“What happened, Lord?” he asked, his voice quivering.
Satan Was In This Room Last Night. He Tried To Come For You, But I Would Not Let Him Near.
The weight of history fell all over the Earth, but perhaps was most keenly felt in the desert, where time itself crushed down the rock until it was pulverized into sand. The monotony was endless, each moment so identical to the next that Candice could’ve been trapped in a single second like an insect in amber and never notice it, never see any difference in the wind scouring the sands or the sun beating down with infinite heat or the landscape stretching on in its barrenness until it felt like the whole world had become a wasteland. Thought itself was burned and blasted and dried up, even the simple hope of escape, until only the strongest survived, while lesser men were driven mad.
“I cannot believe you,” Candice said.
“Really?” Nevada asked, lowering her sunglasses. “Candice, Sudan is old news. New Sudan now: South Sudan. It’s a new chapter in our lives. Hell, it’s a whole new book! And we’re still doing the ‘wow, Nevada, I can’t believe you’re doing something so shocking and inconsistent with social norms’ thing? Move on, lady. I stopped calling you Candy.”
“Yes, you’ve moved on to ‘sweetie,’ ‘darling,’ ‘doll,’ and ‘brown sugar.’”
“I’m so affectionate,” Nevada said, raising her sunglasses back over her eyes. “I thought you Europeans were into that.”
“Let’s review. When I went to sleep, because I’d been driving the tank we’re on for ten hours straight, I assumed you’d be driving the tank.”
“There are sayings about assumption.”
“Instead, when I wake up, I find that you are sunbathing .”
“Oh, that reminds me.” Nevada turned over, prompting an almost instinctive averting of Candice’s eyes. “What’s your damage, sweetheart? I don’t know if you’ve noticed the ratio of melanin between us, but clearly, I need to tan more than you do. Besides, we’re still making good time. Ismail’s driving.”
“Yes, Ismail’s driving ,” Candice emphasized, arms crossed.
“Yeah, and he’s doing a great job.”
“He’s twelve!”
“And this is a valuable life skill he’s picking up.”
“ How to drive an M60 main battle tank? ”
Nevada turned onto her side. “Well, you’ve got a point there; it is a pretty old model. But I think if he can figure this out, an M1 Abrams shouldn’t be too hard.”
Candice sat down on the turret with a sigh like a zeppelin deflating. “Tell me we’re almost there.”
“Yeah, yeah, any day now. We reach this hunting lodge turned refugee camp that the boss made a big donation to, they put us up, Jacques gets there with the plane, we fly out, more crazy adventures and simmering sexual tension.” Nevada flopped down onto her belly again. “Hey, there’s some suntan lotion in my bag, could you put another layer on my back?”
“You brought suntan lotion on your tomb raiding—of course you did. I’m not even surprised at this point.”
“See? New chapter, new book.”
“Stop that. You sound like Oprah before she’s had her coffee.” Candice stood again, hovering over Nevada. “And what do you mean, hunting lodge turned refugee camp?”
“You’re in my sun.”
“ Nevada .”
“ Candice .” Nevada craned her neck to look up to her. “What, it’s some missionary operation. They’ll even take the kids off our hands—I did ask.”
“ Okay ,” Candice said, sliding out of Nevada’s sunlight.
“What do you mean, ‘okay’?”
“Are you being funny?” Candice asked.
“No, no, you said it in this total Real Housewives way like it’s not okay, but you’re going to put up with it. You’re not some Richard Dawkins type, are you?”
“No, I’m not Richard Dawkins. I have a sense of irony. What about you? You’re not some Focus on the Family type?”
“Candice, I’m pretty much a sexy cat burglar. Clearly I’m not the most religious person. But it’s missionaries. Who has a problem with missionaries?”
“Well, the many millions of indigenous peoples around the world who were forced to convert on pain of death.”
“Don’t worry,” Nevada said condescendingly. “I’ll defend you from the big bad youth pastors who don’t want you to swear so much.”
“And a lot of them don’t distribute relief so much as they throw around Bibles and… socks…”
“Candice, we’re doing the missionaries’ position and that’s final.”
