What the Desert Highway Took

• Chapter 1 The Long Blacktop
• Chapter 2 Ghost Radios and Dead Miles
• Chapter 3 The Neon Mirage
• Chapter 4 Relics of the Missing
• Chapter 5 Dust in the Windpipe
• Chapter 6 The Mechanics of Salt
• Chapter 7 Shifting Horizons
• Chapter 8 Old War, New Graves
• Chapter 9 The Bones of Route 9
• Chapter 10 Tracks Leading Nowhere
• Chapter 11 The Chapel of Exhaust
• Chapter 12 The Maw beneath the Asphalt
• Chapter 13 What the Highway Eats
• Chapter 14 The Burden of Sight
• Chapter 15 A Debt Marked in Blood
• Chapter 16 The Smell of Burning Sage
• Chapter 17 Chasing Shadows in the Rearview
• Chapter 18 Hollow Voices on the Wire
• Chapter 19 The Salt Witch's Toll
• Chapter 20 Broken Axles, Bleeding Hands
• Chapter 21 The Night That Stretches
• Chapter 22 No Exit on the Line
• Chapter 23 The Weight of Gravel
• Chapter 24 The Desert Demands a Passenger
• Chapter 25 Unfinished Business
• Chapter 26 Paved into the Earth

The 1947 Ford Super Deluxe had a radiator that wept rust and a third gear that slipped if you looked at it wrong, but it was paid for, and it didn't talk back. Frank Miller kept his left wrist rested on the chrome horn ring, his right hand lying loose over the fake mahogany gearshift knob. The heat coming off the blacktop wasn't just hot; it was heavy, like a wet wool army blanket pulled straight out of a laundry vat and draped over the hood.

Out here on Route 9, seventy miles west of the county line and two hundred miles from anywhere a man might want to raise a child or buy a cold bottle of Schlitz, the pavement had a way of melting into a grey grease. It bubbled in the seams. When the tires rolled over those seams, they made a sticky, smacking sound—thwack-thwack, thwack-thwack—that sounded too much like a man trying to pull his boots out of French mud.

Frank didn't care for the sound, but he didn't turn up the radio to drown it out. The radio was dead anyway, dead since noon when the station out of Albuquerque dropped off into a wall of static that hummed like a nest of disturbed hornets. He’d left the brass dial set to 820 Kilocycles, where the needle quivered every time the generator gave a weak surge.

"Water," Frank said to the empty bench seat beside him.

His canteen sat there, strapped into a leather harness he’d salvaged from an Italian field kit near Anzio. The leather was dry enough to crack like thin brittle candy, but the canvas sleeve was still damp from the ice he’d bought off the Mexican kid at the Texaco in Santa Rosa six hours ago. He unclipped the stopper with his thumb, took a mouthful, swilled it around his teeth to rinse away the grit that had drifted in through the floorboards, and spat it out the vent window. The red dust of the Llano Estacado didn't wash out easy. It stayed on the tongue like copper pennies.

He checked the rearview mirror. Nothing behind him for twenty miles. Nothing ahead of him except the heat shimmering off the center line until the asphalt seemed to lift three feet off the dirt and float like an oil slick in the sky.

It was 1949, and the war had been over for four years, four months, and eleven days, but nobody had bothered to tell the desert. The landscape looked as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to a coal seam, buried the pieces under forty feet of yellow sand, and left the whole mess to bake until the sky turned the color of a bruised kidney.

Frank had a man’s name written on a piece of greasy ledger paper stuffed into his shirt pocket: Hollis Vance. Beneath the name was an address that didn't have a street number, just a description—The Last Stop Garage, Mile 114, Route 9. Below that, in the small, tight hand of a woman who had spent three months crying into her pillow before she hired a man with a gun and a car, were four words: He never came home.

The man who hadn't come home was Artie Vance. Artie was twenty-two, had a hitch with the 82nd Airborne that left him with a bad knee and a citation for knocking out an 88mm gun near Saint-Lô, and had last been seen driving a green '41 Plymouth coupe with a missing rear bumper and a trunk full of cedar shingles he was hauling to his brother's place in Needles. That had been in May. It was now August, and the shingles hadn't arrived, the Plymouth hadn't been found, and the sheriff in San Miguel County had told Artie’s mother that young men who’d seen the Rhine sometimes just kept driving until they hit the ocean or the bottom of a bottle.

