creosote
Tan
by Edward Newton
It’s tan.
As far as the eye could see.
The desert is endless. The closest town to his place is countless miles over unforgiving sand. The nearest sign of civilization is a tourist town five miles away as the crow flies. The only signs of people he ever saw are the crazy adrenaline junkies who sometimes hike this far out into the desert or the cops who come around looking for them when they get turned around and lost. Occasionally, the Mojave took one of these adventurers as a tribute and didn’t give them back.
Irataba has lived out here for ten years. In the middle of his twenty-first birthday party, he stood up, turned his back on his family in the middle of a maudlin rendition of “Happy Birthday to You,” and walked out. He went on foot, walking for nearly a month until he wandered into the desert and never returned. Ira wasn’t a tribute—he had become a permanent citizen.
A stable home meant having a dependable domicile. His ancestors had discovered ways to live off the land, and Ira could be as inventive as any dead Native. He found a stone shell of an abandoned hut during his first days in the desert and claimed the place for himself—a decade later, no one had challenged his squatter’s rights. The roof had caved in, doors deteriorated, and the interior walls eroded to nothing. Over the intervening years, Ira had foraged for materials to make furniture and reinforce the structure, supplementing natural materials with the spoils of the hunt—leather roof, tanned curtains, bone latches to fasten reclaimed panels used for doors.
Would Ira have survived if his birthday had been in July? Luckily, he had arrived in Death Valley at the beginning of November, after the brutal temperatures of summer had passed, where he honed his ability to hunt and scavenge before the sun returned to savage the world. He nearly died the first scorching season alone in the desert, suffering heat stroke several times and almost succumbing to dehydration before a blessed—and rare—rain. How many times had he nearly starved to death? Ira began tanning and storing meats in the winters to eat through the long summers. He fortified his hut for shade the following year and expanded his adaptation against the savage sun over the last decade.
He survived the brutal summers all alone. Not even the occasional hiker would brave the heat this far from civilization. He would go nearly half the year without seeing another soul. The only sign that the world hadn’t ended over these long months were airplanes passing overheard, metal birds so high that he could never make out a face behind the tiny windows—civilization overhead at 40,000 feet.
Ira turns the fire over in the pit, ensuring the flames remain hot enough to smoke correctly. He had been working on some fresh leather for several days, and the beautiful hide is nearly finished curing, almost ready for the final step. Ira may be the apex predator in this desert wasteland, but the occasional mountain lion hunting bighorn sheep or jackrabbits would disagree. Ira keeps an array of weapons etched from bone at the ready in the case of a big cat attack.
Ira is always ready. He has been a fighter his whole life. The kids at school had bullied him and picked on him. He retaliated. His coworkers after high school mocked him and started rumors. He exacted revenge. Mary McDonald had turned him into the cops after she broke off their relationship, accusing him of lies and fabricated evidence. He never forgot—she was the last person from his previous life that he saw before he disappeared into the desert ten years ago.
He never gives his name to the occasional trekkers who stop on their hike through the desert.
Ira is grateful his grandfather had taught him how to hunt and tan as a boy. They had gone out together in the wilderness around the Fort Mojave Indian Reservation to track small game. Grandfather had demonstrated tanning methods on rabbits and foxes. They had gathered a collection of furs that Ira had left behind when he walked out of his home forever and wandered all the way to Death Valley. If his grandfather could see him now—these hides were more exquisite than anything they had ever produced back at the reservation.
Ira finishes the final step in tanning his latest hide, hanging the skins up to dry. The process has taken many days. A week ago, he’d made the kill. First, he removed the skin and soaked the flesh to loosen the hair. He spent hours abrading the soaked skins in a salt brine to stave off decomposition and soften the hair for easier removal. Once he had scraped the hide clean, the skin was soaked in a solution of brains and water. The lecithin in the prey’s brain acts as a softening agent. Ira then worked the hide over a rope for hours until it was ready for smoking. The smoking process weatherproofed the product and gave it a warm brown color. He finishes smoking the hide and removes the skin from the pit. He uses pegs to stretch the skin on the ground where it will dry for final use.
