“That’s why we have to do this,” Tracy said.
Dmitry nodded. “Tracy’s right. That’s precisely why we have to do this. So they don’t get away with it. Isn’t that what we planned from the beginning? Isn’t that why we only have enough food for a year but enough guns to slaughter an army?”
“Fifteen people is no army.”
“But they’ll know,” Dmitry said. “They’ll carry legends with them. We’ll write it all down. We’ll make up most of the first fifteen. We’ll make sure no one ever forgets—”
“You mean make a religion out of this.”
“I mean make a cause.”
“Or a cult.”
“Do we want them to have the world to themselves, the fuckers who did this?”
“We can’t decide anything now,” Tracy said. She rubbed her temples. “I need to sleep. I need to see my family—”
“No one can know,” Anatoly told her.
Tracy shot him a look. “I’m not telling anyone. But we need a day or two before we do anything.” She caught the look on Dmitry’s face. “Surely we have that much time.”
He nodded.
“And you won’t program anything without consulting with us first.”
Again, a nod.
Sherman laughed, but it was without humor. “Yes,” he said. “I need sleep as well.” He pointed to Dmitry. “And I want assurances that I’ll wake up in the morning.”
• • • •
The following day, Tracy grabbed breakfast from the mess hall and found three founders at a table in the corner. She joined them. No one spoke. Between bites of bread and canned ham, she watched the bustle of strangers weaving through the tables and chairs, introducing themselves to one another, glancing around at their surroundings, and trying to cope with their imprisonment. Their salvation.
The buzz of voices and spoons clicking against porcelain was shattered for a brief moment by an awful release of laughter. Tracy searched for the offender, but it was gone as quickly as it had come. She watched Igor chew his bread, his eyes lifeless, focused beyond the mountain’s walls, and knew he was thinking the same thing: They were in a room crowded with ghosts. There was no stopping what they would have to do. And for the first time, Tracy understood all that John had endured those past years. She remembered the way he would glance around in a restaurant, his eyes haunted, the color draining suddenly from his face. Looking for an exit, she used to think. Looking for some way out if it all goes to shit.
But no—he had been doing this, scanning the people, the bodies all around him. How could he search for an exit when there was none?
Tracy saw her sister and Remy emerge from the serving line, trays in hand. She started to wave them over, then caught herself. When she saw her sister among all those walking dead, she realized what she had to do. She put down her bread and left her tray behind. She needed to find Dmitry. To see if it was possible.
• • • •
A new Order was required, a new book of instructions. The ten founders and the five they chose would have the rest of their lives to sort out the details, to leave precise instructions. Tracy had already decided she wouldn’t go with them. If John were there, maybe it could work, but she couldn’t pair off with one of the men in their group.
First she had her own orders to write, her own instructions. This included how to open the great crypt gates, in case there was no one else. She spent her days and nights in the workshop command room, helping Dmitry with the pod, pestering him with questions that he didn’t know the answers to. The cryo-chamber had been designed for one person. And once they’d realized what it was, it had gone untested. Tracy squeezed inside for a dry fit while Dmitry modified the plumbing.
“Maybe one head over here and the other down there? Legs’ll have to go like this.”
Dmitry muttered under his breath. He wrestled a piece of tubing onto a small splitter, was having trouble making it fit.
“You need help?” Tracy asked.
“I got it,” he said.
“What if . . . something happens to you all and there are no descendants? What if there’s no one here to open it?”
“Already working on that,” Dmitry said. “The antenna that taps into the mesh network. I can rig it up so when their timer shuts off, the pod will open. So if it’s twenty years from now or twenty thousand, as long as this place has power—” He finally got the tube onto the fitting. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll take care of it. I have time.”
Tracy hoped he was right. She wanted to believe him.
“So what do you think it’ll feel like?” she asked. “You think it’ll be . . . immediate? Like shutting your eyes at night, and then suddenly the alarm goes off in the morning? Or will it be dream after dream after dream?”
“I don’t know.” Dmitry shook his head. He started to say something, then turned quietly back to his work.
“What?” Tracy asked. “Is there something you aren’t telling me?”
“It’s . . . nothing.” He set the tubing aside and crossed his arms. Then he turned to her. “Why do you think nobody is fighting for their place in there?” He nodded to the machine.
Tracy hadn’t considered that. “Because I asked first?” she guessed.
