PathQuest

The first location Ronnie’s phone took her was the Adobe on the corner of Apache Trail and Ironwood. The owner of the gas station—a middle-aged Croatian man with a thick accent, dressed in the same nicotine-stained tee and denim shorts he always wore—glared at Ronnie and flicked his cigarette into the oil-slicked parking lot between them. So he did remember her from last time. Not that he would forget easily. She had been hungover and spewed all over the taquito-turner. The heat lamp hadn’t done her any favors. Ronnie wondered how pathetic she would look if she picked up what was left of his cigarette for herself. Instead, she waggled her painted fingers at the man. Those people were always so superstitious.

Ronnie’s phone pinged. Her ex again.

Come over

She swiped away the notification, went back to the app that brought her here. She couldn’t figure a divine reason why PathQuest—said to generate random coordinates within walking distance of the user based on “energy and intention”—sent her to this spot. Surely not to say sorry to this asshole. She tapped ‘regenerate location.’

SET YOUR OBJECTIVE WITH A POSITIVE MINDSET.

The week before, Ronnie saw a TikTok of a group of teenagers who PathQuested their way to a corpse spread across a couple of garbage bags. They thought it was a mannequin until the smell hit them. It went viral. They were on Dr. Phil. But that was somewhere glamorous, like Seattle or Portland, not in the middle of the fucking desert. At most, Apache Junction had a teen car death or two each year—unsurprising, as there was little else to do but drive drunkenly up the wrong exit of the 202. One of the dead teens, Carson Hightower, had sat next to her in English their sophomore year. Eric Something, who was in the car with him, told everyone Carson’s head popped right off, like a stomp rocket. It was gnarly. But that had nothing to do with Ronnie. She was looking for something that would change her life. Make her go viral. Get her out, if only for a Dr. Phil appearance. Then, she would just have to find a way to stay out. Either that or drive drunk up the highway.

But Ronnie was 26 now, and everybody knew that a dead woman wasn’t nearly as devastating as a dead teen. They would say she was just another one of those alcoholic locals. A loser. Predictable. No. No highway. She hated meeting people’s expectations.

She looked around for something, anything, that would make her feel like she hadn’t wasted her time coming here. Same unceasingly blue sky. Same dust-colored buildings, dust-covered people. The Croatian man still glaring, his Marlboro still glowing orange at the tip in the lot between them. He stood completely still, as if the heat had baked him into solid clay. A lone bead of sweat dripped down the middle of his face, caught on his lip.

“Do you have something to say to me?” Ronnie called.

Nothing.

On the side of the gas pump, she marked a fist-sized X in red Sharpie. Whatever she was looking for, it wasn’t here. Her phone pinged again, this time with a push notification.

LOCATION GENERATED. IT’S TIME TO START YOUR NEXT ADVENTURE.

Seven minutes away.

“Fuck you, then,” she said to the guy. He didn’t even blink.

↺

The sun beat down on Ronnie’s blue-black hair and reminded her why everyone else in the state was a blonde. Her color soaked up the heat like a sponge. Her neck slicked with sweat. The light coming off the sidewalk forced her to squint. She stumbled, then righted herself before she went on.

BE MINDFUL OF YOUR SURROUNDINGS.

Apache Junction was a good forty-some miles east of Phoenix. In the 90s, the town was little more than cattle ranches, rattlesnakes, and the odd bar or swap meet. Ronnie’s grandfather had worked on one of those ranches for an imposing man called Mr. Klein. Her grandpa’s plan: save up and get out. Again. For good this time. Instead, he lost his left foot when a herd of cattle trampled him during his afternoon nap in the buffelgrass. After that, her grandpa limped around saying he had one foot in the grave, and that’s why he walked funny. It would take him just a little bit longer to leave than he had planned. Then he died, but that had nothing to do with his foot. While working on the old ranch, he fell into a brush-covered mine shaft and snapped his neck. An eleven-year-old Ronnie had been the one who found him—or rather, she found the hole he fell into. She brought him lunch to his spot under the big cottonwood, where everyone knew he liked to avoid Mr. Klein. At first, she thought he climbed down there himself, found an even better place to hide from manual labor, so she got onto her stomach, wiggled up to the pit, and called down to him. He didn’t answer. Because he probably couldn’t hear her, she thought, she left his paper bag of salami and Corn Nuts next to the hole and went home. She came back the next day and the day after that. By the third day, the sun had brought the stink. After a week, she told her parents. They left him at the bottom—it was too deep or too dangerous for a recovery. Her parents told everyone it was what he would’ve wanted, to be buried on the ranch that his father and his father’s father had worked on. Ronnie knew better.

