‘No, don’t,’ Sarah pleaded, still feeling guilty for losing her teammate. ‘We know what happened. I don’t need to hear it again.’
But McNutt was insistent. ‘Play it again. I think I saw something.’
Cobb knew better than to challenge a sniper on what he had or hadn’t seen. ‘Hector, you heard the man. Play it again.’
McNutt walked closer to the screen. ‘Go to the part at the very end, right before the footage stops.’
Garcia rewound the video and played it again.
McNutt stepped even closer. ‘Again.’
Garcia played it one more time.
‘Again,’ he demanded. ‘This time in slow motion.’
Garcia adjusted the playback settings, and the footage ticked by slowly. Halfway through the segment, McNutt’s hand shot forward and he pointed at the screen.
‘Freeze it!’ he shouted with glee. ‘I told you I saw something!’
Garcia and the others leaned in, trying to see why McNutt was so excited. But all they could make out were patches of light and dark on the screen.
‘Where?’ Sarah asked.
McNutt pointed to the center of the screen. ‘Right there.’
Cobb glanced at the blob of pixels, then at Sarah, who was scrunching her face in total confusion, then over to a squinting Garcia. It was quite obvious that none of them was having any luck with the image. ‘Josh, what are we trying to see?’
‘A monkey man,’ he said proudly.
Sarah rolled her eyes at the assertion. ‘Monkey shit, maybe. But not—’
‘I’m telling you, there’s someone there!’
McNutt growled in frustration as he rumbled over to the corner of the lounge that she had been using as workstation. He snatched a black marker off the table and rumbled back to the monitor. Then he drew directly onto the television with heavy black ink.
‘Not the screen!’ Garcia shouted a moment too late.
‘Look here,’ McNutt said as he outlined the blob. ‘This is his head… This is his neck… And these are his shoulders… So all of you can suck it.’
He reinforced his point by circling the dark blob several times.
This time it was Sarah who glanced at Cobb for a second opinion. ‘Am I the only one who can’t see this guy? Because I’ll be honest: I’m horrible at those Magic Eye puzzles. I stare and I stare, but I never can see the dog in the funny hat.’
‘I always find the dog, but I can’t see the guy,’ Cobb admitted.
McNutt groaned as he looked around the room for art supplies. ‘Does anyone have crayons or a bucket of paint?’
‘Wait!’ Garcia blurted. The mere thought of it made him nauseous. ‘Before you do anything irreversible, let me try some digital magic. If we’re lucky, I might be able to filter out some of the diffusion.’
‘Speak in English,’ McNutt demanded.
‘I was,’ Garcia assured him as he tapped on his tablet. ‘I would have tried this earlier if our source material was a little bit clearer, but due to the missing sectors, I’m honestly not sure what my formatting palette will do to the image. It might make it better; it might make it worse.’
A few seconds later, they got their answer.
The borders of the image suddenly sharpened.
Sarah looked on in amazement. ‘I’ll be damned. The hillbilly was right.’
Cobb nodded. He could finally see it too.
A head. A neck. And a set of shoulders.
McNutt smiled in victory.
And then he suddenly stopped.
Instead of gloating, he leaned in and studied the pixels even closer, so close his nose was nearly touching the man on the screen. Then he backed away, spit on his hand, and tried to wipe the magic marker off the man’s neck. The mixture of saliva and ink on the high-end television made Garcia start to dry-heave, but McNutt ignored the gagging and continued with the task at hand, much to the amusement of Sarah and Cobb.
‘What are you doing?’ Sarah asked.
‘I see something else,’ McNutt said.
She rolled her eyes. ‘No, you don’t.’
‘Yes, I do,’ he assured her as he kept spitting and wiping.
‘Josh,’ Cobb asked, ‘what do you see?’
‘Some kind of mark. Maybe a tattoo. Maybe a scar. I can’t really tell because some idiot wrote on the screen. But it’s definitely something funky.’
‘Define funky.’
McNutt stepped back and pointed at the image. ‘See for yourself.’
Cobb studied the unusual marking. It consisted of two concentric circles supported by a pair of pillars that narrowed from their base. Unfortunately, it was a symbol that he had never seen before. ‘Anyone know what it is?’
Sarah cocked her head to the side, wondering what to make of the image that was now clearly visible on the screen. ‘It’s too shiny to be a tattoo. I think it’s a brand — like the ones they get in fraternities.’
‘I meant the shape itself,’ Cobb said.
‘Oh,’ she said as she looked closer. ‘The outline reminds me of an old-fashioned keyhole. The kind that used skeleton keys.’
‘I can see that,’ Cobb admitted, although his gut sensed that wasn’t right. It seemed more abstract. ‘Hector? What about you?’
‘Me?’ Garcia said meekly. He slowly peeked to see if saliva was still visible on the screen. Once he realized it had been wiped away, he was able to focus on the image. ‘I don’t know. Maybe some sort of hieroglyph, like the ones from the wall. I can try to check it, but like I said, I don’t know how to do that without sending it to an historian.’
His words hung in uncomfortable silence as the same thought entered their minds.
If Jasmine were here, she would know.
44
Jasmine opened the door of the hut and ran forward until she saw that there was nowhere to run to. There were no streets, no roads, no buildings, and no one waiting for her on the other side of the door. The scene was empty, without any signs of life, as if she had been dropped in the middle of nowhere and left to die. Confused by the development, her determined sprint quickly slowed to a perplexed, meandering stagger.
In every direction, all she could see was desert.
The sand scorched her feet as she tried to make sense of things. She knew that she couldn’t continue walking much longer… at least not like this. Though the temperatures in the desert had dropped from the extremes of the summer, she would still need something to protect her feet. Now that she knew what she was facing, she needed to rethink her plan. Begrudgingly, she turned around and made her way back toward the relative safety of the simple hut.
Driven by curiosity, she paused only briefly at the doorway before walking around the corner of the building, enduring the scalding terrain under her feet for a few moments more as she investigated. Hoping that the rear of the structure would somehow offer some form of encouragement, what she saw had the exact opposite effect. Instead of salvation, she found faint tire tracks that led off into the distance.
She strained to see something on the horizon — anything that would signal civilization — but there was nothing to be found. No matter which direction she looked, the endless sea of sand stretched out in front of her. Under different circumstances, she would have found beauty in the unbroken vista of rolling dunes and piercing blue sky. But at that moment, she was struck by the horror of her predicament.
Jasmine didn’t like her options. The men who had taken her would surely return to the shelter at some point in time, and although they had kept her alive so far, she really didn’t want to be around to find out why they had abducted her. She knew she had the element of surprise on her side, but she doubted her ability to defend herself against a group of armed men. Besides, she had never taken a life. If it came to that, she wasn’t sure if she could bring herself to do it.