Sandstorm Box Set Page 6

  A thicker mist of sand permeated the air, transforming the houses around them into silhouettes. The sand between the mud brick houses was higher next to the dwellings’ walls, as if the storm was a strange creature, trying to scale the stone. A few of the scarce, green weeds that grew between the homes had been torn up and cast aside. Pieces of stray fabric stuck in the branches of the scant few trees that occupied the colony, not yet burned for wood. A piece of a pot that must’ve been left out was partially buried, poking up from the landscape.

  Hearing the creak of a door, Raj looked over at his neighbor’s house. A young woman stared through the threshold, fixing the goggles on her head.

  “Are you okay?” Raj called to the woman.

  She nodded.

  More and more people emerged from their houses, craning their necks and peering cautiously about. Children hugged their parents’ waists, inching out nervously. Some of the elderly opened their doors just wide enough to glimpse the outside, as if the raging sand might return and carry them off. A few of the earliest—and bravest—of the colonists were already sweeping off debris and assessing the damage to their homes. Raj saw a few holes in some of those dwellings’ walls, where the fierce storm had torn a new opening.

  A sandstorm was always a harsh, powerful lesson.

  Raj said, “We should look for anyone else who might need help.”

  “Dad always said that, didn’t he?” Samel asked.

  “Yes,” Raj repeated.

  Raj doubted Samel had many firm recollections of their father. His little brother had only been four when Pradeep left.

  “Dad was a good person, wasn’t he?” Samel asked.

  “Of course he was,” Raj said. “Why do you ask?”

  Samel looked as if he was working on a troubling thought. “Those kids said he left because of us.”

  Raj bit back the anger the storm made him forget. “You know that’s not true.”

  “Are you sure?” Samel looked over at him.

  “Dad left because he got sick,” Raj said. “He did it for our own good.”

  “I know it is the honorable thing, but I can’t understand why,” Samel said, confusion crossing his face, as it always did.

  Trying to keep the sadness out of his voice, Raj said, “We didn’t have a lot of food. He didn’t want us to have to take care of him. He wasn’t going to survive the sickness, and he didn’t want us to catch it.” He watched Samel’s curious face as he processed it. “That is what the noblest people do, so their families can eat.”

  “Couldn’t the healers have saved him?” Samel asked.

  “He was beyond that,” Raj said. “Everyone knew it.”

  “I wish he was here. And I wish Mom hadn’t died, so I could’ve met her.”

  “So do I. But we have Neena and Helgid,” Raj said. “And we have each other.”

  “I guess you’re right.”

  Raj swallowed the lump in his throat. In the beginning days after their father’s departure, the neighbors had helped, but eventually the free meals had ended. Nobody could afford to feed another family when they could barely take care of their own. Neena’s hunting sustained them, and Raj did his best to stretch the Green Crops they received from The Heads of Colony. That was all they could do.

  “Come on, let’s get to Helgid’s.”

  They walked past some of their neighbors, calling out to verify they were all right. A few seemed relieved to see them. Others cursed the storm that had given them a pile of work to do. Cutting down a perpendicular alley, they passed a home with several holes in the side. A group of people circled around somebody near the entrance. Creeping closer, Raj saw a boy his age spitting out sand.

  “Is he okay?” Raj asked the boy’s parents with concern.

  “He’s fine,” said the boy’s father. “He got caught underneath a piece of the roof when it fell. He lost his shawl. Thank you for asking.”

  Raj nodded and tugged Samel’s hand. “Come on.”

  A few people acknowledged them with commiserating glances. Others were too preoccupied with checking their loved ones, or tending their houses to notice a few parentless boys. Raj and Samel wound through several more homes, watching a few people clean off the cracked places in their roofs, or walls, getting ready for a long day’s work of patching. They had just passed a family, brushing off their door, when Raj heard screams.

  A creeping fear skittered through his stomach.

  “What’s going on?” Samel asked.

  “I’m not sure.”

  Raj pulled his brother through the dust-filled pathways toward the noise, struck with the sudden, terrible premonition that Helgid might be in danger. But the noise was coming from another direction.

  “This way, Samel!” Raj called, leading his brother east and toward it.

  They followed the shrill cries until they found a house with a thick cloud of dust around it. The roof had caved, creating a large barricade of mud brick in the center. Down each of the structure’s sides, small, recessed gaps remained. Raj could see nothing in those dark, rubble-strewn holes. A young woman knelt at one of the recesses, digging frantically.

  “Help!” she screamed, removing a large chunk of brick and casting it aside. “My grandmother’s inside!”

  “Where?”

  “I’m not sure! I can’t find her!”

  “Stay there, Sam!” Raj called.

  His heart slammed against his ribcage as he knelt down on the left-hand side of the dwelling, pulling away some broken bricks, creating a hole he could worm into. Rubble scraped his knees. Sharp rock tore at his hands. Panic hit harder as Raj kept digging, finding something hard that wasn’t a brick. After a few more tugs and some digging, he pulled out a dented pot and set it aside. His heart pumped. The debris was everywhere, and it was more than he could clear himself.

