The Vanishing Tribe

by Alex Archer

  He turned and faced the old man, a gleam of triumph in his eyes. “No visitors, huh? You had better start talking or I’ll start shooting,” he said. “And if I do, I’ll start with that boy right over there.”

  For a moment the old man stood straight and tall, trying to stare him down, but then his shoulders slumped in resignation and he began to talk.

  25

  The elephant led Annja back the way he had come, beneath the boughs of the eucalyptus tree and along a long, winding path with more dense undergrowth on either side, until they emerged into a sun-dappled clearing.

  There, half-hidden in the undergrowth, was a temple.

  Or, at least she thought it was a temple. It was hard to tell because of the amount of vegetation covering it, but she’d seen enough structures like this one to make an educated guess. It rose out of the bushes and trees around it, a squat structure made of large, oversize blocks of dark stone fitted together like a giant jigsaw puzzle of rock. It immediately reminded her of the photographs she’d seen from Farini’s son, Lulu, which supposedly showed the remnants of the lost city that they had discovered in the midst of the Kalahari. This structure before her now had the same look and feel to it as the one in Lulu’s photographs, a sense that it was so old it had stood here and been ancient when ancient was still young.

  But what was it doing here, in the middle of nowhere? And who had built it?

  While she stood there staring at it, she felt Tantor’s trunk against her back and give a shove from behind.

  The message was clear. What she was looking for was inside that building.

  “Okay, okay, I’m going,” she said.

  He nodded that big, bony head and then turned his attention to the succulent green leaves hanging inches from his face and began eating.

  “Right. You stay here and pig out while I go exploring,” Annja said with a laugh.

  She dug her flashlight out of her pack, turned it on and headed into the temple’s interior.

  The building was designed like a lollipop, with a narrow entrance hallway leading to a wide circular chamber that rose two stories off the ground and seemed to be some kind of gathering place. Narrow beams of sunlight shone down from where small sections of the roof had collapsed over time, allowing her to see that much of the floor was covered with what appeared to be stone benches arranged in a semicircle facing the far side of the room. She could see balconies lining the second story, as well, providing even more seating.

  Annja pivoted, focusing her attention in the same direction those sitting in the chairs would have done so long ago, and that’s when she saw it.

  A large circular image had been carved into the face of the wall ahead of her. It showed three concentric circles made up of various images set inside one another and surrounding the carved image of an oversize elephant skull in the center. It reminded her of a Mayan calendar, though of course the symbols were different. Same layout and style.

  She found herself wondering which one had come first.

  Annja moved forward until she stood directly before the design. Switching on her flashlight to get a closer look at some of the carvings, she noted how they had been cut out of the stone so that they stood in bas-relief against the backdrop behind them. She could see an antelope, a wildebeest, what looked to be a giraffe, a set of wavy lines like water, a pair of humans hunting with what appeared to be spears, a sunlike object...

  Wait a minute.

  She took off her backpack and dug into the pocket where she had stored the cloth she’d taken from the elephant tusk the night before. Unrolling it, she compared the symbols on the cloth with those on the wall.

  It took her only a few moments to find all five of them.

  Excited, she realized that she was looking at the next clue. All she had to do was figure out what it meant.

  She’d spent time the night before trying to decipher some coherent story from the symbols on the antelope hide without success and she knew now that that had been the wrong path to follow. The symbols weren’t supposed to tell a story in and of themselves, she realized, but were markers for something else.

  And she thought she knew just what that was.

  She stepped forward until she stood before the first symbol on the cloth, the antelope.

  Her hand trembling, Annja reached out and pushed against the symbol.

  For a moment, nothing happened, and Annja began to suspect she’d guessed incorrectly, but then there was a sudden movement beneath her fingers and the antelope sank down into the surface of the rock behind it to disappear from view with a loud click.

  Annja stepped back, waiting to see if something happened.

  When nothing did, she turned her attention to the second symbol, that of the sun.

  Locating that symbol, she reached out and pushed against it, this time harder. The sun immediately sank into the rock wall with another click.

  It’s a lock, Annja realized, and the symbols were the combination.

  She quickly ran through the rest of the symbols—the river, the elephant and the snake—then stepped back.

  For a moment nothing happened and Annja was afraid she had done something wrong, but then the room was filled with a strange series of clicks, one after another, as if different switches were being thrown, and then, with a clunk of finality, a symbol at the bottom of the carving popped out about an inch.

  Shining her flashlight on it, she saw that it was a symbol of a building, much like the one she stood in now.

  She reached down and pulled it, revealing the drawerlike compartment behind it.

  Inside was a small, leather-bound journal tied shut with a piece of rawhide.

  Carefully, Annja lifted it out of the drawer and carried it over to one of the sunlit benches where she could get a better look at it.

  The rawhide was only loosely tied and came apart easily.

  Annja turned to the first page, which was covered with a bold scrawl from top to bottom.

