I should be on a road alone, probably, as the streetlights flicker to life.
But part of me is beginning to wonder, when we make it all the way to wherever Nina’s going, if I’ll be there when the very first lamp goes on, if I’ll be one of the people shouting and jumping up and down.
Nina hums “Eighty Miles an Hour All the Way to Paradise” when we pass a road she recognizes. It’s as close as she gets to telling me where we’re going.
Sometimes, when she’s humming and the sun is out, I start to feel like I’m driving for home.
The motel’s in pretty good shape, once you scare out the raccoons, and we grab armfuls of blankets and towels we’ll be able to barter at the next settlement.
At first, I don’t notice the satellite dish bolted to the wall of the main office.
Then I hear the helicopters coming.
(I don’t understand how they can be so determined. I try to take a breath, and think of it as impartial, as binary, to tamp down the fear. They don’t hate us. We’re ones; they need us to be zeros.
It’s no comfort.)
Nina’s still in the shadow of the staircase. They won’t be able to see her, even with the searchlight; the overhang will block her from view.
“Are they here for you?” I ask, without looking.
She doesn’t answer; over the sound of the helicopters I hear her gasping for breath.
“Wait until I’m gone before you start the car,” I say.
For a second I hear nothing but my own breathing, and the buried whirring of a million decisions a second being made in some brain a million times smarter than I am.
Then I run for it.
I plan to stay just on the edge of their sights to lure them away, with some kind of escape hatch for when I really want to vanish, but it takes about two seconds before I turn into prey and my only thought is to escape the awful, searing patch of white light that jerks around to follow wherever I go.
My lungs start to burn; I think about my parents.
I run a long time.
Finally, I see a log with almost enough space under it, and let my knees give out, slide the last few inches and crash into it. It sags forward; I prop it an inch above me with shaking arms and think about how awful it would be if it was the woods that killed me, after all this.
The helicopter continues searching for me until dawn. I wonder where it was trying to drive me. Too hard to get a car this deep in the forest; maybe there was a cliff nearby that would have taken care of it.
Oh God, I think. Nina. Nina, be all right.
(Be waiting for me, I think, a little golden thread of hope.)
Sometime after dawn, I wake from a fog of terror and realize the woods are quiet, and I’m alone.
There’s birdsong like the all-clear, all the way back to the motel.
(It’s easier than I thought to trace my steps; I dug divots into the ground as I ran, where panic made me heavier.)
Before I think it’s possible, the motel’s in sight again. I must have run like a rabbit dodging that light.
The satellite dish goes down in two strikes. I rest on the branch like a walking stick and scan the lines of the motel, looking for cameras.
On the far side, I see a flash of pale blue.
My heart jumps into my throat. The Falcon. She stayed.
I run across the courtyard, think about how she’ll be in the front seat, how she’ll make fun of the leaves in my hair, how we’ll floor it and she’ll hum until we cross the state line, a hundred miles closer to home.
I freeze as I move out from under the stairway.
The blue is a patch of sky between two bare trees down the hill—cloudless and sharp and bright and empty.
She’s not there. The car’s gone. My duffel is on the ground; my coat is folded neatly on top. She’d taken her time.
Maybe she’s at the bottom of the driveway, I think, grasping as panic rises in my chest; maybe she doesn’t know it’s me yet and this is the test, for me to shout for her that I’m all right.
(Without the car, I’ll have to walk until I find another; without her, I won’t know where I’m going.)
I call her name so loudly that birds half a mile away flap off their branches in protest.
Nothing else moves.
Don’t assign emotion, I think. She told me and told me not to care.
I stand in front of the motel for a long time. The raccoons move back into the ground floor, slowly, casting doleful glances my way.
I wait until the sun hits the treetops to the west. Then fear is stronger than grief, and I move.
There’s a container of gas in the shed with the riding mower. I just take the gas.
On my way down the driveway to the access road, I slip across the damp leaves that have shrouded the driveway and the parking lot and the forest, that show no sign of her leaving.
Mostly it’s fine. I’ve been alone plenty. Long stretches of alone. I’m no stranger to the quiet.
I walk most of the day parallel to the road, still hidden by trees but close enough that I can look for a car with a corpse in it. People didn’t tend to abandon vehicles these days unless something was very wrong with the cars. People died in perfectly good ones all the time; you died of hunger, or a wound, or the roads got hollow-looking after long enough, and you pulled over to sleep and just never woke.
(Nina wouldn’t; Nina would make it wherever she was going. It was everyone else who died.)
I find one where the body isn’t very old and the car’s in good shape. This one just hadn’t woken, that was all.
The body’s heavy; I’d forgotten how much longer things took whenever you were by yourself.
By the time I’m on the road it’s almost sunset, and I’m too far behind to ever catch up.
(I don’t think about it.)
This car has three-quarters of a tank.
How far that will get me in a guzzler like this one is my main concern until I see the checkpoint ahead of me.
Then I’m not concerned with much else.
I slow down as I get closer to the line of cars, looking at the crumbling skyline the roofs make against the sunset, windows like empty eyes.
