1
“What if this is it?” Bronwyn asked. It was still dark—an endless night.
“It what?”
“It. Our last night on this earth. What if we don’t get out? What if that thing kills us both?”
“You can’t believe that. You can’t. There’s a way.”
“I wonder if Griff thought that. Or Tammy. Or Ziggy.” She lit what must’ve been her twentieth cigarette of the night. “It’s like we’re drowning in the ocean and there’s a great white shark coming at us. Instead of water, all this dirt. What if this is it?”
She lowered the cigarette and leaned into him. Kissed him. Her lips were soft, dry, and yet somehow he felt moistened by them. She looked at him steadily. She no longer looked like a college girl. She no longer looked like a girl he was interested in. She looked like a woman who was preparing for something. And he knew what it was. Not death. But sex. Warmth. Lust.
Something human and animal, hot and cold at the same time, something nearly predatory, seemed to take over within him. He kissed her again, tasting the ashes of her smoky breath, and then he reached around and held her, pressing himself close. She moved gently against him.
If his mind warned him against this, his body didn’t listen. They wrapped around each other, and she pushed him backward. She was all over him, and he scrambled against her. Soon they were thrusting and licking, as uncomfortable as the truck was. He felt as if it were like his dream: The two of them in a great green forest. The God, I love yous were whispered, the hungry gasps and the slushy sounds of the two of them pressing and releasing, kissing and lapping at each other. He entered her body, felt an intense warm embrace, and it shot the feeling up his spine right into his skull—a ripple of lightning—as she tossed and twisted her body to accommodate him and enjoy the breadth of his flesh. He kissed her neck as she twisted around so that he was now behind her, grasping her breasts in his hand, his lower body thrusting faster and faster. She was moaning and whispering, “Yeah, oh, yeah, oh, oh.” A slamming wave of thrusts ended as he reached his climax, as she reached hers, as they fell on top of each other—sweaty, burning, drained, full.
Afterward, he remembered too much, and drew back from her. Had it been a dream, after all? Had he dreamt that he’d made love to her? He wasn’t sure. Is that what people did when monsters were after them? Take a break to mate? Bond sexually so they could face death more easily? He felt older than he wanted to feel. He felt as if he’d crossed some great chasm in life—and looking back at his life before that night, it had all seemed pampered and silly and wasteful. Life and death were too important to play around with now. Even college seemed ridiculous—another ceremonial dance like the one Scratch had done for them. It was not about life and the struggle to survive one single night when faced with danger. He went to pull his clothes back on, and she came up behind him, kissing him on the neck. “I’m glad we did that,” she said.
“Me three,” he joked.
“You love me, don’t you?”
He didn’t respond. Then he thought better of it. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
“I’m sorry. It’s not good to be in love at a time like this.” She laughed. “Oh my God, the sun!”
And it was true. To the east, a lighter purple came up, bringing with it a misty halo around the mesas and mountains.
“I don’t want to die!” she shouted to the still-lingering dark blue sky.
“Me neither!” he shouted.
“I want to live, damn it!”
“Me too!”
“I want to get middle-aged and fat and watch bad TV and raise four kids into neurotic adults. I want to see China and learn how to water ski!”
“I want to grow old and die in a nursing home!” he shouted. “No, I want to die when I step off the curb in a big city, and a crazy taxi driver comes out of nowhere and hits me so that I bounce off the rest of the cars going too fast through the yellow light!”
“I want to die with my head in a bowl of green pea puree, with my Depends on, with only three teeth in my mouth!” she shouted, laughing.
Then they got quiet again.
He closed his eyes, and said a prayer.
“Know what?”
“What’s that?”
“This is a bad dream,” she said. “I bet that’s all it is. I bet I’m sleeping on the lawn with you. Hung over. I bet it’s the Saturday we left campus. The bitch of it is trying to wake up.”
The day had officially begun, with the sun stretching molten gold an hour later. Heat came up too suddenly.
Bronwyn took a drag off the cigarette. Rolled down the window.
“Bron, it may still be out there,” he said.
“It’s a creature of the night, that’s what the sign said. ‘The Sun God is its enemy.’ ” She grinned, and then looked a little grim. He practically could read her mind: It was ridiculous to feel happy after the carnage of last night. But they did. Both of them did. They’d survived the night. She held her cigarette up in the morning air. She leaned back, and looked up at the vague sun, melted as it was into a pure yellow sky.
