by Hugh Howey
She spotted people up on the wall, little black specks of privilege. She envied them that home, that fortress that protected bustling Springston. Here was one solution to the winds from the east; a different answer to the same problem could be seen in Shantytown. The problem in common was that the world was in flux. The sands were always shifting, always pushing from east to west. Progressing, as her father used to say. Always progressing from east to west.
Vic swung the binoculars across Shantytown, where the people moved with the dunes. Not a day went by without a house collapsing. And the rhythmic rattle of hammers there was as constant as the wind. Build and destroy. Destroy and build. People tunneled through the dunes as they closed in around their homes. Back doors became front doors. A doormat shaken out and relocated. Adapt and survive. Life goes on.
People died, of course. Houses collapsed in the middle of the night. Sand rushed through breached walls at any hour. A handful mourned. Hands slapped faces in grief. And then came the rhythmic rattle of hammers, building. The wail of a newborn, breathing.
Change in Shantytown was gradual and continuous. Dunes slid and moved and people adjusted around them. The change was backbreaking and exhausting, but it was a way of life. Each day was much the same as the last. The misery came in buckets, which could be handled. Time. The dunes. Society. The people. They all progressed, as her father would say.
Such were Vic’s distractions as she scanned the line between Shantytown and Springston, thinking on change and life rather than food, putting off how best to proceed. The high sun beat down on her. She could hear Palmer twisting the cap off his canteen, knew they were both getting low on water. Making a decision with his life in the balance made it difficult to be prudent and wise. She was used to risking only her own life. She preferred diving solo.
“What do you see?” Palmer asked from the haul rack.
“One stall near the market,” she said. “Might be our best bet.”
She focused the binoculars on the stall, which would have to be their oasis. They could sail over and park close by, get in and out, drop some coin and a warning about Brock’s men. She watched a family tend the stall, a woman sweeping sand into piles and two kids hauling it out to the dunes. Maybe she could meet the children there and pay them to bring the food out. She watched them work, not wanting to hurry any one plan, and her mind flitted back to these two ways of managing the dunes, Springston’s and Shantytown’s. Here was the perfect vantage for seeing how both worked. In Shantytown, the gradual battle with the sand spread misery across the generations. Evenly distributed. While in Springston, people lived protected from the wind, with flat desert and tall buildings rarely swamped by the dunes. Years of woe were stored up behind a teetering wall. That woe missed some generations entirely. It built and built.
And somehow, Vic knew what was happening before it did. Maybe she knew from her life with brigands, from all their plans and boasts, from living with Marco, from beginning to think like them. Or maybe it was the little black figures she spotted running along the ramparts as if something was wrong, chasing some people away. Or maybe the sound came first, and then her brain whirred with such ferocity, such speed, that all the thoughts came next in an eyeblink. It felt as if minutes passed, as if all she considered about the great wall and the coming ages of man flew by between the first deep thump deep in her chest and the subsequent signs of disaster.
Or maybe it was coincidence. A diver’s intuition. Palmer’s story about a crate of bombs taking out all of Springston, an old dream of insane schemers and revolutionaries who knew how to destroy but not create. Whatever the cause, her gaze was upon the great wall when it happened. And her mind was on the many falls of man.
Thoughts spun. She saw the ages counted by each collapse. Empires that came and went and that made up all of their history and lore. Their ends were both inevitable and unpredictable. The catastrophic nature of each grew bigger with time. No one thought an end would come in their lifetime. People glanced up at the towering wall of concrete and iron bars and reckoned their children or grandchildren would see it topple. It would be left to some distant generation to build the next wall, and to build it stronger. Bigger. Like each fall.
Meanwhile, on the back of the wall, the sand grew heavier and heavier. One grain at a time. Like a clock. Like the ticking clock on a bomb. Or a whole string of them—dozens of bombs like loaves of bread—buried along the base of the wall in the middle of the night, placed there by divers with a hellish bent, divers and pirates who had grown weary of that cool shadow that divides one world from the other, that harsh line between those who toil all day and those who can afford to wait.
Those who think they can afford to wait.
