Page 65 of Badlands

Before leaving Watts’s cabin, Nora had marked—as best she could—the locations of the other five lighthouses, based on Driver’s own rough map. It was not easy, given how many black fingers of lava stuck up like cruel spires all across the wasted landscape. The chopper pilots had been given the coordinates of the five badland formations she wanted to searcharound. They were widely separated, but the Bell 407 was a fast machine and they would be able to complete the search in three to four hours.

The drone of the engine changed as the chopper slowed and began to descend toward the first target. Corrie raised her set of 10×50 binoculars and squinted through them, looking down at the landscape, doing her best to match the various landmarks beyond the window to the map in her lap. She could see the first of the possible lighthouses coming into view: a steeply eroded cone, rising higher than the others around it.

The captain brought the Bell into a hover to one side of the cone and about seventy above it, allowing the spotters time to scan the ground. Corrie drew in a breath: she could see the vague outlines of ruins atop the formation, a large flat hearth of stones and a ruined hut. So Driver was right: it, too, was an ancient lighthouse. She wondered if the stone hut contained more human bones. She scanned it with her binoculars, but the ruins were almost buried in windblown sand and it was impossible to tell what, if anything, was inside.

Slowly, the chopper circled the cone, sometimes angling one way, then another, giving the spotters on either side the angles they needed to locate anything unusual on the ground. After ten minutes, the spotters shook their heads. Nothing. It was time to fly to the next target.

They followed the same procedure at each pinnacle, moving northward along the course of the Great North Road toward Bloomfield. There was nothing at the second and third formations—nothing on the ground, nor visible ruins on top. Perhaps Driver had been wrong about these, or the remains of the lighthouses and huts on the summits had eroded away.

At the fourth spire, they found the remains of a lighthouse…but nothing else. Corrie began to feel a little sick at heart. This was not turning out well.

The fifth and last formation lay in a place called Kutz Canyon, south of Bloomfield. According to Driver’s theory, it marked the northern terminus of the Great North Road. As they approached, the canyon came abruptly into view: a broad gash in the earth, eroded into a crazy labyrinth of humps, spires, and buttes, riddled with bone-dry arroyos whitened with salt. It was a forbidding place, grim and unrelievedly frightening.

The chopper did its usual routine, coming into a hover to one side of the pinnacle. Corrie could see that it was in fact a real lighthouse, with an area of flat stones forming the fire hearth and another hut, roof still intact. She felt a momentary relief. But as the pilot moved the bird around in a slow circle, and the spotters scoured the ground with their powerful binocs, it became clear they could see nothing.

Time stretched on.

Corrie glanced at Sharp. He was not looking at her; instead his eyes were fixed on the metal floor, elbows on his knees, hands clasped. He looked neutral, calm, but Corrie could imagine what he was thinking.

After twenty minutes, she saw the spotters shake their heads, heard the chopper’s rotors power up. They began to rise.

Sharp finally raised his head. “Agent Swanson? Next steps?”

She flushed. There was really nothing else. “I guess head back to base. Looks like this was a bust.”

When he didn’t respond, she looked back out the window, a sick feeling in her stomach. The chopper began to move away from the pinnacle, banking in the direction of Albuquerque.

And then, through her headphones, she heard one of thespotters speak to the pilot. “Can you slow down and descend? I see something on the ground at two o’clock.”

Two o’clock was on the other side of the chopper. Corrie leapt up and scrambled over.

The spotter pointed, and Corrie raised her binoculars.

It took her a minute to bring the dual images into single focus. Then she made out a person, walking—staggering, really—across the sandy wastes.

The pilot brought the chopper into a hover, then descended. The figure below looked up, pale white face indistinct in the blowing dust.

When they had sunk below a hundred feet, Corrie could make out the figure: a woman with long black hair. She abruptly broke into a run, heading up a wash toward the formation they had just searched.

“Put the chopper down!” Corrie cried.

The pilot hovered over the fleeing figure until a landing zone came into view. Then he expertly put the bird down with a small tornado of dust. Meanwhile, the woman, still running, had gone ahead out of sight.

Corrie waited impatiently for the rotors to power down. Then she watched as the ERT, having already slipped on their packs, took off in the direction of the figure, following her footprints in the sand. Corrie threw on her own pack and ran after them. The woman had put distance between them in the time it had taken the chopper to land and power down, but Corrie had seen that she was weak, moving erratically. She soon came into view, tumbling and lurching. The four ERT members quickly surrounded her, and she fell to her knees with a sob.

“Water!” Corrie shouted, coming up running. “Get her some water!”

The woman was a wreck: hair tangled, her skin burned and peeling, her lips cracked and bleeding, green eyes filmy and bloodshot. And yet, underneath this ravaged exterior, Corrie could see—like a palimpsest—signs of what had been a healthy woman about forty years of age.

Corrie grabbed the canteen offered by one of the ERT members, went over to the woman, and knelt, trying to take her hand. It was enclosed around something, and the woman snatched her hand away, concealing what was in it.

Corrie held out the canteen. “We’re here to help you. You need water.”

The woman eyed the canteen with wild eyes, hesitated, shook her head. But Corrie could see she was severely dehydrated, and so she unscrewed the cap, took a sip herself, let a few glistening droplets fall into the dust… and then held it out again.

After a moment, the woman grabbed the canteen with both hands and started gulping down the water.

As she did so, two green lightning stones fell into the sand. The woman, following her stare, snatched up the stones and stuffed them in her pocket before gulping down more water.

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