“Lana . . .”

  The voice came as a dream comes, when the body lets go and the mind hovers between asleep and awake. Mariah sat up in the dark, under a wool-lined coat spread out like a blanket. She turned her head to the shape in the driver’s seat. After a moment, letting her breath out slowly, she laid herself down again.

  “La . . . na . . .”

  Mariah jolted upright. Feeling about, she found the door handle and pulled. The dome light blinked on, and she squinted as John came into focus through the sudden brightness. He sat as he always sat, a melting wax copy of himself with sallow skin and slumped shoulders, like something rejected by Madame Tussaud. Swept in through the shattered window, ash adhered to the grease on his face, forming a light and almost doughy paste.

  Mariah wiped off the paste with her sleeve, paying close attention to John’s lips. They were ringed in crust, and so dry they had cracked. She waited for them to move—willed them to move. They did not. Her heartbeat stayed up-tempo nevertheless.

  “You spoke, didn’t you?” she said, tending to his face, which was beginning to feel a bit warm. “I didn’t imagine it. I know I didn’t.”

  She picked up her half-empty water bottle (number four from the twelve-pack in the back) with blood-flaked hands. She had thought about washing them off—had in fact come close to doing so on several occasions—but thirst had won over in the end. Cleanliness was next to godliness . . . when you weren’t lost in the desert. When you were lost in the desert, you got down and dirty with the devil and you saved your goddamn water.

  Mariah took a sip from the bottle, then poured a dribble into John’s mouth. Any more than that might cause him to choke. She screwed the cap back on and whispered, less to him than to herself, “Who’s Lana? What does that name mean to you?”

  But she already knew.

  They were going to see his daughter after all.

  Mariah shut the door and relaxed onto her reclined seat to give sleep another try, knowing already that sleep was a lost cause. After a few minutes, she sighed and got out. The ground was brittle on top and soft beneath, and the dust on the breeze carried a sour trace of saltiness that reminded her vaguely of the ocean. She worked her way around the truck, one hand on the hood for guidance. It was dark here, much darker than it had been before, thanks to the mountains. They had risen from nothing, peak after peak, stealing all but a dusky purple thread of firelight from the horizon. The sight of that single glowing strand stitching together the land and the sky filled her heart with strange emotion. It was like watching the sun’s afterglow fade as the world tips slowly toward night.

  It was like seeing a ghost.

  She climbed into John’s lap. Stiff with dried blood, his jeans crunched beneath her. Careful not to disturb his right hand and arm, she released the emergency brake and eased it down. Although its engine was shut off, the truck began to roll.

  They’d been on a gentle decline for some time, which was more than okay by Mariah. Driving downhill used less gas. She turned the key and cast a wary glance at the panel behind the wheel. The needle on the fuel gauge had dipped below the halfway mark. But no warning lights were blinking—hallelujah! Not that Mariah would have known what such lights meant, had there been any. She was woefully illiterate in the language of dashboard instruments. But at least she was starting to get the hang of the clutch.

  Well.

  Kind of.

  She worked the pedals, her shoes shifting around on her feet, and she bounced as the pickup started off across the honeycombed sand. In the right lighting—say, at sunset, with the sky a melting pot of colors and the stars just beginning to poke through—the sand might have been beautiful. But in the smoke-sealed darkness, the high-beams bled the sand white, turning its intricate pattern of cracks into dark, insane scribblings. The more she looked at those scribblings (and she was always looking at them; they were the only thing she could make out, except for the solitary reference point of the mountains on her left), the more they dug into her head. They were waiting behind her eyelids when she blinked. They were tattooed on the backs of her hands. She considered switching off the headlights and driving in the dark—what harm could it do? There’s nothing to crash into out here, and it’s not like I’ve got an exit to miss—but there was something claustrophobic about the idea. The headlights made her world a little bigger. They gave her a path to follow, a future, however dim. Without them, how could she be sure she was going anywhere at all?

