remember it anyway. “I won’t.”
“Anything I can get you for the road?”
I think of the orangey, stinking water. “No thanks.”
“Okay.” He scratches his arm. His nails run red tracks through the dark hair. “It’s a long drive back. You can think about what I said.”
I dig my thumb into the key fob, and the car warbles its response. I don’t have to entertain Brian’s delusions of supremacy. He doesn’t know what’s real any more than I do.
“Actually.” I pause with the car door halfway open, my hip wedged into the space it makes. “Did Uncle Bill ever mention a woman named Martina to you? A friend of his, maybe?”
“Don’t think so.”
“She disappeared last year?”
“Doesn’t ring a bell.”
Last try. “Okay, did he ever say anything weird about, like, flayed men? I texted you about it, but I wasn’t sure…”
Brian turns. His shadow falls across me. He looks bigger, suddenly, from this angle.
“Where I grew up, we called him ‘the man from the desert,’” he says softly. “But he’s a story someone made up to scare kids. That’s all.”
“No, yeah, I know.” Something in his tone makes me want to get into the driver’s seat and push the gas pedal as far down as it goes.
“It’s just, I don’t know. When I went to check on Uncle Bill’s house, it looked like someone had broken into his office, and he’d been writing an email to someone about the flayed man—the man from the desert. I thought maybe it was you.”
Brian lifts his ball cap to run a sweaty hand over his forehead, then shoves the cap back over his eyes. “And?”
“My mom’s been talking about him too. Claiming she saw him.”
Those ice-chip eyes fix on me. “Maybe she did see him.”
“You just said he’s made up.”
The muscle under one of his eyes twitches. “I know what I said.”
“Anyway, our version doesn’t live in the desert.”
“Maybe there are two of them.”
I’m not sure what to say to that.
Brian looks straight into the wind and says, still in that same soft voice, “Well, since you’re so interested, here’s how we tell it out here.
A long time ago, there were more of us, a lot more, and we wandered the deserts of the world.
Mojave, Atacama, Gobi. His people, our ancestors, they didn’t try to hide. They weren’t afraid to kill.”
The wind howls, and I taste sulfur.
“Their one rule was ‘We stick together.’ We kill them, not each other. But the man from the desert, he was ambitious. And he was smart. He knew that he could live without limits, if he wasn’t afraid to break the rules.”
It’s different from the version I know, but I can guess what comes next. “He turned on his family,” I whisper. “He ate their hearts, so he could live forever.”
“Something like that.” Brian’s smile is ghoulish.
“He hunted the weak willed first, the ones who trailed too far behind. And he hunted the ones who challenged him, who tried to claim that solidarity or assimilation were the key to freedom. And then, eventually, he began to hunt for fun. Now, what we tell kids out here, is that he’s still out there, waiting in the canyons.
He lures you in by claiming he can tell the future, but if you see him, you’d better not stick around to listen.
You’d better run. Because once you see him, that means he’s got your scent.
That means he’s coming to eat your heart. ”
My own chest spasms, muscle and iron and bone.
“He’s got no human suit, so he can only hunt at night,” he continues. The wind dies down, and for a second, the world is all yellow light. “But he’s got a thousand years of practice.”
I blink, and there’s Brian, and the brown of the house and the brown of the desert.
“But it’s all bullshit, right? My mom just, she keeps talking about him like…”
Brian leans in. The desert air slides slimy fingers up my back. “Bill thought it was real. How about when he gets back, you ask him.”
I smell his mixture of sweat and mistrust, antibacterial spray and a lifetime of believing in his own superiority. I smell his curse rearing on its hind legs, desperate to attack. And him, deciding whether to loose the chain.
“Are you fucking with me, Bill’s niece?” he whispers.
“No,” I choke out. “Sorry—it’s really not—thanks for helping us out.”
Then the moment’s gone. No more dread. No more threat blocking out the sun.
“Sure.” Brian reaches around me to tug the car door fully open. It’s like the last few minutes, the conversation about the flayed man, never happened. “Anytime.”
I smile big enough to show my back teeth and say, “Appreciate it.”
