Rowen’s voice was shaking. “Are we seriously not going to talk about it?”
“What exactly do you want to talk about?” Luke, back to sulking in the shadows, sounded bored.
“How the jeeps came to our rescue and then didn’t even notice us! They nearly killed Lori!”
Luke shrugged. “Lori’s fine, isn’t she? Better than new. Just quiet and slightly less annoying than before.”
“I’m also okay. Thanks for caring,” I muttered, but only Tommy looked in my direction. He was also the only one doing something productive—picking the few fruits still left on the trees and piling them on the ground in the shade.
“Not much we can do now, right?” Tommy said, not pausing in his work. “I say we stick to our original plan and go exploring. We might be stuck here longer than anticipated.”
Admit it—we’re utterly screwed, I read between his measured words.
“Well, I say bullshit,” Luke spat. From his place on the ground he was watching Tommy like a jaguar in wait, about to spring out and go for the throat. “Those cars appearing here means civilization’s not far away. I say we follow their tracks in the sand before they disappear. Only a total idiot would stay here one more night!”
A menace to his movement, Tommy dropped his fruit pickings and took a step toward Luke. Crossing his arms tightly over his chest, Tommy said, “Only a total idiot would wander off into the desert to follow the tracks of an imaginary car.”
“It wasn’t imaginary, and you know it!” Luke jumped off the ground and came face-to-face with Tommy. Luke’s fingers were curling into fists, and his shoulders were pulled back. It would’ve been funny to watch him fluff up like a fighting peacock if it wasn’t so disturbing. I always knew there were emotions underneath Luke’s mild-mannered surface that were less than pleasant, but the only time I ever saw his violence take physical shape was when he made my bully bleed. Ever since, Luke had filtered his anger, only letting it show through verbal aggression and tense body language. But now the desert was pushing him further and further from forced civility, filling me with fear of what was to come when Luke’s facade finally broke for good.
It was time for the voice of reason to intervene. I hoped that voice was going to come from someone other than me. I looked around, finding Minh, but her attention was on Lori. The latter was curled up on the ground, her head resting on Minh’s lap. In a rare show of genuine gentleness between them, Minh was patting Lori’s head, not unlike a handler of wild beasts pacifying a distressed animal. Rowen was also focused on Lori. Okay, I would have to be the voice of reason then. I approached Luke and tried to catch his eye. It wasn’t an easy task to get and hold his attention, since he was engaged in a whoever-looks-away-first-is-a-loser game with Tommy. When I succeeded, I said, “There’s a strong probability that we had a group hallucination and imagined those cars.”
“Strong probability my ass…,” Luke growled, but choked on the rest of his sentence when Tommy’s open palm connected with his chest. I was close enough to Luke to feel his warm breath on my neck as the air got knocked out of his lungs. Luke stumbled back but didn’t fall. If Tommy thought he was going to slap some wisdom into Luke, he was dead wrong. Instead of wising up, Luke turned the color of beets, nostrils flaring and lips twisting into a scowl. Gone was the cocky guy I’d kissed just days ago. I quickly moved aside as Luke lunged at Tommy, but the vegetation underneath his feet got him tangled up, giving Tommy an opening to deliver another blow. This time Tommy’s fist collided with Luke’s shoulder. From a bystander’s perspective, the hit looked deceptively weak, even gentle. Tommy didn’t want a fight—that much was clear. But, again, Tommy didn’t know Luke. Hell, even I couldn’t say I knew Luke, but based on what I did know about him, Luke wasn’t the kind of guy who responded well to being slapped around. This was going to end badly.
“Stop this!” I begged, having enough common sense to stay away from the direct path of destruction. Deaf to my plea and driven by the furious blood pumping through his veins, Luke barreled into Tommy, wrapping his hands around Tommy’s waist and bringing him down to the ground with his weight.
Both of them managed to land enough hits and punches on each other to draw blood. What shook me more was that no one else seemed to care.
“Rowen!” I ran for the shade where Lori lay still, as if soothed into a trance by Minh’s hands running through her hair. “A little help here! Do something! Make them stop!”
Rowen looked up at me but made no motion to move.
I had to resort to the tactics of a girl stuck in a pub brawl. I latched onto Luke’s back, since he was the closest to me, and pounded my fists against him. Trying to reach around him, I yelled and pulled at the two boys’ hands while somehow avoiding being hit myself. It worked after a while: They let go and rolled away from each other.
Tommy was the first to sit up. His lower lip was split. There was a quarter of a napkin in the back pocket of my sweatpants and it looked clean, so I handed it over to Tommy. When he failed to take it, I pointed at his mouth. Absently, he accepted the napkin and pressed it against his lips.
After observing our silent exchange, Luke picked himself up and limped deeper into the oasis.
“What was that about, huh? Really?” I asked Tommy, watching a red dot soaking through the napkin.
