Sandstorm Box Set Read online

  Maybe this was Samel’s nightmare come to life.

  Neena shuddered as the wind kicked up, blurring their surroundings beyond thirty feet. Something shrieked in front of them. She let go of Kai, put two hands on her spear, and raised it. Animal hooves pounded the sand. A bleat filled the air. Something brown and furred ran in their direction.

  A Rydeer.

  She had a brief moment to wonder whether it was the same one she’d seen earlier, before it shot past them, braying and nearly knocking Neena over. Neena cried out in surprise and spun, watching the Rydeer continue in the opposite direction, its hooves beating the sand.

  Something exploded from the ground, pitching the Rydeer skyward.

  It shrieked in panic and pain.

  Through the dust and flying silt, Neena saw something that made her question whether she was living in a nightmare, after all.

  An enormous creature—bigger than the mouth of the largest caves she’d seen, long and round enough to fill several tunnels—took the Rydeer up with it. The Rydeer gave a frightful shriek as the creature opened its giant maw, revealing a mouthful of sharp, gigantic teeth, and caught it mid-air, biting down. Hot blood rained down on Neena’s face, soaking her goggles and her shawl. Through the blur of sand, wind, and blood, she saw the beast swallow the Rydeer. The enormous creature’s shadow loomed over Neena and Kai as it rose higher. Matted, long protrusions unfolded from its scaled body. The protrusions grew rigid and stabbed the air like hundreds of spears.

  “Watch out!” Kai screamed over the wind.

  Hands pushed Neena to the ground.

  She landed on her stomach as a deafening crash pierced the ground behind her, spraying up sand and silt. Her spear skittered away. Looking back toward the boom, she saw an enormous, caving hole in the ground, with sand sliding back into the crevice. The planet felt as if it was pulling in everything around it.

  “Come on!” Kai screamed, grabbing her arm and tugging her upright, away from the sliding soil.

  “My spear!” she yelled, reaching in the direction of the hole. But it was already gone, or buried.

  “Forget it! Come on!”

  The ground shook behind them. They moved faster than before, with Kai leading. If Neena hadn’t felt the pounding of her heart, or smelled the wet blood on her goggles and shawl, she might’ve convinced herself she was living a nightmare.

  Neena had seen sand rats, Rydeers, and dust beetles the size of her torso, but never anything that could swallow a human in a bite. The Rydeer’s dying shriek rang in her head. What was happening?

  “Keep moving!” Kai screamed.

  She cried out as the ground shook underneath her feet. Her boots lifted and the sand rose. It felt like as if the planet were exploding. Kai tugged her away from a splitting seam coming in their direction. They veered this way and that, tripping every so often, but managing to keep upright.

  Kai fell.

  His hand ripped from her grasp. Neena cried out as she stopped, reaching for him.

  “Come on!”

  The seam tore closer—a gaping crevice coming toward them. Finding his arm, she tugged him upright, pulling him back into a frantic run before the sand caved behind them. They changed direction, barely managing to keep ahead of it.

  And then they were heading up an incline.

  Neena couldn’t see the top of the dune, but she kept going, ignoring the pain in her legs, and her heart’s frantic thunder. Reaching the highest point, they halted and looked backward.

  At any moment, Neena was certain the creature would burst from the ground and engulf them, but all she saw was a swirling wall of debris. The wind shrieked and howled, but the rumbling had ceased.

  Leaning over, yelling into Kai’s ear over the wind, she asked, “What was that thing?”

  “We call it the Abomination.”

  Neena had no time to question the strange word. “Where did it go?”

  “It’s having trouble finding us in the storm, but it will keep looking!” he answered. Pulling her head close so she could hear, he said, “We need to keep moving!”

  Neena nodded.

  She caught a glimpse of Kai’s face through the storm. His eyes were terrified slits beneath the goggles. The gash in his forehead had started bleeding again. She wondered what other awful things he had witnessed. She had a feeling she’d find out, before the day was done.

