CW: Pregnancy and abortion; partner abuse.
When the sun plunged beneath the horizon, the striations of red clouds looked like gashes raked across the sky; flayed wounds ready to rain blood on a thirsty desert. Anastasia Mendez offered her left forearm a glance. The lacerations crisscrossing her skin had mended but the scars would always be there; mementos etched upon flesh.
She brought her attention back to the steering wheel and swiveled her head trying to find the road she’d veered off some time ago. She squinted her eyes as if that might help, but the creeping darkness had obscured much of the world around her. “Damn,” she said through gnashing teeth. At some point she must have nodded off and lost her bearings as she was prone to do on long drives.
Joey Garrett, infamous porn producer and self-described King of Smut, would be mingling at a Halloween-themed wrap party tonight. A party she needed to find if she had any hopes of getting a job and paying off her crippling medical debts. They had accrued over the last few weeks, a tumultuous time marked by medical procedures that had left her hollowed out and sutured like a jigsaw puzzle. The dislocated shoulder, the gashes, the broken nose, the split lip, the abortion . . .
She clenched her teeth and fought the urge to sob again. No. Snap out of it. You need to find this party. But the search had proved fruitless. In that darkness, everything looked the same: A world enclosed by jagged hills and loose boulders, the flatland stretching between, densely forested with scrub and yucca. A far cry from the glimmering lights of Los Angeles, there was something otherworldly about the desert that made the hairs on the back of her neck turn prickly.
Her nails dug into the steering wheel as she eyed the dashboard clock: 7:00 p.m. She hoped there was still time. Relax, she told herself. The night’s young.
She plucked her phone out of her clutch and checked for directions. GPS Signal Lost. The connection had probably severed sometime after that rest stop in Joshua Tree.
What the hell would she do now? She’d never driven down this way before. The roar of cars had long subsided behind those obsidian hills, and there had been no landmarks, no lights, no strips of blacktop to lead her to safety. She was all alone out there.
Instinctively, she eyed the rearview mirror. Her taillights projected red whisps into an ocean of black. Her heart thudded against her chest and her breaths became shallow gasps. She didn’t know what she expected to see. Perhaps Robert tailing her in his Corvette. No. He was likely already at the party waiting for her. For a moment she felt silly; she thought she may have been overreacting. But deep down she knew he wasn’t beyond that. He wasn’t beyond anything. She’d found out the painful way.
As night fell, she tried to shrug off her anxiety, but the Prius’s headlights did little to mitigate the encroaching darkness. Before long, the windshield had fogged over as her panic-filled breaths warmed the car.
She pulled over alongside a boulder at the base of a hill and popped the brakes. “Just breathe,” she said, closing her eyes. She inhaled a deep breath through her nose, and exhaled with her mouth until the pounding in her chest subsided. Just like her therapist coached her.
“Okay,” Anastasia said, scooching out of the car, “let’s figure this out.” A breeze swept across the desert, caressing her face like icy fingers. A chill spread across her arms and legs. Tonight, she’d worn a plain white V-neck, black leggings, and open-toed wedges. A decision she was swiftly regretting.
Maybe she could get enough of a signal to call Monica. She raised her phone in the air. “Come on,” she said through chattering teeth, “give me something to work with.” Nothing. She considered turning back; there was a chance she could catch a major road back to L.A. if she headed back the way she came.
No. She was tired of running. Of giving up. She’d be strong for once and stick it out. Besides, she needed this in the worst way. Admittedly, an Airbnb in the middle of the Mojave Desert wasn’t her idea of a great time. But Monica had pressed her about coming to the party, an effort to get her out of the house after all that had happened. After considerable prodding, Anastasia had relented. She told herself it’d be a way to get in touch with a few producers, schmooze her way back into a few films. After that it wouldn’t be long before the money started to come in and she could reclaim her life, start all over again. Make up for the horrible things. The things she’d lost.
Resting a hand on her belly, she told herself her decision wasn’t selfish, just honest. There came the familiar tingle in her nose again as a thin film of moisture coated her eyes. She never even knew if it was a boy or a girl. What could she do? She was an unemployed porn star left to fend for herself in a world waiting to devour people like her. She couldn’t do it alone; certainly not with Robert facing time in prison. A lump formed in her throat. She had loved him. She had wanted to leave the industry, start a family. But he had other plans for her.
