Kalahari

by Jessica Khoury

  With a mighty effort, I drew myself together and stood up. I kept my sleeves unrolled to hide my arms. The invisible counter attached to my life seemed to be ticking faster than ever.

  “Find one?” Sam asked when I returned.

  I blinked at him. “Find what? Oh. No, nothing. Come on, let’s go. We’re wasting time.”

  “Kase isn’t strong enough yet!” Miranda protested.

  “Too bad!” I snapped. “We’re sitting targets out here, don’t you get that?”

  She gaped at me while the others exchanged silent looks.

  I sighed. “Sorry. Look, we should really get moving.”

  “What if we holed up during the day,” said Avani, “and walked at night? They wouldn’t see us, and we’d keep warm by moving.”

  “There are other dangers at night,” I replied huffily. “That’s when the lions are hunting and you wouldn’t see a snake until you stepped on it.”

  “Oh,” she said, dropping her gaze. Sam gave me a reproachful look, which cut my heart, but I forced myself to remain sharp.

  “We can help Kase walk,” I said. “It’ll do him good, at any rate.”

  “I’m fine,” he said, though he didn’t look it. “Really.”

  Miranda glared at me but helped him stand up. He was a little wobbly, but I knew he would make it.

  “What do we do with these?” Joey asked, holding up an empty ostrich egg.

  “Leave them.”

  We marched on in silence, the others lagging a short distance behind me. I told myself that was best. I had to detach myself from them. Otherwise, I wasn’t sure how I could say good-bye when the time came. As I walked, I tried to work out how I would tell them about my infection. I ran through a dozen different scenarios before my courage gave out. When the time was right, I’d tell them. But when was the time ever right to admit you were dying? How could you prepare for that?

  We crossed the road before noon, several miles north of the spot where the helicopter had found us the day before. Before crossing, we waited ten full minutes crouched in the bushes, listening and watching for any sign of Abramo’s search team. Then we darted across together, leaping over the trenches in the sand.

  The water and hoodia had given us an extra burst of energy, and coupled with my hardened drive to reach Ghansi in two days, we moved at a grueling pace. I found that the faster I walked, the easier it was to ignore the maddening itch that burned on my skin. I took extra care not to brush against branches or trees, and held my arms away from my body to decrease friction from my clothes. Several times the others called for me to slow down, and I would—for about five minutes. Then I’d slowly increase my speed until we were almost jogging again.

  The edge came back to my thirst, sharp and knifing. My tongue was sticky and dry like a gecko’s toes, clinging to the roof of my mouth, but I didn’t stop to hunt for bi root. Joey had been stopping at every shepherd’s tree we passed to dig for ostrich eggs, then running to catch up to us again, but he found nothing and soon gave up.

  After a while, Sam jogged to my side.

  “Sarah, what’s wrong?” he asked sharply.

  I stared ahead, not meeting his concerned gaze. “If we walk through the night, we might reach Ghansi by dawn. I know I said there were lions, but I think we can make it. They’re less active near the villages.”

  “You’re burning everyone out. Kase is about to faint.”

  I stopped so suddenly that he walked several more steps before realizing it. He turned to face me.

  “That chopper really shook you, didn’t it?” he asked.

  I frowned, then seized on the excuse. “They were shooting at us. Of course it shook me.”

  “Me too,” he said. “But we can’t keep pressing on like this. We don’t have the energy.”

  “They’ll anticipate us heading for Ghansi,” I said. “We have to stay ahead of them.”

  “We can’t stay ahead of them if we collapse from exhaustion or die of thirst!”

  It would be so easy to tell him the real reason I was rushing, but I couldn’t stand for him to look at me the way we’d looked at Dr. Monaghan: with pity, yes, but also revulsion. I’d made up my mind to insist that he stay in Ghansi with the others. There was no way I could let him see me literally fall apart and turn into a metal monster.

  “Okay,” I said. “We’ll take a short break. But then we have to keep moving.”

  “Thank you.”

