by Suzy Sci-Fi
From her perch on a rocky ridge, SarahT peers down at the Snail Trail, a narrow gray footpath. It cuts from horizon to horizon on an untouched Frosty Veil blanketing the rolling desert expanse. Gripping her spear—a steel pipe ground to a tapered point—she listens for shuffling below.
When she travels, she uses the Snail Trail to obscure her movements. Footsteps that veer off this well-trod, common footpath and mark the Frosty Veil attract attention, and usually lead to a patch of blood.
The sound, SarahT thinks. It must’ve been nothing. She ducks back under the ridge, lungs still hyperventilating as they mine oxygen from the depleted air.
It’s getting cold. Zipping her tan windbreaker to her chin, she hurries and scrapes a layer of frost into a mixing bowl. She pulls an empty BIC lighter from her ragged messenger bag and sparks it over a charred coffee mug, igniting the fire fluid inside. She angles the flame beneath the bowl of frost, then pours the melted water into a two-liter bottle with IV tubes attached, watching as it slithers down the tubes and drips onto a pair of tilled rows where starved potato stalks breach the dark gray earth and hang their withered leaves.
Two months ago, SarahT couldn’t control herself. Shuffling down the Snail Trail, a thought snuck into her mind. What if she could grow something? She stopped and found herself in front of a hillside with a haphazard staircase of bald boulders. Climbing to the top, she found a hidden flat patch where she spent the afternoon tilling and planting seeds from a brown-painted water bottle. She minced her lunch—knotty cucumbers and fat tomatoes—and spread them on the primed dirt. A sacrifice for hope.
Every few days, she makes the two-hour journey to this garden, replenishing the two-liter bottle, checking irrigation tubes, pruning brown leaves. But, the dirt is too starved to grow. Soon, maybe now, after all the death she’s seen, SarahT thinks she could be the last person who remembers patches of green in the wild.
She peeks back over the ridge. The horizons are empty. Repacking her messenger bag and slipping her spear into a sheath woven from stripped wire insulation, she climbs down, stepping carefully on bald rocks to conceal her footprints. She makes a decision: It’s not worth it. She’ll change her routine, come less often. She can barely get enough air for the climb up. If she attracts attention, one or two big swings before her arms are gone.
Landing back on the Snail Trail, SarahT looks down and notices a footprint in the Frosty Veil: hers. It points up the boulder staircase toward her garden. She kneels and swipes some frost over it. It looks worse. She scrambles it with her fingers. There’s no time. It’s getting dark.
The Snail Trail runs through the courtyard of an old mill complex. Along the windward side of the buildings, piles of fine gray dirt accumulate from sky-blotting dust storms, forming gentle slopes up to the rooftops.
SarahT hops off the trail in the middle of the complex and tightropes across the girder of a collapsed gantry crane to a two-story rotunda attached to the back of a mill. Kneeling below a two-foot arched drainage culvert, she unlocks a combo lock on a metal grate and drops to her stomach.
After wiggling through a ten-foot horizontal shaft, she emerges under the rotunda’s round, thirty-foot ceiling. A twin bed, three-gallon jugs, and a workbench stacked with color-painted seed bottles rest in the center of the room. Crumbled machinery and a crooked brick wall seal the rotunda’s arched main entryway.
SarahT flops her sheathed spear and messenger bag on the workbench and approaches an opaque plastic curtain that walls off the back third of the rotunda. Behind it, gray light blasts down from a skylight, feeding curious strawberry bushes and tomato vines as they climb on broken pallets above humble carrots and spinach gathering nutrients in moist, black soil. A greedy apple tree in the center of the greenhouse spreads its fattened branches and bears the scars from where SarahT hacked off its wayward limbs.
SarahT collapses into a patchy brown recliner beside the curtain. A resuscitation mask, attached to a hose that snakes through a duct-taped hole in the plastic, dangles from the chair’s lever. She brings the mask to her mouth and breathes in. Oxygen barrels into her bloodstream, waking her brain.
SarahT hugs a black box and shuffles down the Snail Trail, her sheathed spear and messenger bag dangling from her back. Last night, a dust storm threw a layer of gray dirt over the trail’s belly. So, as she travels, she drags her feet to obscure her footprints.
The sun dips to the horizon. She worked late today taming the apple tree, which had sprawled one of its limbs over a patch of lowly radishes. SarahT tried to compromise, propping the limb up with a piece of rebar. But when it collapsed, she had to amputate.
Across a glassy stream, SarahT glances at Bi-Low Town in the distance. After the catastrophe, a collective took over the strip mall on the edge of the city. The old Bi-Low grocery store became the town’s main hall, where residents and visitors met to haggle. At first, corpses displayed outside the Applebees tavern and Papa John’s brothel warned troublemakers. But as the bodies rotted and multiplied, people forgot their purpose.
