The Narrows

blackness. But she sensed another presence. Someone close but not necessarily someone with her. She moved and turned in the darkness, trying to see who it was. She reached out but her hands touched nothing.
    She heard a moaning sound and then realized it was her own voice from deep in her throat. Then she was grabbed. Something had her and shook her very hard.
    Rachel opened her eyes. She saw the freeway rushing at her through the windshield. Cherie Dei let go of her jacket.
    "You all right? This is the exit."
    Rachel looked up at a passing green freeway sign.
    ZZYZX ROAD
    I MILE
    She straightened up in the seat. She checked her watch and realized she had slept for over ninety minutes. Her neck was stiff and painful on the right side from leaning so long against the window. She started working it with her fingers, digging deeply into the muscle.
    "You all right?" Dei asked again. "Sounded like you were having a bad one."
    "I'm fine. What did I say?" "Nothing. You just sort of moaned. I think you were running from something or something had you."
    Dei hit the blinker and turned into the exit lane. Zzyzx Road appeared to be in the middle of nowhere. At the top of the exit there was nothing, not even a gas station or even an abandoned structure. There was no visible reason for the exit or the road.
    "We're over here."
    Dei turned left and took the overpass across the freeway. Once off the overpass the road disintegrated into an unpaved trail that wound south and down into the flat basin of the Mojave. The landscape was stark. The white soda on the surface of the flats looked like snow in the distance. Joshua trees reached their bony fingers toward the sky and smaller plants wedged themselves between the rocks. It was a still life. Rachel had no idea what sort of animal might be able to subsist in such a barren place.
    They passed a sign that said they were headed toward Soda Springs and then the road curved and Rachel could suddenly see the white tents and RVs and vans and other vehicles ahead. She could see a military green helicopter, its blades still, parked to the left of the encampment Further past the encampment there was a complex of small buildings set at the base of the hills. It looked like a roadside motel but there were no signs and no road.
    "What is this place?" Rachel asked.
    "This is Zzyzx," Dei said, pronouncing it zie-zix. "As far as I can tell, it is the asshole of the universe. Some radio preacher named it and built it sixty years ago. He got control of the land by promising the government he would be prospecting. He paid winos from skid row in L.A. to do that while he went on the radio and called on the faithful to come here to bathe in the spring waters and guzzle the mineral waters he bottled. It took the Bureau of Land Management twenty-five years to get rid of him. The place was then turned over to the state university system for desert studies."
    "Why here? Why did Backus bury them here?"
    "Far as we can guess is because it is federal land. He wanted to make sure we-meaning you, probably- worked the case. If that's what he wanted, he got it. It's a major excavation. We've had to bring in our own power, shelter, food, water, everything."
    Rachel said nothing. She was studying everything, from the crime scene to the distant horizon of gray mountain ridges that enclosed the basin. She didn't agree with Dei's take on the place. She had heard the coastline of Ireland described as a terrible beauty. She thought that the desert with its barren lunar landscape was in its own way beautiful, too. There was a harsh beauty to it. A dangerous beauty. She had never spent much time in the desert, but her years in the Dakotas had given her an appreciation for harsh places, the empty landscapes where people were the intruders. That was her secret. She had what the bureau called a "hardship posting." It was designed to wear her down and make her quit. But she had beaten them at this game. She could last forever there. She would not quit.
    Dei slowed as they approached a checkpoint set up about a hundred yards before the tents. A man in a blue jumpsuit with the white letters FBI on the breast pocket stood beneath a beach-type tent with open sides. The desert winds were threatening to tear it from its moorings, just as they had already played havoc with the agent's hair.
    Dei lowered the window. She didn't bother to give her own name or identification. She was a given. She gave the man Rachel's name and identified