by Hugh Howey
Page 3
“I’ve got Mick Webb working on something related. Logistics and planning, really. You two will need to collaborate on a few things. And Anna is taking leave from her post at MIT to lend a hand. ”
“Anna?” Donald fumbled for his water, his hand shaking.
“Of course. She’ll be your lead engineer on this project. There are details in there on what she’ll need, space-wise. ”
Donald took a gulp of water and forced himself to swallow.
“There’s a lot of other people I could call in, sure, but this project can’t fail, you understand? It needs to be like family. People I can trust. ” Senator Thurman interlocked his fingers. “If this is the only thing you were elected to do, I want you to do it right. It’s why I stumped for you in the first place. ”
“Of course. ” Donald bobbed his head to hide his confusion. He had worried during the election that the Senator’s endorsement stemmed from old family ties. This was somehow worse. Donald hadn’t been using the Senator at all; it was the other way around. Studying the drawing in his lap, the newly elected congressman felt one job he was inadequately trained for melt away—only to be replaced by a different job that seemed equally daunting.
“Wait,” he said. “I still don’t get it. ” He studied the old drawing. “Why the grow lights?”
Senator Thurman reached for his bottle and polished off his water, the empty plastic crinkling in his fist. He smacked his lips and turned to toss the bottle into a blue recycling bin. His profile, Donald saw, was every bit as chiseled and handsome as the face he presented to the cameras. He had barely changed in all the years Donald had known him.
“Because, Donny—” He turned and smiled. “This building I want you to design for me—it’s going to go below ground. ”
2
2110 • Silo 1
Troy held his breath and tried to remain calm while the doctor pumped the rubber bulb. The inflatable band swelled around his bicep until it pinched his skin. He wasn’t sure if slowing his breathing and steadying his pulse affected his blood pressure, but he had a strong urge to impress the man in the white coveralls. He wanted his numbers to come back normal.
His arm throbbed a few beats while the needle bounced and the air hissed out.
“Eighty over fifty. ” The band made a ripping sound as it was torn loose. Troy rubbed the spot where his skin had been pinched.
“Is that okay?”
The doctor made a note on his clipboard. “It’s low, but not outside the norm. ” Behind him, his assistant labeled a cup of dark gray urine before placing it inside a small fridge. Troy caught sight of a half-eaten sandwich among the samples, not even wrapped.
He looked down at his bare knees sticking out of the blue paper gown. His legs were pale and seemed smaller than he remembered. Bony. He felt the urge to pee but had already gone as much as he could.
“I still can’t make a fist,” he told the doctor, working his fingers in and out.
“That’s perfectly normal. Your strength will return. Look into the light, please. ”
Troy followed the bright beam and tried not to blink.
“How long have you been doing this?” he asked the doctor.
“You’re my third coming out. I’ve put two under. ” He lowered the light and smiled at Troy. “I’ve only been out myself for less than a month. I can tell you that the strength will return. ”
Troy nodded. The doctor’s assistant came over and handed him another pill and a cup of water. Troy hesitated. He stared down at the little blue capsule nestled in the crease of his lifeline.
“A double dose this morning,” the doctor said, “and then you’ll be given one with breakfast and dinner. Please do not skip a treatment. ”
Troy looked up. “What happens if I don’t take it?”
The doctor shook his head and frowned, but didn’t say anything.
Troy popped the pill in his mouth and chased it with the water. The cup looked identical to the one he’d peed in. He hoped they washed them thoroughly. A bitterness slid down his throat.
“One of my assistants will bring you some clothes and a fluid meal to kick-start your gut. If you have any dizziness or chills, you’re to call me at once. Otherwise, we’ll see you back here in six months. ” The doctor made a note, then chuckled. “Well, someone else will see you. My shift will be over. ”
“Okay. ” Troy shivered. The doctor looked up from his clipboard.
