Текст книги "Sand"

Автор книги: Hugh Howey

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

23 • Missing Treasure

Vic

Vic and Marco sailed back into a Low-Pub that had transformed into chaos. It was not the sleepy town they usually found after their pre-dawn dives; this was a town startled into frenzy, a transformation jolted by the electricity of rumor. The tale of Danvar’s discovery had sent the diving community into a tizzy, and along with that community the rest of the small southern town. Those who rummaged scrapheaps, the welders who reshaped old steel, the women who catered to men’s lust, the shopkeeps and barkeeps and everyone with a love of coin, all seemed to be out in the streets gossiping or packing their sarfers or checking their gear before they ventured out to find the great and untouched city said to be buried a mile deep.

But confirming a legend may have heightened its allure without any promise of bounty in return. Damien had warned them that no one knew exactly where the city was, only that a couple of divers were said to have found it. Some brigand had flapped his inebriated gums in a crowded bar, claimed to have been there to witness the discovery, and now that same brigand was said to be dead. It had sounded to Vic like the sort of unsubstantiated nonsense that scavengers and conspiracy theorists were drawn to. And even as she and Marco pulled into the marina and began to voice doubts about the veracity of these Danvar claims, other sarfers were flying out in all directions at once. They could hear rumors being shouted from one deck to the other over the whistling winds, each diver seizing on the location that made the most sense to them. It was clear from the chaos around the marina that no one knew where Danvar was, but that wasn’t going to stop anyone from being there when it was uncovered. It was madness. Vic was about to tell Marco this, when he voiced madness of his own.

“So where should we start?” he asked.

Vic moved to the foot of the mast and helped him flake the sail against the boom. “What do you mean start?” she asked. “You don’t believe this nonsense, do you?” She lashed the sail to the boom and saw that Marco was tying slip knots while she was using reefs. As if he planned on heading right back out and she was looking to stay.

“It’s probably a load of shit, but what if? You’d rather sit here and miss the find of the century?”

“No, I’d rather sit here than chase my tail around the thousand dunes. If there wasa find of the century, I’d go. But we both know there isn’t.” She rolled her eyes as Marco undid one of her reef knots and looped in a slip. “You do whatever. I’ve been up and diving since four while you’ve been napping in your sarfer. I’m gonna shake the sand out of these clothes, see what’s in this other case, and then get some sleep.”

Marco looked hurt.

“If you find Danvar,” she added, “come and wake me.”

“Well, I need to run to my place and grab my tanks. But yeah, I’ll catch you later.” He leaned over the boom for a kiss, and Vic obliged.

“Later,” she said. She hopped down to the sand, her knee still a little sore, and slung her gear bag over her shoulder. She grabbed the two cases from the sarfer’s haul rack and extended the handles. Dragging them to her house on those small and useless wheels, she cursed the madness the old world’s allure made in men. The promise of buried treasure warped their minds. Vic liked to think she was more rational than that.

But of course, her mind was prone to dreams of sudden riches too. And she had her own guesses about the location of Danvar. She wasn’t immune to the idea of seeing a city untouched by time and scavenge. Even with the craziness around her, the hysteria, the fun she might poke at Marco and these people off their rockers, she knew her own rocker was prone to tipping, too. It tipped right back, that feeling of vertigo as some momentous event loomed underfoot, until she was the one asking herself: What if it’s real? What if?

But only a fool runs around shouting “A find! A find!” when they haven’t seen it in their own visor. Right? She tried to convince herself. Because the greater fool sits in a bar alone, nursing a warm beer, while hauls of coin start coming into town and the stories that will one day be legend fill the pub. It’s a fool either way, so it’s all about cost. Which fool would she more loathe to be?

