The Lost Read online

  Claire hands me her knife. She doesn’t lose her balance.

  I contemplate the can, the knife, the can again, and then I stab the top of the can with the knife. I twist it in a circle, widening the hole. I hand the knife back to Claire. She cleans and sheaths it as I tilt the can to my lips and drink. “Want some?” I hold it out to Claire.

  She takes it, sips, and passes it to Peter. He widens the hole with his knife and plucks out a chunk of pineapple, and then he passes it back to me. We eat that way, the two of them perched, inexplicably balancing on chairs, until the can is empty and drained.

  I hold up the can. “We need to find string. Or twine. Or an electrical cord. Or something. Plus more cans. We’ll string them together and put them where someone will have to trip over them if they want to reach the house. I want an alarm system.” First step to not dying: secure the little yellow house.

  Claire’s chair tips down. Agile as a cat, she leaps onto the table before the chair crashes to the floor. “I’ll find string!”

  Peter’s lips are twitching as if he wants to smile. “And what happens when someone or something sets off your high-tech alarm system?”

  “Booby traps,” I say confidently and firmly.

  Claire sighs. “I love her.”

  I look in each of the backpacks. “Anyone keep any paper and— Never mind. Found it.” I pull out a pencil case and a notebook. Flipping the notebook open, I sit on one of the dining room chairs. I sketch the house, add in the windows, lightly catch the shadows around it as the sun hits in the dusk...

  Claire peers over my shoulder. “Wow.”

  I stop sketching. I didn’t mean to get carried away. Still, the roof needs a bit more texture. I add the hatching to indicate the shingles. “We need a way to lock the front door and secure the windows when we leave. And we need a way to discourage people from breaking in.” I make X’s where I think we need to add traps.

  Leaving his precarious perch on a chair, Peter joins Claire and peers over my other shoulder. I’m suddenly self-conscious about my sketch. I should have done it in a different perspective, gotten a feel for the expanse of the desert, plus the angles on the porch aren’t right... “Hmm,” he says. I don’t know if this is approval or a critique.

  “The tricky part is that we need to make it look like we aren’t hiding anything,” I say. “It has to be casually inaccessible. What would keep someone from entering a house?”

  “Rabid dinosaurs,” Peter says immediately.

  “Seriously.”

  “I am serious. If I saw a rabid dinosaur, I’d skip that house.” He winks at Claire, and she giggles. He then mimes roaring like a dinosaur, and she laughs out loud.

  I tap the notebook with the pencil. “Anything that exists? Like, say the windows were all surrounded by boards with nails sticking up?”

  “Yeah, I’d skip that house, too.”

  “Good. What else?”

  He shrugs. “If it looked empty.”

  I could paint the shades on the windows to look like empty rooms. It wouldn’t fool anyone close up but might dissuade someone passing by from taking a closer look. But I don’t have the paint, and it would take too much time. I need the house to be safe but not at the expense of my other goal. Don’t die, and find a way home. My new mantra. “Something fast and easy to do.”

  “Plague!” Claire pipes up cheerfully.

  Peter nods in agreement.

  I hold up my pencil to halt discussion for a moment. “Just to be clear, there aren’t really rabid dinosaurs here, are there?”

  Claire giggles again.

  “Just checking. Okay, what about plague?”

  Peter draws a symbol in the dust on the dining room table: a circle with three linking circles on top of it. A biohazard symbol. “Scavengers paint them on the doors of houses with diseased bodies inside or other kinds of contamination. Happens sometimes. Everyone calls it the plague.”

  “Great! I mean, not great about the diseased bodies, of course.”

  Peter smiles, and it’s as if his face blossoms. But I can’t let this distract me. I twist the white strip in my hair as I think. “So...we need paint, bright for the biohazard sign,” I say. “Red, preferably. Nails and hammer, which we have. String and cans and other loud items for the alarm system.”

  “Forks and spoons?” Claire suggests.

  “Yeah, that would be fine. Anything that makes a loud clatter.”

  “Feral dogs,” Peter says.