“He’s an asshole. What would someone like you be doing with someone like him, anyway?”
The unguarded coarseness of his words took me aback. “Someone like me?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Actually, I don’t,” I said, not caring who else could hear me. “I don’t really know what you mean, Tommy, because I don’t really know you, and I certainly can’t read your mind. I’m on your side though, you know. I just hope you’re on my side too—that you’ve got my back.”
Looking as surprised by my outburst as I was, Tommy just sat there, staring at me. I had to ignore the trickle of heat spreading through my face. His eyes were so green, as if painted with impressionist colors.
“What I meant was that Luke and you … I don’t get it,” he said. “He’s the most unlikely guy someone like you could pick for a boyfriend…”
“Who said anything about a boyfriend?” I snorted in shock as Tommy’s expression grew befuddled. “Jump to conclusions much? And again, what was that—someone like me?”
“All I’m trying to say is that you can do so much better.” He wanted to add more—I saw his lips shaping up to it—but then he stopped and just gave me a close-lipped smile, an oddly disarming one.
“Tommy, I’m stuck in the desert with my four friends and my father’s research assistant. I know I can do so much better.”
I left him sitting there and walked away, headed for the palms where everyone else was haunting the shadows like a pack of homeless phantoms. Luke was washing up in the spring, the water around him turning pink.
Our collective mood was down for the rest of the day, and that was putting it lightly. While the rest of us kept to our own space, Tommy couldn’t sit still. He busied himself with rinsing the remaining fruit in the stream and separating it into six piles, each looking awfully small. On and off, we munched on our food until the sun started to set. The unspoken reality was that tomorrow we’d have close to nothing to eat unless we were willing to climb those taller palm trees we hadn’t yet stripped bare. There were no more talks about exploring the oasis or following car tracks out into the desert. This place was draining us of motivation and energy.
As night rolled in and the temperature dropped, there was nothing left to do but settle down on the ground and sleep. I nestled next to Minh, and Luke claimed a spot in front of her but facing away. I took it as a sign of Luke’s waning interest in me, which was a relief. Tommy hesitated before choosing a place next to me, leaving me staring into his back. Despite my miserable mood, my breathing soon grew measured and calm. A thick kind of sleep rolled in and carried me away. Not even the sensation of being watched by someone hiding in the black underbrush—or the unmistakable though difficult-to-comprehend-given-the-circumstances sounds of making out coming from the section of the clearing claimed by Lori and Rowen—could keep me awake.
“Noam was her favorite, you see. That’s why she let him go and not me. Forgive me for being so dramatic, but I do feel wronged by her!” The nervous lips of the speaker were moving close enough to my face for me to feel the displacement of air. His speech was accented. Something European. French, I guessed. I tried to shiver away from his breath, but something held me in place. My eyes shut tight, I couldn’t overpower my fatigue to open them and see who was hanging over me.
“Tommy?” I tried to ask, only no sound came out.
“No, no … Don’t waste your energy trying to fight her. Just listen. Listen! Just listen now,” the man who definitely wasn’t Tommy continued. His presence was fast becoming unbearable. Like a freezer door swinging open, he was letting out chilled air, while something was pressing down on my chest, making it an effort to draw enough air. I attempted to edge away from him, but my body was now weightless. I was no longer lying on the uneven ground but rather floating in the darkness of space—or in water. I wished this dream would end. I tried fighting my way up to the surface, but whenever I’d approach the glow above the water, I was yanked back into the depths.
“There were two of us stuck here. Noam and me. And he left me here … She let him go because there was nothing else he could offer her. But before she released him, she stripped him of his very soul. Which of us has a worse fate? I wonder. And now she’s got six fresh ones. I … can … hear … her belly growling all the way from here…”
His freezing breath washed over me with each new sentence, and I couldn’t stop my body from shuddering. I strained so hard, I managed to open my eyes into a slit. This was no dream at all! The man’s face hanging over mine was familiar. His skin was dark, and his eyes were milky white. He had no pupils.
He smiled at me with something like pity in his expression. I stared in horror at his teeth, rot claiming what was formerly white.
“I … know … you.” Every word was a battle against my unwilling tongue.
“Yes, yes, I guess, you do. In a way.” He gave me an eager nod, flashing those terrible teeth again.
“You’re the man from the driver’s license.” We found your bones in the desert.
Another nod, another disturbing flash of those teeth. “And you’re the girl she’ll save for last. After she devours all the others. One by one, she’ll eat you up, tear you apart limb by limb, separating soul from flesh. But she needs her sacrifice first…”
Abruptly, the man melted into the night, leaving a whiff of cold air behind him as a reminder. It shrouded me in the way of a wet, smelly blanket that was starting to grow mold.
I couldn’t sleep after that. I met the sunrise, my eyes open wide, staring at the beauty that was the auburn sun rising over the desert but seeing none of it.