She dragged her two bags across the sand. It was early morning, but so many people were out and about. Divers who would’ve normally asked where she’d found the cases rushed right by in a hurry. Shopkeeps who would’ve begged her to come pop those latches on their counters were too busy haggling over the rising price of a fuel cell or the use of a generator or the purchase of a haul net. Vic slid through the throngs to her house. She set the cases down outside her shack and fumbled in her pocket for the key. Out of habit, she tapped her toes on the kickplate along the bottom of the door to knock the scrum from her boots loose. The gentle raps caused the door to swing open, hinges squealing. Vic pulled her hand out of her pocket. She was damn sure she’d latched it when she’d left.

“Palm?” she called.

Her brother often treated the place like it was his, had started spending as much time in Low-Pub as Springston and liked to take advantage of the fact that Vic spent most of her nights over at Marco’s. He was the only other person with a key. There was no answer from inside. She studied the door, saw the scratch marks from someone jimmying the thing open with a screwdriver, which brought back memories of the dozens of times she’d jimmied the damn thing open with a screwdriver. She hesitated before going in, wondered if maybe the latch just hadn’t caught that morning. It’d been dark and she’d been groggy when she’d left.

“Hey Palm? You asleep?”

Vic reached into her boot and pulled her latch-break out. She used the metal rod to push the door all the way open. It was dark inside, the west-facing windows getting little of the morning sun. She didn’t hear anyone. Must’ve not pulled the door shut when she left. That was it. She lit a candle and checked the bedroom and bathroom, was satisfied with her theory. She went back for the two bags, brought them inside, and kicked the door shut.

Two days, max. That’s how long before they’d know if Danvar had been discovered. No harm in waiting and getting in on the action late. No harm in that. She had plenty of places she could dive that no one else could. Hell, it might get nice and quiet around Low-Pub for a couple days once everyone cleared out. That would be a pleasant change.

Vic stood under the beam she used for pull-ups and jumped up and grabbed the palm-worn wood. She held herself with one hand while she patted for the key. Securing it, she dropped back down and removed the padlock from the hatch in the living room floor. Grabbing the black case full of clothes, she lowered it down to the slope of drift below. The silver case she left out; Vic wanted to take a peek before she got some rest.

Opening her icebox, she grabbed half a shriveled lime and a jar of homebrew, squeezed the former into the latter, and sipped on her breakfast. She set the Samsonite up on its edge and tried the latches. Stuck. Both of them. She took another swig of the beer, stale but cold, and was wiping her mouth when there was a knock at the door.

“Begging won’t make me change my mind—” she started to tell Marco, when the door opened and two men barged into the room. Brigands, by the smell and look of them. Vic recognized one of the men. Paulie. He used to run with the Low-Pub Legion. Couldn’t hack it as a diver and took to muscling people. The red Legion ker was gone, though. Both men sported the golden kers of the northern wastes. Vic wondered what the hell these guys were doing this far south. And then she saw that the bigger man had a gun on his belt. Probably didn’t work—as most of them didn’t—but the problem was in the probably.

“Hey, wrong house, assholes.” Vic stood up and blocked the view of the Samsonite. “If you’re looking for Danvar, it’s not in my cellar—”

“Save it, Vic,” Paulie said. “Where the fuck is Palm?”

“How the hell should I know? And you guys are tracking sand in.”

The larger man with the gun stomped toward the bedroom and peered inside.

“He’s not here,” Vic said. “You’ve got the wrong fucking house.”

“Well, we hear he spends time all over the place.”

“He’s probably in Springston,” Vic said, trying to throw them off.

“We already checked Springston,” Paulie told her.

“Yeah? Look, I don’t care what he owes you. Dusting up my place is gonna get you in mydebt—”

“Chill with the tough act,” the big guy said. He pointed a finger at her. “Where the fuck is he?”

“Even if I knew, I wouldn’t tell you.”

The large brigand made a move in her direction, but Paulie held the man back. “She don’t know. She’s just fucking with you.”

The brigand spat at Vic’s boots.

“Lovely,” she said. “I’ll tell my brother you boys are wanting him to come out and play.”

