In the distance, she heard the scream of the horn. It made her heart race.
“Minna hurry!”
“I'm coming.” Minna's voice echoed through the tunnel. A rumble of stone shook the walls before the slender woman sidled through the narrow space to Evelyn's side.
“Let's go.” Evelyn picked up the shield that she'd dropped and bolted out into the open. She ran with single minded determination, swatting and flailing the bugs out of the way. And she'd been right in thinking there weren't as many in the air anymore—she could see farther and not as many covered her as quickly as the last time.
Behind her, she heard Minna squeak and swat and knew her sister fought the bugs as hard as she did. They made good time over the precarious path to the car, better than Evelyn going the other direction, and all of a sudden the BMW came into view, horn blasting, Rhett stretched over the seat with his foot against the wheel, his hands over the hole in the back window. There weren't as many insects on it as when they'd pulled in.
Not nearly as many. Shocked at being able to see the paint, at how the insects came close and veered away, she ran around to the passenger seat with Minna on her heels. Wrenching open the door the same time her sister did, Evelyn fell into the front seat while Minna took the back.
“Why are you laying on the horn like that? I thought something was wrong,” Evelyn said, slamming her door shut. She unwrapped Rhett's shirt from around her head and set it on the seat between them.
“They don't like the noise. Where's my father?” He glanced at Minna and retreated to his seat, throwing the idling engine into gear. With impatient yanks, he put his shirt back on, pausing to pick a bug out of the folds and kill it.
“I had to leave him behind,” Minna said.
“What do you mean, leave him behind? I don't think he would have just let you walk off alone.”
“He didn't. I knew I couldn't bring him with me, so I caught a ride with a trucker and left while he was in the bathroom.”
Rhett muttered what sounded like a curse under his breath.
“Where are we going? What about the seals?” He reversed them and spun the car around like any stunt driver might, shooting them forward away from the Dead Sea and the caves.
“The rain seal has been broken but not the Sixth. We have a little time. What's the fastest way to Philae, Egypt from here?”
Chapter Sixteen
“Does it seem like it's letting up a little?” Alexandra stared at the ceiling of the steering room. Sitting on the floor, knees drawn to her chest, she lolled her head back against the cabinet and exhaled. Three hours and nothing. No cessation in the bugs, no restart of the motor. Dracht had tried several times to turn it over. He needed to go down and get his hands on the thing. They both knew it, and both avoided it.
“I can't tell,” he said from where he leaned on the opposite wall, one boot crossed over the other.
“Are you looking?” she asked.
“Yes. It's the same as it was the last time you asked.”
“Hey, maybe they have one of those blow up boats on here. The safety raft or something. If we get desperate and the engine never starts back up, we should take that.”
“It leaves us exposed to the insec--”
“I mean if it lets up. Or if the rains come. Night can't be far away now.” Any thought of arriving in Israel today had been abandoned when the boat quit working.
“Maybe a half hour. It's hard to tell.” Dracht, arms hooked casually over his chest, stared out the window.
“Have you ever thought of doin' anything else besides this?” she asked out of the blue.
“Besides being a Templar?”
“Yeah. I mean, how is it they get all the generations to go along with it?” It baffled her.
“What's not to like? We get to travel extensively, see the world, have what we need at our disposal to get the job done. Both my brothers always liked that aspect.”
“I just thought maybe one of you'd want to go off on your own. You know. Some people do that. Start up a business from a hobby—do you have a hobby?” She looked across the cabin at his profile.
“I have several hobbies, as you call them, most revolving around my work. Swordsmanship is one of them. I like training.” He glanced at her.
“Huh. But like...other things.”
“What kind of other things?”
“Wood working, reading, canoeing, hiking...like that.” She arched a brow.
“I've been on a few climbing expeditions in my time. I like to travel. History interests me.”
“But you're kind of all about the training, aren't you?” she asked, sensing Dracht was not a man who spent too much time in idle pursuits. His outside interests, like the climbing, were probably all physically intensive.
“Of course. I like the challenge of competition. What about you?”
Alexandra quirked her lips. Just past Dracht's head out the window, something moved. Something not the bugs, that she could see only as a vague shadow that was also not the encroaching advent of night. It moved too quick for that. All thoughts of extra-curricular activities fled.
“What's that?” She frowned and lurched to her feet.
“What's what?” Dracht wrenched a look around behind him.
A high shadow slanted across the cabin just as she realized what it was. The boat, a much larger one than they were currently in, slammed into them broadside. The drone of the engine had gone unheard over the buzz of insects and conversation.
Their yacht flipped up onto its side, throwing her hard against the console and the windows—which shattered a moment later. Covering her head to protect it from shards of glass, she felt a band of steel around her waist that she recognized as Dracht's arm. He hauled her to the floor as the fishing trawler bowled right over them, pushing the back end of the boat around and all the way over upside down.
She hit the ceiling—now the floor—with a thump. Dracht lay half over her, grunting either from pain or exertion. Water flooded in, pushing at her hip and legs with unimaginable velocity. Alexandra panicked, thinking she wouldn't be able to get to the windows or the door and swim out.
