Eternal Unrest: A Novel of Mummy Terror

by Dixon, Lorne; Cato, Nick

  She couldn’t.

  “My friend has a high fever,” she told Norberto, each of her Italian words coming out slow and measured, listening as she spoke to make sure it came out as she intended.

  Norberto’s lips curled in a sly little smile that told her he hadn’t missed the accent she’d placed on the word “friend.” She felt a tickle of guilt for misleading him; she had no interest in the young soldier, but understood that his attraction to her might become a powerful piece of leverage.

  As they passed through the center of the battlefield, a scavenging soldier plucked a severed hand out of a pool of blood, wiggled a wedding ring off its finger, and pocketed his prize. After that, Priscilla kept her eyes focused on the colonel’s back. Here, deep in the heart of the battle, heavy artillery had torn through the British troops, reducing bodies to streaks of blood and sinewy mass on the field. These were images she knew she would not be able to exorcize if she allowed herself to see them in anything but the furthest reaches of her peripheral vision. Even there, visible only as splashes of garish red and pale flesh, she could feel them burning into her memory.

  The battlefield seemed to have no end. There were bodies piled everywhere, whole and partial, young men and seasoned soldiers, hundreds of faces locked in the terror of their final moments. She didn’t turn, didn’t dare, but a morbid thought tempted her. Sometimes, in a large enough crowd, she would see a friend or acquaintance’s face among the masses, sometimes a little older or younger, but unmistakable. It was, of course, an illusion and the face always belonged to a stranger. She wondered if she turned her head and stared out into the teeming field of the dead, would she would recognize anyone?

  It was better not to look.

  At the outskirts of the field the dead thinned out and Priscilla found she didn’t need to avert her eyes. Instead, she took in the landscape, a long clear stretch of land interrupted at times by thickets of papyrus reeds and spindly clusters of wild wheat. At a long distance, she saw a pair of curious jackals sniff at the air as they pranced out from the shade of a weather-beaten sant tree. Catching the soldiers’ scent, they bolted away, kicking up pale soil.

  They reached the Italian mobile encampment moments later and were met at the perimeter by a pair of burly guards. Several more ringed the camp, many fanning themselves with field manuals to fight the Egyptian sun. Waved through, Norberto nudged Priscilla, drawing her attention to a large tent. Inside, medics ran between folding metal cots; injured soldiers reached up for help as they moaned and screamed. “We lost three dozen men yesterday,” he told her, “and we’ll lose three dozen more before tomorrow morning.”

  The soldier guiding Priscilla’s left arm said a quick prayer, then added, “The British kept coming. Even after we broke their trench line on both sides, still their commanders wouldn’t order them back. They kept fighting until the last of them died.”

  Norberto sighed. “Yes, Sandro, I think we have many dark days ahead of us here.”

  The colonel’s head snapped back as he reached the open flaps of a desert-camouflaged tent and stepped aside. Norberto and Sandro tightened their lips and straightened their posture.

  “Take them inside,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” they said in unison.

  They guided her through the open flaps. Inside, the tent was a more a warehouse than an office; crates and boxes of various widths and heights took up most of the space and left only narrow pathways. In the center, the only open area, six chairs were arranged in a circle. A heavily-decorated military jacket was draped over the farthest. It was a makeshift war room, she realized, as Norberto led her to a chair and motioned for her to sit.

  Soldiers brought Mason. He stumbled and would have fallen if they hadn’t had a firm hold on his arms. They hoisted him up and pulled him along, his feet dragging, leaving two trails in the coarse soil. He’d passed out. As they dropped him roughly into a chair, Priscilla reached out and placed her hand over his forehead, felt surging heat, and turned to Norberto. “He needs a doctor.”

  Entering the tent, the colonel answered her in a voice that sounded like the reading of a eulogy. “I have five doctors here. As you’ve seen, they are busy attending to the wounded. My wounded.”

  She saw in his face there was no conversation to be had, no plea he’d consider, no chance he’d change his mind. “Medicine, then.”

