From behind the wheel of Paul’s white ‘ GMC pickup, Bella hears the giant bell clang. Finally. A surge of relief rolls chills down her spine. Sweat pools along the base of her neck, beneath a long braid of silver hair. The heat is unbearable; it’s nearing 105 in the salt flats. Paul, sitting shotgun, shirtless and shoeless in a pair of cutoff shorts, pretends not to hear his daughter’s ringing plea over the engine’s wood-chipper rattle. The edges of his wife’s mossy green eyes, hidden by a pair of dark aviator sunglasses, grow hot with tears as she steers their hunk of vintage metal toward the Black Mountain Range, a towering wall of eroding metamorphic rock that makes her relief sour with an inescapable truth: Star is tough. But, no doubt, Mother Nature is tougher.
This “road” is a forgotten stretch of dirt, old wagon tracks baked into the dried-up remnants of an ancient lake by early settlers, then cleared by the mining company who founded Ghost Town in the mid-19th century. It’s barely drivable, bedeviled by deep sand drifts, desiccated mud, and sage. Paul’s exposed thigh meat jumps and jiggles as he tries to coax the window down with a busted hand crank. He’s in need of a heavy breeze.
A spiky ball of guilt lodges itself behind Bella’s ribcage, calling up a bloody montage of possibilities informed by the aftermath of her daughter’s forced desert retreats. The third- and second-degree burns. The broken bones. The snake bites, ankle sprains and near-starvation. The post-traumatic stress. A short film plays out on the inner lenses of her aviators; every scene shows Star breaking down, buried by the blowing sand mere steps from home, as she — the mother, the nurse, the shield between her spawn and Paul’s eccentric madness — flees for the funeral of a burnout hippie renegade she hasn’t heard from in half a century.
Overcome by guilt, Bella applies pressure to the brake with her black ostrich-skin boot and locates an ideal spot to whip into a U-turn and jet back to the compound. The gas gauge is broken but the fuel tank is brimming with diesel. If she speeds, maybe she can make it to the water pump in under half an hour; that’s where Star will be headed if she can still walk. Unfortunately, Paul, dead-set on making it to Big Bear Lake before sundown, senses the minor loss in momentum. After 53 years of marriage, he’s grown to know his wife through an insidious sixth sense. He’s become a lumpy panther, lurking in the thicket of wedlock, camouflaged by familiarity, always anticipating Bella’s next move.
As she adjusts her grip on the wheel, eyeing a wider stretch of road near a bone-dry gully — perfect for a swift turnaround — Paul grabs his wife’s forearm like a vice. He places his hand perfectly between two thick silver bands, which are adorned with raw turquoise stones — bracelets Bella made herself and has worn everyday for years. Paul’s leathery palm, timeworn with calluses and small scars, sinks into her flesh as if it’s returning home, eager to assert a type of steadfast dominance that can only be cultivated over decades spent side-by-side, day after day after day.
“Lovebug.” Paul says. “Keep driving.”
Bella’s hands are fastened around the steering wheel, her fingers placed along its smooth sloping ridges. She pretends not to hear him. “The bell,” she says, “Didn’t you hear the bell?” She continues to apply pressure to the brake, craning her neck over her left shoulder, ready to turn.
“Keep. Driving.”
Paul had also heard the bell. He felt a similar wave of relief, knowing his only child was still alive. But unlike his wife, he trained himself long ago to trust wholeheartedly in Star’s survival techniques; if his daughter perished, it would be a failure of his own instruction, and that would be impossible for Paul to stomach. Typically, he would be glad to welcome Star back to the compound. Reveling in tales from beyond the property. Witnessing first-hand his daughter’s enhanced understanding of how to depend solely on herself and a limited set of tools. It was crucial for him, to know that Star would be prepared for the end of the world. But nothing was typical about these past few days. His brother’s death came as a shock. There wasn’t time to wait for Star’s return. If they’re going to make it out of the desert in time for Roddy’s funeral, Paul knows he must keep Bella on track.
But also, Paul believes that if Star is perish while they are gone, she will rise again on judgement day. She will be saved and reunited with her parents, because she has been raised — and trained — to believe.
