“I don’t think they’d eat you, Ed—though thanks to you, I can’t be sure.” I staggered out of the truck and leaned on it, sliding along to the tool chest in the back. The Winnebago’s dust trail faded off down the road.

“I can’t move my leg!” Ed flailed in the cab, shaking the truck. His voice sounded tattered, like the screams holding there had ripped his throat.

I pulled the chest open and popped the latch on the saw case. I snapped the blade in place.

A gunshot burst inside the car, then three more. What was left of the windows crumbled.

“Ed!” I slammed the tool chest closed and ran to his door.

His fists pressed against his ears, his right hand wrapped around the revolver.

“Ed, what are you doing?” I started dragging the saw across the doorframe.

“Worked last time.” He slumped over in his seat, across the console.

“Ed?” I leaned on the saw.

Ed reached an arm over to the passenger door handle and heaved himself away from his seat, trailing blood and stretching sinew, skin, and muscle over the console and into the passenger seat.

I wrenched the door from the frame and tossed it into the ditch.

“You’ll have to drive now. We can leave that for the crows.” He pointed at his leg, still tied to his thigh with ropes of tendon and stringy cords of massacred muscle. Blood filled the bucket of the seat beneath him. His hand dropped into his lap. His eyes went limp in his grey face.

“Oh, fuck, Ed,” I said, pounding the roof of the car. “That shit never works twice.”

I tossed the saw back in the tool chest and pulled out the shovel. The cold wind turned the wet on my cheeks into a shell.

I paced up and down the road, sucking down breaths of frozen dust till I found a coyote grave. I opened it—a deep one. I wrapped Ed around what had been his good leg, right alongside the coyote. Gave them both a salute—just in case. I put the carbon steel leg in the tool chest. “They’re going to miss you, Ed. I’m going to miss you.”

Two of the tires had gone low, but the truck still drove, and I raced it back to the old Winnebago as fast as I dared go on the dirt, the dust from the dragging tires kicking up into my face through the hole where a door should be.

I backed across the field and hitched the chain to the back of the rusty wreck and dragged it from the trees. Door panels popped off into the tall grass as the camper scraped free. The skeleton shook apart as I pulled it up the embankment back to the road.

A spot of bright red shone in the dead patch of grass where the camper had rotted.