Desert Creatures E-Book

Kay Chronister

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 394

Beschreibung

A young girl and her father take a desperate pilgrimage through a blasted post-apocalyptic Mojave Desert to the Holy City of Las Vegas in this vivid and uncanny tale of outsiders in a dangerous world, perfect for fans of Lucy A. Snyder and Jeff Vandermeer. An unknown devastation has swept across the United States, a sickness causes the dead to flower and sprout fruit, and the promise of miracles draws pilgrims from all over to the Holy City of Las Vegas. Magdala and her father flee their home in the Sonora Desert, setting out across the wasteland in search of a cure for her disability. As they pass through blasted cities and ruined towns, they are forced to join with a group of survivors making their own pilgrimage. But the road to Las Vegas is filled with danger, strange cults occupying the wreckage of towns, and uncanny stuffed men roaming the desert. As a strange sickness begins to take hold, the band of survivors grows ever thinner, and months turn to years. Magdala finds herself placing her trust in the most unlikely of places, and the closer she gets to her holy destination, the further from salvation she seems.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Outlaws

Exiles

Specters

Acknowledgments

About the author

“Like a desert corpse, Kay Chronister's debut novel blooms with dark and unsettling fruit, effortlessly weaving together the Western, the post-apocalyptic, and the Weird. An unforgettable feat of worldbuilding.”

Ally Wilkes, Bram Stoker® award-nominated author of All the White Spaces

“A Canterbury Tales western of faith and fickle miracles. A Scheherazade's feast of horror. Pilgrims and heretics, sinners and self-serving saints, wolves and coyotes, deserts and general weirdness. Beautifully and disturbingly told, devastating and astonishing in equal measure.”

A. G. Slatter, award-winning author of The Path of Thorns

“In Desert Creatures, Kay Chronister populates the Mojave with signs and portents, saints and sinners, hermits and cactus men, and the redemptive bloom of miracles. A visionary novel that shimmers effortlessly between genres; a Canterbury Tales for the apocalypse.”

Una McCormack, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author

“Enter a world where post-apocalyptic dystopia meets Western, where corpses stir and ghosts whisper, where strange cults sprout among the ruins of Las Vegas casinos, where the wildest inventions of the imagination take to their feet and walk. Out of this, Chronister creates a seamless whole: something new under the sun and a very good kind of madness indeed.”

A. J. Elwood, author of The Other Lives of Miss Emily White

“An astounding post-apocalyptic debut that will leave you hungry for more.”

Marie O’Regan, author of Celeste, editor of Twice Cursed and The Other Side of Never.

“Instantly captivating, Kay Chronister's Desert Creatures is a post-apocalyptic western with real heart. Poetic and beautiful, while at the same time gritty enough that you can almost feel the desert sand between your teeth, this is a journey across a surreal, dystopian wasteland that you will never forget.”

Mark Morris, author of The Obsidian Heart trilogy

“In this vivid and compelling first novel, Kay Chronister has created a nightmarishly sparse post-apocalyptic world in which stories are the most valuable commodity.”

Tim Major, author of Snakeskins

“Existing at the sweet spot where A Canticle for Leibowitz and Blood Meridian meet, Chronister’s Desert Creatures is a vivid investigation of faith, perseverance, and human violence as they exist at the end of the world. A scintillating first novel.”

Brian Evenson, winner of the World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson Awards

“Kay Chronister has crafted an incredible setting, pushing the wild weirdness of the Sonoran Desert toward the furthest extremes of possibility. I will never forget this uncanny world, nor brave Magdala’s quest across it, contending with holy saints and hellish killers in a landscape whose every inch and inhabitant is as dangerous as they are in dire need of healing.”

Matt Bell, author of the New York Times Notable Book Appleseed

“Chronister’s futuristic, dog-eat-dog Sonoran and Mojave deserts are as devastating as they are inventive. . . . Chronister cleverly deploys and subverts horror, dystopian and western genres alike in this razor-sharp novel.”

Shelf Awareness, starred review

“If The Canterbury Tales was set in future Sonoran and Mojave deserts, it might look a little like this . . . [A] strange and frightening vision.”

Publishers Weekly

“Chronister pierces with her prose. You’ll find hope and acts of kindness in an unkind world. Desert Creatures is not a comfort read—it is rife with horror, betrayal, and a landscape that will burn itself on your consciousness. But in the end, this book will comfort you.”

BookRiot

“Genre-shredding . . . Stunning . . . A story of both creation and apocalypse, where characters struggle with both belief and heresy.”

Tor.com

“In [this] distorted version of Las Vegas wherein false saints peddle false promises, . . . a rejected girl takes a wretched journey whose inward dimensions hold the potential for healing. . . . Heartbreaking.”

Foreword Reviews

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Desert Creatures

Print edition ISBN: 9781803364995

E-book edition ISBN: 9781803365008

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: September 2023

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© Kay Chronister 2023

Kay Chronister asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

THE FIRE CAME AT NIGHT, a flash of gasoline scent and shattered glass, then a column of flame that swept across the floor. As the room burned, Magdala followed her father, Xavier, out the window. When she was still a few feet from the ground, she crumpled into his arms. Xavier steadied her on her feet, looped her arm around his back and set her clubbed right foot atop his left one. And then they were gone. They ran for hours, for miles. From a distance, they might have been one two-headed creature.

