Candice Cushing and the Lost Tomb of Cleopatra

by Georgette Kaplan

  “Five…”

  Nevada jammed the Shadow 2 between her hostage’s shoulder blades. “You know, back in the States, we’d call this a Mexican Standoff. I’ve never been to Mexico, but I have been to Texas. That’s where I learned to catch a bullet in my teeth. You know the trick to catch a bullet in your teeth?”

  The Shadow 2 popped like a champagne bottle, its bullet punching through the hostage’s body. It was lost among the splatter of the exit wound for a lethal moment—Nevada could’ve sworn she saw a glint of it—then it was gone, zipping over Candice’s shoulder and into Steyr-Hahn’s face, where it ripped open his cheek and chiseled out a row of his teeth. Steyr-Hahn gagged, sunlight hitting the back of his throat.

  “Guess not,” Nevada finished.

  In a spasmodic jerk, Steyr-Hahn returned fire, bullets burrowing into Nevada’s shield. She could feel the momentum of the impacts walloping his body, breaking against her own like the tide. In one smooth motion she brought the Shadow 2 out from behind the hostage and slid into a firing stance, the pistol extended out along her straightened arm like a knight’s lance, lined up with the world and the horizon and Steyr-Hahn’s center mass. As Candice broke away from him, slipped out of his slack grip like a cake of soap in the shower, Nevada fired again, exploding his chest, heart’s blood bursting out of his front and running down his back. He rocked on his heels, no strength left to hold his pistol up, and it dangled from limp fingers as he stumbled back, crashed against the well behind him, and somehow miraculously held his balance leaning against the rock. The gun dropped to the ground.

  Nevada tossed the hostage aside to enjoy his new orifices, walked up to Steyr-Hahn, and saved some ammo by giving him a shove. “Remember the Alamo,” she said as he plummeted fifty feet down to meet his new neighbors. The crocodiles would like the company.

  “Nevada!” Candice yelped, and she turned to see that the other guy was still alive despite a half-dozen holes airing out his chest cavity. She fired from the hip, quick as a gunslinger, and took a chunk out of the man’s waist. He didn’t go down, didn’t go into shock. He was scrambling for the carbine that Nevada had dropped, clawing for it like a man climbing out of hell, and Nevada could only think how lucky she was that she’d discarded the two in opposite directions.

  She’d fired two shots from the Shadow 2, which left fifteen in the magazine. She kept pumping them into the man, one after the other, but he kept going. Wouldn’t lay down and die. The Ash Army will gladly give our lives for the Lady Tendai.

  He wasn’t moving when Nevada fired her pistol into slide-lock. Bulletproof vest. Had to be.

  “Is he dead?” Candice asked.

  “Let me check,” Nevada said. Dropping the Shadow 2 into its holster, she walked up to the body, picked up the carbine, set it to full-auto, and let him have another magazine in the face. “Yes.”

  She slung the Scorpion over her back and grabbed the body by the hands. “Get his legs.”

  “Why?” Candice asked, somewhat reasonably.

  Nevada was already dragging him toward the well. “We can’t just leave him up here.”

  Lugging the body to the well was a far more formidable task than it looked. In life, he’d had the elfin slenderness of a runner, his weight certainly less than two hundred pounds. But in death, he easily weighed twice that. Candice was out of breath when they came to the well. She and Nevada shared a glance, then they hurled the body over the side in perfect sync.

  Sweating, Nevada dropped down against the well, which was just high enough to offer some shade to a sitting body. Candice joined her, as wrung out emotionally as she was physically.

  Curiously, though, she didn’t feel the same rawness of tender nerves she’d had after her first nightmarish meeting with Easy Nevada, when they’d both nearly starred in an Al Qaeda beheading video. She hadn’t been able to stop shaking for so long that she didn’t remember stopping. Even in the past few days, Candice could recall catching her hands trembling at odd moments.

  But this wasn’t like that. There was a tremor in her fingers, but it hadn’t caused her to let go of the corpse. She felt it as abstractly as if it were happening to someone else. And already it was receding, drawing away from her like the sea at low tide. Candice couldn’t explain it. Was she that jaded to the violence already? Or did it have something to do with the calm confidence she’d felt as Nevada had been her usual annoying self to their captors?

