If you haven’t checked out the beginning of this evolving story, feel free to do so prior to reading Chapter 6! Here is the Prologue, Chapter 1: Falcon, Chapter 2: Ghost Town, Chapter 3: Onward!, Chapter 4: The Inevitable End, and Chapter 5: Ghost Town Pt. 2, Rattler.
Bella’s green eyes went black fifty miles back.
They were barely 10 miles out of Ghost Town when Paul pulled the map from its place on the dash. The paper was hot from the sun. He opened up the oversized booklet on his lap and began planning their route in his head, tapping the flat end of the whittled pencil against his bare kneecap. At this point, Bella had only been driving for about thirty minutes, along a bone-dry arroyo washed clean by years of flash floods, one of the few paths considered drivable in this section of the Park.
Eventually, the dry wash opened up to a split in the land, a V-shape. A choice. Bella recognized a rock formation far in the distance, Waucoba Mountain, the highest peak in the Inyo Mountains. Without involving Paul, who looked overwhelmed by thought, his eyes wide, his nose practically touching the map, Bella turned the wheel toward Waucoba, deciding to use the snowcapped peak as an unmovable beacon in their quest to Route 395. Bella hadn’t driven on a proper interstate in years. She yearned for that smooth transition, from dirt to pavement. Jetting down past Sequoia to Route 18, Big Bear, and back home, to Star. Depending on the funeral processions, Bella figured they could be back in Ghost Town just after nightfall.
“What are you doing?” Paul asked. He was slouched over the map, his body folded almost in half, his neck turned toward her like a barn cat’s after choking up a hairball.
“Heading West, what does it look like?”
“We need to go East. Turn around.”
“I thought you said you wanted to get there fast. I’m headed to the interstate.”
“I know where you’re headed.” Paul turned and spat something sinister out the open window. “I said turn around.”
When Paul thought about the interstate, he felt his chest tighten around his breath like a scrapyard’s iron claw. Both pectorals seized up like little earthquakes. His mouth went dry as the ground beneath their tires. Suffocating visions of traffic — idled, bumper-to-bumper — ran for miles across Paul’s hapless imagination. Stuck in an immovable plain of passersby, outsiders, tourists, strangers, stragglers, devils disguised in hiking boots and backpacks, bandanas and blouses, big hats and blue jeans…
Heathens, he thought. All of them, heathens. Belted into their power-washed vehicles, distracted by strip malls and greasy spoons, by pop music screaming out ungodly soundtracks to the pornos panting and moaning in their minds. Their groveling kids, sequestered to the backseats, pulpy brains set on devouring toys and games and pre-packaged cakes — just like their parents, devouring devouring devouring the world.
Imagining the contorted faces of his competitors, his enemies, those needy threats, was enough to send Paul into a throbbing, seething state. To pull onto the interstate? To merge into the masses, to drive beside them? With nowhere to run? Those desperate, greedy cucks!
“Paul!”
“What?!”
“You’re ruining the map.”
Paul looked down at a hole in the paper. His pencil was stuck straight through Ubehebe Crater. A bead of sweat trickling from his palm down one of the pencil’s angled ridges.
“Go East,” Paul ordered, gesturing to the hole he’d made, pulling the pencil out of the map and sliding it behind his right ear. “We’re taking the scenic route.”
Bella hesitated. The stark white rivulets of Waucoba’s snow-capped peaks blurred into the surrounding rock face and disappeared behind them as she whipped the truck around, heading East. She had no other choice. She could hear Paul reaching under his seat to retrieve the buck knife. She could feel the rim of curled leather scratching her inner thighs, from earlier, where Paul had driven the blade between her legs.
Paul pulled the knife from its holster and gently inserted it into the hole where Ubehebe Crater should be — a 600-foot-deep volcanic cavity in the earth. He twisted the blade around slowly, widening the hole, then dragged its tip down the page, outlining his proposed route — a zigzagging path cut through the dry, hot center of the desert, riddled with hairpin turns; loose, cascading rock; road craters; gulches; hidden drops.
As her husband’s knife moved further South, Bella squirmed, taking one hand off the wheel and running her fingertips along the slice in her seat. She buried two fingers into its foam entrails. Sweat shimmered along her exposed collarbone. She closed her eyes and sensed time stretching further away from Star; she could see Paul’s fists pulling at time like putty, until it snapped at its center. If her daughter was wounded, Bella was growing less hopeful that she’d be able to turn the truck around in time to save her before she no longer needed saving.
Paul tracked his wife’s eye movements.
“You need to know Star may not actually be okay,” he croaked, sliding the knife back into its case. “I think she’s fine, of course, but as always, you need to prepare your expectations, for the worst.”
You fucking imbecile, Bella thought, all I do is prepare my expectations for the worst.