It’s turning out to be one of his finest pieces. He circles the rectangular area, adjusting the pegs to make sure the skin remains taut. There’s a smell when the sun bakes the smoked hide that makes him almost dizzy—the aroma of death, past, and fire mixed up in a pleasurable wave. He closes his eyes and nearly swoons.
Ira does swoon.
He adjusts his stance to keep from landing on his ass. Something clatters to the ground from inside his hut—a bone he uses for a spoon has landed on the stone floor. Frowning, Ira looks around. A dune near enough to pick out individual grains has shifted enough to cause a small cascade of sand. A vibration in the air makes the hair on the back of his neck stand on end.
Quake.
Earthquakes aren’t unheard of in the Mojave. The San Andreas Faultline lies right at the edge of the desert. Ira can shrug off the shudder of the Earth as easily as someone from the north deals with wind chill. Yet something felt offabout that tremor. Ira takes a tentative step forward. No aftershock. No lingering rubbery knees from the first shake. Yet, for some reason, Ira thinks this quake felt different from any before.
“What the hell was that, mate?”
The foreign accent shocks Ira into complete stillness. Had he toppled over after the first tremor and whacked his head on a stone? Is he hallucinating 007 getting the jump on him like he’s a Bond villain with a lair in Death Valley (which would be pretty bitchin’)? He watched many Monty Python movies with his grandfather—perhaps he’s having a flashback to his youth?
No, he’s completely in command of his faculties. Ira turns, and a man dressed as an extra in Lawrence of Arabiastands a dozen yards away. He must have come across the cacti forest (Ira has named most of the area in a five-square-mile perimeter around his home) because Ira would’ve seen him approach from any other direction.
“Quake,” Ira says.
“We don’t get earthquakes in London,” the stuffy British fellow says. “They happen often?”
“Nope,” Ira answers.
“Name’s Keith,” the foreigner introduces. Ira doesn’t reply. “You like it out here, mate?”
Keith needs to quit calling him “mate.”
Ira nods.
Keith approaches, looking curiously at the project Ira is working on. The leather is almost finished. It’s going to make a fine piece. Ira suddenly feels very protective of the hide. He steps between Keith and the tanning skin.
“You a hunter?” Keith asks. Ira shrugs and nods. “That must have been a big catch. They have cougars around here?” Ira shakes his head. “Is it a goat?”
The ground wobbles again, shutting up Keith. More things clatter off shelves inside Ira’s home. Keith’s attention redirects to the small hut where Ira has lived for ten years. Ira feels even more protective of the hut than the hide. Keith stands stock still as the rumble subsides. He looks at Ira.
“Another?”
Ira doesn’t answer. Obviously, it was another quake.
“That happen often? Back-to-back earthquakes?”
“No.”
“This the big one?” Keith asks nervously. “The one that sends Los Angeles into the Pacific?”
“No.”
Ira isn’t sure what that was, but it wasn’t a typical tremor. He can sense something different about the world. The predators in the natural order of things were all knocked down a peg. Something in his gut is telling him he’s no longer the alpha hunter in the Mojave. Something bigger and badder has arrived in Death Valley.
“Maybe we should seek shelter?” Keith asks.
Ira tenses. Keith sees his hut as a haven. Ira doesn’t want this guy anywhere near his home. He wandered out into the wilderness to get away from civilization. He doesn’t need any foreigner depending on him for survival. That isn’t the natural order of things out here in the middle of the desert.
“It’s not safe there,” Ira says.
“It’s not safe out here,” Keith argues. “I’d feel better with some walls to lean on.”
Keith starts walking toward Ira’s hut. Ira follows. He doesn’t like where this is going. The idea of Keith in the place where he sleeps and eats makes him extremely anxious. He has not had guests inside his home in the last ten years. Ira doesn’t want to start today. Because today, something has changed…
“Stay away,” Ira warns.
