Spittle flew from between Fess’s trembling lips. His eyes, wide with terror, pleaded with Adán to save him. Adán had to make a decision: allow Fess to be crushed to death by the closing hatch—or let him go.
At the last possible second, just as the edges of the hatch touched Fess’s gear, Adán loosened his fingers.
Fess was gone instantly, sucked out into the darkening storm with a gut-wrenching wail, but in that sliver of a moment when Adán released him, he saw his mistake in Fess’s face. It wasn’t shock or even fear that twisted his features. It was pain. In its basest, most primal form. Pain—and terror.
The panels came together with a loud clang, and Adán was thrust into utter blackness and a silence so severe that the only sound was his own breath filling and emptying his lungs. For a moment, fear penetrated every cell in his body, paralyzing him. Then, like a rope tossed to a man trapped in a well, the comm crackled to life.
“Adán! Fess!” Both Tink and Dema’s voices came in loud and clear. “Are you all right?”
Adán’s body shook so hard he could hardly find the strength to speak.
“I’m here,” he managed.
“The storm, it’s over.” Tink’s voice sounded relieved, joyous even. “Just like before. It hit nearly two hundred miles an hour and then, poof! Over just like that!” Strained laughter came through the comm. Laughter.
“Open the bay doors!” screamed Adán.
“What?”
“I said open the goddamn bay doors!”
Tink didn’t deserve to be spoken to that way. How could he possibly know what had happened? But only a minute had passed. It might not be too late.
Tink called the order to the shuttle computer, and the doors separated with a metallic groan. Adán waited only as long as it took to shove his body through the gap. He tumbled to the ground below, his fall cushioned by the soft orange sand. He tried to stand, but his legs buckled beneath him. He tore off his helmet and scoured the landscape, now completely still. He searched for any sign of Fess—a lump of bloody soil, body parts, anything, but it was all flat and lifeless for miles in every direction.
“Fess!” He yelled before he realized he was shouting into his comm. He tore it from his face. “Fess!”
Suddenly, something had him round the shoulders. He flailed his arms trying to shake it off.
“Adán, hey! It’s me!”
It took a few seconds for Adán’s brain to register Tink’s voice and then his face. He desperately grasped the front of Tink’s uniform.
“Tink! Tink, it’s Fess!” he hissed. “He got sucked out! We’ve got to find him!”
Tink nodded, blinking, trying to absorb what Adán was saying.
“Okay, Adán. Okay. We’ll find him.”
Tink left Adán and climbed into the storage bay. A minute later, Adán heard a motor start up and the heavy clumping of the rover coming down the ramp. It moved ever so slowly while time seemed to race past and through him. They had so little time.
“Get in,” said Tink, pulling up beside Adán. “Let’s go find Fess.”
“There’s nothing out here, Adán.”
Tink and Adán had been driving for an hour in ever widening circles around the shuttle hoping to find even the smallest evidence that Fess was out there somewhere, but not only did they see nothing, the scanners saw nothing too.
“If he was anywhere near here,” added Tink, “the scanners would have picked him up.” He lifted his foot off the rover’s accelerator and let it come to a slow stop.
“I know,” said Adán. “I just can’t believe he’s gone. I mean where could he be? He couldn’t have just vanished.”
But that’s exactly what had happened. Fess was gone, and that bothered Adán more than even Lainie’s death because at least they knew Lainie was dead. With Fess, they didn’t know anything. He could be lying miles off alive and needing help, but how far did they dare stray from the shuttle to look for him? They were already more than a mile off, far enough for the shuttle to look like a small speck behind them.
They continued on without speaking, adding one more ring to their circular path.
“I think we’d better get back,” said Tink. “We’ve gotten out of range of the shuttle’s comm.”
“All right,” Adán agreed reluctantly as Tink turned the rover back toward the Carpathia.