  Candice still thought Nevada had little-to-no idea what she was doing, but she didn’t think the woman would allow her to come to harm. She wasn’t sure if the long-lost son story was real, but she believed that Nevada would fight tooth and nail to defend someone once she’d decided they were in her little tribe. And apparently Candice qualified.

  If she was going to be hurt, it was going to be after someone had stepped over Nevada’s cooling corpse. That probably shouldn’t have been reassuring. Yet her hands weren’t shaking anymore.

  “You sure you’re okay?” Nevada asked, looking at Candice oddly. For maybe the first time, Candice wondered what was behind those soft blue eyes. What Nevada was thinking, feeling—covering up with all her quips and constant motion.

  “Close enough,” Candice said.

  Nevada nodded. “Good. I don’t think I have time to give you a sensual back massage, although it would be very therapeutic.”

  “How you can be horny when you just killed two people?”

  “One person. I’m pretty sure the crocodiles got the other.”

  “There are crocodiles now?”

  “Uh-huh.” By happenstance, the two of them had sat down within arm’s reach of where Nevada had dropped her backpack. Nevada took the canteen from it. “More crocs than a Wal-Mart.”

  “You didn’t hurt any of them, did you?” Candice asked, preemptively aghast.

  Nevada took a swig of water and gulped. “No, no. What do you think I am, some madwoman who goes around blowing away every bit of wildlife I see?” She held the canteen out to Candice.

  “Killed two people,” Candice reminded her. “Just now.”

  “Let’s call it one and a half.” Nevada got up and quickly sorted through their belongings. It took a second to check out her hurt arm and she seemed pleased; apparently it wasn’t as bad as it looked, though Candice blanched at the bruising. Next, she unloaded and reloaded the guns, tucking the empty clips away in her backpack. The soldier’s Steyr-Hahn she picked up, safetied, unloaded, and put away in the backpack as well. Finally, she slung one of the pack’s straps over her shoulder.

  “Good to go?” she asked Candice.

  “I’ll bloody well walk away from here,” Candice replied. “Not that there’s anywhere to walk to.”

  “Oh ye of little faith.”

  They walked for two miles, Nevada consulting her GPS as ardently as a fortune teller peered into a crystal ball. Candice didn’t care where they were going. Whatever she felt, whatever had infected her when she’d had a gun pointed at her head only for its holder to be shot down in turn—she could push it behind her. She walked, the sun shone down on her with warm weight, and the towers of rock all around were beautiful: twisting and stretching and swooping up into the air in a way that she barely believed stone was capable of.

  There was still a part of her that resonated on a frequency with the killing and the danger—like she’d hit her funny bone, or her ears hadn’t popped on an airplane. She didn’t know what to call it: weakness? Compassion? Sanity? But she was getting better at mollifying it. Motion. Exertion. Opening her eyes wide and drinking in the world around her, letting it remind her that she was still alive, still around to enjoy all this. She was sweating and her leg muscles were starting to burn and she was alive. Not dead.

  Suddenly Nevada hugged her from behind, an arm across Candice’s collarbone, hand patting her sternum enthusiastically. “Here we are!” she declared. They’d emerged from a slot canyon into a clearing of plateaus with a megalith the size of an apartment block in the middle. As impossible
as it now seemed, flowing water had carved out the bottom of the stone, leaving it looking like some massive tree trunk that a lumberjack had taken several cleaving whacks at. Nevada pulled Candice into the grotto, where the shade was such an instant relief from the glaring sunlight that it made the space seem refrigerated.

  “Pull up a rock,” Nevada said, sitting down on one of the several waist-high boulders that littered the ground.

  “What are we going to do here?” Candice asked, following Nevada’s advice. Sitting down after the long, hot walk felt almost orgasmic. “Hail a cab?”

  “All good things to those who wait.” Nevada checked her watch. “Give it a few minutes. You’ll like this next bit. It’s been running through my mind all day.”