Frank knew about the bottom of the bottle. He’d looked down it himself once or twice in the depot at Newark before he realized the glass was too thick to see through. But he also knew Artie Vance's platoon commander, a fellow named Miller who wasn't any relation but had shared a foxhole with Frank during the cold week before the Bulge snapped shut. When the old woman called him at the rooming house in El Paso, Frank had looked at his boots, looked at the five-dollar bills stacked on his dresser from three weeks of hauling crates for the Railway Express, and picked up his hat.

"A boy doesn't just evaporate," she had told him over the crackling trunk line. "Not in a Plymouth. It’s too bright a green."

"Everything looks grey out on nine, ma'am," Frank had told her. "Even the red stuff."

Now, fifty miles past the last town that possessed a bank or a barber, Frank began to see what she meant about the emptiness. Route 9 wasn't like Route 66. It didn't have the neon teepes or the plaster dinosaurs or the girls in shorts roller-skating out to put frosted mugs of root beer on your door frame. Route 9 was a bypass built for cattle trucks and oil rigs that never materialized, a two-lane ribbon of gravel and creosote laid down by convicts during the Depression and left to rot when the war took all the oil and rubber.

The telephone poles were the only things that stayed straight. They marched beside the road like pine coffins set on end, their wires sagging under the weight of heat-fattened crows that didn't fly when the Ford went past. They just turned their black beads of eyes and watched the dust settle into the grease on the bumpers.

Around two in the afternoon, the oil pressure needle dipped. It didn't drop to zero—if it had dropped to zero, Frank would have pulled over and cursed until the metal cooled—but it wavered down into the red zone near fifteen pounds.

He eased his foot off the pedal. The Ford groaned, its engine pitch dropping from a steady drone to a wet, hollow rattle.

"Don't you do it," Frank grunted, tapping the glass over the gauge with his middle finger. "We're eighty miles from a telephone and I'm too old to carry an axle on my shoulders."

Ahead, where the horizon flattened out into a grey-white skillet of salt flats, a smudge appeared. It wasn't a town. You didn't get towns out here unless three railway lines happened to crash into each other. It was a shape—square, low, built of sun-bleached cinder block with a roof that looked like it had been salvaged from the side of a boxcar.

A sign stood forty yards before the gravel turnout. It was painted on a sheet of corrugated tin that had been hit so many times by bird shot the letters looked like they were leaking rust.

LAST STOP. GAS. COLD ICE. WE FIX TIRE.

Behind the building, three car frames sat in the scrub like the skeletons of large, iron sheep. They were stripped clean—no doors, no hoods, no glass. The sun had burned the paint off them forty years ago, leaving the metal the blue-grey color of an old kettle.

Frank rolled the Ford onto the gravel, the tires crunching through three inches of crushed limestone that smelled faintly of sulfur and kerosene. He didn't turn off the ignition right away; he sat with his hands on the wheel, letting the engine idled down, listening for the slap of a loose valve or the ping of a cracked head.

The door to the shack didn't open. Nobody came out with a rag in his back pocket and a grease gun over his shoulder.

The heat inside the car rose instantly the moment the draft from the cowl vent stopped. Frank pulled his hat off, wiped his brow with the sleeve of his blue chambray shirt, and pushed the door open. The hinge gave a high, dry scream that sounded like a gull being squeezed.

The air outside wasn't air; it was ash. It entered the nostrils with a bite that tasted of alkali and ancient dust.

"Hello the house," Frank called out. He kept his voice low, the way he’d learned to talk when he was crawling through the scrub near Saint-Vith. Loud noises in open country had a bad habit of coming back at you with a bullet attached.

A dog appeared from around the corner of the building. It wasn't much of a dog—mostly rib cage, yellow skin, and a tail that looked like a piece of old rope that had been dipped in tar. It didn't bark. It just stood on three legs, holding its front left paw six inches off the hot gravel, and stared at Frank's boots with eyes that were cloudy blue around the edges, like milk that had gone sour in the jug.

"You're a friendly bastard, aren't you?" Frank said.

The front door of the shack was screened with wire that had gone green with copper rot. Through the mesh, Frank could see the shape of a man sitting behind a counter made of two oil drums and a length of tongue-and-groove pine.

"We got unleaded," a voice came through the screen. It was thin, dry, and had the rattling tone of an old stovepipe in a high wind. "Thirty-two cents a gallon. Five cents extra if I got to use the hand pump myself."

