overexaggerating the allure of the desert. 'An opportunity to experience a once-in-a-lifetime expedition across the nomadic sands of the Sahara,' he recited under his breath. He'd have wagered a year's pay the copywriter had never ventured past the Dover coast.
They were almost 80 kilometers from the Trans-Sahara Motor Track and a good 240 from the Niger River city of Gao. The safari carried more than enough food, water, and fuel for the remainder of the journey, so Fairweather kept open an option to bypass Asselar should an unforeseen problem arise. The safety of Backworld Explorations' clients came first, and in twenty-eight years they had yet to lose one, unless they counted the retired American plumber who teased a camel and was kicked in the head for his stupidity.
Fairweather began to wonder why he saw no goats or camels. Nor did he see any footprints in the sandy streets, only strange claw marks and round indentations that traveled in parallel as though twin logs were dragged about. The small tribal houses, built of stone and covered with a reddish mud, appeared more rundown and decayed since Fairweather had passed through on the last safari not more than two months ago.
Something was definitely amiss. Even if for some odd reason the villagers had deserted the area, his advance scout should have met them. In all the years they had driven the Sahara together, Ibn Hajib had never failed him. Fairweather decided to allow his charges to rest for a short time at the village well and rinse off, before continuing some distance into the desert and making camp. Better keep a guarded eye, he thought as he pulled his old Royal Marine Patchett submachine gun from a compartment between the seats and tucked it upright between his knees. On the muzzle he threaded an Invicta silencer, giving the weapon the look of an extended pipe with a long curved shell clip protruding from it.
'Something wrong?' asked Mrs. Lansing, who along with her husband rode in Fairweather's Land Rover.
'Just a precaution to scare away beggars,' Fairweather lied.
He stopped the four-wheel-drive and walked back, warning his drivers to keep a sharp lookout for anything suspicious. Then he returned and drove on, leading the column to the center of the town and passing through the narrow and sandy streets that were laid out in no particular order. At last he stopped under a lonely date palm that stood in the middle of a spacious marketplace near a circular stone well about 4 meters in diameter.
Fairweather studied the sandy ground about the well in the last light of the day. It was surrounded by the same unusual tracks he'd spotted in the streets. He stared down into the well. He barely saw a tiny reflection deep in the bowels of the sandstone. He recalled that the water was quite high in mineral content that gave it a metallic taste and tinted it a milky green. Yet, it had quenched the thirst of many lives, human and animal, over the centuries. Whether it was hygienic for the uninitiated stomachs of his clients did not concern Fairweather. He merely intended for them to use it to rinse the sweat and dust off their bodies, not drink it.
He instructed his drivers to stand guard and then showed the tourists how to hoist a pigskin bucket of water by use of an ancient hand winch tied to a frayed rope. The exotic image of desert music and dancing by flickering campfires was quickly forgotten as they laughed and splashed like children in a lawn sprinkler on a hot summer afternoon. The men stripped to the waist and slapped water on their bare skin. The women were more concerned with washing their hair.
The comical scene was eerily illuminated by the Land Rover's headlights that threw their cavorting shadows on the silent walls of the village like film projectors. While Fairweather's drivers watched and laughed, he walked a fair distance down one of the streets and entered a house that stood next to a mosque. The walls appeared old and timeworn. The entrance led through a short, arched tunnel to a courtyard that was littered with so much human trash and rubble that he had difficulty climbing over it.
He shone a flashlight around the main room of the structure. The walls were a dusty white, the roofs high with exposed poles over a stick matting, much like the latilla viga on the ceilings of Santa Fe architecture of the American Southwest. The walls were indented with many niches for keeping household goods in, but they were all empty, their contents scattered and broken around the floor along with jumbled furniture.
Because nothing obvious appeared to be missing, it looked to Fairweather as if vandals had simply trashed the house after the occupants had fled, leaving all their possessions behind. Then he spotted a pile of bones in one corner of the room. He identified them as human and began to feel extremely uneasy.
In the glimmer of the flashlight, shadows formed and played weird tricks on the eyes. He swore he saw a large animal flit past a window to the courtyard. He removed the safety on the Patchett not so much from fear as from a sixth sense of the menace that was forming in the darkening alleyways.
A rustling sound came from behind a closed doorway that opened onto a small terrace. Fairweather approached the door quietly, stepping softly around the debris. If there was someone hiding inside, they went silent. Fairweather held the flashlight in front of him with one hand and gripped the submachine gun, muzzle aimed forward, with the other. Then he kicked the door open, knocking it off the hinges onto the floor where it threw up a cloud of dust.
There was someone there all right, or was it something? Dark-skinned and evil, like a demon escaped from hell, it looked like an animal-like subhuman, swaying on hands and knees, staring insanely into the beam of light through eyes that were as red as burning coals.
Fairweather instinctively stepped back. The thing reared up on its knees and lunged at him. Fairweather calmly squeezed the trigger on the Patchett, holding the butt of the gun against his flexed stomach muscles. A rapid stream of 9-millimeter, 100-weight-grain, round-nose bullets spat from the muzzle with the muffled sound of popcorn popping.
The hideous beast made a ghastly retching sound and collapsed, its chest almost blown away. Fairweather stepped up to the huddled form, leaned over, and beamed his flashlight on it. The body was filthy and completely naked. The wild eyes were staring sightlessly, a bright red where white should have been. The face was that of a boy, no more than fifteen.
A fear struck with such shock, such stunning force, that Fairweather was for several moments numbed with the realization of the danger. He knew now what made the odd tracks in the sand. There must have been a whole colony of them that crawled through the village. He turned suddenly and began running back to the marketplace. But he was too late, far too late.
A wall of shrieking fiends burst from the evening dark and tore headlong into the unwary tourists at the well. The drivers were swallowed in the seething tidal wave before they could cry out an alarm or put up a shred of defense. The savage horde came on hands and knees like jackals, pulling down the unarmed tourists and snapping at any exposed skin with their teeth.
The horrible nightmare, illuminated by the headlights of the Land Rovers, became a frenzied press of writhing bodies with the terrified screams of the panic-stricken tourists mingled with the banshee shrieks of their attackers. Mrs.
Lansing gave a tortured cry and disappeared in a tangled mass of bodies. Her husband tried to climb on the hood of one of the vehicles but was pulled down into the dust and mutilated like a beetle under an army of ants.
The fastidious Londoner twisted the head of his cane from a hollow sheath, revealing a short sword. He flayed about him viciously, temporarily keeping the mob at bay. But they seemed to possess no fear and quickly overwhelmed him.
The area around the well was choked solidly with struggling humanity. The fat Spanish man, blood streaming from several teeth wounds, jumped into the well to escape, but four of the crazed killers jumped in after him.
Fairweather ran up and crouched, firing the Patchett into the surging attackers, careful not to shoot one of his own people. The mob, unable to hear the silenced gun, ignored the unexpected gunfire and were either too crazed or too indifferent to realize a score of their number being cut down around them.
Fairweather must have shot nearly thirty of the murderous crowd before the Patchett spent its last shell. He stood helpless, unseen and unnoticed as the uncontrolled slaughter slowed and eventually ceased as his drivers and clients were all slain. He could not comprehend the suddenness that turned the marketplace into a charnel house.
'Oh God,' he whispered in a tight, choked voice, watching in cold horror as the savages set upon the bodies in a cannibalistic frenzy, gnawing at the flesh of their victims. He went on watching with a morbid fascination that slowly transformed to anger and outrage at the sickening tragedy being played out before him. Fairweather was caught in the nightmare of it, powerless to do anything but stare at the horror.
