Hugh Howey - Sand

“Ho, Marco!”

Vic turned. She saw where Marco was looking, hand shielding his eyes in the low morning sun. A figure stood atop a nearby dune, a silhouette with a tall lance in one hand, the other arm raised in salute. The mast of a sarfer could be seen jutting up beyond the dune, the sail tightly furled.

“While you were screwing around, someone spotted your sarfer,” Vic said.

“Shit.”

“Wait, is that Damien? Oh, he’s gonna love this.”

“Please, please, please,” Marco begged. “At least wait until we get to town. Or tonight when everyone’s drunk and no one will remember. Don’t let him be the first to know. Not Damien.”

Vic squeezed Marco’s neck and laughed. “Some freedom fighter you are.”

Marco tensed. “That’s just it. I’m a fighter .” He made a fist, and his great and tan bicep bulged, scars and tattoos straining.

Vic stopped smiling. “I was stressing the freedom part. You forget that, and all you are is fighting. I’ll tell who I want, when I want. Freedom, Marco. Don’t get like these assholes and fall in love with the fighting. Then you’re just setting off bombs because you like the noise they make.”

Marco didn’t say anything as Damien glissaded down the dune toward them, causing a gentle avalanche and using his spear for balance. He stomped over with a grin, and his eyebrows lifted when he spotted the two bags in the haul rack. “Jesus. Nice find, guys.” His eyes went to the trails left in the sand, quickly filling. “How the hell do you two score every time you go out? And way out in the middle of nowhere?”

Vic didn’t say that it was usually her scoring while Marco watched their things on the surface. “Just lucky, I guess.”

“Clothes?”

“Mostly underwear,” she said. And before Marco could respond, she added: “For the ladies .” She fought off a bout of giggles.

“Hey, my wife could use some. Maybe hook me up before you sell to Jimbo or Sandy and they get their squeeze. I’ll pay what they pay.”

“Slow down,” Marco said. “Don’t be in a rush to get our panties off us.” He laughed.

“Maybe they’re for him ,” Vic said, teasing Damien.

“Yeah, fuck you two. And here I was getting ready to do you a favor. But I guess you can wait until you get to town to find out the news yourselves. To think I was gonna ask you to tag along—” He turned and marched back toward his sarfer.

“Wait. Tell us what?” Marco asked.

Damien held up his middle finger and kept walking.

“Tell us fucking what?” Marco demanded.

“I’ll trade you,” Vic called.

Damien slowed. He turned and glanced at the bags. “Trade for what?”

“Give me the news, and I’ll tell you the funniest story you’ve ever heard in your entire fucking life.”

Damien waved his hand and spit sand. “News like this don’t go for a joke.”

“Don’t you fucking dare,” Marco hissed, but this only seemed to get Damien’s attention.

“It’s not a joke,” Vic said. “It’s a true story. And I promise you won’t be disappointed. You’ll be getting the good end of this bargain, I swear.”

“I dunno…” Damien said, walking back their way. “There ain’t never been news this big. But fuckit, I’d rather you hear it from me than from someone else.”

“You first,” Vic said. In truth, she didn’t care about his news. She was just rehearsing how best to tell this story, a story that would get many retellings.

Damien took a deep breath and searched their faces. The two sand divers waited. The clatter of Low-Pub spilled over the dunes, and sand rode through the sky above their heads.

“Fucking Danvar,” Damien finally said. “Somebody found it.”

It was a crypt for a king. His friend Hap had left him to die in a crypt for a goddamn king—this tomb of untold riches. Palmer was going to take his last breath in a manor no Lord of Springston could refuse. A place where a truly great man should be laid to rest.

And it’ll do for me , he thought morosely.

The air in the buried sandscraper tasted stale and seemed to be growing thinner. But it had outlasted his water. Palmer had poured himself half-caps for what felt like five days. He had eaten both strips of jerky one tiny nibble at a time, like a mouse trying to win the cheese from a loaded trap. Now all of that was gone, along with fifteen or twenty pounds of himself. He hadn’t been eating that well even before the march north. The stress of a deep dive always messed with his appetite. No… it hadn’t been the dive. It had been the camping trip coming up, the anniversary. He never ate well before that trip. Had bugged out the year before. Damn… maybe he’d already been down there a whole week. Con and Rob would go without him, just like last year. Con and Rob. They would never hear from their big brother again.

Or maybe it hadn’t been so long. He had counted five days—five urges to sleep—but maybe it was four. Hell, it could be ten days or ten hours since Hap abandoned him. His mind was playing tricks. He heard noises and voices. Had a dream about his father that seemed so real, Palmer had truly thought he was dead and in heaven. Ah, a crypt fit for a king, and where was his asshole father buried? His father’s bones had ground to sand in No Man’s Land, that’s where. A pauper burial for a Lord. A place for desperate dying. It was as ironic as Palmer’s lavish crypt.

But Palmer had been old enough to remember a Lord’s life. He had bawled when his mom pulled them away from the wall. Had bawled when he was put in a different school with strange kids who smelled bad. Had bawled harder when he could no longer smell them because he had begun to stink as they did. What he wouldn’t give to have all those tears back. Just a capful.

He licked his cracked and burning lips. The dream about his father made sense now. Some part of him had been dwelling on the anniversary. He’d let Con and Rob down again. He was a shitty brother and a shitty son and did not deserve to die in so fine a place as this.

Such were his wild thoughts as he left the conference room where he’d been imprisoned by his hope of Hap’s return. He staggered out and through the dark building, his dive light as dim as he could make it, its staid old battery down to rations as well. Maybe he’d find a pool of water where a spring had flooded or where trapped moisture had drained down through the impossibly tight pack. But there was little hope of that. He left the conference room to get away from his nightmares and his failures. To let his body wander instead of his mind.

Before he died, he should go out into the sand one last time. Better to perish there and be discovered by another diver as they came to pick over this city. He still had a good charge in his suit, might see how far he could make it before the sand filled his lungs. But some naive part of him kept thinking Hap would come back, that Brock would send others, that he would be a fool to go out and die when there was still air in that building to breathe. At any moment, Hap would burst in with a second set of twin tanks, laughing and saying he’d only been gone two hours and here’s the coin those scroungers paid and all the beer and pussy in Springston would be theirs.

Palmer kept thinking this, but the hope had grown as stale and thin as the oxygen. The hope that had kept him prisoner in that room with the chairs and the great table and the brewing machine had weakened. Gone was the need to be there when the divers came for him. And as that hope waned, he left through the door that had damned him, that heavy door that Hap had slammed shut on his face, and with his dive light barely aglow, he nosed around his crypt for the first time.