I hold up my pencil to halt discussion for a moment. “Just to be clear, there aren’t really rabid dinosaurs here, are there?”
Claire giggles again.
“Just checking. Okay, what about plague?”
Peter draws a symbol in the dust on the dining room table: a circle with three linking circles on top of it. A biohazard symbol. “Scavengers paint them on the doors of houses with diseased bodies inside or other kinds of contamination. Happens sometimes. Everyone calls it the plague.”
“Great! I mean, not great about the diseased bodies, of course.”
Peter smiles, and it’s as if his face blossoms. But I can’t let this distract me. I twist the white strip in my hair as I think. “So...we need paint, bright for the biohazard sign,” I say. “Red, preferably. Nails and hammer, which we have. String and cans and other loud items for the alarm system.”
“Forks and spoons?” Claire suggests.
“Yeah, that would be fine. Anything that makes a loud clatter.”
“Feral dogs,” Peter says.
Both Claire and I spin to look at the window. I retreat behind a chair. Claire whips her knife out and drops to a crouch. I don’t hear howls or barks, but...
Peter rolls his eyes at both of us. “Relax. What I meant is— if a house had feral dogs, then I wouldn’t enter.”
“I don’t want dogs in the house,” Claire says. Her lower lip juts out in a pout. She doesn’t put the knife away.
Coming out from behind the chair and sitting again, I think about it, tapping my pen again on the notebook. “If we had a tape recorder, we could record the howl, maybe a few other sounds, and then play it while we’re gone. Kind of like leaving the radio on when you go on vacation.”
“What’s a tape recorder?” Claire asks.
Peter nods. “I may have one.”
“Then we’ll just have to get close enough for some good recordings...” I try to say this like it’s no big deal. Saunter up to feral dogs that would rather munch your face off. Sure. Right after breakfast. “Okay, so here’s our plan. Peter, you get the tape recorder. Claire, try to find red paint, string, and anything metal and loud we can put on the string. I’ll start on hammering the nails near the windows until Claire returns with the paint.”
Claire hops off the table. “Yay!”
Saluting, Peter steps off the back of the chair. It neatly drops onto its four legs. “Yes, ma’am.” I notice he isn’t talking about leaving anymore. I don’t know if it’s because of the intruder, or if he’s decided I’m interesting again.
* * *
Alone, I hammer nails through thin boards and then hammer the boards to windowsills. I wince every time the head of the hammer strikes the wood. The strikes seem to reverberate across the desert. I imagine the sound traveling across the sand and dirt, through the houses, and into town where the people who want me dead will hear it as an invitation.Come to the little yellow house to kill Lauren. BYOB.
I finished downstairs and am working on the upstairs attic room window. I’m placing the nails askew so they’ll look natural, as if a sloppy handyman chose to rip out a chunk of the window frame and didn’t flatten the nails afterward—or at least that’s what I hope it looks like. I’ve never done much construction. Regardless, the nails are long and vicious, and I pound them through the sill so they’ll point upward. Anyone who grabs the sill to hoist themselves inside will have a nasty surprise and hopefully reconsider the whole endeavor in favor of breaking into a less prickly house.
By the time I finish, I’m sweating and my clothes are sticking to me. I look out the window at the haze on the horizon—the manifestation of the void.
Suddenly, I want to see it again. It’s my jailer. My prison wall.
I am walking before I’ve decided to: down the stairs, out the door, around the junk pile and out the gate. The air is hot but not unbearable. The sun pricks the back of my neck, and I sweep my hair up into a twist on the top of my head. On the other side of the fence, I see a pair of chopsticks on the ground, still in their Chinese restaurant wrapper. I pull them out, break them apart, and use them to hold my hair in place. Then I walk into the desert.
The wind whispers across the reddish sand. It’s a soft musical sound, like a whisk in a bowl. The low scrub brush trembles as it blows. I feel the sand on my skin.
Ahead of me, the dust storm—the void—is spread across the horizon. It blots out the thin distinction between the land and the sky, an amorphous but massive wall. Closer, I expect to feel wind. But I don’t. The dust hangs in the air, motionless, a wall of dust. It’s evenly thick, as if it were a mass of reddish-beige cotton, not dust particles suspended in the air.
I stop and study it. It looks endless. Impenetrable. But maybe that’s only here. I turn east and walk, the void to my left. It must end somewhere. No storm lasts forever. There must be a break in it, or at least a weak point.
Iwillfind a way out.
I won’t be trapped here.
I can’t be.
