Beyond the campfires, the men had gathered in a circle, with Carnahan, Bashir, and Zaid on one side and everyone else that was left on the other. But at least they didn’t look like they were about to bolt outright any longer.
She cleared her throat. “We should, ah–” She gestured vaguely to the group down the dune.
“Right,” Clark agreed.
And they headed off to see who was still left in the camp.***
It took another thirty minutes to convince the men that hadn’t run yet to stay the night in the tents. Only a smattering of the conversation was in English, and by the end of it, Lois was bored, antsy, and counting down the minutes until she could responsibly get back into air conditioning. Her long-sleeved linen button-up that protected her during the day was just a sticky, clingy extra layer in the dark. Plus, she could still feel the heat from Clark’s palms where they’d landed on her hips in front of the tomb, and
that sensation wasn’t doing anything to cool her down.
With little else to do but wait, she’d counted the remaining men—from the twenty she’d seen this morning, only thirteen remained, a number that she didn’t consider a particularly favorable sign—and tried to get a sense of whether any of them were acting suspicious. But without context or language she mostly just stood in place, irritated and disbelieving that she somehow already had two shoes once again completely filled with sand.
Eventually, the men came to a shaky agreement and shuffled warily off toward their tents, leaving only the archeologists and the foreman to fret over what would come next for the dig site.
“Thirteen will make slow work tomorrow,” Bashir said worriedly.
“At dawn, I will go out to look for the others,” Zaid assured. “They will come back.”
“I think we know that not
all of them will return,” Carnahan said bracingly.
“Things will look different to them in the day,” Zaid replied with a shrug.
But Carnahan disagreed, shaking his head. “Whether or not they believe in the mummy while in daylight, it is still true that someone out there is taking superstition too far, and with questionable intent. They may not want to come back to that.”
“Perhaps we should plan for the work to take longer until we can replace the men that don’t return,” Bashir suggested.
“We are already behind our projected schedule,” Carnahan sighed.
“We can help out, too,” Lois heard Clark offer from beside her.
Before she could ask what exactly that ‘help’ would entail, since to her it looked like ‘help’ translated to ‘lugging rocks across the heat-stricken desert’, Bashir was thanking them profusely, on behalf of himself, the Theban Mapping Project, Dr. Weeks, and the ancient pharaohs themselves.
“Hey, where
is Dr. Weeks?” Lois asked suddenly. “Shouldn’t he be here right now? Couldn’t he hear all the commotion from his tent?”
“Dr. Weeks doesn’t stay in the tents,” Bashir offered helpfully.
“He shares a houseboat with his wife on the Nile,” Carnahan explained.
“That’s convenient,” Lois mumbled under her breath before intercepting a chastising look from Clark that only made her want to dig her heels in about her suspicions.
“Speaking of overnight accommodations,” Carnahan said, turning to Bashir and Zaid, “our friends here have agreed to be our guests tonight.”
“Wonderful!” exclaimed Bashir.
“Would you ask one of the men to retrieve their bags from the Hotel Luxor?” Carnahan asked Zaid.
Zaid nodded, then looked after the other men, where the last of them were reaching the edge of the tents. He whistled sharply, the sound carrying across the sand.
In response, a short man broke his stride and looked back, and when he turned around, Lois could see that it was Gamal.
Zaid shouted to him, and the small man started trekking back toward them.
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” she interrupted, remembering that she and Clark had wanted to connect with Perry. “We can head back ourselves.”
“It is no trouble,” Zaid assured her.
“Our bags aren’t packed,” Lois protested.
“Gamal will pack them for you,” Zaid said graciously.
“Oh, no, we couldn’t ask him to do that. We’ll just head back to the hotel now and–”
“Gamal will be glad of the chance to get away from the mummy for a while,” Zaid insisted with a smile. “Please. It is our pleasure.” And then he was jogging off toward Gamal.
She felt her brow furrow. Was he just being solicitous? Or did he not want them to leave the dig site? Or maybe he wanted a look through the newcomers’ bags?
She sighed, and shot a glance toward Clark, who was watching Zaid with a curious look.
“Perhaps we should send someone for Dr. Weeks, as well,” Bashir said softly to Carnahan.
