Текст книги "Sand"

Автор книги: Hugh Howey

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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

51 • Waterpump Ridge

Conner moved through the darkened dunes with an empty dive tank on his back and a regulator swinging by his hip. He didn’t head straight for the sarfer. There was one other person he needed to see before he left. He had to know she was okay. Had to see Shantytown and his home and some place where he could imagine life clinging and continuing on when he got back.

There were a few torches and lamps burning out across the dunes. Occasional voices could be heard as people shouted into the wind, calling for one another. The sand in the air was mild, the stars overhead bright. The glow of illumination in Springston that normally drowned out the constellations had been smothered. Extinguished. Conner thought of all the diving that would need to be done to reclaim what the sands had taken.

As he headed toward Gloralai’s place, Conner became aware of some guilty and latent thrill at his being alive. He felt a raw power for having survived being completely buried in drift. There was also some strange pang of guilt for having been present and on the earth for so momentous a disaster as the fall of the great wall. It wasn’t enjoyment—was nothing like enjoyment. There was too much a darkness over everything, too much a longing, a deep ache; but behind it all there was a tiny voice telling him how good it felt to be breathing, how great it felt to be above the sand, and could he believe what he’d just witnessed?

Conner hated this voice. There was no excitement in this. Nothing but tragedy and loss and now an uncertain and terrifying tomorrow. The wind-blown dunes would swamp Shantytown as never before. Another chaotic Low-Pub awaited here. A lesson was coming for his people, a lesson that there is always a new and greater misery to fall back upon. And thinking this caused the endless days to stretch out before him—days when hauling buckets away from the water pump would be remembered with the same blissful nostalgia as hot baths and flushing toilets. Always more room to fall. The sand went down and down and didn’t stop.

He veered slightly out of his way as he thought these things; he wanted to swing by his house. There was nothing there for him—he’d carried everything out of there for his trek across No Man’s Land, a decision and deed that seemed so very far away now—he just wanted to make sure the front door was unburied, that he and Rob would have a place to go to, that the sand around their home hadn’t collapsed shut from the grumbling of the earth.

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.”

Laughter against his neck. Her exhalations. Conner kissed her cheek and tasted salt. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here,” he said. But what he wanted to apologize for was thinking of leaving. For taking the wrong chance. The wrong chance. “And now I’ve gotta leave town for a while. My sister needs me.”

“Your sister.” Gloralai studied his face in the starlight. Buckets rattled on a haulpole as a silhouette left them alone again on the ridge.

“Yeah. The same people who attacked here might be heading to Low-Pub. I don’t want her going alone.”

“You’re gonna sail there? Tonight?”

“We go at first light.”

“When will you be back?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then I’ll come with you. I have a brother in Low-Pub—”

“No,” Conner said. “I’m sorry. But no.”

Her hands fell away from his arms. “I understand.”

“I’ll find you when I get back,” he promised. And it suddenly became very important that he got back.

“What about your hauls?” she asked.

Conner looked down at her pole and the two buckets. “I’ve carried all I can today,” he said. “They’ll have to understand.”

“You staying at your place tonight? Can I come see you?”

Conner thought of the family in his home. “No,” he said. “I’m camping with my sister on her sarfer.”

“And you leave at first light.”

“Yeah.”

Gloralai took his hand. “Then stay with me tonight.”

52 • A Pillar of Smoke

“I didn’t think you were gonna make it,” Vic said. She stood by the mast, arranging sheets and halyards by the red glow of her dive lamp. Conner loaded his gear into the haul rack.

“You said first light,” he told her.

Vic nodded toward the horizon where a bare glow could be seen. Maybe.

“Aw, c’mon.”

“Man the jib,” she told him. “But first, get your suit plugged in so it can build a charge. You probably drained it yesterday. And make sure that gear is lashed down. It’s gonna be windy today.”

Conner studied the sand hissing softly against the sarfer’s hull. “How can you tell?”

“I just can. Let’s go.”

He pulled the dive suit she’d given him the day before out of the gear bag. There were two power leads trailing down from the wind turbine, which was thwump, thwump, thumpingin the morning breeze. Her suit was lashed to the base and plugged in. He did the same with his, double-knotted the arms and legs around the pole. Then he made his way up the sarfer’s starboard hull and across the netting between the two bows. He checked the jib sheets to make sure they wouldn’t get fouled and knocked the sand out of the furling drum. He could see what he was doing without turning his dive light on, so he supposed maybe she was right about the first light.

“You get a good night’s rest?” Vic asked. She worked the main halyard free, and it clanged rhythmically against the tall aluminum mast.

“Yeah,” Conner lied. A smile stole across his lips as he thought—without remorse—of how little sleep he’d gotten.

He helped his sister raise the mainsail, cranking on the winch as she guided the battened canvas up through the jacks. As he muscled the sail up those last few laborious meters, he thought about Gloralai and her lips and her promises and her talk of the future, and he felt an armor form across his skin, some invisible force field like a dive suit puts out, and the sand striking him was no longer a nuisance. It was just a sensation. As was the wind in his hair and the shudder in the sarfer’s deck as his sister moved to the helm and the mainsheet was tightened, the canvas gathering the breeze. The sadness of so much tragedy was still everywhere around him, but Conner felt a new awareness that he would persevere. He felt alive. The sarfer hissed across the dunes, and he felt madly alive.

