Neon Sands Trilogy Boxset: The Neon Series Season One

by Adam J. Smith

  “Age catching up with you, Walker?” said Calix. The middle finger was saluted back to him.

  “He’s forgetting what hard work feels like,” said Annora. Her voice crackled over the comm.

  “I’ve got more sand in my cock’s eye than you two have ever had to pick out of your ass crack,” said Walker, his voice breaking into a cough at the end.

  Rattled, thought Calix.

  “Easy, Walker,” said Barrick. “If you need a break head inside.”

  “Pansies,” said Caia. “Try getting sand out your cunt without a shower then talk about taking it easy.”

  Walker’s coughing fit ceased and he stood up, lifting the blower to his front. “We ain’t heading back inside until we’ve cleared at least 50 square metres. Get on with it.”

  “I need a piss.” Caia dropped her blower and looked up to the forward cabin. It was impossible to see inside. Calix looked back down at her. “You gonna watch me, pervert?”

  “It’s my job to ensure your safety, maam,” said Calix.

  It was Caia’s turn to flip the finger as she slid down the embankment to the underside of the crawler, out of sight.

  “You know I don’t mind swapping, if you want,” said Ardelia.

  “I’m good,” said Walker.

  Calix waited a beat to see if Annora would say anything, and smiled when she did. “Still, you haven’t joined us on the sands like this for ages.”

  “We’re a man down thanks to Cal’s stupidity and there’s no time to be hanging around. Now less questions, more action.”

  “Cal’s stupidity aside,” said Barrick, “just what are you expecting to find?”

  “Barrick!”

  “Something sensitive?”

  “No comm from now unless you hit a find!” ordered Walker.

  ***

  There was silence in the changing room as they stripped off their clothes, powdering the air with clouds of red that quickly vented outside. Barrick threw his clothes to the floor beside him and opened his closet, withdrawing the talc. He had strangely hairless legs, with thick calves and hamstrings, and, thought Annora, if she had to look at an ass his would do. He dabbed handfuls of talc over his shoulders, down his arms and under his armpits. Gradually, the scent of sweat in the condensed space was replaced by roses – not much better in this case. It could overpower sweat that had been vented out already, but it didn’t mix well.

  Annora peeled her own clothes to the floor, with her boots the last to come off. She upended them over the vent in the floor and watched the sand pour out. Then she got a towel and dried the sweat from her skin before applying her own talc.

  Caia was already sat on a bench, kneading the talc into her legs, when Walker entered. “I don’t miss this,” he said, removing his bandana and scarf.

  “Oh I don’t know,” said Barrick, turning around. “Family time is quality time.”

  “Going grey down there, eh?” smiled Caia.

  “Good to get your hands dirty every now and then,” said Barrick.

  “Good work today. My back aches like a son of a bitch. Remember why I let you guys do the heavy lifting these days.” A deep red line ran across Walker’s face where his goggles and scarf had left his face exposed. He shrugged out of his clothes with effort.

  “What about tomorrow?” asked Caia, pulling on fresh clothes. “Gonna slum it then, too?”

  “No choice, Cai. We need everyone.”

  “How about you put Cal in the excavator tomorrow and Ardelia comes out with us? I’m sure he could handle that.”

  “I think Cal would feel more useful,” said Annora.

  “If he can handle it, then that’s a good suggestion,” agreed Walker.

  Annora filled her hands with talc and began to massage it into the skin of her neck, running her fingers behind her ears where she could feel grime peeling away. Dead skin fell from her shoulders as she rubbed them. Opposite, Walker was now naked too, chest broad with a matte of grey hair. A day of work had poured tension into his muscles – where they had previously been slack, like his biceps and pectorals, they were now taught. His ache was palpable in every movement he made.

  “So,” said Barrick, pulling on a pair of slack trousers. “You gonna let us in on the secret?”

  Walker looked up. “What secret?”

  “You had a call last night. Something about keeping us away from anything sensitive?”

