The sun is cruel.
Relentless, it dogged him, draped upon his cooked shoulders, dragging him into the sand for it to feast upon his bones as part of some terra-celestial bargain he had fallen prey to. His shirt, tattered as it was, offered little protection against the intensity of the heat and, worse, was beginning to catch on the rash of blisters that had broken out across his back. His hands, meanwhile, had begun to ooze a thick yellowish pus from the cracks that canvassed them. The burns across his arms and hands had gone from pink to red to black.
Yes, if Brandon Ashcroft was being honest with himself, he was going to die.
Imminently.
In a philosophical sense, it only made sense. He had walked away from a crash that no pilot should have walked away from. Never would Brandon purport himself to be the world’s best pilot, but, even still, it had not been his fault. It was, of course, the sun that had brought him down. The hot drifts rising from the sand of the Gobi below had created horrid updrafts and the small Cessna just didn’t have the juice it once did. For that, he took the blame, at least. He had inspected the craft, sure, but he was hungover and too trusting of the local man in the hangar. He’d also made similar flights enough times to feel confident enough, even in record heat, to make the short flight from Ulaanbaatar to the dig site outside Ch'a-p'u-ch'ih-erh. The researchers there believed they had stumbled upon the remains of some long-lost civilization or some such bullshit that really meant nothing to Brandon or anyone else who lived in this millennium and had their own problems to deal with without delving into the issues of some dried up mummies from four thousand years ago.
He didn’t care, but these archaeological digs always paid well for couriers of goods (go figure, the eggheads had forgotten to pack enough shovels and buckets and picks), and he was a good enough pilot to make a short flight for a fat payday.
The sun, however, had different plans for him. It had brought down his little plane within an hour, sending Brandon and his “co-pilot” (an aggrandizement if there ever was one, considering Seb had been passed out drunk before they even went wheels up) down like a dart to bury themselves in the face of a dune the size of the Chrysler Building. Brandon had crawled his way out of the wreckage, miraculously unscathed. Seb was eaten by the sand.
A dry, hollow cough rattled between Brandon’s ribs. He clutched at his chest and immediately regretted it. His blistered, oozing hands rubbed harshly against the burns on his chest, causing him to screech in pain. He sank to his knees, but there was no sanctuary there. The sand below burned even hotter than the sun above and he felt its sting even through the denim of his jeans. His hair hung loosely about his eyes, dry and cracked like every other part of him. He couldn’t even sweat, let alone cry, but he let out a weak little sob all the same.
This was it. With the last of his strength, he tilted back his head, offering himself fully to the sun to burn him away and be done with it already.
“Drink,” a voice said calmly. It sounded nearby, right beside him, but that was impossible.
“Drink,” the voice repeated and now Brandon turned toward it.
Standing beside him was a figure in a dark red robe. It was tall and lean, looming over him, but it had extended a hand to him, in which was a canteen. Brandon weighed this new sight skeptically for what may have been a half-second before his body simply overrode his mind and snatched the canteen greedily from the robed stranger’s hand. The cap was freed in an instant and Brandon felt an ecstasy he could never later explain fill his mouth and coat his parched throat as he sucked down clear, cool water.
“Yes,” said the robed man, “drink. Drink.”
Brandon had emptied nearly half the canteen down his throat before his brain finally caught back up and sounded an alarm. This may very well be the last drops of water for hundreds of miles and, sweet as it may be, conservation was likely the wiser course of action here. With a mighty effort, he managed to detach his own lips from the canteen’s.
“Th-thank you,” he sputtered, startled by the hoarseness of his voice.
“Drink,” the robed man urged. “Finish.”
Some aspect of his former self’s decorum, evidently not completely burned away by three days of wandering in the desert, cried out deep inside to demure, but it was easily drowned by another swig from the robed man’s canteen. He swallowed it thankfully, feeling the water seep into every creak and crack of his body. When he had finished it, he brought the canteen down and let out a hearty belch.
“Thank you,” Brandon said again as he offered the canteen back to this strange desert man. “I don’t — thank you.”
The man took back his canteen. His robe was heavy and folded around his arms, but even still, Brandon could see the man was remarkably thin. He caught a glimpse of bandages around the desert man’s fingers as he took hold of the canteen and quickly pulled it back into the billows of his robe. No part of the man was visible, Brandon realized suddenly, not even his face. It was hidden somewhere in the darkness of his crimson robe, with everything else.
“You are lost,” said the robed man. It was not a question.
“Yes,” Brandon replied. The water had helped to soothe his throat somewhat, but he still found speaking to be a painful labor.
“You can stand. Walk.”
