Hugh Howey - Sand

The door was still there. The scaffolding was still webbed atop his home. And it looked like there might be a lantern burning inside. Light squeezed around the crooked door.

Conner approached slowly. He didn’t knock, just tried the handle, found it sticky as usual but not locked. He pushed it open.

A man turned toward the door, his eyes growing wide over his neatly cropped beard. He and two boys sat around Conner’s kitchen table. There was the smell of food cooking. The man got up, the chair tipping backward and crashing to the floor, both of his hands out in front of him.

“I’m sorry,” the man said. He reached for his children, who had stopped eating their soup, who sat with frozen expressions on their faces. They all had on such nice clothes. “We’re going. We’ll leave. We meant no harm.”

“No,” Conner said. He waved the man back. “Stay. This is my place. It’s okay.”

The man glanced toward the dark bedroom. Conner couldn’t tell if there was anyone in there, thought maybe the man was thinking that there wasn’t room enough for him and his children to stay.

“Are you from Springston?” Conner asked.

The man nodded. He righted the chair and rested his hand on its back. The children went back to slurping. “I took the boys out on the sarfer this morning. We saw it happen, saw all of it. My wife—” He shook his head and looked away.

“I’m sorry,” Conner said. He adjusted the empty dive tank on his back. “Stay here as long as you like. I was just checking on the place.”

“What about—?”

“I’ve got somewhere to stay tonight,” Conner assured him, thinking of the sarfer and a night beneath the stars. “I’m sorry for your loss.” He turned to go, but the man was across the room, clasping him on the shoulders.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

Conner nodded. Both men had tears in their eyes. And then the man hugged him, and Conner thought how this would’ve seemed a strange thing a day ago.

Gloralai wasn’t at her house. Conner knocked and waited, but the windows were dark, and there was no sound within. He tried the schoolhouse next, thinking that this was where his friends would gather. He spotted Manuel’s mother hurrying between the dunes, her face partly lit from the spitting torch in her hand. Manuel was a classmate. Conner stopped her and asked how he was. She squeezed Conner and said that he was at the well with the others. She asked about Rob.

“Rob’s fine,” Conner said. He asked if she knew where Gloralai might be.

“I think all the sissyfoots are at the well.”

Conner considered the hour and realized he was probably supposed to be there as well. It had been a school day, a fact forgotten not just from looking after Violet at the Honey Hole but from leaving class on Friday expecting never to come back. It was after dark, and he would normally have hauled his quota by now. He thanked Manuel’s mom and hurried toward the well. The sudden awareness that the sand would never stop hit him. Not even for the collapse of the wall. Not even that night, for them to rest and regain their senses, to count and properly bury their dead. Buckets still had to be hauled or they would go thirsty. The gods were merciless. Vic was right. This was the sort of cruelty that only came from turned backs, from being ignored. Well-aimed lashes and direct blows were more easily understood. At least then the stricken knew their anguished cries were being heard.

He aimed for the dancing torches atop Waterpump Ridge. A lot of activity. He could imagine the haul shifts starting late, a period of chaos as the schoolhouse emptied and the sand washed out Springston, nobody knowing what was going on. It was strange, the separation he felt from his peers, thinking on where he’d been all day and what he’d been doing. But here they were, his classmates, keeping the water flowing, saving far more lives than he. There was perspective in this. The man who had broken into his home and had stolen what little Conner had left in his cupboard—that man couldn’t be blamed. The larger rules of the world were broken, the Lords’ rules. But the simpler rules that guided the heart of each man were intact. These were the rules that never changed. Knowing right from wrong. Surviving and letting others be. Maybe even lending a fucking hand.

“Conner?” someone asked, as he approached the outhaul tunnel. It was Ashek. He must’ve been on his way down from dumping his buckets, as his pole was held casually across one shoulder. “Where you been, man?”

The two boys clasped hands, and Conner lowered his ker. They had to strain to see each other in the flicker of torchlight. The moon would not be up for hours yet.

“Been helping my mom,” Conner said, not wanting to explain any further. “Hey, have you seen… is everyone else here? Everyone okay?”

“Yeah, except for the kids who didn’t show up for class. But most of them weren’t around yesterday either. Off diving for Danvar. So I’m sure they’re fine. I just passed Gloralai on the way down. She was taking a haul up to the ridge.”

“Uh… yeah… thanks.” Conner tripped over his words. He hadn’t mentioned looking for her, didn’t think anyone knew he liked her, not even Gloralai herself. He thanked Ashek again and headed up the ridge. Dark shapes blotted the stars on the path up, and Conner felt naked without his haulpole and buckets. A large figure ahead, a familiar voice. Conner saw Ryder huffing his way down the sand path. The two boys stopped and looked at each other. Ryder tugged his ker off his mouth.

“You okay?” he asked.

Conner nodded. “You?”

“Fuck no. I should be out diving, not doing this shit.”

“This is just as important,” Conner said. He kept himself square to Ryder and hoped the boy didn’t see the tank on his back.

“Yeah, whatever.”

But there was something different as Ryder went past him and strode down the sloping sand. More of what had seemed significant falling away from yesterday’s cares. The things at the center of Conner’s universe no longer were. The world had wobbled; its axis had shifted; the core was now at the periphery and vice versa. But there, higher up the ridge, a slimmer hole stood out in the dense constellations, a familiar form, the memory of a beer and a bowl of stew, of thinking that running away might not be the answer. Conner joined Gloralai on the top of the ridge just as she dumped the last of her sand into the wind. When she turned and saw him, there was a gasp. She dropped her pole. Arms around his neck, nearly knocking him over, the feel of her sweat on his skin and not caring. Enjoying it. A sign of her toil. The embrace letting him know she cared. That he wasn’t alone.

“I’ve been so worried,” she said. And Conner realized why Ashek had told him where she was. She had been looking for him . She pulled away and brushed the hair off her face. Everywhere she had pressed against him cooled in the breeze. The sand in the air stuck to the sweat she’d left on his skin, and Conner didn’t mind. “Someone said you pulled Daisy’s kids out of the courthouse. Is that true?”

Conner wasn’t sure. There’d been dozens of people. They’d all looked the same in his red dive light. “I remember the courthouse,” he said.

Gloralai placed a hand on his arm and turned him, looked at the dive gear on his back. “You went camping. You didn’t come back. I thought—”

Conner reached out and placed a hand on the back of Gloralai’s neck. He pulled her close and kissed her, staunching her worry and his as well. She kissed him back. The tank fell to the sand, arms snaking around one another, her lips on his neck, a classmate dumping his buckets in the nearby dark and saying, “Get a fucking room.”