Desert Creatures

by Kay Chronister

Genres: Coming of Age; Post-Apocalyptic sci-fi

Synopsis

Nine-year-old Magdala and her father have been exiled from their home; they flee through the harsh landscape of the American West, searching for refuge. As violence pursues them, they join a handful of survivors on a pilgrimage to the holy city of Las Vegas, where it is said that vigilante saints reside, bright with neon power. Magdala, born with a clubfoot, is going to be healed. But when faced with the strange horrors of the Sonoran Desert, one by one the pilgrims fall victim to a hideous sickness—leaving Magdala to fend for herself. After surviving for seven years on her own, Magdala is tired of waiting for her miracle. Magdala turns her gaze to Las Vegas once more, and this time, nothing will stop her. She recruits an exiled Vegas priest at gunpoint to serve as her guide, and the pair form a fragile alliance as they navigate the darkest and strangest reaches of the desert on a journey that takes her further from salvation even as she nears the holy city. With ferocious imagination and poetic precision, Desert Creatures is a story of endurance at the expense of redemption. What compromise does survival require of a woman—and can she ever unlearn the instincts that have kept her alive? Combining the subversive inventiveness of Téa Obreht's Inland with the eco-surrealism of Jeff Vandermeer's Dead Astronauts and the themes of survival and morality in Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Kay Chronister transfigures genre and the myth of the West in her debut novel.

Release date: November 8, 2022

Publisher: Erewhon Books

Print pages: 288

Sample

The fire came at night, a flash of gasoline scent and shattered glass, then a column of flame that swept across the floor. As the room burned, Magdala followed her father, Xavier, out the window. When she was still a few feet from the ground, she crumpled into his arms. Xavier steadied her on her feet, looped her arm around his back and set her clubbed right foot atop his left one. And then they were gone. They ran for hours, for miles. From a distance, they might have been one two-headed creature.

When the light on the cliffs became soft and blue-yellow, he stopped them at a thicket of creosote bush. “Rest your feet a little,” he said. Magdala laid down in the shadow of the brush, then rolled onto her side to face her father. He sat with his gun propped between his knees, his back stiff, facing the horizon.

“Papa,” she said to him. “Where will we go?”

He wouldn’t look at her. “We’ll find somewhere. We’re not troublesome people. Someone will take us in,” he said. Her gaze stayed on him as he stared ahead, his eyes shutting then snapping open, then shutting again. She fell asleep counting his breaths.

When she woke, the sun was high, and the cactus blooms had closed their faces. “Best be moving on,” said Xavier. “We’ll find water in the hills,” he added, seeing her tongue fumble to coat her cracked lips.

Magdala’s eyes followed his pointing finger to the cluster of rock that rose in the distance. “How far?” she asked.

Her father crouched low and motioned for her to climb onto his back. Magdala wrapped her arms around his neck and swung her feet awkwardly at his sides, brushing the barrel of his gun. With the slow, resigned gait of a pack mule, he carried her across the desert. Above them, the sun whitened with noon.

The hills yielded no clear water; the pool they found on a shelf of rock was lush and green and rank, too full of life for human consumption, even in desperate times. Xavier counted back the days since he’d last heard thunder and guessed more than a month had elapsed since it had rained.

Midafternoon, when their mouths were stuck shut and their hopes running thin, they came suddenly to a forest of cactus arms wrapped around each other: thin and sinewy and curling from the trunk of a limbless human form in a dust-crusted denim shirt. Rising from the arms were red flowers with wide yellow stamens. Some were young and thin, but others looked mature, even near-rotting, and from these hung heavy, knuckle-shaped fruits.

Even from a distance, the smell of the vegetation was bright, rusty, palpable. Magdala’s mouth tried to water; half-consciously, she strained closer. Someone or something had already torn one fruit loose from the cactus, then tried to eat another straight from the vine and left it unfinished, pulpy white-green tendrils hanging from the dense wadded ball of the fruit’s center.

Xavier crossed himself, regarded the human form in the center of the vegetation with revulsion. “Never seen one still rooted,” he murmured.

“What is it?” said Magdala.

