Page 4 of Badlands

“One more!”

He sent it back out a hundred yards, then turned it around. Abruptly, the screen went pixelated; the alarm beeped—then blackness. Fifteen seconds later, a stark warning message appeared on the screen.EMERGENCY LANDING EFFECTED.

Bondi lowered the monitor. “We lost it.”

“Get the backup drone.”

“It crashed—remember? We’ve got another one in shipment.”

“What the hell?” Desjardin roared with frustration. “Fuck me!” He stomped around, cursing and yelling, as everyone else stood around looking on in silence. This was not the first time he’d lost it on set.

Finally, he rounded on Bondi. “Well, do you know where it is?”

“I’ve got the GPS coordinates.”

“You saw the message. It didn’t crash; it did an emergency landing. It’s still good. Let’s go get it.”

This was met with silence, until finally Cobb said: “You can’t be serious.”

“What do you mean?” screeched Desjardin, whirling toward the AD.

“In July, hiking a mile into those badlands, with the sun up? It’s already close to a hundred degrees. It’ll be death out there.”

“Who made you the expert?”

But Cobb stood firm. “Don’t take my word for it, Luke—that skeleton says it even better. I, for one, have no wish to join it.” And then, as the director fumed, the AD added: “I think we’d better call the cops.”

3

HOW MUCH FARTHER?”Supervisory Agent Sharp asked from behind the wheel. His sleepy eyes, half-lidded, looked steadily forward as if he were watching a golf match instead of driving through sagebrush plains a hundred miles from nowhere.

Corrie Swanson checked her phone. Even though they were out of cell range, she had downloaded the Google Earth satellite images of the area ahead of time.

She located their little blue dot. “Another five miles.”

“Five miles,” Sharp repeated. “I guess that means the fun part of the drive’s about to begin.”

Sharp was about as droll as FBI agents came, and she wasn’t sure what he meant by this. She looked out the window at the purple sage and bunchgrass; the faraway blue mountains; and, here and there in the middle distance, patches of badlands: clusters of geological bizarreness—boulders balancing on thin flutes of softer material.

Sharp turned a corner and the vehicle dipped into a declivity she hadn’t realized lay before them—and suddenly they were driving into a forest of those goblin-like rocks, the vehicleheaving and yawing over a dirt road that abruptly turned from bad to bone shattering.

“Jesus!” Corrie said involuntarily, gripping the armrests.

“Now you know why they’re called badlands,” Sharp said, his voice a notch higher now to be heard over the racket.

Instead of answering, Corrie merely hung on. It was one thing to view this kind of bizarre sight from miles away—quite another to drive through it on what was more a track than a road. She’d seen pictures, but they didn’t do the place justice. Some of the rock formations looked like intestines, bulged and coiled. Others were more like monstrous fungi or the papillae of a giant’s tongue, sticking upward in disgusting nodules.

“The locals call these rock formations ‘hoodoos,’” said Sharp.

“It’s like the dark side of the moon,” she said. She glanced into the rear-view mirror, where—far behind—the Evidence Response Team van was creeping along, almost invisible in the dust they were throwing up.

They hit a dry wash that nearly bottomed out the vehicle. Corrie wished he’d slow down, but didn’t dare speak out. Dark side of the moon was an understatement. This was more like the place where, during the creation of the world, God had dumped all His leftover rubbish, the bits and pieces of landscape so deformed and grotesque He couldn’t find a place for them anywhere else.

As they came out of the embankment of yet another dry wash, Corrie was shocked to spy in the distance a small, six-sided wooden hut, made of split logs with a dirt roof.

“That can’t be someone’s residence,” she said. “There’s no life on Mars.” But as they drove farther, she made out a shabby trailer behind the hut, along with some corrals.

“Oh my God,” she said. “Look, someone’s there!” And shepointed toward the figure of a woman who appeared in the doorway of the hut to watch them pass by.

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