Red Sand (4 page)

Howie had to pee
right now
. What had once been a dull ache in his abdomen had swelled to a hardened baseball. If he held it a moment more it would explode. But where? In front of everybody, right on the beach?

A childhood event battled its way into his consciousness. Meeting his Great Aunt for the first time, no sooner had he arrived in her plastic sheathed home than he made a beeline for the restroom. His mother fed him an earful on the way home. “The first thing you do is piss in her house?”

Somehow, the black maw and white hair of Tongueless reminded him of his Great Aunt. How would he react if, immediately upon reaching safety, he pissed on this man’s land? “Thank you for bringing us to your island. Now I’ll give you my autograph.”

No. He would have to hold it for a moment or two more.

“Ouch.” Emily leaned on Howie for support, like a leaf resting on a boulder. “I stepped on something.” A gleaming blue shard protruded from a seeping red liquid in her heel. She plucked it out.

“You’re bleeding,” he said. He would have offered to carry her, she was so slight, but he was ready to explode as it was.

“I was asleep when the ship went down. I don’t have any shoes.”

Broken shells, dismembered crab exoskeletons, and black volcanic rocks littered the shore. Of the survivors in his boat, only Howard wore shoes.

“Here, wear mine.” Howie pushed out of his sneakers, leaving on a pair of wet, grungy white socks. “I don’t need them. My feet are calloused and bunioned like a turtle.”

The shoes floated around her tiny feet like boats. She doubled the laces around her ankles just to keep them on. Better than nothing.

Only Max remained in the boat, hanging over the rail and staring out to sea. He hadn’t even seen the island yet. Mason made sure he wasn’t forgotten.

The boatmen stretched a sheet of plastic around their oars to form a temporary litter. Mason and Lauren hauled Max out of the boat and onto the stretcher. Lauren volunteered Carter to help carry it, each taking an end to stumble up the beach.

They set out in single file, White Hairs in front. Survivors from a second boat joined them in a line up the dunes. After so many hours in a lifeboat, Howie’s fellow passengers felt like family, these other survivors like strangers.

The sun already baked the sand. Despite his calluses, he could feel the heat through his toes.

Being a fat man has its advantages. Already he’d fallen slightly behind the crowd. A little slower and he was the last man in the group. When the sun fell behind a small cloud, he ducked down and ran to the nearest depression.

There is something orgasmic in the release of long-held urine. Only truck drivers and old men know this. That sense of immense relief can be better than sex. Eyes closed in bliss, he heard the patter of relief smacking the sand in front of him. He signed his name. He could have written a book. 

But there was something more to listen to. He heard a dry, rustling sound. Something moved under the sand. The stream no longer hit dry sand but sputtered on something pliant and flat. He opened his eyes.

Something soft brushed past his leg, across his foot. He couldn’t see it, or his feet, through the fat of his belly. The thing felt light as the wind until it pulled his legs out from under him. He collapsed backward, knocking the wind out of him. His body clawed for breath while his mind desperately sought to identify this threat. His chest wouldn’t draw air. Soft tendrils rushed across his arms and legs, pinioning him.
Ropes? Sand? No, too light.

Then something bit him. His lungs filled with air just in time to scream. He thrashed his arms and legs, pushed against the sand, whipped his head in fury and terror, to no avail. Unbreakable bonds held him to the ground. Small creatures bounced over him and sank long spindly teeth into his belly, his arm, his head. He felt them sucking, and now those bonds entered the bites, coursing into him, pushing muscles, tendons, and ligaments aside to crawl up inside his arms, his legs, his abdomen. It wrapped around his ribs and exerted pressure, oh so gentle pressure, until his scream tapered off into a wheezing hiss.

He was a big man. Eating him took time. His brain, encased in thick bone and otherwise impervious to the probing tendrils, recorded it all.

The mountain of fat on his belly offered little resistance to the biters. They burrowed in like ants in whipped cream. Wherever they entered, the tentacles followed, seeking, exploring, pushing. Those tentacles kept him from bleeding out, blocking his wounds so that he would live that much longer. He could feel them fighting in his chest cavity, twisting like boa constrictors in heat, churning up his internal organs in a froth. They missed his heart, sparing him a heart attack. Without his lungs, though, he had only seconds left until he lost consciousness.

