2 Disturbing Road Trip Stories from the Middle of Nowhere

I've had a few people tell me this wouldn't have happened if we'd used our phones. It happened before either of us thought to download maps, and the phones we had were perfectly good at showing us a little blue dot surrounded by absolutely nothing. Anyway, getting lost wasn't really the problem. We could have turned around. The problem was that someone had gone to quite a bit of trouble to make sure we wouldn't want to. This was several years ago, when I was 26 and traveling around western Queensland with my mate Josh. We'd taken a couple of weeks off work, thrown our gear into my old SUV, and headed inland from Brisbane. There wasn't much of a plan beyond seeing some places we'd never seen, and spending as little as possible doing it. For a bit of background, I'm 6'2", and was pretty solid back then. I worked in a warehouse, went to the gym, and had the sort of confidence you get from never having been in any real trouble. Josh was smaller than me, but he was fit. He did those obstacle races where people pay good money to crawl up and down the road. He was a good guy. He was a good guy. He was a good guy. Neither of us considered ourselves an obvious target for anything. We were also enormous science nerds. I realize that doesn't fit the picture particularly well, but Josh could spend an entire afternoon explaining why a film dinosaur had the wrong wrists. When we found out about the dinosaur attractions around Winton, Richmond, and Hugenden, we worked them into the trip immediately. People sometimes hear the words dinosaur trail and picture a walking track with a couple of information on it. I don't know if it's true, but I think it's true. I think it's true. I think it's true. I think it's true. I think it's true. I think it's true. I think it's true. This thing covered different towns, with proper museums and fossil sites spread across a huge area. There were even preserved dinosaur footprints out at Lark Quarry. We weren't trying to do all of it in one day. We were stupid, but we weren't quite that stupid. The plan that particular morning was to drive from Barkaldine to the museum outside Winton, have a look around, and drive back. We'd already paid for another night in Barkaldine. It was roughly three hours each way, which seemed manageable when we discussed it over a few beers the night before. We left at nine. That probably tells you how seriously we'd prepared. I filled the tank before we went, and we had sandwiches, several bottles of water, and one of those big plastic water containers behind the seats. My dad had made me take a proper road atlas as well. I'd laughed at him for that. The atlas was so old that the cover had separated from the pages, and he held the whole thing together with a rubber band. About halfway through the drive, the aircon gave up. The fan still worked. It just blew hot air into our faces, which didn't feel like a particularly useful contribution. We put the windows down and spent the rest of the drive arriving at every conversation about ten seconds after it had started, because we couldn't hear each other. It was November. Everything outside had that washed-out look the country gets, when it's hot enough to be able to breathe. We had a lot of fun, and we had a lot of fun. across the surrounding country. I took a photo of Josh holding his arms out at the edge of the view, looking pleased with himself. That photo turned out to be useful later. We did the tour, wandered around, and ate the rest of our lunch in the car park. By the time we were ready to leave, it was well into the afternoon. I was looking at the fuel gauge and trying to decide whether we should go into Winton to top up before heading back. There was still a bit under half a tank. Enough for the highway run, probably, but probably isn't a word you want attached to fuel out there. We agreed we'd get some. Josh went back towards the building to fill his water bottle. I stayed with the car and tried the aircon again, as though the dinosaur tour might have fixed it. When that achieved nothing, I lifted the bonnet for a look. That's when the old bloke came over. He looked somewhere in his late 60s, although he could have been younger and just spent his entire life outside. He had a narrow face, a white mustache that had gone yellow around his mouth, and one of those broad hats with a cord under the chin. His shirt and trousers were both khaki. There was a little plastic holder clipped to his breast pocket, but it had turned backwards, so all I could see was a white rectangle. He glanced at the open bonnet and asked if we were having trouble. I told him about the aircon. He looked into the engine bay without touching anything and said it wasn't the best weather to lose it. Nothing odd about that. People had been chatting to us everywhere we'd stopped. What I remember is that he stood a little too close to the driver's door. I had to lean around him to put my keys back in the ignition. He asked where we were headed. I said back towards Longreach. He asked where after that. I said we were making it up as we went, which was mostly true. He didn't laugh or make conversation about it. He just waited, looking at me. Until I felt as though I'd given the wrong answer to a fairly simple question. Then Josh came back, and the bloke changed completely. He smiled, introduced himself, asked Josh his name, and let him talk about the fossils. He even knew some of the names. I assumed he was one of the volunteers who'd finished for the day. The clothes, the plastic holder, the way he stood around the place like he belonged there. All of it added up. Josh told him we were staying in Longreach. He said we were staying in Longreach. I said we were staying in Barkaldine. He asked which place. Josh gave him the name. Then he asked whether anyone was waiting for us there. Josh said no, just a room we'd already paid for. I remember giving him a look, but he was still in friendly tourist mode. To him, we were talking to a bloke who'd spent the day helping people learn about dinosaurs. The old man said we were going a long way around. Apparently there was a station road that would put us back onto the main route farther south. It wasn't sealed, but according to him it was in Good Nick and would save us the better part of an hour. He said there was fuel at a place along it if we needed some. That was what talked me out of going into Winton first. I asked whether it was a public road. He nodded immediately, said people used it all the time. When I took out the atlas, he barely looked at it. He told me the useful turn wasn't marked in that edition, then gave us a series of directions involving a train. He said it was a public road. I said it was a public road. A cattle grid, a windmill, and a junction where we needed to bear right. Josh wrote everything on the back of our booking receipt. The man watched him write. When Josh shortened one bit, he corrected it. He wanted the instructions down a particular way. I asked how long it should take to reach the right-hand turn. About half an hour, he said. A little longer if I was being careful. He'd apparently decided what sort of driver I was. Before we left, he tapped the roof twice. And told Josh that if we saw a board for the Moonlight Motel, we were going the right way. There was a fellow there who could help with fuel. I asked why we'd need a motel if we were just passing through. He looked at me, then at the car, and said people change their minds once they got tired. I didn't like him. I want to be clear about that because it annoys me that disliking him wasn't enough to make me ignore his directions. I thought he was a nosy old bloke, with a bit of attitude. I thought he was a nosy old bloke, with a bit of an attitude. That was the worst thing I could imagine him being. I shut the bonnet, and we got ready to leave. As we drove out, I saw him walking towards an old white four-wheel drive parked well away from the other cars. It had a flat tray and a square water tank strapped behind the cab. One of the rear mud flaps hung at an angle. Josh waved. The man lifted two fingers from the brim of his hat. For the first twenty minutes, everything was fine. The directions took us away from the route we'd arrived on, but the road was broad enough, and the landmarks appeared where he'd said they would. We crossed a cattle grid. We passed a windmill with one blade missing. There was a gate, already open, with lengths of white plastic tied to the posts. Josh ticked each thing off on the receipt. The GPS didn't like it. It kept trying to send us back, then put the car in the middle of a blank patch and stopped offering anything useful. Josh checked his phone. No signal. Mine was the same. The atlas showed several minor roads through the area, but without knowing which one we were on, they might as well have been veins on the back of my hand. We kept going because the directions had been right so far. About forty minutes later, we got to a fork. The better track curved left. The right-hand branch was narrower, but someone had put a board against the fence with an arrow, and the words, THROUGH ROAD, painted on it. Josh checked the receipt. Right at the junction. That was what it said. I slowed down enough to look along both branches. There were fairly fresh tire marks going right, and the arrow pointed the same way. We turned. Later, I remembered there had been another sign behind it, a proper metal one on a post. The painted board covered almost all of it. Neither of us got out to look. The surface got worse after that. There were corrugations that made the dashboard buzz and patches of loose stones where I had to drop right back. Every now and then, we went through a shallow dip and lost sight of everything except the banks on either side. It wasn't the featureless red desert people imagine. There was dry grass, low scrub, the odd line of trees where water must have run at some point. But there was nothing that looked like a town or a road carrying regular traffic. We hadn't passed another vehicle since the turnoff. After another twenty minutes, I said we should go back. Josh pointed out that the old bloke had said half an hour to the junction, not half an hour to the highway. We'd taken the correct turn. We just needed to keep going. I said I didn't like the road. He said I hadn't liked the sandwiches either. We weren't having an argument yet, but we were getting there. Then we passed the first motel sign. It was a piece of white-painted timber, wired to a fence, with a blue crescent moon and an arrow. Underneath, in smaller letters, it said FUEL WATER PHONE. I actually felt relieved when I saw it. That's the bit that bothers me most when I think back. Someone had painted those three words, knowing exactly what they'd mean to a person in our situation. We drove for another fifteen minutes before we found anything that might have been a building. By then, the fuel gauge was approaching a quarter. I'd said, Stopped making jokes. Josh had stopped offering directions unless I asked for them. There was a straight section where the track ran beside a fence, and something pale stuck up above the scrub off to our right. I stopped and asked Josh to get the binoculars out of the back. I'd bought them for birdwatching on another trip, and ended up using them mostly to look at road signs I couldn't be bothered driving closer to. Through them, the pale shape looked like a roof. There was a windmill farther behind it, and what might have been a windmill was a windmill. I couldn't be bothered driving closer to it. Through them, the pale shape looked like a large shed. We passed the binoculars back and forth. Both of us wanted it to be a house badly enough that we decided it was. A few hundred meters farther on, we found a turnoff. The wheel tracks were fresher than the ones on the road. Another