Secret Skin

by Frank Coles

  He never finished his next threat. Martin’s whimper became a low guttural wail that silenced the room. His howling lament made the hairs on my arms stand up. Faisal stumbled backwards against Martin’s push and into my line of sight. Then Martin was on him. Lifting my head from the sandy gap between two beautifully woven rugs I saw Martin jab the sizzling prod into Faisal’s throat the same way he had to him. Faisal’s feet jerked off the ground as he fell backwards and then Martin rammed it into Faisal’s mouth and squeezed rapid bursts of electricity into his face.

  There was a stunned silence. No one moved. Then everything happened at once. Khadim pulled his sidearm from its holster. Before he could squeeze the trigger Martin jabbed his wrist. He dropped the gun to the floor with a surprised yelp. Orsa made his move, but an electric pulse slammed into his chin. The big man’s head flipped back but he didn’t fall, just swayed like a crumbling monolith above a precipice.

  ‘Goooooooo!’ Martin screamed at me, his eyes wide with fear and sadistic glee. I heard the urgency in his voice; he didn’t know how long he could hold them off.

  I rose unsteadily to my feet. The warrior editor, my friend, floored the big man for the second time that day with a devastating shock to the head. Hamza tried to sneak up on him but skulked back when Martin waved the electric wand in his face and conjured up a magical mid air zap.

  Faisal writhed on the ground. He pulled his skirts up and yanked a snub-nosed pistol from an ankle holster. Martin fried his balls for him and he let off a wild shot through the roof of the tent before dropping the gun. The piercing snap of the gunshot woke us all up. I hobbled quickly toward the entrance and felt a second shot whiz by my head and out through the tent’s skin.

  I glanced back. Khadim had retrieved his fallen pistol and smoke poured out of the barrel in the enclosed space. He smiled and took aim again, but deliberately off target. He missed the next shot and gave me an odd, almost friendly look before Martin sent a bolt of electricity into his forehead.

  ‘Get out Bryson,’ he shouted as a shisha pipe span out of Hamza’s hands and crashed into his shoulder. I saw Faisal search for his gun. I knew he wouldn’t miss a second chance. I turned and ran across the uneven sand towards the dunes. The two Indian men who had dragged me into the tent loomed ahead. I thought they had me, but one of the shadowy figures held something into the moonlight.

  ‘Good luck sir,’ he said and handed the bottle of water to me.

  I shambled quickly away from him, as shocked by his unexpected kindness as by what would happen next.

  Chapter Thirty Three

  I crested the first rise and heard Martin shout, then a loud thump from back at the main camp. Arabic voices called out orders and were quickly cut off as I descended into the shielded silence on the other side of the dune.

  They hadn’t seen me. I kept moving, slowly, but always forward. If I stopped I was done for. With no energy I had nothing but fear and my gratitude to Martin to keep me going.

  The gully I was in led off into a never ending lunar landscape of small sandy hills. The harsh desert was a magnificent sight beneath the peninsula’s soft moonlight. But I stayed low between the dunes; it was a hunter’s moon.

  I chanced a look behind me and saw the dull rim-light of the camp. I heard the growl of engines. Then the light moved and grew brighter. Three vehicles stopped side by side on the first ridge.

  Silhouetted against the camp, I saw a man standing in the back of the lead vehicle, an open top jeep. The floodlight clicked on and made me dangerously visible against the stark halogen-bleached landscape.

  A shot rang out and a puff of sand flicked up beside my right foot.

  I heard the distinctive zing of another bullet passing in the air as I bolted to the unlit side of a dune. I kept to the gullies, moving as quickly as I could. The loose uneven sands made it tough going. Mercifully my various pains diminished as a fresh rush of fear and adrenaline kicked in.

  I only noticed the sudden sheer drop when I hit the bottom of it.

  I lay breathless in a ditch that led onto a wide flat indentation shaped like a dry river bed. A ridge ran across the top of the steep drop and stretched for a hundred yards in either direction.