He lay on the beach being consumed, watching the clouds drift through a serene blue sky only to disappear over that strange red wall. The sun glinted off something near his eye. A slender tentacle slid into view, silhouetted against an azure haze. It dove in figure eights through his eye sockets. Darkness overcame him. His brain, the sole survivor, registered the enemies beating at the gates of his cranium, tightening, trying the doors and windows of this fortress. Impenetrable cochlea sent frantic messages notifying the brain that what was left was sinking, slowly being pulled down into the sand. The brain ignored this information as the invaders discovered the cavity at the back of the neck and pushed their way in. Surrounded, airless, bloodless, the grey matter at last succumbed, and Howie ceased to be.

Lauren chose against college. Her high school sweetheart, Nick, convinced her to stay in town. Smart enough to matriculate anywhere, she made the dumb choice to stay for love. College is expensive; love is cheap. They moved in together, against her parent’s wishes. She broke contact altogether in retribution.

The little apartment wasn’t much, but Lauren and her boyfriend enjoyed a solidarity in poverty – love against the world. He took a job at a garage, came home every night smelling of grease. He could never quite wash it off before dinner. She got used to the feel of those petroleum chapped hands scratching her body in the night. She pretended it didn’t hurt when his calluses caught her hair. He was kind, but she soon realized they were mismatched.

Lauren found herself working a dead-end job in a grocery store. She endured a half-wit manager and a staff of imbeciles. She suffered the abuse of customers. She listened patiently to the inane conversations of her colleagues. At night, she brought home free suppers desiccated by hours under a deli heat lamp.

She used to fantasize about arriving at work one morning to find the whole shopping center burnt down, the roof gaping aslant across a smoking ruin. She saw that on the news once. Somewhere in America, an overnight gas leak detonated a department store. Television news stations teased her with that disaster for days while helicopters offered tantalizing aerial views of the carnage.

She used to fantasize that someone came to work with a shotgun and shot her boss. The police would take the smiling perpetrator away amidst cheers and applause. The store owner would say, “Lauren, the store is yours now. Make the changes you always wanted.”

Sometimes she fantasized holding the shotgun, especially during staff meetings.

Cursed with an intellect, she inadvertently paid attention to much more than her own role. She listened to the other departments bitch about their jobs in the lunchroom and formulated theoretical solutions. She tabulated pricing structures toward increased profitability.  She studied shopper habits and drew planograms of premium product placement that would appeal to shoppers rather than manufacturers. She researched high-tech gadgets that could improve the shopping experience – handheld scanners, iPad POS stations, self-checkout lanes. Undaunted by a track record of ignorance, she ran every new idea past her boss.

He was a prick. He never took them to the owner, and he didn’t make any changes himself. She resented this. As a result, she badmouthed him to the rest of the staff. Her ideas came out more like snide criticism than genuine improvements. She resorted to sarcasm. She alienated her manager.

Being smarter than the rest of the staff made her stupid at interpersonal relations. She never really fit in because, well, god forbid should she fit in. Even after five years, she felt like an outsider.

Eventually, her boss promoted one of her coworkers, Judy, to Assistant Manager. Judy was a dull, unimaginative peon running the customer service desk. Lauren hid her resentment, but it was the last straw.
Genius is never recognized in its prime
, she thought.

She started going to the gym after work. A regular workout quieted her overactive rage. One hour a day became three. She did yoga, Pilates, cardio, cycling. She took classes, hired a trainer, thought about running a marathon. Running a marathon is what people do when they have no control over the outside world beyond the functioning of their own limbs. She decided against the marathon, but she peaked in body performance.

Despite this, Lauren had not yet found her M.O. She was bored. Her career had stalled and, in all fairness, she couldn’t hope for her boyfriend to rescue her from this ennui. His career peaked the day it started. She had no hope of promotion. She’d squandered her chance for college. Bagging groceries makes for a poor entrance essay. Five years of cashier work didn’t qualify her for something better, something she felt she deserved. She had no choice but to get creative.