Tick. Tick. Tick. Sand and second hands. Vic watched from the top of the dune, from the deck of her dead lover’s sarfer, a sickness deep in the pit of her stomach, a powerful dread, all of this flashing through her mind as the dull thumps hit her in the chest.
The roars were muffled. They came like drums beat out of rhythm: boom … boom-boom … boom. Boom.
And then the teetering—the unholy teetering. A thing meant to last leaned its sad head. The body shuddered, losing its balance, feet knocked out from underneath. Vic covered her mouth and watched. Sand peppered the binoculars. Palmer yelled at her and asked what that was, his voice muffled by his ker.
The luckiest in life became the unluckiest. Those who lived nearest the wall were crushed. Those who lived inside it disappeared. These were the ones with the most to lose, and they lost everything. The sand they had let build for generations flooded down, finishing what the bombs had started. And a slab of concrete as high as many of the sandscrapers thudded impossibly flat.
The dune Vic stood on trembled. Sand flowed down the face of every dune in sight as gravity and the trembling of the world made them all lose an inch of height. Vic could feel the impact in the deck of the sarfer, in the soles of her feet. The rumble came moments later, a roar deep in her chest. And then a great wave of sand slid through Springston, a torrent of this unnatural dune finding its rightful level, flowing like water down on the sandscrapers and markets and square, buildings toppling as their knees were knocked out from under them, small black shapes spilling from the upper reaches, these people wrenched violently from their bequeathed homes.
Onward, the sand flowed. It spilled out to the side and caught Shantytown, those few unlucky enough to live along the edge of the shadows, where the summer solstice made the wall’s shadow more inclusive for a season. These went too. Only in the distance were they spared. The reckoning of the decades made good in a single moment. Shantytown the new Springston. And the Honey Hole, Vic saw, knocked aside at the far reach of the sand’s wake, right along that fuzzy line between town proper and town improper.
Her mother, buried. A town, lost. A small group of men, somewhere out there, cheering.
The wind stirred. The heavens themselves seemed to adjust to this new world. The sarfer’s boom creaked as the mainsail shifted. Palmer was yelling. Vic ignored him and jumped back into her seat. She grabbed the lines and pulled them taut. The jib unfurled with a mighty pop, and the sarfer lurched into motion. Vic sailed the craft dangerously down the side of the dune, fighting the tiller, her mind in splinters. She sailed for where she’d last seen the Honey Hole. She had vowed never to return to that place. Now, she couldn’t get there fast enough.
44 • Held Down, Violently
The sarfer raced across the dunes toward a field of debris where homes and shops had recently stood. Over the creaking mast and the taut and singing ropes, shouts for help and screams of horror could be heard. Screams from the past. Vic focused on a spot of sand at the edge of the destruction. There was a ridge of heaped tin and metal and wood blocking her path. She slewed the sarfer to a stop on the edge of town—was sixteen again as she jumped to the sand and raced between the dunes. Sixteen again and running half-naked across the desert floor. It’d been nighttime back then, and she’d been runnin
g away from the Honey Hole.
She had only gone inside for a drink. She and two friends. One drink had led to two drinks. She still had her wits about her, was able to tell the men no. She wasn’t laughing, not anymore. But the rooms were there, as was the expectation from those who had learned that anything they saw and wanted could be had for a price. A price. Cheap for them. Rent a room. C’mon, it’ll be fun. Firm hands. Friends egging her on.
Tears streaked down Vic’s face as she ran across the sand, remembering.
Two men. Laughing. Beer on their breaths. Strong arms from building and making. Strong arms for tearing and taking. Laughing. Her screams were funny to them. Her arms weak. But the way she squirmed made them roar. And Vic could hear her friends shouting through the walls, shouting now for them to stop, rattling locked doors, yelling at the people in another room, where similar horrors were more habit than happenstance.
Loose sand. Vic reached the end of intact houses, the extent of the onrush of that great dune. She ran past people gazing, people watching, people standing still, not helping, not hearing the muffled screams, the calloused hands over pretty mouths, the beer-breath lips crushing down, the feeling of sand piled on, of being buried alive, a pressure against new parts of her, the first time, crushing, crushing.
