“Tail gun.”
“Yes.” Nevada kept going through a doorway that took them into another compartment, this one marginally lit by a bubble of glass canopy that was so cloudy with caked sand it was almost tinted. “Here we go!” Nevada said, sitting down under it. “M2 Browning. Looks like it’s still in pretty good shape. They built these things to last. Good thing, too. Apparently you never know when you’re going to need to shoot some Nazis.”
Candice leaned against a battered metal wall as Nevada fussed over the glass, knocking away some of the sand with a pounding fist. “Nevada—Easy—have you given any thought to what you’re going to do when all this is over?”
“What, like over-over? Six seasons and a movie over? No more clues written in a rock inside a skull beneath a cairn…”
“Yeah,” Candice said. “You said you have to get twelve skulls. You’ve already gotten eleven, so this is the last one—after this, you’re all done.”
“Weird thought,” Nevada admitted. She took a closer look at the machine gun itself. “This is really well-preserved. You could get a fortune for it on eBay…”
“Well?” Candice prompted.
“Well?” Nevada retorted.
“You haven’t put any thought into what you’re going to do after this? You’re just going to take the money and—what? Retire? Hope someone hires you to go after femurs? What?”
“You know—the kid. Surgery. All that very noble mama bear stuff.” Nevada shrugged. “There didn’t seem much point in thinking it out after that. Never actually thought I’d get this far. I’ve been doing this for six years, and that’s just for Singh.” Nevada pulled the trigger on the Browning. It clicked resoundingly. “Firing pin’s still good, but the thing isn’t loaded.” She shook her head. “What about you? You were on a bona fide archaeological expedition. What were you going to do when you got back?”
“You know—try to get published, try to get hired on for another dig…”
“You don’t know,” Nevada said smugly.
“I had meant to figure it out, but then a civil war broke out, and that seemed to take precedence.”
“Excuses, excuses.” Nevada picked up a long chain of ammunition that Candice guessed fed into the gun somehow. “Maybe you were hoping for some dashing rogue to show up and whisk you off to a life of adventure.”
“Maybe you were hoping to meet someone just sane enough to settle down with.”
“You offering?”
“You know any dashing rogues?”
Nevada chuckled under her breath. “The closest thing I can think of would be you.”
“I’m not a rogue,” Candice said.
“It’s not like we have a permit to do any of this.” Nevada reached up to a handle on the tail gunner’s canopy, hanging from it as she faced Candice. “And you did sort of whisk me away on a life of adventure. I was just trying to loot a hole in the ground. You’re the one who dragged me out into the Sahara Desert with your faithful sidekick.”
Candice stood up to her, jabbing an accusing finger. “You’re the one with the faithful sidekick who jumped out of a plane!”
“You jumped too.”
“You were going to push me.”
“It is so unfair that you keep throwing that in my face when I didn’t even get the satisfaction of actually defenestrating you.”
They were both standing up in the glass canopy now, Candice having to incline her head to keep the sun out of her eyes. “You know what?” she said. “Forget it.”
“Forget what? You didn’t say anything. You just stared at me a lot and for once showed a degree of gratitude for all the times I saved your life.”
“Oh, I throw stuff in your face? You’re throwing that in my face and I just thanked you for it.”
“What were you going to say?” Nevada insisted.
“ Nothing! ”
“You were getting some big pitch ready, and now I’m curious. I wanna hear it.”
“You’re delusional.”
“Was it a green card?” Nevada asked.
“What?”
“Were you going to marry me and get me a green card into Britain?”
“No! It wasn’t a green card!”
“So it was something.”
“It was nothing,” Candice cried. “I swear to God!”
The Land Cruiser exploded.
First, Candice heard a sound like a giant bringing its palms together, then a keen whistling. She turned her head in time to see a blur of motion strike the Cruiser. Flames rippled out from underneath the vehicle as it leapt into the air, doors flying open, hood and trunk wrenched apart, the glass in the windows disappearing as fire licked out of the interior.