  The others dropped to their knees when Sam told them we were stopping, and though they were too exhausted to say much, they all let me feel their indignation with heated glares. Ignoring them, I sat apart and dug up bi roots, which Sam distributed, as well as some chunks of hoodia that I found.

  While the others scraped the roots and squeezed the pulp for water, Sam sat beside me and turned his tuber over in his hands.

  “Are we going to talk about what happened?” he asked.

  “What happened?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “You know . . . the thing between us.”

  The kiss. I shut my eyes and sighed. I’d hoped he wouldn’t bring it up.

  “It was...great,” I said, feeling completely lame. “But where is it going to go? You’re going back to the States.”

  “Yeah. For a little while. But then . . . ?”

  “What are we going to do? Be pen pals?” If only.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I just thought, you know, you’d want to talk about it.”

  I said nothing. I watched a hole under the bush in front of me, where a mongoose kept poking its head up, seeing us, and ducking down again.

  “Sarah,” Sam said as he shifted closer, “I really . . . like you.”

  His hand moved toward me; I jerked it away and stood up.

  “You’re a nice guy,” I said, my voice shaking. “But I don’t feel the same way.”

  The confusion in his eyes was a knife to my heart.

  “But I thought...We kissed and you seemed, I don’t know . . . into it.”

  Oh, that’s putting it lightly. “I think that when we get to Ghansi, you should go home. You don’t . . .” I paused and licked my chapped lips, glad that my body lacked the moisture to generate tears. “You don’t belong here. None of you do. Just go home and leave me alone.”

  Sam was shocked. “Sarah!”

  “I just can’t deal with this right now. Between my mom and my dad and Theo and everything else . . . I can’t deal with any more complications.”

  He stared at me as if I had tried to bite him.

  I turned away and walked to the others, feeling his eyes burning into my back. My hands were shaking again. I thrust them into my pockets and blinked furiously to cool my burning eyes.

  We didn’t speak the rest of the day, and when evening fell, I reluctantly agreed to stop. I pointedly avoided Sam, but it was hard to do considering that everywhere I turned he seemed to be there, and when I closed my eyes to sleep, I saw his wounded gaze. He was sleeping by the others, all of them pressed shoulder to shoulder for warmth. I curled up on a grassy patch ten yards away and shivered in the cold, my teeth clenched to keep them from chattering.

  It has to be this way! I told myself furiously. I couldn’t put him or myself through what was to come. Maybe I could write him a letter or something and have it sent to him after I . . .

  I cried silently, though I was unable to produce tears. I covered my mouth with the hem of my sleeve to muffle my soft whimpers, my abdomen clenched and aching from sobbing. I hated myself for being so weak. It seemed I didn’t even have the grace to die with dignity. Instead I was wallowing on the ground, weeping like a coward. I wanted to fight somehow, to prove that I deserved to walk on this Earth a little longer, but my powerlessness ate away at my core, more devastating than the metal parasite wasting my skin.

  My thoughts roamed to Dad, wo
ndering where he was, what he was doing, if he was even alive. I found myself unable to summon any hope of finding him. He was gone, just like Theo. Just like Mom.

  I am alone.

  When I finally did fall asleep, I was haunted by nightmares. Creeping monsters with their skin hanging from them in ribbonlike tatters stalked through the savanna around me, animals with the faces of my friends watched me with shining silver eyes, and my parents and Theo ran ahead of me, always out of reach, and when I called out to them they turned to show their faces were made of metal. I screamed and clawed at my own face, and my skin tore away in my hands.

  “Sarah! Wake up!”

  I jolted upright, eyes flying open.

  “Don’t touch me!” I snarled.

  Sam’s hand was on my shoulder, our skin separated by thin layer of fabric, and he snatched it away, his eyes wide with worry. Too close, I thought frenziedly. That was too close.

  “You were screaming,” he said. “You woke us all up.”

  “Sorry,” I muttered, pulling away from him. “Did you touch me?”

  “What?”

  “I said, did you touch me?”

  His eyes went to my hand, then back to my face. “No.”

