Shadowfires

of cold space.
    As this was a Tuesday, traffic was light, more trucks than cars.
Thursday through Monday, tens of thousands of people were on their
way to and from Vegas. Frequently, Fridays and Sundays, the traffic
was so heavy that it looked startlingly anachronistic in this
wasteland-as if all the commuters from a great city had been
simultaneously transported back in time to a barren era prior to the
Mesozoic epoch. But now, on several occasions, Rachael's was the only vehicle in sight on her side of the divided highway.
    She drove over a skeletal landscape of scalped hills and bony
plains, where white and gray and umber rock poked up like exposed
ribs-like clavicles and scapulae, radii and ulnae, here an ilium,
there a femur, here two fibulae, and over there a cluster of tarsals
and metatarsals-as if the land were a burial ground for giants of
another age, the graves reopened by centuries of wind. The many-armed
Joshua trees-like monuments to Shiva-and the other cactuses of the
higher desert were not to be found in these lower and hotter regions.
The vegetation was limited to some worthless scrub, here and there a
patch of dry brown bunchgrass. Mostly the Mojave was sand, rock,
alkaline plains, and solidified lava beds. In the distance, to the
north, were the Calico mountains, and still farther north the Granite
Mountains rose purple and majestic at the horizon, and far to the
southeast were the Cady Mountains: all appeared to be stark, hard-
edged monoliths of bare and forbidding stofie.
    At 3:10, she reached the roadside rest area that she had recalled
when deciding not to stop in Barstow. She slowed, left the highway,
and drove into a large empty parking lot. She stopped in front of a
low concrete-block building that housed men's and women's rest rooms.
To the right of the rest rooms, a piece of ground was shaded by
sturdy metal latticework on four eight-foot metal poles, and under
that sun-foiling shelter were three picnic tables. The scrub and
bunchgrass were cleared away from the surrounding area, leaving clean
bare sand, and blue garbage cans with hinged lids bore polite
requests in white block letters-please do not litter.
    She got out of the Mercedes, taking only the keys and her purse,
leaving the thirty-two and the boxes of ammunition hidden under the
driver's seat, where she had put them when she stopped for gas at the entrance to I-15. She closed the door, locked it more from habit than out of necessity.
    For a moment she looked up at the sky, which was ninety percent
concealed behind steel-gray clouds, as if it were girdling itself in
armor. The day remained very hot, between ninety and one hundred
degrees, although two hours ago, before the cloud cover settled in,
the temperature had surely been ten or even twenty degrees higher.
    Out on the interstate, two enormous eighteen-wheelers roared by,
heading east, ripping apart the desert's quiet fabric but laying down an even more seamless cloth of silence in their wake.
    Walking to the door of the women's rest room, she passed a sign that warned travelers to watch out for rattlesnakes. She supposed they liked to slither in from the desert and stretch full-length on the sunbaked concrete sidewalks.
    The rest room was hot, ventilated only by jalousie windows set
high in the walls, but at least it had been cleaned recently. The
place smelled of pine-scented disinfectant. She also detected the
limey odor of concrete that had cooked too long in the fierce desert
sun.
Eric ascended slowly from an intense and
vivid dream-or perhaps an unthinkably ancient racial memory-in which
he was something other than a man. He was crawling inside a rough-
walled burrow, not his own but that of some other creature, creeping
downward, following a musky scent with the sure knowledge that
succulent eggs of some kind could be found and devoured in the gloom
below. A pair of glowing amber eyes in the inkiness was the first
indication he had of resistance to his plans. A warm-blooded furry
beast, well armed with teeth and claws, rushed at him to protect its
subterranean nest, and he was suddenly engaged in a fierce battle
that was simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating. Cold, reptilian
fury filled him, making him forget the hunger that had driven him in
search of eggs. In the darkness, he and his adversary bit, tore, and
lashed at each other. Eric hissed-the other squealed and spat-and he
inflicted more ruinous wounds than