The ground shook, causing the sand to dance on the ground and making it hard for Sam and Tink to stand. Sam might have been stunned into fright instead of flight, if it hadn’t been for Tink. They stumbled into each other; she caught hold of his bicep to steady herself and repeated her command.
‘Run!’
The dunes were to their left, their surface sliding in miniature avalanches pushing more sand in through the fence at the back of the playground. The wind was back, whipping stinging particles into the air. In front of them was the hole that had grown so rapidly. Unsafe ground for sure. There was only one other way: over the fence which was to their backs.
Tink moved first. She planted two hands on the metal railings and vaulted, shakily sticking the landing. Sam was right behind her. He tried to repeat her technique, got most of the way before his trailing foot clipped a railing and he landed in a heap on the other side.
‘Get up,’ Tink shouted over the din, helping Sam to his feet. She took his hand and was about to run back the way they had come to the playground, back across the T-junction and up the main road, when there was a thunderous crack and the spine of the road marked out in white lines was broken by a yawning fissure. The way barred, and thrown back on their heels, Tink looked around desperately. ‘This way,’ she said.
They ran as best they could, cutting left down the middle of the road edging the dunes. With the ground shaking, Sam fought to maintain speed. Another crack rattled his eardrums, and he looked back to see the fissure in the road advancing on them in spasmodic lurches. The ground pushed up, like an active fault line creating a new mountain range.
‘Tink!’ he cried.
She didn’t turn or break her stride. ‘Just run; don’t stop.’
The wind grew stronger, shrouding the way ahead in a dirty yellow fog. Tink tripped but kept her feet. Sam reached out a hand and pulled her back on course. She didn’t let go of him this time. Either side of the road, tiles slid from roofs. They fell through the sandstorm like suicidal shadows, before smashing on the pavement.
An arm held before his face, Sam squinted to no effect. They were running blind. He only prayed Tink knew these streets the same way he did in his ends. Kids knew places in ways adults couldn’t if they never grew up there. Adults navigated by cars and the shortest routes to service lives crammed with functionality and devoid of time. Kids, being the opposite, knew every cut through, back alley, nook, and meandering way. Tink’s legs pumped as though she knew where she was going.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
With every thunderous crack Sam could feel the fissure gaining on them, picking up where the hole had left off. He couldn’t help himself. He had to look behind to see how close it was. Immediately, he wished he hadn’t, not because of how close it was—that was bad enough—but because it wasn’t merely a crack in the road. The ground had bowed upward, as if something huge were tunnelling beneath the surface. Sam had a flash of him standing on the cusp of the dunes at the beach house barely an hour ago, staring out as an unseen thing came closer and closer, shrugging sand from its shoulders. It had seemed like a dream. It’s an earthquake, that’s all, Sam tried to tell himself. They happen in England all the time, he'd heard in geography class, though most were barely noticeable. It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that this was a bigger one, and they were known to stir up other climatic effects. Maybe it wasn’t even that big a quake. It just felt like it because he had no frame of reference. He knew he was bullshitting himself because the way Tink was acting didn’t make him think it was any sort of seismic event. Why had she said sorry and seemed so guilty and ashamed back in the playground? Sam knew that look because he’d seen it in the mirror. She moved with purpose, like this wasn’t a complete shock to her, terrifying yes, but not altogether a surprise. His gut told him it wasn’t an earthquake. That was another of his mother’s less prosaic sayings: ‘Always trust your gut. If it feels right, go with it; if it feels wrong, run like hell.’ Not bad advice for an inner-city London boy from the rough side of the tracks, used to being vigilant about whose territory he was walking through, or where the dealers hung out. Kids on bikes palming off bags of powder and pills in exchange for folded pieces of paper, as though Ken Loach tried to make a Spielberg movie. Easy to get pulled into that world, and even easier to end up as collateral damage.
Tink shouted something but the wind snatched away. There were shapes in the sandstorm, figures shuffling from doors. People, Sam thought with a spark of hope, which quickly guttered and died. At first, the thought they might be coming out of their houses because things inside were falling all around them. That would have made this a quake, a nice rational explanation.
But they didn’t run into the road, looking around, calling to each other, or checking overhead as the tiles dropped and smashed all around them. They moved too slowly, shambling in fact. The way was blocked while to the left came the sand, pushing through the houses backing directly onto the dunes. Sand pushed through the narrow side alleys between pairs of detached homes, in slow moving waist-high drifts. Then it came through the ground floor windows, smashing them as easily as Hollywood sugar-glass, punching open doors, and finally leaking from the top windows. An endless cascade of desiccated tears, weeping from buildings with broken faces.
Sam felt a yank in his shoulder socket as Tink pulled him to the right. They quickly came to the front of a house which loomed out of the choking maelstrom. Instead of trying the door and smashing in one of the windows, they ran along the pavement in front of the building, and with another yank they were in the alley running up its side. The road’s back broke at the entrance to the alley, throwing them both into the scabrous wall. This time, Tink looked back, and Sam followed her gaze. The jagged black asphalt seemed to glare at them. The earth jolted, loosing a shower of tiles that exploded all around them as the sand built up, flowing over the black shoulders of the crippled asphalt and joining together in a chest high wall of sand that forced its way into the mouth of the alley. They turned to escape via the other end of the alley, but a shambling figure had appeared there, trapping them.