They drove in silence, Adán’s mind reeling between Fess’s pain-wracked face, Lainie’s lacerated body, the slashed tent, the scars in the sand he’d seen by the shuttle wheels. He thought again of what Commander Parks had said about the Terrestrial Brotherhood and finding a mole on board the Ensign, but a human mole couldn’t be responsible for the damage he’d seen. This was something bigger, something not human.
Tink’s voice cut through Adán’s meditation. “You okay, Adán? I mean, it’s beyond awful about Fess, but from the looks of it, there’s something else on your mind. Wanna talk about it?”
There was something Adán had wanted to talk with Tink about. He switched his comm to a private frequency.
“I found something,” Adán began, “in the shuttle’s database.”
“You mean aside from a trillion really bad movies?” asked Tink.
But Adán was in no mood for joking. “For one thing,” he continued, “I accessed NASA’s records. Even the restricted stuff. I didn’t have time to look at much, but it was easy. Too easy. Like we were meant to find it.”
Tink kept his eyes on their path ahead, the shuttle slowly growing larger in the distance. “That makes sense, knowing what we know now. If Earth was destroyed, what would be the point of keeping anything off limits?”
Adán thought about Tink’s comment, but it seemed more than that. NASA wanted them to read something, but what?
“When you combed through the archives, did you find anything—unusual?” asked Adán.
Tink shook his head. “I was focused more on schematics, checking for damage to the grid, learning how to run diagnostics. Why?”
“There was something else.” Adán told Tink about accessing the crew register and how each name was linked to a holo. “But not just any kind of holos. These were stories, memories, segments from our lives. I watched mine for a while. I couldn’t believe what I saw.”
Tink slowed the rover to a complete stop and faced Adán with a serious expression, but he said nothing, just waited for Adán to go on. So, he did.
“The day I left for NASA, my brother Saul came home high. He’d been in trouble with drugs for years. I was hoping to say goodbye to him, but he was messed up. Then my dad came into the living room, shouting at him. ‘Where is it?’ he demanded. ‘Where’s your brother’s violin?’”
Adán paused. Saying this out loud was one of the hardest things he’d ever done.
“Saul had sold it to buy drugs. Left the empty case behind, which is how I hadn’t noticed. I was going to bring it with me—here.”
Adán noticed a slight breeze picking up. The layer of dust on the ground began to shift.
“It hurt that he would do that, but I could’ve lived with it. But Saul got defensive and took a swing at my dad. Looked like he was ready to kill him. I was angry, so I called 911. The cops took him away in handcuffs, still high as a kite. That was last time I ever saw him.”
Tink sat quietly for a few moments, then said, “That’s rough, man. I’m sorry.”
“It’s been eating me up inside for a long time, the guilt of having called the cops on my own brother. And now that he’s gone—everyone’s gone…”
Adán hesitated, then continued. “But the thing is,” he said, “I never told anyone what happened, but there it was right in front of my eyes. And I felt it, like I was living it all over again. It was so real, I could smell the cinnamon candle burning on the fireplace mantle. It was like I’d been—invaded.”
“So, you’re saying that your thoughts and feelings, your memories, were somehow stored in the shuttle’s databanks?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. And not jus
t me—all of us. The whole crew. How is that possible?”
The breeze grew into a wind. “We gotta go,” said Tink. The rover growled back to life and started forward. “It must have something to do with the patches. You know, the patches we wore during cryo that recorded our brain activity.”
Adán gripped the hold bar. “Well, it recorded a lot more than just brain waves, I’m sure of that.”
The rover hadn’t gone far when a sudden gust of wind whipped icy pellets of sand against their visors. As the wind grew stronger, seeing more than a few feet ahead became more difficult.
“This isn’t good,” said Tink, referring to his wrist tab. “Wind velocity is steadily increasing. What is it with these crazy storms?”
Adán felt an undeniable sense of dread. “We need to get back quick. We can’t stay out here, Tink.”
A powerful squall of sand slammed into them, and the rover veered to the left, two of its wheels lifting a few inches off the ground before crashing back down again.
