Translator: Nyoi-Bo Studio Editor: Nyoi-Bo Studio
When Zhang Zian finally finished cleaning everything up, the sun had risen past the horizon, brightening their next extremely hot day. As if the curtains had been opened on a stage and the darkness chased away, the surrounding structures were quickly bathed in light.
He placed the drone on the hood of his car to assemble it, using the remote to send it into the sky.
Actually, by now, the others were lending the morning light to see the half-sunken car in the sand some distance away, but they all expressed noises of shock.
The drone quickly flew to the top of the jeep, suspending itself in the sky before circling it. It uploaded the video footage onto the remote control’s screen.
How could this be…?
When he saw the charred body of the car, Zhang Zian was extremely surprised too. This car had clearly been burned to a crisp.
“What happened? Did the car catch on fire?”
“Maybe it was too hot and the sun’s rays were too strong, so it just caught on fire?”
“We have to be careful and not end up like this car.”
Everyone was commenting on it, sorry for the loss of the car.
The night before, everyone had just been illuminating it with their car headlights, so they had noticed the black on the car. But they had just assumed that it was decoration and never expected that the black was due to a fire.
It was uncommon for cars to catch on fire by themselves, but it was by no means rare. It could be caused by a long time spent in a high-heat environment, but usually it was due to old wires malfunctioning and catching on fire. These stories often appeared in the news.
Usual people can’t imagine the heat that the Sahara Desert is under at the peak of summer. Under the direct shine of the sun, even dry branches will catch on fire by themselves. If this car had been caught in the quick sand and was subjected to the harsh light of the flames, heat may accumulate within the car and it’s not too ridiculous to guess that it had caught on fire by itself.
“No! Look at the traces of the fire! This car doesn’t seem to have self-ignited!” Some of them were more sharp-eyed and noticed some abnormal points.
Other than the completeness of the frame, all of the windshields and glass were broken – not just shattered, but even melted. This meant that this isn’t just an innocent self-ignitation, as a natural fire would never be able to reach these kinds of temperatures, so a fuel must have been used.
The fuel might have been petrol, since diesel wasn’t as easy to burn in comparison.
The weird thing was that judging from the stains of the blackening and, the point of ignitation didn’t seem to be near the fuel tank, but instead from the roof of the car, as though someone had poured fuel onto the top and then started the fire.
So, according to these details, this car hadn’t been destroyed by self-ignitation, but instead someone had purposefully set it on fire.
In the desert, there was almost nothing more important than the car. Once the car was destroyed, the driver would immediately be faced with a myriad of problems.
Of course, in the middle of the desert, no one would be driving by themselves. Normally, they would have partners, and the ruin of one car didn’t mean that they were in danger.
Just like Wei Kang’s car—it was wrecked, and a horrible thing had happened to the team, but they had at least managed to save their equipment and perishables. This would not deal a lethal blow to their safety and progress.
But even if so, why burn the car?
Besides, even if it was a malfunctioning car, it could still be a place of rest and a place to hide from the elements. Burning a car also had to use up precious diesel or petrol. No matter how they thought about it, it didn’t make sense.
Wei Kang and Peter Lee both saw the unbelievable sight. The former had been a part of more than one expedition team, and the latter had been to many strange places, but neither of them was able to provide an explanation.
“With the car burnt to a crisp, is there anyone…still in the car?” Someone nervously asked the question that everyone had been wanting to ask.
If there was someone, or even a corpse, then this might have been the scene of a murder. If someone had destroyed the corpse in the middle of the desert, even the best police wouldn’t be able to find the corpse.
Zhang Zian adjusted the view of the drone, letting the camera look into the car from an angle. Some of them couldn’t bear to look, worried that they might see one or even a few corpses burnt beyond recognition in there.
Thank goodness, wherever the camera caught, they hadn’t found a single corpse at all, only the bare metal support of the seats, and a thick layer of sand settled on it. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief.
As Nabari had been doing his morning prayers, he showed up late. He spread the crowd out and walked to Zhang Zian’s side. He took a long look at the screen, frowning. “This is a cry for help.”
A cry for help? Everyone was stunned.
Nabari had a lot of experience, and this wasn’t the first time he had seen something like this, so he explained the situation to the rest.
With the car half-sunken in the quicksand and the driver escaping the claws of death by the width of a hair, this was an SOS that the driver had sent to his buddies nearby or any passing camel groups.
The methods of making an SOS in the wild were just that few – sending a signal flare, shouting or using a whistle, using stones to spell out SOS and hoping for passing planes or ships to notice. Not everyone has signal flares, and whistling or shouting has a limited range, and is affected by the wind. As for using stones to write SOS, that’s even more limiting.
There was one more method, which was to call for help by lighting branches or shrubs on fire to create smoke when they saw boats or planes going past them.
In the vast, sunny, bright, and extremely visible desert, if a smoke column were to rise, it would be able to be seen from far away, and is one of the most effective methods of asking for help.
But it was hard to find firewood in the desert, and it was even more impossible to find stone. The only thing that could be set on fire now was this car in front of them.
When they heard Nabari’s words, a vision of absolute despair flashed before their eyes.
One, or a few, explorers managing to escape from the danger of the quicksand, but the car is stuck with no way to be removed, so they could only wait for help on that same spot. Maybe they did manage to wait for assistance, but their assistance didn’t see them and were about to pass by them, so they poured diesel all over the car and lit it up in desperation. Their car had turned into a bright, burning torch, the black smoke from the rubber and plastic becoming their saving grace.
Desperate, with their last spark of hope.
Had they finally been saved? No one knew.
Peter Lee coughed. “After setting up camp yesterday night, I went online to check the police records for the area. But I didn’t see any related response for helps in the past one or two years.”
No one cared.
The desert claimed the lives of people every day without a single sound, and every day, people went missing without a trace. The owner of this car might have become one of them. Maybe no one even knew that they had gotten lost in the desert.
The owner of the car and their motive can only become one of the many mysteries of the desert.
Maybe it’s because the death is by one of their own species, everyone’s not feeling too well after that too, feeling pity, and also wariness. Hoping that their own team would not fall into the same tracks that these missing people did, and turn into the next “Missing Person’s Case”.