  He could already hear others’ voices, drawn toward the commotion, but he didn’t stop.

  Raj pulled away sand and stone, uncovering several pieces of cookware, another blanket, and some rags. Underneath the shadow of the collapsed ceiling, Raj felt as if he was in some deep, dark cave. From the other side of the building, he heard the frantic young woman crying as she searched.

  Raj’s hands met something soft.

  A hand.

  “I found her!” he screamed over his shoulder.

  Frantic, he tried pulling, but there was no way he was getting an adult from beneath a pile of fallen stone. He squeezed the person’s fingers, hoping for a response, but the person was lifeless, still. Raj dug at the sand around the body, hopelessly trying to free the person.

  Shouts echoed behind him.

  A group of people crawled in behind him, barking commands and lifting bricks.

  “We’ve got it!” someone yelled, patting Raj’s shoulder and taking over.

  Raj backed up and scooted outside, allowing the people access. A growing crowd appeared. More people hovered around the broken house and the opening Raj had created. Some people jumped in to help, while others shook their heads, or held their hands over their shawl-covered mouths. A few parents shielded their children’s eyes. Raj looked for Samel, finding him in a cluster of others, wringing his hands. Raj hurried to him and held him close.

  After more digging, the rescuers pulled a sand-covered body from beneath the rubble, carrying it out. Raj watched as the rescuers dusted off a person’s face, body, and clothes.

  An old woman stared blankly at the sky.

  “Do something!” the frantic young woman screamed to the rescuers.

  The people bent over the body, yelling, wiping the dirt away and asking if the woman was all right. Wispy gray hair framed her dusted, ashen face. Her mouth was agape, filled with sand.

  Eventually, the people helping wrung their hands, and someone made a pronouncement.

  “She’s dead.”

  Raj pulled Samel tighter.

  Chapter 13: Darius

  Darius walked through the debris piled between the sand swept homes. Everywhe
re he looked, men and women cleaned sand from their mud brick dwellings. The hovels were a blessing during storms such as these, but in other ways, they were prisons, cooping up the colonists until the storm ended. With the storm raging, it was easy to fear that the chaos would never end, and they would be trapped forever. He looked up at one of the looming, red silhouettes in the distance.

  The details of his nightmare came rushing back to him. Darius blinked hard, casting them back into the recesses of his memory.

  Back in the alleys, every door was open, and every colonist was outside, looking things over, or checking on one another. Several picked up pieces of mud brick that had come from their roofs or walls. The houses on the colony’s western side had stood for many years, proving their worth in the face of too many storms, but this storm had been severe.

  Luckily, Darius’s house had held.

  He limped on with his cane, passing several of his neighbors. All of them had the same sobering expression that came with each storm. Their grave expressions would last until the effects of the storm had passed.

  With a storm this bad, it was a slim hope there were no casualties.

  Soon, The Heads of Colony would be out with their assessments and their stern faces. After each storm, they made their rounds, determining the damage and the deaths. Once they knew the impact, they assigned able-bodied colonists to help those in need. Even if he had damage, Darius would refuse their help. He wouldn’t take assistance away from those who might need it more.

  In the general area of his home, a few people checked on him, noticing him hobbling past, but no one stopped to converse. They knew him as the old man who fixed their spears and knives, nothing more. They had families—and problems—of their own.

  Darius sometimes felt as if he were a ghost, drifting past the people around him. If not for the rhythmic thud of his cane, he might’ve convinced himself he was invisible. Looking at some of the people and their families, it was easy to feel that way.

  Darius had never married. Most of his younger years had been spent sneaking into the caves, looking for treasures leftover from the first colonists. He had become an expert on maneuvering through those dank tunnels, finding the animals that lurked there, and bringing them back for food. His parents’ scolding hadn’t gone far with Darius. Each time he agreed to stay away from the formations, he ended up returning.

  Everyone feared the punishments of The Heads of Colony.

  Everyone except Darius.

  His accident changed that.

  When Darius was twenty-five years old, he’d been scavenging along a narrow ledge in a tunnel’s bowels when a bat dove at his head, knocking him off balance. Darius had grabbed for a handhold, but found nothing. After falling many feet, he’d landed hard, fracturing a bone in his right leg. Despite tremendous pain, Darius had crawled for most of a day to get out of the caves, finding his way back without a torch, eventually making his way to the sunlight. Darius had lived, but the long journey out of the caves had worsened the injury, and he had lost the use of his leg.

  He still remembered the crowd that had gathered around him that day as he pulled his dirty, bloodied body from the mouth of one of the tunnels.

  A few kindly people had sent for a healer.

  For several days afterward, The Heads of Colony and The Watchers had questioned him, thinking he was a criminal. More than one had threatened to throw him in the annex for a month, even a year. A few suggested he remain in there forever, for breaking the laws and venturing into the caves. Eventually, they decided his intentions weren’t nefarious.

  Or perhaps they decided that the loss of his shattered leg was punishment enough.

  Overnight, Darius went from a respected person in Red Rock to a warning parents used to frighten their children. His accident ruined any chance he had at securing a woman to marry—no woman wanted a crippled man. Most turned away from Darius, and in turn, he withdrew, spending most of his time indoors, fixing things for those few colonists kind enough to give him work.