  Both Claire and I spin to look at the window. I retreat behind a chair. Claire whips her knife out and drops to a crouch. I don’t hear howls or barks, but...

  Peter rolls his eyes at both of us. “Relax. What I meant is— if a house had feral dogs, then I wouldn’t enter.”

  “I don’t want dogs in the house,” Claire says. Her lower lip juts out in a pout. She doesn’t put the knife away.

  Coming out from behind the chair and sitting again, I think about it, tapping my pen again on the notebook. “If we had a tape recorder, we could record the howl, maybe a few other sounds, and then play it while we’re gone. Kind of like leaving the radio on when you go on vacation.”

  “What’s a tape recorder?” Claire asks.

  Peter nods. “I may have one.”

  “Then we’ll just have to get close enough for some good recordings...” I try to say this like it’s no big deal. Saunter up to feral dogs that would rather munch your face off. Sure. Right after breakfast. “Okay, so here’s our plan. Peter, you get the tape recorder. Claire, try to find red paint, string, and anything metal and loud we can put on the string. I’ll start on hammering the nails near the windows until Claire returns with the paint.”

  Claire hops off the table. “Yay!”

  Saluting, Peter steps off the back of the chair. It neatly drops onto its four legs. “Yes, ma’am.” I notice he isn’t talking about leaving anymore. I don’t know if it’s because of the intruder, or if he’s decided I’m interesting again.

  * * *

  Alone, I hammer nails through thin boards and then hammer the boards to windowsills. I wince every time the head of the hammer strikes the wood. The strikes seem to reverberate across the desert. I imagine the sound traveling across the sand and dirt, through the houses, and into town where the people who want me dead will hear it as an invitation. Come to the little yellow house to kill Lauren. BYOB.

  I finished downstairs and am working on the upstairs attic room window. I’m placing the nails askew so they’ll look natural, as if a sloppy handyman chose to rip out a chunk of the window frame and didn’t flatten the nails afterward—or at least that’s what I hope it looks like. I’ve never done much construction. Regardless, the nails are long and vicious, and I pound them through the sill so they’ll point upward. Anyone who grabs the sill to hoist themselves inside will have a nasty surprise and hopefully reconsider the whole endeavor in favor of breaking into a less prickly house.

  By the time I finish, I’m sweating and my clothes are sticking to me. I look out the window at the haze on the horizon—the manifestation of the void.

  Suddenly, I want to see it again. It’s my jailer. My prison wall.

  I am walking before I’ve decided to: down the stairs, out the door, around the junk pile and out the gate. The air is hot but not unbearable. The sun pricks the back of my neck, and I sweep my hair up into a twist on the top of my head. On the other side of the fence, I see a pair of chopsticks on the ground, still in their Chinese restaurant wrapper. I pull them out, break them apart, and use them to hold my hair in place. Then I walk into the desert.

  The wind whispers across the reddish sand. It’s a soft musical sound, like a whisk in a bowl. The low scrub brush trembles as it blows. I feel the sand on my skin.

  Ahead of me, the dust storm—the void—is spread across the horizo
n. It blots out the thin distinction between the land and the sky, an amorphous but massive wall. Closer, I expect to feel wind. But I don’t. The dust hangs in the air, motionless, a wall of dust. It’s evenly thick, as if it were a mass of reddish-beige cotton, not dust particles suspended in the air.

  I stop and study it. It looks endless. Impenetrable. But maybe that’s only here. I turn east and walk, the void to my left. It must end somewhere. No storm lasts forever. There must be a break in it, or at least a weak point.

  I will find a way out.

  I won’t be trapped here.

  I can’t be.

  I keep walking until my throat feels dry. I wish I’d brought water. I didn’t plan for this properly—or at all. I can’t circumnavigate Lost on foot, not without water. I’m still near the eastern outskirts. There could be a break in the dust to the west or the south, but at this rate, it would take me hours to reach it.

