Sand and Shadow

by Laurisa White Reyes

  R. Herrera: And…?

  M. Whitlock: And take them out.

  Scott remained unconscious for another two hours while Dema fussed over him like a mother hen, which set Adán’s nerves on edge.

  “He’ll be fine,” he said finally, pulling Dema away from Scott by the elbow. “We have more important things to worry about than Dryker’s headache.”

  Dema did not attempt to pull her arm from Adán’s grasp, and her voice was not unkind. “Adán, we need to rendezvous with the Ensign. Scott is our Commander for a reason. He’s the only one of us who knows how to get this shuttle off the ground.”

  Adán turned to Jonah. “Do you think you can figure it out? Once it’s in the air, we can program the destination and let the shuttle fly itself.”

  Jonah stared at him for what felt like an eternity, and Adán wondered if he had processed anything he’d just said.

  Finally, Jonah gave a slow nod. “Yeah,” he stammered. “Yeah, I can drive this tank. I just need to read through the, uh, instructions.”

  “How long do you need?”

  Jonah snatched a tablet from the table and started scanning through pages. The tense anxiety on his face did nothing to reassure Adán, but what choice did they have? Unless Scott woke up soon, they would have to fly the shuttle without him.

  “Two, three hours maybe?”

  Dema guffawed. “This isn’t like assembling a Lego model, Jonah.”

  “Give him a break, Dema,” said Adán. “He did have preliminary training in the navigation systems.”

  “He was a backup, Adán! Just because he can read a map doesn’t mean he can take a 50-ton spacecraft into the air!”

  “I can do it,” said Jonah, with more confidence than he had a moment earlier.

  “Good,” said Adán. “Get into the cockpit and get started. Let me know when you’re ready to go.”

  “All right,” said Jonah, nodding again. “All right.” Once he was in the cockpit, he shut the hatch behind him.

  On the cot, Scott moaned.

  Dema was at his side in a heartbeat. “Maybe he’s coming around,” she said. “Scott? Scott, can you hear me?”

  Scott’s eyelids flitted, struggling to open. He moaned again and raised a hand to his bandaged head. “No,” he said. “No...no.”

  “How is he?” asked Adán. “Is he conscious?”

  “Yes,” Dema said, “but he’s really agitated.”

  Scott’s moaning grew louder. He grabbed at his bandages, his fingers scraping at his hair and skin as well as the gauze. Dema grabbed his wrist and tried to force his arm back to the cot.

  “Shhh, Scott. It’s okay. You’re okay.”

  But it was as if he couldn’t hear her, and he was too strong for her. Then suddenly, Scott’s body went rigid. His back arched, and his fingers splayed out like ten stiff prongs.

  “What is it?” asked Adán.

  “He’s seizing,” said Dema. “Help me keep him from falling off.”

  Adán hurried to her side, bracing his arms against the side of the cot. Scott’s body stiffened even more. His head tipped back, and his eyelids opened and closed rapidly.

  “Scott!” shouted Dema. “Scott!”

  And then it was over. Scott’s body went suddenly limp. Dema hurriedly rolled the commander onto his side and swept a finger through his mouth. She let out a relieved breath, casting Adán a reassuring glance. “His airway is clear,” she said.

  In the next moment, the shuttle jerked so violently, Dema and Adán were thrown against the far wall. Adán slid to the floor, hitting his knees with a painful thud. Dema managed to stay upright by holding tight to the edge of a table. Scott’s cot had been upturned, spilling the unconscious commander to the floor.

  “No!” Dema hurled the word like a weapon. “No, not again! Not now!”

  The shuttle shook again, rattling like some cheap aluminum soda can being kicked through the street. The shaking was so rough, Adán feared the very seams of the ship might burst apart.

  The cockpit door slid open. “What the hell’s going on?” demanded Jonah.

  Just then something slammed against the side of the shuttle. The impact raised its port side several feet before it dropped back down again with a tremendous shudder. Then there was another impact, just as hard, and another. Each collision sent Adán, Dema, and Jonah bouncing around the common room like rag dolls, hitting walls, floor, tables, and each other. Scott’s limp body became wedged between a table and the wall, his arms and legs bent at unnatural angles.

