The 50 Mile Desolation

September 8 2002

Ug. So I've got a whole Sunday afternoon and several weeks of sleepless nights. I gotta finish this, get it on paper and out of my head.

---

The trip to 50 Mile started with a "shave and a haircut" knock, and the dust that seemed to rain in from the figure at my front door the moment I opened it. Marcus Stetz, geochemist and Giger horror sometimes hidden in human skin, stood there looking as usual like he'd just climbed out of a dumpster. When he's shifted, he presents as a skinny, pale man in his fifties with wire-rim glasses and grey hair sticking up in places, and of course wearing the only type of clothes I've ever seen him in: a once white and aging Goldschmidt conference t-shirt under an open collar shirt with rolled-up sleeves, dirt-stained tan pants and even dirtier hiking shoes.

He did his typical "Hallo!" and after a moment too long, "Sanne de Winter." He then pleasantly asked to come inside. If I were a cat, I'd have looked like a huge puffball.

Very briefly I had thoughts about monsters, invitations, and thresholds. Surgeons, being creepy-crawly two-and-a-half meter long lobster-centipede things known for carefully slicing limbs off people and eating them bit by bit—hence the name—scare the everliving fuck out of me, and here was one at my door in shifted form.

I mentally kicked myself for being a cringing cuntwillow and offered him coffee. He stepped in and dropped soundlessly into one of my kitchen chairs in that inhumanly careful way. In public, he's slower and makes noise, but not for me because he knows it scares the shit out of me.

As I set up the coffee machine for the third pot of the morning, he stared at me without saying a word. I frowned hard and ignored the small hysterical voice rambling in the back of my mind. They attack if they sense fear! But once I had two steaming cups of bitter machine piss on the table, he spoke.

"Was contacted by Jitendra Radhamani," pause, "at U of C," he started with his strange hesitant speech. Speaking is something he does better with texts he's practiced. "Needs a sample haul at the 50 Mile Area. A one-person job."

"Okay..." This didn't sound like the kind of research he had asked me to help with originally. I hadn't known he was coming that particular day, but I knew he would show up whenever he found a new project—and I was not getting anywhere job-wise, at least not in geology.

He looked at me with eyes that don't match his pale colouring, so dark they look black. "You've not been to an Area. Fifty Mile is considered, erm..." he played air-piano with the spidery fingers of one hand. "Relatively mild, yes?"

The 50 Mile Desolation wasn't all that far away. I'd always thought the low number of events reported from there was more due to nobody living near its edges than anything. That whole section of the province has maybe a thousand people living there, max.

I was still getting used to his snippered speech and pauses back then. By now I know that if I wait, he'll finish whatever he's trying to say, but at that point I jumped in. "I don't understand," I told him. "What are you getting at?"

If I irritated him, he didn't show it. "Proposal," he said, placing the palms of his hands together in front of him. "You come along this simple sampling job. I split the pay. You learn." He peered at me over the rims of his glasses. "I see how you deal with Area... occurrences. That you don't fall into trouble."

"Huh," I grunted. So this was more like a test, and a bit of practice for me. I thought that made sense, really. "Okay, that sounds... oh wait." A mix of rage and frustration filled me for an instant before I pushed it back down. "That Area straddles the Medicine Line. Shit."

Marcus pushed up his glasses. "And?"

I shook my head. "I can't leave the country. I mean, I don't expect there to be a border station in the middle of an Area or anything, but if I had to get out and ended up Stateside, that would be a problem."

"Why?"

I shrugged helplessly. "I don't have a passport."

"Get one."

"I can't," I said, trying to keep my voice calm. It came out a childish whine instead, which made me angry at myself. A word lahar tumbled out. "I can't get a passport, because they test! They test for Weston's. Turns out I can't apply to GSC jobs, I can't apply to any of the mining majors, or most of the juniors, I can't go anywhere or do anything because they all fucking test!" I focused on breathing and balled my fists, trying to calm down. "I can't so much as wiggle a fucking nose hair," I growled, "or they'll find me and put me on ditch duty fishing out bodies of dumbass drunken cuntberries." No government would allow someone with Weston's syndrome to live freely when we could instead be swallowed by legal decree into the cesspool of Civil Service. Supposedly for our own good.

I forced myself to stop there and chomped on my lip. Marcus just sat there, eerily still, staring off into a space above the table between our coffee cups without blinking. Like a fucking spider. He finally took one hand off his cup and started drumming on the table, without moving his gaze.

"You let me in," he said finally. I blinked. Was he referring to that night about a year and a half ago, outdoors at the chemistry lab of Mines U? He had been injured and on the run. I'd not only opened the doors for him, but I'd also gotten food. I reminded myself that if I didn't want monsters following me, I shouldn't feed them.

"Then I requested favours," he continued. He finally looked up, eyes flickering right and left as if he was looking for his next words. "Reciprocation, balance the equation..." he finally pushed out, in a bit of a sing-song. Then sat back with a sort of satisfaction and seemed to wait for me to respond.

I looked at him doubtfully, but he didn't go on. I thought a moment. Did he mean he knew how I could get a passport? There was no way around the testing requirements that I knew of. It wasn't just the blood test and the school medical records. Governments, multinationals and institutions almost always have a De Real person working for them. They'd know I was sick with just a sustained touch, something I learned by accident from a former boyfriend, Bob, because he is one of them. Luckily for me, he wasn't interested in entering the family business.

In any case, it was through him that I learned how a De Real touch feels, which burns slightly, and since then I've worked hard to avoid touching people I don't know. But you can't avoid it at government offices, or in HR departments. At that moment, the coin dropped.

"You have a passport," I said slowly to Marcus. They would know what he was with a touch as well. "There's no way you didn't get pawed by some reali." That word is only slightly less insulting than calling a cop a pig. I like it. "How'd you do it?"

His face suddenly had an overly wide and entirely fake grin, and he leaned his long body a little too enthusiastically over the table. I recoiled. I'm pretty sure he shows me that grin because he knows it scares the bejesus out of me, and he finds that funny. "Sunscreen."

I frowned. "Wut?"

"Specifically, mineral-based sunscreen." The grin vanished as unnaturally quickly as it had come, and he held up an index finger as he leaned back into the chair. "Needs to have at least eighteen percent. Not so common anymore," pause, "but it works."

I shook my head. "Wait, sunscreen blocks reali fu?" I don't know how De Real people do what they do.

"Zinc does. Titanium dioxide and zinc oxide."

"You're shitting me," I growled. He shook his head, now with his eyebrows raised in amusement. "Mother fuck," I cursed. All this time, I could have avoided stinking with fear sweat from accidental contact with someone who turned out to be a De Real, just by smearing goddamn drugstore sun protection on myself? I slapped my hand onto the worn linoleum table.

"I offer contact information," pause, "of a lab I use," he continued. "For the blood tests, yes?" Pause. "Before bringing in your application. Cover yourself. If they comment..." he shrugged. "Geologists work outdoors. Don't need sunburns."

"Jesus," I sighed. "Well, this is amazing news. Flaming duck turds. This changes so much." Immediately I was thinking about being able to apply to all those positions I'd avoided. Interesting, fun, maybe even decent-paying geology jobs. The world was suddenly a lot brighter. Plus, I've not really been using as much sunscreen as I should. I know I've used my light brown skin colour as an excuse too often. Having melanin doesn't mean you can't get cancer.

Marcus spread his hands wide. "Happy to help. In the meantime. Know what to pack?"

"For an Area? I mean, I guess. Camping stuff and the usual tools, right?"

"And?" He gave me an expectant look with black eyes.

I shook my head at him, not knowing what more I could possibly bring with me. "Weapons?"

Eventually he sighed, nodded to himself, and fished a crumpled bit of lined paper out of a pants pocket. He stood slightly to do this, and I think this is when I first noticed the pockets on his tan jeans had zippers sewn onto them. I remember wondering what the hell was up with that.

"I've made a list," he said as he unfolded and flattened the paper and pushed it across the table to me. "Skip no item."

I started reading his list, which was carefully written in small, neatly-printed block letters with black pen. It did include the usual camping stuff, but it also had weird items. "An umbrella?" Normally, in the field, we put on these waterproof things, either full rain suits or ponchos, depending on the climate and season. Umbrellas are super impractical, though parasols are sometimes useful.

"Yep. They are not for rain."

I frowned at him, then went back to squinting at the paper.

"Areas do not follow normal rules," he reminded me. I looked up and glowered at him.

"Yeah yeah, I know. I watch the news."

He made a "hmph" noise. "News does not begin to cover," pause, "what the Areas are."

The paper actually had two lists; on the back was a list of rules to follow. I knew that some version of these rules get passed around amongst Areas travellers. Some of them had tiny asterisks next to them. "Those are ones I've broken," Marcus explained. "I do not recommend it. But... it happens."

I began reading them out loud, I guess because it felt like I was bringing a legend into reality or something. Excited, like some moron unaware of how stupid it is to break into and wander around the lion pen at the zoo at night. "One. Remember that you are a visitor, and you are not welcome." That was one circled several times in black ink.

"Most important," Marcus said. "In nature, you may be a guest. But not in an Area."

"Two," I continued. "Do not eat or drink anything from an Area, unless you can't avoid it."

"This one is difficult. For both of us," he said. I nodded unhappily. My metabolism is broken, and he spends a lot of energy shifting. "Unless... we eat any travellers we come across." He showed me his teeth again.

I looked at him hard. The one time creatures like him made it on the news, over twenty years ago, it was for slowly dissecting and eating people alive. "You're kidding, right?"

He stared at me a moment. "Yes," he said blandly. I swore at him, using more of the nice words I learned from a British undergrad. Anything with "wank" and "womble" was usually good.

"Three. Don't enter water unless it's shallow and has a hard bottom. No sandy or muddy bottoms. Four. Practice 'leave no trace' camping and travelling. Five. Avoid buildings or remains of buildings, such as foundations, stairs, etc, unless it is clearly an outpost."

That one had an asterisk. Outposts are usually run by provincial governments, or states in the US. They're mostly occupied by a single provincial agent, something like a cross between a park ranger and a fire watch. Usually there's a small measuring station inside where any changes outside are noted and sent back to the feds.

"Six. Watch out for exposed wells, or wells covered with rotting wood or brush."

"Surprised me, how many there are," he murmured. I nodded. Having done some work in environmental during my bachelor's, I knew the risks of forgotten wells and abandoned boreholes. It doesn't matter if they're in an Area or not. My supervisor once found a meter-wide well hole with a broken slab of concrete on top, in the corner of an empty car lot. Nobody knew how deep it actually was; we had a two-hundred fifty foot oil probe and it never reached a bottom. A small well house had been built around it, with clear signs that a homeless person or teenagers had been hanging out there. "Betcha they'd never get close to that thing if they had any idea what the hell was under them," my supervisor had said.

"Seven. If you see a figure, either people or animals, try to avoid getting their attention. Eight. If you do still get a stranger's attention, be very polite to them."

"What the umbrella is for," Marcus commented. I wasn't sure how, but he didn't elaborate.

"Nine. Travel around the edges of fields and other large open areas if possible, rather than straight through them."

I wasn't sure what that one was about either, but I didn't ask at that point, because the last one was ridiculous. "Ten. If you are walking and the surroundings suddenly become unfamiliar, don't turn around. Walk backwards until you recognise things again." I looked back up. "Okay, why?"

He shook his head. "Don't know. Sounds like how, hmmm... experienced hikers get lost." He squinted at me. "Hope this happens to you. Would love to hear... how it seems." He gestured at me with a wavey hand. "With your... sense... thing."

I scowled at him. "I don't use it." He tilted his head questioningly, in that jerky predator-bird way that he does. I sighed and ignored the small chill that went through me. "Every time I go feeling things with my brain, it seems to happen again more easily. Like, when I'm not trying. And my friend—a friend of mine who knows more about all this, he said probably each time I did it, it could encourage my symptoms to develop further. I really don't need people seeing any of that." I sighed again.

I can only delay it, I think, and eventually it will be too obvious to hide, especially the akathisia and the eye colour. My eyes used to be very dark brown, like my mom's, and now they're more of a light brown. But they don't look like the copper-gold wild-animal eyes of someone with Weston's. Not yet. I intend to keep it that way for as long as possible.

Marcus shrugged, and placed his hands flat on the table. "Well." He gave me an intense look. "Will I see you?"

Even with the good news about the sunscreen, I had already decided I would try out this trip to an actual Desolate Area. Honestly, the stories around them were just too weird to pass up checking one out up close, even if it was just once.

Jesus, I was such a fucking sweet summer child. The only kinds of people who deliberately go into Areas are cowboys, outlaws, nutters, and "omega men," off-grid types who like to live as if they're the last of humanity.

Geologists are cowboys.

"Okay, man. Gimme the deets. When, where, and all that?"

---

I showed up two weeks and one fresh passport later at the Husky truck stop on First Leaf Highway, the main highway that brings you vaguely near 50 Mile. I carried a backpack stuffed with things, a few cooking utensils strapped to the outside, a small tent under one arm, and in my hand a pair of steel toes I got as PPE when I did CMT work.

