by Hugh Howey
“I don’t like where you’re going with this.”
“But it makes sense, right? Otherwise, where’s your brother? No one’s seen him or his friend, right? I bet they’re both in trouble.”
“Or they’re over Danvar right now, diving and hoarding. Or they’re both shit-faced drunk. Either way, we should check with this guy you know. The two assholes who barged into my place were wearing kers from the north—”
“Who, Brock? I don’t know him. Only heard about him.”
“What’ve you heard?”
“Conflicting stuff. I heard he grew up in Springston and came from money. But a friend of mine says his accent ain’t like the Lords, that he had to be from up north. Supposedly he has a camp up there in the middle of the wastes. I know a guy, Gerard, who quit their group. Came back saying he couldn’t live that far from an adequate supply of pussy—”
“Lovely.”
“In fact … shit, Gerard disappeared on a dive a week or so after he got back. And nobody found his body.”
“We need to go talk to this guy.”
“To Gerard? I’m pretty sure he’s buried.”
“No, idiot, to Brock. His camp, you say it’s in the middle of the wastes? You know where?”
“Not really.” Marco chewed on a dreadlock. “It’s near the grove, I think. I remember Gerard talking about lavish campfires. West of the grove but south of some big spring. I only remember ’cause he was bitchin’ about having to haul barrels of water down from—”
An explosion of bells rang out as the front door was thrown in. Thrown in with violence. There was a shout, and then the stomp of heavy boots. Vic turned and looked for some place to hide, started to yell for Marco to c’mon, to get out the back door, but then two men with guns joined them in the workshop, silver weapons gleaming, one swinging at her and the other at Marco.
“Hey, whoa—” Marco said. He held up his hands, and Vic found herself staring down the barrel of one of those ancient and unreliable killing machines.
The two men looked down where a pool of light spilled on a dead man. The guy training a gun on Vic, a bald man with tats on his face, snarled at her, rage in his eyes, as he pulled the trigger. There was a click and a curse. She and Marco still hadn’t moved, were both rooted in fear and surprise. And then the other gun went off. And Marco moved for the very last time. One side of his skull erupted, his body sagging downward. There was another click, but Vic was moving now. Moving and screaming, staying in a crouch with her arms over her head, unable to breathe or think straight as she dove for the back door, another gunshot ringing out behind her.
30 • Into the Starry Night
Palmer
There was no sun waiting on Palmer’s arrival. No people or encampments. Just the vast and jeweled clear desert sky.
Small gulps of that sky passed through Palmer’s sand-specked lips and filled his desperate lungs. He lay on his back, gasping, the sand collecting against his side and filling his windward ear and his hair as he breathed in the loud, laborious, grateful way a newborn does.
His friend Hap lay lifeless beside him, partly submerged in the sand. Somewhere, a cayote howled at this sudden scent, and the wind skittered across the dunes with the sound of a thousand snakes flicking their tongues.
Palmer scraped the sand off his tongue using his teeth. He spat out the grit and with it precious fluid. He turned to Hap, whose shoulder and knee were out of the dune. A boot as well, but not in the right place. Hap’s canteen strap could be seen on his shoulder. Exhausted but mad with thirst, Palmer slid his hand into the sand and floated Hap up the rest of the way. His visor beeped with a battery alarm. His suit was nearly dead.
He reached for the canteen, saw that it was tangled, and pulled out his bloodstained dive knife. He cut the strap. A quarter full. He was too weak to ration and took great gulps. The water burned his parched lips. His stomach churned, was startled to have something to do. Palmer twisted the cap on and sat with his back to the wind, studying his dead friend.
