Despite my patchy sleep last night and the unfortunate toxic-flower incident (which I’d written off as some kind of a sleepwalking episode better kept secret), I felt refreshed, even optimistic. If only my clothes didn’t feel so disgusting against my skin, I’d even say I was full of ridiculous glee. I was alive, after all! My disturbing dream about the fireball in the sky and the gigantic figure in a throne room now seemed like just that—a dream.
Unfortunately, the rest of our group didn’t seem to share my soaring mood.
“We don’t know anything about this place. It’s a bad idea to split up,” Luke, quiet all morning, snapped at Lori.
“What can possibly happen?” Lori, face red, was turning more irate with each word.
My eyes wandered to Tommy, who came to stand between Lori and Luke. I recognized my father’s “teaching” intonation in Tommy’s voice when he addressed Lori, “I’m with Luke on this one. We’re not leaving anyone behind. We’re not splitting up.”
Lori grimaced in response. It was obvious she wanted to challenge him. But knowing Lori, she also wanted to ensure she had someone else’s support first. So she stared at Rowen until he looked away. Finding no backup, Lori shook her head and said nothing.
With our group in discord, we ate our meal of leftover apples and peaches from yesterday as well as a handful of strawberries Minh and I picked out from the grass. Then the six of us split into smaller groups and took turns kneeling and drinking at the section where the spring water was least muddled by the sand.
After a short reprieve, Lori picked another fight with Luke. Their voices, growing shrill and breaking, forced me to seek solitude. It was either that or attack someone with my bare hands. My temporary euphoria had been totally destroyed. Who were these people? As I observed my friends, I could barely recognize them. Or maybe they were like this all along, their true natures merely hidden by the excesses of Western civilization, only showing through now, in this extreme situation of life and death. And who was I to judge, anyway? I was perhaps the worst of them all, the water poisoner.
I grabbed an apple from our quickly diminishing common pile and walked as far away from the group as I could while still keeping them in my sights. I found a spot to sit by the roots of one of the taller palms, its core straight as a needle and hard against my back. After I settled in, Tommy left the group and followed me into the palm grove.
“Can I join you?” he asked, standing over me. He looked uncertain, as if he really needed my permission to sit here.
“I don’t own the oasis. You can sit anywhere you’d like.”
He sat next to me, his hands propping him against the ground. “I woke up early this morning and did some exploring on my own,” he said.
My breath caught. I prayed Tommy didn’t notice how my tentative smile faded. Was he going to tell me he saw what I did to the spring? I went on the offensive.
“I thought we weren’t supposed to split up?”
“I didn’t go far.” He shrugged and didn’t say anything else for a long moment. I was waiting for him to accuse me of sabotage, but he stayed silent, pensive. I started to relax again, even coming to enjoy that fuzzy feeling brought on by being singled out by Tommy. But mostly I just felt like I always did in Tommy’s presence—squirmy under the scrutiny of his pale green eyes, their color stark against his bronzed skin. He moved a tad closer to me and now, in addition to my nervous discomfort, I worried that I smelled from all the desert wanderings and from sleeping in my clothes. If I did smell, he didn’t show it.
Not looking at him, I said, “Still, you should’ve been more careful. We know nothing about this place, and if you’re too far when you call for help, no one will hear you.”
“I know, but I’m fine. And, anyway, if there’s one person in our group who shouldn’t be left on her own it’s Lori. I don’t think she’d last long.”
“You might be surprised about her.” I shrugged. “If I had to bet on the last person standing at the end of our ordeal, I’d bet on her. She’s resilient.”
“Resilient maybe. But is she also armed?” He pulled a hunting knife from a hidden leather scabbard I’d taken no notice of before. The blade—not that long, maybe three or four inches tops—hooked near the tip and overall seemed rather sharp. The way the blade reflected the light made me want to edge away from it, and from Tommy. As if sensing my unease, he put the blade away, tucking the scabbard back behind his belt and under his shirt.
I asked, “You’ve been carrying that in your pants the entire time you were at the camp? Why?”
He chuckled. “It’s like a Swiss Army knife, but for archaeologists.”
“Never heard of archaeologists carrying hunting knives that size.”