The Cruiser had been so solid and dependable when they were in it, but now it was a cheap toy, first yanked up into the air by the explosion and then dropped back down. It slammed into the dune under it in a burst of sand and rolled down the slope, flinging away the supplies inside as flaring embers. The flames got a rush of air as it turned end over end, and they roared, covering the Land Cruiser until it was nothing but a fireball, finally coming to a stop at the bottom of the dune in an immediate haze of black, oily smoke.
It had all taken only seconds. Then Nevada reacted, shoving Candice down with a whispered command: “ Stay low! ”
She took her scope out of her pocket and eased her head upward until she was aiming the end through the glass canopy.
“What do you see?” Candice asked. Nevada shushed her. “Do you see my grandfather?”
“No,” Nevada whispered back. “He’s probably keeping his head down, like you should be doing.”
“Yeah, right,” Candice retorted, starting to rise.
Nevada shoved her back down. “Technical. Three-man crew. SPG-9 recoilless rifle.”
“ What? ”
Nevada dropped the scope into her hands. “Fine! Look!”
As Nevada ducked down to the machine gun, Candice poked her head up and looked into the scope. A hundred feet away a rusty old pick-up was parked on top of a dune. There was something that looked like an oversized bazooka on a tripod in the truck bed, like a harpoon gun on a whaling ship, one person manning it, two others getting out of the truck’s cab. Candice recognized their stringy builds, bristly hair, swords, and old AK-47s. Khamsin.
While the man in the back stayed with the truck, the other two were coming their way. Candice ducked back down to see Nevada doing something to the Browning, a Swiss Army knife in hand.
“They’re coming over here!” she said in a fearful hush.
“There’s not exactly a lot of other places to look for us,” Nevada replied, not looking up from her work. “You have your gun on you?”
“No!”
“Oh, right, you’re British.” Still not looking up, Nevada took the Shadow from her gun belt and held it out. “Take this and go to the hatch. If they try to come in, shoot them.”
Candice looked at the pistol like Nevada was offering her a handful of earthworms. “I thought we kinda delegated the shooting people to you.”
Nevada turned her full attention to Candice, shoving the gun into her hand and locking her other hand around it. “The moment they know for sure we’re in here, they’re going to shell us. If I can get the Browning working, maybe I can take out the technical from here.”
“The pick-up?”
“Yes, the pick-up,” Nevada said patiently. “Just don’t let them shoot me before I can shoot them.” Candice looked askew at the gun in her hand, then felt Nevada squeeze her shoulder. “You can do this, Cushing. I mean, they can shoot people, and I’m pretty sure they have nowhere near as many degrees as you do.”
“Yes, but…” Candice ground her teeth together. “I’m terrified!”
“So be terrified and shoot the motherfuckers.”
Crouching low, almost going on her hands and knees, Candice moved to the hatch. It was facing the technical and the pair of approaching men, but she didn’t dare stick her head out. He
r heart pounded, her lungs working like bellows. It was impossible that she could’ve been lightly conversing with Nevada a couple of minutes ago. It felt like hours must’ve passed.
She edged closer to the frame of the hatch, still not poking her head out, but straining her ears to hear anything. She could make out a metal on metal sound, but that was Nevada’s work traveling distantly through the fuselage. No trace of the men’s footsteps or conversation. Maybe they were taking their time. In this heat, they’d want to conserve energy. Or maybe they’d turned back, assuming their enemies had died in the Land Cruiser.
Almost unthinkingly, Candice moved to check before she stopped herself. She wanted to cry out to Nevada, ask if she’d finished with the Browning yet, say anything to get a response proving she was still there. Sweat ran out of her palms, into the cold, hard weight of the Shadow. Candice looked down at it. It didn’t look right there, the symmetry not fitting the graceful curves of her slender fingers. It was like some tumor growing out of her palm, filling her hand.
