Unassigned Territory by Kem Nunn

some off. Obadiah was not ungrateful for this. It was her energy, he was certain, which fueled him now. When she swung back around it brought her face up close to his own and he could smell the burger and grilled onions on her breath. But it didn’t matter. Her hair was loose and wild about her face—which appeared to him, by the poor light of the dashboard, to be slightly flushed. He felt flushed himself, a bit feverish. He guessed that he was feverish. Perhaps he was sick.
    “Well, it could be the pickup,” she said. “You can only go two ways out of that dump so it’s fifty-fifty. Don’t worry about it.” She put her arm up over the back of his seat and he could feel her fingers on his shoulder. Her fingers were rather thick and strong for a girl—but nice, too, smooth tanned skin, short, clean nails. He liked feeling them on his shoulder. He liked the way she sat close by his side. Other girls had sat that way, on dates, if you wanted to call them that, but they had only been girls from the congregation and there had been nothing between them. This girl was his lover. It made all the difference. It made him different too. Or perhaps it made him the same. He had always been different; he had been raised to be. In the world but not of it. A pilgrim and a stranger. Now he had a lover and he was like the rest of them. It was a cause for both celebration and sadness.
    “You’ve got to eat something sooner or later,” she said. He had been turning down food since he’d met her. He had passed on lunch at a place called The Desert Inn and somehow he never had been able to get started on the A & W burger. Delandra had had a few bites of it, after finishing her own, then thrown the remainder at a sign. There was a six-pack of tall cans on the floor between her feet. She broke it open. “Let’s drink them one at a time,” she said. “And share. They’ll stay colder.”
    He liked sharing with her. They passed the cold, sweating cans back and forth between them. He took long drinks and the beer burned in his throat, moving quickly to his head. “I don’t know,” he said after a time. He was looking into the rearview mirror. “I would feel better, I think, if I knew who that was, Delandra. I’m not kidding; that guy in the place was looking very weird.”
    “Well, shit,” Delandra said. She shook her head. “You’re a nervous boy, Obo. Why don’t you just pull over and let him go by.” She shot out a booted foot and hit the brakes. The car swung into a skid. They were going down the road sideways for a moment—Obadiah fighting the wheel, trying to remember if you went with it or against it. He jerked the wheel back in the direction of the skid, hit the gas, and the car popped back around, ran off the pavement and onto the shoulder, finally sliding to a stop in a shower of dust and sand. “Jesus Christ,” Obadiah said, and killed the engine. The headlights drilled two holes into the night. The holes were pale yellow and filled with swirling clouds of dust. Delandra reached across his chest to kill the lights and everything went dark and quiet except for the sounds of their breathing and the popping of a hot engine.
    Obadiah looked into the mirror. He could see those lights almost on top of them now. Suddenly a dark pickup shot past them and then hit its brakes. They could see the taillights come to a stop and what looked like the dark head of the driver turning to look back toward them. Obadiah remembered the large round head and thick glasses. Delandra still had one arm over his shoulders and he could feel her fingers digging into his flesh. He waited for back-up lights. The back-ups did not materialize, however, and suddenly the taillights were moving away from them once more, at last vanishing in the darkness.
    “He just wondered if we were hurt,” Delandra said.
    Obadiah sat watching the empty road. The black, tortured shapes of several Joshua trees stood grouped near the side of the car. In places