by Steven Welch
The men thrashed their feet as best they could and grunt through their gags. She ignored them and rubbed her temple where it felt like a headache was coming on.
Maybe they would be eaten and maybe they would starve and maybe they would be saved. She was done with the men and what happened next was up to the desert.
The Treasury wasn’t rose red in starlight but it was nevertheless astonishing. Elise walked through the mouth of the Siq and into the wide open canyon of camel bones and dust.
THE HIGH PLACE
There was a platform carved of heavy rock that rested in a wide flat plain at the pinnacle of a winding path nearly two hundred meters above the floor of the Siq. This platform, this alter, looked out over the vast cityscape of Petra and it had a purpose, although the truth was lost in history.
Here, at al-Madhbah, The High Place of Sacrifice, had been made with the Gods of the Nabateans. Perhaps it was sacrifice. Perhaps ritual exposure of the dead. It was a place of holy importance.
Elise knew there was a new sacrifice to be made and if she didn’t fight through the burning of her leg muscles, she would be too late to stop it.
To summit the High Place was difficult in darkness. She went as quickly as she could but she didn’t want to break an ankle on the unsteady rocks. The winding pathway was narrow in many spots with treacherous falls and shifting rock. There was a time not too long ago when tourists would have made this journey to stand at the peak and take happy snaps of their holiday adventure. Those trips were made during bright daylight when the path was well tended by the caretakers of Petra. Those tourists hadn’t been carrying heavy gear and hadn’t been racing against time.
Elise was strong, but this was difficult in the dark and at speed.
Need to be quiet, she reminded herself. Need to hurry but need to be quiet. They’ll just do the deed early if they hear me approach.
The path was nearly vertical now. She chanced a glance back over her shoulder. The view of Petra took what breath she had left away. So huge, so ancient, so stunningly beautiful.
Go, Elise, go, she thought.
She passed two tall obelisks that seemed to stand guard over the path.
And then she was there.
She ducked her head back. She’d gotten a glimpse of the roaring pyre on top of the sacrificial rock and men standing around the blaze.
Well, I hope they didn’t see me, she thought.
Elise inspected her rifle. Clean, oiled, loaded, ready. She attached the bipod and settled into position.
She checked the sight for accuracy on a distant rock. The cheek piece at the back of the stock was cold on her skin.
Elise slowed her breathing. Focus. Concentrate. She wiped everything out of her mind except the feel of the rocks around her and the smell of burning wood. Her mouth was really dry. Maybe I could make it over there and use more of the gas.
No time for that. Limited choices here.
She used the scope to scan the wide emptiness of the High Place of Sacrifice.
Six figures wearing dark clothing and baseball caps. They stood around an open fire. Sky behind them, stars slipping into the eternity of dark blue.
Well, it wasn’t a lie. Now I wait, thought Elise.
Minutes passed. The figures moved about some. One of them pissed from the top of the summit.
Elise was sleepy. Her eyes were almost closed when she noticed movement. She focused on one of the figures as he lifted something from a large box.
He held something rectangular and flat. She adjusted the magnification on the scope.
Vincent Van Gogh’s painting of sunflowers. Sunflowers, beautiful sunflowers, blossomed. So perfect, she thought.
The figure held the painting above its head and moved toward the fire.
Elise targeted the center of the figure’s head and felt her stomach drop as she did.
I don’t want to kill this man.
Maybe catch him on the shoulder.
No. Can’t risk him dropping the painting into the fire.
His arm, just near the shoulder. Yes. His arm.
Elise fired, and the sound was a thunder strike in the silence of Petra’s dawn. She went deaf.
The figure spun around and the painting of sunflowers flew off to the left, away from the flames. Good, she thought.
There was a scramble. Two of the figures moved toward the painting. They would not stop. These were bad men and Elise would not listen to her father’s voice tell her to be kind on that night. She would do what she would.
But it’s just a painting. No. More than thought. It represents more than that.
Deep breath. Steady. You can do this.
You must do this.
Elise fired again and this time the bullet removed a man’s head just below the eye.
A moment before he had been Stefan, a farmer from Belgium who had joined the cause out of fear and to protect his family. All that was Stefan leaked into the dust.
Elise took another deep breath and cleared her mind as she exhaled and pulled the trigger five more times.
There had been, only moments before, Aldi the Jordanian merchant who was no older than Elise. Omar, John, Bartholomew, and finally John. Between the six there had been families and lovers, old fears from the days before The Turn and new hope brought by the cause they had joined. All of those things drained into the sand and all of those men were just meat bundled in cloth that would decay and become dust in time.
Elise walked shakily up the final steps to the peak of The High Place. Adrenaline and ringing of the ears made her unsteady on her feet. Her shoulder ached from the kick of the rifle butt.
All six were dead. There was movement but it was just the twitch of death and she paid it no mind. The twitching and kicking and shitting would stop soon enough.
Her boots made grinding sounds as she walked to the sunflowers but she did not hear the noise. The burning pyre ticked and popped. The flames felt warm on her face against the chill but Elise still shivered uncontrollably.