Since my symptoms started, the sensation of wearing shoes became very uncomfortable, although I actually have no idea if it's got anything to do with Weston's. I'm usually wearing sandals or flip-flops with bare feet, even in winter. But it only took one time during field work to be hammering a rock out of an outcrop and have one of those chunks fall right on my foot to convince me that, at least some of the time, I need to wear real shoes.

This Husky stop has a restaurant, so as soon as I hopped off the friendly rig that had been my ride, I went straight for lots of greasy, calorie-dense food, a ton of coffee, and afterwards a cigarette. Since I didn't see Marcus in the restaurant nor in the gas station market shop, I let my mind kinda wander and thought about nothing, and managed to amble across one of the parking lots straight to a dust-brown sedan, parked far from other vehicles. I was getting better at doing this thing deliberately.

Marcus' long frame, clothed in a checked shirt and brown pants, was partially bent over the open trunk, and I got surprisingly close before he straightened with a bit too much speed and whirled around to stare at me. I got just the briefest sensation of having startled a wild animal.

And he kept staring at me for a moment too long. I realised the wind was coming at me, and wondered if he used smell more than sight to recognise people. I waved my hand at his face. "It's me. Sanne."

"Sanne de Winter," he replied, with no change in his blank facial expression, but it seemed his body relaxed. He looked to his left, then his right, and then back at me. "Um. Where's your vehicle?"

"My what?"

"Your auto-mo-bile. Where is it?"

I shook my head. "I'm a poor post-grad, I don't own a car. Got a lift."

"What-what?" He blinked at me. "How did you do school fieldwork?" he asked after a moment.

I shrugged. "Borrowed a friend's suburban." Turns out, a suburban is a bit too heavy for doing stuff in the squishy northern muskeg in the summer, and more than once I had to unload all my soil samples in order to get it out of some mud pit, then load them back in. The four-wheel drive was essential though.

I peeked around him to give the car a dubious look. "I mean, you weren't planning on going out there with this carburated heap, were you?" It did look that way; the inside seemed filled to the roof with crap, and attached to a rack on the roof was more stuff, including a solar panel, some jerry cans, and a gas canister.

"Of course," he replied matter of factly. He closed the trunk and patted it. "I have fuel injection, Sanne de Winter." He looked back up at me. "And have made... several modifications." He made that large fake grin for a second. I was totally oblivious to the implications of his statement at the time. Why hadn't I paid attention?

I squinted skeptically at the brown sedan. The name Oldsmobile was clearly appropriate. Its hard square corners called out from a time before people realised wind pushes back. A relic from the eighties.

"I thought you were going to rent a truck. I probably should have told you." I sighed. My first job, sort of, and I'd already fucked things up a bit. I gave myself a moment of self-hate before shoving it away. "So what do you want to do? We won't be able to fit everything in this," I waved at the car.

"Hm," he thought a moment, one hand playing air-piano. He stood there for a while.

"Look, let's just start tomorrow. I can rent a—" I started, but he shook his head and waved his hand at me with a raised index finger. Wait.

"If you're not part of the solution, then you're part of the precipitate," he said cheerily after a moment, and pulled open the passenger door and started pulling things out. Stacks of books and papers. A huge black trash bag filled with clothes, maybe his laundry. Lots of actual trash, mostly fast food containers, plastic cups, used napkins, old mail envelopes. A small gas cylinder on wheels with what looked like a tiny engine on it. A desktop sewing machine. Rocks the size of hands. He was just dumping it all in a pile next to the car.

"Oh!" he exclaimed, and held something in front of his nose before popping it into his mouth. He looked at me. "French fry." I made a face. So fucking gross. He went back to pulling out more stuff. Finally he straightened, holding a brownish tent, and made another large grin.

"This," pause, "for when I meet people outside." He looked down at the material he was holding. "They expect I have camping gear." He was standing there like a person, but this reminded me again that he wasn't human, and I was about to wander off into a dangerous wilderness area with a creature which was more like a giant carnivorous bug. Quit being such a damn pussy, I told myself sternly.

He scanned the scrub surrounding the edge of the parking lot, and suddenly marched off into the dirt.

I dropped my stuff and wormed out of my oversized backpack to run after him. "What are you doing?"

"Setting up the tent."

"What? Here?"

His strides were much longer than mine and I needed to jog a bit to keep up. He glanced back at me, then slowed and seemed to sniff around a spot of ground with interest. We were a good distance from the parking lot now, in the middle of sandy scrubby dirt acreage. Seemingly satisfied, he started smoothing dirt with his feet.

I watched as he worked, setting up a tent faster than I'd ever seen anyone do before. It was quite tiny, shaped a bit like an igloo, and the colour blended into the surrounding area really well. The moment he was satisfied, he headed back to the car, and I followed, more confused than ever. He started picking up the stuff from the crap piled outside the still-open front passenger door and carrying it back to the tent. I looked at the pile, grabbed some books, and followed. With just a few trips, everything that wasn't actual garbage was inside the tiny tent, nearly filling it.

Back at the car, Marcus grabbed a grease-stained pizza box from his trash pile and fished a large sharpie out of a pocket. With broad strokes, he scratched uppercase letters on the underside of the box. Then he grabbed a box cutter from the glove compartment and cut around it, tossing the rest of the box onto the ground, and brought the square to the tent while I waited.

"What did you write?" I asked when he returned. He started grabbing the food containers and other trash, and I gingerly picked up the rest and followed him.

"It says, 'Smile for the camera! Don't worry, the owner will clean this all up soon'," he replied.

"What camera? You set up a camera?" I asked.

He gave me a look which made me feel stupid, then he continued to the collection of trash bins outside the gas station store building. He peered into one of the containers first and with a noise of delight pulled something metallic out—aluminum wrapping. When he unfolded it, I saw it was a half-eaten sandwich. He shoved the sandwich into his mouth, then dumped his car trash into the bin. I tried not to gag before adding the take-out boxes I'd brought, and wondered how long I could stand to work with this thing before I puked.

With the trash gone, we returned to the car and I peered in. The rest was still filled nearly to the roof, but now the passenger seat and footwell were empty. The back seat was missing entirely; it looked like he had removed it, though it was hard to tell under all the stuff. I swore under my breath.

"This is sufficient?" Marcus asked me. I looked at him, shaking my head.

"Are we seriously going out to 50 Mile in this heap? Isn't it going to break down?"

He stared at me for a moment, making me uncomfortable. "Going or not?" he asked finally.

I sighed, looking back at the passenger seat. The door had a crank handle for the window and a silver-coloured sliding lock with a square red indicator. The dashboard was still covered with crap, mostly loose papers held down by thick books. A car battery sat atop some dog-eared and yellowed papers in the footwell between the seats—the shifter stuck out of the steering column. Next to the driver seat was a sort of arm rest folded down, made of the same blanched fuzzy material as the seats themselves, with yet more papers and what looked like maps wedged underneath.

The dash was weird, and I don't know why this didn't alarm me right away: in the place where I think the radio used to be, there was something installed with dials and silvery toggle switches, each with a cryptic set of label-printed codes. There was an additional gauge attached on top of the dashboard on his side, and what I thought was some kind of CB radio. What the hell had he done to this car?

I eyed the rest. There were bits of rust here and there, and something about the way it sat on its wheels seemed a little off, but I couldn't quite tell why. Was I willing to rely on this to get us into, around, and back out of a Desolate Area?

Ug, why did I have to be so fucking afraid of everything all the time?

"Oh fuck it," I growled, and grabbed my tent, sliding it into the back from the passenger area atop what I could see now were mostly supplies mixed with miscellanea. Adding another layer of sediment to the strata, I thought, and set my backpack and shoes on the passenger floor. It seemed as if it really would take a stratigrapher to make out all the stuff, though the large plastic water jugs and tubs of food were obvious. It didn't smell nearly as bad in there as I expected, but there was a stale odour I couldn't quite identify. I made a face as I swept crumbs off the stained seat and sat down, feet on each side of my stuff, and pulled the door closed. It slammed with a hard bang.

"Be nice!" Marcus wagged his finger at me like a schoolteacher. "I put much love into this." I rolled my eyes as he walked around the back to get into the driver's side. I think this is when I began to notice this wasn't just an old car.

As Marcus climbed into his seat in his fast but careful insect-like way, I realised that there were two vertical seat belts coming over the top of his seat. He pulled his arms through them and then clicked two ends of a lower belt in the middle. A freaking four-point harness, not a car seat belt. Peering behind his seat, I saw the belts were attached to a big-ass metal bar running from each side of the car, right behind the front seats. Attached to that bar was an even bigger one running along the ceiling, like a roll bar.

I looked over my right shoulder and found a regular seat belt, and pulled it out. Dust puffed into the cabin as if it hadn't been moved in years, and saw that the rest of the belt was a very dark grey. The front part had gotten enough decades of sun to have bleached. I looked back at Marcus.

"Sorry," he said cheerfully. "No reason to put... something sturdier there." He drummed the thin steering wheel excitedly with his long fingers.

"What the everloving fuck?" I gestured at his harness. "Does this thing fly or something?"

He shook his head seriously, and adjusted his glasses. "Nope. But it goes where I need." He had a key in his hand, and slid it into the lock with a click and turned it. The sound that came out did not belong to a late eighties sedan; more like the rumbling growl of a monstrous jet engine, or something that ran on the coals of hell. I should have gotten out right then. I should have insisted we rent a truck.

I should have at least insisted on driving.

With his frightening toothy grin flashing at me and black eyes wide with excitement, he grabbed the shifting lever and pulled it down into reverse like a mad scientist starting the awful process of animating a body on a slab. He stomped on the gas and the car suddenly lurched backwards, a steel animal trying to throw an unwelcome rider off its back.

"Fucking mother of—!" I braced my hands against the dash as the seat belt cut into my chest, and stared at Marcus wide-eyed. Predictably, some of the papers and books on the dashboard slid off and hit my legs and the floor from his slamming the brakes. The crap that had filled the passenger area must've been holding it in place until then. He pulled the shifter down to drive with glee, glanced at me again and then suddenly inertia was plastering me back into the seat as the car roared along the parking area. He didn't brake as we approached the entrance to the highway, but spun the steering wheel and gave even more gas as we flew down the asphalt.

"What the hell! Are you trying to kill us!?" I screamed at him. He was now going much, much faster than the speed limit. I grabbed the part of the door you hold to pull it shut, the grip, and held it for dear life.

Not only did he seem to think he was in a race, he cranked down his window so the inside of the car became a wind tunnel. Even with the harness on, he was able to stick his head out the window now and then like a shaggy grey dog. We quickly approached a truck, and with a yank on the wheel we zoomed around it as if it were standing still. I heard the Dopplered two-tone whine of the truck's blaring horn fall away behind us.

"Lemme out, lemme out, lemme out!" I cried out, but I couldn't even hear myself over the roar of the hot wind and the gutteral engine scream. Nor could I tear my eyes away from the road, where the stripes in the middle were streaming towards us like stars seen from a warp-speed spaceship on television.

Frozen in place with a death grip on the door, I think I made permanent crescent-moon holes in the material with my fingernails. My hair swished around my head, swatting my face with angry black whips. Every car or truck ahead of us was passed with a violent manoeuvre as if we were in a video game or an action film instead of driving a physical car on real roads. The piles of stuff in the back lurched from side to side with each yank of the wheel as the July sun beat down on everything and small bits of paper and trash blew around the cabin like snow. The painted lines on the road seemed treated as suggestions at best by the creature behind the wheel.

This is it, I thought to myself. This is where I die. I don't wanna die like this, I don't wanna die! I scrunched my eyes shut. I didn't want to see death coming at me. But the fear had made something click in my head, and that strange sensation of surfaces and spaces flooded my brain as I realised I was still going to see, feel, all the tiny gory details of the trip whether I wanted to or not. I couldn't figure out how to shove it away, turn it off. My symptoms were in full bloom, egged on by adrenaline.

After a small eternity, Marcus hit the brakes as if he suddenly needed to stop, and I realised he was going to make a turn. A smaller road crossed the highway and I knew he was going to head left. Yanking the wheel before getting down to what I would consider a safe speed, the car squealed as it slid, and the whole thing tilted towards the passenger side. My side.

I felt the tires on his side leave the ground and did something I never thought I'd do: I prayed. Oh I prayed. It was laced with profanities and started tumbling out of my mouth in an erosive sheetwash of words, while the tires came back down to earth and the car bolted forward as Marcus hit the gas again. We flew past desert warning signs so fast, I only saw the blur of red, white, and caterpillar orange.

Somehow we didn't roll the car, but now I knew why there was a roll bar supporting the roof. I prayed harder.

The smaller road meandered a bit, and after a short time Marcus did another unsafe turn, south onto a tiny gravel road. It was bracketed by a second set of worn signs marking the edge of the 50 Mile Desolation, as that Area is officially called, with all the usual warnings nobody can read because the letters have been wind-blasted to nubs.

The landscape had gotten less flat; first hilly and now this gravel road started wandering along a scarp, and the road quickly became what one of my old instructors at school liked to call "interesting," with hairpin switchbacks little wider than a single vehicle. Soon there was a small wall of rock on Marcus' side, and a literal fucking drop-off on my side. When I dared to peek my eyes open, I only saw sky and layered rocks in the distance before squeezing them shut and counting the centimeters of ground I could feel between the tires on my side and where the road shelf curved down steeply.

