The others gave Jeffcott some of the bottled water to drink as they resumed their trek, all of them carrying snacks and bottles of water in plastic bags bearing the Boswell Chemistry Solutions logo. The de-ionised water the others were drinking still looked foul to him, making it the longest lasting hallucination any of them had suffered so far, but the mineral water still looked and tasted fine to him. He tried to pay it as little attention as he could in case the hallucination spread to it as well.

Many of the others were also suffering anomaly effects, he saw. The horses were skittish and jumpy, occasionally reacting to something that only they could see. Their riders were able to bring them back under control with gentle pats on the neck and reassuring words in their ears, but the riders were having problems of their own. Corporal Tigh was staring at something off to his left, Jeffcott saw, and for several miles after that he kept his gaze firmly away from that direction, even when Private Parrott, walking to his left, spoke to him. Jackson, meanwhile, walking at the front of their procession, was following a meandering path as if he was avoiding obstacles that only he could see. The worst affected at the moment, though, was Private Leonard, who was wearing the uncomfortable expression of someone trying to ignore a constant stream of insults based on a shameful truth. At one point he shouted for someone to shut up before looking embarrassed and apologising to the people around him.

Gradually, though, the miles passed by under their feet. The sun passed its zenith and shortly after that the road they were following came to an end, terminating at a much wider road that crossed theirs from left to right. Traffic lights were attached to long, almost horizontal poles reaching out sideways from their silver-grey posts. For a brief, crazy moments Jeffcott thought they were vultures, waiting to swoop down and tear the meat from their bodies, but this hallucination was thankfully brief and vanished once he fixed his full attention on them.

One of the horizontal poles, supported only at one end, had snapped under the weight of the lights and was lying on the hot tarmac. Jeffcott and Duffy went over to look at it. "Must have been a storm since the place was abandoned," said Duffy.

"Then why isn't there sand and dust all across the road?" asked Jeffcott.

Duffy nodded, looking puzzled, and the two men went over to look at the broken end of the pole. The jagged, bare metal was dazzlingly shiny in the light of the sun. "Manufacturing defect, maybe?" said Duffy.

"No rust," said Jeffcott. "If there'd been a crack that's been slowly getting bigger over the years, there'd be rust in it, wouldn't there?"

"I don't know enough about the subject to know," the other physicist replied. "We'd need a metallurgist. To look at it, though, it looks like it was hit by something..."

They heard a sound coming from behind them, the groaning sound of tortured metal, and spun around just in time to see another horizontal pole crashing to the ground. The horses jumped in alarm and their riders struggled to maintain control over them. The humans were scarcely less startled and Mark Summers, who'd been standing under another of the horizontal poles, jumped aside in case it suffered the same fate as its fellows.

"I think the metal's become weaker," said Jeffcott, his eyes wide with fear. "It couldn't support the weight any more. Could the anomaly have done that?"

"We have no idea what the anomaly does to metal," said Jeffcott. "We've been preoccupied with what it does to living tissue."

"Yeah," said Jeffcott. He looked down at the bottle of mineral water he was still holding in his hand. It still looked clean and pure, but could it be doing something to him after all?

"Okay, let's keep moving," said the Sergeant. "Just a couple of miles to go now until we reach Maricopa."

Jeffcott nodded. They turned left onto the new road, now going south through the empty desert, but Jeffcott looked back at the junction one last time before they left it behind. "We can't take anything for granted in here," he said, as much to himself as to anyone else. "Not even the strength of metal."

Duffy nodded his agreement, looking more unhappy than ever.

Jeffcott fingered the magnet strapped to his chest and hoped it was doing its job. He looked around, trying to take his mind off the anomaly by thinking of something else. Still nothing but desert in all directions as far as the eye could see. Flat and empty. Dotted with tall cacti and stunted shrubs and with a range of low hills on the horizon. They even looked like the same hills.

"If we're approaching a town of sixty thousand people," he said, "wouldn't we see some signs by now? The occasional building perhaps. Some sign of habitation."

"The Northern edge of Maricopa is very abrubt." Bright replied. "It's like someone drew a line across the desert. On one side, packed buildings. On the other, empty desert. And it's a city, not a town."

"With only sixty thousand people?"

Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.

"A town is a city if it has more than twenty five thousand people," she replied, looking at him with eyes that glowered with a faint hostility.

"Er, do you come from Maricopa? Sorry, didn't mean to step on your toes."

"I come from Idaho," she replied. "A city called Post Falls, population forty thousand. Best city in the state. Size isn't everything. I'm sure you've been told that."

"Yes, of course," said Jeffcott hurriedly. "And you're right. In the UK, population has little to do with whether a town's a city. The smallest city over there only has a population of around sixteen hundred. Historical reasons. And there's a town called Bolton with a population over a quarter of a million that isn't considered a city." She was still looking at him, unblinkingly. "Okay, so Maricopa's a city," he hurriedly added. He looked ahead at the unbroken horizon, still devoid of any man-made structure. "Still don't understand why we're not seeing it yet, though."

