Kalahari (21 page)

S
arah!” Sam jumped up and ran to meet me. He raised his arms to pull me into a hug, but I ducked it. His brow furrowed and he gave me an inquisitive look but said nothing about it.

“You made it,” I said. “How did you find your way back so quickly?”

“Oh, ye of little faith.” He grinned. “I remembered what you said about the nests.”

“Huh?”

Sam pointed to a nearby tree covered with hanging sparrow nests. “You said they build the nests to face west, right?”

I couldn’t help but smile, and for a moment I simply gazed at him, standing there in the morning sunlight with dirt on his face and tangles in his hair, grinning like a beautiful, proud lunatic. The urge to throw my arms around him pulled at me like Earth pulling at the moon, but instead I balled my hands into fists. My heart aching with longing, I nodded crisply. “Right. Well, we have to find the others.”

“I know.” He sighed, losing his grin. “Any ideas on where to start?”

“Let’s give them another hour or two. They might still make it back. You did, after all, and you were on your own.”

“Want some water while we wait? I’ve been here a few hours, so I had time to build up a fire and boil some more water. Took me forever to get the fire going. Thankfully some of the embers were still warm from when we camped yesterday.”

“Yes! Oh, Sam, I could—” I stopped myself, choking on my own voice. I’d nearly said
I could kiss you
, but realized my mistake halfway through. My heart beat against my ribs like a fist punching me from the inside. “I could really use a drink of water,” I finished weakly.

I followed him to the pan, where he had left some baobab shells filled with water near a small, smoldering fire. Barely letting the water cool, I gulped it down greedily, pausing only to breathe. I limited myself to only one shell of water; what had seemed a pool when we’d arrived was now more of a puddle, and I could tell from the tracks that a herd of kudu had passed through yesterday and drunk almost all of what was left. If the others made it back, they’d need water too. Though the edge was gone from my thirst, I felt far from sated.

Sam knelt and tossed a few sticks on the fire. “Close call, huh? I saw the chopper take off after the giraffes. Did they show up after that?”

“No. Of course, it got dark pretty quick. They couldn’t have been flying at night.”

“Unless they’re really desperate.”

I nodded reluctantly. “Unless they’re really desperate.”

Keeping distance between us, I sat down by Sam and tucked my hands under my legs to stop myself from scratching. The itch was maddening, almost blinding in its persistence. The more I tried to ignore it, the worse it got.

Avani and Joey appeared about a half hour later. Avani had her eyes on the ground, following my tracks, so she didn’t see us until she was just a few steps away. Joey, who spotted us while they were still some distance away, had kept quiet and pranced behind her, laughing silently. When she finally realized she was standing two feet away from me, he burst out cackling.

Avani smiled sweetly and sat down, taking a shell of water that Sam handed her. “I’m gonna save those goons the trouble and kill him myself, ’kay?”

“Need a hand?” I asked.

I was more than impressed with both Avani and Sam for having found their way. All of them—even Miranda and Kase—had changed since I first met them. They were tougher, more capable—or maybe they always had been tough all along and I’d just been too blind to see it until now.

“I’m going to find them,” I said, after an hour had passed with no sign of Kase and Miranda.

“I’m coming,” said Sam.

“We all are,” said Avani. “It’s stupid to split up again.”

I nodded. “We’ll leave very clear tracks so that if they do come here, they can follow us.”

Joey wrote a giant message in the sand that said
Gone 2 find U,
with an arrow pointing the way we went.

We walked side by side, instead of in single file, to leave a trail of footprints so obvious that it might as well have been lit in neon. It worried me a little. I doubted anyone in a helicopter would be able to see our tracks, but after what happened at the road, I wasn’t sure.

Sam strayed closer and closer to me. Panicked, I sidestepped in what I hoped was a casual, thoughtless motion, not wanting him to accidentally—or purposefully—brush against me.
I have to tell him
, I thought. It was hard to put that distance between us, when what I really longed to do was hold his hand. The memory of our kiss rested in my thoughts like a fragile rose in the midst of a hurricane, the one bright and lovely thing I had to hold on to. I clung to it, using that kiss to distract me from the fiery itch burning on my skin, hoping somehow,
somehow
it wouldn’t be our last.

