CHAPTER 9

"The Wanderer"

They were following her.

Or, at least, they had been. Faintly, she had heard a man shout "She is missing!" as she sprinted from the dig site.

She ran and ran, as fast as her legs could carry her, until it turned into more of a stumble.

The image in her mind of those bodies was enough to keep her running. The memory of the metallic smell of the blood, the fact that the screams her subconscious had incorporated into that dream were actual shrieks of terror.

The look on Emmy Witsell's face before she died was etched into her eyelids. She was so scared. A simple American girl from Connecticut, on a trip she wasn't all that bothered about, had been murdered tonight.

What would her parents know of this? What would anybody know of this? All of the diggers were dead, without a doubt. Lallier, Jeffrys, and probably Sherif— lovely, kindly Sherif— all murdered in the middle of the desert, on an excavation she had insisted they take part in.

Meela had been kidnapped, from what she gathered. Dr. Bunbury, too.

Would those savages have spared another life? Had anybody at all escaped?

She saw their trucks, and wondered if they were for the soldier men or the prisoners they took. As for the Scrolls of Thebes... Well, she had dishonoured Terence Bey's memory. She had practically placed those sacred items in the hands of The Cult.

The thought of it all kept her running. She was ashamed, all at once terrified and wracked with guilt and so very, very angry.

The pain of the desert night's cold biting at her bare flesh had been received with open arms; she deserved it, every part of it, for luring innocent people to their demises.

Morning came, and with the bright sunrise her paranoia began to fade. Nobody was following her. She climbed to the top of a tall dune to check, and that was when she found that nothing was following anything out here.

She was in the middle of nowhere.

There wasn't a flicker of life for hundreds of miles. All she could see was sand— glaring yellow sand, sand that travelled in ripples and waves and burned the soles of her feet by midday.

There were no oases, not a tree in sight. No travellers, no Bedouins.

In her sheer terror, the notion of getting lost in the Sahara wasn't one that even flitted through her mind. Now, however, she saw that she was as likely to die out here as if she had been kidnapped by those men.

She had no food and, more importantly, no water.

When the sun was at its highest, she sat down and emptied the contents of her handbag into the sand.

Terence's journal, an empty matchbox, her house keys, Jonathan's last letter... An untouched case of Tangee lipstick, and 'The Ancient Egyptians: Their Life and Customs, Volume 2'.

"No water, no food," she said to herself, "But I have my million pound Chanel handbag! Bloody fantastic!"

In raging frustration, she grabbed the expensive handbag Meela had given her shook it at the heavens, a scream of anger leaving her throat somewhat cathartically.

She tossed it into the sand and then utterly lost her temper with the blasted leather sack. Standing, she threw it in the air and booted it as far as she could, before collapsing in a fit of laughter.

The tears of hilarity lasted for a long time, and then they turned to sobs. The afternoon drew on, and Pyrrah found herself crying hopelessly as she retrieved the handbag and put her few belongings back inside it.

Night fell.

Perry had nothing, not a scrap of fabric aside from her nightgown with which to cover herself. And fashioning a hat out of the handbag wasn't going to help anybody.

She was cold, dressed immodestly, and knew that praying for heat was a ridiculous notion, as she was probably going to die of dehydration the next day.

For a while, she gave up.

Might as well say goodbye, she thought. I led all those people to their deaths. The Cult has the scrolls, anyway, which means they'll find the Bracelet of Anubis and rule the world.

In days gone by she had chastised Ardeth for his pessimism. Now, she was ready for death, as the forthcoming apocalypse was all her fault.

Morning came again, and she sat atop a sand dune and watched the sunrise with a surprising lack of emotion.

She didn't want to die today, and the world's end was yet to happen. So, she walked.

Drifting between depression, anxiety, tiredness, hungriness and raw devastation, the heat began to get to her head.

"How many miles have I walked, Jonathan?" she asked thin air.

"I'd say at least seven million, my dear." Jonathan replied.

Perry stopped, swayed on the spot, and then broke down into another fit of laughter. In her mind, Jonathan was laughing, too.

"Seven million?" she shouted. "Mr. Carnahan, there's no such thing, you bloody fool!"

Long before that point had she stopped sweating, and the skin on her forearms became as dry as the desert floor. She was dizzy, so incredibly dizzy, but there was nothing to hold her upright.

Hunger disappeared in favour of a sickening hollowness of her stomach, and when night fell again and she cried in anguish, her eyes produced not a single tear.

She wandered on, watching the stars in the sky with a sort of delirious fascination.

"I'm heading west," she said aloud, like the constellations might confirm it. "I am surely in Timbuktu by now."

Her legs gave way a short while after that. She lay in the sand, full of regrets, staring at the stars and wondering if she would wake up the next morning.

If I never agreed to clean out Terence's office, she thought, I would never have found that blasted journal.

The journal seemed to be the root of all her problems. If she had never read from that book, she would be in the company of Ardeth's tribe at this very moment.

Ardeth... He would never know what happened to her. Neither would Jonathan. Mr. Carnahan would assume that his assistant just stopped writing.

Nobody was going to find her body out here. Not even vultures.

Exhaustion was just about to drag her into slumber when a sharp hissing noise made her look around.

Perry sat up.

A snake, probably three feet long, had emerged from the sand below her head.

"Oh, Salam," she said, and laughed. Lazily, she waggled her fingers at it.

The snake looked brown, although it was hard to tell in such darkness, and its scales reflected the moonlight in their gentle ridges.

It stopped and looked at her, tongue flickering, and eyed her fingers.

"Pretty snake. What are you? You're not a cobra—"

The reptile rose its forebody, spread its hood and spat.

Shock was the first thing that registered, and all Perry could do was sit with her jaw dropped and some sort of hot liquid coating her tightly-shut eyes.

Then, the pain hit her.

She screamed.

Burning, stinging, intense pain rocketed through her eyes to the back of her skull, and she fell over in agony, clawing desperately at her face to try and make it stop.

Her screams were involuntary at this point: the pain was unbearable, the worst she had ever felt, and the fact that she was vulnerable near a massive cobra made her panic all the more.

She yelled for help, but it would never come. Opening her eyes a tad to see where the snake was, she found it had slithered away, probably back to its underground home. But her surroundings were hazy and throbbed with the pounding of her pulse, a mesh of liquid and darkness and blurred stars that spun and stretched like a hallucination.

The pain intensified further, and she wondered if this was how she was going to meet her end. It felt like her brain itself was swelling, like her eyes were about to set fire in their sockets.

Tortured yells falling on only the desert's deaf ears, she collapsed and listened to her own thundering heartbeat. Before she could consider tearing her own eyes out— Bernard Burns seemed the fortunate one for a time— hallucinations seized her again.

"No snakes in England," Jonathan told her. "At least, I don't think there are... Well, I only know what you know, old girl, so there are no snakes in England."

Perry wailed and sobbed through his voice, a tiny part of her knowing that he wasn't actually there, and then her arms fell limp and the blood rushed away from her head.

Unconsciousness lulled her away from the otherworldly pain, and all too soon she was blind to her solitude and numbed by slumber.

"Hello?"

She thought, just for a fleeting moment before she gave in, that somebody's voice had drifted across the plains.

"Hello?"

But it was too feeble, too unsure, and so she decided it was an angel waiting for her in the afterlife.