Sand Red

11

We awoke at what I could only guess was the next dusk. My breath was hot around my face and I had taken my jacket off so my skin was slick with a waste of water. I felt around for the twins. Two left arms told me they were both safe and asleep. I sat up and was met with the disorienting experience of no change in my surroundings. No horizon lined up in the distance. There was nothing but gravity and my feet telling me which way was up and down. I shook the body nearest me.

'Od, Yul. Wake up.'

The twin sat up with a start and in a flash, I was pinned to the floor.

'It's me! It's me!' I choked.

'Sorry!' The hold on my throat loosened. I sat up, massaging my neck. My windpipe felt crushed and the walls felt stuck. I swallowed a few times to rid myself of the unpleasant feeling. 'Sorry, I'm on edge.'

'S'alright.' I said thickly.

'It's goddamn hot. I'll wake Yul.'

There were soft scuffling noises and then Yul was speaking.

'Water.'

I fumbled for the waterbag. Having found it, I handed him the entire bag, not trusting myself to pour out the ration without sight.

'Just a gulp,' I told him.

Turn by turn, we all took our ration. My stomach was gloriously sated and I felt fat and lazy. We had eaten the meat raw the previous day and drained the corpses of blood. We had eaten it all so the blood wouldn't dry up and insects didn't get to the bodies. Yul had had the misfortune of biting into a bowel in the darkness. That had been funny.

'It must be late,' a twin said. We had slept well with our stomachs full.

'Come on,' I said, getting up. 'We've got to start.'

There was shuffling as the twins began to get up and pack. In half a minute, we were ready. I touched my empty ankle scabbard sorely. Leaving the knife in the child's body had been a mistake, no matter how much suffering it had saved him. It had been of Red make, sharper than anything I had ever owned, made for cutting harvest. The dead men's knives lay in the sack we carried our meagre belongings in. I found a knife that felt sharp, and slid it into my ankle sheath.

We travelled forward. The air cleared up a little way ahead where the heat from our breath was reduced and the air was freezing, telling me it was night and probably late. I stopped to wrap the jacket well around me and hoisted the sack on my shoulders before trudging on. The twin before me stopped. I walked into his back,

'Ow!' I said, rubbing my nose. 'What is it?'

'It's the wrong way. We're back where we started.'

I felt ahead, there was no sand. 'No sand.'

A shoe crackled. 'Beneath your feet.'

I rubbed a sock on the floor. The passage had indeed been sandy, but the wrong direction?

'We'll turn,' a twin, presumably Od, ruled.

It didn't matter anyway. We had only been walking a few minutes and if our sandy opening was the way back, we'd only waste half an hour, tops.

We turned back and began to move slowly. Walking was scary in the dark, when you never knew what was ahead, or who was ahead, and if the ground fell away before your feet you wouldn't know until it was too late.

We kept on, hands on the passage walls until it became apparent to me that Od had been right. Encouraged, I moved faster and more boldly. I was already getting tired of the eternal darkness and I longed for the moon and the stars and the daylit sky.

We tread on until we were thirsty again, then sat down for a drink before getting up and going on yet again. There was no way to know what time it was. Smaller passages began to appear at our sides and we hesitated at each in the beginning and then got used to them. We stuck to the large passage we had hit upon. The Baxter camp was not very big. We expected to reach the Pechora in three hours at most. With the entire camp, It would have been difficult travelling, far harder breathing and would have taken far more time. I thought about my friends among the campers as I stepped. There was the scrawny boy Robert from England that had died years before I had met the twins, and the Crimean woman Elena, who had perished in the massacre. She had tried to teach me to read in my childhood, but I had never learned too well. Anas from Ethiopia, who cried every time he skinned his knee. He had grown up to drive oil rigs for the J.C. Company among the scientists. He had left camp for the work. I wondered if he was still alive. And Raul, my funniest friend, that slept in the bunk above me and cracked jokes about how Charlotte snored and Jordan's bunk sagged. He had died upset with me. I missed them. You only realize what you have when it is lost.

We dragged on, a little slower now that our stomachs wanted for food again. How demanding bodies are, constantly wanting food and water and sleep and a conversation with someone that is dead. An hour or so later, I was blinded around a bend. A light in the far distance scarred my eyes, bright as day, though the world outside was doubtless dark in the glaring moonlight. The twins rounded the bend to behold it, and we ran forward towards the light as fast as our legs would carry us. My eyes watered weakly and I blinked to get used to the brightness. The opening got brighter and brighter as we neared it, until it was as big as my body and brightness seared my eyeballs even through my eyelids. I wavered at the edge of a precipice suddenly, and tried to look down. Od and Yul came up behind me, silent as fish.

'How are we getting down?' Yul asked.

I looked down the massive slope. It fell away towards the dry river bed, perhaps thirty feet below. The way down was smooth, smoothed, no doubt by the flow of water from the drain and the river in the last century. I thought bitterly, not for the first time, of the Life planet Cerulone. The astronauts drinking, working, walking on streets, raising their children healthy and safe. Did they think about us? Did it weigh on their consciences, what they had done to us? I sat down tiredly, dangling my legs over the fall. We would have to figure out how to get down without breaking every bone in our bodies. The Milky Way glared at me from above in its full splendour. It must have been a little past midnight, judging by the Evening star. It was humbling and hard to imagine that each of those faraway twinkling balls of light were stars and planets of their own, larger than we could comprehend; and they would live and die unaware and uncaring of us. I did not know how we were to climb down. My head was empty and my mood was deteriorating.

'I need water,' I said as Yul sat down beside me.

We drank in silence, full of heartbreak, joy and hunger. It was our last day by ourselves in the desert. Twenty kilometers from here was the Old World settlement of Nel'min Nos and the children. We finished the last of our water, each man drinking more than his ration, a little less than he needed. Looking back, the journey we had undertaken seemed like a dream clouded by thirst. Every person I had ever known in my life was dead but for the twins. It was all I could do to save their children. I thanked whatever emotions had grasped me in the desert with Jordan when I decided against curling up to die. My heart beat painfully as I thought of Jordan, the only man I had ever admired, like a son would a father.

'We have to start now. We have to get out of the Baxter perimeter,' Od said in his forever patient voice. He was all I had left. My childhood protector, and the two of them my best friends. Overcome by emotion, I turned to tell them so, accidentally banging into Yul and nearly sending him cascading down the silt to the riverbed

'What the hell do you think you're doing!' Yul shouted.

'Sorry, sorry.' I turned away. Yul dusted himself down, and wiggled to a less precarious position. Od said nothing. He lifted himself up wordlessly.

'We're starting now,' he announced, scanning the thirty foot drop carefully.