“What good would it do, now?” Carnahan asked, although Lois could tell that he wasn’t expecting an answer back. “Let him sleep. When he gets here tomorrow, Zaid will already have retrieved the men who went to their homes tonight.”
“He will not be happy if he finds half the men gone in the morning,” Bashir warned in an anxious tone she hadn’t heard from him before.
“He will not,” Carnahan agreed in a stony voice.
Lois watched them, unable to decide if Carnahan was right about leaving Dr. Weeks to sleep. He might not be able to do much now, but he was still in charge here.
“Is there anything that we could do to help?” Clark asked sympathetically.
“No, of course not,” Bashir said immediately, dropping the tense tête-à-tête happening between himself and Carnahan. “You are our guests!”
“Yes,” agreed Carnahan, with a knowing look at them. “Let’s all get a good night’s sleep.”
He started to lead the little group back to the tents when Zaid returned to them.
“Are there any more plans for tonight?” he asked.
“Would you mind taking our guests to their tent?” Carnahan asked him.
“It would be a pleasure,” Zaid said congenially.
Carnahan and Bashir both bid them a good night before they moved toward the far side of the encampment, heads bent together.
“I wonder what that’s about,” she mused.
“Probably coming up with a game plan for the morning,” Clark suggested.
“I wonder…” she repeated.
“Please, this way,” directed Zaid, and they both followed after him.
“Pretty exciting night,” Lois remarked, directing her comment toward Zaid.
In spite of his pleasant attitude a moment before, now he didn’t reply.
Wondering why their loquacious dinner companion was suddenly silent, she nudged Clark and followed it up with a look toward Zaid.
Clark rolled his eyes, but said aloud, “Not every night you see a mummy.”
But Zaid didn’t take that bait either.
She stifled an impatient sigh and addressed him directly.
“Zaid, is this the kind of thing that usually happens on a dig?”
“I have seen many men embalmed. I have never seen one walk upright,” he replied without looking back.
“So you really believe that it was a mummy reincarnated?”
This time he did look at her. “We hear stories of a man in your city who can fly. Why would this be less believable than that?”
She noticed Clark adjust his glasses out of the corner of her eye, but he didn’t join in the conversation.
“If you thought it was real, why didn’t you run when everyone else did? Weren’t you scared?”
“This land is my home,” he said emphatically. “I will not let someone push me out. The fear I hold is being separated from the land, from my home. No other fear is greater than that.”
That earned a warm smile from Clark. “You do really sound like a farmer.”
“I was a farmer once. Now I am a foreman,” Zaid said without emotion.
“As a reporter, I still feel connected to the land I worked,” Clark said. “That connection never really goes away.”
“It does not,” Zaid agreed stoically, coming to a stop. “Here is your tent.”
Lois glanced at the tent and then back to Zaid. “Whose? Mine or his?”
“Yes, yours. His. Both,” Zaid confirmed.
“Both?” she asked.
“We have only one tent for guests. Not many people stay here,” he said by way of explanation.
She slapped back the tent flap, tuning out Clark as he thanked Zaid for his help.
Stepping inside, she looked around, and immediately forgot about pressing Zaid on his stalwart reaction to the mummy. The tent was so small that there wasn’t much to see. There was a little wash stand with a basin for water and, at the far end of the tiny space, two thick mats with a large mosquito netting attached to the tent’s ceiling to hang over them. Two hurricane lamps sat on the floor at opposite ends of the tent, neither offering very much light. The tent was small enough, though, that it was fully illuminated by the soft, amber glow they emitted.
She’d been expecting a tent like the one Carnahan had invited them to yesterday, something with enough space for both of them to have, well, their own space! But this was
significantly smaller. More spartan. More claustrophobic.
More
intimate.
“This isn’t going to work.”
“We’ve had worse,” Clark said, as the tent flap fell closed behind him.
“Oh, yeah? When?” she challenged.
“The honeymoon suite,” he suggested.
“With a bed, a couch and two separate rooms? Oh, yeah, much worse,” she threw back, turning around to meet him and realizing that he was standing so close in the small space that he was nearly on top of her.
She took a step back.
“What do you think is going to happen?” he asked her, clocking her movement.
“What?”
“It doesn’t sound like you’re just cranky over air conditioning and down pillows. It sounds like you’re really upset by having to share a tent with me,” he said, crossing his arms. “What do you think is going to happen?”
