Dad had gone north, away from the road, away from the car. Jeremy picked up the other water jug and followed.
There was a large stretch of gravel and sand interspersed with mixed cactus and mesquite, and some dry- as-tinder grass. Jeremy kept his eyes open for rattlesnakes and scorpions. He wasn’t as worried about Gila monsters, since they rarely bit unless you picked them up.
The brush stopped at water, and Jeremy blinked, surprised. It was a water trap on the edge of a golf course. On the other side of the water was a green fairway starting to turn brown, and condos lined the far side of that.
They weren’t as far out in the desert as he’d thought.
There were bugs buzzing across the water, and something moved just below the surface, then Dad’s head came up and he took a deep gasp of air. The bugs shifted toward him, but Dad was already underwater again. Jeremy saw a flash of a kicking leg as he swam toward a different spot.
Jeremy knew Dad couldn’t do that forever. He wished he had the GameGuy again, so he could heave it across the pond, distracting the bugs. He had to do
A groundskeeper’s shed, roofed and sided with corrugated fiberglass panels, was strewn across the grounds at one end of the pond. There were bugs crawling through the contents, but Jeremy saw, off to one side, some scraps of hose. He ran over, slowing drastically as he got closer. The bugs were eating metal shovels, brass fittings, and the screws out of the two-by-four framing.
But they’d cut through a bunch of hose, too, while eating through the metal reel the hose had been coiled around. Jeremy inched closer until he could reach in and snag a foot-long section. It was still connected to the main hose, but only by a small strip, left when the bugs had crawled through it. Jeremy put his foot on the longer section and heaved. The connecting material broke with a snap, and he fell back into the brown grass, clutching the short end.
Bugs—disturbed by the vibrations, Jeremy guessed—rose into the air, and he froze on the ground as they swirled over him, then finally returned to the scattered shed and settled back onto the tools.
Jeremy edged away from the shed and ran back to the pond, plunging in and swiftly heading for Dad through waist-deep water.
This time, Dad’s face was out of the water, just barely, just enough for him to breathe. His eyes were wide and flicking back and forth, looking for bugs, but they hadn’t spotted him yet.
“Get back, Jerry! Those bugs could get you as they’re trying to get me!”
Jeremy held up the tubing. “A snorkel.”
Dad couldn’t hear him. The water was in his ears. So Jeremy put one end of the tubing in his mouth and tilted up the opposite end, then held his other hand flat, indicating the surface of the water below the upper end of the hose.
“Ah!” Dad reached for the hose, and Jeremy put it in his hand. Dad’s head came up out of the water, and the bugs, four or five, homed in on him. Dad dove back under, and Jeremy did too.
When Jeremy came up again, the bugs were spread out, quartering the pond. He could not see his dad, only the hose sticking out of the water in the middle of the pond.
The water wasn’t that cold, but when Jeremy climbed out of the pond, his wet skin and clothes acted like an evaporative cooler, chilling him. It felt good at first, and then uncomfortable. He wanted to get those bugs away from Dad. Dad couldn’t stay in that pond forever.
Laurie and Mom had changed clothes when he returned. Mom looked up sharply when he came back into sight. “Where’s your father?”
Jeremy gestured. “He’s okay. But he needs to stay where he is. The bugs really like his pacemaker and his crowns.”
The car was now completely covered in bugs, and its outline had changed substantially. It was lower on the ground. Between cactus thorns and bugs burrowing through the tires, going after the steel fibers, the tires no longer held air.
“We should get farther away from
Mom started stuffing their metal-free clothes into one of the clothes baskets, ignoring the discards.
Jeremy looked at Mom’s purse, still lying besides the ring of rocks that marked the buried coins, keys, and scissors. He picked it up. It was a leather purse lined with cloth. The straps were a continuous sweep of the body’s cloth-lined leather and it had a nylon zipper. The only metal part, the zipper pull, had come off the previous year.
He started filling it with sand.
“What are you doing?” Laurie said.
“Need to carry some metal over to where Dad is.”
“What? Won’t that bring the bugs down on us?”
“Not if it’s buried in sand. Shielded.” He dug his hands into the sand in the middle of the rock circle, worming his fingers down.
He found the scissors by stabbing himself firmly in the ball of his thumb. He jerked his hand back up and stuck it in his mouth, tasting sand and blood.
Jeremy brought the items up one by one, centered in a double handful of sand, and dropped them into the purse. Only once did a bug come to investigate, and he frantically shoveled more sand into the purse until it flew back to the mound of bugs that used to be their car.
The last thing was his mom’s key ring, with the radio remote for the car and some decorative metal stars hanging on chains. As he pulled it up out of the sand, several bugs took to the air and flew toward him. He dug down into the growing hole, grabbed the last few coins, and threw them at the approaching bugs. As the pennies and nickels flew by, the bugs turned around to follow them.
He had to get Laurie to help him carry the purse, it was that full of sand. She took one strap, Jeremy took the other, and they staggered back through the mesquite and chollo to the water trap.
Dad was still underwater, out in the middle of the pond, breathing through the hose. The bugs, now more than a dozen, were patrolling the water’s surface.
“Where’s your father?” Mom asked.
Jeremy pointed and told her about the snorkel.
She put her hand to her mouth. “We’ve got to get him out of there!”
“And put him where?”
“Someplace where he won’t
“What about the bugs, Mom? If he gets out of the water, those bugs are going after his crowns and his pacemaker.”
Mom blinked and looked around desperately, as if hoping for a policeman or an EMT or a fireman to help her. Then she covered her mouth, as though holding back screams to keep them from echoing across the pond.
Jeremy curled in on himself, arms crossed. He remembered the body from the road, the one the vultures had been stripping, and he wondered if this is how the man had died. Had the bugs drilled through his head, going for his crowns? Did he have a pacemaker or an artificial knee or hip? For a terrible instant, Jeremy visualized his father lying faceup in the sun, the bugs crawling over him.
Laurie said, “Bury him.”
Mom dropped her hands, shocked. “How is that better than drowning?”
Laurie shook her head. “I don’t mean like a grave. Shield him with earth, like this.” She jerked her chin at the purse.
Jeremy licked his lips. He took a deep, shuddering breath. That could work, maybe. “We’ll have to dig a hole.”
It took an hour to build the bunker. They ran into caliche—fused clay and gravel—at a foot and a half. Without metal tools, they couldn’t really go any deeper, but they could raise the ground around it.
They ended up with a trench that was as long as Dad was tall, with walls that stuck up three feet above the caliche floor. Jeremy dragged some of the fiberglass panels over from the remains of the groundskeeper’s shed, and set them aside. When they were ready, he retrieved a quarter from the center of the sand-filled purse and flung it across the pond. The hovering bugs followed it.
Dad was able to stick his head up out of the water long enough for Jeremy to explain the plan.