It wasn’t the canteen strap that’d been tangled, he saw. It was Hap’s body. Palmer covered his mouth. The grumbling in his stomach grew worse, and he feared he might lose what little fluid he had just taken in. Hap’s leg was twisted beneath him. Where the thigh meets the pelvis was torn the wrong way. An arm was shattered, white bone pointing up at the stars. Palmer tried to make sense of this. He had seen bodies snared in the sand before, had seen them trapped in silent and peaceful repose. This was not that. This was a life that had met a violent end. His brain whirled as the clues fell together. His homing beacon was in a mesh pouch on Hap’s thigh. Palmer had found his friend a hundred meters down, right beneath the dip in that great bowl Brock’s men had dug, right where their dive had begun. Hap had made it back after all.
Maybe the walls of that strange shaft had crushed him. Maybe Hap had gotten back too late, right as they’d given up on them both, and when they released the held-back sand, the walls had pushed in violently around him. But no, there would be damage everywhere. It would be even. Hap had been hit on that side, there. A fall. A great fall.
It was the visor that told the story. Hap’s visor was gone. The visor would have a recording of his dive. Of Danvar. Of the location of every building, maybe even the streets below, every block of that buried legend.
Sand blew across Hap’s body and ramped up against his side. His mouth was packed with grit, his nostrils clogged, his lifeless eyes dusted. Palmer saw now that there was never any coin in this for either of them. This had been the plan all along. Get a layout of the land, see where to dig, where to put their efforts, and keep the location of all those vast spoils to themselves. He saw in Hap’s open and horrified eyes what had happened, imagined him pulled up by the ropes, maybe saying that his friend was still down there, that there was a pocket of air in the building, that they needed to go back. Or maybe Hap telling them that it was no use, that his friend was dead.
Palmer scooped a handful of loose sand and placed it over Hap’s eyes, duning them shut. It was no wonder they were never told what they were looking for when they took this job. If Palmer and Hap had known they were diving for Danvar, they would’ve wondered why they weren’t blindfolded for the hike north. Hell, they would’ve known right then and there that this was a one-way trip. Of course. Otherwise, they would’ve begged to have been blindfolded. They had marched north from Springston as dead men.
“You saved my fucking life,” Palmer told his dead friend. “You betrayed me, and you saved my fucking life.”
And who knows, maybe Hap would’ve come back for him. Who was to say what decision he’d made, what was going through that mind of his, what he had told Brock and the others. Yes, he would’ve come back for him. Palmer was sure of it.
He was also sure that his life was now in danger. Not just because he was in the middle of the desert and starving, but because he knew what Brock didn’t want anyone else knowing. Palmer reached up and touched the visor on his forehead, needed to make sure it was still there, that his dive was still there, that it had happened.
As exhausted and weak as he was, he needed to do something about Hap. Not relishing the task, he patted his old friend’s pockets, pulled the two transponders out of his hip pouch, then reached into Hap’s belly pocket for his death note and the few coins there. With his suit’s charge dangerously low, he flowed the sand beneath Hap and sent his body straight down. No way of getting the distance exact, but Palmer planned on being long gone before anyone realized the body had moved.
He took off the tank he’d stolen from the other diver and stretched his limbs, pulled his hiking goggles out and adjusted them around his eyes, stowed his visor away. He would have to carry the tank a few dunes away and bury it. Couldn’t leave anything behind, couldn’t flow it down with Hap where it might be discovered, where Brock’s next foray into the sand would reveal that they had a problem.
Rising on unsure legs, he peered up that slope of sand from the bottom of the great
pit Brock’s men had dug. There was no generator running; the sand was no longer loose; the metal platform had been taken away. He could see the sand rolling down in the darkness to fill that great dip in the desert floor. Dreading the climb, he took one step at a time. The night wind would mask his departure. His bootprints would be erased by morning. He could put the breeze on his left cheek, keep the pole star at his back, and head due south until he reached Springston. But he knew he would never make it that far. He was starving—only had a few swallows of water sloshing around in his dead friend’s canteen—he wouldn’t make it two days’ march, much less five.
At the top of the arduous hike out of the bowl, he faced the wind. Palmer tried to remember the route he’d taken to get to the dive site from the brigand encampment. And oddly, strangely, crazily, he prayed that Brock’s men were right where he’d last seen them. They would be the only ones with food and water for miles around. On weary legs and with little conviction, he marched off toward the men who in all likelihood wanted him very much dead.