  Chapter 6: Gideon

  “Brace the door!” Gideon called, motioning to two Watchers, who were already hurrying for the long, wooden post next to the open doorway of the Comm Building. They lifted the heavy piece of wood while several other men slammed the door, dulling the wind’s scream. The Watchers wedged the board into several wooden grooves, stepping back and wiping the sand from their faces.

  A heavy gust of wind drew Gideon’s attention to the roof, where something struck the edge of the dome and scraped over the top. A pang of fear he wasn’t used to coursed through him.

  Looking at the sloping roof’s surface, it was easy to spot the years of repair. Some parts of the roof were comprised of the same slate gray stone that made up the rest of the building, but too many sections showed different colors, where they had patched the roof with the same mud brick as the rest of the hovels outside. The enormous, round building was the construct of the first generation—brave men who had forged a path on a new planet. He and his men had kept it stable, but the storm was severe enough that even Gideon worried it might collapse.

  The other Heads of Colony—Wyatt, Brody, Saurab, and Horatio—hovered instinctively near the round table in the room’s center, watching him. Nearby, The Watchers silently judged the building’s stability, with tan, weather-beaten faces. Most had made it down from the cliffs before the storm started. A few had been forced to duck for cover. They were brave men, but the storm had them rattled.

  All of Gideon’s men knew the protocol for a storm such as this. The best place to be was in the main room, where they could survive underneath the enormous, round table if the roof collapsed. Everyone knew to stay away from the walls, or the private quarters accessed by the doors along the round edges of the main room. Those smaller rooms might easily become their graves.

  He appraised the table, around which most of his Heads of Colony instinctively gathered. Around it were two dozen chairs. In its middle was a huge, metal centerpiece—a remnant from the days of the earliest colonists. Gideon traced the contours of the round, strange relic. The piece of metal was covered in small flaps and useless buttons he would never understand. Whenever he looked at it, he envisioned the enormous, rusted satellite dish of which it had been a part.

  His father had told him about it. At one time, the dish had been a means of communication between Ravar and Earth, sending signals through some pieces of metal in the sky to the ships, reporting back on the colonists’ mission. Over generations, the satellite dish had lost its use, like most of the other things that used to be in the room, scavenged by his ancestors and turned into things of necessity. Long ago, the metal’s last scraps had sunk into the sand beneath the other side of the cliffs on the western formation. That area was forbidden, like too many other areas of danger.

  Lost in a moment of reflection, Gideon ran his hands over his gray hair. Whenever he looked at the remainder of that relic, he recalled watching his father and his men hovering around the table during sandstorms like these, the way he and his men did now. His father had always kept him close, allowing him to attend every meeting, priming Gideon for the role that would encompass the rest of his life. Gideon had taken his position seriously, and would continue to do so until his death, just like his father, and his grandfather.

  He’d never forget his father’s last words as he lay on the bed in his room, dying of old age.

  “Preservation at all costs.”

  A rattling noise distracted him.

  Gideon’s head jerked to a section of wall by the entrance, where one of the dozen hanging fossils shook. His head Watcher, Thorne, hurried over, ad
justing the long, curved, yellowed skull. Thorne’s severe expression didn’t waver as he rotated the fossil with muscular, tanned arms.

  The ancient skull was several times the size of Gideon’s head.

  He knew those bones almost as well as he knew his own body.

  “Should we take it down?” Thorne asked.

  Gideon studied the shaking object, and the others next to which it hung. All of the skulls had been there far longer than he had been alive, secured into the walls by pieces of metal that were probably older than the building, and would probably outlast both he and his men.

  Each one was different, but no less entrancing. More times than Gideon could count in his childhood, he had stared at those skulls with equal fright and imagination, trying to put flesh over their bones. He had envisioned the animals that had walked around with them, with the heavens only knew how many legs. Each of the skulls contained a multitude of gaping sockets, housing features of which only his ancestors knew.