Anastasia was nineteen when she met Robert Pierce on her first shoot, some low budget casting couch video. She’d been a nervous, trembling wreck when the cameras rolled, her skin a canvas of goosebumps as Robert’s hands explored her body. In between takes he had comforted her, promised to guide her along, show her the ropes. Before long they’d started dating, eventually moving into a condo together. He offered to be her manager, to steer her clear of predators and sketchy contracts. Young, soft spoken, and alone in a new city. How could she refuse?
She could still hear his voice. “We’re going straight to the top, baby. Stardom, money, drugs, book deals; anything your pretty little face desires.”
She thought he loved her, but coveted was more apt a term. But she knew now. She was just a prize to be won, a marionette to be controlled, a means to an end.
He’d been in Florida shooting some films while she decided to take some time off. At first, she hadn’t thought much of the subtle changes happening to her body; the modest weight gain, the swollen feet. But the trip to the doctor’s had proved an unexpected revelation. The news had been a pleasant shock. A welcome development in their relationship, one she thought had been blossoming over the years. She saved the surprise for his return, watching his face intently for an elated reaction, but it had only seethed with rage.
Her fingers slid across the raised scars on her arm.
The memories flooded back, intrusive little things bearing gifts of pain and shame. She recalled everything, like a movie reel playing in her mind. The belt came down on her, slicing her arm open like raw meat as she tried to block his onslaught. The weeping wounds stung as if hot coals had been pressed to her skin. Then his fists shattered her nose and parted her lips like the proverbial Red Sea.
Her neck suddenly began to flare like it did the moment his fingers had laced around her throat, depriving her of air. Her jaw clenched and she wrapped her arms around her chest. The thoughts had once again manifested into phantom pains.
With the tip of her middle finger, she wiped the tears from her eyes. Leaning against the hood of the car, she regarded the sprawl of Joshua trees laid out before her, their twisted forms like occulted entities watching her in the dark. Judging her. Waiting to admonish her. She considered the possibility that Robert might be hiding there amongst the scrub, watching her too.
She clutched the door handle.
She paused when she spotted what appeared to be old petroglyphs etched onto the boulder beside the car. Curiously, she approached the rockface, squinting as she tried to decipher the images chipped onto its smooth surface. In the dusk, the sepia-colored markings were almost indiscernible.
There were rudimentary depictions of bighorn sheep, coyotes, and bobcats lurking amidst the scrub and grass. A dome of spiraling stars speckled the top of the image, beneath them swaths of yucca trees, where in their shadows lurked an uncanny form; a great thing with numerous heads protruding from a long, snaking body. Some of its faces depicted animals or people; others were too terrifying to fathom.
The pictures were mesmerizing, the gravity of their mystery pulling her toward the rock. Were they religious depictions? A story of some sort? Somehow, she had the gut feeling that she’d stumbled on a secret not privy to most eyes. Hesitantly, she traced her index finger along the contours of the many-faced aberration.
The phone suddenly vibrated in her palm, snapping her out of her trance. GPS Signal Restored. A wave of relief washed over her as a broken green line directed her toward her destination. Thank God. She wasn’t far.
Anastasia slid back into the Prius and drove, reuniting with a narrow dirt road leading south. After a few miles, the path terminated beside a small house overlooking hundreds of vacant acres in every direction. Through the car’s frosted windows, the house looked solemn, like a specter keeping watch over the desert, its eyes and mouth aglow in fire.
Several Cadillacs and BMWs had been stationed on either side of the house. She parked on the fringes of the property, just outside the amber glow of a pair of floodlights. She threw on her leather jacket and stepped out. The place was a small single-story home, its patio flecked with lawn chairs, benches, and a fire pit. No signs of sunbaked erosion, the clapboards appeared a freshly painted beige.
The subtle scent of woodsmoke lingered in the cool air. As she approached the house, she could see that the hill had been scorched. Gnarled and crooked, the remnants of yucca trees stood as obsidian obelisks in the dark, their bark singed bare. Fresh saplings had started to sprout from the dead land, their blades swaying in the wind like sea anemones. Something crunched under her feet. She lifted a heel. Ash and small bone fragments carpeted the ground like gravel.
