Pitch black. A residual warmth in the sand from having been outside in the sun. Complete silence. Just his pulse, which he could feel in his neck as it was squeezed by the drift. The pulse in his temples. No room to expand his chest. Couldn’t swallow. Hands around his throat. His brother nearby. And not enough room even to cry. Just a coffin to be terrified in. A place for dying. For panic. For muscles and tendons raging and flexing but not budging an inch—what a paralyzed person must feel. What everyone who has ever been buried alive must feel. This is how they go. This is how they go. This is how they go. Conner couldn’t stop thinking it. The dead had been bodies in the sand before. But now he could feel what they had felt. They had felt just like this, frozen and terrified and not able to move their jaws even to sob for their mothers.
He prayed and listened for the sound of digging—but heard nothing. His pulse. His pulse. Maybe the sand wasn’t so deep. Maybe his mother was okay, pressed there against the wall. Maybe Violet—his half-sister—maybe she would live and her story would be known. He might have a minute of air left. They could dig him out. But that rumble—that rumble—too much sand. It had gone black in the room. The sand had swamped the second story of the Honey Hole. The great wall must’ve gone. Collapsed. Blown up. And the sand on Conner’s back grew deeper and heavier with this thought. In the dark and quiet, he imagined the horror that must be taking place outside. His rapidly approaching death became a pinprick in a wider world of hurt. That grumble of sand he’d heard had been the dune coming at them, the great dune behind that teetering wall on which he’d been born. A life given and then taken away. It had come for him. Had found him. Was now going to claim him.
The struggle against the sand was futile, so Conner relaxed. As he did, it felt as though the bullies on his back grew heavier, like he had sagged within himself and the sand was eager to consume that space, to take whatever he might give. How much longer? The need to breathe grew intense. Like the training games with his brother, when they strained their lungs and counted with fingers. Dizzy. No way to inhale or exhale. Would just black out. And as he felt it coming, his panic surged anew, and there came an intense drive to not die. He didn’t want to die. He wanted to call out to Rob, to his mom, tell them he loved them, get them out of there, somebody please dig me out of here.
As his senses faded, the press of sand all around him softened. It was as if his skin was growing numb to the pressure. Or the blood flow was stopping. Conner had a bright flash of a memory, his father waking him up one morning with a finger pressed over his gray beard, urging Conner to be quiet. Conner, confused, half-asleep, leaving the room he shared with his brothers, his father taking him up the narrow stairs to the top of the great wall. They sat there with their faces to the east and their feet dangling over the ramparts. A windless, noiseless sunrise. The first quiet dawn he’d ever seen, one of those rare moments when the gods stop their thundering and become calm, when the sand isn’t blowing down on them—and Conner sat and watched the morning sun swallow the stars and then Mars, and then a golden dome of light grow and blossom into a perfectly blue sky.
“Why’s it so quiet?” he had whispered to his father. He was young and confused. “Will it always be like this?”
“Another half an hour,” his father had said, studying the sky. “If we’re lucky.”
This placed an enormous pressure on Conner to enjoy the moment. To remember it. To soak it up. The way that crow up there flapped its wings as it took advantage and made for the east. The way the sun warmed the cool morning air. The stillness on his cheeks. His father’s heavy hand on his shoulder. Remember. Remember, he told himself. That intense pressure to make this last forever, to cup his mind tight like hands under a running tap. And then he had glanced up and down the ramparts and realized they were enjoying this moment alone.
“We should wake the others,” he had whispered. “Palmer and Vic—”
His father squeezed his shoulder. “They’ve had theirs. This one is yours.”
And nothing more was said as the sun broke free of the dunes and the wind returned and whatever made that noise that haunted their sleep resumed its infernal grumbling. And it dawned on Conner, sitting there on the great wall with his father, that the world was full of secrets and strangeness. At some point in the past, he had slept while Vic and Palmer had been taken up into the darkness to witness this. They had never told their little brother, had never shared that moment, and Conner knew he never would either.
And it occurred to him there in the Honey Hole, buried under all that sand, that Rob had never been given a windless dawn with their father. Had never been given any kind of morning with him. Had never known him. And the sand loosened even more around his body, and Conner knew it was happening. The last of his breath. The last of sensation. He’d had a minute or two there under the press of dune to consider his life—and now his time was up.