The sickness that visited Mariah on the world’s last morning—the kind of sickness that often acts as an early weather forecast for motherhood—was what saved her in the long darkness of the desert, when the night was still young and its terrors were still largely unknown. She held it back as long as she could. At first this meant shifting around in her seat and taking slow, deep breaths. Then it meant sitting very still and breathing as little as possible. She did not speak. She could not. All the questions she wanted—needed—to ask John about his daughter and the road ahead held no weight next to this one simple, desperate imperative. She did not know where she was or where she was going, and she did not care. The only thought she had room for was no.
No.
No.
No no no no no—
All of a sudden it was too much. The dips and bumps, the twists and curves, too much. The knocking inside her rose to a deafening BANGBANGBANG, filling her ears and stomach with ugly echoes.
“Pull over,” she whispered.
“What?”
“Pull over.”
“Why?”
“Pull. Fucking. Over!”
She unclicked her seatbelt and opened the door, and before the truck could come to a complete stop, she was out in the night, in the smoke, staggering through soft sand with her palm over her mouth. John’s voice followed her, but only his voice and only for a moment. Alone under the red-hued sky, no light to be found anywhere but firelight, Mariah fell to her knees and welcomed her old friend at last.
???
John called after Mariah as she fled the truck, and quickly stopped himself. The engine was one thing and the low beams were another—he needed the engine to drive, and the headlights to see—but shouting? That was an unnecessary risk, and therefore a risk not worth taking. Even out here, in the lowest and loneliest place in America, where the Mojave Desert culminated in the vast wasteland known as Death Valley, it paid to be cautious. They were out here, after all. Someone else could be out here with them.
Or something else.
He squeezed the wheel in frustration, listening to her footfalls fade through the open door. A moment after she passed beyond his hearing, just as he was preparing to get out and bring her back to the truck, there came a soft but distinctly messy noise. So. She was sick. Good thing (and no wonder) she’d turned down the can of beans he’d offered a little while ago. If she hadn’t, her stomach would have rejected it for her, and they couldn’t stand to waste any food. Not with his stockpile as small as it was, and so much road still ahead. He only wished she’d given him more notice before jumping out of the truck. She could have injured herself, and that would have compromised them both. John let go of the wheel and propped his elbow on the armrest. They’d talk it over when she got back. For now, he’d give her a minute. He could use a minute himself, if he was being honest. He wasn’t tired yet, but he was close.
They’d left the Mojave River behind outside of Baker, after its underground course became too obscure to follow. Soon after, their path had intersected with the 1-15 again. Mariah had been asleep, and probably for the best. The crossing was . . . strange. With no underpass to slip beneath, John was forced to drive over the freeway—an easy enough task, as things were spread thinner out here, including the traffic that once soared to and from Las Vegas. What remained on the road was dark, save for a rare flicker. No flashing lights, no sparks, no sound. Just shadows and silence. Dead cars and dead people. Bodies hung upside down from seatbelts; insides smeared the asphalt. They’d been going fast when the sun stepped out of the sky, no time to think, no time to stop. He shut off his headlights and eased his truck across the eastbound lanes. In the sand divider rested a charred Honda Civic that had long since given up the last of its smoke. John coasted by the wreck, continuing forward, and that was when someone walked in front of the hood. Two someones. Three. Four. He stopped counting and watched the group . . . except group was not the word that came to mind. The word that came to mind was school, as in a school of fish. They moved in slow formation, seemed to float. Clothing rustled on their bodies. Their limbs hung slack. The wind whipped at them, and as it changed directions, they changed directions too, riding its current without thought or will. Back and forth they went, back and forth, their silhouettes fluttery and indistinct against the smoky red horizon. Not one of them looked at the truck as John slipped past. Not one. It was as if they were sleepwalking.
But sleepwalkers didn’t travel in packs.
And they certainly didn’t smile, either.
A faint sob tickled the lining of John’s ears. Mariah had begun to cry. The physical hurt of sickness had stepped back and the emotional hurt—shame, helplessness—had moved in to take its place. A purge for the stomach, then another for the heart. After all they’d been through, she needed this. This letting go. Some things were too much to keep inside.