“Technically, it’s a bowie knife. And it was a gift from Dr. Scholl when I got accepted into the honors program. He gave one to all his students.”
My mouth fell open. Dad giving out knives to his honors students? “Wow. My family was never much for hunting, but, who knows, maybe one day Dad will gift me with a knife too.” I didn’t mean to sound bitter, but I guess I did, because Tommy reached out to touch my shoulder. A soothing kind of gesture, it was a light pat. Still, I flinched in response. Tommy immediately took his hand away, but his eyes stayed locked with mine. “Alif … I hope you’re not jealous or something.”
“That’s ridiculous. Why would I be jealous?”
“I don’t know … You don’t seem to like me very much, and every time I mention your father or my work with him you do this I’m repulsed thing with your face and shoulders.”
“I do not … I’m repulsed thing? What does that even mean?”
He did a poor imitation of me, and it looked as ridiculous as it sounded. I really hoped he was exaggerating and I didn’t actually look like that.
“I’m not repulsed. And I’m not jealous and I don’t … dislike you.” I was grateful he couldn’t hear the wild beating of my heart.
Tommy went on. “I’m not sure if you know this, but I grew up in foster care. And while I know many kids have good experiences there, I didn’t. Dr. Scholl is the closest thing I have to a father.”
“I didn’t know that,” I mumbled, a wave of shame washing over me. I’d never admit it, at least not to Tommy, but I did get jealous over Dad being excessively nice and fatherly with his research students, most of all with Tommy. But hearing about Tommy’s childhood made me feel petty and spoiled.
He chuckled at my fumbled response. “That’s okay. I’ve barely had a conversation with you that lasted longer than a minute until now.”
It was my turn to chuckle.
“What’s so funny?” he asked.
I fought off an onslaught of nervous giggles but couldn’t control the burning blush dancing on my cheeks. I met his eyes and almost shuddered at how focused he seemed on what I had to say.
“It’s just funny that we had to get stranded in the desert to get to know each other.”
COGITO, ERGO SUM
Tommy told me his morning solo expedition took him on a half-hour trek eastward following the line where the desert and the oasis met. Tommy saw no signs of the oasis curving, which would’ve hinted at its eastern limit. That’s why, he said, his suggestion to the group would be to walk west, to see if the situation was any different in that direction. By the time we rejoined the group, Lori was sunbathing, with her tank top rolled up and her toned stomach exposed to the sun. Her hair, a messy bird nest in the morning, was now tightened into a high ponytail. Rowen, hunched next to her, was holding a gigantic palm leaf over her head to create a shade. His uncovered neck was turning that deep red hue that screamed blisters. He didn’t seem to care.
Minh and Luke huddled together in the shade. Though their voices were too low to distinguish words, it was their aggressive gesticulating and facial expressions that gave them away. They were arguing. Upon my approach, with Tommy lagging behind, the two of them looked up and became unnaturally quiet. I studied Luke’s face—his cheeks were sunken
and his eyes, normally bright blue, were darker now, hooded by bloated, reddish lids. If I didn’t know better, I would’ve sworn that Luke looked wronged and betrayed. It didn’t take a genius to suspect it was likely because of my tête-à-tête with Tommy in the bushes. But given the circumstances, it was hard for me to care about Luke’s feelings. I didn’t want to confront him about this tension between us either—it’d just add to the fire of our group disarray that was already burning bright. I focused on Minh instead. She stood up and approached me, but Luke remained seated, feigning indifference while clearly listening to our conversation.
“What’s with Lori baking in the sun?” I asked. “Is this some kind of spa-in-the-desert delusion?”
“She’s in denial.” Minh spared a long stare in Lori’s direction. I followed her eyes to see Rowen pick Lori off the ground and half carry, half drag her into the shade. Lori was playfully fighting him off while laughing.
Minh shook her head at them and said to me, quietly, “We need to get out of here, Alif. And soon. Before Lori snaps and kills us all in our sleep. I swear, I heard her going on and on last night about a ‘sacrifice.’ I know she’s our friend and all, but she gives me the creeps now, and this whole thing between her and Rowen…” She stopped midsentence, her eyes suddenly looking everywhere but at me.
“What do you think Lori meant by that? A sacrifice?” I asked, struggling to keep my tone flat amid the blood rushing to my head, dizzying me.