crescent moon had been painted on a scrap of metal beside it. I remember saying we'd ask for directions first and worry about petrol second. Josh said that sounded good. The track curved around a patch of scrub. And the building came into view. It was a caravan. Or what was left of one. The front had burned away almost completely. Three partial walls remained, black along their upper edges, with strips of melted material hanging from the window frames. The thing we'd taken for a roof was a sheet of corrugated iron propped above one end. Someone had put effort into the area around it. That made it worse. There were animal bones hanging from the fence. I couldn't be bothered with that. Most looked like cattle bones. But I wouldn't know enough to identify all of them. Some had tufts of horsehair tied around them. A few were threaded together so they'd knock against each other in the breeze. There was a cow skull on a post beside the doorway, bleached white except for a muddy brown handprint across its forehead. A board planted in the ground said, Moonlight Motel. Below that was a smaller board, hanging from one nail. Please ring for service. There wasn't a bell. I stopped with the front of the SUV pointed towards the caravan. The turnoff behind us was narrow, but the ground opened out beside the wreck, so there was room to turn around. Josh tried to laugh. He said maybe the rooms were around the back. I told him to stay in the car. Of course, I then got out myself. People always ask why. The best answer I've got is that from the driver's seat. seat. With the engine running, it was still possible to think we were looking at someone's strange roadside joke. I wanted to see whether there was another sign, or a track beyond it. I switched off the engine, left the door open and kept the keys in my hand. The smell hit me once I was outside. Old ash, hot metal, something sour underneath. There were flies around the lower part of the caravan, although I couldn't see what they were landing on. I called out once. Nothing answered. Then Josh said my name from inside the car. He was looking back along the track. A column of dust was rising beyond the scrub. Someone was coming towards us fairly quickly. For about a second, I thought we were finally going to get some help. That's when I heard the scratching. It came from the far end of the caravan, where a section of wall still stood above the blackened chassis. A slow scrape, then another. It sounded like someone dragging the teeth of a fork down a door. I took one step to the side, so I could see through the doorway. There was a face at a hole in the wall. Not a face that had just appeared. It was already there, watching. One eye, part of a cheek, and a mouth pressed close enough to the opening that I could see the moisture along the bottom lip. The person inside shifted, and I saw a broad, hairy face. He was a grown man, probably somewhere in his thirties or forties. There was no mistaking that. Then he giggled in this high, breathy little voice, and asked whether we'd come to play. I'm not going to try to make that sound more supernatural than it was. It was obviously a man doing a voice. That was what made it so horrible. He wanted me to hear the effort he was putting into it. Behind me, Josh had his door halfway open. I told him to shut it. I was already moving. The man scraped the wall again. This time I saw his hand move, and a short piece of metal slid through the hole beneath his face. I got into the SUV, locked the doors, and started it. My hand missed the ignition the first time. I remember the key scratching across the plastic while I tried to get it in. By then, the other vehicle was coming into view. As it rounded the bend, I saw the white cab, the tray, and that square tank behind it. Then it straightened up and pulled directly behind us, close enough that its bonnet filled most of my rear window. The headlights were on. I couldn't see the driver through the glare and dust. The bloke from the museum. Josh said something about the car being in the way. I was already trying to reverse, realized I couldn't, and put it into drive instead. There was enough open space for me to see the car. I couldn't see the driver. I couldn't see the car. and ground on the left to make a tight turn. I went forward, brought the wheel around as hard as I could, and felt the front tire climb over something solid. The motel sign tilted, scraped down the passenger side, and vanished beneath Josh's window. The white vehicle's horn started. One long blast, then several short ones. Not the sort of quick beep you use to warn someone. He was leaning on it, making as much noise as possible. The man in the caravan stopped using the little voice. He shouted something I couldn't make out, and I saw him coming through the doorway. He was much bigger than the narrow glimpse of his face had suggested. Bare arms, long dirty shorts, heavy boots. He had something in one hand. I didn't wait to see what it was. We bumped off the cleared patch, clipped a low bush, and got back onto the track. Josh twisted around to look behind us. I kept watching the ground, because the last thing we needed was to put a wheel into a hole and stop. The horn continued until the caravan disappeared behind the scrub. Once we reached the main dirt road, I turned back the way we'd come. For a little while, neither of us spoke. Then Josh said it had to be some sort of joke. He didn't sound like he believed it. I think he wanted me to agree, so he'd have something to work with. I said the vehicle was the one from the museum. He asked if I was sure. I told him I'd recognize the tank as it came around the bend. He looked out the rear window again. There was no dust following us yet. I wanted to drive much faster than the road allowed. Every time the car slid on loose gravel, I backed off, then caught myself accelerating again. My left leg was shaking so badly that I had to brace it against the door. About ten minutes later, Josh made the first emergency call. It didn't connect. He tried my phone as well, then held both of them near the window as though he could scoop up some reception. There was nothing. He took a photo of the track behind us. I asked him why, and he said he didn't know. That answer was closer to how we were feeling than anything else either of us said. We'd been driving away from the caravan for perhaps twenty minutes when the steering started pulling left. At first, I thought it was the road. Then came a heavy flapping noise from the front wheel. I kept going for another few seconds, hoping it might somehow stop. Josh leaned towards his open window, heard the flapping, and told me to pull over. There was a flat patch beside a low bank. I eased onto it and got out. The front passenger tire was almost empty. Something metal stuck out near the shoulder. It wasn't a neat little nail. It looked like a bent piece of dirty steel, and I could hear the last of the air leaking around it. Maybe we'd picked it up at the caravan. Maybe it had been on the track. I couldn't tell, and standing there arguing about it wasn't going to help. The spare was underneath all our luggage. I can still see the stupid arrangement of things we threw onto the ground. Two bags, a sleeping bag neither of us had used, a packet of chips, Josh's dinosaur brochure, all this normal holiday rubbish sitting in the dust while he kept turning to look down the road. I'd changed a tire before. Not often, but often enough that I knew what to do. What I hadn't done was change one with sweat running into my eyes, while waiting for two strange men to come around a bend. The wheel nuts were tight. One wouldn't move until I stood on the brace. I slipped once and knocked my shin against the wheel. It hurt enough to make me feel sick. Josh kept watch until I needed him to hold the spare. Then we both crouched beside the car, trying not to look at each other. We could hear a vehicle before we could see it. Not close. Just the faint change in the sound of the afternoon. An engine. An engine working over the rough road. I had two nuts properly tightened, and the others only partway on. Josh said very calmly that I needed to finish. I did. I lowered the jack, tightened everything again, and threw the brace and flat tire into the back. We didn't pack anything properly. Josh shoved the water container in after the bags, and slammed the hatch. As I got behind the wheel, a white bonnet appeared at the far end of the straight. It was still several hundred meters away. The driver wasn't racing. He'd slowed down. For some reason, that frightened me more than if he'd come flying towards us. We pulled away. I checked the mirror at the first bend and saw the white vehicle stop beside the patch where we'd changed the wheel. The driver's door opened. I didn't see anything after that. The next thing we recognized was the fork with the painted board. It was farther away than I remembered. Everything was farther away than I remembered. I turned left to retrace our route, and Josh leaned forward, studying the fence. The arrow board had fallen forward into the grass. The metal sign behind it was fully visible now. Private property. No through road. Below it was a telephone number and the name of a station. Josh photographed it as we passed. I didn't say anything. I had run out of explanation. We reached the open gate with the white plastic tied to the post about ten minutes later. Except now it was closed. A new looking chain had been wound around it and the post, secured with a padlock. On either side, wire fencing ran off across the paddock. The road went over a raised crossing at that point, and both shoulders dropped into a dry, rocky channel. I stopped a short distance away. Josh was out before I'd said anything. He ran to the chain, pulled it, then lifted the bottom of the gate as if the whole thing might just come free. It didn't. I looked at the banks on both sides. In a proper four-wheel drive, with someone who knew what they were doing. Maybe there was a way around. In my old SUV, tired and shaking, I could see us tipping sideways and ending up stuck below the crossing. I got out with the wheel brace anyway. We tried to force the chain. I tried to force the chain, but it didn't work. It didn't. I tried levering the gate at the latch. All we managed was to bend a little tab of metal, and make enough noise that anyone nearby would have known exactly where we were. Then we heard a horn behind us. Just two short beeps this time. The white vehicle had stopped up the road. I couldn't hear it. I could hear it. The white vehicle had stopped up the road, well outside the distance where I could see the driver's face. Both men were in it now. I could make out the old man's hat and the larger shape beside him. He wasn't trying to get past us. He was waiting to see what we'd do. I put the brace back in the car and told Josh to get in. He asked what I was going to do. I said I didn't know, but we weren't staying outside. There was room to turn before the crossing. I made an awkward three-point turn while Josh watched the white vehicle. the white vehicle. It didn't move until we started towards it. Then it rolled slowly forward. We were facing each other on the road. I kept coming. I had no idea what I'd do if he blocked us completely, but I couldn't make myself stop and wait for him to decide. The ground was flatter there, above the rocky channel. I put two wheels into the grass and went around him. Something scraped underneath the car. Josh grabbed the handle above his window. As we passed, the old man leaned towards his open window. He said almost pleasantly that we wouldn't get home that way. His passenger was laughing, in his normal voice this time. That deep, ordinary laugh was somehow worse than the little girl act. I got back onto the track and kept driving. In the mirror, the old It didn't move until we started towards