Strontium Swamp

J.B. joined him. “Doesn’t look so good, does it?”

Ryan shook his head. “Nothing but this fireblasted desert, and no way of getting back to make a jump.”

“Which direction gives us the best chance?”

Ryan shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. Just looks like sand, as far as you can see. Figure the best thing to do is form into pairs and fan out, see how much territory we can survey.” He looked up at the sky. “Hard to tell with this cloud, but I reckon we’ve got a couple of hours before sundown.”

“Only plan that makes sense,” J.B. stated. “But one of us should go solo. I can’t see Doc being up to it,” he murmured, indicating the prone figure.

Ryan shook his head. “Mebbe a good thing. Doc can be our anchor. Gives us somewhere to head back to.”

“My dear boy, you are too kind—making an asset from my infirmity,” Doc wheezed. “But, I suppose, if it is all I can do, it is, at least, something.”

The five companions used their baggage to form a sun-break around Doc, offering him at least some shading from the sun, angling it to shield him from the angle of its descent. That angle also gave them some kind of compass point from which to try to determine their location. But their first task was to see if they could find shelter before the night fell.

Ryan trekked alone, while Jak accompanied Krysty and J.B. marched with Mildred. The plan was simple, but backbreaking. Taking a different position, they were each to fan out from the point of their location to see if they could sight anything other than sand on the horizon.

Simple, and also soul-destroying, for it soon became apparent that they could march for hours and see nothing but sand stretching out before them, rolling in dunes and broken only by the occasional patch of grass or scrub. As they marched outward, so the sand pulled at their calves, each step an effort to drag their boots from the grip of the sand, sapping what little reserves of energy they had.

It was nearing twilight when they converged once more on where Doc lay. The old man had used the time well, taking more water and resting, and was now almost back to normal. It was little consolation, however, when they compared their lack of sightings.

“It would appear,” Doc said with a glimmer of a smile after listening to them, “that we are caught between a rock and a hard place, except that there are no rocks and the sand is far too soft.”

“Wish I could see the funny side, Doc,” Ryan muttered. “We’ve got little option other than to pick a direction at random and keep marching, or try to find the redoubt and force our way on for another jump—and that’s always assuming we could dig our way in, which I doubt.”

“So it’s just the marching, then,” Mildred said wryly. “Pick a direction—any direction.”

“How about that away,” J.B. said, pointing to his left. “Or mebbe not…’cause I think that’s where trouble’s coming.”

Before he even finished, they knew he was right. A mistral wind was reaching them, tendrils of sand picked up in the light breeze that was getting stronger with each second. The chem clouds had gathered densely in the twilight, and the air became damp as chem rain started to drizzle. The speed at which it gathered was phenomenal.

“Fuck it! Try to get some cover. It’s coming down too fast!” Ryan yelled as the first fat, heavy drops of rain began to splatter them and the tendrils of sand became sharp bullwhips of grain, lashing against them.

Within minutes, as they tried to dig a trench into the sand, the storm had risen to a pitch where the sand and the rain made it impossible to see in front of them and the gathering clouds turned twilight into darkest night.

They could no longer see one another.

As the sands were whipped up by the storm, it became hard to even tell where the ground began and ended.

Chapter Two

Ryan Cawdor shuddered and groaned as he raised himself slowly, painfully, from the tomb of sand he had made for himself. Every part of his body was in pain, and parts of his skin felt as though they would slither from his flesh at the slightest touch. He was thankful that there had been no open wounds for the rain to run into, which would have been too painful to contemplate.

He looked around, trying to locate the others, there was no sign of them. No sign of any other life at all. And no sign of the storm, which had blown over as quickly as it had arrived. The sky above was clear, the stars illuminating the dark, the crescent moon casting a pale light over the sands, which now seemed as calm as they had before the storm hit, as flat and undulating, and showed no relation to the whirling clouds of flaying grit that had battered him just a short time before.

They were also completely unrecognizable as the sands on which he had stood before the storm. Although there had been no real landmarks by which to judge, the shape of the dunes had become familiar as they had recced the area. Now, the landscape was unrecognizable, the sands whipped into new contours by the currents of the mistrals and gales of the chem storm. Ryan could be in the same place as before, or he could have been swept along in the tide of the sand, landing miles from where he began. He had no way of knowing. He hadn’t felt as though he had been moving, and yet the sands had been shifting around him. Where would his movement begin and the sands end? Or vice versa?

“Fireblast and fuck it,” he murmured to himself, sinking to his haunches. He was tired beyond belief, every muscle ached, and his head felt as though it had been pounded by a thousand hammers: a legacy of dehydration and salt loss as much as the storm.

He was alone, with no sign of his companions. The quiet of the night was eerie and unearthly. If he could get past the pounding in his skull, the sound of blood hammering in his ears, then there was nothing beyond. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard the sounds of silence…if ever.

It meant that the slightest sound would register, however, so Ryan’s body tensed, and he whirled around as quickly as his protesting muscles would allow when he heard the whispering of shifting sands from somewhere over his left shoulder.

