“This isn’t going to work,” she said, her voice muffled.
A stab of fear. “What?”
She looked up at me. “There are no trees, not even shrubs. We’ll be totally exposed. There’s nothing but red dirt.” She tipped her face back down and a drip hovered on the end of her nose.
A rushing sound filled my ears and I felt cold again, my shoulders and jaw tensing. She’s right. What the hell did I know about evading law enforcement, about ditching a goddamn body? It was hopeless; we were done for.
But then I looked at Kristen, sagging in the driver’s seat, and tenderness sprang up in my chest. I knew how she felt; my brave, beautiful best friend had just been attacked.
I blinked hard. She’d done this for me in Cambodia—I could dig deep, channel her confidence. Be there for her like she’d been for me. “The nothing—that’s why we’re safe,” I said. “There’s nothing out there, so no one will stumble onto the spot where we dig. No hikers or, or campers with their dogs or farmers or alpaca herders or anyone else.”
She wiped her silvery tears and nodded. The car began to move, imperceptibly at first and then with mounting assuredness, as if it, too, were growing in resolve.
There was only one road in and out of Quiteria, as well as all the towns before and after us, a twisty two-lane highway slithering through the valley like a lizard in the shade. I thought back to when we’d first trundled onto it, after a few confused loops around Santiago: flat, open road, how sunlight had beamed into the windshield, as cheery and charmed as the Latin pop Kristen found on the radio. Everything was blasting that day: the bass through the speakers, the sun through the windows, our zippy sedan down an endless road.
Neither of us remembered seeing any side roads up into the mountains—just sudden grids of streets when the road bloated up into towns and villages. Now we were in a barren stretch, with signs placing the next town at eighty kilometers away, and Kristen tasked me with looking for a swath of mountain we could walk out into, something remote and forgettable, and not near farmers’ fields. It was hard work, not least because I was also keeping an eye on the clock: We’d been driving for a half hour, and we needed plenty of time to get back and return the shovels before the sun rose. It was already after one, and the sun would be up at seven. And though I’d never dug a grave, I assumed it would take hours.
“What about here?” I said, so quietly I had to clear my throat and repeat myself. Kristen eased the car to a stop and opened her window. The cold rushed in, eager and uncaring. Foothills loomed on either side of the road, ragged outlines blotting out the stars. There were a few bushes near the road and a smattering of skinny pines, but no sound for miles.
“This could work,” she said. “I’ll drive down and see if there’s a big curve ahead—we don’t want another car appearing out of nowhere.”
We hadn’t seen another soul all night, but it was a smart thing to check.
“Go ahead,” I said after a confused, waiting moment.
“You should get out here.”
Cold splashed through my insides. “What? Why?”
“C’mon. Figure out which hill we should be climbing and make sure there are no signs of life—fencing or sheds or anything.”
“You’re going to leave me here alone?”
“Just for a minute. We’re going to lose our sense of where to stop otherwise.”
I stared at her, my heart thrashing.
“Emily, we don’t have all night. Can you please just do this?”
Wind whipped around the brush and through her open window, a hushed, zipping noise. It mingled with the warmth of the car, and with the oxygen churning in and out of my body, my chest heaving as if I’d run a marathon.
Okay, I thought, then realized it was aloud. “Okay. Okay. Okay.” I reached for the door handle and held my breath as I pulled. The dome lights flicked on, spooking us both. Kristen looked pale and childish in the sallow glow.
“I’ll be right back,” she murmured. “Aim your flashlight at the road when you see me.”
I nodded and stepped into the frigid darkness. I swung the door shut and she drove off into the night.
I was alone. The space around me was like something solid, chilled air and night sounds and the cosmos pushing in on me, vibrating on my lips, my scalp, my eardrums. I felt a sudden instinct to pierce it all with a wild scream. Instead I squeezed my fingers into fists and watched Kristen’s taillights shrinking in the distance. They hooked to the right, then disappeared altogether.
The cold air felt charged and fear mushroomed inside me, a huge desperate thrash. I’d be left alone forever; the whole world had evaporated and it was just me, alone in the Earth’s wrinkled fold. The sky overhead was too bright, too high, too deep. I clicked on my flashlight and swept the feeble beam onto the soil behind me. I wished I had my phone—its light put this one to shame—but Kristen had insisted we leave them at the hotel; even in airplane mode, she said, a phone was traceable, chattering with satellites in the night sky.
Over the last few days, we’d learned what a strange swatch of land the Elqui Valley was: tropical trees and bright flowers on bar patios, fields of tender vegetables stretching from one mountain base to another, but beyond that, an arid moonscape, mountains coated in pebbly gray-brown. The streak of green narrowed in points, like here, where the valley oasis was only as wide as the highway and a few roadside shrubs; in every direction, I saw sloped hills covered in desiccated dirt and the occasional rock. We’ll have to cover our footprints, I thought, and bent to find a bough that’d work as a makeshift broom.
Pinpricks of light in the distance, and my shoulders eased. Only now did I let myself indulge the hellish vision: me abandoned, wandering this mountain road as my tongue grew parched. Kristen speeding toward civilization, alone except for the body in the trunk.
I pointed the flashlight at the pavement, and the pale disc of light shook in time with my hand. Kristen rolled to a stop and climbed out of the car.
“Did you find a good spot?” She crossed to me and put her hands on her hips.
“What? Oh, not really.” How long had she been gone? It’d felt like hours, like days, but I hadn’t actually done any recon. “It’s just sloping land in every direction. Did you see anything?”
“There’s a curve up ahead so I followed it for a while. No signs of anyone using this area. If we’re smart, we should be fine.”
I turned to face uphill. “There are a few big rocks. If we dig right behind one, it’ll be hidden from the road.” I held a boulder in the flashlight’s beam, and Kristen nodded and opened the car door. The shovels leaned against the back seat like awkward teenagers, and they clanged as Kristen yanked them out.
We set off on the crumbly hillside. One step at a time. One foot in front of the other. One task, then another, then another.
“It’s just after one,” I said. “If we want the car back at the hotel before sunrise, we have maybe five hours here.” Car in the lot. Shovels in the shed. Padlock on the door, hardware screwed back into the frame. Our things folded in our suitcases, the hotel suite tidy, like we’d never been in that room, this valley, this country. This quivering, epic nightmare.