Neon Sands

by Adam J. Smith

“From California.”

  “To the New York island – wherever it may be now.”

  “Shush. From the redwood forest.”

  “To the Gulf Stream waters.”

  “This land was made for you and me,” they sang in unison.

  “I don’t remember the rest,” said Calix, rubbing his finger along the top of bottle.

  “We sang that song so much you ain’t never forgetting it.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Close your eyes.” Annora leaned back, eyes towards the sky.

  Calix turned towards her and shook his head. The one person he trusted – the one person he loved even – who made simple existence even bearable, was her. No one else would get him to utter a single syllable of song. He shook his head again as a smile brightened her face, and closed his eyes. Saw Galen with the firelight flickering orange in the reflection of his guitar. Kirillion swaying next to him. He focused on Kirillion’s face, absently singing along with him, hearing him in his mind and Annora outside of it; her sweet singing and Kirillion’s drawl, and his own dry barrelling tone.

  “As I was walking, that ribbon of highway, I saw above me, that endless skyway,” they sang. “I saw below me, that golden valley; this land was made for you and me.” Calix stretched his back, prising pain from his midsection but using it, grimacing, bringing the full force of his memory to Kirillion’s singing voice, their eyes locked. “I’ve roamed and rambled, and followed my footsteps, to the sparkling sands, of her diamond deserts.”

  The lingering ghost in his blood summoned ghosts of its own. Living, vivid, ghosts. He could almost smell Kirillion’s alcohol-free, sweet breath. “And all around me, a voice was sounding; this land was made for you and me.” He could almost hear the crackle of burning deadwood. “When the sun came shining, and I was strolling, and the wheat fields waving, and the dust clouds rolling.” He could almost feel the heat, with the firelight in Kirillion’s grin.

  “As the fog was lifting, a voice was chanting; this land was made for you and me.” Kirillion’s arms seemed to stretch around the whole group, holding Herm, Delia, Jayan and Deven in his embrace as they swayed back and forth. “As I went walking, I saw a sign there, and on the sign, it said ‘No Trespassing.” And then he held Annora, close, her face buried under his armpit. “But on the other side, it didn’t say nothing; that side was made for you and me.”

  Kirillion grinned wider now, and in Calix’s mind those eyes bore into him as they swayed left and right, left and right, with Annora in his embrace. “In the shadow of the steeple, I saw my people, by the relief office, I seen my people.” Kirillion offered Annora now, her twelve-year-old self, effortlessly holding her out. “As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking, is this land made for you and me?” And she sang along with the biggest smile on her face.

  He could hear her voice in the now pulling him back. “Nobody living, can ever stop me, as I go walking, that freedom highway.” But in the then she was gasping, mouth open, legs kicking in the fire as Kirillion held her tight at arm’s length. “Nobody living, can ever make me turn back, this land was made for you and me.”

  Calix wheezed, bolted upright and heaved over the edge of the crawler.

  “Damn, are you alright?” asked Annora, leaning forward and putting an arm around him.

  Glutinous saliva and acidic bile dribbled to the ground below. Calix turned his head away and spat, wiping his mouth. She squeezed his shoulder.

  “Don’t do that,” he shrugged, and Annora withdrew.

  Calix tipped the bottle to his mouth and drank the rest of the spiked apple juice. Looking to his left, he saw Annora was upset – her face stony and her eyes piercing the middle distance.

  “Do you know why I love you?” he asked.

  She huffed.

  “You don’t run off or slam doors; you’ve always looked to make amends straight away.”

  She tipped her drink to her lips.

  Calix continued: “Even if it’s meant the silent treatment, you’ve still stuck around, making me feel guilty.”

  She punched him lightly on the arm. “Where else could I go?”

  “Nowhere – you’re stuck with me,” he said, punching back. He sighed, was about to throw his empty bottle out to the sand but caught himself. Waste not, want not, said Kirillion in his mind. “Fuck off. Not you.”

  “Still feeling some after affects eh?”

  “Maybe. I just don’t know what to make of it. Of...” he rubbed his side, not because he had to. “...Kirillion... us.”