“You’re not cold, are you? I keep it a little extra warm in here. ”
Troy hesitated before answering. “No, doctor. I’m not cold. Not anymore. ”
••••
Troy entered the lift at the end of the hall, his legs still weak, and studied the array of numbered buttons. The orders they’d given him included directions to his office, but he vaguely remembered how to get there. Much of his orientation had survived the decades of sleep; it was other items that seemed to be slipping away.
Memory wasn’t supposed to work like this. He felt as though he were on a ship beset by fog. There were breaks where he could spot the shoreline, the recent past, but much of what lay inland was obscured. Voices rang out, drifting over the water. Troy sensed bad things happening to the people deep in the woods.
The doors to the lift closed automatically, and he shook away the image. His apartment was on thirty-seven; he remembered that. His office was on thirty-four. He reached for a button, intending to head straight to his desk, and instead found his hand sliding up to the very top. He still had a few minutes before he needed to be anywhere, and he felt some strange urge, some tug, to get as high as possible, to rise through the soil pressing in from all sides.
The button for the top floor clicked and glowed to life as he applied pressure. Something loomed above him. He could feel an attraction upward, a thread running clear through the top of his skull and yanking him like a puppet. There was something there he needed to see, something he’d left behind.
Troy struggled to remember as the lift lurched upward. He groped for this gossamer and fading dream, this glimpse through the mist—but the bitterness in his throat and the pills in his stomach were a tide tugging him away from the shore. Why had he been crying earlier? Or had he cried? He couldn’t remember. His stomach grumbled around the shake he’d been forced to drink. He shivered but was not cold.
The elevator accelerated up the shaft. There was a whooshing sound as another car or maybe the counterweight zoomed by. He knew these things. The round buttons flashed as the floors passed. There was an enormous spread of them, seventy in all. The centers of many were dull from years of rubbing. This didn’t seem right. Just yesterday, the buttons were shiny and new. Just yesterday, everything was.
The elevator slowed. Troy palmed the wall for balance, his legs still uncertain.
The door dinged and slid open. Troy blinked at the bright lights in the hallway. He left the elevator and followed a short walk toward a room leaking chatter. His new boots were stiff on his feet, the generic gray coveralls itchy. He tried to imagine four more times of waking up like this, feeling this weak and disoriented. Five shifts of six months each. Five shifts he hadn’t volunteered for. He wondered if it would get progressively easier or if it would only get worse.
The bustle in the cafeteria seemed to modulate as he entered. A few heads turned his way, utensils pausing. He saw at once that his gray coveralls weren’t so generic. There was a scattering of colors seated at the tables, forks paused between plate and mouth. A large cluster of reds, quite a few yellows. No other grays.
That first meal of sticky paste he’d been given rumbled once more in his stomach. He wasn’t allowed to eat anything else for six hours, which made the aroma from the canned foods overwhelming. He remembered the fare, had lived on it during his orientation. His orientation after—
He couldn’t remember. It was there, but he was losing it. And the food he had once grown tired of suddenly seemed
appetizing.
“Sir. ”
A young man nodded to Troy as he walked past, angling for the elevators. Troy thought he recognized the man, couldn’t be sure. Dreams intervened. The gentleman certainly seemed to have recognized him. Or was it the gray coveralls that stood out?
“First shift?”
An older gentleman approached, thin, with white and wispy hair that circled his head from temple to temple. He held a tray in his hands, smiled at Troy. Pulling open a recycling bin, he slid the entire tray inside and dropped it with a clatter.
“Come up for the view?” the man asked.
Troy nodded. It was all men throughout the cafeteria. All men. They had explained why this was safer. He tried to remember as the man with the splotches of age on his skin crossed his arms and stood beside him. There were no introductions. Troy wondered if names meant less amid the short shifts and long dreams. He gazed out over the bustling tables toward the massive screen that covered the far wall.
Here was the shoreline and the edge of the woods—some part of the thing that was wrong. And sure enough, a real mist roamed the view, whirls of dust and hanging clouds over a field of scattered and half-eaten debris. A few metal poles bristled from the ground and sagged lifeless, the tents and flags long vanished. Troy remembered. He couldn’t name it, but his stomach twisted in recognition; it tightened like a fist around the paste and the bitter pill.