“I can’t see a thing,” Adán shouted to make himself heard over the roar of the wind. “I can’t make out the shuttle anymore! We might miss it altogether! We’ll have to follow the coordinates on your wrist tab.”
“I can’t even see the screen!” Tink replied. “We may have to just wait this out!”
The idea of staying out in the storm in the same conditions that had killed both Lainie and Fess made Adán shudder. He thought of what Jonah had told him, that the monster was God’s way of finishing what he had started on Earth, but Adán did not believe in God—or monsters.
“We could set up a portable,” suggested Tink, “protect us from this wind, at least! There’s one in the ER kit on the back of the rover!”
They got off the rover and fought the wind to the back of it. Tink opened the metal box that contained all the equipment, tools, and survival items someone would need on a short journey away from the shuttle. The portable was a scaled-down shelter, just large enough for two, like a camping tent, only sturdier.
The wind had only grown stronger by now, so strong Adán had to hold his helmet on with one hand while unfolding the shelter with the other. He and Tink held tight to the canvas, which flapped in the gale like a panicked bird beating its wings in a desperate attempt to take flight. It was supposed to be a simple setup, easy enough for one person to manage. Yet even between the two of them, they couldn’t hold it steady enough to secure it to the ground let alone stand it upright.
“It’s no use,” said Adán. “We can’t do this without help.”
Adán rolled the shelter into a thick ball and stuffed it back into the case. He and Tink stood together, grasping each other’s arms now, trying to remain upright in the battering wind.
“We’re a little closer than we were before,” said Tink. “We might be in comm range now.”
Adán switched his comm frequency back to open and hailed the shuttle. “Carpathia, this is Adán. Is anyone there? Situation has deteriorated. We can’t get back on our own, can’t get the shelter up. We’re exposed. Over.”
The comm crackled loudly. Interference from the storms had proved an ongoing challenge with communication.
“Dema here,” said a female voice after a few agonizing moments of silence. “Adán, are you and Tink okay?”
“So far,” he replied. “But unless this storm lets up soon, I’m not so sure how long we can last.”
“Did you find Fess?”
“Negative. He’s gone. Not a trace. I’m afraid the same thing might happen to us if we don’t get back to you soon.”
“The shuttle sensors are reading seventy-two mile an hour winds, and it’s only increasing. Can’t you get back on the rover?”
“Again negative. We can’t make visual. It’s so bad Tink can’t even see the readings on his wrist tab anymore.”
There was a pause which felt like forever to Adán. When Dema’s voice came on again, he felt as though it was salvation itself.
“I’ll rig a transmitter to the other rover. The guidance system will use audio signals to lead me to you and back. We can drive blind that way, but it’s going to take me a few minutes to get the rover out of the storage bay. Can you hang on that long?”
“I don’t think that’s such a good idea, Dema. It’s bad out here.”
“I don’t see any other way, Adán. You run the risk of dying out there in the storm or let me come get you. We can tether the rovers together, and you can follow me back that way. According to the sensors, you’re not too far from here, a little more than half a mile. I’ll be there in in a few minutes. Just hang on.”
“Okay,” Adán finally relented. “But let’s keep this channel open. I want to make sure you’re all right.”
Dema snorted. “You want to make sure I’m all right? Give me a break,” she said, but Adán could hear the smile in her voice. “I’m heading for the rover now. See you soon.”
Adán turned to Tink. “You got all that?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. I guess we just wait then.”
They stood there, clutching the rover, when Adán noticed something different in the storm. “Hey,” he told Tink, “I think the wind is shifting.”
“Shifting?”
“I mean it’s changing direction.”
Sure enough, the sand blowing nearly horizontally before was now altered somehow. Adán squinted, trying to figure out what was different. It was difficult to see at all, but there was no mistaking it. The sand was blowing in two directions at once!
How was that possible? It couldn’t be, yet Adán was seeing it with his own eyes. Blurs of sand collided and raced through and past each other, like a cyclone that couldn’t make up its mind. And it wasn’t blowing straight either, but in a circular pattern, spiraling up from the ground. The sand was compressing together, he realized. It was taking shape.
