Kalahari

by Jessica Khoury

  Sam took my face between his hands. “Think about the facts, and only the facts. What you can see, what you can know. Your dad and Theo were here, but now they’re not.”

  “So I have to find them,” I whispered.

  “Right. And I’ll help you.”

  I pulled away from him. “Why are you doing this? Why are you so . . . calm? So nice to me? Why aren’t you back there with the others?”

  He opened his mouth to answer, then shut it, looking conflicted. “Just let me help you, okay?”

  I nodded reluctantly, unsure whether to be suspicious or glad for his steadying support.

  “Can their tracks tell you anything?” Sam asked.

  Pulling myself together, I focused on the ground. I could almost see the scene happening around me, like a ghostly reenactment. “Dad hit the tree and then . . . Here, see these deep tracks, and the way the sand was pushed away? The poachers skidded to a stop, probably to avoid hitting the Cruiser. And there! Footprints!” My heart began to race as I processed the clues in the sand, sorting the impressions into a pattern I could read. “Dad jumped out here and took off to the west.” I circled to the passenger side. “And Theo went east. They split up, trying to lose the poachers on foot. It’s easier to disappear that way than to try to outrun them in the truck.”

  Which left me in a dilemma. Follow Dad or follow Theo? They had a twenty-four-hour head start on us, and as more time passed, their trails would only get fainter.

  If I were a bloodhound, this was where I would have whined and run in circles, chasing my own tail. Racked with indecision, I spread out and followed each trail a bit farther before doubling back, just in case Dad and Theo had met up somewhere nearby and taken off together. They hadn’t. And I noticed that the poachers had pursued Dad, not Theo. A closer look at the surrounding foliage revealed why: The brush through which Theo had passed was dotted with blood.

  SIX

  Theo,” I said, my voice coarse as gravel. “It’s Theo’s blood.” I broke into a run, as fast as I could go while still keeping an eye on his footprints. He had staggered along, dragging one foot. Broken branches on the dry bushes showed where he had grabbed them for support, leaving behind bloody fingerprints. Left by any other person, these signs would be normal. But Theo, my graceful, delicate Theo, could move through the bush in a way that left no hint of his passing. He could be harder to track than a leopard. Seeing these otherwise obvious signs told me more about the gravity of his condition than I could bear. My eyes began filling with tears as I feared the worst. By the amount of blood he’d left behind, he could already be dead.

  I found him sitting under a shepherd’s tree, slumped over, so still that I nearly missed him altogether in the deepening darkness. My stomach turned inside out; I couldn’t breathe. I fell to my knees beside him and gently took his face in my hands, barely able to see him through my tears.

  “Theo?” His eyes were shut, but he was breathing shallowly. “He’s alive,” I told Sam. I took out my flashlight and clicked it on, searching for the wound, gasping when I found it. He had been shot just above his left hip, and again in his right rib cage. How he was still hanging on, I had no idea.

  “Help me,” I said to Sam. “We have to carry him back to the truck. There’s a medical kit inside.”

  “Are you sure we should move him?” Sam looked deeply shaken, standing over us with his hands clenched into fists and his eyes wide.

  “We don’t have a choice.”

  Sam carefully lifted Theo into his arms. The Bushman groaned but didn’t open his eyes. I hovered anxiously at Sam’s elbow.

  “Hurry,” I said. “Don’t jostle him too much.”

  “Trying,” Sam grunted. “He’s heavier than he looks.”

  I hurried back to the Cruiser, leading the way with the flashlight. Once there, I pulled down the canvas roofing and laid it on the ground. Sam set Theo down gingerly as I rummaged for the medical kit. To my dismay, I found the boxes of supplies had been torn apart by wild animals. The food had all been damaged or taken, likely by jackals and hyenas. I found the med kit and went back to Theo, but the contents of the little box were woefully inadequate to treat Theo’s wounds. I stared at the small bandages and bottles, wondering where to start and if it would make any difference at all.

  “I can get Avani,” said Sam. “She might know what to do.”

  I nodded numbly. “Bring them all here. We should stay together.”

  After he left, I sat beside Theo and buried my face in my hands.

