“Just checking. Okay, what about plague?”

Peter draws a symbol in the dust on the dining room table: a circle with three linking circles on top of it. A biohazard symbol. “Scavengers paint them on the doors of houses with diseased bodies inside or other kinds of contamination. Happens sometimes. Everyone calls it the plague.”

“Great! I mean, not great about the diseased bodies, of course.”

Peter smiles, and it’s as if his face blossoms. But I can’t let this distract me. I twist the white strip in my hair as I think. “So...we need paint, bright for the biohazard sign,” I say. “Red, preferably. Nails and hammer, which we have. String and cans and other loud items for the alarm system.”

“Forks and spoons?” Claire suggests.

“Yeah, that would be fine. Anything that makes a loud clatter.”

“Feral dogs,” Peter says.

Both Claire and I spin to look at the window. I retreat behind a chair. Claire whips her knife out and drops to a crouch. I don’t hear howls or barks, but...

Peter rolls his eyes at both of us. “Relax. What I meant is— if a house had feral dogs, then I wouldn’t enter.”

“I don’t want dogs in the house,” Claire says. Her lower lip juts out in a pout. She doesn’t put the knife away.

Coming out from behind the chair and sitting again, I think about it, tapping my pen again on the notebook. “If we had a tape recorder, we could record the howl, maybe a few other sounds, and then play it while we’re gone. Kind of like leaving the radio on when you go on vacation.”

“What’s a tape recorder?” Claire asks.

Peter nods. “I may have one.”

“Then we’ll just have to get close enough for some good recordings...” I try to say this like it’s no big deal. Saunter up to feral dogs that would rather munch your face off. Sure. Right after breakfast. “Okay, so here’s our plan. Peter, you get the tape recorder. Claire, try to find red paint, string, and anything metal and loud we can put on the string. I’ll start on hammering the nails near the windows until Claire returns with the paint.”

Claire hops off the table. “Yay!”

Saluting, Peter steps off the back of the chair. It neatly drops onto its four legs. “Yes, ma’am.” I notice he isn’t talking about leaving anymore. I don’t know if it’s because of the intruder, or if he’s decided I’m interesting again.

Alone, I hammer nails through thin boards and then hammer the boards to windowsills. I wince every time the head of the hammer strikes the wood. The strikes seem to reverberate across the desert. I imagine the sound traveling across the sand and dirt, through the houses, and into town where the people who want me dead will hear it as an invitation. Come to the little yellow house to kill Lauren. BYOB.

I finished downstairs and am working on the upstairs attic room window. I’m placing the nails askew so they’ll look natural, as if a sloppy handyman chose to rip out a chunk of the window frame and didn’t flatten the nails afterward—or at least that’s what I hope it looks like. I’ve never done much construction. Regardless, the nails are long and vicious, and I pound them through the sill so they’ll point upward. Anyone who grabs the sill to hoist themselves inside will have a nasty surprise and hopefully reconsider the whole endeavor in favor of breaking into a less prickly house.

By the time I finish, I’m sweating and my clothes are sticking to me. I look out the window at the haze on the horizon—the manifestation of the void.

Suddenly, I want to see it again. It’s my jailer. My prison wall.

I am walking before I’ve decided to: down the stairs, out the door, around the junk pile and out the gate. The air is hot but not unbearable. The sun pricks the back of my neck, and I sweep my hair up into a twist on the top of my head. On the other side of the fence, I see a pair of chopsticks on the ground, still in their Chinese restaurant wrapper. I pull them out, break them apart, and use them to hold my hair in place. Then I walk into the desert.

The wind whispers across the reddish sand. It’s a soft musical sound, like a whisk in a bowl. The low scrub brush trembles as it blows. I feel the sand on my skin.

Ahead of me, the dust storm—the void—is spread across the horizon. It blots out the thin distinction between the land and the sky, an amorphous but massive wall. Closer, I expect to feel wind. But I don’t. The dust hangs in the air, motionless, a wall of dust. It’s evenly thick, as if it were a mass of reddish-beige cotton, not dust particles suspended in the air.

I stop and study it. It looks endless. Impenetrable. But maybe that’s only here. I turn east and walk, the void to my left. It must end somewhere. No storm lasts forever. There must be a break in it, or at least a weak point.

I will find a way out.

I won’t be trapped here.

I can’t be.

I keep walking until my throat feels dry. I wish I’d brought water. I didn’t plan for this properly—or at all. I can’t circumnavigate Lost on foot, not without water. I’m still near the eastern outskirts. There could be a break in the dust to the west or the south, but at this rate, it would take me hours to reach it.

Ahead, the dust swirls. It’s only moving in one section—a whirlpool in the center of an otherwise-undisturbed beige lake. Continuing to walk alongside the storm, I watch it swirl. The whirlpool darkens, and the dark-light shadows swirl together as if stirred faster and faster. I slow, and then I halt. Maybe I shouldn’t be so close.

The shadows suck in, the spiral turns inward, and then it shoots out, a tornado-like arm of dust extending over my head. Instinctively, I duck. A car tire is propelled out of the dust tornado. The tire shoots over me and lands between the houses nearly a mile away.

“What the hell,” I say out loud.

I look at the void again as the tornado shrinks back, and the spiral slows. Soon, it’s placid again, as if the eruption had never occurred. This is how items end up in Lost? The void...expels them? Violently. Like a...leviathan burp. Eyeing the dust, I back away from it. There’s nothing normal about this dust storm. Nothing normal about this place. Nothing normal about any of this.

I shouldn’t be here.

I don’t belong here.

Enough, I think again. This is the plan: I will find a break or weakness in the dust storm, and then I’m going to cross it, leave, and never look back. For now, though, I’ve walked as far as I can. I turn back and head for the little yellow house.

Maybe I walked too far. My side is cramped, and my breath rakes over my dry throat. Sweat beads and then is wicked away by the heat of the sun. A few minutes later, I begin to feel dizzy and see black spots speckled over my vision.

Claire and Peter are on the porch waiting for me when I arrive at a walk-stumble into the yard. Running to me, Claire hugs my waist. Peter hands me a soda bottle. It’s filled with only slightly murky water. I drink it anyway. My muscles are shaking, and I lean against Claire harder than I should. Soon, I feel a little stronger.

It was stupid to walk into the desert unprepared. But other than that, it’s not a terrible plan. Somewhere, out in the desert, away from the highway, there must be a way around the void. Somehow, I’ll find it. Finishing the soda, I smile at Peter and Claire. I am taking steps toward my goals, and that makes me feel better. Mom would approve.

“I found red paint!” Claire says. “And string.”

Peter waves an ’80s tape recorder in the air. “I have this.”

I nod. Neither asks where I have been or why I went or what I saw.

I find a cloth and wrap it around a stick. Dipping it in the red paint, I paint the biohazard symbol on the front door. For good measure, I also add it to each side of the house. By the time I’ve circled the house, I’m splattered with red paint, and I feel as if I’ve won a battle, as if the act of slathering paint on the house were a direct attack against the horror of the void.