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Two long tracks made snakes in the red dirt, their scales formed by tire tread. From high-enough up, you could almost see them wriggling through the heat-shimmered air. The only sign of their creation in this vast empty desert was a plume of dust whose twin voices grumbled their low warning. Keep away, they might say to the birds, if there were any birds in the sky.
But the birds were gone from here now, like most anything alive.
Inside the cloud, or just at its forefront, two motorcycles cut the horizon. A white, relentless sun pummeled the figures who rode them—figures of denim and dust.
One raised an arm, signaled to the other, and they slowed to a stop.
Tugging a red sun-faded bandana from her mouth, Mads called out, “Too hot.” Her voice was like the motorcycle’s: coarse, choked with grime.
Her partner spoke through her own bandana, which had been a dark blue, once, before it turned the vague almost-gray of the sky. “Can’t stop here. No shade.”
“Sun’s been up for hours, though. We can’t keep going.” She propped up the bike, slid off, dropped to one knee. “We can dig to cooler ground.”
Waynoka yanked the bandana from her face. Her lips, chapped and flaking off like old paint, were pulled into a frown. While Mads found a spade in her pack and punched its blade into the dry dirt, Waynoka brushed grime from the wheel spokes and checked their gauges. “Running low,” she said. “Should have taken those bicycles instead. Won’t be any gas to siphon out here.”
Mads barked a laugh as she pulled off her jacket. “Wouldn’t have made it this far. Bicycles mean pedaling. Pedaling means sweat. Sweating means losing water.”
“Like you’re not sweating anyway.”
After half an hour of digging, they lay in the long hole surrounded by mounds of dirt, propped their bags under their heads and opened a solar blanket just big enough to cover them both. The cool dirt at their backs was like a balm on scorched skin. They slept a few restless hours, then rose as twilight fell, from red to blue, and shared a stick of leathery old jerky. Mads tried to shake the dirt from her curly mane, but it was futile.
The dust was unshakable here in the dry, dead desert. Maybe there had been patches of green here, once, but they were long gone now.
They waited until the sun gave up the ghost so they could sit a while and watch the stars come out before they continued on their way. Their voices carried across the desert, but there was no one around to hear them.
“My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas.”
“Yeah, but Pizza ain’t a planet.”
“Well, that’s how I learned it.”
Mads crumpled up the jerky wrapper and tossed it aside, where it crinkled as it slowly expanded. “How many people you think nine pizzas would serve?”
“A lot.”
“Sounds like your very excellent mother just served you high cholesterol.”
“You don’t even know my mother,” said Waynoka. “And she would never.” They lay in silence while the wrapper finished its crinkling and went still, before a passing wind took it away like a plastic bird. “Is it a planet though, or not?”
“It was, and then it wasn’t. Not big enough or something. It’s all semantics anyway.”
“Guess it doesn’t matter now.”
“No. Guess not.”
Mads stood up and fixed a pair of grimy pool goggles over her eyes, pulling her bandana up over her mouth and nose. Waynoka nodded.
The dust devils took off again.
And then, in that endless nowhere, out of the nothing, there was . . . something.
“You see that?” Waynoka pointed at an angle from their trajectory. Rocky hills hunched black against the night, rising jagged into mountains, like giants creeping. But she wasn’t pointing at the hills. She was pointing at the smaller shapes that stood at the base of the hills.
Mads wiped at her goggles. “What is it?”
“Not sure.”
They changed course. The shapes drew closer, looming out of the dark. The dust devils slowed enough that they had to keep balance with their feet, toeing the ground away.
They passed a sparse series of clapboard houses that whistled as the wind worked its way through gaps in wood, warped and crooked with age. One shack still had a door attached, and the wind swung it open and shut with an arduous groan. Further on, the buildings clustered closer together. They came upon a dozen crumbling structures along a stretch of dirt that might once have been a small town’s Main Street. Waynoka imagined what the buildings had been in their heyday—maybe a quaint general store, a bank with iron vaults, gambling halls, and saloons. Now they were rotted shells, the bones of long-dead buildings. Some looked burned out, scorched down to their blackened foundations; others stood on the force of stubbornness alone.
“It’s a town,” said Waynoka. “Why don’t we stop here?”
