Strontium Swamp

J.B. and Mildred were also on their feet, the black woman casting her eyes around for Doc. His frail physique meant that he had suffered the most from lack of oxygen and was the most vulnerable right now. She grunted as she located him. He was still on all fours, looking down, barely aware that the sea of sand was burying him, now up to his elbows and halfway up his thighs. If he didn’t move quickly, it would cover him and start to smother the life from him.

Jak, recovering quicker than the others, had taken in what was happening and used the flow of the sand to save energy that was only just returning, surfing the sand back to where the others were moving, almost in slow motion. The wiry albino joined Mildred, and they tugged Doc free of the sand, hauling him to his feet. He grunted and whispered to himself, wordless mutterings that were masked by his inability to speak through a parched throat. His eyes were staring and vacant. Whatever Doc was seeing, it wasn’t the corridor before him.

Jak and Mildred began to haul themselves out of the sand, struggling to move their still-leaden limbs against the flow, hampered by Doc’s near deadweight. As they moved forward, Ryan and J.B. stepped in to help, joined by Krysty when they reached the point at which she stood. The six companions formed a chain, uniting their strength—failing as it was—to fight against the flow of the sand to try to reach the yellow-tinged sky that lay at the top of the spilling wall.

It was like swimming in a swamp: the current of the sand wanted to pull them back into the redoubt, but they fought against it, even though their limbs ached and their lungs, still fighting to make up oxygen deficit, felt like bursting.

With every fiber screaming for them to stop, to just give in and let the sand sweep them down into its warm and welcoming depths, they crested the wave that flowed from the peak of the wall, struggling until they were past the top and pulling themselves over sand that was barely moving.

The world swum around them, stars and lights flickering inside their skulls, their lungs screaming for more air. It was only now that they were on the outside, away from the fetid air of the redoubt, that Mildred realized why it had been such a struggle. Out here, the air was little better. It was foul and hot, the sun heating up the chem clouds that made the sky so yellow. Just to breathe normally, a person had to try twice as hard against the atmosphere.

Looking around at her five companions, Mildred could see that Doc was almost unconscious and the other four were barely able to move. Come to that, she felt herself teetering on the brink of unconsciousness. She looked up at the sky, squinting into the intense light. It was impossible to see beyond the covering of clouds, but she figured that it was the middle of the day. If they succumbed to unconsciousness now, they could dehydrate and risk exposure and sunstroke. She lifted her head and looked around. Now that they were out of the valley in which the redoubt entrance was housed, she could see why the wall of sand had tried to cave in upon them.

The surrounding area was a flat desert, with no peaks or valleys, and no scrub that she could see through the chemassisted heat haze. The entire area was flat and covered with sands. At some time, the area could have been arable, but the intense buffeting of the chem storms had left the area a wasteland of desert, all features of the land covered by layers of sand. That had to have been what had happened to the redoubt entrance. Once in a valley, the dip had been filled by the sand, and in opening the door they had done nothing more than allow the sea of grains to shift once more.

As she tried to focus on the area where the redoubt entrance had been, and where the sands were already settling into their new pattern, she found darkness creeping into the corner of her vision. Alarmed, she battled against it, looked for the others. Doc was down, Jak was trying to get to his feet but stumbling and falling once more. She couldn’t locate J.B., he had to be behind her somewhere. She caught a flash of Krysty’s hair as the woman tried to stay awake, shaking her mane before her head slumped once more. Where was Ryan? He had to be behind her somewhere, too…

The blackness closed in, blotting out all else.

RYAN FELT THAT he had to black out all else and concentrate on keeping awake. The howling wind swept through him, chilling him to the marrow, and he felt the heavy splash of the rain on his back and sides, could almost feel the acids eating through his clothes. He burrowed deeper into the sand, feeling the exposed areas buffeted less and less, but always mindful of the new danger. If he should accidentally breathe the sand, clogging his nostrils and lungs with the sharp grains, then all this would be for nothing. He was still weakened, and didn’t know how much he could fight against that implacable enemy. The sand around him was still, protected him from the worst of the storm, but held its own dangers.

It was important he stay triple red, yet everything in him wanted to curl up and go to sleep.

If he did, he would close his eye forever.

There was no way of telling how long it lasted. Only that each second could have been an hour, and each hour a day. It was all as one: the winds, the sand, the rain…

But gradually he became aware of a lessening in the winds and the rain, the sand stung his skin less often. He didn’t dare relax, in case his body give in and sink into a fatal unconsciousness. If anything, he redoubled his efforts to stay alert, to try to determine what was going on around him.

Even after he was sure, he waited a little longer. Gradually, Ryan disinterred himself from his sandy tomb and, every muscle and tendon creaking, rose unsteadily to his feet.

The sky above was clear, the stars twinkling peacefully above as though the previous hours had never occurred.

The storm was over.