Frank walked up the two wooden steps. The pine boards were worn down in the center until the grain stood up in sharp ridges that would go right through a thin shoe sole.

"I can pump my own," Frank said, pushing the screen open.

The room smelled of lard, salt pork, and stale gasoline. On a shelf behind the counter sat four cans of beans with the labels falling off, three boxes of rusted horseshoe nails, and a jar of pickled eggs that looked as though they had been put there while Woodrow Wilson was still in the White House.

The man behind the counter was old, but he was the kind of old that looked like he’d been dragged out of a river and left in the sun until he hardened into leather. He had three fingers on his left hand and a pair of spectacle frames held together over the bridge of his nose with black friction tape. He was wearing an undershirt that had lost its buttons, showing a chest as flat and grey as a cedar board.

"You ain't from the state," the old man said. It wasn't a question. He didn't look at Frank's face; he looked at the top button of Frank's shirt, where the silver discharge pin—the 'Ruptured Duck'—was pinned through the blue cotton.

"Texas plates," Frank said. "El Paso."

"El Paso's three hundred miles that way." The old man pointed a three-fingered hand toward the wall behind him. "Nothing between here and there but salt and wind. What you looking for?"

"A green '41 Plymouth," Frank said. He reached into his pocket, pulled out the greasy slip of paper, and laid it on the oil drum. "And a boy named Artie Vance."

The old man didn't look at the paper. He didn't even reach out his hand to touch it. A large blue fly, heavy with heat, landed on the grease stain on the note, twitched its wings twice, and began to circle the pencil marks.

"Lots of cars go down nine," the old man said. His eyelids were heavy, raw-red along the rims, like he’d spent fifty years looking straight into the noon sun without blinking. "Some of 'em go east. Some of 'em go west. Most of 'em go too fast to see what color they are."

"This one was green," Frank said softly. "Bright green. Had cedar shingles in the back. Smelled like a lumber yard."

"Deserts smell like salt," the old man said. He leaned down, picked up an iron key attached to a block of wood the size of a brick, and threw it onto the counter. It landed with a dull thud that didn't bounce. "Privy's out back. Don't touch the pump handle on the well. It's sour."

"I don't need the privy," Frank said. He took a five-dollar bill from his wallet and laid it next to the paper with the fly on it. "I need to know if Artie Vance stopped here for gas three months ago."

The old man looked at the bill now. He looked at it the way a dog looks at a stick you've picked up—not sure if you're going to throw it or hit him with it.

"May," the old man said.

"May twentieth," Frank said. "Give or take two days."

"It was hot then, too," the old man said. He reached out a thumb—the nail was black and split down the middle—and slid the five-dollar bill off the wood. It disappeared into his trousers pocket so fast Frank didn't see the motion. "A green car come through. Had a bad clutch. I could smell the leather burning three miles before he hit the yard."

"Did he buy gas?"

"Ten gallons," the old man said. "Paid with a silver dollar and two quarters. Said he was going to California."

"Did he get there?"

The old man looked past Frank, out through the greening screen door at the empty grey line of the highway. A thermal was building out over the salt flats, twisting the heat into a long, clear corkscrew that made the telephone poles look as if they were dancing.

"Nobody gets to California on Route 9," the old man said plainly. "They just think they're going there because the sun sets in front of 'em."

"What's that mean?"

"It means the road ends before the state line," the old man said. He picked up an greasy rag and began to wipe down the pine counter, moving the dirt from one side of the wood to the other in long, slow arcs. "The state stopped paying the graders in thirty-eight. After Mile 140, it ain't a highway no more. It's just grease on rock."

"A car can drive on rock," Frank said.

"Not when the rock moves," the old man said.

Frank stared at him for three seconds. He’d heard plenty of men talk crazy after a few years in the sun—old prospectors who thought the mesquite bushes were talking to 'em about silver veins, old infantrymen who still heard the mortars coming in whenever the kitchen stove backfired. But this old man didn't sound crazy. He sounded bored. He sounded like a freight clerk reading off the weight of coal cars.

"Where's the next telephone?" Frank asked.

"Tucumcari," the old man said. "Sixty-two miles north. You got to take the dirt cut-off at the dead sycamore."

"There aren't any trees out here," Frank said.