  Mariah leaned back against John as the desert wind slapped at her through the broken window. His body was nice and warm. Too warm, maybe? Feverishly warm? No. Not possible. Not yet. It had only been . . . how long? Mariah glanced at the radio out of reflex, remembering as she did that its clock had been put permanently out of commission. Her gaze crept uneasily to John’s arm, which she had wrapped in a few clean shirts, not having enough bandages left over after seeing to his hand. His skin showed in places, oily smooth with ointment. An exposed staple peeked out at her near his elbow, where the steady motion of the truck had caused the cloth to slip. Reaching over, she tucked the staple back in, nighty night. God. It was so quiet out here. Quiet like this could make a girl crack up—even a girl like her, who had grown up on a hearty diet of silence. Speaking of diets, was she ever going to be hungry again? She fished a pinto bean from the can in the cup holder and stuck it in her mouth. Her stomach responded with an ugly roll. She swallowed the bean anyway.

  “Waste not want not. Right, John? Right?” Talking out loud, hearing her voice, helped somehow. She decided to continue. “Say, I never did thank you for coming to find me after all the fun started. Pretty touching, that. Pretty romantic. It only took the sun going out for you to show up at my doorstep.”

  John’s tongue moved inside his mouth.

  “Now now, don’t be hurt. I’m not. Really. I mean, I get that you care about me, even if you’re a little confused on the subject. But caring on its own is cold. Caring needs a touch. By the way, you’ve got one good arm left, don’t you? Why don’t you make yourself useful?” Mariah took his left hand and slung his arm around her, protection against the wind. “Thanks. That’s much better. What was I saying again? Oh yeah, I was talking about how you came for me in the dark. There’s a line worth melting over . . . or shivering for. You came for me in the dark. Has a rather ominous undertone, doesn’t it? Hard to tell if it’s a nice line or a scary line. Well, how about this one? You came inside me in the dark. Come on, John, you tell me. Scary or nice?” She waited. Waited. “No? Nothing? I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. You never did want to talk about our night together. For you, it never happened. And that’s fine, John, that’s whatever. You do you, and all that. But here’s the thing.”

  She wiped a flake of ash out of her eye and felt some unexpected wetness there.

  “The thing is, and it’s just a little thing, but you should probably know . . . the thing is I’m pregnant, and it’s not nice at all. It’s fucking terrifying.” Her voice chipped. “There you go. There. Now you can’t say I never told you. I’ve got something inside me that’s a little of you and a little of me, and this is where you shut your mouth and listen, all right? Good. Because what you think doesn’t matter here. You’ve got your daughter to go to, great, I’m happy for you, but I never wanted a kid, and if you think that the world turning itself inside out would somehow change my mind on the subject—like, oh, everything sucks now, time to pop one out and start a family—then you’re the dumbest man there is. My mom used to lay that classic ‘when you’re grown up and have your own children’ line on me all the time, and I’d always tell her I wasn’t going to have any kids of my own. She didn’t believe me. People never do. They just smile at you like they know a secret you don’t know. But I meant it.” Mariah shifted in John’s lap, watching those dark lines scrawl endlessly across the sand. “The thought of something living inside me, changing me, always freaked me the hell out. Like being the babysitter in one of those movies where a stranger calls on the phone and whispers, ‘you’re not alone in the house,’ except the house isn’t a house. It’s my body and the stranger is inside me, living in my basement. Feeding. Growing. Biding its time before the grand and bloody reveal.” A five-knuckled laugh fisted its way out of her throat. “I was getting it taken care of, you know. Before I opened the curtains, before I saw the night, I was all set to go to the clinic. But I doubt there are any clinics taking appointments now. So what am I supposed to do? Huh? What the fuck am I supposed to do? I don’t have anywhere to go, and I wouldn’t know how to get there if I did because I don’t even fucking know where I am.”

  Mariah lashed at the dashboard and yelped as a sharp jag snagged her knuckle. Tears came in a hot and helpless downpour, burning her eyes and drenching her cheeks. She threw her hands up in defeat.

  “Great,” she choked out. “Now I’m wasting water.”

  ???