Eventually, Apache Junction filled up with people and their need for conveniences, and all the old mine shafts were covered up. Unlike Ronnie, none of those people were actually from the town, let alone the state, and they never stayed very long. Most were snowbirds, retirees from Canada, who lived a few months of the year in trailer parks with names like Happy Days Resort and Sunshine Village. No one ever stayed summers, except for those who had nowhere else to go. Each year, it seemed summer bled its guts further and further into their pathetic excuse for a winter, so no one really stayed winters much, either, anymore. All of their shitty mini-marts and gas stations and strip malls waited for them to return, empty and bleaching in the sun. The few who did stay looked at Ronnie like she was the one who didn’t belong, as if their American Flag T-shirts gave them the right.

Fuck them.

BE SINCERE IN YOUR THOUGHTS.

↺

Ronnie found herself in the parking lot of the American Legion, tucked between a liquor store and a minute-spa named Le Nails, where there had been a Help Wanted poster hanging for the last seven months. She knew—because everyone knew everything in Apache Junction—that multiple Young Women From Out of Town had been hired for this same position. Each time Ronnie got news that someone new had filled the spot, she decided it was time for a manicure. She would sit down, size them up, ask them a few questions—find out why they had come here, of all places, and see if they were any better than the other losers her age, the ones who never left. Most of the young women were California transplants fleeing rising sea levels and astronomical rent, making one last go at the West before retreating to their hometowns along the safe Great Lakes. She even thought she might befriend one of the girls—Shayna—who had her hair cut in a way that Ronnie had never seen in person. While she was doing Ronnie’s nails, the girl clocked the scars on her wrists from when Ronnie dragged a razor blade over her skin. Unlike everyone else who noticed them, Shayna didn’t look away embarrassed or disgusted. When Ronnie told her that the only reason she hadn’t gone all the way through with it was because she didn’t want to end up dead in a hole in a place she despised like her grandfather, Shayna nodded like she understood. Like she understood, completely. Within a week, though, the girl with the cool hair was gone. Somehow—and no one could explain this part—not one of the Le Nails girls stayed more than a week or two. The women just disappeared. So the Help Wanted poster still hung, taunting Ronnie with the friend that almost was.

Parked out front of the Legion was an electric wheelchair covered in flags meant for dog-whistling, its owner nowhere in sight. Ronnie thought he might be at the bar, getting slammed on boilermakers, but it looked as if God had suddenly decided that the man’s time was up, yanked him into the sky, left only the power chair as proof he had ever been there at all. Or maybe his legs were perfectly fine, and the power chair was just a way to get around. It was cheaper than a golf cart. And they had the audacity to call her generation lazy.

A man in cowboy boots stepped out of the Legion, looked at Ronnie, and spit. Whispered under his breath, “Freak.”

Her phone pinged twice. The first, another text from her ex.

What r u up to? :P

The second, a message from PathQuest:

EMBRACE THE OPPORTUNITY TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE PATH.

Right now, her life path looked like it might include a job application at Le Nails and a life forever as a nail tech. She could get after-work drinks at the Legion. Her grandfather was a veteran from some war—the one with all the Agent Orange—and she was pretty sure that’s all she needed for a membership to the club. Once, when he was too drunk to stand up on his one foot, he told her he would rather be back there, picking his friends out of trees. Or dead. Anything but back where he was. Ronnie would leave that part out. She would go to the bar with her Le Girl of the Month, then stop at the liquor store for a bottle of Jose before heading home to her bedroom at her parents’, which she would never be able to leave. Not with the price of rent driven up by all the Californians moving to the area, if only until they realized how shitty it was. Maybe she would get back with her ex. Maybe it wouldn’t even bother her that Nails wasn’t a French word.