  “None to spare,” the colonel growled as he took his seat opposite her. Dropping his elbows onto his knees, he leaned forward and regarded her with intense, scrutinizing eyes. “Perhaps, though, if you cooperate, we can find him a clean cot.”

  She shook her head. “If you can’t help him, let us go. I’ll find help somewhere else.”

  Standing at her side, Norberto shifted his weight from one leg to the other, a sign of his discomfort. Priscilla wondered how much the soldier feared the colonel and what experiences had warranted that fear.

  “No, I couldn’t do that,” the colonel said, his face retaining the same straight, emotionless expression. “You’re our guests until we receive word back from Rome what we should do with you.”

  Priscilla settled back in her chair and crossed her arms. “What do you want?”

  “Answers,” he said.

  She drove her gaze into his eyes. While she couldn’t match the intensity of his drilling stare, she could show him that she wouldn’t back down, either. “I’m not answering anything until Mason gets medical treatment.”

  A chill spun through her a second before she realized she’d used Mason’s real name. The colonel’s stone face remained unchanged, but Norberto shifted again. Priscilla wondered if he’d caught the slip.

  “Do you think this is a stalemate? You’re playing chess with me?” The colonel reached for his side arm, pulled it from the holster on his hip, and rested it in his lap, muzzle facing Mason’s unconscious body. “I don’t care for games, Miss, especially ones with too many rules. But if you insist, I’ll remove an insignificant game piece from the board.”

  “And then I’ll tell you nothing. Ever,” she hissed.

  “I can live with the curiosity,” he said and lifted his arm, aiming the pistol at Mason’s sloping forehead. His thumb removed the safety and his forefinger curled over the trigger.

  Priscilla’s eyes darted away, breaking contact. Retreating, she felt weakened and disoriented, as if the earth under her feet had moved. “No, wait.”

  The colonel lowered his gun back into his lap. “Are you done with the games, little American? Then good. Tell me what happened to your ship.”

  She told him as much as she could without mentioning the resurrected mummies: the story of the Limpkin, a ship boarded by German deserters looking to steal the cargo, the murdered crew, and the fire in the engine room. She finished by describing a simpler escape by lifeboat.

  Still no change in the colonel’s expression, no glow of enlightenment or cock of his head to symbolize a fulfillment of his curiosity. Instead, another question came on the heels of the final word of her story. “There were no other survivors?”

  Lips pressed together, she shook her head.

  The colonel rose from his seat, swung his side arm back into its holster, and gestured for her to stand. “Before you tell me the story again, I want you to see something. You see, it’s not that I don’t believe you. You’re telling us the truth of what you saw, at least most of it. You can keep your secrets, I don’t care, but I still need you to answer a question or two.”

  “There’s nothing more to tell,” she said, following him down a narrow corridor of crates, out of the tent, past two guards, and into another. Smaller, the second tent was empty except for a single medical cot in its center obscured by a translucent curtain. The colonel took a handful of fabric in his fist and pulled. The curtain squeaked as it slid on a rusty overhead runner, a sound like a child’s scream, Dara’s scream.

  Lying on the cot, on his back, was a man covered in extreme burns. In profile, the skin on his face had bunched and shriveled, are
as of muscle exposed, one lidless eyeball staring at the ceiling. The colonel took the man’s head in his hands and turned it. The other side of his face had fared better, marked only by purple and red spiderweb fissures.

  It was Doctor Oelrich.

  “Is this one of the Germans from your ship?” the colonel asked, releasing the doctor’s head. It dropped to one side. A line of pink drool ran from his mouth onto the white sheet.

  “Yes,” she said, not bothering to consider if it was the best answer to give or not. The shock of seeing Oelrich stole any attempt at subterfuge.

  “Is this Doctor Gottfried Oelrich?”

  “Yes,” she said again.

  With that, the colonel’s face finally changed. He smiled. “In that case, your friend—Mason or Buddy or whatever his name may be—will get his medicine. There’s a reward for this criminal, offered from Hitler himself they say, dead or alive.”

