We had pushed the truck until it literally died. The modified engine Guilermo had built finally gave up about ten miles back, coughing out a plume of black smoke before seizing with a metal-on-metal shriek that echoed too loudly in the silence. We had left it there, a rust-bucket tombstone, and continued on foot.
The terrain had shifted hours ago. The scrubby pine and frozen dirt of the foothills were gone. In their place was a nightmare landscape of twisted obsidian spires that rose from the ground like black, jagged ribs. The ground was treacherous, a crust of brittle stone hiding pools of boiling mud that stank of sulfur and rotten eggs.
The air here was thin. It felt sharp in my lungs, like inhaling crushed glass. Every breath was a labor.
We had been walking for a day, navigating a