  “Tu!um-sa.”

  My head shot up. “Theo!”

  His eyes were open and he managed a weak smile. “Are you well?”

  “Am I well? Theo, you’ve been shot!”

  “Ah, just so.” He shut his eyes briefly, and I could see a tremor of pain beneath his gentle smile.

  “Does it hurt a lot?” I asked quietly. “Theo, what happened?”

  He sighed, his smile flickering out. “We split up . . . tried to lose them on foot . . . Too late for me now. Your father did not know they had got me, or he would never have . . .”

  “Theo! Stay with me!” He was slipping back into unconsciousness. I dribbled some of my water into his mouth, which roused him again.

  “Stop it, girl!” he said. “Don’t waste your water on me!”

  “You’re going to be fine,” I said. “We’ll get you out of here and to a doctor.”

  “Make me a promise, Tu!um-sa.”

  “Theo—”

  “Promise you will bury me here in the Kalahari, yes? In the towns, the sky is small. How can I see God through such a small sky?”

  “Stop talking like that. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

  “Out of earth we come, into earth we go,” he murmured dreamily. “You cannot stop the sun from setting. Now hold my hand, child. I must tell you . . .”

  I took his hand in both of mine and willed my strength into him, blinking hard to keep my tears from falling. He looked at me and smiled, and for a moment my heart lifted as I saw his eyes fill with his usual mischief and joy. The skin of his face, golden brown and lined with years of laughter, crinkled happily. I smiled back through my tears, squeezing his hand as if I could anchor his soul to the world by sheer willpower.

  “I saw...” His smile drooped. “I must tell you. Something . . . is out there.”

  “Theo, don’t talk,” I whispered. A tear slipped loose and trickled down the side of my nose. “Save your strength.”

  “Did you see it?” he groaned. “A spirit, perhaps, come for this old soul...So beautiful, so strange. All silver, like the moon . . .” He shut his eyes.

  “Theo!” I shook him very gently, wild with terror. “Theo, come back!”

  He grunted and his eyelids lifted just slightly, eyes staring up at the darkening sky. “The hunter becomes hunted. Keep watch, Tu!um-sa. Watch for silver eyes. The lion is hunting. . . .”

  He coughed once, then sighed a long, long breath, his eyelids falling shut, his facial muscles slackening.

  Just like that, he slipped away.

  “Theo? No, no, no. Theo, look at me!” Wildly, I patted his cheeks, called his name, tried to shake him from his stillness. I pressed my head to his chest and felt a jolt of alarm when I could not hear his heartbeat. “Theo! Wake up!”

  “Sarah . . .” I looked up to see Sam and the others standing over me, their expressions shocked and horrified. Kase cursed while Miranda went white as a sheet. Sam knelt beside Theo. “Oh God, Sarah. I’m so sorry.”

  “He’s just unconscious,” I insisted.

  Sam glanced up at me, and I refused to read what was written in his eyes. He held his fingers to Theo’s neck, then his wrist.

  “Sarah—”

  “No.” I looked away, my jaw set. “No, no, no. He needs a doctor. Avani?”

  She backed away from my
pleading look, averting her eyes. Sam just stared at me, full of sadness.

  “Don’t look at me that way!” I snapped. “Here, let me do it!”

  I began pumping Theo’s chest with my hands. His blood was slick and warm beneath my fingers. I breathed into his mouth, pumped his chest, breathed, pumped, breathed, pumped. . .

  Finally Sam pulled me away. I fought him, struggling to get back to Theo.

  “Sarah! Sarah, stop! He’s gone; there’s nothing you can do. It’s over, Sarah, please. . . .”

  “I have to try!”

  He took my face in his hands and pierced me with his gaze. “You can’t save him. It’s too late.”

  I went perfectly still, my face burning under his palms. His hands slid down to my arms, holding me upright. His eyes were uncertain and watchful, as if he couldn’t predict what I’d do next. I slumped forward, falling against him. Tears leaked from my eyes but I couldn’t feel them; my skin had gone numb.

  “He’s dead,” I said tonelessly.

  Despite his silence, I could hear Sam’s heart hammering at his ribs. Why was he so warm, while Theo was turning so cold? So still? So . . . lifeless?