We came across a patch of hoodia, a low-growing cactus-like plant, the meat of which can stave off hunger and thirst while giving one a boost of energy. The Bushmen had relied on it when they went on long hunting trips, to sustain them in the harsh conditions. It didn’t provide any real sustenance though, so we’d need something more substantial soon. But it helped take our minds off our overwhelming thirst and hunger, and my thoughts felt clearer than they had in days.

The longer we searched, the more worried I grew. We were moving slowly, so if Kase and Miranda had reached the baobab and followed our tracks, they would have caught up to us by now. I knew that if we went back to the road and found their prints from yesterday, I might be able to track them from there. But time wasn’t on our side. Between the wind and the animals roaming around, the tracks would be faint.

Since it was the only real lead we had, we made the long trek to the road for the second time.

“I have never,” declared Avani, “been so thirsty in my entire life. And these don’t help.” She was holding another
bi
root I’d found. “They get nastier every time I drink from one. We can’t keep going like this.”

She was right. We weren’t built like the Bushmen, whose small, hardy statures were suited for the harsh Kalahari. The hoodia suppressed our thirst; it didn’t quench it or hydrate us much.

We were still a few miles from the road when Sam stopped and held up a hand.

“Do you hear that?”

I listened; the sound was faint, and at first I mistook it for a bird. But then the wind shifted slightly, pushing the noise toward us.

Avani heard it too. “Miranda.”

I couldn’t make out what she was yelling, but it was definitely Miranda’s voice. We broke into a run.

We found her sitting on the ground with Kase’s head in her lap. At first, I thought he was dead. His eyes were shut and Miranda was keening over him, rocking back and forth while her hands cradled his still face. I froze in shock, my abdomen turning icy cold.
No, please no . . .

But then Kase’s lips moved, though all he managed was a hoarse groan.

“He just collapsed,” Miranda said. “I found one of those root things, you know, like you showed us? He made me drink most of the juice, said he wasn’t thirsty! I—I believed him. How could I be so stupid?”

I knew immediately what we were dealing with. “He’s severely dehydrated. He needs water now.” I looked at Avani, but she wordlessly shook her head.

“I tossed the rest of the root away.”

No one else had any, either. I began looking around, frantic. The roots belonged to a tiny, leafless shoot, and I scoured the area in search of one, down on my hands and knees. The others joined me in looking, as Miranda wailed and cried, her eyes dry from lack of water.

When it comes to surviving harsh conditions, you can generally go by the Rule of Three. Three minutes without air, three weeks without food, three hours without shelter in extreme temperatures . . . and three days without water. I didn’t have to run the exact calculations to recognize that if we didn’t find water—and
fast
—Kase wouldn’t live to see the next morning.

I combed the sand with my fingers, using both my eyes and hands to locate the moisture-giving root, but I wasn’t sure even that could save him now.

I froze, my hands having brushed something buried in the sand.
Then, digging faster, I uncovered a rotting leather bag. It was the skin of a steenbok that had been tanned and cured, the legs tied together to form a strap. I picked it up and turned it over, and a jumble of items fell out: wooden arrows with tips made of giraffe bone, sharpened sticks like the ones I’d used to start the fire, a string of cocoons filled with bits of twigs and bone to make them rattle.

This was a Bushman’s kit, buried here for decades. Often they would hide their stuff if they intended to get roaring drunk, so that their relatives wouldn’t steal their gear. They usually forgot where they buried the stuff, and people would find these little caches all over southern Africa.

This had been Bushman territory. Which meant . . .

I looked around and spotted a shepherd’s tree, its telltale white trunk and evergreen leaves standing out amid the dry, brown savanna. I ran to it and fell to digging furiously around its trunk, creating a trench around it. Nothing.