it. daylight and then fuel. There had to be another way off the property. Trucks got in and out. People brought water and equipment to places like that. I kept saying those things because they sounded practical, and I needed to hear something practical. Back at the fork, we took the broader branch we'd ignored on the way in. A little farther along, a rough service track branched off towards higher ground. There was a black plastic water pipe beside it, half buried in dust. I turned onto it. Josh started to object, then stopped when I said I only wanted to get high enough to see where we were. We needed a road, a house that wasn't theirs, a bit of phone reception, anything. The track climbed a low rise. At the top, I stopped with the engine off. The sudden quiet made the ticking under the bonnet sound very loud. We tried the phones again. Josh walked a short distance up the slope with one held over his head. I stayed by the car with the other and watched the track below. Neither call connected. From there, I could see the road we'd left, but only in pieces. It dipped behind the scrub and came out again farther away. That explained how a vehicle could follow us without leaving a dust cloud we could see the whole time. Beyond it was the burnt caravan. Farther across the property, near the windmill, stood a long corrugated shed and a smaller building with a veranda. There were water tanks, yards, and a rusting tractor parked under an awning. The pipe beside us continued towards those tanks. A service track followed it. On the other side of the buildings, a second track ran away across the grass. Through the binoculars, I could follow it for a while before it disappeared behind another rise. I handed them to Josh. He said it might lead to another gate. I said that was better than the gate we already knew was locked. Neither of us suggested asking whoever lived there for help. We understood by then that all of it probably belonged together. While Josh was looking, I checked the time. It was a little after six. We'd spent much longer at the tire and the gate than I'd realized. The sun was still up, but it had started dropping towards the low ridge behind us. Then Josh lowered the binoculars and told me to get in. The white vehicle had come into view on the road below. It slowed at our turnoff. The old man didn't have to search very hard. We'd left two fresh tire tracks in the dust. I started the SUV and followed the pipe down the other side of the rise. We came to the buildings from the back. Up close, the long shed looked like an old shearing shed with a workshop attached. Parts of it had been repaired with different colored sheets of iron. There was a satellite dish on the smaller building, a rotary clothesline, and a pair of work trousers hanging on it. After the caravan, those normal things made me feel strangely worse. Whoever these people were, they washed their clothes. They sat on that veranda. They went into town for groceries and came back here. The service track passed between the tanks and the shed, then reached a closed gate in the far fence. For one lovely second, I thought we'd found our way out. Then Josh got out to open it. Another padlock. This one was on a heavy stock gate set between timber posts. There was no rocky channel beside it, but the fence continued right up to the buildings on one side and an old machinery heap on the other. I could see the track carrying on beyond it. It was wide enough for a vehicle. We just couldn't get to it. I sat there looking at the chain while the engine idled. frighten makes you quick. There are other times when it makes you stare a simple object as though you might eventually think it open. Josh came back and said there might be tools in the workshop. I didn't want either of us going inside. I also didn't have a better suggestion. I backed the car up beside the shed, keeping it pointed towards the gate so we could leave quickly once it was open, and switched off the engine. I kept the keys in my pocket and took the wheel brace. We were heading towards a half-open sliding door when someone spoke from inside. It was a woman's voice. She said very quietly that if we were real people, we needed to come around the other side. Josh stopped so abruptly that I walked into him. The voice came again. An ordinary adult voice, hoarse and exhausted. She asked us not to leave. I thought of the man in the caravan. Of course I did. I expected the same giggle to come after it. Instead, fingers appeared in a gap between two pieces of iron near the back corner of the shed. They moved once, then disappeared. We went around the corner, keeping some distance from the wall. There was a window with plywood screwed across most of it. Through a broken section at the bottom, I could see one eye and a strip of pale forehead. The woman told us her name was Anna. She said she was locked in a room and the door was inside the workshop. She kept glancing away while she spoke, as though someone might come up behind her. I asked how many people were there. "Two," she said. "The older one and the other one." She hadn't seen anyone else. Josh asked whether she was hurt. She said she could walk. That wasn't what he'd asked, but it was what we needed to know. I told her about the gate. She said the old man carried the keys on his belt, but there were bolt cutters in the workshop. Long, red handles. She'd seen him use them the day before. Then we heard an engine coming down from the rise. Anna pulled away from the gap so fast that she knocked her head against the plywood. I heard the impact. That settled something for me. It wasn't a performance. Nobody rehearses that kind of flinch. I told Josh to get the cutters while I found her door. We went into the shed together. The first part was a workshop, with a bench, a vise, and the usual assortment of greasy machinery. Beyond it, plywood walls divided the old shed into a narrow passage and several small rooms. Someone had put numbers on the doors, using those brass numerals you buy for letterboxes. Above the passage was a board painted the same blue as the crescent moons outside. Reception. There was an actual desk underneath it. An old kitchen table with a bell, a stack of brochures, and a little wooden desk. There was a table with a bell, a wooden rack for keys. The rack was empty. I could see how it might have worked on someone arriving before they knew about the caravan. It was shabby, but we'd stayed in shabby places. There was a light on above the desk, and a fan turning slowly in the corner. The smell of hot dust and disinfectant could have belonged to any cheap room in the country. Then I saw the bolts on the doors. Everyone was on the outside. Anna tapped from the second room on the left. There was a big sliding bolt and a loose length of chain hanging from a staple. No padlock on that door. I pulled the bolt back, expecting it to stick, but it moved easily. She was sitting on the floor with her knees pulled up against her chest. The room had a mattress without sheets, a plastic bucket, and the boarded window we'd spoken through. The door handle on the inside had been removed. She looked to be in her thirties. One side of her face was swollen, and there was a dark bruise around her upper arm. Her shirt was dirty and buttoned wrong, with one button left over at the bottom. She tried to stand too fast and caught the door frame. I put an arm around her, and she immediately told me not to shut the door. I said we weren't shutting anything. We were leaving. From the workshop, Josh said he'd found the cutters. At the same time, the engine outside stopped. We all froze. The white four-wheel drive had come down the same service track we'd used. Through the workshop entrance, I could see part of its front wheel, and the shadow of someone getting out. The old man called Josh's name. He said it as though he was collecting him from a waiting room. Anna gripped my wrist hard enough to hurt. Josh backed into the passage holding the bolt cutters against his leg. I expected the old man to come in straight away. Instead, he walked past the open door. I heard his boots on gravel. Then a sound from beside the SUV. A sharp hiss. Josh leaned just far enough to see and pulled back. The other man was crouched beside our rear tire. The old man told us to stop making things difficult. He said there was water inside, and we'd all feel better once we'd sat down. I wanted to run at him. I really did. It sounds brave written down, but it was mostly panic. My car was right there, and he was speaking as if he had ever had a right to decide what happened next. Anna pulled me back before I moved. She pointed through a crack in the partition. The old man was standing outside with a rifle held down beside his leg. I hadn't seen him take it from the vehicle. I hadn't heard anything that told me it was there. Suddenly, being a big bloke meant absolutely nothing. We moved farther down the passage, out of sight of the workshop entrance. There was a doorway at the back leading into the original part of the shed. I could see timber flooring, old wool presses, and a row of openings where sheep must have gone through. The light from reception didn't reach very far into it. Josh pushed through first. I helped Anna over the raised timber at the doorway. She whispered that she'd come there the previous afternoon. The old man had spoken to her near Winton. She was traveling alone, taking photographs, and he'd offered to show her a waterhole on a property where there were supposed to be birds. He'd talked about the road and the light at sunset. He'd sounded as though he knew what he was talking about. When she got there, he'd sent her into the shed to fill her bottle. The other man was waiting inside. She hadn't been able to see where they'd put her hire car. I asked whether they'd taken her phone. She nodded. Then she looked towards the passage and said the worst part was that they kept pretending she was staying willingly. The old man had made her stand at reception while the other one filmed her. She'd had to say her name, where she was from, and that she'd decided to spend the night. If she said it wrong, they started again. They'd kept doing it until she stopped crying enough to sound normal. I didn't know what to say to that. I still don't. There was a scrape from the workshop, followed by a clatter. It sounded as though he was dragging something across the entrance. Then his voice came down the passage. Anna she'd lost her room key again. She put both hands over her mouth. I pulled her farther back into the dark. The rear of the shed had a proper door, but a chain passed through holes beside the frame. You could see daylight around it. Josh put the cutters against the chain and looked at me. I nodded. The noise seemed enormous. A creak from the handles, a little metallic snap, then the loose end hit the floor. We all stopped breathing. From the other side of the shed, the old man asked what we were doing. Josh eased the door open a few inches. Beyond it were sheep yards, their rails gray and rough from years outside. The ground sloped away under the raised part of the shed. A series of gates connected the pens to a narrow race along the side of the building. We could get out there. Getting to the car was another problem. The end of the shed. The SUV was parked near the far corner, beside the tanks, facing the locked exit. Between us and it were the yards and a patch of open ground. The old man was at the workshop end. We didn't know where the other one had gone after cutting the tire. Josh took out his phone and showed me the screen. He wasn't trying a call this time. He'd opened the camera and was holding it low through the gap in the door, using the picture to look around the corner without putting his head out. I wouldn't have thought of that in a million years. The picture shook badly. For a moment it showed the