Kalahari by Jessica Khoury

The silver lion emerged from the grass to my left, moving silent as a whisper on his huge silver paws. I caught my breath and shrank away, but not before he spotted me. Fear freezing my veins, I couldn’t move, couldn’t blink. His gaze held mine, utterly blank and terrifying. Time seemed to stand still, the world around us vanishing, as that long look bound us together with a force stronger than gravity. In those mirrored eyes I saw myself looking back at me, my hair wild, my eyes wide, my face dirty and scraped. Androcles stood as still as a statue and poured his stare into mine as if he could discern my very thoughts. And in that moment, my fear melted away, leaving behind a deep sadness and an odd wonder.

  In that moment, I understood him.

  His sorrow, his wildness, his pain. I felt them all, my own emotions reflected in those unblinking silver eyes. A sob welled in my chest but I suppressed it, feeling it press against my lungs.

  Then Androcles turned away with a deep sigh that shuddered through his body, making his muscles quiver beneath his silver skin. He lowered his head and padded away, heading west, and vanished in his own reflection of the grass and trees and sky. I strained to hear his footsteps but there was only a glassy silence.

  He knew I was infected. I don’t know how I knew it, or if it was really true, but I felt it resonate deep inside me. He had looked into my eyes and seen it. Perhaps he thought it a waste of time to infect me, since I was already doomed. Perhaps he was just tired.

  I let out my breath as my head sank onto my chest, my fingers burrowing into the sand. Behind me, I could hear a few reluctant sparrows whistle to one another, as if making sure their family was still accounted for after the unnatural interruption.

  How far would this thing spread? How many would it kill?

  Avani had described it as a new life-form, something alien to our world. Perhaps it was more lifelike than we knew. Maybe it could think, rationalize, plan.

  Maybe it wanted to take over our world.

  Berating myself for losing Sam’s tracks, I followed my own, retracing my steps from the night before and wasting even more valuable time. I kept an eye out for the lion but didn’t see another sign of him. I knew we’d have to be more alert from now on, since he was in the area.

  It took me an hour to find where my prints deviated from Sam’s, and I tried to make up for the lost time by moving quickly, my eyes speed-reading the sand.

  To my surprise, his prints led me straight to the lone landmark I hadn’t been sure even I could find: the beautiful, ancient baobab.

  Sam was sitting in its shade.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Sarah!” 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 h
ad 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.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  I immediately rolled down my sle
eve, 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.