Sand Red

32

Sunburn. The price for being a fool is sunburn. I felt like I should have noted it down because of all the times this has happened to me. I'm an idiot, and even a million lessons could not teach me this the hard way.

Thanks to sleeping late (aka thanks to goddamn Syenin), I woke to the Sun high in the sky and my cheek burnt to god damn crisp. I managed to lift myself using my good side and sat with sleep-filled eyes on the hot sand. Aida and Yul were asleep peacefully and Syenin lay sprawled out on the sand, his nose in the wind, sleeping like teenagers do.

'Get up.' I nudged his head with my foot. I felt not the slightest bit of empathy for him at the moment. I crawled to Yul. 'Yul!' I shook him awake.

The two of them sat up, itching their faces, rubbing their eyes.

'Shit,' Yul said as his burnt face hit him.

I looked at Syenin scathingly. He didn't have any burns and he looked normal as ever, probably because his skin was so dark. I had always envied the dark skinned Africans. It was an advantage in the desert world we had been born in.

'How bad is it?' Yul asked. From what I could see, it was positively woeful. 'It's alright,' I told him.

'Yours looks bad.'

'So, it does,' I muttered darkly. 'Wake her up,' I said, readying myself to stand. 'We've got to start soon.'

Yul looked at Aida hesitantly. 'Just do it before the burns are worse,' I said flatly.

I lifted myself to my knees and stood painfully. My head spun from hunger and my knees felt weak.

'We need to eat today,' I said to no one in particular.

'Hunt something soon,' Yul replied. Our only meal in days had been what the Reds fed us. Everybody in the New World is starved to begin with, and the kind of diet we have been on since we set out from the camp is now bordering on dangerous.

'People in the Old World ate three meals in a day,' Syenin said wistfully.

'Shut up,' I said.

I knew I was being callous, but the pain and weakness of the past week coupled with the new sunburn was not doing wonders for my mood.

We were packed and ready in less than a minute and the skeletal frame of the vehicle, coloured patched ochre yellow like the sand, still standing a few metres off improved my mood to an extent. I would not have to footslog today. I loved cars.

It looked expensive. It was open to the elements in a steel frame painted red and ochre yellow to blend into the desert, built of scrap and poorly hammered nails, for who could produce nuts and bolts in these times? The wheels looked like Silicon 939, covered in stonecrusher scabbards to plough through the Redthorn without bursting, which works quite satisfactorily on sand. The poor Reds. It was worth quite a bit of water.

'We could just have slept under this,' Yul said.

'You too?' I said scathingly. 'Live in the present, goddamnit.'

He ignored me. 'We'll take the last ration in the car.'

There were roads in the Old World. Paths made purely for vehicles to ply on. They were built of cement and people weren't allowed to walk on them. The idea was mad.

'You have the device safe?' I asked Yul.

'Slept with it under my shirt.'

We were going home. My spirits lifted as I thought of the wealth of water that awaited us at camp. 'Do we have enough fuel to get back to camp?'