by Hugh Howey
“I still live here, you know,” Conner called out. But one glance at the sand wrapping around his home, and he knew this was a complaint with an expiration date.
He pulled the door open and kicked the scrum[6] off his boots before stepping inside. “Yo, brother! You home?” Pulling the door shut required heaving up with both hands to get the doorknob to latch. Sift[7] fell from the ceiling, and the rafters creaked. There was no sign of Palmer, no boots or track of sand, no gear bag or detritus from a raided pantry. Just a voice calling out from below, muffled and distant. Sounded like Rob. The hammering overhead resumed. Conner aimed a middle finger toward the ceiling.
“You had dinner?” he called out. He set his leftovers on the rickety table by the door—half a can of cold rabbit stew from the Dive Bar. His little brother shouted another reply, but again his voice was a dull rumble. It sounded like he was a shack down.
It took four strides to go from the foyer, through the kitchen, and into their shared bedroom with the two little cots on their rusted springs. Rob’s bed was shoved off to one side, and three of the floor planks beneath it had been removed. It was dark below. The only illumination in the small house was what little lamplight filtered through the cracked glass set into the front door. A candle by Rob’s bed had melted down to nothing. Conner rummaged through the bin by his cot and grabbed his flashlight, turned it on. Dead. He threw it back into the bin. Three strides, and he pulled down the gas lamp from the living room. Shook it and listened to the splash of oil. Fumbled to get it lit. “You getting the gear together?” he asked.
Rob didn’t answer. Conner adjusted the lamp until the room was flooded with light. He sat on the bedroom floor and dangled his feet into the pit, then lowered himself down and reached up to grab the lantern. A pale glow filled someone’s former home.
What had once been rafters holding up a roof were now floor joists in Palmer’s house. Someone else’s house stood below theirs, long abandoned and unclaimed. Soon, his own home would be someone’s basement and this a sand-filled cellar. And so it went, sand piling up to the heavens and homes sinking toward hell.
Conner swung the lantern around in the small space. He and Rob kept the few things they owned stowed down there. The bag that held the tent and all their camping gear was undisturbed. It sat right where they’d left it a year ago. It was covered in sift. Conner dusted some of the sand off the bag and wondered where the hell Rob was. He pushed open an old bathroom door and saw more floor planks removed. A light danced below. “What the fuck’re you doing down there?” he asked.
Rob peered up at him through the hole in the old floor and smiled guiltily. He was sitting on a pile of sand one more shack down. It was as far down as one could go, this next buried home nearly full of drift.[8] His brother’s hair looked wet, was matted to his forehead, like he’d been exerting himself. Conner quickly looked away.
“Aw, c’mon, man. You’re not down there jerking off, are you?”
“No!” Rob squealed, and Conner peered back into the hole. He saw his brother wiggling back and forth. Rob glanced up at him and bit his lip in frustration. “Where’ve you been?” he asked. “I’ve been calling for you and calling for you.”
Conner realized now that his brother was in trouble. Crouching down, he lowered the lamp below the floorboards and saw that the sand was up to his brother’s hips. There were gouges where Rob had been digging.
“What the fuck have you done?”
“I was just playing,” Rob said.
Conner hung the lantern on a nail and worked his way down another level. “I told you to stay out of here. Drift can dump through in a flash.”
“I know. But… it didn’t dump in. I kinda buried myself.”
Conner spotted the wires trailing out of the sand. He tried to pry his brother out, but Rob wouldn’t budge. The sand around him was hard as concrete. “What’ve you done?”
“I’ve been working on… something.” Rob showed Conner the band in his hand, a cluster of wires trailing off and disappearing into the hard pack. “I wasn’t diving, promise. Not all the way. Just trying to see what I could do with my boots—”
“With your boots—?”
“Father’s boots.”
“You mean my boots.” Conner snatched the band out of his brother’s hand. “Eleven fucking years old, Rob. You’re gonna get yourself killed playing with this shit. Where’d you get the band?”