  It was an almost vertical wall. The cars wouldn’t be able to drive down it without toppling over. They would have to drive around. I had a head start.

  I forced myself to get up. My right ankle warned it was twisting too far. I ignored it and started to run.

  The first car slammed to a stop immediately on my left, a Jeep Wrangler. The light span round to track me but the car couldn’t move further than the ridge. I hugged the incline and tried to avoid the light.

  Another vehicle pulled up. The men shouted to each other.

  The second car waited until the third car joined it. Rifles pointed out of each vehicle. The men laughed and the firing began. Then I realized they didn’t need to follow me; they just needed one clear shot.

  If the men had been using automatic weapons I would have already been another invisible corpse in the desert.

  The cars sped after me, navigating the rise and fall of dunes that ran parallel to the ridge. Single shots rang out.

  They only needed to be lucky once, I needed to be lucky every time.

  I thought my luck had run out when my ankle finally gave in. Face in the sand I screeched with pain, but there was no time to indulge. The cars had overshot my position and were already turning back. The tracking vehicle panned the spotlight in a wild bumping arc trying to find me again. The lame duck.

  I had seconds before they found me.

  Then I saw it. Directly opposite me was a short dusty channel between two tall dunes. I sprinted; my ankle would have to suffer. I bit my bottom lip to stifle any involuntary moans and dived into the darkness.

  The searchlight found the spot where I had just been and carried on past it. I sat panting for a moment and then looked around me. The two big dunes towered above me and the channel I was in was too narrow to allow any cars through except at the most unstable of angles. The desert’s scrubby little bushes clung to the side of the dunes, surviving in that harsh environment in splatters of scraggy burned out green.

  I tried to stand and had to swallow a cry of pain. I flopped back down into a small indentation beside one of the bigger bushes. In the distance the voices became angry shouts and I saw one of the vehicles speed around the other side of the drop.

  I didn’t have long.

  Instinctively I began to dig with my hands. A plan formed and I quickly made the shallow hollow deeper, enough to hold my curled up body. I squeezed in and then scooped the sand back over my legs and waist and pulled more sand from above over my shoulders and head.

  One of my arms, a shoulder, an ear, any part of me could still be exposed. But I was too tired to care, I poked my nose and mouth clear and tried to stay as still as possible.

  I heard a jeep pull up, the sound of men’s feet hitting the dry sand and Arabic voices. Footsteps approached. They stopped close enough to my face that I thought I could make out a pair of expensively sandaled feet through my sandy camouflage. I held my breath. My body fought me and demanded air. I ignored it and felt my lungs burn.

  The man said something else I couldn’t understand and trudged around the bush toward the top of the slope. I breathed one long slow calm breath and held again. I heard his footsteps disappear along the ridge and then they didn’t come back. I held on as long as possible and then pushed my head out of the sand, gasping for breath.

  I could still hear voices over in the main channel and saw that another vehicle had joined it. I pulled out the bottle of water that I had been clinging to the whole time and took a huge gulp.

  The men seemed to be searching back towards the camp and away from me but I couldn’t take any chances. I buried myself again, as much under the bush as I could manage, with just my nose and mouth pushing through.

  I didn’t hear any more footsteps.

  Chapter Thirty Four

/>   My eyes opened when something tickled my nose. The scorpion’s tail quivered above the blind spot between my eyes and it took what seemed an age to focus on it. I recognized the desert scorpion, I’d read about them. They never grew to a particularly big size and their tails were poisonous, but not lethal.

  Confronting one is easy to rationalize when you’re sitting comfortably, sipping a caffeinated beverage of your choosing and leafing through a desert survival book. I could handle that you think. But when you wake up buried in the desert where you’ve been anally raped with a cattle prod and a scorpion within stinging distance, even just a mildly poisonous one, you react a little differently.

  I jumped to my feet and began moving, then falling, backwards over the bush. I stumbled away and up the dune until I’d put a comfortable distance between me and my new breakfast chum.

