fence running alongside the road. She passes yet another sign about Wink, this one a half-ruined thing asking her why she would ever wish to leave, though Mona could think of a few million reasons. She slows down when the fence’s silver glimmer turn to snarls of black. She pulls over and sees that there is indeed a gap in the fence, and it’s quite large, nearly twenty feet across.
“This must be the place,” she says. Then she frowns, thinking of the doughnut tire. It can’t hold up on uneven terrain, and it’d be impossible to get a good tire for the Charger out here. And besides, she doesn’t trust a damn soul in this town anymore.
She decides this will have to be done on foot, as she feared. She’ll drive the Charger in just far enough for it to be hidden from the road, because while she hasn’t seen anyone else along the highway, she’s not willing to take the chance. So, wincing each time she hears a rock or branch snap under the tires, she slowly, slowly steers the Charger through the gap in the fence.
Mona parks it behind a fallen ponderosa pine, then gets out and scans the way ahead. She cannot see much of a road out here. She looks around, marking this spot, for though she’s brought plenty of water the desert is large and it can’t last forever if she gets lost.
She shoulders the pack she made for herself (using a pink child’s backpack from the Ponderosa Acres’s “lost and found” box, as her previous pack was too small for this expedition) and begins her trek to the mesa. It is not unbearably hot in such high deserts, but it is quite dry, and the wind seems to corrode her skin.
She crests one hill and stops. For a moment she thought she saw something in the landscape, but then it was gone…
She takes a step or two back and scans the countryside. Then things align just right, and she sees it.
There is a road, just as Parson said there would be. It is incredibly faint, like a whisper of a brushstroke on a painting, but it’s there. She can see it winding across the rocky terrain, running over hills and ridges until it disappears behind the shadow of the mesa. It’s like a seam in the skin of the earth itself, as if the desert was stitched together here.
It will be a long walk. But this, Mona has decided, is hostile territory. Parson can tell funny little riddles all day, but he doesn’t know jack shit about infiltrating what essentially is enemy ground.
And that’s what Mona’s going to be doing. There are secrets at the mesa no one wants her to know. So she hikes the pink backpack up high on her shoulders, bows down low, and starts to jog across the desert.
She stops in the shadow of every tree and rock to survey the territory around her. She sees no movement. There is no wildlife, not even any birds. She is utterly alone here. Still she does not let her guard down. Sometimes as she runs she touches the butt of the Glock, reminding herself how close it is, and what she will need to do if she encounters any—she searches for the right term—obstacles.
Things feel more and more unreal as she runs. The sun does not seem to move: it is forever stuck at just a half hour after dawn. Its slanted light turns the shadows into a staggered calligraphy that loops across the red ground. Enormous cliffs somehow keep creeping up from out of nowhere, slowly emerging from behind what looked like a simple knoll, like she’s being stalked by the mountains. And everything here is quiet, save for the wind. It is such a harsh change from the piney valley of Wink.
One peak rises, then slowly falls, as if she’s wading through a red sea. But as this peak falls, she thinks she sees something behind it—something thin and gleaming white…
“The hell?” she says. She reaches into her backpack and takes out her binoculars. She glasses the hilltop behind the cliff and scans for what she saw.
It’s hard to miss. There behind the cliff is a white column sticking straight up out of the ground. It contrasts brightly against the dull red of the terrain. And the column is too perfect, too unblemished, for her to think it’s there naturally.
As she watches, a violet light on the top of the