“Used to be a man. He died and the desert got inside him.”

She was silent, considering this. Then she whispered, “Can I have some?”

Xavier was almost horrified. “Be like cannibalism,” he said. “Wouldn’t it?” He seemed not to know the answer.

Magdala fidgeted away from the question. “I’m so thirsty,” she said, her eyes on the fruit.

“Listen, we can dig for water here. He’s blooming, there might be moisture underground,” said Xavier. But his digging yielded nothing; the earth was parched. At sunset, he relented and they gorged themselves. The scent and taste of the fruit made Magdala gag, but she ate until her belly swelled. Afterwards, Xavier insisted that they walk away backwards.

In the dark of night, she woke trembling and sick, her stomach reeling and her vision blurred. In spite of her shivering and weakness, she wanted to walk, to walk and walk and never cease. Unsteadily she rose to her feet. Xavier was still sleeping, his gun beside him. The full moon throbbed before her eyes as she climbed the hillside, the track of her rubber sandal distinct beside the long divot left when she dragged her clubfoot.

She walked through the night without direction or purpose, borne on by a kind of hunger which she felt not in her stomach but in the heartbeat that galloped beneath her ribs. When her father caught her, she saw him as if through a veil. He was distant, hardly real. She could hear him saying her name, but somehow his cries did not really reach her. She woke only when he slapped her cheek, and then the hunger faded but somewhere down deep, she could feel the sickness stayed.

“Should never have let you eat that,” Xavier said, crouching before her. Her stomach twisted as she tried to focus her gaze on him. His eyes were wet. Magdala wrapped her arms around his neck and buried her head in his shoulder, as much to console him as to console herself. She thought she had never seen tears in her father’s eyes before.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and he drew back.

“It’s not your fault,” he said. “None of it. Understand?”

But it was her fault: not only the sleepwalking but the rest, the fire from underneath the door and the flight into the desert and the desperate, stupefying thirst. He didn’t know.

 

They had gone two days in the desert when they saw from afar the glistening mass of the town, a low, flat sea of glass and brick and corrugated tin. “Could be uninhabited,” Xavier warned. But neither of them could resist hope. Magdala was still sickly, and afraid to close her eyes in the desert for fear that the hunger to walk would come back. As they made for the road, they passed another of the many-tendriled creatures that was once-man-but-now-cactus, and Xavier refused even to slow his pace.

Late at night, he killed a gopher snake. They cooked the animal in the coals of their fire and shared it, sucking the moisture thirstily from the charred meat. Magdala knew as she ate that the snake meat would not stay down, that her stomach was hungry for something else now, but she held her breath and held her belly until her father fell asleep, and only then surrendered her meal back into the buffel grass, retching until she was breathless and weak.

In the end, she had to be carried the rest of the way to the barbed wire barrier that surrounded the cluster of flat buildings. There Xavier stopped, set Magdala on her feet and paced the fence line with the restlessness of a caged predator. Through heavy-lidded eyes, Magdala saw a man wearing leather chaps and a Stetson approach them from the other side. She did not see the gun he was carrying before he lifted it to his shoulder and aimed at her father.

“Weapons down and hands up,” the man said. “You and your girl.”

The words broke faintly through her confusion, and she understood their meaning but not what they demanded of her. Only when she saw Xavier’s hands lifted, his gun lying on the dirt beside him, did she lift her own palms to the wind.

“My daughter’s sick,” her father said. “We’ve been traveling. Looking for shelter. If you could just let us in for a single night—”

“She eat raw desert fruit?” the man said abruptly.

“We both did.”

The man nodded. “Not everyone gets sick,” he said. “And you can cure it. But we’re not some pilgrim stopover. We don’t take visitors.”

Xavier’s eyes moved from her to the man and back again. “What do we have to do to get inside?” he asked.

The man’s chaps rustled like they were a living thing as he shifted. “I guess I can bring you to Oscar,” he said. “He’ll tell you if you’re fit. Come around, now. We’ve got a gate; we’re civilized people.”