  Mariah had begun to nod off, lulled by the smoothness of the sand and the rumble of the engine, when John’s left hand tightened around her belly. She sat up in surprise and her head shot back, whopped him on the nose. She felt it crunch and had time to think, shit, like he isn’t damaged enough, then something glinted in the headlights and she slammed on the brakes. Her body lifted off his lap, thrown forward against the steering wheel, before crashing down painfully onto his legs.

  She collected herself and turned to check on him. He seemed unbothered. His eyelids, cracked open a smidge, shut again slowly. Blood drew a thin red line from his left nostril to his upper lip, which called up an unwelcome image of Rick Lot hunched over a shot glass.

  Mariah wiped John’s mouth with her sleeve. Her gaze lingered on him. Had he . . . it didn’t make sense, not with him asleep . . . but had he somehow warned her?

  She twisted back around to face the desert and leaned toward the windshield. “What the hell is that?”

  It stuck up from the sand like a shark’s fin: a glossy piece of metal, three or four feet high and completely white except for its tip, which was a dark inky blue. There was nothing else nearby. Only it, all alone.

  Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

  Mariah re-started the engine and pulled around the fin-thing. A few minutes passed, and she was just beginning to relax when a small black shape coasted into view. It resembled a soccer ball that had been dented by a vicious kick and then burned to a crisp—that was, if you ignored the wispy strands clinging to its side.

  Mariah watched the strands twitch in the air, her insides slowly freezing over. If she were to step outside the truck and nudge that lump, roll it over with her toe, what would she find? A charred glob of nose? Two jellied pits where there once had been eyes? A mouth whose lips had cooked together, sealing themselves around a scream? Mariah’s hands tightened on the wheel. Next in her path lay a luxurious brown suitcase. Louis Vuitton. Or maybe Gucci. It had been ripped open, its clothes scattered far and wide across the honeycombed sand. She saw a shoe on its own, right side up and perfect as could be, and she wondered where the other one was. The night had taken on a queer, almost expectant shimmer, like the surface of a very still and very clear pond; Mariah had the surreal and yet somehow plausible feeling that if she breathed too hard or blinked too sharply, everything—including her—might simply ripple away and disappear.

  She passed a battered dog kennel and a tipped leather seat, its back and armrests still intact.

  The seat was empty. The dog kennel was not.

  She drove on, winding through scraps of metal. Some were little and some were big. A few had windows. One, much larger than the rest, had enormous, dark blue letters painted on its curved face.

  UNI.

  Thank you for flying with us, came a light and carefree voice inside Mariah’s head—a voice with wings. She had forgotten about John beneath her. She had even forgotten about the clutch. Her legs worked the pedals in thoughtless, mechanical silence, and when the desert floor began to slope down, sinking into a crater from which every scrawling crack had been wiped away, blown away, she knew she was close.

  Mariah left her body unoccupied for the next little while. She continued operating the truck, but she herself was not there.

  She’s up in the air, bundled into a stiffly cushioned seat. Not comfortable, but not quite uncomfortable, either. She feels the belt around her waist, its webbed polyester riding up under her flannel shirt (in this waking dream, she is still wearing John’s clothes) and scratching her belly. There’s a man next to her. A big one. His elbow has claimed the armrest and his knee edges into her space; she pinches her thighs to keep from touching him. Her throat is dry, her mouth is stale, and outside the window, the sky sweeps away into a peaceful clean forever. No clouds this morning, only a blue so fresh and fine it almost seems to sparkle. And then darkness. The sky no more. Her breath no more. Nothing left in her to scream, even if she could remember how. In the plane the lights stay on, and the big man beside her goes on reading his Tom Clancy novel obliviously, his wrists propped on the dinner tray next to a rise-and-shine scotch on the rocks. He’s a nervous flier, this one—he told her so before they took off, as if his twiddling fingers and grinding teeth didn’t speak for themselves, but the scotch has soothed his nerves and his tough-guy book has steeled them. At last the quiet breaks, though it’s not a scream that does it. It’s a laugh, a witch’s insane splintering cackle, rising up from somewhere in the back. Mariah’s neighbor chuckles, only partially concealing his irritation. “Somebody get that lady a broom,” he grumbles as he flips the page, and that’s when the intercom crackles on and an infant’s babbling gibberish comes through the speakers.