Or maybe, like all the other girls who took the position at Le Nails, she would just suddenly be gone. Out. Finally. Before it all burned down in a brushfire.

Ronnie stood there, unsure what to do next, what to do ever, until a bird hit the street sign and fell to the ground at her feet, making her jump.

“Fucking drones.”

It was hot, and it was starting to get to her. She needed a drink, something cold, but she didn’t have her wallet and didn’t want to flirt with the old men at the bar for a free one. And besides, they would probably all think she was a freak. They were the kind of men who liked their blondes. Instead, she went into the liquor store. She knew the guy who worked there. Eric Something’s brother. Once, when she was bored, she had given him a handy in the beer cooler. Since then, he would slip her a mini or two each time she came in.

“Ronnie,” Eric’s brother said, drawing out the final syllable of her name. “Long time no see.”

“It hasn’t been that long.”

He looked at the clock above the beer cooler, then at the beer cooler. He shrugged.

“What brings you in, then?”

“I was wondering about the girls next door. If they said anything to you before they left. About where they were going or how…” Ronnie trailed off. What should she be asking? She checked to see if PathQuest had sent her another message.

Nothing.

Eric’s brother looked around. They were the only two in the store. “I have a couple of theories,” he said. “And keep this between you and me, but I have a gift. I feel things. Vibes, I mean. I’m an empath, psychic, whatever you want to call it. I get bad vibes from that place, man.” He shook his head sadly but glanced over to make sure that Ronnie was watching him. “It’s all in the eyes, man, all in the signs. These girls are coming back from California, right? Well. I think something happens to them there before they come here. You know how California can be. They’re changed or something. Brainwashed. And the owner of Le Nails knows this, you follow? He came from California, maybe twenty years ago. I think he draws them here with a job and then uses them for his bidding—sex slavery, moving drugs over the border, you name it. It’s all there. You just have to look close enough to see it.”

Ronnie nodded, if only to make sure she still got the minis. It was enough. While Eric’s brother went behind the counter to grab her nips of Fireball, Tito’s, and Bacardi—a greater bounty than even after the handy—she took out her Sharpie and marked another X, this time on the face of a busty woman plastered on a Baileys display. She would eliminate every place in Apache Junction if it meant that, someday, one of the unmarked places would hold the key to getting out.

Ronnie walked outside, to the heat and another notification.

LET YOUR INTUITION GUIDE YOU. YOU WILL FIND WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR.

Across the street from the liquor store, a couple walked hand in hand, making their way out of a gated retirement community. They looked like they could be mother and son. The pair stopped, and the old woman leaned down for a peck. No, not a peck. She was gnawing on the much younger man’s ear. In fifth grade, Ronnie learned that the praying mantis devours the head of her mate during copulation. She drew it in her notebook and was sent to the principal’s office to be reprimanded for the anatomical detail. Apparently, praying mantises didn’t have what people have. Still, this reminded her of the bugs. The young man leaned his head back, eyes closed, and let out a moan that carried across the street. She wasn’t sure, but she thought her intuition might be telling her that this was something she could work with.

Ronnie waited for a notification from PathQuest, and when nothing came, she crossed the street to Meridian Manor, which wasn’t a manor at all, but a development of modular homes. The gate to the development hung crooked, as if someone had tried to force it open with their car or a mob of people had slammed it, over and over, to get out. Now, there was a gap in the gate just big enough for Ronnie to squeeze through. She took this as another sign to enter.

The houses in Meridian Manor were squat and close together, painted in awful colors that clashed with the muted shades of the desert around them. Lime green. Mustard yellow. A mauve someone should go to jail for. No cars in the driveways or people peering out windows at her. So they were all back in Canada. She was alone. Ronnie made up her mind to find the house from which the odd couple had come and imagined she would sense something sinister when she got close or at least see the young man’s car parked out front. She was willing to bet it was a Kia Soul. Only real freaks drove Kia Souls.

Maybe the freak couple were serial killers—like Ian Brady and Myra Hindley—and she would get famous when she found not one, but two dead bodies hogtied in the back of their Kia Soul. She would get some big reward, and it would be enough.