  His eyes riveted on one in particular—an oversized skull with three orifices that might be eyes. A few of the animals appeared similar to the Rydeer that roamed the desert, or even the speckled wolves, but more than a few were decidedly hideous. The shaking skull’s jawbone wiggled up and down with some wind that must be getting in through a crevice. Thankfully, that species was dead, or hadn’t been spotted in so long that it might as well be, like most of the others.

  The harsh environment—and the earliest hunters—had killed them off.

  “Sir?” Thorne called over to him, awaiting his command.

  Gideon swallowed, feeling a tinge of childhood fright he hated. With the sandstorm raging, it was easy to imagine himself and his men all buried, and some strange, future race digging them up.

  “Leave the skulls. They’ll be fine,” Gideon ordered. “Get back to the table. We should be ready, in case the winds get worse.”

  Chapter 7: Darius

  A clatter echoed across the room.

  Darius cursed as he put too much weight on his bad leg, hobbling with his cane over to the workbench. He found a fallen chisel on the ground underneath, rolling back and forth on the floor. He must’ve missed it. Straining to reach it, he caught hold of it and secured it in one of his bins underneath the thick bench.

  He looked around to see if he’d left any other loose objects around.

  In various spots across the workbench and on a few other tables that sat alongside the walls of his dirty hovel, piles of heavier tools sat in their usual positions, overlapping or stacked on top of one another. Most were heavy enough that they shouldn’t fall. He’d stowed most of the scrap metal away safely. Those metal scraps—artifacts from the days when the supply ships went to and from Ravar—had been pulled from the desert in various scavenging runs throughout the years. Others, he had secretly found in the caves when he was a younger man, before the accident had taken the use of his leg.

  The metal served him well while fixing his neighbors’ weapons, tools, or cookware, earning him meals to supplement his rations.

  Everything seemed stable.

  The only thing left on the wall was the long, metal spear that hadn’t seen use in more years than he remembered. A sad, nostalgic feeling coursed through Darius as he remembered the days when he could hunt.

  He’d leave it.

  If the house caved, he would have greater problems than his old spear.

  Huddling down so that he was level with the workbench, Darius found an empty spot and eased into a sitting position. Clutching his cane, his thoughts traveled where they always did, in the midst of such a storm. A tear fell down Darius’s wrinkled, sun-spotted cheek as he envisioned Akron’s body, long rotted and decayed in some hidden cave.

  On most days, his guilt weighed in his stomach, threatening to pull him under. But during sandstorms like these, it was even worse, because Akron had disappeared during one.

  Darius hadn’t given up hope.

  It was his fault Akron had died, and he would make up for it.

  One day he’d find the boy’s remains and bury them.

  Chapter 8: Neena

  Neena and Kai kept a quick pace, stumbling every so often in the heavy wind and sand, pushing through the soreness and the powerful gusts that fought their every step. Neena’s body was scraped from her fall. Her legs felt as if they might collapse.

  She wished she had her spear.

  Even the long, pointed weapon would be useless against a creature as large as the one they’d seen. She pulled her knife from the sheath at her side, realizing how useless it was. It might as well be a grain of sand to the beast. And Kai had nothing but the clothes on his back.

  It felt as if they were insects, waiting for a giant boot to squash them.

  Neena reached up, smearing some of the dried sand and blood away from her goggles. A coppery odor filled her nose, but she had no time to clean herself or her gear off properly.

  They kept running, skirting between desert dunes for longer than she could keep track of, heading in a direction only the heavens knew. Every so often, Neena heard a rumble in the distance, but never as close or as loud. More than once, she looked down at her feet, as if the ground might disappear beneath her, or a gigantic set of sharp, bloodied teeth might emerge and engulf her.

  Eventually, after they had run for a long while, the rumbling ceased again, and a large, reddish-brown silhouette appeared through the wind and dust. Four connected, maroon rocks reached into the sky. The segments of stone varied in length, like the enormous, thick palm of a hand and several fingers. Neena recognized the formation.

