San Diego man. Off-road. This time, my search turns something up.
Raul Vargas, runner and IT guy in his thirties, up from San Diego on a road trip. Last seen at a gas station buying Red Bull and uncooked bacon. Cashier said he was acting erratic. They found his Subaru in the middle of the Desert National Wildlife Refuge, windows busted, a note written on the inside of the windshield in blood:Gone hunting.
Raul Vargas. RV.
Highway 95 is wide open. I shove the gas pedal down as far as it goes and try to ignore the pounding in my sinuses. The Joshua trees leer as I speed past.
I’ve known hunger all my life, but as the GPS counts down minutes and I lock stiff lips over my lengthening canines, I realize this is unknown territory. I’ve passed the point where I’ve always caught myself before, where I’ve always fed. I don’t know what comes next, only that I have to keep myself from finding out before I reach my mom.
I don’t need to ask my curse’s help to scent the flayed man anymore. My hunger is so close to the surface our senses are melding. A vibrating ache spreads down my neck, seeps the length of my arms. A series of pops as my wrists begin to shift. The car veers toward the shoulder. Bite tongue, taste blood. My own, like ashes. Control it. Feeling springs back into my hands, and I jerk the wheel.
Gas pedal. Speedometer spikes. The horizon’s the color of an orange cream popsicle. I remember the sugar taste of Veer’s wounds. I weave around an oil tanker, jolt past a Prius.
Corn Creek, three miles away. Two. Next exit. My teeth jut over my lip, and for a second my vision goes white.
Control it. I’m so close.
Past the visitor’s center. A sign says five miles per hour. There’s a buzzing in my ears. Is my phone ringing, or is it only hunger snarling its demands through my eardrums?
It doesn’t matter. It hurts to take my eyes off the cracks in the windshield and the faded brown expanse beyond it. I follow the flayed man’s scent onto a dirt road, wheels throwing up a spray of dust and gravel. Keep going. My knees shudder, my ankles beg to come apart. Keeping my foot pressed down on the gas pedal is agony.
When the road craters into piles of rock and withered scrub, I park the car and jump out. The canyon walls look like opening jaws, and the impact of the ground under my feet almost brings me to my knees.
Something pops inside me. Broken rib. It hurts, it must hurt, but it’s hard to tell when all my bones are screaming. I shove my arm between my teeth and bite down. Skin breaks. My curse howls.
Maybe I can catch a rabbit. A snake. Anything I can drain of its blood, anything to keep me contained. But this is the desert, there’s nothing here I can outsmart or outrun, and if I let go, I will turn inside out and lose myself and not know how to get back.
I take a step. My ankle rolls on gravel. I try to remember my name. My mom. Focus on that. He took my mom. The smell is so strong now. He’s nearby. They both are.
I double over as another rib snaps. My phone buzzes in my pocket. I can’t reach for it. My wrists shatter in slow motion, lacerations snaking up my arms, daring my elbows to join them. Cartilage warps in anticipation. I’ve made a mistake. I’ve made such a mistake. Soon the animal in me will punch through my chest, and I will not be able to save my mom, and I will not be able to save myself.
High above, a hawk shrieks. I smell motor oil and dust-slick metal on the wind. A plume of dust from the direction of the road, heading this way. A way out.
I’ll flag them down. I’ll bury my jaws in the driver’s throat.
My cracked ribs shriek as I lift my arms above my head. Blood from my lacerated ankles pools in my sneakers. My elbows shift and snap, and wetness—sweat? blood? synovial fluid?—whirls around me like snowflakes as I wave.
The parched ground laps up my collapsing body, and the car rumbles to a stop.
A dented silver Camry.
“Ellis?” She smells like singed cotton and the sugar stickiness of a spilled energy drink. “I’m sorry if you don’t want to see me, but I heard something happened at work and you weren’t picking up my calls and I checked the location and you were out here and I just wanted to make sure you were okay and…”
I’m going to be sick. I grasp for the chain, but my fingers have curled into claws and there’s no purchase on the iron.
The car door slams. My throat closes. The blood coursing under her skin smells like eggs from the late-night diner, like burnt rubber and desperation. It smells like home.
I’m so, so hungry.
“Don’t—” I try to say, but the words catch on my warped incisors. I struggle again for purchase. Pull back. Ten seconds, even, just enough to get her back in the car with a plate of metal between us. Pull, Ellis. Pull. But my name has no meaning when I’m only instinct.
Veer freezes in place, halfway between me and the car. In a half second of lucidity, I see the terror on her face. I don’t look like myself. I’m cracking open. I lunge forward, double over, and she jerks away.
Another rib pops. My sternum sighs and splinters. The beast in my rib cage barrels toward freedom.
Veer backs up. “Oh my god,” I think she says. Words don’t mean much anymore. I’m on all fours, shoulders sliding like tectonic plates to spread open my chest. The air goes charred as Veer’s engine turns over.
The flayed man’s scent overwhelms me. Quartz fragments and creosote and days-old carrion. The stink of decay, of the desert’s harsh corrosion, of rotten flesh and empty canyons, the sharp snap of a hawk’s claws.