Dracht had other ideas. Against the rushing stream, he jack-kicked a boot at the remaining shards of glass, bugs streaming in with debris picked up from the floor.
“Take a breath, take a deep breath—we're going out!” he shouted, tugging her with him against the current.
Sucking in a lungful of air, she submerged when he did. Combined with Dracht's strength, using the console to push against with her feet, she squirmed through the jagged hole and into the open ocean. Several slivers of glass gouged into her skin.
It was the least of her worries right now.
Dracht towed her like she weighed nothing, legs kicking, free arm slicing through the water. His strength was surprising, the hold on her arm firm but not crushing. She sputtered and gasped when they broke the surface.
“Why did they ram us?” she shouted. The trawler that hit them didn't appear to be stopping. It churned on, hardly taking any damage from what she could see. None of the insects were on the water itself, staying several yards above the surface. Which left them worry free—for now—about that at least.
“They might not have seen us until too late. Look at it out here,” Dracht said with a jerk of his head to flip his hair from his eyes. “You stay here. I'm going to go back and see if I can find an emergency flotation device.”
“You're not going back there, Dracht! What if it starts sinking and pulls you under with it? No.” Alexandra had horrifying visions of him going under and never surfacing.
He shot her an impatient look and enunciated his next words. “Alex. We're going to die of exposure out here much faster or get taken down by sharks. I don't know about you, but I'm bleeding in several places. Now stay here.”
“Dracht!” Too late. She watched him swim back toward the capsized boat, take a deep breath, and go under. Startled by something black and slippery on the water, she
slapped at it, yelping, only to realize it was her hair.
Treading water, she cast her gaze far and wide, taking in the ocean from this level. The waves were low swells that lifted and set her down gently. Ten feet above the water, the swarm all but obliterated the gray sky, a hissing, buzzing noise competing with the lap of the current against the boat's hull.
Alex felt vulnerable. Exposed. Even when she'd been held captive by the rogue Templars, there hadn't been this vast sense of helplessness. She and Dracht couldn't turn the boat back over, the one that hit them was already gone from sight, and she couldn't discern which direction had the closest shoreline. Turkey should be the nearest, but which way was it? Disoriented, she spit a mouthful of water and concentrated instead on Dracht.
How long had it been? A minute? How long would she wait until she went after him?
“Dracht!” His name floated over the water. Useless.
There was no answer. Nothing but the eerie, monochrome day and the thousands of insects that seemed never ending.
She realized the swarm didn't seem as thick as it had before; more of the darkening sky became visible in snatches.
“Dracht!” Swinging her attention to the boat, she searched the water for him. No sign. At least a minute had gone by. Maybe a minute and a half. A chill that had nothing to do with their predicament or the weather raced down her spine.
Another half minute, and she was going after him. To hell with it. Hyper-focused, she tried to will Dracht to the surface. A surreal quality painted itself over the scene, as if she might wake up from the beginning of the nightmare any second now. It didn't feel real anymore, like all this was happening to someone else.
To the side of the capsized boat, something burst up from the depths, bumblebee yellow in color, and burst open on the surface. A life raft.
But where was Dracht? She started swimming toward the raft while it inflated, spitting out another mouthful of water.
He broke the surface a moment later, dragging in great lungfuls of air.
“I thought you weren't going to make it,” she railed at him, angry that he'd worried her to the extent she was about to risk her own life to save him.
“When are you ever going to trust that faith you have in me you refuse to acknowledge?” He grasped the side of the raft and hauled himself with no small amount of struggle over into the bottom.
Alex grabbed the rope circling the craft on the other end and clasped her hand in his when he reached for her. Dracht hauled her in with almost too much ease. She thought about his comment, realizing silently that she did have faith in him. And after everything, she trusted him more than anyone else except her sisters.
Flopping onto her back, out of breath, she stared at the sky. She could see patches of it in the thinning swarm.
“I thought you'd drowned.” To her surprise, he laughed.
“I'm harder to get rid of than that. Feel up to rowing?” From a net attached to the interior wall of the raft, Dracht pulled a fold up oar. It took a tug and two snaps to make full size.
Alexandra rolled over and scooted to the opposite end, fishing out the second oar. There were only two, and she took the extra precaution of attaching the wrist strap so she didn't accidentally drop it.
Sitting on her knees, uncomfortable in soaked jeans, she surveyed the ocean with the oar across her thighs. “Do you have any idea which way we're supposed to go?”
“No. Any directional sense I had went out the window when the boat rammed and flipped us over.”
Everything looked the same in all directions to Alex. “The bugs are starting to thin though. That's something.”
Overhead, ever larger swaths of sky were visible. Alexandra considered the remains of the swarm to be stragglers, and lucky for them, the stragglers had no interest in something that close to the water.
“At the very least. I don't think I want to know when the rains might come.” Dracht stuck his oar in the water and started rowing.
Alex matched him, digging in and pulling to get them going forward. “Me either.”