That’s when she figured out the coupon scam.

Here’s how it works. A penny pinching matron clips a coupon out of her Marie Claire for 25 cents off frozen pastry dough. She presents it to the store, wrinkled by her sweaty, anticipating hands and receives her hard-earned quarter. The store, now short twenty five cents, collates all the coupons for the week and sends them off to the manufacturer, who then sends a reimbursement check. A busy grocery store takes in hundreds, even thousands of coupons a week.

That makes for easy money if you don’t have to sell the product in the first place. So many coupons stream in from so many local grocery stores and bodegas that most manufacturers don’t bother to investigate who they’re paying.

Lauren started small. Two years ago she had filed for a business license when she thought about starting an on-line store. Now, she legally changed the name to that of a small grocery chain she knew that operated in an adjoining state. Manufacturers rarely, if ever, cross reference the coupons coming in with orders going out, but she didn’t want to take any chances. Any corporate bean counter who took an interest would just think the supermarket had opened a new branch. She had the checks mailed through a forwarding agent rather than a PO Box, which made it look more official. Then she set to work.

Every Monday morning, the local paper dropped off leftover Sunday editions on her doorstep. Officially, she generously recycled them into Sunday school paper mache projects. Realistically, no child ever saw them. Every Monday night she sat down with the circulars and cut coupons from the big brand names. She cut irregularly, mussed them up, dropped a few in a bucket of water, sat on the pile, and even rubbed a little dirt on them from the basil plant in her kitchen window. In the end, they looked like dozens of old women had clipped and coveted them. The following Sunday night, envelopes stuffed with coupons shipped out to manufacturers across the country.

Each coupon is only worth 50 cents here and 25 cents there, but fifty coupons for 50 cents out of two hundred newspapers quickly adds up. Lauren was shocked at how much she was pulling in. That was before she discovered the internet. Every manufacturer’s website posts coupons for consumers to print out in the privacy of their homes. Her Monday night operation expanded to every night of the week. Before long, she was swimming in cash like Scrooge McDuck. It was so easy.

Too easy. Her success was her failure.

She should have done the math. Her Monday night storefront was selling more product than the only other grocery store in town - her employer.  Someone in Sales at a nationwide purveyor of salad dressings sent her a congratulatory letter on the amount of product she was selling. Said they’d send out a rep to see how they could help her expand. It sounded like they would give her some kind of award.

She hadn’t been entirely blindsided. When she hit the fifty grand mark, she’d opened a Swiss bank account to avoid local attention. Now Julius Bar kept watch over her two million dollar nest egg somewhere high in the Alps. Feeling like James Bond, she’d ordered a passport and kept her tank full of gas for this inevitable day. 

Lauren emptied her local bank account, left a deceptively loving Dear John letter on the table, and hit the road. As soon as her Dodge bumped into the Atlantic Ocean, she jumped on the next ship for wherever.

When the rep came out he’d find a polite elderly woman in a white house with a picket fence who forwarded any mail she got to “that nice young lady at the grocery store” for ten dollars a month. They’d cross check their sales lists and realize she’d never placed a single order for salad dressing, or any other product for that matter. It would be months before the manufacturer sorted it out, started the class-action lawsuits, set the law on her. By then she would be on a far-away beach, impossible to find or track down.

How right she was.

Somewhere across the dunes, Lauren heard a scream.
Probably just the wind
, she told herself, but there wasn’t any wind, not on the beach and not here in the lee of the sand dunes. Sand fleas distracted her as they clung to her bare flesh like new skin. Holding the stretcher prevented her from scratching or slapping at them. Already, red welts began to appear on her arms and legs. 

“C’mon Carter. Keep up,” she shouted as Carter stumbled at the front of the litter. Her rescuers weren’t waiting for stragglers, as if they wanted to be off the beach as fast as she did. Sand doubled the effort required to walk. The early morning sun had already heated the sand intolerably. Her heels blistered with every step.

