Pulling her hair away from her eyes, Glory leaned slightly forward to watch what Howard was doing. “Can you see?” she said, leaning even closer.
Howard turned his head to face her. Under her flannel shirt, which she wore loose and unbuttoned like a jacket, Glory wore only the T-shirt she had taken from her sister’s house; it was a little small for her, and it pressed revealingly against her breasts. Howard didn’t fail to notice that, or the scent of her hair, or the warmth of her body so close.
Glory smoothed her hair away from her face, revealing the pale flesh of her neck, the dark hollow of her collarbone. She smiled and watched Howard frown and turn away. Over his shoulder, she thought she saw something odd about the tire, so she leaned even closer, touching his shoulder as she angled the beam of the flashlight. Several large bumps were beginning to form along the bottom edge of the tire. “You should have a look at the tire,” she said.
Cocking his head around, Howard answered, annoyed. “Oh, I’m havin’ a look all right,” he said. He wondered what his mother would say about this-a harlot sidling up to him at night in the middle of nowhere, making such a flagrant pass at him. He felt the blood still hot in his face, so he turned his attention elsewhere; careful not to lose track of them, he began laying the lug nuts down in the dirt. “Kaput,” he said.
“What did you say?”
“Kaput. It’s German for broke.”
“There’s something very strange about the tire. Should it be—”
Glory screamed, grabbing Howard with her free hand and yanking him backwards.
From his awkward kneeling position, Howard instinctively turned away from the tire and fell on his back. Utterly confused, he looked up at Glory, only to be blinded by the flashlight as he heard the strange double sound of the tire exploding. Crack! Kraak!
The black rubber had burst from the internal force that had engorged it, spewing a mass of bright red skittering things that made a hideous crackling noise as they fell in the dirt. Howard scrabbled back in shock, his limbs all contorted. “Scorpions!” he cried. “Glory, get; back!”
Standing there still disoriented from her own scream, Glory hesitated until she turned the beam of the flashlight down between her legs. There were hundreds of them, some longer and thicker than her fingers, their hard, segmented bodies scattered in the dirt, their tails arched and rigid, and the poison tips of their needle-sharp stingers probing the air, quivering with anticipation for something to pierce. One scorpion had already found her boot, and it jabbed its armored tail into the side, hardly puncturing the thick leather but squirting a tiny drop of venom from its hypodermic tip. Glory jerked her foot away, parting her legs wider, only to hear a sickening crunch as she stepped on another scorpion.
Lovecraft stepped around the front of the car, his journal fluttering. “Glory?” he called.
“Stay back!” Howard shouted, scrabbling to his feet and stomping wherever he could, crunching the hard arachnids under his bootheels. It was difficult to see exactly how many there were; they had scattered everywhere from the exploding tire. Glory aimed the beam of her light at her own feet, and with involuntary shudders at the sight of the creatures coming at her, she gritted her teeth in concentration and stepped hard, pushing with her hips for force. The things under her boots cracked and splintered, only to make room for others to crawl at her with their sharp stings upraised and twitching.
From the front of the car Lovecraft contributed his own flashlight beam, aiming at Howard’s feet. With the help of the light, Howard flicked several of the remaining scorpions off his pant legs and casually stomped them into the ground before striding over to Glory. He lifted her into his arms and walked back past the car, grunting with the surprise of her weight. As he put her on top of a rock, he noticed a movement in her hair—yet another scorpion, tangled there, almost invisible in the waves of red. He pinched it by the tail and jerked it away from her, flicking it into the darkness even before she was able to protest with a loud “ouch” of pain.
“What did you do that for?” said Glory, smoothing her hair.
“Sorry. My watchband musta got caught.”
“Well, thank you, kind knight.” Glory planted a quick kiss on his cheek and Howard turned away, his face fiercely red, only to catch a glance from Lovecraft.
Howard wondered if his blush had been visible in the moonlight.
He checked the surface of his boots, which he had been fortunate enough to wear. The stingers had left droplets of venom, which had discolored the leather to a darker hue, but none had penetrated the thick leather. Howard checked Glory’s boots, helping her wipe away some of the wet dripping gore on their soles, and then he went back to attend to the tire. He cautiously finished with the spare, cursing when he realized he had lost a lug nut in the excitement. He had to pause at least a dozen times to squash an errant scorpion that had gotten too close for his comfort.
Lovecraft and Glory sat together on the rock like people stranded
<…>tiously into the backseat and Lovecraft stretched out in the front after checking inside with his flashlight. “Just a moment,” said Lovecraft, sounding somewhat annoyed. “If you don’t mind, I must… ahem.”
“Go ahead,” said Howard. “Just watch where ya step.”
Lovecraft opened the door and stepped out again. A pale creature was skittering toward him in the dirt-a ghastly albino scorpion. Lovecraft lifted his foot with a sneer of disgust and brought it down, hard, on the thing, crushing its erect tail down onto its own body until its smashed appendages oozed out from under his shoe sole. He shook his foot to clear it of the splintered shell and the sticky gore, but it clung there until he scraped his foot again and again on a rock, smearing its surface with the sickening mess. He averted his face and stepped back into the car. “Never mind, Bob,” he said. “Let’s go. I shall never endeavor to eat lobster again. Well, not that I did in the first place.”
13
THEY HAD JOINED Highway 40 at Reno, and now they were in the Sierras, passing clusters of beat-up old cars and homemade trucks that had pulled off the road to form campsites. Through the back window Glory could see a rusted old Model A that had been rigged with a wooden platform to look almost like a covered wagon; an entire family’s possessions-pots, pans, farm tools-were roped to the sides or hanging from hooks; beyond the truck she could see the haggard faces of the poor farmers and their families gathered around makeshift fires sharing what little food they had with their fellow travelers. Even in her current circumstances, Glory knew she was far happier than they-she hadn’t lost a farm to the sun; she hadn’t seen her life and her land literally burned away and dried into dust that blew for hundreds of miles across the barren prairie.
“Lots of them must have broke down or overheated on the grades,” said Howard, noticing her expression in the rearview mirror. “Thank God I ain’t a farmer. Just look at ‘em.”
“At least it’s not winter,” said Glory.
From the front seat, Lovecraft began his own musings. “Winter,” he said. “Ah, if this were winter, then those wretched souls would be in the same predicament in which the Donner Party found themselves. Imagine eating the flesh of your own fellow travelers in the madness of hunger.”