“Stop this!” I begged, having enough common sense to stay away from the direct path of destruction. Deaf to my plea and driven by the furious blood pumping through his veins, Luke barreled into Tommy, wrapping his hands around Tommy’s waist and bringing him down to the ground with his weight.
Both of them managed to land enough hits and punches on each other to draw blood. What shook me more was that no one else seemed to care.
“Rowen!” I ran for the shade where Lori lay still, as if soothed into a trance by Minh’s hands running through her hair. “A little help here! Do something! Make them stop!”
Rowen looked up at me but made no motion to move.
I had to resort to the tactics of a girl stuck in a pub brawl. I latched onto Luke’s back, since he was the closest to me, and pounded my fists against him. Trying to reach around him, I yelled and pulled at the two boys’ hands while somehow avoiding being hit myself. It worked after a while: They let go and rolled away from each other.
Tommy was the first to sit up. His lower lip was split. There was a quarter of a napkin in the back pocket of my sweatpants and it looked clean, so I handed it over to Tommy. When he failed to take it, I pointed at his mouth. Absently, he accepted the napkin and pressed it against his lips.
After observing our silent exchange, Luke picked himself up and limped deeper into the oasis.
“What was that about, huh? Really?” I asked Tommy, watching a red dot soaking through the napkin.
“He’s an asshole. What would someone like you be doing with someone like him, anyway?”
The unguarded coarseness of his words took me aback. “Someone like me?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Actually, I don’t,” I said, not caring who else could hear me. “I don’t really know what you mean, Tommy, because I don’t really know you, and I certainly can’t read your mind. I’m on your side though, you know. I just hope you’re on my side too—that you’ve got my back.”
Looking as surprised by my outburst as I was, Tommy just sat there, staring at me. I had to ignore the trickle of heat spreading through my face. His eyes were so green, as if painted with impressionist colors.
“What I meant was that Luke and you … I don’t get it,” he said. “He’s the most unlikely guy someone like you could pick for a boyfriend…”
“Who said anything about a boyfriend?” I snorted in shock as Tommy’s expression grew befuddled. “Jump to conclusions much? And again, what was that—someone like me?”
“All I’m trying to say is that you can do so much better.” He wanted to add more—I saw his lips shaping up to it—but then he stopped and just gave me a close-lipped smile, an oddly disarming one.
“Tommy, I’m stuck in the desert with my four friends and my father’s research assistant. I know I can do so much better.”
I left him sitting there and walked away, headed for the palms where everyone else was haunting the shadows like a pack of homeless phantoms. Luke was washing up in the spring, the water around him turning pink.
* * *
Our collective mood was down for the rest of the day, and that was putting it lightly. While the rest of us kept to our own space, Tommy couldn’t sit still. He busied himself with rinsing the remaining fruit in the stream and separating it into six piles, each looking awfully small. On and off, we munched on our food until the sun started to set. The unspoken reality was that tomorrow we’d have close to nothing to eat unless we were willing to climb those taller palm trees we hadn’t yet stripped bare. There were no more talks about exploring the oasis or following car tracks out into the desert. This place was draining us of motivation and energy.
As night rolled in and the temperature dropped, there was nothing left to do but settle down on the ground and sleep. I nestled next to Minh, and Luke claimed a spot in front of her but facing away. I took it as a sign of Luke’s waning interest in me, which was a relief. Tommy hesitated before choosing a place next to me, leaving me staring into his back. Despite my miserable mood, my breathing soon grew measured and calm. A thick kind of sleep rolled in and carried me away. Not even the sensation of being watched by someone hiding in the black underbrush—or the unmistakable though difficult-to-comprehend-given-the-circumstances sounds of making out coming from the section of the clearing claimed by Lori and Rowen—could keep me awake.
* * *
“Noam was her favorite, you see. That’s why she let him go and not me. Forgive me for being so dramatic, but I do feel wronged by her!” The nervous lips of the speaker were moving close enough to my face for me to feel the displacement of air. His speech was accented. Something European. French, I guessed. I tried to shiver away from his breath, but something held me in place. My eyes shut tight, I couldn’t overpower my fatigue to open them and see who was hanging over me.
“Tommy?” I tried to ask, only no sound came out.
“No, no … Don’t waste your energy trying to fight her. Just listen. Listen! Just listen now,” the man who definitely wasn’t Tommy continued. His presence was fast becoming unbearable. Like a freezer door swinging open, he was letting out chilled air, while something was pressing down on my chest, making it an effort to draw enough air. I attempted to edge away from him, but my body was now weightless. I was no longer lying on the uneven ground but rather floating in the darkness of space—or in water. I wished this dream would end. I tried fighting my way up to the surface, but whenever I’d approach the glow above the water, I was yanked back into the depths.
“There were two of us stuck here. Noam and me. And he left me here … She let him go because there was nothing else he could offer her. But before she released him, she stripped him of his very soul. Which of us has a worse fate? I wonder. And now she’s got six fresh ones. I … can … hear … her belly growling all the way from here…”
His freezing breath washed over me with each new sentence, and I couldn’t stop my body from shuddering. I strained so hard, I managed to open my eyes into a slit. This was no dream at all! The man’s face hanging over mine was familiar. His skin was dark, and his eyes were milky white. He had no pupils.
