The Lonely Dead

'This is as close as we're going to get.'

He drove straight over the hard shoulder and down onto a track I hadn't even noticed. We bumped along this as it led down the side of a hill until it was beneath the level of the road, and then climbed around the side of an outcrop. It didn't look like anyone had come this way in a very long time. Within half a mile the grade was getting steep in all directions and I was hanging onto my seat with both hands.

Zandt checked we weren't visible from the road and stopped the truck. He got out, and I did too. It was very quiet.

I looked around. 'This is it?'

'No, but we're going to have to walk the rest.'

'Never been much of a hiker.'

'Why am I not surprised?' He pulled something out of his jacket that looked like a personal organizer with a fat slug lying on the top.

'GPS?'

He nodded. 'I want to be able to find our way back.'

He logged the car's position and pointed up the rise. The view was the same as we'd had all afternoon, except now there was no road. 'Let's get going.'

We followed the remainder of the track until it petered out around the back of the hill, and then walked out into nothing. Behind the hill was another, the far slope of which led down into a shallow canyon. We made our way down, mist settling around us, and up out the other side. Then it was pretty flat for quite a while. There were no trees. The ground was hard and rocky and bare except for tufts of the yellowish grass and more of the pale blue-green ground shrubs. Walking made a sound like someone eating Doritos with their mouth shut.

Zandt kicked at a plant. 'What is this stuff?'

'Sagebrush, I'm assuming. Though to be honest I know shit about high plains flora.'

'Fucking pain in the ass to walk through.'

'It surely is.'

We kept on walking, cloud gathering around us until we couldn't see more than thirty yards in any direction. John consulted his satellite positioning gadget every now and then, but this didn't feel like a place that had destinations. It was dry and cold, not bitter, but with the kind of steady chill that makes it hard to remember being any other way. I tried to imagine people living out here once, and couldn't. It must have been long ago. The land felt like it didn't want anyone bothering it any more.

After a good while I looked at my watch. It was after four o'clock, and the light was beginning to turn. A sly wind began to pick up. The sun was a silver coin in the mist, hazy and starting to tarnish.

'I know,' John said, before I'd even spoken. 'The mark on the map is all I have. We're there, or thereabouts.'

'We're not anywhere,' I said. 'I've never seen a place that is so not somewhere in my entire life.'

We kept on walking nonetheless. The mist got thicker, sometimes a grey blanket, every now and then suddenly hollowing out to form a hidden inner channel that caused the sun to make it glow from within like a golden vision. We found ourselves walking along a low crest, the foot of another hill rising like a grey-green sand dune ten yards to the right, the lip of a canyon over on the left.

We didn't seem to be making much progress but I didn't say anything. I didn't have anywhere else to be.

— «» — «» — «»—

Finally it was John who stopped.

'This is bullshit,' he said. He was pissed. I didn't blame him, but he seemed edgy too, restlessly angry beneath the surface. The dark smudges under his eyes suggested he hadn't been sleeping well. I hoped his contact had the sense not to go back to the bar in South Dakota for a while.

'Your gizmo got a backlight?'

'Of course.'

'So we've got some more time.' I started off again.

He stayed put. 'Ward, I don't think it's worth it. Even in a straight line we're forty minutes off the road, maybe more. We've circled around the entire area covered by the mark.'

I turned. 'And where did he make that cross? Where was he?'

'In the bar.' From only a few yards away, Zandt's voice sounded as if it had to fight its way through the mist.

'Right. A week and many hundred miles from when he was here, in other words. How drunk was he at the time?'

'He said he was sure.'

'He's probably sure he can handle his drink too. You take a witness's word for anything back when you were a cop?'

'Of course not,' he snapped. He pulled out his cell phone and glared at it. 'No signal. We're a long way off the map out here, Ward.'

'In every possible way. But…' I stopped talking, as the world seemed to take a side step. 'What the fuck is that?'

He came level with me and we stood shoulder to shoulder for a moment. Then he saw it. 'Holy shit.'

There was a man a little way ahead of us, just far enough that his edges were blurred by the mist. He was dressed in a grey business suit and black office shoes inappropriate for the environment. I could hear the sound of his jacket flapping in the wind. The set of his stride was purposeful. Despite this, he wasn't moving.

I took a step forward, stopped. Reached for my gun, and then left it. Thought again, and got it out anyway.

Separating slightly, we approached the walking man.

He looked to be in his late fifties. He had grey hair that had recently been well cut, but it was now plastered down over his head. His hands and face were an unattractive colour. Once white, now a variable palette of blue and harsh pink, shading in places towards some purple-brown hue that had no name. A jagged cut gouged across his neck as far up as his left ear: the knife had taken off a section, giving him a curiously lopsided appearance. His upper lip was also missing. There was a smell coming off him, but it wasn't unbearable. It had been very cold, and dry.

Now that we were closer, it became a little more prosaic. No longer a ghost. Just a body. Nobody likes to see a body, but it's better than seeing a ghost. Bodies just make you doubt the world and the people in it. Ghosts make you doubt everything, and to doubt it in a part of the mind that has no words to answer the question, where the comforting promises you make yourself are neither believed nor even really understood.

Zandt headed around the back. He held his PDA up towards the man's face and started taking pictures. 'Look,' he said.

I circled, unconsciously keeping well clear, as if I feared the body would start moving, resuming some progress across the plain. A metal pole, about five feet high and maybe two inches thick, had been driven into the ground behind him. He had been tied to it, his body held upright in a way that happened to make him look like he was walking. In time the body would fall and the clothes fade, and the pole would rust away.

'Christ,' I said. Zandt just nodded, apparently fresh out of other points of view. He put his hands in the man's jacket and trouser pockets, and came up empty.

I stood back. If you waited a while, as the mist ebbed and shifted, you could see that the positioning of the body had been carefully chosen. He was sheltered from view by the hill. You wouldn't see him unless you were actually out here, some place there was absolutely no reason to be.

Zandt looked out over what he could see of the plain. 'He said there were two.'

'Excellent. That gives us something to look forward to.'

'He didn't say where.'

I nodded at the walking man. 'I'd guess he was supposed to be going someplace.'

We walked in the direction that the man was pointed. After fifty yards we began to sense, rather than see, the lip of another canyon. Then we saw something else.

She was sitting right on the edge. She was about the same age as the walking man, but with her skin in its current condition it wasn't easy to be precise. Her elbows rested on her knees, and her hands were brought together to cup her face. The pose was natural, presumably achieved before the body stiffened. The only wrong note was her hair. This was wild and stood up in grey clumps. It looked as if crows had discovered her and started to do their work, and then stopped. Perhaps even they had their limits. Now, she just sat and stared with hollow, sunken eyes.