  I looked around me.

  Dunes. Hundreds of them. No end of them in fact, and no water, except what was left in the plastic bottle under the bush. I resisted the overwhelming urge to shout with frustration in case anyone was nearby. The cars weren’t in the gully but who knew what was still out there. The camp couldn’t be that far away and they might be able to hear me.

  The camp. I tried to think about what had happened. I visualized the smiling faces and heard the men’s laughter, I remembered a burning, melting invading horror, and the smell. I couldn’t think about it.

  I couldn’t.

  I remembered Martin’s final shout. Was he already dead?

  Khadim had shot at me and missed. He seemed happy about it. What was that about?

  If Martin was still at the camp, shouldn’t I go back for him?

  But what could I do?

  That wasn’t the point I told myself.

  My body jerked with an imagined electric shock.

  I would never go back there.

  I checked my watch. Seven a.m. It was still early and relatively cool. A small blessing. I scanned the monotonous landscape around me. I couldn’t see the camp where I expected it to be, so either my bearings were shot, it had been packed up, or…

  …or nothing, I was already lost.

  Okay boy scout how do you get out of this one?

  The sun rises east to west. I followed its path. Okay that’s eastish. If Dubai ran roughly north-east to south-west then the city should be off to my left and the Hajar Mountains should be over there to the east. I scowled at the horizon and saw a rocky scar jutting out of it.

  ‘Hah!’ I yelled in triumph.

  I knew where I was, that meant Abu Dhabi and Al Ain were behind me. It meant I could set off in at least three directions and eventually reach somewhere I knew. The easiest thing to do would be to head north. At some point I would hit the Hatta Road which ran all the way from the outskirts of Dubai to the border of Oman.

  I had no idea how far away it was though. I could be a kilometer from a village behind me or 40 kilometers from the road. I looked around and urged any unseen villages to show themselves.

  I made one last scan for the camp, and then headed northish.

  The average human can walk three or four miles an hour on flat ground and in temperate weather, really, how long could it take?

  ***

  By nine o’clock the water had run out. By midday I hadn’t achieved anywhere near four miles an hour. Who would have thought that walking could be so hard? I remembered one very lazy day on the public beach when some friends and I had made a stab at being the happy beach goers we were all supposed to be. It was August and the sand was so hot you couldn’t touch it without burning your feet. We sat under a palm tree and watched the mad dogs do their thing. A group of men grabbed a ball and began a boastful game of volleyball. Within two minutes all enthusiasm had drained from their faces and even the keenest could barely lift their heads up or be bothered to hit that damned ball. Twenty seconds later they all ran off to the beach bar and drank cokes.

  Oh please god, a fizzy drink with a straw.

  Tragically the desert had no leafy palms and no beach bars. Not even a mirage. The hot stagnant air just hung about being blisteringly hot.

  I held my shirt over my head as a shield and felt uncomfortably exposed. I was so used to politely covering my own skin that even in a people free desert I still felt I was breaking taboos by showing a little flesh.

  The light hurt. My skin had burned hours before. It was sore to the touch and my lips had cracked to expose the raw tissue beneath. My ankle although sprained had finally given up complaining. I could only imagine what the rest of me looked like, swollen, bruised, caked in my own blood. Inside it felt as if someone was scraping a sharp fork through my intestines. Every single step was excruciating. I winced at the thought of what could be damaged up there.

  Don’t think about it. Keep walking.

  The urge to sit down was too much. I could lie down I reasoned, wait for the night. Yeah right, get lost in the dark, wake up even more lost and dehydrated than I had that morning.

  I spied a solitary Gaff tree atop a dune and headed for it. I stopped and leaned against its scrubby bark. A solitary desert friend, the only living thing for miles, but it couldn’t tell me which way was out.

  I’m going to die out here I thought, and staggered on.