When the light on the cliffs became soft and blue-yellow, he stopped them at a thicket of creosote bush. “Rest your feet a little,” he said. Magdala laid down in the shadow of the brush, then rolled onto her side to face her father. He sat with his gun propped between his knees, his back stiff, facing the horizon.

“Papa,” she said to him. “Where will we go?”

He wouldn’t look at her. “We’ll find somewhere. We’re not troublesome people. Someone will take us in,” he said. Her gaze stayed on him as he stared ahead, his eyes shutting then snapping open, then shutting again. She fell asleep counting his breaths.

When she woke, the sun was high, and the cactus blooms had closed their faces. “Best be moving on,” said Xavier. “We’ll find water in the hills,” he added, seeing her tongue fumble to coat her cracked lips.

Magdala’s eyes followed his pointing finger to the cluster of rock that rose in the distance. “How far?” she asked.

Her father crouched low and motioned for her to climb onto his back. Magdala wrapped her arms around his neck and swung her feet awkwardly at his sides, brushing the barrel of his gun. With the slow, resigned gait of a pack mule, he carried her across the desert. Above them, the sun whitened with noon.

The hills yielded no clear water; the pool they found on a shelf of rock was lush and green and rank, too full of life for human consumption, even in desperate times. Xavier counted back the days since he’d last heard thunder and guessed more than a month had elapsed since it had rained.

Midafternoon, when their mouths were stuck shut and their hopes running thin, they came suddenly to a forest of cactus arms wrapped around each other: thin and sinewy and curling from the trunk of a limbless human form in a dust-crusted denim shirt. Rising from the arms were red flowers with wide yellow stamens. Some were young and thin, but others looked mature, even near-rotting, and from these hung heavy, knuckle-shaped fruits.

Even from a distance, the smell of the vegetation was bright, rusty, palpable. Magdala’s mouth tried to water; half-consciously, she strained closer. Someone or something had already torn one fruit loose from the cactus, then tried to eat another straight from the vine and left it unfinished, pulpy white-green tendrils hanging from the dense wadded ball of the fruit’s center.

Xavier crossed himself, regarded the human form in the center of the vegetation with revulsion. “Never seen one still rooted,” he murmured.

“What is it?” said Magdala.

“Used to be a man. He died and the desert got inside him.”

She was silent, considering this. Then she whispered, “Can I have some?”

Xavier was almost horrified. “Be like cannibalism,” he said. “Wouldn’t it?” He seemed not to know the answer.

Magdala fidgeted away from the question. “I’m so thirsty,” she said, her eyes on the fruit.

“Listen, we can dig for water here. He’s blooming, there might be moisture underground,” said Xavier. But his digging yielded nothing; the earth was parched. At sunset, he relented and they gorged themselves. The scent and taste of the fruit made Magdala gag, but she ate until her belly swelled. Afterwards, Xavier insisted that they walk away backwards.

In the dark of night, she woke trembling and sick, her stomach reeling and her vision blurred. In spite of her shivering and weakness, she wanted to walk, to walk and walk and never cease. Unsteadily she rose to her feet. Xavier was still sleeping, his gun beside him. The full moon throbbed before her eyes as she climbed the hillside, the track of her rubber sandal distinct beside the long divot left when she dragged her clubfoot.

She walked through the night without direction or purpose, borne on by a kind of hunger which she felt not in her stomach but in the heartbeat that galloped beneath her ribs. When her father caught her, she saw him as if through a veil. He was distant, hardly real. She could hear him saying her name, but somehow his cries did not really reach her. She woke only when he slapped her cheek, and then the hunger faded but somewhere down deep, she could feel the sickness stayed.

“Should never have let you eat that,” Xavier said, crouching before her. Her stomach twisted as she tried to focus her gaze on him. His eyes were wet. Magdala wrapped her arms around his neck and buried her head in his shoulder, as much to console him as to console herself. She thought she had never seen tears in her father’s eyes before.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and he drew back.

“It’s not your fault,” he said. “None of it. Understand?”

But it was her fault: not only the sleepwalking but the rest, the fire from underneath the door and the flight into the desert and the desperate, stupefying thirst. He didn’t know.

*   *   *

They had gone two days in the desert when they saw from afar the glistening mass of the town, a low, flat sea of glass and brick and corrugated tin. “Could be uninhabited,” Xavier warned. But neither of them could resist hope. Magdala was still sickly, and afraid to close her eyes in the desert for fear that the hunger to walk would come back. As they made for the road, they passed another of the many-tendriled creatures that was once-man-but-now-cactus, and Xavier refused even to slow his pace.

Late at night, he killed a gopher snake. They cooked the animal in the coals of their fire and shared it, sucking the moisture thirstily from the charred meat. Magdala knew as she ate that the snake meat would not stay down, that her stomach was hungry for something else now, but she held her breath and held her belly until her father fell asleep, and only then surrendered her meal back into the buffel grass, retching until she was breathless and weak.