"There's one," said the old man. "It's been dead since the flood of '04. You can't miss it. It's white as a dry shinbone."

Frank stood there for a moment, listening to the house settle. The heat was making the cinder blocks pop—short, sharp noises like small pebbles hitting a wall. Outside, the dog had laid down under the rear axle of the Ford, where the shadow was only three inches wide.

"You got a name?" Frank asked.

"Hollis," the old man said. He didn't offer his last name, though Frank already knew it from the paper in his pocket. He didn't ask Frank's name either.

"Hollis," Frank said, "if a boy in a green Plymouth didn't make it to Tucumcari, and he didn't turn back south, where did he go?"

The old man stopped his rag. He held it still against the wood, his three-fingered hand looking like a dried claw resting on a plank.

"There's places out here where the road gets thin," Hollis said. His voice dropped an octave, losing its dry rasp and turning into something heavy and flat. "You drive over 'em every day and don't think nothing about it. Just blacktop and oil. But every now and then, if the sun's right and the wind's coming off the salt, the blacktop ain't there no more. Just what was under it."

"What was under it?"

"The dirt," Hollis said. "And the things that were in the dirt before we put the gravel down."

Frank reached down, picked up his five-dollar bill off the counter—he was fast enough that his fingers brushed the old man's dry knuckles—and put it back in his shirt pocket.

"I'll buy twenty gallons," Frank said. "And I'll pump it myself."

Hollis didn't argue about the five dollars. He just spat on the floor behind the oil drums—a dark brown squirt of tobacco juice that hit the dirt floor with a hiss—and went back to wiping the wood.

"Watch your oil pressure," Hollis said as Frank touched the screen door. "The heat after Mile 120 gets into the bearings. It makes 'em stretch."

"I've got spare oil in the trunk," Frank said.

"It ain't the oil that stretches," Hollis said to the screen. "It's the iron."

Frank stepped out into the glare. The heat hit him in the face like a flatboard swung by a heavy man. The yellow dog didn't move as he walked past to the gas pump.

dropped the heavy brass nozzle into the Ford's tank and began to turn the iron crank on the side of the red pump cylinder. Clack-chunk, clack-chunk. With every stroke, five gallons of yellow, foul-smelling fuel rose into the glass globe at the top, sloshing against the etched lines.

He looked down the highway to the west.

The heat had pulled the road up into the air so far that he could see three different horizons, one stacked on top of the other like grey cardboard. A truck should have been visible ten miles off—the dust cloud alone usually gave 'em away twenty minutes before you heard the valves—but there was nothing. No dust. No chrome. No movement except the slow, oily turning of the air above the blacktop.

Frank put the cap back on the tank, wiped his hands on his trousers, and got back into the car. The leather seat burned through his jeans, but he didn't jump. He just sat there, waiting for his heart to slow down. It wasn't beating fast because he was scared; it was beating fast the way it used to beat when they were sitting in the trucks behind the hedgerows, waiting for the whistle to blow so they could walk out into the cabbages where the machine guns were.

He pulled the starter button out. The Ford gave a dry, heavy cough, then caught, the fan belt squealing once before settled into its grey rattle.

He put the car in gear, let the clutch out slow, and pulled off the gravel.

As the tires hit the blacktop, Frank looked in his rearview mirror.

The old man wasn't in the doorway. The yellow dog hadn't moved. But on the tin sign by the road, the shadows had shifted so that the bullet holes didn't look like holes anymore. They looked like teeth, black and tiny, set in a long tin mouth that was wide open to the sky.

Frank pushed his hat back off his forehead, took a breath of the hot, copper-tasting air, and stepped on the gas.

The mileage counter on the dash registered 114.2.

Two miles later, the telephone poles stopped.

They didn't taper off, and they hadn't fallen down. The last pole sat twenty feet off the right shoulder, its wooden cross-arm broken off on one side so it looked like a one-armed gallows. Beyond it, the thick, black wires simply dropped into the dirt, disappearing into the scrub mesquite as if somebody had taken a spade, dug a three-foot trench, and buried the rest of the line all the way to the horizon.

Frank slowed the car down to twenty miles an hour.

The road didn't have a center line here. The blacktop was older, darker, and full of deep, narrow cracks that looked like they’d been cut with a hatchet. In between the cracks, grass was growing—not yellow desert grass, but a thick, oily kind of weed with fleshy leaves that were the color of a wet slate shingle.