Brandon was beginning to note that this robed desert man spoke only in declaratives, like a master to a dog. Better a live dog than a dead man, he figured, and, miraculously, he found that he was indeed able to stand. The water had given him some life, whatever little there was to be found in this blazing hellscape.
“Follow,” said the robed man. He turned and began to make his way across the sand. Brandon obeyed, surprised that his legs allowed it.
With each step, he felt a little stronger. His heatburns stung less, his eyes were clearer, his breath less labored. Before long, he found himself keeping pace with the desert man, who took long, seemingly effortless strides across the drifted sand which licked at the bottom of his robes but, somehow, did not stain them.
They walked along in silence for some time, the sun beating down on them.
“Where are we going?” Brandon managed after a time. The hoarseness in his voice had abated somewhat and he was happy to once again hear his own voice.
The robed man ignored him. They continued in silence as the sun drew closer to the horizon, two small dots in a rolling sea of endless sand.
The sun kissed the dunes, flared one last angry flash of red and then disappeared. Brandon stopped and watched. The robed man turned to him.
“Follow,” he said flatly and then continued on his way. Brandon obeyed.
For the first time in three days, he felt a chill kiss his skin.
They made a black line down the face of a dune, the robed man gliding gracefully across the surface of the sand as if it were ice while Brandon stumbled behind him like a drunkard.
Above them, a full moon shone brightly, painting the entire desert a ghostly pale — all but the desert man’s robe, which drank the moonlight to grow an even darker shade of blood crimson.
They had been walking for hours, yet Brandon wasn’t tired. Nor was he thirsty. Perhaps just a canteen-full of water was enough to restore a man’s strength from the brink of near death by dehydration. He doubted that, but then, here he was, trudging through miles of deep sand in one of the world’s largest deserts for hours on end after only a few mouthfuls of drink. Brandon Ashcroft was no biologist, but he also knew better than to question things when they were going well.
“Well” may have been a bit strong, he’d admit. A few aspects of his current predicament (beyond being the survivor of a single-engine aircraft crash in the middle of one of Earth’s harshest environments) gave his stomach an uneasy turn. For one, he still did not know where they were heading. Hey may be no biologist, but Brandon Ashcroft was indeed a navigator and, judging by the stars, he knew they weren’t headed back towards Ulaanbaatar and there were no other settlements that he knew of for hundreds of miles to the southwest as they were now headed. There was, however, the dig site outside Ch'a-p'u-ch'ih-erh.
While the robed man certainly did not strike Brandon as part of the archeological team, he figured he may very well be some sort of local emissary or guide hired out by the eggheads. But that thought, too, brought up some disturbing questions. If this robed man had been hired by the dig team, why in the world would he have been combing the desert dozens of miles away from the site. And he had just so happened to come across a dying man in the midst of these endless sands and offered him the last of his only source of water? Brandon had been lucky enough to survive the crash and luckier still to not have died of heat stroke after nearly three days out in the sand, but no one, absolutely no one, was that lucky.
Every inquiry Brandon had lobbed at his newfound guide had been met with silence. The robed man never answered and God only knew if he even listened. He only glided forward. If Brandon stopped, the desert man would turn, his face hidden beneath the dark folds of his robe, and stare. Even without seeing the face, Brandon could feel the robed man’s eyes upon him. They were as hot and unyielding as the sun.
And so, Brandon followed, for what other choice did he have.
They continued in silence as the moon arced across a starstrewn sky. For miles and miles they walked and yet Brandon never grew tired or thirsty. He felt strong, capable, alive. And that worried him most of all.
The two carried on for some time longer, up one dune and down another, until they eventually came to the base of a towering drift of sand, white as a sheet beneath the hanging moon.
“Wait,” commanded the robe man, and so Brandon did.
They had made great progress in the night. If they were indeed heading toward the dig site, Brandon assumed they would be well on their way to it, a welcome prospect considering the sun would be rising soon and with it would come the heat again. He wished the night would last forever.
“Come,” he heard the desert man call down to him. His crimson drapery made him look like an open wound on the face of the dune. Even though Brandon had been walking behind the robed man for hours now, it was still astonishing just how quickly and effortlessly he could move across the sand. His demanding guide had somehow made it nearly halfway up the dune in the amount of time it took Brandon to scan the skyline.
Again, he obeyed, and began to trudge his way up the shifting face of the drift, far slower than his companion. Still, he managed to work his way upward, struggling and huffing, but not tiring. He forced his mind not to linger on that fact.
Perhaps luckily, he had something else to focus on, anyhow. The smell. Its existence alone was peculiar. There is no odor in the desert. Nothing but arid heat which baked away anything that made stimulate an olfactory sense.