sky, then the fence, then the space beside the shed. A man walked into it, the one from the caravan. He was moving slowly, looking into the pens. He had the knife down beside his thigh. There was a strip of black rubber stuck to the blade. Josh pulled the phone back. We shut the door as quietly as we could. The cut chain hung uselessly beside it. Footsteps came along the outside wall. I stood with the brace held against my chest. Josh still had the cutters. Anna was behind us, one hand on the back of my shirt. The man stopped on the other side of the door. He scratched it. The same slow sound we'd heard at the caravan, except this time I couldn't just get back in the car. I could hear him breathing through his nose. A little click came from his throat as he swallowed. In that awful high voice, he asked if we'd found his room. Josh looked at me. His face had gone completely blank. The handle moved. The door pressed against my shoulder. I held it shut. He pushed harder. For a second, I thought that was it. He'd force his way in, the old man would come through behind us, and we'd be stuck between them. Then the old man shouted from the workshop, telling him to stand back from the door and watch the yards. He told him not to let us reach the tanks. The pressure stopped. He stayed outside for another few seconds. I could see the shadow of his boots through the gap under the door. He whispered something in his normal voice. Something about us having to sleep eventually. Then the shadow moved away. I kept my shoulder against the door long after he was gone. Anna tugged at my shirt and pointed down. Along the back of the shearing floor was a low opening with a timber flap. It led into one of the narrow chutes beneath the shed. You couldn't walk through it. You'd have to crawl. Through the gaps below, I could see the same sheep yards, but farther along, on the side closest to the SUV. Josh looked through first, then nodded. There was no one immediately outside. The old man was in the passage now. We could hear him opening room doors one at a time. He was checking each doorway before moving past it. His mate was outside, watching the rear exit. I told Anna to go first. She shook her head, looking into the dark space below, and for a second I thought she couldn't do it. Then she got onto her knees and lowered herself through. Josh went after her with the cutters. I handed him the brace, went feet first through the opening, and felt for the ground. The drop was less than I expected. My shoes hit dirt. I eased the timber flap shut behind me, then crouched beneath the floor, with the backs of my shoulders pressed against old timber. Josh passed the brace back to me. I couldn't get enough room to wipe them away. Overhead, the floor creaked. The old man had reached the back of the shed. All three of us stayed still beneath him. Dust fell through a gap and landed on my wrist. I could see the bottom of his boot through the boards. He was so close that when he shifted his weight, I felt it in the timber touching my back. He called Anna's name again. She was crouched less than an arm's length away. I couldn't get enough room to wipe them off. Her whole body was shaking, but she didn't make a sound. He tried the rear door. We heard the broken chain drag across the floor, then drop. His tone changed immediately. He shouted for the other man. There was no pretense of friendliness now. He said we'd gone out the back. The door banged open above us. We waited until his boots had gone down the steps and away into the yards. Then Josh started moving. We crawled along beneath the shed towards the tanks. It wasn't a proper tunnel, just the space under a raised floor, interrupted by posts and old rubbish. Twice I had to lie almost flat to get past a beam. A rusty length of wire snagged my shirt and held me for a moment, and I nearly tore the whole thing off trying to get loose. We came out into a narrow race between the shed and the sheep pens. The tanks were ahead. Beyond them was my car. Josh checked the space between the rails and started opening the first gate. It squealed. From the far end of the yards, someone shouted. We stopped being quiet after that. Josh pulled the gate open and pushed Anna through. I followed. The other man was running along the outside of the pens, cutting across to meet us at the next opening. He was fast, much faster than I'd expected from the slow, theatrical way he'd moved before. Josh reached the final gate and got it open. Anna squeezed past him. I was a step behind when the man came around the corner and caught the top rail with his free hand. He yanked it back towards us. The gate caught my shoulder. I hit the fence hard enough to knock the air out of me. Josh stumbled backwards, and the man came through the opening with the knife held low. I swung the wheel brace. I didn't aim properly. I didn't do anything clever. I just swung because he was coming towards Josh and there wasn't time to do anything else. It hit his front wheel and I couldn't get it out of the way. Josh was coming towards me, and I hit his forearm. He dropped the knife and made a flat, ugly noise. Then he ran into me. I went backwards against the rails with his weight on top of me. He smelled of sweat and something sweet, like old cordial. His good hand grabbed the neck of my shirt, twisting it tight against my throat. I couldn't get the brace up between us. Josh dropped the cutters and hit him from the side. We all crashed into the gate. It swung wide. The man lost his life. He fell on the other side of it, caught between the open gate and a low trough. Josh pulled the gate back across the opening. I slammed the latch down while he snatched the cutters off the ground. It wasn't a lock. It wouldn't hold him for long. It gave us enough time to run. I grabbed Anna's arm. Josh went straight for the exit gate with the cutters, while I got her to the SUV. The rear tire on my side was flat. With a long split through the wall. There was no repairing that beside the road, and our spare was already on the front. For a moment, I stood there looking at it. Then Anna told me to start the car. She said it with such force that I did exactly what she told me. I got her into the back seat, threw the brace into the front footwell, got behind the wheel, and turned the key. The engine caught. I looked through the windscreen and saw Josh at the chain, trying to get the cutters into place. Behind the car, the other man was lifting the latch. I leaned on the horn. Josh looked up, then back at the chain. He put everything he had into the handles. They moved, stopped, then came together. He dragged the gate open. I put the SUV into drive. It felt wrong immediately. The back of the car lurched, and the flat tire slapped against the ground. I kept my foot down just enough to move, terrified that too much would pull it off the wheel before we got through. Josh ran alongside the passenger door. I stopped for the second it took him to climb in. A shot went off behind us. Something hit the metal tank beside the shed with a hard, cracking sound. Anna folded down across the back seat. Josh ducked before he'd even shut his door. I didn't look for the old man. I drove through the gate. There was the old man. There was a bend beyond the fence. I got around it with the back of the car pulling sideways, and the shed disappeared behind the rise. We were out of the yard. We weren't out of the property. The track was rough, and the tire got worse almost immediately. There was a rhythmic thump, then a tearing sound, and a piece of rubber struck the underside of the car. After that, every stone seemed to come up through my seat. I slowed down. I had to. The steering still worked, but the back corner kept dropping into ruts and pulling us across the track. Josh was looking behind us. Anna had one hand hooked through his headrest, and the other pressed against her mouth. I kept expecting to see the white vehicle come over the rise. We passed a water trough, a collapsed section of fence, and a big gum tree with rubbish caught high in its branches from some old flood. I noticed all of it with ridiculous clarity. My brain seemed determined to catalog the things we'd pass before the car stopped. The track divided again. I almost braked to a halt. Then Josh pointed left. Through the gathering dusk, there was a line of dust moving across the country ahead of us. Too far away to be on our track. Moving sideways, steadily, like a vehicle traveling on a bigger road. I took the left branch. A few minutes later, the fuel light came on. I remember actually laughing. One short noise that didn't sound like me. The ruined tire finally came apart on a straight section. I heard it go, and the corner of the car dropped harder. The wheel made a grinding sound whenever it hit stone. I kept it crawling forward. The engine was still running. The front wheels were still pulling. As long as those two things remained true, I wasn't stopping. Josh tried another emergency call. This time, it rang. He looked at the screen as if he couldn't believe it, then started talking so quickly that I could barely understand him. He told the operator about the men, the rifle, Anna, the property. He read out the station name from the photograph he'd taken of the sign. The call broke up twice, but it stayed connected long enough for him to get that much out. Then he said he could see a road. So could I. There was a cattle grid ahead, with an open gate beside it for stock. Beyond that was a wider gravel road running left and right. A proper sign stood on the opposite side. Reflective lettering. Something made by a council, not by a man with a brush. I got the car over the grid so slowly that each bar gave us a separate jolt. On the far side, I pulled onto the shoulder and stopped. I kept the engine running while we watched headlights approaching along the road. They belonged to a dual-cab ute towing a stock trailer. I thought it was the engine, but it wasn't. I thought it was the car, but it wasn't. I stood beside my open door and waved both arms, ready to get back behind the wheel if I saw anything I recognized. The ute slowed. An older woman was driving it, with a man in the passenger seat. I must have looked terrible. Before I finished explaining, the man had reached their homestead on the radio. He knew which road we were on and gave our location, asking them to call the police and warn them about the rifle. The woman helped Anna into the back seat. Once I knew they were helping, I switched off the SUV and joined Josh beside her. They drove us a safe distance along the road and stayed with us while the police came. The white four-wheel drive never appeared. An officer later told us the white four-wheel drive had been stopped on the road back towards Winton. The old man had left through the front gate, taking the rifle with him. He'd left the other man at the shed. While we'd been watching the track behind us, he'd been heading for the highway on the other side of the property. Both men were in custody before daylight. Officers found the younger one. Anna's hire car was behind a locked workshop door, along with her bag and phone. The property wasn't an operating motel. The old man had been employed to keep an eye on an unused part of a larger station, and he'd been living in the outbuilding. The owner hadn't known what he'd done to the shed. They found the camera, too. One of the recordings showed Anna at the makeshift reception desk, trying to say what the old man wanted her to say. She'd described it to the police before they searched the shed. The recording backed up her account. Neither man returned to the property. Once the police had finished with the shed, the owner had the internal rooms pulled out. The fake road signs came down, too. We were told when that happened. The next morning, a woman from the dinosaur museum spoke to us while we were