  Walker’s face somehow turned redder. “You listening in on my calls now?”

  “Small world. Thin walls.” Barrick glanced at Annora who stood frozen.

  “Whatever happened to discretion?”

  “Whatever happened to honesty?”

  Suddenly, Annora’s nakedness left her feeling unshielded. She began pulling clothes on.

  “I don’t know what you want? We’re out here to do a job. If we find anything that’s Linwood’s call.”

  “Pfft. Maybe Linwood should get his ass out here once in a while,” said Caia.

  “So it’s perfectly safe?” asked Barrick.

  “Why wouldn’t it be? It’s just another dig, like any other.”

  Barrick shook his head. “Lying now, Walker. I heard what Linwood said. It could be dangerous.”

  “Honestly, when is it never dangerous? I don’t know what Linwood meant by that.” Walker had put on trousers by now. He picked up his jacket and headed for the doorway. “If privacy and rank cannot be respected on this crawler then things will have to change when we get back to Sanctum.” He slammed the door behind him.

  “Nice one,” said Caia, following him out.

  Annora grabbed a pair of socks and was about to leave too when Barrick grabbed her arm. “Hey,” she said. His grip was hard, but not painful. He was big, bigger than Calix. Even with a canopy of talc still circling the air she could smell his sweat beneath the roses.

  “Sorry,” he let go. “You heard it too, last night. You tell Cal?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Good. I’ve been on enough finds to know when something is different. There used to be something important here. Maybe what we’ve always been searching for. Maybe it’s dangerous, maybe it’s not, but keep your eyes extra open, yeah?”

  “What we’ve always been searching for?”

  “We’re looking for more than spare radio parts, and you know it.”

  “I thought I knew everything, but now I don’t think I know anything.”

  Recall

  It was difficult to accurately describe the effects the landscape had on the narrowing remnants of humanity as they struggled on; of waking each day and knowing there had once been a previous morning filled with blue sky and sunlight and densely packed woods – jungles even – where it was the greenest leaves an imagination could summon that blocked the light, and not an ever-present, single mantle of various hues of grey. Which generation more keenly felt the injustice it was hard to say: no-one really knew how long it had been like this; the young looked to the old and tried to blame them; the old looked to the young and despaired that nothing had changed and this was the world they’d brought them into. Some settlements, Calix heard, had disappeared not from resource deprivation, in-fighting or inter-settlement war, but from choice: deciding not to bear any more children. The last of the living the last of the dead. Visiting wanderers left with no choice but to destroy the entrance door that could only be opened from the inside. Finding a single body slumped in a chair in the centre of the courtyard. Others elsewhere. Skin crinkling, thin as hemp-paper; threads hanging from unhemmed edges. The Agridome a barren womb.

  In contrast, other settlements became overpopulated, children running amok beneath the extended bellies of pregnant women; some lips cut or foreheads protruding or limbs shortened from sibling and cousin love as the pool in which they bred grew ever smaller. Each one as loved as the one before and the one after. Happiness sought and found in the only place it could be. Rations themselves rationed until the cutting took its toll and there were too many mouths to feed. Or el
se too many people to heal as something like typhoid or dysentery spread, leaving the infirm to die of starvation, or the children to gnaw like rats on dog carcasses before crawling out of the ever-open entrance to die in the sand.

  Sitting on top of the crawler at dusk, to the rear, staring down the path they had dug, Calix understood all too well why Linwood and Kirillion were the way they were. The necessitation under which they ran Sanctum, ensuring they were never overstretched or under resourced, was the reason things were able to continue; was the reason for the lingering hope that anyone felt, should they feel any at all. Day after day of regimented tasks. All the checks crossed and cogs oiled. The one in and one out rule of thumb. The ongoing search that simultaneously provided extra resources for the settlement, and gave them purpose. With purpose, an ouroboros of hope. A sense of mystery also fed the serpent – the main reason why they hadn’t pressed Linwood too much about what they were really searching for was because in the mystery was excitement. Not that he would reveal anything anyway – most likely just set you to work within the dome and send out some other sap.

