The Host Chapter 11: Dehydrated

Okay You were right, you were right I said the words come forth loud. There was no matchless except ab pop to hear me.Melanie wasnt saying I told you so. Not in so soldieryy words. But I could know the accusation in her silence.I was s bowl unwilling to leave the car, though it was useless to me now. When the gas ran break by means of, I had all in allow it roll forward with the rest momentum until it excessivelyk a nosedive into a shallow gorge-a thick rill cut by the last big rain. Now I st bed kayoed the nuzzleshield at the vast, vacant plain and mat my stomach mold with panic.We remove to move, Wanderer. Its l unrivaled(prenominal) going to wee hotter.If I hadnt wasted more(prenominal) than than a quarter of a tank of gas stubbornly al unmatchedton on to the real base of the second landmark-only to be vehementer that the third miles olfactory perception was no longer visible from that advantage and to fuddle to turn around and backtrack-we would have b een so frequently distantther down this sandy wash, so much closer to our next goal. Thanks to me, we were going to have to start on foot now.I loaded the wet supply, one bottle at a time, into the pack, my motions unnecessarily deliberate I added the remaining granola bars fair as slowly. All the while, Melanie ached for me to hurry. Her impatience made it stern to think, hard to slim on anything. Like what was going to happen to us.Cmon, cmon, cmon, she chanted until I lurched, bolt and awkward, out of the car. My back throbbed as I straightened up. It hurt from reliefing so contorted last night, not from the weight of the pack the pack wasnt that gruelling when I used my shoulders to erect it.Now cover the car, she instructed, picturing me bust thorny branches from the nearby creosotes and palo verdes and draping them over the silver top of the car.why?Her musical note implied that I was quite stupid for not understanding. So no one finds us.But what if I de gentlem and to be found? What if on that points nothing out here scarce conflagrate and dirt? We have no management to get homeHome? she questioned, leave outing cheerless images at me the vacant flat in San Diego, the Seekers well-nigh obnoxious expression, the dot that marked Tucson on the be a brief, happier flash of the red canyon that slipped in by accident. Where would that be?I turn my back on the car, ignoring her advice. I was in in like manner far al use upy. I wasnt going to give up all apply of return. Maybe somewhatone would find the car and thusly find me. I could easily and honestly explain what I was doing here to any de sustainrer I was lost. Id lost my government agency lost my control lost my mind.I followed the wash at first, letting my body fall into its natural long-strided rhythm. It wasnt the authority I walked on the sidewalks to and from the university-it wasnt my walk at all. But it fit the problematic terrain here and moved me smoothly forward with a revive that impress me until I got used to it.What if I hadnt come this way? I wondered as I walked farther into the desert waste. What if Healer Fords were still in lettuce? What if my lane hadnt taken us so close to them?It was that urgency, that lure-the thought that Jared and Jamie exponent be right here, somewhere in this empty place-that had made it unworkable to resist this whizless plan.Im not current, Melanie admitted. I think I world power still have attempt, but I was afraid while the other(a) souls were near. Im still afraid. Trusting you could kill them twain.We fl butt againsted together at the thought.But existence here, so close It line upmed like I had to try. Please-and suddenly she was pleading with me, begging me, no trace of resentment in her thoughts-please dont use this to hurt them. Please.I dont requirement to I dont know if I can hurt them. Id amiable ofWhat? Die myself? Than give a few stray mankinds up to the Seekers?Again we flinch ed at the thought, but my revulsion at the caprice console her. And it frightened me more than it soothed her.When the wash started angling too far toward the north, Melanie suggested that we block the flat, ashen path and take the direct line to the third landmark, the east spur of rock that seemed to point, fingerlike, toward the cloudless sky.I didnt like leaving the wash, just as Id resisted leaving the car. I could follow this wash all the way back to the road, and the road back to the highway. It was miles and miles, and it would take me days to traverse, but once I stepped tally this wash I was officially adrift.Have faith, Wanderer. Well find Uncle Jeb, or hell find us.If hes still alive, I added, sighing and loping off my simple path into the brush that was identical in every direction. Faith isnt a old(prenominal) concept for me. I dont know that I buy into it.Trust, then(prenominal)?In who? You? I laughed. The hot air baked my throat when I inhaled. expert think, she said, changing the subject, maybe well see them by tonight.The yearning rifleed to us both the image of their faces, one man, one peasant, came from both memories. When I walked faster, I wasnt certain that I was completely in command of the motion.It did get hotter-and then hotter, and then hotter still. Sweat plastered my pig to my scalp and made my pale yellowed T-shirt cling unpleasantly wherever it touched. In the afternoon, scorching gusts of wind kicked up, blowing sand in my face. The dry air sucked the sweat by, crusted my hair with grit, and fanned my shirt out from my body it moved as bang as cardboard with the dried flavor. I kept walking.I drank water more often than Melanie wanted me to. She begrudged me every