In the end, she had to be carried the rest of the way to the barbed wire barrier that surrounded the cluster of flat buildings. There Xavier stopped, set Magdala on her feet and paced the fence line with the restlessness of a caged predator. Through heavy-lidded eyes, Magdala saw a man wearing leather chaps and a Stetson approach them from the other side. She did not see the gun he was carrying before he lifted it to his shoulder and aimed at her father.

“Weapons down and hands up,” the man said. “You and your girl.”

The words broke faintly through her confusion, and she understood their meaning but not what they demanded of her. Only when she saw Xavier’s hands lifted, his gun lying on the dirt beside him, did she lift her own palms to the wind.

“My daughter’s sick,” her father said. “We’ve been traveling. Looking for shelter. If you could just let us in for a single night—”

“She eat raw desert fruit?” the man said abruptly.

“We both did.”

The man nodded. “Not everyone gets sick,” he said. “And you can cure it. But we’re not some pilgrim stopover. We don’t take visitors.”

Xavier’s eyes moved from her to the man and back again. “What do we have to do to get inside?” he asked.

The man’s chaps rustled like they were a living thing as he shifted. “I guess I can bring you to Oscar,” he said. “He’ll tell you if you’re fit. Come around, now. We’ve got a gate; we’re civilized people.”

Xavier crouched so Magdala could climb onto his shoulders, and they trudged the half mile to the gate, an assemblage of garage doors on pulleys the man yanked to admit them. As they got closer to him, passing through the shade of the elaborate structure, Magdala could see the outline of a wolf stenciled faintly on his pale neck.

“This is Caput Lupinum,” the man said as he led them down the gentle slope into town. “Was a ghost town for a long while before we settled in. Infested with everything nasty you can imagine. We’ve been making progress with it.”

Magdala regarded their surroundings with dizzied wonder. The tenement where they’d lived before stuck out of the desert like a single finger of civilization, every man-made thing around it long since collapsed, and she had never seen so many buildings so close together. Enthralled by the Savings & Loans sign in unlit neon lettering, the buffet chili pepper mascot still grinning beatifically from a window, Magdala half-forgot her sickness. She squirmed and twisted on her father’s back to see as much as she could.

Down the road a ways, the man held open the glass door of a long, flat building marked LARDER in spray paint. Inside, hanging aisle markers still promised the impossible: produce, eggs, meat and fish. Someone had propped the back door open with a rock, admitting a thin slice of sunlight and a heavy black cord running to an industrial fridge.

“Stay here,” their escort said, disappearing through the door.

Once they were alone, Xavier set Magdala down and paced the length of the room, surveying the sacks of mesquite flour spilling over and crates of the dried desert fruits stacked like imports from another country, like things that hadn’t sprouted from dead bodies. Magdala felt a hum inside her head, low and insistent, when she saw that fruit; the taste of it returned to her as real and full as if she were chewing still. But her father was more interested in the fridge. He approached it cautiously, then at once opened the door and shut his eyes and let the cold waft out in a full thick blast that tore Magdala loose from her desert-fruit pining.

“Never seen one that still works,” he said.

Magdala edged up close to him, and they stood a moment bathing in the chill together. They both startled when the man came back in the door. “I should warn you, brother,” he said to Xavier, “that’s not exactly the sort of thing that makes Oscar likely to smile on you.”

“How’d you get power out here?” her father wondered.

The man only laughed. “How long you been wandering out there?”

Xavier didn’t reply. The man clucked at them like he was cueing a horse, and they stepped through the back door, sidestepping the generator that rumbled contentedly on the brickwork. Inside a cloud of smoke sat a lean man, his skin the same copper-brown as her father’s, his hair shaggy beneath his white Stetson. A hand-rolled cigarette hung from one side of his mouth, and a revolver sat in his lap.

“Oscar,” their escort said by way of introduction. “He’s the one in charge here.” He disappeared back into the larder.

“So you’re the trespassers,” Oscar said, smiling around his cigarette. “Come on, pull up a chair.” He nodded to the stack of folding lawn chairs in the corner. “For the girl, too.”

They were all like men from a campfire story, Magdala thought. Their hats and their chaps and their dusty, drawling way of speaking. They could have been actors in one of the theater troupes that had come occasionally past the tenement and performed spectacular dramas full of fake gunfire and weeping, golden-haired women. Her head still cloudy, her stare lingered long on the man, and he regarded her with something between disgust and amusement.

“How’d you end up here?” he asked Xavier. “Someone tell you about us on the road? Give you direction?”

“No one told us. We just saw you from a distance. First settlement in miles,” Xavier said. “Didn’t know anything of you, just hoping for someplace with a well and a roof.”

“We aren’t looking to be a roadside motel,” said Oscar. “You’re miserable-looking enough that I can’t but believe you were hard up and desperate. Still.” He exhaled a puff of smoke, shifted his revolver in his lap. “You taking the girl to kiss Saint Elkhanah’s feet?”