“Nothing,” she said immediately.
“Then what’s wrong?” he asked.
She didn’t answer, agitated without being able to pinpoint why.
“Lois, we’ve fallen asleep in the same place dozens of times. On my couch. On stakeouts. In your Jeep. That one time in the conference room,” he reminded her. “Why is this different?”
She crossed her arms over her chest protectively, shrugging as she cast her eyes downward. “It is.”
He sighed, taking in her posture, then offered, “I can sleep outside. I’ve done it plenty of times at the farm. On camping trips.”
She eyed the thick mosquito netting draped across the furthest section of the small tent, guessing that the bugs in Smallville and the bugs in Egypt weren’t equal.
“No,” she recanted hesitantly, still not meeting his eyes. “It’s fine.”
“Are you su–”
“It’s fine,” she cut him off.
“Lois.” She made eye contact with him at the sound of her name and he held it. “You are perfectly safe with me.”
Her eyes slid away.
She was sure of that, of course she was—Clark had never been anything but a gentleman to her. But in this dimly lit tent, in a faraway place, with a whole dark night ahead of them, she felt skittish. But her apprehension was her own baggage, and not enough of a reason to banish Clark to the mosquitos and scorpions and whatever else was out in the dark.
“It looks like we aren’t going to be able to check in with Perry about Carnahan tonight,” she said, maneuvering them toward neutral territory.
“We’ll have to keep an eye on him until we can get back to a computer,” Clark said. “Do you still think he’s our main suspect?”
“I’m not sure,” she mused, grateful that he’d so easily taken up her new subject. “I think anyone we couldn’t see at the same time the mummy appeared is a suspect.”
“So that rules out Zaid,” Clark said. “And Gamal, and Abo, and most of the workmen.”
“Abo?” she asked.
“The grillman at dinner,” he reminded her with a grin.
“Right.” Of course Clark would remember the cook’s name. “And that leaves Carnahan and Bashir and Weeks. Don’t you think it’s strange that the head of the whole operation doesn’t stay on-site overnight?”
“It
would give him the opportunity to do things without being watched or accounted for,” Clark agreed.
“Plus, he runs everything. He knows where everyone will be all the time. How do we know he didn’t empty the generator himself? Maybe that’s part of the reason he didn’t want us to check it out with him.”
“It’s possible. And what about Zaid’s friend, Wahid?” he asked.
“That’s right! He left right before the mummy appeared! Did you see where he went after dinner?”
Clark shook his head. “I wasn’t watching.”
“That’s pretty suspicious timing,” she observed. “Plus, I didn’t see him with the rest of the group that went back to the tents. Did you?”
Clark thought back, and she could practically see him rewatching the moment in his mind. “No, he definitely wasn’t with the other men.”
“Probably because he couldn’t circle back in time after getting rid of the mummy costume.”
“It’s a good working theory,” Clark agreed.
“Okay, well, at least that gives us a start for tomorrow. Wahid, Weeks, Carnahan, and Bashir,” she said, listing their suspects in order of suspicion.
“And, of course, there’s one last suspect…” Clark said.
She mentally skimmed through the list again, looking for who she possibly could have left out.
“Who?”
“Well, the Project was missing a mummy. And now there’s a mummy walking around. How do we know it’s not–”
She practically did a double take. “How do we know it's not some ancient pharaoh
risen from the dead?!”
“Like Zaid said: if one man can fly, maybe another can walk again…”
“Superman can do that because he’s from another planet! I don't know about him, but no one from
Earth is coming back from the dead,” she said with certainty.
“But how do you
know, Lois?”
“How do I–” She could swear that they’d had this conversation before. But it wasn’t over mummies; it was magic. He’d been pressing her to believe in something just on faith alone and she’d told him that if she could see it and touch it then it was real. But magic didn’t exist. Looking back, she wondered if he’d been teasing her, because now she could see the mischievous look hiding in the back of his eyes.
“Uh-huh. I get it. If you want to believe in magic and mummies, you go chase the walking dead. I’ll chase the
real suspects.”
“Alright, alright,” he said, chuckling as he surrendered.
“Wahid. Weeks. Carnahan. Bashir,” she repeated firmly.
