Oasis of the Damned

by Greg F. Gifune

  OASIS OF THE DAMNED

  Greg F. Gifune

  First Edition

  Oasis of the Damned © 2014 by Greg F. Gifune

  All Rights Reserved.

  A DarkFuse Release

  www.darkfuse.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  Other Books by Author

  APARTMENT SEVEN

  DREAMS THE RAGMAN

  HOUSE OF RAIN

  KINGDOM OF SHADOWS

  LORDS OF TWILIGHT

  THE RAIN DANCERS

  Check out the author’s official page at DarkFuse for a complete list:

  http://www.darkfuseshop.com/Greg-F.-Gifune/

  For Marc. I’ll see you there.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to Shane Staley, Dave Thomas and everyone at DarkFuse for their help and continued support. Also, thanks to my family, friends and all my fans and readers across the globe. And special thanks to my friend and colleague Robert Dunbar for being an advance reader on this, offering his invaluable expertise and input, and for helping me pull this project together into the novella I’d envisioned.

  “If I never meet you in this life, let me feel the lack. A glance from your eyes, then my life will be yours.”

  —James Jones, The Thin Red Line

  1

  Through his binoculars, Owens watched the pillar of black smoke billow toward an endless expanse of sky, the sun a brilliant sweltering globe lording over miles of barren desert for as far as the eye could see. He slowly panned to the right until the figure staggering along the distant dune came into focus, the remnants of a tangled and recently freed parachute draped across the nearby sand behind it.

  It had finally happened. He’d dreamed about this moment, sometimes happily, sometimes not, though he’d never been certain it would truly come to pass. What were the odds? No matter. It had happened. The desert had taken what it wanted. Again.

  Disguised as a bead of sweat running along his temple, an old saying about curiosity killing cats trickled through his mind.

  Owens ignored them both.

  It was already over one hundred degrees, and before the day was through, the desert would get even hotter. Owens drew a breath of dry air and watched the figure a while, waiting for the inevitable. It arrived quickly. The figure collapsed and rolled away lifelessly, vanishing from sight between the dunes and leaving in its wake a wide swath in the sand.

  “If he’s lucky, he’ll be dead by the time I get to him,” Owens mumbled. Or had he only thought it? He couldn’t be sure. How long had it been since he’d spoken? How long since he’d heard someone else speak? Didn’t matter, he supposed, nothing much did out here. Owens returned the binoculars to his belt, slid on a pair of sunglasses and shouldered his rifle. After a quick look behind him at the ruins from which he’d come, he adjusted his backpack, then started off across the sand toward the fallen stranger.

  Not quite ten minutes later, Owens reached the summit of what he hoped would be the last dune he’d have to negotiate in this heat. Below, in the narrow valley between this dune and the next, a body lay crumpled and facedown in the sand. Owens set down his rifle, wrestled free of his backpack, then pulled a canteen of water from it and trudged through the thick sand toward the figure.

  When he got closer, he realized it was a small man dressed in khakis and boots. Owens couldn’t be sure if it was a uniform of some type or casual work attire, but rather than worry about it, he continued on, sliding the remaining few feet until he’d reached the desert floor.

  Dropping into a crouch, he placed his free hand on the center of the man’s back. It rose and fell in a shallow but steady rhythm. As he leaned in for a closer look, the man suddenly jerked up in a quick convulsive motion and threw a handful of sand into Owens’ face.

  More startled than disabled, Owens fell back and away from him, managing to avoid the blows that followed before scurrying up the side of the dune for his rifle. He’d only made it a few feet when he felt a hand clamp onto his lower leg. Without looking back, he kicked until he made contact with something solid.

  From behind him there came a muffled but peculiarly pitched grunt that sounded almost infantile, and his leg was free.

  Owens rolled onto his back, continuing to wiggle up the dune in a crablike, hands-and-heels crawl. The kick had sent the man back to the desert floor, but he was scrambling to his feet and this time he’d pulled something from his belt.

  The sun caught the glint of knife blade as the man spun and faced him, assuming what Owens could only conclude was some sort of previously learned fighting stance. Owens ran a forearm back across his face to clear away the sun and sweat. Having forgotten he was wearing sunglasses, he managed to knock them cockeyed but they remained on his head. The sun was blinding, but even as he pushed himself to his feet, he realized he’d been mistaken.

  The man was not a man at all, but a woman.

  “Easy,” Owens heard himself say. He’d spoken aloud so rarely these last few weeks his voice sounded oddly disconnected and foreign to him. “Easy.”

  The woman, a shorthaired brunette, remained in her stance, chest heaving, face bathed in sweat and her lips already beginning to chap and burn. Along the right side of her face, a narrow trickle of blood ran from hairline to chin. “Who are you?” she asked in an assured though raspy voice.