  Now he was an old man, whose stories had mostly been forgotten.

  But he’d never forget Akron.

  Darius still remembered the day when Akron’s parents had sent him to Darius’s house to ask him to fix a spear. Unlike most of the colonists, who only spoke to Darius long enough to give him instructions, or exchange surface pleasantries, Akron had taken a keen interest in his work, hanging around as he made the repair. Darius had told him stories of the caves, describing each of the places where he’d found some of his scavenged metal—remnants from the miners—or in the case of a few older keepsakes that he’d hung on to, where his father and grandfather had found them in the desert.

  Akron kept returning long after the spear was fixed.

  Eventually, Darius came to enjoy his visits, and Akron turned from an acquaintance to a friend.

  If Darius could have foreseen how his stories would spark a passion in the boy, he would’ve never told them. Looking up at the silhouette of the enormous, red rock formation on the colony’s eastern side, where Darius suspected he’d disappeared, he felt the same pit in his stomach he did with every sandstorm.

  It was his fault Akron had journeyed to the caves on that day, like he had done so many other days. And in an indirect way, it was Darius’s fault he had died.

  Chapter 14: Gideon

  Gideon walked among a pile of sand and wreckage, assessing one of the collapsed homes. Around the outside walls, and inside, a family worked to clear the fallen stones. The woman’s crushed body had already been covered with a blanket. Tear streaks marked only the youngest faces, those who were too busy mourning to realize that a hard day’s work was the quickest way to ease their grief.

  “How many other deaths?” Gideon asked Wyatt.

  “Two in another house to the north.” Wyatt stared curiously at the family as he watched them work. His face was strangely thoughtful, as he rubbed his bony cheeks, probably calculating numbers and tallying the impact on the population.

  “Anyone of consequence?”

  “A man and a woman,” Wyatt said. “Tenders of the Green Crops.”

  “A shame,” Gideon said. It always hurt to lose such knowledge.

  Pointing to the body under the blanket, another of The Heads of Colony, Brody, said, “This was an older woman, named Joan, I believe.”

  Gideon nodded gravely. There were too many names in Gideon’s colony to know them all. Tomorrow morning, when most of the dust had cleared and the shock of the deaths had worn off, he would say some words to comfort his people while they performed a group burial. But for now, his concentration was on assessment and rebuilding.

  It was unlikely another sandstorm would hit in rapid succession, but they needed to be prepared.

  Behind him, Saurab and Horatio looked over the houses to the left and right, perhaps searching for flaws in the structure that would lead to damage in subsequent storms. Finishing their assessment, they continued on south, toward the river and the crops.

  Walking through the dusty village, Gideon thought of that first generation, scrapping it out on the ratty weeds they could find on a mostly barren planet while they built the first homes in the colony, or hunted animals whose habits they were still learning. In a way, his people had it better. They were more realistic. Most lived without the foolish hope that a ship from the stars would rescue them, or that some higher power would take pity on them and perform a miracle, like the miracles for which their ancestors had prayed. Most accepted there were no secret resources to find on the planet, like the first generation thought when they’d first colonized and explored. And they certainly had less vicious predators to face. Ravar was, for the most part, a harsh desert environment where only the scrappiest animals survived.

  From what Gideon had heard—recounted by his father, passed from his grandfather, and some people before that—it had taken several years for their ancestors to accept they’d been abandoned. During the first year, supply ships would land regularly, checking o
n the colonists who sought out things of value. Their food stores and water supply were supplemented to ensure their survival. In the event the storms were too severe, the plan was to pull out the colonists.

  Soon, the supply ships stopped landing.

  Contact was lost.

  Frantic, the first generation had sent messages to Earth on strange metal contraptions, asking for assistance, but those signals were never answered. Eventually, dwindling resources and severe storms forced the colonists to build more permanent shelter. That’s when they’d doubled down between the twin, parallel formations they’d called Red Rock. Looming high above the river, the cliffs provided a place of shelter from some of the high winds and storms, and provided a place between which to build their permanent homes. Each time a severe storm struck the colony, Gideon thought of those first, temporary dwellings, and how much worse the casualties could have been.

  Three casualties was not a large toll.

  Even with the protection of the mud brick houses, Gideon wasn’t blind to the challenges.

  The crops were dwindling, and the animals were harder to find. More and more families subsisted on less and less. That was one of the reasons he had instituted a new law about the number of children in a family, and the rations to be taken from the crops. He had limited hunting to certain areas, those that were safer, and not too far away.

  Control. It was the only way to ensure the survival of his people.

  Without order, the colonists would burn themselves to the ground.

  He looked behind him, where Wyatt, Brody, Horatio, and Saurab observantly measured the storm’s damage. Then he looked up to the cliffs, where his Watchers stood observantly, carrying out his orders.

  He had a greater worry than people.

  Gideon was more concerned about the loss of crops than the loss of three lives. A shortage could lead to a breakdown of order, which would mean a much greater catastrophe.