pass in the mountains.
Though he has been here once before, on that long-ago garbage run with Christy and her father, Henry doesn’t recognize the place or recall anything useful about it. He has secret interludes of panic wondering what they will do if a car should choose this moment to come along. He keeps thinking he hears hoofbeats and furtive sounds in the bushes—the snuffling of rogue bison and wild boar; bloody-eyed animals around every bend.
Echoing his fears, Ruby says, “What do we do if a car comes by?”
“We’ll hear it a long way off—plenty of time to get out of sight.”
“Well, I think I hear one.”
“No, I keep imagining sounds too. We’re just dehydrated.”
“No, listen!” She stops and grabs his arm.
Frustrated at losing upward momentum, Henry stops to listen. Ice-cold adrenaline sluices through his rusty plumbing: Ruby is right—there’s a car coming! He can hear its tires squealing around every turn, a furious, seeking sound.
“Son of a bitch. All right, come on. Stay right behind me.”
There is no place to go but up. Without a rope, it is too dangerous to try climbing down in the dark—they could lower themselves into a situation where they can’t get back up again. The only way to leave the highway will have to be by scaling the right bank.
They are approaching a place where the road corners sharply at a fold in the mountain, creating a steep gully. The desert brush is thick, but Henry hunches low and shoulders through it. Gored by sticks, he manages to find what he’s looking for: a dry watercourse that forms a natural crawlspace beneath the scrub; a few inches of maneuvering room against the rocky slope, with woody roots and trunks of bushes as handholds. Difficult but doable—barely doable.
Ruby is right behind him, not complaining. The car is closer, just below now, and they can hear a thin squabble of raised voices over the engine noise—the sound of men arguing.
I ain’t goin’ up there, one protests—they see us and it’s our asses! You know what they—
It’s your ass if you don’t do what I tell you to do, says another.
“Go faster, honey,” Ruby says.
“I’m trying my best. Stay close.”
“I’m practically up your butt.”
Listening to the car approach, Henry slithers upward, trying to find passageways through the tangled undergrowth. It is not tremendously steep here, just a matter of being willing to crawl on your belly through sharp thorns and God knows what venomous creatures might lurking in a place like this. One scorpion or spider, one pissed-off diamondback rattlesnake, and they would be screwed. Ouch—they could be getting bitten and not even know it.
Topping a hump of stone, Henry drags himself onto a relatively level shelf of dirt, scooting aside to make room for Ruby. It is a little scrape, some animal’s wallow or a natural den under the close ceiling of sticker-bushes. They are not more than fifteen or twenty feet off the road.
“This’ll have to do,” he gasps, lying on his back with unseen things tickling his nose and a hard root in his kidneys.
“You sure?” Ruby plops down beside him, blowing hair out of her sweaty face. “I was beginning to think you were looking for someplace with patio dining and HBO.”
“I never promised you a rose garden.”
“Shh!—jerk. Here they come.”
It is two vehicles full of people: the same pickup truck that Henry saw at the condos, and a big white SUV with dome lights flashing—a sheriff’s car. The bushes strobe neon red and blue as the vehicles squeal around the curve, their lights spiderwebbing Henry and Ruby in scrolling shadow, exposing them in their huddled fear like illicit lovebirds caught in the act.
“Get down!” Henry snaps.
Feeling totally exposed, he and Ruby press flat, trying to appear as small as possible under the force of those penetrating colors, which pause as if staring right at them...then sweep past. The cars billow on up the mountain, leaving a fading red afterglow.
In a few seconds Henry says, “I think we’re in the clear.”
Both their bodies relax a little; they start breathing again. “What should we do now?” Ruby asks.
“I think we ought to stay right here for the night. Hopefully by morning the authorities will have arrived.”
“I was hoping you’d say that. I can’t move a muscle.”
“Me neither.”
Trying to get comfortable, Ruby says, “Did it look to you like there was a chase going on? Like one was chasing the other?”
“You mean a police chase?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Yeah…just wishful thinking. Ouch—scoot over a little.”
“I