“Found it.”
“Did you steal this?” Conner shook the band. He had half a mind to leave his brother there for the night, just to teach him a lesson.
“No. I found it. Swear.”
“You know what Palm would’ve done if he found you playing with this? Or Vic?” Conner checked the band. It belonged to an old pair of visors, but someone had removed those. “Did you find this in the trash? Because that’s where this piece of shit belongs.”
Rob didn’t say. A scavenger’s admission.
“Did you do the wiring?”
“Yes,” his brother whispered. “Con, I can’t feel my feet.”
Conner saw that his brother was crying. And one of his arms was pinned. Rob didn’t need to be told how serious this shit was.
“Look,” Conner said, “you can’t leave these contacts exposed like this. They’ll work for a while until you get a sweat going, and then they’ll short.” He used his shirt to dry the inside of the band. “Once that happens, everything you try just gets worse and worse. You were tightening the sand by trying to loosen it. All we’ve gotta do is kill the power and the sand should unclench.”
Rob sniffed. “I put the power in the left boot,” he said.
“In the boot? Why the fuck would you do that?”
Rob wiped his cheek with his free hand. “’Cause I thought I could make a dive suit without the suit. Just the boots.”
“Jesus Christ, how did you make it to eleven?” Conner checked the band, made sure it was dry, and was about to press it to his forehead and release his brother when he thought of his sister and what she would do.
“Hold still,” he said. He pulled his shirt over his head, found a dry patch, and patted his brother’s forehead dry.
“I’m not crying,” Rob said quietly, as Conner dabbed his head.
“I know you’re not crying. I’m drying your temples.”
His brother held still. Conner checked the dive band to make sure it was aligned right, then paused a moment to admire the tiny solders his brother had made. “You’re a piece of work,” he said. He slid the band down on his brother’s head. “Now listen, I don’t want you to just release the sand, got it?”
Rob nodded.
“I want you to flow it down around your legs, okay? Feel it move. Direct it. And then let it push up on the bottoms of your feet. You have to picture two hands down there beneath you, lifting you up. Two hands with good grips on those boots, okay? Can you feel the fingers? The palms?”
“I think so,” Rob said, biting his lip.
“Okay. Try it. Quick, before you start sweating.”
“’S’not helping,” Rob grunted. He squinted his eyes and concentrated. Conner felt the sand stir and loosen beneath him.
“Good,” he said. “Now up.”
Rob yelped as he shuddered skyward. His head nearly bumped into the rafters. The sand lifted him through the hole in the old bathroom, until his boots were high and dry on the pile of drift.
Conner laughed and brushed the spill[9] off his lap. Rob whooped and pumped his fists.
“Awesome job,” Conner said. “Now take those boots off. You’re fucking grounded.”
13 • Son of a Whore
Conner stayed up late that night and waited for Palmer to get home. He finally passed out beside Rob on the tiny cot and woke in the morning to find his own bed undisturbed. He had left it open for Palmer, but his brother had probably gotten lucky with a girl. Totally flaking out on them again this year, even after promising. After really promising. And now Conner had a crick in his neck for n
othing.
He got up and stretched. Rob grabbed the loose sheets, rolled over, and cocooned himself. Conner grabbed a white open-front shirt that tied shut around the waist. He stepped into the washroom and rubbed sand on his face and hands, exfoliating the sweat and grime and stink. With some sand in the shirt, he rubbed the fabric together with his fists. The sand in the basin still had the faint smell of old dried flowers crushed up in there. Damn faint, though.
He shook the sand back into the basin and got dressed, leaving his shorts on and knotting the shirt. Hurrying out into the morning chill, he pissed in the general vicinity of the nearby latrine, steam swirling off in the breeze. After kicking some light sand on the dark sand, he hurried back home.
“Yo, Rob, I’m running out for a fill and to find Palm. Get the tent aired out, will you? And no fucking around down there.”