“Do that,” Paulie said. “Seriously. Your brother is tied up in shit beyond your comprehension. If you see him, tell him to come in. It’ll go easier on him this way.”

“Shut the door behind you,” Vic said.

The large brigand took one last look around the room. His eyes fell to the locked hatch. But Paulie guided him back toward the front door, and the large man relented. They left the door open. Vic crossed the room and shut it. She spun the latch and rested against the hammered tin. What the fuck was her brother into this time? It was that asshole, Happy. Gonna get her brother killed, running around with that group, trying to impress people. She’d talked to Palmer about that, about needing to find a different dive partner. And what the hell could he have gotten into that would have brought a couple of scavengers this far south? That would have them running all over Springston and Low-Pub when everyone else was out looking for Danvar—?

“No way,” Vic said. She paced a small circle around her living room. “No fucking way. Palmer, you didn’t.”

She glanced at her dive bag. Damn, she was tired. Too tired for this. But her brother had come to her a week ago asking if he could borrow her visor. She’d laughed and told him to fuck off. He’d then asked her about a two-tank valve, which she’d given him. She remembered the conversation like it was yesterday. Remembered the way he’d hugged her before he left. He never did that. Couldn’t remember the last time he’d done that.

“What’ve you done, Palm? What the fuck have you done?”

Vic crossed the room and grabbed the jar of stale beer with its shriveled green lime. She chugged the bitter breakfast down and grabbed her dive bag. Damn, she was tired. But hopefully Marco hadn’t left town without her.

24 • A Mad Dash

Palmer

Dive light and diver were extinguished as one. Palmer felt the wild man sag lifeless to the ground, and the light around his neck threw out one last spurt of red rays before it too gave up the ghost. He was left shaking and terrified in the pitch black. His dive knife felt heavy in his hand.

Palmer wiped the blade on his thigh and placed a hand over his belly, holding the coins there. He remembered that a coin had spilled out, and bent down, patted the floor until he found it. There was a tear in his suit. He felt to see if any of the wires had been severed—couldn’t be positive but didn’t think so. The knife went back into his boot. He arranged the folded map in his belly pocket so it was against the tear, outside of the coins, stanching the costly wound.

Reaching for his dive light, he switched it off, shook it, and tried it again. Popping the battery out and touching its leads to his tongue didn’t resurrect it. He felt for his visor, wanted to check the charge in his suit, then remembered it getting knocked off. Palmer felt around in the darkness and tried to retrace his steps. The air was fucking awful in there. It was the stench of the dead mixed with the stale and too-weak oxygen. His knees were wobbly. He bumped into a desk. Felt around the corner. Went too far and placed a hand in the gore of the other diver.

“Fuck. Fuck.”

Palmer backed up, wiped his hand on the ground, wiped again on an office chair, was bumping into things and making noises, ghosts everywhere. He practically crawled on his belly, swept his arms across the floor, found random knick-knacks, lost a coin from his pocket and chased after it, wasn’t able to find the damn thing, when he bumped into his visor.

Tank of air, the madman had said. Tank of air but no charge.Palmer had some battery left but no air. Fucking Hap. He tried to remember where the tanks had been. Couldn’t see shit. Couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. His fins were back in the other room. Vic always made fun of him for using fins, said only beginners wore them, that once you really learned how to flow sand you could do it in your boots. You could do it barefoot.

Palmer strained with his other senses. He listened for the sound of sand tumbling across sand, little tiny rocks the size of pinpricks whispering in diminutive avalanche. He searched for that noise of his life, of his entire goddamn existence: sand on sand.

He heard a sigh. A hush. Barely more than a rustle, maybe the sound of him breathing or his heart thrumming or the brush of fabric between his trembling knees.

But no—it was sand moving. Sliding toward him.

Palmer slid toward it in return.