Bella slams the brake to the floor. The truck halts and lurches like the mechanical bull in the backroom of Cheeky’s, a long-gone Ghost Town dive. Paul’s head whips back and forth like it did when he was a teenager, riding the bucking metal beast, destined for the mats and a few unwelcome bruises.
“Paul. We need to go back,” Bella pleads. She stares into the rearview mirror at the tire-treaded dirt, avoiding the endless road ahead, a desolate view marred by dust and bug guts. Tears stream from the curved edges of her scratched-up shades. She can taste the wet salt in the creases of her mouth. “Star could be in trouble, she could...”
“She’ll be safer alone on the compound than out in the Big World with us,” Paul says, sweat standing still atop his salt-and-pepper stubble. “We left a note for God’s sake!”
Paul lets go of his wife and reaches for the buck knife he keeps stored under the seat. He unlatches it from its leather casing, crosses his legs, and begins using the knife to carefully sharpen the point on an old carpenter’s pencil. Tiny wood shavings painted red and lined with lead spring from the blade. When it’s finally sharp, he’ll use the pencil to mark their path to Big Bear Lake on a regional map folded up on the dashboard, baked in a triangle of blistering sun. Carving down this old pencil instills a feeling of calm in Paul. Even if, deep within his bones, he’s petrified. Based on his calculations, the Big World is slated to collapse any day now; being there when it does would ruin everything he’s built up and worked towards. The bunker, the self-sustaining lifestyle, Star’s survival lessons, the hoarding of supplies, not to mention his own prophecies, preserved in paint across hundreds of canvases hanging on the inner walls of the barn.
Bella leans over the center console and grabs Paul’s earlobe, planting a wet kiss on the edge of his upper lip. When he turns toward her, she slides her tongue into his open mouth and basks in her deluded husband’s dumbfounded expression; she can taste the fear on him. Without speaking, she pulls away, acting as though he dreamt up her unexpected display of affection. Paul pushes in for more, but Bella pivots her boot to the gas and continues to drive.
After a few minutes, she can feel the pressure drop in the cab. Shreds of wood and lead continue to fly off the blade of her husband’s knife, bespeckling his denim lap. He’s immersed in his task.
“My father used to sharpen his pencils with this knife,” Paul says. “I would watch him rock back and forth in the living room at night in that old chair of his. Silent as a musk ox. Sometimes chipping away for so long that all he left was a nub of wood and a pile of shavings at his feet.”
Bella doesn’t respond. She doesn’t give a shit about Old Man Bellamy or his strange nightly rituals, though she is glad to hear her husband drift off into one of his memory trips. It comforts her, even after all these years. Paul’s innate infatuation with the past was something that drew her to him in the early days of their relationship. When they decided to return to Ghost Town after the earthquake, Bella was confronted with Paul’s vivid memory. At night, when the air cooled, the two of them would sprawl out on the purple-stained plateau, where the five-story fire tower now stands, and look down at the demolished town, marked by rows of caved-in homes, razed shops and sidewalks — a quiet disaster lit by the moon and a sheet of stars. Looking down, with their legs dangling above a forty foot drop, they could see the altar of the church; the steeple had fallen, detached from its perch, and pulverized the conjoining schoolhouse, leaving a gaping hole in its wake. Bella was quiet after the quake; for a long time she couldn’t find the words to describe what it meant to lose everyone she knew. None of it seemed real. So instead of talk, she’d listen to Paul, whose recollections naturally transformed into anecdotes and stories she could live in. The longer he spoke, it was as if she were able to crawl back inside her childhood, surrounded by the people they’d both grown up with, the folks they loved most, and lost.
With Paul entranced, mindlessly flicking his blade against the pencil, Bella realizes that now, if ever, is the best time to act. She gains speed and commits to the U-turn outright, whipping the old truck around so the back tires slide across the cracked dirt, spitting up bits of clay and swerving into a deep rut. The front right wheel drops violently and the cab jolts side to side. Paul’s knife cuts straight down into the pencil, slicing off its crude tip, just barely missing his thigh. Everything on the dash — a bundle of bird’s feathers tied up in an orchid vine; dried rattlesnake skin; the jawbone of a kit fox; a bag of homemade trail-mix; and a folded map — jumps up and slides right, piling against the passenger-side window in a strange witchy heap.