They sailed downwind to get west of Shantytown before turning south. Conner tidied the lines and then got comfortable in one of the two webbed seats at the aft end of the sarfer. He helped work the sheets while his sister manned the tiller. Watching the sad and flat expanse of sand where Springston used to be, he asked his sister why they didn’t just cut across rather than sailing around.

“Because we’d catch the skids or the rudder on some buried debris,” Vic told him. “This way is longer, but it’s safer.”

Conner understood. He remembered all that was buried out there. He checked that his dive suit was secure, wasn’t going to fly away. It already felt like his, that suit. It smelled like him. Had served him.

It was quiet as they sailed in the direction of the wind. Just the shush of sand on the aluminum hull. It wasn’t until they were beyond the last of the Shantytown hovels and even west of the water pump that they turned south and gathered the sheets. The sun was nearly up. There was already enough light to see by. Conner watched Waterpump Ridge slide by, the sand blowing from its heights, tiny sissyfoots up there dumping their hauls. Vic had left the ridge well to port to keep it from blocking their wind.

“So what’s this nonsense about Father?” she asked. She took a turn on one of the winches, locked down the jib sheet, then sat back with a leg resting on the tiller, steering with her boot. “What was that scene on the stairs last night about?”

Conner remembered his sister barging out of the Honey Hole. He wanted to turn the question around and ask herwhat that scene had been all about. She’d been the one who’d caused it. He adjusted his goggles, tucked his ker up under the edge to keep it in place. He wasn’t sure how to tell her the same news without getting the same reaction. Their mother had probably dumped too much on her all at once the night before. But he tried. “You know what last weekend was, right? The camping trip?”

He tried not to make it sound like an accusation for her not being there. Vic nodded. The sarfer glided happily south in a smooth trough.

“So, Rob and I went alone like last year. Palmer didn’t make it… which I guess you already knew. Everything went the same, you know? We set up the tent, made a fire, did the lantern—”

“Told stories about Father,” Vic said.

“Yeah, but that’s not the thing.” He took a deep breath. Adjusted his goggles, which were pinching his hair. “So we went to sleep. And in the middle of the night, a girl stumbled into our campsite. A girl from No Man’s Land.”

“The girl Mom wanted me to meet? The one she said came all the way across. And you believe that?”

“Yeah. I do. I was there, Vic. She collapsed into my fucking arms.”

“Maybe she’s Old Man Joseph’s daughter,” Vic said, laughing.

“It’s not like that,” Conner said. “Vic, she was sent by Dad.”

His sister’s brow furrowed down over her dark goggles. “Bullshit,” she said. She wasn’t laughing anymore.

Conner tugged his ker off. “It’s not bullshit. I’m telling you. She knew who I was. And Rob. She described Dad to a tee.”

“Anyone in town could do that.” The sarfer hit a bump, and Vic glanced toward the bow, adjusted their course. “And even Mombelieves her? You sure it’s not just someone looking for a handout? Some kid from the orphanage?”

“Yes, Mom believes her,” Conner said. He rubbed the sand out of the corners of his mouth. “Palmer doesn’t, but he wasn’t there. I don’t know how long he even talked to her.”

“No one comes out of No Man’s Land,” Vic said. She turned from watching the bow to peer at her brother. He wished he could see past her dark goggles. The same hard shells that allowed one person to see, blinded another. “So what’s her story?” Vic asked, her tone one of distrust and suspicion.

“She was born in a mining camp on the other side of No Man’s. Dad helped her escape. He sent her with a warning—”

“And she claims to be our sister?That our father is herfather?”

“Yeah. Dad built her a suit, and she dove down under some kind of steep valley and walked like ten days to get to us. But—”

“But what?”

Conner pointed ahead, as they had begun to drift again. Vic took her foot off the tiller and steered by hand.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I believe her, but Palm pulled me aside last night. He seems pretty convinced that something’s wrong. Violet—this girl—our sister—has a… strange accent. Palm says she talks just like the guy who hired him to find Danvar.”

“Who, Brock? That’s the fucker we’re after. What did Palm say?”

Conner shrugged. “Just that they sounded alike. That’s all.”

Vic gazed forward and chewed on the grit in her mouth. Conner could hear it crunching between her teeth. “I don’t like it,” she said. “And I don’t want to hear any of this nonsense about Dad, okay? There’s too much else going on. I don’t need that.”

Conner nodded. He was used to his family telling him that. He had learned a long time ago to shut up about their father, that there was only one night a year in which it was allowed. He tried to get comfortable in the webbed seat, then saw something in the distance. He pointed over the bow. “Hey, what’s that?”

“That’s not good, is what that is.” Vic adjusted the tiller to steer straight for it. Up ahead, a column of smoke rose in a slant before bending sideways and blowing westward in the breeze. Something was on fire.