There was another tree a short distance away. I dug out the sand around it too, and around two more after that. I saw one last tree in the area and considered ignoring it. The chances of finding a
bi
root were much better anyway. But it was just one more tree. . . .

I dug with both hands, like a dog hunting for a bone. The sand shifted easily, giving way to yet more sand—there was no end to it out here. Around the tree I went, scooting on my knees, panting from the effort.

I’d nearly circled the whole trunk when I jammed my hands into the ground again—and struck something solid.

Heart pounding, I pushed the sand aside.

Nestled against the root of the tree, as white and pristine as the day it had been buried, was a smooth, round ostrich egg.

I picked it up and shook it, then let out a shout of glee.

The others gathered around as I ran back to them. I still had the Bushman bag, which I slung onto the ground. While they inspected the items, I pulled out the bundle of leather that had been used to plug the tiny hole in the top of the egg. Then I upended the egg over my mouth and a thin, sweet stream of water trickled onto my tongue.

“Water!” cried Miranda. “Give it to him!”

I didn’t want to risk touching either of them, so I set the egg on the ground beside her.

She was so focused on Kase that she didn’t seem to notice the way I avoided her touch. She held open Kase’s mouth and poured the water in, just a bit at a time. He swallowed, and his mouth spread into a weak smile.

“Come back to me, baby,” Miranda murmured. “I need you. Don’t you leave me here!” She looked up, her supermodel beauty replaced by the face of a lost and frightened girl at the edge of her wits. Despite days of complaining, crying, and running for her life, she had never looked more vulnerable. “He’s everything to me, you understand?
Everything
. He’s always been there, through all the crap, keeping me together. I’ll
die
without him! I—I love him!”

“Hey, angel,” Kase murmured. His lashes fluttered but his eyes remained shut. “I love you too.”

At that, a smile broke across Miranda’s face and she bent over and kissed him.

With a little cough, I turned away.

“Spread out,” I said to the others. “Look for trees with white trunks that still have their leaves, and dig around the root. In the rainy seasons, Bushmen would fill eggs with water and bury them under shepherd’s trees for the dry season. There may be more hidden around the area.”

“So
that’s
where Easter egg hunts come from,” said Joey, but his voice lacked its usual mischief and the joke seemed halfhearted.

Avani rolled her eyes. “Let’s go.”

They seemed invigorated by the possibility of finding water and vanished into the bush to search.

“Don’t let him drink it too fast,” I warned Miranda.

She nodded, and her breathing calmed. Her eyes were fixed on Kase’s face, filled with a passion that left me oddly jealous. Their obsession with each other had annoyed me at first, but I was slowly coming to believe that they really did love each other as much as they said. Who was I to judge the depth of their relationship? I’d had only one kiss in my entire life. Maybe Kase and Miranda could barely survive a night in the wilderness—but they seemed to understand a much deeper mystery that I couldn’t even grasp. Would maybe never grasp, I pondered morosely.

Kase would survive. They all would. The water-filled egg was a sign, I was sure of it. I’d never believed in signs, but my mom had, and she would have said this was a good omen, a “turning of our luck.”

The others returned soon, one by one. Avani and Sam had both found eggs. Sam shared his with me (I made him drink first, just in case), and Avani split hers with Joey. We were far from being fully sated, but the water had restored our spirits. We were all together and we were alive, which was more than I’d expected twelve hours ago.

I was so overwhelmed with relief and satisfaction that I didn’t even realize I was scratching my arm until I looked down and saw the small patch of silver just below my inner wrist.

I
immediately rolled down my sleeve, hiding the metallic patch. My chest felt as if it were being crushed. I mumbled something about looking for more buried eggs and hurried away, out of sight of the others.

Then, crouching beneath a tangle of branches, I pushed up my sleeve and studied the infected area, which had taken over the left wing on the tattooed bee.

The skin around the silver area was white and loose, and it itched like a bad spider bite. It would fall away at the slightest touch. Immediately I thought of Dr. Monaghan’s pallid complexion and of how fragile the skin on his face had been.

