The Ghost Who Guarded Me

She woke to flies.

Their bodies crawled across her cheeks, her lips, the wet collar of her dress. She tried to lift her hand to brush them away. Her arm would not move.

She was on her back. The sky above her was white, bleached, the sun somewhere behind clouds she could not see. She smelled rot. Old blood. Diesel.

She turned her head. The movement cost her.

She was in a pit.

Not deep. Maybe four feet. The walls were packed with dirt. The bottom was scattered with refuse, empty oil drums, rusted machinery, the skeletal remains of an engine block.

She was not alone.

Three feet away, a man's body lay facedown in the dirt. His shirt was dark with dried blood. His skin was gray. His eyes were open.

She did not scream.

She did not have the strength.

She looked down at herself. Her dress was black with blood. Her hands were red to the wrist. She touched her shoulder. The wound beneath her collar was sealed... not with stitches, not with bandages.

Just pressure. Time.

She had been here for hours. Maybe a day.

The blood on her dress was not hers.

She did not feel grateful. She did not feel anything.

She pressed her good hand against the dirt wall and pushed.

It took four attempts to climb out.

Her left arm hung useless. Her vision swam. Her stomach heaved but produced nothing. On the fourth try, she hooked her fingers over the edge and dragged herself onto solid ground.

She lay there for a long time. Face pressed against gravel. Breathing.

When she finally sat up, she saw where he had left her.

A scrap yard. Abandoned. The skeletons of trucks and tractors rose from the dust like monuments to nothing. A chain-link fence slumped along the perimeter, cut open in three places. Beyond it: desert. Scrub brush. Mountains so distant they looked painted on the horizon.

No road. No buildings. No water.

No truck.

She stood. Her legs shook. Her shoulder screamed. She took one step, then another.

And then she saw it.

At the base of a mesquite tree, two hundred yards from the pit. Black. Duffel.

Half-buried in sand. slowly she walked to it.

Knelt down

Unzipped it.

Water. Three bottles.

Cash. Stacks of twenties, rubber-banded. Enough to disappear.

A map. Hand-annotated in black ink. Her location marked with an X. A route traced north, skirting the border checkpoints.

And underneath, pressed flat at the bottom: a passport.

Not her name. Not her face. But close enough.

She stared at it for a long time.

He had known. He had prepared. He had put a bullet in her shoulder and a corpse beneath her body and a bag of supplies at the edge of the dumping ground.

She did not know what that meant.

She did not know if she wanted to find out.

She closed the bag. Slung it over her good shoulder. Turned her back on the pit and the body and the blood that was not hers.

She walked.

The sun moved across the sky. Her shadow stretched, shortened, stretched again. She did not stop. She did not look back.

The desert swallowed her.

By nightfall, her wound had soaked through her dress. The movement had opened it. She pressed her palm against her collar and kept walking.

The stars emerged.

Thousands of them. She had never seen stars like this, not in El Paso, not in Juárez. Here, with no city lights for a hundred miles, the sky was a living thing.

She walked beneath it until her legs gave out.

Then she sat against a rock, drank water she did not want, and waited for morning.

She did not cry.

She did not think about his face when he pulled the trigger.

She did not think about anything except the next step. The next hour. The next breath.

Somewhere behind her, a coyote called.

She closed her eyes.