SarahT remembers her last visit. As she headed home, she passed a nail salon gutted by flames at the far end of the strip mall. Through the broken windows, she saw a family of four, arranged in a semi-circle, heads on chairs, their rib cages open. In the charred back of the salon, figures stirred. A woman, covered in dried blood, and a man with half his beard seared off rose from the shadows and fixed their eyes on SarahT.
The woman flinched, then chased as SarahT bolted into the blanket of frost, dumping canned corn and ham from her messenger bag behind her. At the top of a ridge, she glances back and found the couple tearing into her packaged ham.
SarahT never returned. She found a metal pipe in a junk pile near her mill complex. As she ground a jagged point onto its end, Bi-Low Town’s electric lights turned into fires on the horizon. Fires that became a week of screams. Now, the town’s rubble hums with silence and bad memories.
Along the Snail Trail, SarahT arrives at Mater’s Labyrinth, a maze of paths that wind up ridges, dip into ditches, and loop back on themselves, confounding anyone who tries to navigate it. Mater, the maze’s creator, scattered bones along the paths to ward off the persistent.
Shuffling into the labyrinth, SarahT takes a left, then the third right, followed by three lefts—then freezes. Two sets of footprints. Fresh ones, she thinks, tracing them with her eyes as they stray off the path onto the Frosty Veil. They circle around a ridge, drop into two butt-prints, then rise and vanish back onto the trail.
At the end of Mater’s Labyrinth, yellow light knifes from Mater’s lonely corrugated hut onto a flat depression below frosty hills, a slope of wind-gathered dust nestled at its foot. Above, a cylindrical windmill collects meager watts from the strolling dusk wind.
Hugging her black box, SarahT approaches the front door and hears Mater’s music. Funny, she thinks. Mater only plays his croon music when he’s got company. Tap. Tap. She raps her spear against the salvaged metal door. A gruff “Come in” usually greets her. But today, the music cuts off, followed by shuffling and a “shush.” She peeks inside, then stumbles back. Through the crack in the door, she spies Mater yanking a race car shower curtain closed, hiding someone with cascading hair in the corner of his junk-filled hut.
“Yeah. Alright, come in,” Mater grunts.
“You’ve got company?” SarahT asks, sliding inside.
“What?” Mater asks. “No.” He reaches for the leather sheath on his belt but grabs air. His 12-inch tactical knife hangs on a hook on the opposite wall. It’s never off his hip, SarahT thinks.
Mater squeezes by a workbench cluttered with disassembled motors and snags his knife. Brushing shaggy, white hair from his square face, he squats to the dirt floor and lays a worn yardstick over a clear plastic tarp. “Last time you said one stick by two sticks?”
“Two by three,” SarahT says. “And fire fluid, too.”
“Sorry. All out.” Mater measures and marks the tarp. “What’s in the bag?”
SarahT sets two cucumbers on the workbench, surrounded by empty tuna cans and stripped wiring.
“Someday,” Mater says, slicing rectangles in the plastic tarp, “you’re going to have to show me where you get those.” He hands the rectangles to SarahT.
“No,” she replies, slipping the plastic into her messenger bag.
Mater points to SarahT’s black box, then to an old cathode ray tube television in the corner of the hut. “Hook her up.”
Shimmying past red race car toys and stacks of women’s magazines, SarahT kneels in front of the TV and sticks wires into the back of her black box. A DVD tray pops out. Mater hands her a scarred disc featuring a cartoon red race car.
“Please, no,” SarahT groans.
“The others don’t work,” Mater says. “I ain’t lying.”
Popping the disc in, SarahT watches as Mater hesitates, starting to sheath his knife on his hip, then changes his mind and hangs it back on the wall.
Khh! Khh! Khh! SarahT pops up, hearing wheezing coughs blare out from behind the shower curtain.
Mater freezes as SarahT darts forward and pulls it back. Jan, with inky black hair and marigold skin unmarred by age and dust-biting wind, sits cross-legged on Mater’s stained mattress. “Hi,” she says.
Mater yanks the curtain shut. “That’s not for you.”
“There’s just one?” SarahT asks.
“What? Let’s watch. Let’s watch.” Mater scrambles to the DVD player, pressing play before plopping onto a mass of unmade comforters three feet from the screen. “Go get ’em, Lightning!”
SarahT mashes her lips as she settles onto a couch filled with tongue-scraped potato chip wrappers. Glancing back at the curtain, she finds a pair of lucid gray eyes peeking out and feels her breath catch.
Night has taken over, but a full moon fills the desert floor’s Frosty Veil with a hushed glow. SarahT hugs her black box as she exits Mater’s hut and spirals onto the labyrinth, climbing out of the depression, feeling eyes watching.
At the hilltop, she pauses to catch her breath and notices footprints meandering off the path. She tells herself to go home, but curiosity overtakes her. Placing her feet in the footprints like a child trying on her father’s shoes, she follows them for twenty yards until she spots a shadowed lump clinging to the ridge overlooking Mater’s hut.