  “We have to do something!” shouted Dema to Adán. “You said this—thing—is coming from the shuttle.”

  “I think it’s using our own recorded selves against us!”

  “Then turn it off! Shut down the archives, the holo system, anything that might be behind this!”

  Adán made his way, not without difficulty, to the large screen in the common room and its keyboard. He’d mainly used the shuttle’s computer from the cockpit, but it was all interconnected. He typed in the key that Tink had given him to access the system, but unlike all the times before, he couldn’t get past the NASA logo.

  He tried again, but the logo was replaced with a red ‘Restricted’ screen, the first time he’d been confronted with it.

  “I can’t get in!” said Adán in frustration. “It’s like it knows what we’re trying to do.”

  The shuttle continued to rock and quake. Dema and Adán grabbed each other’s hands in a firm grip. With her free hand, Dema managed to take hold of the outer hatch’s handle. “Then we have to get out of here!”

  “What?” Adán couldn’t believe Dema said what she had. He’d seen what that thing out there could do. “No! We need to reach New Earth!” He called out to Jonah. “Get this ship off the ground—now!”

  Jonah said nothing but groped his way back into the cockpit, leaving the door open this time, and strapped himself into the pilot’s chair. From where he was in the common room, Adán saw the control panel light up and felt the hum of the shuttle’s engine come to life.

  “I’m starting the ignition system,” Jonah called from the cockpit, “but I’ve got to warm up the thrusters. It’ll take a few minutes.”

  “We don’t have a few minutes!” shouted Adán.

  The shuttle began to move forward, the momentum slowly building. Adán scrambled to a bench and sat down on it. Dema, however, dropped to her knees beside Scott.

  “Adán, help me get him back onto the cot and get him secured!”

  Adán slid off the bench and grabbed hold of Scott under his arms. Unconscious, Scott was two hundred pounds of dead weight. Adán strained as he slid him out from beneath the table all the while trying to keep his footing as the shuttle moved forward.

  Together Dema and Adán managed to wrangle Scott back onto his cot before the shuttle was hit by yet another concussive force, and the impacts kept coming. The shuttle walls creaked from the stress. Then there was a terrible cracking noise below them, and the nose end of the shuttle dropped, smashing into the ground with a crushing blow and shifting the entire shuttle forward at a steep angle. Dema was thrown against the forward wall. Adán landed on top of her, crushing her beneath his body. As he struggled to lift himself off her, he knew at once damage had been done. Dema wrapped her arm protectively against her ribcage, and her eyes were squeezed shut in pain.

  “Dema! I’m sorry. I couldn’t help it. What’s wrong?”

  “My ribs,” she managed to say through several weak, shallow breaths. “I think a couple are bruised. Nothing broken, thank God.”

  Adán peered into the cockpit. All he could see through the window was the ground, now only a few feet away.

  “The front landing wheel is gone!” Jonah shouted back at them. “The nose is in the dirt! We can’t fly like this!”

  But whatever had done this wasn’t finished with them yet. The next series of collisions pushed the shuttle off balance, tipping it sideways. The massive structure rolled onto its side, its occupants r
olling helplessly with it. There was a deafening pop as the starboard wing broke away. Dema cried out in pain as she landed on top of the row of cabinets. Jonah was now suspended from the pilot’s chair, several feet in the air. Adán landed in a heap with Scott, the cot now dashed to pieces beneath them.

  Scott sputtered, blinking his eyes open. He coughed. “Wh—what’s going on?” he said feebly. Adán reached for him, futilely trying to hold him in place.

  “Just find something to hang on to!”

  Scott’s eyes widened, but he obeyed, wrapping his trembling hands around the table leg jutting out horizontally above him.

  The shuttle lurched violently. Powerful tremors shook through the hull, the shuttle jerking and rattling all around them.

  “We’re moving! But in the wrong direction!” said Dema.

  “You guys need to come here—now!” called Jonah.