“If it’s still out here, maybe it’s sleeping,” Josh said.
“It doesn’t sleep,” she said. She puffed out dragon breath. Sucked on the cigarette until it nearly disappeared between her lips. “I wonder what it’s all about?”
“The creature?”
“No,” she said, her voice carrying the quality of Ziggy’s when he was at his most stoned. She was ragged, and when he looked at her, he thought she was beautiful despite the half-circles under her eyes and the skin drawn tight around her lips. “No, you know how life is this thing? This thing that you grow up doing because you think one day . . . one day you’ll get to this . . . I don’t know . . .”
“Wisdom?”
“Yeah. Wisdom. Knowledge. You’ve known something because there’s this key you turn, and you don’t get the key or even know which door to go to when you’re a kid. You assume grown-ups have it. You assume education brings it to you. Or experience. And then, here we are. You believe in God, don’t you?”
“Sometimes.”
“I don’t. Not at all. I used to think all religion was just a big lie. But after last night, I started thinking that maybe people came up with God and religion to give hope. Maybe hope isn’t a real thing, but people need it because otherwise life is just this jungle where you wait to see what ends up jumping out of nowhere and eating you. And you have God. You have order. You have a reason. You have hope.”
“Sometimes when I’m not sure I believe in God, I think of goodness.”
She glanced over at him.
“That’s all God is. Goodness. That there’s goodness here. On earth. That it’s our job to find it. To create it. To keep it going. Like a flame in your hand. Like a little fire everyone can hold if they want to. And it means fighting sometimes. It means standing up to darkness.”
Bronwyn sat up, leaning forward. “On that note, I have to go take a leak,” she said. She opened the door, and slid down out of the truck. He gasped for a second, his heart seeming to leap out of his chest. But nothing happened. No Scratch showed up suddenly, its claws extended.
She squatted down beside the truck. “Don’t see any monsters under here,” she said. He looked the other way to give her a little privacy. He had to go pee, too, so he got out and went around, peeing on a sagebrush.
They found a cooler with Coke and even some Twinkies in the back of the truck. They devoured these like it was the finest meal in existence.
Then they saw the siphon and the red plastic gas tank sitting at one end of the truck.
“Wow,” he said.
“Wow is right,” she added. “I guess we have Dave to thank for this.”
“We’re all to blame,” he said. “All of us.”
2
“We’re probably going to die,” she said, mid-Twinkie.
“Everybody dies.”
They had begun walking back to the Pimpmobile to put what Josh had called “Plan B” into effect. He lugged the full plastic gas container, and she held the siphon and an extra Twinkie.
“Is that okay by you?” she asked.
“No. It’s not okay. Today is not our day to die. That’s all I know,” Josh said. “This is not the day.”
“They’re all dead. All of them,” she said.
“Maybe last night was their night. Maybe it was,” Josh said. He swallowed a little dust, but felt better. Felt fear leaving his body as if through sheer force of will. “I’m not going to give in to this. We are alive now. We have some water. It can’t be more than twenty miles out to the highway. Twenty miles is doable. Two gallons of gas will get us there.”
“It’s going to be hot as hell in an hour. Or less.”
“So we’ll get sunburnt.”
“And it’s going to find us.”
“We don’t know that. Are you just going to wait around, Bronwyn? Are you going to just sit there and let that thing tear you up like you were bait for a mountain lion? Think of it as a mountain lion. Don’t get psyched by its claws. Or how we saw it at that gas station. We haven’t seen it fly. It hasn’t grown nine feet tall. It’s little. Sure, it’s fast. It’s smart, maybe. Maybe not. But whatever you and I have, whatever is buried inside us that’s going to come out someday . . . someday, years from now . . . I mean, what if you are destined to be a hero of life? What if I am? What if you go on to medical school and get into research and become the first doctor to cure cancer? What if I go on to write the book that changes lives? Is it worth us giving up now to this stupid little nasty monstrous . . . little bastard? Are we going to let it win just because we’re afraid? Are we?”
Bronwyn gasped. “I’ve never seen you like this.”
He sighed, but felt a steely resolve take him over. “I’ve never had to be like this.”
Everything hurt inside him, every bit of him felt raw and raked, but he locked into the mindset that he knew he had to have.
The Pimpmobile came into view.
Bronwyn dropped the siphon when she saw what had happened to it.
3
Scratch had been busy in the night. The Pimpmobile’s doors were off their hinges. The trunk was open, and all the crap from it was spread out on the ground.
