to let the insistent cars pass. His shins were bleeding. He thought a bone in his foot might be broken, because it hurt to scramble back into the desert. After he’d gone a fair distance and couldn’t hear the sirens anymore, Julian glanced back, to make sure they had passed him, and it was safe again.
But no.
It was the opposite of safe again.
All the lights in the kaleidoscope of his failing vision were pinholed at the place in the road where he had just been, colors spinning like a silent carousel. They were all stopped—as if they had stopped for him. There was even an ambulance. As Julian watched, a civilian car screeched to a stop, the driver door opened, and a man jumped out. A police officer pointed in Julian’s direction. Leaving his car door flung open, the man started running toward Julian.
Was that right, or was it another illusion?
Julian’s one eye had crusted over and the other was filled with dirt and swollen with poison ivy. The one eye that could still see was playing tricks on him. Through his blurred myopic haze, Julian could almost swear the running man was getting closer to him in the dried-out skeleton grass. And his ears were deceiving him. He thought he heard a voice calling his name in the wilderness.
Julian . . . !
The man kept tripping on the rough ground full of ditches and rocks and poverty weed, falling, getting up, running, shouting his name. Julian! Julian . . .
The man was coming toward him clumsily, frantically—or was it frantically and clumsily? Consequences were important. Causes and effects were important. Was the man clumsy because he was frantically trying to get to him?
Julian wavered, fearfully watching the blur come into focus. His head hurt. But his heart hurt more.
Maybe it was being too long without water in the pitiless desert, but for a moment, the mirage in front of Julian glimmered like a ghost of the most familiar shape of all. Ashton.
Except this yelling running ghost was calling out his name.
Instead of taking another step away, like he thought he wanted to, Julian took a step forward, whispering a parched prayer through a throat that couldn’t make a sound. Oh God, please PLEASE let it be Ashton.
Dimly he recalled the lies he had told himself in some flat subarctic city where he searched not for one lost soul but two, peering into the faces of faceless men the way hopeless people do when they’ve lost everything, when every back, every jacket, every hearty laugh looked and sounded like a beloved someone forever gone. But this mirage wore no jacket and wasn’t laughing and yet looked and sounded like his vanished friend.
Julian took another step forward.
A few feet away from him, the panting man stopped running. His hands fell to his sides. Gasping, he crossed his arms over his stomach and doubled over. When he straightened out, he spoke. “Julian,” the mirage said, the eyes welling up, the voice breaking.
Ashton.
Julian dropped his stick, walked toward him, threw his arms around him.
Ashton threw his arms around Julian. The two men stood, gripped in a deadlock.
Julian was dry heaving.
Ashton clasped him around his back. “It’s all right. It’s all right,” he said, holding Julian up. “You’re okay. You’ll be okay. Can you walk? Holy shit, dude. Can you walk? What the fuck happened to you, Jules? We thought you were dead.”
Me, too. Julian tried to speak, but no sound came out. He grabbed Ashton’s shirt. His mouth opened. Ashton waved to the cars in the road. “It’s him! It’s him,” he yelled.
With Ashton’s arm around his neck, a barely upright Julian limped through the grass, was almost dragged through it. It’s all right, dude, it’s all right, Ashton kept repeating. Then Julian couldn’t walk anymore. Ashton yelled for help, but Julian was falling. Before the paramedics could get into the bush with the stretcher, Ashton carried Julian to the stretcher himself.
Julian heard anxious rapid-fire conversation over his head, as if he wasn’t there, as if he couldn’t hear. “White male, twenty-two years old, IDd by his friend Ashton Bennett as Julian Osment Cruz. Found in Topanga Canyon, severely injured, bleeding from his nose and ears, presenting with a compound skull fracture, likely cerebral hemorrhage, vocal cord paralysis, risk of infection, loss of blood, one eye shut, the open pupil not responding to light, concussion certain, sun stroke definite, visible spider bites, possibly a snake bite, poison ivy, body swollen from burn blisters,