An Unforgiving Desert – Chapter 11

It really sucks being a side sleeper and having one side of my body a painful mess. I pass out for an hour or two at a time, try to roll over, stop myself, grimace at the pain, stretch, and fall back to sleep. It’s better than nothing.

The howling of the wind dies down during our rest period. I have no idea if it’s night or day here. There’s one small window and it’s dark, but that could just be the storm. Kalvin sleeps like the dead, and blessedly, doesn’t snore. The only bonus to this situation.

When I groan and roll over to my back to stare at the ceiling, Kalvin appears above me with painkillers and the other half of my bottle of water.

“Here. I think you need these.”

I push his hand away. “I’ll be fine. Save them for an actual emergency.”

“You spent most of the night whimpering in your sleep. Take them.” His voice is gentle, and my body flushes with embarrassment. No one is supposed to see me weak — under any circumstances.

I take the pills and throw them down with some water. Fine. I’m stubborn, but I’m not a martyr like Vivian.

“So, it looks like dawn will be in about an hour,” Kalvin says, accessing the pod’s system. “And from the sound of things, the storm is almost over.”

I stretch out my neck and crack my back. “Any thoughts on our next move?” My body aches like I did ten cardio workouts yesterday. I rise from my seat and begin a stretching routine to work out the kinks. Closing my eyes, I dig deep for my reserve of strength.

I feel Kalvin staring as I raise my arms to lengthen my body.

“Keep your eyes on the datapad,” I say, not even bothering to double-check he was gawking. He clears his throat, and I smile as I bend over to touch my toes.

“Standard Operating Procedure says to stay with the vehicle, right? But we’re in the middle of the desert, and once we lose power, this thing will be an oven.”

“Agreed.” I twist to the side, and my spine cracks even more. Ahhhh. “We should try to boost the radio signal and call for help. Then we should lock up, leave a note, and head for the coast. Do we have any idea where we are and how far we are from the rocky parts of the continent?”

I let out a cleansing breath and try to push the pain of my hip into a rear compartment in my brain. This is something both Vivian and I are good at. We compartmentalize. It’s our way.

“Yeah, here. To the southwest.” Kalvin switches to the map and points to our location. “This is somewhat accurate based on the last GPS pings we got before the antenna broke.”

I lean in next to him, and he shifts to the side to give me some space. Touching our spot on the map, I place a pin where we are and then another pin at a small rocky range between us and the ocean.

“Yikes. Almost seventy kilometers.”

“My buddy on Ossun keeps trying to get me to do one of those century walks for charity. I always said no because walking a hundred kilometers seemed like torture.” Kalvin looks up at me. “Seventy kilometers in the sand and heat? No. That sounds like torture.”

I huff a small laugh. He’s not wrong. It sounds like something my brother Oliver would be into. He was the first of us to move planetside and decide he was never living on a spaceship again. Long walks are his thing.

“Let’s plan to get there in three days. We can’t make it in one. Even two days is pushing it. I think we have enough water to last us. Let’s eat and hydrate, then strip this place of everything we need before we venture out.”

“Shouldn’t we travel at night? It might be easier.”

“Nighttime is when the animals come out, looking for food. Tasty little morsels like us.”

He grimaces. “Damned if you do; damned if you don’t.”

“I’m not sure if they come far into the desert or stay close to the rocky regions, so we’ll have to observe the situation today.”

I leave him to rifle around in the medkit. There are enough supplies in here to keep us safe for the time being. But I’m after the sanitary wipes.

“Yes!” I pull out a packet and squish them. Still hydrated! And there are three more in here. I toss a pack to Kalvin, and he rolls his eyes.

“Do I stink?”

“No. Maybe.” I sigh as I wipe down my face, neck, arms, and underarms. I bring a second wipe into the bathroom and clean the rest of myself in private. Thank the heavens. This will keep me going. I just need to get dressed, and everything will be fine.

Of course, that’s just an expression, right? I’m still stranded with Kalvin. Everything will not be fine. At least for the next few days.

