Sam and Tink ran down the dune, immediately losing sight of whatever burrowed towards them. It was impossible to judge how far off it was, the landscape was so barren it occluded distance. Their feet slipped with every step. Sand not only filled Sam’s trainers but also seemed to fill his muscles, weighing him down with fiery ballast. The wind was hot and rough and getting stronger, making the air so dry it sucked all the moisture from Sam’s nose and mouth, leaving him as raw on the outside as he felt on the inside. At the bottom of the dune, Sam tripped into Tink. They both went tumbling down the last few feet in a spray of yellow.

  The twilight of the brewing storm burnt away in a white flash of sheet lightning. Shadows vanished to another world, only to lurch back moments later to reclaim the twilight. They lay in the well between two dunes, the next rising steeply above them. Tink took Sam’s hand and they staggered to their feet and began to climb, using their free hands to pull them up, not letting go of each other. At the top they were already breathing hard, sweat beading on their faces. A thousand more dunes as big or bigger lay ahead of them. Sam really had become Finn McCoo. He and Tink were a lost tribe of two. They both looked behind, as the sky blazed white. They squinted and far off, but closer than before, a dune came alive, rippling and collapsing in on itself.

  The shore seemed impossibly distant even if it was a straight line on solid ground. Sam wanted to wake up from this nightmare.

  ‘We can’t make it,’ he said.

  ‘Not to the shore, no.’ Tink pointed ahead and off to the left. ‘The tree. We can reach it.’ Her lack of confidence weakened the statement to a question.

  A boiling darkness barrelled towards them from the distant ocean. Behind, something beneath the sand was coming, leaving them little choice.

  ‘We can,’ Sam said. He thought of Dune, both Lynch’s and Villeneuve’s versions and the Fremen’s irregular walking pattern to fool the giant sandworms. Would that work now? He decided they hadn’t been walking when they’d attracted Sugnar’s attention. So, it was probably a bad idea to do anything other than run. Maybe this was more Tremors. Another of his and his mum’s favourites, a go-to comfort movie. That was too painful to think about, so he squeezed Tink’s hand instead. ‘Ready?’

  She nodded, and they cantered diagonally down the dune in loping strides. At the bottom, they let go of each other and scrambled up the next, using their hands for balance on the shifting ground. Sam tore off his sweatshirt and tied it around his waist as they descended. Sand stuck to their sweat and stung their eyes. Five ascents later and they were both heaving in lungfuls of hot air through improvised masks made from the necklines of their tops. Tink bent double. Sam pinched the stitch in his side with the claw of his hand and searched for their pursuer.

  At first, he couldn’t see anything. The twilight was thickening. A weak flash from the coming storm out at sea didn’t lift the darkness, but he could feel what he couldn’t see. The vibrations were getting stronger. Then the first fork of lightning lanced the earth near the galleon closer to the sea. Shadows instantly grew longer and bowed across the landscape, like black robed acolytes. At the start of their breadcrumb footsteps, the crest of the dune grew before sloughing apart, and the back of a huge beast ploughed back into the sand. Even at that distance, the potential size of the thing gave Sam a sense of uncontrolled falling. He pointed. Tink saw and, without the need to speak, they started running again.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Down and up. Slipping, tripping, sliding but not stopping. Never stopping, no matter how much their lungs hurt, and their muscles screamed for them to stop.

  The fallen tree was two dunes away when the tremulous earth staggered and felled them both. The sand hopped and jumped in a manic dance. A fork of electricity speared from the sky, and the wind had whipped up, filling the air with particles. They coughed and stumbled down the dune and up the next. The last one was higher than the rest and covered in marram grass, which from a distance hadn’t seemed strange at all, not that it was easy to think about very much at all running for their lives. But up close the sheer size of the tree became clear and so did the grass. A fallen skyscraper, the tree lay on its side, and the grass leading up to it was as tall as a bamboo forest, their stalks tapering up from the thickness of a leg to high wavering needle points.

  The tremulous ground made their legs sink ankle deep. A handful of strides later it was to the calf. Each glutinous step was becoming slower and slower. Their only grace was to be lumbering downhill. Half-way through the descent, Sam spilled forward and crawled on his belly to free his feet. Tink was stuck and her struggling was becoming panicked. Sam wheeled on all-fours and threw his arms around her body and pulled. They fell back and tumbled downhill for two revolutions, blind and choking. When they came to rest, the sand was already beginning to swallow them.

  ‘Crawl,’ Sam tried to shout but it was choked off in the arid maelstrom.

  Tink seemed to hear or to have come to the same conclusion. Like soldiers in no-man’s-land, they slithered on their bellies to the bottom of the last dune. A deep rumbling rose from below, and the ground became even more liquid. Now, almost swimming through sand, they worked frantically, pulling themselves on. With every laboured movement the last of their energy was draining away, and then the peak of the dune behind them exploded.

  Sam threw an arm around a thick blade of marram grass, and with his other he reached for Tink. They collapsed on their backs amid the giant spikes of grass and scrabbled deeper into the thicket as the world beyond became a filthy, billowing cloud that rushed towards them. An enormous shadow reared up. A roar screamed at the storm clouds, a dragon’s bellow more grating than a locomotive’s screeching brakes, louder than the groaning, ripping steel of a falling tower. The shadow swayed serpentine as it howled, and then fell through the cloud and landed with a thunderous crash, shaking the earth and sending forth another roiling sand-cloud.

  Half-blinded, coughing and exhausted, they dragged themselves further into the grass and up the dune. Sam had never felt so physically spent. His mind floated, seeming to swim insubstantially and ineffectually in the sea of burning acid that was his body. He caught a thick stem in the crook of his arm, went to take another step back, only to crumple to his backside. Tink reached to help him up and fell next to him.

  A hiss like storm waves raking through shingle spat from beyond the edge of the marram grass. A shadow swept past, almost substantial, the outline of jagged quills bristling along the back of a freight train. Rags of something flapped like tattered sails from its flanks.

  The cloud thinned. The monstrous shadow lurking in its depths disappeared. Its hiss faded behind the bluster of the coming storm.

  How long they lay on their backs looking up at the wavering points of grass above them, Sam couldn’t say. Their chests sucked in the warm, bone-dry air. Sam was drenched in sweat, which had turned into a rough paste on his exposed skin. He didn’t care. Somehow, they were alive. His thoughts gradually solidified and the lactic blaze in his limbs and lungs ebbed, leaving him washed out.

  Maybe they could have stayed there forever, staring at the wavering tips of giant grass stems, but Sam blinked and wiped away the sweat on his brow with an arm that couldn’t possibly be as heavy as it felt. The blackening sky stuttered and then blazed white. With a deafening crack, a bolt of lightning forked down between the swaying stems and struck the ground in front of them, searing Sam’s vision in the eruption of sparks. If they needed a sign that they couldn’t stay there, they took the hint, dragging their bodies from the soft ground.

  Up the dune, they staggered from stem to stem. The sky burned and roared, flashing pale the smooth grey flanks of the felled tree, that with every step grew more enormous, until a bulging cliff face of petrified wood loomed over them: the end of their grassy haven.