“C’mon, mate,” Keith begs. “A little shade. Wait out the shakes. Then I’ll be on my way. I’ll share some of my jerky. You like beef?”
“No.”
Ira’s domicile doesn’t have doors. The leather roof provides shade. He has a place to sleep, tools and dishes made from natural materials, and plenty of shade. Keith barges inside without invitation. Ira grits his teeth and follows the invader inside. Keith sweeps his eyes over the interior, cataloging the things inside the hut.
“Looks like something out of a Native American museum,” Keith says.
“I make my own materials,” Ira says. “I use what the world gives me.”
“Looks like you have jerky right there.” Keith points at the row of meats hanging from Ira’s recent kill. “Rattlesnake? Big cat? Goat?”
“No.”
Keith notices the accessories hanging along the perimeter of Ira’s living space—bladders to carry water, leather blankets hanging from hooks and rawhide cloaks, soaps made of animal fats, moccasins, clothing, and braided rope. Alcoves embedded into the clay walls hold tools made of bone—utensils, needles, scrapers, fishhooks, combs, and even a whistle. Keith frowns, looking a little closer at the pieces. Ira tenses. Keith squints, moving his handsome face closer to Ira’s collection of weapons, an array of different knives that includes shivs, daggers, flaying tools, bayonets, and scythes made from ribs.
“Are these bones…human?” Keith mutters.
Ira doesn’t say, “No.”
Ira lunges forward, but Keith is closer and as fast as Ira. The foreigner snags a dagger and slices sideways, making Ira stop and retreat. Keith holds the sharp point out, aimed at Ira, teeth bared like trapped prey desperate to defend itself. Even a cornered animal weaker than the alpha predator can hold its own if it has a good position. Ira couldn’t attack without the risk of being maimed. Or worse.
“You sick bastard,” Keith spits, fear making his eyes bulge, turning his handsome features ugly and pale. “These were people?”
“The desert is a dangerous environment,” Ira says.
Keith’s eyes dart to the collection of bone tools as if counting the victims. Then, his gaze revisits the row of meat drying from hooks in the ceiling. The leather clothes and footwear are too numerous to have originated from one victim, even if an obese adventurer had somehow made it this far into the Mojave. Keith from London understands that there have been multiple bodies donated to Ira’s collection.
“How many?”
How many? Over the last ten years, Ira doesn’t even remember the total. Some folks wandered into the desert and got lost. Rescuers might come to look, but they rarely found the missing hikers. Ira used his prey’s bodies for utensils. When authorities came around asking Ira if he’d seen anyone, he stashed his human cranium bowls and other more apparent homo sapiens artifacts out of sight until the authorities left again. Ira hadn’t expected Keith. Keith is a problem. Keith wants an answer but won’t like any number over zero.
It was definitely considerably above zero.
Another rumble drowns out Ira’s reply, the sound of thunder coming from somewhere below the soles of their feet. Keith slaps one palm against Ira’s wall, steadying himself, bracing his legs, still pointing the sharp end of the bone dagger at Ira. A fissure opens in the cracked clay floor, a zigzag shape like a lightning bolt. Ira steps backward, exiting his home, as Keith remains in place, one foot on either side of the widening crevice.
“Oh, God,” Keith cries over the low baritone of the earth moving below Ira’s home.
The floor continues to crumble, then begins to sink, a hole opening in the center of the place Ira has called home for ten years. The wall behind Keith starts to fall apart, chunks of clay falling to pieces and thudding on the ground. Keith has two choices—he can run through the door where Ira stands outside, waiting. Or he can stay inside the home with tools made of human remains as the world disintegrates around him. Keith chooses natural disaster over a maniacal murderer.
The floor ground beneath Ira’s hut becomes a sinkhole, the whole building falling into the pit. Ira watches Keith’s eyes grow big as he stares down the hole beneath him, the wall crumbling around him, the world swallowing him whole. Then the leather covering made of multiple human victims flaps down around him like a curtain call, and Ira listens to the horrified screams grow quieter and quieter as his home and all its contents sink deeper into the funnel shape.