Once we’re dressed, fed, and watered, Kalvin and I find everything we think we’ll need to continue, including a compass, food and water, a small folding shovel, signal flares, matches, a mirror, spools of wire, and a few other odds and ends. I put them all in a survival backpack along with the medkit.

“Oh, wait.” I rush into the bathroom and grab the few thin towels that are in there. I sweep my shoulder-length hair into a ponytail before draping the towel over my head and wrapping it around me like a headscarf. Never have I been so grateful for my undercut. I have a lot of hair, inherited from my father’s Brazilian side of the family. The undercut is necessary to survive.

“Don’t want to get sunburned,” I say, bringing the end of the towel over my face so Kalvin can only see my eyes.

“Yeah. I’ll pass for now. I’m sweating just looking at you.”

I shrug. It’s his skin, not mine. Despite the Brazilian blood in my body, my family’s Japanese side gave me skin that burns if the sun so much as lays one ray on me. With no sunblock in the survival kit, I’ll need shade any way I can get it. I don’t want to be vain, but I also don’t want my skin to be like leather by the time I’m forty.

“What should we do first?” Kalvin asks.

“We open the doors and assess the damage. Maybe we can fix the antenna?”

Kalvin grimaces. “I don’t know. It looked like the wind snapped it clean off.”

I sigh. “Let’s see what we can do.”

Kalvin starts the door open sequence, and the mechanism grinds and squeals. My hands fly to my ears as the high-pitched, angry howl of metal on metal echoes through the life pod. I catch a whiff of smoke before I see the problem.

“Stop!” I yell. Kalvin jumps forward and hits the abort button. “Oh, crap.”

Beyond the half-open door is a wall of sand. The less compact sand is spilling into the pod, but it looks like we’re covered.

“Huh.” Kalvin folds his arms over his chest. “I wasn’t expecting to be buried.”

“Great. Now we have to leave. Once the power runs out so will the air. Especially if we’re buried in the sand.”

Kalvin looks around behind us until he finds the compact shovel we packed.

“Wait,” I say, grabbing his arm. “What if we’re several meters under a dune? When you dig out sand, it’ll just keep coming in.” I gesture to the life pod. “There’s only so much room in here to hold sand.”

He shrugs. “I don’t think we’re under that much. The storm only raged for another thirteen hours after we landed.”

“A lot can happen in thirteen hours.”

He raises an eyebrow. “A lot can happen in thirteen hours, but I don’t have a kitchen and bottles of wine to prove it.”

I burst into a hearty laugh, deep enough to make my belly ache from it. “That’s a good one. Do you use it on all the girls?”

“Only the pretty ones.” He turns to face the sand, and I’m annoyed that I’m flattered by that statement. I’m pretty? Well, thanks. “I say we get started. I’m dying to leave this desert behind, and sitting around here is not helping my mood.”

“Okay by me.” I grab a side of the parachute and lay it on the floor. “You take the first shift. We’ll put the sand on the parachute and dump it farther back in the pod to keep it out of the way.” I let out a heavy breath as I study the state of the life pod. “Man, the flight school is going to be unhappy with the condition of this thing when they retrieve it.”

I wonder what happened to Amira? To Damian? I hope they’re okay.

“Well, they won’t get the ship back from Cressida, so I doubt they want the pod. They’ll probably sell it for scrap.” Kalvin starts digging, pumping his arms in and out of the door, and dumping sand onto the parachute. He takes a break at the ten-minute mark, and I drag the sand to the rear of the pod. We hydrate and switch.

As I shovel sand, more comes down from above. This feels like Sisyphus pushing his boulder up the hill.

“My arms are going to be sore after this.” I toss another shovelful onto the pile. “Maybe I should work out more. Wait.” I stab my shovel at the sand. “That’s a terrible idea. It sounds boring and tiresome.”

Kalvin laughs. “Do you workout at all?”

“Only yoga and lots of walking. I hate pretty much every other exercise that ever existed.”

Kalvin is quiet for a moment. “So, you grew up on a spaceship?”

I stop and turn around to face him. “What’s this? I thought you already knew all about me.”