“Elkhanah?” Xavier shook his head. “Never heard of it.”

“You’re not pilgrims?”

“Just travelers.”

“Excuse the assumption. With the girl’s deformity, I just figured—well, that’s one mark in your favor, not caught up in the Holy Church circus. Seems like half the people who wash up here are hungering after some long-dead holy man’s hair or tonsils or clavicles to cure what ails them, and not a one has the strength to even get all the way there to get grifted. But I’m straying from my purpose. What brought you out to this stretch of the Sonoran?”

Xavier glanced at Magdala. “Got evicted,” he said. “I guess that’s what you could call it.”

“What for?”

“The neighbors were telling stories. Food gets scarce and folk get jealous, suspicious. You understand.” He shrugged his shoulders. “It was time to be moving on. But we weren’t expecting so many miles of nothing ahead of us.”

“Nothing is all you ever oughta expect,” Oscar said, laughing. “Well, we don’t mind evictions here. Nor banishments, marks of Cain. You know what Caput Lupinum means?”

Xavier shook his head.

“Wolf’s Head, if you want to be literal. But really, it means outlaw. All of us here got exiled from somewhere. Ran afoul of other men’s laws. Here, we just have a few simple ones. And if you follow them, we don’t infringe upon your freedoms. One, you gotta take out less resources than you put in. That includes you and your women or children.” He jerked his chin at Magdala. “You’re gonna have to pull her weight and your own here. You prepared to do that?”

“I didn’t say we’re staying,” Xavier said.

“’Course you didn’t,” he said. “But we’re not a charity. You want protection, food, you need to throw in your lot with ours. And I’ll tell you now, you’re not gonna find a better deal anywhere in the Remainder. I didn’t tell you rule number two. So long as you’re not interfering with someone else’s property, no man can tell you your business. I’ve been around long enough to see a thousand communities spring up and then go to rot. Always, they’re plagued by folk not pulling their own weight, or one man interfering in another man’s business. Sift through any pile of ash between here and Vegas, and you’ll see it.”

“You’re so well-off, what do you need me for?” Xavier asked.

“We got plenty of use for good, strong men without too many compunctions,” said Oscar. “We prefer when they don’t come with dependents hanging off them, but like I said, it’s no trouble so long as you’re prepared to feed and keep her.”

“I’m not making a promise to stay here,” Xavier said. “But I’ll work, for some time, if that’s what you require. I understand there’s a debt, what with her curing.”

“A canny man,” Oscar said. “What do you think, girl? You want the antidote to your desert sickness?”

From the thick haze of her illness, Magdala managed to nod.

Oscar got to his feet and shook her father’s hand. “You’re a man of your word,” he said to Xavier, and it was not a question.

Magdala’s father carried her as Oscar led them to an old bank. The lobby was empty except for an enormous hole in the middle of the floor where a ladder had been propped, leading them down into a darkened vault. Magdala buried her face in her father’s chest as he carried her down, her nausea rising and subsiding with the motions of his descent. When they reached the bottom, Oscar told Xavier to lay her out on one of the mattresses. “Any will do,” he said. Then he called, “Alma! We got a child, desert sick. You think you can manage?”

Magdala emerged from the clammy shelter of her father’s arms to find a woman standing above her with an infant strapped to her chest. The woman crouched; she pulled on Magdala’s eyelids, then pressed the back of her hand to Magdala’s cheek.

“She just needs to purge her system,” she said to Xavier. “How much did she have?”

“Too much,” Xavier confessed. “I shouldn’t ever have let her.”

“I understand what thirst can make you do.” She left Magdala’s side and returned a second later with a sweating glass of water. She lifted Magdala by the armpits onto a wad of blanket and poured a thin stream of water through her cracked lips and down her throat. “This isn’t enough by itself,” she said as Magdala drank. “But it’ll help. You have to sleep a while.”

“What’s the cure for it?” Xavier asked.

“There’s no cure,” Alma said. “Just water, rest, and staying inside. That’s it.”

“That’s not what Oscar said.”

Alma made a sound that was like a laugh but was not one. “So I suppose he left out the part where it will always come back,” she said. “Well, the rest of her life, it’ll keep coming back. There’s no getting rid of it. Only keeping it at bay.”

*   *   *

When Magdala woke, her father was gone, but she was surrounded by women wearing loose, sack-like, colorless dresses, all with brands on their necks. As they crossed the room, washing their faces and gathering their hair into plaits, Magdala silently read their marks to herself: Mateo, Robert, Oscar.

“She’s awake,” whispered one woman to another, and a few of them crowded closely around her as if she were an object of wonder.

“You feeling all right, honey?” someone asked.

Magdala pushed herself up onto her elbows. “I’m better,” she replied. When she got to her feet, at once two of the women moved to steady her. Their eyes fell to her clubfoot, absorbed the fact of it, then moved elsewhere.

“She’s just a child,” sighed one of the women, as if this by itself was tragic.

“Are there other children here?” Magdala asked.

“Only Alma’s baby.”

“I’m the only girl?”

