The boom/hiss of the tractor-trailer’s air brakes rose in the air, echoing back and forth in the canyon.
Thomas stared down the rock face at Gordo, teeth bared, crouching on the ground where the Ford had been. He remembered what Consuela had said about her and the dog being travelling companions. When the Caddy had pulled into the trading post parking lot, the dog hadn’t been there. It was the same when the Ford had sat at the mouth of the canyon waiting for them. Both of the vehicles were black. Like the dog. And now the dog was huge, and the Ford was nowhere to be seen.
“Are you serious?” Thomas said. “Gordo shapeshifts into a car? What is he—a Transformer?”
“A what?”
“You know, the little toy cars that you can twist around and turn into robots?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Consuela said.
But he was longer listening to her. With the truck stopped, the doors of the cab opened and a trio of enormous men stepped out onto the road, one from the driver’s side, two from the passenger’s. They were tall and bulky with muscle. One was a black man with a shaved head. The other two had a Native cast to their skin and features, but Thomas didn’t recognize the tribe.
“Who are they?” he asked.
“It’s a salvage crew.”
“Salvaging what, exactly?”
“Anything alive that’s travelling down the roads of the dead. It’s usually old vehicles—something that’s been invested with so much love that when they’re finally set aside, their spirits keep driving, except now they’re heading down the highways and byways of the spirit realms. If they happen to stray onto one of the roads of the dead, they become fair claim to the salvagers.”
“Vehicles invested with love.”
Consuela nodded. “Cars. Pickup trucks. Bicycles from one’s childhood. Even old wagons and carts. Anything that somebody drove and loved enough to give it a life after it’s been scrapped in the first world.”
“So why have they been chasing us? Gordo wasn’t some scrapped vehicle in another life, was he?”
Her raven aura appeared on her shoulder, eyes wide, and shook its head, but it was Consuela who answered. “They’re after you.”
“That’s nuts. I don’t have some inner car totem.”
“No, but you’re alive and you were on the roads of the dead. That makes you fair game.”
“So were you. Unless you’re…” He let his voice trail off.
“Alive, dead,” Consuela said. “That kind of thing doesn’t apply to beings like Gordo and me.”
Thomas turned his attention back down to the road. The salvage crew was approaching Gordo with wariness. Then one of them looked up and saw Thomas. He pointed and said something to his companions, then they all looked up and started moving toward them. When the first one reached for a handhold, Gordo growled, a big, chest-deep rumble that Thomas swore was making the rock ledge they were perched on shake. He could see the huge dog bunching its muscles, ready to pursue the salvagers. But before he could spring at them, the tractor-trailer’s horn blasted and the big vehicle lurched forward, cutting him off.
“Tell me somebody’s driving that thing,” Thomas said.
He turned to Consuela. Again, her aura was no longer present.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “It’s enough to keep Gordo busy and they’ll be after us.”
Sure enough, the salvage crew were already climbing up toward the ledge. Gordo was behind the truck, no longer in sight.
Crap, Thomas thought.
But he didn’t pause to argue. He scrambled up the cliff after Consuela, the threat of the salvagers enough to make him take chances with precarious holds he never would have normally trusted.
He didn’t look down as he climbed—he’d learned that lesson the hard way as a kid, when he’d almost broken his leg from a fall. Instead, he concentrated on the lip of the cliff above. He took the same route Consuela did, which made the climb a little easier, though no less dangerous.
As they neared the top of the cliff he noticed something funny about the sky. There appeared to be lines running across it, parallel to each other. It wasn’t until they’d scrambled up the last few feet that he realized what he was seeing. That wasn’t a sky above them—not a real one. It was a sky painted on boards. The sheer impossibility made him giddy with the absurdity of it all.
He pulled himself up onto the cliff top. “Well, thank God for that,” he said, collapsing on his back.
“What are you doing?” Consuela said. “They’ll be up here soon and there aren’t any boulders we can roll down on them.”
Si’tala suddenly manifested on her shoulders, urgently pumping her body up and down as though doing knee bends.
Thomas grinned and waved a hand at them, then pointed upward. “See that?” he said.
“I’m not blind,” Consuela answered. “Give me a hand. Those boards look old. With any luck we can push enough of them aside to get out of here.”
