Текст книги "Sand"

Автор книги: Hugh Howey

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

Conner’s mouth filled with grit. The earth had opened for him, dropping him down beneath sand as loose as water. His feet hit something solid below. Swimming with his arms, his head bumped into a wall of sand above. There were walls on all sides. Ryder had made a solid box filled with flowing sand, a death coffin.

Conner sealed his lips, half a dune in his mouth, the loud crunch of grit between his teeth, and fought the urge to swallow or spit. Only had the barest of lungfuls. Had been talking. But his sister had done this to him before, had taught him to be calm, to last a minute or more. If he counted to ten, Ryder would bring him up. He was just trying to scare him. Conner thought this, but part of his brain screamed: We’re gonna fucking drown. Do something, asshole.

With sand burning his eyes, Conner fumbled blindly at his father’s boots. His head flipped upside down. He had to remember which way was up. Had to remember. Goddamn, he couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t swallow. He hit the power switch under the tongue of the left boot with one hand and pulled the band out of his pocket with the other. C’mon, Rob,he thought. C’mon, brother.

Conner pressed the band to his forehead, couldn’t feel anything, too much sand between the contacts. Damn thing was upside down, that’s why. The wires were coming out the top. He tried it again. Could feelthe sand now. No idea if this would be strong enough. Needed to be stronger than Ryder. Was about to black out. Had to go. Had to go. With desperation, he didn’t flow the sand so much as explode it. Arms over his head, expecting a collision, hoping this was up, that this was up, not sure—he felt the sandwall above him shatter, felt his arm break the surface, his head and then his entire body rising out of the sand.

The other boys lost their footing in the flow. Conner was on his hands and knees, spitting the grit out of his mouth—grit that had turned to mud. He coughed and wheezed, and the black edges of his vision receded. Arms and legs weak, he fumbled for the band, tried to get it back on his head before they came at him again. Damn—the boots—strong as a whole suit. Shouldn’t have been possible. Fucking Rob—

A hand clenched over his knuckles and squeezed into a fist, the bones of his fingers grinding together. Conner dropped the band and grimaced in agony. Ryder was down on one knee, casting a long shadow over him, his face a mask of rage.

“You think you’re a diver, boy?” Conner watched as Ryder grabbed the band with his free hand and yanked it free, ripping the wires. “Patrol would bury you for this.” He shook the band in front of Conner’s face, and the grip with his other hand tightened, crushing his knuckles. “You’re lucky I don’t tell them. That’s your life I just saved.” Ryder spit into the sand and dropped the band. “I fucking own you. Don’t you forget that, Whoreson. I own you like every man in Springston owns your goddamn mother.”

A swift kick in the ribs for punctuation. And then the boys were back to laughing. The sand trembled and opened up, and they dove and disappeared.

Conner rested his forehead on the warming sand and took deep breaths. When he spit, it colored the sand like a sunrise. This is my life, he thought miserably. But not for long.

15 • Sins of a Father

Conner got up and dusted himself off, probed his tender ribs. A sip of water swished and spat got most of the grit out of his mouth. His anger soon abated. It was from looking down—not at the pink sand between his father’s boots—but at the old band torn loose and curled amid a tangle of wires.

He stooped to retrieve the band and inspected it again. Ryder would’ve let him up. Was just messing with him. Damn, he should’ve just waited it out. But the boots—he remembered how solid the sand had felt the night before, clenched around Rob’s legs. Scanning the training dunes, he looked toward the school. He still needed to get jerky, but another quick errand first. His trip that evening just got more interesting. He needed to show a friend these boots.

Around the corner from the school stood a line of shops that catered to scavengers. Used suits, visors, repair stalls, fins, electronics, all the scraps and tools of the trade. This was an industry honed by abrasive necessity. Practically all of Springston, Shantytown, Low-Pub, Pike, and the gardens to the west were built with dredged spoils from beneath the sands. The mounds of dirt that rose up and were in shallow enough sand to reclaim had been discovered by divers. The same divers who went on to do the digging. Water, gas, and oil pumps relied on divers. It was the industry on which all others were founded, which is why the death toll hardly dented the number of enthusiastic volunteers and why most of the kids who dreamed of entering dive school found packs of others standing before them. It was why many never got the chance.

