Shuttered Sky

28. The Memory Of Dust

The empty fields five miles north of Dallas/Fort Worth airport had browned and died more than a month ago. Al­though the weather was clear, the temperature stayed a brisk thirty-five. At one o’clock in the afternoon, a red Durango turned off a sparsely traveled two-lane road, churning up dust. Then it stopped at no place in particular, letting out its five occupants. Three of them walked further out into the field, the dead brush beneath them turning green and growing denser beneath their feet. Wild mustard bloomed yellow around sudden pockets of bluebonnet and red cosmos.

Drew and Okoya stood beside one another back at the Durango watching the greening of the field—and although Drew swore he’d never allow himself to be left alone with Okoya again, neither did he want to be out in the field with Dillon, Winston and Michael. Getting here had been an undertaking in and of itself. While the storm over southeastern Texas had ended, so many roads were washed out be­tween Houston and Dallas, that a four- hour drive had stretched into eight.

Up above, a United jet screamed its way heavenward against the pull of gravity. When Drew looked back from the ascending jet, the field before him was almost entirely green.

Dillon was quite aware of the field renewing around him. He also knew there would be no disguising it from anyone who cared to no­tice, so he didn’t worry himself with it. Like smash-and-grab robbers, they would accomplish this deed by brute force, rather than subtle scheming. There was no time for anything else.

Dillon looked around, realizing that he was in between Winston and Michael, a pace ahead of them. As had been the case so many times before, they were following him.

Winston realized this as well, and knew he could have taken the lead. A part of him wanted to, but there was something very natural about being a wing to Dillon’s center. Winston had long since learned that whatever came naturally to the Shards was not to be fought.

Michael, on the other hand did not care who took the lead. He had no time for such thoughts, because his task had already begun. He knew what he had to do, and kept telling himself that he was up for it, bolstering his confidence, and thereby bringing clarity to the skies. Compared to Winston and Dillon he felt like a novice, for their skills were so exact and precise; fine brush strokes to Michael’s sloppy finger-painting. Every few moments a doubt would invade his confidence, reminding him that what they were about to attempt was like seeking a single grain of sand in a hundred miles of beach. Such negative thinking was a formidable enemy for him now, because everything depended on his ability to manipulate his own emotions on cue, like an actor.

Dillon stopped about two hundred yards away from the car. “This is as good a place as any.”

“So what do we do now?” Winston asked. “How do we begin this?”

“It has to start with Michael,” Dillon said.

“No pressure.” Michael closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “How far away do you want it to start?”

“I don’t know,” said Dillon. “Fifty miles? Can you do that?”

“Let’s find out.” He took off his jacket and held his hands out wide as if to receive an embrace, but kept his eyes closed. In the cold, it was easy for him to feel the fine hairs on his arms and legs rise, tightening into gooseflesh. He concentrated on the feeling, bringing his attention to his extremities. Then he began to generate turbulence. He thought of bad times and brutal fights from his past; arguments at home; acts of violence directed at him, and acts he directed out at the world. Some were memories, others fabrications, but they had the desired effect. He could feel his finger tips and toes begin to tremble with anxiety, and slowly, slowly he let the anxiety sweep inward.

Two hundred yards away, Drew and Okoya watched and waited. Drew couldn’t feel the slightest change in the breeze. All he felt was . . . unsettled. “Nothing’s happening.”

“It would seem that way,” Okoya agreed.

After fifteen minutes, Drew saw Michael put his hands down, too tired to hold them up any more. Now he just stood there, with Win­ston and Dillon pacing behind him through an ever-increasing tangle of brush. At twenty minutes Drew was close to panic. “It’s not work­ing,” he said. “He’s not ready, it’s too soon!”

“It’s his anxiety you’re feeling, not your own,” Okoya reminded him. “Which means it is working. Why don’t you turn on the radio.”

Desperate for any diversion, Drew powered up the Durango, and turned on the radio.

“Now find a local news station.”

Drew searched the AM band until finding one. The big news of the hour was a weather advisory. A wind storm. Gale force gusts had already swept west through Dallas, east through Fort Worth, and ap­peared to be zeroing in on the airport in between. Callers from the north and south reported the winds as well, again moving in converg­ing directions. The winds and accompanying dust storm had shredded signs, torn down traffic lights, and brought the twin metropolitan areas to a standstill. Drew turned to see Okoya smile.

“Michael doesn’t know his own strength.”

Now when Drew looked toward the horizon, he could see it had taken on a strange amber shade in all directions.

Meanwhile, out in the field, Michael concentrated. He didn’t look to the horizon, he didn’t open his eyes. He focused on his anticipation and turmoil, letting his heart rate increase, feeling his heartbeat in his fingertips, then his wrists, then his elbows. Tension bubbled within him. He had no idea how far away the wind was, until he felt a hand on his shoulder.

“Michael,” Dillon said. “Get ready to brace yourself.” Dillon’s voice cracked as he spoke.

Then Michael opened his eyes, and saw his creation. A tumbling wall of dust, hundreds of feet high. A brown tidal wave bearing down on them from all directions. Michael closed his eyes again, his anxiety closing in on his heart.

Back at the Durango, Okoya laughed with glee at the sight, and Drew could only stand with one hand on the open door of the car staring at this mountain rolling toward them, engulfing the earth.

A jet, perhaps the last one with departure clearance, fought its way heavenward on a trajectory taking it directly toward the dust storm. It looked as though it might clear it, but then the plane disappeared into the cloud’s roiling head. Drew didn’t know what became of it, because now there was a roar in the air, and the ground began to shake like an earthquake.

Suddenly Drew realized they were out in the middle of nowhere. There was no structure they could run to. No place they could go.

In the distance a farmhouse vanished beneath the dust. A string of telephone poles disappeared one by one, measuring the distance. It was five poles away.

“Oh shit!”

Drew practically threw Okoya into the car, and threw himself in after him. When he turned to reach for the door, the leading edge of the dust storm was upon them. He pulled the door closed just as it hit.

Two hundred yards away, Winston saw the Durango disappear and he panicked. “Slow it down!” he screamed at Michael, “it’s coming too fast!”

“I can’t!” he screamed back. “I’m trying, I—'

It hit them from all directions at once, banging them into one another, lifting them off their feet and tumbling them through the shredding brush.

Michael felt his flesh abrading away and regenerating. He could have died a hundred times in those first few seconds, before self-preservation kicked in. He bore down, held his breath and found, in the middle of it all, a seed of peace in which he now centered his awareness. Almost instantaneously the wind pushed outward, leaving a gap in the center of the maelstrom; a ten-foot bubble of still air, an eye in his storm in which the three of them now huddled, coughing and trembling.

Dillon was the first to stand and assess the situation. The violent sands that raged around their air pocket kept shifting and changing— but it wasn’t random—nothing in Dillon’s presence ever was. The dust now swirled in shifting moire patterns. Spirals within spirals, like galaxies revolving.

Now the burden was on Dillon.

This was by far the most difficult task Dillon had ever been asked to perform. It was not just reconstructing