Tink crouched on her hands and knees, peering out of the cave. She looked as worried as Sam felt. Eddie had squirmed in Tink’s arms when she picked him up so that Sam could wrap him in his hoodie. It took a couple of goes to work it out. In the end, they managed to make a papoose-style sling, which Sam could wear slung from shoulder to hip. His small head poking out, Eddie was less than impressed. Whether it was the effect of swaddling or plain fear of being tied to a boy’s chest, Eddie stopped struggling. Sam lowered himself onto the closest root and started the climb down.

  Many of the roots were as broad as mature tree trunks, wide enough for Sam to easily stand or sit astride. Where they met the base of the stone tree there were smaller roots, jagged nubs and sheared-off spikes. These he used for hand grips, working his way down from root to root. Unfortunately, the wind whipped through the roots, whistling, and buffeting Sam, snatching at him with phantom hands whenever he reached for a new handhold. Despite this, he made good progress, trying unsuccessfully not to think about how far down it was or that if he slipped their bodies would be broken against each fossilised outcrop.

  When he finally touched down, his forearms seared more from the tension of the descent than its difficulty. He released Eddie from his swaddle and the little dog sprinted off, ears back. At first it seemed he wouldn’t come back, but the little dog put on the brakes, skidding in the sand, sprinting right back, before doing it again, burning off the pent-up anxiety of the climb. The little guy was kind of funny.

  Dusting off his hands, Sam craned his neck to see Tink. Her short blonde hair tousled in the wind, standing out against the darker stone. Even forty feet up, he could tell she was worried.

  In the sky overhead, the clouds were thickening, bunching their shoulders. They crackled with flashes. A palpable pressure was building. The taste of iron and the smell of ozone on the air. Tink held the witch’s stone to her eye, scanned the dunes, left to right, and put up her thumb.

  Sam took a breath and ran. Eddie sprang into action and sprinted ahead. First there was a descent, followed by a steep gradient that taxed his lungs and slicked him with sweat. The sand quickly sapped his energy. His thighs burned with every slipping stride. By the crest of the dune, Sam was already breathing hard, even Eddie was panting, tongue lolling, but his eyes glittered with expectation, as if it was a fun game. There were another five dunes to go. Sam checked on Tink. She used the stone and gave him the thumbs up.

  On the rise to the second dune, Sam settled into a more sensible pace, conserving energy. Urgent but gradual. Something Eddie was incapable of. He’d race ahead, stop, practically bouncing on the spot, and give an encouraging bark. At each crest, Tink reconnoitred and gave the all-clear. But at the crest of the fifth dune, Sam bent over his knees, sucking in nothing but hot air and grit, and saw it. A cold prickle tightened his scalp and needled down his neck.

  The camp of military vehicles possessed a dim familiarity. Sweat dripping down his face and soaking his t-shirt, he made the last descent on jellied legs. Eddie scampered ahead, tumbling tail over ears at the bottom, picked himself up, shook himself off, and sprinted into the camp.

  In many ways, it was the classic reveal. Crest a hill and see Shangri-La, an oasis, a secret Fremen camp in a rocky outcrop, the Statue of Liberty rising off kilter out of a beach. Sam approached the camp with a sense of walking onto the set of a much-loved movie. But this was no make believe and that feeling quickly morphed to one more like entering a graveyard at night.

  Torn pieces of canvas flapped in the wind to a metronomic ting of a guy rope against the metal pole of a tent, or what little was left of it. The camp was laid out in a manner uncannily similar to the climax of his grandfather’s movie. The British and German soldiers had moved their vehicles into a defensive circle to make their last stand. A Panzer tank faced the gully between two dunes, but its turret was rotated to the left, pointing into the belly of another dune. One of its tracks hung broken and limp, and the wind had drifted the desert against its flank. There were two jeeps. One was flipped on its side. Protruding from underneath was the shrivelled body of a British solider. Skin leather brown and pulled gaunt and taut, showing death’s grinning face. His hair was rusty, and in the movie that was his name. Rusty, the sarcastic joker and naysayer, the one to first lose his nerve only to find it again at the last. The other jeep was mounted with a machine gun in the rear. The weapon pointed up to the sky, with its feed strip of ammunition threaded through and ready to rock.