He drove for ten minutes in silence. The engine temperature gauge was pinned to the right, past the 210 mark, right up against the small brass rivet that held the needle to the face. The oil pressure was down to ten pounds.

Then he saw the shingle.

It was sitting on the shoulder, five feet off the asphalt, half-buried in the white alkali crust. It was cedar, eight inches long, notched at the bottom the way carpenters in San Miguel County notched 'em for barn roofs. It wasn't gray like the wood out here ought to have been after three hours in the sun; it was fresh, reddish-brown, and when the draft from the Ford's front fender caught it, it flipped over twice, showing the bright, creamy white of fresh-cut sapwood.

Frank pulled the Ford over to the side of the road, left the engine idling with the hand-choke pulled out to keep it from dying, and got out.

The air was dead still. There wasn't enough breeze to lift the red dust off his boot toes.

He picked up the shingle. It was cold. Not cool like a stone in the shade, but cold like a piece of lard that had been sitting in an icebox all night.

When he smelled it, he didn't smell cedar. He smelled oil—heavy, greasy crankcase oil—and something else that reminded him of the butcher shop his uncle had run in Pittsburgh, back before the war, on days when the hot water had failed and the scrap tubs were sitting out in the alley behind the alley door.

He looked down the road.

A quarter-mile ahead, the asphalt didn't melt into the heat anymore. It ended.

It didn't end in a gravel turnout or a dead-end barricade with red reflectors. It just stopped, cleanly, as if a large pair of shears had cut the three-inch crust of tar and gravel right across the lanes. Beyond it, the road was just red dirt—red, packed tight, and smooth as a cellar floor.

And running straight down the middle of that red dirt, pressed two inches deep into the packed clay, were two parallel grooves.

They weren't tire tracks. Tire tracks had tread—diamond patterns or rib patterns or the zig-zag teeth of mud-and-snow tires.

These were smooth. They were six inches wide, set four feet apart, and they looked as if somebody had pulled two heavy, flat iron bars through the earth while it was still soft as butter.

Frank walked back to the Ford, reached through the open window, and turned the key off.

The engine didn't die right away. It ran on for three seconds, dieseling—thump... thump... thump-ping—as the hot carbon in the cylinders kept firing without the spark. When it finally stopped, the silence that came down over the desert was so heavy that Frank could hear the grease dripping off the oil pan and hitting the dry dust below with a tiny, wet hiss.

He reached under the seat, pulled out his canvas holster with the .45 Colt he’d taken off a dead captain in Normandy, and buckled it around his waist over his trousers. He didn't unbutton the strap. He just liked the weight of it against his hip. It felt like something that had been made by men who used rulers and scales.

"Artie," Frank said to the horizon.

Nobody answered. A mile off, a sheet of salt crust lifted off the flats, whirled around three times in the grey air like a piece of paper, and fell back down.

Frank walked toward the cut edge of the blacktop.

When he reached the place where the pavement stopped, he stopped too. He didn't put his foot on the red dirt right away. He stood on the last six inches of asphalt, looking down at his boots.

The blacktop under his heels was hot enough to soften his rubber soles. But two inches ahead, where the red clay began, the ground was grey with a thin layer of frost.

It wasn't ice. It was salt—fine, powdery salt that had crystallized in the tiny hollows between the pebbles.

Frank knelt down, touched the red dirt with his middle finger, and brought it to his tongue.

It was salt, all right. Salt and iron.

And under the dirt, about four feet down, he could hear something.

It wasn't a sound you heard with your ears. It was a vibration that came up through the leather of his boots, through the ankles, and settled in the small of his back like a dull ache. It had the rhythm of a pump—not an iron pump like the one Hollis had at the station, but a wet, slow pump that took six seconds to lift and six seconds to fall.

Suck. Squish. Hold.

Suck. Squish. Hold.

Frank stood up slowly. He looked back at the Ford.

The car looked small out here. It looked like a blue beetle that had crawled out onto a large, gray zinc table and died before it could reach the sugar bowl.

He took his pencil out, pulled the paper with Artie Vance's name on it from his pocket, and wrote three words below the mother's address:

Mile 116. Cold.

Then he crossed the line into the red dirt.

