The wind blew across the plain with no intention and no mercy. A dust devil crawled along the cracked earth, spiraling up from nothing, heading to nowhere. A dog watched it from the shade of a rusted water tank, ribs pushing out from under skin like the fingers of the dead. The sun stood high and white above the world and the sky was a flat searing thing with no edges and no depth, just the relentless smothering of time. He walked the road alone. Boots eaten near through. A hat low over his brow. The rifle slung across his back was older than he was and he was not young. The road had long since lost its meaning. No markers. No signs. Just the narrow path that cut through the dry land like a vein and bled nothing. He passed a barn half fallen into itself. Planks peeled from bone-colored beams. A windmill without blades. Inside, a rusted tractor like a relic from a godless age. He looked in and then moved on. The barn had nothing for him and he had nothing for it. A buzzard traced lazy circles above him. He watched it awhile and then turned his eyes back to the horizon. There was a man out there. A figure. Small and still. He'd seen him two hours back and again now. Always the same distance. Never closer. He didn't wave. He didn't call. Just walked. By the time the sun dropped low he found a tree, lonesome in the dust. He sat beneath it and pulled from his coat a heel of bread, hard and stale. He chewed it slow, as though to remember what it had been before it was ruined. There was no fire. There was no talk. The world turned dark like the lid of a coffin closing. When he slept he dreamed of water. Not the idea of it but the cold clarity of it. Springs in the high mountains. Creeks with trout. Rivers that moved like glass beneath the dawn. He woke with the taste of it in his mouth and the ache of it in his gut. Come morning he walked on. The figure still behind him. Or ahead. He couldn't say. The road bent and twisted in small unseen ways and the man was always where he was before. Not nearer. Not farther. Just there. He reached a town by dusk. Or what had been one. A church without roof. A store with shelves still nailed to the walls but nothing on them. A sign hanging by a single chain that creaked like a voice dying in the throat. He stood there a while. He listened. Nothing. He walked on. The road behind him empty. The figure gone or never there. The buzzard gone too. Only the dust. Only the wind. And he did not pray. For there was no god he had not already met.