Where the Pavement Ends
The rental car's tires spat gravel as they crossed onto Navajo land, the last strip of asphalt giving way to packed earth that didn't breathe beneath them. Jake exhaled for the first time in hours, the pressure in his skull lessening with every mile they put between themselves and the infected highways.
Rachel studied the map drawn in shaky ballpoint—the one a gas station clerk had pressed into her hand with trembling fingers after noticing Jake's black-streaked temple. "There's a medicine man near Tó Naneesdizí who knows about... things like this."
Jake touched his throbbing forehead. The voices had gone quiet, but the visions hadn't stopped—flashes of maintenance crews pouring black tar that slithered up their arms, of rest stop bathrooms where the mirrors showed something else moving behind the reflections.
A road sign flashed by:
WARNING: NO SERVICES NEXT 74 MILES
The 'S' in 'SERVICES' had been scratched out.
Rachel didn't notice.
Jake didn't mention it.
The Singer of Sands
The hogan stood alone in a sea of red rock, its rounded back to the wind. As they approached, an old man emerged—face like sun-cured leather, eyes that saw too much. He held a gourd rattle studded with turquoise.
"You're late," he said.
Rachel blinked. "We didn't call ahead—"
"Not you." The medicine man—Hatathli, he'd called himself—pointed at Jake's temple. "The black road has been whispering about you for days."
Inside the hogan, the air smelled of sage and something older. Hatathli stirred a pot of pitch-black liquid that moved against the spoon's motion. Jake's head pulsed in time with its ripples.
"The white men built their roads where they shouldn't," Hatathli said. "Cut through places that should never be opened. Now Ma'iitsoh walks again—the Coyote Who Hungers."
Rachel leaned forward. "The Big Man?"
Hatathli's laugh was dry as desert bones. "Big? No. That's just the piece of him that squeezes through the cracks." He tapped Jake's forehead, sending white-hot pain through his skull. "You carry his scent now. That's why the roads call you keeper."
Jake gasped. "How do we kill it?"
The old man poured the black liquid onto the dirt floor. It writhed, forming perfect highway lines before soaking in. "You don't. You send him back to sleep." He held up three fingers. "Three days to prepare. Three sacrifices to close the way."
Outside, the wind howled through the canyon.
It sounded like laughter.
The First Sacrifice
That night, Jake dreamt of teeth.
Great stone molars grinding beneath the desert, chewing through time itself. He saw the first roads—not asphalt, but dark veins pumping through something vast and buried. Saw the Navajo ancestors singing the hungry thing to sleep. Saw the exact moment the interstate crews drilled through the seal.
He woke screaming, his mouth full of sand.
Rachel wasn't in the hogan.
He found her at the canyon's edge, staring at fresh tire tracks that hadn't been there at sunset. The tracks led straight to the precipice... and continued beyond, floating over empty air.
"Did you hear it?" she whispered. "The engine?"
Jake's temple throbbed. The voices were back, but different now—older, speaking in a language that hurt his teeth.
Hatathli appeared beside them, shaking his rattle. "First sacrifice: memory. The land must forget the taste of gasoline."
He handed Rachel a knife.
Handed Jake a shovel.
Pointed to the freshly turned earth near the hogan.
Something pale protruded from the dirt—
A human hand.
Their rental car's license plate was clutched in its fingers.
The Second Sacrifice
By noon, the heat warped the air like spoiled film. Jake dug where Hatathli directed, each shovelful revealing more:
A wrist wrapped in a familiar watch (Rachel's, lost two days ago)
A tattered podcast microphone windscreen
Their motel keycard from Flagstaff
Rachel wiped sweat from her brow. "These are our things. But we never buried them."
Hatathli sprinkled corn pollen over the hole. "The desert knows what doesn't belong."
Jake's shovel hit something solid. He cleared the dirt to reveal—
Himself.
Not a corpse. Not quite. A version of himself, eyes wide and black as the interstate tar, mouth moving soundlessly.
Rachel recoiled. "What the fuck—"
"Second sacrifice," Hatathli intoned. "The self that walked the black road."
The thing in the hole reached for Jake.
Its fingers were made of crumbling asphalt.