by S. A. Beck
She decided to risk it. Pushing her doubts out of the way, she went back down to Vivian, got her on her feet, draped one of her arms around her own shoulder, and headed for that dark line and the ruins.
The walk was a living hell. Vivian could barely put one foot in front of the other, and Jaxon had to take most of her weight. The land they passed through was a series of little dunes that kept their goal out of sight and forced them to veer off to one side or the other to go around each rise. Jaxon kept having to stop to check their compass bearings, and each time she did, starting again felt harder.
At last, the dunes petered out and the land became flatter, one of the many stony, gritty plains in this endless desert. By now, the sun shone high overhead, nearly blinding Jaxon with its merciless glare. The heat was an almost physical pressure, bearing down on her head and shoulders. Vivian slumped in her arms, and Jaxon staggered as she took the extra weight.
Squinting ahead of her, blinking away the sand that blew in little gusts into her face, she could see the first of the ruins in front of her. She’d been right. Those shapes had been walls once. Now they were barely more than foundations, the tallest no higher than her waist, worn and wind scoured and looking incredibly old. Beyond them, she could see a cliff overlooking a crevasse in the earth. She couldn’t see inside. From her higher vantage point back on the dune, she’d seen the shadow that cliff had made. Now that it was noon, there were no more shadows, and the sun would suck the life out of them before nightfall.
Something crunched under her boot. She looked down and saw what looked like a weathered old human leg bone. She’d stepped right on it, and it was so old that the middle part had crumbled to dust under her weight. Next to it lay a piece of broken pottery, made perhaps hundreds or even thousands of years ago. Maybe it had even been the property of the person whose remains she had just desecrated.
Jaxon’s heart trembled. This place was dead, as dead as they soon would be. Whatever water this town or city had thrived on had long since disappeared, and within an hour or two, they would join the former residents and become another set of dried-out bones.
That didn’t make Jaxon stop walking. Through her exhaustion and the blinding light and the insufferable pain in her head, she still felt that strange pull toward the cliff that had first set her feet walking in this direction. She was practically dragging Vivian now. Perhaps they’d find some shade. At least they could get out of the sun and die a little more comfortably.
As she approached the cleft in the earth, she could see it was about a hundred yards wide, with the far cliff a little higher than the one closer to her. The cleft was about two hundred yards long, and the right side looked as if it had an easy slope down. Jaxon made for it.
She found a gentle slope leading to the bottom, about fifty feet down. All along the length of the little canyon stood the ruins of old structures. She barely looked at them, for she could see that right at the bottom, the far cliff opened up into a cave.
Jaxon stumbled, dropping Vivian, who flopped like a rag doll. Jaxon got on her hands and knees and checked her friend. She couldn’t tell if she was alive or not. Wearily, she picked Vivian up and moved down the rest of the slope to the entrance of the cave.
When she looked inside, her eyes went wide, and she nearly dropped Vivian again.
The cave had a pool of water! Staring through the low arch of the cave mouth, Jaxon could see the cave reached back about thirty feet. The interior was dim, and Jaxon had trouble seeing after the scorching light of the noonday desert, but she could clearly see a pool of water about the size of a couple of bathtubs against the far wall.
Jaxon stumbled over to it, tripping on the cave’s rough floor and landing flat on her face. Her burning throat pushed a grunt of pain past her cracked lips, and in the next instant, Jaxon was up on her hands and knees, crawling toward the pool. The sweet smell of water and the cave’s cool, shaded interior urged her on.
She stumbled again right in front of the pool and landed face first in the water. The cool liquid hit her sweating, sunburnt face like a plate-glass window.
Jaxon didn’t care. She sucked in the water, gulping it down as she immersed her head. She wanted to drink the whole thing, fill her body to exploding with water—sweet, sweet water. She’d drink and drink and drink until there was no water left in the whole world.
Her burning lungs brought her back to sanity.