“We should stop and check,” Vic said. She pointed to the line that furled the jib. Conner gathered this and waited for her to give the word. Ahead, the smoking ruin of a sarfer loomed into view. The mainsail had burned, and the mast had caught as well, had pinched and melted near the base and now drooped over like the wick of a candle. Both hulls were still on fire, the metal aglow, the color of the morning sun. Black smoke billowed up and spiraled away in the wind.

Vic began to let out the mainsheet, and Conner furled the jib. Vic then dialed down the power of the skids and rudder, so the sand stopped flowing as easily and slowly braked the craft. They left the main up, just allowed the boom to swing and point with the wind the way a vane does.

“That looks like a body.” Conner pointed to a form lying near the smoking ruin of the sarfer. The man wasn’t moving, was lying close to the wreckage.

Vic jumped down from the sarfer, and Conner scrambled after her. They both approached the wreckage warily. The hull of the burning craft creaked and popped from the heat of the fire. The smell was awful. Acidic and biting. Conner was scanning the scene for more bodies when blood frothed up on the lips of the prone man. One of his hands lifted several inches off the sand before his arm collapsed again.

Conner heard his sister curse. She rushed forward and dropped to her knees beside the figure. She yelled for Conner to bring the aid kit, which he ran back and retrieved from the haul rack. The sand was loose beneath his boots as he hurried back to his sister.

“Oh, god. Oh, god,” Vic was saying. Conner placed the kit in the sand and untied the flap. His sister ignored it. The way she was rocking and holding the man’s hand, Conner knew there was nothing they could do for him.

“Damien?” she asked. “Can you hear me?”

The blood stirred on the young man’s lips. Conner looked him over, couldn’t see any obvious wounds, no blood on his chest or stomach or hands. And then Conner noticed the odd way the man’s legs were bent. They were shapeless. The tight dive suit dented in where there should have been protruding knees. He moved to the other side of Vic and gently slid his hands from the man’s thigh toward his calf, looking for any response on the man’s face, feeling for a break. The man’s lips moved—he was trying to say something—and Conner felt the spongy flesh beneath his palms, the absence of bone.

“Say again,” Vic said. She bent close to the man’s lips, sweat dripping from her nose. The heat of the burning sarfer was unbearable. Conner saw that the man wasn’t moving one of his arms, which looked as limp and deformed as his legs.

“We’ve gotta get him away from this fire,” Conner said.

His sister waved him off and listened. Her face was contorted in concentration, rage, grief, some impossible-to-read combination of worry lines and furrowed brow. Conner joined her by the man’s head and tried to help her listen. The man was rambling, his voice a rough and halting whisper. Conner heard him mention a bomb. Something about playing marbles. He was mixing accounts of the dead with talk of a child’s game. And then Conner heard the name “Yegery,” a name he recognized, a man his sister had talked about often, some kind of divemaster. The injured man licked his lips and tried to speak again.

“I’m sorry,” he wheezed. The words came clear, seemed a powerful effort. There were bloody gasps for air between each short sentence. “Tried to stop them. Heard what they were gonna do. From a defector. Made me tell who I heard it from. I told ’em, Vic. I’m sorry—”

He coughed and spit up blood. Conner saw the tattoos on the man’s neck, the marks of the Low-Pub Legion. One of his sister’s friends.

“What’re they planning?” his sister asked.

The man spoke again of making glass marbles, of a bomb, of people in the group who didn’t want to go along, who were dead now. He said Yegery had gone mad. That there was no talking to him. That this guy from the north was in his ear, in his head. The young man lifted his hand a few inches from the sand, and Vic gripped it with her own. “Today,” he said. His eyes drifted away from Vic and toward the heavens. He stopped blinking away the sand. “Today,” he whispered, the blood finally falling still on his lips.

Vic bent her head over the dead man and screamed. More a growl than a scream. Like a cayote cornered between pinched dunes. An inhuman sound that made Conner afraid.

He sat perfectly still and watched as his sister scooped two handfuls of sand and placed them over the man’s eyes. She dropped his hand and patted his stomach, opened a pocket there and pulled something out. She stuffed this away, then seemed to notice something wrong. She turned back to the suit to inspect it more closely, wiped the tears from her cheeks.

“Those sick fucks,” she hissed.

“What is it?” Conner asked. He could barely breathe. The heat from the fire was intolerable, but he knew he would sit there as long as his sister needed.

“His suit,” she said. She pointed to a tear at the man’s waist, a place where wires had been pulled out and twisted together. There was another spot just like it by one shoulder. “They wired his suit inside out. They used his band to torture him. Turned his suit against him to make him talk.” She punched her fist into the sand. Did it again. Then stood and began marching back toward the sarfer.

“What did he say?” Conner asked, getting up and chasing after her. “What’re they planning to do? Did he say where the bomb would be?”

“No,” Vic said. “But they’re doing it today. They’re gonna end everything. And we’re gonna be too late again.” She jumped back into the helm seat and began taking in the lines. Conner adjusted himself in the other chair and unfurled the jib.

“We’ve got plenty of wind,” he said. “We’ll get there in time.”

Vic didn’t respond. The sarfer lurched into motion and began to build speed. She had been right about the weather that day.