Hope and Undead Elvis - By Ian Thomas Healy Page 0,20

a good listener. Easy to talk to."

"My pleasure, Li'l lady."

The Way rolled on down the highway as it followed the lay of the land. On occasion the road would wind around a dune of exceptional size or dip between them, but for the most part their course remained straight. Hope drove in silence, letting the drone of the engine drive uncomfortable thoughts about motherhood and the state of the world from her mind. The sand to either side of the road became less distinct as The Way covered mile after mile. Hope couldn't tell how far they'd traveled, for the odometer was frozen at 65,536 miles.

She jerked awake in sudden fear. She'd been asleep at the wheel!

Undead Elvis sat beside her, a calming paragon, one hand on the steering wheel.

"You let me fall asleep!"

"You looked like you needed it."

"I do! God, I'm tired enough to sleep for a week, but you let me fall asleep while I was driving!"

"I'd have awakened you if something came up. You were doing just fine. I just had to nudge it left or right once in awhile."

"Don't ever do that again! I've got a b—" Hope's eyes widened as she realized what she'd been about to blurt. I've got a baby to think about!

So there it was. Maybe her biological time card got punched after all. She was pregnant, and she felt protective of the little cluster of cells embedded somewhere within her uterus. She took one white-knuckled hand from the wheel to touch her tummy, wondering what it would be like to be a mother.

"I'm sorry, Li'l lady."

"It's okay. You meant well. Scared me half to death, though." Then Hope really looked at the world beyond the road and realized it had changed.

Red rocks poked up through the sand. As they drove, the rocks became more prevalent until they'd replaced the sand as the predominant landscape feature. The Way's engine took on a more plaintive note. Hope's ears popped and she swallowed hard and then yawned to try to clear them. She let up on the accelerator for a moment and The Way slowed. "Feel that? I think we're going uphill."

"Sure seems like it."

"What do you think we'll find?"

"The top."

Hope rolled her eyes. "Funny man."

What they found, it turned out, was a bridge.

Chapter Nine

Hope and the Bridge

At one point, the bridge would have crossed a canyon lined by rocks in a thousand shades of red from pale salmon to dark cherry. The central span had collapsed, leaving only the steel ramps and miscellaneous torn support structure on either side of the chasm.

Hope shut off The Way and got out. Undead Elvis followed her to the cliff edge and they looked into the canyon in silence. The air was cooler than it had been amid the sands, but as still as ever. The unmoving sun beating down upon them was tolerable instead of miserable. The myriad colors in the rocks felt like a vacation for Hope's eyes after the unending golden blur of the desert below.

A pale stripe along the canyon floor, hundreds of feet below, suggested whatever river had carved such a gash in the world had dried up to leave only more sand behind. Hope toed a small rock over the edge. It clattered down the face, dislodging a few pebbles along the way. She watched it fall until she lost sight of it.

Hope said, "When I was a kid, my mom took me to the Grand Canyon. I remember standing with my face pressed against a guard rail, looking down into it, and thinking that giants must have made it because nothing else could make such a deep hole. It might have been ten times as deep and wide as this. It was beautiful. This one here just breaks my heart." She looked over at the broken bridge. "What do we do now?"

"Things fall apart. The center cannot hold."

"What does that mean?"

"Just a line from a poem. Seemed like an apt metaphor for our situation, Li'l lady."

"I don't need a metaphor, Elvis, I need a bridge. What do we do now? We can't go along the edge looking for another way across. This could go on for hundreds of miles, and The Way can't drive along that edge." She motioned to the jagged rocks that made up the landscape to either side of the road.

"We could go back and try to find another way."

"What if there isn't one?"

"What if there is?"

Hope stamped her foot. "You're not helping. We were lucky to