Thomas shook his head. “That just tells me that all of this is a dream. This whole day has been weird from start to finish, but come on. A sky painted on a bunch of boards that stretch as far as we can see? Let the salvagers come. I’m going to wake up at some point and all of this will have been meaningless anyway.”
Consuela dropped to his side. She grabbed him by the shirt and pulled his face right up to hers. In his peripheral vision, Thomas saw Si’tala’s raven eyes peering at him with equal urgency.
“We can’t save you from them!” Consuela yelled. “These are the dreamlands and you’re not here like you usually are, your spirit travelling while your body lies asleep in its bed. You are here, and if those salvagers catch you they’ll suck the life out of you the same way they do anything else that strays onto their roads. That’s what sustains them.”
“This is insane.”
She let him go and he fell back to the rocks. She stared down at him, the bizarre slats of the painted sky behind her. Si’tala studied him as well, her expression dark and unreadable.
“Stay and die,” Consuela said, “or accept what you can’t believe and live another day. You have a choice, but the window is closing with each moment you wait.”
Thomas thought of his sisters and brother. Of his mother and Auntie. If he were gone, who would take care of them?
The charity of the tribe, he supposed. But his family was his responsibility. Taking care of them was his job.
He’d been accepting the impossible all day. Why stop now?
“Okay,” he said.
Consuela stepped close and lashed out with one foot. Thomas dodged the blow but it wasn’t aimed at him. He heard someone grunt, the sound of hands scrabbling for purchase. A distant thud.
“That buys us a moment,” Consuela said.
“Did you kill him?”
“No such luck. He landed on the ledge.” She cupped her hands. “Let me give you a boost. See if you can reach those boards.”
Those boards.
This was insane.
But he got to his feet, put a foot in the saddle of her hands. She lifted him up, over her head, her arms straight. She was stronger than he expected and held him steady as he used the heel of his hand to hammer against the nearest board.
It burst upward in a cloud of dust and dirt that came back down in a shower with bits of old, rotted wood. He was blinded by the bright light of another sky beyond the boards.
How was that even possible?
Don’t think, he told himself.
He grabbed hold of another board on one side of the rectangular hole he’d just made and hammered it with the palm of his free hand. More debris showered him. The light grew brighter.
“Hurry up!” Consuela called.
He leaned a little to the side, bracing himself by his grip on the one board. Consuela continued to hold him steady as the heel of his hand drove up into yet another board. A fourth, a fifth. By then there was enough room that he could pull himself through by turning to one side. He got a grip on the board with his free hand and hauled himself up.
Without bothering to look where he was, he lay flat out and reached down a hand.
“Move back,” Consuela told him.
He did as she said and a huge raven rose up out of the hole he’d made. He looked back down to see the top of the cliff, the men climbing, the truck on the road far below, trying to run over Gordo’s enormous body. Tires spun, sending up clouds of red dust, but the truck couldn’t budge the dog.
Vertigo hit him and he would have tumbled back down through the hole if Consuela hadn’t grabbed him by his belt and pulled him back.
“We need to get moving,” she said.
Thomas stood up and looked around. They stood in the ruin of an old barn in the middle of some desert. Half of one wall remained of the structure. The rest had tumbled down uncountable years ago. No other structures were in sight except for a stone fireplace that stood in the midst of another mess of dried and broken wood. There was no break in the desert. The scrub spread out as far as he could see to every horizon.
“What about Gordo?” he asked.
“He’ll get to us when he can. He wouldn’t miss a visit with your Aunt Lucy.”
My dead Aunt Lucy, Thomas thought.
But all he did was brush the dust and debris from his clothes, shake out his hair, and nod. She wanted stoic? He could play stoic.
“Then we’d better head out,” he said.
Consuela started to walk, picking what appeared to Thomas to be a random direction.
“What about the salvage crew?” he asked, falling in step with her.
She shrugged. “Now that we’ve made it to here, we can lose them. But I’d stay off the roads of the dead for the next little while.”
“Wasn’t my idea in the first place.”
“Don’t think I won’t hear about it from your aunt.”
All things happen at the same time, Thomas thought. So had she known beforehand that they would escape? And if so, why hadn’t she known that they’d run into trouble in the first place?
On her shoulders, Si’tala looked at him as though she could read his mind. She rattled her beak. It made no sound, but Thomas heard a vague clatter inside his head.