Sand and Shadow

by Laurisa White Reyes

  I tossed him the towel, and he caught it.

  Alex laughed some more, and then he and the others turned away, heading for the showers. I wanted to make sure Corey was okay, to tell him he shouldn’t mess with these guys, but I didn’t want to damage my standing with them. So instead, I turned my back to Corey and followed my team.

  Corey wasn’t in the locker room anymore when I got out of the shower and got dressed. And he wasn’t in class on Thursday or Friday. I didn’t know his number, so I couldn’t call him. And I didn’t know where he lived. Otherwise, I would have still picked him up for JPL on Saturday, and I would have explained, apologized. But we’d never gotten the chance to exchange info.

  When I heard the rumor going around campus the following week, I didn’t believe it at first. A student had offed himself. One of our own. But no one seemed to know his name. Only the other kids in our study group noticed Corey’s empty seat and made the connection, but the others didn’t talk about it. We weren’t really friends, so why would we?

  I heard there was a memorial on campus. I didn’t attend. And the family had a private service before his body was sent back to Wisconsin to be buried in the family plot. I never met his parents. I never even knew if Corey had brothers or sisters. I never asked. In fact, I knew pretty much nothing about him. Nothing except that he wanted to go to Cal Tech, that he liked to run, that he was really smart and probably could have changed the world.

  I wish I could say I quit the football team, that things changed between me and the guys, that I never picked on anyone else again. But things didn’t change, except for the hate expanding inside me – hate for myself and for the human race. Humans are weak, either weak in body or weak in character. Either way, every time I wake up in the middle of the night, the image of Corey’s face in my head reminds me what a piece of shit I am – that we all are.

  Adán stopped cutting. Only a narrow strip of cloth remained. Once it was severed, the tent would fly off never to be seen again. Scott could be carried miles before landing in a deadly collision. He had to get Scott down.

  “Tink!” shouted Adán. “Help me!”

  “But the transmitter!” Tink called back. He hesitated only for a moment, but then set down the metal box. The wind instantly pushed at it, shifting its position in the sand. Tink hurried to Adán’s side.

  Adán heard Dema, Fess, and Lainie calling out to him in his comm, but he didn’t have a moment to spare to respond to them. They were clear of the tent, standing far enough away to avoid injury. He hoped they wouldn’t try anything stupid. He and Tink alone would take the risk.

  “Hold it here!” Adán jabbed a finger at the corner of the tent still attached. Tink obeyed, gripping the fabric with his gloved hands. Adán grasped the canvas several feet above Tink. Then he began to pull it, gradually drawing the fabric toward him. It was like trying to haul an anchor up from the ocean floor, the effort requiring every ounce of strength he could muster. He wasn’t sure his plan would work. He was battling a storm that at any moment could snatch him up and carry him off.

  “Get me down!” Scott screamed, his voice piercing through Adán’s comm.

  “I’m trying! Just hold on!” Adán kept pulling, but he made little headway with the wind pulling so hard in the opposite direction. “Scott, use your hands! Try to climb down!”

  Scott started hand-over-hand down the column of living canvas. The distance between Scott and Adán slowly began to shrink. The sand pelted Adán so hard now that he could feel it through his gear.

  “The rest of you get inside!” he called out. “It’s too dangerous out here!”

  Fess grabbed the heating unit that Scott had dropped and made his way toward the shuttle. Tink held tight to the tent behind Adán.

  “Tink! I’ve got it! Go on!”

  “You don’t have it,” said Tink. “I’m not leaving!”

  “But you have to—” Suddenly, a powerful gust tried to rip the silver tarp from Adán’s hands. The knuckle in his pinky finger snapped in a stabbing flare of excruciating pain, but he did not let go. Scott flipped around in the air, as helpless as a marionette on strings, though he was a good eight feet closer to the ground than he had been minutes before.

  Adán tried to hold tighter to the fabric, but the pain in his hand throbbed ruthlessly and had robbed it of its strength.

  “Scott!” he shouted. “You’re going to have to let go!”

  “Let go? Are you insane? This wind will blow me away like a kite!”