He nodded in agreement.
“When Gamal comes back, let’s ask if he saw Wahid after dinner,” Clark suggested, apparently over his need to tease her.
“Yes!” she agreed. Then she looked around the sparse tent, brows furrowing as the antsy feeling from earlier started to creep back in. “But what do we do until then?”
Clark knelt down and drew lines into the sand at their feet.
“Up for a challenge?” he asked teasingly.
She tilted her head to see that he’d drawn a tic tac toe board.
“You’re on!” she said, kneeling down beside him and drawing an ‘x’ in the top left corner.
***
An hour later, they were sitting back-to-back in the tent, playing a low-rent version of battleship on twin grids that they’d hand-drawn in the sand. She’d been winning until Clark protested that she was cheating and forced them to sit with their backs up against each other so they could feel if the other turned their head. A few turns later, she was convinced that
he was the one that was cheating.
“C-6?” he asked over his shoulder.
“How are you doing that!?” she protested, sliding her hand over the corresponding square to wipe out the little boat design she’d made.
“Is that your last destroyer?” he asked with a chuckle.
“Why do I feel like you know that it is?” she accused, turning to shove at his shoulder.
He only laughed harder. “It’s called ‘skill,’ Lois.”
“I think it’s called ‘cheating,’ Clark!”
“How can you accuse
me of cheating?!” he asked indignantly, his delight at winning still apparent in his voice.
“Tell me how you’re doing it,” she demanded.
Still sitting with his back to her, he turned around then, too. “I wasn’t! I swear!”
His laughter was contagious and she knew she was grinning back at him in spite of her aggressive tone.
“Scout’s honor,” he swore.
She was about to bite back at him about his goody-two-shoes-boy-scout act when the atmosphere in the room changed. His breathing was a little quicker from the laughter, and his eyes were focused on hers. They’d been touching as they sat back-to-back, to minimize the risk of either of them seeing the other’s grid, and the prolonged casual contact, the first they’d shared in months, had soothed her into unconsciously lowering her guard. Now that they’d turned toward each other, they were even closer, their faces tilted toward one another, and she was suddenly ultra alert over his intimate proximity. She would never admit it out loud, but she missed this.
“Such a boy scout,” she teased, her voice unintentionally soft.
His grin turned sweeter at her more affectionate than expected response and he leaned imperceptibly closer to her.
“And boy scouts never cheat,” he said, his voice matching hers.
She only half-processed what he was saying, as if the words weren’t the important part of the conversation anymore. Instead, her breath caught in her chest unexpectedly, and she felt the intangible, simmering magnetism that was always present between them shift suddenly into something undeniable and pulsing.
Unable to move away from him, the moment drew out, feeling tighter, as if the tension between them was fighting for release.
“Lois,” he murmured.
And her eyes flickered shut for a heartbeat, tilting her face toward his and the inevitable connection with him she’d been craving.
“Hello!” a voice called at the flap of their tent.
Suddenly dropping back into reality, she launched herself backward and up off the sand and catapulted herself toward the door.
“Hello!” she called back, lifting the tent flap to find Gamal holding two suitcases and her messenger bag.
“Oh, thanks! Come on in,” she said, taking one of the suitcases from his hand.
She’d barely swung it around to the other side of her body and out of the way of the entrance when she felt its weight relieved. Turning away from Gamal, she found Clark at her side, his hand on the suitcase’s other handle. He smiled tentatively as he took it from her, an unanswered question and a heat hotter than the desert air around them still lingering in his eyes.
She tried to smile back at him but butterflies rose furiously in her chest, and she dipped her head instead, barely acknowledging the interrupted moment with an uncoordinated movement that could have been a shrug or just a motion from passing the suitcase.
Turning back toward Gamal, who had deposited the other suitcase nearer to the mats, she reached for the messenger bag and he handed it over.
“The manager asked if this meant you were checking out of the hotel?” Gamal said in his soft-spoken voice.
“Oh, um—” She felt herself stutter. Checking out would mean spending the rest of the trip sleeping in the hot, sweaty, lowly lit atmosphere on a mat with just a few inches between herself and Clark—the man she’d nearly just kissed.
Had she really nearly
kissed Clark?
Had he wanted that, too?
