chapter ten #2
I am walking before I’ve decided to: down the stairs, out the door, around the junk pile and out the gate.
The air is hot but not unbearable. The sun pricks the back of my neck, and I sweep my hair up into a twist on the top of my head.
On the other side of the fence, I see a pair of chopsticks on the ground, still in their Chinese restaurant wrapper.
I pull them out, break them apart, and use them to hold my hair in place. Then I walk into the desert.
The wind whispers across the reddish sand. It’s a soft musical sound, like a whisk in a bowl. The low scrub brush trembles
as it blows. I feel the sand on my skin.
Ahead of me, the dust storm—the void—is spread across the horizon. It blots out the thin distinction between the land and
the sky, an amorphous but massive wall. Closer, I expect to feel wind. But I don’t. The dust hangs in the air, motionless,
a wall of dust. It’s evenly thick, as if it were a mass of reddish-beige cotton, not dust particles suspended in the air.
I stop and study it. It looks endless. Impenetrable. But maybe that’s only here. I turn east and walk, the void to my left.
It must end somewhere. No storm lasts forever. There must be a break in it, or at least a weak point.
I will find a way out.
I won’t be trapped here.
I can’t be.
I keep walking until my throat feels dry. I wish I’d brought water. I didn’t plan for this properly—or at all. I can’t circumnavigate
Lost on foot, not without water. I’m still near the eastern outskirts. There could be a break in the dust to the west or the
south, but at this rate, it would take me hours to reach it.
Ahead, the dust swirls. It’s only moving in one section—a whirlpool in the center of an otherwise-undisturbed beige lake.
Continuing to walk alongside the storm, I watch it swirl. The whirlpool darkens, and the dark-light shadows swirl together
as if stirred faster and faster. I slow, and then I halt. Maybe I shouldn’t be so close.
The shadows suck in, the spiral turns inward, and then it shoots out, a tornado-like arm of dust extending over my head. Instinctively, I duck. A car tire is propelled out of the dust tornado. The tire shoots over me and lands between the houses nearly a mile away.
“What the hell,” I say out loud.
I look at the void again as the tornado shrinks back, and the spiral slows. Soon, it’s placid again, as if the eruption had
never occurred. This is how items end up in Lost? The void . . . expels them? Violently. Like a . . . leviathan burp. Eyeing the dust, I back
away from it. There’s nothing normal about this dust storm. Nothing normal about this place. Nothing normal about any of this.
I shouldn’t be here.
I don’t belong here.
Enough, I think again. This is the plan: I will find a break or weakness in the dust storm, and then I’m going to cross it, leave,
and never look back. For now, though, I’ve walked as far as I can. I turn back and head for the little yellow house.
Maybe I walked too far. My side is cramped, and my breath rakes over my dry throat. Sweat beads and then is wicked away by
the heat of the sun. A few minutes later, I begin to feel dizzy and see black spots speckled over my vision.
Claire and Peter are on the porch waiting for me when I arrive at a walk-stumble into the yard. Running to me, Claire hugs
my waist. Peter hands me a soda bottle. It’s filled with only slightly murky water. I drink it anyway. My muscles are shaking,
and I lean against Claire harder than I should. Soon, I feel a little stronger.
It was stupid to walk into the desert unprepared. But other than that, it’s not a terrible plan. Somewhere, out in the desert,
away from the highway, there must be a way around the void. Somehow, I’ll find it. Finishing the soda, I smile at Peter and
Claire. I am taking steps toward my goals, and that makes me feel better. Mom would approve.
“I found red paint!” Claire says. “And string.”
Peter waves an ’80s tape recorder in the air. “I have this.”
I nod. Neither asks where I have been or why I went or what I saw.
I find a cloth and wrap it around a stick. Dipping it in the red paint, I paint the biohazard symbol on the front door. For
good measure, I also add it to each side of the house. By the time I’ve circled the house, I’m splattered with red paint,
and I feel as if I’ve won a battle, as if the act of slathering paint on the house were a direct attack against the horror
of the void.
“You look gruesome,” Peter comments. “Like you’ve committed murder most foul.” I shake the cloth with wet red paint at him.
He jumps out of the way, and Claire laughs.
Skipping in front of the cloth, she shouts, “Paint me! Paint me!” I spatter her with paint. It falls in dots on her arms and
princess dress. She swirls, and the paint sprinkles over her. She giggles. “I’ll do you!” She jumps on a stray sock and dips
it in the paint. She shakes it at me, and I jump backward but not fast enough to avoid the dollops of paint on my dress.
“If you two are done . . .” Peter says behind me.
I turn to say—
And he dumps paint on my shoulder. It drips over my chest and back. He is completely unscathed. I look at Claire; Claire looks
at me. We both grip our makeshift paintbrushes and chase after him. We race around the junk pile. Circle the house. Run out
the gate toward the other houses.