Elise lifted the painting just as the sun broke in the distance.
Rose red light washed over the valley, over the lost city of the Nabateans, and up to The High Place. The sunflowers were touched by the light so that their beauty, their vibrant shimmering colors burst through.
Elise couldn’t breathe. The work of the artist was so beautiful.
Van Gogh’s sunflowers. From the second set of the series, painted by the artist in Arles, France, 1888.
The thick swirl of paint in the embrace of the rising sun. The heavy feel of the old parchment that the artist had used because it was probably all that he could afford in those days of poverty and madness in Arles. The smell of the oils, the smell that still lingered. Elise was no longer in Petra, no longer deaf from the sound of her own gun, no longer surrounded by men she had killed. Elise was twelve years old, and she was on a field trip to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. She was free of the others, the children who were cruel and the teachers who were cold. She broke away when they weren’t paying attention and she wandered the museum alone, her thick black dress making swish sounds as she walked and her uncomfortable shoes clattering the cold tiles. She imagined that she could hear the ghost sounds of old trains in the station, could hear the voices of artists and models as they argued over pay and fought for love. She stood for what seemed an hour in front of this painting by Vincent Van Gogh in the Musee de Orsay when she was only twelve and she had been transported to a place beyond the pain and loneliness and hurt of her everyday life in Paris at that awful place she was sent when her father had died.
Six lives taken.
She looked at the fragile painting in her hands then back to the bodies that still twitched out their lives onto the ground.
Six lives for a painting. Elise felt her stomach tighten and grow cold.
Her old friend slithered out of the backpack and scuttled down her leg. He was as big as a cat, with eight suction cupped arms the color of an old white man’s sun damaged sc
alp. On four of the tentacles were feet, on the other four were tiny hands. His eyes were large and expressive, the beak of a mouth tucked away under the mantel.
The Octo-Thing rolled in the dirt, happy to have the sand and rock scratch its skin. With a soft puff of air it cuddled up to Elise and closed its eyes.
Need to get back to my horse and ride to the sea, she thought. This is done and there could be more of these men coming. I’m pushing my luck.
But my shoulder hurts and I’m so tired.
She raised her wrist and, with the twist of a steel knob, activated the glowing green screen.
“I killed six people. Maybe eight when it’s all said and done. Saved the hostage. Did I win?”
The recorded voice of the man with the French accent sounded stern this time as he answered, almost angry.
“The Aquanauts do not kill.”
“Did I win?”
There was silence. The program loaded into the wrist screen, “The Aquanaut’s Survival Guide,” had thousands of pre-programmed responses but they usually had little significance to what was actually happening.
“Did I win?”
The cheerful tone of the recorded voice returned.
“Every day survived is a win. If you are asking this question, you survived, so you win.”
Elise reached into her backpack and pulled out the warm, old, beer. She twisted the cap with shaking hands and took a deep drink. The bottle was from the time before the end of the world. Cheap beer does not age well. It tasted foul, but it was fluid and she needed fluid.
Her father was long dead, but she heard his voice then, just for a moment, a whisper in the wind as it came across the rocks of the mountain.
No. Just the wind.
Another sip and she vomited. The vomit was sudden and hard. She just missed the painting. Burning liquid backed up into her nose. Her eyes watered.
She didn’t hear the sound of her father’s voice but she heard the echo of gunshots and blood gushing from open wounds and the gasps of the dying.
Deep breath. She took another sip, and this one stayed down.
She wiped vomit from the corner of her mouth.
Elise sat in the dirt with the masterpiece in her lap, dead men scattered around her, the taste of stale beer in her mouth, and watched the sun rise over the mountains of Petra as her cephalopod friend snored softly at her feet.
THE SUMMIT
Taariq Tanaka pulled the thin gloves from his fingers so he could feel the warmth of the rising sun. He stretched and yawned. His black hair fell like a curtain over half of his lean face. The sandstone was comfortable, and he sat down to study his target again.
She had not been difficult to track. He watched her with his battered black binoculars from his perch as she walked toward the exit of the Siq.
She will make her way back to her horse at the mouth of the ravine and then he would trail her again.
The girl was dangerous. She was a legend. This is the one that everyone talked about and he assumed that her myth was just that, a fantasy, an overblown load of shit created by fevered imaginations and fools.
But she had just killed with no effort. It happened in seconds.
The legend passed the test and then some.
This girl was supposed to be the one who brought back the ocean, as foolish as that sounded, and here she was within sight. She was traveling like a plague. She had not been killed, and he had only heard of instance when she had truly been hurt while on the road.
How much was truth and how much was fiction could not yet be judged.
That’s how legends are born, he thought. In the darkness of ignorance and lies.
The girl was sick. He watched as she convulsed and something came from her mouth. Vomit. She had been sick after killing the men of The Truth at the High Place of Sacrifice.