  “Which is he?” she asked.

  The colonel closed the curtain. “Somewhere in between. My men found him on the beach near the wreck. His clothes were burnt, so we couldn’t tell his rank, but we knew he was German. I hoped he was Oelrich, but in this shape, there was no way to know.”

  “Did he speak at all?”

  The colonel led her out of the second tent and back into the first. “Yes, as a matter of fact he did, only at first. He went catatonic not long after we found him.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Most of it, we don’t know. His throat’s burnt and most of my men only speak Italian anyway, but Corporal Gaetano was there for the last thing he said, and he understands German.” Back at the chairs, the Colonel turned to face a young soldier. “Cesare, what did you say he said?”

  The corporal said, “He said just the one word that I could understand, sir. He said ‘scnicksal.’ It means ‘fate.’”

  Chapter 33

  The day’s warmth fled as the Egyptian sun set.

  News of Dr. Oelrich’s identity spread through the Italian encampment, changing the mood from gloomy to jubilant, no doubt facilitated by the addition of wine rations at dinnertime. The soldiers came off the fields in shifts, a heavy look of relief on their faces that the grisly job of sifting through the dead was done for the evening. As they amassed in the center of the camp to eat, they were each poured a third of a glass of deep red Fontanafredda. They chatted, speaking too fast for Priscilla to keep up, let alone decipher, but she managed to catch random snippets of their conversations: a dirty joke about a French nun; a proud son crowing about his mother’s risotto; two soldiers happily debating the rules of various card games. If she closed her eyes, it would have been easy to forget these were the same scared boys from the beach. They seemed … normal, as if while they ate and sipped at their wine they were able to forget the war they were conscripted to fight.

  Mason lay on a cot in the makeshift infirmary tent, feet from Dr. Oelrich, snoring through a morphine-induced sleep. There hadn’t been a cot for him at first, but one became available when a soldier who’d been hit by shrapnel stopped breathing. There had been no attempt to revive him. Instead, they wasted no time wrapping him in a black body bag and adding him to the back of a flatbed truck. An hour after Mason’s bed was rolled into the guarded tent, twenty more were available in the main infirmary. Now, three hours later, only six were occupied, the rest empty except for stained sheets.

  Norberto stayed by her side for the evening, at times translating a joke or explaining the gist of a conversation. She wasn’t sure if he was under orders to observe her, or he chose to stay close, or both, but she was grateful for his company. He told her about his childhood, growing up in Brescia, a small city in the shadow of the Alps, where his family operated a store that sold sausage and shoes, an odd combination that had been a compromise between his mother, a shoemaker, and father, a cook. Picking at his canned rations—she’d already wolfed down the provisions allowed her—he released a boyish smile. There were unspoken memories playing in his head, she knew, and hoped he wouldn’t forget them in the madness of war.

  A few spare gunshots echoed over the distant hills as night approached. Each time the young soldiers would fall silent, frozen in place, listening for the shots to get louder and the echoes to come closer together, but when silence returned they resumed their conversations at a lower volume.

  “Where will I sleep?” she asked Norberto, who turned his head and blushed. Although a few years older than most of the other soldiers, he had an innocence that the others were missing. Whereas they had been changed by the war forever, he’d managed to keep his essence unpolluted.

  He pointed to a long tent beyond a line of storage containers. “We all sleep there. Don’t worry, there will be enough beds. None of the men in the truck will need one tonight.”

  She glanced at the pile of body bags on the truck.

  Norberto stood up and extended a hand to her. She took it and pulled herself up beside him. She came up closer to him than she expected, close enough to feel the warmth of his breath. Stepping back, she watched his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed hard. She’d dated boys like him in high school and college, young men fighting to shrug off the last clumsy artifacts of childhood but failing in that struggle. They were tender lovers, she knew, but also unsatisfying ones, too concerned about her feelings to ever surrender to the heights of insane passion. She preferred lovemaking to be like skydiving, tumultuous and dangerous, falling to Earth in another’s arms, chancing catastrophe with each movement.