There was a grunt from the bedroom, and the Rob-shaped mound shifted beneath the covers. Conner gathered his canteens: one on the hook by the door, an old beat-up one of Vic’s sitting in the window like a relic or a piece of decoration, and a third he’d hidden on top of the kitchen cabinet. He strung all three over his head, grabbed all the coin he owned in the world—which fit easily in one palm—and called into the bedroom again.
“All right. I’ll be back. Don’t sleep till noon, man. I want to get going early enough we aren’t figuring the tent out in the dark like last year.”
Conner sat on one of his sister’s old chairs and grabbed his boots. Then he spotted his dad’s boots where he’d dumped them the night before and decided to wear them instead. Maybe he was already thinking about his trip that night and wanted something of his father’s with him, or maybe it was just to keep Rob from getting into trouble while he was gone.
The band and a tangle of wires his brother had rigged up hung inside the right boot. Conner looked for a way to unplug the thing. He glanced into the bedroom, but the glorious Cocoon-of-Rob had not opened and sprouted its precious little butterfly, so he didn’t ask. He saw how the band split in two, little metal contacts soldered into snaps, and took it apart. Each half went up a leg of his shorts and out at his waist, snapped back together, and then the band went into his pocket. It was eerie how well the boots fit. He felt a little older as he grabbed his ker, stepped outside, and shook the sift out. He left the door open to let in the light and keep Rob from oversleeping, then set off toward Springston.
His first stop would be the Honey Hole. Palmer would’ve hit their mom up for money, no doubt. And then he’d try the dive school. As much as he dreaded visiting the Honey Hole, morning was the safest time of day. Not because he minded the patrons and bar fights and the slosh of beer downstairs, but because it presented the best chance of catching his mom when she wasn’t working.
The Hole was on the edge of Springston, right between town and the sprawl of shacks and shops that made up Shantytown. The location kept the riffraff who worked and drank there out of the town proper while also keeping the alluring fruit upstairs well within reach of the Lords and the wealthy. No one wanted to walk through Shantytown to find a good time. It would annul the effects of the carnal visits during the long stagger home.
Beyond Springston loomed the great wall where Conner had been born. The towering edifice of concrete rose nearly a hundred meters above the sand, had been erected generations ago by a rare union of Lords in the most massive of public work projects. It was said that this wall was bigger than any of the last and would stand for all of time. It now leaned noticeably westward over Springston, had angled itself toward the nicest parts of town. Any view of the wall reminded Conner of the first six years of his life. The good years. There were the baths he could submerge in, covering his whole body and even his head. There had been electricity and toilets that flushed—no going out to shit in the sand and having to dig his own hole only to find two other shits already buried there. These luxuries he remembered that Rob would never understand, luxuries he had to share with his brother like stories about their dad. They were half-memories of things blurred by childhood and by having taken those years for granted.
Nearer to him, rising up between two of the sandscrapers, was a column of black smoke. The top of the column sheered off into wisps as it rose past the lip of the wall and met the wind. Conner thought he’d heard a rumble in the middle of the night. Another bomb. He wondered who the fuck this time. The self-styled Lords of Low-Pub? The brigands up north? The dissidents there in the city? The FreeShanties out in his neighborhood? The problem with bombs when everyone was making them was that they no longer stood for anything. You forgot what the fuck for.
He rounded a low dune and approached the Honey Hole, a building no one would ever bomb, not in a million years. The various brothels along the edges of Springston had to be among the safest places across the thousand dunes. Conner laughed to himself. Probably why the Lords spend so much time in them, he thought.
He kicked the scrum out of his boots before pulling open the door and stepping inside. Heather was behind the bar, drying a jar with a rag. A lone man sat on a stool in front of her, bent over with his head on his arms, snoring. Heather smiled at Conner before glancing up at the balcony that ran clear around the second floor. “She should be up,” she called out, not bothering to lower her voice. The man in front of her didn’t stir.