  “Curl up into a ball! Wrap your arms around your knees and drop to the ground!”

  Adán heard Tink’s voice. “This strap is tearing! When it rips all the way, that tarp is taking you with it, Scott!”

  “Scott, you’ve got to let go now!”

  He did. Scott released the fabric and pulled his knees to his chest. He fell like a stone to the sand below. He hit the ground, his limbs sprawling out in every direction. Then, getting to his hands and knees, he scurried away like a bug just as the tarp tore free from its strap. The silver snake curled and whipped like a flag in a hurricane and then vanished into the darkening sky.

  Adán, his back to the wind, dropped to his knees beside Scott. “You all right?” he asked. “Can you get up?”

  Scott collapsed into the sand, moaning. Adán felt a wave of relief. Their commander was dazed, possibly even hurt, but he was alive. A few yards off, Tink fought against the storm’s assault. He clutched the transmitter case to his chest and staggered forward one step at a time. The sky was so dark now and the sand so thick that the shuttle looked like nothing more than a broad mass of shadow.

  Adán slid one of his arms beneath Scott’s shoulder and hoisted the barely conscious commander into a sitting position. “Dryker, listen to me! We’ve got to get back to the shuttle or we’ll die out here! Get up, Commander! On your feet!”

  Scott moaned again, but Adán felt his muscles stiffen as he attempted to get his legs under him. With a bit of effort on both their parts, Scott was soon standing, though he leaned much of his weight against Adán. Adán looked back at Tink, who hadn’t made as much progress as he’d hoped.

  “Tink, drop it!” Adán shouted.

  Tink shook his head furiously. “If the main transmitter ever fails, we’ll need it to communicate with the other shuttles! They’ll never find us without it!”

  Tink’s words came back to Adán broken and staccato. He tapped on his earpiece. He thought the storm must have damaged his comm. “Tink? Can you hear me?”

  This time Adán heard only static. He looked back to the shuttle, a mere ten yards away. Dema and Fess, clinging to each other, were scrabbling for the hatch lever. Adán looked back at Tink, half that distance behind him. He’d get Scott to safety, he decided, and come back for Tink.

  “I’ll be back to help you in a second!” he said, though he couldn’t be sure if Tink had heard him, then he trudged forward with Scott in tow.

  The two minutes or so that it took for him to hand Scott over to Dema and Fess felt like hours. He was exhausted and in pain, but Adán turned and headed back out for Tink, now on his knees hunched over the transmitter just four or five yards away.

  He had just reached him when Adán saw it—a dark mass rising up from the ground behind Tink. “What the hell is that?” he said more to himself than to anyone else.

  Dema’s voice crackled over the comm. “Adán, do you read me? Scott’s okay. A bit stunned but okay. Fess is with him in the common room now. Do you have Tink and Lainie?”

  Lainie. Adán had forgotten all about her. But Tink. . .

  “There’s something out here!” said Adán.

  There was a pause before Dema’s voice returned. “Adán, get out of there. The sensors are picking up something solid, something big!”

  He reached Tink and pulled him to his feet. Together, with the transmitter still clutched in Tink’s arms, they staggered toward the shuttle, which they could now barely make out through the thick haze of sand.

 
“Lainie!” Adán waited a moment for a reply. “Lainie, do you read me?” He shook his head. “The storm’s interfering with the frequency!”

  “She was carrying the generator,” said Dema, her words nearly impossible to make out through the static. “She was closer to the shuttle than we were. You should see her!”

  Adán and Tink continued trudging forward. Then just to right of the shuttle hatch, they spotted something square and black half buried in the sand at their feet. It was the generator tipped onto its side, but there was no sign of Lainie.

  “Where the hell is she?” shouted Tink into his comm.

  Adán felt the urge to call out her name again, but she wouldn’t have heard it over the storm anyway. “With all this sand,” he said, “she probably went right past us! Maybe she lost her bearings!”

  The hatch slid open, and Dema emerged in full gear.

  “What are you doing?” Adán shouted. “Get back inside!”

  “I’m not leaving Lainie out here alone!” said Dema. “And neither would you or Tink!”