Conner hurried through the bustling Saturday markets in the dive district and down one of the side alleys that kept creeping along with the dunes. He let himself into Graham’s, one of the larger shops. An annoying collection of bells and chimes clattered and rang as the top of the door struck them. Inside, the walls were covered in artifacts. Mirrors and clocks, pumps and small motors, coils of wire and tubing and pipe, and bin after bin of bolts, washers, and nuts. Across the high ceiling hung the remains of dozens of bicycles. Conner had to duck under a few of these.

Most of the goods that studded the walls and hung from the rafters had been brought up by Graham himself. The rest had been bartered for with something else he’d discovered. Despite appearances and the occasional price tag, hardly any of it was for sale. Convincing Graham to part with a single washer could take weeks of pleading. Trade was the only coin that worked, and Graham always got the better end of the deal. He was a pain in the ass, but had been good friends with their father, which meant getting work done even without an official dive card from the Guild.

“Graham?” Conner let himself through the counter and peered into the workshop. Graham glanced up from his bench. He had a wire brush in one hand and what looked like part of a rifle in the other.

“Con.” He smiled. “Thought you were off camping this weekend.”

“Tonight. I’m getting some water and a few other things while Rob airs out the tent. Hey, I want you to take a look at something for me.”

Graham pushed his glasses up his nose. “Sure,” he said. “You scavenge up something good?”

“You know I’m not allowed to dive.”

“Sand in your hair says you do.”

Conner touched his hair, and sand rained down. He stared guiltily at the mess. “Sorry—”

“Forget it.” Graham shooed his apology like a fly. “Never gets all the way clean in here. So what’ve you got?”

“It’s this band here that Rob made.” Conner reached into his pocket and pulled out the band. He handed it to Graham. “The wires are ripped loose—”

Graham gave the band a cursory glance. He leaned over his workbench and studied the wires trailing over Conner’s belt, then looked down at his feet.

“Dad’s boots,” Conner explained.

“I see that. You got a suit on under there?”

“No, that’s the thing. You know how Rob is, well, I caught him trying to dive with these last night. Wasn’t doing too bad a job of it—”

“Diving runs in your family,” Graham said. “Guild made a mistake not taking you in.”

“Yeah, well, it’s just these boots, see? No suit. But I felt what they could do to the sand and I wondered if you’d seen anything like this before.”

“You felt it,” Graham said. “So how far down did you go?”

Conner glanced over his shoulder, made sure they were alone. “A meter. Maybe two.”

Graham sniffed. He flipped the band inside out and adjusted the long-armed and multi-jointed light affixed to his desk. “People have toyed with these before. You can have some fun with a pair of boots. Skate along the sand, dip your toes and what-not. But they’re no good for diving. If you can’t keep the pressure off your chest, you can’t breathe. And even if you could, you’d be in a world of hurt when you came back up. Did Rob do the wiring?”

“Yeah.”

Graham looked up from his study of the band. “He’s better than you.”

“Yeah, I know.” Graham didn’t mean it with malice. He didn’t have a cruel bone in his body. But the power of dry observation sometimes felt the same. He made space on his workbench, setting that long steel barrel aside. He plugged in his soldering iron.

“Can I see the boots?”

“Sure.” Conner pulled the wires out at his knees and kicked off his dad’s boots. “He put the power charge in the left sole.”

“Interesting,” Graham said. He grabbed a magnifying glass from his desk and peered into one of the boots, removed the leather insole. He inspected the other one. “Looks like he made room inside the right one to stow the wires and the band. A visor too.” He glanced up at Conner. “A meter, you say?”

Conner nodded.

“Hmmm.” Graham studied the ceiling for a moment. “Could you leave these with me awhile?”

Conner frowned. “I’m sorry. I wish I could. I was just hoping you could rewire them for me while I wait. I have a few coin.”

Graham grabbed the iron and tested the tip with his tongue. The hiss made Conner cringe and bite his teeth together. Graham began touching the wires back to leads, seeming to see at once how Rob had rigged the band. “You’re always eyeing that pair of visors in the case over there. The green ones.” He didn’t look up from his work. “I’d trade you those visors and a mostly new suit for these boots.”

Conner didn’t know what to say. “That’s… uh… I appreciate the offer, but those are my dad’s boots.”

“They were his old boots. Even he didn’t care about them anymore.” He finished his work and blew on the band, smoke curling from the iron. He looked up at Conner expectantly.

