REP

Tick Tick Tick

48 minutes. That's about how long he had to appreciate his vague grip on his humanity, give or take a few seconds of error. In the time of the average response time from Davis Monthan AFB was under an hour, Border Patrol would be crawling all over the area and he'd be some kind of cryptid that'd make the average National Geographic photographer shit their pants. He wasn't too happy with His choices that'd lead to this point, He let a Curandera from the Reserve get shot to bits around lunch time. He gave her some last rites and a proper burial (at gun point), and took a $1,000 pay cut in hopes that the typically flighty Flock that the Prowling God kept would continue to let them pass. Holy grounds like these are not the places for cruelty and bloodshed, foolish men and their little guns don't really stand a chance against things that can survive going extinct with the power of spirit. That's the kind of shit the Curandera would've said, if she was alive right now.

He shouldn't have taken this job in the first place, but He wanted a life off the Reservation and the Curandera needed a hand cleaning up after the Coyotés and their people-smuggling operations that ever-agitated the Prowling God. He'd gotten them both into the business proper because He didn't want to get on the wrong side of the wrong men, men who worship violence and money, not old Apache Spirits. This many miles north of the border you're free of most of the Gringo patrols, so arguments for pay between the smuggled and the smugglers tended to come to pass just a few miles shy of Flagstaff. The young men come up easy enough for simple pay, they're not product like the young women, and that clarification usually is clarified when people are about to get shot. Can't blame the old lady for intervening with the Coyotés, the girl was barely 12, her parent wasn't ready to part with her as payment for making it to the bus hub before heading East to the job site.

He should've just kept walking, but something angry and hungry watching from just beyond view had convinced him otherwise. He'd never seen them up close, now he wish He hadn't.

North of the Navajo Nation, up the 191, is a seemingly endless stretch of desert plains dominated by shallow mesas, with distant mountains. Arizona is the kind of state that makes you learn the differences between types of private road, types of desert climes, and types of biological landmines.

You find yourself broken down, pulled over somewhere north of a town called Rock Point (calling it a town is diplomatic by city-folk definitions), where the last gas was. Somehow you wound up here: down an access road "shortcut" your GPS swore was going to take you past the rise and up into southern Utah. Instead, you're nowhere. An endless stretch of sand dunes and shrubs. It's miserably cold too, you didn't expect January to be cold in the middle of a desert. Then a factoid from Animal Planet emerges gently from the mist of earlier times: yes, the Arctic is a form of Desert. Tundra? That's the word for it, probably.

This road has been maintained, despite the vibrations of its washboarded surface, that means people must travel up and down it. You're not really sure how far back that little strip of buildings with a gas station was, but it's not hot, it's just dry, cold, windy. The sun is already starting to hang lower than you'd have liked... wasn't the desert supposed to be perpetually sunny? You shrug. There's about half of a candy bar left, a few swigs of water from your Stanford water bottle, and the backpack with a weekend's clothes you had with you. Road trips aren't supposed to be this hard.