With every pile of sand they moved from the top of the Land Cruiser to the desert floor, Candice tongued the bump on the roof of her mouth. Still wasn’t gone. Probably heal faster if she stopped tonguing it. She touched it again anyway. Dammit.
Candice stabbed her shovel into the sand and flung it over her shoulder. All at once she heard a click and felt a sharp pain in her back. Double dammit.
“What’s wrong?” Nevada asked, having heard Candice’s pained gasp.
“Nothing,” Candice replied, holding her lower back. “I think I pulled something. I’ll be fine.”
Nevada skidded down the dune, dropping her shovel to take Candice by the shoulders and lead her into the shade the jeep cast. “Sit down, take a load off. I’ll finish up.” She reached through an open window and brought out one of Usama’s waterskins, dropping it in Candice’s lap. “I’ll rub some Ben Gay on you later. It’s a lot more platonic than it sounds.”
“I’ll bet.” Candice shifted to get comfortable.
Nevada picked up her shovel, slinging it over her shoulder. “And after that, we’ll see how things go. But it is called rub and tug, not rub and don’t tug.”
Candice sighed as she uncorked the gerba. “You do of course know why you keep hitting on me, don’t you?”
Nevada steadily ate into the sand with her shovel. “Because eventually you’re going to be overcome with lust and throw yourself at me, so we’d better get your feelings for me on the table first or else I’ll feel like a slut.”
“I think you want me to fall for you because it’ll give you some validation that you’re this lovable person who’s… capable of being loved.”
Nevada stopped digging. “Wow.”
“Which you are!” Candice added hurriedly as Nevada started digging again. “But you don’t need to have sex with me to prove that to yourself.”
“Yes, but I want to ,” Nevada stressed. “You have a really nice ass and these tits that are just top-notch, so, respectfully, and with the fullest regards for your intelligence and your talent and your overall nice personality… I really want to fuck you.” She finished off with a shrug.
“‘Overall nice personality’?” Candice asked.
“You have some quirks.”
“You kill people for a living!”
“I rob graves for a living. The dead people are more of a hobby.” Nevada staked her shovel into the ground. “Okay, that should do it.”
They deflated the tires, then took the floor mats out and laid them behind the tires. It was slow-going, but Nevada managed to back the jeep out of the dune. When she put it into first gear and twisted the wheel to take them to the side, there Usama was, standing right in front of the grille holding a cat.
“Where have you been?” Nevada demanded, launching herself out of the front seat.
“Finding this one,” Usama replied, holding up the cat. It wasn’t a breed Candice recognized, but it resembled an orange tabby, or maybe a tiny caracal. “He’s a sand cat. I found him chasing scorpions. It’s good luck to catch a sand cat.”
“You’re not going to hurt him, are you?” Candice asked suspiciously.
“No, no,” Usama demurred, and indeed, he held the cat gently. It submitted to being petted with feline contentment. “You let them go once they’ve caught all your bad luck in their fur. They take it with them.”
Candice gave in, crowding up to Usama to pet the cat. Even Nevada leaned in to tickle its chin.
“I suppose he can stay until after breakfast,” Nevada said. “You missed out on all the fun, exhuming our ride.”
“Then it is working once more?”
“Yeah,” Nevada nodded. “Air conditioning and everything. I take it all back about the Japanese. Their car takes a beating and keeps on going. It’s a regular Irish housewife.”
Candice glanced at her. “Not funny.”
“Haven’t you heard? Comedy isn’t supposed to be funny these days. Comedians just talk about how they were abused as children and can’t get dates. You go to a comedy club, it’s like being someone’s therapist with a two-drink minimum.”
“Any therapist you have would need two drinks, minimum,” Candice retorted.
Usama handed her the cat. “I believe I will fix breakfast.”
Breakfast ended up being kofta—ground beef rolled up into balls with egg yolk, bread, and spices, something like giant meatballs if the spaghetti were replaced with rice and gravy that was practically in drag as curry. Usama apologized for serving it cold, but Nevada came up with an ingenuous way of heating it on the Land Cruiser’s engine—Candice didn’t want to know how she had learned that trick.
