Hugh Howey - Sand

Conner watched his mother work, was too tired and numb and afraid to speak. He just concentrated on keeping the sand firm as they floated down. All the sand in the Honey Hole was draining away, vibrating as though someone was making it move. The rigid platform of sand rode back through the hole and into his mother’s room. More light filtering in. Sand coursing through the shattered window and the splintered wall. The Honey Hole was now above the dunes. Conner didn’t understand. He felt a rage and a violence in the sand, could feel it through his boots and his band. A burn like the fabric was on fire, a scorch around his temples, and then that rage and heat were gone. The world fell still. A coat of sand stood on everything in the room, but the drift had poured out. Conner tried to piece the last few minutes together, wondered if maybe the Honey Hole had done a full roll, if he’d been buried for a minute as the world went upside down, had righted itself, and then the sand had drained away.

He went to his mother and Rob. His brother wasn’t moving. Their mom leaned over him, palms on his chest, pressing down violently and counting. She got to five and stopped. Bent down and began blowing into Rob’s mouth again.

“What do I do?” Conner asked.

His mom didn’t respond. She repeated the steps. Like she was reviving a drunk. Or someone choking in the bar. Here was the reason they’d brought the girl to the Honey Hole. His mom could save people. That’s what she did. That’s who she was. And Conner saw this as she bent to her task. He pulled for her. He pulled for Rob. Reached for his brother’s small, limp hand. Saw that Violet was holding the other. Sand coating all of them. They had come back down beside the bed, the four of them on the floor, and then a gasp of air from their mother—

No, a sob. A sob from their mother. The gasp from Rob.

His brother spit sand and heaved for air. Their mother cradled his head, and Conner felt his brother’s hand flex around his own. He realized he was squeezing Rob’s too tightly.

“Water,” their mother said. She turned to Conner to give him some command, but then her gaze drifted beyond him to something on the floor. Her eyes grew wide in alarm. They opened like the empty sky. Conner turned, expecting another wall of sand to come crashing down from behind him, and saw the body lying on the floor just outside the door. A woman. Rivulets of red trickling from her ear. Head turned to the side, facing him, a visor over her eyes. But Conner would recognize her from a thousand dunes away. His sister. Here. This made less sense than the sand.

He scrambled toward her, got his hand tangled up in the wires that trailed from his band to his boots, threw the band off his head and let it drag behind him, finally made it to her side.

“Vic?” He rolled her onto her back. Lifted her visor. There was blood coming from her nose. Conner cried out. He turned to his mom, who was still holding Rob and urging him to breathe. “What do I do?” he asked.

His mother was crying. Dark streaks of sand beneath her eyes like ruined makeup. Conner tore his shirt off and shook the sand out as best he could. He dabbed at Vic’s nose.

“Is she breathing?” his mother asked.

“I don’t know!”

He didn’t know. How did you check? What was going on? Vic and all the sand. The world had gone upside down. Rob was coughing. Violet took over holding him while their mother came to Conner’s side. She seemed unsurprised. Calm. She checked Vic’s neck and then held her cheek to her daughter’s lips. And Conner saw again that this was their mother. Taking the dunes as they came, as the world shifted beneath her feet, all in stride, because the world had always been moving. A shock to Conner, this violence, but his mother was just in motion. Saving them.

Vic stirred. Groaned.

“What the fuck?” Conner asked, overwhelmed by a flood of confusion and relief. He surveyed the damage, this gasping and sand-covered family all around him. Maybe his mom didn’t hear. She didn’t answer, didn’t tell him to watch his language, just held her daughter as Vic’s eyes fluttered, as her sand-crusted lips parted, a groan and then a gasp.

Vic tried to sit up. She looked around the room, seemed to grasp where she was.

“Easy,” their mother said.

But Vic didn’t seem to hear. Vic didn’t go easy. “There are more,” she said, as though she had never been unconscious, as though she weren’t bleeding, like she was finishing some sentence started a year prior. A year. It’d been that long since Conner had seen her. And her first words were: There are more. And then: “I’ve got to go.”

She staggered to her feet. Wobbled there. Steadied herself on the doorjamb with one hand and raised the other to touch her visor.

“The great wall—” their mother said, turning to what was left of the window.

Vic dabbed at her nose and inspected her finger. “Check the others,” she said, jerking her head down the balcony. She turned to go.

“Wait,” Conner begged.

But his sister was already running toward the stairs. And the word she’d left them with— others— rattled around in his head. The miracle of his own life and the confusion over what in the world had happened dimmed in the bright new awareness of all those who must be in trouble. His mother seemed to understand. There was no shock or complaint. The lid on a jar of water was cracked and passed to Violet, who took it with her bandaged hands, and the ministered-to became the caretaker as she held the jar to Rob’s lips.

Conner was the one left staggering about, the one with the dull ache of a bomb blast ringing in his ears, the one groping after his own life for a minute, for five, before looking to help others. His mother and Vic had sprung into action like they’d been here before. Even Violet seemed to take this awful world in stride. Conner spun and felt bewildered. Lost. He heard his sister racing down the steps outside. There was a band on the ground, a diver’s band, and a trail of wires leading to his father’s boots.

Conner gathered the wires. He pulled the band down over his head. There were buried people outside. His buried people. This he knew. Conner ran out of the room, yelling for his sister to wait up.

His fear was that Vic would be gone and far beneath the sand by the time he got outside. He navigated the staircase, which swayed beneath his feet, was hanging on by a few sad nails. There were people stirring across the expanse of the bar, helping one another up, piles of drift everywhere, some bodies half-buried, as many alive here as dead, a miracle. By the time he reached the front door, Conner had a vague sense of what his sister had done, why any of them were still alive. He knew, but it wasn’t possible. Lifting a building like this. The blood leaking from her ears and nose. He felt afraid of his sister right then, a feeling remembered from childhood.

He spotted her outside, saw her running across the sand rather than diving into it. A nightmarish world stood all around: folded tin and splintered wood jutting up through a rolling sea of new sand. To the west, the sprawl of Shantytown seemed to have been spared. Those on the eastern edge, however, were gone. Conner saw people rushing in with shovels and buckets. More stood scattered atop the distant dunes, shielding their eyes and staring numbly toward the scene of such awful destruction. Conner chased after his sister. He glanced over his shoulder toward the east and saw the mostly flat expanse of ruin. A ridge of a fallen sandscraper jutted out of the sand like the spine of a half-buried corpse. A high dune stood where the great wall had once been. All the rest of that sand—stored up for generations—was gone. All that misery had been evenly dispersed.