He runs his hand over his head, and his hair stands up. “Well, I gave it some thought last night, and it seems I may have, um,” — he clears his throat — “a biased opinion of you.”

Biased opinion of me? No, say it’s not true.

But his expression is earnest, and I don’t feel like fighting with him any longer.

I turn back around to the sand. “Yep. I was born on the same ship where I grew up. I call it the ‘home ship,’ the Mikasa, but it’s Mom’s Corsario.”

“Oh, wow. Which model?”

“An eleven,” I huff as I stab at the sand again. For fuck’s sake, how bad was that storm?

Kalvin whistles. “That’s a great ship.”

“Yep. It may become mine someday. I don’t know.” I don’t want to think of my mom dying. I love her too much for that. If she dies on that ship, I’ll be happy to let it float into a star.

“You didn’t grow up planetside at all?”

I step away from the door and shake out my arms. “Time for a break and a switch.”

Kalvin nods and drags away the sand. I grab my bottle of water and sit with a sigh, being careful not to land on my sore hip.

“No, I’ve never lived planetside. I mean, I visit Ossun and Rio and Palo Alto and Laguna and Sonoma, and on and on…” I wave my hand in the air. “But I’ve never actually lived there, like for longer than a week or two.”

His eyebrows draw together. “You weren’t sent to boarding school? I thought all the spacefaring families did that.”

I shrug. “Nope. It wasn’t even an option for my family.”

He nods as he returns the parachute to the door.

“My older brothers and I had a teacher on board for schooling, and then I passed the standardized education test when I turned fourteen.” Then I was saddled with educating everyone else.

“Fourteen?” This catches his attention. “I didn’t think most people took that test until they were eighteen.”

I swallow another mouthful of water. “They don’t.” I spent all my free time reading, writing, and learning. It’s not like I could hop on my bike after school and go play with the local kids. Sometimes but not often, I would vidcall with my cousins or other kids I knew from the spaceship life. Whenever we were on a planet or at a space station, there were people to see or spend time with. But sometimes that would be weeks away. I took the test in secrecy to piss off Dominic. He hated that I was smarter than him.

“A child prodigy then.” Kalvin stabs at the sand. “It explains so much.”

I roll my eyes. “Hey now. If you call me a nerd, I’m gonna beat the crap out of you.”

He laughs and wheezes as the sand drops on him. “No. Not a nerd. I’m sorry that I didn’t believe you were so good at flying. I thought you were relying on your connections and looks.” He pauses for a second, not looking at me but looking up at the wall of sand. “I appear to have been wrong.”

I press my lips together. That can’t be easy for him to admit.

“I think we’re almost through.” He reaches up with the shovel, and a torrent of sand falls into the life pod, revealing a ray of sunshine.

“Yay!” I jump up and clap. “Excellent work!”

He turns to me with a big smile. “Ready to get out of here? Gather up the stuff again.”

After dumping the sand and grabbing the parachute, I stuff the backpack with everything else and meet Kalvin at the door. He holds out his hand, and I slip my fingers into his so I can jump over the door jamb.

It takes a little doing, but we crawl out of the life pod and onto the dune. Looking down at the life pod, I have a pang of regret. I want to stay and wait for someone to rescue us here where there’s shelter and a bathroom.

“So I guess we’re not going to repair the antenna.” Kalvin laughs, but his happiness dies as the sand around us moves.

We both yelp and jump back.

The sand is moving, yes, but not just filling in empty spaces. It’s shifting forward, slithering like it’s alive. It forms a wave and fills the life pod, hissing and rushing to take over the dead open space we just left behind.

“Holy shit.” Kalvin’s hand is on my upper arm as we back away. He slips from English to Spanish, and wow, he has quite the colorful vocabulary in his native tongue.

I can’t speak. All I can do is watch the sand fill the life pod and cover it. The dune of sand deflates, and I think it’s because the life pod has been pulled under, into the depths of this sandy sea…

My breath is light in my chest as I look down at my feet. “I wonder what else is beneath us.”

“I don’t want to know.” Kalvin’s eyes squint into the rising sun as he pulls me backwards. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”