The Devil's Highway

Before nightfall, the walkers are able to walk between 10 and 12 miles. Most of the time is spent walking through rough patches of saguaro trees. Many of them would later report that their feet were full of thorns at that point. As a last desperate measure, they decide to set the brush and trees on fire. They reason that, because they are still inside a National Park, someone will see the blaze. Within a couple of hours, the fire dies. No one has come.

On Tuesday, May 22, the heat wave is at its peak. Temperatures reach 108 degrees. The survivors will later agree that this is when people began to die. The remainder of Chapter 13 is intercut with survivors’ memories and snapshots of what the Border Patrol found. Some of the walkers had been baked into the ground. One man’s face had become so bloated with heat that it slid off of his skull. Another man recalls someone jumping up and down, screaming for his mother, and then smashing his face against a cactus until he fell and stopped moving. Chapter 13 ends with the official testimony of Nahum Landa, describing the horror of what happened.