Free Dune Time by Jack Nicholls Page B

his toes in for purchase, and beneath the crust the underlayer was still hot with yesterday’s warmth.
    Hasan had reached the ridge of the nearest dune. Tariq could make him out now as a deeper black silhouette against the radiance of the stars. Hasan raised the rifle toward the sky, and the sound of a shot broke across the desert. Memories of tear gas and street fights flashed across Tariq’s mind and he found himself diving to the slope for protection.
    The shock of it seemed to silence the hum of the desert for a moment, then it washed back like a wave. Tariq spat sand from his mouth and crawled up to the ridgeline, where Hasan was crouched with his head cocked intently.
    â€œCan you hear them?” Hasan whispered.
    Hasan’s fear seemed to people the void before them with menacing figures, black against black beneath the vibrating stars, but Tariq could only hear the sand, the wind, and his own strained breathing. He lay against his brother, shivering in the darkness.
    â€œWe must have scared them off,” Hasan said at last. “Probably kids trying to boost the camera.”
    He led them to the camera tower and took Tariq’s phone to examine the equipment, pointing with satisfaction to a confusion of scuffed sand beneath the tower, although Tariq couldn’t tell if it was made up of their own tracks or someone else’s. There was no sign of damage to the camera or its case.
    â€œWe can’t risk any tampering with the equipment,” Hasan said firmly. “We’ll have to sleep out here from now on, in shifts.”
    Tariq wrapped his arms around himself. He was shivering, and not just from the cold—the thrum of the desert was more overwhelming at night, like helicopters patrolling the sky.
    â€œI am not sleeping here,” he said.
    â€œThen I will,” said Hasan, staring blankly into the dark. “We have to do our job.”
    *   *   *
    Hasan was serious about guarding the equipment. He kept his bedroll and rifle by the camera, just out of sight of its lens, and slept under the stars. He would wake with sand in his hair and nostrils and wash himself from a bucket of cloudy water before dawn prayer. In the afternoons he had taken to disappearing on long walks along the tops of the dunes. Tariq would think his brother was reading one of his National Geographic magazines in the chair behind him, then be startled to see a shadow stalking along the ridgeline high above the house.
    Tariq was struggling not to sleep through prayer times. He had built himself a nest of cushions, power cords, and water bottles in the hammock outside the door, and rarely stirred from it. He would swing in the hammock, obsessively checking his phone’s Wi-Fi like a fisherman angling for a catch that never came. The cloud was as remote and elusive in the desert as its namesakes above..
    Some days it was so silent that he could hear the tiny shutter-click of the camera every three hours. Other times, the horizon hummed like a field of locusts. It was just vibrations from wind rolling sand grains down the slopes, Google told him, but it was unnerving, and he kept his earphones in at those times.
    Today there was something wrong with the music on Tariq’s phone. The beats of all his songs had sped up, the singers sounded like chipmunks. He experimented with settings and playback for five minutes until he gave up and threw the phone into the sand with a curse.
    The drone of the wind bored into his head. Hasan seemed unfazed by the sound. He sat in a sagging deck chair beside Tariq, peacefully contemplating the dunes.
    â€œHasan, let’s sing. Remember when we did our own version of ‘Buffalo Soldier’? Old camel herdman! Sand in his turban! ”
    He sang the verse out into the sky, then waited for Hasan to chime in on the chorus.
    â€œI don’t remember,” said Hasan, after a pause. “I don’t listen to music much anymore.