Scavenger: Evolution: (Sand Divers, Book One)

by Timothy C. Ward

  “Is that supposed to mean anything?” The older boy, Jeff, stared at Rush behind his black goggles. There was confidence in his rebellion. “All the divers worth anything left for Danvar weeks ago.”

  “It means,” Dixon said, “if something happens and you fall off this boat, they are the only ones who can stop you from drowning.” He grinned at Rush. “So ease up on the lip. Or they might find something to distract them. How long can you hold your breath?”

  The boys kept their tongues still and knelt beside Dixon like maybe they could be friends anyway. All three fixed their attention on the dunes straight ahead. Strong winds blew sand off the peaks, making a thicker dust screen to lower visibility of where the second shooter and his possible group of bandits had gone. Harder to aim, though, also.

  To his left, three of their group’s ships were already ascending the half valley. His ship was only three hundred meters or so behind.

  Rush’s eyes grew heavy. He scooted his knees up and rested his head on his arms, non-cast arm on top.

  Star rubbed his back with the remaining fingers on her left hand. “Good idea,” she said. “I think I’ll try and shut my eyes for a bit, too.”

  Worry and confusion over Avery and his weird radio kept Rush from nearing sleep. He looked at the panel Avery had stuffed it into. Should he ask Avery about it?

  “Where are we going?” the mother of the two kids asked behind him. “I don’t think this is safe anymore.”

  “This world isn’t safe,” Avery said. “Would you like to be dropped off here?”

  That stilled her tongue.

  Rush didn’t think he was serious, but he sounded it.

  Rush remembered a prior trip searching for Danvar. They’d come up from a dive and found their air tank supply gone and dive generator cut right out of the hull. Avery cursed and said if he caught the culprits he’d kill them. The false promise was a common phrase, but spit from Avery’s lips, Rush heard no falseness to the promise. He’d dropped the matter, and luckily for the bandits, they hadn’t found them. Over time, and whenever the memory came to mind, Rush told himself that Avery was just mad, and he tried not to hear the way Avery had said kill, like he’d done it before and had passed through that moral barrier without caring to look back.

  Stop thinking worst-case scenario.

  Avery was still his friend. He hoped for that moment of weakness to be as fleeting as the wind, just as he hoped that whatever secrets lay behind the strange technology would be answered with them remaining friends. The joining of the Old World with the new, after they’d been left alone to battle wind and sand for so long...it left him too distrusting to ask Avery outright.

  Why are they coming back now?

  The ship fell into a bored silence and Rush let his exhaustion close him within its heavy blanket.

  Rush bit into a hot dog as he strolled with the sidewalk traffic toward a skyline cut down the middle by an ocean horizon. This was his world. No bombs boxing him in from the east. This was the peace he had dreamt of since his dad first told him what the incessant pounding was in the sky.

  The face of a woman walking toward him chirped. As she passed him, it chirped again, then more and more as tiny boxes of her skin folded in and opened up. A bright white light escaped. Then the flaps of skin returned and she smiled as though nothing were wrong. A blue beam of light swirled around her pupils. She blinked. Brown eyes returned. She walked past.

  Then every pair of eyes walking toward him magnified pinpoint blue beams into his eyesight until he was blinded and scraping his knees on the sidewalk, clawing at his eyes to keep the blue beams from escaping him as well.

  “Rush, calm down!” Star’s hands grabbed his wrists and pushed them away from his face. “Stop it.”

  The sky’s light had descended into a pale gray, masked by the winds of sand and sun setting beyond the western mountains. The horizon-spanning maw of jagged peaks rose high in the shorter distance. They’d traveled a good clip while he was asleep. Only his bright yellow cast could be seen clearly in the haze of twilight—that and spots of Avery’s blood on it.

  Star had taken her goggles off. Blue tracers spun around her pupils. He jerked back and closed his eyes. She pulled him by the jaw to face her again. Green eyes, but only a blink away from glowing blue. “It’s okay, you were just dreaming.”

  In ways he didn’t understand, he wished that he hadn’t been. The bombs continued to punctuate their dominance along a horizon he dared not cross, and was also glad to flee from.