Gingerly, trying to still my shaking hands, I touched a finger to the silver. I could hold it there for only a moment before jerking it away, my heartbeat racing. The metal was warm. I’d expected it to be cool, like a coin, but of course I’d forgotten that this wasn’t just metal—it was
alive
. Maybe it wasn’t quite an
entity
; that would require that it was able to think and reason. It seemed more like a bacteria, acting out of the purely biological impulse to replicate itself. Still, it was hard not to see it as being consciously malignant. It was
eating my skin
, after all.

I rocked back and forth in the sand, cradling my affected arm and staring blankly at the ground. Sure, I’d made myself accept that I was infected. But that was before I’d actually seen it. It was the difference between accepting that someone was going to die and seeing the actual body. This was a point of no return. My skin would melt off and be replaced with a coat of living metal. It would drive me insane and then I would die.

And what about Dad? Would I see him again? Even if he was still alive, out there somewhere in the deep bush, would I have time to find him? I longed for Dad so intensely that it hurt, a pain in my chest as if my ribs were pinching my lungs. I wished he was there to hold me, to tell me it would be okay, that I was his Sissy Hati
and he’d never let anything bad happen to me. I wanted those silly, loving promises parents make. Wanted them so badly that I whispered them myself, soft as dandelion fluff, but it wasn’t the same. They felt hollow and false, faint betrayals of my own breath.

With a mighty effort, I drew myself together and stood up. I kept my sleeves unrolled to hide my arms. The invisible counter attached to my life seemed to be ticking faster than ever.

“Find one?” Sam asked when I returned.

I blinked at him. “Find what? Oh. No, nothing. Come on, let’s go. We’re wasting time.”

“Kase isn’t strong enough yet!” Miranda protested.

“Too bad!” I snapped. “We’re sitting targets out here, don’t you get that?”

She gaped at me while the others exchanged silent looks.

I sighed. “Sorry. Look, we should really get moving.”

“What if we holed up during the day,” said Avani, “and walked at night? They wouldn’t see us, and we’d keep warm by moving.”

“There are other dangers at night,” I replied huffily. “That’s when the lions are hunting and you wouldn’t see a snake until you stepped on it.”

“Oh,” she said, dropping her gaze. Sam gave me a reproachful look, which cut my heart, but I forced myself to remain sharp.

“We can help Kase walk,” I said. “It’ll do him good, at any rate.”

“I’m fine,” he said, though he didn’t look it. “Really.”

Miranda glared at me but helped him stand up. He was a little wobbly, but I knew he would make it.

“What do we do with these?” Joey asked, holding up an empty ostrich egg.

“Leave them.”

We marched on in silence, the others lagging a short distance behind me. I told myself that was best. I had to detach myself from them. Otherwise, I wasn’t sure how I could say good-bye when the time came. As I walked, I tried to work out how I would tell them about my infection. I ran through a dozen different scenarios before my courage gave out. When the time was right, I’d tell them. But when was the time ever right to admit you were dying? How could you prepare for that?

We crossed the road before noon, several miles north of the spot where the helicopter had found us the day before. Before crossing, we waited ten full minutes crouched in the bushes, listening and watching for any sign of Abramo’s search team. Then we darted across together, leaping over the trenches in the sand.

The water and hoodia had given us an extra burst of energy, and coupled with my hardened drive to reach Ghansi in two days, we moved at a grueling pace. I found that the faster I walked, the easier it was to ignore the maddening itch that burned on my skin. I took extra care not to brush against branches or trees, and held my arms away from my body to decrease friction from my clothes. Several times the others called for me to slow down, and I would—for about five minutes. Then I’d slowly increase my speed until we were almost jogging again.

The edge came back to my thirst, sharp and knifing. My tongue was sticky and dry like a gecko’s toes, clinging to the roof of my mouth, but I didn’t stop to hunt for
bi
root. Joey had been stopping at every shepherd’s tree we passed to dig for ostrich eggs, then running to catch up to us again, but he found nothing and soon gave up.

