Sand Red

7

Od limped in the darkness behind me, Yul supporting him. I guided us on through the desert with dread settled in my stomach like stone, painfully aware I was likely leading them to their deaths. The idea devoured my mind in the dark, empty hours as we drifted on. We walked all night, agonizingly sleepless, hungry, and above all, thirsty. When dawn's pink tendrils began to creep across the East sky, I was ready to lie down and die like Jordan had been. I found myself thinking about Jordan often. He was a trained assassin. He had grown up among the Basque people in Spain before they had to move North for the heat. It was then he ran away from his parents and siblings. He had lived with the Osad assassins in the mainland for well over a year before leaving to return home again. Only there had been no one left. The Basque had been massacred, the same as us now. He never found his family. So he started out by himself, falling in with our camp and eventually rising to the position of leader for his skill with blades that had helped him survive five decades on this Earth. And now he was probably dead of some commonplace cause. 

The sun rose powerfully. The sky was puffy white now and in the distance, a lonely hawk called out, circling the sand. And still we walked on. I was half dead for a sip of water. A little after noon, I took Od onto my shoulders from Yul. He clung onto me like a baby, his face grey from the exertion. His weight pushed into me heavily and in my mind's eye we grappled like drowning men, forever kicking each other into the depths so one could rise to take a breath. I dragged us onward and still the desert stretched before me endlessly, unforgivingly, cruelly burning me up until I felt fevered.

***

The days rolled on. Our third day in the desert, come dusky evening I could no longer move. My shoulders drooped and I crumpled to the ground. My palms flared in pain as a thousand tiny thorns embedded themselves in them. A man cannot even fall in comfort in this world. This thought struck me as particularly funny and a weird hacking noise rose from my mouth in laughter. I laugh like a madman at the dying world we have been born in and the doomed children we were rushing to save. How many of them do I think will die like me, like Od, like Jordan, dying of thirst while their stupid bodies pissed and shat like we had all the wealth of water in the world? Why, all of them! I think all of them are goddamn doomed. I think none of us will make it out of here alive. A wave of hunger clawed at the inside of me and my subsiding laughter turned into a choke.

Yul bent to dig himself a pit to sit in. I continued to lie in my hot bed of thorns. Neither of them asked what was funny. Maybe they had given up as well. Maybe they just didn't care. I fell silent. I felt alienated and violently alone.

By unspoken consent, we slept. When I awoke the next morning, I didn't move. I was far too hungry to lift a finger. My skin cracked painfully from sunburn, but it didn't matter anymore. I was ready to die now. All I wanted was to be free of the suffering of my body. I lay on my side, watching a small insect crawl in the sand near my eye. In the distance, a figure was marching towards me. Strangely enough, it was dressed like Yul. But Yul was in the dirt behind me. It's the hallucinations, I accepted calmly. If I was hallucinating now, I was so thirsty. I would be gone soon enough. The vision approached and I found myself marvelling at the fact that I had always seen Yul as the one needing protecting. It was Od who had always looked out for us, Od who had fought the bullies that had made Yul cry and Od who was our leader, but I saw now the poise with which Yul carried himself and how he had carried his brother a hundred kilometers without complaint and would carry him a hundred more, even if it killed him. I realized I had been the one they had protected all along. The twins had each other's backs and they had mothered me all these years since my poor mother's death. I was dying just like her now. We were all dying like her.

My hallucination moved to Od and I saw that it had a sloshing bag of water. Yul lifted his brother's head and dribbled water into his gaping mouth. He gently rested Od's head back, and he turned to me. I found myself being assailed by its hands. I gladly yielded. Horribly, wonderfully cool liquid trickled onto my tongue and my back arched in pleasure and I galloped to swallow. I thanked biology for the vision fervently. Yul lifted my head up and I felt his hand in my hair, disturbingly real. My eyes opened suddenly.