  They have their place and we have ours, his dad used to say. No one who goes after them comes back, so we live here, together, and free.

  Rush remembered a time when his dad had poured at least four canteens worth of water into the sand beside their hut in Shantytown. Cooled in the morning shade, his dad had sat with him and helped build their own great wall and city. He remembered the joy of their time passing like a grain in a gust of wind blowing across town, and the sadness when his dad stood up and left for work.

  “Hon, what are you thinking about?”

  In Star’s face he saw someone he loved that wasn’t beyond his reach. His dad had passed four years after their sand city’s construction, a sudden collapse in a roof he walked by at just the wrong moment. His mom had made it to his wedding day, but an awful sickness had withered her too far and she left him a few weeks later.

  “I’m thinking about you. My parents. This world. What I can do as one man when a random accident could take my father? And our son.”

  Six sarfers sailed in a line behind their ship, cutting a path wide enough in the ridge to catch wind, but not too far to lose their cover.

  He turned toward their path leading the pack northwest into the mountains. “I’m thinking of the sickness my mom got and didn’t pass on to anyone else. How it squeezed her strength one cough at a time until she was a husk of herself. Loving, but in that desire to love, unable to overcome the weight of our world. I wonder how much longer I’ll have you now that I’ve found you again.”

  She kissed his cheek and hugged him. “Please, Rush. Just enjoy that you have me again.”

  “I’m trying, Starlight. But how long before something beyond my ability to defend either takes your life or mine?”

  “Why are you thinking of these things right now?”

  “I never stop thinking of these things, love.”

  “And what good has all that thinking done you?”

  “If I could turn it off, I would.”

  Her lips brushed his ear. “I’ll turn it off later if we get a second.”

  The blond boy watching him made him force down his smile. He and his brother had also taken off their goggles. He didn’t look too young to guess what Star had just whispered, but he also didn’t appear upset by their happiness. He let out a grin of his own.

  “What’s your name?” Rush asked him.

  “Cool.”

  “It is not.”

  “Shut up, Jeff. Dad called me it so I’m claiming it.”

  “Whatever, Carson.”

  “Stop.” Cool lifted a fist and twisted to throw it at his older brother, but was stiff armed at the armpit.

  “Guys.” Dixon turned from his post watching the dim ridgeline, where sand billowed its mass into the already defeated sky. He shoved Jeff’s hand off Cool and stuck a finger in the older boy’s face. “The sooner you realize you two work better as a team, the sooner I’m going to forget that you might not be worth the trouble of training you to shoot.”

  The words sank into Jeff’s thoughts and calmed him down.

  Cool cocked his head at Dixon. “Train to shoot?”

  “Maybe. You two a team or adversaries?”

  “A team,” Cool said. “Definitely a team.” He wrapped an arm around his brother’s neck and fought to get him into a hug. “See?”

  “Get off.” Jeff playfully pushed him back. “We can be a team that doesn’t hug.”

  Cool kissed his hand, then snuck it up under his Jef
f’s arm and tapped his cheek. Jeff sucked in a breath as he seemed to plot revenge.

  “Guys?” Dixon caught their attention.

  Jeff backed down.

  Cool grinned at Rush. “So you’re a diver?”

  “Divemaster,” Dixon corrected.

  “Sorry, Divemaster.”

  “Yeah.”

  Avery glanced over his shoulder as he piloted their ship. “D.M. Stenson to you, if you hope to have him teach you as well.”

  Cool beamed. “Really? Wow. Can you imagine, Jeff? Sand diving under dunes, popping up on the other side and, bang bang, shooting bad guys.”

  “I only saw Dixon shooting back.” Jeff spoke loud enough for Avery to hear. “Do we have any other guns?”

  “Not yet,” Avery said. “But I hope to find a way around needing Dixon’s bullets in the short term. These bandits don’t realize I’ve been sailing these dunes for years. I’m sure they’re plenty lost from our tracks by now.”

