Nothing – no one – came out of the van. The door swung and banged in the wind like the last shutter on a haunted house. At last I crept back, heart pounding, and peered inside. There was nothing but the jumble of stuff I had left in there – the road-arrow with the broken bulbs, the jack, my toolbox.
“You have got to get hold of yourself,” I said softly. “Get hold of yourself.”
I waited for Elizabeth to say, You’ll be all right, darling… something like that… but there was only the wind.
I got back into the van, started it, and drove halfway back to the excavation. That was as far as I could make myself go. Although I knew it was utterly foolish, I became more and more convinced that Dolan was lurking in the van. My eyes kept going to the rear-view mirror, trying to pick his shadow out of the others.
The wind was stronger than ever, rocking the van on its springs. The dust it pulled up from the desert and drove before it looked like smoke in the headlights.
At last I pulled over to the side of the road, got out, and locked all the doors. I knew I was crazy to even try sleeping outside in this, but I couldn’t sleep in there. I just couldn’t. So I crawled under the van with my sleeping bag.
I was asleep five seconds after I zipped myself into it.
When I woke up from a nightmare I could not remember – except there had been hands in it, clutching at my throat – I found that I had been buried alive. There was sand up my nose, sand in my ears. It was down my throat, choking me.
I screamed and struggled upward, at first convinced that the confining sleeping bag was earth. Then I banged my head on the van’s undercarriage and saw flakes of rust silting down.
I rolled out from under into a dawn the color of smutty pewter. My sleeping bag blew away like a tumbleweed the moment my weight was off it. I gave a surprised yell and chased twenty feet after it before realizing it would be the world’s worst mistake. Visibility was down to no more than twenty yards, and maybe less. The road was totally gone in places. I looked back at the van and it looked washed-out, barely there, a sepia photograph of a ghost-town relic.
I staggered back to it, found my keys, and got inside. I was still spitting sand and coughing dryly. I got the motor going and drove slowly back the way I had come. There was no need to wait for a weather report; the weather was all the jock could talk about this morning. The worst desert windstorm in Nevada history. All roads closed. Stay home unless you absolutely have to go out, and then stay home anyway.
The glorious Fourth.
Stay in. You’re crazy if you go out there. You’ll go sandblind.
That I would chance. This was a golden opportunity to cover it up forever – never in my wildest imaginings had I suspected I might get such a chance, but it was here, and I was taking it.
I had brought three or four extra blankets. I tore a long, wide strip from one of them and tied it around my head. Looking like some sort of crazed Bedouin, I stepped out.
I spent all morning carrying chunks of asphalt up from the ditch and placing them back into the trench, trying to be as neat as a mason laying a wall… or bricking up a niche. The actual fetching and carrying was not terribly difficult, although I had to unearth most of the asphalt blocks like an archaeologist hunting for artifacts, and every twenty minutes or so I had to repair to the van to get out of the blowing sand and rest my stinging eyes.
I worked slowly west from what had been the shallow end of the excavation, and by quarter past noon – I had started at six – I had reached the final seventeen feet or so. By then the wind had begun to die and I could see occasional ragged patches of blue above me.