Of course, the part of my brain that wasn't utterly focused on my imminent death was watching the change in rocks as we slowly lowered our elevation, layers of sedimentary rock showing the diminishing edges of what was once a massive interior seaway. Dark grey shales alternated with greenish sandstones, yellow goethite and reddish-brown ironstone. What a pretty place to die, my brain thought irritatingly.

Marcus seemed enthralled with driving and paid no heed to the change in landscape, not until we hit a real steep spot. He whacked the brakes just long enough to downshift, forcing the engine to slow, but continued to careen merrily along the yellow and red dirt strip.

I screamed again as we descended through the Cretaceous.

---

Dr Radhamani had a grad student studying the Tea River Formation, a sedimentary rock formation that tells the story of the moving shores of a great late-Cretaceous and Paleogene inland sea; a formation which today follows the Tea River and covers another, older formation called Badwater. The Tea River Formation starts in the States and crosses the Medicine Line into Kainai land and Canada, but eventually it continues into the 50 Mile Desolation.

Apparently, Radhamani didn't feel it was responsible or safe to let his student go out there. He'd worked out a deal with Marcus to do the last bits of mapping and sampling, knowing he was experienced in Area work.

Marcus was never very public about working on Desolate Areas when he was a visiting researcher at Mines U, probably because it's not a good idea. Only a few scientists are brave enough, or maybe stupid enough, to let the general public know they're studying places so controversial that even some government ministers deny their very existence. Some researchers get death threats and people camping in front of their homes.

Within academia though, especially earth sciences, people generally know who is doing what, respecting and supporting their colleagues. I wonder how often Marcus has been asked by non-Area researchers to help them out.

So when he slammed the brakes and ground his Franken-Oldsmosteinian Paleozoic deathtrap rather abruptly to a halt, we were inside but very near the edge of the Area. The plan was to start at the Area border and work our way along the formation until we ran into Badwater.

"We're here!" Marcus said in his excited honey-I'm-home voice, and was out of the car with uncanny speed, circling around to the back to start pulling things out of the trunk.

I was still frozen in the passenger seat, rigid and splayed like a cat trying not to fall into a full bathtub, and only after several minutes was I able to pry my hands loose from the door grip. I pushed the creaking door open wide enough to roll out and fall onto the sweet, sweet, stable ground. I nearly kissed the dirt.

I remained on my hands and knees for a while, getting used to the idea that I was still alive, that I was out of the car, and for my heart rate to fall below punk-band-on-cocaine levels. It took an additional moment for me to pull that symptom-fueled sense of surfaces back into the limits of my skull, until the world was only what I could see with eyes, hear with ears, and feel with skin.

We had driven over two hours to reach our destination. When I finally stood up on shaking legs and looked around, I turned in a slow circle, wanting to get a good look at where I was before tearing into Marcus. I couldn't really see that I was in something people would call desolate, or frightening. Just some arid scrub, and the rocky walls of the coulee we were parked at the bottom of. Maybe I expected it to look weird, or to feel something, but everything seemed... fine.

I considered maybe we had died after all and Purgatory just happens to look like the baking ridges of southern Alberta. After another moment, I stalked over to the rear of the car. Marcus was busying himself as if nothing unusual had just happened.

"What the hell was that?" My fear-induced bitch-snark was tumbling out of me. "What glue-sniffing, pit-scratching dumbass chimpfucker gave you a driver's license, anyway? Do you even have a license? Do you think that's how driving works, trying to scrape the rubber from your wheels by pogo-sticking the gas and brake pedals like a coked-up investment banker humping a dead prostitute? Or was that a ritualistic exercise in suicidal ideation, your invertebrate trash-panda version of jumping in front of a train or setting yourself on fire?" He turned to look at me with slightly widened black eyes, but I kept going.

"Were you planning on getting us killed and it was a complete cosmic accident that we're still alive? Did you think the best way to introduce me to Area work was to make sure I arrived with heart problems and piss-stained pants?" I ran a bit out of breath and paused there. He was shaking his head at me.

"Wow," he said, and gave me an expressionless stare. "I just really like driving!" That came out with a sort of childlike sincerity. "Exhilarating!" His eyes were wide, and he started wriggling his spidery fingers in the air, looking like he was searching for how to continue. His next sentence sounded like some weird song he'd heard. "With just some suck, squeeze, bang and blow, four cycles really make you go!"

"We! Almost! Died!" I yelled. "You don't even have airbags in that thing!"

"Died? Nonsense." The switch from twitching with excitement to a bored calm was nearly instant and made me catch my breath uneasily. He adjusted his glasses, looking like he was in school and blandly correcting my grammar or something. "I've not had a single motor vehicle accident."

"Bullshit," I said, shaking my head. "You must at least have a towering stack of tickets. There's no way you drive like that all the time and haven't been unlucky once." It occurred to me that we probably threw ignored tickets away with the other car trash earlier that day.

He merely shrugged. "I am... more careful when the law is about."

I waved my arms at the car. "And what the hell did you do to this thing? What's with the roll bar and the toggle switches and the wires sticking up everywhere?" I demanded.

He shrugged again. "Modifications." After a moment came the too-wide fake grin, which left just as suddenly.

"Yeah what modifications? What all did you do?"

"Mmmmodifications." He blinked at me, looking like he was repeating things to a slow child, and went back to setting some maps into a pile.

"Un-fucking-believable," I muttered, and the thought occurred to me that I didn't have any way home other than another deathride. I wondered if it would be better if I were unconscious on the way back.

Marcus had moved on to pulling things out of the section that used to have the back seat, and I sighed loudly like a snotty teenager before going to the other side to help set up the small camp. There wasn't really much to set up, and as soon as my tent was ready I realised it had been about three hours since I'd last eaten. I remember when that didn't used to be a problem.

I guess Marcus had the same idea; he had pulled open the various food tubs and was using the trunk a bit like a table to set up whatever he was going to eat. It turned out to be something that looked like artificially-coloured fruity loop kids' cereal with cooking cream mixed with a mashed banana, chunks of fish and a shit-ton of peanut butter. And there was something green sprinkled on top. I noticed there was no banana peel in the compost bag. Had he eaten it? As soon as he had his bowl ready, he stepped back and gestured at me. I couldn't take my eyes off the gag-inducing goop he was holding, and made a face as he stuffed a big spoonful into his mouth.

"That looks like something a worm-infested Moose vomited up after eating a flock of berry-munching shitbirds," I told him, referring not to the wild animal moose but the endless-maw monsters people tend to call Moose.

Marcus raised his eyebrows, swallowed, and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. So gross. "I've worked it out. This mixture is one of my... high-calorie concoctions." He raised his chin at me. "How do you keep your weight up," pause, "in the field?"

I opened my mouth to say I ate normal food, then closed it. My last several weeks in the field for my master's, up in the Liard Basin, I had lost so much weight that when I got back I needed to just lay on my couch for a week and do nothing but eat to recover. (Man, I spent that week missing UBC's ponderosa cakes!) Jen was working together with me out there, getting her data for her Liard glaciation paper, and kept asking me if I needed a doctor. Normal food wasn't enough, and it's hard to carry as much as you need into the field when you're already carrying a bunch of tools, equipment, and rocks.

Marcus nodded, gestured to the large plastic tubs sitting out next to the car, and then wandered off to munch his rainbow vomit salad.

This is when I began exploring obscene combinations of food. When he'd told me that he would take care of our camp supplies, I was worried he'd bring actual garbage or rotting stuff as the food. But it was real food, and a small camp stove.

I'm pretty sure that was just for me. He doesn't eat like people do, and only used the stove to make coffee. His idea of pasta, for example, is to just let an amount sit in a pot of water in the afternoon while he works. Hours later he drinks the remaining water and then wads the soft pasta around something else like bits of tuna, and sucks it down with amazing speed. That wasn't a habit I copied, but my diseased metabolism did encourage me to imitate his scooping of peanut butter directly from the discount-store sized jars with granny's butter tarts. Gross, but I couldn't ignore the practicality of it.

The green stuff turned out to be melanterite, which I vaguely remembered we used to clean chromium pollution at my short stint working in environmental, though at first he called it something else. Copperas? He said he adds it "for improved flavour." Later I wondered if he was trying to make his food taste like blood.

That first week, the mapping was pretty typical. It really didn't need two people, especially once I decided a lot of the evening work could just be skipped. I hate stereonets, and was starting one until I figured I should let Radhamani's grad student do their own damn stereonet work. We were only there to get raw data the student couldn't, after all. We were noting the land, taking measurements of the topography, strike, dip, photos, and looking for specific rock types to take as small samples for them. But, having been able to do all my own fieldwork for my school projects, I felt the weight of getting things right. It would really suck to be responsible for fucking up someone else's dissertation study.

It was also a privilege to be able to directly see some of the amazing geology there: uncanny castellated sandstones, great pillars that stick out from the shores of the Tea River, looking like square blocks that had been stacked by giants; or the huge iron-red concretions littering some of the hills like ominous eggs of monstrous alien creatures. The coulees we started work in reminded me of the nearly unimaginable power of water which surged out from dislodged ice dams to pummel deep channels into hard rock for miles and miles, often within just a few days' time.

Once geologists agreed there wasn't such a thing as a Biblical flood, there was a period of time when they didn't believe massive miles-long erosion and destruction of such magnitude was possible from floodwaters. Not until they were forced to read the rocks, admit truth in the stories of huge ice-age lakes like Missoula and Agassiz. My school field partner Jen's personal hero was Bretz.

But anyway... I really need to describe that first evening. As it grew late, I was wondering whether Marcus was going to stay shifted at night. Indeed, he seemed easily tired of the whole walking around on two legs thing, or as he put it bluntly and with something between a shiver and a sigh, "I dislike breathing through the same hole I eat with." Several times throughout the trip, he complained about human bodies: "sticky," "sweaty," and most often "extremely smelly!" But because that first day he was setting up camp, explaining to me a lot of his little rules with occasional remarks on the Area, and doing work which required writing, he remained shifted until the sun hung low. It would be the first time I got a real good look at a Surgeon, in full daylight, though it became a regular sight during the weeks of work.

I was sitting on a nice-sized boulder between the car and my tent, writing out full names of my shorthands of my strat chicken scratch notes, and he had finished something and walked over to stand in front of me. I thought he seemed a bit uneasy, or maybe just uncomfortable. He sort of swung his weight back and forth between his two feet, and his restless fingers did even more air-piano than I'd gotten used to. I figured he was waiting for me to say something.

I looked up at him. "Soooo, uh, you're gonna go bug out now?" I said it as casually as I could.

He looked at me a moment, then glanced around the camp. "I tend to wander about. Quite far, sometimes. Return in the morning. You are... fine with the night here. Alone?"

I shrugged. "I guess? I mean, yeah." The way he said "night" and "alone" about this camp site gave my stomach a small squeeze, but I didn't show it. "You said there weren't monsters out here. I haven't seen a plains rattler yet. So yeah I'll be fine." Then I frowned at him. "Do I have to worry about you?"

He looked upwards, what I think is his version of rolling his eyes, and sighed. "You are not food. Sanne de Winter." Satisfied, he bent down and untied his hikers, plucked his socks off and stuffed each into its respective shoe. He walked over to the driver side of the car and shoved the shoes underneath, behind the front wheel.

I thought he was going to strip then, and that's not something I ever want to see, but I stood to watch because I was going to see a monster shift. Hell, I was going to see a living monster, as it really looks. Until then I'd only seen one in a dark room at the chemistry lab at school, over a year ago, and had only felt a vague shape during a moonless night in the wilderness with my weird brain sense years before that.

But other than unbuttoning his fly and carefully taking off and folding his glasses, he didn't undress. He just bent forward at the hip a little, arms held out front, and then what I saw is hard to describe, and it happened so fast. Something grey just pushed itself out of his lower back, between the bottom of his shirts and the top of his pants, looking like a sped-up video of a... I dunno, it reminded me of an adult cicada coming out of its old body.

The part growing out of his back pushed the shirts further up towards the head, and jointed legs started sprouting from the resolving segments. The same thing was happening in the other direction, until the pants were in a pile under a long series of leggy segments. An insect-like head pulled itself out from under the shirts. Longer legs coming out of the middle of the body started gathering the shirts into a ball, and then the thing curled to meet its tail end, which had two long segmented parts sticking out like horns. Long claws grabbed the pants and wrapped them around the clothing ball, and this was tucked up underneath the shell of the middle part. The thorax, I remembered. The clothes were held in place by a pair of legs.

I remember wondering if this was why the pants pockets had zippers, so stuff didn't fall out as they were being carried around.

Somehow, even though it was now further away than the night at school, the jaekelotherium—I remembered that was the official name—looked frighteningly large. The long whiplike antennae, coming out above each large black eye, swept the ground and air around the car. Lots of fuzzy little branches unfolded, making the antennae look like a pair of pale Christmas trees. Smelling, I think. The jointed legs coming out of the middle part, the thorax, were longer than the ones sticking out from the centipede-like rest of the body, with the very first pair ending with large, slender claws. With the benefit of the sun, I could see that the shell-like surface wasn't just grey. It was more like a dull silvery pearl, with a hint of gasoline iridescence.

