The Sand Devours (Part II)
Part I can be found here:
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 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.
To be continued…