  “Right.” Candice knew better than to doubt Nevada, but at the same time, she was hardly in a mood to indulge the woman’s dramatics. She looked around, taking in the almost subterranean space that Nevada had led her to.

  The cleft in the rock was maybe two and a half meters high, and stretched under that tall ceiling for several yards before stopping in a disconcertingly organic sweep of stone. It reminded Candice of some primary school health class on fallopian tubes, though perhaps that was just Freud at work from beyond the grave.

  Then she saw something, some exotic texture to the darkness that shouldn’t have been there, a misapplied brushstroke on the shadows that painted the rock. She took out her cell phone and turned on its flashlight.

  In the light from her two-year-old Nokia, she saw a frail link to a past as distant as the bottom of the sea: maroon and white and ochre paint shaped into cows, camels, lions—engravings depicting men and women that were long dead—cave paintings tens of thousands of years old. Nothing as simple as art, but an attempt to physically capture the raw power of life, nature, the things that dwarfed primitive man. Less writing and language than dreams put down on the only thing that could hold them, some shamanistic, hallucinogenic thing invoked like a spell and shattered by time into a million possibilities. Was it decoration? Magic? A diary? After millennia, there was nothing to glean from them but the truth of their existence—the feeling that eons ago, there had been people who had wanted others to see what they saw and feel what they felt. They hadn’t been so very different from her.

  Candice let out a shrill, unbelieving laugh.

  “Yeah,” Nevada said. “I thought you’d get a kick out of that.”

  Candice turned to her. “You… knew?”

  “It’s on the tour.” Nevada glanced up at the paintings. “Fuck, that guy’s dick is huge.”

  Candice looked, then shrugged. “It’s probably just the lighting.”

  Nevada shared a laugh with her. For a moment, she looked weirdly herself —not putting on an act, not trying to look cool, but more like a rambunctious kid enjoying a small prank or dumb joke. Then Nevada coughed and dug into her pocket.

  “Here,” she said, taking out her phone. “More nerd shit for you.”

  “Seven years in university and I end up a grave robber,” Candice lamented.

  “It’s only robbery if you take something. This is more like grave tourism.”

  It was a video. Hieroglyphics—possibly a whole dig site down that well. Candice opened her mouth to insist on going down there, then saw the crocodiles. It could wait. Still, she made a note to herself to save the GPS coordinates. This place could be an archaeological treasure once they had the army of assassins off their back.

  “What’s it say?” Nevada asked.

  “Play it again,” Candice said. She took out a notepad and pen, translating as Nevada held the phone for her. “Do you always rely on some brainiac to do the hard work for you?”

  “It’s how I got through high school. But don’t worry, I made it worth their while. And mine. Something about a girl in glasses…”

  “Makes me glad I wear contacts.” Candice stopped writing. “Okay, rough translation, but this first line is distance markers, same as back in Meroe. Exactly the same. It’s either an accounting of their journey up till then or maybe directions on how to get back. This next line is presumably where they went next. West approximately two hundred and fifty miles, to something called the Doubled Tree. Probably some local landmark they could use for navigation.”

  Nevada scoffed. “They already went eight hundred miles to get here . That wasn’t far enough?”

  Candice looked at her. “Maybe they didn’t want your skull coming back.”

  Nevada massaged her temples. “Okay, two hundred and fifty miles west, that’s…”

  “Middle of the desert,” Candice said. “Borkou.”

  “And we have to find a burial site no one else has found in two thousand years.” Nevada huffed a sigh. “What we really need is a guide. Someone who knows the desert like the back of their hand, knows what this Doubled Tree is, and knows how to do the whole Lawrence of Arabia thing.” Nevada looked at her phone again. “I’m going to check LinkedIn.”

  “Actually, I may know a guy.”

  Nevada glanced at Candice as she took out her own cell phone and booted up a map. “You? You know a guy? Candice, you don’t know anyone.”

  “Yeah,” Candice said to herself, “Faya-Largeau, that’s right on the way to Borkou. Well, it’s a place in Borkou—”

  “Is he reliable?” Nevada interrupted.

  “Reliable? Yes. Sure. He’s my granddad.”

  “Your grandfather?”