She dusted the ash from her heels on the planks of the patio and entered the house. Greeting her was an ankle-high haze of dry ice, the cloud hovering lazily across the living room. A creaky wooden floor announced her arrival. Two dozen costumed partygoers awash in red light mingled in the living room, their chatter mixing with the beat of electronic music. A few masked guests cast sidelong glances her way before returning to their conversations.
A swell of blood rushed to her head as her eyes darted from person to person. She spotted some familiar faces. A few strange ones as well. She wiped the sweat from her palms against her thighs. Would he be here? Robert had been in many of the same films as the talent in the room. Hell, he’d fucked most of the girls here. Girls who’d worshipped at his feet like acolytes, a god of their own creation.
Howling laughter broke out toward the center of the room. Cassy Kane, dressed in a revealing pirate costume, twirled drunkenly as a crowd of men cheered her on. Amongst the spectators was Joey Garrett, garbed in a wolfman outfit. He regarded Anastasia and smiled, his lips curling crookedly. She would make her way toward him, introduce herself. But first she’d find Monica, tell her she’d arrived.
Anastasia hung her jacket on a coat rack and waded inside. A man wrapped in rags shuffled toward her and plucked a bottle out of a Styrofoam cooler. “Beer?” he said in a muffled voice she could barely make out. She stepped back, regarded the contours of his bandaged face, and decided it hadn’t been Robert. She politely waved the mummy off.
As she searched for Monica, she wriggled past Ben Dover and Jack Hammer, arms flailing, feet shuffling clumsily to the beat of the music. There had been rumors Ben and Jack had been involved in sex trafficking, though nothing had ever been proven.
She averted her gaze. It wasn’t the first time she’d been in a compromising position between both men, though not by choice. When it came to the industry, she had come to learn that she had little say, including who she’d get to fuck onscreen.
Ben and Jack were swathed in crimson silk vests and cheap Dracula capes, the smell of musk tainting the air around them. Almost like rot. As she shimmied past, they eyed her blemished arm and offered each other fanged grins. Her face flushed with embarrassment. Everyone had known. She had made an earnest effort to keep a lid on things, but gossip metastasized like unchecked cancer. This had been a bad idea. She should have stayed home.
Anastasia slipped past the crowd, hung a left, and strode into an empty kitchenette, slumping over the sink as her heart beat against her sternum. Dragging in long, deep breaths, she let the air fill her lungs and settle the fire coursing through her veins.
Get over yourself. You’re a big girl and you need to talk to Joey. Maybe a drink of water would do her good. She plucked a small tumbler from a cabinet and turned the handle on the faucet. Nothing came out.
Long fingers suddenly wrapped around her left forearm. “There you are,” said the voice at her back. Anastasia spun around to find Monica flashing that bright, bleached smile of hers. Wine glass in hand, she leaned playfully against the doorway dressed in a skimpy devil outfit, a pair of horns adorning her head. The corona of red light at her back enhanced the effect.
“God,” Anastasia said, “you scared the fuck out of me.”
“Sorry, Kid,” Monica said, her fingers moving to her neck where her favorite pearl necklace should have been. “Forgot how jumpy you’ve been lately.” Monica had taken to calling Anastasia Kid due to their ten-year age gap, though she was far from old. But at just thirty-four, producers had begun casting her in not-so-coveted MILF roles. The death knell in many a woman’s porn career. At least financially.
Anastasia’s eyebrows furrowed. “I’d say I’ve been more than just jumpy, Monica.”
Monica’s smile faded. “No. You’re right, Kid. I’m sorry. I know it’s been a rough few months. Listen, don’t be scared. He’s not here.”
“Yeah,” Anastasia said, her head stooping.
Monica removed her devil horn headband and strapped it over Anastasia’s head. “Why aren’t you in a costume, hunny?”
“Didn’t feel much like dressing up,” Anastasia said.
“Well, look,” Monica said, brushing away a lock of black hair from her eyes. “We’re gonna move the party outside soon.”