  They weren’t the only ones. The sand dunes became smaller as they gave way to taller hills of tan dirt, thorned weeds, and gangly trees. This was the end of the sailers’ territory. Sand born dared not trek out into the hills and valleys that skirted the tallest rock in the land. The cliff dwellers that looked out over their territory from hidden caves were just as feared as the cannibals from the north.

  Avery grabbed the radio off the dash. “Everyone get ready. Steep decline.”

  He cut their sarfer down a slope to the left, avoiding an inlet of earth into the sand. Rush’s stomach lifted and a breeze blew through his hair as they picked up speed toward a shaded valley.

  And then came the end of the sand. Rush couldn’t see Avery’s map device, but he knew they were far from Denver.

  The sail stuffed in a heap at the ship’s stern fluttered and snapped in the wind. The mother of the two teens woke and wiped at her mouth, pushing up from the pillow her backpack was turned into for her. Viky watched him observing the mother, then returned to scratching a wire brush inside a hole in some kind of small engine part. One at a time, the sarfers behind them dipped down the slope and cut their snakelike path around moguls in the sand.

  “Careful,” Avery shouted into the radio, glancing back over his shoulder. “Slow down!”

  The third one failed to turn sharply enough and sent up a blown top of sand that hid their ship and fanned up into the air behind them. Then, right into the path of the fourth. The fifth veered hard right. The sixth, hard left. The third came out of the sandwash sliding sideways, tipping forward on its starboard.

  “Av.” Rush powered his suit and slipped his visor on, turning the pale twilight into a violet sky, blobs of red and green signifying the ship and its passengers, and the wayward ship, an orange slice within a sea of tan. That slice continued to lean the wrong way, flattening out. The slivers of green inside slid toward the front and held on where they could.

  Rush’s brain became a fist of pain and tension, but his connection to the sand around the tilting ship became as solid as the ground he stood on. He sent a hard wave sideways across the ship’s starboard hull, leading the front edge along the curve, carrying the ship until the stern touched down and the pilot regained control.

  The passengers on Rush’s ship cheered and he took the visor off, easing the squeeze between his temples like a breath of undirtied air. The fourth ship was still shaky in its navigating out of the sandwash’s interruption, but it would do fine. Rush sat down into Star’s almost catch, his head lacking proper authority over his frame as he thumped onto the bench. The power meter inside his visor read 3%. His stamina felt like a negative twelve.

  “Easy there.” Star helped him get the visor over his head, his cast hand struggling to fit under the band, and clicked off his suit. “Good job, hun, but we need you to rest.”

  Avery brought the ship around a northeastern beach of sand parallel to the mountain in a tree-cropped plain at the bottom of the valley. The sand was not deep enough to sail farther, even if the ship could climb the rising elevation of the mountain hills and rockfaces that surrounded them. Light glinted off the eyes of an owl perched atop a dead tree. Whooo-whooo, echoed up the valley. The owl took flight and coasted off to the west.

  Avery eased off the throttle and coasted to a stop. The sand and then dirt crunched as he dialed back the generator and let the earth tuck them in. The first of the trailing sarfers cut around the bend, its sail puffed full of air, digging their multihulls into a path overtop Avery’s single crevice in the sand.

  “Let’s get that suit off and charging.” Avery knelt in front of Rush, smiling. He looked him in the eye. “I’m glad to see you haven’t lost it, Pokey.”

  “I’m starting to wonder if you have. Where do we go from here? Does your back way involve mountain climbing?”

  “You’ll see.” He smiled and freed Rush’s cast arm out of the sleeve while Star tugged on the back of his suit.

  “Are we done with our ships? Those sarfers aren’t sailing out of here.”

  “We have a little walking to do, yes, but don’t worry. You’ll get your earth legs in no time.”

  “Is this your plan?” Rush asked. “What about the cliff dwellers?”

  “That brain of yours needs a break. We’re fine. We’ll pitch camp here for the night. You—all of us—need a recharge. We have a long hike ahead of us that I’d like to do in one stretch if possible.”

  “Is Danvar in the mountains?” Cool asked.