  The wind picked up. Calix’s hair was too greasy to be easily blown. Nevertheless he ran his fingers through it and pulled it back over his scalp. It stuck as though modelled. The grease was good for keeping it out of his eyes, at least. He unfastened his pigskin jacket and unbuttoned his trouser belt and aimed a stream over the edge of the crawler. It puddled and splashed on the sand. What would it do with it? What did it need with it? Water used to cover over half the planet but where was it now? Absorbed? It seemed like that was the better option. Calix imagined an ocean of water deep underground where all the water had gone – everything now was just a vessel floating on that ocean.

  A memory stirred. Another gift from the ghost? He’d had a recurring childhood dream where he’d been in the lift and gone down, right down, past the store room, down the vault and into darkness. But in his dream he could tell he was still moving despite the darkness. Minutes passed in a flash of dream logic and suddenly the cage stopped besides a small rowing boat. He’d seen one before in some film. He’d stepped onto the boat and the cage had gone back up – through a ceiling of rock. The rock had shone an azure blue, and turning, a sun had turned with him so it was always just above the horizon directly in front of him. Eventually, he noticed an oar in his hand and started rowing, not understanding why he was going in circles. And then he had stepped to the prow and rowed from the front, aiming forward. Searching for something. Searching for a way to release the ocean back to the surface. But the azure rock sky had descended, getting lower the further he rowed, until he found himself crouching, until he could go no further and he reached out to touch the sun. But it wasn’t the sun. It was a giant, round button. He pressed it. The sound of blowers echoed around the ocean chamber and he turned around to see the hole of the lift shaft was now sucking the water up. A water-rise. A funnel swirling up, pulling the boat towards it. Circling. An inverse whirlpool. Until the oar and the boat crumbled in his hands and he felt himself lifted up in the eye of the tornado of water, rising up through the hole and up through the shaft and out into Sanctum, only it wasn’t Sanctum. The dome of Sanctum was west. The water geysered up and created a lake at the doors of Sanctum, and rose further, surrounding the dome like a moat.

  Calix finished sprinkling and sat back down. The wind blew harder. Dust devils played in the darkness of dusk, sweeping to and fro across the crawler’s wake, mating and splitting like dancers. Were he down there with them they’d break and reform as though afraid of his touch.

  How many others were outside right now, watching the dancing devils or simply feeling the wind against their cheek? What was beyond the crawler’s reach? How many continued to live on this planet? How many more Kirillions were there, doing what was necessary to ensure life continued?

  Whatever annihilated us, it didn’t finish us off. Do you get it, Calix?

  He heard Kirillion’s voice and saw the once-kind eyes. The ghost had really pulled back a veil – so much of his childhood was clear again, as if it were only yesterday. He saw the appeal of it now, a dual purpose to the drug: a way to block out the present, and a way to enliven the past. Even if your past was nothing more special than life spent mostly underground beneath a dome waiting for the next meal; the appeal was the child inside who could be satisfied with a game of hide and seek, finding laughter in simple cartoons and peek-a-boo. Calix felt he could almost sense what it was like to be a toddler again, Jinny’s face peering down at him from between two open hands.

  But mostly it was Kirillion and the endless memories of kindness, humility and stern lectures about living with a purpose and a goal that he felt. Of reclaiming the past. A near obsession, Calix now thought. But it was an obsession that had driven them to survive.

  Why oh why then would he kill Ziyad?

  His stomach turned. It wasn’t the ghost this time, just the simple difficulty of reconciling what he knew to be true, with the face of the man who had brought him up. The closest thing he would ever have to a father. Father to Annora. Father to the whole of damn Sanctum. Father to Ziyad.

  “He’s no father to me.”

  He thought of Linwood. “Nor you.”

  He thought of Rafe. “What about you? How much do you know?” Not much, probably. Linwood and Kirillion held all the secrets.

