“Thanks,” I mumble, then clear my throat. Keep it polite. “I really appreciate it. I’ll try not to bother you again.”
“No problem.” Brian shrugs, squinting into the sun from under his baseball cap. “Just don’t make a habit of it. And don’t tell your mom how to find me.”
“Yeah. Even if I did, she…” I catch myself before I finish the sentence withwouldn’t remember it anyway. “I won’t.”
“Anything I can get you for the road?”
I think of the orangey, stinking water. “No thanks.”
“Okay.” He scratches his arm. His nails run red tracks through the dark hair. “It’s a long drive back. You can think about what I said.”
I dig my thumb into the key fob, and the car warbles its response. I don’t have to entertain Brian’s delusions of supremacy. He doesn’t know what’s real any more than I do.
“Actually.” I pause with the car door halfway open, my hip wedged into the space it makes. “Did Uncle Bill ever mention a woman named Martina to you? A friend of his, maybe?”
“Don’t think so.”
“She disappeared last year?”
“Doesn’t ring a bell.”
Last try. “Okay, did he ever say anything weird about, like, flayed men? I texted you about it, but I wasn’t sure…”
Brian turns. His shadow falls across me. He looks bigger, suddenly, from this angle.
“Where I grew up, we called him ‘the man from the desert,’” he says softly. “But he’s a story someone made up to scare kids. That’s all.”
“No, yeah, I know.” Something in his tone makes me want to get into the driver’s seat and push the gas pedal as far down as it goes. “It’s just, I don’t know. When I went to check on Uncle Bill’s house, it looked like someone had broken into his office, and he’d been writing an email to someone about the flayed man—the man from the desert. I thought maybe it was you.”
Brian lifts his ball cap to run a sweaty hand over his forehead, then shoves the cap back over his eyes. “And?”
“My mom’s been talking about him too. Claiming she saw him.”
Those ice-chip eyes fix on me. “Maybe she did see him.”
“You just said he’s made up.”
The muscle under one of his eyes twitches. “I know what I said.”
“Anyway, our version doesn’t live in the desert.”
“Maybe there are two of them.”
I’m not sure what to say to that.
Brian looks straight into the wind and says, still in that same soft voice, “Well, since you’re so interested, here’s how we tell it out here. A long time ago, there were more of us, a lot more, and we wandered the deserts of the world. Mojave, Atacama, Gobi. His people, our ancestors, they didn’t try to hide. They weren’t afraid to kill.”
The wind howls, and I taste sulfur.
“Their one rule was ‘We stick together.’ We kill them, not each other. But the man from the desert, he was ambitious. And he was smart. He knew that he could live without limits, if he wasn’t afraid to break the rules.”
It’s different from the version I know, but I can guess what comes next. “He turned on his family,” I whisper. “He ate their hearts, so he could live forever.”
“Something like that.” Brian’s smile is ghoulish. “He hunted the weak willed first, the ones who trailed too far behind. And he hunted the ones who challenged him, who tried to claim that solidarity or assimilation were the key to freedom. And then, eventually, he began to hunt for fun. Now, what we tell kids out here, is that he’s still out there, waiting in the canyons. He lures you in by claiming he can tell the future, but if you see him, you’d better not stick around to listen. You’d better run. Because once you see him, that means he’s got your scent. That means he’s coming to eat your heart.”
My own chest spasms, muscle and iron and bone.
“He’s got no human suit, so he can only hunt at night,” he continues. The wind dies down, and for a second, the world is all yellow light. “But he’s got a thousand years of practice.”