  I first heard of the Lost City of the Kalahari while traveling in Kenya with my son, Malcolm. He was little more than a boy at the time—ten or eleven years old—and we had just returned from an expedition to...

  Her eyes widened and Annja skipped ahead to a random page in the middle of the book. The same person had written there, as well.

  The second expedition has ended in as spectacular a failure as the first. I don’t know where my calculations went wrong. Based on the coordinates in Farini’s notes I would think...

  Annja leaned back. The book was Humphrey’s private journal, it seemed, and given what she had read so far it contained an accounting of everything he had done in his pursuit of the Lost City of the Kalahari. It was an invaluable find and would be particularly useful in fleshing out the back story surrounding Humphrey’s final expedition for the Chasing History’s Monsters special she had promised Doug.

  With more than a little trepidation, she gave her attention to the journal and turned to the final page with writing on it. There she found a note of a different kind.

  We meet again. Congratulations on deciphering the clues I’ve left along the way. If you’ve managed to get to this point, I have little doubt that you’ll be able to reach the final destination, as well.

  I leave in the morning on the last leg of my own search for the Lost City of the Kalahari. I’m convinced I’ve located it and hope to stand within its walls in just a short time. Farini’s notations have proved to be a godsend. I highly doubt I would have gotten this far without them.

  I’m leery of becoming another Fawcett, so I’ve been leaving this record behind me as I go. I’ve been hiding each waypoint behind simple clues that will keep the rabble out but that any adventurer worth their salt could decipher. As before, if you’re reading this, things did not go as well as I had hoped and I have been unable to clean up the trail after me. If, by following in my wake, you discover my fate, please inform the necessary parties. There is no harsher fate than to be lost and forgotten.

 
Good hunting!

  Robert Davis Humphrey

  Written beneath the signature was a set of map coordinates.

  Before she had the chance to begin figuring out just where the coordinates would lead her, there was a loud report from somewhere outside the temple. Annja immediately recognized the sound as a gunshot.

  A big one, too, from the sound of it.

  She had no idea what anyone could be shooting at out here, except...

  Tantor!

  Annja stuffed Humphrey’s note into her pocket, snatched up her backpack and ran back the way she had come.

  26

  Annja raced out of the temple and back into the sunlight. She was just in time to see Tantor crash to the ground with earthshaking force, blood leaking from a bullet hole just above his right eye and staining his hide red.

  She rushed to the elephant’s side, oblivious to the fact that she had dropped her backpack somewhere along the way. She fell to her knees and threw her arms around Tantor’s massive head, hugging him to her breast, knowing instinctively there was nothing she could do. The elephant was already dead—had been since the bullet from a high-powered rifle had entered its brain seconds before—but its body just hadn’t accepted the stark reality of the situation yet. Annja watched as Tantor’s eyes rolled in their sockets, the big beast struggling in vain to understand what had happened to it. It let out one final lungful of air.

  The elephant went still.

  Annja slumped forward, her head against the animal’s pebbly hide.

  Behind her, a man said, “How touching.”

  Annja knew that voice. She stiffened, her mind working to understand how they had found her, caught up with her, even as hatred and rage bubbled over.

  She was going to make them pay for what they had done.

  Blood smeared her shirt and stuck to her skin but she barely noticed as she spun around, searching for and then finding the owner of that voice.

  Malcolm Porter.

  He wasn’t alone, however, not that she had expected him to be. His hired gorilla, Bryant, stood behind him, cradling a big-game rifle in his arms. Several of Porter’s other goons stood behind them, standing watch over a bound and gagged Dr. Crane.

  For a second she considered calling her sword to her and rushing Bryant. Obviously he had fired the killing shot and she was reasonably certain she could reach him and gut him down the center before he had a chance to bring that big gun to bear. Still, she suspected even an idiot like Porter couldn’t miss her at that range.

  It was tempting, though.

  She looked Bryant in the eye and said, “I’m going to kill you.”

  No bluster, no boast, just a plain statement of fact.

  Bryant seemed taken aback for a moment and then laughed it off. “You’re welcome to try.”

  Porter scowled. “You’ve led us on quite the chase, Ms. Creed, but that’s over now. Dr. Crane has told us about the clues my father left to the location of the Lost City. Be a good girl and turn them over to me now, why don’t you?”

  Annja stared at him without saying anything.

  “Uncooperative to the end. I expected no less,” Porter said with an unsettling smile. “So be it.”

  He extended a hand toward Bryant, who was already in the process of passing Porter something.

  Realizing what it was, Annja charged.

  She made it three steps before the dart took her high in the chest, near her neck. She yanked it free and managed another step before the world seemed to tip up on its side and she crashed to the ground as darkness closed in.

  The last voice she heard before unconsciousness claimed her was Porter’s.

  “Search her.”

  27

  Annja came to in the back of a moving vehicle with a pounding headache, probably a side effect of whatever they’d shot her with. Despite the pain, her thoughts were reasonably free of fuzziness, for which she was thankful. Getting out of this mess was going to be hard enough without having to fight through fifty feet of cotton between her ears.

