“Did they install a battery monitor on this bucket of bolts?” Trace asked after they had been crawling along for close to an hour.

  Monroe had been struggling to give him directions as the connection to the old GPS satellite flickered in and out. They had even needed to back track earlier when they missed the turnoff by a few hundred feet.

  “It already has a power monitor installed, from when I was bringing it back to life,” Monroe told him, as he began digging around in the old-fashioned glove-box.

  A moment later, he pulled out a small screen attached to a cable. He swiped through several information-filled screens, pausing on one only to grunt at it and continue on. “Sand is starting to clog the first of the air filters already.” He settled on a screen and placed it on the dashboard where they could see it.

  “Already? We’ve only been driving through the badlands for maybe two hours. If you include the area near it in Colorado, then you can add another two, or three, hours.” He glanced at the power monitor, which displayed their current battery reserves as ninety-two percent.

  They supposedly only needed to go twelve miles. Nine of which had already been traversed at their slow crawling pace. He was feeling confident the battery would at least get them there. Once there though, the battery would need to also power their tools, including the welding unit.

  In the worst-case scenario, it would also need to charge the battery in the semi. In which case, they would need to keep an eye on the charge level so they could run the van back over the border to recharge it.

  The worst part was, they hadn’t even hit an actual storm yet. The winds were around seventy miles an hour outside the van and carrying near-constant particulate matter. It was what people had taken to calling a sand-dervish. It wasn’t a proper storm, but at the same time, it wasn’t quite not one either.

  That was the badlands for you. The winds were constant, and the sand in those winds was also a guaranteed constant. However, the amount of sand could change depending on the situation.

  The inside of the van was utterly quiet, as Trace needed to focus ever harder to see the road through the gathered silt. Few people took the main road through Wyoming, and even fewer took the one they had turned off onto.

  As long as they kept moving, they would be fine. However, as soon as they stopped, they would need to release some pressure from the tires. It was something they should have already done earlier, but had forgotten.

  Trace startled as Monroe tapped his arm. “We should be coming up on where it initially pulled off the road.”

  He took his foot off the accelerator and switched the modes in his eyes back to normal with a sigh of relief. Focusing so intently for so long had started to give him a headache.

  “Do we want to wait for this dervish to die down, or take our chances with trying to find it now?” Trace asked, trying to see anything out of his scratched-up window. Now that he was looking at everything with normal vision again, he was seeing how bad the condition of the glass on the windows and windshield had become.

  Monroe snorted and shook his head. “Unlike you, I can’t see through all of this. Besides, if we open the doors right now, we’ll only flood the inside of the van with sand. No, I think we should wait it out, assuming the filter will let us.” He flipped the little information screen back a couple of times until he landed on the one he wanted. “We should be fine for another hour or two, and then it’ll be too clogged for anything to even reach the secondary filter I put in place.”

  Trace tilted his chair back to grab a nap. “Well, I guess we can only hope it exhausts itself by then.”

  ***

  It took two hours for the sand-dervish to mostly disperse.

  As soon as it did, they took the opportunity to strap the hoods of their suits down and hop out of the van. Trace released some pressure from each of the tires, while Monroe quickly swapped out the first filter. He tried to bang it against the tire, in the hope that they could dislodge enough of the sandy particulate to gain some more use out of it.

  Instead, all he managed to do was dislodge the abused fibers of the filter. Like before, it disintegrated in front of his eyes, floating away in the wind, until all he was left holding was the plastic frame.

  He threw it to the side in disgust and proceeded to tape up the outside of the passenger and driver's windows.

  While he was busy doing that, Trace had wandered away from the road and was looking for any sign of the semi. Now that the dervish was over, it was much easier to see things. The remaining sand blowing around them was more akin to a light snowfall than the blinding blizzard from before. It still disrupted your vision, but you could see through it.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  From what he was seeing in their immediate area, there was nothing that even looked like the semi. Nor was there a place where it might have hidden behind. The few small hills weren’t large enough to hide something that large.

  He walked back to the van, waving down Monroe as he did so, sending him a point-to-point message. Out here in the badlands, they didn’t have access to their usual NetConnect messaging services and needed to go with the alternatives. Network access was available in all established scarpo towns, and regular cities. However, it had been deemed a waste of money to maintain the repeaters needed to penetrate the constant storms.

  Inside the van, they carefully vacuumed the sand off their suits and from the rebreather units before pulling the hoods off.