Candice simmered for a moment on the pun she’d walked into. “I hate you.”
“But it’s an erotic hate, like James Bond and the villain’s sexy henchwoman.”
“I’m going back inside,” Candice said, pulling the hatch up.
“So you’re really not doing my back?” Nevada called after her.
The hatch clanged shut.
“Okay, send Uday up, he has strong hands. Candice? Hello? ”
It took a few more days of travel, but eventually the unchallenged dominion of the Sahara sands began to combat the plains and low hills of what locals called the goz . The two fought like weary, wounded soldiers, with long stretches of gravel and jagged sandstone broken up by guerrilla attacks of wiry grass or thorny scrub, spreading over the gritty soil until it had taken over the horizon. After the sterility of the desert, it should’ve been a relief, but the weak and crippled attempts at growth only made the surroundings seem more lifeless. Bleached bones and desiccated corpses were the only landmarks, accompanied by dust devils clawing at the burning sands like red-handed murderers displaying their handiwork.
The sun had disappeared behind evening clouds and the heat was bleeding out of the sand like a fire guttering out when the tank came across a mother elephant and her fallen calf. The child was as big as a St. Bernard, but infinitely more ungainly. Like some cobbled together toy, it refused to function, only stirring slightly as its mother pulled at it with her trunk. It was obvious to Candice that the calf was halfway to being another set of bleached bones, but Nevada stopped the tank, got out, and brought it water in an upside-down helmet. The calf only drank sparingly, but Nevada stayed beside it as ardently as its mother, encouraging it to drink more.
The human children filed out to stretch their legs and relieve themselves, while Candice stayed on the tank in some parody of guardianship, keeping one eye on the children to ensure they wouldn’t wander off and another on Nevada. Riding in the tank, she felt like she was being shaken apart. The M60 wasn’t much more comfortable when it was parked, but Candice appreciated the stillness.
A week ago, she didn’t think she had ever seen a tank in real life. Or heard a gun go off. Or seen any blood that hadn’t come from someone’s nose. She’d been an archaeologist, working on a dig site in Meroe. She’d been more worried about contaminating her findings than losing her life.
Everything had changed so quickly that it hardly seemed real. More like some TV show where someone got bumped on the head and dreamt they were in the Wild West. The government of Sudan had been decapitated in a terrorist bombing. Another cell of that same terror network, the Khamsin, had come to destroy Candice’s dig. Nevada had saved her, then shanghaied her into an expedition inside the tomb her team had uncovered to find a treasure Nevada was set on claiming. There hadn’t been any treasure, though. Only a clue to where it had been taken, to be buried in the tomb of Cleopatra herself.
Calling on the resources of Nevada’s mysterious employer, they’d finagled their way onto a train evacuating refugees from Khartoum, which had been destroyed midway through the journey. Most of the refugees had been left to hike back to Khartoum and an uncertain fate, while Nevada had used a tank they’d liberated from the Khamsin to drive to safety in South Sudan, taking Candice, the wounded, and the children with her.
Now the plan was to get the refugees to safety and set off on the second leg of this treasure h
unt. Candice would find an archaeological treasure trove, with Nevada only taking one small trinket for her trouble.
It felt like she’d sold her soul.
Candice sometimes wished she’d stayed with her first instinct, to drug Nevada and leave her safely behind in the hotel in Khartoum while she went after the treasure… the find … herself. But she needed Nevada’s street smarts as much as Nevada needed her expertise. And she wanted Nevada to save her kid… assuming he wasn’t some con job.
Of course, even if he wasn’t, that hardly made things better. You weren’t allowed to rob banks just because you donated the money to charity. In Candice’s experience, people rarely acted according to justifications anyway; they acted according to their nature. Was the boy Nevada’s justification, or an excuse for her to indulge in her nature?
And what’s your nature, Candice Cushing? she asked herself. What is your justification and what is your excuse?
Something sparked at her eye, almost like a tear. Covering her eyebrows with the chop of her palm, she saw a metallic glimmer on the horizon with a dust storm behind it. Some futile defiance of the sun, rising up to try and blot it out before being sucked away by indifferent winds. In that miasma of torn sands, the metal vehicle gleamed even brighter.