Ira stands at the precipice of the sinkhole, staring into a pit a dozen yards in diameter. He watches the world swallow his home as quickly as he sucks down the eyeballs of his victims immediately following each kill, the juicy orbs a succulent appetizer for the main course. He understands as the desert slurps up the remains of Ira’s multiple victims—bone tools and skin suits—along with the clay walls, reclaimed materials from the harsh desert, and Keith from London. Ira watches the world eat everything.
There’s something under the sand.
It’s hungry.
Ira turns from the sinkhole as his home disappears. The ground closes again after it has eaten, a burp of sand and a thump of closing earth. The only thing that marks the grave is Keith’s sweat-stained hat on a vast expanse of undisturbed sand. Ira stops to collect his tanned hide, draping his latest victim over his shoulders, and walking away from the place he’s called home. The world is changing. He no longer rules the desert. It is time for Ira to move on.
He follows Keith’s footprints back the way he’d come. After an hour of walking through cacti clusters and over rolling dunes of fine sand, Ira finds a campsite where Keith must have stayed the night. He wasn’t alone. There are traces of other campers. Keith had companions. Ira smiles. Maybe he could find other prey. He might have competition in his search for victims from some hunter underfoot, but even the beta predator could still enjoy the hunt. Ira circles the perimeter and finds tracks leading back out of the desert—Keith had gone deeper into the Mojave while his companions had retreated. Ira sees three sets of footprints leaving in the opposite direction as Keith.
Three potential sources of new tools. He would need more leather after losing so much to the sinkhole. He had only had time to salvage his latest skins, draped over his shoulders like his grandmother’s shawl.
Had Keith’s companions had a falling out? Did he strike out on his own after everyone else bailed? Maybe Keith had been the Ira of his group—a loner abandoned by his companions. Ira thinks about his parents as he follows the tracks. He knows his parents never sent anyone to look for him. They didn’t want him back. Mom and Dad knew from an early age that Ira could snap at any time and hurt them. Maybe Keith’s group had also breathed a sigh of relief when Keith went on without them.
The world quakes again, the unstable ground shaking underfoot like he’s walking on thin, slick ice.
Ira hears screaming. Directly ahead.
He recalls the day of his birthday ten years ago. He left his birthday party and decided to disappear. But he hadn’t gone immediately. He stopped at one place before he exited town. Mary McDonald had called him dangerous and suggested Ira could snap and kill someone. The cops couldn’t do anything about her suspicions since he’d never done any such thing. He thought about how she had accurately predicted the events of tomorrow as he popped her eyes in his mouth like bonbons—why hadn’t she seen this future? Oh, how she’d screamed, blood pouring from her empty sockets until she bled out and died at his feet. Ira smiles and starts running.
“No,” cries a female voice with a British accent like Keith’s. “Maggie! Nigel!”
Ira moves as fast as his feet can take him. He isn’t rushing in to rescue the next potential victims from whatever hunts them from beneath the sand—Ira wants to be there when they die. He wants to watch. He saw something under the sands, a sight he can’t hardly believe and finds it hard even to describe. Ira needs to see it again.
He crests a dune and stops at the top. The desert stretches in every direction. Below, three figures dance on the sand like Ira’s ancestors may have powwowed to appease the great spirits many moons ago. The gyrations going on at the base of the dune seem like sacrilege. One hiker writhed on the ground like someone doing bad breakdancing. Then, Ira realizes the world is shaking again. Another tremor.
The quake intensifies until the sand shifts beneath his soles, and Ira tumbles, slipping and sliding down the sandy side. He scrambles through a patch of cacti, not even feeling the needles poke into his flesh. He doesn’t care about pain. He only wants enlightenment. This is the brink of Armageddon. He has been waiting for the gates of Hell to open and let out the demons ever since he killed his first victim. He still wore Mary McDonald’s fingerbones as a trinket around his neck.