John listened, brushing his knuckle against the window. The glass was cool. During the day, Death Valley got hot enough to torch the record books, but at night the desert slipped its heat off like a gown. Tonight was no different in that regard. The air reaching in through the open door had a curious fingernail’s edge. It teased the skin on John’s neck, and not for the first time he doubted his decision to bring them here. This way. His plan after crossing the I-15 had been to track down Highway 28, the main thoroughfare for Death Valley, and chase its yellow line clean into Nevada. And found it he had. It had been everything he’d hoped for, a two-lane ghost town masquerading as a highway, nothing but abandoned blacktop as far as the eye could see. The kind of road, it seemed, that had been built just for him. But as John journeyed, he couldn’t seem to shake the sleepwalkers from his head. He kept seeing their limp, gliding figures swim up into the headlights. Kept tapping on the brakes or twisting at the wheel, causing Mariah to shift uncomfortably in her seat. Using the high beams didn’t help. Nor did letting off the gas and going along at a crawl, which only made him certain that the walkers were behind him, creeping up in the rearview mirror. Then came a sign for somewhere called Renoville, and the thought of continuing down the road, of entering the community with no way to know what might be waiting there, put an itch in his skin. He pulled off into the scrub, thinking he would return to the highway as soon as the town had been left behind. But he never did. He simply drove on, losing himself in the desert’s big empty, where the loneliness outside him mirrored the loneliness he held within. Because alone was the only place where John Hawthorne had ever felt safe.
Looking back now, he recognized his choice to leave the road behind for what it was: paranoia. The product of an overtaxed mind. He wasn’t tired? Bullshit. When was the last time he had slept? The dashboard clock read half past six in the morning, and even though it wasn’t morning, would never be morning, that still put him at well past twenty-four hours since he’d shut his eyes. He needed rest. No two ways about it. After Mariah came back to the truck, he’d take them a little further, until he found somewhere they could hunker . . .
No. If he let himself go a little further, he’d keep going a little further until his body shut itself down, or something shut it down for him—maybe for good. He knew how to be still, how to watch and wait and listen, but he did not know how to stop once he’d started down a path. There was a strand missing in his DNA, a cut brake line in his genetic code. All it took was a step to set him in motion. Or a sip. Let’s be honest, John, was there ever a whiskey bottle you opened that you did not see to the end? You can’t say, can you? You can’t remember. You’re a case of empties shaking in the cold wind, that’s what you are. That’s the sound of your soul, if you’ve got one. What can you possibly do for your daughter if you do make it to her? What do you have to offer but bad memories and pain?
“Whatever she wants,” he said. “I’ll give her whatever she wants.”
Falling ash coated the windshield. The headlights dimmed to hazy cones. Outside, Mariah continued crying, muffled, almost fuzzy, as if she were holding her shirt over her mouth, trying not to be heard. John could help her. With that much, at least. He leaned across the seat to close the passenger door. As the latch clicked, the dome light switched off. It became dark inside the truck. Dark . . . but not quiet. The sobbing kept on, and clearer than before, closer. Another sound insinuated itself in the air around him. A smooth, continuous crackle, so low that he had not been able to hear it over the sleepless panting of the desert. Static. John turned his head to the dashboard. To the radio. But you’re off, he thought. Mariah shut you off. He reached for the volume dial. It wouldn’t turn left, was already as far left as it would go. A crazed, distant chatter filled his head, the noise of jackals communing in some derelict hole. Impossible. The machinery of the universe could fail; the cogs and wheels at work behind the stars could spin out of order, making darkness out of daylight and moonlight out of darkness. These things were bigger than him, beyond his understanding. They made their own rules, and so it stood to reason that they could break them. But he had held this radio in his hands. Had opened it up and tinkered with its insides. It was a simple tool, operated by a simple electrical current. If there was no current feeding it, then there could be no sound.
Yet there was.
There was.
