CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

SLIDING TO A stop at the base of the dune, I flopped onto my back. Peeling open my eyelids revealed nothing except a blinding sun and overexposed sky. “Oleg.” My voice croaked. I tried to swallow, but the simple mechanism failed to execute. Instead the swollen interior of my throat clenched and released ineffectually. I gagged, finally drawing a trickle of breath into my lungs. Gradually, the world stopped spinning.

I pushed to my knees. In the distance, dark shapes loomed behind a curtain of storm-blown sand. With wobbly effort I stood. After wiping the heels of my hands on the tattered remains of my shirt, I pressed them against my eyes in attempt to clear my vision. A buzzard swooped somewhere overhead, its shadow whisking across the sand dune beside me.

Focusing again on the distant shapes, I realized they were wooden structures. Steadily I progressed toward them, my eyes roving from the buildings to the tops of the dunes and then the rock wall rising behind me. No other sounds, save the wind and the sand and the wheeze of my own breathing penetrated the shroud of the desert—the forbidden Rub’ al Khali, my father’s lifetime obsession. My father.

He was here somewhere. He’d led an expedition for oil. We’d started drilling in the base of a rocky canyon. I scanned the cliff behind me again. Right here. This was the drilling camp. Somehow I felt out of time and place, like my existence here was wrong. Then again, I supposed those on the edge of survival always felt as much.

I drew within several yards of the nearest structure, a splintered derrick half submerged in wind-blown sand. The top third had burned brittle and broken in a storm. While gazing upward, I slipped, collapsing to my side. Balled clumps of tar and sand littered the floor of the rocky canyon. A disaster had struck a week into the drilling. I couldn’t remember what, or how long ago it had happened.

Where had everyone gone? Using a scorched timber to stabilize myself, I rose and proceeded throughout the remains of the camp. The chaos had not been result of a storm or even one coupled with a fire. There had been an attack. Claw marks were slashed across canvas tents, blood spilt and splattered like paint.

Twitchers. A shudder dropped me to my knees. I crouched, finally collapsing into a ball. I remembered the shrieks, the lust for blood. My father had ordered me up the rock wall at the other end of the canyon. I’d run and left him to die. All of them. But how long ago? How had I survived? Why would God permit it?

I fumbled to my feet, now hurrying through the maze of tattered hemp canvases and abandoned wooden crates. I had to find our tent, my father’s and mine—there, tucked under a boulder. A gust unloosed a fresh cascade of sand. Slipping down both sides of the rock, it buried my bare feet.

The tent still stood, half buried in sand. A blood handprint emblazoned the flap over the entrance. Digging like a dog, I unloosed enough of the flap to heave myself inside the dusty space. Choking on fine, silty sand, I covered my mouth with my shirt. Finally, I scanned the insides of the last place my father had spoken kind words to me.

Little Buck. He shook his head, a smile on his lips. I see success in your future. But you gotta always remember, life’s about the adventure as much as the discovery. Never let man’s obsession with success corrupt you with regret. No matter what. He gripped me by both shoulders, a tear forming in his eye. For the true visionary, failure is the beginning of adventure.

I blinked away tears of my own before noticing a set of markings etched in blood on the back wall of the tent—hashmarks in sets of five, four lines crossed out by a fifth. I counted seventy-eight in total. But seventy-eight what? Days? I scanned the rest of the tent finding a few dozen empty ration cans and finally a notebook.

I opened crinkled pages, damaged by moisture and stained as if carried in a shirt pocket, close to my father’s chest. Page after page, he’d gridded the surrounding landscape in broader and broader swaths around the camp. Starting above the rock wall, he’d x’d out each sector and scrawled a date beside it—the last one labeled March 15th, 1996. I didn’t know the current date.

I placed the notebook back in the crate where I’d found it. He’d been searching for something. I picked up a small, dog-eared photograph. Of course, he’d been looking for me. I clutched the picture to my chest—the one of me taken on the front stoop of our old house, the day after my mother had died.

“Little Buck?”

I jolted. Spinning toward the tent flap, I lost my balance and floundered against the side of the tent. “Dad?”

A weathered man with a scraggly, long beard full of sand, poked his head through the opening. The man grinned, his black eyes turning red. “Little Buck, I thought I’d find you here.”