  She opened her eyes to find that she was slumped against the passenger door in the backseat of a moving sport utility vehicle. Her hands and feet were secured with plastic zip ties that provided very little room for movement, but were thankfully secured in front of her body rather than behind. In the front seat ahead of her were a driver and one passenger, both men in their mid-thirties. She didn’t recognize either of them, but the assault rifle on the dash was proof that they were in Porter’s employ.

  In the seat next to her sat Dr. Crane. He was awake and staring out the window beside him with a dull and listless expression. His hands and feet were also secured with plastic zip ties, although his were stained with dried blood. The gashes in his flesh beneath the tight black loops of plastic told of his efforts to try to free himself.

  He turned to face her when he realized she was awake.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Where are we?”

  “A few miles southwest of the White Valley, near as I can tell.”

  “Any idea where we’re going?” She looked around outside the truck. They were bouncing along a barely beaten track in a westerly direction.

  “Unfortunately, no. They took what looked like a journal from you and a few minutes later loaded us up and got under way.”

  Looking past the driver’s shoulder, Annja counted four vehicles ahead of them. She twisted around to look behind them, saw one, possibly two, more. It was hard to tell with all the bouncing around they were doing.

  “What do you think will—” Crane was cut off by an angry snarl from the man in the passenger seat. “Quiet, back there!”

  Crane dutifully shut up, but Annja saw no need to cooperate in any way. Flustered guards meant distracted guards and distracted guards improved their chances of escape. If they wanted to get out of here, they were going to need to start taking control of the situation and not follow along like docile sheep.

  “How did they find the temple?” she asked.

  Crane glanced worriedly at the men in the front seat, but answered anyway. “They told the elder they’d start killing tribespeople if he didn’t tell them where you were.”

  Annja was surprised. She hadn’t expected coercion to work on a man like Mmegi. “He gave me up, just like that?”

  Crane shook his head. “No, Porter killed Xabba and threatened Mmegi’s grandson, Nemso, first.”

  “That son of a—”

  “I said shut up back there!” the passenger snarled, snatching his gun off the dash and pointing it at Annja.

  She laughed. “What are you going to do?” she taunted. “Shoot me? Somehow I don’t think Porter would be all that happy about that, especially given the trouble he went through to bring me along on this little jaunt.”

  The driver gave the passenger a look, and Annja knew she’d won that round.

  But the guard was more intelligent than she’d expected.

  He laughed in her face and turned the gun on Crane.

  “So I can’t shoot you. Big deal,” he said. “But no one said anything about keeping your friend here alive and well, so if you open your mouth again I’ll shoot him instead. How’s that sound?”

  This time, Annja kept her mouth shut.

  “See that?” he said. “A little cooperation and no one gets hurt. That’s not so hard, now, is it?”

  Annja refused to respond.

  Laughing at what he clearly felt was a victory, the guard faced forward once more.

  But Annja was far from done.

  She caught Crane’s attention with a soft snap of her fingers. When he looked her way, she inclined her head toward the guard sitting in front of him and then mimed slipping her arms over the back of the seat and pulling backward.

  Crane understood what she wanted, but seemed dubious about his ability to pull it off. He grimaced and cocked his head slightly as if considering his chances.

  Annja was insistent. All she needed was a few seconds of d
istraction and then it would be all over for the two guys in the front seat. What she was going to do to get them away from the rest of the convoy she didn’t yet know, but she’d figure that out when the time came. For now, though, they had to gain control of the vehicle if they wanted to escape.

  Crane looked a little shaky still, but she ignored his unspoken pleas for a different course of action. She nodded her head once, emphatically, in his direction and then pretended not to see the pleading expression he was giving her. He’d either pull through when the time came or not. There wasn’t much she could do about it and so she just barreled ahead as if he’d accepted her plan.

  Annja sat up a little straighter in her seat and put her hands in front of her stomach, palms up.

  The guy in the passenger seat glanced back at her, but must have been satisfied with what he saw for he faced forward again without saying anything.

  He was going to regret that oversight.

  She looked at Crane and saw that he was starting to sweat. If they didn’t act soon, the guard would notice something wasn’t right.

  She flashed her fingers in a countdown.

  One...

  Two...

  Three...

  Crane lunged forward, extended his arms over the head of the man in the passenger seat so that his PlastiCuffed hands were directly in front of the man’s neck and then hauled backward with all his might.

  That was all Annja had time to see before she reached into the otherwhere and drew forth her sword, the same sword that Joan of Arc had once wielded in a righteous battle of her own. The sword materialized in her cupped palms, the blade thrusting forward as it came into existence. The sharpened steel went through the seat in front of her, pushed through the body of the unsuspecting driver sitting in that seat and came out the other side just to the left of his sternum. The blade was so long that the driver was able to look down at several inches of solid steel where it emerged from his chest.