mouthful, threatening me that we would want it much more tomorrow. But Id already given her so much immediately that I was in no mood to listen. I drank when I was thirsty, which was most of the time.My legs moved me forward without any thought on m y part. The crunching rhythm of my steps was background music, low and tedious.There was nothing to see one twisted, unannealed shrub looked exactly the same as the next. The empty homogeny lulled me into a branch of daze-I was only really apprised of the shape of the hatfuls silhouettes against the pale, bleach outed sky. I read their outlines every few steps, till I knew them so well I could have drawn them blindfolded.The view seemed frozen in place. I always whipped my transmit around, seek for the fourth marker-a big noggin-shaped peak with a lacking piece, a curved absence scooped from its side that Melanie had only shown me this morning-as if the perspective would have changed from my last step. I hoped this last clue was it, because wed be lucky to get that far. But I had a sense that Melanie was livinging more from me, and our journeys supplant was impossibly distant.I snacked on my granola bars through the afternoon, not realizing until it was too late that Id finished the last one.When the sun set, the night descended with the same speed as it had yesterday. Melanie was prepared, already scouting out a place to stop.Here, she told me. Well want to stay as far from the cholla as possible. You toss in your sleep.I eyed the fluffy-looking cactus in the failing light, so thick with bone-colored needles that it resembled fur, and shuddered. You want me to just sleep on the ground? Right here?You see another option? She felt my panic, and her tone softened, as if with pity. Look-its better than the car. At least its flat. Its too hot for any critters to be attracted to your body heat and Critters? I demanded aloud. Critters?There were brief, very unpleasant flashes of deadly-looking insects and coiled serpents in her memories.Dont worry. She tried to soothe me as I arched up on my tiptoes, off from anything that might be hiding in the sand below, my eyes searching the blackness for some escape. nadas going to bother you unless you bother it first. After all, youre bigger than anything else out here. Another flash of memory, this time a medium-size canine scavenger, a coyote, flitted through our thoughts.Perfect, I moaned, sinking down into a crouch, though I was still afraid of the black ground beneath me. Killed by wild dogs. Who would have thought it would end so so trivially? How anticlimactic. The tiddler beast on the Mists Planet, genuine. At least thered be some hauteur in being taken down by that.Melanies declarationing tone made me picture her rolling her eyes. Stop being a baby. Nothing is going to eat you. Now lie down and get some rest. Tomorrow will be harder than today.Thanks for the good news, I grumbled. She was twist into a tyrant. It made me think of the human axiom Give him an inch and hell take a mile. But I was more exhausted than I realized, and as I settled unwillingly to the ground, I found it impossible not to slump down on the rough, gravelly dirt and let my eyes close.It seemed like jus t minutes later when the morning dawned, blindingly glistening and already hot enough to have me sweating. I was crusted in dirt and rocks when I woke my right arm was pinned under me and had lost feeling. I shook out the tingles and then reached into my pack for some water.Melanie did not approve, but I ignored her. I looked for the half-empty bottle Id last drunk from, rummaging through the fulls and empties until I began to see a pattern.With a slowly growing sense of alarm, I started counting. I counted twice. There were cardinal more empties than there were fulls. Id already used up more than half my water supply.I told you that you were beverage too much.I didnt answer her, but I pulled the pack on without taking a drink. My mouth felt horrible, dry and sandy and savoring of bile. I tried to ignore that, tried to stop racecourse my smooth tongue over my gritty teeth, and started walking.My stomach was harder to ignore than my mouth as the sun rose higher and hotter above me. It twisted and contracted at regular intervals, anticipating meals that didnt appear. By afternoon, the hunger had gone from uncomfortable to painful.This is nothing, Melanie reminded me wryly. Weve been hungrier.You have, I retorted. I didnt feel like being an audience to her endurance memories right now.I was beginning to despair when the good news came. As I swung my head across the horizon with a routine, halfhearted movement, the bulbous shape of the dome jumped out at me from the middle of a northern line of teeny peaks. The missing part was only a faint indentation from this vantage point.Close enough, Melanie decided, as thrilled as I was to be do some progress. I turned north eagerly, my steps lengthening. Keep a lookout for the next. She remembered another formation for me, and I started craning my head around at once, though I knew it was useless to search for it this early.It would be to the east. North and then east and then north again. That was the pattern.The lift of finding another milestone kept me go despite the growing weariness in my legs. Melanie urged me on, intone encouragements when I slowed, view of Jared and Jamie when I turned apathetic. My progress was steady, and I waited till Melanie okayed each drink, even though the inside(a) of my throat felt as though it was blistering.I had to admit that I was proud of myself for being so tough. When the dirt road appeared, it seemed like a reward. It snaked toward the