But now there was an odor, and an odor it was. It came on quickly as he marched up the dune’s pale face. At first it was sharp, like vinegar or sweat, but soon it took on a cloying nature, almost damp as it clung to his nostrils. With each step it grew in intensity, attacking him, strangling him. By the time Brandon Ashcroft managed to join the robed man at the crest of the dune, he was nearly choking on it.
“What is —,” he started, only to have the words drop away from his hanging mouth like spittle from a dog. There was a heat now to go with the smell and also an answer to his half-asked question.
Far below, in the moonlit sands, a fire was raging. Around it stood a ring of shapes, all draped in crimson robes. The flames licked upward in a column, fueled by a massive pyre.
The light of the fire cast shadows in the sand, but still, he could make out the telltale signs of a dig. Shovels, pits, lines of rope, here and there a collapsed canvas tent. Those sights were familiar to Brandon Ashcroft. What was queer to his eye was the color that the firelight illuminated.
It was not just the robed men who were crimson. The sand, too, was stained with it. Everywhere. In ribbons, all leading to the pyre.
And in that pile of wood and ash and flame, even from high upon his pale dune, he could make out the shape of corpses stacked in among the rest.
“Come,” the robed man said, and then made his way gracefully down across the sand.
Brandon thought to run. He was, after all, a survivor and before him was the face of death. But what was there behind him? Nothing but endless sands and a broiling sun that would soon rise again. Even if he were to turn and run, the robed man would simply gather him up again before he made it out of the shadow of the dune.
No, it was no real choice at all, when he thought about it. He had already cheated death twice, why not a third time?
So, he followed, making a clumsier way of it than his adroit guide some ways farther down the dune. The stench grew with each step. Knowing its source made him gag even harder. Brandon had seen death before (Seb’s vacant eyes, still so blue against the mangled wreckage of the Cessna, blazed out at him through the fog of his memory), but the stink of burning flesh that buffeted him now was something else entirely. He buried his face in the curve of his arm, hoping the acrid odor of his own sweat and grime would help mask the deathstench of the pyre.
No luck.
By the time he reached the foot of the dune, Brandon was green and his head was swimming. The robed man awaited him there, silent and unmoving. Behind him the pyre spat red flames up into black night while the other robed figures stood still as stone around it. An oppressive heat hung heavy on the night air, but, to Brandon, it did not feel as if it was emanating from the pyre. The sand was broiling, so hot he could feel it through his boots, as if some buried furnace was churning away beneath it.
The robed man lifted a thin arm toward him and Brandon felt his skin crawl as the ring of crimson acolytes turned their shrouded faces his direction.
“Come,” beckoned the robed man.
Brandon swallowed. His head was pounding. Sweat and blood stung his eyes. He walked forward.
The robed man led him around the edge of the raging pyre, gliding as he always did with elegant dexterity. Brandon walked uneasily behind him. The flames burned hot and bright to his right. He chanced a quick glance, was met with a blackened char of human meat sandwiched between reddening logs, and promptly looked away. To his left, the faceless shapes of the acolytes followed his every movement, a sight somehow more unsettling than the pyre. He kept his eyes down.
The sand was white-hot, even in the moonlight, and streaks of blood traced their way across it. His footing was uneven, constantly shifting as his steps displaced the sand beneath them. It felt to Brandon as if there was something moving under there, writhing and swimming through the dense, packed desert. It was almost hypnotic.
“Wait,” the robed man commanded, snapping Brandon out of his sandtrance. They had reached the opposite end of the pyre. Protruding from the sand was a tall, polished obelisk that caught the moon and firelight in a frenzied dance across its surface. Latched to the base of this monolith was a man who, based on his torn and blood-spattered khakis, Brandon took to be one of the unlucky archaeologists who had stirred up this scene deep in the heart of the Gobi. His white beard, meanwhile, led Brandon to believe he was likely the head of the excavation. His limbs were splayed wide, held to the face of the obelisk by thick, corded ropes. He was bleeding and burnt, but though his wrinkled face was pained, his eyes remained defiant.
Beside this dogged old man was another robed figure, who, in place of the crimson folds of his fellow acolytes, was draped in a white so pure that it appeared to be woven of moonlight itself.
“You have seen,” the white robed figure spoke in a low, strained voice, uttering words that were foreign to Brandon’s ears yet somehow understandable. “Olgoi-khorkhoi comes. You must drink now.”
The old man leveled a bitter eye at the figure in white robes before him and spat. No reaction came from the desert priest. It remained fixed in the sand for a moment and then turned towards the pyre and its acolytes. “Olgoi-khorkhoi,” it spoke and then spoke again. “Olgoi-khorkhoi.”