“Monica,” Anastasia said, “did you tell people about what happened?”
Monica wrapped an arm around her chest, bit her lip, and swirled her wineglass. “I may have inadvertently told a few people.”
“What the fuck, Monica?” Anastasia said. “Nobody’s gonna want to work with me. They’ll say I’m that baby killer who ruined the great Robert Pierce’s career.”
“First of all, people in the industry get abortions all the time. Second, no one’s surprised your boyfriend got locked up. We’ve all heard the stories. It’s not just you he’s dragged through the mud.”
“He’s not my fucking boyfriend,” Anastasia said, the heat from her cheeks radiating outward. “And he’s out on bail.” She balled her fists and felt her legs tremble. Her breaths became quick and shallow. She felt powerless, made to feel unimportant. As always.
“I-I’m sorry.” Monica set her glass down and stepped forward, her arms open for a hug.
Anastasia put up a hand. “No. Give me a minute. I think I need some fresh air.”
Monica opened her mouth to speak but Anastasia slunk away through a screen door at the end of the kitchen. Outside, she shut her eyes and let her anger dissipate slowly into the cool desert air. There was no point being here. Nobody in that house gave a shit about her.
She opened her eyes. This side of the property overlooked the eastern portion of the desert, a vast nothingness staring back at her. Beneath the hill sat a valley, a deep depression shaped like a crater. It appeared out of place, unlike something the Earth had gradually carved out over the ages through erosion or the shifting of tectonic plates.
A wisp of cigarette smoke wafted across her face, bleeding into the night sky where the moon cast a halo through a patch of clouds.
“Yeah,” a voice said. “I have you booked for next week. Your family is gonna love this place.” To her left, a man sitting on a small bench snapped his cell phone shut and tapped a cigarette, breaking loose a pillar of ash. He wore a reflective orange vest over a thick grey jacket. With a head of scraggly blonde hair attached to a long, oval face peppered with stubble, he didn’t look like most actors she’d come across.
His mud-stained work boots grated back and forth against a patch of ashen dirt. “Prescribed burns,” he said, meeting her gaze.
“I’m sorry?” Anastasia said.
“The desert’s full of invasive plants. Not from around here, that is. They steal moisture away from the native grasses. It’s a hot, dry world out here, so every drop counts.” He tipped his head toward the scorched ground at his feet. “The county schedules prescribed burns to try to quell their spread.”
“Oh,” she said, instinctively crossing her arms around her chest. She checked the screen door. Monica was gone. “How do you know so much?”
“I work for the county.” He put out his cigarette on the black soil and smiled warmly. He extended a hand. “Name’s Riley.”
“I see,” she said, hesitantly offering her hand in return. “Well, nice to meet you, Riley. I’m Anastasia.”
Riley shook her hand gently. “Not enjoying yourself inside?”
“Not really.”
“Mind if I ask?”
She pursed her lips, thought about it for a moment, and supposed there’d be no harm in telling him. “Ex-boyfriend. Can’t shake the feeling that he’ll turn up any minute and . . .” She paused, unsure of how to finish the sentence.
Riley regarded her scars. “Hey, don’t be scared. You’re safe with me.” He patted the seat beside him. “Here, sit down. I don’t bite.”
Anastasia forced a half-smile and nervously eased into the seat, leaving enough of a gap so their legs wouldn’t touch. He stank of tobacco, beer, and kerosene. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but I was pregnant. Four months in. He didn’t take the news too well.”
Riley shook his head in dismay. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not your fault. I’m used to men punishing me for living my life. God. And I aways let it happen. Guess I’ve always been a pushover.” She peered at the sky, her eyes jumping from star to star. They gleamed like distant jewels and held promise of better days. And yet, they were always out of reach. “Sometimes I wish I were stronger. That I could shed my old self and start over. A new life.”
“Hey, don’t say that,” he said. “It’s never too late to change things.”
“Anyway,” Anastasia said, “how’d you end up at this party?”
“I own the house. Run it as an Airbnb. I’m a friend of Joey Garrett, the producer that put this shindig together. I let him book the place for free.”
“Why’d you buy a house in the middle of nowhere?”