  It was Annora’s turn to sigh. She couldn’t delay the topic any longer, thought Calix.

  “If it was anyone else with that story I’d strike it up to the ghost. But I do vaguely remember you that day. You came down from the watchtower. I... I must’ve grabbed you for some reason because I think you were shaking. You said... you saw someone jump? Was that it?”

  “You’d got new shoes. I didn’t even remember that bit ‘til just now. I said, ‘I saw a boy fall down the shaft’ and started to cry.”

  “That’s right.” She leaned into Calix. He wrapped an arm around. “If Zi was killed, then who killed him?”

  “If not Kirillion, than who else? He was the one calling for help before I saw Ziyad fall.”

  “Maybe he was calling because Zi had threatened to jump?”

  “Didn’t sound like that did it? Besides,” a body lunged out into the shaft from what looked like level three and hit the opposite wall head first before spiralling down to the bottom where it landed in a confusion of twisted limbs. “He was thrown.”

  “Well, if it was anyone else I wouldn’t believe them. But I believe you.” She kissed him on the cheek and stood up to leave. “We grew up together and you’re like a brother to me – or so I thought.”

  “So I thought too.”

  “We need our sleep.”

  ***

  Annora slept fitfully that night. The white noise of the air condenser was normally an insistent lullaby that droned quietly above her, rocking her to sleep. Tonight it was a constant ricochet in her dreams, interrupting them, like some kind of flying machine doing cartwheels around the crawler; or something digging through the ground and breaking the surface right next to her. Despite this, memories of acclimatisation camps floated to the brim of her consciousness; wondering about the waste of wood being burned, so-called deadwood; wondering how anything had ever grown out here, as she let the sand tumble between her fingers; wondering how Galen made the strings for his guitar from the guts of a pig; wondering how dangerous was it, really, travelling out here? Living was another matter. Without a portable air condenser there’d be no water. Without the supplies from Sanctum there’d be no food. Without Sanctum there’d be no place to call home, no people to call friends.

  In her dreams, Kirillion’s beard was long, as though he himself had been wandering the sands without scissors to cut it, for months. The normally white streaks were red. His normally pale grey eyes were red. His hands were red, reaching out for Calix, who was twenty, then fifteen, then twelve, and now seven. Even as he spoke the words “I’d never hurt a hair on your head,” his hands were smothering Calix’s mouth.

  Sweat beaded on Annora’s brow and her clothes clung to her as she turned. She murmured in her sleep; Caia even woke once, sleeping in the adjacent alcove, and heard Annora saying “No, no,” quietly. She just turned over, calling “Keep it down, Annie,” and falling immediately back to sleep.

  Those words startled Annora to consciousness, her brow and cheeks hot to touch. Her heart palpitated. She needed water. She needed a shower. To be back home. She sat up and reached for her bottle and realised it was empty, so she stood groggily, using her hands to fumble along the wall in darkness. Caia snored to her left. She passed Ardelia further down on her right, and then was out in the corridor leading to the dayroom and facilities. She flicked a switch and the light above the water outlet came on.

  She filled her bottle and drank, and then cupped s
ome water in her hands to wash her face, relishing the instant cooling. After wetting her hands again, she rubbed her neck and shoulders, then went to check on Calix.

  He was asleep, no sign of fresh vomit. The extra cup or two of juice he’d had would help him sleep through, maybe even dull his pain a while. What that meant for his dreams, she didn’t know – hopefully he’ll be so far under that the faint murmurings of the ghost, the pull of his subconscious, wouldn’t be enough to challenge his tiredness.

  She listened to his breathing. The ghost had a way of bringing up old memories – the revelations about Ziyad were outlandish, but the more she focused in on that time, the more she feels sure that there had been something odd, something Calix had said about what he saw. And he had seen something – he hadn’t been shaking, coming out of that lift, for nothing.

  As for ‘us’: “What can of worms are we opening, Cal?” she whispered before turning back.