“Dulcinea’s just fifteen,” Alma said, and nodded to the youngest of the women, who was still halfway a girl with coltish limbs and eyes deep-set in her round face. She had two brands on her neck, one still distinct and the other faded so it was almost invisible on her brown skin.

“Where’s my papa gone?” Magdala said.

“With the other men, eating dinner, I think.” She looked to Dulcinea. “Will you take her to him?”

The girl bristled. “Why me?”

“You know why.”

“It doesn’t matter if I got Oscar’s brand.” Her voice rose, getting louder, getting higher, sounding younger with every syllable. “They don’t treat me any different.”

“I can go by myself,” Magdala offered.

The women were silent for a minute. “I’ll take you,” Dulcinea said, firmly now, as if the idea had been her own.

The sun was setting when they emerged from the permanent twilight of the bank vault; Dulcinea led Magdala down the road to the larder. Outside, a long wooden table had been set and men sat crowded on a motley assemblage of chairs and benches. When Magdala saw her father, she quickened her pace and stumbled the distance to him, heedless of the eyes that followed her.

“I got better,” she said to him, and his embrace was unhesitant, encompassing.

“You look better,” he said, drawing back to examine her. “They take good care of you?”

Her father was filthy, she saw then. His arms and face were paled by the dust that stuck to every inch of him, his eyes stark and wild-looking in his face, his hair stiff and sheened over. And he had a raised welt on his neck, bright and angry-looking, in the shape of a wolf.

“Papa, why do you have that?” she asked, reaching out to brush the brand with her fingertips.

Xavier glanced at the other men, then back to her. “Part of the deal,” he said. He swallowed hard, with forced lightness said, “You get one too.”

“Do I have to?”

“Seems that way.”

“Why?”

Her father lifted her into his lap. When he spoke, his voice was low and tender. “You remember when you were just six years old and you got that gash all down your leg from playing in the junkyard?”

“I remember.”

“And you remember how it started to get infected, and every day I made you wash it with alcohol, in spite of how you cried and how it hurt, to keep it from making you sicker?”

She nodded.

“It’s gonna be almost like that. Pain, but it’ll protect you.”

“Why will it protect me?”

“Because it tells people that you’re my child, and that you’re under my protection, so I don’t have to watch you every moment while we’re here.”

Magdala narrowed her eyes, watching his face. “I don’t want it to hurt,” she said. She felt the swelling in her throat that presaged tears and remembered suddenly the strangers all around them. Embarrassed, almost angry, she buried her head in Xavier’s chest and inhaled her father’s familiar odor, laced now with the foreign smell of jimson smoke.

“It’ll be all right,” Xavier said to her. He didn’t say that she wouldn’t have to do it. As the sky darkened, he pushed his chair back from the long table, leaving his food half-eaten. They trudged down the road together until they came to a sagging pink bungalow, where her father held the screen door open and Magdala stepped inside to find herself in a filthy kitchen lit by a pair of kerosene lanterns. Across from them, a hulking man knelt low before a gas oven, contemplating the heat that flared low in its belly. Seeing them, he reached for an iron from the stovetop. Magdala shrank away.

“Hold my hand,” Xavier said. “It’s X-A-V-I-E-R,” he informed the man at the oven.

“She’s gotta get on the floor,” the man said, without looking at them.

“No need for that. I didn’t,” Xavier said.

“Don’t trust her not to squirm. All the women do.”

Xavier looked down at her. “Magdala, can you do what the man says?”

Slowly, Magdala lowered herself to her belly. A lizard skittered across the room and into a hole in the wall, and her eyes followed the creature as the man with the branding iron approached her. When he came close, she flinched.

“Hold her down,” the man said to Xavier. “If she moves, it’ll be worse.”

“Magdala, hold still for the man, all right?” Her father’s hand moved hesitantly to the small of her back and Magdala startled, hunching up her shoulders as if to hide her neck from the brand’s hot, hungry reach.

“Get her to stick her neck out,” the man said.

Obligingly her father pressed harder, his other hand grasping the back of her head. Magdala, determined, shut her eyes and clenched her teeth and ground her face into the rotting vinyl floor. The branding iron was lowered, singed through dirt and flesh and hair, did its work and then was lifted.

“Not so bad, was it?” Xavier said.

Magdala saw the hopefulness on his face and made herself nod her head, swallow the lump in her throat.

“You did good,” her father told her.

She nodded again.

As they left the pink house, he explained that they had a rule in Caput Lupinum. “You have to bed with the women,” he said. “But you’ll be all right. Have a nicer time with them than you’d have with me.”

“I want to stay with you,” said Magdala.

“It’s for a few days,” Xavier said. “Only a few days. I just gotta work off the debt we owe them and then we’re out of here.”

She wanted to believe him, but she was afraid he didn’t mean it. In the tenement, he was always saying he’d be gone for a few minutes, a few hours. “Things’ll change in a few weeks,” he’d say. It was a way of not saying anything. “If it’s only a few days, then how come I had to get branded?” she asked.

