CW: Abuse, kidnapping and abduction, death/dying, cannibalism, blood/bodily fluids, bodily harm.
The engines echo across the emptiness of the plain like a chorale, individual melodies weaving together to create a tune in the voiceless air. We hear them miles away, aeons in the distance, giving us time to prepare for their arrival. By the scratch-wounded clouds of the sunset and the throat-clawing grasp of the grass, we will prepare the house for them. We scent them on the air. The petrol. The sweat.
Sarah hides in the walls during the day, between the weatherboards where she picks away at insects and lets them play on her tongue until, bored, she pops them between her teeth. When she is nervous, she gnaws at the timber, and she is nervous. I can tell. She tries to hide it, but the shudders erupt through the house long before we see the pack of bikes on the road, still miles and miles distant. I would calm her, but I am behind the bricks in the chimney breast.
Many years have passed since I owned makeup, so I kohl my eyes with ash and redden my lips with brick dust. It feels gritty when I run my tongue over my mouth. They are getting closer, and night is coming.
Delilah is under the floor, held in place with metal nails. I did not put her there, nor did Sarah, but we both agree it is the best place for her. When she forgets the nails through her cheeks and throat, she screams into the dust that this place calls soil.
We have had others pass through here, in trucks and on motorbikes, though we are isolated and not easy to find, but then noone finds us on purpose.
There are ways to siren them to us, this small abandoned ranch in the middle of the great plains, more dust than house. The owners are under the dirt behind the building, limbs held in wooden boxes like overripe fruit. If I ignore the sound of motorbikes on the air, I can hear them pleading. They’ve been pleading for seventy years, and each year their voices sound more beautiful than the last.
I unbind myself from the bricks, and crawl across the living room, reaching below the floor to free Delilah, plucking the bent nails from her skin. I could wait until the bikers are nearer, but I need her help to prepare. Sarah erupts from the wall like a natural disaster and clings to my back, knotting her fingers through my hair until my hair is nothing but knots. I let her have her playtime and shake free her work when she leaps onto the windowsill, sniffing the air beyond the glass.
“Someone is coming,” she says. “More than someone. Ten. Twenty.”
I do not have any better senses than Deliah or Sarah, but I get less distracted. Less waylaid in my thoughts.
“Will they stop?” Delilah asks. I stroke her face and let her kiss my fingers.
“It’s inevitable,” I say.
Other visitors have already given the house a certain ambience. Not the owners below the soil. They were god-fearing folk, before they learned there were other things much closer to home to fear. No, the decor is by hippies and cultists and wanderers. Those looking to lose themselves in the plains of Nebraska. All were very surprised when they were found by us.
For a while we decorated the house with them, hanging vocal chords like wind chimes so they would catch the breeze and replay their final words, but we lost them to crows so desperate for meat they did not care if that meat continued to sing as it was eaten.
Sarah powders herself into dust and dances into the evening sky. Swirling before the setting sun, she is so beautiful, and in the dance of her I fall in love again.
She does not return until after the day is finished.
“I got caught in their engines,” she says, and I know she played too close. “Dragged into metal, mixed with petrol and burnt to a crisp.”
She does not look worse for wear, but we are fast to recover, and the engines are getting closer, up the road to the house.
They park outside the boundary and do not come in, tearing down the fence to start a fire against the darkness of the plain. We smell the burning of the timber, and Delilah climbs out to where they talk and drink in the circle they think will protect them from the night.
They do not notice her claw her way beneath the paint of their bikes, bubbling the sparkling patterns and stripping them away to glitter her eyes. They do not notice Sarah dancing in the smoke, veiling herself so only the sharpest edges of her teeth catch the firelight. They do not notice me settle on the surface of their bourbon, bubbling the alcohol as it slides across their tongues, and when they sleep, they do not notice us unseam their skin, slicing away their tattoos as keepsakes, and licking the fat from their bones as they stare eyeless into the Nebraska sky, until we press them down into the dirt where their voiceless throats will scream their love for us forever.
Author’s note:
As someone living in England, I grew up on biker films from Easy Rider to Werewolves on Wheels, and the myth of what America is. I wanted to capture the desolation of places that are forgotten, where something malevolent and damaged can linger, patient enough to wait a long time for someone else to pass by. The types of places only found by those who are wanting to lose themselves. The location/title is also a nod to Springsteen’s work.