She hurried up the slope of sand until her legs were sore and would barely obey. She angled for where the Honey Hole used to sit. Vic pulled her band on, flipped her visor down, powered up her suit as she dove forward. She disappeared into the sand with barely a splash. Down where she was free and nothing could pin her.
Bright objects everywhere. The yellow and orange of great spoils, a scrounger’s paradise, so much worth saving. There were riches here carried all the way from the great wall. The rich were here as well. Vic saw a form trapped ahead of her, probably too late, but she formed a column of sand beneath the body and sent it to the surface. There were entire homes buried and flattened. There was debris everywhere to dodge. And ahead of her, right where she’d been running, was the three-story building she remembered, the house of nightmares, completely encased by the dune. No one would ever be harmed in that building again. They already had been. They already had been. The place was full of sand.
Vic slid through a busted window, hardening the sand around her to protect herself from the shards of glass. The walls inside were askew. The building had nearly buckled. It might have buckled were it not for the low concrete wall on the back side of the building to hold back the sand. Vic dialed her visor down to account for the loose pack inside the Honey Hole. Too bright in there. Bodies everywhere. Chairs and tables and the flash of glass jars and bottles. She raced up through the great hall and over the railing—or where the railing once stood. A purplish pocket of air along the third floor. The sand only got so high. Vic started to move who she could toward the air, but there wasn’t enough time. Not enough time. Even if the people there had gotten a lungful when it happened. Even if they had closed their mouths. Dead in minutes. Her mom was gone. Never got to say goodbye.
Vic saw the door to the room where it had happened all those years ago. The door was still whole, still solid, still closed on what took place in there. No one knew but those who had been inside. No one. Suffocating.
In her visor, her suit’s power glowed a bright green. A full charge. Ready for a deep dive, all that extra juice for holding the world at bay, for holding up that column of sand and air that was always pressing down on her, pressing down. Vic only had breath enough in her lungs for another minute or two. Her heart was racing, burning through her oxygen, not prepared for this. Not ready to see this. Not ready for her mother to die.
She couldn’t scream beneath the sand. There were no divers to hear the shouts rising up in her throat. Nowhere for that rage to go. But something inside Vic burst, something like a great wall meant to hold back the years and years. It toppled all at once, anger flowing outward, a power she’d honed in the deepest of sand now surging through her suit. That power exploded; it raged in the deadly spill from that tumbling dune; and the muscle to lift a motor, a car, to rip the roof off an ancient skyscraper, billowed forth.
There was a rumbling in the earth, a swelling, a press of sand from beneath, and the Honey Hole creaked upward, out of the spill, Vic screaming and crying beneath the sand where no diver could hear her, hands curled into claws of rage and effort, the sand spilling into her mouth and onto her tongue, sand soaked in beer and tasting of the awful past, and a grumble, a grumble as the world tilted and walls popped and sand flowed from orifices, out of windows and doors, flowing like warm honey, like blood and milk, draining from that awful place where the past had long been buried, as the Honey Hole rose out of the desert and settled, shuddering, atop the dunes.
The Honey Hole—full of the spitting and coughing and bewildered and dead—was sickeningly saved. And Vic, exhausted again in that place, terrified and weeping, collapsed to the ground outside her mother’s door, her mother’s open door, blood coming only from her ears and nose this time.
Part 5:
A Rap Upon Heaven’s Gate
45 • A Quiet Dawn
There was a distant thrum. The sound of drums, of bootfalls, of a god’s mighty pulse. Conner knew that sound. It reminded him of the thunder far east. It was the muffled roar of rebel bombs, a noise that came before chaos and death and red dunes and a mother’s wails. Conner dropped his spoon into his bowl of stew, pushed away from the beer-soaked table in the Honey Hole, and ran toward the stairs to warn his mom.
He took the steps two at a time. His brother Rob chased after him. There were more of the muffled blasts in the distance as they raced down the balcony. Danger outside. Violence. Or maybe it was nothing. Maybe it was cannon fire to celebrate the discovery of Danvar. Conner almost felt silly for running to his mother, a child doing what boys did in a panic, turning to a parent to save them, to tell them what to do.