The ring of acolytes took up the chant, swaying and thumping against the sand as they incanted.
“Olgoi-khorkhoi, olgoi-khorkhoi, olgoi-khorkhoi”
“What is happening?” Brandon asked, frantic. He aimed the question at no one in particular, but probed the old man for an answer with panic painted across his face. The archeologist’s expression remained stoic.
“Drink,” the desert priest commanded. In its hand now there was a waterskin. It held it up to the archeologist’s mouth. “Drink. Olgoi-khorkhoi comes.”
The old man was struggling against his constraints now, thrashing and cursing. The chants of the acolytes grew louder, drowning him out. They were pounding on the sand rhythmically, a steady beat beneath their incantation. The robed man who had guided Brandon to this hellish place fell to his knees beside him. Brandon looked on in horror as the desert man threw off his robes, revealing a grotesquely disfigured body. It was burnt and twisted, with chunks of flesh hanging off of cracked, yellowing bone.
Brandon screamed. He turned, making to run, but the sand heaved below him and tossed him to his own knees. All around the pyre, the other acolytes had discarded their robes, revealing their hideous forms. Only the desert priest remained in his snow-white robes.
“Olgoi-khorkhoi, olgoi-khorkhoi, olgoi-khorkhoi”
The air thrummed with chanting and the monotonous drumming of the sand.
“Drink,” the desert priest commanded again, shoving the waterskin into the old man’s face. He spat again, knocking the skin from its grasp.
“OLGOI-KHORKHOI, OLGOI-KHORKHOI, OLGOI-KHORKHOI”
Now the desert floor was alive with movement. Brandon watched in stupefied terror as long, slithering shapes shifted through the sand, making their way toward the obelisk.
“OLGOI-KHORKHOI, OLGOI-KHORKHOI, OLGOI-KHORKHOI”
In a spray of hot sand, the shapes broke through the surface. Pale, wafting tendrils rose from the desert like the fingers of a decaying corpse. They rose all around the obelisk, dancing to the acolyte’s chant. They looked to Brandon like worms, but even half buried they stood taller than any man and were as thick around as the trunk of a tree. They appeared white, but what external covering they had was so thin that they were nearly translucent. Upon their heads, or what Brandon assumed were their heads, were sharp beaks, like those of a squid, black as onyx. They snapped these beaks in rhythm to the acolyte’s sand drumming.
“Olgoi-khorkhoi,” the desert priest called out, raising both its hands high above its head and shaking them victoriously. The acolytes fell silent. The worms swayed in the moonlight.
“Drink,” it told the old man as it picked up the waterskin from the sand. “Drink or die.”
The old man, for the first time, turned to Brandon. “Don’t do what they ask,” he told him with a deep sadness in his voice. He then turned his eyes back to the white robed priest and defiantly clamped his mouth shut and inclined his chin, refusing the skin for a third time.
The desert priest hung its head and sank to its knees. “Olgoi-khorkhoi,” it said, beginning the chant again. The acolytes took it up once more and Brandon watched as the worms closed in on the old man, who was struggling mightily against his ropes.
One of the worms arched backward, hissed, and shot a thick globule of clear sputum into the old man’s face. Instantly, his screams filled the night. Flesh burned beneath the worm’s noxious spittle, eating away at the archaeologist as he screeched and thrashed. Another worm reared up and spat forth another glob which struck the old man’s chest. It sizzled there as it ate into his khaki shirt then devoured the meat beneath.
The screams were horrendous, cutting through the acolyte’s chants and into Brandon’s mind. He buried his head in the sand, praying for an end to it. Blessedly, it came quickly. Brandon took some small solace in that, knowing that the old man had not suffered long.
“Come,” Brandon heard the low voice of the desert priest say. “You must drink.”
He looked up from the sand to find the naked grotesquerie around him as the acolytes stripped what was left of the old man from the obelisk. The worms still danced silently. The desert priest was offering him the skin. “Drink,” it told him.
“He has already,” said his guide.
“Yes, yes, I have, I have,” Brandon sputtered.
“Good,” said the priest. “Then you shall not know death.”
Brandon stared about him disbelief. A wave of relief washed over him. He had cheated death once more, without even knowing it. He was a survivor.
“You will live,” the desert priest told him as Brandon made his way shakily back to his feet. “Live to serve olgoi-khorkhoi, as do we.”
The flesh-eaten mouths of the acolytes took up their chant. They closed around him as the worms moved forward. Brandon tried to scream, but his tongue melted away as the acidic sputum of the worms bathed his face. His flesh bubbled and burned.
He prayed for an end, for a release, but he did not find the solace of death that the old man had. He was, after all, a survivor.