The ash came down in thicker flakes, gathering on the windshield and clumping beneath the wipers. The headlights were little more than obscure specs, like quarters glimpsed at the bottom of a pool. Soon they would be gone altogether, and the only light in the truck would be the soft green glow of the dashboard clock. John swallowed the last of the spit from his mouth and gingerly twisted the radio’s dial, turning the volume up on something he should not have been, could not have been, hearing in the first place. The static swelled. So did the sobs. They poured from the speakers, waves in a white-noise ocean. A boy. They belonged to a boy. It sounded as if he were choking on his tears. Drowning on them. John’s mind spun back to the men and women he had seen on the freeway, their bodies slack, their movements so slow they might have been walking underwater, and he felt a connection deep down, in a place beneath conscious thought where four-legged things ran in packs and spoke in savage howls. He twisted the dial again, the other way, the quiet way, but the sobbing stayed just as loud, pounding in his eardrums and ringing in his head. The practical man in him shouted one final protest—not possible—and then John observed something curious and extraordinary, the final, lunatic touch that tipped his disbelief over once and for all. The speakers on the radio, both of them, had begun to drip. No. Weep. They had begun to weep. He watched their porous surface trickle darkly, and if he were to touch that wetness and lick if off his finger, would it taste like salt? Like tears?
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Yes.
Yes, he thought it would.
All at once the sobbing stopped, and the truck fell into an uneasy, expectant silence. The headlights no longer shone; they’d been blackened out by ash. John sat in darkness, listening to water slide off the dashboard. He might still have gotten out in time, if he had undone his seatbelt and shoved out his door. He might have gotten out in time . . . or maybe not.
The voice that came from the radio was low and staticky. It crackled at the edges and broke apart into little tiptoeing echoes, little whisper children. It was a boy’s voice, and it was the voice of something else too, something older, something that watched without eyes and listened without ears and spoke in wordless, shifting currents—a presence like an undertow, pulling away from the shore of all that was sane and sacred in the world. But most of all the voice was one of infinite, tender sadness. Of understanding. The voice on the radio knew how it felt to hurt. It knew the pain of being human, and it wanted to help.
“Good night, good night.”
John’s shoulders dropped. The cords in his neck loosened, and the fingers on his hands uncurled. He leaned back in his seat. His eyes began to shut. All the air in the truck seemed to flow into the speakers, pulled by the boy’s song. For it was a song. A lullaby. The boy sang to John as a father does to his child when dark has fallen and bedtime has come.
“The stars are out, the moon is bright.”
Those words. John remembered them. They were his mother’s words, passed down through him to his children. It felt good to hear them again. It felt like coming home. A dim, fading part of him thought to ask how he could be listening to her lullaby all these years later, and listening to it here of all places. But it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. He had pushed so hard, had driven so far, and it felt good to rest his head and let go. To leave the nightmare of the world behind and give in to the comfortable dreams that awaited him, one slow breath away, on the other side of sleep’s opening door.
It felt so, so good.
Which was why he did what he did next.
Not because of Mariah, who was somewhere out in the desert night, and not because of the message on his answering machine summoning him to a blue house by the Atlantic. No. As the lullaby reached its final, haunting line, John forced his eyes open and slammed his fist into the radio for no other reason than because listening to it felt good, and he did not trust what felt good.
“Good night, little one, sleep—”
Plastic crunched, and the boy sobbed as if he’d been struck. Fresh lines of tears poured from the speakers, running down the dashboard and pattering into the cup holders. When he started to sing again, he’d lost his place, was set back a step.
“The stars are out, the moon is—”
John’s arm was hard to lift, a rope filled with wet lead. But he had strength enough to shatter the display. The clock went dark, killing what light remained inside the truck; now there was only the voice and its weeping, fractured lullaby—good night good night good night—and the panting of John’s breath, the smashing of his fist. His knuckles split open. Blood spattered his face. He cried out in pain, in triumph, and he kept going. Pain was something he understood. Pain was something he could trust. He pounded the radio until it cracked and caved in, then he started on the steel mesh speakers, where the boy’s last sobs had already died. His fingers stripped back from the bone. He screamed. He howled. His hand was in rags, dripping, and still his body sat limp in its seat, still his eyelids tried to close. The lullaby had ended, but its undertow had not. He felt its pull inside him, tugging him down and down toward sleep, and he could not let that happen, would never wake again if he let that happen. To say goodnight now was to say goodnight forever. So he punished the speakers, and when nothing remained of them but twisted, bloodied jags, he took what was left of his fist and drove it through the window, carving his arm open to the elbow in a white-hot climax of agony. Only then, clinging weakly to consciousness—at least for a time—did John Hawthorne do what the cut brake line in his genetic code made it so difficult for him to do.