There was plenty of sickness in the world. She might have been poisoned by food or water that was unclean. This had happened to Taariq many times.
Did the killing make her sick? Taariq knew what that felt like as well.
Maybe The Legend wasn’t as ruthless as he’d been led to believe?
Can’t think that way, he thought. She’s a world-killer and that’s all I need to remember.
The light was shades of rose red and gold as the sun moved higher on the horizon. Beautiful. Taariq considered how the light played along the rock and sand, along his dark leathers, against the deep blue of the Jordanian sky. Beauty beyond compare. He wanted to stay in Petra all morning and sip the water he had boiled over coals.
Well, they had been good men. She killed them without warning and they had been good and righteous men. They came along on this journey and they knew it might be for nothing. The plan was to draw her out was done. They paid with their lives. Now the men were dead and the sunflowers still bloomed on the parchment that she tucked into her backpack.
That will be dealt with later, he thought, and not by me.
Taariq Tanaka took a deep breath and cleared his mind. He pushed away his memories, his worries, his plans. He smelled the freshness of the air. The pain of his sore muscles, the taste of the boiled water, the sound of wind against tall stone, all of these things were pushed away. His eyelids dropped and he saw only black and red, darkness being overwhelmed by the light of the sun. He counted his heart beat.
After an hour Taariq allowed himself to pull his thoughts and sensations back into the moment. He felt clean and refreshed. He had been only a child when the world ended but he remembered his parents and some of the things they taught him during the short time that they were together. They read him stories and taught him to ride a horse. They traveled with him and he had seen other lands. His parents also taught him the value of meditation. He enjoyed thinking of the things they taught him, the good and useful things. Taariq assumed that his mother and father used meditation to calm their minds before they were tortured and killed by those men along the highway in what was once Amman.
Their screams sometimes came to him at the most unexpected moments. When he had to do bad things he heard their screams in his head and he would sometimes be sick, like the girl, perhaps.
Well, there’s no way to know how she feels when she does bad things so no point in considering it.
The sun was now well over the horizon. He rolled over, keeping low just in case the girl happened to look this way although he was so high and so distant that he didn’t think she could spot him.
He had a good rifle with a true sight and excellent barrel. Taariq was certain he could have aimed well at that moment when his heart rate was low and his mind was clear. He was absolute in his belief he could have killed the girl right then without much trouble. Probably one shot, even from this distance. Then another shot to kill that monster she kept in her backpack.
The girl was a legend but her value to Taariq was nothing if she was dead. Dead, the girl would have just rotted away. Future travelers would have found a skeleton in rotten leather and in the skeleton’s backpack there would be dust that had once been a portrait of such power, such evil.
She was tall and lean, maybe his age. She might have been pretty but he couldn’t tell from this distance, even through his binoculars.
Legends are one measure truth and one measure bullshit. How much of each in this girl?
Had she made a world of good or evil? Had she saved us or doomed us all? Was she righteous or was she lost? Perhaps she hadn’t considered alternatives to her ways. She would make a ferocious ally.
The Dream Butcher wanted her dead, but not yet, and Taariq had made that promise.
He reached into his backpack and pulled out a strange thing, like a watch face of glass and copper with a Kevlar band. Taariq did not like the thing. Apparently it was called an Aengus. It frightened him but it was necessary to the task. The device had been given to him at great cost. He’d been sent on this mission and he would do as he was told.
Taariq twisted a knob on the side of the device. There was a tiny beeping so
und. One, two, three beeps. Then, silence.
Now the Dream Butcher knew the girl was in sight. How the device worked, Taariq did not understand. He did not care. It worked. It sent its message in code over the miles and that was all Taariq needed to know.
“Keep your eye on the long game,” he said to himself as he lowered the binoculars and prepared to follow the girl known as Elise.
THE CHECK POINT
The stars were her guide on the long ride through the desert back to the Red Sea and the port town of Aqaba.
Elise slept by day to avoid the heat but that meant more time playing hide and seek with the things that crawled the world when the sun went down. She did not play her guitar on this trip, nor did the Octo-Thing fiddle his tiny violin. The vibrations of the strings carried far in the desert and would act as a dinner bell for things that lived beneath the sands. To pass time during the heat of the day, she would sleep or sketch or play sand chess with her odd little companion.
The Octo-Thing was a good chess player, but he cheated.
The moon was ascendant on the second night and she saw the familiar bioluminescent silhouette of an air jelly pass overhead at one point. The big things were rare in the deserts of Jordan, at least to her experience, and she didn’t know if that was the result of the heat or the winds or a lack of food.
There had been a time before The Turn when the only jellyfish on earth drifted on the tides of the sea. There had been a time when they were a nuisance, an oddity, a tasty treat in an Asian restaurant.
There had been a time before The Turn when there were restaurants.
Now the jellies were in the ocean, yes, but swarms of the fliers had come through the portals when the world changed and these were just some of the monsters that nearly wiped humans from the face of the earth. Elise remembered a world before there were monsters like this but that was long ago and she had learned much since then.