  Grasping onto table legs and cabinet holds, Dema and Adán scrambled as best they could to the cockpit. Staying upright was difficult with the movement of the shuttle, but they managed to peer through the door. Outside the windshield was a blur of orange sand. From their vantage point, the ground looked as though it were rushing by them like a raging river. Yet it wasn’t coming at them, Adán realized. The shuttle was moving across it—sideways. The monster was pushing them across the desert.

  “The canyon,” Adán said, hardly believing what he was seeing. “The monster is pushing us toward the canyon.”

  They all watched in horror, feeling helpless to stop it.

  “It doesn’t want us to rendezvous with New Earth,” said Adán, the reality of their situation sinking in. Jonah unhitched his restraint, and the three of them tumbled back into the common room.

  “But why?” said Dema. “What does this thing want with us?”

  Jonah gestured toward the lab, its door torn from its track and now on the floor along with them. “It wants us all dead. Like God and Gomorrah.”

  “You’re right, Dema. We have to get out,” said Adán. “If we can get away from the shuttle, draw its attention toward us, maybe we can fight it.”

  “Fight something we can’t see?” asked Dema.

  “There’s no fighting this thing!” said Jonah. “It wants to destroy us. It’s going to push us into the canyon. We can’t stop it.”

  Adán considered their options. There were so few. “I could access the hardware somehow,” he suggested. “Damage it. Destroy it.”

  Dema grabbed his arm, a desperate urgency in her eyes. “We don’t have time.”

  Scott coughed again. He sounded hoarse and raspy, and his breaths came with a struggle. Adán wondered how badly Scott had been injured being thrown about while unconscious.

  “What are you guys talking about? What’s happening?” Scott asked.

  “Without the shuttle,” said Dema, “how will we get to the colony?”

  “We’ll have to take the rovers,” said Adán.

  “Did Tink find a pass through the mountains?” Dema asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Even if he did, it’s too far. We’ll never make it.”

  “Yes, we will,” said Jonah, a big grin spreading across his face. “They’re solar-powered, so we’ve got unlimited juice. And there aren’t seven of us anymore, only four. Two per rover. We’ll get as far as we can and then comm the Ensign and tell them to send someone to meet us.”

  He glanced from Adán to Dema and back again as if waiting for their enthusiastic response. He didn’t get it. “We’ve at least got to try!”

  “What about the cargo?” Dema glanced toward the lab where the embryos, the future of the human race, still waited. “What about them? Without them, we’re nothing.”

  Dema looked up at Adán, pleading. Her eyes tore a hole through his soul. There was barely enough room for all of them on the rovers, how could they transport the cases too?

  “We’ll find a way,” he said, not entirely sure of himself. “Somehow, we’ll find a way. Okay. Jonah,” Adán added, “we have to get to the rovers.”

  “How can we do that when this thing is moving?!”

  “Both rovers were left outside after we lost Tink. You and Dema have to get out and distract—whatever it is—long enough for you to retrieve them. I’ll get to the lab and grab whatever I can of the cargo.” He looked at Dema. “I can’t save them all. You know that, right?”

  She nodded, though her eyes were full of doubt and fear. Suddenly, the shuttle lurched forward. The rear of it raised into the air and then dropped violently, hitting the ground with a horrible shudder. Dema cried out from pain, clutching a table leg. Adán was thrown across the length of the common room when he came down and landed hard against the cabinets. He lay flat on the floor, his heart thumping so hard he felt as though it might explode.

  “Adán!” Dema cried.

  The shuttle righted itself, so that the floor of the common room was below them again.

  A sharp jolt threw Adán to the floor. Dema collided with the edge of a table. Suddenly, the nose of the shuttle rose into the air. The floor tilted, and Adán slid on his back, crashing into Jonah and pinning him against the wall. Then the shuttle fell back again, the entire vehicle shuddering as it slammed into the ground. Adán felt the vibration in his bones, and he bit the edge of his tongue. His mouth filled with the coppery taste of blood.

  “It knows we’re in here!” hissed Scott who had braced himself in the cockpit doorway. “It’s trying to get in!”

  “It’s okay, Scott,” said Adán.

  “Don’t you get it? We can’t hide from it. It’ll tear this shuttle to pieces! We’re trapped in here!”