He crawled through the desks, straining to remember the layout of the room, where the tanks had been, where in relation to the drift. There were chairs and desks everywhere. There were tangles of wires and a keyboard. Palmer considered trying his visor, using it to navigate, trying to see by the pulsing purples of open air, but the dead dive light around his neck was a reminder to not waste his charge. His suit had held enough juice to get him down to that building and back to the surface, and he was only halfway through that dive. This is what he told himself as he fumbled around in the darkness: he was only halfway through this dive. He had stopped for a few days, a few hours, who knew how long? He had starved at the bottom of his plummet, had scrounged longer than any living soul ever had, and he wasn’t through. Weak and exhausted and terrified, he wasn’t through.

Palmer felt sand beneath his palms. He nearly bent and kissed the stuff, those cool granules that reminded him of home. He turned to the side and kept one hand in touch with the slope of drift, the other waving out in space, shuffled along on his knees, when his fingers hit that cool metal.

The tears came. Palmer cried out in relief. But he dared not hope, dared not hope, not until he knew. He felt around the dive tanks for the valves—everything in a different place, a strange arrangement, a different model, three damn tanks to lug, to flow around. No way he could lift all three. He cracked the valve at the top of one tank and felt down the hose to the regulator. With his heart pounding, unable to breathe or think or swallow, he touched the purge button in the center of the regulator.

Nothing. Empty tank. He tried the next. Prayed. Really fucking prayed to the old gods, the ones he didn’t believe in, but he promised them now that he would. He would. He would believe. Just give him some air.

But the regulator made no sound. He tried sucking on the mouthpiece to make sure. All he got was dizzy.

Last tank. There was no hope now. No promises to the gods. Nothing but weariness and despair. Anger and fear. And then—a blast of air.

A blast of air, goddamn you. He thought this to Hap, to his friend who had left him for dead, who had promised to come back for him, to save him. Well, Palmer would get out of there and he would find Hap, would return to him like a vengeful ghost. He would kill that motherfucker. That’s what he would do. And this gave him the courage to go. To go. Palmer fumbled for the webbing straps and the buckles that held the tanks in place. He removed the two empties, shoved them aside with clanks and bangs, set them off to roll into invisible furniture and warn away the ghosts.

He slipped his arms through the webbing straps on the harness, the single tank lopsided on his back. His visor wouldn’t be able to interface with the regulator and tell him how much air he had, but that didn’t matter, did it? There was enough or there wasn’t. The dead diver would’ve turned back if he had gotten too low. Palmer told himself this. He told himself this. Pulling his visor down and powering both it and his suit on, he bit down on someone else’s regulator, took a long pull of someone else’s air, and he crawled up that slope of drift. He told his suit to vibrate outward against the world, against the hard pack, shiver it until it moved like water, and then he sank down, was enveloped by the deep dunes, the purples becoming oranges and reds, and he could see again.

25 • The Risk of Believing

Vic

Vic found Marco back at the marina, loading his tanks into the haul rack. His was the last sarfer in sight. There were sails and masts out across the dunes, but all were heading away. Everyone was looking for Danvar. Vic wondered how to explain to Marco that they needed to use his sarfer to look for her brother instead.

“You heading out alone?” she asked.

Marco turned from his sarfer and smiled. He moved his goggles up to his forehead. “Thought you needed a nap.”

“Naw. When I need beauty rest, I just blink.” She batted her eyes to demonstrate.

“Prettier by the moment.” He helped her with her gear bag and lashed it down with the tanks. “So I thought we’d head south. One of the rumors floating around is that Danvar is in a line with Springston and Low-Pub. A lot of people are going west where the sand isn’t so deep. I think that’s a mistake.”

“I think we need to go north,” Vic said.

“You would.” Marco studied the wind generator at the aft end of the sarfer. It howled as it spun in the breeze. He checked the charge on the batteries. “If I’d said north, you would’ve told me we needed to go south.”

“No, I think we need to find my brother.”