He stopped.
???
As John obliterated his hand against the radio, Mariah pushed her own hand up into her vagina. After the sickness passed—the first bout, anyway—she’d gotten mad. Spitting mad, as her mother would have said, and of course she was thinking about Mommy now, because she was well on her way to becoming one herself.
Fingers clenched in the soft dry sand, which greedily drank up her vomit, she made herself say it out loud: “I’m pregnant. I’m goddamned pregnant.”
Some hidden trapdoor unlocked inside her, and she experienced a brief whooshing sensation. There it was. She was pregnant. Mariah Nowak had gone and gotten herself knocked up sky-high, and it was a long, long way back down to solid ground. But how? That was the question, and the answer wasn’t so difficult to spot once she decided to look. Math. That was how. She’d gotten her IUD sometime during the summer of 2013 . . . no it had been 2012, the year she totaled her Hyundai on the freeway. It hadn’t been a bad accident, all things considered, just a wee bump into a much bigger truck, but it had served her a healthy scare and a heap of stress, and the stress had triggered a period to rival what had poured forth from the elevator doors in Kubrick’s The Shining. After fifteen days of constant bleeding and lightheadedness, she’d been having vivid thoughts of rising sea levels and a certain Biblical ark. She was so fed up with her vagina when it finally dried up that she went to the doctor, who suggested Mirena as one possible way to slow down, if not stop, those ‘heavy rains.’ Mariah scheduled an appointment then and there. She and her new t-shaped pal didn’t get along so great the first year—there’d been mood swings, upset stomachs, even a few inexplicable fevers—but after that it had been smooth sailing. A spot of blood a month, if that, and the years slipped away as years like to do, until she simply forgot about the tenant taking up real estate in her uterus. It must have run short on cash and stopped paying rent, and yes, now that she thought about it, she’d had a few cranky spells late this winter, a few days where getting out of bed felt tantamount to climbing a mountain. But no blood, no cramps. Well, maybe a little blood and a few cramps . . . but not enough to raise any warning flags. And so, when she missed her period after her one night with John Hawthorne, it didn’t even occur to her, because she hadn’t been looking in the first place.
What a hoot.
What a riot.
Hunched over in the dirt like some feral castaway, Mariah started to laugh. It was not a pleasant laugh, and it was not kind to the raw lining of her throat. Still laughing, she shoved John’s sweatpants off her trembling legs and squatted with her butt pressed to her ankles. What did you do to a tenant who defaulted on rent? You evicted that fucker—that’s what you did. She clenched her jaws and got digging. One knuckle in, two, and she really should have washed her hands first, or at least wiped them off. She could feel the desert on her fingers. She and the Mojave Riverbed were getting to know each other real nice, yes sir; only she was not so sure this was the riverbed, now that she considered it. The dark seemed different here. Bigger. Busier. The wind in this place didn’t walk one way but every way, like pedestrians bustling about a city square. She glanced over her shoulder, looking for the pickup, and found only its headlights. Their beams shafted off into the night, touching nothing but swirls of ash and what might have been a tree . . . or an exceptionally tall and exceptionally still person standing just outside their reach. She groaned. Focus, girl, focus. There should be a string up yonder, the doc said so, and had the headlights been swaying ever so gently side to side? She was pretty sure they had been, and much less sure what John could possibly be doing to rock the truck. Maybe Led Zeppelin is on, and John is going at the old air guitar. That almost got her laughing again, but then she wondered what she was going to say when she got back. She might be able to pass off the first sick as a random case of the blahs, but the second? The third? Even John, Mr. Mouth Shut and Eyes on the Road Ahead, might start to ask questions if the lid started flying off her stomach like clockwork, and what would she tell him then?
Mariah didn’t know.
