I climbed from the open driver’s seat and walked over.

Another body, dark hair, splayed, in a shredded red shirt and jeans. Just a kid. The driver’s boy. His skin had shrunk against his bones, smooth, untouched by crow or coyote. That old camper had shielded him—saved him from scavengers. Maybe that’s why the old man was always leading them away, drawing them elsewhere. Feeding them other things. Things no one would miss.

I wrapped him in the thermal blanket from the emergency kit and set him inside the Winnebago, back in the passenger seat, where he belonged.

The old camper tires had long ago rotted dry, but I dragged it down the road, plowing a furrow through the street.

I stacked their bones in the coyote grave with Ed. I covered them over with the dust I’d carved from the road. I piled dry sage bushes over the mound and set them on fire.

I dragged that empty camper right up the side of the bluff, yanking it around the switchbacks, and I dropped the thing over Dead Man’s Curve. It was a thousand dusty pieces before it ever hit the bottom, scattering itself over the cars it had chased down.

I dangled my legs over the edge and watched through Ed’s binoculars at the line of dust already cutting through the plain, its hungry little stowaways flashing their feathers.

A billow of dust rose as the speck—that same old Winnebago—stopped with a jerk at the grave. It idled. The dust settled around it. Crows circled above, their screams carrying up the side of the mountain.

They dropped, then, and fell on the camper. The screech of metal and the shriek of birds echoed off the surrounding bluffs till it sounded like the earth itself had torn open and hell was pouring through.

As the sounds faded, the dust settled, the air cleared, not a bird in the sky. Not a car on the road. No sign of the Winnebago. Just a rising column of sage smoke.

I stood, pulled Ed’s leg from the truck, and pressed the foot against the rear bumper, leaning on it, adding a leg of my own, shoved the truck over the edge. It rattled over, down, and settled in the scrap bowl.

I hitched Ed’s leg over my shoulder and hiked down the road, around the switchbacks, and stared out across the prairie. In the winter, everything looks dead. Everything snaps, if you bend it. Everything scavenges, and nothing worth missing is left behind.

In Tongues

IN TONGUES

Pastor Thomas Minstrel ran one hand over Miranda’s bulging stomach. His other clutched a microphone. Beads of sweat ran down the microphone’s shaft and trailed along its cord like dewdrops on a cobweb. Miranda watched the droplets, afraid to raise her eyes to the hissing crowd.