  Why was she thinking this way? It wasn’t Norberto. No, the young lieutenant, not much more than half her age, didn’t excite her, but still there was that same pull toward a new man, the same gravity that had pulled her away from Buddy time and time again. Was she already searching for an excuse to leave Mason once this horrible journey was over? Except for the husband that left her, she’d lost every lover she ever had to the fallout from following this instinct—every one—and knew the inevitable look that would sprout on Mason face when she abandoned him, too: anger, jealousy, and disappointment.

  Norberto led her to the tent, through the front flaps, and down the center aisle. Soldiers slept on both sides, those unlucky enough to have drawn dawn security patrols, stripped down to white tank tops and trousers, fatigue shirts balled up under their heads as pillows. The few unable to sleep stared at her as she walked by, heads craning for a view after she’d passed.

  Norberto dropped a hand on a bed a decent distance from the others.

  Priscilla hoisted herself up and sat on the cot, legs dangling over the edge, feet brushing the floor as they swung. The cot was cold enough to sting where it touched her skin. “It’ll be like sleeping on an ice cube.”

  Norberto chuckled. “We’re only allowed one sheet. You can choose to cover yourself with it and put your skin against the cold metal, or you can lie on top and bear the draft.”

  Gathering up a second sheet off an unused cot, he handed it to her. Then he unbuttoned his shirt, removed it, folded it into a thick square, and set it down at the edge of her cot. Settling back on the cot opposite her, he said, “For your head.”

  She smiled, thanked him, and reclined back. The cold seeped through the thin sheet, but his shirt was warm under her scalp. Pulling the second blanket over her body, she watched him strip off his tank top, ball it up, and slide it under his head. Shirtless, gooseflesh dimpled his hairless, muscular chest.

  Don’t, she told herself. Don’t even think it.

  Although the words to her invitation had already formed in her head—Norberto, come here—she fought them away and turned her face to the ceiling. She listened to the sleepers in the tent—the rustle of restless turning and congested snoring; a whispered conversation in a corner; and the yowl of a growling stomach—and willed herself to sleep.

  Sleep didn’t come, not even after Norberto’s breathing deepened and he joined the choir of snores. Not even as the last of the soldiers finished their meals and shuffled inside to claim their cots. Not even wh
en the night outside grew completely silent as the camp retired for the night. She imagined the sentinels out on patrol at the edges of the encampment, hands cupped against the cold, out in the darkness with only their thoughts and their fear as company.

  Mason. She imagined him stretched out on his infirmary cot, the scent of blood and the charred flesh surrounding him, the fever inside him burning, his torment invisible behind the morphine curtain. She worried that he might talk in his sleep; even a few mumbled words in his Irish accent would give him away. She had no doubt what the colonel would do with him then. Civilian or not, he’d be executed.

  And only feet away, resting on his own bed, was Dr. Oelrich, who knew the secret and, if he woke, held Mason’s life in his hands. One sentence from his mouth— “He’s Irish” —and her ‘friend’ was as good as dead.

  She scanned the tent. The whispered conversations had died away and the last set of tired eyes had closed. She pulled the sheet down and slid off the cot, careful that her feet made no noise when they touched down on the soil. The cot squeaked—a tiny sound—as it settled. Again she swung her head around and inspected the sleeping soldiers, but none stirred. She crept down the aisle, knees bent and back bent, as if ready to duck down under the nearest cot for cover. At the front flap, she peeked out. Two guards shared a smoke near an arms cache, huddling together and shivering, facing the perimeter. The temperature had plummeted to a wintery cold that Priscilla would not have expected from an Egyptian night.

  She sneaked out of the tent, still hunched over, and darted across the camp to the war room. Fearing the guards might turn, she stepped inside without a quick peek before doing so, and exhaled deeply when she found the tent unoccupied. An empty wine bottle sat on one of the folding metal chairs. Hurrying past, she headed down the corridor of boxes, out the back flap, and into the second tent.