“My grandfather built it in the ’50s. My family used to live here until we moved into town just over yonder. There’s only so much one can take living out here. It’s a cruel place.”
“I bet,” she said gazing around the horizon, the moon illuminating the faint outlines of the peaks and canyons. A shooting star streaked across the sky and fizzled out somewhere over the crater. She made a wish. “Believe it or not, this is my first time in the desert. Been a city girl my whole life. My family never did much travelling.”
“Count yourself lucky. You ever hear of the Pinto People?”
She shook her head.
“They lived in this desert about 8,000 years ago. Besides a few excavated tools, there’s not much known about them on account they just vanished one day. No one knows if they assimilated somewhere else or just died out here.”
“That’s wild,” Anastasia said. The last part didn’t surprise her. She’d felt so helpless out in the desert’s dark expanse, like a stranger out of place. She couldn’t fathom what it was like in the daytime at the mercy of an oppressive sun. “I could never make it out here.”
“Whatever lives in this desert,” Riley said, nodding, “has adapted to the cruelty of its harshness.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Anastasia said. “Which reminds me, I don’t have a drink. Listen, I have to introduce myself to a few people, but maybe we can keep this conversation going later? It’s a hell of a lot more interesting than anything going on in there, I promise you.”
A smile cut across Riley’s face, his cheeks rosy in the dim light. “I’d like that.”
Anastasia beamed as she got up and turned to open the screen door. She hadn’t remembered the last time she’d smiled and meant it. She’d spent so much time living in fear and grief that the memory of human contact had nearly faded like a petroglyph in the sun.
Inside, she noticed the chatter had stopped, leaving only the sound of music blaring through the house. Red plastic cups and beer bottles littered the misty floor of the otherwise empty living room. She found the stereo and turned down the music. Silence.
“Monica?” Anastasia called out. No response. Maybe the party had already moved outside.
She went out the back door, where the hill faced south. Where there should have been chatter and music and rustling, there was only a subtle hum, the nocturnal whispers of the desert and the faraway chirping of insects. The floodlights created a small crescent of illumination. Beyond its light stretched the expanse of night and nothing more.
No—not nothing. She could see a deeper darkness a few yards ahead. A ditch. She approached it cautiously, her feet dragging as she moved forward. She gasped and felt her heart skip a beat. Strewn alongside the rim of the ditch were heaps of wallets, undergarments, and assorted jewelry. Rings, sunglasses, a cheap cape, Monica’s pearls.
First, her hands began to shake uncontrollably, then the shivers coursed down her legs. She forced herself to take another step. Within the ditch lay a tangled heap of shriveled limbs, dry and contorted as they interlaced with one another. Leathery faces peered upwards, their hollow orbital sockets staring back at her.
In the gloom she couldn’t be sure but there was something resembling Monica, its corpse like a discarded doll, its hair a mop of black disheveled hair. Anastasia’s eyes settled on the corpse’s face. Those unmistakable bleached teeth had been bared in a lifeless grin.
Riley stepped outside holding a can of kerosene, a freshly lit cigarette dangling out the corner of his mouth. “Don’t be scared.”
Out in the darkness beyond the sphere of the house’s floodlights, something rustled. Anastasia spun around. The thin shoots that had sprouted from the singed earth—not yucca, she was sure now—lashed out like feelers, prodding, grasping greedily at the air around her feet. She sidestepped their thrashing tips, tripped over her feet, and fell to the ground, breaking her fall with her palms.
Glints of moonlight caught on something jagged and rocky as it breached the earth, uprooting heaps of black sediment. The scant ambient light hinted at a colossal, appalling form as it flailed about in the darkness beyond. Its eyeless head sniffed the air with a bristling tentacled snout. Rows of sickle-like legs hoisted its long, segmented carapace as it lurched slowly forward. The nightmare could best be described as a cross between a centipede and a star-nosed mole; something not born of an arid wasteland. Something that had been forced to adapt to a new environment.
She wanted to run but fear paralyzed her legs. Her heart drummed against her chest and her lungs burned as they struggled to take in air. The monster let out a high-pitched screech and she felt a piercing pain in her head. Fragmented visions raced inside her mind as if something had been scanning her memories, forcing them to life. Memories of Robert. Of a child flushing out of her body.