  His thoughts turned to Walker. The wind picked up and buffeted his face. “If we really are looking for something specific, the man in charge would need to know what to look for.” He’d called Linwood ‘Sir.’ If Annora hadn’t told him, he wouldn’t have believed it even if he’d heard it with his own ears.

  He sat. He watched. The sides of the trough they had ploughed began to slowly fall back in. When they woke in the morning it would be as if they’d never touched it at all.

  Excavation

  With their progress already halted by the night’s windstorm covering their tracks, they decided to inch the crawler to the theoretical centre and begin the dig again there. As it rolled forward they blew the sand away to ensure they weren’t about to crush anything useful, and it was then they hit solid hardtop. The blowers polished it black. Faded white lines painted parallel slowly became visible. The tracks of the crawler cascaded like a sheeted waterfall behind them, stopping just short of the solid ground. Its pistons hissed with exhaustion.

  Calix hung from the cabin window, acknowledging Walker’s order to cease progress. From his vantage point he watched as the crew spread out, pushing the sand out until they unveiled enough hardtop they could fit five crawlers side by side. They stepped over building foundations, some with remnants of walls poking up, revealing where doorways and windows had once been. Where the hardtop was pale it was still streaked either with tar-black oil or grease, or scorch marks. There had been a fire here, but whatever had burned to ash was now reclaimed – blown to the other side of the planet for all they knew.

  Over the comm, Walker ordered the crew to begin exploring what they had revealed so far, rather than reveal more just yet. Calix lifted his left shoulder and felt the stabbing pain of the healing ribs as the action pulled on them, and grimaced. He gripped the gear lever, tapping a silent crescendo with his fingertips, knuckles turning white. Toes in boots clenched, unclenched. Beneath his pigskin jacket he began to sweat. Sweat that itched. Itched like a bitch.

  “I’m relieving the cabin,” he said, standing and removing the jacket.

  “No,” said Walker. “I want you inside. Begin excavating the sand around the edge, see if anything comes up.”

  “Come on, Walker. That’s a bust. Just let me help.”

  “You can help. You can rid the sand and see what you can find.”

  “Walker...”

  “Calix.” There was a click. The others had been cut out. “Cal, we’re going to be out here a while, you’ll get your chance. Right now, you’re the nominated babysitter, okay?”

  “For what? What is going to happen?”

  “Not for yo
ur safety. For ours.”

  Calix sighed, sitting back down.

  “We need you in there to report back should anything happen to us. We don’t know what we might find, what structure could collapse. Simple safety protocol. Got it?”

  “Yes...” there was another click, “boss.” Calix bit his lip.

  “Good. Just hunker down and enjoy the ride.” Down below, he saw Walker raise his arms in a gathering gesture. “Crew, over here.” He waved, and they clambered. He shrugged off his blower, and the others followed suit when they were near him, stretching their shoulders and back. Those things got heavier the longer you wore them.

  “What you found?” asked Ardelia.

  “This section,” he pointed to the markings on the floor, “is very similar to Sanctum, where the salvage yard is.”

  Annora pointed at the foundation nearby. “Kinda looks like the size and shape of it too. You can see where there used to be a pit inside. I bet if we got the blower on to the rest of that...” Calix peered down, spotting the rectangular shape of sand within the borders of the foundation. “... it would leave the same kind of pit behind.”

  “Exactly,” said Walker.

  “I see it,” said Calix.

  The crew glanced up at him.

  “Don’t you have a task to do?” said Walker.

  “On it, boss.” He started the engine. A hiss issued from the crawler’s sides. As he reversed, Annora gave him their hand signal; the forefinger and littlefinger. Something they’d seen in the film archives.

  “Barrick, would you do the honours?” Walker’s voice was a little more muffled now over the din.

  As Calix reversed a few metres so he could line up the excavator, he watched as Barrick blew the sand from the rectangular pit. They walked over after the sand had settled.

  “Good work.”