The long pale form skittered in a large circle, making small tick-tick-tick noises with its chitinous legs against the rocky ground, and then the feathery antennal branches folded back into two whiplike trunks and swept backwards, lightly touching the smooth shell of the thorax, and the thing turned my way. The eyes aren't like insect eyes, though they are huge and black, because each has a little silver ring about the size of my hand which moves around like a pupil. They were pointed at me, and the creature went still. I realised I was just standing there with my mouth hanging open, and closed it. But I kept staring.

It He stood there absolutely still for another moment, and then suddenly charged right up to me. I made a squawk like a shitchicken and awkwardly jumped backwards, almost stumbling against my rock as the huge arthropod came to just an arms-length away and stopped, raising its front part up to bring the head level with mine, and stilled like a spider. I could now see the two rows of sharp black little toothlike serrations on the mandibles on the underside of the head. The two small segmented appendages sticking out from either side of those mandibles reached towards me like fingers.

"You trying to make me shit myself?" My voice came out in a hoarse quiver. The antennae raised up, I'm certain in amusement—I could almost imagine he would have been giving me his can you see aaaall my teeth? fake grin—and the next moment the arthropod was skittering away, moving like a long silvery wave around the edge of our stuff and my tent, weaving smoothly around small boulders and clumps of sedge, and then sweeping in an arc towards the river, which we were camped quite far from. In an instant it was gone and everything was quiet.

I remember my head buzzed for a long time after that, and I kept hearing myself muttering "un-fucking-believable" several times. The sky darkened quickly after the sun went down, and I told myself to stop being such a weakass pusswillow and get ready to sleep. Even sternly yelling at myself didn't stop the chill that went through me as I looked around at the rapidly darkening, silent camp. Because that's when I noticed it, the silence. I knew the coulee was arid, but that area isn't really desert, it's more grassland—the Tea River wasn't too far away. I should have heard night animals. The silence seemed unnatural, and unnerving. Turned out most nights were like that, and I never really got used to it.

Somehow the fact that I was working with an inhuman creature became nearly normal to me, although any time he was too close as a Surgeon still made my heart rate shoot up with fear. And almost every time he shifted, he wriggled his Christmas-tree antennae in my face like he did that night at Mines U. I'm not entirely sure why. At Mines, he seemed to be smelling me, but out at 50 Mile he knew who I was, so I think it was just to gross me out.

Shifted or not, his movements were always very careful and precise, and I noticed he made sure never to come in contact with me, even if we were both lifting a heavy object from the car. That precision still gave me the creeps because it kept reminding me of the stories of the people getting amputated and eaten alive twenty years ago by another of these creatures.

We expanded my original communication setup, which had consisted of me asking questions and him answering them with his claw clicking once for yes, twice for no, and three times for ambiguous or unknown answers, to something a little more complex but a lot more useful. Part of the improvement came from my starting to see meaning in how he moved. Surgeons' faces don't have any more expression than an ant's, but they do have body language.

What weirded me out was when I began to notice some of the movements he made as a Surgeon were nearly the same, or had some kind of analogous movement, as when he was shifted. It's not just the antennae and eyebrows making the "amused" expression. One that stood out to me in the field was how, in either form, he liked to pick up things like rocks or tools and bring them right up close to his face, turning the objects over and over with either spidery fingers or with those little appendages that stick out on either side of his bug mouth.

A lot of the work requires human hands: drawing landscapes in our notebooks, taking measurements, writing down locations and sample names. Marcus is also the first person I'd ever seen actually using a Jakob's staff. But normally on his own in Areas and other places outside, he's come up with ways to do at least some things even without hands or human eyes.

He showed me a digital camera he uses, which has these plastic sticks poking out the front and a wire coming out the top. The wire is a remote trigger, and the plastic sticks are for ensuring whatever it is Marcus is photographing is actually in view. I was a bit shocked when I realised he was doing this to take pictures of everything from rocks to his GPS screen and other measuring tools... as a Surgeon. At a later time, when he's shifted human, he goes through the photos and writes everything down into his notebooks, and matches the rock samples so each canvas sample bag has the right designation. It's a pretty wild setup.

Radhamani's student also wanted mags and this was another thing Marcus does on multiple legs, though I didn't see it until the second week. He's built a sort of harness which he can slip through and then carry the magnetometer, which is basically a long pole with a battery and a bulky GPS box, across long distances.

---

Other than Marcus being, well, inhuman, and the nights making me nervous because I live in constant fear of every damn little thing, the week started fine and when it went downhill, it wasn't because of any Area weirdness. Most of the time we just worked; Marcus was getting an idea of how I worked in the field, and I learned how he liked to do things.

I did my best to work at a good speed and keep all the notes and rules for how Marcus prefers to do things in my head, but several times I floundered. The way he charged ahead when we spent the first days hiking away from the car gave me the feeling that he wanted to get this job done as quickly as possible. He didn't seem afraid of the Area at all, but maybe he thought the work was boring, or didn't like a bumbling newbie getting in his way, I dunno. But so it was, at the end of the fourth day we came back to the car and Marcus was looking a little unhappy.

I sat my pack onto the ground and started pulling out the canvas bags holding the samples I'd collected, when I heard Marcus say something about our supplies. I looked up to see him standing next to the tubs we kept outside the car during the day and packed into the back at night, hands on his waist.

He turned his head to look at me. "I've miscalculated."

I walked slowly towards the tubs. "What do you mean?"

"Expected more done by now." He waved his hand at the tubs. "We've eaten more than... I anticipated."

I felt a pit form in my stomach. Was I going too slow? Was I eating too much? Was the job in jeopardy of getting curtailed? Would we have to stop early and leave some of the formation mapping unfinished?

Marcus announced that the next day he would drive to the Ikimekoi region, which is about an hour away from the edge of the Area, and get to Ponokiokwe, a small town which has a goods store because there's a lake and people like to go out there to camp. He'd get as much food as he could buy, and we'd see how far that took us. I didn't say anything, but felt terrible. Here I was, fucking up this relatively simple project, making me wonder if this was something I should even be doing. Maybe I should go into GIS work or databases or analysis, I remember thinking. Desk shit.

We decided that I would stay at the new camp while he went on the supply run. It was time to move the car to the next stop anyway, as it served as a sort of base camp for our daily excursions, and so I was to spend the morning and afternoon working that new area. I figured I'd also be spending that time feeling miserable and mentally beating myself up, and resolved I would not be a soppy whinging wreck when Marcus came back, because that would be even worse.

What I did not expect was the visitor.

The sun was getting high. I'd just finished the immediate area and was packing my backpack to move further up the coulee, when I noticed the figure walking towards me which I could have sworn hadn't been there a moment earlier. It looked like an older man wearing a grey coverall, like he worked in a garage or something, moving towards me with a deliberate but easy pace. He raised a hand.

"Hey," he called out. I was frozen in the act of putting my tool sachel, a small leather bag, around my belt. For some reason my stupid brain wondered if the tiny bottles of acid in that bag could be squirted at the guy's face if he was dangerous. I never even thought about the dog spray I kept in another pocket, or even my Estwing. It's good to have dog spray when you're outside, but the real reason I even packed it in the first place was for the off-chance it would be needed against Marcus. I actually have no idea if chili peppers would bother a Surgeon in the slightest.

Rule eight. If you do still get a stranger's attention, be very polite to them.

"Hello," I replied courteously.

The man was still ambling towards me like a friendly neighbour. "Who's all out here? Watcha doin?"

"Hi," I said again, thinking fast. "Um, we're here to see the rocks."

"The rocks?" He was now standing just a few steps away. His skin looked tan and weather-beaten, and his black stubble and eyebrows were mixed with grey. In addition to the stained and frayed mechanic-style coverall, he had a baseball cap on that had definitely seen better days. Old sludge was smeared onto it and it looked to have been blue originally, with a word written across the front that might have been a sports team if I could read it. I got a whiff of old cigarettes and immediately needed one myself.

"Uh, yeah. We're looking at the rocks and measuring them." It sounded stupid in my ears, but I couldn't think of anything better at that moment.

"Huh." He chewed something in his mouth a moment. "Tribe know you're here?"

Kainai Nation, he meant. Radhamani had already set up permission, initially for his student.

"Yeah." I remained standing there awkwardly for a moment, then remembered I still had my belt bag in my hands, and finished fastening it.

"Who're you working for?" the man asked.

"Uh, for U of C. Up north," I replied.

"Huh," he said again. "What's your name?"

His tone was even but the questioning felt slightly aggressive. I could imagine similar queries from a property owner or something, but this felt more like the kinds of questions I'd get when a man catches me standing alone at a bus stop. My fear rose, like it does in those situations, and with it some imaginary hackles of irritation. I held Inner Bitch back, knowing it's mostly a defense mechanism and I needed to keep the rules in my head. Be very polite. This was an Area.

"I'm Sanne," I told him. I needed to push the questions back onto him. "What's yours?"

"It's Frank."

"Hi, Frank." I raced to think of a follow-up. "So what brings you out here?"

He shrugged. "Just went for a walk. Lunch break. I work just up the road there." He pointed over his shoulder with his thumb. So far as I knew, there was nothing, just absolutely nothing, for miles around. No farms or outposts or anything. I felt a chill despite the heat.

"Well, Frank, uh... I really need a cigarette right now," I said truthfully. "You want one?"

The tension I hadn't noticed in the man visibly lessened, and his voice sounded more friendly when he replied "Sure, thanks." I swear, smoking is like the best way to get strangers to bond. I was scared to turn my back on him, but walking around backwards looks fucking weird. I think I only dared to step over to my backpack because the sensation of surfaces had come out, as it seems to do every time I'm ready to piss myself. I could keep track of his shape and general position without looking at him. I was trying not to, though. He scared me, but not more than I scared myself.

I fumbled with the cigarette pack and shook a few out, and stretched out a shaking arm towards the strange man. He selected one with grease-stained fingers, and I worked hard not to drop my lighter as I lit my own, then held it out for him. As he leaned forward, I got a faint whiff of something metallic. I tried to place it, but it vanished before I could figure out why it was familiar.

I eagerly inhaled the nicotine that always calmed my symptoms, and managed to relax a little as we both stood there enjoying a smoke in the sun. Maybe there was some kind of garage or workstation nearby that I didn't know of. Maybe this guy really just went for a walk, saw me in the distance where there are never any people, and came to see what was going on. Maybe this was all just fine.

"Say... you don't happen to have an umbrella, do you?"

I coughed in surprise. "Sorry, I breathed in spit. Did you say 'umbrella'?"

He nodded. "Yeah, for the rain that's comin'."

I did not move my head to look up into the clear blue sky. "There's rain coming?"

"Sure is. Take a look at that thunderhead peekin' outta the west there," he said, and then he turned to point at the empty sky behind him. He was only a few steps away but now he was standing almost with his back to me, and I was no longer concerned about whatever imaginary clouds he was seeing.

The back of the guy's head looked like when you smash a bowling ball into a pumpkin. A nearly-round concavity only somewhat smaller than his head itself, covered with the smooshed back of the worn baseball cap and salt-and-pepper hair matted with dried blood. The back of his neck and collar of his coverall were also covered with thick runs of brownish-red goop. The metallic smell suddenly made sense; that he was walking around and talking with most of his head gone did not.

Had I allowed my senses to reach out fully, I would have known this from the moment he walked up to me.

I stood frozen in place and clenched my cigarette in my teeth. Frank turned his head back to look at me, his neck rotating too easily and allowing him to face me while his shoulders hadn't turned enough. It wasn't quite an like owl looking backwards, but it was damn close.

"Oh, yeah, that," I stuttered. Act normal act normal act normal, I repeated to myself. Whatever this thing was, he'd been friendly so far. I need to just keep going along with this until he leaves. Please, please, please leave. I found myself wishing Marcus were there.

At that point I was also really, really regretting not having brought a real umbrella. I'm stupid, or stubborn, but I guess the fact that I didn't know why I was supposed to bring one had made me question bringing it in the first place. Also, the shop I was in while getting stuff for the trip didn't have any. Instead I'd gotten a bag of those weird fancy little cocktail umbrellas, the kind made of tiny sticks of wood that you can really open and close, with coloured plastic stretched over the tops.

"Uh, well, I might have something in my tent," I told the man with the caved-in head shakily. "It's just over there, lemme—lemme just go get it."

"Alrighty," Frank replied, his head still turned too far, but he otherwise didn't move to follow me as I walked with numb legs over to my tent. I glanced back at him as I unzipped the entrance, then reached in for the packaging. As I walked back I realised I was praying again, silent and almost mindless repetition.

The thing that called itself Frank stared hard at the small bag in my hands, and I stopped a little further away from him than when I'd offered the cigarettes. Explain this convincingly, I told myself sternly, but I only felt supressed panic.

"So, I don't actually have an umbrella. Um, because if it rains on me, I don't melt," I tried, talking a bit too fast. "Um, but if I'm caught in the rain while having a beer, I don't want rain turning it to piss. So that's what these are good for," and I opened the plastic bag and pulled out a red and orange tropically-patterned bamboo umbrella. I extended it open and twirled, keeping my eyes on it. I was too scared to look at the man in front of me, while at the same time my sense of surfaces didn't seem to be able to pay attention to anything else.