Xavier crouched so Magdala could climb onto his shoulders, and they trudged the half mile to the gate, an assemblage of garage doors on pulleys the man yanked to admit them. As they got closer to him, passing through the shade of the elaborate structure, Magdala could see the outline of a wolf stenciled faintly on his pale neck.

“This is Caput Lupinum,” the man said as he led them down the gentle slope into town. “Was a ghost town for a long while before we settled in. Infested with everything nasty you can imagine. We’ve been making progress with it.”

Magdala regarded their surroundings with dizzied wonder. The tenement where they’d lived before stuck out of the desert like a single finger of civilization, every man-made thing around it long since collapsed, and she had never seen so many buildings so close together. Enthralled by the Savings & Loans sign in unlit neon lettering, the buffet chili pepper mascot still grinning beatifically from a window, Magdala half-forgot her sickness. She squirmed and twisted on her father’s back to see as much as she could.

Down the road a ways, the man held open the glass door of a long, flat building marked LARDER in spray paint. Inside, hanging aisle markers still promised the impossible: produce, eggs, meat and fish. Someone had propped the back door open with a rock, admitting a thin slice of sunlight and a heavy black cord running to an industrial fridge.

“Stay here,” their escort said, disappearing through the door.

Once they were alone, Xavier set Magdala down and paced the length of the room, surveying the sacks of mesquite flour spilling over and crates of the dried desert fruits stacked like imports from another country, like things that hadn’t sprouted from dead bodies. Magdala felt a hum inside her head, low and insistent, when she saw that fruit; the taste of it returned to her as real and full as if she were chewing still. But her father was more interested in the fridge. He approached it cautiously, then at once opened the door and shut his eyes and let the cold waft out in a full thick blast that tore Magdala loose from her desert-fruit pining.

“Never seen one that still works,” he said.

Magdala edged up close to him, and they stood a moment bathing in the chill together. They both startled when the man came back in the door. “I should warn you, brother,” he said to Xavier, “that’s not exactly the sort of thing that makes Oscar likely to smile on you.”

“How’d you get power out here?” her father wondered.

The man only laughed. “How long you been wandering out there?”

Xavier didn’t reply. The man clucked at them like he was cueing a horse, and they stepped through the back door, sidestepping the generator that rumbled contentedly on the brickwork. Inside a cloud of smoke sat a lean man, his skin the same copper-brown as her father’s, his hair shaggy beneath his white Stetson. A hand-rolled cigarette hung from one side of his mouth, and a revolver sat in his lap.

“Oscar,” their escort said by way of introduction. “He’s the one in charge here.” He disappeared back into the larder.

“So you’re the trespassers,” Oscar said, smiling around his cigarette. “Come on, pull up a chair.” He nodded to the stack of folding lawn chairs in the corner. “For the girl, too.”

They were all like men from a campfire story, Magdala thought. Their hats and their chaps and their dusty, drawling way of speaking. They could have been actors in one of the theater troupes that had come occasionally past the tenement and performed spectacular dramas full of fake gunfire and weeping, golden-haired women. Her head still cloudy, her stare lingered long on the man, and he regarded her with something between disgust and amusement.

“How’d you end up here?” he asked Xavier. “Someone tell you about us on the road? Give you direction?”

“No one told us. We just saw you from a distance. First settlement in miles,” Xavier said. “Didn’t know anything of you, just hoping for someplace with a well and a roof.”

“We aren’t looking to be a roadside motel,” said Oscar. “You’re miserable-looking enough that I can’t but believe you were hard up and desperate. Still.” He exhaled a puff of smoke, shifted his revolver in his lap. “You taking the girl to kiss Saint Elkhanah’s feet?”

“Elkhanah?” Xavier shook his head. “Never heard of it.”

“You’re not pilgrims?”

“Just travelers.”

“Excuse the assumption. With the girl’s deformity, I just figured—well, that’s one mark in your favor, not caught up in the Holy Church circus. Seems like half the people who wash up here are hungering after some long-dead holy man’s hair or tonsils or clavicles to cure what ails them, and not a one has the strength to even get all the way there to get grifted. But I’m straying from my purpose. What brought you out to this stretch of the Sonoran?”

