by Hugh Howey
Page 5
The uprisings! Maybe it was just to prevent them from happening over and over again. Holston applied an ablative film on the second sensor and wondered if the ugly lie of an unpleasant outside world was some misguided attempt to keep people from wanting out. Could someone have decided that the truth was worse than a loss of power, of control? Or was it something deeper and more sinister? A fear of unabashed, free, many-as-you-like children? So many horrible possibilities.
And what of Allison? Where was she? Holston shuffled around the corner of the concrete tower toward the third lens, and the familiar but strange skyscrapers in the distant city came into view. Only, there were more buildings than usual there. Some stood to either side, and an unfamiliar one loomed in the foreground. The others, the ones he knew by heart, were whole and shining, not twisted and jagged. Holston gazed over the crest of the verdant hills and imagined Allison would be walking over them at any minute. But that was ridiculous. How would she know he’d been expelled on this day? Would she remember the anniversary? Even after he’d missed the last two? Holston cursed his former cowardice, the years wasted. He would have to go to her, he decided.
He had a sudden impulse to do just that, to tear off his helmet and bulky suit and scamper up the hill in nothing but his carbon undersuit, breathing in deep gulps of crisp air and laughing all the way to his waiting wife in some vast, unfathomable city full of people and squealing children.
But no, there were appearances to keep, illusions to maintain. He wasn’t sure why, but it was what his wife had done, what all the other cleaners before him had done. Holston was now a member of that club, a member of the out group. There was a press of history, of precedent, to obey. They had known best. He would complete his performance for the in group he had just joined. He wasn’t sure why he was doing it, only that everyone before him had, and look at the secret they all shared. That secret was a powerful drug. He only knew to do what he had been told, to follow the numbers on the pockets, to mechanically clean while he considered the awesome implications of an outside world so big one couldn’t live to see it all, couldn’t breathe all the air, drink all the water, eat all the food.
Holston dreamed of such things while he scrubbed dutifully on the third lens, wiped, applied, sprayed, then moved to the last. His pulse was audible in his ears; his chest pounded in that constricting suit. Soon, soon, he told himself. He used the second wool pad and polished the grime off the final lens. He wiped and applied and sprayed a final time, then put everything back in its place, back in the numbered pouches, not wanting to bespoil the gorgeous and healthy ground beneath his feet. Done, Holston stepped back, took one last look into the nobodies not watching from the cafeteria and lounge, then turned his back on those who had turned their backs on Allison and all the others before her. There was a reason nobody came back for the inside people, Holston thought, just as there was a reason everyone cleaned, even when they said they wouldn’t. He was free; he was to join the others, and so he strolled toward that dark crease that ran up the hill, following in his wife’s footsteps, aware that some familiar boulder, long-sleeping, no longer lay there. That, too, Holston decided, had been nothing more than another awful lie.
7
Holston was a dozen paces up the hill, still marveling at the bright grass at his feet and the brilliant sky above, when the first pang lurched in his stomach. It was a writhing cramp, something like intense hunger. At first, he worried he was going too fast, first with the cleaning and now with his impatient shuffling in that cumbersome suit. He didn’t want to take it off until he was over the hill, out of sight, maintaining whatever illusion the walls in the cafeteria held. He focused on the tops of the skyscrapers and resigned himself to slowing down, to calming down. One step at a time. Years and years of running up and down thirty flights of stairs should make this nothing.
Another cramp, stronger this time. Holston winced and stopped walking, waiting for it to pass. When did he eat last? Not all yesterday. Stupid. When did he last use the bathroom? Again, he couldn’t remember. He might need to get the suit off earlier than he’d hoped. Once the wave of nausea passed, he took a few more steps, hoping to reach the top of the hill before the next bout of pain. He only got another dozen steps in before it hit him, more severe this time, worse than anything he’d ever felt. Holston retched from the intensity of it, and now his dry stomach was a blessing. He clutched his abdomen as his knees gave out in a shiver of weakness. He crashed to the ground and groaned. His stomach was burning, his chest on fire. He managed to crawl forward a few feet, sweat dripping from his forehead and splashing on the inside of his helmet. He saw sparks in his vision; the entire world went bright white, several times, like lightning strikes. Confused and senseless, he crawled ever upward, moving laboriously, his startled mind still focused on his last, clear goal: cresting that hill.