  He put his hands out in front of him, as if this might somehow calm her. He had to think a moment. What the hell was his name again? “Owens.”

  “You part of a rescue crew or something?” she asked dully.

  “Rescue crew?”

  The woman relaxed her stance but her brown eyes continued darting about, covering as much of their vast surroundings as she could. “Where the hell am I?”

  “Your helicopter crashed, looked like you were having engine trouble. You bailed before it went down. I saw the whole thing. I came to see if you were still alive.”

  With an expression of mounting confusion she said, “Ran into a storm and—never seen anything like it—knocked me way off course but I got through it and thought I was all right, then everything just died and—if I’m even close to where I think I am, where I think I went down, then—then there shouldn’t be anyone out here, I—”

  “No,” Owens agreed, “there shouldn’t be. But there is.”

  She wavered and nearly fell, but caught her balance. “My head…it hurts.”

  “You got a nasty wound there. You’re bleeding.” He ran his index finger from his cheek to his chin to illustrate his point. “Was there anyone else onboard?”

  “No. Transport chopper, I—I’m the pilot.”

  “What’s your name?”

  She looked at him like she’d never heard a more ridiculous question. “Richter,” she said. “My name’s Richter. Are you…alone?”

  “Not if you’re real, and I’m guessing you are.”

  “Real?”

  “Just trying to be sure is all. Desert plays tricks, and I’ve been here a long time.”

  “Answer the question!” she sna
pped, as if only then remembering he might be a threat to her. She stabbed the air between them with her knife. “Are you alone?”

  “Yes, it’s just me.” He carefully reached for the canteen he’d dropped, then held it up for her. She nodded, so Owens tossed it to her.

  Richter caught it with her free hand, used her teeth to twist the cap free, then took a long drink, eyes trained on Owens throughout. When she’d reached her fill, she gasped and choked as excess water ran over her chin and along her throat. “What are you doing out here?” she finally managed.

  “Desert took me. Same as it took you.”

  “What? What does that mean?” She shook her head and rapidly blinked her eyes, as if she were losing sight of him. “There’s no one else here?”

  “They’re gone now.” As he struggled to his feet, Owens scratched at his scalp through the red bandana covering his head and tied at the back. “Lockwood lasted the longest, but he died a while back. I can’t remember when exactly, but...but it’s been a month or more, I think. It…must be...must be a month or more.”

  Richter tossed the canteen back to him. “How long have you been here?”

  He caught it, slung it around his neck, and rather than answer her question, said, “There’s shelter not far from here.” He pointed in the direction from which he’d come. “Can you make it?”

  She wiped her mouth and nodded. “I can make it.”

  He started back up the dune.

  “Owens, wait.”

  He stopped, looked back over his shoulder at her.

  “We’re really all alone out here?”

  “We’re by ourselves,” he told her solemnly. “But we’re not alone.”

  2

  At first, Richter thought it was a mirage. Moments earlier, she’d seen the top of a tower poking up over distant dunes, but hadn’t been entirely sure what it was. Between the heat, the sweat in her eyes, her light-headedness, confusion and exhaustion, she was disoriented and still stumbling along after Owens, as if trapped in a dream. But as they moved over and down the final dune, she saw the ruins in their entirety for the first time. Blurred by waves of rippling heat, perhaps one hundred yards away and in the literal middle of nowhere, the ruins constituted what had once been a military outpost of some sort. Beyond the crumbled remains of an outer wall that encircled the outpost, there resided two small buildings. The larger of the two sported what remained of a domed, once-ornate roof, while the other was more intact, had a flat roof, and was connected to an outlook tower that stood perhaps fifty yards in the air.

  Several paces ahead of her, Owens moved with slow but steady purpose. Though in rough shape himself, he’d become accustomed to the desert, and knew how to move through the sand efficiently. A little over six feet tall, he possessed a rugged build that had grown sinewy due to lack of proper nutrition, and his deeply tanned skin and thick growth of beard left his stern features all the more craggy and weathered.

  Through the blinding sun, they continued on, trudging through the shifting sand as they closed on the outpost. Richter noticed an odd half circle of darker sand just inside the ruins of the outer wall. A long-extinguished makeshift torch had been dropped or haphazardly thrown to the ground nearby, and scattered about were a few large, very old and empty military-issue containers of gasoline, the kind generally housed on trucks, tanks or other heavy vehicles.

  Once beyond the outer wall and deeper into the outpost, Owens came to a stop and turned back to her. Both were dripping sweat and breathing heavily, but neither said a word until Owens, sensing her confusion, said, “It’s okay, you’ll come to understand.”