  Beyond the dayroom a light shone from beneath the door to the forward cabin. Walker would be inside; he usually fell asleep in one of the chairs with his legs propped up on another, arms hanging limp to the floor. If daybreak didn’t wake him, it was usually one of the crew giving his chair a good kick as they came in to begin the day’s work. Walker’s face would be slack with sleep, Barrick’s personal moonshine stash raided and a half-empty bottle on the floor. Maybe Barrick would also be present, each of them kicking it back and shooting the shit until someone relented and the snores began.

  The door was closed but the sound of voices came through, or under, drawing Annora in. Barefoot, she approached silently – since Barrick wasn’t in his alcove next to Calix, she expected to discover him in the forward cabin along with Walker, but the voice she heard was neither of them. “... the place. Certainly one of interest,” said an unmistakable Linwood. “Looks promising, but we’ve had too many false flags over the years. Scan, mark, dig, and send me the data.”

  “What about the crew? Calix fucked up his ribs so he’s out of action for a while, at least where digging’s concerned. There’s a lot of mysterious artefacts out here, damn even I don’t know what half the readings are. I’d like everyone else involved, directly.”

  “What happened to Cal?”

  “Fell off the crawler doing repairs. We had to fix a nasty gash, fix up two broken ribs, give him ghost for the pain though that seems to have done more worse than good.”

  Linwood’s laugh came faintly through the door – he must’ve been tilting back in his chair on the other end of the call. “I bet the lowcase was pleased about that,” he said.

  What is with Linwood and lowcases?

  “Seems to’ve shook him up.”

  “Right. Well no time for that, signal will drop again soon. Just do what you gotta,” then Linwood coughed. When the fit ended, he continued. “Just do what you have to. Try and keep them away from anything too sensitive. If there’s anything too sensitive to be found. It might be dangerous.”

  “Okay, sir,” said Walker, followed by a rustling. Sir. Something about Walker saying ‘Sir’ was weird. He rarely showed deference. And what was that about ‘too sensitive’?

  Annora retreated from the door in case Walker decided to leave the forward cabin, and headed back to her alcove, her heart pounding. Too many odd things going on. Too much revelation and mystery and secrecy – it made her anxious, jittery to her fingertips. She just wanted to go back a couple days to when she thought she knew everything.

  “Night,” said Barrick from behind her.

  “Fuck!” she jumped. “What the...” she looked back to the dayroom and saw Barrick underlighting his face with his torch. He often slept here, but you could always hear him snoring from your own alcove. It hadn’t crossed her mind he’d just be sitting there in the dark, wide awake.

  “Sorry, couldn’t resist.”

  “Not funny.”

  “Catch any gossip?”

  “You what?”

  “Eavesdropping.”

  “Nope. Good night.”

  Work

  Finding fragments of history was easy. Just wait for the beep on the detector, turn on the blower, close your eyes against the swirling sands, and then open them to see what gift had been revealed. Analysing what it had once been was more difficult. The larger elements like the exterior of a blown out dome were easy to recognise; transparent and sticking out like shards of glass in skin. Smaller treasures were more difficult; metallic components like bent or warped piping and cogs that had once turned the great machines of the settlement; melted rubber frozen in pudding shapes; ruptured doors smashed in half and quarters; neon signs with part-broken letters that could never be renamed. It seemed as though everything that you would expect to find on the surface of a settlement now lay in shreds, ruined and drowned in sand; a puzzle waiting to be put back together. But what picture would it paint?

  Calix was forced to watch the action from the forward cabin, relaying instructions to the crew and directing the crawler to the next major detection, so that Ardelia could use the excavator. They left a canyon in their wake that, for now, had not relapsed back in on itself. Debris was scattered behind them, with anything useful pulled up inside the crawler on the lift inside its hollow belly and stored within the cargo bay. So far, not much had proven useful, just scrap that the salvage yard might be able to magic into something.

  “How goes it, Ann?” Calix asked into the microphone.

  It buzzed back, the whirring of the blower in the background. “Nothing exciting. You drinking water?”

