Lana covered the last few feet to the barrier and touched it with one finger.
“Ahh!”
She yelped and pulled her finger away. Before the crash she would have described the pain as searing. Now she had higher standards for what counted as real pain. But she wouldn’t be touching the wall again.
“Some kind of electric fence?” she asked Patrick. “What is it doing here?”
There was no choice now but to try to scale the side of the gulch. The problem was that Lana was pretty sure the ranch lay to her left, and that side was impossible to climb. She would have needed a rope and pitons.
She figured she could make it up the right side, pushing from tumbled boulder to crumbling ledge. But then, unless she was totally turned around, she’d be placing the gulch between herself and the ranch.
The remaining alternative was to head back the way she came. It had taken half the day to get this far. The day would be over before she made it back to her starting point. She would die back where she started.
“Come on, Patrick. Let’s get out of here.”
It took what felt like an hour to climb the right-hand slope. All the while under the silent, baleful stare of the wall that Lana had come to think of as a living thing, a vast malevolent force determined to stop her.
When she finally reached the top, she blinked and shaded her eyes and scanned left to right, all the way. That’s when she almost fell apart. There was no sign of the road. No sign of the ranch. Just a sheer ridge and no more than a mile of flat land before she would have to start climbing.
And that impossible wall. That impossible, could-not-be-there wall.
One way blocked by the gulch, the other by the mountains, the third by the wall that lay across the landscape like it had been dropped out of the sky.
The only open path was back the way she had come, back along the narrow strip of flat land that followed the gulch.
She shielded her eyes and blinked in the sunlight.
“Wait,” she said to Patrick. “There’s something there.”
Nestled up against the barrier, not far from the foot of the mountains. Was it really a patch of green, shimmering in the rising heat waves? It had to be a mirage.
“What do you think, Patrick?”
Patrick was indifferent. The spirit had gone from the dog. He was in no better shape than she was herself.
“I guess a mirage is all we have,” Lana said.
They set off together. At least it was easier than the climb up out of the gulch. But the sun was like a hammer now, beating down on Lana’s unprotected head. She could feel her body giving up even as her spirit was tortured by doubt. She was chasing a mirage with the last of her strength. She would die chasing a stupid mirage.
But the green patch did not disappear. It grew slowly larger as they closed the distance. Lana’s consciousness was a flickering candle now. In and out. Alert for a few seconds, then lost in a formless dream.
Lana staggered, feet dragging, half blind from the relentless glare of the sun, when she realized that her foot had stepped from dust onto grass.
Her toes registered the sponginess of the grass.
It was a minuscule lawn, twelve feet by twelve feet. In the center was a back-and-forth sprinkler. It was not turned on. But a hose led from the sprinkler. The hose led around a small, windowless wooden cabin.
It wasn’t much of a cabin, no bigger than a single room. Behind the cabin was a half-tumbled wooden shack. And a windmill of sorts, really just an airplane propeller placed atop a ramshackle tower twenty feet tall.
Lana staggered along the hose, following it to its source. It came from a once-painted, now sandblasted steel tank elevated on a platform of railroad ties beneath the makeshift windmill. A rusty pipe jutted up from the ground beneath the windmill. There were valves and connecting pipes. The hose came to an end at a faucet welded into the end of the tank.
“It’s a well, Patrick.”
Lana fumbled frantically with weak fingers at the hose connection.
It came off.
She twisted the knob and it turned. Water, hot and smelling of minerals and rust, came gushing.
Lana drank. Patrick drank.
She let the water flow over her face. Let it wash the blood from her face. Let it soften her crusted hair.
But she had not come this far to let her salvation drain away for a momentary pleasure. She twisted the knob shut again. The last drop quivered on the brass lip, and she took it on her fingertip and used it to clean the crust from her bloodied eye.
Then, for the first time in forever, she laughed. “We’re not dead yet, are we, Patrick?” Lana said. “Not yet.”
SIXTEEN
171 HOURS, 12 MINUTES
“YOU HAVE TO boil the water first. Then you put in the pasta,” Quinn said.
“How do you know that?” Sam was frowning, turning a blue box of rotini around trying to find instructions.
“Because I’ve seen my mom do it, like, a million times. The water has to start boiling first.”
Sam and Quinn stared at the big pot of water on the stove.
“A watched pot never boils,” Edilio said.
Sam and Quinn both looked away. Edilio laughed. “It’s just a saying. It’s not actually true.”
“I knew that,” Sam said. Then he laughed. “Okay, I didn’t know it.”
“Maybe you can just zap it up with your magic hands,” Quinn suggested.
Sam ignored him. He found Quinn’s teasing on that front annoying.
The firehouse was a two-story cinder-block cube. Down below was the garage that housed the fire engine and the ambulance.