"Uh—and um, if it's hot, and I've got a cold drink, like with ice cubes, you know, this can—it can keep the sun from melting it so fast," I added, the words still coming out too quickly. "So uh, these are what I've got, and uh, you can have a bunch of them."

The midday sun was hitting my shoulders and back. Beads of sweat moved slowly down the inside of my shirt and alongside my face. The hot wind had kicked up, making some of the dry plants on the ground rustle. But everything else was quiet, and Frank just stood there looking at my ridiculous little cocktail umbrella clenched in my bleaching fingers. It jiggled, because my hands shook, and I kept expecting the figure before me to suddenly run at me in a rage or something.

We must have stood there for a full minute, and my heart rate didn't drop the whole time. Seconds inched by agonisingly. Please please please ran endlessly through my head.

Finally, he rotated his body to face me fully again, allowing me to pretend to myself that this was just a guy. He took a few steps towards me, and at that moment I looked up at him. He didn't seem angry, but then again, he didn't seem to have much of any expression on his weathered face. I held the small wooden contraption out to him, and I felt sweet relief when he reached out gently and took it.

"Keep your beer from gettin' rained on?" he asked, looking at the item in his hand.

"Yeah, I mean... who likes watery beer?" I asked, almost in a whisper.

He looked up directly into my eyes and stared a moment. I could see then that his own were greenish blue, but one of them had tiny red capillaries stretching out from the outer edge, and the inside edges of both eyes seemed to have a bit of dark stuff caked there. Is he deciding whether I'm shitting him or something? I have never wished so hard in my whole damn life to seem as convincingly sincere as I did at that moment.

He looked back down at the little umbrella, and twirled it a bit by rolling it between his fingers. "You know," he drawled, "I've never thought of that before." He looked back up at me. "Rain in my beer."

I shrugged. "I'm a geologist. We drink a lot of beer outdoors." This was true enough. We're kinda famous for it. I just never worried about rain getting into the small opening of a can or bottle. Well, that and my medical condition has really limited my ability to chug.

He finally nodded. "Not a bad idea. Not bad at all."

"Have a couple," I offered, taking a few more out. There were four colours in the bag, so I dug around to get one of each out. He took them easily, holding them together in one hand, and then smiled at me. I stiffened my core muscles against the urge to piss myself.

"Thank you kindly, miss. But ah, if you'll excuse me, I still don't wanna get caught under any thunderstorm, so I'mma get movin'."

I remembered to breathe. "Yeah, makes sense. Uh, I have to stay here and finish this. Like I said, I won't melt in the rain. I'll hunker down if it really storms." I was still hoping and praying he would really leave.

"Stay safe out here."

Safe from what, besides you? His words felt ominous, but he did leave. He turned and started walking away from me, holding one hand up in a goodbye-type gesture. There was still the horrific dent in the back of his head. I stood there shivering as I watched him disappear into the far end of the coulee. I realised too late that my cigarette had burned all the way to my lips, and I spat it out onto the ground before picking it back up again to put in my trash and toilet paper bag. With a big swig from my water bottle, I kept looking around me, fully spooked and on high alert, but I was definitely alone.

Goddamn. I'm writing this right now and my shaking hand can barely make the letters legible.

I managed to get myself back to work, while remaining jumpy, and I absolutely knew I couldn't breathe a word of what happened to Marcus. After all, he seemed already pissed at me and if I told him I had probably needlessly endangered myself by not following all his packing instructions, that would be just another black mark. I was already certain this first job with him would be my last, but I sure as hell didn't want to worsen my reputation with him.

When he got back, I did notice him sniffing the air around camp a bit more than usual, but when I simply reported how much I'd gotten done, he didn't ask anything further. He'd gotten enough food for over a week by his reckoning, and we would just see how much we got done with that time before deciding whether we needed one more food run.

Those days following my visit by the man with the caved-in head were a little easier, though. Marcus was obviously going slower for me, which made me silently curse at myself, but I guessed he had given up getting everything done as quickly as he'd planned and he was suspiciously upbeat. I reduced the amounts I ate for my meals, pushed myself, and it turned out we needed one final food run which lasted almost exactly to the edge of the formation. We had reached Badwater.

Despite the hunger, fatigue, and at times overwhelming waves of guilt and self-hate, and maybe because Marcus spent larger chunks of time as "himself" rather than human, the last week actually felt pretty fun. Sometimes I would look down at my last page of notes and measurements in my notebook and feel this sort of satisfaction: this is data collection, this is science! And when he was a man, Marcus was his weird self, still gross and sometimes scary, but often silly, the way I remembered him during my student field job. Terrible word puns and non-sequitur observations. And so many stupid, obscure facts! Everything seems to interest him.

Sometimes I found myself imagining I was one of those explorers from back before the horse flu, writing down scientific observations to bring back to civilisation while my trusty animal companion wandered off to find more things to inspect, measure, and record. A wild animal that actually had its own agenda and might, should we run too low on food, decide to devour me, but I found myself worrying less and less about that.

I was still in a bit of a daze at that point, not having entirely mentally digested all the strange stuff I had seen since we got out there. And I kept arguing with myself that experiencing weird shit was one of the reasons I'd wanted to visit a Desolate Area in the first place. Hadn't I gotten what I'd asked for, even though it was a lot more terrifying than I'd expected?

Wasn't I just one of those timid, quivering masses of cowardice who watched a horror film to get a bit scared as entertainment? It was fine. The last thing I had to get through was the ride back, I thought. But as it turned out, well, no.

---

I was unfortunately not unconscious as Marcus punished his mechanical monstrosity along the cracked and deserted two-lane highway back to the inhabited world. We had drifted from July into August during fieldwork and it was mid morning. The car was heavier at this point than when we had entered 50 Mile, due to the canvas bags filled with rocks laying underneath all the measuring equipment and stuff in the back, but Marcus still tried to go fast enough for liftoff. I kept my eyes shut and fruitlessly practiced meditation.

There had only been one tin of mackerel and a single individually-wrapped granny's butter tart left that morning. I'd told Marcus he could have them, determined to make it home that day through sheer force of will and knowing I'd much rather have a less-hungry Marcus driving us back. He'd looked at me a little too long, until the hair on the back of my neck stood up, but then inhaled the fish and butter tart in nearly a single swallow. Together. I had also noticed that morning that the compost bag was empty. You bring your fruit peels and coffee grounds and things back with you when practicing 'leave no trace' camping, so I guess he'd already had a sort of breakfast. Yuck. After more than two weeks of disgusting behaviour, I should have expected it.

Of course, that tiny crumb of food wasn't enough to let him drive past a dusty diner, nestled against a former garage that had clearly seen better days, once we were back out of the 50 Mile Desolation. Without slowing nearly enough, he careened the car into the gravel parking lot, sliding past a set of outdated gas pumps and coming to a halt at the edge of a sparsely-filled parking area with a cloud of dust following us fit for a magician's dramatic stage entrance.

The silence almost hurt my head after forty or so minutes of wind blasting from Marcus' open window and the engine roar blowing my ears to bits, making me blink. When I turned, he was rolling his window up with too much speed.

"Lunch!" he announced like a eureka moment, then was out of the car and already walking towards the buildings while I was still fumbling with my seat belt. I ran to catch up, noticing my vision fuzzing at the edges and I was quickly out of breath. My blood sugar level was definitely not keeping up like it should. Stopping for food got no argument from me.

The outside looked like a paper box made of horizontal strips of painted but weathered wood above and below a single row of tall aluminum-framed windows, interrupted only by a pair of metal double doors and wrapping around to either side of the building. Walking in, the place reminded me of the old-fashioned style roadside diners of decades ago. All along the edges, against the tall windows were wide booths, while the centre of the room had a wide U-shaped countertop-table with bar stools surrounding the server area. Most of the booths and the stools seemed pretty old, covered with a sort of dark red vinyl. In the back I could glimpse bits of the stainless steel kitchen, and both the sounds of metal spatulas slapping the cooktop and the smells of grease, salt and coffee made delicious promises to us.

There was just one guy hunched over a plate at the counter, wearing a yellow and black flannel shirt topped with a trucker hat, and only a few of the booths had people in them. A heavyset older woman wearing a polo shirt and traffic-ready magenta lipstick on her indigenous face crossed the floor carrying a notepad and a pot of coffee that grabbed my eye and made me ache for caffeine. Lunch rush, or whatever the rural version of lunch rush was, hadn't started yet. Marcus glanced back at me before heading for a booth against the right side of the building, near the door in the back which led to the washrooms. I followed and sank clumsily into the seat across from him, noticing the shaking of my hands. I hoped it was just low blood sugar and not an emerging symptom.

I blinked at the paper placemat, waiting for my vision to improve, staring at the ads for local businesses hailing from Many Persons, Dogberries and One Eight. Towns around there have some interesting names. I could almost feel Marcus' heavy gaze pressing down on me from across the table, but thankfully he stayed silent until the waitress appeared, equipped with a never-empty pot of life-giving coffee and ready to take our ridiculously large orders—with only a few items repeated back to us in the tone of a question. Did we really want two breakfasts and a lunch... each? Maybe she thought more people would join us later, but I didn't care. Nobody here knew me.

After ordering, I headed to the washroom to scrape off the grime of the previous two weeks from my face and hands, and to pull myself together mentally. Yes, yes, I clean my face and hands every day in the field, but it's still not the same as regular soap and running water. The washroom was brightly lit, tiled mostly in white and it was clean, but also obviously a few decades old. There were two sinks and four stalls, entirely empty. After scrubbing my face, I dared to look up at myself in the mirror above the sinks. My shoulder-length black hair was coming out of its ragged ponytail. A little thin in the cheeks, but it seemed my eyes hadn't gotten any lighter in colour. Good enough. Satisfied, I dried my face with paper towels, pulled my hair back into a neater ponytail and returned to my seat. Marcus, of course, didn't seem to feel the need to wash the great outdoors off himself before feeding.

I wondered what the waitress thought of us. She had the bland friendly poker face of a professional, but she must have seen two filthy, mud-covered, slightly emaciated people savagely inhaling food like wild animals rather than two scientists on a work trip. I had fallen into a small wet ditch at one point so my long shorts and oversized hoodie were literally brown with dried mud, and I was wearing my usual worn sandals, looking like one of those kids on the news who throw rocks in dusty, unpaved countries.

Marcus looked like a bespectacled bum, or something that lives under a bridge, although strangely he didn't have a huge wildman beard despite never shaving. At best it had become longer, shaggier stubble. And while he was wearing a collar shirt as usual, the ends of his sleeves and the hem were discoloured from using them to wipe things: his hand lens as well as his glasses, the insides of his car windows, the dust from rocks. He wiped his hands on the front of his pants a lot too, so those were covered in a variety of stains.

When the food started coming in, I was so gutfoundered I almost kept up with him at first, but while I have no idea where he puts it all, I'm small and eventually needed to slow down and take my time with my meals. Still, we each went through two plates of pancakes, toast with butter and jelly, hash browns, farmer's omelettes, possum sausages and these butter biscuits that seemed to nearly melt in my mouth.

At some point I finally started getting full, or at least less empty, and leaned onto my elbows to pause with what was probably my fifth mug of coffee, feeling the caffeine wash away the jitters just as the food had filled the ever-gnawing hole in my middle. Marcus chose this moment to wipe his mouth with his sleeve and speak with his strange excitedly-talking-to-children voice.

"Well! Was this a success?"

I looked up at him. I had been expecting, and dreading, a question like this. I started shaking my head, and felt small in the large booth seat. The guilt I'd been holding down during most of the trip came back like vomit in an unpleasant upwelling, and I shrank down into my coffee cup.

But my words were up-front and honest. Slimey scuzzbuckets who pave over their failures with pretty bullshit excuses shouldn't be doing science, in my opinion. I had been slow, I admitted right away. Told him how I'd eaten too much, how I had retarded our mapping rate and noticed his deliberately reduced speed after coming back from Ponokiokwe. How my screwing up of his numbering system caused me to waste a whole evening re-labelling everything, about all the little rules I kept forgetting, and my inability to hike quickly between sites. Especially in the beginning, I'd needed to almost run to keep pace with Marcus simply walking.

I said all this to him, or really to my cup of coffee, and made sure he knew I was very sorry for making this quick sampling trip more of a cost and ordeal than it normally would have been, and that I understood if I hadn't made a particularly good impression on him. That I understood that fieldwork may not be my strong point like I'd thought. I think at that point I may have drifted off into a mutter or something, when I felt the light shift.

Marcus was suddenly looming over the table, staring at me with wide black eyes, his head not far from mine, and holding an index finger against his lips while his other hand was held flat out towards me. Stop! Talking!

I jerked back in surprise, my head even lightly hitting the booth's worn back support. We stared at each other like that without a word for a moment. Finally, he glanced around and eased back into his seat, but kept one hand extended over the table while he adjusted his glasses with the other, as if his hand was physically stopping me from speaking, and his eyes remained intense. I took a quick glance around as well, but nobody in the nearly-empty room seemed to be aware of us.

"Sanne de Winter," he said finally.

"Mm-hm."

