End Time by Keith Korman Page B

shoulder; their cowboy boots going click-clack on the paved surface, then swishing as they moved through the weeds.
    The two policemen paused a moment looking down at the locator, and the spot on which they stood. Then pointed in different directions as if uncertain which way to go. An argument was bubbling between them—the service station? The road, the rail tracks? Deputy Jimmy complaining, “Look it’s all over the place, first north then south, then north again.” With the Texas Highway Patrolman arguing, “No it always swings south again.” And the two men weren’t getting anywhere.
    Bhakti’s BlackBerry buzzed in his shirt pocket. Really weird, as if the batt still possessed a drop of juice. The screen ID flashed ELEANOR , a Twitter feed: Here I stand stupidly texting, thinking railroad tracks be Chen’s last hope thing.
    â€œUp to the railroad tracks,” Bhakti urged. “Don’t ask me why. Eleanor seems to know already.”
    Chen gave him a weird, doubtful glance, but didn’t challenge him. The fathers picked up speed, past the truck stop and onto a strip of desert. The two lawmen hustled to catch up. The banked gravel bed of the railroad tracks stood out like a low wall. The flashlights danced back and forth. They caught a bit of color and automatically homed in on it. What they found was very, very bad. Two cell phones discarded on the gravel and a pile of girls’ clothes strewn on the tracks.
    Bhakti had to restrain Chen from scooping them up; the man was in tears, frantic. “Don’t touch them, no!” Bhakti hissed, and it took the two lawmen to shake some sense into the father, blocking Chen from the empty shreds of jeans and tops, torn undies.
    â€œWe’ll get dogs. We’ll start tracking first light, just as soon as they get here. Just don’t touch a thing, you’ll ruin the scent.”
    Chen collapsed to his knees. “No, no, God no.…”
    How much worse could it get?
    They found out soon enough.
    The dogs didn’t have much luck; they were good dogs, they snuffed around for a bit, but wound up mostly going in circles. Some of the clothes were shredded as if torn apart by a berserk animal.
    The cell phones weren’t much help either. No strange numbers in the memory, a confusion of sweaty prints. There should have been some kind of registry, cell IP address, a digital fingerprint on the Felix song—but there wasn’t. The stupid song seemed to have come out of thin air, untraceable. And by the middle of the day, by the looks of the lawmen, neither believed Bhakti or Chen had actually heard it. DNA would take some extra time. But no footprints, no remains; the girls had simply been plucked naked from the earth, leaving only their rags behind.
    The two fathers drove back to Van Horn, neither speaking a word. The gray interstate rolled under them; a gritty roar seeping into every crevice of their brains. A blinding, deadening sound; the yellow sun coming up, a blistering eye.
    Bhakti could see his days stretching out before him like a path of broken glass on which he would crawl. There’d be trips down to every border patrol post five hundred miles east and west. A hundred meals in diners, another hundred in Motel 6s. Every other night, wondering how long his strength would last, how long he could keep on searching. Handing out the endless stack of flyers in every border town from New Orleans to San Diego, trying to get on “America’s Most Wanted,” and the thousand copies to every cop’s office in the United States; there’d be the stapling up of the handmade handbills with Janet’s picture on a dozen lampposts on every Main Street, and public notice boards that everyone walked by without looking. He’d walked by handbills like that himself a million times, just walked by with a touch of pity at the faces of children, the milk-carton kidz half covered by ads for landscapers,