Mads frowned at the sky. “Dawn’s a long way off, still. We could cover a lot more ground if we kept going.”
“Even if we do make it all the way to New York—I don’t think one extra day will make a difference.”
“Don’t be dense. Every day we stay in the desert is another day closer to dying of thirst. At least if we get farther east, we’ll find something to drink.”
“You don’t think there could be any water here, do you?”
Mads frowned. She looked around at the ruins lining either side of Main Street. “Doubt it. This place looks dry as a bone.”
“At least we can rest here. There’s shelter—safer than staying out in the open. Under the sun.”
“Always playing it safe,” said Mads, shaking her head. “If we’d played it safe back in LA and gone with that group to the encampment, we’d have had all our shit taken in that police raid like the rest of them. We’d never have left.”
“I’m not playing it safe. I’m playing it smart.”
Mads sighed. “All right, fine. We’ll stay here for a day. See if we can find any water. And then we’re gone. New York will only take so many refugees before they start turning people away like they say they’re doing in Chicago.”
“Then we’ll pick somewhere else,” said Waynoka. “I hear Canada’s nice.”
Pulling a flashlight from her pack and winding it up, Mads followed its beam into the nearest building. Shadows crept around the edges of the light as it asked the ceiling how many spiders lived in its corners. The floor was dirt. The walls had buckled under the weight of the roof where jagged holes punched through to the sky. She came out again and shook her head.
It wasn’t the first ghost town they’d come across. Some, you couldn’t even tell how long they’d been standing. Could have been abandoned for centuries; could have emptied out only last year, when the climate had really started to blister the desert and make it uninhabitable. When the temperature rose, and the water dried up, and it was too late for an apathetic populace to give up any of the luxuries that had brought them all to this point of no return.
Newly abandoned towns wore battle scars from hours in the sun and drifts of sandy dirt, but you could still see the memory of life in their shattered TV sets left in the living rooms, dusty treadmills, and the square holes in the walls where A/C units had been looted. Not here, though.
“This place is old,” said Mads. “Been empty long before the decline started. I’m talking eighteen hundreds, maybe.”
Waynoka tipped her bottle carefully against her lips for a small sip of warm water that was mostly backwash. She didn’t like the look that crept across Mads’s face.
“You know what this is?”
Waynoka raised an eyebrow. “Bunch of decrepit old buildings.”
“Boomtown,” said Mads. “West was full of them. People coming to mine gold, get rich.”
“Great. Let’s mine some gold. That’ll solve all our problems.” Waynoka put away her bottle, pulled her jacket collar over her neck, and crossed her arms. The temperature still dropped at night, even out here, cooling the sweat they had built up in the heat of day.
“Know what that means?” Mads looked excited now. She didn’t wait for Waynoka to take a guess. “Means you were right. There probably is water here.”
“Did you just admit I was right about something?”
“No, listen. Lot of these old mines are flooded.”
“You want to drink stagnant mine water.”
“Better than piss,” said Mads.
A tumbleweed rolled toward them, pausing intermittently in its wandering, until it was close enough for Waynoka to put her foot on it and flatten it. “Don’t mines usually have toxic runoff?
“Oh please, at this point, toxic runoff is the most common by-product of civilization. Your body is probably, like, seventy-five percent toxic runoff.”
“Huh. I guess you really are what you eat.”
“More like, you are where you live.”
Waynoka looked around at the wasteland and could not deny it.
“Look, we’ll check to make sure it’s not toxic. Plus, we’ll boil it.”
Waynoka sighed. “You sure there’ll be water down there?” She finished stepping on the tumbleweed and looked up again at her partner, at the gleam in Mads’s eyes, the moonlight on her teeth. “Because if you’re wrong, we will be drinking piss again.”
The wind tried to take the misshapen tumbleweed, pushed it feebly, and it tilted though it didn’t give an inch. It wasn’t round enough to roll anymore. The wind gave up and wandered away to howl through the cracks in the buildings, haunting the old dead town. Behind Mads, the moon’s crooked rictus mirrored her own eager grin, the few stars that pierced through the dusty air mimicking her shining eyes.
“Trust me.”