“Easy!” she cried. “We’ve got company!”
Nevada looked in Candice’s direction, which brought her the sight of the woman standing on the tank’s cupola, as if she needed to be any taller, and pointing at the southern horizon. Their destination. Nevada looked that way, and there it was, plain as day. And if there was one thing the Sahara had in stock, it was day.
Nevada took her scope out of her pocket and looked through it.
“What do you see?” Candice called.
Nevada adjusted the scope to bring the scene into focus. “Tour bus.” Distantly, Nevada heard the whump of sand compacting as Candice hopped down from the tank.
“Tour bus? What’s a tour bus doing in a war zone?”
Nevada replaced the scope in her pocket. “Maybe it’s the economy tour.” She dropped her hand to the gun in her holster to check that its reassuring weight was still there. It wasn’t her own pistol, but a revolver she’d taken off one of the Khamsin on the train—so old that she didn’t know the make or model. But it fired.
An unfamiliar weight draped across her shoulders, and she looked up to see the mother elephant, its trunk outstretched to curl around her in some gesture of pachyderm emotion she refused to try to read into. Thankfulness or beseeching or even consoling—God, she didn’t want to be one of those people who called a pet their “fur baby.” Nevada pushed the trunk away.
“It’s tough being a mom,” she said, as if she’d know, and walked back to the tank.
She slid her dive knife out of its sheath, checking to make sure it would come out without a hitch, then pushed it back inside. Candice was standing in front of the tank, arms crossed, her strong features set with worry. Nevada emptied her own face of emotion, giving Candice a cheeky grin instead. Candice was a tough cookie and she’d taken more than most, but that was no reason to throw anything at her that she didn’t absolutely need to catch.
“Get everyone inside the tank,” Nevada said confidently. She took her revolver out and checked the chambers. Five of the six were full, the chamber under the hammer left empty to prevent an accidental discharge. She spun a loaded chamber behind the barrel and holstered the pistol again. “Aim the main gun at the bus. If I do this—” Nevada raised her fist into the air and pumped it in a circle. “Blast ’em.”
She was turning to walk out to the approaching tour bus when Candice said, “Wait, stop, what if you forget and do the sign accidentally?”
Nevada held up her fist and circled it in the air again. “How many times do you think I do this in the average day? Do you think I’m going to meet Arsenio Hall?”
“Who?”
Nevada laughed. “This is actually about as irritating as I remember commanding a tank crew was.”
“I’m sorry, the last time you told me to fire a tank’s gun, we blew up a bridge!”
“That worked out well,” Nevada reasoned.
Candice stuck her hands to her hips. “We fell off a speeding train.”
“I remember that as getting to first base with you.”
Candice’s elbows spasmed as she pushed her hands harder into her waist. “I suppose it depends on who landed on top and who landed on bottom.”
“I’m not touching that one,” Nevada said, and started off.
Nevada walked out to meet the bus and it grew like the atomic monster in some fifties B-movie. She was walking on bony grit that shifted under her with every step and flew away from her strides like its deadness was repulsed by her life. This sand didn’t feel like the good, honest soil of the Mojave she’d grown up with, or even the Arabian Desert. It was more like ashes.
Behind her, she heard the tank’s turret pivoting, the main gun taking aim at the bus. If it came down to it, she didn’t doubt that Candice would choose the refugees inside over anyone outside. Me included, most likely.
The bus stopped forty yards away from her. Peeling paint on the sides announced that it was, or once had been, ‘Big Jim’s Safari Tours.’ It was a big, gas-guzzling, diesel thing, snub-nosed, stippled with rust, and pimpled with bullet holes. The Igor of vehicles. Cargo netting had been strung through the windows and over the roof, a camel hump for luggage. The side windows had been plugged up: plywood, scrap metal, even bricks in one place. To make up for the loss of ventilation, the windshield had been taken out entirely, replaced with chicken wire stretched across the front of the cab like the face mask of a football helmet. Christian rock drooled out of the speakers. Nevada could see a Bible on the dash.