With the pickup now stopped sideways in the road, Paul and Becca are left facing a scorched tundra. From above, the truck is a dirty-white speck on the map of a sprawling unpopulated wasteland. It idles, exhausting fumes into the endless desert sky. The closed cab feels hotter than ever.
Somehow, despite the chaos, Paul’s grip tightened around the elk-bone handle of his knife. Without thinking, he drives the blade between his wife’s legs, deep into the seat. When he yanks back on it, the knife’s blade slides easily through the cracked leather, pulling up an explosion of yellow foam. A few chunks cascade down the back of Bella’s cowboy boots. Paul looks down at the castrated pencil shaking violently between his thumb and forefinger. His knuckles are taught around the knife. He’s seething. For the first time since they departed, Paul fully directs his gaze at his wife.
She nods to Paul’s bludgeoned utensil. “You’re lucky it was just the tip,” she says, coolly, her chest heaving.
“My only brother is dead.” Paul’s amber irises glow red in the sun. “Do you understand that?”
“You hate your brother.”
“That’s irrelevant. He’s the only family I have, and now he’s gone. I need to pay my respects. That’s the way it works.”
“The way it works? The way what works? You think Roddy deserves your respect? What about your daughter?”
“For Christ’s sake, I’m not worried about Star. If anything, I envy her. The wild, the desert; that’s her home. Our home. She’s not the one trekking out into the Big World, a fucking ticking time bomb, full of strangers and unimaginable risks.”
Bella shoots a quick glance down at the slash in her seat. She says nothing. Just straightens out the truck and drives on. With her eyes back on the road, Paul returns to whittling his cherished pencil. Bella knows he never forgave his brother for leaving Ghost Town, and for running away with the rock-and-roll circus. She’s heard the stories, the rantings. Call it empathy, or call it osmosis; either way, Bella now shares a sliver of that same betrayal slowly eating away at her aging husband’s soul. In fact, she was the last person to see Roddy, as he left the fallout shelter all those years ago. Paul had been snoring in a cot on the other side of the gymnasium when his brother pulled Bella outside to announce his departure; he was headed East, to New York. He had a pile of records stuffed under his arm, car keys dangled from his finger. That was it. He asked Bella to tell Paul he’d see him soon and then he was gone.
“I need you there with me,” Paul mumbles.
“Excuse me?”
“I said I need you there with me.” He shifts his mouth from side to side like a child. “I can’t face those freaks alone.”
“Star’s in danger and you’re more worried about being judged by a bunch of burnout groupies?”
“Star is fine!”
“How can you say that? The last time she made it back from a Scav she was so dehydrated and feverish she didn’t even recognize us! Her own parents. She thought we were ancient mystics. She thought we were Indians! Dead-set on stealing her organs and sacrificing her to the gods. It took weeks to settle her nervous system, not to mention rid the rot from that bite on her forearm.”
“She fought off a pack of wild coyotes, then cooked the one she slaughtered over a fire she forged from the tinderbox you made her for Christmas. Bell, she survived! It was incredible. And she recovered. To overcome something like that…she’s stronger than she’s ever been.”
“I’m not talking about strength, Paul. I see the way she looks at us now. She’s on edge. Our daughter is skeptical of us. Does that sound right to you? She’s losing trust in us.”
“She’s almost 18 years old, of course she doesn’t trust us. As long as she trusts herself, that’s all that matters. I advise that you find the strength to do the same.”
Bella says nothing. She’s tired of arguing with Paul about their daughter’s wellbeing. He’s delusional and his disdain for the surrounding world has become a thorn in her side. She keeps the truck pointed toward the horizon, bringing the hulking pickup back to speed. She decides to do what she learned to do years ago. Channel this desperate longing for her daughter’s wellbeing into a burning hatred for her unsuspecting keeper: that same daydreaming God-fearing boy who’d rescued her from death. Who persuaded her to return to the ruins of their hometown and build this bizarre, isolated life deep within the desert where no one would ever find them, where they could reminisce and rebuild their old lives, safe from the destructive whims of humankind, the Big World army of rats, destined to eat each other alive. And for a while, she actually believed Paul. She loved him. She trusted his visions. Why not? What else was there for her to do?
But after a lifetime spent fortifying their so-called safe-haven and preparing for the reckoning, Bella, Paul, and their daughter have somehow become the rats, trapped in a cage at the end of the world. At least until now.