31 • A Bounty
There was a glow beyond the dunes. Voices mixed and carried on the wind. Palmer used the tall sand for cover and worked his way toward the light. When the voices seemed too near to dare march any farther, he snuck up a sloping dune, crouching as he got higher, then crawling on his hands and knees before finally squirming on his belly to the wind-blown peak. He peered over the lip and down into the camp where he’d spent his last night above the sand.
The encampment had shrunk. Palmer had expected an explosion of activity—the rest of Brock’s men descending on the site of the find—but many of the tents from earlier were gone. The large tent where he and Hap had been shown the map was still there, throbbing with the light of a lantern inside. Beyond this tent, the embers of a fire glowed and sparked, a column of smoke dulling a patch of stars. There were two men around the fire, animated silhouettes. The smell of food cooking made Palmer’s empty stomach knot up. His belly tried to convince his brain that these people didn’t want him dead, that Hap’s mangled body was an accident, that he could just stroll into camp and be hailed a hero, the discoverer of a lost land, with coin and a feast for his efforts.
There was laughter in the darkness—one of the men around the fire—but it was almost as if someone were mocking his belly’s wild thoughts, someone daring him to come down and announce himself.
Palmer lay still behind the crest of that dune, his ker over his nose and mouth, his goggles pelted with sand, just watching and thinking. The sun would come up soon. The stars were already dim over the horizon. He was wasting time. He needed to eat. There were several dark tents he might try to surface inside of, to scrounge for food or water, but the danger of waking someone was too great.
An hour passed, the stars marching the width of a hand, the horizon faintly glowing, Palmer unsure. He finally chose a tent to raid. He removed his hiking goggles and fumbled for his dive visor, got the band around his forehead, when a commotion erupted in the distance—and Palmer thought he’d been spotted.
He ducked down and began to scoot back, then watched as the two men by the fire rushed off, casting long shadows. There were voices, shouts. Palmer looked in the direction the men were running and saw swinging flashlights between the dunes. A marching party. A nearby tent filled with a brightening glow as someone woke. Several silhouettes left the larger tent where the lantern was burning. Everyone was moving away from Palmer and toward this arriving party.
Now, his belly commanded. Now, goddamn you.
Palmer obeyed. He scampered over the crest of the dune and glissaded down the other side on his back, the loose sand following him. He found himself half in the lee of a smaller dune, the sand no longer pelting his face. The large tent stood nearby, the fabric flapping noisily. Palmer remembered the barrels of supplies in this tent. There had been a table in the middle. He could go down and pop up under the table, have a look around.
Hurry, his belly told him. The marching party was approaching. How long would they sit around the fire and swig liquor and smoke tobacco before returning to their tents?
Palmer took a chance by creeping around the dune and hurrying in a crouch toward the back of the large tent. He needed to get close. There was danger in entering the sand with the charge in his suit low. The only thing a diver feared more than running out of air was running out of charge and feeling the sand stiffen around their body. Movement was life in a way no lungful of air could match. If you could move, you could get to the surface and win a breath. A full lung and an empty cell were what nightmares were made of. This gave a diver time to die and space to do it in. And so Palmer ran in a crouch as far as he could, hoping he had enough juice for a quick dip.
He reached the back of the tent without being noticed. All attention was on the people returning to camp. Listening over the wind and the flap of canvas, he heard nothing inside. Palmer powered up his visor and his suit and lay flat on his belly to minimize the drain. Damn, he was weak. Hungry. Limbs quivering. He flipped his visor down, eyed the red blinking light in the corner of his vision, his suit telling him that it was nearly done. You and me both, Palmer thought to himself.