The mass of churning sand rose above the desert floor, coagulating into something not quite solid. Adán followed it with his eyes, watching it grow taller and wider until it eclipsed even the pale smear of sun left in the sky.
Beside him, Tink stood rigid, eyes fixed on the shape looming above them. As the storm whipped around and through it, the edges solidified into harsh three-dimensional curves that bulged out, forming what appeared to be lopsided appendages.
Adán took a step back. “Tink, is that…?”
One of the appendages, a thick stub of swirling sand, extended outward, lengthening, dividing into fingers—no, not fingers—claws.
“Run! Run!” Adán grabbed Tink by the arm and hurled him onto the rover. The motor hummed to life and shot forward as Adán threw himself into the passenger seat. Tink pressed his foot to the accelerator, quickly reaching the rover’s top speed, which wasn’t, Adán realized with horror, nearly fast enough.
The clawed arm of the sand monster swooped down on them, slipping beneath the rover and flinging it into the air with ease. The rover toppled end over end, throwing Adán and Tink free of it. They both hit the ground and rolled away from the crashing vehicle.
In his comm, he heard the sickening crack of a bone breaking and of Tink howling in sudden pain. Adán clambered to his feet, scanning the area around him. Tink lay ten feet away, writhing on the ground.
The wind relentlessly shoving at his back, Adán ran toward Tink, but the wind was too strong. He toppled forward, skidding face first into the ground. The sand beat mercilessly on him, pinning him helplessly in place. Adán watched in horror as the monster, for what else could he call it, bore down on him.
Suddenly, Tink was there grabbing him by the arm and hauling him to his feet. How he had managed to reach him, Adán couldn’t begin to guess. Tink held one of his arms tight against his chest, the jagged fractured bone protruding from his forearm like the tooth of a wild animal. And there was blood. A lot of it.
“Get up!” Tink shouted. “Get up and run!”
Tink dragged Adán blindly through the storm toward what they hoped was the safety of the sh
uttle.
“Dema!” Adán screamed into his comm. “Dema, can you hear me?”
“I’m coming, Adán,” said the familiar voice. “I’m maybe twenty yards away from you!”
“There’s something out here! Something big!”
Through the swirling sand, Adán could just make out the dark outline of what must be the rover. He had allowed himself to feel a moment of hope when a virtual mountain of sand dropped down right in front of him. It was as dense as any solid wall, and he plowed into it before he could stop himself. The force of the impact broke Tink’s hold on his arm. Tink continued to run, but to Adán’s horror, he realized he had veered off in the wrong direction.
“Tink, get back here!”
Adán peered again at the rover’s silhouette in the storm—safety, escape. Then he turned and took off after Tink, but the enormous wall of sand lifted and dropped in front of him again, effectively blocking his path and separating him from Tink. He couldn’t even see him through it. Adán backed away from the barrier, his gaze following it to its origin: the creature itself. This block was part of its arm.
Suddenly, the arm shifted away from Adán, rolling like an enormous wave across the sand toward Tink as fast as the wind itself. As it did, Adán caught glimpses of his friend staggering blindly ahead.
“Tink!” Adán screamed. “Tink!” But it was no use. The connection between them had gone dead. Tink was alone.
The wall of swirling sand pushed forward, sweeping the surface of the ground with merciless efficiency. It reached Tink in seconds. Adán saw Tink shudder with the impact, and then the sand swallowed him up. And he was gone.
The storm breathed a final gasp and died out. The trillions of grains of sand that had been caught up in the maelstrom fell to earth like dry rain. The sound of it reminded Adán of the time when he was a boy when he lay awake half the night listening to hail pelting his roof.
The sand fell for five seconds. That was all. And then there was silence. Even the static in Adán’s comm had ceased. Everything was still and deadly calm.
Adán’s legs trembled as he took a hesitant step forward, and then another. Soon he was running, stumbling, and then crawling across the frozen sand to the spot where he had last seen his friend.
Sand and Shadow Page 18