It tasted good, but Candice couldn’t really comprehend the logic of eating something so spicy in a desert. She was sure she used up twice as much water as usual just washing the meal down.
Candice drove, Usama in the front seat quizzing her on what the different dials meant and how the controls worked. Nevada sat in the back, her arms crossed impatiently until the shuffling of the Land Cruiser lulled her to sleep. She didn’t look peaceful, her teeth grinding together and her head slumped to the side as if she’d taken a punch.
Every time they crested a dune, the desert stretched on to eternity ahead of them. The scalloped hills only made it look more endless—without them, Candice could’ve convinced herself that infinity was a trick of the eye. But there really did seem to be no end to how much sand was laid out in front of them. The more she drove, the more Candice felt a dreamlike haze descend over her. The dunes blurred together until she was seeing them without seeing them: seeing through them to the undying wind that sculpted them into the delicate yet imposing mounds that broke up her journey. And seeing inside them to the impregnable rock they’d once been, before time had broken the sand down like a blacksmith’s hammer at work for eternity.
The engine kept up an invigorated roar, pushing the four-wheel drive through the soft, giving sand that tried to bog them down, and making it splash out like an exhale of cigarette smoke. But no matter how exclamatory their wake was, it didn’t last long before the wind had its way with it—tearing down their tire tracks and kicked-up sand alike into the same unvarying ripples that lay ahead of them. At times, Candice saw a glimmer of metal in the distance and wondered if it weren’t their own vehicle, the Land Cruiser somehow following itself through a desert that was one big circle.
When she realized she was nodding off, she shook her head to clear it. “Say, Grandpa… where did you get that rifle?”
Usama hefted his Lee-Enfield, an almost quaint-looking bolt-action rifle, so wooden it looked more like a walking stick than a gun. “It was my father’s,” he said simply.
“Your father?”
“Yes. Here. Look at this.” Under the muzzle of the rifle was the bayonet mount, but there was no spike, only a jagged metal end half an inch long. “It broke off. Father showed me that the first time he let me use it.”
“Wow.” Candice looked it over. Military history wasn’t her specialty, but if she’d added up the dates right, she’d guess her great-grandfather fought in the First World War. “British?”
“Yes. The colonial government of Sudan at the time. Not so popular these days, but my father vowed loyalty to them. He was very proud to have such a fine weapon and very proud to have a son to take it. Why do you ask?”
Candice didn’t quite know even as she spoke. “No reason, really. I’ve just been thinking lately about—archaeology, I guess. How we see the Egyptians and the Nubians from where we’re standing. And how people are going to see us in the future. As these terrorists or…”
Usama considered this, dropping the rifle onto his lap. “It is a little presumptuous, is it not?” he asked finally.
“What is?”
“To imagine how you’ll be seen so many years in the future. Granddaughter, as long as our lineage stretches back, the desert has been here longer. It is the only thing I truly own. And next to it, I’m nothing. This heritage you try so hard to for
m in your mind—perhaps it’s not meant to be held there. Perhaps it’s something you touch.”
“You really think that’s all it is?” Candice asked. “Me caring about you and you caring about your father, all the way back?”
“I think people can choose their heritage. Either hate and fear and ignorance, or love. There’s more than enough of all of them in everyone’s blood.”
Candice thought on that for a moment. She could agree with Usama’s sentiment, but there was something in it she took issue with, something she felt compelled to voice. “I used to love …” Candice drew out the word like she was slowly biting into a piece of chocolate, “coming to visit you. I never quite felt I fit in in London. All the cars, the people, radios and subway cars. The desert was so quiet. And everyone looked at me like... I don’t know. Never any second looks, nothing out of the corner of the eye...” She glanced at Nevada’s fleeting reflection in the windshield. “The way they must look at her wherever she’s from. And now I look at the desert and... it’s death.”
“It’s both,” Usama said simply.
“I wish I could go back to it just being the first one.”