“Palm? To cut him in on this? Shouldn’t we find the joint first?”

Vic followed Marco to the boom and helped him tug the slip knots loose. “I didn’t get a nap because a couple of assholes barged into my place as soon as I got there. Paulie and some other guy.”

“Paulie? Is he back in town?”

“Yeah. Looking for Palm.”

Marco shook his head. “You gotta tell your brother to stay away from those guys.”

“I have.”

Marco lowered his goggles and unwrapped the dock lines from the hitching post. The sarfer rocked in the breeze, felt eager to get moving. The wind generator whirred. He lowered the rudder against the sand and tested the tiller. “How about we shoot south just to see if anyone’s found something, and then we go look for your brother?” He nodded toward the mast. “If you raise the main, I’ll pull us out of here.”

Vic stepped back toward the cockpit instead. She raised her hand and steadied the boom as it moved in a gust of wind. “I don’t want to find Palmer to take him diving with us,” she said.

“Good. Let’s get going.”

“We need to find Palmer because…” She wasn’t sure how to say this. “Goddamnit, Marco, I think he might be the one who found Danvar.”

26 • A Long Way Up

Palmer

Palmer slid easily through the loose bank of drift inside the building, but the hard pack he found outside was a shock. As he pushed his way back into the world, the earth he encountered there pushed back at him. He didn’t quite get a full breath of air before the strain around his chest and neck made another gulp impossible. He could’ve turned and forced his way back into the building to escape the crush, but a slower death beckoned there. And he might never have gotten the courage to go again.

His mortality was suddenly everywhere at once. Never before had it registered with him that this was the moment. Now. Right now. Here was where he would die and where his bones would lie, never to see the stars again.

With half a lungful, he turned skyward in desperation. He only knew which way was up by leaving the tall building behind. Fighting against the squeeze, fighting against all that pressure, he struggled to flow the sand and at the same time to breathe. But still he could not pry the hands of those deep dunes from around his neck. He had a tank of air strapped to his back, but he couldn’t draw on the regulator, couldn’t force his chest to expand, needed to go upin order to win a breath.

Palmer kicked and flowed the miserable sand. He should be around three hundred meters. There was no depth reading in his visor. Go by feel. Move fifty meters. That should be enough to get a breath. Battery in his beacon must be dead. Didn’t matter—just kick. The depth would show when it sensed the surface. Should’ve been able to breathe but couldn’t. Too weak. Too exhausted. Too hungry and thirsty and terrified.

The sun does this every day, he heard his sister say. Palmer felt consciousness slip through his fingers. He was back on a dune with Vic, learning to dive in the loosest of sand, afraid he wouldn’t have the knack, that he wouldn’t have the special talent that made diving possible, was afraid all of his dad’s skill had gone to his sister.

Look at the sun, she told him. The sun was just coming up. He’d been in her too-big dive suit for hours and hadn’t been able to so much as slide a hand into a dune. He was growing frustrated. He didn’t want to hear another lecture from his older sister.

“Every day,” Vic told him. “Every day, the sun rises out of the sand without effort. It glides. It burns. It melts all in its path, and then it shows us how it’s done in the evening as it bores straight down through the jagged peaks. Through solid rock, Palm. And all you’ve gotta to do is move the sand.”

The sun.His father was calling. His father, who told him he would be a great diver one day. Sitting on his lap, Palmer’s earliest memory, back when his father had been a great man and a ruler, telling his firstborn son that he would be the greatest of divers one day. Nearby, Vic listened, ten years old, sitting in the same room and unmentioned. Unmentioned.

No shadows cast, not from this son. No, this son livedin shadows. Lived in the dark and cool sand. Watched his sister dive and rise up again, basking, radiating glory, a rebel and a pirate and a scrounger and a great diver. But Palmer… who saw Danvar when it was a legend… who spilled the life of a man with his dive knife… who would die with a tank of air on his back and a quarter charge in his suit… his white bones at three hundred meters.

