The Vanishing by Bentley Little

replaced by flat land broken up by rugged outcroppings of forbiddingly shaped boulders.
    A week went by.
    Two.
    They’d been hunting and fishing along the way, gathering berries and digging up edible roots to supplement the flour, beans and dried meat they’d brought along. Now, however, the game and birds were growing scarce, the streams less frequent and more often than not dry. Most of the time they had biscuits for breakfast, dried meat and beans for supper, both washed down with a small sip of warm water.
    The land changed yet again, although this time the shift was more subtle and Marshall could not be sure when it actually happened. It almost seemed as though it had altered overnight, while they were asleep, but of course that was impossible. Whenever it had happened, the badlands were gone, replaced by a seemingly boundless plain that stretched in all directions as far as the eye could see, its monotonous sameness broken only by clusters of low mounds or hillocks. Their hope at first was that they’d have more luck finding food and water here, but if anything the plain proved even more barren than the rocky terrain that came before it.
    Days passed.
    Another week.
    Beans and biscuits, beans and biscuits . . .
    The animals were tired, more than a few travelers were ill, but still the pace continued unabated. Each day, it seemed, they started earlier and stopped later, spending less time resting though they needed it more than ever. Marshall understood the desire to press on, but to do so at the expense of the horses, the livestock and the people seemed at odds with the purpose of the journey and certainly with his own needs. Many of those about him felt the same, and he questioned Uriah Caldwell, the wagon master, about this unsuitable pace, but the man refused to give him a straight answer, promising only that the speed of travel would change soon, that once they reached the next river they would be able to slow down.
    The plain was haunted, came gossip from the front of the wagon train. That was the real reason they were attempting to move through here so quickly, and while Marshall refused to believe in such nonsense, he did find this grassy region with its endless expanse of mounds and hillocks quite strange and more than a little unsettling. For one thing, the directions here were often wrong. They shifted and changed of their own accord, as if the plain itself were attempting to fool them, trap them, make them stay. Twice now, he had ridden to the front of the train to tell Caldwell that they had drifted off course and were heading north instead of west, only to find when he arrived that they had been moving in the right direction all along. He had no doubt that were he riding alone through these lands, he would find himself lost and confused, unable to escape, and would die here on this hellish plain.
    There was also a nagging sense that they were not alone. Marshall had no idea how many others felt the same, because it was a thought he was too embarrassed to share. But for the past three nights he could have sworn that others were moving stealthily through the land surrounding them, hiding behind hillock and bush, scrambling about beneath the cover of darkness. Even in the daylight hours, it seemed to him that they were being spied upon, their progress carefully monitored. It wasn’t Indians or other native savages that he suspected of watching them, nor other sojourners heading West, but . . . someone else.
    Some thing else was more accurate, because his mind was possessed of the irrational idea that those who lived on this plain were not human. He was not even sure what he meant by that, but he had a lot of time to think on the trail, and no matter how he examined the situation, he could not conceive of any way that the watchers could be people.
    They were there, though.
    He knew it.
    And still they pressed on.
    Beans and biscuits . . .
    They had not thought to encounter such a long stretch with no water