Candice saw another glint of metal, this time much closer. She stepped on the brakes.
Nevada woke with the sudden change in motion. “Eh?” she asked, her confusion somehow irritated.
“Over there.” Candice pointed. Fifty feet away was a low, rippling sand dune, little more than a fold in the fabric of the Earth. A metal cylinder laid across its backbone, forty feet long, maybe the height and width of a subway car, with a crude lean-to at one end. Candice couldn’t make out what it was until she saw the tail fin at the other end. “It’s a plane,” she said.
Nevada crowded in between the front seats, settling her elbows next to the headrests. “Looks like a B-17 Flying Fortress. Must be a couple decades old. Sucks to be them. Let’s go.”
Candice looked at her incredulously. “You don’t want to check it out?”
“We don’t have time,” Nevada insisted, looking at the Cruiser’s GPS. “We’re twenty miles out and you wanna stop?”
“I would like to stop,” Usama said. “For… male business.”
“Number one or number two?” Nevada asked.
Usama drew himself up. “I would not bring it up if it was number one.”
“Okay, fine,” Nevada said. “But I’m eating a sandwich while we’re stopped.”
Nevada grabbed her Scorpion and Shadow 2, while Usama took his Lee-Enfield. Candice guessed it was something they had in common, though Nevada wasn’t so paranoid that she held a weapon at the ready like Usama did. True to her word, she took a ham on rye from the cooler in the back and bit into it as they walked up to the wreck.
Cresting the hill that the back half of the plane was embedded in, they saw a wing jutting out of the hollow between dunes, climbing up nearly fifty feet. There was no sign of the other one. Nevada guessed that was why the thing had crashed in the first place. They came to the lean-to, a tent constructed out of what looked like parachute canopy, a ghostly membrane still pulsing and fluttering with the wind. Usama went first, brushing it aside with his rifle. With the first step, he nearly fell in—Nevada’s free hand lashed out, grabbed the back of his shirt, and hauled him backward.
Kneeling, Candice took out a flashlight and turned the beam downward. It was like a mineshaft going straight down, its mouth covered by the tent. Nevada crouched down beside her. “Radio compartment, bomb bay, flight deck—” She glanced upward. “She must’ve come down in a nosedive, smashed straight into the sand, then the back half broke off and fell over…” She directed Candice’s flashlight upward to see into the aboveground portion of the plane. It was an empty circular shaft, olive-green, with two gunnery positions on the side and an open door. Though mostly dark, light flooded in through the waist gunner windows and door, sparkling almost mockingly on the dusting of sand that had seeped in to cover the floor. “Waist section,” Nevada said. “Tail gunner will be at the back.”
Candice stood up and backed out of the tent, looking at the exterior of the bomber. The metal was rusted and pitted, but it was mostly intact. The driving sand had only vandalized the craft, unable to make it rot or decay. “You think anyone could’ve survived that?”
Nevada took hold of the parachute fabric that’d been used to make the tent protecting the interior from the elements and gave it a rustle. “This didn’t build itself.”
Candice looked down the buried half of the airplane—it reminded her of a grain silo, plunging straight down thirty feet through narrowing, constricting passages of metal to terminate in the nose section. She could barely make out the bottom, but it looked like the glass in the flight deck had shattered, mingling with the sand that had punched its way inside on impact. Her flashlight beam threw back glints of light when she looked down.
“This is my first time in an airplane,” Usama said.
“Beats flying in coach,” Nevada replied.
“There is no danger here?”
“Tetanus, maybe.”
“I will take my leave then.” He held the rifle across his chest in a mild salute. “I will return, having attended to my business.”
“Remember to take a hall pass,” Nevada quipped.
Usama looked quizzically at Candice.
“Ignore her,” she said. “She’s being American.”
Usama strolled back to the Land Cruiser, where he dug into the back for a spade, a roll of toilet paper, and a beach umbrella, Candice was amused to see. He took all three with him behind a sand dune, where there was plenty of privacy to be had.