giving our statements. The police had contacted the place after hearing how we'd met the old man. She'd said something about the bloke who'd worked there. She looked confused and asked me to describe him. When I did, she said he wasn't an employee. He'd been approaching visitors in the car park, asking where they were staying and telling them he had cheap rooms available. Someone had already asked him to leave earlier that afternoon. I mentioned the plastic holder clipped to his pocket. She said visitors sometimes wore their tour passes that way. That was all it had taken. A khaki shirt and a black shirt. She said, It was a bit of plastic, and I'd turned him into someone whose directions we could trust. Josh found the photo I'd taken of him at the lookout. The white four-wheel drive was visible in the car park below. The old man stood beside it with his head tipped back, looking up at the visitors. The police kept a copy. Its timestamp put that distinctive vehicle at the museum before we'd spoken to him, backing up where we'd first encountered him. Anna left with her sister a couple of days later. Before she went, she hugged both of us, and apologized for shouting at me to start the car. I told her it was probably the most useful thing anyone had said all evening. The SUV came home on a tow truck. The rear wheel was ruined, the side was scraped to pieces, and it had a few other problems I couldn't afford to sort out. I sold it to a mechanic the following month. Josh and I are still mates. We've done other trips since, although we fill the tank whenever we get a sensible opportunity. And neither of us accepts a shortcut from someone we haven't asked. We never finished that dinosaur trip. When we finally got back to Bar-Kaldeen, we stayed one more night. The next morning, we put our bags in the car we'd hired, checked the route together, and stayed on the highway all the way home. The woman at reception asked if we'd enjoyed our stay. For once, Josh let me do the talking. I was born in Farmington, New Mexico, and I've never lived more than 20 miles from it. That matters for this story, because of where Farmington sits. You've got the Navajo Nation starting about 10 miles west of town and running clear to Arizona, Apache land to the east, the Ute Mountain UTEs up north over the Colorado line, and in the middle of all that, a dusty oil town full of white guys who drive trucks for a living. Everybody out here knows about skinwalkers. Everybody has a story. Most of the stories are a guy's cousin who saw a coyote stand up on two legs by a gas station in Shiprock, and the guy telling it is laughing while he tells it, and you laugh too. The thing you figure out after a while is who doesn't laugh. The Navajo guys I grew up with, went to school with, worked with, they'd do one of two things if the subject came up. Either they'd look at the floor and let the subject die, or they'd grin and say that was a white man's thing, a story from the movies. Nobody real believed in that. Until I was 12, I took the silence for embarrassment and the jokes at face value. That changed in the summer of 1996. I'm 42 now, and I'm writing this down because my dad passed in the spring, and he was the only other person who'd talk about it with me. The other two people who were there, won't. My dad was Curtis Ladd. Everybody called him Kurt. He ran a one-man freight business out of our house on the south side of Farmington, down by the river. He had a white one-ton diesel pickup with dual fuel tanks, dual rear wheels, a steel rack behind the cab, and a 20-foot tandem axle gooseneck trailer, and he hauled things nobody else would haul to places nobody else would go. The big freight carriers would take a load as far as Farmington or Gallup, and they'd take a load as far as Farmington or Gallup, and then call the customer and say, come get it. A lot of the customers couldn't come get it. They didn't have a truck that would pull it, or they lived two hours off pavement, or they were 80 years old. So the freight company would call my dad, or the family would, and he'd put the thing on his trailer and drive it to the door. Water tanks, hay, lumber, mattresses, wood stoves, a coffin once. He charged by the mile, and he took cash. Summers, I rode with him. It was that, or sit in the house. I learned to strap a load before I learned long division, and I knew every dirt road in San Juan County by the time I was 10. My dad liked having me along. He'd tell me the names of the washes and the mesas, and who lived down which road and what they'd ordered the last time. Daryl was my dad's closest friend, which is a strange thing to say about two men who could sit in the same cab for three hours and say nine words. They'd met on a drilling crew, in the eighties. Daryl was Navajo from Window Rock, Arizona, down near the New Mexico line, and he'd ended up in Farmington for the same reason everybody ends up in Farmington, which is the oil field. He was a tall, lean guy with a crew cut and a gap in his front teeth, and he drove a green half-ton pickup that he kept cleaner than anybody keeps a work truck. He was quiet, dry. He could make my dad laugh harder than anybody I ever saw, and he'd do it with his head. He'd put his face dead flat and his eyes on the road. Daryl had rules. I didn't call them that when I was a kid. They were just the ways Daryl was. He wouldn't whistle outside after dark, and he'd tell you to quit if you did. If a coyote crossed in front of the truck while he was riding with us, he'd look down until it was gone. When he was driving, he watched the road and wouldn't follow it with his eyes. He wouldn't say a certain word. If my dad said it, Daryl would say, Don't. And my dad would say, Sorry. And that was the end of it. My dad never asked why. He told me once that Daryl had never made fun of him for preying over his food, so he wasn't going to make fun of Daryl for anything. The Window Rock job came in on a Wednesday in late June. My dad took the call in our kitchen. It was from a woman at the chapter house in Window Rock who had a load sitting at the freight yard in Farmington. A galvanized stock tank. A big one. Eight feet across. And a windmill head and pump rods to go with it. It had come in from a supplier in Oklahoma, and the trucking company had dropped it at the yard and washed its hands. The chapter house wanted it at a sheep camp north of Window Rock, off Route 12, where a family was running dry. The woman said they'd pay cash at delivery, and she gave my dad a name and directions, and the directions ended with the words, You'll see the tires. My dad said Saturday. Daryl was over that night. He came by most nights that summer because his girlfriend Lita worked evenings at the Safeway Deli, and he didn't like an empty apartment. My dad told him about the job while they were sitting on the tailgate in the driveway drinking beer, and Daryl got quiet in a different way than usual. And then he said he hadn't seen his grandmother in two years. He said she was 91. He said if Kurt was driving to Window Rock on Saturday, he and Lita would follow in the green truck, help with the delivery and then see the family, and we'd all ride home together in the evening. My dad liked that. He liked company on a long run, and he liked the idea of me seeing Window Rock, which is the capital of the Navajo Nation, and has the big red rock with the hole through it that the town is named for. He said we'd do the delivery, go see Daryl's grandmother, look at the rock, eat, and head home. He said we'd be back by 10. Daryl said, Before dark, would be better. My dad said he'd try. My dad had two walkie-talkies he used whenever he ran with another truck, gray plastic handheld CB units with rubber antennas, good for a couple of miles across flat ground. He went and got them out of the glove box and handed one to Daryl. Daryl looked at it in his hand, longer than you'd look at a walkie-talkie. Then he put it in his jacket pocket and said he'd have batteries in it. Saturday morning, we loaded at the freight yard at six. The tank was a big round galvanized thing, eight feet across and two feet deep. A couple of the yard men helped my dad settle it on the gooseneck with the forklift. He laid padded timber across the rim and ran wide straps over it so he wouldn't buckle the thin metal. The windmill head and the bundle of pump rods went in front of it, secured separately. My dad walked around the trailer twice checking everything, which was his habit, and he kicked each tire, which was also his habit. And then we went and met Daryl and Lita at the station on the west edge of town. Lita was in the passenger seat of the green truck with her feet up on the dash. She was a small woman, maybe five feet even, with a laugh you could hear from across a parking lot. And she had a bag of sunflower seeds she'd already opened. She waved at me through the windshield. Daryl had the walkie-talkie sitting on the dash of the green truck. My dad keyed ours, and the one on Daryl's dash crackled and lit up. And Daryl gave a thumbs up, and we pulled out onto Highway 64 going west with the morning sun behind us and the trailer rolling smooth, and I thought it was going to be a good day. You go west from Farmington to Shiprock, then south on Highway 666, until you get to the turn for 264, near Yatahay. That's north of Gallup. It takes you west across the state line into Window Rock, something over a hundred and thirty miles altogether. With the trailer loaded and a breakfast stop, we did it in three and a half hours. My dad let me run the radio, and Daryl would come on every so often and tell me what I was looking at. The Chuska Mountains off to the right, blue and long. The spot where a trading post had burned in the 70s. A dead horse in the borrow ditch that he told me not to look at, and that I looked at anyway. We rolled into Window Rock around half past ten in the morning. I saw the rock. It's a wall of red sandstone with a round hole worn clear through it, the size of a house, and the sky shows through the hole. The tribal offices sit right under it. My dad slowed down so I could get a good look, and then we went on north up Route 12 into the pines. Route 12 runs along the state line through Ponderosa Country, up high, and it's cooler up there. And it smells of pine and wet rock. The directions said to go eleven miles. Look for a dirt road on the left, and we'd see the tires. We saw the tires. Somebody had stacked about forty old truck tires in a pyramid at the turnoff, and painted the top one white. We turned in. The dirt road was fine for about a mile, and then it quit being a road and became two ruts with rocks in them, climbing. My dad put the white truck in four low and crawled. Daryl had to get out of the dirt road. Daryl hung back a hundred yards to stay out of the dust. It was five miles in. The camp sat in a flat with pines around it, and a dry stock tank in the middle that had rusted through. There was a hogan, a newer frame house, a corral of juniper posts, a long shed, and maybe eighty sheep in a pen that were making the noise sheep make when the water's gone. Three dogs came out at us. That was normal. What wasn't normal was that after about ten seconds of barking, all three of them stopped at once and went back under the house and stayed there. The family was a couple in their forties named Sam and Alice Begay, and Alice's mother, and a boy about my age, named Jonah. They were glad to see us. Sam had a backhoe with a bucket on it, and between the backhoe and the chains and my dad and Daryl, we got the tank off the gooseneck and set where the old one had been in about an hour. The windmill parts went on blocks beside the shed. We were able to get the tank off the gooseneck and set where the old one had been in about an hour. Sam had somebody coming to fit them the next morning. Until then, he was hauling water