Bella rests her head against the door frame and stares into the abyss. Paul blows on the tip of his newly sharpened pencil, brushes off his lap, and snatches the map from the dash. He tries the window crank one more time and the glass pane drops with a thud.
“Onward!” he yells, and buries his face in the scalding breeze.
This “road” is a forgotten stretch of dirt, old wagon tracks baked into the dried-up remnants of an ancient lake by early settlers, then cleared by the mining company who founded Ghost Town in the mid-19th century. It’s barely drivable, bedeviled by deep sand drifts, desiccated mud, and sage. Paul’s exposed thigh meat jumps and jiggles as he tries to coax the window down with a busted hand crank. He’s in need of a heavy breeze.
A spiky ball of guilt lodges itself behind Bella’s ribcage, calling up a bloody montage of possibilities informed by the aftermath of her daughter’s forced desert retreats. The third- and second-degree burns. The broken bones. The snake bites, ankle sprains and near-starvation. The post-traumatic stress. A short film plays out on the inner lenses of her aviators; every scene shows Star breaking down, buried by the blowing sand mere steps from home, as she — the mother, the nurse, the shield between her spawn and Paul’s eccentric madness — flees for the funeral of a burnout hippie renegade she hasn’t heard from in half a century.
Overcome by guilt, Bella applies pressure to the brake with her black ostrich-skin boot and locates an ideal spot to whip into a U-turn and jet back to the compound. The gas gauge is broken but the fuel tank is brimming with diesel. If she speeds, maybe she can make it to the water pump in under half an hour; that’s where Star will be headed if she can still walk. Unfortunately, Paul, dead-set on making it to Big Bear Lake before sundown, senses the minor loss in momentum. After 53 years of marriage, he’s grown to know his wife through an insidious sixth sense. He’s become a lumpy panther, lurking in the thicket of wedlock, camouflaged by familiarity, always anticipating Bella’s next move.
As she adjusts her grip on the wheel, eyeing a wider stretch of road near a bone-dry gully — perfect for a swift turnaround — Paul grabs his wife’s forearm like a vice. He places his hand perfectly between two thick silver bands, which are adorned with raw turquoise stones — bracelets Bella made herself and has worn everyday for years. Paul’s leathery palm, timeworn with calluses and small scars, sinks into her flesh as if it’s returning home, eager to assert a type of steadfast dominance that can only be cultivated over decades spent side-by-side, day after day after day.
“Lovebug.” Paul says. “Keep driving.”
Bella’s hands are fastened around the steering wheel, her fingers placed along its smooth sloping ridges. She pretends not to hear him. “The bell,” she says, “Didn’t you hear the bell?” She continues to apply pressure to the brake, craning her neck over her left shoulder, ready to turn.
“Keep. Driving.”
Paul had also heard the bell. He felt a similar wave of relief, knowing his only child was still alive. But unlike his wife, he trained himself long ago to trust wholeheartedly in Star’s survival techniques; if his daughter perished, it would be a failure of his own instruction, and that would be impossible for Paul to stomach. Typically, he would be glad to welcome Star back to the compound. Reveling in tales from beyond the property. Witnessing first-hand his daughter’s enhanced understanding of how to depend solely on herself and a limited set of tools. It was crucial for him, to know that Star would be prepared for the end of the world. But nothing was typical about these past few days. His brother’s death came as a shock. There wasn’t time to wait for Star’s return. If they’re going to make it out of the desert in time for Roddy’s funeral, Paul knows he must keep Bella on track.
But also, Paul believes that if Star perishes while they are gone, she will rise again on judgement day. She will be saved and reunited with her parents, because she has been raised — and trained — to believe.
Bella slams the brake to the floor. The truck halts and lurches like the mechanical bull in the backroom of Cheeky’s, a long-gone Ghost Town dive. Paul’s head whips back and forth like it did when he was a teenager, riding the bucking metal beast, destined for the mats and a few unwelcome bruises.
“Paul. We need to go back,” Bella pleads. She stares into the rearview mirror at the tire-treaded dirt, avoiding the endless road ahead, a desolate view marred by dust and bug guts. Tears stream from the curved edges of her scratched-up shades. She can taste the wet salt in the creases of her mouth. “Star could be in trouble, she could...”