“Well, she was asleep,” Minh replied. “So it must’ve been some kind of dream or hallucination—either way, something freaked her out. Big-time. I guess it really burned her out, because she kind of crashed after that, hence the sunbathing trance.”
I briefly met Tommy’s eyes, wondering if he was thinking what I was thinking, remembering my recent assurances of Lori’s resilience. Maybe Lori wasn’t as solid as I thought. Then my own dream echoed in my mind in all its surreal glory, and I grew silent. My fingertips were still a little numb from handling the poisonous flowers … Could Minh and Tommy sense that I was keeping something from them? To shift attention away from myself, I focused on our survival plan. “Do you think Lori actually should stay behind after all? Because we were thinking we need to explore the rest of the oasis, and soon.”
“We?” Luke snarled, catching my muted words. “As in Tommy and you?” His voice was unrecognizable, hoarse, and scary-low. “Does this mean you’re finally hooking up with your forever-crush?” The malice in Luke’s eyes made me want to take a step back. I fought the urge to look over at Tommy, who was somewhere behind me.
I met Luke’s stare with one of my own and held his attention long enough for him to grow tense and look away first.
But it was Tommy who spoke. “Seriously? We’re stranded in the desert and you’re still wasting your energy pining over Alif? Just give it up, man, and focus on surviving.”
Luke readied to answer him, sitting up taller and opening his mouth, but whatever words were building inside his throat were swallowed by the wild roar of car engines.
Four-wheel drives! Our rescue was here!
Everyone was on their feet. We exchanged feral glances and then we were running for it, dashing like a pack of wild dogs toward the sound of our salvation. In a flurry of galloping legs and waving hands, we left the oasis.
I caught a glimpse of Lori’s ponytail, swinging as she sprinted ahead of me, heading straight for the gray-yellow cloud on the desert and a jeep emerging from it. The jeep, though seriously covered in dust, spotted a familiar lineup of logos for the dig’s sponsors.
“Dad!” My voice broke into a scream and then a coughing fit. But that didn’t stop me from screaming at the top of my straining lungs. I tripped in my mad dash but held my ground, stumbling my way through the stretch of desert that separated me from my father and the cool breeze of the car’s air-conditioning. The others were around me, on either side of me, behind me, all of us yelling, moving, jumping … If we had a flare gun, it would have been fired.
Not long now. We were saved. A miracle!
As the first jeep approached, I saw another following. I came to a halt, catching my breath, but Luke and Minh kept on running for a few dozen feet before reaching Lori and slowing down. Tommy and Rowen must’ve been somewhere behind me.
People in those cars, they must have seen us by now. I started to move again, not running but walking fast toward the jeeps, which were still a few hundred feet away, speeding at us. Up ahead, Lori fell to her knees and dug her hands into the sand. She sobbed, her cries turning into screams.
I caught up with Minh, our eyes meeting briefly. Together, alarmed, we watched Lori digging her hands into the ground and throwing the sand all around and over herself. I hadn’t been sure what to make of Minh’s story about Lori freaking out in the night, but here was some truly unsettling behavior right in front of me. But even more alarming, though the cars should’ve been slowing down by now, they weren’t.
After coming to her feet again and even taking some tentative steps forward, Lori let out an animalistic sound of defeat. The same suspicion that was building in my brain must’ve hit her too. The jeeps weren’t going to stop. As if they couldn’t see us.
The first car drove straight at Lori, swallowing her in the cloud of dust. The car kept on moving. Half concealed in its swirling column of dirt, it was now headed for me. I squeezed my eyes shut.
Nothing, just some cool breeze on my face.
I kept my eyes closed. Was this death? Was there some sort of an afterlife? I’d read somewhere that because our brain was normally the last organ to go, there was a brief period of time when a dying person knew they were dead. Following this disturbing idea, another thought filled my brain: Descartes said “I think, therefore I am”—cogito, ergo sum. And right now, I was most definitely thinking.
I opened my eyes. The desert all around me was still, undisturbed.
“It went right through her…” Tommy was the one speaking. “A mirage?”