  Her hope renewed.

  She passed by the reddish rocks on every hunting trip. Although most of the formation was solid, she knew of a downward outcrop of rock that hid a small cave just big enough to crawl into. She had a memory of going inside the small den with her father on one of her earliest hunting trips.

  “This way!” she urged, tugging Kai.

  Getting close, Neena weaved around some unattached rocks that surrounded the formation’s base. She traveled in a circle until she found the opening. Beckoning, she showed Kai. Together, they huddled down and scooted through the formation’s narrow entrance. The cave was small and smelled of animal droppings, but it was a few degrees cooler than the heat of the desert.

  And it was out of the storm, and away from the creature.

  Neena scurried over loose gravel and rough stone. The ceiling was just high enough that they could walk with their backs bent. Several, smaller holes on the walls spoke of hiding places for desert animals, but Neena saw nothing else in the dim lighting. They stopped and turned. With the walls around them, the keen of the wind fell slightly quieter, but it was still abrasive, battering against the outside of the solid formation.

  Sand blasted by the opening. Sticks and pebbles carpeted the cave’s first few feet. Neena clutched her knife, her panicked breaths burning her throat.

  “Is it gone?” she asked Kai, listening for more rumbles over the wind.

  Kai knelt. Cocking his head, he said, “I haven’t heard it in a while, but it could be deeper underground. The rumbling is only audible when it gets to the sand’s top layers.”

  “How did it find us?” Neena kept her voice low as she stared through the entrance.

  Kai pointed at his boots. “Vibrations,” he said. “It followed us.”

  Neena thought of how the sand rats hid from the storm. They sensed something, even before it was coming. Perhaps this was something similar, though she had trouble fathoming it.

  “Can it hear us talk?” she whispered.

  “We should be safe if we keep our voices to a whisper, but we shouldn’t risk more than that,” he said.

  Neena nodded. Kai didn’t need to tell her twice. Dozens of questions swam into her head. “Where did this thing come from?”

  “It lives in the deserts near my colony,” Kai said.

  “New Canaan?” Neena remembered, still having trouble processing the existence of anot
her colony, let alone the beast. “How far away is that?”

  “I don’t know anymore,” Kai said. “Several days, probably even longer. I lost direction in the sandstorm. The Abomination has followed me, never close, but never far. I haven’t been able to lose it.”

  “All this way, and it is still tracking you?” Neena asked.

  “It has taken in a keen interest in me. I wish I could lose the thing.” Kai shook his head.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it. And my people haven’t, either. At least, I don’t think they have.” Neena’s confusion was written on her face. “I don’t understand how something like that could be here.”

  “Your people are fortunate. Or perhaps they live far enough away that they never had to worry.” Kai’s expression went grave. Looking out the cave’s opening, where the wind whipped past, Kai said, “We should be safer in here, because the rock that makes up this cave is more solid than the sand. I can’t promise our safety, but we are better off here than in the desert.”

  The pungent odor on her goggles filled Neena’s nose. Reaching up, she carefully lifted them off and inspected them. A thick, clear goop was mixed with the Rydeer’s blood. Neena had skinned and dressed plenty of animals, but she’d never smelled something so foul.

  “What is this?” she whispered, smearing it off on the floor.

  Kai looked over, catching sight of the vile substance. “The creature’s bile,” he whispered gravely. “It helps it swallow its meals.”

  A panicked fear struck Neena as she reached up, finding some of the substance on her face.

  Noticing her expression, Kai said, “You don’t have to worry. It’s disgusting, but it won’t cause you pain.”

  Kai silently removed his goggles, dusting the sand off. Without the protective mask, or the whipping debris, she got a better look at him. His eyes were blue and intense; his nose was sharp. The strange, curved markings started at his hairline, extending down toward his temples. He was about five years older than her. If she were one of the girls down by the river, she might have called him handsome, if she had time for such thoughts.