  “Are you okay?” Sam asked, looking at me as warily as if I were standing on a bridge about to jump.

  “No.” The question made me angry. “How the hell could I be okay? What about this is remotely okay?”

  “Sarah—”

  “What do you want, anyway?” I demanded. I felt as if the top of my head were lifting off and steam were pouring out of my skull. “You’re always following me, always asking questions—what is your problem?”

  “I just—”

  “Shut up!” I screamed, jumping to my feet, Sam quickly rising with me. “He’s dead! Theo is dead!”

  I began sobbing and grabbing fistfuls of my hair, as if I could pull the pain out of my head. Sam gripped my wrists and held them so tightly that my fingers tingled. He twisted my arms away from my face as I thrashed, kicked, and sobbed. He managed to spin me around while keeping a grip on my hands and held me tight against his chest with my arms crossed in front of me, a human straightjacket preventing me from harming myself or him. My knees gave out and I sagged; Sam knelt with me, still holding me tight, staying silent as I hurled curses at him, not caring if I sounded unfair and maniacal.

  He held me until I ran out of breath and collapsed into him, no longer fighting. I turned my face into his chest and sobbed silently, the way I had for my mother. I cried without making any noise, and perhaps that was the worst way to cry, because the noise was trapped inside me like a hurricane, blasting my mind, scouring my heart.

  It’s a dream, it’s a nightmare, it cannot be real. If I opened my eyes I would be back at camp, in my cot, with my mother’s dream catchers hanging over me.

  “The bad dreams will get tangled in the strings,” my mother used to say. “They’ll hang there like flies in a web until dawn, and they’ll evaporate in the morning, and you’ll never have a nightmare as long as they hang over you.”

  She had lied. I was sinking into a nightmare that never seemed to end—first my mom, now Theo, and probably my dad too. I couldn’t imagine finding him alive, like I had forgotten how to hope.

  “Dad,” I gasped out. I hurriedly wiped my eyes with my kaffiyeh. “I have to find Dad.” I scrambled to my feet and took off, ignoring Sam when he called for me to wait. The others were leaning against the truck and stared at me as I brushed past, my eyes on the ground, searching for Dad’s trail. When I found it, I took off like a bloodhound following a scent. His prints wound this way and that, zigzagging through the bush—until he seemed to have evaporated. The trail disappeared. Why? Had they taken him? Or had he begun hiding his tracks? He knew how to disappear without a trace, just as Theo did. Well, if that was what he’d done, then there was no chance of me tracking him down now. I stared into the darkening bush, at the silhouettes of the trees against the twilight. I told myself that he was safe, that he knew how to survive out here.

  “Nothing,” I murmured when I arrived back at the truck. “He’s out there somewhere. Maybe he got away.”

  The others remained quiet. They all looked terrified. I knelt in the sand by Theo, exhausted and numb. Sam had followed me back but held his distance uncertainly, looking as if he wanted to help but didn’t know how.

  “Why would they do this?” I asked. “Why kill him? He was the gentlest person in the world. He was my friend.”

  Sam murmured, “I know, I’m sorry. I understand, Sarah. I do.”

  “How could you possibly?” I whispered.

  He came forward then and knelt rigidly beside me, his mouth tightening into a thin line. “When Adam was killed, it felt like I’d been buried alive. I went insane for a while. I was just so angry, at Adam, at myself, at the army, at every person I met. For a long time, I just wanted to break stuff. Punch things. Make the world feel my pain, you know? No one could handle me. I’d grown up in foster homes since I was five, and it sucked, but Adam was always there, you know? He was there to promise me that we’d get out one day, that we’d just grab our bags and go see the world. He was all I had. The one constant thing in my life.”

  I thought of Theo, of my mom. Sam might as well have been describing what they had been to me. They were the steady center around which I orbited. Without them, I drifted aimlessly through an empty, broken sky.

  “If he made those promises,” I asked, “why did he join the military?”

