SAND

десять: 10

The sky had an ominous look, a brooding weight. Her ears popped: strange indeed. She reached the old house in its waste of sand and looked for signs that it had been discovered, but there were none. She went in and shut the door, descending to the cache where she carried on with an inventory of the contents and sketched out how to sort them into loads for transport. She felt almost ready for the big day.

A sound, a vibration distracted her. She climbed up to the ground floor of the house. The wind thundered and shrieked. Sand filtered down from the cracks in the floorboards above. She climbed up to the attic where the roof and rafters shuddered in the gusts, sand blowing in and drifting on the planks. Had there ever been such a wind?

Her first thought was to flee to the village, to get home.

She had to force the door with her shoulder, plowing through sand. Once she was out, she could feel the pressure of the blown sand, like a waterless river, buffeting her side and blinding her. She raised her hood but it blew off. She couldn't keep her eyes open. She had to turn back and shelter in the house, but where was it?

How many steps had she taken? Had the wind changed direction?

She turned, deliberately, making sure the wind was pressing her other side. The force of the blown sand made it hard to stay on her feet. She took a step, her arms flailing ahead. Nothing.

Another. Nothing.

She kept her eyes shut and tried to listen. There was a shriek, the wind tearing around something solid. Where?

She turned toward the sound and took another step. Her hand hit something– the edge of the roof. She bent and found the door, but it wouldn't open.

Too much sand, she thought, and fell to her knees and started digging, madly, with both hands, until she could feel the bottom edge of the door.

She hauled it open and fell inside and shut it.

Dark. Too dark. She fumbled for her headlamp and switched on the narrow, cold beam. The sandstorm must be shutting out the sun. She opened the trap and descended to the main floor. She slipped down into a cross-legged posture, the way she sat at home looking into the fiery heart of the stove. But there was no stove here. No fire. No heat.

She went down into the cache, leaving the way open. There was no chance anyone would follow her in this storm. The beam of her headlamp slid over the shelves, the tins, the boxes. She found a tin of candles and a box of matches. She upended the lid of the candle tin on the floor, lit one, and dripped wax in the center until she could seat the candle firmly.

She came to the logical conclusion of her plan. After the men were off to the com station, lusting for meat and vodka, with Pyotr's help the tractor would be fueled and haul a trailer to the cache. Each load would take two hours, but there was plenty of daylight. Once the cache was empty of useful things, she would lay the charges, inserting detonators, and then blow it out of existence.

The keening of the wind reached down into the cellar. As she gazed into the candleflame, it seemed, at times, like singing, heard at a distance. Kolyadki, carols sung by a group of young people, going house to house. She had sung, in her early youth. It was organized by the village priest, who taught the words of the old songs, from before the days of the Soviet Union. He'd been dead for, what? Fourteen years. A few of the old people gathered on Sundays to pray and sing hymns, but no one her age joined them. They had lost faith: there would be no heaven, no resurrection. Only hunger, darkness, and cold.

≈ ≈ ≈

The storm, what meteorologists, when there were some left, called a bomb cyclone, centered around a zone of extreme low pressure, drawing the air in a spiral, with winds of hurricane force.

The first gust flattened the boat sheds and tore through the village, scooping up sand from the beach and driving it inland. The village, already half-buried by drifts, began to blur and disappear, walls and corners and eaves going under the rising flood of sand. Doors that opened outward were blocked. Old glass in windows shattered from the force of the wind and the blizzard of loose objects. The draft sucked live flame up a tar-clogged stovepipe and started a chimney fire, that spattered flaming gobbets downwind. Soon, several houses were burning, with fire spreading along the track of the wind.

The voices—howls of agony, shouts, curses, screams—were snatched and carried off bodiless into the arctic dusk.

≈ ≈ ≈

When the wind ceased, the village was ruined: half-burnt and mostly buried. A few people crawled from attic windows or pried boards from their roofs and ventured out, blinking the grit from their eyes, onto vanished streets, looking for help where there was none.

The old house in its waste of sand, the cache, had entirely disappeared. Not even the peak of the weathered roof could be seen above the gleaming dunes.