  Adán nodded. Dema was right of course, but the storm was on top of them. Every second longer they remained outside increased the chance that one of them would get lost, injured—or killed.

  “If we split up,” said Dema, “we’ll cover more ground!”

  There were good reasons to reject Dema’s suggestion, but Adán couldn’t argue with finding Lainie as quickly as possible. Before he could agree or disagree however, Dema had already ducked under the shuttle.

  As Tink and Adán headed back out into the wind, the two of them followed the shuttle’s body down toward the tail. Adán kept his hand against the hull, using it as a guide.

  “I can’t see anything!” he shouted. Shielding his eyes with his arm did no good. “We have to turn back!”

  “No!” shouted Tink. “No! I’m not leaving her!”

  “We have no choice!”

  Adán reached for Tink’s arm hoping to coax him back toward the hatch, but Tink shook him off. “I’m going to find her, Adán!”

  Suddenly and without warning, the wind ceased. Not tapered off, but abruptly stopped, as if it had just blown itself out. When it did, the sand and grit that had been swirling around in the air dropped straight down, raining on the Carpathia’s crew like hailstones. A moment later, the sun was again visible, and the terrain for miles all around was flat and still.

  Adán froze in place, stunned by the abrupt end to the storm, expecting it to pick up again just as quickly. When it didn’t, Adán and Tink brushed the remnants of soil from their uniforms and helmets.

  Adán pulled his helmet off. It had cracked in the gale, and his mouth was full of sand. He could feel the grit on his teeth and spit out what he could.

  “I think it’s over,” he said, clipping the comm to his collar.

  “Yeah,” replied Tink. “Bizarre the way it just stopped like that. At least now that we have a clearer visual, we’ll spot Lainie—or she’ll spot us.”

  “She’s only been out in it a few minutes,” said Dema through the comm, which seemed to be working better now. “She couldn’t have gone far.”

  “We’ll find her,” said Adán, more to reassure himself than the others.

  “Lainie!” called Dema. She joined Tink and Adán back on their side of the shuttle. She had removed her helmet as well despite the bitter cold. Though the storm had died, Lainie still had not responded to their comm hails.

  “Do you see that?” asked Adán, pointing to something in the near distance.

  “What?” asked Dema.

  “That bump, heap or whatever. The landscape is completely flat, but the ground is raised a little there.”

  The lump in the soil was about ten yards off the shuttle’s port side, nowhere near the hatch at all. Dema took two hesitant steps toward it and then burst into a sprint. Seconds later she and Adán were on their knees scooping away armfuls of dirt.

  Adán shouted into his comm, hoping the crew inside the shuttle could hear him all right. “Scott! Fess! We found her! We found Lainie!”

  Dema brushed the thick layer of dust from Lainie’s face. Grit caked the corners of her eyes which were partially open and staring blankly toward the sky. Dema scraped more dust away from Lainie’s throat and abdomen, her hands only hesitating briefly when the sand turned wet and red with blood.

  “She isn’t breathing!” shouted Dema, pressing two fingers against the side of Lainie’s throat. Then she bent forward, sealing her mouth around Lainie’s, and gave her two deep breaths. More red grit slipped off Lainie’s chest as it rose and fell. Adán realized that the ground beneath and surrounding Lainie was completely saturated in blood.

  Dema placed her hands on Lainie’s chest and pushed, grunting with the effort. She pushed three, four times, and then growled impatiently.

  “I can’t do it this way!” she shouted. She reached for the utility knife at her waist and used it to cut through Lainie’s uniform.

  “What are you doing?” asked Adán. “She’ll freeze out here!”

  “I can’t compress her heart through all this fabric!”

  Adán spoke into his comm again. “Lainie’s hurt! I need blankets and warmers, stat!”

  Dema reached for the ragged edges of Lainie’s suit and tore it open. Lainie’s breasts and ribcage were now exposed to the frigid air. Adán paused just long enough to take in the jagged wound in her stomach before looking away. That’s when he realized Tink was standing behind him, his face contorted with disbelief.