He smiled at me with something like pity in his expression. I stared in horror at his teeth, rot claiming what was formerly white.
“I … know … you.” Every word was a battle against my unwilling tongue.
“Yes, yes, I guess, you do. In a way.” He gave me an eager nod, flashing those terrible teeth again.
“You’re the man from the driver’s license.” We found your bones in the desert.
Another nod, another disturbing flash of those teeth. “And you’re the girl she’ll save for last. After she devours all the others. One by one, she’ll eat you up, tear you apart limb by limb, separating soul from flesh. But she needs her sacrifice first…”
Abruptly, the man melted into the night, leaving a whiff of cold air behind him as a reminder. It shrouded me in the way of a wet, smelly blanket that was starting to grow mold.
I couldn’t sleep after that. I met the sunrise, my eyes open wide, staring at the beauty that was the auburn sun rising over the desert but seeing none of it.
WORSE THAN SABOTAGE
The morning of day three started off on the wrong foot. Rowen was missing.
I must’ve drifted off at sunrise because I was jolted out of sleep by the sound of Lori screaming. Still shaken from my nightmarish experience, I was drafted into a panicked search effort. I had no time to dwell on whether what happened to me last night was a horrid dream or some kind of actual spiritual encounter. And now we had a real crisis on our hands.
“Who saw Rowen last?” I asked Tommy as the two of us headed into one of the denser parts of the oasis. Minh and Lori were going in the opposite direction, while Luke stayed where he was, uncaring and unwilling to move. Tommy got his bowie knife out and used it to hack at the low-hanging fronds of the palm trees blocking our way.
“I’m guessing Lori, since she sounded the alarm, but everything�
�s really jumbled in my mind right now. This place is messing with my head…,” Tommy said, leaving me to wonder what exactly he meant by that. I agonized over whether I should tell him about my own increasingly unsettling nighttime experiences, but we had to stop talking when our sloppy advance through the jungle disturbed a horde of black flies. I clenched my mouth shut and followed Tommy as he raced the hell out of there. After breaking through some more of the same tight green shrubbery, we stumbled onto a miniature clearing, a smaller replica of our current sleeping grounds. That’s where we found Rowen.
He sat in the middle of the clearing, arms circling his knees.
“What are you doing out here?” Tommy asked. “Lori’s been really worried about you—” He stopped talking when he saw what I was seeing—a sea of white-and- gold foil wrappers, spread over the ground all around Rowen—wrappers from those Al Nassma candies he liked so much.
Just noticing us, Rowen’s red, tear-stained eyes rattled me. His lips were bitten bloody.
“What happened here?” I perched on the ground next to him, balancing on my heels, foil wrappers rustling under my feet.
“Where did you get all this candy?” Tommy asked, incredulous. Good question. If Rowen had all this chocolate on him when we got stranded in the desert, he must’ve hidden it somewhere in the oasis the moment we’d arrived. But surely we would’ve noticed if at any stage of our ordeal Rowen was bursting with chocolate? And surely he would’ve shared it with us? Right?
Rowen muttered an inaudible response into his knees.
“What happened?” I repeated.
“I found it…,” Rowen said. “I found it all, and I couldn’t stop. I was so hungry.”
“You found all this candy and you ate it all because you were hungry,” I said, fully aware of how thick I sounded.
“Yeah … There was a voice. It told me it was all for me. That it was a reward.”
“A reward for what?” Tommy asked.
“For telling everyone who poisoned our water stream.”
My eyes sought Rowen’s, but he was evading me. I silently begged him not to say it. Not in Tommy’s presence. Please.
“It was Alif who contaminated the spring.” Rowen looked up at me briefly, then let go of my gaze, but not before I saw her reflection in his eyes—the Queen of Giants, the lonely spark.
* * *
“Why would you do that?” Tommy asked under his breath once we’d started walking back. Unsure what to do with him, we left Rowen on his own, but after a few steps, I could hear the telltale noises of him following after us, tearing his way through the trees.
“It’s … I wasn’t even aware of what I was doing until I woke up in the morning and my fingers were numb from handling the flowers. Until that moment, I thought it was a dream.”
“Do you sleepwalk?”
“Not that I know of. It’s never happened before … I’m scared, Tommy. I’m fucking terrified!” I stopped, growing dizzy on my feet, as cold waves of dread battered me from all angles. Tommy did the thing I least expected. He hugged me. It was a short-lived but fierce hug that consumed all my senses and ignited a strange fire in my chest. When Tommy let go of me, I remained motionless, still dazed but happy in an unrestrained kind of way.
“Wait here,” Tommy said before disappearing back into the thickness of the trees we’d left behind. I heard him talking something over with Rowen but couldn’t discern what it was about. When they both emerged from the trees, we resumed walking. Tommy whispered to me, “Rowen won’t say anything to anyone about the spring if we keep our mouths shut about the candy incident. Right, Rowen?” Tommy looked in the direction of my friend.