Frozen like an awkward statue carved out of disbelief, Lori was half splayed, half seated on the ground. I looked back in the direction where the jeeps had gone. I could still see them—the cars’ white plates glittering in the sun. And then they were gone over the dunes.
I came to where Lori sat, her legs half buried in the sand. The rest of our miserable group followed suit, surrounding her, our weakest link. I said Lori’s name, but she gave no reaction. Her skin was dangerously red. She needed shade. And water. I was about to say it, but Rowen must’ve been thinking it too. He grabbed her by the waist and pulled her up. Cradling her in his arms, he carried her back into the oasis.
I watched them disappear into the shade of the palm trees. The rest of us followed, our shoulders sagging in defeat.
A NIGHT VISITOR
Rowen’s voice was shaking. “Are we seriously not going to talk about it?”
“What exactly do you want to talk about?” Luke, back to sulking in the shadows, sounded bored.
“How the jeeps came to our rescue and then didn’t even notice us! They nearly killed Lori!”
Luke shrugged. “Lori’s fine, isn’t she? Better than new. Just quiet and slightly less annoying than before.”
“I’m also okay. Thanks for caring,” I muttered, but only Tommy looked in my direction. He was also the only one doing something productive—picking the few fruits still left on the trees and piling them on the ground in the shade.
“Not much we can do now, right?” Tommy said, not pausing in his work. “I say we stick to our original plan and go exploring. We might be stuck here longer than anticipated.”
Admit it—we’re utterly screwed, I read between his measured words.
“Well, I say bullshit,” Luke spat. From his place on the ground he was watching Tommy like a jaguar in wait, about to spring out and go for the throat. “Those cars appearing here means civilization’s not far away. I say we follow their tracks in the sand before they disappear. Only a total idiot would stay here one
more night!”
A menace to his movement, Tommy dropped his fruit pickings and took a step toward Luke. Crossing his arms tightly over his chest, Tommy said, “Only a total idiot would wander off into the desert to follow the tracks of an imaginary car.”
“It wasn’t imaginary, and you know it!” Luke jumped off the ground and came face-to-face with Tommy. Luke’s fingers were curling into fists, and his shoulders were pulled back. It would’ve been funny to watch him fluff up like a fighting peacock if it wasn’t so disturbing. I always knew there were emotions underneath Luke’s mild-mannered surface that were less than pleasant, but the only time I ever saw his violence take physical shape was when he made my bully bleed. Ever since, Luke had filtered his anger, only letting it show through verbal aggression and tense body language. But now the desert was pushing him further and further from forced civility, filling me with fear of what was to come when Luke’s facade finally broke for good.
It was time for the voice of reason to intervene. I hoped that voice was going to come from someone other than me. I looked around, finding Minh, but her attention was on Lori. The latter was curled up on the ground, her head resting on Minh’s lap. In a rare show of genuine gentleness between them, Minh was patting Lori’s head, not unlike a handler of wild beasts pacifying a distressed animal. Rowen was also focused on Lori. Okay, I would have to be the voice of reason then. I approached Luke and tried to catch his eye. It wasn’t an easy task to get and hold his attention, since he was engaged in a whoever-looks-away-first-is-a-loser game with Tommy. When I succeeded, I said, “There’s a strong probability that we had a group hallucination and imagined those cars.”
“Strong probability my ass…,” Luke growled, but choked on the rest of his sentence when Tommy’s open palm connected with his chest. I was close enough to Luke to feel his warm breath on my neck as the air got knocked out of his lungs. Luke stumbled back but didn’t fall. If Tommy thought he was going to slap some wisdom into Luke, he was dead wrong. Instead of wising up, Luke turned the color of beets, nostrils flaring and lips twisting into a scowl. Gone was the cocky guy I’d kissed just days ago. I quickly moved aside as Luke lunged at Tommy, but the vegetation underneath his feet got him tangled up, giving Tommy an opening to deliver another blow. This time Tommy’s fist collided with Luke’s shoulder. From a bystander’s perspective, the hit looked deceptively weak, even gentle. Tommy didn’t want a fight—that much was clear. But, again, Tommy didn’t know Luke. Hell, even I couldn’t say I knew Luke, but based on what I did know about him, Luke wasn’t the kind of guy who responded well to being slapped around. This was going to end badly.
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