MILDRED FELT LIKE a dog turd that had been left on the sidewalk to dry out for an eternity. The heat was still burning, but nowhere near as intense as it had been before. She opened her eyes and immediately screwed them tight again. She had been lying on her back and the light was too bright to take. She rolled over, feeling the hot sand against her face, and opened her eyes again. After adjusting, she tentatively raised herself onto all fours. Once she felt steady, she groped for some of the bottled water they had rescued from the redoubt and distributed among themselves. It was tepid and unpleasant, but it was liquid, and it helped rehydrate her. She was slick with sweat, yet the military OD green jacket she wore had covered her skin and saved her from too much direct exposure to the sun.

But what of the others?

Mildred slowly raised herself to her feet and looked around. Jak was sitting up, drinking. Like her, he looked as though he had only just regained consciousness. He managed a weak grin and slowly rose. Ryan and Krysty seemed to be coming around slowly, and J.B. appeared by her side as though from nowhere.

“Doc’s not so good,” he said simply, guiding her to where the old man lay. He had less covering than the rest of them, and so had suffered most from being unconscious under the harsh sun. Mildred settled herself beside him. His skin was burned and flaky, and there was froth flecked at the corners of his mouth. He was mumbling incoherently to himself.

While J.B. lifted his head, she used some of the water to wet his lips and gums, then pried away the dry skin of his mouth where it stuck to his teeth and gums. He reacted to this, and she risked pouring a little of the liquid into his mouth. He choked at first, but soon began to swallow.

While J.B. continued to feed Doc the water, Mildred fumbled in her jacket pockets for salt tablets. She had been able to replenish her supply from the redoubt its infirmary. Doc would be in dire need of these after being so long exposed to the sun.

By the time Doc had recovered enough to realize where he was, Krysty, Ryan and Jak had joined Mildred and J.B., clustered around the old man.

Doc managed a weak grin. “Always the liability, I fear,” he whispered through chapped lips. “If I were a horse, then the knacker would be a necessity. And if I were a carpenter—”

“Shut up, you old fool,” Mildred interrupted. “You’re in no fit state to be talking sense, let alone the drivel you always come out with. You need to drink some more, for a start.”

Doc agreed, taking a water bottle from her.

Ryan had been surveying the area while they stood over Doc, and he didn’t like what he saw. Stretching in every direction was nothing but sand. It was an almost entirely flat landscape, only the occasional undulation of a dune to break the monotony. The sand covered everything so completely that even now he couldn’t be too sure where the redoubt entrance had been situated.

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.

“If we did it, Mildred and J.B. must have. Mebbe they’re with Doc,” Krysty suggested, hardly daring to voice the opinion that Doc was the least likely to have made it on his own.

“Bastard thing of it is, where would they be?” Ryan asked, scanning the bland and unremitting wastes of the desert.

“You end up there,” Jak mused, indicating the disturbed sands where Ryan had dug himself out, “And us here,” he continued, indicating their own patch of desert. “Figure same radius others. Mebbe spread out, search.”

Ryan agreed. “It’s all we can do, I guess.”

The friends began to spread out and search in an arc, moving in wider spirals from their beginning. In truth, no one knew exactly what they were looking for. The lanes of the desert had been altered then smoothed by the storm, so unless their friends were attempting to dig out—assuming even that they were alive—then there was no way of knowing where they lay. Or even if they were together, or had been separated.

Tired and aching, the search was a struggle. Tired legs tried to deal with the sucking sands that made each step a chore; eyes stung by wind, rain and sand, aching from the same tiredness that beset their limbs, tried to focus on the flat landscape, searching for something…anything.

It was Jak who stumbled on them. His left combat boot hit the harder surface of the backpacks that were being used as a roof for the trench. Expecting his foot to sink into the sand as before, he was surprised when he hit a harder surface, and an uneven one that made his ankle buckle beneath him.

“Ryan, Krysty…” he yelled, waving and beckoning to them in the wan light of the moon.

As they made their way over, battling the sapping desert floor to move as swiftly as possible, Jak began to dig. Eighteen inches of sand had gathered in some places, but only six or seven in others, as the bags revealed themselves to have been steepled on either side of the trench. As he burrowed into the sand, clearing as much as possible on his own, he became aware of some movement beneath the makeshift roof. The angle of the steepling changed as someone stirred beneath the cover.

Relieved that whoever was under there was still alive, Jak redoubled his efforts, and he had made good headway by the time he was joined by Krysty and Ryan, who immediately fell to their knees and helped him to dig. They cleared the backpacks of the sand that had buried them, and made an indent into the area around it.

“Think they’re okay under there?” Krysty asked anxiously as they continued to dig.

“Mebbe. Whoever it is, at least they’re moving,” Ryan grunted as he worked.

The makeshift roof was cleared, and the three companions hurried to clear it away from the trench beneath, making room for whoever was underneath to come out.

“Thank Gaia,” Krysty breathed as the last piece was removed and she saw J.B., Mildred and Doc lying huddled together. Doc was unconscious once more, but still breathing. Mildred was struggling to stay awake, her breathing labored and her eyes flickering, trying hard to focus. J.B. was the most aware, and it was the Armorer who had been trying to move the roofing from beneath as he heard the others dig and felt the weight upon them decrease.