Did
she want it?
Or was she just so lost among the dunes and the wreckage of her romantic life that she was mistaking a mirage for an oasis?
“We’ll hold onto the reservations for now,” Clark answered for them.
A small but sure vein of disappointment ran through her flood of relief.
When she looked at him, his eyes met hers, and her safe and protective friend was back, ensuring that she had air conditioning available if she decided after all that she would melt in the Egyptian heat.
I just might melt anyway, she thought, biting her lip as she reigned in her emotions about her partner, with no thought at all to the Egyptian sun.
Meanwhile, Gamal was replying, “Someone will tell the manager when we go back to town.”
“That would be great, thanks,” Clark said.
Gamal made a move to head toward the tent entrance again, but she stopped him, remembering that they’d planned to ask about Wahid.
“Ah— Gamal, do you think that work will start again in the morning?” she asked.
“I do not know,” he said, only partly turning back to her.
“Carnahan and Zaid thought it would start again after the generator was fixed.”
“If they say,” he said passively.
“Do you have a reason to think it wouldn't start again?” she asked innocently, head titled to one side.
“I do not know,” Gamal said again.
A surge of frustration traveled down her spine. She was questioning a source for a story, but her mind was still on Clark, the warmth of his back as she sat against him, the heated tension as he leaned toward her, the longing whisper of her name on his tongue. And the distraction meant that she wasn’t getting a clear read on Gamal.
“Do you think work might not start because of the generator? Or because the other workers might not return?”
“Maybe. Or maybe it will start. If Zaid says we work, we work.”
She couldn’t tell if the prickles down the back of her neck were her reporter’s instincts warning her that Gamal was hiding something behind his blank replies, or if it was a response to Clark’s presence just behind her; she could tell he’d dropped the suitcase off and stepped in closer to them for this part of the conversation, and her split attention was agitating her.
“Did all of the men come back, then?” she asked.
“I do not know. I have been in town,” he said, gesturing to the luggage.
“Right,” she agreed, deciding to release him. “Okay, well, thanks, again.”
“Yeah, thanks for bringing these up to us,” Clark reinforced gratefully.
Gamal waved in parting and headed out the tent door.
“You didn’t want to—”
She held up a hand and Clark stopped speaking. Then she counted to ten before walking over to the tent flap and quietly pulling it back.
When she turned back, Clark’s head was tilted questioningly toward her.
“I wanted to make sure no one was listening,” she said, her voice as low and soft as she could pitch it.
“You think Gamal would stay to eavesdrop?”
He’d made his voice as quiet as possible, too, in spite of the fact that he was questioning her notion, and she moved across the tent to stand just in front of him so that she could hear better. Another round of butterflies began their flight through her abdomen as she stopped within whispering distance, but she crushed the feeling down.
“I don’t know. But I don’t think I trust
anyone with the Project anymore.”
“But Gamal was with us when we saw the mummy,” Clark pointed out.
“Didn’t his answers seem vague?” she asked, not able to catch exactly what was picking at her brain.
“You think he’s hiding something?” Clark asked back, catching up with her suspicions.
She shrugged. She hadn’t been able to tell because her mind had been in two places at once, and she couldn’t tune into her instincts about Gamal when her emotions and attention were so scrambled over Clark. But she couldn’t very well tell Clark that!
“I think
everyone is hiding something,” she confessed plainly with a shrug, alluding to her general opinion of the world.
Clark cringed lightly at her assertion but asked, “Is that why you didn’t ask about Wahid?”
She bit her lip. “I didn’t want to tip our hand if we were right about him but wrong about Gamal.”
Clark nodded. And then she thought she saw a flicker of the heat from when they were interrupted start to smolder behind his eyes. Or maybe her overactive mind was just imagining it.
Still, his voice was low when he said, “Should we talk about—?”
Alarm bells went off in her head as his more intimate tone went right to her core, and she cut him off before he could finish. “We can talk about a game plan tomorrow. Right now I just want to find a pair of clean pajamas and go to sleep.”
She moved toward her suitcase without waiting for a reply and without looking back.
A moment later, she heard Clark unzip his own suitcase, and she tried to bury that traitorous little sliver of disappointment that stubbornly ran through her relief at evading whatever he’d wanted to say.