“Magdala, listen to me.” Her father crouched low so his face was level with her shoulders. “We will find a better home. We will not stay here. It’s just what we gotta do for now. That man, Oscar, he showed me a map. There’s nothing for miles around here. We didn’t make it two days in the desert. Not twenty miles. If we wanted to make for the pilgrim highway he mentioned, the main road, the big one, the one where we’d have any hopes of finding a scrap of civilization, we’d have to make it almost fifty. Now, you and I aren’t ready to do that. Are we?”

Looking him in the eye, she thought she could see that he was afraid. “No,” she said reluctantly.

“So we need to stay here a little while. Shore up our strength. Make our plans. All right?”

She understood that he was not really asking her. “Yes,” she said, just the same.

“Tell me you’ll be brave,” he said.

“I’ll be brave,” she repeated, and she meant it. She did not want to be troublesome to him. She did not want to see fear in his eyes again.

But when she descended into the bank vault and saw the bed that had been made up for her, she thought inescapably of her old bed in the tenement: of the ragged scrap of blanket that she’d held close to her face as she slept since she was too young to remember; of the blue dress she used to cover herself, which her father said had belonged to the mother she’d never met. And she thought how those things probably had all burnt now, and how stupid she had been to believe the tenement was worse than anywhere else they might end up. She stood at the bottom of the ladder and cried silently, angrily, until Alma handed her baby to one of the other women and came and collected her.

“The pain will fade,” she said with her arms around Magdala. “Come here, sit down. I want to show you something.”

Magdala climbed up into Alma’s hammock and sat wiping the tears from her eyes as Alma took up Rosy and handed the baby into Magdala’s lap. The baby’s eyes were wide and dark and alert. She reached toward the fresh brand on Magdala’s neck with her small brown fist, and when her fingers brushed it, the pain dissipated.

“Is that her?” Magdala said, taken aback.

“It is.”

“How is she doing it?” As long as the baby’s hand stayed on her, the pain of the brand was muted, almost vanished.

“She’s saint-touched.”

Magdala shook her head uncomprehendingly.

“Haven’t you ever met anyone born saint-touched?”

“No.”

“Well,” said Alma, “the Church doesn’t officially recognize it. But ask anyone in the Remainder and they’ll have a story of their cousin who was canny about the weather or their neighbor who could always hit a mark. That’s the saints, interceding for us all through their chosen ones.”

“Oh,” said Magdala, reappraising Rosy’s puffy cheeks, her spit up–stained nightgown.

“When Rosy was in the womb, I prayed every night to Saint Rosalinda the Comforter. I never imagined she’d answer me like this. Of course, you never can expect it, or wish for it, or they won’t give it to you.”

“Is she nice?” Magdala said. “Saint Rosalinda, I mean.”

Alma looked amused by the question. “Lie down with Rosy,” she said. “I’ll tell you her story.”

Magdala looked back toward the ladder. Then, slowly, she laid down in the hammock with her forehead pressed to the baby’s back, Rosy’s fingers still curled around Magdala’s thumb. Alma settled into the hammock beside them, the arch of her legs forming a wall between the girls and the world.

“Saint Rosalinda,” she said, “was a child when she performed her first miracle. One of her father’s goats was birthing a two-headed kid. It was terribly painful, and the goat cried and cried all night long until Rosalinda, feeling such pity, such compassion for the creature, left her bed and laid comforting hands on it. At once the goat’s cries softened, she rested her head in Rosalinda’s lap, and her kid slid out as easily as anything. Two-headed, but otherwise healthy. That was Rosalinda’s first humble miracle.”

“Why didn’t she heal the two-headedness?” a soft voice asked. Magdala lifted her head and saw Dulcinea standing in the back of the room, a blanket draped around her narrow shoulders.

“It’s in the name,” someone else chided, and Magdala realized all the women were listening from their beds to Alma’s story. “She’s the comforter, not the healer.”

“Couldn’t she heal?” said Dulcinea. “If she wanted?” She gathered the blanket closer and sat down on her mattress, knees tucked to her chest.

“That is not what she was called for,” said Alma.

“Unfortunately for the two-headed kid.”

“Hush,” Alma said. “This story’s for Magdala. When Rosalinda was sixteen, her village was stormed by desperados. They had come to rob the bank, but finding that the village had almost no money to take, they killed and pillaged without mercy. Rosalinda survived by hiding in the rafters of her father’s barn. When the desperados left, she tended to every hurt man, woman, and child still living, held their hands as the town surgeon plucked the bullets out of them.”

“Can Rosy do that?” Magdala whispered.

“Perhaps she could, one day,” said Alma, stroking the baby’s downy cap of hair. “After that day, Rosalinda was called to leave her home village and become a wanderer. Before she was twenty-four, she had crossed all the most desolate lands in the Remainder. Everywhere she went, she brought comfort to sufferers.”

“Don’t tell of her death,” someone said. “You’re getting to her death.”

“You have to tell of her death,” Alma said. “It’s part of the story.”

“All saints die violently,” Dulcinea said with loathing.

“Not all saints,” said Alma. “But this one did,” she admitted.