  “Hoo!” the pilot shouts. “Hoohiggy!”

  The big lug beside Mariah looks up in confusion just as the plane begins its nosedive and the stewardess—still cackling—sails up the aisle. His scotch splashes into his face, and his book smashes against his nose, sticking there. He’s got a book mask now, a Clancy mask, and the pilot goes on hollering over the intercom as the freefall picks up speed and turbulence: “Hoohiggybiggly! Poog! Jabloo!”

  It’s night outside. It’s night, and the plane is corkscrewing through the darkness, up and down trading places until there is no up or down. Mariah feels the seatbelt against her waist and then she doesn’t, she feels it and then she doesn’t, and her terror evolves past terror into ecstasy. The lines between emotions crumble away. All that exists now is intensity and volume. When the freefall finally ends and everything washes into smooth white silence, she’s almost in orgasm.

  Down in Death Valley, in the expansive saltpan of Badwater Basin, Mariah sat in John’s idling pickup truck, unaware that she had coasted to a stop. Wind reached in through the broken window and flicked her hair about her face, which felt tingly and hot. Her body prickled; she felt like a limb that had fallen asleep, full of foggy pins and needles. There was something undeniably sexual about the sensation—she might have been coming down from a climax instead of coming up from a dream . . . if dreaming was what she had been doing in the first place. She wasn’t so sure about that. It seemed to her that what she’d just experienced might very well qualify as a bout of insanity—and an inventive bout at that—but wasn’t inventiveness the root of insanity? Mom always said I have one mighty imagination, she thought. Then she thought, I’m cracking up. I’m losing it out here. Hoohiggy.

  John breathed, and Mariah breathed with him. She opened her mouth to ask if he saw what she was seeing, but the power of speech failed her.

  It did not look like a plane anymore. It did not look like anything. The monstrous hulk lying on the desert floor, forlorn and gray in the ghost-glow of the headlights, resembled a jetliner as much as a deer resembles a deer after it has been dragged under a semi and pulled apart by the wheels. She could not tell the cockpit from the fuselage or the wings from the rudder. But the bodies . . . she recognized the bodies just fine. Some were in pieces, scattered like the clothes from the suitcase she had passed. Others were burned, their flesh as tough and black as jerky. These, she guessed, must have been near one of the engines. Somebody’s legs and torso dangled listlessly from a jagged spire of metal: a human flag on a crooked flagpole.

  The bodies that drew her gaze, however, were the three sitting closest to her. Because they were sitting. A man, a woman, and a boy. They slouched in their seats, which remained—impossibly, miraculously—joined into an upright row. Beneath their feet was a strip of carpeted floor, totally intact. The man, whose head was turned almost completely backwards on his neck, was wearing shorts. Something had stripped the skin off his shins and cracked his kneecaps like walnuts. The woman wore a dress, and looked pretty enough except for her face . . . or what was left of it, anyway.

  Which side of the aisle had they been on? Mariah wondered. And who got the window? Probably the boy, she decided. Yes, they would have given the boy the window. She could tell it was a boy because of the red sneakers and the Spiderman pajamas. She could also tell he was still breathing. She covered her mouth and moaned.

  But that wasn’t what made her floor the gas and flee into the night, her hands white-knuckled, her teeth bared.

  What made her do that was the boy’s smile.

  His little, sleeping smile.

  ???

  After Mariah leashed her runaway heart and reoriented herself with the fire-licked mountains, she slipped out of herself again. She did not dream this time—that had been a one-of-a-kind deal—but her mind loosened its grip on the wheel as she continued across the cracked desert sand. Part of her, still able to feel and smell the smoky wind in her hair, remained firmly rooted in the truck.

  The rest of her was back on the plane, flying in the dark.