Now Candice could hear them, voices carried on the wind. Laughter. A joke being told. Candice could barely think to translate it with the blood pounding in her ears between each thought. Something about Jew York. The sand puffed lightly with each of their steps, the sound surprisingly feminine. She looked again at the gun in her hand, like a tool this time. Tried to remember Nevada’s instructions: rear sights and front sights, safeties.
She thumbed the safety off. Wrapping her free hand around the unfamiliar heft of the slide, she racked it back and let it spring forward. There was a bullet in the chamber now—potent venom that gave her an immediate contact high. Her ears were supersensitive, hearing the hand settling on the side of the plane to steady a body as it came inside, the huff of exertion as he lugged himself off the ground…
Candice whirled and pivoted, pointing herself at the hatch with the Shadow at the ready. She saw the man filling the doorframe, filling her sights, and she pulled the trigger as fast as she could. Bullets went into him, scooped out handfuls of blood that splashed onto the sand behind him. She kept pulling, no, squeezing the trigger. He staggered backwards, holes filling his chest, gun smoke and arterial spray like a bucket of paint dumped over the picture that had once been all white robes and golden sand. He fell on his back, but she was still pulling the trigger, bullets digging up the sand around him, the air full of smoke a shade of blue she’d never seen before. She kept squeezing the trigger with an aching finger. The gun clicked.
There was a pressure in her ears like she was underwater, but they were still so sensitive. She could hear the metal ring of a sword clearing a scabbard, then a high, animal yowl shaped into a human ululation. She thumbed the mag release and the clip dropped away. Candice tried to think of where more ammunition was, but the second man was in the hatch now, coming at her with that trilling howl and a flashing scimitar.
She held her hands up to block the blow and the blade came down right next to the trigger guard on her upturned pistol, slamming the gun down against her chest. Its metal frame kept the sword from entering her body and she pushed back, her strength against his, shoving the blade away while he tried to force it into her, still ululating, the sound filling the wreck like a thousand screeching bats in some dark cave—
“Hey!” Nevada called, and they both turned to see her with the Scorpion raised high. “You’ll wake the neighbors.”
She fired a short burst, no more than three bullets, but they wrenched the Khamsin away so quickly that Candice was suddenly unbalanced without him straining against her. He flew back, toppling to the ground and skidding across the floor, the sand parting around him.
Nevada let the Scorpion drop, hanging from its strap as she turned back to the Browning. “Cover your ears,” she said.
Candice slapped her hands against her head as Nevada let it rip, a bridge of tracer fire immediately connecting the gun and the technical. Candice could see it through the open door. Bullets the size of butter knives poured into the truck even as the last man standing tried to turn the recoilless rifle on them. Before he could, the truck’s hood flew up over a bloom of flame and smoke, and then the whole vehicle went up—Candice could see the blast picking up the nearby sand, pushing it along the desert floor in a liquid ripple, and sending gales of it up into the air, hiding all but the light from the flaming wreck.
Nevada took her finger off the trigger, the gun hissing and cooling and leaking smoke. “What’d I tell you?” she cooed to it. “I know you were in the Nazi killing business, but these guys hate Jews and have shit taste in facial hair too. What’s the difference?”
Bullets thudded against the plane like hail on a tin shack. Nevada ducked as more bullets sparked off the struts of the canopy, shattering the glass over her. Crouching, she spun the Browning to face the other way and opened up, working the gunfire back and forth blindly. A moment later, more bullets came from the other way—Candice saw them dimple the hull.
Candice poked her head out the door. At least ten Khamsin, both on foot and mounted on horseback, were coming over the same rise the technical had been on. She ducked back behind cover as a barrage chiseled at where her head had been a moment ago.
Nevada took her finger off the trigger. “I think they may be doing a pincer maneuver,” she said.
“Is that bad?” Candice asked.
“Well… do you like pincers? Watch my six.”
Where’s your six? Candice was about to ask, when Nevada popped back up, took quick aim through the shredded canopy, and fired. Her line of tracers walked across the ground, kicking up gouts of sand and knocking the Khamsin down, replacing them with clouds of arterial red.