“This’ll be my second shift,” the man said.
Troy barely heard. His watering eyes drifted across the lifeless hills, the gray slopes rising up toward dark clouds full of menacing and invisible things. The debris scattered everywhere was rotting away, molecules taking flight. Next shift, or the one after, it would all be gone.
“You can see further from the lounge. ” The man turned and gestured along the wall. Troy knew well enough what room he was referring to. This part of the building was familiar to him in ways this man could hardly guess.
“No, but thanks,” he stammered. Troy waved him off. “I think I’ve seen enough. ”
Curious faces returned to their trays; the chatter resumed. It was sprinkled with the clinking of spoons and forks on metal bowls and plates. Troy turned and left without saying another word. He put that hideous view behind him—turned his back on the unspoken eeriness of it. He hurried, shivering, toward the elevator, knees weak with more than the long rest. He needed to be alone, didn’t want anyone around him this time, didn’t want sympathetic hands comforting him while he cried.
3
2049 • Washington, D. C.
Donald kept the thick folder tucked inside his jacket and hurried through the rain. He had chosen to get soaked crossing the square rather than face his claustrophobia in the tunnels.
Traffic hissed by on the wet asphalt. He waited for a gap, ignored the crosswalk signals, and scooted across.
Rayburn’s marble steps gleamed treacherously wet. A woman in a black dress clopped up them in heels, an umbrella held low, and Donald wondered how this mad dash of his made more sense than the carpeted hallway beneath the streets. By avoiding an irrational fear, he was putting himself in real danger. Slick steps and cutting through traffic—the banal claimed far more than the subject of strange phobias.
A doorman in a red jacket stood on the portico, out of the rain. He reached for the long brass handle, grabbed a dark patch of patina, and pulled the door open for the woman in the heels. She shook the rain loose from her umbrella, brushed her hair back, and ducked inside. Donald thanked the doorman and followed. He caught a glimpse of his matted and dripping hair in the glass.
Inside, a Security officer stood impassively while badges were scanned, red unblinking eyes beeping at barcodes. The woman spun through the turnstile, and then Donald. He checked the folder Thurman had given him, made sure it was still dry, and wondered why such archaic things were considered safer than an email or a digital copy.
His office was one floor up. He headed for the stairs, preferring them to Rayburn’s ancient and slow lift. His shoes squeaked on the tile as he left the plush runner by the door.
The hallway upstairs was its usual mess. Two high schoolers from the page program hurried past, most likely fetching coffee. A TV crew stood outside of Amanda Kelly’s office, camera lights bathing her and a young reporter in a daytime glow. Concerned voters and eager lobbyists were identifiable by the guest passes hanging around their necks. They were easy to distinguish from one another, these two groups. The voters wore frowns and invariably seemed lost. The lobbyists were the ones with the Cheshire grins who navigated the halls more confidently than even the newly elected.
Donald opened the folder and pretended to read as he made his way through the chaos, hoping to avoid conversation. He squeezed behind the cameraman and ducked into his office next door.
“Mr. Keene. ”
Margaret, his secretary, stood up from her desk. She grabbed a pack of mail and held it out, a handful of notes stuck to the top.
Donald took the envelopes and piled them onto his folder. Margaret lowered her voice.
“Sir, you have a visitor. ”
Donald glanced around the waiting room. It was empty. He saw that the door to his office was partway open.
“I’m sorry I let her in. ” Margaret mimed carrying a box, her hands at her waist and her back arched. “She had a delivery. Said it was from the Senator. ”
Donald waved her concerns aside. Margaret was older than him, in her mid-forties, and had come highly recommended, but she did have a conspiratorial streak. Perhaps it came with the years of experience.
“It’s fine,” Donald assured her. He found it interesting that there were a hundred senators, two from his state, but only one was referred to as the Senator. “I’ll see what it’s about. In the meantime, I need you to free up a daily block in my schedule. An hour or two in the morning would be ideal. ” He flashed her the folder. “I’ve got something that’s going to eat up quite a bit of time. ”