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Nowhere
by
T. L. Morganfield
“Turn here.”
Mark squinted through the windshield glare, trying to read the sun-faded green and white sign Maggie pointed to. Sand had long ago blasted away all the letters, but lumps of brown sagebrush clung to the dented aluminum signpost’s single leg like frightened children. “Where are we going?”
“Nowhere,” Maggie answered vacantly.
Mark rolled his eyes. The tiresome woman probably wanted to look for roadrunners, or take pictures of cactus to send to her mother in New York. Thousands of the tall pitchfork plants littered the New Mexican landscape and three more sat watch alongside the off-ramp, porcupine men with wilted, brownish-green skin.
Mark pulled off the highway and brought the Honda Civic to a stop at the bottom of the embankment. He watched her snap a couple pictures with her Polaroid camera then asked, “Can we get going now?”
She didn’t look away from the window. “Why? We’re finally here.”
He gestured to the brown, sun-scorched land. “Does this look like Dallas to you?” But Maggie only clicked away with the camera. Mark glanced at his watch. “Are you finished yet?”
She didn’t look at him as she nodded.
“Well, if you don’t mind, I’m getting back on the highway. My mother expects us by six.” Maggie made no reply, so Mark pulled forward, grumbling under his breath.
But there was no on-ramp at the other side of the cracked asphalt road, just a dusty incline.
“Half-wits,” he muttered as he backed up and turned down the main road. The overpass slashed out the sun as they drove under. “Who would build an off-ramp, but give you no way to get back onto the highway?”
On the other side, he slowed for the turn, but instead, the bumper hit another dirty, roadless incline. “What the hell?”
Maggie flipped carefully through the dozen undeveloped pictures.
Mark wrenched the car into reverse and drove back to the other side of the overpass. “I’ll drive up the damn off-ramp if I have to,” he growled. This time he turned without slowing.
With a shrill scraping noise, the car bucked as if running over a dead body. Mark slammed the brakes. He shoved the door open and stepped out, setting his shoe on the edge of a growing pool of black oozing from the under the car. "Fuck!" He stared at it for a moment, disgusted.
But the cracked oil pan completely vanished from his mind when he looked over the hood at the hill they'd driven down just moments before. There was no more off-ramp, just baked dust, clumps of yellow rabbit brush and chunks of rock. The three cactuses stared back at him, their twisted bodies shivering in the hot wind. Even if the oil pan hadn’t busted open, he couldn’t navigate the little Civic over all that.
He clambered up the hill and slid to an abrupt stop at the crest. Wind turned up skiffs of dust across the vast expanse of brown desolation where the highway used to be. A lizard sat atop a stone several feet away from him, its tongue smelling the restless air. The horizon rippled in the heat. He ran onto the overpass, looking for traces of asphalt, any sign of a road, but more dirt and rocks greeted him.
He turned to find Maggie standing several feet behind him, clutching the pictures in her trembling hands. "This is your fault," he hissed. "If you hadn't demanded I stop to let you take those goddamn pictures...." He went to the edge of the overpass and glared down at the bleeding Civic. "Do you see that? We're stranded in the middle of nowhere now!"
"I thought you wanted to come here."
"Why in God's name would I want to hang out with a bunch of...?" He started pointing to the three cactuses but they were gone.
"Isn't this where we've been heading all along?" Maggie asked, her eyes like sandstone.
He stared at her in disbelief, and then, with a snarl, he struck her hard across the face with his open hand. She dropped to the dirt, the now developed pictures littering the ground.
Mark stared at her, his jaw quivering. “Maggie, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to...I just...” His gaze fell on one of the pictures laying face up against his shoe.
The three cactuses crowded the frame, showing off angry black maws filled with spines lined up like shark's teeth. Pairs of faint red glows glared up at him. He froze when the cold, pitchfork-shaped shadow covered him from behind. A growl rose like thunder as something sharp pricked him at the back of his neck.
"I know," Maggie said. The sun sparkled in her teary eyes and blood crept from the corner of her mouth. “It’ll never happen again.”
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© Morganfield, 2006
T. L. Morganfield lives in Colorado with her husband and two children. Her short fiction has appeared in various online magazines, including Gothic.net and Nocturnal Ooze, and she has stories forthcoming in Dragons, Knights & Angels and Back Roads: Horror Off the Highway. She's also a graduate of the Clarion West workshop. Her blog and more details of her work and upcoming projects can be found at www.tlmorganfield.com.