”How much further?” I asked.
“We’ve still a long way to go. The sea is at least sixty miles north,” Rupert called back.
“Sixty miles? Do you really think we’re going to make it, Rupert?”
“As long as we keep walking. Who knows? Maybe we’ll find some of our friends.”
“I need a drink. This heat is unbearable,” I said.
My lips and mouth were as dry as the desert and I heaved my cumbersome rifle and pack onto the carpet of sand, hoping to satisfy my thirst. I knelt and feared my canteen was about to pour its last. My lips did not easily part, for overwhelming dehydration had parched them terribly. The cool water seeped into my throat with joy that was replaced by dread.
“I’m out of water!” I shouted to Rupert, up ahead.
“Already? Bloody hell! You know I don’t have any! Let’s just keep walking.”
I snatched up my pack and rifle and continued. The burst of strength from those last drops would not last long. We marched for hours, keeping the sun on our left. It was beginning to grow dark and a cold wind started to blow. Exhaustion once again demanded that we rest.
“Let us stop here for the night,” said Rupert, finding a small gully between the dunes. I unfurled the tent from my pack, took a few minutes to set it up and collapsed.
We walked another day and the taste of an arid death settled into my mouth. If I did not find water soon I would surely perish of dehydration. The sun’s inexorable ferocity brought us to a standstill. Just I could go no further, the heat produced an apparition in the distance, at the base of a large cliff. Could it be the sea? Had we really found the sea so soon? Maybe Rupert was wrong about the sixty miles. In my excitement I quickened my pace, striding forward.
“What are you running for? Don’t waste your strength! We aren’t there yet!” Rupert yelled as I stumbled past him.
As I neared the shining object I realized that it could not possibly be the sea. My apparition now took on the form of a jeep, with a bright white star on the hood. The jeep had obviously plummeted from the ridge, along with its driver, who was already beginning to rot behind the wheel. Maybe he still had some water? I excitedly searched the corpse for a canteen, but to no avail. The radiator! I propped open the star-painted hood and unscrewed the radiator drain. I lay underneath the jeep, to drinking the water as it trickled out. Unhesitatingly, I slurped the water down, relieved of all my ailments and worries.
“Hey! Save some for me!” Rupert shrieked, as I swallowed the last drop.
We both realized his fate had been sealed.
“Is there any left?” Rupert begged as I rose to my feet.
I shrugged.
“What?” he yelled. “You know I haven’t had water in three days!”
His sudden animosity startled me.
“It was my water, I found it,” I said.
“Your water? It is always your water! Always yours! Never once did you consider that I have endured the same exhaustion that you have! This is outrageous! I have a right to your water!”
I stammered, “I’m sorry Rupert. I was thirsty.”
“You’re sorry? Sorry isn’t going to change the fact that you may have just committed a form of murder!”
I stared at him, not wishing to upset him further. How could he claim that I was murdering him? All I did was drink some water that I found myself. It wasn’t his; it was rightfully mine.
“Enough of this,” said Rupert as he continued walking past me, “I am not going to die shouting at such a pathetic human being, if that is what you call yourself.”
I stood and thought for a moment. Having resisted the sun without water for over three days, Rupert obviously had more endurance than any normal man. If we did not find our allies sometime that day, he would perish from the heat. We stumbled onward with the sun to the left, and then to right, as it arched overhead and began to grow dark once again. The sea was nowhere in sight, nor any of our companions, for that matter. I was expecting Rupert to pass out at any moment, but his strength seemed as endless as our journey. What would I do when he finally collapsed? Perhaps I could carry him, or drag him somehow? I cringed at the thought of staggering alone through the desert, dragging a man hardly more alive than I.
That night we rested in the tent longer than usual, and I abandoned my rifle and some other supplies. Yet at great length we packed up and struck out once again across the dunes. Rupert’s endurance began failing and he grew noticeably weaker. His lips cracked like a broken nutshell. When would he give out? It had been two days since we stumbled upon the jeep, and the exhaustion struck me once more. I began to wonder if Rupert was merely a mirage, a delusion of my fevered head. We had not spoken since our argument, and he had been without water for five days.
We rested one more night and set out again in the morning. It was all a dream now, just a long horrible dream; nothing seemed real. For hours a distant booming sound had grown ever more piercing with each step. At first I mistook the great pounding for faraway artillery, but as it grew louder, cracking with the magnitude of a thunderstorm in harmony with my footsteps, I realized the impossibility of its distance.
My vision blurred, my feet no longer lifted above the sand, my muscles ached, my tongue pleaded for water, and still Rupert was ahead of me, walking at no less a pace than when we started a week ago. He must have been a figment of my imagination, a spark at the end of a landscape of darkness.
Suddenly I could walk no further; the sand had finally claimed me and I was falling into the sun’s trap. I fell for an eternity it seemed, for everything in that desolate place echoed unnaturally, like the sound of my body impacting the sand in tempo with the shelling inside my head. I shut my eyes, trying to imagine the sea before me, and when I opened them again I saw not the sea, but a hallucination of a dreary young man hardly dissimilar from myself.
“You’re dying,” said Rupert.
“Are you a mirage?” I asked.
“No, not a mirage,” he replied calmly.
“How did you beat me? How did you keep walking?”
“You were drinking your water quite fast. Had I not pilfered from your canteen each night you would have consumed its remnants in no time. You are a bitter man, one who satisfies his temptations without acknowledging others’ needs. If you had shared the water you found in the jeep three days ago, I would have spared you your own water.”
Rupert turned and walked away. I tried to force myself to stand, but the trap would not let me go. I surrendered my struggle as life escaped my dried-out carcass.
As I blacked out, I wondered what I had done to deserve such a fate.