  Candice nodded.

  “We’re going to the middle of the Sahara, with two separate groups of crazy people trying to kill us, and you want to bring your pop-pop along?”

  Candice stood, stretching, relieved to find that her feet felt much better after their rest. “He’s a Hadendoa nomad. He’s been traveling the desert his whole life. Right now his tribe’s in Faya; I’m sure he’ll help us out.”

  “What, because he’s family?” Nevada gave Candice a condescending look. “This is why America invented Thanksgiving, so we’d all remember that families suck.”

  “We’ve been writing letters back and forth since I was old enough to read. He’s a good guy. And what’s your big plan for getting there? Take the bus?”

  “I’m an American, Candice. I don’t take public transportation.” Nevada sighed in frustration. “The treasure’s never just in someone’s junk drawer. You always have to put together three pieces of a map and travel to the middle of nowhere and solve a puzzle with stones—those guys on Storage Wars have no idea how easy they’ve got it. Okay. Guess who’s coming to dinner.”

  “It’ll be fun!” Candice insisted, feeling an unaccountable excitement. She hadn’t spent much time with her grandfather, but when her father had taken her to visit him, he’d always struck her as the kind of highly competent sage that gave the elderly a good name; far from the doddering old man Nevada seemed to expect. “You’ll like him. He has a scimitar.”

  Nevada grunted and nodded, staring at the cave paintings.

  “So we do still have to get to Faya-Largeau,” Candice said. “It’s two hundred miles.”

  “Yes.”

  “And we’re in the middle of the desert.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are we just going to walk?”

  “Candice, I already said I’m American. Be patient; I’ve thought this through.”

  “Well, which is it: are you American or have you thought this through?”

  Nevada shook her head and looked over the cave paintings some more. It was twenty minutes before she spoke again, and then it was just to say, “I think that’s Waldo in the upper right corner.”

  Candice pushed her over into the sand.

  It was then they heard the phlegmatic slap of running feet compacting sand into more sand. The sound was echoing through the rocky clefts and Candice felt the odd animal suspicion of something she could hear but not see. Then the footfalls resolved themselves into a marathon runner rounding the corner. He wore running shoes, running shorts, and a tank top as bright as a robin’s breast,
with name and number signposted on the front of it. A Camelbak was slung over his shoulders.

  Nevada waved her arms in the international signal for distress. He kept going at his cool, collected pace, a white man, skin burnished with sweat and suntan, until he was next to them. He regarded them smilingly, but with concern in his eyes. “You ladies alright?”

  “Sure,” Nevada said, before Candice could even think of answering. “We just got a little lost. We’re tourists.”

  “Free climbers,” Candice said, remembering that Ennedi was a popular rock-climbing destination.

  Nevada quickly shot her a look. “Rock-climbing tourists,” she confirmed, turning back to the runner. “You must be with Le TREG. I don’t suppose there’s a bus stop or anything around here, is there?”

  “No, but I’m about…” the runner consulted his watch, “three hours out from the next checkpoint. There should be some people there.”

  “Three hours,” Candice repeated dismally. She tried to make herself like the sound of it. “We can do that. I’ve been meaning to jog more.”

  “Yeah, jogging,” Nevada agreed as noncommittally as possible. “Hey, marathon man, I’ve always wondered: What happens if one of you guys has a stroke when you’re running or something? They can’t have doctors everywhere , so what happens? Do you just die ?”

  “No, no…” He showed them an armband with an electronic device the size of a beeper on it. “This monitors my vital signs. If there’s a big change, they send a medevac chopper to airlift me out. But that probably won’t happen. I’m in pretty good health.”

  “Yeah,” Nevada concurred, sizing up his biceps. “You on the Paleo diet?”

  “No, can’t say that I am.”

  “Too bad. Cavemen were really well-known for having six-pack abs.” Nevada eyed the monitor. “You know what’s really interesting about that? It looks almost exactly like that thing.”

  She pointed over the runner’s shoulder. He twisted around to look, and the moment his head was turned, Nevada had one arm around his throat, the other collaring his arms, tying him up in a Gordian knot as she choked the breath out of him.