Several people were looking tired, and so when they came to a wildlife underpass the Sergeant called a halt to let them rest for a while. "Then we'll be fresh and rested when we enter the city," he said. "Ready to face whatever we find there."

They left the road, therefore, and followed the slope down to the thin stretch of desert that went under the road to allow wildlife to cross safely. Back in the days when there'd been wildlife, Jeffcott thought regretfully. They followed a relatively flat and level path that he assumed had been left by the workmen who'd done whatever maintenance work the underpass required, and then they were out of the sun, in a cool darkness in which they could barely see until their eyes had recovered from the dazzling brightness outside.

There was nothing to sit on, so they took off their white robes and folded them up to make soft cushions which they placed on the cool desert sand. Then they sat on them with their backs to the vertical sides of the road supports. They fished around in the plastic bags they'd been carrying for the snacks they'd brought from Boswell chemical plant, tore open the wrappers and began to eat. Jeffcott stared suspiciously at the nutty protein bar he was holding, daring it to turn into something inedible, but it remained an innocent bar of toffee and nuts and he so he bit into it warily. It was delicious, and the taste suddenly made him ravenously hungry. He gobbled it down and ripped open another.

"Dead lizard," said Gruber, glancing at the tiny corpse sitting motionless on the sand a few feet away from him. He prodded it with the end of his spear but it didn't move. He used the steel tip to pull it towards him. "It is a lizard, right?" he asked the others.

"Some kind of reptile," Summers replied. "Could be a gecko. I'm not an expert."

"It doesn't matter what kind of reptile it is," the other doctor snapped impatiently. "The important thing is that I shouldn't eat it, no matter how delicious I think it'd be."

"I think that would be a bad idea."

"Yeah." He looked back at the grain bar he was holding in his other hand. "And this isn't a reptile. Right?"

"Nope. You can eat that."

"Thank God for that." He raised his voice to be heard by everyone. "If anyone sees anyone eating something that isn't food, stop them."

"Everyone watch what everyone else is eating," the Sergeant added. He nodded his gratitude to Gruber for the suggestion.

"I've eaten lizard many times," said Dustu conversationally. "There's good eating on a lizard."

"And I bet you've drank water from a muddy hoofprint too," said Parkin with a grin. "Right? Never met an Indian who's never drunk water from a muddy hoofprint."

"He's not an Indian," said Rahul Bhatt with a sharp look in his eye. "I'm an Indian."

"Right, right," said Parkin with an amused glance at the other soldiers sitting beside him. "He's a Cherokee. A first nation person. A noble savage."

"Noble compared to you," said Jackson. Parrott laughed aloud.

Parkin ignored the comment. "Hey, Dustu. Sorry we stole all your land from you."

"My grandmother was German," the Cherokee replied stoically. "If your people had never crossed the ocean, I would not exist. Neither would my mother, my sister or either of my children. I am content, therefore. You will hear no protest from me."

"Good luck trying to wind up Tonto," said Leonard, smiling around a mouthful of chocolate-covered biscuit. "He doesn't wind up."

"Right," said Parkin, his grin growing wider. "These Cherokees are very stoic. Very philosophical." He began singing. "Three wheels on my wagon, and I'm still rolling along..."

Dustu just smiled, though. "Follow that song to the end and the Cherokees win," he pointed out. The others laughed, and Parkin laughed with them. Jeffcott smiled despite his worries and took another bite of his protein bar.

Blane hadn't laughed with the others, though, and Parrott turned to him, looking concerned. "Hey, you okay?" he asked.

"Of course," said Blane flatly. "Why wouldn't I be?"

"Are you still upset about killing that women? What was her name?"

"Lucy Dennings," said Duffy.

"Am I still upset?" said Blane, staring at him incredulously. "I don't know. How long does it normally take to get over something like that?"

"It could have been any of us," said Parrott gently. "Ordinarily you'd have given your life to save her. We all know that."

"You were a victim of the anomaly just as much as she was," Costanzo told him.

"Except I'm still breathing," Blane replied. He sat in a sullen silence after that, ignoring all other attempts to talk to him. Eventually Parrott put a hand on his shoulder and left him in peace.

When they'd all eaten the Sergeant decided to make another attempt to communicate with the command post. They set up the Polaris lamp out in the desert, sent the message and waited for a reply. As before, though, there wasn't one.

"I'm still thinking they're just suffering technical difficulties," Costanzo said to the Sergeant as they were packing it away again. "To us, it seems like an eternity since we set out, but the fact remains that it's only been about five hours. It could take a lot longer than that to sort out any issue that's come up."

The Sergeant nodded. "We proceed as normal," he said. "Get ready to move out. We should be in Maricopa within the hour."

They hitched the horses back up to the equipment wagon and took it back up to the road. As they were preparing to set out on the last leg of their journey Blane went to the edge of the road and climbed up onto the three foot high concrete wall that protected traffic from the twenty foot drop below. Parrott saw him, cried out and ran over, but before he could get there the other man stepped off, his face completely emotionless. He fell, and the others froze in a stunned silence as they heard his body hitting the hard ground below.