  While the domed building was in pretty bad shape, Richter noticed that the other building, the squat one attached to the tower, had two windows cut into the structure that faced them, but neither had anything to prevent or even block the sand or God knew what else from getting inside. Her mind reeled. What were these strange ruins doing in the middle of a vast and brutal stretch of desert? And what was Owens doing here by himself? How had he survived? Was this truly happening, or was she lying in the sand and slowly dying; hallucinating these things and this odd man with his cryptic mutterings? Perhaps she’d never really escaped the helicopter at all, had died in the crash and was now trapped in some bizarre netherworld between the living and the dead. She couldn’t be sure of anything just then, as nothing seemed real.

  Nothing seemed…right.

  “What is this place?” she asked in a hoarse voice.

  “Come on,” Owens said, leading the way toward the tower.

  As they reached the second building, Richter saw that although the lone entrance was wide open, it had been packed with numerous old sandbags piled a quarter of the way up the doorway. Owens straddled and climbed over them and continued on without waiting for her, so she followed without protest and stepped over the bags into the interior of the building. The light immediately shifted and the air turned somewhat cooler within the scarred walls. The area was wide open, a single story with no interior walls. The floor was nothing but more sand, but it wasn’t nearly as deep or thick as it was outside, and although there were some empty boxes and bits of trash and debris scattered about, two old rifles leaned against one wall and a crate of grenades just to the right of the sandbags, the building was otherwise empty.

  Richter placed a hand flat against the nearest wall and leaned her weight against it as she caught her breath and tried to clear her head. Why were all these old weapons lying around?

  At the far end of the open area was the only actual door she’d seen. It was badly worn and scarred but intact and appeared sturdy. Owens had already made his way to it by the time she’d noticed it. He pulled it open to reveal a set of stairs leading to the tower. This time he waited, and when Richter finally pushed herself away from the wall and joined him, he led her to the stairs.

  Just inside the door lay a thick beam of wood used to barricade the door and a small oil lamp, and along the stairs she noticed another rifle leaned against the wall. The climb was taxing, as her already depleted strength was waning, so she saved her breath and continued on, up the long stairwell, until she and Owens reached the top.

  When the stairs ran out, they came upon a small, dark, circular room.

  Owens went ahead, reached up and fiddled with something on the low ceiling, then pushed up a door and pulled down a short wooden ladder that led to the literal tower. Sunlight poured in, along with the heat, filling a good portion of the small area and illuminating a makeshift bed made of what appeared to be scraps of clothing. Again, another rifle, this one a dated machine gun of some sort, lay next to the bed along with an extinguished torch, a canteen and a few open, empty cans. In the shadows, from floor to ceiling, were three stacks of worn boxes and crates, old supplies from the looks.

  The entire area reeked of body odor.

  With a sigh, Owens straightened out the makeshift bed, then shuffled over to the stack of boxes, opened one about the size of a shoe box and rummaged around inside. A moment later, he came back with a relatively clean rag, then scooped up the canteen and held them both out awkwardly for Richter. “It isn’t bleeding anymore,” he mumbled, motioning to the blood along the side of her face. “But you should clean it up.”

  She took the items. “I’ll try not to use too much water.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” he told her. “We’re sitting on a natural well. They built this place on top of an oasis. Wasn’t for the steady supply of water, I’d have been dead weeks ago.”

  Richter wet the rag, then dabbed at the wound just above her hairline. Wincing, she wiped it again, then cleaned her face. “How old is this place?”

  “Goes way back, probably to the old Foreign Legion days or earlier, but it was used during World War II. From some of the things we found—weapons and supplies left behind—at various points there were American and German forces here.”

  “You telling me those supplies are from World War II?”

  Owens nodded. “Gas, food and
weapons mostly, still good. The rations don’t have any taste anymore, but they’re still edible. An outpost with water this deep into the desert would’ve been a valuable asset to either side. It probably changed hands a few times throughout the course of the war before both sides realized this place wasn’t what they thought it was.”

  “Not what they thought it was?”

  Owens stared at her, filthy and glistening with sweat.

  When it became apparent he wasn’t about to elaborate, Richter took another long drink from the canteen, then handed it and the rag back to him. “Thanks.”

  “You still look weak. You should probably try to get some rest.”

  She knew he was right but there were too many unanswered questions cycling through her head. “I’m fine.”

  “You should rest. It’ll be dark in a few hours.”

  “I need to know what’s happening.”

  Owens tossed the rag aside, drank from the canteen, then dropped it back next to the bed. “Okay.”

  “You said the desert took you.”

  “Same as it took you.”

  This time it was her turn to stare.

  “I was on a crew working an oil refinery in Béchar,” he said. “Job was done and we were flying to Tunisia. Sandstorm came up out of nowhere, took us way off course, same as you. Then it took us down. Wreck’s not far. I can show you, if you want.”

  “You stayed? None of you ever tried to walk out?”