Xavier glanced at Magdala. “Got evicted,” he said. “I guess that’s what you could call it.”

“What for?”

“The neighbors were telling stories. Food gets scarce and folk get jealous, suspicious. You understand.” He shrugged his shoulders. “It was time to be moving on. But we weren’t expecting so many miles of nothing ahead of us.”

“Nothing is all you ever oughta expect,” Oscar said, laughing. “Well, we don’t mind evictions here. Nor banishments, marks of Cain. You know what Caput Lupinum means?”

Xavier shook his head.

“Wolf’s Head, if you want to be literal. But really, it means outlaw. All of us here got exiled from somewhere. Ran afoul of other men’s laws. Here, we just have a few simple ones. And if you follow them, we don’t infringe upon your freedoms. One, you gotta take out less resources than you put in. That includes you and your women or children.” He jerked his chin at Magdala. “You’re gonna have to pull her weight and your own here. You prepared to do that?”

“I didn’t say we’re staying,” Xavier said.

“’Course you didn’t,” he said. “But we’re not a charity. You want protection, food, you need to throw in your lot with ours. And I’ll tell you now, you’re not gonna find a better deal anywhere in the Remainder. I didn’t tell you rule number two. So long as you’re not interfering with someone else’s property, no man can tell you your business. I’ve been around long enough to see a thousand communities spring up and then go to rot. Always, they’re plagued by folk not pulling their own weight, or one man interfering in another man’s business. Sift through any pile of ash between here and Vegas, and you’ll see it.”

“You’re so well-off, what do you need me for?” Xavier asked.

“We got plenty of use for good, strong men without too many compunctions,” said Oscar. “We prefer when they don’t come with dependents hanging off them, but like I said, it’s no trouble so long as you’re prepared to feed and keep her.”

“I’m not making a promise to stay here,” Xavier said. “But I’ll work, for some time, if that’s what you require. I understand there’s a debt, what with her curing.”

“A canny man,” Oscar said. “What do you think, girl? You want the antidote to your desert sickness?”

From the thick haze of her illness, Magdala managed to nod.

Oscar got to his feet and shook her father’s hand. “You’re a man of your word,” he said to Xavier, and it was not a question.

Magdala’s father carried her as Oscar led them to an old bank. The lobby was empty except for an enormous hole in the middle of the floor where a ladder had been propped, leading them down into a darkened vault. Magdala buried her face in her father’s chest as he carried her down, her nausea rising and subsiding with the motions of his descent. When they reached the bottom, Oscar told Xavier to lay her out on one of the mattresses. “Any will do,” he said. Then he called, “Alma! We got a child, desert sick. You think you can manage?”

Magdala emerged from the clammy shelter of her father’s arms to find a woman standing above her with an infant strapped to her chest. The woman crouched; she pulled on Magdala’s eyelids, then pressed the back of her hand to Magdala’s cheek.

“She just needs to purge her system,” she said to Xavier. “How much did she have?”

“Too much,” Xavier confessed. “I shouldn’t ever have let her.”

“I understand what thirst can make you do.” She left Magdala’s side and returned a second later with a sweating glass of water. She lifted Magdala by the armpits onto a wad of blanket and poured a thin stream of water through her cracked lips and down her throat. “This isn’t enough by itself,” she said as Magdala drank. “But it’ll help. You have to sleep a while.”

“What’s the cure for it?” Xavier asked.

“There’s no cure,” Alma said. “Just water, rest, and staying inside. That’s it.”

“That’s not what Oscar said.”

Alma made a sound that was like a laugh but was not one. “So I suppose he left out the part where it will always come back,” she said. “Well, the rest of her life, it’ll keep coming back. There’s no getting rid of it. Only keeping it at bay.”

 

When Magdala woke, her father was gone, but she was surrounded by women wearing loose, sack-like, colorless dresses, all with brands on their necks. As they crossed the room, washing their faces and gathering their hair into plaits, Magdala silently read their marks to herself: Mateo, Robert, Oscar.

“She’s awake,” whispered one woman to another, and a few of them crowded closely around her as if she were an object of wonder.