“She’ll be safer alone on the compound than out in the Big World with us,” Paul says, sweat standing still atop his salt-and-pepper stubble. “We left a note for God’s sake!”
Paul lets go of his wife and reaches for the buck knife he keeps stored under the seat. He unlatches it from its leather casing, crosses his legs, and begins using the knife to carefully sharpen the point on an old carpenter’s pencil. Tiny wood shavings painted red and lined with lead spring from the blade. When it’s finally sharp, he’ll use the pencil to mark their path to Big Bear Lake on a regional map folded up on the dashboard, baked in a triangle of blistering sun. Carving down this old pencil instills a feeling of calm in Paul. Even if, deep within his bones, he’s petrified. Based on his calculations, the Big World is slated to collapse any day now; being there when it does would ruin everything he’s built up and worked towards. The bunker, the self-sustaining lifestyle, Star’s survival lessons, the hoarding of supplies, not to mention his own prophecies, preserved in paint across hundreds of canvases hanging on the inner walls of the barn.
Bella leans over the center console and grabs Paul’s earlobe, planting a wet kiss on the edge of his upper lip. When he turns toward her, she slides her tongue into his open mouth and basks in her deluded husband’s dumbfounded expression; she can taste the fear on him. Without speaking, she pulls away, acting as though he dreamt up her unexpected display of affection. Paul pushes in for more, but Bella pivots her boot to the gas and continues to drive.
After a few minutes, she can feel the pressure drop in the cab. Shreds of wood and lead continue to fly off the blade of her husband’s knife, bespeckling his denim lap. He’s immersed in his task.
“My father used to sharpen his pencils with this knife,” Paul says. “I would watch him rock back and forth in the living room at night in that old chair of his. Silent as a musk ox. Sometimes chipping away for so long that all he left was a nub of wood and a pile of shavings at his feet.”
Bella doesn’t respond. She doesn’t give a shit about Old Man Bellamy or his strange nightly rituals, though she is glad to hear her husband drift off into one of his memory trips. It comforts her, even after all these years. Paul’s innate infatuation with the past was something that drew her to him in the early days of their relationship. When they decided to return to Ghost Town after the earthquake, Bella was confronted with Paul’s vivid memory. At night, when the air cooled, the two of them would sprawl out on the purple-stained plateau, where the five-story fire tower now stands, and look down at the demolished town, marked by rows of caved-in homes, razed shops and sidewalks — a quiet disaster lit by the moon and a sheet of stars. Looking down, with their legs dangling above a forty foot drop, they could see the altar of the church; the steeple had fallen, detached from its perch, and pulverized the conjoining schoolhouse, leaving a gaping hole in its wake. Bella was quiet after the quake; for a long time she couldn’t find the words to describe what it meant to lose everyone she knew. None of it seemed real. So instead of talk, she’d listen to Paul, whose recollections naturally transformed into anecdotes and stories she could live in. The longer he spoke, it was as if she were able to crawl back inside her childhood, surrounded by the people they’d both grown up with, the folks they loved most, and lost.
With Paul entranced, mindlessly flicking his blade against the pencil, Bella realizes that now, if ever, is the best time to act. She gains speed and commits to the U-turn outright, whipping the old truck around so the back tires slide across the cracked dirt, spitting up bits of clay and swerving into a deep rut. The front right wheel drops violently and the cab jolts side to side. Paul’s knife cuts straight down into the pencil, slicing off its crude tip, just barely missing his thigh. Everything on the dash — a bundle of bird’s feathers tied up in an orchid vine; dried rattlesnake skin; the jawbone of a kit fox; a bag of homemade trail-mix; and a folded map — jumps up and slides right, piling against the passenger-side window in a strange witchy heap.
With the pickup now stopped sideways in the road, Paul and Becca are left facing a scorched tundra. From above, the truck is a dirty-white speck on the map of a sprawling unpopulated wasteland. It idles, exhausting fumes into the endless desert sky. The closed cab feels hotter than ever.