  I felt the change before I saw it. The hot lazy air started to move. Imperceptibly at first and then I began to feel strangely happy. There was a subtle change in the desert’s acoustics, as if an orchestra in a cathedral had suddenly been forced into a very small room, muffled but noisy.

  I even sang a half remembered song, ‘Walk a mile in my shoes,’ I crooned with forced irony.

  At the summit of yet another sandy hump I turned in the direction of the change. A vast wall of stampeding sand closed the last few meters in the time it took my heart to skip a beat.

  The wall hit with incredible power and the needles of wind-whipped sand forced my eyelids shut. I rolled into a ball and covered my head with my hands. Nothing to do but wait as the sandstorm thrashed about me with reckless fury.

  I howled back at it.

  The storm blew over a few minutes later, almost as quickly as it had arrived. It left the air pleasantly unsettled. But by the time I got back on my feet the slow motion hammer blows of heat had started up again and the storm was just a smeared brown tempest racing off into the distance.

  Its wake had opened a cool window of clear vision through the blurred heat of the day. In the far distance I could see Big Red, the large red lump of sand that the weekend quad bikers and 4x4 drivers liked to aim for.

  I yipped and danced, then realized it was still several kilometers away. I stuck my head down, pointed myself in its general direction, and started walking towards the way out.

  My second step crunched through something soft that crackled like burnt paper. I lifted my foot out of the cardboard box and fell backwards, the lid still attached around my ankle. I pulled it off and scraped away the dried up gunk that clung to the bottom of my shoe.

  Then my eyes focused on what my brain had failed to process. The brief storm had blown away the top layer of sand to expose a shallow well between the dunes. It contained row upon row of shoe boxes.

  For all kinds of shoes, both men’s and women’s and arranged into lines, each box the same distance apart.

  Somebody had organized this. Like an abstract art installation in the middle of the Antarctic.

  I peered into the first lidless box.

  A small flattened face stared back at me.

  I scanned the rows of small designer labeled boxes.

  The face was human.

  I stood up and flicked the lids from several more. Their sun baked contents gazed up at me.

  Whoever did this, this was a job, this was regular, this was a new site recently covered over.

  A graveyard for the unborn. An abattoir for those that were. A field of cardboard coffins for the unwanted offspring of domestic staff, wives, sisters, daughters and working girls. Some of them looked like they’d die
d out there in those very boxes. Their hands outstretched and their faces contorted from crying so hard.

  Like the Victorian baby farms. The rumors were true.

  Staggering away from that grotesque scene on even weaker legs I wondered what happened to the bodies of the mothers who never made it.

  Chapter Thirty Five

  Set back from the road beneath Big Red, the landmark dune, there was a small camp with a kiddie’s bike park, camel rides, snakes and hawks. It was a week day and no one was bouncing bikes off the dunes. I staggered in through the side entrance of the deserted camp, the mustached teenager behind the ticket counter looked at me with one sleepy eye – no money there he thought – and went back to sleep. The older Indian gent who made fresh fruit juices took one look at me and smiled with compassion. He pointed to a building on my left and I followed his hand to the building and its dirty bathroom inside.

  On the wall hung a grubby plastic mirror with a crack in its façade. The mirror was in better shape than I was. The toilet was the usual squat hole in the ground, left in a muddy mess of footprints and toilet paper by its previous occupant. Not that I was going to use it, I had no fluids left.

  I took off my shirt and washed under my sore blistered armpits and then shoved my head under the trickle of the low pressure tap. I threw my head back and let the water run down my back and chest. I caught sight of myself in the mirror again. The covering of sand had been washed away and the water had mixed with the dried blood to create an all over red varnish.

  I was so thirsty I’d forgotten to drink.

  I jammed my head into the small sink and opened my mouth under the tap’s dribble of warm water. I expected it to be the most amazing thing I had ever tasted, but it was purely functional. Something that had to be done, my body almost resented the water. It had begun the slow shut down of dehydration, on its way to physical delirium and harmful happiness.