  A loud thump sounded against the side of the ship, and a low creaking, the shuttle’s frame under stress. The thump sounded again and again.

  “This is my fault!” said Scott. “You said I was the mole. I thought it must be someone else, but what if it is me? What if that thing is using my brain to hurt us?”

  Regret climbed up Adán’s throat. “No, Dryker! Not you. Not only you!”

  “I’m the commander. I’m supposed to protect the ship. Protect the mission!” Scott’s eyes were wild with fear. “After I woke up, and I realized what had happened, I used the Quarters terminal to access the archives. What I found—it was wrong. What they did to us was wrong!”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” said Dema.

  “It was classified,” said Scott. “But it shouldn’t have been. I disabled the restrictions, used the patches to try and reconnect to the shuttle—to stop it. I was going to tell you, but then Fess died, and Tink. Things have gotten out of control!”

  Scott’s expression twisted in mental agony. “We’ve gotta get outa here!” he shouted. “We’re sitting ducks! Out there, at least we got a chance!”

  “That’s exactly what we’re trying to do,” said Adán with growing concern about Scott’s deteriorating mental state. “Jonah and Dema are going for the rovers. I’m going to grab as many of the zygotes as possible, and we’re going to make a run for it, get as far away as we can.”

  “But. . .but how?”

  Adán cast glances between Jonah and Dema. “We haven’t quite figured that out yet. We have to distract it somehow.”

  A strange calm came over Scott. He winced as he pulled himself with effort to his feet. “Someone’s got to distract it,” he muttered. “Get to the rovers.”

  Scott turned to look at Dema. “There isn’t space for all of us,” he said, taking her by the shoulders. “You’ve got to save them. I couldn’t tell you before. I was under orders not to. But the baby, our baby, is there—somewhere.” He blinked back tears. “Like you said, we’re nothing. They are all that matters.”

  Then suddenly, Scott let go of Dema and lunged for the hatch.

  “Scott, no!” Dema reached for Scott as he skidded past her but failed to find purchase.

  Scott grasped the hatch’s handle with both hands and gave the door a violent shove. He turned to Dema one last time.


  “I’m sorry,” he said, then flung himself outside.

  Adán had managed to roll away from Jonah, and he and Dema scrambled to the open hatch. Sand attacked them with the force of a tornado, but they could see the figure of Scott Dryker running.

  All of a sudden, what could only be described as a hand, though it was nothing but sand and wind, snatched Scott right off the ground. They heard him scream as the hand held him by every limb, pulling him taut like a little toy. All at once, his shoulders and hips ruptured, his arms and legs ripping free from his torso. Still alive, Scott’s screams took on a gurgling, gut squealing quality. Blood gushed from his mutilated body. Streaks of crimson and bits of limbs swirled around him with the sand, creating a red cyclone. Scott’s mass shredded before their eyes, the sand stripping the flesh from his bones and pulverizing what was left of him until Scott was one with the storm. No piece of him remained that was larger than a grain of sand.

  “Nooo,” Dema whimpered, her hand covering her mouth. Tears sprung from her eyes, and she turned away.

  Adán enveloped her in his arms. “Dema, there’s no time. The storm—”

  And just as it had so many times before, as it had taken each life, the storm abruptly ceased. The winds stopped churning and the sand rained to the ground. Everything fell deathly still.

  For a moment, Adán held his breath, not quite believing that this sudden respite had actually come, but how long would it last?

  “It’s gone,” said Jonah, with an almost jubilant laugh. “It’s gone! It was Scott! He’s gone and so is the monster.”

  “We don’t know that,” said Adán.

  “Yes, we do. We’re safe now.”

  “No. Scott’s mind, all our minds are still here in the ship. It’s just—it’s just resting. Jonah, Dema—go now. Get the rovers. I’ll meet you outside once I get the cargo.”

  “But we’re safe now,” repeated Jonah.

  Dema cut in. “No, Jonah! We’re not safe. We will never be safe until we get those embryos to New Earth. They are the entire future of our species. Now, do what Adán says and get the rover!”

  “But—” said Jonah.