  The big guy with the Clancy novel is there too, but now there’s a kid somewhere, sitting in a window seat just like her. He’s wearing red sneakers and Spiderman PJs. He’s crying. She can hear him over the ruckus, and there’s a lot of ruckus. In this version of her dream, this reimagining, the pilot does not lose his mind at nightfall and send the plane into a suicidal tailspin (although that very thing did happen all over the country, Mariah would later come to think; she had once read on the internet that there were as many as 5,000 planes up in the air over America at any given time, and operating every one of those planes was a pilot who had witnessed the morning’s sudden death firsthand . . . and who might not have been able to cope with the loss). No, in this version of the dream, revised because of a young boy’s sleeping smile, the pilot is a tough-as-nails sonofabitch straight out of her neighbor’s Clancy novel. Somebody with a military background, equipped with the mental duct tape to hold himself together and get the job done. Hoorah. He shuts off the computer that does the flying stuff, and he takes the plane’s controls in his more-than-capable hands. Then he comes on the intercom and tells everyone, in a shaky but solid voice, to keep their seatbelts on and stay calm. People do not comply. Men and women flood the aisle, shoving one another in a hurry to get nowhere. The cackling stewardess clears a path with her drink cart, using it as a battering ram whenever someone is foolish enough not to dive out of her way. She tosses out water and soda and beers as she goes, and soon the floor is rolling with cans and bottles. One guy hammers angrily on the cockpit door. Enough moving bodies can rock a boat, and it turns out they can rock a plane too—Flight 373 into Las Vegas is now filled with its own inner turbulence. The few quiet passengers listen to music on their headphones or watch the tiny movie screens on the backs of the seats in front of them with ferocious concentration. And what next? Why, more of the same. The pilot might still be doing his job, but that doesn’t mean the people on the ground are still doing theirs. It’s pandemonium down at the airport, just as it’s pandemonium on the plane. All the spinning chairs at air traffic control have been abandoned. And so, with nowhere safe to land, the plane goes sailing the sky in aimless loops, circling and circling—

  Here, Mariah noticed a curious dragging in the back of the truck, as if she were driving through mud rather than across dried, brittle sand.

  —and circling until people spend their adrenaline and limp back to their seats or plop down listlessly in the aisle. The guy banging on the cockpit door slumps to his knees and cries quietly to himself. She can see it all so clearly. Hear it all so clearly. The sobbing, the weeping, the silence beneath. When the intercom wakes up again, it’s not the pilot’s voice that speaks to them. It’s the voice of someone much younger. Someone calling out through waves of static . . . and sobbing just like one of them. The movie has ended and the screens on the backs of the seats have gone dark, but now each one lights up again. The passengers watch. They listen. And when the intercom turns off for good and everyone on Flight 373 is asleep and smiling—everyone including the tough guy in the cockpit and his copilot, who received their own personal lullaby on the airband radio—the plane begins its inevitable descent, coasting down across the Nevada state line into California, where it will touch ground in the dark of Death Valley and spout a brilliant geyser of flames into the desert night.

  Mariah released a long-held breath. Yeah, that. It had happened like that, or close enough. It might have been a woman flying the plane, determined to get home to her family, or it might have been a steward instead of a stewardess in charge of the drink cart. The details didn’t matter, only the general course of events. And the ending. That too. She shut her eyes and saw a shadowed curve of lips. A shudder shook its way up her arms and into her shoulders. They said drunk people survived crashes better than sober people because drunk people didn’t tense up, because their bodies just went with the flow. Wouldn’t the same be true for a person who was sound asleep? A person who could not be woken up, no matter the commotion? She pictured the boy, shipwrecked in the desert with his dead parents, dreaming contentedly in the dark. How long would he last? Would he still be sitting in his discarded window seat when the world ended, his pajamas wrapped around bones, his smile rotted away from his teeth?

  Mariah removed a hand from the wheel to rub her face, then grabbed back on as John’s truck began to fishtail wildly. The dragging she’d felt and tried to ignore now had a sound—a heavy glugluglug, like someone greedily drinking water.

  “No,” she said, the first word she’d spoken since coming upon the lonely wingtip stuck in the sand. She repeated the word as she slowed to a stop, and repeated it again as she sat there, and again as she stepped out into the night and started around the pickup, knowing exactly where to go and exactly what she would find. “No, no, no, no, no.”

  The truck’s flatbed was no longer flat.

  But the back right tire was.

  The back right tire was plenty flat.