WHEN THE STORM HIT, Mildred’s first thought was not for herself, but for Doc Tanner. For all that she would argue with, and insult the older man, she was aware that he was the most vulnerable of them at this moment. And more than that, she shared with Doc something that none of the others could ever truly understand. Neither of them belonged to this time; they had been thrown into the Deathlands by freaks of chance and designs of evil, both taken from their own times in differing ways and made exiles against their wills. It wasn’t something they ever spoke of, but Mildred knew that if Doc bought the farm, she would feel just that bit more alone in a way that could never be truly explained.

Doc had been raised on one elbow when the storm hit, and before the first heavy drops of rain hit him, Mildred had thrown herself down to cover him.

“Madam, contain yourself,” Doc yelled in bewildered tones. “I am not that much of an invalid that I need to be treated this way.”

“Shut up and dig, you old fool, as deep as you can,” Mildred replied, her eyes flashing at him.

“That’s more like it,” he countered in a milder tone, as he turned to join her in digging into the sand. “I fail to see that this will be of much practical use to us, but I suppose it is all we can do,” he continued, raising his voice above the rapidly growing winds.

“Save your breath for when you need it,” Mildred snapped back.

J.B. stumbled on them by chance. Blinded by the flying sand, trying to shield his face from the rain as it suddenly roared from the heavens, he turned and stumbled over the backpacks they had earlier set up to act as a sun-break for Doc, falling into the hollow trench that Mildred and Doc were digging for themselves.

“Nice of you to drop in, John,” Mildred yelled, unable to prevent herself cracking the gag despite the situation.

“No time to be funny,” J.B. snapped sourly. “Lost the others. Dig and use these to cover us,” he yelled as tersely as possibly, pulling one of his canvas bags over the top of them as they scrabbled in the sand.

It was hard to tell exactly what was happening in the narrow trench, but all three of them used their backs to try to reinforce a sand wall, giving themselves a small, clear area of breathing space in the middle. The bags were dragged over the top of them to form a makeshift roof, not as stable as any of them would like, but nonetheless temporarily effective. At least it prevented the sand overhead from burying them, as they became aware of the weight increasing with the buildup of sand on top of their makeshift shelter. It was stiflingly hot, and sand still moved around their bodies. No one would say, but it occurred to all of them that they could possibly be making their own burial ground.

As they seemed to fall deeper into the sand, it became difficult to tell when—or if—the storm subsided.

KRYSTY AND JAK HAD stumbled blindly into each other as the storm began to hit, each searching for the other, and for the rest of their companions. With no place to hide, and no time to move, the storm had taken all of them unaware. Jak cursed himself for not realizing the changes in the air before the others. His instincts dulled just that little too far by the rigors of the day.

Wordlessly, unwilling to waste energy in the middle of such a crisis, and unable to make herself heard above the roar of the storm, Krysty clutched at Jak, pulling him to her as they stumbled and fell. Feeling the acid rain hit her skin, her air coiled tightly to her neck and scalp as the danger increased, Krysty shrugged out of her long fur coat and draped it over herself and Jak, hoping that the chem rain would pass over before enough had fallen to eat through the fur and hide of the coat. They dug themselves into the sands, constantly fighting the shifts that threatened to overwhelm and bury them, rather than provide protection. The coat, just about covering the pair of them where it had been spread out, acted as a buffer between their prone bodies and the raging wind, sand and rain above. It grew heavier as the shifting surface began to cover them, and their arms ached from trying to hold it up just enough to give them some kind of cover without it smothering them.

It was a question of playing odds. Would the storm subside before their muscles finally gave out under the strain?

THE WHISPERING SANDS came from over his shoulder. Ryan whirled and scanned the dunes behind him, the light just good enough for him to be able to see any movement, the sand acting as a reflector to the crescent moon.

About 150 yards away there was a shifting on the surface, as though a bank of sand was rising up out of the mass. Ryan began to walk toward it, unable to move at a faster pace because of the way his feet sank into the loose sand, up to and beyond his ankles.

The sand wall dissolved in a cloud of scattering grains as two figures emerged from behind a blanket of fur, shaking off the sand that had sought to entomb them.

“Krysty, Jak,” Ryan yelled, his voice sounding strangely alien and harsh in the silence of the night.

“Ryan, what fuck that?” Jak grinned, relieved to see at least one other of their companions was still alive—come to that, glad that he had managed to survive the storm.

“Weirdest shit I’ve seen for a long time,” Ryan replied, shaking his head. “Come and gone, just like that.”

“Just like us, almost,” Krysty put in, pulling the coat around herself to keep out the chill of the desert night. “Gaia, you look like shit, lover,” she continued, noting how Ryan’s exposed areas of skin had been blasted raw by the sand and the chem rain.

“Thanks for pointing that out,” he said wryly. “Feels like it, too. Just about managed to keep covered long enough to stop the worst, I guess. Lucky to make it out.”

“Yeah. Mebbe only ones,” Jak mused, looking around and flexing his aching limbs, trying to get the cramp out of them.