The man’s name was Ray; and he struggled, alone, through the drifting waves of coarse white sand. The desert was anonymous—the rocks and sand and scrub and occasional twisted naked tree had taken on the look and feel of everything else... distance fooled his eye, and before long he realized that he was right back where he’d started. He was walking over his own footprints. He sank to his knees—exhausted, fevered. Hopeless.
But now, he noticed something new: Another set of prints. Small, barefoot ones; walking just to the left of his own tracks... always a few feet to the left. There was no other soul in sight, but the footprints were real enough.
Get up, his inner self told him.
Follow them.
Hurry.
There's someone else here. Maybe someone who knows the way out of this godforsaken featureless hell.
So he followed them, racing the setting sun, until:
They ended.
Suddenly, they just stopped.
Impossible.
Ray knew whose prints they were:
The great ball of fire burned the air as it sank below the sand to the west, and he found himself on his knees again. Exhausted. Unable to move. More tired than he’d ever been in fifty-some odd years. Slowly, blissful oblivion crawled over him. He could feel it seducing him as it came. He knew if he lay down he would never get up—and he didn't care.
He could hear Kaylee calling to him out of the blackness. Her image danced in the periphery of his mind. She was tiny, her hair all in ponytails and the rhinestones on her sundress sparkling in the sunlight. She was smiling, waving. Happy to see her dad's buddy Ray.
She was happy to see him.
Then the blackness washed over him again. Just flashes now: The truck. Kaylee's sweet smile as he drove her home. Highway signs flashing by. Kaylee 's face, all gone pale now, not happy anymore, knowing that something was wrong. The desert road stretching on and on. The flat tire. Kaylee running from him. She was fast for such a little thing, but his legs were still longer. One more look on her tiny face—a scared look—and then blackness again.
The shink of the shovel blade in the earth, the skrill sound of tumbling sand.
More blackness.
Ray thought at first that he’d woken up; but he could see Kaylee leaning over him as he lay there, so he knew he was still asleep because Kaylee was dead and buried. Yet here she was dead, buried, and smiling at him again. But it was a different kind of smile now, than before: void of anything resembling joy. A dark smile full of malice and vengeful glee. Ray had taken her good smile away from her, and now this horrid grimace was what was left.
Her laughter tickled his ears, fading away as he woke up for real this time. Nothing. Not a sound. The desert should have sounds, even at night. Ray looked around. Little naked footprints. All around him.
The sun was gone, now.
He called her name. He screamed her name. He pleaded with her; he lied to her. Anything. He needed her. She came and went as she pleased here. This was her place now, this wasteland. Ray lay in the dark and listened to her bone china laughter echo all across the moonlit dunes, and he knew as certain as anything that they would find his bleached bones here one day, half-buried in the sand—but they would never find hers, because she was part of all this now.