and drums. He paid my dad in cash out of a coffee can. Alice gave us fry bread and bottled water and wouldn't take no. While the men were unloading the windmill parts, Jonah and I sat on the trailer deck with our feet hanging. He asked me if we were driving back to Farmington tonight. I said yes. He asked which way. I said gallop for fuel and then up. Dad had said he'd fill both tanks at the truck stop he used on the north side of town. It meant going a few miles south out of our way, but he knew it would be open. Jonah nodded. He picked at the deck boards for a while. Then he said, there's a thing that sits in the road between here and gallop. He said it flat, with no change in his voice at all. He said, it sits on the hill by the culvert, and it faces the cliffs, and if you go by it after dark, you'd see it. I said, you don't slow down. I asked him what it was. He said he didn't know. He said his uncle had hit it with a truck two years ago, and the truck had come back with the grill pushed in, and the uncle wouldn't say anything about it, and had moved to Phoenix that fall. He said his grandmother said it was an old man from out past Hunter's Point, who'd been doing a bad thing for 60 years, and wasn't an old man anymore. I didn't tell my dad about any of that. I was 12, and a boy my own age had told me a scary story on a trailer. That's how it felt at the time. We left the camp at one in the afternoon, and went back down to Window Rock, and Daryl led us to his grandmother's house on the north side of town. A little tan stucco place with a fence, and a cottonwood, and a hogan out back that still got used. Daryl's grandmother was a tiny woman with white hair and a bun, and a velvet blouse, and a lot of turquoise, and she held Daryl's face in both her hands, and talked to him in Navajo for a long time, while he stood there and took it. Then she looked at my dad, and then she looked at me. Family came in all afternoon. Cousins, aunts, a brother of Daryl's I'd never heard of. There was mutton stew, and more fry bread, and a lot of laughing I couldn't understand. My dad sat in a lawn chair in the shade of the cottonwood with his hat on his knee, and a plate on his lap, and I think it was one of the better afternoons of his life. Around four o'clock, the sky over the top of the mountain, and the sky over the top of the mountain, the ridge to the west went black, and it came down. A summer storm, fast and heavy, with wind. We all packed into the house and watched it through the windows. The first downpour lasted forty minutes. Then another band came over, and another. By the time the rain stopped, the little road out to the pavement was running with water. Daryl walked down to look at it twice, and came back shaking his head. It was after eight before he said we could get the trucks through. The air smelled of wet dirt and sage. Daryl's grandmother didn't want us to leave. She said it through Daryl. She said the road to Gallup was bad after a rain, and the sun was going, and there was plenty of room in the house. My dad thanked her and said he had a job in Aztec at seven the next morning, an early haul, and that he knew the road fine. He'd been driving it twenty years. Daryl translated that. His grandmother listened, and then she said something short. She said something short to Daryl, and went inside. She came back out with two small leather pouches on cords. I'd seen things like them before, hanging off the mirrors of trucks on the reservation, and I'd always figured they were decoration. They were about the size of the end of your thumb, dark and soft, with something in them that gave a little when you pressed. She put one in Daryl's hand, and closed his fingers over it, and said a few words. She came to my dad, and did the same thing. My dad looked at it, and said thank you, and he went to put it in his pocket, and the old woman reached up and took his wrist, and stopped him, and said something. And Daryl said, she says on the mirror, where you can see it, not in a pocket. My dad hung it on the mirror of the white truck. Daryl hung his on the mirror of the green truck. The old woman watched both of them do it. Then she said something else, longer, and Daryl didn't translate it straight away. My dad asked him what she'd said. Daryl said, she says don't stop. Then he said, she says if there's something in the road, you don't stop for it, and you don't go around it. You go through it. Then he said we needed to get across the San Juan at Shiprock. He looked at my dad. He said, Kurt, if you hear my voice on that radio telling you to pull over, don't do it just because it sounds like me. Get a look at me first. See me give you the signal, not headlights. Not a horn. Me. My dad said, why wouldn't it be you? Daryl looked at the radio in his hand. He said, just promise me. My dad promised. We left Window Rock around half past eight with the sun down behind the ridge and the sky still light in the west and the road shining. Daryl wanted the rear. My dad said he knew the road better. He should lead. Daryl said no. He said it again. He said, I'll be behind you, Kurt, the whole way, and you keep me in the mirror. was in the passenger seat with her bag of seeds, and she wasn't laughing anymore. She'd been quiet since the old woman came out with the pouches. The road east out of Window Rock toward Gallop is empty country. Sandstone bluffs run along the left side close to the pavement, red going to gray going to black as the light went. On the right side, there's open rangeland, flat, with wet grass and sage going silver in the last light, and a barbed wire fence on steel posts running along the shoulder the whole way. A few houses sit back off the road with a half mile between them. That night none of them had a light on, and I noticed it, and I didn't say anything. The pavement was still wet, and the headlights lay out on it long and bright. The trailer was empty now, and it rattled over every seam. My dad was doing 50. I had the walkie-talkie in my lap with my thumb off the button. Daryl's headlights sat in the side mirror about a hundred yards back, steady. About nine miles out, there's a long straight hill. The road goes up it and over and comes down the far side the same way, straight, and at the bottom there's a dip where a wash runs under the road through a box culvert. I know this because I've driven it since, in daylight, once, to see it. We came up over the top of that hill, and the headlights swung down the far side, and there was something sitting in the road. at the bottom by the culvert. It was in our lane, dead center, sitting on its back end with its front legs straight, and it was facing the bluffs on the left, so what we saw was its side and the back of its head. I thought, dog. There are big dogs all over the reservation, and they sit on the asphalt at night because it's warm. That's what I thought, and it's what my dad thought, because he let off the gas a little, and keyed the radio, and said, Daryl. You see this dog. I had time to look at it while the radio was quiet. The shape was wrong. The spine humped up behind the shoulders too high, and the back went on too long. The front legs were straight and set wide, and they were too thin for the body, and whatever it was sitting on, the hind end, was bunched up under it bigger than the rest. The head was too big, and the ears, which I'd taken for a dog's ears, weren't ears. They were tufts of hair sticking up the back of its head. Off the top of the head. The radio came alive, and it was Daryl, and he was screaming. I'd never heard Daryl raise his voice in my life. He was screaming into the radio so hard the speaker couldn't take it. He said, that's not a dog, Kurt. That is not a dog. You put your foot down. You hit it. You hit that thing. Kurt, you hit it. You hit it. You hit it. He wouldn't let off the button. I could hear Lita behind him making a sound. He said, Kurt, please. Please, for God's sake, hit it. Don't slow down. You go through it. My dad's foot went to the floor. The white truck's a diesel, and it doesn't jump. It leans. And I felt the trailer come tight, and the hill started going by faster. Fifty. Sixty. The thing turned its head and looked at us. It didn't flinch from the lights. It turned its head around on its neck, farther than a dog's head turns, farther than any head should turn. Until it was looking back over its own shoulder straight up the hill at us, and the headlights were full on its face. It had a man's face. I'll say that plainly, and then I'll say the rest. It was a man's face, an old man's, the forehead and the eye sockets, and the shape of the mouth. The skin was dark and pulled tight back toward the ears, so the mouth hung open and you could see the teeth, and the nose was wrong, flat and pushed up, and from the cheeks down, there was a. thick and matted, that ran down into the fur of the neck. The eyes had whites. They were a person's eyes. And they moved. They tracked the truck coming down the hill. The mouth worked. It closed and opened and closed. The fur on the body was brown, wiry, sticking out in clumps, and down the neck and across one shoulder it was dark and stiff with something that had dried in it. In the headlights, that dark patch shone. It was dark and stiff. It shone red at the edges, where it hadn't dried yet. It was big. We were close before I understood how big. Sitting, with its front legs straight, the top of its head was even with the top of the white truck's hood. The white truck was a one ton on big tires. The hood came to my dad's chest. We were almost on it when it moved. I remember the speedometer above 60. I couldn't tell you how many feet were left. It went backward. It didn't turn and run. It came up off its back end onto its hind legs and it stood. And when it stood it was taller than the cab. And it went sideways and backward out of our lane in two long strides with the front legs hanging down at its sides. And the front legs were arms. And it screamed. I've been trying for 30 years to find the right way to tell people about that sound. It was a man's scream. High and ragged. A man's voice. And it was full of water. It gurgled. There was a thick, wet rattle under the scream the whole time. And it went on for longer than a breath should last. And it came through the closed windows of the truck over the engine and the road. Then it was at the fence. And it went over. It didn't jump. It lifted one leg and then the other over four strands of barbed wire without breaking stride. And it was out in the grass in the dark. And then it was gone. We hit the dip. The trailer slammed over the culvert so hard the seat bounced beneath me. My dad didn't lift his foot. We went up the far hill at 70 with the empty trailer bucking. And my dad's hands white on the wheel. And the radio was going. Daryl saying, go, go, go. Don't stop, Kurt. Go. I turned around and looked back. I could see Daryl's lights coming down the hill behind us into the dip. And in the field, lit gray by the fence. It was on all fours again. It was about 50 yards off the road, out in the grass, running beside us. We were doing 70. It was keeping up. I could see the hump of the back rising and falling and the long stride. And every few strides, the head would come around and look at the road, at us, and then look ahead again. I told my dad. He looked. He said one word. And the word wasn't a like miles. I couldn't tell you how far it actually was. Then the field dropped into a draw where a creek came down out of the hills and the fence dropped with it. And the thing went down into the draw and didn't come up the other side. I keyed the radio and told Daryl it had gone into the draw. He didn't answer for a long time. When he did, his voice was down low, almost normal. And he said, it's not done. His headlights had fallen back. The dip and the hills had put distance between us. And