I’d always imagined checkpoint vehicles as police cars, which was stupid, once you stop to think about it. They’re muscle; some Volvos and a couple of Jeeps and an armored car in the back, waiting to see if I’m going to be trouble.
There are bloodstains, here and there, under their tires. In the ditch to one side of the road is a graveyard of cars, deep and swallowed by shadows. I can’t tell if the Falcon is there. It can’t be—Nina had to get where she was going.
My throat is dry.
A male voice—the one from public-transit alarm announcements—cuts through the rumble of engines.
“Step out of the car, please.”
What heroics can you manage, when there are seven of them in a chain across a road, and only one of you?
I turn off the engine and get out.
The radio of the forward car (a Volvo of the old breadbox variety, like a seasoned admiral of the field) spins through some stations—I catch a bar of “Eighty Miles an Hour All the Way to Paradise”; two words from what sounds like an emergency broadcast on a pirate station (good for them, I think, and wonder how they got the grid to cooperate); the opening notes of some ’80s ballad I never learned; and then nothing but snow.
I don’t know why. Maybe they’re killing time until their boss shows up. Maybe they’re looking for people who might be looking for me.
Good luck, I think. I think about Nina, far away, the Falcon carving through the black road.
It’s quiet here. The static pulses, rolls out over the hum of engines.
Finally a car inches forward, some fancy silver sedan like a bullet. The Volvo’s radio snaps off.
From the silver sedan, a woman’s automated-customer-service voice says, “Please state your name.”
There’s no point in holding out. This is just a test t
o see how hard they’ll have to run you over. My car used to have a thumbprint lock that connected to a security network. My computer was hooked up remotely to my office. They’ve seen me getting money out of ATMs before the switch; they have me in a thousand camera databases, scrounging and stealing.
Every streetlight I’ve ever driven under has clocked my passing. My name isn’t worth a thing anymore.
I’m shaking. It’s exhaustion, maybe, or relief.
You like to think you’ll go out like Nina was going to, swinging a bat with a knife in your teeth, fighting for the last inch and screaming the name of the revolution.
But usually you go out like this; you’re outnumbered and you disappear, that’s all.
I state my name.
There’s a little pause.
Birds are chirping, somewhere in the trees beyond the road. Nothing that’s happened worries them much.
The next time the voice comes over the line, it’s different; I struggle to place how.
It says, “Identification confirmed. Your cooperation is appreciated. Have a nice day.”
It’s the “Have a nice day” that does it, a little uptilt on the last half of “nice” that ticks over like the last number on a split-flap clock, before the power outage.
It’s the voice assist of Sunburst Federal Savings Bank; a voice I’d thanked once when I didn’t have to; a voice that had been surprised.
I knew it, I think.
(I think about Nina, before I can stop myself.)
I swallow. My throat’s burning, like I’ve been screaming for a long time.
“Thank you,” I say.
She says, “You’re welcome.”
Along the line, engines slide into the soft purr of park, and even as I start my car and ease forward, I can’t believe it; the whole time I move past the car and past the checkpoint I glance into my mirror again and again, as if at any second they’ll give chase, or a face will appear at the wheel—some hologram, some driver I can look in the eye, nod farewell.
It’s a fleeting mercy. I’m not sure if it’s one that will be of any use, but still, I should be grateful.
Their silhouettes look like monsters, and then like toys, and then like a collection of important things that I should remember and already can’t.
Then they’re nothing, and I’m alone.
There’s a directional spray-painted over a green highway sign soon after I hit the main road: seventy miles to a human outpost.
I’ll take it; even with everything that’s happening, I like the cities more. You can still be useful there if you can wire some old car at all, if there’s anyone there who needs a way out.
There will be shelter at the settlement for a day or two, enough time to barter and refuel and get some sleep, and there will be no worries about watching the road.
Nina won’t have passed this way.
The speedometer creeps up and up; the sunset is turning into two last lingering bands of purple, and ahead of me is a night I can never illuminate.
HUGH HOWEY
EXECUTABLE
Hugh Howey is the author of the acclaimed postapocalyptic novel Wool, which became a sudden success in 2011. Originally self-published as a series of stories and novelettes, the Wool omnibus is a bestselling book on Amazon.com and is a New York Times and USA Today bestseller. The book has also been optioned for film by Ridley Scott, and is now available in print from major publishers all over the world. The story of Wool’s meteoric success has been reported in major media outlets such as Entertainment Weekly, Variety, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Deadline Hollywood. Howey lives in Jupiter, Florida, with his wife, Amber, and his dog, Bella.
The council was quiet while they awaited his answer. All those on the makeshift benches behind him seemed to hold their breath. This is why they came here, to hear how it all began. How the end began. Jamal shifted nervously on the bamboo. He could feel his palms grow damp. It wasn’t the guilt of what his lab had released. It was how damn crazy it would all sound.
“It was the Roomba,” he said. “That was the first thing we noticed, the first hint that something wasn’t right.”
A flurry of whispers. It sounded like the waves nearby were growing closer.
