Poe's children: the new horror : an anthology - By Peter Straub Page 0,116

remember because whatever purpose is behind all this hasn’t been achieved. Whatever happened, last time, we blew it. And if we blow it again, we’ll find another backpack just like this one.”

“Do you want a third of this or do you want to continue the lecture?” Zach had drawn his Swiss Army knife to divide one of the energy bars, but the protein goo was already so warm it practically poured apart.

“No, look at it.” Donny was flushed with fear and anger now. “Two of everything. Only two. Why only two? Who’s the odd guy out, here? Me. What the fuck happens to me?!”

“Shut up, Donny!” said Vira. “Look at the damned thing—it doesn’t have my wallet, my I.D., my hairbrush, tampons, or any of the other stuff in my backpack. It’s a fucking coincidence!”

“No. Something happens. Something changes. One of us gets gone.”

“Donny, you’re gonna pop a blood vessel, man.” Zach cracked one of the tins and took a ginger sip of the water packing the mini-wieners.

“And I’m not hungry,” Donny continued. “I see that stuff, food, and I should be starving, but I’m not. We walked all day yesterday and all today and we should be ready to hog a whole buffet…but all I feel is that edge of hunger, of thirst. Just enough to keep me crazy.”

“I wholeheartedly agree about the ‘crazy’ part,” said Vira.

“Eat anyway,” said Zach. “Save your energy for your next explanation of what the hell has happened to us.”

“Yeah, we’ll be laughing about this tomorrow,” said Vira, methodically swallowing capfuls from the sports bottle of water, knowing enough not to chug, not to waste, to take it extraordinarily slow and easy.

“Anybody care for an alternate point of view?” said Zach, relishing the salt in the chips even though they made him thirsty. “The backpack is a marker. Someone else has made this trip. And they left this stuff behind because they got out, got rescued, or didn’t need it anymore.”

“Yeah, maybe because they died.” Donny was still sour, and not meeting their eyes. Privately he thought Zach’s proposal was too upbeat to be real, and was full of holes besides. Maybe he was just playing optimist to cheer Vira up. In a book or a TV show or a movie, it just would not track because it begged too much backstory.

“If somebody just dropped this and died, we’d’ve seen a body,” said Vira. She was always on Zach’s side.

“Not if the sand blew over it,” said Donny.

“Jesus fuck, there’s just no winning with you,” she said. “You just have to be right all the time.”

That caused more long minutes to elapse in silence as they picked through their paltry booty. Donny looked out, away…anywhere but at his two increasingly annoying friends. Vira and Zach huddled, murmuring things he could not overhear, and neither of them acknowledged his presence until he jerked them back to the real world.

“Look at that,” he said.

“What?” Zach rose to squint downroad.

Donny pointed. “I think I see something. That way.”

“Then it’s time to burn a little energy, I guess. We get lucky, we can leave the backpack in the sand for the next sucker. Sweetie?”

Vira dusted her jeans and stood up. “Yeah. Ten-hut, let’s march.” She tried to think of a sarcasm about the Yellow Brick Road and Dorothy, or the Wild Bunch, minus one, but it was just too goddamned hot.

Donny led them, appearing to scent-track. Normally he liked to walk two paces behind Zach and Vira, because he enjoyed watching Vira’s ass move. Perhaps if he walked with his partners to the rear, they would just disappear at some point. Plucked away. It could happen. It happened in stories, in movies.

They walked toward it, but it turned out to be nothing.

They had wasted most of the second day waiting around the car under the arc of the sun. Waiting for rescue. Waiting for answers, for trespassers, for anything outside themselves. That was when Donny had begun ticking off his handy theories.

“Okay, we’re all drunk,” he said, knowing they weren’t. “We’re stoned. This is really a dream. See the car? We actually crashed it and we’re all dead, and this is Hell or something. Purgatory. Limbo.”

“I love that concept,” said Zach. “Hell-or-something.”

“Water jug’s empty,” said Vira. They’d stashed a gallon container in the backseat prior to departing on their road trip. One day of busy hydration had killed it. Her careful makeup had smudged, melted, run down her face, and evaporated.

Zach tied a T-shirt around his head to