Hugh Howey - Sand

People died, of course. Houses collapsed in the middle of the night. Sand rushed through breached walls at any hour. A handful mourned. Hands slapped faces in grief. And then came the rhythmic rattle of hammers, building. The wail of a newborn, breathing.

Change in Shantytown was gradual and continuous. Dunes slid and moved and people adjusted around them. The change was backbreaking and exhausting, but it was a way of life. Each day was much the same as the last. The misery came in buckets, which could be handled. Time. The dunes. Society. The people. They all progressed , as her father would say.

Such were Vic’s distractions as she scanned the line between Shantytown and Springston, thinking on change and life rather than food, putting off how best to proceed. The high sun beat down on her. She could hear Palmer twisting the cap off his canteen, knew they were both getting low on water. Making a decision with his life in the balance made it difficult to be prudent and wise. She was used to risking only her own life. She preferred diving solo.

“What do you see?” Palmer asked from the haul rack.

“One stall near the market,” she said. “Might be our best bet.”

She focused the binoculars on the stall, which would have to be their oasis. They could sail over and park close by, get in and out, drop some coin and a warning about Brock’s men. She watched a family tend the stall, a woman sweeping sand into piles and two kids hauling it out to the dunes. Maybe she could meet the children there and pay them to bring the food out. She watched them work, not wanting to hurry any one plan, and her mind flitted back to these two ways of managing the dunes, Springston’s and Shantytown’s. Here was the perfect vantage for seeing how both worked. In Shantytown, the gradual battle with the sand spread misery across the generations. Evenly distributed. While in Springston, people lived protected from the wind, with flat desert and tall buildings rarely swamped by the dunes. Years of woe were stored up behind a teetering wall. That woe missed some generations entirely. It built and built.

And somehow, Vic knew what was happening before it did. Maybe she knew from her life with brigands, from all their plans and boasts, from living with Marco, from beginning to think like them. Or maybe it was the little black figures she spotted running along the ramparts as if something was wrong, chasing some people away. Or maybe the sound came first, and then her brain whirred with such ferocity, such speed, that all the thoughts came next in an eyeblink. It felt as if minutes passed, as if all she considered about the great wall and the coming ages of man flew by between the first deep thump deep in her chest and the subsequent signs of disaster.

Or maybe it was coincidence. A diver’s intuition. Palmer’s story about a crate of bombs taking out all of Springston, an old dream of insane schemers and revolutionaries who knew how to destroy but not create. Whatever the cause, her gaze was upon the great wall when it happened. And her mind was on the many falls of man.

Thoughts spun. She saw the ages counted by each collapse. Empires that came and went and that made up all of their history and lore. Their ends were both inevitable and unpredictable. The catastrophic nature of each grew bigger with time. No one thought an end would come in their lifetime. People glanced up at the towering wall of concrete and iron bars and reckoned their children or grandchildren would see it topple. It would be left to some distant generation to build the next wall, and to build it stronger. Bigger. Like each fall.

Meanwhile, on the back of the wall, the sand grew heavier and heavier. One grain at a time. Like a clock. Like the ticking clock on a bomb. Or a whole string of them—dozens of bombs like loaves of bread—buried along the base of the wall in the middle of the night, placed there by divers with a hellish bent, divers and pirates who had grown weary of that cool shadow that divides one world from the other, that harsh line between those who toil all day and those who can afford to wait.

Those who think they can afford to wait.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Sand and second hands. Vic watched from the top of the dune, from the deck of her dead lover’s sarfer, a sickness deep in the pit of her stomach, a powerful dread, all of this flashing through her mind as the dull thumps hit her in the chest.

The roars were muffled. They came like drums beat out of rhythm: boom… boom-boom… boom. Boom.

And then the teetering—the unholy teetering. A thing meant to last leaned its sad head. The body shuddered, losing its balance, feet knocked out from underneath. Vic covered her mouth and watched. Sand peppered the binoculars. Palmer yelled at her and asked what that was, his voice muffled by his ker.

The luckiest in life became the unluckiest. Those who lived nearest the wall were crushed. Those who lived inside it disappeared. These were the ones with the most to lose, and they lost everything. The sand they had let build for generations flooded down, finishing what the bombs had started. And a slab of concrete as high as many of the sandscrapers thudded impossibly flat.

The dune Vic stood on trembled. Sand flowed down the face of every dune in sight as gravity and the trembling of the world made them all lose an inch of height. Vic could feel the impact in the deck of the sarfer, in the soles of her feet. The rumble came moments later, a roar deep in her chest. And then a great wave of sand slid through Springston, a torrent of this unnatural dune finding its rightful level, flowing like water down on the sandscrapers and markets and square, buildings toppling as their knees were knocked out from under them, small black shapes spilling from the upper reaches, these people wrenched violently from their bequeathed homes.

Onward, the sand flowed. It spilled out to the side and caught Shantytown, those few unlucky enough to live along the edge of the shadows, where the summer solstice made the wall’s shadow more inclusive for a season. These went too. Only in the distance were they spared. The reckoning of the decades made good in a single moment. Shantytown the new Springston. And the Honey Hole, Vic saw, knocked aside at the far reach of the sand’s wake, right along that fuzzy line between town proper and town improper.

Her mother, buried. A town, lost. A small group of men, somewhere out there, cheering.

The wind stirred. The heavens themselves seemed to adjust to this new world. The sarfer’s boom creaked as the mainsail shifted. Palmer was yelling. Vic ignored him and jumped back into her seat. She grabbed the lines and pulled them taut. The jib unfurled with a mighty pop, and the sarfer lurched into motion. Vic sailed the craft dangerously down the side of the dune, fighting the tiller, her mind in splinters. She sailed for where she’d last seen the Honey Hole. She had vowed never to return to that place. Now, she couldn’t get there fast enough.

The sarfer raced across the dunes toward a field of debris where homes and shops had recently stood. Over the creaking mast and the taut and singing ropes, shouts for help and screams of horror could be heard. Screams from the past. Vic focused on a spot of sand at the edge of the destruction. There was a ridge of heaped tin and metal and wood blocking her path. She slewed the sarfer to a stop on the edge of town—was sixteen again as she jumped to the sand and raced between the dunes. Sixteen again and running half-naked across the desert floor. It’d been nighttime back then, and she’d been running away from the Honey Hole.

She had only gone inside for a drink. She and two friends. One drink had led to two drinks. She still had her wits about her, was able to tell the men no. She wasn’t laughing, not anymore. But the rooms were there, as was the expectation from those who had learned that anything they saw and wanted could be had for a price. A price. Cheap for them. Rent a room. C’mon, it’ll be fun. Firm hands. Friends egging her on.