  “No idiot,” Jeff cut in. “It’s—”

  “It’s okay.” Avery stuck a calming hand out at the older brother. “His question makes sense. I just said we were going for a hike.” Then, to Cool, he said, “We are going to hike, but—” he pointed straight at him “—we aren’t going up.”

  With Cool and everyone else silenced in thought, Avery lifted the suit off Rush’s sticky legs, leaving him in his yellow-stained skivvies. The other women looked away long before, and the teens across from him searched the floor, embarrassed to see their future teacher so vulnerable.

  “I’ll tell everyone more about it when we get ready to leave in the morning.”

  The humid heat made Rush want to lie back and pack cool sand on his forehead. He was afraid to ask how long the hike was going to be. “You up to hunting a snake down for me?”

  Star rolled her eyes. “Just a snake?”

  “Okay, a moose.” That cheered her up. “Mind wandering all over the valley for a moose when a nice snake den would do just fine?” he asked Avery.

  “Sure thing, Rush.” Avery turned to Star. “He always volunteers me to find and clear out the snake dens.”

  “Funny.” Rush opened the story up to the crowd. “Avery screamed when his visor was blinking in and out. ‘No problem,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a hunch he’s close.’” Rush and Avery’s laughter paused the story. “Then not two seconds later I hear—” Rush screamed like a hawk.

  “My whole screen was filled with the S-shaped bodies,” Avery explained between chuckles. “Even the rattles that I didn’t hear until they were right in front of my face.”

  Av lifted a cord out from a hole in the center of the ship and plugged it into Rush’s suit. He folded it into a smooth square and set it down, then shot his hand out like a throat jab into the air. “I bolted, screaming like whatever might scare them back into their hole.” He shivered. “I can still hear the hiss-spit of venom that burned a hole right here.” He pointed at the small of his back. “I was this close to being snake food.”

  The group chuckled. The boys eased into their new company with smiles and relaxed their posture against the side of the boat.

  “So I might ask for someone else to help me with any snake dens.” Avery stood and observed the row of sarfers. “Better go tell the group our plans for tonight.”

  Rush looked as well. Only six sarfers. Maybe ten people per. Less than seventy souls made it out of Springston.

  Seventy. Out of nearly three thousand.

  Rush knew he should b
e hungry, but thinking of asking those people, from whom he’d taken more than he could give back, to help get him dinner, made him want to vomit into the sand until his insides made his meal for him.

  SCAVENGER: Blue Dawn

  Chapter 6

  Everyone but Star exited the ship, stretching their legs and then jumping down onto the packed sand. It cracked as they walked toward a semicircle of tree trunks between them and the rising of sand back into the desert. Rush wondered if the trees had been used before for a gathering of minds, maybe between Avery and whatever friends—from another world—he’d made in the past few years.

  Avery headed off a man with long, thin brown hair tucked under a faded purple hat. They talked. The man spotted Rush, and nodded. “Thank you!” Then he turned and ushered a group of eight toward the semicircle gathering. Half of them either waved or mouthed their thanks at Rush before filing in with the crowd. Two began lifting Avery’s shirt to dress his wound.

  “You’re a hero.” Star ran a hand through his sweat-drenched lower scalp, stroking knots out of his hair. “You’ve always been. I didn’t marry you so much for your dreams of finding Danvar. I didn’t realize how much those might have been hard for me, with the time it took from us. And I guess I let that resentment cloud my memory of the man and heart I wanted in my life.”

  “I let resentment take a hold of me as well.”

  “Honey, this isn’t about you right now. Just let me talk.”

  “Okay.”

  “I see the pain in your eyes over what happened in Springston. I saw the same guilty reflection the night Fish died.”

  “Star, I know.”

  She tugged on his hair. “Are you listening?”

  “Sorry.” He chuckled. “I didn’t realize my hearing improved by yanking my hair.”

  “Well, now you know. And I’m glad to remind you any time you forget.”

  He laughed. “I bet you will.”

  She twirled a shoulder length lock around her finger. “The long hair is nice though. Needs trimmed, but it’s nice.”

  “Did you cut your hair for me?”