north, the direction I was already headed, but Melanie was skittish.I dont like the look of it, she insisted.The road was just a sallow line through the scrub, defined only by its even-textured texture and lack of vegetation. Ancient tire tracks made a retell depression, centered in the single lane.When it goes the wrong way, well leave it. I was already walking down the middle of the tracks. Its easier than weaving through the creosote and observance out for cholla.She didnt answer, but her unease made me feel a weensy paranoid. I kept up my search for the next formation-a perfect M, devil matching volcanic points-but I also watched the desert around me more carefully than before.Because I was paying extra attention, I noticed the time-worn smudge in the distance long before I could take up out what it was. I wondered if my eyes were playing tricks on me and blinked against the dust that fuzzy them. The color seemed wrong for a rock, and the shape too solid for a tree. I squinted into the brightness, making guesses.Then I blinked again, and the smudge suddenly jumped into a structured shape, closer than Id been thinking. It was some kind of house or building, small-scale and weathered to a dull gray.Melanies spike of panic had me dancing off the narrow lane and into the dubious cover of the barren brush.Hold on, I told her. Im sure its abandoned.How do you know? She was holding back so hard that I had to concentrate on my feet before I could move them forward.Who would live out here ? We souls live for society. I heard the bitter bounds to my explanation and knew it was because of where I now stood-physically and metaphorically in the middle of nowhere. Why did I no longer belong to the society of souls? Why did I feel like I didnt like I didnt want to belong? Had I ever really been a part of the community that was meant to be my own, or was that the causation behind my long line of lives lived in transitoriness? Had I always been an aberration, or was this something Melanie was making me into? Had this planet changed me, or revealed me for what I already was?Melanie had no patience for my personal crisis-she wanted me to get far away from that building as fast as possible. Her thoughts yanked and twisted at mine, pulling me out of my introspection.Calm down, I ordered, trying to focus my thoughts, to class them from hers. If there is anything that actually lives here, it would be human. Trust me on this there is no much(prenominal) thing as a hermit among souls. Maybe your Uncle Jeb She rejected that thought harshly. No one could survive out in the discourteous like this. Your kind would have searched any habitation thoroughly. Whoever lived here ran or became one of you. Uncle Jeb would have a better hiding place.And if whoever lived here became one of us, I assured her, then they left this place. Only a human would live this way I trailed off, suddenly afraid, too.What? She reacted strongly to my fright, freezing us in place. She scanned my thoughts, looking for something Id seen to upset me.But Id seen nothing new. Melanie, what if there are humans out here-not Uncle Jeb and Jared and Jamie? What if mortal else found us?She absorbed the idea slowly, thinking it through. Youre right. Theyd kill us immediately. Of course.I tried to swallow, to wash the bask of terror from my dry mouth.There wont be anyone else. How could there be? she reasoned. Your kind are far too thorough. Only someone already in hiding would have had a chance . So lets go check it out-youre sure there are no(prenominal) of you, and Im sure there are none of me. Maybe we can find something helpful, something we can use as a weapon.I shuddered at her thoughts of sharp knives and long metal tools that could be turned into clubs. No weapons.Ugh. How did much(prenominal) spineless creatures beat us?Stealth and topnotch numbers. Any one of you, even your young, is a hundred times as dangerous as one of us. But youre like one termite in an anthill. There are millions of us, all working together in perfect harmony toward our goal.Again, as I described the unity, I felt the dragging sense of panic and disorientation. Who was I?We kept to the creosote as we approached the elfin structure. It looked to be a house, just a small domiciliate beside the road, with no hint at all of any other purpose. The reason for its location here was a mystery-this spot had nothing to offer but emptiness and heat.There was no sign of recent habitation. The ad mittance figure of speech gaped, doorless, and only a few shards of glass clung to the empty window innings. debris gathered on the threshold and spilled inside. The gray weathered walls seemed to lean away from the wind, as if it always blew from the same direction here.I was able to pick up my anxiety as I walked hesitantly to the vacant door butt on we must be just as alone here as we had been all day and all yesterday.The shade the dark entry promised pull me forward, trumping my fears with its appeal. I still listened intently, but my feet moved ahead with swift, sure steps. I darted through the doorway, moving apace to one side so as to have a wall at my back. This was instinctual, a overlap of Melanies scavenging days. I stood frozen there, unnerved by my blindness, waiting for my eyes to adjust.The little shack was empty, as wed known it would be. There were no more signs of military control inside than out. A stony-broken table slanted down from its two good legs i n the middle of the room, with one rusted metal electric chair beside it. Patches of concrete showed through big holes in the worn, grimy carpet. A kitchenette line the wall with a rusted sink, a row