After a few minutes of seeing and feeling nothing at all, Ronnie decided she would check out the deep, in-ground pool at the clubhouse she passed when she walked in. The water would be nice, even if it was a little warm from the late-afternoon sun. On the gate, a sign: Open 6-6. Old people hours. She could get in there.

She was halfway up the fence when she realized that the pool was empty. No water. There was something small and black at the bottom, buzzing loudly against the concrete. A cell phone—one that someone was calling, over and over. The call had to be for her.

Ronnie pulled herself the rest of the way over the fence and descended the steps into the deep end. They could’ve drained the pool intentionally. She hadn’t heard of pools just drying up, yet.

The phone stopped buzzing just as she reached it. The screen flashed eighteen missed calls, then the buzzing started again.

“This is Ronnie.”

“Hi, Ronnie,” a voice said. “What are you doing picking up this phone?”

“I found it.”

“Where did you find it?”

“The bottom of the pool.”

“Where’s the pool?”

“Meridian Manor.”

“And that is…?” The voice trailed off.

“Apache Junction, Arizona. Where are you?” Ronnie asked.

“Somewhere safe.”

The call ended. Ronnie tried to redial, but the number was unlisted. She slid down the edge of the pool to sit and popped open one of her minis. Then another. Then the last. She chucked the phone at the wall of the pool and considered doing the same to her own. Stupid app.

She climbed down the fence and out of the pool area, marked a red X on the sign that said: Open 6-6. A throat cleared behind her. She turned to see an old man on the ground, using his forearms to drag the rest of his body across the street towards her.

“You can’t be here.”

The declaration caught her off guard. She expected him to ask for help. Instead, the old man was scolding her, as if she were standing on his perfectly mowed lawn. As if he weren’t sprawled across the asphalt, which had to be nearing 180 degrees. She stared at him. He stared back. She wondered if he knew her grandfather.

“You have to leave,” the man said.

“Do you have something to say to me?” Ronnie asked. “Like, a message.”

“Get out.” With that, he pulled himself off in the direction of the Legion.

↺

Meridian Manor was only half a mile from her ex’s house. After graduation, he got a full-time job at the same mechanic shop he worked at while they were together. He turned his dad’s basement into an apartment, which had its own entrance separate from the main house. She made it a point to only use the side door after the time his dad caught her leaving the basement apartment a few weeks before, bleary-eyed and hair matted to the back of her head. “Hey kid, you’re back!” he had said. “Thought we’d never see you around here again.”

She told him it was only temporary.

“We always thought you two would get married and have a bunch of kids of your own.” He eyed Ronnie’s mussed up hair and wrinkled T-shirt. “Looks like we might get that after all.”    

She told him she would rather go out of state to get an abortion.

Ronnie had been over at least a dozen times since, but she had yet to see her ex’s dad.

YOU ARE A CATALYST IN YOUR EXTERNAL ENVIRONMENT.

Instead of tapping ‘regenerate location,’ Ronnie turned to walk to her ex’s house.

He was okay-looking, she guessed, but the bad-boy look she loved so much in high school just looked sad on him now. He had thinned out, from all the drugs probably, which made all his features seem disproportionately large. Except for his teeth. He had always had baby teeth. It was as if his mouth never got the memo from the rest of his body that it was time to grow up and be a man and talk and chew and smile like a man.

She texted him, Coming over. Be there in 2.

Her phone pinged almost immediately. :P

A minute later her phone pinged again.

Just come in. Playing GTA.

Ronnie could see his dad out front, mowing his brittle, brown lawn. He didn’t notice her when she passed.

“So,” Ronnie heard herself saying when she got down the stairs. It was dark. The only light came from the glow of the TV and the dirty window she couldn’t fit her head through. Ronnie sat down next to him on the lumpy plaid couch, the only other place to sit besides his unmade bed, which was covered in half-consumed water bottles, dirty clothes, and a leopard-print blanket. “What do you think your life path is?” She felt a slight slur in her mouth, but her ex didn’t seem to notice.  

“What?” he said, not looking away from the screen as he drove a digital car off a cliff.

“Your life path,” she said again. “What’s next, do you think?”