She tossed her head back, lungs heaving as she sucked in air as greedily as she had been sucking in fluid. Every nerve felt alive. Her headache was gone, the nightmarish half sleep she’d been in for the past day vanished and replaced with crystal clarity.
Vivian!
Jaxon sprang to her feet and hurried over to where her friend still lay outside the cave, directly in the harsh sunlight.
How could I be so selfish? Jaxon cursed herself.
She lifted Jaxon up effortlessly, all her Atlantean strength having returned. Carrying the mercenary over to the pool, she laid her down next to the water. Vivian flopped down on the hard stone, as loose as a bag of laundry.
“Please don’t be dead. Please don’t be dead,” Jaxon whispered. In her desperation, she didn’t notice that her voice rang out pure and clear, that her throat no longer burned, her tongue was no longer swollen, and her lips were no longer chapped.
She felt for a pulse and couldn’t find one. How did you check a pulse, anyway? Was she doing it correctly? You pressed two fingers against the neck, right? Or was it against the wrist?
She couldn’t find a pulse on Vivian’s wrist either. Putting her wet hand against Vivian’s nose and mouth, she held it there for several seconds, hoping to feel her breath.
Nothing.
Jaxon grabbed the water jug still attached by a cord to her wrist and filled it in the pool. Lifting up Vivian’s head, she poured some water over her sunburnt face.
It could have been the relative darkness of the cave or the way the water changed the reflection of the light that did make it to the back of the cave, but Jaxon swore that the sunburn washed away along with the sand and grit from Vivian’s forehead and cheeks.
Still, Vivian did not move. With a trembling hand, Jaxon brought the jug to her lips and poured a little water into the mercenary’s mouth.
The response was immediate. Vivian’s mouth worked, she swallowed, and her eyes fluttered open.
Jaxon tipped the jug further, and Vivian gulped the water down greedily.
Her hand came up and stopped Jaxon from pouring more.
“That’s enough for now,” Vivian said in a surprisingly clear voice. “If you drink too much at once after what we’ve been through, your body can go into shock.”
“Well, if that’s true, I must be dreaming all this in a coma!” Jaxon laughed, relieved to see her friend still alive. “I must have drunk a gallon.”
Vivian sat up, blinking and staring at her body. She felt her face and her lips then stood up.
“Something’s wrong,” she said.
“Wrong? We found water! I’m thinking everything has just gotten a whole lot better.”
Vivian stared at Jaxon for a moment.
“Come with me to the front of the cave,” she said in a quiet voice.
Jaxon did as she was asked. When they got into better light, Jaxon and Vivian both let out startled gasps.
Vivian looked perfect. Her sunburn had disappeared, and her lips weren’t chapped anymore. From the expression on the mercenary’s face, Jaxon realized she must look the same. She touched her own face and found it was true.
“How is this possible?” Jaxon whispered.
Vivian shook her head, too baffled to speak.
“We shouldn’t be one hundred percent, should we?” Jaxon asked. “I mean, we found water, but we should still be tired and sunburnt. It should take days to recover from what we’ve been through.”
Vivian nodded.
They walked back to the pool of water. It didn’t look special, except for the fact that it had sa
ved their lives. Dimly, they could see the rock beneath, and a little crack in the side where they guessed the supply of water seeped through from some underground spring.
Jaxon put a hand on her stomach. “I don’t even feel hungry. We ran out of food a day ago, and I’ve been starving ever since. I had stopped noticing once my thirst got so bad, but now that that’s gone, shouldn’t I feel hungry again?”
“I don’t feel hungry either, or tired,” Vivian said.
They stared at the pool for a while longer, as if its placid surface would somehow give them the answers they sought. After a time, Jaxon looked away and studied the cave.
And that was when she saw the paintings.
They were faint and looked older than anything she had ever seen. She couldn’t see them well in the poor light, but they appeared to show people and buildings.
“What are these?” Jaxon asked.
Vivian studied them a moment. “I’m no archaeologist, but they don’t look like anything I’ve ever seen in this part of the world. Here, let’s get a better look.”