"Thought your problem would be with... the Area." He glanced out the window, then back at me. "Or with me. But it's... yourself?" He started shaking his head. "I miscalculated. I had forgotten." He wriggled his fingers in frantic air-piano, and made a few Common signs—Outside alone I quick—and sputtered a word. "But!" His eyes flickered back and forth in a bit of frustration as he looked for words. "With teams... with human people..." he closed his eyes.

"Take your time," I told him.

He looked up at me and sighed, but nodded. He sat there a moment, and I continued going through the rest of my plates except for a last, delicate butter biscuit. I tucked that into my hoodie's kangaroo pocket, the inside of which wasn't mud-covered like the outside. The days were hot but the mornings were cold, and in my half-fed state I'd started keeping my hoodie on over my t-shirts in the mornings and only taking it off when the sun and the temperature rose sufficiently.

"Alright," Marcus started again after a moment. "I need to explain this. I was confusing my speed alone... with how I work with others. Yes? When I am with a group," pause, "I am usually... hungry. And exhausted. Keeping up appearances, yes? It slows me down." He pointed a single thin, pale finger at me. "You are not slow. Not... slower than colleagues. Or students." He gulped a few swallows of his coffee. "I was myself. I was too quick. And I forgot." He shook his head at me and switched back to Common. Please don't quit.

I stared at him. So he was used to being slowed down in the field when working with people... because he spent so much energy hiding his appetite and what he was—something he didn't have to do around me? I wondered briefly if he was just saying this to cheer me up, but decided it was the truth. His words were even more disjointed than usual, in his haste to convince me.

He leaned forward over the table. "And next time. Eat more!" he added, then leaned back. "After all, we must deal with a lot of apatite." At this he showed his teeth, I suppose to emphasise the bad geology joke. Enamel is made of apatite.

Next time? Did he really mean he would want to have me in the field again? "Is this bullshit, or are you being straight with me?"

"I was mistaken," he insisted, looking at me. "After I came back. I adjusted." He stuffed a piece of toast into his mouth. "I thought the job went well," he said, talking through a full mouth. Gross. "Only missed one thing." He swallowed. "Unusual things."

He thought we'd been in the 50 Mile Desolation for about two weeks and hadn't run into anything weird. The lead weight of guilt that had been sitting in me had floated away like smoke upon hearing that I had read the whole situation wrong, and I think this is why I changed my mind about mentioning the creepy visitor.

"Actually, about that..." I looked down at my last plate, and took in a big breath. "Someone came to our camp while you were getting supplies."

Marcus' fuzzy eyebrows rose a bit in surprise, and his head did a very small predator-bird tilt. "I smelled blood," he said quietly, "and fear. But you... seemed fine. Said nothing."

"A guy showed up asking for an umbrella, and Marcus, his head was half gone. Like, literally not there. Gone." I was watching his face for signs of disbelief, but there was only attention. "How does that even work?" I continued. "Can Areas make people still function without most of their brain or something?"

"Did you... give him what he asked?" was all he said.

"Um."

He became very still at my non-answer. I shifted in my seat.

"Uh, I gave him a couple of cocktail umbrellas. Told him they'd keep rain out of his beer."

No movement from across the table. I'm not sure if he was even breathing.

"They were accepted?" he finally asked.

"Yeah," I nodded, and took a big bite of greasy hash brown. The waitress came by at that point to take away some empty plates and refill our coffees for like the sixth time. I mentally gave her points for not only making no comments about the amount of food we were consuming, but even her expression remained nothing but polite. Like we were the most normal customers she'd ever seen.

When she left, I leaned forward a bit. "I couldn't find an umbrella, so I brought those cocktail umbrellas. You didn't say what it was for." I noticed his eyes widened a bit at that. I lowered my voice a bit, even though there was nobody near enough to overhear us. "But how the hell does someone walk around without most of their head, Marcus?"

I've got a feeling, with not a whole lot to base it on, that Marcus doesn't just look old. I think he is old, I mean really old. When I asked my question, I think I was hoping for some kind of wise answer from an ancient creature.

"I have no idea!" he said, sounding thrilled, and took a gulp of coffee. Maybe he saw the disappointment on my face though, and continued. "I have pet theories. We all do," he added with a wave of his hand, referring I guess to the other Areas researchers. "I think events don't stay in order... in Areas."

"Events don't stay in order? What does that mean?"

He shrugged. "Normally. One thing happens. Then another thing follows. And so on." He waved first one hand, then the other, like two fish following each other. "I think, out there... another thing happens. Then maybe one thing. Or not." His hands did fish-swimming in random directions. He froze, and looked at me with a little too much intensity, before suddenly putting his hands down and leaning forward. As usual, this kind of unexpected instant change freaked me out.

"That was dangerous. Not having what was asked." He peered over his glasses at me. "It was... assessing you."

"Assessing me? What, the guy?"

He looked away and nodded slowly. "Or... the Area itself, perhaps."

"Uh... assessing me for what, exactly?" I asked, thinking of Frank's last words to me.

Marcus waved his hand a bit in the air. "That you... hm. Understand your precarious position. We're tolerated. But..." He held up a finger. "You did well. Very well." He was nodding now, mostly to himself. "A creative solution. Noticed in general, you improvised several times... in the field. Improvisation is a necessary skill. And!" Suddenly his serious voice went back to childlike excitement, "you did use your, hm. Sense thing."

"What do you mean?" I asked carefully.

He responded with lots of teeth. "My car. You call it," pause and air-piano, "a disaster. My things are all over, yes?"

What a gross understatement. Like his gross car. I rolled my eyes. "Oooooh yeah."

He tilted his chin. "Yet every item I asked. You went right to it. Never once... asked where something was."

"Oh! Oh, oh." I started shaking my head. He was confusing things. "That's different. That's a whole different thing." I tried to explain how finding things where I expect them is something I've done for as long as I could remember and felt like lucky guesses, while the sensation of surfaces thing was one of the symptoms that appeared right before I turned twenty years old. And that I usually tried to hold the latter back, because sometimes I swear I can feel it changing my brain somehow. But I also admitted that I hadn't succeeded at supressing it very well, since every time I got scared, there it was anyway. That last bit of information made his eyebrows go up in amusement.

"So..." Marcus cupped each hand and bounced the fingertips of his hands against each other, thinking. "When Westies... search for an item..." he frowned at his now-empty plate before looking back at me. "They only use this. Surfaces thing?"

I shrugged. "I don't know."

He sat back with a look of realisation, blinking. "You've never met one."

I shook my head. "If I had, would I be here?"

"And how is that? That you are here. Not in Civil Service." He suddenly looked like an animal about to pounce, so intense was his black-eyed stare. Another sudden switch that raised the hair on the back of my neck.

Jesus, I don't know what his problem is. I still think he does it to fuck with me, 'cause I've never heard of grad students complaining about him.

So I was careful in explaning that people with Weston's usually showed their symptoms even before starting school. You could miss a physically over-active four-year-old, but if they get brought into a room and can tell the nice lady what's on the other side of a thin but high wall of carton on a desk, especially if it's a treat they get to have if they describe it correctly, then you've got reason for a full investigation of the kid and rest of the family too, replete with blood and urine tests, eye examinations, and carefully watching bodily movements as parents and siblings sit in what they think is a waiting room, with what seems to be just a cheap restaurant-style mirror on the far wall.

Something had prevented that from developing in me. I had no jitters, and kept guessing there was a puppy or french fries during the school-admission tests. I do remember thinking I wished I got the answer right, because I really wanted the treat. My family was a very human, slightly disfunctional, lower-class collection of nightly screaming matches packed into a rotting hallway on wheels. When things suddenly changed for me, after I was living far off in another province for school, I couldn't figure out how that could be so. But Bob had told me that people can have Weston's from some random individual mutations, even if most of the time it's inherited.

After a moment, Marcus nodded, but had a bit of a far-off look to him. I'm not sure I wanted to know what he was thinking. Then he folded his hands, elbows resting on the table.

"Well! Was this a success?" He said it exactly the same as before, with the same tone, as if hadn't asked it just a few moments earlier. And he waited.

Now that I could look back at the last two weeks in a different light, I found myself nodding after mentally going through most of the events that had taken place. When I hadn't been busy thinking I had failed, I had been enjoying myself. I like being outdoors, I like spending time far away from all my daily-life problems and worries, and I enjoy that feeling of lifting up Earth's skirts to find story pages telling me whispers of the past. You're supposed to strictly separate data collection from storytelling, but I'm sure I'm not the only person who doesn't see some bits of The Book out there, the great history of it all. It's easy to get things wrong, of course. Sometimes geology is like trying to learn about barley by studying beer.

"You know, I think it was. And maybe... maybe I overthink things too much."

"Are you sure?"

It was a moment before I recognised it was one of those Marcus jokes. "Har har," I muttered.

Despite a lack of expression on his face, he seemed relieved. Then he sank back, just a little, and turned his head very slightly. "You did not seem to mind me. Too much." It sounded almost shy, and I had the feeling it was also a question.

It took me a moment to realise what he meant. "Eh, I guess you're okay, for a gross scary giant scorpisectipede."

"Whatever faults I have are normal and stress-related," he replied without missing a beat, index finger upraised in correction.

"Ug, please, no more horrible geology jokes," I groaned, and stood up. We were finished with all the food.

"But they're so gneiss!" He deliberately mispronounced "gneiss" to force another joke into the air. It sounded very Old World that way. Smartass monster.

I gave him my meanest glare, and held up my sticky hands. "I need to wash this off, then I'm ready to get home."

He nodded once, curtly.

"Uh, wait. Do I give you money for this, or...?" I asked.

"Nope. Jitendra Radhamani pays. Just need a receipt." He stood as well. "See you at the car."

As I walked to the washroom, I was grossed out by the realisation that not only hadn't Marcus washed his hands before we ate, he also didn't when we were done. I figured he was probably licking them clean, and swallowed bile at the thought. I was grateful at least that during those two weeks I hadn't smelled more than the faintest of whiffs of him or body odour, even though at times we worked side by side with little wind. If anything, he smelled a bit like dirt. I had noticed throughout the mapping that he avoided ever bumping into me, and thinking back, I was certain I'd never seen him touch another person in any way at all. It was as if he thought humans were the disgusting species. I'm still wondering if he ever washes, or maybe he does that grooming thing animals do instead where they chew off accumulated dirt and eat it.

The bright lights of the washroom helped me dump those thoughts on the floor and I quickly allowed the coffee to exit me and cleaned up. I can't imagine I was in there more than a few minutes, and I didn't notice anything different about the washroom as I exited.

But the diner had changed. Mostly, it was darker, had a stale smell, and there was some orange light coming in from the windows on the far side as if the sun were going down. I stood there as the washroom door clapped shut behind me, blinking in confusion. Almost more than the sudden dimness, what hit me was the absolute silence.

No kitchen noises, no muted conversation from the few people who'd been inside. It's closed, I remember thinking. I must have had a blackout somehow or something and now the restaurant is closed. But why would it be closed in the evening?

...Blacked out?

After a moment I also realised the diner was dark for a few reasons. Not only were the lights off and the sunlight coming in was low and orange, but light wasn't even making it through all windows. A few were boarded up.

Taking another step forward, I glanced to my left, at the table we had just been sitting at. The paper placeholders looked as if the waitress had taken away our plates but not cleaned the table or replaced them. I could see my coffee rings.

But the table looked... older. As if I, or someone, had made those coffee rings months or years ago. The red material of the booths was also notably older, with rips and the plastic fake-leather had spots where the red was lighter, less deep.

I walked further in and saw many, maybe most, of the windows on the front of the diner were boarded up. There were sheets of wood or plywood also covering the windows of the double doors. I was shaking my head at the impossibility of that being set up in the few minutes that I had been in the washroom. I turned to look at the washroom door behind me, seeing light still peeking around the edges. Frowning, I walked back and opened it, which revealed the room as exactly as I'd left it: bright lights on, white tiles. So, I thought, the electricity hasn't been turned off.

I started walking back into the diner, with I guess the idea of seeing if I could still walk out through the front doors, when I noticed the guy sitting at the bar was still there. Still a yellow and black flannel, still hunched over the countertop, trucker hat perched on his head. I squinted my eyes at him, and carefully approached.

There was no movement as I came closer. He wasn't moving his fork, not chewing. I was leaning towards him, trying to see his details in the orange glow coming from the windows on the other side of him, the west side of the room, when I froze. I hadn't noticed the feeling of surfaces spreading out from my head, but now I was very aware of it, because I'd felt, without meaning to, that it wasn't just a man sitting very still. His insides were also still. No heart moving, no swallowing, no breathing. Nothing. Absolute stillness. I almost lost my balance, tipped towards him, and caught myself by grabbing the counter, noticing my hand leaving a dust print. I could suddenly see his face very well, pointed down at an empty, dirty plate.

It looked like a mummy's. The skin was dried and stretched across his cheekbones, shrunk up his nasal bridge, making the nostrils almost face upwards. The lips had pulled back as they dried, showing nubby dark teeth along with a few yellowed ones and some silver ones. Indian corn, my stupid brain said. The worst were the eyes, sunken into the sockets and milky, what little could be seen within the collapsed eyelids, which had also sunken in.