  A British armoured car, like a small tank, but with outsized wheels instead of caterpillar tracks, sat half-crushed next to the Panzer. Its gun turret was flattened, and the armour had buckled under a downward force as if Godzilla or some other Kaiju had run through here. Slummed next to it was another corpse, this one missing everything from the waist up. The legs sprawled; the tread of his boots clear as the day he died.

  A little madly, the old song the Brits tried to teach their German foes on their last night while they waited sprung to Sam’s mind.

  Our Sargent Major jumped from forty-thousand feet,

  forty-thousand feet, from forty-thousand feet,

  Our Sargent Major jumped from forty-thousand feet,

  But he ain’t gonna jump no more...

  …without his boots on.

  Faster and faster. More and more raucous. Slapping palms on their thighs around the campfire. The two uncomfortable allies coming together finally over a stupid song. And yes, those that knew saw Jonathan Lorimer’s hand as script supervisor on Jaws, when the shark rams The Orca. But here was half a dead man, a real dead man, and he certainly would jump no more. Sam turned away, gorge rising to the back of his throat.

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  ‘Eddie, no.’

  He jogged over to stop the terrier licking the face of a German officer, collapsed against a barrel of fuel. His head was twisted to his shoulder, jaw hanging wide, that same leathery brown skin as Rusty stretched tight over his skull. A bullet hole in the side of his head crusted his blonde hair with black blood. In the officer’s clawed, mummified hand was a pistol. When the final motor bike, mounted with the British corporal, made a break for it, and their job was done, Captain Von Beck took the realist’s way out, with the iconic last words “Und lass mich nicht mehr tr?umen,” and let me dream no more. But maybe only in the movie. None of these men escaped.

  Sam crouched. His stomach knotted at that thought of touching a corpse, but they needed weapons. Hesitating only a moment, he grasped the gun, expecting it to stick with rigor mortis, but it easily slipped free. Ignorant of anything to do with firearms, Sam suspected, given the hole in the skull of the German, the safety was off. He turned the gun over. There was a catch just above the grip, at the spot you’d intuitively think would be good to have a safety. Not in the way, but easy to reach. He clicked it down. Safe. He hoped. Still the gun trembled in his hands like a living thing.

  Von Beck, if that was ever his name, had a leather holster on his hip. With gritted teeth, Sam undid the corpse’s belt. The German officer’s body was far too light. Its bones and skin cracked dryly at being disturbed, and Sam hoped nothing would fall off as he worked. Or worse: a B-movie hand from the grave. Gotta love that end to Carrie, unless you were in the movie with her. Focus! He told himself and let out the breath he’d been holding as the belt came free. The gun slid solidly into the holster, and he fastened it around his waist.

  The rest of the camp was slim pickings. Empty canteens. He slung two over his shoulders. They could fill them at the pool in the tree. Spent shells lay here and there. More were under the sand, hard under the soles of Sam’s trainers, and warm from the heat of the desert when he dug them up. The sky guttered with lightning when he found a machine gun buried in the sand. He wiggled and pulled at it until it came free, suddenly spilling him on his backside, a spray of sand blinding him as thunder rolled.

  When his vision cleared, he cried out and dropped the gun. There was an arm, and only an arm, steadfastly holding on. Sam got to his knees and set about relieving the the appendage of the machine gun. This one had a stronger grip. The fingers needed prying apart, and the thumb snapped off like rotten dry wood. He dropped it in revulsion and wiped his palm down his t-shirt.

  The filthy looking clouds had darkened further, pushing the dunes deeper into the depths of twilight. Another flash of lightning pulsed and then ignited into a startling glare, and a bluish fork of electricity speared the distance. That couldn’t be good. Sam didn’t want to hang around.

  He took stock. One pistol. One machine gun. Ammo? Hopefully. Sam had another thing to check: the vehicles. It might be a long shot and the choice was limited. This camp, if it was from World War II, would be, what, around eighty years old? But maybe time didn’t work the same here. Sam jumped into the driver’s seat of the jeep with the mounted gun. A little steel key was in the ignition. It was dabbled with rust, and when Sam turned it, nothing happened except a faint mechanical click. He got the same result on his second and third attempts.

  There was nothing else of use in the jeep. Sam sat back, taking a moment of reprieve, and concentrated hard. He wished he had the witch’s stone. There might be things buried under the sand he could find.

  A double fork of electricity, one strike followed a blink later by a another, lanced the dunes, closer this time and a little more towards the colossal dead tree. As the glare faded, a shadow lurched and retracted a little way outside the ring of the camp.