  Ahead, the dust swirls. It’s only moving in one section—a whirlpool in the center of an otherwise-undisturbed beige lake. Continuing to walk alongside the storm, I watch it swirl. The whirlpool darkens, and the dark-light shadows swirl together as if stirred faster and faster. I slow, and then I halt. Maybe I shouldn’t be so close.

  The shadows suck in, the spiral turns inward, and then it shoots out, a tornado-like arm of dust extending over my head. Instinctively, I duck. A car tire is propelled out of the dust tornado. The tire shoots over me and lands between the houses nearly a mile away.

  “What the hell,” I say out loud.

  I look at the void again as the tornado shrinks back, and the spiral slows. Soon, it’s placid again, as if the eruption had never occurred. This is how items end up in Lost? The void...expels them? Violently. Like a...leviathan burp. Eyeing the dust, I back away from it. There’s nothing normal about this dust storm. Nothing normal about this place. Nothing normal about any of this.

  I shouldn’t be here.

  I don’t belong here.

  Enough, I think again. This is the plan: I will find a break or weakness in the dust storm, and then I’m going to cross it, leave, and never look back. For now, though, I’ve walked as far as I can. I turn back and head for the little yellow house.

  Maybe I walked too far. My side is cramped, and my breath rakes over my dry throat. Sweat beads and then is wicked away by the heat of the sun. A few minutes later, I begin to feel dizzy and see black spots speckled over my vision.

  Claire and Peter are on the porch waiting for me when I arrive at a walk-stumble into the yard. Running to me, Claire hugs my waist. Peter hands me a soda bottle. It’s filled with only slightly murky water. I drink it anyway. My muscles are shaking, and I lean against Claire harder than I should. Soon, I feel a little stronger.

  It was stupid to walk into the desert unprepared. But other than that, it’s not a terrible plan. Somewhere, out in the desert, away from the highway, there must be a way around the void. Somehow, I’ll find it. Finishing the soda, I smile at Peter and Claire. I am taking steps toward my goals, and that makes me feel better. Mom would approve.

  “I found red paint!” Claire says. “And string.”

  Peter waves an ’80s tape recorder in the air. “I have this.”

  I nod. Neither asks where I have been or why I went or what I saw.

  I find a cloth and wrap it around a stick. Dipping it in the red paint, I paint the biohazard symbol on the front door. For good measure, I also add it to each side of the house. By the time I’ve circled the house, I’m splattered with red paint, and I feel as if I’ve won a battle, as if the act of slathering paint on the house were a direct attack against the horror of the void.

  “You look gruesome,” Peter comments. “Like you’ve committed murder most foul.” I shake the cloth with wet red paint at him. He jumps out of the way, and Claire laughs.

  Skipping in front of the cloth, she shouts, “Paint me! Paint me!” I spatter her with paint. It falls in dots on her arms and princess dress. She swirls, and the paint sprinkles over her. She giggles. “I’ll do you!” She jumps on a stray sock and dips it in the paint. She shakes it at me, and I jump backward but not fast enough to avoid the dollops of paint on my dress.

  “If you two are done...” Peter says behind me.

  I turn to say—

  And he dumps paint on my shoulder. It drips over my chest and back. He is completely unscathed. I look at Claire; Claire looks at me. We both grip our makeshift paintbrushes and chase after him. We race around the junk pile. Circle the house. Run out the gate toward the other houses.

  He disappears between two houses, and we collapse against the wall of a brick building, laughing. I don’t know why it’s funny, but it is. I gulp in air.

  Suddenly, I hear voices.

  There’s no place to hide. We’re exposed on the side of a building. And then I think, Up. Dropping the paint cloth, I turn and hoist myself onto a windowsill. I grab the gutter and scramble my feet up to the top of the window. I climb onto the roof and turn around to help Claire. She’s already up on the roof beside me. We scramble up to the peak as two men round the corner beneath us. One carries a knife, and the other has a rust-pocked saw. Both are in tattered dirty clothes, and their skin is covered in ugly, smeared tattoos that look as if they did them themselves. I hold my breath.

  They don’t look up.

  I exhale.

