D. MacHale - The Rivers of Zadaa

I was getting dizzy. I knew I was about to pass out. I closed my eyes and tried to think of something other than death. My head went back to Second Earth. Home. I didn’t do that often; it was just too sad. But I did then. Why not? If these were going to be my last thoughts, I wanted them to be good. I thought of my family, and Marley. Man, I missed them. I thought of you guys. We were hanging at the beach. All of us. It was a beautiful sunny day. The sun was so bright, I had to cover my eyes. I felt its warmth on my face. This was a good last thought. The strange thing was, it was like I could really feel it. I wondered if this is what people talked about when they were at the moment of death? Was this the bright light at the end of the tunnel that I was supposed to walk into?

It wasn’t, I’m happy to say. I opened my eyes to see bright sunlight blasting through the windshield. For real. That’s what I was feeling. We were out! But we weren’t safe, not by a long shot. The dygo had stopped drilling, but we continued on upward, lifted by a powerful jet of water that was pushing us from behind. Rather than settle down to the ground on our treads, the force of water lifted us into the air. We couldn’t have gone very high, but it was high enough to flip us over. We crashed back to the ground, upside down. It was a good thing we were strapped in or we’d be dead. The dygo hit, bounced, and flipped over more than once. With one final shudder, we landed… on our treads. It was a rude arrival, but we were upright and alive.

“Open the vents!” I shouted to Loor.

Loor flipped the switches, letting in fresh air. Truly fresh air. Surface air. We all took a deep breath to fill our lungs.

“Where are we?” Alder asked.

Through the windshield we could see that we were in the middle of the desert. Only a few yards away was the geyser of water that had rocketed us out of the tunnel. The ground rumbled. Right next to us another geyser burst out of the ground, shooting into the sky like a huge water cannon.

“It is not safe here,” Loor said.

That turned out to be a huge understatement. We weren’t even close to being safe. Geysers of water burst out of the ground everywhere. It was like the underground couldn’t contain the massive pressure that the water had created. It had to go somewhere, so it blasted up. All around us. There was nowhere for us to go. Nowhere to hide. We didn’t know if we were safe, or sitting on the next geyser. All Loor could do was react to what was happening.

We weren’t alone. Dygos kept popping up out of the sand. It reminded me of when Bokka and Teek and the others had magically appeared out of the sand at the farm. I didn’t know if the drivers of the other dygos were Batu or Rokador. It didn’t matter. With each new dygo that appeared, it meant that more had survived. Now we could only hope that we would all live through the onslaught that was roaring up from below.

The ground continued to shudder. Loor came to a quick stop, barely avoiding a cave-in directly in front of us. Another dygo wasn’t so lucky. It teetered on the edge and tried to reverse. The sand gave way beneath it and it tumbled over the edge, falling into the deep crevice that had appeared out of nowhere.

Loor positioned the giant drill bit directly overhead. It gave us a better field of vision. What we saw was Armageddon. The sand rolled in every direction like there were giant serpents moving beneath. Dygos were flipped around like pinballs. We nearly went over a few times, but Loor was able to keep us upright. I don’t know how. All around us giant geysers kept spewing up from nowhere, without warning. One blasted up so close to us that it pushed us up on one tread. Loor drove us away from harm on the one tread before we bounced back down.

The most frightening thing of all was that we had no idea how long this would last. Every second seemed like a lifetime. If this continued, I was afraid that every dygo that had escaped from the underground would be destroyed here on the surface. How wrong would it be to make it this far, only to be scrambled inside the very vehicle that got us out. As it turned out, this frenzy didn’t continue much longer.

It got worse.

We had rallied together with what looked like a dozen other dygos. The ground had stopped moving. There were no more geysers.

“Is it over?” Saangi asked.

Nobody answered. We didn’t dare believe that we were safe. There was a rumbling. It was like nothing we had experienced so far. It was deep, and low, and coming from somewhere underground.

“Does anybody feel that?” I asked.

“Ihearit too,” Loor answered.

Sure enough, it sounded like there was a rumbling freight train coming closer. We looked around at the desert, but there was nothing unusual. Aside from the dozens of geysers that were spewing water into the sky, that is.

It was Saangi who saw it first. She didn’t say anything; she simply pointed. We looked straight ahead to see something far in the distance. It appeared as a jagged line in the sand…that was headed directly for us. The line moved fast. Behind it, the desert opened up wider and wider like some giant, demonic zipper.

“It is tearing the desert in two,” Loor said in awe.

“Move!” I shouted.

All the dygos reacted at the same time. Some moved left, some moved right. The idea was to get away from the growing chasm as quickly as possible. There was no telling how wide it was going to get. Loor spun the dygo and hit the throttle. We bounced over the sand, desperate for distance. I could lean forward and look out the far end of the windshield to see that some dygos weren’t fast enough. The widening chasm caught up with them and they fell back into…what? We had no idea what was beneath this rip in the desert.

I said one word to Loor. I said it calmly, but I felt as if she needed to hear it. “Faster,” I said.

Loor poured it on. There was a fine line between speed and loss of control. If we hit a rise in the sand that was a little too steep, we’d crash, and the crack in the earth would catch us. It was a chance we had to take. If the growing chasm caught us, we’d be doomed for sure. The point of the tear moved behind us and continued on. I looked out the other side of the window to see it continue to rip its way across the desert. We didn’t dare stop. If the gap continued to grow, it would get us. We churned our way across the sand, along with more and more dygos that we picked up along the way. It became clear that there were many survivors of the disaster below. It remained to be seen how many would survive the disaster on the surface.

I don’t know how long we rumbled across the desert. Five minutes? Ten? I had lost all track of time and reality. At one point I looked back at the chasm to see that we were actually pulling away from it.

“Look,” I shouted. “I think it stopped.”

Everyone else looked, but nobody wanted to quit moving.

“We will continue for a while, to be sure,” Loor said. Nobody argued.

Another few minutes went by. Loor had gradually been slowing down. The other dygos around us were also slowing. We were pretty sure that the chasm had stopped growing. Finally Loor brought our dygo to a halt. The race was over. We had won. The four of us sat there, our senses tuned for any new sound, or movement, or rumbling or earth-wrenching disaster.

Nothing happened.

Minutes passed. We didn’t move. If something new started, we wanted to be ready to roll. Saangi cracked the hatch open to get more air. Still, nobody moved. More time passed without so much as a tremor. After what felt like around half an hour, I couldn’t take it anymore.

“I want to see,” I said.

Before anyone could talk me out of it, I unclipped my seat belt and climbed over Alder to get to the hatch. I didn’t even wait for Saangi. I pushed it open myself. The first thing I saw outside were hundreds of dygos all parked around us. Many hatches were opening and cautious noses were beginning to peek out. I saw many Ghee warriors. I also saw many Rokador. Neither cared that they were among their enemy. They had a much bigger enemy to deal with at the moment. It was an eerie sight, seeing so many dygos in the middle of nowhere like that.