After a while, Sam jogged to my side.

“Sarah, what’s wrong?” he asked sharply.

I stared ahead, not meeting his concerned gaze. “If we walk through the night, we might reach Ghansi by dawn. I know I said there were lions, but I think we can make it. They’re less active near the villages.”

“You’re burning everyone out. Kase is about to faint.”

I stopped so suddenly that he walked several more steps before realizing it. He turned to face me.

“That chopper really shook you, didn’t it?” he asked.

I frowned, then seized on the excuse. “They were
shooting
at us. Of course it shook me.”

“Me too,” he said. “But we can’t keep pressing on like this. We don’t have the energy.”

“They’ll anticipate us heading for Ghansi,” I said. “We have to stay ahead of them.”

“We can’t stay ahead of them if we collapse from exhaustion or die of thirst!”

It would be so easy to tell him the real reason I was rushing, but I couldn’t stand for him to look at me the way we’d looked at Dr. Monaghan: with pity, yes, but also revulsion. I’d made up my mind to insist that he stay in Ghansi with the others. There was no way I could let him see me literally fall apart and turn into a metal monster.

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll take a short break. But then we
have
to keep moving.”

“Thank you.”

The others dropped to their knees when Sam told them we were stopping, and though they were too exhausted to say much, they all let me feel their indignation with heated glares. Ignoring them, I sat apart and dug up
bi
roots, which Sam distributed, as well as some chunks of hoodia that I found.

While the others scraped the roots and squeezed the pulp for water, Sam sat beside me and turned his tuber over in his hands.

“Are we going to talk about what happened?” he asked.

“What happened?”

He raised his eyebrows. “You know . . . the thing between us.”

The kiss. I shut my eyes and sighed. I’d hoped he wouldn’t bring it up.

“It wa
s...
great,” I said, feeling completely lame. “But where is it going to go? You’re going back to the States.”

“Yeah. For a little while. But then . . . ?”

“What are we going to do? Be pen pals?”
If only.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I just thought, you know, you’d want to talk about it.”

I said nothing. I watched a hole under the bush in front of me, where a mongoose kept poking its head up, seeing us, and ducking down again.

“Sarah,” Sam said as he shifted closer, “I really . . . like you.”

His hand moved toward me; I jerked it away and stood up.

“You’re a nice guy,” I said, my voice shaking. “But I don’t feel the same way.”

The confusion in his eyes was a knife to my heart.

“But I though
t...
We kissed and you seemed, I don’t know . . . into it.”

Oh, that’s putting it lightly.
“I think that when we get to Ghansi, you should go home. You don’t . . .” I paused and licked my chapped lips, glad that my body lacked the moisture to generate tears. “You don’t belong here. None of you do. Just go home and leave me alone.”

Sam was shocked. “Sarah!”

“I just can’t deal with this right now. Between my mom and my dad and Theo and everything else . . . I can’t deal with any more complications.”

He stared at me as if I had tried to bite him.

I turned away and walked to the others, feeling his eyes burning into my back. My hands were shaking again. I thrust them into my pockets and blinked furiously to cool my burning eyes.

We didn’t speak the rest of the day, and when evening fell, I reluctantly agreed to stop. I pointedly avoided Sam, but it was hard to do considering that everywhere I turned he seemed to be there, and when I closed my eyes to sleep, I saw his wounded gaze. He was sleeping by the others, all of them pressed shoulder to shoulder for warmth. I curled up on a grassy patch ten yards away and shivered in the cold, my teeth clenched to keep them from chattering.

It has to be this way!
I told myself furiously. I couldn’t put him or myself through what was to come. Maybe I could write him a letter or something and have it sent to him after I . . .

I cried silently, though I was unable to produce tears. I covered my mouth with the hem of my sleeve to muffle my soft whimpers, my abdomen clenched and aching from sobbing. I hated myself for being so weak. It seemed I didn’t even have the grace to die with dignity. Instead I was wallowing on the ground, weeping like a coward. I wanted to fight somehow, to prove that I deserved to walk on this Earth a little longer, but my powerlessness ate away at my core, more devastating than the metal parasite wasting my skin.