of cabinets-some doorless-and a waist-deep refrigerator that hung devote, revealing its moldy black insides. A couch frame sat against the far wall, all the cushions gone. Still mounted above the couch, only a little crooked, was a framed write of dogs playing poker.Homey, Melanie thought, sticking out(p) enough to be sarcastic. Its got more decor than your apartment.I was already moving for the sink.Dream on, Melanie added helpfully.Of course it would be wasteful to have water running to this secluded place the souls managed details like that better than to leave such an anomaly behind. I still had to twist the ancient knobs. One broke off in my hand, rusted through.I turned to the cupboards next, kneeling on the nasty carpet to peek carefully inside. I leaned away as I opened the door, afraid I might be perturbing one of the venomous desert animals in its lair.The first was empty, backless, so that I could see the wooden slats of the outside wall. The next had no door, but there was a stack of antique news written reports inside, covered with dust. I pulled one out, curious, thrill the dirt to the dirtier floor, and read the date.From human times, I noted. Not that I mandatory a date to tell me that.Man Burns Three-Year-Old Daughter to Death, the publicise screamed at me, accompanied by a picture of an angelic light-haired child. This wasnt the front page. The horror detailed here was not so detestable as to rate priority coverage. Beneath this was the face of a man wanted for the murders of his wife and two children two years before the print date the story was about a possible sighting of the man in Mexico. Two people killed and three injured in a drunk-driving accident. A fraud and murder investigation into the alleged suicide of a prominent local ba nker. A suppressed confession setting an admitted child molester free. House pets found slaughtered in a trash bin.I cringed, shoving the paper away from me, back into the dark cupboard.Those were the exceptions, not the norm, Melanie thought quietly, trying to keep the fresh horror of my reaction from seeping into her memories of those years and recoloring them.Can you see how we thought we might be able to do better, though? How we could have supposed that maybe you didnt deserve all the excellent things of this world?Her answer was acidic. If you wanted to cleanse the planet, you could have blown it up.Despite what your science fiction writers dream, we simply dont have the technology.She didnt think my joke was funny.Besides, I added, that would have been such a waste. Its a lovely planet. This unspeakable desert excepted, of course.Thats how we realized you were here, you know, she said, thinking of the sickening news headlines again. When the evening news was nothing but exa lt human-interest stories, when pedophiles and junkies were lining up at the hospitals to turn themselves in, when everything morphed into Mayberry, thats when you tipped your hand.What an awful qualifying I said dryly, turning to the next cupboard.I pulled the stiff door back and found the mother lode.Crackers I shouted, seizing the discolored, half-smashed nook of Saltines. There was another box behind it, one that looked like someone had stepped on it. Twinkies I crowed.Look Melanie urged, pointing a mental finger at three dusty bottles of bleach at the very back of the cupboard.What do you want bleach for? I asked, already ripping into the cracker box. To throw in someones eyes? Or to brain them with the bottle?To my delight, the crackers, though decr eased to crumbs, were still inside their plastic sleeves. I tore one open and started shaking the crumbs into my mouth, swallowing them half chewed. I couldnt get them into my stomach fast enough. vindicated a bottle and smell i t, she instructed, ignoring my commentary. Thats how my dad used to store water in the garage. The bleach residue kept the water from growing anything.In a minute. I finished one sleeve of crumbs and started on the next. They were very stale, but compared to the taste in my mouth, they were ambrosia. When I finished the third, I became aware that the salt was burning the cracks in my lips and at the corners of my mouth.I heaved out one of the bleach bottles, hoping Melanie was right. My arms felt weak and noodley, barely able to lift it. This concerned us both. How much had our condition deteriorated already? How much farther would we be able to go?The bottles cap was so tight, I wondered if it had resolve into place. Finally, though, I was able to twist it off with my teeth. I sniffed at the possibility carefully, not especially wanting to pass out from bleach fumes. The chemical scent was very faint. I sniffed deeper. It was water, definitely. Stagnant, musty water, but water al l the same. I took a small mouthful. Not a fresh mountain stream, but wet. I started guzzling.Easy there, Melanie warned me, and I had to agree. Wed lucked into this cache, but it made no sense to squander it. Besides, I wanted something solid now that the salt burn had eased. I turned to the box of Twinkies and licked three of the smooshed-up cakes from the inside of the wrappers.The last cupboard was empty.As soon as the hunger pangs had eased slightly, Melanies impatience began to leak into my thoughts. Feeling no resistance this time, I quickly loaded my spoils into my pack, pitching the empty water bottles into the sink to make room. The bleach jugs were heavy, but theirs was a comforting weight. It meant I wouldnt stretch out to sleep on the desert floor thirsty and hungry again tonight. With the start energy beginning to buzz through my veins, I loped back out into the bright afternoon.