he was a half mile behind now, maybe more. I watched the mirror. His lights came over the hill behind us and held there. And then they wobbled. They swung hard to the left, across the center line, and then back. And then they vanished below the shoulder for a second. When they came back, they were tilted, one higher than the other. Then they straightened out and came on. The radio clicked. It was Lita. She was crying. She said, it was on the road. Kurt, it was standing on the road behind us where you drove at it. It was just standing in the road on two legs watching our lights. She said, Daryl almost put us in the ditch. She said, it's behind us now. My dad told her to tell Daryl to close it up. He said, stay with me. Stay where I can see you. A few minutes later, we reached the junction with 666. Home was north, but the fuel gauge was already low on the second tank. Dad turned south toward Gallup and the truck stopped. He said, 10 minutes, we get fuel and we go. We were doing 80 when the first streetlight came up out of the dark on the approach to Gallup and the houses and the trailer court. And about a quarter mile after that, there were red and blue lights behind Daryl and then behind us. My dad slowed when he saw the light bar. Under the streetlight, he could make out a marked patrol car. He pulled onto the shoulder of a streetlight by a closed tire shop and sat there with both hands on the wheel. Daryl pulled in behind the trailer. The cruiser pulled in behind Daryl with the lights going. It was a Navajo Nation police unit, white with the seal on the door. The officer was a Navajo man, maybe 40, square built, with a flashlight. He went to Daryl's window first. In the mirror, I watched him lean in and listen for about five seconds. Then I watched him take two steps straight back from the truck, fast, and stand there with the flashlight pointed at the ground. He came up the shoulder past the trailer to my dad's window. He didn't ask for a license. He shined the light in on me and then on my dad and then on the leather pouch swinging on the mirror between us, and he held it there. He said, your friend says you saw something on the hill. My dad said, yeah. The officer said, he says you drove straight at it. My dad said, yeah. The officer's face didn't move, but the color went out of it. i watched it happen under the streetlight a big calm man standing with his feet planted turning gray from the forehead down he looked back up the road the way we'd come into the dark past the last streetlight and he looked for a long time longer than he should have with his hand resting on his belt he said verbal warning slow down in town then he said low not looking at us almost to himself get fuel here if you need it stay together somewhere lit once you're on the highway don't stop again until you're across the river at shiprock it's not going to let you get there easy my dad said what is it the officer looked at him he said you know what it is then he walked back to his cruiser without looking at daryl's truck and he got in and he pulled out past us with his light bar off fast and went into town and was gone my dad looked at the fuel gauge it was nearly on empty he said a word again then he put the white truck in gear there was a truck stop on the north end of gallop and it was lit up white under its canopy with nobody at the pumps my dad pulled in and put the trailer alongside the end pump he switched off the engine took the cash sam had paid him and hurried inside to put money on the pump daryl pulled in on the far side of the same island and he said i don't know what happened but i don't know what happened but i don't know what happened but i don't know what happened lita got their pump going while he stood at the back of my dad's trailer with his arms crossed facing the dark beyond the lot he didn't look at the pumps or the store or anything but the dark my dad came back and ran the diesel the pump was slow i sat in the cab and watched the numbers roll and i watched my dad watch daryl lita finished before we did and got back in the green truck the kid behind the counter inside kept looking out through the glass i don't think he liked having two men standing out there staring beyond his lights at the edge of the lot past the last light there was an ice machine and a dumpster and then a gravel lot and then the dark i was looking at the ice machine i don't know why and while i looked something stood up behind it it came up slow the top of the head first over the top edge of the ice machine which is about six feet and then the eyes and then the eyes and then the eyes and then the eyes and it stood there with just its head showing above the machine and it looked at the trucks it was 60 feet from me the light from the canopy reached it just enough the tufts of hair on top of the head the dark lined forehead the eyes with whites in them steady on us not blinking i didn't make a sound i couldn't i put my hand flat on the window and i looked at daryl and daryl was already looking at it i didn't make a sound i couldn't i put my hand flat on the window and i looked at he didn't move he didn't say anything he uncrossed his arms and let them hang and he stood there and looked straight back at it across 60 feet of concrete and the two of them stayed that way while the pump ran my dad hadn't seen it my dad was watching the numbers daryl's lips were moving i couldn't hear what he was saying and he never took his eyes off the thing behind the ice machine and the thing never took its eyes off him the pump clicked off my dad hung the nozzle up and turned around and said let's go and daryl said don't look over there kurt get in the truck my dad looked over there i saw him see it he stood with his hand on the door handle and his whole body went still and then the head behind the ice machine sank down out of sight slow the way it had come up and there was just the ice machine and the dumpster and the dark my dad got in and started the engine and i saw him standing there and i saw him standing there he didn't go back for his change we pulled out with the kid inside the store standing at the glass watching us and we hit 666 going north daryl stayed close behind the trailer until we cleared the lights then dropped back enough to give himself room to break 666 from gallop to shiprock is roughly 95 miles back then most of the stretch we drove was two lanes it's straight for miles at a stretch and then it bends around a mesa and then it's straight for miles at a stretch and then it goes straight again on the left west the chuska sit up against the sky on the right there's nothing there are a few places along it yata hay tohachi nashidi sheep springs and their chapter houses and a few homes and a closed trading post and that night most of the windows we passed were dark once we were clear of gallop there were long stretches without another car i'd catch a headlight far ahead and watch until it came past wishing the driver would turn around and stay with us it was us in the green truck in the road my dad kept it at 75 i held the radio nobody talked the pouch swung off the mirror and i watched it swing every mile marker came up green in the lights and went by i counted them i've counted things ever since when i'm scared south of tohachi there's a long flat stretch with a borrow ditch on the side of the road and i'm scared right side and a fence past the ditch and rangeland past the fence and the moon was up now and the land showed gray out to the hills i was looking at the fence line because i couldn't stop looking at fence lines and i saw it again it was out in the grass maybe 200 yards off the road running north on four legs head low the long stride the hump going up and down it was ahead of us it was out in front of us and it was running north the same direction we were going and we were doing 75 and we weren't gaining on it i told my dad he said i see it he didn't slow down and he didn't speed up we ran beside it for a long time a minute two minutes then the land rose on the right into a low ridge and the ridge came between us and it and when the ridge dropped away again the grass was empty at nishidi the trailer tire went i heard it before i felt it a bang and then a flapping and then the whole trailer started to walk back and forth behind us the gooseneck pulling the back of the white truck one way and then the other at 75 miles an hour on wet pavement my dad got off the gas and held the wheel and let it come down slow the trailer went back and forth and back and forth and then settled by the time we were at 30 it was tracking straight with a sound under it of rubber beating the fender we were on the road the speedometer kept dropping the thing on that trailer that was still a tire was coming apart my dad said i can't run on that he said it to himself he said it'll take the fender and the wiring and then the wheel he said i can't pull a trailer on the rim for another 50 miles the spare was slung underneath the trailer changing it meant getting down there in the dark with that thing somewhere out in the grass the radio came on it was daryl he said kurt you've got a blowout on the right rear he said you have to pull over he said you have to stop my dad looked at the radio in my hand he looked at the mirror daryl's headlights were right there then he looked at the pouch and i saw him remember what daryl had said in the yard don't do it just because it sounds like me see me give you the signal he didn't answer the radio he kept the truck rolling at 25 with the tire flapping the green truck's headlights flashed high low high low then the horn long and steady then the green truck pulled out from behind the trailer into the oncoming lane and came up even with my dad's window and lita switched on their dome light we could see daryl's face could see him speaking into the radio and daryl was pulled over and daryl was pulled over and daryl was pulled over and daryl was pulled over and daryl was pulled over and daryl was pulled over and daryl was pulled over and over and then he drew his flat hand across his throat once and pointed at the hitch my dad understood leave the trailer we could see it was daryl giving the order and dad wasn't going to spend 10 minutes changing a wheel out there he keyed the radio and said you're going to stay right there with the lights on me daryl said i'm not going anywhere we stopped my dad pulled into a broad gravel pull-off until the trailer cleared the pavement and he set the brake and left the engine running and the lights on and he looked at me and said you stay in this truck you lock the door when i get out do not get out of this truck for anything not for me then he got out daryl had pulled the green truck in off to the passenger side behind the trailer angled so his high beams shone along its side across the hitch area and into the field past the fence i locked my door open and i saw daryl in the car and i saw daryl in the car and i saw daryl in the car i turned around on my knees on the seat and watched through the rear window what my dad did he did fast he grabbed the wheel chocks from the bed and kicked them against the trailer tires then he disconnected the wiring the breakaway cable and the safety chains he released the coupler latch dropped the landing leg and wound the crank until the hitch just cleared the ball i'd seen him unhook that gooseneck a hundred times and it never took him under five minutes that night it felt like two though i wasn't watching a clock the whole time daryl stood in the open door of the green truck with one foot on the running board and one foot on the foot on the ground, looking past the trailer into the field. I looked where Daryl was looking. At the edge of the green truck's lights, where the high beams ran out at the fence, it was standing there, on two legs, fifty feet from my dad. It was standing with its arms