Again and again, his view shimmered, his visor letting in a solid bright light before it flickered away. It became difficult to see. Holston ran into something before him, and his arms collapsed. He blinked and gazed forward, up the hill, waiting for a clear sight of what lay ahead, but saw only infrequent strobes of green grass.
And then his vision went away completely. All was black. Holston clawed at his face, even as his stomach tangled in a new torturous knot. There was a glow, a blinking in his vision, so he knew he wasn’t blind. But the blinking seemed to be coming from inside his helmet. He could see the blinking. It was his visor that had become suddenly blind, not him.
Holston felt for the latches on the back of the helmet. He wondered if he’d used up all his air. Was he asphyxiating? Being poisoned by his own exhalations? Of course! Why would they give him more air than he needed for the cleaning? He fumbled for the latches with his bulky gloves. They weren’t meant for this. The gloves were part of his suit, his suit a single piece zipped up twice at the back and velcroed over. It wasn’t meant to come off, not without help. Holston was going to die in it, poison himself, choke on his own gasses, and now he knew true fear of containment, a true sense of being closed in. The silo was nothing to this as he scrambled for release, as he writhed in pain inside his tailored coffin. He squirmed and pounded at the latches, but his padded fingers were too big. And the blindness made it worse, made him feel smothered and trapped. Holston wretched again in pain. He doubled over, hands spread in the dirt, and felt something through his glove—a poke.
He fumbled for the object and found it: a sharp rock. A tool. Holston tried to calm himself. His years of enforcing calm, of soothing others, of bringing stability to chaos came back to him. He gripped the rock carefully, terrified of losing it to his blindness, and brought it up to his helmet. There was a brief thought of cutting away his gloves with the rock, but he wasn’t sure his sanity or air would last that long. He jabbed the point of the rock at his armored neck, right where the latch should be. He heard the crack as it landed. Crack. Crack. Pausing to probe with padded finger, retching again, Holston took more careful aim. There was a click instead of a crack. A sliver of light intruded as one side of the helmet came free. Holston was choking on his exhalations, on the stale and used air around him. He moved the rock to his other hand and aimed for the second latch. Two more cracks before it landed, the helmet popping free.
Holston could see. His eyes burned from the effort, from not being able to breathe, but he could see. He blinked the tears away and tried to suck in a deep, crisp, revitalizing lungful of blue air.
What he got instead was like a punch to the chest. Holston gagged. He threw up spittle and stomach acid, the very lining of him trying to flee. The world around him had gone brown. Brown grass and gray skies. No green. No blue. No life.
He collapsed to one side, landing on his shoulder. His helmet lay open before him, the visor black and lifeless. There was no looking through the visor. Holston reached for it, confused. The outside of the visor was coated silver, the other side was nothing. No glass. A rough surface. Wires lead
ing in and out of it. A display gone dark. Dead pixels.
He threw up again. Wiping his mouth feebly, looking down the hill, he saw the world with his naked eyes as it was, as he’d always known it to be. Desolate and bleak. He let go of the helmet, dropping the lie he had carried out of the silo with him. He was dying. The toxins were eating him from the inside. He blinked up at the black clouds overhead, roaming like beasts. He turned to see how far he had gotten, how far it was to the crest of the hill, and he saw the thing he had stumbled into while crawling. A boulder, sleeping. It hadn’t been there in his visor, hadn’t been a part of the lie on that little screen, running one of the programs Allison had found.
Holston reached out and touched the object before him, the white suit flaking away like brittle rock, and he could no longer support his head. Collapsing to the ground, curling up in pain from the slow death overtaking him, he held what remained of his wife and thought, with his last thought, what this death of his must look like to those who could see, this curling and dying in the black crack of a lifeless brown hill, a rotting city standing silent and forlorn over him.
What would they see, anyone who had chosen to watch?