She walked out of the cave, rummaged through her pocket, and pulled out her compact.
“You kept your compact?” Jaxon laughed. “I thought you said to ditch everything that wasn’t necessary.”
“Instinct,” Vivian replied with a grin.
She angled the mirror in the compact so that it caught the sun and reflected it onto the back of the cave, illuminating a small area a couple of feet wide.
What they saw painted there changed Jaxon’s entire concept of herself.
Chapter 7
August 3, 2016, IN THE DESERT NEAR AIN BEN TILI, ON THE BORDER BETWEEN MOROCCO AND MAURITANIA
2:30 P.M.
* * *
To Otto’s surprise, Grunt and the stranger did not start tearing each other apart. Instead, they gave each other a big bear hug. They laughed and slapped each other on the back.
Otto looked nervously at the circle of gunmen, their reactions to this strange turn of events hidden by the clothes covering the lower halves of their faces. He summoned up the courage to walk forward. So did Yuhle and Yamazaki, probably as much from a fear of being left alone as from any desire to get closer to the man who just moments before had been pointing an artillery piece at them.
“It is good to see you, my friend! I couldn’t believe it when you got out of that Land Rover. I said to myself, ‘Is that really my old friend Bill Carson, after all these years?’ And so it was!”
Bill, Otto thought. Isadore, General Meade’s agent and Jaxon’s fake stepmother, had called him Bill too.
Grunt didn’t like it then, and it doesn’t look like he likes it now.
The man stared curiously at the rest of the Atlantis Allegiance as they walked up to him.
“And who are your friends?” he asked in that strange high-class English accent that seemed so out of place in this group.
“This here is Otto, and Drs. Yuhle and Yamazaki. Folks, this is Agerzam, leader of the local tribe of Tuareg. Agerzam, we have a problem. We’re passing through to Mali like I said, but we’ve lost a couple of people in the sandstorm that hit yesterday. We know they’re close by.”
“I’ll spread my men out in the desert to find them,” Agerzam said. “Do you have flares?”
“Of course.”
“Send up a flare. There is no one else close by.”
“What about drones? Any drones come to search that wreckage?” Grunt asked.
“There was a drone,” Agerzam said with a hint of a smile.
“Has it already left?” Otto asked.
“No, young man, but you do not have to worry about it,” Agerzam said and laughed.
Is this guy saying what I think he’s saying?
“Those weren’t your people who got hit, were they?” Otto asked.
“No. It was Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Magreb. Terrorists. Crazy people. You Americans bombed the right side for once, eh?”
“Enough chitchat,” Grunt said. “Jaxon and Vivian don’t have much time.”
Agerzam’s eyes widened. “By Vivian, do you mean your old partner Aisha?”
“Yeah, she goes by Vivian now.”
“We must find them at once!” Agerzam cried. He turned and shouted in their language to his men, who immediately bolted for their vehicles and sped off into the desert every which way.
Otto stared in wonder for a moment, trying to keep up with what was going on. Grunt grabbed him and hauled him back to the Land Rover, where he retrieved the flare gun and shot a flare high into the air.
“Too damn bright,” Grunt said, shading his eyes and watching as the flare cut a sizzling arc through the pale desert sky. “They might not see it.”
He threw Otto the keys.
“You drive,” the mercenary ordered as he got up onto the roof of the Land Rover.
“Wait—you’re going to sit up there?”
“Yeah, now get a move on, or we’re going to get left behind. Those guys drive like lunatics.”
Otto revved up the engine and headed out in the direction they had been taking before they had been stopped. Once again, the two scientists drove parallel to them about half a mile to the north. To all sides, he saw the plumes of dust kicked up by the people he’d thought were going to kill him just five minutes before.
Otto had to wonder how effective this search would be. Wouldn’t Jaxon and Vivian be just as scared of these guys as he had been? Wait—that Agerzam guy, that rebel or militia leader or bandit or whatever he was, didn’t he know Vivian? Maybe she would recognize his little army.