  “Look at you! Your teacher is proud.” It’s Peter. He’s perched on the chimney. He holds up a tape recorder and waves it in the air. “Ready to record some feral dogs?”

  I swallow. My heart is still beating fast, and the palms of my hands sting. I scraped them as I climbed too fast over the shingles. The good feeling, the illusion of control that I’d had when I’d painted has vanished completely. I wish I weren’t here. I hate this place with the strange dust prison wall and the dangers that lurk everywhere.

  I don’t know what he sees in my expression but his smile fades. “The Missing Man isn’t back yet, and the townspeople continue to blame you,” he tells me. “You’re still stuck with us.” He slides off the roof. “Come on, Little Red.” He glances back at me, spattered with paint. “Or ‘Very Red.’”

  * * *

  It’s easy to find man-eating dogs if you want them.

  On the way into the alleys, we collect stray bits of food: beef jerky laced with dust, half-eaten hotdogs with spots of mold, green meatballs, etc. We carry it in open containers as we walk into the alleys, and then we dump it on the ground and climb up onto the slope of trash and cardboard boxes that chokes the alley.

  After that, it’s a matter of waiting.

  We hear the snarls in the distance, and Peter switches on the tape recorder.

  In a pack, they pad into our alley, three of them, each more muscular than the last. Finding the treasured meat, they leap onto it. They snap and snarl and growl and howl at each other, a cacophony that echoes in the alley.

  Peter begins to record.

  One of the dogs catches our scent. He fixes his yellow eyes on us and howls. The other dogs notice. All of them begin to scratch and paw at the trash that leads to us. But Peter has picked a place with too steep a slope. They can’t do anything but pace below us, which they do.

  I look at Peter and want to ask what the plan is now, but he’s crouched at the edge of the trash, still recording, and I don’t want to mess up his recording and have to repeat this. So I wait. My legs begin to cramp but I don’t dare move. Claire curls beside me and naps.

  And wait. And wait.

  He settles against the trash, tape recorder resting in his lap, still whirring away. I see his chin droop onto his chest. Both he and Claire sleep.

  The dogs keep their vigil below.

  At last, the tape recorder clicks—it’s run out of tape. But the dogs aren’t gone. I try to make myself comfortable. I close my eyes and
can’t imagine how I’ll sleep through this.

  Somehow, I do.

  I wake in near darkness to the sound of a woman shouting. Claire and Peter are shadows beside me. Howling, the dogs scatter as gunshots ring out through the alleyway. In close quarters, the shots sound like bolts of thunder inside a room. They echo and rattle deep into my bones.

  “You’re both dead,” Peter whispers.

  I shut my eyes and don’t move.

  He calls down, “I found them like this. Dogs must have gotten them.” I hear him half run half hop down the side of the trash. The pile shakes but doesn’t fall. I try to breathe shallowly. “They must have climbed to safety and then bled out.”

  There are several people down there. I hear their voices, murmuring to each other, too low for me to pick out individual words. I concentrate on not moving. My leg is cramped. My shoulder itches. My back is twisted. But I keep myself as still as possible. If it were daytime, the red paint would never be mistaken for blood. In the darkening shadows, I think it must look like dark liquid. I can’t open my eyes to check.

  A man’s voice is louder than the others. “But they’re gone, not just dead?”

  In a singsong voice, Peter says, “Because they could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for them. The Carriage held but just these two and Immortality.”

  “The Missing Man must be back!” a woman cries. “He sent their souls on!”

  I hear cheering. Cheering for my death, for the death of a little girl. Peter promises to bury our bodies, but the crowd doesn’t listen to him. They’re racing out of the alley, whooping with joy.

  I want to cry.

  I don’t.

  I want to throw my arms around Peter and thank him. For a little while at least, I’ll be safe, maybe for long enough to find my way home.

  But I don’t move.

  I lie there until I am certain that the people have left the alley and aren’t returning. Then I sit up. Claire sits up beside me. Wordlessly, we climb down the trash heap. She slips her small hand into mine. Hand in hand, we go home.