Three hundred meters. The depth reading flashed in Palmer’s awareness like the appearance of a mother’s face in the midst of a burning fever. Like a knock at a door in the middle of a nightmare. A small part of his brain yelled at the rest of him, saying hey, you might want to see this.

But he’d been going up. Should be less than three hundred meters. His lungs were straining. And then he remembered the bowl they’d dug, the deep shaft in the sand they’d made, the extra two hundred meters. Fuck, he’d only gotten started. No way, no way, no way.

Palmer stopped moving. He worried less about the flow and more about breathing. The sand held him, but he was able to draw air through the regulator. A breath. A sip. Life. That surreal feeling taking him right back to the day Vic had taught him how to dive, had told him to breathewhile his head was under the sand, his body telling him this was impossible, his brain saying not to do it, his sister yelling at him, her voice distant and muffled, to fucking breathe.

And breathing.

Palmer managed a gulp. He peered down at the now-faint image of the sandscraper below. Up was the other way. Away from Danvar. He kicked; he grunted with effort, the sounds of his screams trapped in his own head, his own throat. So far to go. Where was he? There were no transponders, no beacons, but his visor was getting his depth now, so the surface was up there somewhere. No beacon to show him the way. And the shaft they’d descended, that Brock’s men had made, that bright yellow needle deep in the earth, was missing. That’s why so deep.

It grew harder to breathe, even as he pierced two hundred meters. Should be getting easier. Air was running out. Fuck. Air running out. Only enough to get back to the bottom of that well. No. Not this close. He wouldn’t die this close. He felt the resistance of the dry tank, that fruitless tug on a bottle sucked dry, and his air was gone. Maybe he could get fifty meters on a lungful. Maybe. Two hundred meters to go. He kicked anyway. He wouldn’t make it. This registered as bright as metal in loose sand. He wouldn’t make it. Could feel himself blacking out. Still another one fifty, as deep as many divers dared to plunge, at the bottom of most dives, and he was down there with a lungful of nothing but toxic exhalations.

An orange spot in the sand above. Thirty meters away. Something to steer for. A dying light. An island in the vastness. His body needed to breathe; his body told him to spit out his regulator and suck down sand; it was that impulse at the end of asphyxiation, the urge to get something into the lungs, anything, even the soil. Whatever it took to breathe. To gasp. Just fucking do it. Clog his lungs with sand and end the pain. He would. He would. But an orange spot. A body.

Palmer ran out of energy. The sand would no longer flow. There was a diver there beside him, and he numbly, distantly, in some corner of his diminishing soul, knew why Hap never came back for him.

Hap had never made it.

Palmer spit out his regulator. He tasted the sand on his tongue. He could see Hap’s face, the way his body was twisted out of shape, something wrong about that. Something wrong. A frozen look on Hap’s face, mouth and eyes wide, regulator dangling. Palmer’s regulator. Palmer’s regulator.

Palmer flowed the sand around the regulator and grabbed it, placed it into his mouth. No hope. No hope. But air cares not for hope. It is or it isn’t. And here it was. Here it was.

Air.

Energy flowed into Palmer’s cells like electricity. He blinked away the tears behind his visor. Vic and his father were yelling at him. His mother was yelling at him. His baby brothers. Hap. All yelling at him. Go. Go. Fucking breathe.

A hundred meters to the surface, to the bottom of that slowly filling bowl of sand. No time to switch tanks. But this was sand he could handle. Even as he could taste the wet metal on his tongue that let him know this other tank was running dry, this tank and regulator he knew so well running dry, he also knew the loose sand. He knew this dead diver. Palmer was a scrounger, a sand diver, one who brought back heavy loads from the past and saw the sun glint off them for the first time in generations. He flowed the sand upward, pulling Hap and his tank with him, rising through the last hundred meters of sand as his air ran out, as his air ran out, but he knew and Vic told him that he could make it. And he believed.