Ira grabs hold of a creosote bush rooted securely at the edge of another sinkhole, stopped just short of sliding into the massive funnel before him. A young woman on the opposite edge of the pit screams her fool head off, reaching into the sinkhole with an outstretched hand, trying in vain to rescue her friends, her two companions trying to scramble up the sides. Ira watches an abandoned VW van that had sat rusted and hollowed out since the Sixties disappear down the bottom of the sinkhole. Something under the sand opened like a gullet, taking the van into its wide maw. Ira tries to process what he’s staring at, but his mind rebels. Not even a man who had committed great atrocities in his life could understand this…this…what is it? A monster? A monster under the sand?
The woman across the diameter continues to caterwaul even as her friends slide farther and farther down the sides of the growing sinkhole. They attempt to claw their way up the sides, but the continually cascading sands make it impossible. They steadily descend toward the dark center of the pit. A giant saguaro passes one hiker, and he grabs it, ignoring the needles stabbing through his hand and holding the succulent like a drowning man grasping a life-prickly preserver. Ira sees the long spines protruding through the webby flesh between fingers and piercing his palm, but the hiker holds on for dear life despite impalement.
He desperately clings to spikey hope.
The sinking female tries to claw her way through the sloughing grains of sand like a salmon swimming upstream. Like a novice oceanside vacationer caught in a riptide offshore, the young woman attempts to fight the pull toward the dark center of the sinkhole. The effort is in vain as she moves ever closer to the open maw at the bottom. The rules of nature may have been upended, but the nature of physics remains undeniable. Gravity will not be refused.
In the end, fate wins. The center swallows both hikers. Whatever the monster Ira observes under the sand—his mind cannot properly process the scene—it spares no part of its victims. Like Ira, the entire body of the prey is utilized without one single iota of waste. As quickly as it had opened, the earth closes with a baritone harumph, a cloud of dust and sand coughing up into the clear blue sky.
“Nonononononono.”
The woman who’d been separated from Ira by the deadly indentation between them now drops to her knees on the other side of a smooth expanse of uninterrupted sand, burying her face in her hands. Ira crosses the unbroken desert, sifted clean of all debris, where the mouth of some hellish creature once gobbled people and product alike, and stops before the grief-stricken hiker. He says nothing as long minutes pass, the sounds of inconsolable mourning carrying across the quiet desert. Otherwise, there is no sound. No movement. The world has come to a standstill.
“The world ate them up,” she finally says, the words out loud making it real.
Ira stares at the sky—no bird. No plane. No one is coming to save them. He redirects his attention to the young woman kneeling before him. She looks up with a face ruined by sorrow. She may as well have been swallowed by the earth alongside her friends because she appears defeated already. Ira contemplates ending her life right here and now—she’d be of more use as farmed body parts than as a valuable traveling companion. Yet his instincts suggest escape is a more practical application of time than tanning hide. He doesn’t have days to skin and brine her flesh before the apocalypse arrives.
“Yes.”
Ira waits one more minute to see if she will stay at the site of the gravesite or if she’ll get up and choose life. To his surprise, she stands on wobbly legs. She finally looks at Ira for the first time in his leather clothes, weathered moccasins, and a fresh shawl made from his most recent victim. If she registers danger, Ira doesn’t rank anywhere near the experience she’d just suffered losing her friends.
“We have a Jeep a few miles to the east,” she says. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
“Yes.”
He follows the young woman as she turns her back on the scene. The world shakes twice more as they travel across Death Valley, but she doesn’t scream, and Ira never panics. They wait out the quakes like seasoned storm chasers suffering passing cloudbursts. As the Jeep appears after cresting a sloped dune, Ira takes measure of the supple texture of the young woman’s flesh. It will make an excellent specimen to resupply his collection. Her skin was a nice, warm tan color.
He stares around one last time before the last leg to the Jeep and then eastward, where the world becomes greener and firmer. The shifting sands suggest a significant change. The amorphous landscape in every direction hides buried revelation. The rolling seas of desert stretch into a russet blanket for miles, the entire Mojave concealing a secret like something trying to hide.
The whole world is tan.
THE END
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