“One day, Rosalinda was riding through the mountains on her white donkey when she heard gunfire. She galloped toward the sound into the town of Durango, which some say is the place you must go if you want to see Rosalinda’s true grave, although her shrine is in the holy city of Las Vegas with all the great worthies. She knew desperados were attacking this village just as they had attacked her own. And on that day, she met a true black hat, a man whose heart was so full of cruelty and wickedness that nothing gave him more pleasure than the idea of snuffing out a life devoted to comforting others. Rosalinda’s reputation was already well-known then, for she had performed many miracles. When she came to comfort the survivors, the desperado strung her up and gave her a choice: She could join his band, pick up a revolver, and bring suffering to a hundred other villages, or she could be the last sacrifice they made in Durango. She chose the second. And even as he burnt her alive, the smoke that rose from the fire gave him a feeling of peace for the seconds he inhaled it, the one short moment of mercy he would experience thereafter.”

“Why didn’t she run away?” asked Magdala.

“She was a martyr,” said Alma.

“They never run,” said Dulcinea. “Not the lady saints. You’re supposed to stay and suffer.”

“Was she real?”

“She is as real as you or me or Rosy,” Alma said. “If you go to the holy city of Las Vegas, even now, you can see her preserved left hand, a little charred but still recognizable. It has never rotted. Pilgrims go there to pray for intercession, and afterwards they have been reported to forget the pain of lifelong ailments.”

“You ought to go for your itching,” one of the women said to the other.

“Someday, I pray, we will all go there,” said Alma solemnly. The vault fell silent as they all reckoned with the force of imagining it.

Magdala fell asleep that night with the faint ache of the brand throbbing in her neck, images of two-headed goats and virgin martyrdom and Las Vegas filling her dreams.

*   *   *

In the morning, the other women were sent beyond the barbed wire barrier to gather desert fruits for stewing and mashing and canning. Alma was allowed to stay back, on account of the baby, but when Rosy at last succumbed to a nap in the hottest hours of the day, so did she, and Magdala was left alone. She was sitting outside the bank tracing patterns in the dirt with a stick when a man passed, whistling a road ballad. He stopped for a second and looked at her from beneath the brim of his Stetson. He was a tall, narrow figure in faded blue jeans that ended above his ankles, hitched to his waist by a belt with an ostentatious golden buckle. As if he’d borrowed Oscar’s clothes, Magdala thought.

“Do you know where my papa’s gone?” she said to him.

“The newcomer? Probably digging trenches.” He grinned. In the shadow of his hat, Magdala could only see his mouth and not his eyes. “Oscar won’t be much pleased by an interruption of the work out there. Something you need?”

Magdala hesitated, glancing back at the bank. “No,” she said reluctantly.

“That don’t sound like a real sincere ‘no’ to me. They got you babysitting in there? Think you’ll die of the tedium?”

“They’re just napping.”

“Even worse.” He shook his head ruefully, then lowered his voice, drew a little closer. “Would you rather go hunting?”

She leapt at the idea; her father had said they should be stronger before they returned to the desert. If she could learn to find food, she thought, she would be useful to him all through the fifty miles to the pilgrim highway. “With my papa?” she asked hopefully.

“With me. I could use a partner. Just got to talk with Oscar a moment, and then we can be off. I’ll have you back before your papa knows to look for you.”

Magdala brushed her fingers across the brand on her neck. It was protection, she thought; that’s what her father had said. And the man was not really a stranger, he was their neighbor.

“Can you teach me?”

“Teach you to hunt?” The man laughed. “’Course I can teach you. Only right for a little wolf to be lethal.” He extended his hand for her to shake. “Name’s Rawley.”

Magdala let her palm be swallowed up in his as she told him her name.

She sat on the steps of Oscar’s porch while Rawley went inside. The men’s rumbling voices came faintly from the house, interspersed with the occasional peal of laughter. She sat impatiently until Dulcinea came by with a wheelbarrow. When she saw Magdala, she stopped short, nearly spilling her burden of fruit peels and pulp.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded.

“Waiting,” said Magdala cautiously. No one had said she couldn’t go with Rawley, although if Dulcinea told her father or Alma or one of the other women where she was going, she was certain she would be in trouble.

“Waiting for who?”

Magdala drew her knees up to her chest. “My father,” she said, but her voice wavered.

Dulcinea worried her lip and stared past Magdala at the blue house. Magdala was afraid she would go inside to see if the story was true, but when the sound of laughter reverberated, she returned hastily to her wheelbarrow and left without looking back.

Rawley emerged a moment later with two revolvers and a small box of bullets, which he slid into the left pocket of Magdala’s dress, patting her hip as if to seal the bullets inside her clothes. “You ready, girl?” he said, whooping at nothing in particular. Magdala nodded eagerly. She shadowed him to the big-bellied black truck that was parked behind Oscar’s house and watched with fascination as he turned the key in the ignition and the car roared to life.

“Ever seen its like?” he called over the sound of the engine.

“I’ve never seen a car that worked,” she confessed, clambering up into the passenger seat beside him. She was barely tall enough to see through the cracked windshield. “Doesn’t it scare away all the animals?”

