Sand: Omnibus Edition by hugh howey

Author:hugh howey
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781494904487
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Published: 2014-01-04T00:00:00+00:00

30 • Into the Starry Night

Palmer

There was no sun waiting on Palmer’s arrival. No people or encampments. Just the vast and jeweled clear desert sky.

Small gulps of that sky passed through Palmer’s sand-specked lips and filled his desperate lungs. He lay on his back, gasping, the sand collecting against his side and filling his windward ear and his hair as he breathed in the loud, laborious, grateful way a newborn does.

His friend Hap lay lifeless beside him, partly submerged in the sand. Somewhere, a cayote howled at this sudden scent, and the wind skittered across the dunes with the sound of a thousand snakes flicking their tongues.

Palmer scraped the sand off his tongue using his teeth. He spat out the grit and with it precious fluid. He turned to Hap, whose shoulder and knee were out of the dune. A boot as well, but not in the right place. Hap’s canteen strap could be seen on his shoulder. Exhausted but mad with thirst, Palmer slid his hand into the sand and floated Hap up the rest of the way. His visor beeped with a battery alarm. His suit was nearly dead.

He reached for the canteen, saw that it was tangled, and pulled out his bloodstained dive knife. He cut the strap. A quarter full. He was too weak to ration and took great gulps. The water burned his parched lips. His stomach churned, was startled to have something to do. Palmer twisted the cap on and sat with his back to the wind, studying his dead friend.

It wasn’t the canteen strap that’d been tangled, he saw. It was Hap’s body. Palmer covered his mouth. The grumbling in his stomach grew worse, and he feared he might lose what little fluid he had just taken in. Hap’s leg was twisted beneath him. Where the thigh meets the pelvis was torn the wrong way. An arm was shattered, white bone pointing up at the stars. Palmer tried to make sense of this. He had seen bodies snared in the sand before, had seen them trapped in silent and peaceful repose. This was not that. This was a life that had met a violent end. His brain whirled as the clues fell together. His homing beacon was in a mesh pouch on Hap’s thigh. Palmer had found his friend a hundred meters down, right beneath the dip in that great bowl Brock’s men had dug, right where their dive had begun. Hap had made it back after all.

Maybe the walls of that strange shaft had crushed him. Maybe Hap had gotten back too late, right as they’d given up on them both, and when they released the held-back sand, the walls had pushed in violently around him. But no, there would be damage everywhere. It would be even. Hap had been hit on that side, there. A fall. A great fall.

It was the visor that told the story. Hap’s visor was gone. The visor would have a recording of his dive. Of Danvar. Of the location of every building, maybe even the streets below, every block of that buried legend.

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