The driver wrestled aside a slab of bullet shield from the driver’s side window and pulled his upper body out into open air, seating himself on the bottom of the window panel. He held some sort of machine gun in his lap. Nevada rested her thumb in her belt, near the butt of her pistol.
A passenger worked the lever to open the bus door and stepped out. He had a .45 strapped to his belt, under a white T-shirt with a picture of a fetus on it that read ‘BABY.’ At least one of the men, Easy judged, was Dinka tribe, the same as Candice’s mother. Tall in the elegantly slender way of a Tolkien elf, with starless-night complexions and deep, radiant eyes. Candice definitely took after that side of her family.
The passenger walked out to her. On closer inspection, Nevada could see his shirt had holes along the sleeves. His sandals were a handspan under the cuffs of his too-short jeans, which were themselves wearing thin along the knees. Maybe it was Nevada’s imagination, but the sand didn’t seem to crunch under him. He stepped over it as lightly as Jesus walking on water.
“I am John Makuei Ladu,” he said in a lilting African accent. His English was good, but a bit strange-sounding. His words didn’t have a rhythm that Nevada was used to. “I come from the camp. I am here to retrieve you.”
“I suppose that makes me here to be retrieved.” Nevada glanced at the other man, the one who’d been driving the bus. He wore fatigues, in places more maroon than green or black—splotched with old bloodstains, and she doubted they were his. He had the ritual scarification of the Nuer tribe: beads of scar tissue surrounding his mouth like a second goatee and horizontal gaar lines circling his forehead. He was relaxed in a limber sort of way, the machine gun held comfortably in his grip, no nerves, no anxiousness. He didn’t expect there to be trouble. At least, not for him. “You have anything more for me to go on than a smile on your face and a song in your heart?”
Ladu looked confused for a moment. His lungs pumped his chest out and then sucked it back in. The sand blew over the hills with a plaintive wail. Nevada felt sweat between her shoulder blades, tingling a path downward like a plucked guitar string.
Shoot him, shoot the guy with the machine gun, get to his body, get his gun…
Nevada tapped her pinky against the butt of h
er revolver. Doable. Very doable.
“Mr. Pike,” Ladu started again, reverence in his voice, “said he had been given a name by your boss-man. The name is Harry Calhoun.”
Nevada felt a crack go through her poker face. Her deep, even breathing was interrupted by a sudden intake. She listened to the almost hollow, almost echoing moan of the wind.
Okay , she thought, okay .
“We’ve got kids in the tank. Some walking wounded, a few old fogeys. You can take them?”
“It is a bus,” Ladu said reasonably. “I must tell you that there are no weapons allowed at Camp Esau.”
Figures . Nevada took out her pistol. Handling the gun between two fingers, she held it up, rolled out the cylinder, and let the bullets tumble onto the shattered ground, rolling into the sands like maggots. “Now it’s a paperweight.”
She went to tell Candice they were getting bumped up to first class.
They left the tank to continue rotting, as it seemingly had been doing even when they were riding in it. In no time at all, it would be stripped, scavenged, salvaged for parts. One more set of old bones being resurrected in the decay economy of South Sudan.
The bus was just as bone-jarring as the tank had been. The music was worse. The driver pushed the gas pedal all the way down and took them up to a speed that seemed nearly suicidal, as if he was determined to kill the suspension once and for all. Through the chained windshield, Nevada could see the sands finally give way fully to browning vegetation, grass, crops, the traditional flattened savannah of Sub-Saharan Africa. It was the dry season, and the occasional brush of green seemed more like an outbreak of some disease than anything else. Farmers performed stubble burning, sending up clouds of greasy smoke and low, orange flames that bleached the landscape to a further monochrome, making it look like just another variation of the desert they had left.
The wooden stock on the FM Mle1915 CSRG the driver had leaning against his right thigh used the same limited palette. The machine gun was big enough for Nevada to make it out all the way from the back of the bus. The crescent-shaped magazine straddling the underside could leave no doubt it was the French Chauchat. It probably dated back to World War I. Made the Browning Automatic Rifle look like cutting-edge tech.
Candice Cushing and the Lost Tomb of Cleopatra Page 2
