Chapter 69: The First Ten Deaths
[Day 3 — Death]
The edge theory was wrong.
The worm had not been herding me away from an edge. It had been herding me toward a specific section of desert that looked identical to every other section of desert except for the quality of the sand.
I found this out by walking into it.
The sand swallowed my legs to the knee before I understood what was happening.
Quicksand.
The worm surfaced beside it.
I looked at it. It looked at me.
"Fair," I said.
It waited until the sand reached my waist, then my chest, then my chin.
The last thing I saw was the worm settling back under the surface.
[Day 3 — Death]
***
[Day 4 — Begin.]
The worm knew my patterns now.
I changed my direction three times in the first hour. It adjusted all three times without surfacing, just the ripple shifting, tracking the changed vibration.
Whatever sensory apparatus it used was better than my ability to confuse it.
Hour four it surfaced underneath me from below rather than beside me, the sand erupting upward, and what happened next was fast enough that the pain had already finished before my brain had organized it into a sequence.
[Day 4 — Death]
***
[Day 5 — Begin.]
No water.
This was the day I understood that the desert was not going to provide water because it was not a desert that had water in it. No oasis, no morning dew, no moisture in the air, nothing.
The heat extracted whatever the body was carrying and returned nothing.
By hour three the thirst was no longer background. It had moved into the foreground and started rearranging everything around it. Every thought bent slightly toward it before finishing.
Hour five the worm found me before I reached the rock.
The sand erupted from the left side this time. The hit carried enough force that I was airborne before I registered the impact, and the landing introduced me to several things about my own skeleton that I had not known previously.
[Day 5 — Death — 5 hours, 23 minutes]
***
[Day 6 — Begin.]
I found a rock formation.
The sun hit it from three angles, but the fourth side was in shadow for approximately two hours in the afternoon. I ran for the shadow.
The worm circled around the rock formation but did not come close to the rock itself,
I lasted eight hours. My longest day.
Then the shadow moved and the heat finished what it had started.
It brings the full weight of its head down.
Not a bite. A bite would have been faster, cleaner, over in the time it took to process the mechanics.
This was the head coming down on top of me the way a wall comes down, the way a building comes down,
The sand under me compressed. My ribs went first all of them simultaneously pressing inward until they stopped being ribs in any functional sense. My pelvis.
The pain from the day before had been deliberate, orchestrated, the work of something paying attention. This was indifferent.
The worm was not doing anything to me. The worm was simply being large in the space I was occupying, and I was the thing that could not survive that.
[Day 6 — Death]
***
[Day 7 — Begin.]
The system said nothing.
I stood in the sand and waited for a notification.
Nothing came.
It was hunting me based on vibration.
I had been running. Running produced a regular vibration. Regular vibration was easy to track.
I stopped running.
I walked.
Everything in the desert became very quiet.
The ripple patterns changed.
The worm appeared.
It did not swallow me whole.
It came back along the surface and I saw the teeth properly for the first time, rows of them angled inward.
They caught my left leg below the knee and the pressure kept increasing until I heard the bone give way. I screamed.
The sound came out and it was broken.
The worm pulled and my body followed for a few meters across the sand before the leg failed completely.
The world lurched sideways.
Sand filled my vision.
When it went back under, it took part of my leg with it.
[Day 7 — Death]
***-*
[Day 8 — Begin.]
I walked.
I ran when the ripple changed.
The worm circled.
It looked at me.
We had been doing this for days.
I picked up a rock.
It dove.
I did not run. I stood where I was and held the rock and waited.
It surfaced behind me.
I turned and threw the rock
My arm did not work correctly.
I used the other one to keep moving and the worm made two more passes across the next hour, each one leaving me slower than before.
By hour five it had noticed.
The next pass caught my midsection.
The impact folded me into the sand.
I heard something breaking.
The worm kept moving.
I did not.
When it disappeared beneath the surface, it took enough of me that the outcome stopped being negotiable.
I lay in the sand and watched the wrong sky above me.
I was crying.
The desert took the tears immediately.
[Day 8 — Death — 14 hours]
*-**
[Day 9 — Begin.]
I walked.
I had stopped walking.
I fell.
It took ten minutes to stand up again.
[Day 9 — Death ]
***
[Day 10 — Begin.]
The worm surfaced eight times.
The eighth time it came from directly ahead while I was watching behind me and the head hit my chest and the force was enough to stop everything, my movement, breath, thought — for a moment, and then I was on my back in the sand and the worm was repositioning for the follow-through.
It came back at ground level.
The teeth caught me at the waist.
It pulled.
I screamed and cried.
The pulling was slow, the worm reversing back into the sand and taking what it had caught, and the slow made it worse, the specific terrible slowness of it, and
I put both hands into the sand and screamed and screamed.
The pulling stopped because there was nothing left to pull against.
I was tired. Very tired.
[Day 10 — Death ]