“Well, I’ll think about it,” Conner said. He reached for the boots. “What do I owe you for the repair?”

Reluctantly, Graham returned the boots. “Tell you what, promise me you won’t barter these to anyone else, and we’re even. Trader’s dibs.”

“Okay,” Conner said, knowing it didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to trade his dad’s boots, not after what he’d felt under the sand. “You got dibs.”

Graham smiled. “Great. You tell Rob to come by and see me when he gets a chance. Been a few weeks since he’s stopped by.”

“Yeah, about that…” Conner stuffed the band into the sole of one of the boots. He slipped them on, leaving the laces untied. “Knowing how useful Rob can be around here, if anything ever happened to me and Palmer wasn’t around to watch Rob…”

“I promised your dad I’d look after you boys,” Graham said. “I’ve told you that. I mean it. Don’t you worry.”

“Thanks,” Conner said. He turned to go, then paused by the door leading back into the shop.

“Tomorrow’s the day, isn’t it?” Graham asked.

Conner nodded. He didn’t turn around. Old Graham was too damn insightful. His rheumy eyes could see further into the deep sand than anyone else. He could tell at a glance how something was wired. If Conner turned to say goodbye, to ask one more question, if he even reached up to wipe the water from his cheek, the old man would know. He would know that tomorrow wasn’t just an old anniversary. But the start of a new one.

16 • The Long Hike

“Palmer sucks sand,” Rob shouted. He hitched the large pack up on his shoulders, had been complaining about having to carry such a heavy load since they’d left the house. “He promised us.”

“I’m sure he has his reasons.” In truth, Conner was tired of sticking up for his older brother. It was a full-time job keeping little Rob from being disappointed with the entire family. And here he was about to contribute to that. Just as the sand seemed to pile higher for each generation, so the youngest siblings ended up with the full brunt of familial mistakes. It was a tiring refrain, but Conner thought it again: Poor Rob.

He and his brother skirted Springston on their way toward No Man’s Land. Avoiding the open dunes, they stuck to the outskirts where they could spend much of the hike in the lee of homes and shops. They kept their kers over their mouths and rarely talked, shouting above noisy gusts of wind when they did. An escaped chicken flapped and clucked across their path, a woman in a swirling dress chasing it, calling its name. In the distance, the masts of a line of sarfers jutted up beyond the edge of town. Conner could hear the ringing bangs of loose halyards slapping aluminum masts. A solitary sail fluttered aloft, caught the wind, and the sarfer built speed toward the west, off to the mountains for a load of soil for the gardens or to trade with the small town of Pike, most likely. Conner and his brother pressed east. He scanned the horizon for other deserters, for families with heavy loads on their backs, but almost no one left town on a weekend. Mondays were days for departure. Wednesdays as well, for whatever reason. Maybe because Wednesdays were those depressing days as far from time off as possible.

When he and Rob got even with the great wall, they tightened their kers and adjusted their goggles and angled off into the wind and toward the roar of distant thunder. Conner took the lead and broke the wind for Rob. Off to the side, he watched the edge of Springston approach. The city sat near to the boundary of No Man’s Land—just a few hours’ hike—like some kind of dare. But the city also looked afraid. It seemed to sulk in the sand, a towering wall erected to hold back the wind and dunes and fear.

A handful of the tallest sandscrapers tilted sickeningly to the west, ready to topple. One of these towers had been abandoned a few years ago, such were the creaks and quakes felt by its inhabitants. It leaned with a promise of collapsing—and yet a refusal to do so. It had been so long since the place had cleared out that the once-great anticipation had relaxed into boredom. Talk had grown among those now eager to move back in. Conner knew that some squatters already had; pale lights danced up in those forbidden towers at night and could be seen from Shantytown. And the deeds to those apartments had begun to change hands as speculators bet on topple or stability, their moods as fickle as the alley winds.

Conner marched with his head to the side, goggles out of the peppering sand, and imagined the sound those rickety scrapers would make when they tumbled. The homes in their shadows would be crushed, the people living there buried, the shops and stalls flattened. The poorer people to the west must live in daily terror of what dangerous things their wealthy neighbors built. Those in the shadows didn’t speculate with their money but with their lives.