My thoughts roamed to Dad, wondering where he was, what he was doing, if he was even alive. I found myself unable to summon any hope of finding him. He was gone, just like Theo. Just like Mom.

I am alone.

When I finally did fall asleep, I was haunted by nightmares. Creeping monsters with their skin hanging from them in ribbonlike tatters stalked through the savanna around me, animals with the faces of my friends watched me with shining silver eyes, and my parents and Theo ran ahead of me, always out of reach, and when I called out to them they turned to show their faces were made of metal. I screamed and clawed at my own face, and my skin tore away in my hands.

“Sarah! Wake up!”

I jolted upright, eyes flying open.

“Don’t touch me!” I snarled.

Sam’s hand was on my shoulder, our skin separated by thin layer of fabric, and he snatched it away, his eyes wide with worry.
Too close
,
I thought frenziedly.
That was too close.

“You were screaming,” he said. “You woke us all up.”

“Sorry,” I muttered, pulling away from him. “Did you touch me?”

“What?”

“I said,
did you touch me
?”

His eyes went to my hand, then back to my face. “No.”

“Go back to sleep,” I said. “I’m fine now.”

He watched me for a moment, his face unreadable, then he turned away and went back to the others. I heard them whispering to one another. It made me inexplicably angry.

“Go to sleep!” I snapped. “We have a long way to go tomorrow.”

They fell silent and I lay back down, my eyes smarting. I felt rabid. Was it me or the Metalcium? Would it turn me silver first and
then
drive me insane, or was it the other way around? I tried to remember what Dr. Monaghan had said, but I couldn’t seem to focus my thoughts.

It took me a while to fall back asleep. The whispering started up again, but this time I held my tongue. They probably already thought I was a monster, even without seeing my face turn silver.

I pulled up my sleeve and looked at my arm. It was hard to see, until I shifted it into the moonlight. Then the light reflected off the inside of my arm so intensely that it seemed to be emitting its own florescence. I quickly turned it over so the others wouldn’t see.

The Metalcium had spread while I slept. My inner wrist was covered now, with just half of the bee tattoo still visible, and silver streaks ran down to my elbow. It was moving faster than I’d feared.

Awake or asleep, I was locked in a nightmare. The whole of the Kalahari around me, the vast, starry sky above, and yet I had never felt so trapped.

I remembered the dream catcher in my pocket and pulled it out. As I clutched it tight in my hand and held it to my chest, I felt a mellowing of my spirit. My weary eyes slid shut, and instead of the nightmare I expected, I saw Mom, her hands nimbly weaving dream catchers as we sat in a field of golden grass. Her hair was gusting around her face, blown wild by the Kalahari winds, but she only laughed when I asked if she wanted to tie it back. Instead she caught one of the wayward hairs and pulled it out, then wove it into the dream catcher. “There,” she said, holding it out. The feathers danced in the breeze. “Now you’ll dream of me.”
My memory of that day mingled with my imagination, until I didn’t know how much of it was real and how much of it was spun by my own wishful heart. As that golden, windswept field faded away, Mom’s playful smile lingered, and I fell into a dreamless sleep.

I woke when dawn was just a faint promise on the horizon, nothing more than a soft glow. Sam was the only one up, sitting cross-legged in the sand and scraping a
bi
root. He cast me a brief, blank look, then went back to scraping. He’d also gathered some crowfoot grass, which he portioned out.

I stood up and stretched, careful to keep my left sleeve pinched between my palm and my fingers so that the rash of metal wouldn’t show. I felt a deep sense of calm in my spirit, an acceptance of the day and a resignation to my fate.

Sam stood up and brought me some grass and root shavings. I asked him stiffly to set them down, and as he did I saw the skin around those lovely green eyes wrinkle with hurt. Sam stood and stared at the ground between us for a moment, while I squeezed pulp from the shavings, and then he lifted his face.