Here and there he could make out the jagged shapes of cacti, though not like any he’d seen before. They were a leprous, sickly yellow white, with narrow spines a foot long, tapered like the sharpest needles.
“Christina doesn’t mind the desert, you know, Ryan. But the brightness hurts my eyes.”
It was no surprise to find that Jak Lauren was walking at his side. The vivid sun flared off the deathly white of the albino teenager’s hair, deepening the ruby coals of his deep-set eyes.
“You should wear dark glasses, kid. Sorry, Jak. Forgot you don’t like being called that. Been such a long time since we last met up.”
“Yeah. Tomorrow is the yesterday you worried about before we met, Ryan.”
“Or you could try blinding yourself in one eye. I did that, and it cuts the pain from the sun in half. Why don’t you give that a try, Jak?”
“Sure. Or could pluck out both eyes and then have no pain at all.”
Somewhere in the brazen fastness above them they heard the raw screech of a hunting falcon, but neither of them could quite make it out.
Jak laughed and threw his skinny arms out wide. “Happiness is being happy, Ryan,” he shouted, his voice seemed to echo back from the edges of the land.
Far off, toward the distant horizon, there was a single vivid flash of lightning that appeared to stay frozen in place, like a jagged strip of silver. Ryan turned and stared at it, but it eventually faded away, leaving only a faint dark memory imprinted across the retina.
The building to his right, a quarter mile away, seemed to be falling into a dark tarn, its ivy-covered walls crumbling like stale bread. At one of the golden, lamplit windows, there was the shape of a woman, with long hair, watching them across the wilderness.
Jak had started to run, spinning like a dervish, his bare feet kicking up clouds of dust that threatened to envelop and overwhelm him.
“Careful, kid. Watch out for the big, bitching cactus behind you.”
“Don’tcallmebecause I’ll call you, Ryan.” A screech of eldritch laughter erupted from the center of the dust devil.
“Of course you call me Ryan. That’s my name, Jak. I’ve got my identification on my belt.”
The white-haired boy stopped suddenly, deathly still, both hands making a strange flicking motion. Ryan felt something tug at his right shoulder and almost simultaneously at the left. A jabbing, stabbing pain.
When he glanced down, Ryan saw that Jak had hurled two of his leaf-bladed throwing knives, showing his usual unerring accuracy. Each of them pinned Ryan’s coat to the barn wall behind him, the honed tips also nipping a fold of skin. A tiny trickle of blood ran down each arm.
“Good throwing, Jak. But why did you do that?”
“Stopping you stopping me, Ryan, old friend, old comrade, old look-after-yourself-first.”
Jak resumed his whirling dance, nearer and nearer to one of the murderous cacti.
“Keep an eye out, Jak,” Ryan called.
It was extremely difficult to understand exactly what happened next.
Jak stumbled over an eyeless human skull that lay half-buried in the sand and fell, facedown, into the cactus.
He screamed, rolling over and over, feet kicking in the air, his hands pressed to his face, pressed to his eyes, over his eyes. He squeezed tight, the slender, bloodless fingers clamped close together, but that didn’t stop the blood coming through.
Not white, like his hair and skin.
Red.
Vivid, brilliant red.
A venous, arterial red.
It oozed into a trickle, into a sticky, steady rush of blood that dripped over Jak’s hands and onto his neck and shirt and pattered into the dust, drying instantly into small clotted lumps, like dark popcorn.
Ryan ran to him, his feet slipping. Three paces forward and then two paces back.
Behind him he heard a rumble and turned for a moment to see that a huge crack had opened in the flank of the house, and it had fallen into the bottomless lake.
“Can’t see. Once could see but now blind, Ryan. Was free but now lost.”
The boy was sitting up now, his face still hidden behind his hands, the blood still pumping out from the unseen wound. Ryan knelt and gently pulled away the hands, surprised how soft and unresistant they were, feeling his own hands become instantly clotted with Jak’s blood.