Some vestigial memory of bad action movies sparked, telling Candice that Nevada’s six was behind her, and she wondered how she was supposed to look through the solid metal of the hull before remembering the waist gunner windows. She sprinted to the one looking out on the other side, dropping down against the metal below, and looked gingerly through the window. More bad guys coming over the sand dune there, hooves thundering as the horsemen rode hard for the plane, puffs of smoke blotting the air with each bullet they fired. Candice threw herself down on the floor.
“Easy! There are more of them!”
Nevada ducked down again, covering her head as a volley of return fire punched out more glass in the canopy, the shards raining down on her. “That sucks. If only you had like a gun or something…”
“I ran out of ammo!”
“Ran out?” Nevada demanded, jumping back up to fire a quick burst from the Browning. Candice heard a dying wail from outside. “There were seventeen bullets in the magazine! Who were you shooting, Rasputin?”
“I panicked, okay?”
Nevada took another magazine off her belt and slid it across the floor. “Could you maybe panic only three or four shots at a time?”
Candice picked up the magazine and her hands seemed to know just what to do, popping it into the butt of the pistol and racking the slide. She looked through the window again. In only a minute of chaotic action, the landscape had become clogged with flying sand and lingering gun smoke, the Khamsin roving through it like sharks in a feeding frenzy—a riot of their ululating war cries.
She tried to take aim and fire, spacing out her shots one at a time, but still didn’t think she hit anything. They were moving too fast. She got an answer of gunfire ricocheting off the hull all around her. The metal dimpled inward. A foot above her head, it was easy to remember those were bullets trying to get at her.
Candice wanted to curl up in a ball and wait for Nevada to make all the bad men go away, but she couldn’t shut off the adrenaline coursing through her, almost shaking her apart trying to get out. It was pure life force, wanting to defend itself, wanting to survive.
She heard the whiplash sound of disturbed fabric in the middle of all the carnage and turned to see one of them pulling aside the tent to get into the plane. Candice aimed and fired, three bullets punching into the silhouette.
He went limp, weight settling against the parachute canopy as blood spread through the silk. She knew, intellectually, that she should feel traumatized and sorrowful and horrified, but she grinned fiercely, a laugh welling up in her breast.
“Get some! Get some! Get some!” Nevada shouted over the roar of the machine gun, spent shells fluttering out of the breech and chittering to the floor.
Candice shook her head and looked out the window again. The horsemen rode in a great circle around the plane, while the Khamsin on foot advanced slowly, firing on—Candice ducked her head—any hint of movement. The horsemen were bigger targets, making Candice briefly consider the ethics of shooting horses. She didn’t want to. But she didn’t want to die either.
Candice jumped up, ready to fire when she saw another pick-up truck cresting the dune on her side of the plane. This one didn’t have a bazooka on its back; it looked more like a bunch of tubes tied together, sort of a…
“Nevada!” Candice called. “I think they have rockets!”
“I highly doubt they have—”
The second technical let out a throaty cough, one of the barrels lighting up as it freed a fireball roaring sideways. Candice heard Nevada swear, saw her jump down from the tail gun as the rocket hit. The noise of the explosion crashed into Candice’s ears, compacting itself down into a dull, tinny tone against her eardrums as fiery claws slashed into the hull, caving in the tail end of the plane. More than that, the impact shoved the plane over, dislodged it from its perch on top of the sand dune and sent it rolling downhill.
The ground slid out from under Candice, rolling her body across the fuselage as the plane careened out of control. She saw the window spinning down to meet her, blaring light in the whirlwind of darkness, and had a nightmare vision of falling partway through it and having her body scissored in half by the plane’s revolution. She threw out her arms, catching the window’s sides, but her momentum still shoved her facedown into the sand. The plane’s roll pulled to a stop, checked by the twisted metal still connecting it to its other, buried half, and it swept sideways instead, digging into the unresisting sand before finally coming to a halt.
Candice Cushing and the Lost Tomb of Cleopatra Page 16