“You feeling all right, honey?” someone asked.

Magdala pushed herself up onto her elbows. “I’m better,” she replied. When she got to her feet, at once two of the women moved to steady her. Their eyes fell to her clubfoot, absorbed the fact of it, then moved elsewhere.

“She’s just a child,” sighed one of the women, as if this by itself was tragic.

“Are there other children here?” Magdala asked.

“Only Alma’s baby.”

“I’m the only girl?”

“Dulcinea’s just fifteen,” Alma said, and nodded to the youngest of the women, who was still halfway a girl with coltish limbs and eyes deep-set in her round face. She had two brands on her neck, one still distinct and the other faded so it was almost invisible on her brown skin.

“Where’s my papa gone?” Magdala said.

“With the other men, eating dinner, I think.” She looked to Dulcinea. “Will you take her to him?”

The girl bristled. “Why me?”

“You know why.”

“It doesn’t matter if I got Oscar’s brand.” Her voice rose, getting louder, getting higher, sounding younger with every syllable. “They don’t treat me any different.”

“I can go by myself,” Magdala offered.

The women were silent for a minute. “I’ll take you,” Dulcinea said, firmly now, as if the idea had been her own.

The sun was setting when they emerged from the permanent twilight of the bank vault; Dulcinea led Magdala down the road to the larder. Outside, a long wooden table had been set and men sat crowded on a motley assemblage of chairs and benches. When Magdala saw her father, she quickened her pace and stumbled the distance to him, heedless of the eyes that followed her.

“I got better,” she said to him, and his embrace was unhesitant, encompassing.

“You look better,” he said, drawing back to examine her. “They take good care of you?”

Her father was filthy, she saw then. His arms and face were paled by the dust that stuck to every inch of him, his eyes stark and wild-looking in his face, his hair stiff and sheened over. And he had a raised welt on his neck, bright and angry-looking, in the shape of a wolf.

“Papa, why do you have that?” she asked, reaching out to brush the brand with her fingertips.

Xavier glanced at the other men, then back to her. “Part of the deal,” he said. He swallowed hard, with forced lightness said, “You get one too.”

“Do I have to?”

“Seems that way.”

“Why?”

Her father lifted her into his lap. When he spoke, his voice was low and tender. “You remember when you were just six years old and you got that gash all down your leg from playing in the junkyard?”

“I remember.”

“And you remember how it started to get infected, and every day I made you wash it with alcohol, in spite of how you cried and how it hurt, to keep it from making you sicker?”

She nodded.

“It’s gonna be almost like that. Pain, but it’ll protect you.”

“Why will it protect me?”

“Because it tells people that you’re my child, and that you’re under my protection, so I don’t have to watch you every moment while we’re here.”

Magdala narrowed her eyes, watching his face. “I don’t want it to hurt,” she said. She felt the swelling in her throat that presaged tears and remembered suddenly the strangers all around them. Embarrassed, almost angry, she buried her head in Xavier’s chest and inhaled her father’s familiar odor, laced now with the foreign smell of jimson smoke.

“It’ll be all right,” Xavier said to her. He didn’t say that she wouldn’t have to do it. As the sky darkened, he pushed his chair back from the long table, leaving his food half-eaten. They trudged down the road together until they came to a sagging pink bungalow, where her father held the screen door open and Magdala stepped inside to find herself in a filthy kitchen lit by a pair of kerosene lanterns. Across from them, a hulking man knelt low before a gas oven, contemplating the heat that flared low in its belly. Seeing them, he reached for an iron from the stovetop. Magdala shrank away.

“Hold my hand,” Xavier said. “It’s X-A-V-I-E-R,” he informed the man at the oven.

“She’s gotta get on the floor,” the man said, without looking at them.

“No need for that. I didn’t,” Xavier said.

“Don’t trust her not to squirm. All the women do.”

Xavier looked down at her. “Magdala, can you do what the man says?”

Slowly, Magdala lowered herself to her belly. A lizard skittered across the room and into a hole in the wall, and her eyes followed the creatu. . .