Somehow, despite the chaos, Paul’s grip tightened around the elk-bone handle of his knife. Without thinking, he drives the blade between his wife’s legs, deep into the seat. When he yanks back on it, the knife’s blade slides easily through the cracked leather, pulling up an explosion of yellow foam. A few chunks cascade down the back of Bella’s cowboy boots. Paul looks down at the castrated pencil shaking violently between his thumb and forefinger. His knuckles are taught around the knife. He’s seething. For the first time since they departed, Paul fully directs his gaze at his wife.
She nods to Paul’s bludgeoned utensil. “You’re lucky it was just the tip,” she says, coolly, her chest heaving.
“My only brother is dead.” Paul’s amber irises glow red in the sun. “Do you understand that?”
“You hate your brother.”
“That’s irrelevant. He’s the only family I have, and now he’s gone. I need to pay my respects. That’s the way it works.”
“The way it works? The way what works? You think Roddy deserves your respect? What about your daughter?”
“For Christ’s sake, I’m not worried about Star. If anything, I envy her. The wild, the desert; that’s her home. Our home. She’s not the one trekking out into the Big World, a fucking ticking time bomb, full of strangers and unimaginable risks.”
Bella shoots a quick glance down at the slash in her seat. She says nothing. Just straightens out the truck and drives on. With her eyes back on the road, Paul returns to whittling his cherished pencil. Bella knows he never forgave his brother for leaving Ghost Town, and for running away with the rock-and-roll circus. She’s heard the stories, the rantings. Call it empathy, or call it osmosis; either way, Bella now shares a sliver of that same betrayal slowly eating away at her aging husband’s soul. In fact, she was the last person to see Roddy, as he left the fallout shelter all those years ago. Paul had been snoring in a cot on the other side of the gymnasium when his brother pulled Bella outside to announce his departure; he was headed East, to New York. He had a pile of records stuffed under his arm, car keys dangled from his finger. That was it. He asked Bella to tell Paul he’d see him soon and then he was gone.
“I need you there with me,” Paul mumbles.
“Excuse me?”
“I said I need you there with me.” He shifts his mouth from side to side like a child. “I can’t face those freaks alone.”
“Star’s in danger and you’re more worried about being judged by a bunch of burnout groupies?”
“Star is fine!”
“How can you say that? The last time she made it back from a Scav she was so dehydrated and feverish she didn’t even recognize us! Her own parents. She thought we were ancient mystics. She thought we were Indians! Dead-set on stealing her organs and sacrificing her to the gods. It took weeks to settle her nervous system, not to mention rid the rot from that bite on her forearm.”
“She fought off a pack of wild coyotes, then cooked the one she slaughtered over a fire she forged from the tinderbox you made her for Christmas. Bell, she survived! It was incredible. And she recovered. To overcome something like that…she’s stronger than she’s ever been.”
“I’m not talking about strength, Paul. I see the way she looks at us now. She’s on edge. Our daughter is skeptical of us. Does that sound right to you? She’s losing trust in us.”
“She’s almost 18 years old, of course she doesn’t trust us. As long as she trusts herself, that’s all that matters. I advise that you find the strength to do the same.”
Bella says nothing. She’s tired of arguing with Paul about their daughter’s wellbeing. He’s delusional and his disdain for the surrounding world has become a thorn in her side. She keeps the truck pointed toward the horizon, bringing the hulking pickup back to speed. She decides to do what she learned to do years ago. Channel this desperate longing for her daughter’s wellbeing into a burning hatred for her unsuspecting keeper: that same daydreaming God-fearing boy who’d rescued her from death. Who persuaded her to return to the ruins of their hometown and build this bizarre, isolated life deep within the desert where no one would ever find them, where they could reminisce and rebuild their old lives, safe from the destructive whims of humankind, the Big World army of rats, destined to eat each other alive. And for a while, she actually believed Paul. She loved him. She trusted his visions. Why not? What else was there for her to do?
But after a lifetime spent fortifying their so-called safe-haven and preparing for the reckoning, Bella, Paul, and their daughter have somehow become the rats, trapped in a cage at the end of the world. At least until now.
Bella rests her head against the door frame and stares into the abyss. Paul blows on the tip of his newly sharpened pencil, brushes off his lap, and snatches the map from the dash. He tries the window crank one more time and the glass pane drops with a thud.
“Onward!” he yells, and buries his face in the scalding breeze.
Great stuff, keep it up!