  Adán listened to the whoosh of air as Dema breathed into Lainie’s mouth again, and the dull thumping of the chest compressions. At one point, a distinct crack of a rib cut through the sound of Dema’s heavy breathing.

  “Come on, Lainie,” she said over and over. “Come on!”

  Dema continued CPR while Fess appeared at the shuttle hatch. He half ran half limped across the sand, delivering the requested items. Adán unfolded the vellum blanket and covered Lainie’s body with it. A layer of sweat had formed along Dema’s forehead, and she was breathing hard. She’d been at Lainie for almost ten minutes by now. Adán, Fess, and Tink looked on.

  “Dema,” said Adán after another minute. “It’s time to stop.”

  She ignored him. Her hands, coated in blood, compressed Lainie’s chest again and again. Lainie’s eyes, caked with sand, remained fixed on the sky. The gash in her body gaped open, but blood no longer gushed out of it. She had long since bled out.

  “Dema,” Adán said again. “She’s gone.” He placed a hand on Dema’s shoulder, but she lurched back and swung her bloodied arm at him. Adán jumped back, just avoiding the blow.

  Dema’s expression was ferocious, crazed. Adán realized that her hands were not the only part of her that were bloody. The entire front of her, including her arms and face, were covered with it, which made her appear more animal-like than human. If someone had stumbled upon her like that hovering over Lainie’s battered body, they might have thought Dema had feasted upon it.

  Adán’s stomach churned, and he forced the bile back down his throat. It was all a horrible nightmare, Lainie lying in the blood-soaked sand, Dema desperately trying to resuscitate her. He wished someone would wake him.

  Dema dropped her arms to her side and let out an exhausted breath. She knelt there in the sand for a few moments longer, and then slowly stood, defeated.

  “We can’t leave her out here—like this,” she said, her voice hoarse.

  Adán nodded. “We’ll bury her with the others.”

  He turned to Tink who hadn’t moved from where he’d been standing before. His gaze was still fixed on Lainie’s body, only now his face was wet with tears.

  “Tink?” Adán asked.

  Tink answered with an abrupt nod. “We’ll bury her,” he repeated. “With the others.”

  “Fess, maybe you should take Dema back to the shuttle.”

  “No,” Dema said. “No, I’m fine. I’ll go alone.”

  Adán watched Dema wa
lk back toward the shuttle. When she reached the hatch, she didn’t go in, however. Instead, she placed a hand on the side of the shuttle as if to steady herself. Adán ran after her.

  “Dema, let me help you.”

  “I don’t need help,” she said.

  Her comm hung around her neck, her mouth exposed to the frosty air. Adán switched his off. Whatever they were about to say to each other need not be heard by the others.

  “There was nothing you could have done for Lainie,” Adán said, slipping an arm around Dema. He was afraid she might faint or burst into tears, but she did neither. She just stood there with her head down, her hair hanging like a curtain from it. “You can’t blame yourself, Dema,” he said. “You tried—”

  “That’s right,” Dema said, a sharp edge to her voice. “I tried. I tried and failed.”

  “The damage was—” Adán swallowed, not wanting to say what he had to “—extensive.”

  Dema raised her head and faced him. Her cheeks glistened. “You don’t get it, do you?” she said. “Lainie was my responsibility. They were all my responsibility! I’ve let everyone down.”

  Adán gently squeezed Dema, trying to comfort her. “That’s not true, Dema. You’re part of a team. We all are. We all share the responsibility for each other. Whatever happened to them—it was an accident.”

  Dema took a step back from him, breaking his hold on her.

  “An accident? You don’t really believe that, do you? Did you see what that thing did to her? When I did CPR, when I compressed her chest, blood and muscle and tissue fell out of her! Something fell into my hands. I think it was part of her liver, and I—I tried to put it back in. Her whole body was sliced to ribbons!”

  Dema looked into Adán’s face, willing him to understand her. “Whatever did that to Lainie was no accident, Adán. Whatever tore open the tent and Fess’s leg was no accident. There’s something out here. Something real. Something—intentional.”

  AND THE WORD WAS…

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