“You’re a canny one,” he said. “We just drive it out a few miles for the distance. Otherwise the walk’s too long to be borne. We’ll know to stop when we see hoofprints or watering holes; that’s how we can tell there’s been big day-dwelling animals around.”

With a roar, he revved the engine and the car jolted to life, bumping through the pitted earth. Rawley showed her where they had cut a hole in the barbed wire for the car, said it was Caput Lupinum’s only vulnerability. Beyond the fence line, they thudded across the desert at a breakneck pace. As scraggly clumps of vegetation passed in a blur, Rawley explained how to find water. “Willow’s a thirsty one,” he said. “Got desert willow, got water somewhere near. Now, paloverde, that can survive anywhere so it’s no good indicator, but if you’re desperate enough, you might be able to dig into the bark with a little blade and catch yourself a nice fat beetle.” Seeing the disgust on her face, he laughed. “I said desperate. You won’t ever need to do that as long as you live here.”

Abruptly, he braked. Magdala was thrown against the seat back; Rawley fumbled in her pocket for the bullets and loaded the first of his revolvers, then settled the gun on his shoulder. “You see it?” he whispered.

Magdala leaned across the dashboard. Twenty yards away from them, a deer was moving through the sagebrush at a slow, painstaking pace. Its body was obscured almost to the waist, but she could see still the fleshy growths that bloomed from its chest and head and back. Rawley gestured for her to come closer, and she clambered halfway on his lap to peer through the driver’s side window.

“How come it didn’t run when we drove up?” she asked.

“Bet it can’t hear us. Some of them are deaf that have tumors on their heads like that.”

The deer moved slowly forward, its stride pained and deliberate, its head vanishing now and then into the sagebrush.

“Easy mark,” Rawley said. “If this gun didn’t have the kickback that it does, I’d let you give it a go.”

“I don’t wanna shoot it,” Magdala said.

“Why not?”

“It’s not fair,” she said. “It can’t hear us, so it’s not fair.”

“You ever been hungry before?”

“Yes,” she said.

“I mean truly hungry. Starving hungry.”

Magdala was quiet; she didn’t know.

The animal lifted its head, fixing its dark eyes on them. Its ears tipped forward; it became very still. If not for the nakedness of the landscape it could almost have been mistaken for an assemblage of tree limbs, something deep-rooted and inanimate.

“Does it see us?” Magdala whispered, settling back into her seat.

“Maybe so,” said Rawley. He looked grim. “There’s something wrong with it. Apart from the tumors, I mean.”

The deer began again to advance through the sagebrush, its motions clumsy and labored, but fast now, purposeful. Rawley let out a low whistle. “It’s not hiding,” he said. “It’s hunting.” The words were barely out of his mouth when a ground snake skimmed through the brush into the exposed soil. The moment it showed itself, the deer attacked, exploding clumsily forward and lunging open-mouthed at the snake. The snake struck back, missing its attackers’ forelegs by a narrow margin. When the deer lunged again, it aimed true. The snake lashed frantically between its jaws as the deer tossed its head.

Rawley wedged his revolver out the window of the truck and fired. He struck the deer in the shoulder, then in the hindquarters, and it folded, collapsing down onto the heavy bundles of its tumor-riddled legs; the snake hit the ground and maneuvered itself back into the depths of the brush in ragged, desperate motions.

“You still sorry it had to be shot?” Rawley said.

“What’s wrong with it?” said Magdala.

He shrugged his shoulders as he climbed down from the truck’s cab to collect the deer’s body. “One, the usual. Cancer of the skin. Two.” He bent and examined the animal, then pointed at a wound on the flank, angry-red and weeping yellow around the edges. “Desert sick. As I thought. Means that this animal was done for no matter whether I landed a bullet in it.”

“Desert sickness? Like what I had?”

“Like and not like.” He lowered himself to a crouch and shouldered the deer, flinching back from contact with its bloody mouth. “Heard folk say, the kind of sick you get depends on how the desert gets inside you. Or what kind of creature you are. Sometimes you just wander. Other times you rave. And the raving ones are the ones that die fast-like. But eventually, it always ends the same. You die, and you end up stuffed.”

Magdala watched as he heaved the deer carcass into the back of the truck. It landed with a heavy rattling thud, its legs spilling over. “Will we get sick from eating it?” she asked.

Rawley settled back into the driver’s seat with a satisfied grunt. “You’re already sick,” he said, and his laughter was raucous, cruel, half-frantic as he gunned the engine and launched them back to Caput Lupinum.

*   *   *

At sunset, the rest of the men came back in throngs of five or six, sweat-soaked and dry-mouthed and snarling, tired of each other and the heat. Wearing a borrowed Stetson and a gun in a holster that was not his, Xavier was almost indistinguishable from the rest of them. From a distance, Magdala could recognize her father only by his stride, short and precise compared with the long, loping cowboy’s walk of the others. When she ran out to meet him, he was speaking in low, confidential tones with another man, hanging back a little ways from the rest. “You just have to get used to it,” the other man was saying, punctuating the sentence with a long swig from the bottle in his hand. “And get her used to it, that’s the important thing.”