The cold did not creep up through Frank Miller’s boots so much as it claimed them. On the blacktop, the heat had been a living, heavy thing, pressing down on a man’s shoulders until his ribs felt crowded. Here, two paces past the severed lip of the asphalt, the air was still hot against his face, but his feet felt as if they were standing on a slab of butcher’s marble left out in a December dusk.

He looked down at the twin parallel grooves running through the red clay. They were clean, uniform, and deep enough to swallow the sole of a work boot. No displaced dirt spilled over the edges. Whatever had cut those lines into the earth hadn't pushed the soil aside; it had compressed it, packing the red dust into something dense and shiny as mica.

Frank walked ten yards along the right groove, his hips swinging with the easy, measured stride he’d used when minesweeping near the Meurthe. He stopped and squatted. The fine white salt that frosted the clay was wet to the touch, leaving a grey slick on his fingers that didn't evaporate in the sun. When he rubbed his thumb and index finger together, the grit didn't roll—it slid, like oil mixed with pulverized glass.

Behind him, the Ford’s engine was completely still, but the bodywork was making a slow, metallic music. As the hot iron cooled against the subterranean chill rising from the dirt, the floorboards popped with the sound of small dry sticks breaking underfoot.

Frank stood, pulled his handkerchief from his back pocket, and thoroughly wiped his fingers. He didn't want that grey grease on his steering wheel. He walked back to the car, unhooked the leather strap on his canteen, and drank a small swallow of warm, tinny water. It didn't clear the copper taste from his mouth, but it gave him something to swallow.

He got back into the bench seat. The cabin was still suffocatingly warm from the sun, but the floor pan beneath his boots was growing noticeably cold. He reached for the brass ignition key, turned it, and pulled the starter knob.

The starter motor whined—once, twice, three times—a thin, strained sound that lacked its usual iron punch. The battery was dropping charge, as if the soil beneath the tires were leeching the current right out of the lead plates.

"Come on, house-cat," Frank muttered, tapping his shoe against the accelerator.

On the fourth turn, the engine caught with a dull, wet thud. It didn't idle smoothly. The intake was pulling air that felt too heavy, sputtering as if the carburetor were breathing swamp gas instead of desert heat. Frank kept his foot light on the pedal, holding the engine at a fast walk until the grey shake smoothed out into a passable rattle.

He shifted into low, released the clutch, and eased the Super Deluxe off the edge of the blacktop.

The transition was eerily smooth. There was no bone-jarring bump as the tires dropped from the three-inch crust of asphalt to the dirt. The red clay took the tires without a sound, swallowing the tread noise entirely. The sticky thwack-thwack of the tar seams vanished, replaced by an absolute, muffled silence. It was like driving a rubber wagon over a feather mattress.

Frank kept the Ford’s tires positioned six inches to the left of the deep grooves. He didn't want his wheels falling into those channels. If the front end slipped in, the axle would drag, and at ten pounds of oil pressure, he’d burn the main bearings out before he could jack the frame high enough to clear the rut.

The speedometer needle sat dead on zero.

Frank tapped the glass dial. The needle didn't budge. He checked the odometer: 116.4. The small white numbers on the third wheel were stuck halfway between four and five, jammed against the brass casing as if the gear teeth had stripped out all at once.

"Dead miles," Frank said aloud.

His voice didn't carry inside the cab. It flatlined immediately, swallowed by the wool headliner and the weird density of the air.

He glanced at the radio dial on the center dash. The brass needle was still resting on 820 Kilocycles, where the station out of Albuquerque had drowned in static four hours ago. He hadn't touched the volume knob, but now a faint, rhythmic sound began to push through the small oval speaker set into the stamped steel dashboard.

It wasn't static. Static was sharp, dry, and crackled like grease in a skillet.

This sound was round and wet. It was a rhythmic breathing—fshhh, fshhh, fshhh—matched perfectly to the wet, slow pulse Frank had felt through the ground when he was kneeling in the dirt. Every six seconds, the tone dropped into a low, metallic hum that made the tiny glass face of the oil pressure gauge vibrate in its socket.

Frank reached out and turned the radio knob to the left, all the way to the off position.

The click was sharp and clear in the quiet cab.

The speaker kept breathing.

Fshhh. Fshhh. Fshhh.

Frank stopped the car. He didn't turn off the engine this time—he didn't trust the starter to pull the flywheel around again—but he pulled the handbrake until the ratchet clicked six times, then leaned over the dash.