Otto’s hope that the extra help would lead to their finding Jaxon and Vivian quickly faded as the sun began to sink to the west. They reached the highway, a desolate stretch of cracked asphalt stretching through the desert, and followed it to the north for a while before circling around and following it to the south. Every half hour or so, Grunt, still riding on top of the Land Rover, fired a flare, but if the two women saw it, they were either too weak or too scared to show themselves.
Grunt pounded on the roof, and Otto stuck his head out.
“Circle back the way we came,” he said. His face was covered with a fold of his kaffiyeh, but Otto could still see he was worried. “They never made it this far. We have to check back the way we came.”
Otto circled back, a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. Plumes of dust came from all around, a sign that Agerzam and his men were still searching, but no one had sent up a flare. No one had found the two missing women.
Otto’s mood sank with each passing minute. Yuhle had said they couldn’t last past noon, and it was approaching dusk. Even if they were still alive, they were probably too weak to signal now, and in this vast desert, it would be easy even for all these vehicles to pass by without seeing their bodies.
Their bodies.
Otto shuddered, trying not to think about it.
A flash of light from the top of a dune far to his left caught his eye. He slowed, staring at the spot, and saw the flash again.
He slowed even further and shouted up to Grunt. “You see that?”
Otto pointed. The light flashed again. Hope rose in Otto’s heart.
Grunt replied by firing another flare. In his rearview mirror, he saw the other Land Rover closing with them. Had the scientists seen it too?
The flash came again, three times in rapid succession.
Grunt pounded on the roof. “Go!”
Otto didn’t need to be told. He was already stepping on the gas.
To his right and left, he saw a couple of Agerzam’s jeeps closing in on the spot. One of them was one of those “Technicals” Grunt had mentioned, a jeep with a large machine gun bolted to the top.
Otto accelerated, shooting over low dunes and slamming down on the low areas behind. He could see the tips of Grunt’s fingers at the top of the windshield, white with the effort of gripping. The mercenary would probably chew him out for this later, but he wasn’t about to let Agerzam’s crew make it to t
he women first.
Up ahead, he could see two figures waving from the top of the dune. Otto closed the last quarter mile in a few seconds and screeched to a halt at the base of the dune, sending Grunt onto the hood with a thud. Otto leapt out of the Land Rover, grabbing a canteen and leaving the engine running.
“Nice driving, idiot!” Grunt called out after him as Otto ran up the dune.
Halfway up, he slowed his pace. Jaxon and Vivian stood at the top, cheering and waving at him, but they didn’t look half dead with thirst as he’d expected. In fact, they looked completely fine.
Otto slowed to a walk. Grunt huffed up the dune and caught up with him just as he made it to the top of the dune.
Jaxon smiled and gave Otto a hug, followed by a kiss.
“Thank God we found you,” Otto said. “Here.” He held up the canteen.
Jaxon giggled. “No, thanks.”
“Huh?” Otto said.
“Brilliant response, Pyro, although I can’t think of a better one. Why aren’t the two of you dead?”
Vivian looked past them. Agerzam and a few of his men were coming up. Agerzam was carrying his AK-47 and had a pistol strapped to his belt. There was no obvious reason he needed to be armed at the moment, but Otto figured that Agerzam would no sooner go anywhere without a gun than he would without his pants.
“I’ll explain everything later,” Vivian said. “Jaxon, follow my lead.”
She turned and gave Agerzam a warm smile.
He opened his arms. “Aisha! Or should I say Vivian? I have missed you.”
They fell into each other’s arms and gave each other a passionate kiss. Agerzam’s men looked on with a mixture of admiration and jealousy.
After a long minute, they let each other go, and Agerzam looked curiously at Jaxon.
“Who is the southerner?” he asked.
“She is under my protection,” Grunt declared.
Agerzam shrugged. “Then we shall speak of her no more.”
Otto tensed as Jaxon frowned.