Where, to what country, time would only tell.
***
Every street, every highway, every patch of land they passed wore a blanket of insects. The GPS directed them on the most expedient route through Israel, taking them past cities buried in black. Minna expressed her shock at the entirety of the coverage with small noises from the back seat. She covered the hole in the window with the windshield protector to keep the bugs out.
A half hour into their trip, just as the sky moved from gray to black, the swarm came to an end. It trickled and thinned until only a few buzzed onto some far location Evelyn couldn't begin to guess at. The ones that remained dealt more destruction by chewing through foliage, material, anything that wasn't steel or metal or hard plastic. Sometimes, even people.
The survivors they saw all had the same stunned looks on their faces. Some flashed by in cars going the other direction and once a military type vehicle blew past them for some unknown destination. In the heart of the cities people moved much slower than the panicked pace she saw in Greece. Those that dared to surface from their hidey-holes found nightmares and scenes of horror awaiting them. Evelyn caught glimpses of their faces while they drove past, moved by their plight, their obvious distress.
Children sobbed right alongside the parents.
Rhett had to get inventive to obtain gas when the stations themselves proved to be empty. He siphoned from other vehicles on roads with little to no traffic or signs of life, filling the tank and securing the plastic tubing he'd found in the trunk for later.
They had a long way to go.
Between towns, at a lonely truck stop with a convenience store attached, they found food remnants on wrecked shelves from looters who hadn't had time to take everything yet.
Evelyn ate vienna sausages, a kosher pickle and split barbecue corn nuts with Minna. It wasn't much, but it took the pangs away.
Rhett consumed his portion of beef jerky and dried banana chips without complaint.
Walking over the thick layer of bugs proved to be the harder part of finding sustenance—they wanted to cling and crawl up shoes and pantlegs. Evelyn found it much easier to fend them off this way however than when they smothered her whole.
This she could deal with.
Passing through Be'er Sheeva, the city as buried as all the rest, they stocked up on water they found at a last stop gas station and set off through the desert landscape.
A red moon rose, like it had last night, the stars seeming smaller somehow, less visible. Evelyn hated the enclosed sensation that came along with nightfall, an unusual occurrence when the nights had always seemed so expansive and limitless. They might has well have been in a snowglobe, contained and confined.
“I don't know about anyone else,” Rhett said at one point. “But I'm just glad to be able to see.”
“It's a relief,” Evelyn admitted. “I wonder how Alexandra and Dracht are faring.”
“I don't know, but when we get into Sinai, I'm going to find someplace with a working phone and call Father Valanzano,” Rhett said.
Evelyn glanced across the car, about to protest. Then she realized how foolish that would be. Whoever the elite, the powermen of the world were, they wouldn't be listening in to any conversations.
“To see if your Dad's checked in? He's probably got Christian with him, you think?” she asked.
“I don't know. I can't imagine him leaving Christian behind though.” Rhett looked pensive and glanced in the mirror at Minna before looking at the road again.
Evelyn wondered if he blamed her for anything that might happen to his father or brother, even if Christian had put himself in a bad situation. She refrained from asking for now.
Out the windows, she stared thoughtfully at the red moon. It cast a strange glow over the slithering, shiny backs of the insects, making the terrain appear alien, foreign. The desert wasn't a desert but a living, writhing mass as far as the eye could see.
/> ***
“Evelyn. Evelyn.”
She stirred at a gentle shake of her shoulder. Sitting upright, she blinked open her eyes. “What, where are we?”
“Cairo. I'm getting out to make a call. If you need to use the bathroom, do that before we get on the road again.” Rhett took his hand away and opened his door.
Evelyn realized she'd been asleep for hours. Darkness cloaked the city and when she twisted around to look into the back seat, she found Minna there, awake but looking out her window.
“All right. Be careful.” She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and stretched, trying to get a feel for what time of the night it was. Rhett had pulled up alongside a convenience store that had been ransacked at some point before the swarm set in. At a phone booth with a shell around the receiver instead of solid glass walls, she watched him punch numbers into the keypad.
“He already got gas from an abandoned car a few miles back,” Minna said.
“I don't know how I slept through all that. Did you get any rest?” she asked, glancing back again. Minna met her eyes.
“Not yet. I will on the next leg, maybe. The store has restrooms, I'm sure. Do you want to go in?”
“Might as well. We're here.” The pressure on her bladder, insistent already, would only get worse. She opened her door and braced herself for the prickly trip across the layer of bugs into the convenience store. Rhett watched them instead of facing the wall, alert, speaking too low into the receiver for her to make out any words.
At least the phones still worked.
Front windows blown out, shelves teetering at angles, the store looked a wreck. Picking her way over debris, she made her way through the mess toward the back where a sign indicated mens and ladies rooms. So far she saw no people, no bodies. The layer of insects ceased several feet into the building, giving them a clear shot to the back. On the way, Minna spotted packages of raisins and pastries that she gathered up to take with them.
Daughters of Eve Collection (Books 1, 2 & 3) Page 41