Worse, as they got closer, the interior was ripped to shreds, and wires had been pulled and cut.
And the keys were gone.
“You know,” Bronwyn said. “I think we better start walking while we still have Twinkies in us.”
Josh set down the gas, sat on the shredded backseat, and began weeping like a baby.
Bronwyn put her arms around him and whispered, “Come on. Let’s go. We’ll get away from it. We have the whole day.”
4
“Okay, what do we know about it?”
They walked side by side, Bronwyn with a slight limp, but she leaned on him now and then. They both guesstimated a general southwesterly direction to the main highway, although all they could see for miles was just more desert and mesas and arroyos and caverns and mountains in nearly every direction. They stuck to the road.
“You studied the Aztecs, didn’t you?”
“I read a book. I didn’t exactly study them. I just don’t remember the details,” she said.
“Remember. Force yourself to remember. You have to.”
She stopped, closed her eyes.
“I can’t.”
“You can. What was on the cover?”
“An Aztec calendar.”
“Good. So it was round and stone and had a face on it.”
“Something like that.”
“First page?”
“I don’t think that thing is really from the ancient Aztecs,” she said. “It’s something else. They just made up all the stuff.”
“Well, we know it hates the sun. And it loves the dark. And it skins people. And drinks blood.”
“Oh I know,” she said, “it’s a vampire.”
“I only wish,” he said.
They continued walking, and he pointed out a snake moving along the edge of the road, so they stepped to the side, but kept walking.
“All right. It had a job. It skinned those who had been sacrificed. What about the ritual?”
“I just don’t know.”
“Try.”
After another ten minutes, she said, “All right. Okay. It was an obsidian dagger. Used for the sacrificial victims. Tore their hearts out. The blood was like rain. They let the blood rain down because it was to encourage rain and the crops. The Flesh-Scraper was used to get the skin off.”
“To wear it,” Josh said, solemnly.
“Right.”
“And somehow, it fed off Griff first. Was it blood?”
“I think so. I don’t know.”
“It’d make sense if it was blood.”
“Wait,” Bronwyn said. “Wait.”
She stopped.
“Rain,” she said. “Rain. Water. Liquid. It needs it. It’s not just taking their skin. It drank them. It drained them. It needs water—water in the blood. It’s a desert here. It needs water. It brings rain. That’s its ritual.”
“That was a rain dance? Last night?”
“Maybe,” she said. “The enemy is the Sun God.”
5
“This road is endless,” she said.
“Thank God,” he said.
“Have we been walking for hours?”
“Feels like it.”
“You thirsty?”
“Mean thirsty.”
“We must’ve gone twenty miles by now,” she said.
“At least.”
“Wrong direction,” she said, too sadly. She pointed ahead.
He looked up—he’d been mainly watching the road for snakes and lizards.
The road just ended.
It ended into a dusty nothingness.
“We’re not very bright,” Josh said. He was soaked with sweat, exhausted, and had begun to wish that he’d just stayed back at Dave Olshaker’s pickup truck.
“Wait,” she said. “Wait! Oh my God! Oh my God!” Bronwyn began jumping up and down. “Where the road ends! Oh my God, Josh! Josh!” She was so gleeful he had thought she’d gone insane for good.
She began running to the west, across what looked like a well-beaten dirt path.
He looked in the direction where she’d run. Something shiny over the rise of land.
She stopped, turning around. She cupped her hands to her mouth and shouted, “Ely! He told us! He said he lives where the road ends! Do you hear it? I can. I can hear his ZZ Top records! He’s playing them! Oh my God, Josh, we’re safe! We’re safe!”
Her enthusiasm lasted three more miles. The closer they got, the more they saw the hubcaps outside what looked like a large shack with a trailer behind it. ZZ Top’s “Tush” played from within the house. They went to the front door and rapped at it.
After a while, the truck driver they’d met briefly, who had given them a lift to the Brakedown Palace, opened the door.
6
An hour later, something that the entire town of Naga believed was a miracle occurred. It began raining. At first, it was a small trickle of rain, and then clouds swiftly overtook the fire of the sun. Thunder was heard in the mesas, and a bitter storm swept the desert.
Josh slept, his arms around Bronwyn. When night came, he went out into the rain with Ely, who asked him what had happened to his friends. He lied. He wasn’t ready to tell him about the night.
Bronwyn came out a bit later, standing beneath the eaves of the little house, watching the storm as it blew across the night sky.