I pushed myself away in a panicked explosive thrust of my hand against the counter and took a few stumbling steps backwards, not breathing and trying not to make any noise, trying not to alert the thing sitting on the stool of my presence, even though if it were alive it couldn't have missed me.

I stood a moment staring at the dead man whose body was clearly cramped into place, holding itself upright on the stool and leaning on its elbows onto the bar top, and my feeling of surfaces frantically poked outwards in all directions, noticing the booth in the west corner and its occupants. I glanced at them, but they were silhouetted against the strong dusk sunlight, three figures against the west windows. They were also impossibly still, somehow sitting upright but certainly dead.

Everyone in here is dead.

I jumped for the front doors, which were two sets of doors to keep heat or air conditioning in, trying to make no noise at all. I couldn't hear if I was successful because my heart was pounding in my ears, obscuring any faint sounds which could be eminating from any of the bodies. The inside doors didn't need to be touched, since one of them was already propped open, but I saw to my dismay and rising fear that the outer doors were not simply shut and their windows covered with variously-shaped plywood bits, but the windows were gone and a heavy iron chain was wrapped several times around the metal frames of the doors where they met in the middle. With a huge-ass padlock.

I looked at where the plywood was against the windows, or where the windows used to be. I tried pressing against several parts of the plywood sheets, but they were all pretty solidly attached. While my heartrate had gone up when I realised the man at the bar was a mummy or that I was in a closed-up restaurant filled with bodies, that solid unmoving plywood and the thick chain really set off my panic mode, my breathing getting faster and starting to make a bit of noise, which I tried to squench by holding my mouth more open. I didn't care if I was inhaling particles of rotten human bodies at that moment.

Mentally I was swearing up and down at whoever the motherfucking asshat was who had done all this work to lock me into a building full of dead bodies. Of course I get angry when I'm scared, and at that moment I hoped it could keep me from falling apart.

How to get out? My brain raced through possibilities, the first one being that there was usually a side or back entrance in these kinds of places. Not from the side where I'd stepped out of the washrooms, but likely on the other side... past the bodies sitting in the southwest corner.

No, not likely; I realised I knew it, and followed with my feeling of the surfaces of the room, pressing that sense lightly against the inside wall and moving it towards, yes, a door. I couldn't see it from where I stood, having stepped back into the room from the small airlock area between the outer and inner main entrance doors, but I could feel that there was a large window, not plywood, in the single door on the side, and at least no huge chains.

It might not be locked.

Please don't be locked. It can't be locked. Can't be.

I started walking on fuzzy legs towards the deepening orange light, past the body sitting at the bar, forcing myself to focus on this possible exit. I tried to walk lightly, to make no noise. I'm not even really sure why—so far as I could tell, I was the only living thing in this building. I didn't care what was outdoors, I just wanted out before the sun set.

That was important; the sun was going down. I did not want to be inside a pitch black diner filled with dead people. As I neared the corner booth with the three bodies, I dared a quick glance and saw more mummy faces, staring lifelessly forward, or maybe at each other since one body was sitting right across the two against the window. Like they were having a conversation, enjoying their dead-people apple pies or whatever. How's the weather in your part of the afterlife, Joe? Oh, you know, pretty calm, pretty calm. Can't complain. You?

I hurried past them, to the left side of the big U making the diner layout.

The sun is setting the sun is setting the sun is setting the sun! the sun! the sun!

I forced my stupid brain to quit panic-whinging and focused on getting to the door. That's when I felt—it was a sort of thump. "Thump" is the wrong word, but it's what I first thought at the time. But also... subsidence. It was more like the whole of everything behind me sorta sank, just a few centimeters. Like when an area of land suddenly sinks during earthquakes, a literal drop of the crust as plates slip. This caused the surfaces-feeling part of my brain to scan around, which is a bit like dragging a finger across something to feel the texture... except it's not. It's so hard to explain, feeling things with ends of attention that aren't fingers.

Everything behind me was the same. Nothing was moving. But I felt more unease on top of my low-grade panic. Something was different. What? What was different...?

The heads. The body at the bar, the three in the corner booth... their bodies were still exactly as they were, but now their heads were turned. I could feel the wavey edges of their sunken, wrinkled husks of faces, and they were all closer to me than the hair-covered backs of their heads.

I could see the door on my left, and the light of dusk which was no longer sunlight coming through it, and for some reason turned to look back. To verify with my eyes what my sense of surfaces told me, something I don't recall ever doing before.

Three heads on dead bodies were facing the back of the diner. Facing me. I hadn't felt them move, hadn't felt them actually turn. Just the strange sense of a drop in the room and then the heads were rotated. One of the two sitting against the window was a woman, with dried white hair still wavey down her back and shoulder, her lips stretched into a dried grimace, two cornrows of teeth.

I almost fell from the shudder that went through me, and I imagined myself tripping and ending up on the floor while mummified zombies ran at me. I didn't fall, I didn't get mobbed by zombies, but I knew if this door was locked then I was going to scream.

I grabbed the large handle sticking out. It was a metal handle, not a round doorknob, the kind you push down to move the latch. I felt relief as it moved down easily, but then freaked when the door didn't budge as I pushed it. Wait, was it a push door or a pull door? Pull door—not moving—shit shit shit—

A round thing below the handle had a ridge for grasping, below the keylock. A deadbolt? I tried turning it, and nearly melted with relief when it turned. I heard the bolt slide back into the door, and now it opened. I practically leapt out, and thought I felt another "thump" behind me.

Outside now, with the freshness of the air reminding me of the dead staleness I'd been breathing, I rabbited out in an almost blind panic. There was only the need to put as much distance as possible between me and still-yet-moving dead people inside a boarded-up diner that somehow just minutes before had served me lunch.

I found myself approaching a shape, dark against the lighter-coloured gravel of the parking lot, which resolved into the car. Marcus' mechanical experiment on wheels! Sweet sweet car! I did not slow down as I plowed into the passenger door, and frantically yanked the door handle up and down, with nothing happening. It took me a while to realise it was locked. I had slid the little lever thing in before closing the door when we went inside earlier.

I whirled around, putting my back against the car and gasping for breath, and squinted at the diner. It was still covered in the reddening light of the sun, and I expected to see the bodies in pursuit outdoors, perhaps frozen in place because I was looking at them.

Nothing there.

My sense of surfaces told me otherwise. Something was moving, coming out from behind the diner. And... something else, something huge was moving inside the diner. Something I couldn't recognise, and it was impossibly immense inside that tiny building.

The figure running from behind the diner was a familiar rail of a man, running like someone on video which was sped up slightly, and I remained flattened against the car as Marcus wordlessly ran to within arm's length before abruptly stopping. It was freaky to see someone at a full sprint stop so suddenly without much slowing down beforehand. He was breathing hard, panting, and still hadn't said anything, not even my name. I leaned back as he leaned forward, taking in deep breaths. Smelling me.

"Sanne de Winter!" he said after a few sniffs. "Sanne de Winter." He sounded as if he hadn't been sure at first.

I was still getting my breath back, my mind half-focused on whatever was moving around inside the diner that I couldn't recognise. I was almost too far away to get any details. Things become vague and uncertain near the edge of this strange sense I have.

Marcus stepped back, one hand at his temple and the other on his waist, as if relieved. He began signing agitatedly. Walked out. Parking lot empty. Turned and saw... and he waved at the diner behind him breathlessly. "You weren't there." You weren't there!

"I was!" I insisted hoarsely. "I was in the washroom for a minute, but when I came out everything was dark and empty!"

"You weren't there. I could not get back in," he repeated, sounding afraid. Lost. And the idea that something like Marcus would feel fear about anything made me even more frightened. "I waited. All afternoon."

"Afternoon?!" I asked incredulously. "It was just a few minutes!"

He shook his head in disagreement, and then there was a sudden rumble under our feet like a tiny aftershock, and a low powerful drone from the diner. We both stared at it, the last of the sunlight only reaching the very top of its walls.

Marcus pointed at the car, and placing one hand on the trunk, leapt over the back to the other side in a gymnastic feat. "In, now!"

"It's locked!"

Muttering something that sounded like "shy-zah," he didn't pause but unlocked his door and slid in, and within a second he had reached over and pulled back the door lock as I waited in terror with my shaking hands ready to yank the handle. I threw the door open and jumped in. Marcus was already belted in and starting the car, his uncanny speed appreciated at that moment. I was still pulling my seat belt on as we tore out of the gravel lot, which indeed was completely deserted save one pickup that seemed to have lost a wheel long ago. For once I had absolutely zero qualms about Marcus' unsafe driving style. The sooner we were far away from the dilapidated nightmare, the better.

After some amount of time—I'm not sure how long—of following reflective lines painted on the asphalt which disappeared beyond the edges of the headlights, I started feeling sick. Really nauseous. My guts were very unhappy and I felt fresh sweat break out on my skin.

"Pull over," I said to Marcus. He didn't seem to hear me, staring straight out at the road without blinking as he had been since we'd escaped the diner. "Pull over!" I yelled over the engine noise.

He glanced at me, must've seen my face in the dash lights, and a moment later braked rather abruptly as he manoeuvred to the gritty shoulder of the paved road. Even before the car was still, I had my belt off and was opening the door. I just made it a few steps out before I started puking everywhere. It was dark out, the stars had appeared, but the scrubby plants were darker against the lighter-coloured ground, and my sense of surfaces was still in force. I puked between the plants, and in between puking I stayed on my hands and knees because I didn't think I had the strength to get up. I heard and felt Marcus turn the car off and walk up behind me, but he kept his distance.

After several shakey minutes, I seemed to feel better, and kept spitting the sour acid taste out of my mouth, and another flavour I've never puked up before: rot. It was as if I had eaten rotting garbage and it had all come back up. I took my time to stand up carefully.

Marcus was suddenly there, with a cloth and my small water canteen. I took them both gratefully, being careful that drinking didn't trigger more puking. After a while I nodded, muttered that I felt better, and shuffled back to the car. He followed.

We both sat in the car, silent now that the engine was off, and didn't say anything for several minutes. But I knew we had to talk.

"Okay... What the hell just happened?"

"Oh. You were sick. In the bushes."

"Dude, I know. Before that."

"We lived. And you are here." The way he said the last part, it was as if there was more significance to it than the words conveyed.

"Uh, yes, I am here. What the fuck happened back there?"

He shook his head in the dark. "I am not certain, but... I think..." I heard him drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. "Think the border has moved. Since it was last mapped."

"Moved? The border moved? What, right when we were eating?" I asked.

"Nope. Earlier."

"The place looked totally normal when we sat in there. Those people were all alive. When I came out of the washroom, they were dead. It was full of dead people, Marcus!"

He breathed out heavily through his nose. "The border extended, but we came from the inside. We... we entered the... before-state. Of the diner."

"The what state?"

He turned his head to look at me, and I wondered if he could see my face in the dark.

"The before-state. How the diner was," pause, "before the border... moved."

"You mean, if we had been driving towards 50 Mile, we would have seen it already boarded up and abandoned?"

"Yep. I believe." He shifted in his seat. "Need to," pause and drumming fingers on the steering wheel, "inform the province. Provincial outpost."

"Jesus." I thought a moment, and made a face nobody could see as I tasted the gross rotting flavour in my mouth again. I gagged and sucked more water down. "So... so this means we broke a rule. We ate inside an Area."

"Yep."

I glared at him in the dark. "So everything I ate, was it rotten? Did it turn to shit inside me when I stepped into the—the, whatever it was, current diner?"

"Perhaps," he replied. He sounded like he was thinking along with me, rather than telling me things he knew for sure.

"Then why aren't you spewing lekfast-brunch all over out there?"

"Ah. Hm." He patted his belly. "Suspect my microbiome... remains while I'm shifted."

So that's how he doesn't die eating all that literal garbage, I thought, but didn't say. What the hell are Surgeons? Carnivores, omnivores... detrivores? Crapivores. My thoughts returned to the bodies, and the whatever that was inside the diner as we left.

"Marcus. There were dead people inside the diner."

He didn't say anything.

"Does that mean they were... those people were inside the diner when the border moved? Were... were they killed by 50 Mile?"

He shrugged in the dark. "Don't know." He sighed. "Couldn't get back inside. You weren't there... something was. But not you."

"Yeah what was that thing? When I was in the diner, nothing was alive but me. Once I got out, there was something huge stumbling around in there. Some kind of Area monster?"

He only shook his head with raised shoulders in silence. He didn't know. "You weren't there," he repeated morosely.

"Fucking Christ, yes I was!" I hissed at him.

"I went to the doors. Banged against them. They were locked. Listened. Heard only the... thing. I waited. Hoped you would... somehow—"

"You didn't shift."

"Nope. In case we needed to drive. Escape. As we did."

I thought about it, of how it might have gone, had he been himself and managed to get inside the diner. Maybe he would have ended up in that missing time between noticing the diner had changed and before I emerged from the washroom. Maybe he would have encountered whatever the large thing was that moved, but not found me. I would have eventually gotten outdoors, and the car would have been locked and there'd be no Marcus. Maybe I would have walked away from the place, sick and hungry, still unknowingly stuck inside the 50 Mile Desolation, staggering along a highway with no traffic all night. Maybe trapped there in some kind of time loop, walking until I collapsed. Or eaten by something.