He disappears between two houses, and we collapse against the wall of a brick building, laughing. I don’t know why it’s funny,
but it is. I gulp in air.
Suddenly, I hear voices.
There’s no place to hide. We’re exposed on the side of a building.
And then I think, Up. Dropping the paint cloth, I turn and hoist myself onto a windowsill.
I grab the gutter and scramble my feet up to the top of the window.
I climb onto the roof and turn around to help Claire.
She’s already up on the roof beside me. We scramble up to the peak as two men round the corner beneath us.
One carries a knife, and the other has a rust-pocked saw.
Both are in tattered dirty clothes, and their skin is covered in ugly, smeared tattoos that look as if they did them themselves. I hold my breath.
They don’t look up.
I exhale.
“Look at you! Your teacher is proud.” It’s Peter. He’s perched on the chimney. He holds up a tape recorder and waves it in
the air. “Ready to record some feral dogs?”
I swallow. My heart is still beating fast, and the palms of my hands sting. I scraped them as I climbed too fast over the
shingles. The good feeling, the illusion of control that I’d had when I’d painted has vanished completely. I wish I weren’t
here. I hate this place with the strange dust prison wall and the dangers that lurk everywhere.
I don’t know what he sees in my expression but his smile fades. “The Missing Man isn’t back yet, and the townspeople continue
to blame you,” he tells me. “You’re still stuck with us.” He slides off the roof. “Come on, Little Red.” He glances back at
me, spattered with paint. “Or ‘Very Red.’”
It’s easy to find man-eating dogs if you want them.
On the way into the alleys, we collect stray bits of food: beef jerky laced with dust, half-eaten hotdogs with spots of mold,
green meatballs, etc. We carry it in open containers as we walk into the alleys, and then we dump it on the ground and climb
up onto the slope of trash and cardboard boxes that chokes the alley.
After that, it’s a matter of waiting.
We hear the snarls in the distance, and Peter switches on the tape recorder.
In a pack, they pad into our alley, three of them, each more muscular than the last. Finding the treasured meat, they leap onto it. They snap and snarl and growl and howl at each other, a cacophony that echoes in the alley.
Peter begins to record.
One of the dogs catches our scent. He fixes his yellow eyes on us and howls. The other dogs notice. All of them begin to scratch
and paw at the trash that leads to us. But Peter has picked a place with too steep a slope. They can’t do anything but pace
below us, which they do.
I look at Peter and want to ask what the plan is now, but he’s crouched at the edge of the trash, still recording, and I don’t
want to mess up his recording and have to repeat this. So I wait. My legs begin to cramp but I don’t dare move. Claire curls
beside me and naps.
And wait. And wait.
He settles against the trash, tape recorder resting in his lap, still whirring away. I see his chin droop onto his chest.
Both he and Claire sleep.
The dogs keep their vigil below.
At last, the tape recorder clicks—it’s run out of tape. But the dogs aren’t gone. I try to make myself comfortable. I close
my eyes and can’t imagine how I’ll sleep through this.
Somehow, I do.
I wake in near darkness to the sound of a woman shouting. Claire and Peter are shadows beside me. Howling, the dogs scatter
as gunshots ring out through the alleyway. In close quarters, the shots sound like bolts of thunder inside a room. They echo
and rattle deep into my bones.
“You’re both dead,” Peter whispers.
I shut my eyes and don’t move.
He calls down, “I found them like this. Dogs must have gotten them.” I hear him half run half hop down the side of the trash.
The pile shakes but doesn’t fall. I try to breathe shallowly. “They must have climbed to safety and then bled out.”
There are several people down there. I hear their voices, murmuring to each other, too low for me to pick out individual words.
I concentrate on not moving. My leg is cramped.
My shoulder itches. My back is twisted. But I keep myself as still as possible.
If it were daytime, the red paint would never be mistaken for blood.
In the darkening shadows, I think it must look like dark liquid. I can’t open my eyes to check.
A man’s voice is louder than the others. “But they’re gone, not just dead?”
In a singsong voice, Peter says, “Because they could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for them. The Carriage held but
just these two and Immortality.”
“The Missing Man must be back!” a woman cries. “He sent their souls on!”
I hear cheering. Cheering for my death, for the death of a little girl. Peter promises to bury our bodies, but the crowd doesn’t
listen to him. They’re racing out of the alley, whooping with joy.
I want to cry.
I don’t.
I want to throw my arms around Peter and thank him. For a little while at least, I’ll be safe, maybe for long enough to find
my way home.
But I don’t move.
I lie there until I am certain that the people have left the alley and aren’t returning. Then I sit up. Claire sits up beside
me. Wordlessly, we climb down the trash heap. She slips her small hand into mine. Hand in hand, we go home.