He reached behind the painted steel lip beneath the glove box, found the heavy cloth-wrapped wiring bundle that ran from the battery to the receiver, and located the inline glass fuse holder. He gave the plastic casing a hard twist, pulled it apart, and dropped the small glass tube into his shirt pocket.

The circuit was broken. There was no juice running to the vacuum tubes.

From the speaker, the breathing continued, steady as a bellows in an empty shop.

Fshhh. Fshhh. Fshhh.

Beneath the wet rhythm, another sound began to scrape through the speaker cloth. It was thin, high-pitched, and distant, like a woman singing through three walls and a bucket of water. Frank couldn't make out the words, but the melody had the slow, dragged-out cadence of a church hymn—the kind they sang in the small wood-frame chapels back in West Virginia when the coal mines were on strike and the lard tubs were empty.

Frank sat back, his hands resting on his knees. He didn't feel the sharp spike of panic he’d felt the first time a mortar shell had whistled over the trees at Saint-Vith. This was different. This was the dull, heavy dread that came when you were sitting in a wet ditch at three in the morning, knowing the shift was six hours long and your socks were already frozen to your heels.

He looked out the windshield.

The landscape had stopped looking like New Mexico. The scrub mesquite and yellow creosote bushes were gone, replaced by low, rounded hummocks of grey dirt that looked like piles of wet slag dumped outside an iron foundry. There were no rocks, no cactus, no lizard tracks in the dust. Nothing grew on the slopes of the hummocks except small, circular patches of white lichen that looked like silver dollars dropped in the mud.

The sky above had lost its bright, pale blue glare. It had flattened into an even, leaden sheet of grey cloud that held no sun, yet cast no distinct shadows. The horizon was no longer miles away; it seemed to have drawn in close, wrapping around the Ford like a dusty wool curtain fifty yards in every direction.

Frank put the car back in gear and let the clutch out.

The red dirt road began to curve—not with the long, wide sweeps designed by highway engineers for sixty-mile-an-hour traffic, but in sharp, awkward angles that felt as though they had been laid out by someone walking with a heavy load on his back, choosing the path of least resistance between the slag piles.

At Mile 118—or what should have been Mile 118—he found the first relic.

It sat on the right shoulder, half-submerged in a drift of fine white salt that had blown up against its flank like a snowdrift. It was an army-issue Dodge three-quarter-ton weapons carrier, the kind Frank had seen by the hundreds lined up along the roads around Cherbourg.

Its canvas top was gone, the wooden bows rot-grey and broken off flush with the iron bed. The front bumper was bent back in a sharp V, as if it had hit something solid at high speed, but there was nothing in front of it—just the flat, salt-dusted red clay stretching off into the grey haze.

Frank pulled the Ford alongside the truck and idling his engine, looked through his passenger window.

seasonal rust hadn't taken the Dodge the way it usually took iron left in the open. The green paint was gone, but the metal underneath wasn't red or pitted; it was dark, almost black, covered in a greasy film that looked like coal tar. The tires were still on the rims, but they hadn't dry-rotted. They looked like they had been cooked—melted down until the tread was smooth as inner-tube rubber, then flattened into the dirt under immense weight.

On the driver’s door, the white five-pointed star was still visible, though someone had taken an iron tool and scraped five deep, vertical gouges right through the center of it, leaving the bare metal bright and silver beneath the grease.

Frank reached across the seat, opened the passenger door, and looked down into the cab of the Dodge.

The steering wheel was bare iron—the dark green tenite plastic coating had melted off the spokes and pooled on the rusted floorboards like black syrup. On the bench seat sat a single canvas duffel bag. It was rotted through along the seam, and out of the tear spilled three brass mess kit spoons, a pair of wool trousers that had been folded into a neat, square bundle, and a small, square frame made of stamped tin.

Frank didn't get out to look at the picture in the frame. He knew what would be in it. Every third boy in the 28th Infantry had carried the same photograph—a girl in a summer dress standing on a porch in Ohio or Indiana, holding a black dog by the collar while the sun squinted her eyes shut.

What caught his eye was the radio set mounted behind the driver’s seat. It was an SCR-508, the heavy, boxy unit they used in battalion command vehicles. The iron casing was cracked wide open across the top, as if a sledgehammer had dropped on it from thirty feet up.

The dials were gone, but from the open speaker grill, small, dry puffs of grey dust were blowing out in regular intervals.

