Dust: (Part I: Sandstorms) by Lochlan Bloom Page A

evidence of his own wrongdoing.
    The sand flooded in the door around him and firmly offering his arm as if to help me down. I dressed hurriedly and climbed down from the truck on my own. I wore a helmet that completely covered my head and for a moment I imagined myself a diver, descending to the bottom of the deep, blue sea, swimming through the soft currents of some tropical beach.
    John led me a few metres away from the vehicle and I quickly lost sight of our convoy. All was swirling grey, ashen, alive and buzzing around us. The helmet Jon had left me in the cabin was snug, a short range earpiece was embedded and I heard Jon’s voice, crisp in my ear.
    ‘It blocked our reader,’ he said, a tight pitch in his voice. “That’s how we knew there was something here.’
    ‘What?’ I asked. ‘What did?’
    There was more than enough obscurity out here without extra guessing games.
    ‘A cathedral,’ he said. ‘We’ve come across them before but never seen one this big before.’
    After the initial wave of destruction strange structures started to appear. It is unclear where they come from but as those first sand drifts encroached on the suburbs, heaping new drumlins in unused cul-de-sacs and high streets, people started to report peculiar sightings.
    The first formations were little more than mounds of sand. People paid them little attention, after all the city was covered in sand. Overnight a sandbank might shift its distribution, take on a different shape, a new pile appearing at random.
    ‘It’s the wind,’ we would say, ‘naturally it shifts the sand around.’ We did our best to convince ourselves of this, even when we knew there had been next to no wind.
    Doubtlessly there were plenty of hoaxes, kids no doubt with nothing better to do, would shift the sand around to spook out their parents. We laughed at the paranoia.
    It was only when more complex structures started to appear that things got uncomfortable. At first they were distinguished by small tunnels, around the width of a clenched fist, that peppered certain mounds, like an animal’s burrow.
    Despite the precarious nature of the sand, these tunnels somehow managed to retain their structure, and when attempts were made to excavate some of the tunnels it was found that they extended for several miles in a complex warren system. In different cities around the world there were reports of these tunnelled sandbanks. Explanations abounded.
    ‘It must be rodents and other small mammals,’ we said, ‘forced out of their homes and forced to seek shelter in the city amongst the sand.’ It sounded plausible, even though there were next to no sightings of rodents in any of the streets.
    As the sand become common in streets, piled up banks of sand with tunnels disappearing into them at odd angles were accepted as normal. They searched for the animals that produced such burrows but it was obvious there were none.
    As the restaurants and estate agent offices became disused, the sand would collect in doorways and side streets. We got used to everything, those sandbanks, the tunnels. It became normal to see pavements sporadically covered with these “rat dunes” as we called them. Everyone had time to get used to them. They did no harm. 
    The irony of course was that we all knew that whatever might live in those holes it certainly wasn’t rats. We citydewllers had long held a belief that city rats were stubborn survivors. Everyone who lived in the city thought of them as indestructible, on a par with cockroaches, natures enduring vermin. Yet they were one of the first to go, almost overnight. Something about the dust damaged them.
    For a period of about four weeks, right at the start, there were rats everywhere, sick wheezing creatures, driven out into the light to gasp a final breath. Thousands of them, congregated next to drains and sewer hatches, they died peacefully, silent, piled body upon body in heaps around the streets. We tried to clean them away. We