As I settle into the driver’s seat, Brian calls, “Hey.” He retraces the path from his door to my car. Something metal jingles in one of his pockets. “Give me your email.”
I find myself frozen. Prey again.
Brian scowls. “Or not.”
“No, um.” I scramble for a smile. This is a sign that Brian wants to keep helping us, right? I spell out my email address, waiting for him to type it into his phone or write it down on a notepad, but he just nods.
“Okay. Drive safe now.” And he’s disappeared back through the brown door and into the brown house, the only sign of him the faint movement of one of the curtains.
My back twinges as I pull away from the curb.
I can’t get myself to relax, even with Brian out of sight.
The steering wheel is so hot to the touch I’m scared to breathe in, in case I smell my palms burning.
A rusty kid’s bike lies abandoned in the driveway next door. I wonder again about Brian’s neighbors.
Better not to.
It takes me till I get back on the highway to finally fill my lungs all the way. What’s in the trunk will feed us for two weeks. That’s two more weeks to find another solution, because I’m sure as hell not coming back here.
I don’t think to check my phone until twenty minutes into the drive. There are three texts from Veer.
Twenty-three minutes ago: All done
Eighteen minutes ago: Ellis? You okay?
Six minutes ago: where are you. please come back already I hate this place fuck
Sorry, I text back. Be there in ten
When I pull up, she’s squatting on the curb, elbows on knees, face a hurricane.
“It was fine,” she growls, before I can ask. “Let’s get out of here.”
As the highway unfurls under our tires, the sky grows dull and dark, the color of a fresh bruise.
Veer is restless in the driver’s seat, putting on music, then turning it down, alternating between humming to herself and squinting into the windshield.
When we stop for gas and fresh ice, I text Joanne: Have you been able to check on my mom today? How is she?
Yesterday the desert was so beautiful. Now it’s just gray blankness.
It starts to drizzle as the stoplights fade and we cross into another long, dead stretch of asphalt.
We sit in silence. What’s waiting for me at home?
Rage? Hurt? Desolation? Or what if, worse, she woke up again while I was gone, brain fully functional, memory patched over, and I wasn’t there to hold it tight and make it last?
I told her I hated her.
I told her I hated her, and then I left.
Veer coughs. I can smell everything—her reticence, her longing, her fear that she’s fucked this all up. She hasn’t, of course. It was me.
“So.” Her fingers drum on the steering wheel. “Seen anything good lately?”
“Not really.” I watch thirty-year-old sitcoms because sometimes that’s the only thing that keeps my mom from breaking down in tears. I haven’t seen anything new in months. “You?”
“That movie about a bunch of farmers in a murder cult. Did you see it?”
“No.”
“It was terrible. Like, really bad.” She laughs, and for a second the fog lifts and I feel like myself again. “Not even, like, so bad it’s good. Just, straight up, sucks that I wasted my money on a movie ticket, bad, bad, bad.”
She goes for another laugh, but it comes out strained. I’m not sure what to say.
“Does your mom like movies?” she asks, after a while.
“No.”
“Does your uncle?”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay. Do you have any plans this weekend?”
“No.” I want to cry. I want to say something true. I can’t seem to do either. “Just work.”
She gives me a look and doesn’t try again.
The rain starts up as we cross back through Tonopah. Big fat drops, beating down on the windshield like drumbeats. Veer smacks the windshield wipers awake. We haven’t said a word to each other in forty-five minutes.
Veer brakes too hard at the red light. My seat belt bites in my shoulder.
“Motherfucker,” she spits.
She slaps the wheel with the butt of her palm, cutting through the background noise of rain and rubber on asphalt like a gunshot.
“So, what did I do to piss you off?” Rage simmers just below her words.
“Nothing.” She’s read me all wrong. I’m not pissed off, I’m knotted up. I’m a clogged drain, I’m a dead end.
“Bullshit. You’ve been weird ever since you picked me up. Do you have a problem with me? Is my shit, I don’t know, too shitty for you?”
“No.” I try to find the right words. They all seem to come to me at the wrong angles. “I had a…” A conversation I didn’t want. A debt I don’t need. One more person trying to convince me my mom isn’t worth caring about. “I had a weird encounter. With a friend of my uncle’s.”