  Two thunderclaps stood the hairs up on Sam’s arms to attention. He ducked, getting out of the jeep, and wandered cautiously out of the camp. One hand rested on the machine gun. Sand had filled his trainers and grated between his toes when he walked. He stopped where the shadow receded and started to dig with his hands.

  A motorbike lay on its side, concealed in a shallow grave. Sam spotted the handlebars first. Walking around to get a better hold, he heaved. The bike was much heavier than he’d expected, and he nearly dropped it, but the drift of sand fell away and the bike righted.

  Another burst of light from the heaven.

  The bike wouldn’t start. Damn it! The brief dream of them mounting up and driving across the dunes to the sea, with their middle fingers up to the curse, died. He let the bike drop and trudged back into the camp.

  The sky blazed behind him, flinging long shadows and he stopped, flinching when the thunderclap came far, far sooner than he’d expected. He listened, but Eddie, who’d scampered out from whatever trouble he’d been into, was barking.

  ‘Eddie, shh!’

  The dog didn’t. Sam strained to listen. Did he hear something? A sense of dread preceded the tremor coming up through the soles of his feet.

  ‘Tink!’

  He sprinted back the way he came, feet slipping in the soft sand. He knew this fear. Before, it had come along with Death counting down through the beeps of a heart rate monitor, the click of a morphine drip, the pathetic wet wheeze of his mother’s lungs, the smells of decay and the cleaning chemicals that failed to hide it. All behind a bedroom door he didn’t want to open.

  Sam couldn’t climb fast enough. He slipped, put down a hand, and forged on. Eddie was already at the top of the dune, barking madly. When Sam reached the crest, the dunes spread out before him, barren and immense. The dead tree nestling in the tall grass lay ahead. Above, the clouds had blackened to scowling charcoals and septic browns. To his right, miles in the distance, the sea that had been a line of white foam, underlining their goal, was now a churning bar of steel. But these things weren’t what made his stomach drop and the noiseless scream of terror shriek inside his brain.

  From the direction of the sea, lightning struck the back of a dune that seemed to peel in two, and thunder rent the air. Sugnar was burrowing towards the camp. Or had been. The trapped god had changed direction and was aiming for Tink, who was running away from the tree roots, waving her arms. Between the thunder and Eddie’s barks her cries formed a stutter of half-words.

  Gravity pushed him downhill, and Sam was flat out after a few steps. The burning in his muscles seemed to fade away. The distant anger of the sea found its way into his ears via his rushing blood. A crashing, roaring sound in his head. Legs pumping, two hands on the machine gun, canteens jangling, he was breathing hard, sucking in as much sand as air. Ignoring the choking cough, one eye on Sugnar, one on Tink, he pushed on. The distance lessened too slowly as the vibrations in the ground started to liquify the sand so that his feet sank in deep with each step. But he was close. Tink staggered through the veil of dust whipping across the desert. A blue trident of electricity pierced the back of a dune a few hundred feet away and the hill of sand collapsed. Sam pulled himself on, clambering on hands and knees, stumbling back onto his feet, and he and Tink fell into each other's arms.

  The rumble of Sugnar’s tunnelling drowned out the tide of blood in Sam’s ears. Tink was shouting and Eddie was barking, but neither could be heard. He held her tightly as they began to sink in up to their knees. But Sam wasn’t worried about drowning for a second time that day because the crack of thunder and flash of lightning seemed loud and bright enough to cleave the world. It wasn’t quicksand that would kill them.

  Sugnar breached.

  The Great Wyrm roared. Her screaming maw swallowed a lightning bolt and silenced the thunder. Towering so far above them, her body swaying, they gazed upon the trapped god, mountainous and ancient. Dried and rotten flesh hung from her flanks like tattered sails, filling the desert’s hot breath with the stench of the grave.

  Tink trembled with fear. Sam wanted to scream but nothing would come. He was frozen in a shadow so immense it was the night itself. It, she, Sugnar, eclipsed the dunes, the storm, and the heavens above. She was the darkness. She was death. And she was hungry.

  Her slow swaying ceased, and she permitted the storm to speak once more.

  Sam turned to Tink. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  Her brow creased uncomprehendingly at first, before her eyes widened. Her mouth opened to speak, and Sam wished he’d been able to kiss her at least once more. But then the shadow was moving, and the sand was quaking. Above them Sugnar arced her back, and jaws wide she descended upon them.