“We can’t leave it there,” Josh said. “It’s loose now. You think the cops will believe us? You think anyone will?”
For just a moment, she looked empty. That’s the best way he thought of it. She looked as if there was nothing to her at all. All she wanted to do was get away. Even from him. She just wanted to run in the opposite direction, even if it meant that Scratch was going to be hunting others.
“Go on,” he said. “You can call your dad. Get him to wire you money. Rent a car or catch a bus. And go on. But it’s out there. I can’t just go back to life and forget that. What if campers go out there? What if, at night, a policeman shows up to look at the cars? What if Scratch is just waiting for them?”
Her shoulders went slack.
“Tomorrow morning, go. I don’t blame you.”
She didn’t blink. She wasn’t going to stay behind; he saw it in her eyes. “I think you should come, too. You’re not obligated to deal with that thing. It’s a monster, Josh. We can get help. We can . . .”
“Nope. I think there’s a way to stop it. I think there’s a way to end this. I need to try something.”
“I don’t want you . . .” she began. He knew how that sentence finished: to die.
“We all die, Bron. We die. Life is a short space of time. Some people die young, some die at middle age, some die old. We’re lucky if it’s swift. We’re lucky if it’s only seconds of pain. We’re lucky if what’s between when we’re born and when we die is a powerful thing. A miraculous thing. I never believed in miracles. Before. I never believed that the goodness of the universe existed. But I know it does. I don’t believe for a minute that we’ve gone through this night because life is horrible. Or because monsters rule. Or because we’re meant to. I believe this is a test. This is a test, and to pass it, to find out who each of us truly is, we have to stand up to this thing. We have to stop it. Because not stopping it is just letting the bad things happen. For me, not stopping it is worse than getting killed.”
“You’re going to die out there. Oh, please, Josh. Please. Don’t be the next victim.”
“I am not going to sacrifice myself,” Josh said. “I know I can stop it. I know it. Here’s how I was living before this, Bron: I was living as if nothing mattered. As if life were a joke. As if it didn’t matter whether I was happy or sad, or did nothing or did something. I was on disconnect. But last night showed me. Life is about something. We are about something. I am. And I know I can stop it.”
“Please don’t die,” she said, quietly. Calmly. “Don’t be some kind of hero.”
“I’m going to do what I know I have to do,” he said. “We woke that thing up. I have to put it back to sleep.”
7
He bought the little souvenir at a shop in downtown Naga. Ely loaned him his busted-up Civic, and Josh drove around trying to gather what he thought might help. He went to the library in Naga and read a little in the reference section. He felt foolish and doomed, but something inside him—some engine—had begun to turn over. Something had changed within him from that one night.
The rain continued into his second evening at Ely’s. Bronwyn had already gotten on a bus headed for Los Angeles, and although she told him she loved him, he knew now that it wasn’t love. It was simply attraction and situation. Love was something else. He hoped to have it someday, but it wasn’t a feeling you could hand over to someone. It was deeper than that. He wished her the best, kissed her good-bye, and he told her that he would stop Scratch so that no one else would ever get hurt.
He sat down with Ely and told him everything except the truth. Josh refused to let another person—either friend or foe—die because they’d let Scratch out of its cage.
8
He withdrew what he’d bought the day before.
Probably not an authentic Native American design, but it looked real enough.
Tourist crap, no doubt.
The stone was carved to a point.
An arrowhead.
Made out of obsidian.
Obsidian was the translucent dark stone used in the Aztec ritual.
The dagger went into the heart. Something like that. He wasn’t sure how it was done. But the heart was brought up, spraying blood.
How the Flayer of Men, the Flesh-Scraper, then skinned the bodies. And wore the skin.
Obsidian was sacred.
It had magical properties.
And even the avatar of Xipe Totec, Mr. Scratch, would have something resembling a heart. Some engine that ran him.
Sure, Josh thought. Maybe it was all roadside attraction mumbo-jumbo. Mystical babble that some con artist had written up to get tourist dollars off the highway.
He held the arrowhead in his hand. It felt cool against his hot skin.
Please. I don’t believe in anything other than the goodness of the universe. Let it be here. Let it be with me now. Give me the strength to stop this abomination.
Without even knowing why, Josh fell to his knees, clutching the arrowhead. He closed his eyes.
Whatever I have in me. Whatever there is beside flesh and blood and molecules and nerves and bone. Let it come out in me. Let it come through me. In the name of Griff and Ziggy and Tammy and Dave. And that other guy.