“Alone at last,” Nevada said in a playfully suggestive tone.
“Stop it,” Candice said bluntly, but with no venom in her voice.
“Can’t help it. Something about airplane crashes. Always gets me going.” Nevada stepped back under the tent, skirting the edges of the abyss to step into the horizontal portion of the Flying Fortress. “Come on, you wanted the grand tour…”
Candice wondered for a moment at Nevada’s motivations. She knew how impatient Nevada must be to press on, even when they all needed a break, and it didn’t seem like her to be so magnanimous when she wasn’t getting her way. Usually Candice would think Nevada was trying to seduce her, but there was something so joking about that last flirtation that Candice didn’t think she was taking the prospect seriously.
Maybe she’s just being nice , she thought as she followed Nevada’s path, joining her in the waist section. But why would Nevada be nice when she had a chance to drop cheesy pick-up lines and show off her body?
Inside, the darkened wreck felt like it was holding its breath, warped and deformed by the crash, keeping stubbornly quiet while Candice sensed the groan of metal waiting to be voiced.
“There are the .50-cals,” Nevada said, pointing to blackened parts scattered across the sandy floor. Candice took Nevada’s word for it. Whatever they had once been, the crash had shattered them, and they now reminded her of beetles that had been stepped on and then scraped off on the ground. “Wonder if the tail gun’s any better…”
Nevada led the way through the wreck’s fuselage, through pools of light radiating from the shafts that cut in from the windows and door. The metal underfoot thrummed hollowly, impotently, with their footfalls. It seemed less noisy than the sand that crunched beneath their heels. Once or twice, a footstep sent a few metal cartridges arcing through the air or rolling across the sand. Candice guessed they were ammo from the waist guns. There could’ve been kilos of it buried ankle-deep in the sand.
“Ten crewmen,” Nevada said, her voice echoing through the tomblike space. “Maybe some bailed out, maybe not. Maybe some died in the crash, maybe not. Some of them, at least, survived, built shelter, waited for rescue. Buried whatever dead there were—” She looked back at Candice, answering an unasked question. “No bodies.”
Candice suppressed a shudder. As brave as she was feeling at the moment, she didn’t know how brave s
he’d be with corpses lying around. At this point, of course, they’d probably be as skeletal as the remains in any pyramid, but there was a difference between the long-dead, wrapped in linen or sacrificed in arcane ritual, and someone who had gone to the cinema, breathed smog, read a newspaper.
Ahead of her, Nevada stooped down before an open hatch to the outside. Using her hands and one strong breath, she cleared away the sand from the bottom of the doorframe. The floor she excavated was corrugated metal, and there was a boot print in blood, the toe facing out the door.
“No rescue,” Nevada said. “They left.”
The way she said it, Candice could almost picture the next footstep, and the next, an endless trail leading out into the sand. The sand that was now as clear as an innocent conscience.
“Do you think they made it?” Candice asked.
“Who knows?” Nevada replied. Then, apropos of nothing: “You’re staring at me.”
“No, I’m not,” Candice said automatically.
Nevada pressed on. “And I’m not even doing anything interesting with my hips. Or breathing hard.” Reaching the end of the waist section, she stopped next to a twisted lump of metal whose purpose Candice couldn’t fathom—perhaps a compartment to hold the rear landing gear while in flight?—and looked back, taking a deep breath that strained her breasts against her shirt.
Candice looked her in the eyes. “Have I ever thanked you?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say I’ve done anything too fun to you so far—”
“For saving my life,” Candice said. “The couple of times you saved my life.”
“Probably,” Nevada shrugged. “You’re a very polite person. And I’m kinda uncomfortable with affection, so don’t give a big speech. You’ll trigger me.”
“Thank you,” Candice said, sincerely.
“You’re welcome,” Nevada said, flatly. “And thank you for translating those hieroglyphics and stuff. I probably could’ve done it myself, but you saved me a lot of time. And I didn’t have to do math. Where were we?”
Candice Cushing and the Lost Tomb of Cleopatra Page 15