Rowen nodded. I tried finding his eyes again, but his gaze was unfocused. I guessed this place was affecting us all in different ways.
In a few minutes the three of us made it back to the others. At seeing Rowen, Lori flung herself into his arms. He came to slowly embrace her, his movements shaky with uncertainty.
* * *
I had exactly one apple left in my allocated food pile. When I bit into it, it tasted bitter.
Rowen became more talkative after drinking from the spring and conferring with Lori in the shadows of the palm trees before the two of them joined our loose circle on the ground. This entire time, Luke avoided looking at me directly, but I could sense his stare drilling a hole into the side of my head every time I looked away. A purplish bruise around his left eye stood out on his swollen face. Tommy looked slightly better off—his face had taken less assault from Luke—but his knuckles were the bad kind of red and scraped.
Our group felt sluggish and in discord, but we had to start discussing our plans for survival—for real.
Nobody was taking the initiative, so I said, “We need to go deeper into the oasis and look for food. If our group has to split up, so be it. In that case, I’ll go with Tommy and we’ll walk the length of the oasis to the west. Depending on how we fare, we might follow the length of the entire perimeter. That’ll give us a good idea of what we’re dealing with.”
“I’ll come with you two,” Minh said, reinforcing her words with a nod. She started braiding her long hair—her way of getting ready to tough it out. I envied that she could just pull her hair up into a bun or braid it like that. I couldn’t do anything of the kind with my shoulder-length mess, which was only getting messier every minute I went without giving it a proper wash.
“And the rest of you?” I looked between those still undecided.
Rowen gave me a quick nod, which I took as a yes on behalf of Lori as well since Lori just stared back at me.
“Luke?” I made a point of saying his name, but he insisted on glaring down at his feet and not acknowledging me. Rivulets of sweat were running down his face and neck.
But after a long, awkward minute, Luke caved, and the six of us got on with our quest.
* * *
Staying under the protection of the shadows, we all headed west, keeping to the outer edge of the oasis, following the line where the sand encroached on the grass. No words were exchanged. Bound by an unspoken agreement and a sense of self-preservation, we stuck close to one another, forming a tight formation. After some twenty or thirty minutes of walking, our path dead-ended into a deep and wide arroyo. Jagged rocks framed its outer edge, coloring my thoughts with imagined pain brought on by a myriad of cuts to the skin. Not needing to confer with one another, we bore right alongside the arroyo’s outline and deeper into the oasis proper.
The arroyo turned out to be bigger than expected. Before we knew it, we were deep enough into the oasis that whatever light had been sneaking through the tight canopy overhead all but disappeared. Reaching almost to my knees, the undergrowth put snakes and scorpions on my mind. The palm trees’ trunks were so closely spaced, at times we had to take turns squeezing in between them before we could proceed. Aside from our collective heavy breathing and an occasional swear word uttered when skin was grazed by a stick or a foot slid off a rock, there was no sound. No insects buzzing. No birds cooing. None of the signs of animal life.
The oasis was holding its breath as it spied on us, waiting to see what we’d do next. Every shadow seemed to move in a deliberate way. My mind wandered, making me fixate on Noam and Alain—and their respective fates. Noam was missing for two years before walking into my father’s camp. And Alain? How long had he actually been stuck in here before finally making what turned out to be a fatal decision to leave the oasis? I imagined him collapsing on the sands and staying there, the sun melting his flesh and bleaching his bones. It was quite an effort to exorcise that image out of my mind. Alain insisted on returning, again and again, a broken record trapped under the cursed needle of an otherworldly gramophone.
I’d long lost any idea of time, and the trees and the shadows got almost too tight, almost too suffocating for us to keep pushing in. Yet, stubbornly, we kept on. The alternative to that was starving, as our fruit piles were all but gone. But the deeper we went, the more uncertain our steps b
ecame.
Rowen was the first to voice his doubts. “Okay, should we go back? Is this enough exploring for one day?” His words were ignored. We were a herd of mindless robots hell-bent on our (probably futile) mission. But then we ran into yet another natural barrier when the land started to curve, going up higher and higher. Following the elevation, the forest of palms thinned until it released us at last. We came to a narrow stretch of barren land, with the palm trees behind us and an unclimbable rocky formation before us.
I tipped my head up high to take all of it in. I’d long stopped questioning whether what I was seeing was possible. The size and scale of the oasis that emerged out of sizzling thin air to save us, the impossibility of fruit and berries in these arid parts, my all-too-realistic night terrors, the ghosts of jeeps passing through us, and now this—a mighty rock blocking our way.
We spread out to check the footing of what upon closer inspection appeared to be a hybrid between a dune and a rock. A solidified dune? I heard the spring before I saw it, its thin line of bubbling water emerging from the palms somewhere behind us and racing down the natural rocky steps to our side before vanishing into a large opening in the rocks.
We crowded around the opening. It was cut into the monolith with humanlike precision.
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