  Calix sighed. “Yes, yes. Check in when you find something.” Looking out, watching the mini-whirlwinds and imagining what kind of graveyard this could turn out to be, he didn’t mind too much that he was stuck inside. “I should fall and break a rib more often,” he said.

  “Don’t get ideas,” said Walker.

  “I’ve already got my name on the next broken rib, Cal,” said Barrick.

  “We’ve been riding you easy so far,” said Caia. “Next time, you won’t get so many breaks.”

  “I can’t tell if that’s rhetorical or not,” said Annora.

  Calix envisaged Caia’s shrug of indifference, and smiled.

  “Since we’re all getting in on the action,” said Ardelia. “All’s fine up here, if a little hot.”

  “You should hit something soon,” said Calix. “Depth counter looks like it’s nearly there.”

  “Taking it slow, as always.”

  The strangest thing so far was that they hadn’t found any dead bodies. Calix was certain this was a graveyard; perhaps whatever blast destroyed this place had given fair warning, and people were able to escape. Or perhaps they had huddled together awaiting their fate and a stack of bones lay hidden, waiting to be exposed.

  Outside the forward window, speckled with red dust, the crew were spread out in an arc, and beyond them a mountain range peered above the various dunes. The same mountain range they had hit on previous excursions; the same one they would still be slowly arrowing for if they had not found something. On the last excursion, the U-turn had occurred at the base of a great cliff and Calix had been awed by its size. Where rock still ruled this planet, Calix was always awed; the way it rose defiantly and held its shape against the wind. At the base of this cliff, as he always did whenever he was confronted by rock, he thrust a finger into the sandstone about a centimetre deep and wrote FUCK THE SAND. It crumbled from his fingertip.

  He would gaze up the cliff-face and hope that whatever they were looking for was not on the other side. And not for the first time, wonder just what they were looking for. The way Linwood spoke, and even Kirillion on occasion, betrayed the agenda; an unspoken truth they all knew. They were searching for something specific – over the years Linwood’s agitation had grown beyond casting any pretence at scavenging. Even when they returned home with a great haul: seed packets for a variety of tomato they didn’t have; electronics that hadn’t burned beyond use; engines they could repurpose; Linwood would greet them, st
ick around for a while as they unloaded the cargo, and when it was all laid out, walk the aisles silently before retreating back to the watchtower. He used to take inventory as a matter of course before the celebrations in Sanctum could begin, with even Kirillion preferring to warm the stools in Mireille’s and wait until inspection was over. Now Kirillion greeted them first, with a smile and a drink, leaving Galen and his team to unload.

  Looking at the map on the monitor with its green and red markings, Calix zoomed out. Whole areas were tracked green, emanating from Sanctum with the smaller settlements dotted here and there. Like the mechanical tractors in the Agridome, they had been ploughing the sands, reaching further with each excursion. This crew had consistently been sent west, sometimes northerly, sometimes southerly. Other teams worked on the star-shape; the one that predominantly went south kept hitting a wall, just like them. Their ploughed track lines ended abruptly directly south, curving on the map like a frown. Herm, part of Tonita’s crew, had described it as the biggest sand dune you ever saw. “He called it a mountain of sand, taller than any mountain of rock he’d seen,” said Alden, relaying word of mouth. “So high he couldn’t see the top, and so wide there was no end to it. He called it a frozen tsunami, like in the disaster films, and moving towards it, it was as though it was actually moving towards them. Like it was gonna drown them.” Alden, who had never spent more than a day outside Sanctum, had snorted derision.

  “You spend your life in the workshop,” Calix had said, “and you get your knowledge about the outside world from those of us who actually go out there. If Herm says it, I believe him.”

  “Never said there was no truth in it,” said Alden on the defensive.

  Calix still hadn’t had the chance to ask Herm about it himself. He looked at that upside-down smile on the monitor and wondered; why isn’t Linwood sending us all there? Surely the greatest mystery is how can there be a mountain of sand that the wind hasn’t flattened?

  He looked up to the horizon again. Those mountains were dry and bare, every last grain blown from them. No way the southern sand mountain could be made of rock. If Linwood wasn’t exploring that, maybe he already knew what it was.