The great wall itself would topple one day. Conner could see this as they passed the boundary of Springston and the wall was viewed edge-on like he saw it twice a year. An entire desert pushed against the wall’s back. It had built up slowly and inexorably over the decades, wind howling and sand piling up, spindrift blowing over ancient ramparts to haze the sky with occasional gusts or to dim the afternoon sun with furious blasts. When it went, the sand would loose a hellish fury. He was quite glad he wouldn’t live to see that.

“What all did you pack in here?” Rob asked, his voice muffled by his ker and his voice’s upwind march.

Conner waited for his brother to catch up. “The usual,” he lied. He saw that Rob was practically bent over from the weight of the pack. Conner had planned on carrying it himself so no one would grow suspicious. Which would’ve left Palmer to carry the tent and Rob the lantern and his own bedroll. Fucking Palmer,Conner thought to himself. And for the first time, he considered what his brother’s absence would mean for their father’s tent. Rob would get back to town easily enough, the wind at his back, but the tent would probably be left to flap to tatters, with no one to help him break it down or haul it home.

“Can we stop for water?” Rob asked.

“Sure.” Conner lowered his large bag to the sand, and Rob nearly fell over backward as he shucked the other pack. Conner could hear the extra canteens of water sloshing in there. Enough for eight nights of marching out and back, as far as he told himself he would go.

“Twelve years,” Rob said. He sat on the gear bag and pulled his ker down, used it to wipe his neck. The cloth had sandworn holes in it and was tattered along the edge. Conner felt like a shitty brother.

“Yeah, twelve years.” Conner pushed his goggles up onto his forehead and wiped the gunk [10]10
  The sand that gathers inside goggles and around the eyes.


[Закрыть]from the corners of his eyes. “I can’t believe it’s been that long.”

“It has. It means I’ll be twelve this year.”

“Yeah.” And Conner wondered if he’d waited this long for any other reason than to know his brother would be okay without him. And he would. At twelve, Rob could officially apprentice in a dive shop. He could get room and board for what he now did anyway on the side. Graham would take him in. And Conner knew Gloralai would watch after him like he was her own little brother—

“Why’d we bring so much jerky?” Rob asked.

Conner turned from the horizon and saw his brother rummaging in the rucksack. “Close that up,” he said. “You’re letting sag [11]11
  The sand found in the bottom of any container.


[Закрыть]in.”

“But I’m hungry.”

Conner reached into his pocket. “I’ve got food for the hike here. Now seal that flap.”

His brother did as he was told, didn’t seem to have seen all else in the bag. Rob sat with his back to the wind and chewed on a heel of bread. In the far distance, carried on the breeze, the drums and thunder of No Man’s Land could be heard, sounding nearer than last year and nearer still than the year before that. Soon, Conner thought, those drums would be beating in Springston. Soon they would be beating in all their chests, driving them mad.

The sun beat down as the clouds of sand abated. It was one or the other during the day. At night, it was the cold and the howling beasts. The various torments of life worked in shifts so that one was always on duty. Thus was human misery extracted day and night like water and oil are pulled from the earth. Thus was the toll inflicted, the price one paid for being unwittingly born.

“Let’s go,” Conner said, getting to his feet and adjusting his ker. He pulled his goggles down over his eyes. “We’ll be making camp in the dark if we keep lingering like this.”

His brother rose without complaint, and Conner helped him with the pack. He lifted the heavy tent with its lantern and bedding and stakes and sandfly, and the two of them left the great wall behind and marched to the thunder. They marched to the thunder, if not in step with it.

17 • The Bull and the Boy

Legend had it that the great god Colorado and the white bull Sand had not always been at war. The constellations that hung in the heavens were not always thus, for the stars that outlined man and beast moved like planets, albeit more slowly.

In the olden days, the stars that marked the great warrior had been more closely arranged, the man a mere boy and not fully grown. But even when young he had shown promise as a hunter and a warrior. He and the bull whose tail always pointed north had been great friends in those days. They rode across the sky in defiance of the firmament, laughing and howling, playing and hunting. Together, they ruled all, for the spear and hoof were a keener measure of power than land or title. The world beneath them stood quiet, and water ran everywhere like the softest of sands.

But the white bull belonged not to the boy but to his chief, the One Clansman. Sand was the Royal Bull, protected from the hunt and sacred. So when Sand returned from a long absence with a nick in his hide, it was Colorado’s spear that was blamed. Sand moaned and moaned and said this was not so, but none save for Colorado could understand the bull’s laments. The others heard only the pain, which stoked their anger.

