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up the volume, but the higher it went, the softer the voice and chant became, going silent. There was no apparent signal, but the radio scan was still stopped, locked in on something.
    Perplexed, Max noticed that the compass on his dash began to shimmy in its housing, spinning this way and that, even though the road ahead was straight as an arrow.
    The silence was shot through by a booming intonation that blasted from the speakers, startling Max, who grasped at the volume button, barely noticing the brownish, misshapen hulk that lurched onto the highway ahead at the far edge of his headlights, gripping something large in its massive paws. Max mashed the brakes while cranking the wheel away from the creature, which dragged a half-eaten carcass of a deer—or was it a dog   ?—up the rocky embankment, as the Dodge swerved by, skidding onto the shoulder and burying the front grill into the opposite hillside as the radio went silent again.
    The car engine gurgled and pitched under the slightly crumpled hood, then jerked to a stop with a wheeze. Breathing hard, Max fixed his eyes on the compass. It was spinning like a top inside the plastic housing. Was this from the crash   ? But the car wasn’t moving, and probably wouldn’t be anytime soon. The radio was again cycling through dead air. And what was that huge fucking thing that ran across the road   ? Pebbles rolled down the hillside and onto the car like a hundred tapping fingers.
    Max sat frozen, blinking his eyes that were obviously playing tricks on him after too many hours on the road. That thing . . . Was it a desert inbred   ? Some sort of mutated bear that wandered too close to a nuclear test site   ? This was Nevada, after all, the bullpen of the atom bomb. Max was unnerved, more by what he did know of what he saw than what he didn’t. Or maybe it was what he heard. They both happened so fast, so close together. He was sweating, and felt as if the car was closing around him like a tin can prison. He locked the doors, not sure if what was out there was worse than what he heard inside, as he quickly realized what most terrified him was that the radio would again find that baritone chanting that seemed to echo from somewhere impossible deep. He reached out hesitantly to push the off button, when the scan again stopped on the far end of the dial, but this time, he heard . . . weeping . The strange, uncomfortable sound of a man crying, as if profoundly grieved by the tragically occurred or the unfortunately inevitable. This stayed Max’s hand, before the sobbing splintered into sudden, spastic laughter. What was this nonsense   ? What sort of psychotic local pirate station owner or ham radio operator was pranking over the air, scaring the shit out of those who scanned the far end of the dial   ? This fucker owed Max a new, shitty, late model Dodge. Or at least a ride to the coast.
    The laughter then stopped, and in the silence, the mic picked up sounds of papers being shuffled, tapes stacked methodically. Then, a flat voice that sounded distant in tone and emotion began. “You can hear everything in the desert.” The voice wavered, as if the speaker needed to stop, to breathe, to collect himself. “The buzzing of insects, the hooting of owls, the mad yap of the coyotes . . .
    “You got that right,” Max chimed in with irritation to no one but the unhearing voice at the other end of the radio transmission, which came to life again   :
    “Sometimes those sounds fall away by some unspoken agreement, and in that profound silence, the right type of ears can hear, can sense , the softer, more terrible noises that lurk underneath the normal nighttime din . . . ” Another pause, another intake of breath. “The desert whispers to me, telling me things I never knew existed, never dared dream, giving up secrets older than the primordial soup . . . I record these secrets, as I have been tasked, and broadcast them when I can. But the recording is the