Puff. Puff. Puff.

Six seconds apart.

The dust didn't disperse in the air. It fell straight down, hitting the running board with a faint, papery pat-pat-pat, forming little grey cones on the rusted iron.

Frank looked away from the Dodge and back down the road.

The parallel grooves in the red dirt were deeper now. They had sunk to eight inches, the inner walls polished so smooth they reflected the leaden grey light from the sky like wet slate. Between the grooves, the earth was mounded up, showing fresh, dark clay that looked as though it had been turned over by a double-bottom plow only twenty minutes before.

He drove past the Dodge. The sound from his own radio speaker shifted as he passed, the hymn-like singing dropping away, replaced by the faint, distinct sound of a telegraph key tapping out an endless, frantic string of code.

Dot-dot-dash-dot. Dash-dash-dot.

It wasn't military code. Frank had sat in enough signals tents to know the rhythm of a corps operator pushing traffic down the line. This was erratic, broken, like a child picking at a piano wire with a rusty nail.

The road dropped into a shallow cut between two high banks of grey, salt-crusted earth. The air inside the cut was cold enough that Frank could see his breath now—small, white plumes that hung in the cab for three or four seconds before collapsing into the grey damp.

The engine was running colder now, too. The temperature gauge needle, which had been pinned against the far right rivet at 210 degrees back at the blacktop, had begun to slide back toward the blue zone. It moved slowly, steadily, inching down past 180, past 140, until it rested against the left stop pin at zero.

Yet the radiator wasn't freezing. Frank could hear the water sloshing through the upper hose, thick and heavy, making a sound like cold porridge being stirred in a wooden bucket.

He turned his headlights on.

The twin yellow beams poked through the grey haze, illuminating about twenty feet of red dirt before terminating abruptly in a wall of flat, dull light. The light didn't scatter or bounce off the dust; it was absorbed, as if the air itself were made of fine charcoal dust suspended in grease.

In the circle of the left headlight, something gleamed.

Frank slowed the car to a crawl.

It was a sign. Not a state road sign or a tin gas advertisement, but an old wooden highway marker, six feet tall, made of two-inch oak planks bolted to an iron rail post. The wood was black with age, the edges rounded off by decades of salt-laden wind.

Painted on the wood in faded white lead paint were two words:

DEAD MILES

Below the words, someone had driven three large iron horse-shoe nails into the oak. Hanging from each nail was an object.

From the first nail hung a silver pocket watch, its crystal cracked in a star pattern, its hands stopped at four minutes past seven.

From the second nail hung a leather dog collar, small enough for a terrier, with a round brass tag that had been beaten flat with a hammer until no letters remained.

From the third nail hung a length of green garden hose, six feet long, coiled into a tight circle and tied with a piece of greasy balking twine.

Frank stopped the Ford three feet from the post. He leaned out the window, looking at the watch.

The second hand wasn't moving, but inside the nickel-plated case, he could hear the balance wheel spinning—not with the clean, sharp tick-tick-tick of an American lever movement, but with a high, whirring scream like a small drill running through soft pine.

"Artie," Frank called out again.

The name sounded dead as a dropped stone.

He put the car in gear and drove past the sign.

Fifty yards beyond the wooden marker, the parallel grooves in the road widened. They pushed out from four feet apart to six, then eight, until the Ford was riding entirely inside the mounded center ridge of red dirt. The tires creaked as they scraped against the inner walls of the tracks, the rubber squealing against the dense, compressed clay.

Then the radio speaker in the dash finally stopped breathing.

The static didn't return. The telegraph key didn't click. The woman’s voice dropped off mid-note.

In the sudden, heavy quiet, the Ford’s engine gave one last wet, hollow cough, and died.

The car rolled three feet and came to a rest.

Frank didn't turn the key. He didn't pull the choke. He sat with his hands on the wheel, his shoulders back against the horsehair padding of the bench seat, listening.

Outside, in the grey gloom between the slag heaps, the air was completely motionless. But from somewhere up ahead—not far, maybe two hundred yards down the red cut—came a sound he recognized.

It was the dry, loose rattle of a four-cylinder engine with a bad clutch and a missing muffler, idling slow and cold in the dirt.

Thump... thump... thump-ping.

Frank unlatched the door, took the brass fuse from his pocket, laid it carefully on the dash, and stepped out into the salt.