She made a point of destroying the fox's skull before she threw away its remains. She felt guilty enough about the bear she had consigned to a life of wandering undeath. When she was done she sat down hard on the sand and let her brain relax, let herself become visible again. Every time in the past she had used her trick Mael Mag Och had appeared to tease her with riddles but not this time. She waited an hour but he never showed. That saddened her'she would have been glad for his company. Loneliness gnawed at Nilla, though she was hardly alone.
For one thing she had the desert all around her. Death Valley had failed to live up to its name. It might be a dangerous place for unprepared campers but it was hardly dead: in fact it crawled with life, with animals in startling abundance. They didn't exactly announce themselves and with normal human eyes she rarely caught sight of them. With her eyes closed, though, the desert sparkled with their energy, like a vast field of stars but far more active and mobile. She would sit and watch for hours sometimes, especially at night as the life-lights of the desert played out their endless game, chasing each other, devouring each other. Predators were big bright blotches of light that flowed toward and absorbed the smaller, dimmer sparks of prey animals. The shrubs and cacti around her flickered dimly but under the ground their massive root systems, ten times as large as the parts they showed above the ground, made a tapestry of interwoven bright radial lines and curves, a fabric with a radiant warp and a luminous weft. It was the most beautiful thing Nilla had ever seen.
For another thing she couldn't say she was alone because she was being followed. Followed and watched by the armless dead thing that had killed Charles. She had become aware of his continued presence during her first torturous afternoon in the valley, when she had walked so far and so hard she wore holes in the fabric of her too-tight jeans and her lips had split open with dehydration. The sun had started playing tricks on her early and had never let up'she saw heat shimmers in every direction that looked like pools of water rippling on the horizon, felt the shadow of every wisp of cloud on her back like a blast of icy breath. He stood at the top of a rise, his face distorted by glare, his ravaged body full of darkness in her life sense. She would have liked to write him off as yet another hallucination but she couldn't. She knew he was there. She was pretty sure he had instructions to follow her, though how anyone could make a dead man do their bidding was an open question.
He dogged her footsteps no matter how far or how fast she moved. On foot she was slightly more mobile, more agile and with better balance, but he had longer legs. He never approached more than five hundred feet from her but he never receded over the horizon either. As she headed east, walking night and day, stopping only to feed her body or to give her mind a momentary rest, he was never too far behind.
She stopped looking back, eventually. His presence became a fixed thing, a necessary piece of the environment. If he had stopped or turned away she would have felt it, she knew. She ignored him the best she could and kept trudging.
More of the same. Bushes no higher than her knee, some as low as her ankle. Soil cracked and broken by evaporation gave way to sharp-edged sand dunes gave way to rock scoured billiard ball smooth by trillions of individual grains of sand, each of them rolling, tumbling, microscopic jagged edges catching on the tiny defiles in the stone, tearing and breaking, wearing the rock face smooth a nanometer at a time over eons.