Dave’s friend.
In the name of them, and their memories. Their lives. Their life forces.
And my own.
Give me the power.
The knowledge.
The ability.
To stop this creature.
9
Josh drove back up the road that ended, and found the Pimpmobile. The rain had stopped hours ago. The sun beat down on his scalp and the back of his neck. He got up after a bit, feeling slightly dizzy. He went down and sat under a manzanilla tree—a gathering of bleached sticks more than a tree, but it provided a very slight shade. He drew down one of the dried branches and began creating the weapon.
Within a few hours, it looked good.
The arrowhead was tied—with a strip from his belt, which he’d shredded—and the tree branch was smooth and white—an imperfect spear.
He tried throwing it, but his aim sucked. He felt weak and sleepy, and knew he needed to rest if he were to fight in the darkness.
So he slept, using his shirt and jeans as a bit of a tent, propped up between rocks and sticks and scrub.
It was boiling, but at least for a bit, the bright searing eye of the sun was not upon him.
His dreams came fast and feverish—
They were dragging him up the long steps, up the pyramid. Only it wasn’t a real pyramid. It was like a cartoon. It was like someone had made it up, and hastily drawn the stones and the men who dragged him—everything was all outline, with no substance.
They stood over him—Ziggy, Griff, and Tammy—and held him down against a freezing cold stone. Above him, the face of Charlie Goodrow, from the gas station. Their big greasy mugs looked down at him, while someone else raised a shiny black knife just over his head.
When it thrust down, he screamed. Charlie Goodrow brought up a big mass of pulsating red, and started crowing, “He’s a gusher! Lookit that! The boy gushes like a goddamn sweet Texas oil field.”
Josh’s blood sprayed up, peppering their faces, splashing their features until all of them were red. Josh thrashed, wanted his heart back, but felt no real pain.
Someone began playing some kind of reed instrument, and a drum was beaten slowly. A woman’s voice began singing a strange, unmelodic song. Although it was in another language, Josh knew what it meant:
Flayer of Men
Bring us your rainfall
We give you blood
Bring us life!
We offer flesh for scraping
To you alone—
Flayer of Men
Dance in his skin
Dance so that children may be born!
Dance so that the crops will grow!
Dance so that the sun will not burn your people!
Dance and be reborn in blood and life, from your dark place!
And then Josh became disembodied, floating along the flat but rough stone floor within the pyramid, lit by torch, and watched as the Flayer of Men scraped the skin using the long needlelike talons, carefully drawing the top layer of flesh from the meat, and pressing it, with blood still dripping, against his shadowy face.
Josh drew closer to look at the eyes of the scraper, but they were empty sockets, and Josh realized that he was looking at his own skin, laid across the Flesh-Scraper’s small body, wrapped and sewn together.
The Flayer began to move oddly, side to side—a dance of life and death, wearing the skin of the sacrifice.
Suddenly, Josh no longer watched this dance, but was inside, behind the skin, looking out.
10
He awoke.
It was night.
He sat up, feeling the dryness at his lips and the scaly feeling in his throat.
11
He waited a long time, until he heard the scraping sound.
The only light was the luminescence of the white sand of the desert, the enormous blue-faded moon in the sky, and the stars, which, as he looked up at them, seemed to him so far away as to be unconcerned with the problems of a man of nineteen in the middle of a wasteland waiting for a monster.
12
The gasping sound came first, then the sound of something being dragged.
Against the whiteness, he saw a small dark form.
Running between bits of brush and clutches of cactus.
He felt a lump form in his throat. He wondered whether a person could genuinely die of fright.
13
He knew Scratch’s hunting method now. He knew that the little mummy liked to get the scares going. It was its ritual. Get the scares going, make a big to-do, get people on the edge of their seats, and then strike.
He felt his nerves jangling, and wondered whether prey animals felt this just before an eagle or owl swooped down, or a mountain lion neared.
He felt like prey, and it brought with it that strange sensation he’d felt before:
That somehow he was more alive now. That this monster, this evil, horrible thing, could somehow make him more aware of every cell in his body, right down to his toes and the electrical whirring beneath the skin of his fingers.
14
And as he sat there, thinking all this, feeling it, he felt the first scrape of talon along his ankle.
He reached back for his weapon.
The obsidian arrowhead, tied to the nearly smooth stick.
The hunt had begun.