That instant, Robert stepped out of the darkness holding a baby in the crook of his arm, its body tiny and dark and bathed in blood. “Hunny,” he said. “Don’t be scared.”
Her unborn child cooed and cried. Her heart ached for her baby, and she found herself rushing toward Robert. She tried to pull the baby from his grasp. Only it wouldn’t budge. As if it was attached to Robert’s flesh.
Something was wrong. Up close, the child’s face was blurred, smoothed over and devoid of features. It was nothing more than an abstract, a thought unrealized. She let out a pained wail. This wasn’t her baby. She’d never even seen its face. She’d only gotten to know it from the pieces that had fallen out of her, sometimes one at a time.
Her chest heaved and she began to sob, the tears in her eyes distorting the world around her.
A pair of shoots sprang from the earth and coiled around her ankles, entrenching tiny thorns deep into her skin, locking her in place. Warm trickles of blood cascaded down her feet, pooling on the ground. Another pair of shoots latched onto her arms, gradually squeezing until they turned purple, and all sensation had been wrung from them. With a swift, cold sting, one tendril pierced her neck like a mosquito’s proboscis. Anastasia gurgled as blood collected in her throat.
The monster screeched again, and the tendrils coiled around her body constricted. A swell of memories flooded up. Of the night Robert beat her. Of her father yanking out clumps of her hair. Of men having their way with her, discarding her, leaving their imprints, like bruises in her mind. She glared at the monster dwelling in the shadows. Get out of my head, she wanted to scream, but the shoot in her throat had robbed her of her speech.
The Robert-and-fetus hybrid shambled back toward the monster, a thin fleshy tether connecting them like an appendage. They were just facsimiles. Like the lure of an angler fish, they were bait.
A green sprout burst from the ground, its tip bloating and bulging into a fleshy pod the size of a melon. The pod swelled and something unraveled from within. Like rapidly expanding cells, clusters of meat began to form until something that resembled Anastasia curled naked on the desert floor, its body shimmering in fluid like a newborn baby.
Anastasia gasped and hacked as her naked duplicate began to drag itself across the dirt. The facsimile pushed off the ground with trembling arms. Then it stood with bowed, quaking legs, its balance supported by the tether coupled at her back. The facsimile was a perfect copy, even down to the same scars marking her arm.
The sprout around Anastasia’s neck tightened and her skin grew taut, her throat ran dry. The spittle on the corners of her mouth dissipated. A wave of nausea washed over her as her veins retracted and shriveled.
She heard Riley’s voice echo in her mind. It’s a hot, dry world out here, so every drop counts.
Her facsimile shuffled toward the creature in the dark. Once in the shadow of its corpulent shell, she turned to Anastasia. “Donbeescared,” her duplicate said, its words raspy, garbled, a farce of a human pushing out air through a meat pipe for the first time.
“I don’t think it’s from around these parts,” Riley said, his voice quivering with fear. He stood over the ditch, regarded the husks below, and doused them with kerosene. “But we’ve got a pact. The town keeps it fed, and it leaves us alone. I’m sorry. You know better than most. We’ve all got masters to appease.” He flicked his cigarette into the grave and great flames spat skyward, lighting up the night.
The fire illuminated the veiled countenances of dozens of costumed facsimiles lurking in the shadows; puppets, lures, all of them tethered to the monster as it scuttled back underground.
In the shadows, the false Monica smiled at her warmly. As had Ben and Jack and Cassy and Joey and the rest of the producers. People she’d known. Others she hadn’t. “Don’t be scared,” they said in unison.
“Don’t be scared,” Anastasia’s duplicate echoed, her voice now a perfect match to her own.
Anastasia felt her eyeballs dry and wither, a thousand needles pressing into her pupils. The stars became great, blurry pinwheels before the world vanished from her sight. Arms and legs growing limp, she felt herself slipping, her death giving way to a rebirth, a twisted chance at that new life she’d always wanted. And yet she couldn’t help but feel a deep ache in her heart knowing that the new Anastasia would be just as powerless; forever a pawn to yet another monster.