Wool 2 – Proper Gauge
1
Her knitting needles rested in a leather pouch in pairs, two matching sticks of wood, side by side like the delicate bones of the wrist wrapped in dried and ancient flesh. Wood and leather. Artifacts like clues handed down from generation to generation, innocuous winks from her ancestors, harmless things like children’s books and wood carvings that managed to survive the uprising and the purge. Each clue stood as a small hint of a world beyond their own, a world where buildings stood aboveground like the crumbling ruins visible over the gray and lifeless hills.
After much deliberation, Mayor Jahns selected a pair of needles. She always chose carefully, for proper gauge was critical. Too small a needle, and the knitting would prove difficult, the resulting sweater too tight and constricting. Too large a needle on the other hand, and it would create a garment full of large holes. The knitting would remain loose. One would be able to see straight through it.
Her choice made, the wooden bones removed from their leather wrist, Jahns reached for the large ball of cotton yarn. It was hard to believe, weighing that knot of twisted fibers, that her hands could make of it something ordered, something useful. She fished for the end of the yarn, dwelling on how things came to be. Right now, her sweater was little more than a tangle and a thought. Going back, it had once been bright fibers of cotton blooming in the dirt farms, pulled, cleaned, and twisted into long strands. Even further, and the very substance of the cotton plant itself could be traced to those souls who had been laid to rest in its soil, feeding the roots with their own leather while the air above baked under the full glory of powerful grow lights.
Jahns shook her head at her own morbidity. The older she got, the quicker her mind went to death. Always, in the end, the thoughts of death.
With practiced care, she looped the end of the yarn around the point of one needle and crafted a triangle-shaped web with her fingers. The tip of the needle danced through this triangle, casting the yarn on. This was her favorite part, casting on. She liked beginnings. The first row. Out of nothing comes something. Since her hands knew what to do, she was free to glance up and watch a gust of morning wind chase pockets of dust down the slope of a hill. The clouds were low and ominous today. They loomed like worried parents over these smaller darting clouds of windswept soil, which tumbled like laughing children, twirling and spilling, following the dips and valleys as they flowed toward a great crease where two hills collided to become one. Here, Jahns watched as the puffs of dust splashed against a pair of dead bodies, the frolicking twins of dirt evaporating into ghosts, solid playful children returning once more to dreams and scattered mist.
Mayor Jahns settled back in her faded plastic chair and watched the fickle winds play across the forbidding world outside. Her hands worked the yarn into rows, requiring only occasional glances to keep her place. Often, the dust flew toward the silo’s sensors in sheets, each wave causing her to cringe as if a physical blow were about to land. This assault of blurring grime was anytime difficult to watch, but especially brutal the day after a cleaning. Each touch of dust on the clouding lenses was a violation, a dirty man touching something pure. Jahns remembered what that felt like. And sixty years later, she sometimes wondered if this misting of grime that led to a different sort of bodily sacrifice wasn’t even more painful for her to abide.
“Ma’am?”
Mayor Jahns turned away from the sight of the dead hills cradling her recently deceased sheriff. She turned to find Deputy Marnes standing by her side.
“Yes, Marnes?”
“You asked for these. ”
Marnes placed three manila folders on the cafeteria table and slid them toward her through the scattered crumbs and juice stains of last night’s cleaning celebration. Jahns set her knitting aside and reluctantly reached for the folders. What she really wanted was to be left alone a little longer to watch rows of knots become something. She wanted to enjoy the peace and quiet of this unspoiled sunrise before the grime and the years dulled it, before the rest of the upper silo awoke, rubbed the sleep from their eyes and the stains from their consciences, and came up to crowd around her in their own plastic chairs and take it all in.
But duty beckoned; she was mayor by choice; and the silo needed a sheriff. So Jahns put aside her own wants and desires and weighed the folders in her lap. Caressing the cover of the first one, she looked down at her hands with something between pain and acceptance. The backs of them appeared as dry and crinkled as the pulp paper hanging out of the folders. She glanced over at Deputy Marnes, whose white mustache was flecked with the occasional black. She remembered when the colors there were the other way around. She remembered when his tall and thin frame was a mark of vigor and youth rather than gaunt fragility. He was handsome still, but only because she knew him from long ago, only because her old eyes still remembered.