  “I guess all we can do is keep moving forward, and hope the directions I was given were at least somewhat accurate.”

  Trace nodded and began driving again, switching the mode in his eyes so he could see through the scratched-up windshield.

  At the third stop, Monroe spotted an old bridge off to the side, along with a pyramid-looking object. Walking closer, he spotted the semi in the gulley beneath the bridge, partially protected from the elements.

  It only took Trace a few moments to find a small driveway that led to the pyramid and then park the van beside it, where it would be partially out of the wind.

  He cracked his neck with a sigh of relief and twisted at his hip, popping his back for good measure. “Why don’t you head down to the semi and start checking it out? I’ll check out this building and see what it is before coming down to join you.”

  Monroe checked to make sure he had his revolver on his thigh, and covered, before grabbing a bag of tools and affixing his hood. “Be careful. You don’t know what you might find out this far from proper civilization.”

  “Same to you. Make sure nothing has taken up residence in the thing before you go opening any of the doors.”

  Copying Monroe’s actions, Trace made sure he had easy access to his CD-10 pistol before lightly covering it. The simple protection would keep sand from getting into it for a while at least, though he would still give it a thorough cleaning later, just to be sure. Lastly, he grabbed a powerful flashlight and then secured his hood. There were some things you wanted a flashlight for, versus simply increasing the gain of your eyes or switching modes. The latter worked, but it tended to wash out colors, switching modes, removed them entirely, along with other details.

  In this environment, a flashlight was better.

  He approached the completely metal door of the building and flicked on the flashlight. There were spots where glass would have been at some point in the past. Now there was only shiny metal that had been welded into place behind it.

  The constant sands never let any rust form, leaving it smooth and shiny.

  He tried each of the doors and found that three of the four were locked. The fourth was stiff from disuse but unlocked. The hinge ground on itself, complaining at the sudden use. Sand had gotten into it at some point in the past.

  The inside of the building was remarkably sand-free.

  There were four doors, along with a couple of vending machines. To the left of the entrance was a door with an image of a woman on it. On the opposite side was one with a male. The center most door had the word ‘Family’ written on it, while the sign on the door next to it had been scribbled over in the past. Whatever had originally been written there was no longer legible. Now, it read ‘Corpo-Munch-Hole’.

  The building was a restroom, one that still had power, judging by the hum of the vending machines. Though he wouldn’t trust anything in them to still be edible.

  If this place had power, then they might be able to rig up a cable to charge the van or semi. It wouldn’t be fast, but it would be faster than making multiple trips to the border and back.

  Uncovering his pistol, he swept each of the rooms, confirming that the place was empty. The corpo-munch-hole door led to an underground sewer system for the building. He nodded at the appropriate name and made sure everything was locked tight. They didn’t need some monstrous sewer monster popping out to try and eat them while they were here.

  He already had one of those to worry about back home. If there was one here as well, then it would be better to cut off the source of the problem before it actually became an issue.

  There were several bolts that were loose, which he took the time to tighten. Before closing the door, with a wary eye. Despite himself, he couldn’t help but be suspicious of how loose those bolts had been.

  A minute later, he found himself walking down the hill of the gulley, toward where Monroe was inspecting the semi.

  “Have you found anything yet?” He called out.

  “The battery is completely dead. No surprise, since it has been sitting here for at least a year.” The big man shouted back, as he wriggled back out from beneath the frontend of the truck. “That said, it also has a broken linkage on the passenger side. It must have had some crazy wheel wobble. That’s all I’ve seen at the moment, but there is a lot of truck to inspect and without power…”

  Trace nodded. Without power, he wouldn’t be able to run most of the inspections he needed to on the motors. Not to mention, there were all the automated diagnostics the system would run to narrow down any problems for them.

  “I might have a solution for that issue,” He said somewhat hesitantly, unsure if they had brought the cabling to even do what he was thinking. “The building up there, it’s a public rest area from when people used to travel these roads in the past, and it somehow still has power.”

  Monroe instantly saw where he was going with that line of thought. “So, if we could run some power cords down to this, we would be able to trickle charge the battery system.”

  There would be some loss of power over the distance involved, how much would depend on the quality of cables they used. No matter what, asking for more than a trickle would be pushing it.

  “Or we could move the van closer. Plug the building’s power into it, and then take power from the van,” Trace offered as an alternative. They would need even more cabling, but using the van would help to keep the power constant over a longer distance.

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