Since the boats landed as close to the cliffs as possible, they followed a steep upward path. The red wall loomed over them. Strategically placed stones held the sand in place, but it was a far cry from a staircase. Going up was even harder carrying Max. All those yoga classes paid off. She hadn’t built the perfect body for nothing.

She looked up the line. It wasn’t hard to spot the natives. Bright white hair sprouted from every native head. Either they were all old, or Steve Martin had a fan base here.

There were so few survivors. Her boat crew joined another at the beach, making twelve. Most in the other boat were as overweight as Howie. It seemed the only people who survived floated without life jackets, but, then, statistically those who frequented cruise ships were not the adventurous type. Where was Howie, anyway? He must be at the front of the line.

She could see a third boat emptying half-clothed survivors down the beach. That made a total of eighteen.  The rest of the boats only carried debris and salvage.

Eighteen souls out of 1200. Incredible. She thought maybe the boats would go back out for more, but already the White Hairs were stowing them in a cave below the massive red wall.

Two million dollars. Two million dollars.
She repeated it to herself to keep going. She had to stay alive for it.

They reached the base of the red wall. As they approached, Lauren was shocked. It was man-made. The walls were fifteen feet high, massive and thick, and seemed to demarcate the divide between sand dunes and lava flats. The sand piled up against it, assaulting it, but unable to scale it. The wind exposed black scars of lava at its base. The wall glistened as if wet. It had a deep red hue with veins of orange and white marbling as if built of frozen cubes of beef, reminding Lauren of the Bodies exhibit she’d seen in New York. 

“What is the wall made of?” Lauren whispered.

Carter stretched his fingers out from the oar and scraped his fingernails against the wall. He frowned. He couldn’t lift his hand to inspect the fragments without tipping Max out. Instead, he leaned over and licked the wall.

“Salt!”

They followed the base of the wall for some time, heading inland. Finally they reached a portal. To the right, another trail led off into the heart of the dunes. The sturdy oaken hull of a rowboat formed double doors.  As the party approached, two men with spears and large, heavy bags at their waists silently opened the doors from the inside.  After they passed, the two guards bolted the doors shut again.

Just on the other side of the wall lay a heap of clothing like the sale bin at a thrift store. Lauren and Carter put Max down. She couldn’t wait to put on something with sleeves to ward off biting insects.  Carter tempered her delight when he observed, “It looks like Dachau. Where did all these clothes come from?”

For the next ten minutes, they all played dress-up, digging through the pile for clothes that fit. Lauren settled for a white dress-shirt and a pair of shorts. She preferred flip-flops to shoes. Carter took one look at her outfit and said with a straight face, “Laundry day?”

Emily couldn’t find anything small enough for her, so she draped herself in an oversized University of Maryland t-shirt, sporting a grinning turtle in a fighting stance. Mason grabbed a pair of jeans, a blue t-shirt, and some white tennis shoes. Somehow Carter managed to dress sharply, the cleanest of them all. They felt almost civilized again.

While dressing, they took in the view. At best, Lauren hoped to find a modern village of stone huts with tin roofs and an army of children to greet them. She’d seen that in a movie once. Instead, an expanse of lava fields stretched out to the horizon like the negative of a frozen river. To the right, toward the cliffs of the volcano, what looked like a junk yard huddled in the shade. As their party trudged closer, she could make out individual units, dwellings, cobbled together from randomly shaped panels in all different colors and states of environmental degradation. The wind rustled tattered sheets of plastic across this shanty town.

A band of five White Haired men approached from the village. The White Hairs left the line and joined their cohorts. They were a ragged bunch, but their clothes were civilized. One of them, apparently the leader, stood out in a starched but discolored white suit.

Lauren’s heart dropped. These were not natives. They were survivors. All hope of rescue abandoned her.

The leader stepped forward, arms wide. “Welcome to our island! Here you are safe!”

An American! He had a strong, masculine voice with no hint of accent. Nevertheless, it felt like a lie. He seemed to have a whole speech prepared, like a merchant who starts his negotiations high.

“Whatever unfortunate circumstance has brought you to us, we welcome you. We will try to make you as comfortable as possible during your stay. Many ships pass our shores, and I’m certain we can find you passage home shortly.