“How do you know when it’s too hot?” Debra asked.

“Ya throw some meat in it,” the driver said.

Dr. Harold elbowed Debra. “We’ve done that,” he stage-whispered to the group as though they didn’t know. Debra turned away without comment.

“It’s really nice,” the driver said of Post. “You’re going to love it.”

When they reached the top of a rise they didn’t know they’d been climbing, they saw Lower Post laid out ahead. Behind it a border ridge with a craggy surface that seemed impossible to fake. A carpet of sage lay all around the truck. They were finally past the playa.

The truck was hurtling down the road, their speed clear now that there was some visual landmark to gauge it. The Post would have seemed big, but it was dwarfed by everything: the expansive land, the endless sky, the humped shoulders of the border ridge. But Lower Post was man-made, and so, to Bea, it felt bigger than everything around it.

Of course, it was deserted.

“Remember, holiday weekend,” the driver said, shifting the truck, slowing it to a stop in an empty parking lot. “Long weekend too. They won’t open till Monday.”

“What day is today?”

“It’s Thursday. End of day. And you know what that means.” He sang these words as he hopped out of the cab and whipped a towel around his neck. “Soak time,” he sang again and jogged toward a shack set a ways off from the tight ring of Post buildings. The metal roof of the shack quivered against the horizon, steam shape-shifting it in front of their eyes.

They climbed down from the truck bed as awkwardly as they’d climbed up, asses in the air, feet dangling until the body shimmied over, clumsy handing off of heavy objects. Dinged fingers and a couple of broken grouse eggs.

This Post was the living version of the one they’d just passed. The buildings were whole and covered in fresh paint. The metal roofs gleamed. They were new, rust-free, admiral blue. Corrugated metal. Carl lobbed a rock and it clanged against the roof, hollow and bright, then slid down the pitch, falling back into his hand. He tossed the rock to Brother. The children played the new game in earnest.

The adults wandered the buildings.

Debra whistled. “This is a big fucking Post.”

Three larger buildings hid behind the main semicircle of buildings. They looked the same, had the same layout of windows, some curtained with cloth that still held the fold creases and others frosted. Inside one, a fluorescent light zapped on and off. They must have been bunks or barracks.

The inner circle of buildings looked official, and were labeled, officially. The Office, the Garage, the Horse Barn, the Arsenal. The Arsenal? Bea thought.

Aside from the erratic light in what must have been a bunkhouse bathroom, the rest of the Post was in shadow, and it became darker as the sun set. Even now, after all these years, Bea was still surprised by nightfall. Days never felt like they would finish. The sky was too big and filled with light until the very bitterest end. Sometimes it was as though the sun blinked out as suddenly as a lamp turning off. But she had noticed, long ago, in the first year, that the key to nighttime was in the clouds, if the sky held any that day. When it was time, the bottoms of the clouds turned black. They reflected the dark world below before Bea even registered that the darkness had arrived. The clouds revealed what everything else refused to accept. The clouds were the warning: Get the fire built and hunker down. The night has come. Above her, the bottoms of the clouds were dark as coal.

They unrolled skin tarps and beds. Some went for kindling, though the land was so manicured within the property that there wasn’t much, and they had to walk far for some dead sage on the outskirts.

Carl and Val built a fire that smoked and hissed and snapped the tiny dried branches to ash. It smelled like everything their lives had become. Under hot sun or around the fire on a cold night, their world was sticky with sage.

As they were getting their eating implements out, they heard the truck turn over and the tires begin to grind. The driver’s soak was over and now he was someone they would never see again. They watched his red taillights dissolve to pinpricks, then disappear. They looked down the road, hunting the horizon for more lights coming, but there were none. The traffic was gone. The holiday had begun, and they imagined no one would be coming by until Sunday. Bea counted on her fingers, naming the days of the week out loud for the first time in years, like they were words of a foreign language. Four days. Forlorn, she looked over at the campus of buildings and saw that life in the desert had already aged them. Anything in the middle of nowhere looked lonely, and all things lonely looked worn down.

“We’ll hunt tomorrow,” said Carl. “We’ll stay until it’s processed. By then we’ll know why the fuck we’re here.”

They made acorn cakes and portioned out some meat. It was a moonless night so far, and unless they sat against the fire, they couldn’t see their hands in front of them. In the distance they heard the sound of horses tremoloing their lips at the dark. Perhaps they were the horses of the Horse Barn, Bea thought and listened to their soft nibbles of grasses, the brush of their necks against one another. Bea noticed the darkness brought a quiet to the Community. They cleaned up. They went to bed. The silence was heavy, as though they were sullen and shaking off a fight.

*

In the morning, two horses stood in the corral in the middle of the buildings and watched the Community with what seemed like disdain. A hunting party left at dawn, and the rest of them timidly entered the steaming derelict shack for a soak. This felt ancient. A structure from long ago, somehow preserved even as the land was re-wilded.

Condensation dripped from the roof, the echo pinging between the water and the metal. The soft wood walls were etched with names and drawings. Taken out of context they seemed like ancient pictographs. An etched horse looked like a sign to communicate horses were nearby. But these were more recent history. From the days when local kids might have driven out here to hide from their parents, to imagine they were adult and free. Now, to the Community, it felt like salvation, as it probably had for everyone before them.

When Bea lowered herself into the warm water, it was almost too hot, and at first her skin cringed against the heat. But soon an ease she couldn’t remember feeling before settled over her. They all wept a little before they laughed. The hot spring filled an old concrete tub about the size of the flatbed they’d been on. They needed a stroke or two to reach the other side. The mineralized water was slimy, syrupy, and they flailed into the middle, then returned to the side, venturing out again and again, thrashing back to the pocked concrete edge, like kids learning to swim. Bea went under the water and listened to her heartbeat. She bobbed her ears slowly under, then out, under, then out, alive, dead, alive, dead. The sulfur would stay on their skin for days. It felt like a tonic.