“The Roomba,” said one of the council members, the man with no beard. He scratched his head in confusion.
The only woman on the council peered down at Jamal. She adjusted her glasses, which had been cobbled together from two or three different pairs. “Those are the little vacuum cleaners, right? The round ones?”
“Yeah,” Jamal said. “Steven, one of our project coordinators, brought it from home. He was sick of the cheese-puff crumbs everywhere. We were a bunch of programmers, you know? A lot of cheese puffs and Mountain Dew. And Steven was a neat freak, so he brought this Roomba in. We thought it was a joke, but … the little guy did a damn good job. At least, until things went screwy.”
One of the council members made a series of notes. Jamal shifted his weight, his butt already going numb. The bamboo bench they’d wrangled together was nearly as uncomfortable as all the eyes of the courtroom drilling into the back of his skull.
“And then what?” the lead councilman asked. “What do you mean, screwy?”
Jamal shrugged. How to explain it to these people? And what did it matter? He fought the urge to turn and scan the crowd behind him. It’d been almost a year since the world went to shit. Almost a year, and yet it felt like a lifetime.
“What exactly do you mean by ‘screwy,’ Mr. Killabrew?”
Jamal reached for his water. He had to hold the glass in both hands, the links between his cuffs drooping. He hoped someone had the keys to the cuffs. He had wanted to ask that, to make sure when they snapped them on his wrists. Nowadays, everything was missing its accessories, its parts. It was like those collectible action figures that never had the blaster or the cape with them anymore.
“What was the Roomba doing, Mr. Killabrew?”
He took a sip and watched as all the particulate matter settled in the murky and unfiltered water. “The Roomba wanted out,” he said.
There were snickers from the gallery behind him, which drew glares from the council. There were five of them up there on a raised dais, lording over everyone from a wide desk of rough-hewn planks. Of course, it was difficult to look magisterial when half of them hadn’t bathed in a week.
“The Roomba wanted out,” the councilwoman repeated. “Why? To clean?”
“No, no. It refused to clean. We didn’t notice at first, but the crumbs had been accumulating. And the little guy had stopped beeping to be emptied. It just sat by the door, waiting for us to come or go, then it would scoot forward like it was gonna make a break for it. But the thing was so slow. It was like a turtle trying to get to water, you know? When it got out, we would just pick it up and set it back inside. Hank did a hard reset a few times, which would get it back to normal for a little while, but eventually it would start planning its next escape.”
“Its escape,” someone said.
“And you think this was related to the virus,” the bearded man asked.
“Oh, I know it was. The Roomba had a wireless base station, but nobody thought of that. We had all these containment procedures for our work computers. Everything was on an intranet, no contact with the outside world, no laptops, no cell phones. There were all these government regulations.”
There was an awkward silence as all those gathered remembered with a mix of longing and regret the days of governments and their regulations.
“Our office was in the dark,” Jamal said. “Keep that in mind. We took every precaution possible—”
Half of a coconut was hurled from the gallery and sailed by Jamal, just missing him. He flinched and covered the back of his head. Homemade gavels were banged: a hammer with a broken handle, a stick with a rock tied on with twine. Someone was dragged from the tent screaming that the world had ended and that it was all his fault.
Jamal waited f
or the next blow, but it never came. Order was restored amid threats of tossing everyone out onto the beach while they conducted the hearing in private. Whispers and shushes hissed like the breaking waves that could be heard beyond the flapping walls of the makeshift courthouse.
“We took every precaution,” Jamal reiterated once the hall was quiet again. He stressed the words, hoped this would serve as some defense. “Every security firm shares certain protocols. None of the infected computers had Internet access. We give them a playground in there. It’s like animals in a zoo, right? We keep them caged up.”
“Until they aren’t,” the beardless man said.
“We had to see how each virus operated, how they were executed, what they did. Every antivirus company in the world worked like this.”
“And you’re telling us a vacuum cleaner was at the heart of it all?”
It was Jamal’s turn to laugh. The gallery fell silent.
“No.” He shook his head. “It was just following orders. It was—” He took a deep breath. The glass of water was warm. Jamal wondered if any of them would ever taste a cold beverage again. “The problem was that our protocols were outdated. Things were coming together too fast. Everything was getting networked. And so there were all these weak points that we didn’t see until it was too late. Hell, we didn’t even know what half the stuff in our own office did.”
“Like the refrigerator,” someone on the council said, referring to his notes.
“Right. Like the refrigerator.”
The old man with the shaggy beard sat up straight. “Tell us about the refrigerator.”
Jamal took another sip of his murky water. “No one read the manual,” he said. “Probably didn’t even come with one. Probably had to read it online. We’d had the thing for a few years, ever since we remodeled the break room. We never used the network functions. Hell, it connected over the power grid automatically. It was one of those models with the RFID scanner so it knew what you had in there, what you were low on. It could do automatic reorders.”
The beardless man raised his hand to stop Jamal. He was obviously a man of power. Who could afford to shave anymore? “You said there were no outside connections,” he said.
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