  “Go back to sleep,” I said. “I’m fine now.”

  He watched me for a moment, his face unreadable, then he turned away and went back to the others. I heard them whispering to one another. It made me inexplicably angry.

  “Go to sleep!” I snapped. “We have a long way to go tomorrow.”

  They fell silent and I lay back down, my eyes smarting. I felt rabid. Was it me or the Metalcium? Would it turn me silver first and then drive me insane, or was it the other way around? I tried to remember what Dr. Monaghan had said, but I couldn’t seem to focus my thoughts.

  It took me a while to fall back asleep. The whispering started up again, but this time I held my tongue. They probably already thought I was a monster, even without seeing my face turn silver.

  I pulled up my sleeve and looked at my arm. It was hard to see, until I shifted it into the moonlight. Then the light reflected off the inside of my arm so intensely that it seemed to be emitting its own florescence. I quickly turned it over so the others wouldn’t see.

  The Metalcium had spread while I slept. My inner wrist was covered now, with just half of the bee tattoo still visible, and silver streaks ran down to my elbow. It was moving faster than I’d feared.

  Awake or asleep, I was locked in a nightmare. The whole of the Kalahari around me, the vast, starry sky above, and yet I had never felt so trapped.

  I remembered the dream catcher in my pocket and pulled it out. As I clutched it tight in my hand and held it to my chest, I felt a mellowing of my spirit. My weary eyes slid shut, and instead of the nightmare I expected, I saw Mom, her hands nimbly weaving dream catchers as we sat in a field of golden grass. Her hair was gusting around her face, blown wild by the Kalahari winds, but she only laughed when I asked if she wanted to tie it back. Instead she caught one of the wayward hairs and pulled it out, then wove it into the dream catcher. “There,” she said, holding it out. The feathers danced in the breeze. “Now you’ll dream of me.” My memory of that day mingled with my imagination, until I didn’t know how much of it was real and how much of it was spun by my own wishful heart. As that golden, windswept field faded away, Mom’s playful smile lingered, and I fell into a dreamless sleep.

  I woke when dawn was just a faint promise on the horizon, nothing more than a soft glow. Sam was the only one up, sitting cross-legged in the sand and scraping a bi root. He cast me a brief, blank look, then went back to scraping. He’d also gathered some crowfoot grass, which he portioned out.

  I stood up and stretched, careful to keep my left sleeve pinched between my palm and my fingers so that the rash of metal wouldn’t show. I felt a deep sense of calm in my spirit, an acceptance of the day and a resignation to my fate.

  Sam stood up and brought me some grass and root shavings. I asked him stiffly to set them down, and as he did I saw the skin around those lovely green eyes wrinkle with hurt. Sam stood and stared at the ground between us for a moment, while I squeezed pulp from the shavings, and then he lifted his face.

  “How long have you been infected?”

  I froze. “W-what?”

  “Sarah. I’m not stupid. When you told me not to touch you last night . . . I didn’t want to believe it, but it’s true, isn’t it?” His voice was low and harsh, his brow furrowed in anger, not at me, it seemed, but at the ugly truth.

  I drew a shaky hand across my forehead, briefly hiding the shame in my eyes. “It happened two days ago, when I went to get the baobab fruit the morning after we, um, kissed.” I glanced at the others. They were still sleeping, oblivious to our conversation. “There was an infected bush baby in the tree.”

  Sam swore and threw the rest of the shavings at the ground. “I should have gone with you. I should have—”

  “There’s nothing you could have done.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  My hand moved automatically to my silver wrist, which was still covered by my sleeve. “I wasn’t sure, until yesterday afternoon. I thought maybe . . . I don’t know. Saying it out loud makes it real, you know?”

  His eyes burned into me, his misery cutting me deeper than my own. “We have to get you to a hospital.”

  “Sam, I don’t think—”

  “How far to Ghansi?”

  “Two days at least, and that’s even if we hike without breaks from dawn till dark. It’s not possible. You saw how quickly Dr. Monaghan went, after it started.” I pulled up my sleeve and showed him the infected patch of skin. His face went white. “It’s too late.”