She waited. He sighed, paused the game, and looked at her. “Don’t be stupid, Ronnie.”

Ronnie got up, walked to his mini fridge, and grabbed a Corona, the only beer he drank. Her ex went back to his game.

“Grab me one, babe.”

He hadn’t called her babe since high school.

“Can I practice painting your nails?”

“I don’t care,” he said. Then, “Do my toes. I don’t want the guys to see.”

They moved to the bed, where he kept his bong and she kept his sister’s nail polish—the one she had stolen years ago. She knew it would still be there. The nail polish was separated and came out in globs, but there was enough left to do one coat on each foot. She admired her work and took a rip off the guy’s bong.

After a while, Ronnie decided to leave. She was bored. Before she could put on her clothes, he asked, “So what’d you do today?”

Ronnie told him about how last night when she couldn’t sleep, she started reading a thread about this girl who downloaded PathQuest. She was broke, you know, and needed money bad. So this girl thought about it and thought about it and she thought so hard that when she used the app her intention had already been set. She found $100 at the first random location she went to. There were at least twenty stories like that. Except each one was different. One person met a guy while PathQuesting, and they’d been dating ever since. A few others wanted to see and subsequently found something grotesque and awful, like in that TikTok. Ronnie told the guy how she thought maybe she would find something that would help her get out. Leave here. For her and her grandfather at the bottom of that mine shaft. She told him about her day and where she went. About the freak couple and the phone call and the man crawling across the asphalt. How much she hated it here. She told him about the disappeared girls, and how she was starting to think that maybe they were the key to getting out of here. Whatever that meant.

He didn’t say anything for a moment. Ronnie thought maybe he was thinking about what she said.

Then, “Oh. Cool.”

“That’s it?”

“Well, yeah. What do you want me to say?”

“Anything.”

“I said it was cool.”

“You’re pathetic.”

He turned back to the T.V. and said, “Well, I’ve got news for you. You and me? We’re the same. Open your goddamn eyes, babe. This is all that’s here for you.”

↺

Ronnie ran into his dad on her way out the side door. He was still mowing the lawn. She stared at him. It had to have been a few hours, and it wasn’t like their yard was a big one.

“You’re back!” He said. “I thought I’d scared you away.”

Ronnie unlocked her phone and tapped ‘regenerate location.’ The next place was only six minutes from her ex’s house. She made it in four.

↺

PathQuest brought Ronnie further into the desert, though she could still see the tops of the trailers over the red cinder-block wall that used to protect tiny, Canadian dogs from coyotes. Though they were still another thirty miles away, the Superstition Mountains loomed over her and made her feel small. To the west, there was a mile-high wall of dust. It would hit sometime that evening, and the next day they would wake up and everything would be covered in orange filth.

A notification. Different this time.

YOU’RE HERE.

Ronnie looked around, kicked a small rock with her Docs. It tumbled into a deep ditch she couldn’t quite see from where she stood. Nearby, a turkey vulture circled then perched on top of a tall saguaro. Finally, she might be onto something. Even if all she found were a couple of animal bones, she could turn one of them into a necklace or talisman or something else of the sort—give the Canadians something to talk about when they came back or maybe spook an old man or two at the Legion.

KEEP GOING.

As Ronnie approached the ditch, she started to gag. What she smelled reeked of garbage and alcohol and something like motor oil. What she saw was a body. What she saw was herself.

Same blue-black hair. Same long, dark coat. She couldn’t quite make out her face—it was sliced into a big, bloody X—but it was her. Ronnie watched herself turn her head slowly, so that—if not eye to eye, face to face—she could say, “This is all that’s here for you.”

Ronnie threw up in the rocks, shook her head, wiped the sick from her mouth.

“No,” she said. “Not here.”

Ronnie turned—away from the body in a ditch, not quite a mine shaft, but almost—and walked back to Le Nails to fill out an application.

She would find another way.

Alexandra Salata

Alexandra Salata is a fiction writer living in Cleveland as she finishes her degree through the Northeast Ohio MFA program, though she often writes her way back to the warmth of her home state of Arizona. She has an MA in literature from John Carroll University and works helping young people find their voices through writing. "PathQuest" is her first literary publication.