The One Clansman was pulled from his tent and was asked to make a judgment. He approached his injured bull and studied the wound. When his hand came away red, it painted the sky at dusk. “It was the boy’s spear,” he said.

Outraged, the people of the tribe drove the boy out. They cast stones at him, which broke into smaller and smaller rocks. And still they threw them, until there was stone no more. The boy Colorado wintered by himself beyond the jagged peaks where no rock could reach him. And so began the winter of ten thousand ages. During this time, the belt of the great warrior Colorado never rose above the horizon, as was common in the cold months. The months stayed cold for a very long time.

Rain froze and gathered. The ice grew so heavy, it made valleys where once there were plains. The rocks used to drive the boy out now covered the old world. Sand and ice took turns burying the clan.

Countless moons and a thousand winds passed. Now a man, Colorado chased a cayote up the mountains, following his tracks, which led him over the peaks and down to his people. He had been absent so long, no one recognized him. Not even the great bull Sand, who had grown old, his hide and eyes gray, the scar on his flank a black and jagged mark. Nor did Colorado recognize his old friend of the hunt. The years had been too many. The world was upside down. Ancient maps had been redrawn and relearned.

The only reminder of what had happened was that black scar on Sand’s hide, and all the old bull knew of the wound was that the spear in Colorado’s hand had made it, and so the bull and the grown boy began to war with one another. Man and Sand were now at odds, could no longer find harmony. A fiction had become truth. Lost was the true story of how Colorado had saved the bull’s life. No one remembered the pack of cayotes clinging to Sand’s hide, how they’d been felled with a mighty blow from Colorado’s spear, a nick made in the bull’s flesh as the point caught him as well. The truth had vanished like the sheets of ice. A hide bore a great gash, just as the plains where Colorado hunted held a jagged line in the crust of the earth that marked the boundary of No Man’s Land.

Conner knew these legends, but he didn’t trust them. He was old enough to know more than one version of these stories. The tales he had learned as a youth had changed, and he imagined they’d been changing for as long as they’d been told. Back when the legends began, the sand that made the dunes had probably been solid rock.

But there stood the valley out of which no man returned. It lay before their campsite as he and Rob staked the tent a dozen paces from its jagged border. It was a hard line, this. The desert floor was cracked, the hide of the bull an open wound. And across this blew the sand. Out of No Man’s Land blew the sand. It blew across an injury that would never heal.

No Man’s Land. Despite the name, Conner didn’t know of a single boy his age who hadn’t ventured out to the rift just to jump across and back. It was a dare undertaken in trembling packs of youth, the taboos whispered on long hikes, the false tales each year of a boy who had slipped and had fallen into the chasm and whose screams could still be heard. “That’s how deep it is,” an older boy would invariably warn with a sinister smile. “You fall in and you fall forever, screaming and screaming, until you grow old and die.”

Conner had heard these warnings as a boy. Later, he had spoken them to others. When he had gone on his own trek, he had been nine years old and had known that it was the wind that made that noise. And for all the boys who seemed to annually plunge to their deaths, none were ever named. There were never any funerals or sobbing mothers. It was just older kids trying to scare the younger.

The chasm itself was a mere two paces across where boys made brave leaps. Once they crossed, they stood on the other side, trembling and afraid, chests thrust out in defiance of the noisy gods deep in the valley, feeling the wind and sand on their faces, thinking on warnings from fathers who had in their youth done the very same. And then they jumped right back, vastly relieved to have this ritual behind them.

And so it was said that no man returned from this land even though all men dipped a toe in unharmed. But Conner knew, as everyone else did, that legends and law did not have such hard borders as these. They were soft things, probed without bursting, until one pressed the point too far. And the danger in life was that no one knew when the skin would give, just as Colorado had not known how to fight an enemy who wrestled with his friend, how to aim true enough to hit only the one.

They set up the tent and made a fire and warmed bread and stew in silence, and Conner thought on these things. They lit the lamp and sipped caps of water and shared stories of stories about the long dead and long absent, and Conner thought on these things. That night, he lay in his father’s tent while embers throbbed red outside, and he dwelt on the legends, thinking how a boy might leap across that gap and live, but how no boy truly believed he had entered No Man’s Land. Not really. Not for honest. Because this was a place from which no soul returned.

No man, at least.