  “We have to try!”

  “Sam—”

  “I won’t let you die!” he yelled.

  His shout woke up the others, who looked at us groggily and asked what was wrong. Sam exhaled bitterly and ran a hand through his hair, his eyes squeezing shut.

  “Nothing,” I said. “We should get going. There’s some bi root if you want it.”

  While they roused themselves, I walked a short distance away, motioning Sam to follow. When we were far enough away not to be overheard, I whispered to Sam, “Don’t make this harder than it is and blame yourself. Look. You’re right. We’ll get to Ghansi and I’ll go to the hospital. They’ll figure something out.” My head spun suddenly and I stumbled. Sam’s hand shot out to steady me.

  “No!” I snapped, pulling away. “Don’t touch me!”

  “You’re pale,” Sam murmured. “Are you sure you can walk? I’ll carry you if I have to.”

  “No, you won’t. You’ll lead the others to safety is what you’ll do. I can take care of myself. And please don’t tell them. Not yet.” I didn’t want them to look at me the way Sam was, as if I were some kind of ghost.

  The others were ready to go. They huddled together, stamping their feet to keep warm, their breath frosting the air. Avani watched Sam and me suspiciously. I sighed and stepped around Sam.

  “We should go. Moving out, people,” I said.

  They groaned but nodded. Sam said nothing, but I could feel his concerned gaze burning at the nape of my neck.

  I turned to face north, drew a deep breath, and then began to walk.

  A few steps was as far as I got. Lights suddenly blasted from every direction, blinding me, and I stumbled back. The others cried out, equally disoriented. I blinked furiously, my eyes feeling scalded, trying to make out what was going on. Hazy shapes formed in front of me, like distorted reflections: a group of men in camouflaging khaki rising out of the grass, standing beside a trio of Land Rovers with their headlights on full blast. The lights centered on us, leaving me feeling almost naked, the beams so strong they seemed to hold us in place with physical force. My eyes foggily focused on the men. They all had guns, and they were
pointed at us.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Lookee, boys,” said the lead man, a tall African with a clean-shaven skull. From the French bent to his accent, I judged him to be from the northwest, perhaps Niger. “I think we found Mr. Abramo’s missing kids.”

  Abramo himself was nowhere to be seen. He must have had more than one group of mercenaries scouting the Kalahari. It was a cruel trick of fate that we should walk right into this one, this close to our destination. There were half a dozen of them, big, tough-looking guys with dusty bandanas tied around their heads and necks, dressed in faded fatigues that might have been scavenged from a handful of different militias.

  They cocked their guns and Miranda let out a sob. Our hands were all lifted, and I pushed mine forward as if I could stop the bullets with just my bare palms.

  “Wait!” I yelled. “You really don’t want to do that! I swear, you’ll regret it!”

  The men hesitated but didn’t lower their guns. My mind raced like a frantic gazelle trying to outrun a cheetah. My friends all looked at me with such desperation, such hope in their eyes that I felt nauseated. Think, Sarah, come on. . . . I snatched the first wild idea that drifted by.

  “Where’s Abramo?” I asked, in as stern and sharp a voice as I could muster.

  The Nigerien man narrowed his eyes. “I am in charge now.”

  “I have information for him,” I said to him in French. “Information he’ll reward you for. You know about the Metalcium outbreak, right?” He nodded and spat, not taking his eyes off me. I drew a deep breath and, switching back to English, laid down a mighty bluff. “I know what the cure is.”

  “Ha!”

  “What do you have to lose? Take us to Abramo, and if I’m lying, you can do what you will. But if you hurt my friends or me now, you get nothing, and when the infection takes over, which, believe me, it will, you’ll die.”

  He considered me doubtfully as he clicked his teeth together. “Tell me what it is.”

  “I’m not stupid. I want to talk to Abramo.”

  The Nigerien sneered. “How could a girl know what these rich scientists do not? They cannot stop this silver poison—how can you?”