hanging and its head cocked, watching him work, and it wasn't moving at all. The high beams lit the fur gray and the face dark, and it was patient. It stood at the fence with its weight on one leg and watched my dad work, and it was waiting for him to finish. My dad let go of the jack handle and stepped back toward the cab. He saw it. He stopped with his hand on the side of the truck. Daryl said, Kurt, get in. Get in now. He didn't yell it. He said it flat and clear, and my dad moved. He came up the side of the white truck with his hand on the bed rail, and he didn't take it. He said, Kurt, get in. Get in now. He didn't yell it. He said it flat and clear, take his eyes off the fence, and when he got to the door, I leaned across the seat and pulled up the lock, and he got in and locked it again, and he put the truck in gear. The thing at the fence stepped over. It did it the same as before. One leg, then the other, over the wire. It came down into the borrow ditch and up the near side of it onto the shoulder behind the trailer, and it walked. It walked up to my dad's trailer on two legs, with the high beams of Daryl's truck full on it, and it put one of its hands on the deck of the trailer, flat, the long gray fingers spread, and it looked at Daryl. Then Daryl's horn went, one long blast, and the green truck's tires spun on the gravel, and he came up around the trailer and around the back of the white truck and out onto the road beside us as my dad pulled off the shoulder, and the two trucks went north side by side for a hundred yards before Daryl dropped in behind. I looked back. I shouldn't have. In the last of the light from our trucks, the thing had climbed up on the trailer deck and it was down on all fours on the boards, and its head was up, and it was watching us go. Without the trailer, the white truck ran free, and my dad put it at 80 and held it there. It was a little after 10, more than 50 miles to Shiprock and the river. I didn't know why the river was supposed to help. The cop had mentioned it, and Daryl's grandmother had too, and my dad had heard both of them. All he said to me was, we get across the bridge. He said it twice in the next 10 miles, and I don't think he was saying it to me. Sheep springs went by dark, mile markers, the chuskas on the left, black against the stars. I watched the fence line on the right and the mirror and the pouch. I'd stopped counting markers. I'd started counting my own breaths, in and out, because they were something I could control. I'd stopped counting my own breaths, in and out, because they were something I could control. South of Little Water, the radio clicked and Lita screamed. Not words, just a scream, and then the sound of something hitting metal hard, a bang and a scrape, and the green truck's headlights in my mirror swung out into the oncoming lane and back, and then the radio was Daryl, saying, it's on the truck, Kurt, it's in the bed, it's in the bed of the truck. I turned around on the seat. The green truck was a little way back, and there was something in the bed of it. I could see the hump above the cab against the moonlit sky. Then it rose, and two long arms came over the roof. Lita told my dad later that its hands had flattened on the metal on either side of her, and its head had come down over the passenger side of the windshield. From our truck, all I could see was its upper body fold down out of sight. It was looking in at Lita. I heard her say that through the radio. Daryl braked hard. The green truck's lights were on. I heard her say, I heard her say that through the radio. Lita's lights dropped and swung, and the thing pitched forward over the cab. I saw the shape tumble past the windshield into his own headlights. It hit the road ahead of him. He was still sliding, and there wasn't room to stop. The impact came through the open radio. A thump, Lita crying out, and another thump. The green truck lifted on one side, dropped, and straightened. My dad had slowed. He was looking in the mirror with his mouth open. The green truck's lights were still coming. The radio said, I got it. I ran it over, Kurt. I ran it over. And Daryl's voice was shaking so hard I could barely make the words. Then he said, oh no. I looked back as my dad slowed enough for Daryl to catch us. For a moment, the trucks were almost alongside each other. In the red wash of the green truck's taillights, something was getting up off the road. It stood. It stood up in the middle of 666, behind the green truck's taillights with one arm hanging wrong, swinging at the shoulder. And it stood there on two legs and watched us go. Then it dropped to all fours, and it came. My dad put his foot through the floor. Daryl was right on us. We went north with the needle climbing past 80, the engine roaring and the land going by in a gray smear. And I watched the fence line, and I caught it there again in the moonlight, out in the grass, running with an uneven, dragging stride. It was falling behind. I could still make out the hump, then only movement. And then the road bent east around a mesa, and the mesa took it out of sight. For several miles there was nothing behind us but Daryl's headlights. Then my dad said, we get across the bridge. He said it's five miles. The lights of Shiprock came up. The gas station, a few houses, lights farther back in town. It was dark. It was dark. It was dark. It was dark. It was dark. It was dark. It was dark. It was dark. My dad had to slow for the turn. There were two bridges side by side, the old steel trusses beside the crossing carrying us toward Farmington. Cottonwood stood black along the water. Dad brought the truck straight, and our headlights reached along the bridge deck. It was on the bridge. It was sitting in our lane partway across, under one of the lights, with its head turned toward the river. Its back was humped exactly the way it had been outside Window Rock earlier that night. One front arm was folded uselessly against it. It had gotten ahead of us. I don't know how. We'd seen it fall behind, and neither of us had seen it pass. There it was. My dad didn't break again. I've thought about that a lot. He had the river coming, the one thing everybody had told him to get to, and the thing that had been following us since Window Rock was sitting on the bridge between us. My dad had Daryl's grandmother in his head saying, You don't stop, and you don't go around. He didn't lift his foot. He put both hands on the wheel at ten and two, and he lined the hood up on it, and he went. It turned its head. The man's face came around in the sodium light, and this time it didn't stand up and step backward. It stood up and came at us. It came down the bridge on two legs with the good arm out and the bad one swinging, straight into the headlight. And the face was wide open and screaming, and I had time to see the eyes and the teeth and the gray hand reaching, and then it hit the truck. Or the truck hit it. It came up over the hood and struck the windshield with its chest and face. The glass on my side went white and bowed inward, holding together in a cracked sheet. One hand punched through it. The fingers spread just inside the cab and closed on nothing, and then the weight went up over the roof. It stretched through the seat and dropped into the bed. There was one more heavy impact, and it was gone over the back. My dad still didn't stop. The driver's side of the windshield was cracked too, but there was a narrow patch at the lower corner he could see through if he leaned forward. He slowed, hunched over the wheel, and kept us between the rails. I looked back through the rear glass. It was in the road behind us on the bridge, near the outer rail. It was moving. It had one foot under it and was trying to stand. Daryl hit it. Daryl had enough distance to see us strike it, but not enough to stop. The front corner of the green truck caught it as it got upright. I saw its body fold over the rail, the good hand reaching back for a hold. It missed. Then it was gone below the bridge. All I could hear was Daryl's horn and the broken glass rattling in front of me. My dad kept going to a lit business beyond the far end. He pulled into the forecourt and stopped under the lights. Daryl came in behind us. Both trucks were still running. For a while, nobody moved. Then Daryl got out and came to my dad's window. He had the radio in his hand and he kept looking back toward the bridge. Lita went inside to ask the clerk to call the police. My dad stayed with me. I wanted to get out, but I couldn't stop him. I couldn't stop him. I couldn't stop him. I couldn't stop looking at the hole in the windshield. The San Juan ran west from there, away from Farmington. Whatever had gone into it was being carried away from the road home. When the officers came, Daryl and my dad told them about an animal on the bridge. Then Daryl spoke to one of them alone. A patrol car went back to the crossing. We stayed under the lights. My dad finally shut the truck off, and in the quiet I could hear Lita crying in Daryl's cab. The mirror hung crooked from a piece of glass that was still holding, with the pouch on its cord beneath it. Dad reached in and took the pouch before anyone started. clearing the windshield. We didn't drive the last 30 miles. Dad's truck needed a tow, and fluid was dripping from the front of Daryl's. A cousin of his came from Farmington to collect the four of us. We got home well after midnight. Dad canceled the Aztec job. I'll tell you how it ended, and then I'm done. My dad borrowed a truck with the right hitch and went back for the trailer on Sunday afternoon, with a Navajo Nation officer following him. It was where he'd left it at the pull-off near Nishidi. The tire was shredded. The deck boards on the back half were scored with long grooves, eight of them, in two sets of four. He put the spare on it in daylight and pulled it home. He used that trailer for 19 more years. The Navajo officer who'd stopped us on the way into Gallup came to our house the following week. Dad had given the officer the trailer, his name, and told them about the traffic stop. The man stood in our driveway beside the truck, which had a new windshield by then, and told my dad that a body had been found on Tuesday on a gravel bar downstream of Shiprock. An older man, no identification, one arm and both legs broken, with other injuries from a heavy impact. He showed dad a photograph. I wasn't allowed to look. After the officer left, dad told me that he'd found a body on a gravel bar downstream of Shiprock. Dad said the face was the one we'd seen in the headlights. He didn't need to see it twice. The officer said they hadn't identified the man. I don't know whether they ever did. I know dad stopped taking that road after dark, and I know none of the four of us ever saw the thing again. Daryl and Lita got married that fall and moved to Window Rock. He had the radiator and lights repaired on the green truck, but the grill stayed bent. He wouldn't replace it. The truck's still in his yard. He'd never seen it again. Dad said he'd never seen it again. I've never once brought up that night with either of them, and neither of them has offered to talk about it. I run my dad's business now. Two trucks, and a gooseneck and a pager that's a cell phone. I work all over the four corners, and most places I'll go after dark if that's when the customer needs it. I don't drive 666 after dark. They changed the number years ago, and it's 491 now, and I still won't. I've turned down money, I've turned down a lot of money. The pouch my dad hung on the mirror of that white truck in a yard in Window Rock in 1996 is on the mirror of my truck right now. It's worn almost black. I've never opened it. When a coyote crosses in front of me at night, I keep my eyes on the road. I don't follow it into the dark. It's gone. It's gone. It's gone. It's gone. It's gone. It's gone.