The sand accepted him. Palmer held his breath and slid down a full meter in case the floor inside dipped. He slid to where the center of the tent should be and peered up at the wavering purple overhead. Open space. Nobody standing there. A few patches to the side that might be his barrels of food and water. He came up slowly with his head tilted back, breaching just his visor and ears, ready to flee if anyone spotted him. Bringing one hand out into the air, he flipped his visor up and took a deep and quiet breath. The table overhead blocked the lamp, keeping him in shadow. He flowed the sand so that it spun him around slowly and silently, giving him a scan of the entire tent. No boots. No lumpy bedrolls. No voices approaching. He rose out of the sand in a crouch and powered his suit down quickly, conserving whatever he had left so he could get out again without going through the flap.
He crawled first toward a stack of crates, some part of him aware of the tracks he was leaving in the sand. The lamp overhead swayed, the shadows in the tent stirring menacingly. Burlap covered one crate. Palmer could only think about food, so when he lifted the burlap, he saw loaves of bread sitting there. Bright white loaves. He retrieved one, caught a whiff of something like chalk and rubber, and realized these loaves were too small, too heavy, not bread at all.
His mind was playing tricks on him. Palmer held the object into the light. Explosives. He’d seen bombs like these once before, when a sandscraper in Springston had to be demolished before a dune pushed it into its neighbor. He checked the crate and saw that it was full of white loaves like that. He had seen the aftereffects of rebel bombs. Everyone who grew up in Springston had. The red stains on the sand, the trails of gore, the boots with bloody stumps, men and women and children unrecognizable. He felt the same fear holding that loaf, that tingling up the back of his neck, that he felt at any funeral or wedding or celebration where there might be reprisals, where a loud roar was the last thing you’d ever hear.
Palmer scanned the tent. Brock and his men were losing the look of scroungers and pirates out for a score. Something else was going on.
His belly told him to focus. Food, it said. The loaf went back with the others and the burlap was put back as he found it. There were barrels on the other side of the table. The metal hook of a ladle gleamed over the lip of one barrel. Palmer’s mouth ached for a drink. He shuffled toward the barrel, shaking the sand loose from his canteen, and peered over the side to see a dim, murky, but glorious reflection at the bottom. His gaunt face wavered in the inky puddle. Palmer uncapped the canteen and leaned over the lip, plunging the vessel beneath the surface, the water on his arm cool and invigorating. The canteen gurgled twice, pockets of air bursting through the surface, and then a shout erupted just outside the tent. Laughter. Voices approaching.
Palmer yanked his hand out and whirled around. His limbs and organs desired to go
all directions at once, which left him rooted to the spot. The laughter grew near. He fell to the ground as the tent flapped open. Wiggling on his belly, he got under the table, dribbling water, pairs of boots kicking their way inside.
“Fucking hell!” someone roared. “This thing’s heavy.”
There was the thud of a palm slapping someone’s back. The smell of cooked meat, a hot meal in someone’s hand. Palmer powered his suit on and sank his knees and feet into the earth, pivoting his legs down while keeping his shoulders and arms clear. He worked the cap back onto the canteen, didn’t risk taking a sip, could feel water dripping off his right hand. He pressed his wet palm to his mouth and sucked what moisture he could without making a sound. Seeing the tracks he had left behind from crawling under the table, he used his suit to flow the ground level, careful as a man tucking in a sleeping baby. Something heavy thudded down right beside the table, a large metal cylinder, and there was a shout to be careful. Packs and other gear knocked overhead. Someone brushed the sand off the surface of the table, and it rained down around Palmer, a veil in the lamplight.
Palmer started to sink himself beneath the sand to get out of there, to wait and come back later when everyone was asleep, but a fragment of a sentence caught his ear.
“—any sign of the other diver?”
The laughter and noise died down. Palmer held his breath, certain that his heartbeat could be heard.
“No, sir.” It was Moguhn speaking. Palmer recognized his quiet but commanding voice. “We scanned down two hundred meters, as far as we could, and there’s no body but the one.”
“And no chance he surfaced?” This was Brock again, the one who had asked about the diver. There was no mistaking his strange accent. He must’ve been away from camp. Just returned with the hiking party. But from where? Palmer listened.