Sliding her spear from its sheath, SarahT collapses to the ground as the lump shifts. It’s the second set of footprints, she thinks. Whoever they are, they’re waiting for something, hidden under a Desert Shroud—a camouflaged ghillie suit made from stitched gray tent canvas. SarahT steadies her breathing and waits with them.
An hour passes. Below, light sweeps out from Mater’s hut as Jan exits, clutching something against her stomach. She hurries to a dark hole fifty yards from the hut, pulls down her tattered sweatpants, and squats to pee.
Near SarahT, the Desert Shroud slips over the ridge and slides downhill towards the hut.
Standing, Jan pulls up her sweatpants and spots the Desert Shroud tumbling towards her. She tears at her hair and screams, “It found me! It’s coming! It’s coming!”
Mater appears in the glowing doorway and squints at the dark figure moving down the hill. Reaching towards Jan, he calls, “Come! Come!” Limbs stiff, Jan shakes her head as the Desert Shroud closes in. Mater steps out of the hut. “It’s not real! It’s not real!”
Jan faints, flopping her body next to the dark hole.
Mater scurries into the night. “Go! Get! Get!” he shouts, flailing his arms at the approaching figure.
The Desert Shroud halts. Jan creeps to her feet, then sprints towards Mater, wielding his 12-inch tactical knife. They collide—the knife stabbing into the back of Mater’s thigh—and tumble to the ground.
Jan drops the knife and crawls toward the hut, unable to get enough oxygen to stand.
Rolling in pain, Mater clutches his leg as the Desert Shroud lands on him, knees-first, stabbing with a flathead screwdriver. Mater swats at the figure, but the shaft punctures his eye, cheek, neck.
The Desert Shroud rises, retrieves the knife, and stands over Jan, who coughs up ragged phlegm on all fours. The figure pulls loose two knots, and the stitched gray canvas suit falls to the dirt, revealing Carly, Jan’s older sister, with glass-shard-cut hair and a sand-scratched face. She pulls Jan to her feet and drags her into Mater’s hut.
Half-blind, Mater claws towards the sisters. “Ahh! Why ya…” As he flops onto his back, waves of pain crash over him, chattering his teeth, stealing his words.
From the ridge, SarahT listens as the sisters tear the hut apart.
Twenty minutes pass. The light inside flicks off. Mater lies dead in the depression. SarahT sheaths her spear and heads back home.
Scanning the horizon for figures, SarahT trudges down the Snail Trail. As she nears the hillside that hides her potato garden, she spots her scrambled footprint at the base of the boulder staircase. Two pairs of fresh footprints now frame it.
Leave, she thinks. Go home.
Khh! Khh! Khh! Coughing tumbles down from the top of the ridge. Unsheathing her spear, she sneaks up the staircase and peeks over. Carly and Jan squat in her potato garden, wrapping their fists around stalks, yanking out and munching fingernail-sized potatoes dangling from stringy roots.
SarahT lingers, watching as Jan cradles her plant carcasses like a mother before devouring them.
Coughing, Jan glances up and sees SarahT’s head perched over the ridge. A smile spreads across her face. SarahT can’t tear her eyes away from the young woman with tiny suns in her eyes.
“Hi,” Jan says, lifting a limp stem. “What’s this?”
Carly looks up, brown dirt stuck to her lips, and notices SarahT. Popping to her feet, she pulls Mater’s knife from a sixty-liter duffel bag.
Tumbling down the hillside, SarahT flees home.
SarahT sprawls on the brick floor of her rotunda, greenhouse curtain towering behind her. Tan windbreaker zipped to her chin, she presses her hands over her ears, trying to block out the wailing—Jan’s wailing—echoing from outside through the drainage culvert and bouncing off the curved walls of her sanctuary.
When did it start? SarahT thinks. Make it stop. It’s a trap…What if it stops?
Snatching her spear, she crawls into the culvert and squeezes outside to blinding daylight. As her pupils contract, she sees a pinpoint of black hair sitting above the mill complex’s debris. Stepping across the bricks, tiptoeing halfway down the fallen gantry crane, she finds Jan on the Snail Trail, legs splayed in a valley of ruined brick walls, face vomiting tears.
“Yes?” SarahT asks, surprised the word escaped her mouth. Jan jerks her head toward her, perched on the gantry crane. A pained grin stretches across Jan’s lips as she extends her hand, pleading. SarahT drops onto the Snail Trail, squats a few yards away, and spins her spear in the dirt, waiting for Jan to spill her story.
“She’s dead,” Jan says.
“Who?”
Jan turns the tears back on. “My sister. She…she just fell, slipped off, and…her neck.” She flicks her head to the side to mimic the break.
She’s not a good liar, SarahT thinks, glancing around the courtyard. No movement. “You need a place to stay?”
Jan nods, forcing more tears.
“Stop crying.”
Jan wipes her cheeks and resets her face.
“Follow my rules.”
Jan nods.