Red Sand by Ronan Cray Read Free Book Online Page A

circulars and cut coupons from the big brand names. She cut irregularly, mussed them up, dropped a few in a bucket of water, sat on the pile, and even rubbed a little dirt on them from the basil plant in her kitchen window. In the end, they looked like dozens of old women had clipped and coveted them. The following Sunday night, envelopes stuffed with coupons shipped out to manufacturers across the country.
    Each coupon is only worth 50 cents here and 25 cents there, but fifty coupons for 50 cents out of two hundred newspapers quickly adds up. Lauren was shocked at how much she was pulling in. That was before she discovered the internet. Every manufacturer’s website posts coupons for consumers to print out in the privacy of their homes. Her Monday night operation expanded to every night of the week. Before long, she was swimming in cash like Scrooge McDuck. It was so easy.
    Too easy. Her success was her failure.
    She should have done the math. Her Monday night storefront was selling more product than the only other grocery store in town - her employer.  Someone in Sales at a nationwide purveyor of salad dressings sent her a congratulatory letter on the amount of product she was selling. Said they’d send out a rep to see how they could help her expand. It sounded like they would give her some kind of award.
    She hadn’t been entirely blindsided. When she hit the fifty grand mark, she’d opened a Swiss bank account to avoid local attention. Now Julius Bar kept watch over her two million dollar nest egg somewhere high in the Alps. Feeling like James Bond, she’d ordered a passport and kept her tank full of gas for this inevitable day. 
    Lauren emptied her local bank account, left a deceptively loving Dear John letter on the table, and hit the road. As soon as her Dodge bumped into the Atlantic Ocean, she jumped on the next ship for wherever.
    When the rep came out he’d find a polite elderly woman in a white house with a picket fence who forwarded any mail she got to “that nice young lady at the grocery store” for ten dollars a month. They’d cross check their sales lists and realize she’d never placed a single order for salad dressing, or any other product for that matter. It would be months before the manufacturer sorted it out, started the class-action lawsuits, set the law on her. By then she would be on a far-away beach, impossible to find or track down.
    How right she was.
     
    Somewhere across the dunes, Lauren heard a scream. Probably just the wind , she told herself, but there wasn’t any wind, not on the beach and not here in the lee of the sand dunes. Sand fleas distracted her as they clung to her bare flesh like new skin. Holding the stretcher prevented her from scratching or slapping at them. Already, red welts began to appear on her arms and legs. 
    “C’mon Carter. Keep up,” she shouted as Carter stumbled at the front of the litter. Her rescuers weren’t waiting for stragglers, as if they wanted to be off the beach as fast as she did. Sand doubled the effort required to walk. The early morning sun had already heated the sand intolerably. Her heels blistered with every step.
    Since the boats landed as close to the cliffs as possible, they followed a steep upward path. The red wall loomed over them. Strategically placed stones held the sand in place, but it was a far cry from a staircase. Going up was even harder carrying Max. All those yoga classes paid off. She hadn’t built the perfect body for nothing.
    She looked up the line. It wasn’t hard to spot the natives. Bright white hair sprouted from every native head. Either they were all old, or Steve Martin had a fan base here.
    There were so few survivors. Her boat crew joined another at the beach, making twelve. Most in the other boat were as overweight as Howie. It seemed the only people who survived floated without life jackets, but, then, statistically those who frequented cruise ships were not the adventurous type. Where was Howie,