I took another sip of water, and felt sick and shivery. The water bottle felt incredibly heavy. Adrenaline drop, I thought. The idea of all the food I'd eaten turning to rotten mush inside me made me want to puke again, but I also realised that the net effect was not having eaten all day, and had raced around at top speed while doused with energy-stealing fight-or-flight chemicals.

"I need to eat," I groaned. "Something that won't turn into death inside me."

"Indeed," Marcus said energetically and brought the strange motor back to life. We returned to the highway and while he was still driving fast, it had neither the manic quality of our flight from the diner nor the enthusiasm of our earlier ride towards 50 Mile.

I hadn't realised I'd fallen asleep until something was poking me hard. Groggy anger went through me until I realised it was the butt end of a plastic bottle, becoming awake enough to remember I was in the car as I saw the headlights shining against a wall in front of us. The cabin was filled with the smell of hot fast food. We were back in the civilised world.

I looked down at the bottle, being offered by Marcus, and saw it was one of those new sodas, the ones that taste terrible and claim to keep you awake through anything. After I took it, he promptly dumped a paper bag onto my lap. Food.

He was already eating and I almost mindlessly unwrapped whatever was in the bag and ate like I did when I got back from my master's project, taking only time to chug the horrible sugary un-cola with the sour brewer's yeast flavour that the teens these days seemed to love so much. And when we were done, we both just sat there in a haze of rising blood glucose.

The engine was off, but the electronics were on, including the parking lights. Marcus had turned the headlights off as we'd started eating. We were parked behind what looked like a truck stop or gas station shop. I suddenly thought about how my mom used to call them "highway deps" for some reason.

"I am sorry," he broke the digestive silence.

"What?"

He didn't reply right away, staring ahead through the windshield. "I will take you home."

"Okay." I felt so tired. Mentally, physically, emotionally. I set the bottle onto my side of the footwell and stuck my hands into my kangaroo pocket, and felt something. I pulled out the butter biscuit I'd put in there during lunch, and sniffed it. It looked and smelled... normal.

"What the hell..." I muttered. I heard an intake of air through a nose next to me, a sniff.

"Is that from lunch?"

"Yeah," I said, confused. "Why is it still okay?"

"Don't know. Don't trust it." He meant he didn't trust it.

I put it into the food bag which had become the trash bag and we dumped everything into bins sitting outdoors.

But back inside, Marcus sat again with drumming hands on the steering wheel and stared forward. Like he was trying to decide something. I belted in and waited.

After what felt like several minutes, he spoke. "Can I tell you a story?"

"Uh... what kind of story?" I asked suspiciously.

"A true one. But metaphorical."

"And you want to do this now?"

He continued to stare out at nothing through the windshield, then nodded as if more to himself than to me. "Now. Or before we part ways."

Having any kind of discussion while driving was out of the question due to the space shuttle liftoff noise of the engine.

"Fine," I said cautiously, and with some trepidation. I couldn't imagine why the hell Marcus suddenly needed storytime in the car. I felt like I had just cheated death; did I need to hear something weird right now? But it seemed important to him, and I was caffeinated, so I let him do his thing.

He took in a big breath. "Long ago, when I was very young and very stupid, I fell into a large cave. As large as the biggest sports stadium you can think of, just as tall, and completely without light. I fell inside, or perhaps walked in there myself, proudly parading about in my ignorance, and discovered I needed to find a particular object.

"I was not certain what this object was, but I thought I would know it when I found it. And in those early decades, I did not realise I was in fact trapped within this cave unless I found it. I was excited. I felt like an explorer, being somewhere I should not, a forbidden place. And oh, the floor of this cave is filled with wonders—think of what is left behind by tsunami."

Dead things from the bottom of the sea, my brain coughed up. Such a dark thought was probably a result of the what had just happened at the diner. Still, I knew what he meant. Tsunami bring up all kinds of stuff, not just the bodies of fantastical benthic creatures, but all sorts of sediments and, recently, lots of human trash. Yeah, I could definitely see Marcus happily sifting through a bunch of trash on a beach somewhere. He continued, inadvertently confirming my thoughts.

"So many amazing constructions and artifacts of people! Of human people, and other people. As I carefully went from small area to small area, feeling each item I ran across, I marvelled. I found things and ideas which I knew my friends and family, my mentors and even very wise ones had never known. It was thrilling!" His fingers trilled against the steering wheel as he said "ideas."

I gave a start at the thought that when he referenced friends and family, he meant Surgeons. As if they were people.

"But a moment came when I thought I should stop. It had been fun, but it was time to leave. Contact with everyone was becoming tenuous." At this point in his smooth and obviously carefully-practiced monologue, Marcus turned to look at me, his face lit slightly by the bizarre blinky lights on the dash. "I have a nickname, you know. Back home. Best translation I can give you might be 'staccato.'" He pronounced it very Italian. "You know this term?"

I nodded.

"Refers to how I connect with people. We..." he paused only a moment, as if reconsidering telling me this. "We use messages to tell our stories." He held his arms out wide, though as always he was extremely careful not to let a hand be close enough to touch me. "Constantly creating messages, manufacturing molecular words from the elements around us. The local environment gives a stamp, a flavour, to what we are saying. But I... I have periods of silence, then an intense series of messaging, and again silence." He looked at me with slightly widened black eyes. "You understand why."

I did have to think a moment. "Because you can't talk like that when you're shifted?"

He bobbed his head, seeming a bit crumpled, defeated. After another moment, he continued.

"This is when I found I could not leave this cave. Not really. The first few times, I thought I had. But eventually I realised I was still very much inside. Driven to find this particular object, no matter how interesting and amazing the other items were, and no matter how much I felt I should not be there at all anymore. And it is dark, Sanne de Winter. It is so very dark. I must ensure I do not miss something, do not skip a bit of the floor. Remember, the size of a sports arena."

He did another pause, and again it felt like hesitation. Maybe even a little fear?

"I can only cover very small bits of ground at a time, this immense acreage of cave floor, because there is no light... until there is." He stared straight ahead and clutched the steering wheel tightly. "One day, a small and fragile pocket flashlight is brought to me. I did not find it among the objects on the cave floor, no. It was brought to me. By various events." With the faint glow of the dash lights, I saw his mouth tighten slightly, and a few of his fingers twitched, maybe wanting to play air-piano.

"With that light, small as it is, I can see in that cave. I can move so much faster. I finally have a real chance to actually find my way out." Now he turned at looked at me, still with his face mostly expressionless as usual, but with a sound in his voice that sounded like pain.

"At the diner today. I was beset by two deep fears."

I snorted. "So was I. Several fears."

He gave me an intense look and held a finger to his lips. I guessed he was fighting to hold on to the series of words he'd prepared in his head, although the pauses had crept back in already. I bit my lip.

"I thought you would quit. That you would decide... investigating Desolate Areas was not for you. Or that you could not work with... something like me. This was not a typical research trip, you should know. This was getting some data for another. Normally... I bring my field lab equipment. I get different samples. I am hunting movements through time. This work is delicate and... at times frustrating." He sighed. "I only have access to a proper laboratory through work contacts. Most of the time. I have many items in storage."

I nodded, just to show I understood what he meant. Trying to do your own research while not having a facility like a university at your disposal, doing your work on the side while being hired to help with someone else's research goals, that all did indeed sound frustrating. I was starting to get suspicious about his metaphors, however.

"Then, a worse fear. I thought you were gone. Taken by 50 Mile." He kept staring forward but now clamped one pale hand over his mouth.

I sighed. "Is that why you keep repeating that? I'm glad I'm not dead or stuck in an Area, but I'm here."

He glanced at me, then back to the windshield, and gripped the steering wheel again with both hands. "You let me in."

I blinked at him, and kept silent.

"What are the chances? They are low. Very low. The chances! It was not chance."

"That someone would sooner help you than kill you?" I asked tentatively.

He stared at me. "A human person. Helping me when I'm... myself. Did not report me. Let me in. Brought food!" He leaned towards me and there was something definitely unhinged in the way he did it, and I found myself plastered against the passenger door and holding very still.

"What are the chances?" His voice was rising now. "That the one who does this... has Weston's, yet is free? Has geological training? Is not afraid!?"

"Jesus fucking Christ, I am very fucking afraid right now!" I yelled at him, flattened against the door despite the seat belt, the back of my head painfully pressed against the window glass. His own window had remained open, I think mostly to let the food smells out, but I had only cracked mine a few centimeters open at the top.

He blinked, as if realising what he was doing and finally seeing me, and he pulled back with his inhuman speed and clapped his hands over his mouth again. I remained pressed against the door and stayed very still.

His hands moved up his face to press into his eyes, pushing his glasses up, and then fell as he made another heavy sigh.

"I am fearful, Sanne de Winter. I... may have been asked to answer this question. Of the Desolate Areas. It intrudes my sleep. It surrounds me when I hunt. It... interrupts my relationships. Pulls me away from my people. I am doing this," and he gestured to his body. "This is not allowed. Being near any of your people... is not allowed. It is very wrong. And disgusting."

In my mind I was reconsidering my world view. I had figured there were probably Surgeons shifted as people wandering the world all this time, like some of the other monsters I'd heard of. But from what he was telling me, he might be the only one. He continued.

"Your people. They are ignorant. Fearful. Dangerous. Human people seeing any one of us... is no different... from someone throwing a stone at a nest of hornets."

"The one in Florida?" I whispered. The one that had gotten into the news all those years ago.

He threw up his hands. "Yep! Like that one. Terrible." He shook his head. "That one no longer exists. We have forgotten them. They have lost their name." He said it in a way that seemed like this was much, much more significant than it sounded. Maybe names were really important in monster bug society or something.

I had already gotten my heart to slow down again. Fear was being replaced as a slow anger began to build. Had he compared me to a damned flashlight?

"So let me get this straight," I told him. "You're like, on some mission from God or something to solve the mysteries of the Desolate Areas, you're hiding what you're doing from other—uh, your people, and I'm a... a tool you want to use to complete it? And you think—you think I was brought to you? Given to you? Like, by the fates or something? The fuck?"

He went very still and only looked at me.

"Weston's is a disease, Marcus! I'm sick. This isn't some goddamn superpower, it's a weirdo side-effect nobody really understands, while my liver slowly shrivels and trace metals build up everywhere and it's going to kill me before I hit middle age! I have one slightly-crappy decade left if I'm lucky, then I'll hit my forties and look like I'm ninety and I'll collapse into a pile of massive organ failure."

He was like a statue. Or a spider.

"So did you think I'd spend those last years I have getting killed or nearly killed or whatever else happens to people out there—that little time I have left, helping you go a bit faster in looking for some thing you don't even know what it is and might not be real?" I was being much louder in the car than I needed to be. Or maybe I needed to be exactly that loud. "Did it ever occur to you that maybe this is all a steaming vomit-heap of psychotic fantasy bullshit and you might be suffering from some serious mental illness?"

"Yep." The reply was soft and had more than a hint of frustration. He had certainly considered this.

I swore, and swore again, using everything I grew up with and a decent helping of the British stuff. Then I swore some more, mostly getting pissed at the thought that I was along on this trip as a thing to be used, little different from the magnetometer sitting in pieces in the back of the car. Or more like a living GPR machine.

"Fucking hell. These Areas eat people? One almost ate me? Shit-sucking cockwomblery! Fuck that, and fuck you and your nutbucket delusions of saving-the-world asshattery." I glared at him. "Are you going to bring me the fuck back home now? Huh?"

"Yes! Yes. Yes..." His first word was almost a shout, each successive one quieter and the last sounded more like a murmur to himself. He attached his weird harness, started the overpowered engine, and yanked the shifter down. It was very different from how he did these things back at the Husky stop, at the start of the trip. The car still moved fast, but it had a feeling of despair.

As we drove, my anger dimmed, or maybe I just didn't have the energy to maintain it. He had hoped to use me as a means to fulfill some deranged invention of an unbalanced and inhuman mind, but that's pretty much how everyone sees people with Weston's syndrome. Oh look, they're really sick but they can find stuff, let's put them to use for the public good before they collapse! And he hadn't really lied to me about anything. He had told me he was studying the Areas. He'd warned me several times about the dangers, and I had wanted to go anyway. Even specifically because of those dangers, though now I can see I had been horribly, cringingly naïve. I had wanted to see a Desolate Area. I was not badgered or tricked into this trip.

With a few directions as we got close, the car was eventually idling around the corner from my rental, since it was loud enough that I didn't want it where my own neighbours could see me stepping out of it in the middle of the night. I grabbed my stuff, got out, and went to slam the passenger door but hesitated.

At the last moment, I bent down to look at him. His head was turned just slightly in my direction, almost as if he were afraid to look at me.

"Marcus... I hope you find what you're looking for. Your way out." I did mean it. At that moment I think I felt more pity for him than anything else.

He only replied with one of those fake tooth-filled grins and a small raise of his hand in farewell. I pushed the door shut and watched the taillights move down the street, turn a corner, and vanish. The sound of the engine got softer much faster than I'd expected. I turned around and dragged all my crap back to my rental, and spent the night trying to stop seeing dead people staring at me.

Damn near every night since then, really.

---

My hand is cramped. I haven't written this much in one go in a long time. But I have a feeling this will be my first good night of sleep in a month.