We’d passed two more of the monstrous Noors, both times while at a safe distance of a half-mile or so and never in their draft path. And even then, we could feel the strength of the accelerated winds blasting out their north-facing ends. And the sands were nearly unbearable, at least to me. GPS and Carpe Diem had their heads down but otherwise seemed okay, and DNA had wrapped his veil over his face but he didn’t slow his gait. Until this moment.
“It’s going to get very bad soon,” he said, switching on his anti-aejej armband. Immediately, the sand that had been scraping at my clothes dropped and the four of us were in a tight bubble, protected from the sand. The barrier reached less than a foot above my head and inches from around us. If he’d waited this long to turn it on, its battery power must have been limited.
“Better?” he asked me with a smile.
“Much.”
“You looked like you wanted to die,” he said.
“Thought I was going to,” I muttered.
We walked for another twenty minutes. Though the storm appeared to be close, for a long time, it seemed to stay in the same place as we walked toward it. It was that huge. The winds decreased here and he switched off his anti-aejej. While the storm lurked near yet far, we came across another menacing thing: The charred remains of an Ultimate Corp warehouse. Like the head of a great desert djinn, it loomed at the end of a parking lot whose asphalt was covered with a layer of shifting sands.
“Whenever I see this place, I think ‘failure’,” he said, patting Carpe Diem and GPS on their sides as he glared at the warehouse. “The biggest business out here is with the small people—nomads, people escaping, people hiding, the people of the desert have the biggest black market in the world. Not Ultimate Corp.”
As we crossed the parking lot, I squinted at the warehouse. It looked like it had burned long ago, though I could have sworn I still smelled smoke. Minutes and about a half mile later, the winds grew strong and dusty. Somehow, the smoky smell of the burned warehouse withstood the winds for the moment.
“What happened there?” I asked. “Never heard of a warehouse in the north. And it’s so close to the Red Eye.” Across the empty parking lot, where a road ran into the distance, was a large sign with the Ultimate Corp logo, a stylized outstretched blue hand. Several chunks of the tiling had fallen off and shattered to pieces below.
“For a while, even Ultimate Corp tried to get in on business with people living in the Red Eye,” DNA said. “They had these crazy delivery drones that could fly through the wind in the Red Eye. But they couldn’t compete with the black market. Especially when thieves kept breaking into the warehouse and waylaying delivery drones, then reselling the stolen goods. Ultimate Corp tried to fight back; we call that day The Reckoning.”
“Wait, was it that day when those desert black marketers ambushed those Ultimate Corp delivery drones?” I asked. “I saw coverage of that back home! It was the first time I ever saw people of the desert who weren’t, no offense, Fulani herdsmen terrorists.”
DNA looked deeply annoyed. “We aren’t terrorists, it’s those stupid men who sold off or lost their steer. And no one attacked those delivery drones. The Reckoning happened because Ultimate Corp tried to fight black marketers on their own turf.” He laughed. “So so stupid and arrogant. Afterwards, all their employees fled and none came back.”
“There was no Ultimate Corp warehouse on the news or anywhere else.”
“Of course not. How would it look to know that Ultimate Corp was trying to do business with the ‘wild people’ living in the Red Eye. But they were. Those drones that could move through the wind, whipping sand and dust. They tried to use those to attack desert people. That’s when everything went to shit.”
“Interesting,” I said, looking back at the warehouse. It must have been a battlefield back then.
“We come from dust, to dust we all return, even failed Ultimate Corp projects.”
We spread the red cloth right in the middle of the parking lot, using stones we found littered around the place to hold it down. And there we ate a heavy lunch from the food packed for us. He used his small capture station to draw cool water; it was small but still much bigger than the one I had. Mine certainly couldn’t have drawn enough water in minutes to slake ours and the steer’s thirst. Even with the clouds in the sky, my personal capture station was the size of a keychain and would only have drawn a few cups of water. The steer drank noisily from the bag; thankfully, I’d taken water into my cup first. I shuddered when I saw him drink his water after the steer. Fried chicken, goat cheese, dates, something he called latchiri, some kind of vegetable soup he called takai haako—by the time we finished, both our bellies were comfortably full.
“It’s not so comfortable to eat when in the storm,” he said. “So fill up.”
I nodded. “Even now, I feel like three percent of what I ate was sand.”
He laughed. “Get used to that.”
Sitting there was eerie. Since I’d left my car, this abandoned warehouse was the first thing I’d seen that was like home. And it had an apocalyptic feel. When we’d passed the front doors, which were brown from the flames’ heat, I noticed that they swung a bit with the wind. I wondered what we would find inside if we went in there. Would there be charred remains of people who couldn’t escape? Or just a bunch of burned lawn chairs, mobile phones, jars of honey, clothes, warehouse things.
Fifteen minutes after leaving the warehouse parking lot, he had to turn the anti-aejej back on. We were back in the high winds, the sky was dark with dust and the looming storm finally fell on us. It blocked out the sun. It locked in the heat. It made hearing difficult. What a feeling it was to be there. No car. No nearby shelter. Only the sky above. Somewhere. I wished I could have photographed myself in this moment, maybe the photo would capture my conflicting feelings of vastness, smallness, freedom, and doom. But I’d left my mobile phone behind, along with any connection I had to the connected world. I was here. Only in the moment.
When a gust of wind strong enough to pass through the anti-aejej’s barrier made us stumble, we paused, meeting each other’s eyes. He quickly turned to the raffia ball he’d stuffed between the bundles on GPS’s back. He tapped on it and the raffia relaxed. The upper part of the ball collapsed revealing tightly packed items inside. He picked up and threw something white and small at me. I caught it and held it up. What slowly unfolded in my hand looked like a piece of clear gelatin. “It’s a mask,” he said. “Put it on now.”
I unrolled it more and held it up. It looked like it would fit comfortably over my face, but it had no mesh where the eyes, nose and mouth would be. “How am I supposed to breathe with this on my face?”