And it’ll do for me, he thought morosely.
The air in the buried sandscraper tasted stale and seemed to be growing thinner. But it had outlasted his water. Palmer had poured himself half-caps for what felt like five days. He had eaten both strips of jerky one tiny nibble at a time, like a mouse trying to win the cheese from a loaded trap. Now all of that was gone, along with fifteen or twenty pounds of himself. He hadn’t been eating that well even before the march north. The stress of a deep dive always messed with his appetite. No … it hadn’t been the dive. It had been the camping trip coming up, the anniversary. He never ate well before that trip. Had bugged out the year before. Damn … maybe he’d already been down there a whole week. Con and Rob would go without him, just like last year. Con and Rob. They would never hear from their big brother again.
Or maybe it hadn’t been so long. He had counted five days—five urges to sleep—but maybe it was four. Hell, it could be ten days or ten hours since Hap abandoned him. His mind was playing tricks. He heard noises and voices. Had a dream about his father that seemed so real, Palmer had truly thought he was dead and in heaven. Ah, a crypt fit for a king, and where was his asshole father buried? His father’s bones had ground to sand in No Man’s Land, that’s where. A pauper burial for a Lord. A place for desperate dying. It was as ironic as Palmer’s lavish crypt.
But Palmer had been old enough to remember a Lord’s life. He had bawled when his mom pulled them away from the wall. Had bawled when he was put in a different school with strange kids who smelled bad. Had bawled harder when he could no longer smell them because he had begun to stink as they did. What he wouldn’t give to have all those tears back. Just a capful.
He licked his cracked and burning lips. The dream about his father made sense now. Some part of him had been dwelling on the anniversary. He’d let Con and Rob down again. He was a shitty brother and a shitty son and did not deserve to die in so fine a place as this.
Such were his wild thoughts as he left the conference room where he’d been imprisoned by his hope of Hap’s return. He staggered out and through the dark building, his dive light as dim as he could make it, its staid old battery down to rations as well. Maybe he’d find a pool of water where a spring had flooded or where trapped moisture had drained down through the impossibly tight pack. But there was little hope of that. He left the conference room to get away from his nightmares and his failures. To let his body wander instead of his mind.
Before he died, he should go out into the sand one last time. Better to perish there and be discovered by another diver as they came to pick over this city. He still had a good charge in his suit, might see how far he could make it before the sand filled his lungs. But some naive part of him kept thinking Hap would come back, that Brock would send others, that he would be a fool to go out and die when there was still air in that building to breathe. At any moment, Hap would burst in with a second set of twin tanks, laughing and saying he’d only been gone two hours and here’s the coin those scroungers paid and all the beer and * in Springston would be theirs.
Palmer kept thinking this, but the hope had grown as stale and thin as the oxygen. The hope that had kept him prisoner in that room with the chairs and the great table and the brewing machine had weakened. Gone was the need to be there when the divers came for him. And as that hope waned, he left through the door that had damned him, that heavy door that Hap had slammed shut on his face, and with his dive light barely aglow, he nosed around his crypt for the first time.
He had seen many crumbling office buildings full of sand outside Springston, but never on such a scale as this, never so pristine. The buildings he had seen had been picked over for centuries. Men with mastery over the sand had ripped out great holes and had salvaged almost anything worth taking. But Palmer now strolled through a perfect recreation of that long-dead world. It was a museum for the buried gods and the world they had lived in. His fragile mind tallied stacks and stacks of coin as he felt his way down the hall. There were clocks; pictures framed and behind perfect glass; recessed lights and miles and miles of copper wire; unbroken tile; wood countertops. Coin everywhere.