  Sam let out a breath. His eyes were hard. “We got into some trouble, ran with the wrong crowd. Ended up stealing a car when I was fourteen. Adam was eighteen, and he took most of the rap for it, saying it was his idea. I hated him for that, hated and loved him, you know? I got a hundred hours of community service. He got a jail sentence but dodged it by volunteering to join the army. He died on his second tour.”

  Instead of distracting me from my own grief, Sam’s story sharpened it like one knife to another. My chest compressed, and I felt a sob welling deep inside me, growing like a tumor. He must have sensed it, because he quickly took my hands and held them. I hated my tears. Water was the most precious resource in this desert, and here I was pouring it out all over the sand.

  After a few minutes, I felt my grief begin to change. It grew hard and metallic and sharp, as if it had been forged over a bed of coals.

  “I’ll find them,” I said, hardly recognizing my own voice. “I’ll make them pay. I swear to God I will make them pay.”

  “You told us no confrontations, remember?” Sam’s brow lowered and he met my eyes. “You said we were only going to find your dad, that no way were we going after the poachers.”

  “That was before. Things have changed. They crossed a line.” My voice was steel. “Anyway, there’s no we.” I pulled my hands from his, stood up, and lifted my eyes to the sky. The stars had truly begun to blaze, their light strengthening in the darkness. “We’ll bury Theo, and then I’ll drive us back to camp in the Cruiser. We’ll get as many supplies as we can and then drive to Ghansi. You can go home, and I can go look for Dad.”

  “You can’t go after him by yourself.”

  “I have to find my dad, Sam.” I felt suddenly weary; the toll of a day of hiking coupled with the emotional trauma of Theo’s death was nearly crippling.

  “Then I’ll come with you.”

  “No, you won’t. I don’t need your help.”

  He didn’t press the issue but looked as if he wanted to. Instead, he stared at Theo and sighed quietly. “Does he have family?”

  “No.” Maybe a few distant relatives near the Namibian border, but no one close. He’d always said he’d been born in the Kalahari, and so he wanted to die in the Kalahari. It was his people’s tradition to immediately bury their dead and then move on quickly, never returning to the grave unless absolutely necessary. Theo had held tightly to these fading traditions. When we’d f
irst met him, he was living in a hut in the bush outside Maun, having refused to move into the city with the rest of his tribe. And anyway, it was his last request of me. How could I say no to that?

  Sam left and I sat beside Theo’s body, trying to keep my eyes on the Bushman’s face and not the bloody cavity in his chest. I clicked on the flashlight and shone it on the area around me, dancing the beam over my dad’s footprints. Where are you now? Are you safe?

  As my light grazed the surrounding sand, another set of prints caught my eye. I crawled on my knees to a patch of sand surrounded by flattened grasses and inspected it with the light held at an angle, to better throw the shadows of the impressions into relief.

  The lion.

  He’d been here too. Now that I had his track identified, I saw it all around. He’d prowled around the vehicle several times and seemed to have stopped to sniff it. Had he smelled Theo’s blood? Was that why he’d been following the Cruiser—in search of an easy meal? But his tracks turned to follow Dad’s, not Theo’s, which worried me immensely.

  Those questions opened the way for a whole slew of new ones. Theo had said Dad didn’t know he’d been shot, but even so, if Dad was free and able, he would never have abandoned Theo for so long. Why hadn’t he returned or come looking when Theo didn’t show up? Which told me Dad must still be on the run or . . .

  I unclipped my radio and murmured into it, calling for Dad. I heard my own voice, muffled with static, coming from the Cruiser. My heart sinking, I went to the truck and searched, noting with a sick twist of my gut that the satellite radio was gone, no doubt taken by the poachers. It was too bulky for Dad to have taken if he was in a hurry. I found the smaller handheld radio on the floor of the cab. The batteries were almost drained, probably from me calling so much.

  Sam managed to persuade Joey to help him begin scraping sand aside to create a grave. After a while, Avani helped, and Kase pulled himself away from Miranda to join the effort. Miranda was swaying a little on her feet, staring dully at the ground, her lips moving but making no sound. Her state of shock made me irrationally angry. She had barely known Theo. I knew my flare of anger was foolish and unjustified, but I had zero control over what I was feeling. My emotions shifted and changed as quickly as a bushfire driven by the wind.