And with that, a supreme rage fused with the grief already rotting the desert woman’s bones. The ringing of the mighty Ghost Town bell echoed through her head, growing louder and louder until she could no longer think, see, hear, or feel.
Bella Bellamy is on autopilot.
Gnawing on a slab of mule deer jerky, the desert woman has the dead-eyed look of someone freshly lobotomized. Yet, still, she navigates her husband’s truck with precision through a narrow canyon pass, a shadowy maze of rock. Her heartbeat is low, her stare as vacant as her mind. The fear and grief she felt at the beginning of this trek, for her daughter’s fate, has brimmed over onto the stamped-steel dash, dissolving into its mint-green finish.
In a way, the numbness is bliss. A muted escape. A protective shell that confines her heart like the jagged walls of limestone surrounding the hulking white pickup, daring to catch hold of the one remaining side-view mirror, and snap it like a twig from its trunk.
Such a thing, however, is unlikely. Bella’s steering is instinctive and flawless. With the absence of fear, grief — any feeling at all — Bella has become nearly invincible in a land known to devour so-called experts: pioneers, explorers, soldiers, adrenaline junkies. Men, mostly. Along with their wives and their children.
With a lusty side-eye, this land coaxes men — greedy men, desperate men, men praised for their fearlessness — into its bosom — a harsh, enchanting wasteland — and seduces them with the overwhelming rhythms of nature, with the unknown. Then it leaves them helpless. Swallowed by dust.
Bella, fortunately, will not fall into the same trap. Unlike her husband, she’s never set out to conquer or tempt the desert. Explore the land, make a home in it, sure. But if the earthquake of her youth taught her anything, it was that this place can’t be beaten. It must be respected as it is and always will be: a force far greater than any man with a deserving look in his eye.
Paul, sitting shotgun, can sense his wife’s altered state. His secret weapon.
Like a junker rusting in Ghost Town’s sprawling scrapyard, Bella’s ego has been stalled and stripped down to nothing; her deepest worry and her deepest love lay baking in the tire tracks leading back to where she was born.
With Bella operating on muscle memory, the desert’s extremes pose little threat. Paul can’t exactly explain why, but on the day of the earthquake, he saw it first-hand — her superpower. Discovering that her family had died in the quake, the young bank teller’s mossy-green eyes glossed over and turned black. Paul watched in real time, a woman become possessed by an inner plague, some dark energy. Instead of shutting down, though, Bella’s trauma took note of what came next and shocked her instincts like a pair of supercharged jumper cables. That night, seated outside the fallout shelter, sharing a smoke, Paul began to see that his crush had almost no memory of what she’d done to save their lives.
Like a badly told story, or a drunken escapade, the events that transpire during Bella’s superhuman state lack clarity; they become floating snippets of detail she can only hazily recall, without order or understanding.
Paul has been exploiting this fact ever since.
After a lifetime spent in the Big Sink, Paul’s secret weapon has only grown more valuable. Surviving has become second nature to the desert woman. For years, Paul has been using his wife’s profound thoughtlessness as a shield against certain death. He knows that by breaking Bella down to her essential elements, he has a better chance of not only conquering the extremes of Death Valley, of Ghost Town and its surrounding tundra, but of controlling the love of his life.
Scavenger Hunts were devised with more than just the essential development of Star’s survival skills; Paul wanted his daughter gone, unreachable, and in danger for days at a time. He wanted her to know from an early age what living in the desert demands; he wanted her to be prepared for the end-times. But he also needed a surefire way to pry open the gates of Bella’s consciousness, to expose her empathy, make her mind vulnerable to the idea of limitless pain. Like a tooth stripped of its enamel shell, shrieking with every breath.
Bella chews her mule jerky on tempo.
Chew, chew, chew, chew, swallow. Chew, chew, chew, chew, swallow…
Paul, having just finished penciling in their route, taps his wife on the shoulder and holds up the map so she can study it. But Bella’s eyes remain on the path ahead. Without warning, her boot lands hard on the gas and jets the truck faster through the canyon pass, nosediving down a short, steep gulch. Paul rockets forward, smashing his face against the dash.
“Ah!” he grunts, grabbing again for his knife.
Gutted by anger and a sharp pain along the outer edge of his right eyebrow, he raises the blade and turns to his wife. But a loud crash booms through the pickup and Paul turns to see a chunk of the canyon wall, cracked and rocking between their tire tracks about twenty feet back. He should have known.
Twisting back in his seat, he lets out a deep sigh, focuses on the wind hitting his face and laughs. He looks down at the mint-green dash marred by a smudge of fresh blood. Paul’s thoughtless desire for vengeance has been replaced by relief and awe; even after all these years, he’s amazed by his wife. How she continues to save him.
Chew, chew, chew, chew, swallow. Chew, chew, chew, chew, swallow…
Bella utters no response.