But she knew she was going to scream if her dig didn’t turn up gold soon. Scream, or puke. Iced sweat slicked her cheeks. Her forehead burned like an oven range. She was hot and cold and running out of patience, not to mention fingers, and where the hell was that stupid little . . . there! Her nails caught onto a thin strand that might have been string. At least she hoped it was string, because it was coming out one way or another. Even if it unzipped her from the inside out. She pinched tight and pulled. There came a curious dragging tickle, only heavier than a tickle and so, so deep. Whatever the strand was attached to might have been lodged under her navel or up behind her Adam’s apple, except she didn’t have an Adam’s apple, always forgot that little tidbit about women, and why did guys get all the easy stuff while girls got the high-maintenance equipment? No man ever woke up thinking, Good God, why do I have to deal with this lump on my throat? If only I’d been born a flat-throated female with a nice wide set of hips, and please can I trade these balls in for something that bleeds all the time instead? Mariah gritted her teeth, unable to tell the darkness outside from the darkness washing through her head in painful, dizzying waves. She rocked back on her heels, nearly tipped over, and then it was done. No ceremony, no fireworks, just this white little anchor resting in her palm, blood smeared across its hooked tips.
“Nice to meet you, Mirena,” Mariah said. “You bitch.”
She dug a small grave for the plastic T that had lived inside her for the last six years. As she covered it up, she felt an unexpected touch of sadness. It had been put in her on a day when people still sat in coffee shops and walked their dogs, a day when Mariah Nowak had been younger, and if not better, then at least more hopeful. That counted for something. That meant something. Or maybe she was feeling sentimental because she was a woman, and a pregnant woman at that. But she didn’t think so. Not really. She thought that feeling sentimental on occasion was a condition of being human.
Unless you were John.
Mariah got up. Her legs cramped as she pulled up her sweatpants and took the first, hobbling steps back to the truck. Its headlights had stopped swaying, assuming they’d ever been swaying in the first place. The refreshingly chilly night air cooled the sweat on her skin. She stared out to the burning curtains of smoke draped over the horizon . . . and how long that horizon was, how far it reached without interruption, spanning not just one compass point but all of them. No, this was no riverbed. This was the great wide open of a desert that made the desert of her childhood look like . . . well, a child. But she knew of only one dust pit in all of California that could be this enormous, and John wouldn’t have driven them straight into Death Valley. He was nuts when it came to steering clear of people, but he wasn’t that nuts. Was he? She walked on, her feet shifting inside her borrowed Nikes. Up ahead, John’s pickup sketched itself against the fire-brushed darkness. Ash had gathered on the windshield and roof. It occurred to Mariah that she was wearing quite a bit of gray herself. She shook out her hair and dusted off her shoulders, then nausea doubled her over like a punch to the gut. The spell was brief, thankfully, and dry—she had nothing left inside her to give. As she straightened up, she heard what resembled a far-off shout.
Or a scream.
Wind carried the sound away, and the desert smoothed itself back into silence. She started to walk again. The chill in the air no longer seemed quite so refreshing; what had been a nibble was now a bite. She was almost back to the truck when another noise—high and bright—shattered the quiet for good. Glass. Breaking glass. John. She sprinted around the hood in time to watch his hand withdraw through the driver side window, which had been reduced to shards. What she saw of that hand stole her breath. It looked like he was wearing a thick leather glove, one that had been chewed to strips and was barely holding together, except John didn’t own gloves—not that Mariah knew of, anyway. She slowed. Glass crunched under her heels as she stepped up to his door. Distantly, she thought, Good thing I’m wearing shoes.
John sat with his eyes half-closed and his head back against the seat. Mariah could not see his far hand, nor the limb attached to it. Was not sure she wanted to. Oh God, what happened here? But looking at the unrecognizable mash of wires and plastic and metal on the dashboard, she had an idea—a foggy, unthinkable idea—that chilled her in places she’d never felt before.
“John?” she said, quietly. “Are you okay?”
John lifted his right arm, blood spilling into his lap, and pointed at the radio with a finger whose knucklebones bulged nakedly through the skin. “It sings a lullaby,” he said in a voice softer than a whisper. “It sings a lullaby, to lay you down to sleep.”