He threw open her door, knew there were no clients inside, just his half-sister Violet who had emerged from No Man’s Land. And as he stepped into the room, Conner felt a rumble in the earth, felt it through his father’s boots, and he knew what was happening. He knew that this was more than the usual bombs. That great roar and that impossibly loud hiss meant the sands were coming for them all.
And in the brief flutter between two beats of his heart, as the din grew and grew, as his mother yelled for the boys to run, to hold their breath, to move, Conner thought only of diving onto the bed, of protecting the girl he’d spent the last two days looking after. He bolted across the room, Rob on his heels, got halfway there, when the wall of sand slammed into the Honey Hole.
The floor beneath Conner’s feet lurched sideways—a god snatching a rug out from under him. He tumbled. There was a crash of wood and tin, an explosion of glass, a sudden blindness as all light was extinguished by a press of solid dune, a splintering sound, and then the desert sands pouring in around Conner and his family.
He barely heard his mother scream for them to hold their breaths before he was smothered. Sand was in his nose and against his lips. He was frozen, pinned to the floor in a sprawl, the weight of ten bullies on his back, a sense, nearby, right beside him, of his brother Rob. Just a memory of where his brother had been—where his mother had been—before the sand had claimed them.
Pitch black. A residual warmth in the sand from having been outside in the sun. Complete silence. Just his pulse, which he could feel in his neck as it was squeezed by the drift. The pulse in his temples. No room to expand his chest. Couldn’t swallow. Hands around his throat. His brother nearby. And not enough room even to cry. Just a coffin to be terrified in. A place for dying. For panic. For muscles and tendons raging and flexing but not budging an inch—what a paralyzed person must feel. What everyone who has ever been buried alive must feel. This is how they go. This is how they go. This is how they go. Conner couldn’t stop thinking it. The dead had been bodies in the sand before. But now he could feel what they had felt. They had felt just like thi
s, frozen and terrified and not able to move their jaws even to sob for their mothers.
He prayed and listened for the sound of digging—but heard nothing. His pulse. His pulse. Maybe the sand wasn’t so deep. Maybe his mother was okay, pressed there against the wall. Maybe Violet—his half-sister—maybe she would live and her story would be known. He might have a minute of air left. They could dig him out. But that rumble—that rumble—too much sand. It had gone black in the room. The sand had swamped the second story of the Honey Hole. The great wall must’ve gone. Collapsed. Blown up. And the sand on Conner’s back grew deeper and heavier with this thought. In the dark and quiet, he imagined the horror that must be taking place outside. His rapidly approaching death became a pinprick in a wider world of hurt. That grumble of sand he’d heard had been the dune coming at them, the great dune behind that teetering wall on which he’d been born. A life given and then taken away. It had come for him. Had found him. Was now going to claim him.
The struggle against the sand was futile, so Conner relaxed. As he did, it felt as though the bullies on his back grew heavier, like he had sagged within himself and the sand was eager to consume that space, to take whatever he might give. How much longer? The need to breathe grew intense. Like the training games with his brother, when they strained their lungs and counted with fingers. Dizzy. No way to inhale or exhale. Would just black out. And as he felt it coming, his panic surged anew, and there came an intense drive to not die. He didn’t want to die. He wanted to call out to Rob, to his mom, tell them he loved them, get them out of there, somebody please dig me out of here.
As his senses faded, the press of sand all around him softened. It was as if his skin was growing numb to the pressure. Or the blood flow was stopping. Conner had a bright flash of a memory, his father waking him up one morning with a finger pressed over his gray beard, urging Conner to be quiet. Conner, confused, half-asleep, leaving the room he shared with his brothers, his father taking him up the narrow stairs to the top of the great wall. They sat there with their faces to the east and their feet dangling over the ramparts. A windless, noiseless sunrise. The first quiet dawn he’d ever seen, one of those rare moments when the gods stop their thundering and become calm, when the sand isn’t blowing down on them—and Conner sat and watched the morning sun swallow the stars and then Mars, and then a golden dome of light grow and blossom into a perfectly blue sky.