Stars and planets and the moon and anything that glowed gave the buildings form and presence, at least enough to know they were there. They walked down the dirt road, trying to find a building that still had an intact roof; most yawned open to the elements. A walkway made of wooden planks ran along the fronts of the buildings, sheltered in places by an overhanging roof held up by splintered posts. A few faded old signs spoke of a time and place that felt utterly foreign to Waynoka: one sign, hanging crooked, boasted a blacksmith; another read, Feed & Seed.
Mads shined her flashlight on one half of a pair of swinging doors, the other long gone. The circle of light crept up the crooked entryway to find letters worn to near illegibility.
“Saloon,” she read. “Think they got any whiskey?”
“Sure,” said Waynoka. “And dancing girls. Gunfights. Ghosts of cowboys.”
Mads pushed the remaining door; it swung inward, and a rotten board at its middle fell away in a cloud of dust. Pulling her bandana over her mouth, she stepped through, let the flashlight rove around the old saloon, revealing it in fractured bits. Against the far wall stood what was left of the bar. The light found a broken bottle, grimed over, dry of whatever substance it had once contained; pink bubble letters painted on the bar, newer graffiti that cheerfully announced “Hell”; a barrel, half-rotted away, bloated out of proportion. The decay was palpable, apocalyptic; the air smelled like the death of civilization. How many people had once sat in this saloon, drinking the bitter elixir that would take them away, if only for brief respite, from a life of fruitless toil?
They sat against the graffitied words and laid out their bags. Listened to the wind creeping in. Outside dawn was paling the sky, but it was still dark in here, a cool shadow of the past.
Waynoka pulled the rubber band from her hair, shook it out, retied it away from her face. Stray dark wisps clung to her angled jaw. She blew them from her chapped lips. “What are we waiting for?”
“Hmm?”
“Let’s go find the mine. It’ll be easier in daylight.”
Mads didn’t answer for a moment. She eyed her partner. “Chill out, eager beaver. Ever heard of heat stroke?”
“Ever heard of dehydration?” Waynoka snapped. She stood up quickly, stumbled, leaned against the sagging bar.
“Easy,” Mads said without getting up to help her. “Sit down, kid. We need to rest up. It’ll hit one-twenty out there in a few hours.”
Waynoka found her balance, let go of the bar, sucked frustrated breaths through her nostrils. She crossed her arms, stood over Mads. “Don’t call me ‘kid.’ You’re not that much older than me.”
“I’m old enough.” Mads cleared her throat, her voice like gravel—the voice of a woman in her sixties, not forties.
“Well, you don’t need to treat me like a child,” Waynoka continued. “I’m obviously capable of taking care of myself. Or did you forget which one of us snagged all that camping equipment before the REI was picked clean?”
Mads snorted. “Oh, please. If I hadn’t come along, you’d still be sitting around at some evacuation center, waiting for the world to go back to normal.”
Dust spiraled dizzily in the air as the sun started to peek through cracks in the walls, throwing bright lines on the floor like alien code. Waynoka exhaled slowly and sat down. She pulled a paperback from her rucksack, the cover worn to shreds, pages soft and feathered at the bent edges, and angled the book against the bands of light to read. Not that she needed the light. She had read the book a dozen times, practically knew it by heart. But it was the only one that had survived the fire.
Eventually she gave up, the light too poor to make out the small type. She closed the book and put it away.
“You know,” said Mads, chewing her words as if they were food, as if they could produce saliva for the desert of her mouth, “I feel like I would fit right in here, back in the old days. Sitting here, drinking themselves insensible. What else was there to do? They were like us. Bored as hell by the damned monotony of survival. Ever think of that? Ever think we have more in common with them than some people who are still alive?”
Waynoka slid down, lay with her head on her bag, shut her eyes. “Don’t talk so much.”
But Mads remained sitting, her arms draped on her knees, staring into the cracks of darkness she could just make out in the rough wood. “At least they had something to drink,” she said. Waynoka turned over, turned her back to Mads. “If there was whiskey here, I’d drink it all. I’d drink till I didn’t care anymore. Then I’d drink some more. I’d drink till I was dead.”
“Why don’t you make like the dead now,” Waynoka’s muffled voice drifted up from where her face was pressed against the canvas of her bag, “and shut up.”