“Thanks,” Conner said. Up was where he liked to find his mom. Standing. He headed for the stairs and nearly tripped over a drunk sleeping on the floor. Foreman Bligh. Conner resisted a dozen spiteful urges and stepped over the man. It was easy to blame people for the misery of life rather than blaming the sand. Yelling at the sand got you nowhere. People yelled back, and at least that was a response. An acknowledgment. Being tormented and simultaneously ignored was the worst.
He marched up the stairs toward the balcony, old wood creaking with each step, and couldn’t imagine being one of the drunks who took this walk in full view of their friends. But then men bragged about whom at the Honey Hole they’d bagged the night before. Enough trips up those stairs, and maybe it feels normal. Fuck, he didn’t want to get a day older. He imagined sitting down there getting hammered out of his skull one day, a beard down to his navel, smelling like a latrine, then paying someone to lie still while he fucked them.
As much as the entire scene disgusted him, Conner knew that most men ended up right there, hating their life and trying to avoid it. One night of escape at a time. Drowning their misery with a bottle and paying for a brief spasm of lust. It would probably get him too, as much as he hated the thought of succumbing to that. It would get him too if he stuck around. Man… he remembered wishing life would rush along, that time would hurry up and go and he would get older already, but now he wanted it to stop. Stop before shit got any more dreary than it already was. If life would stop moving, maybe he could clear his head. He wouldn’t have to run out on it.
He paused outside his mom’s room, almost forgot why he was there. Palmer. Right. He lifted his hand and knocked, really hoped he didn’t hear a man barking at him to scram, this one’s taken. But it was his mother who opened the door, a robe draped over her shoulders. She tightened it up and cinched the sash when she saw who it was.
“Hey, Mom.”
She turned and left the door open, walked back to her bed and sat down. There was a bag beside her, a roll of cloth laid out with brushes. Lifting her foot to a stool, she went back to painting her toenails.
“Slow night,” she said, which Conner tried his damnedest not to picture the meaning of. But trying made it happen. Fuck, he hated that place. Didn’t know why she didn’t just sell it and do something else with her life. Anything else. “I don’t have a coin to spare,” she told him.
“When’s the last time I came here asking for coin?” Conner asked, offended.
She glanced over at him. He still hadn’t stepped inside. “Wednesday before last?” she asked.
Conner remembered that. “Okay, fine, but when before that? And that was for Rob, just so you know
. The kid has fucking holes in his kers.”
“Watch your language,” his mother said. She jabbed her tiny brush at him, and Conner resisted the urge to point out that her profession sorta depended on that word.
“I just came to see if you’d heard from Palmer. Or maybe even Vic.”
His mom reached for the bedside table where a curl of smoke rose from an ashtray. She took loud, popping tokes and got the cherry glowing again. Exhaling, she shook her head.
“It’s that weekend,” Conner told her.
She turned and studied him for a long while. “I know what weekend it is.” A column of gray ash fell from her cigarette and drifted to the floor.
“Well, Palm promised he was coming this year—”
“Didn’t he promise last year?” She blew smoke.
“Yeah, but he said he was really promising this time. And Vic—”
“Your sister hasn’t been out there in ten years.” His mom coughed into her fist and went back to work with the little brush.
“I know.” Conner didn’t bother correcting her. It’d been eight years, not ten. “But I keep thinking—”
“When you get older, you’ll stop going out there too. And then poor Rob will go out on his own, and he’ll make you feel bad for not going with him, but it’s him you’ll feel sorry for, and you’ll sit around and wait for him to grow up and figure out what the rest of us know.”
“And what’s that?” Conner asked, wondering why the hell he even tried anymore.
“That your father is long gone and dead and the more you go on wishing he weren’t, the more sick you make yourself for no good reason.” She studied her handiwork, wiggled both sets of toes, and screwed the small brush back into its little bottle. Palmer tried not to think where she got little artifacts like this. Scavengers and divers trading for her wares. Fuck, his brain was obstinate.
“Well, I guess I came by for nothing.” He turned to go. “By the way, Rob says hello.” Which was a lie.
“You ever think about what I named you boys?”