“Because that thing is a coffin. People have been putting their loved ones in there for years. Nobody wakes up.”
“So this is a bad idea?”
Dmitry shrugged. “I think maybe the people who do this, it isn’t for the ones inside the box.”
Tracy lay back in that steel cylinder and considered this, the selfishness of it all. Giving life without asking. Taking life to save some other. “For the last two days,” she said, “all I’ve thought about is what a mistake all this was.” She closed her eyes. “Completely pointless. All for nothing.”
“That is life,” Dmitry said. Tracy opened her eyes to see him waving a tool in the air and staring up at the ceiling. “We do not go out in glory. We leave no mark. What you did was right. What they did was wrong. They’re the reason we’re in this mess, not you.”
Tracy didn’t feel like arguing. What was the point? It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. And maybe that’s what Dmitry was trying to tell her.
She crawled out of that coffin-within-a-crypt to check the supplies one last time, to make sure the vacuum was holding a seal. Inside the large storage trunk were her handwritten instructions, a set of maps, two handguns, clothing, all of Remy’s and April’s camping gear, and what extra rations would fit.
Five hundred years was a long time to plan for, almost an impossible time to consider. And then it occurred to her that she was wrong about something: She was wrong about the great doors that led into that mountain. This was not a crypt. The dead were on the outside. Here was but a bubble of life, trapped in the deep rock. A bubble only big enough now for fifteen people. Fifteen plus two.
• • • •
Before waking her sister, Tracy stole into her father’s room and kissed him quietly on the forehead. She brushed his thinning hair back and kissed him once more. One last time. Wiping tears away, she moved to the neighboring room. Igor and Anatoly were waiting outside the door. They had agreed to help her, had been unhappy with her decision, but she had traded her one spot for two others.
They stole inside quietly. The Russians had syringes ready. They hovered over Remy first. It went fast, not enough kicking to stir her sister. April was next. Tracy thought of all she was burdening them with, her sister and Remy. An accountant and a schoolteacher. They would sleep tonight, and when they woke, what would they find? Five hundred years, gone in an instant. A key around their necks. A note from her. An apology.
Igor lifted April, and Tracy helped Anatoly with Remy. They shuffled through dark corridors with their burdens. “Carry on,” Tracy whispered, that mantra of theirs, the awful dismissal of all they’d done. But this time, it was with promise. With hope. “Carry on,” she whispered to her sister. “Carry on for all of us.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hugh Howey is the author of the acclaimed post-apocalyptic novel Wool, which became a sudden success in 2011. Originally self-published as a series of novelettes, the Wool omnibus is frequently the #1 bestselling book on Amazon.com and is a New York Times and USA TODAY bestseller. The book was also optioned for film by Ridley Scott, and is now available in print from major publishers all over the world. Hugh’s other books include Shift, Dust, Sand, the Molly Fyde series, The Hurricane, Half Way Home, The Plagiarist, and I, Zombie. Hugh lives in Jupiter, Florida with his wife Amber and his dog Bella. Find him on Twitter @hughhowey.
DEAR JOHN
Robin Wasserman
Dear Neckbeard,
The fact that I’m writing this on toilet paper shouldn’t make you think I don’t care. This toilet paper is not symbolic, it’s expedient. Writing you a letter on something I can use to wipe my ass is just a happy coincidence.
These letters are supposed to help us indulge in happier times—that’s what Isaac says. Bathe in all our wonderful memories, then pull the plug and watch them circle the drain. Write out our teary I loved yous and what might have beens to all the people we’ve lost out there in the world, then set them on fire and say goodbye to smoke and ash. Or, in my case: Write, wipe, flush. Farewell. This, Isaac also says, will be closure. Isaac, apparently, doesn’t know from mixed metaphors. And he doesn’t know his flock as well as he thinks, not if he imagines wonderful memories and happy might have beens. That’s not how you end up in a place like this.
You’d probably be surprised I ended up here, fucked up in this very specific way, but then, we haven’t seen each other in a while. Things happen. Maybe I’d be surprised about where you ended up, too. I doubt it, but see me politely trying to give you the benefit of the doubt—one of those things you thought I was incapable of? Things happen; people—at least those of us who venture out of our basement every once in a while—change. Here’s me, since the days of you: Austin, then LA, then back into the nation’s beer belly, even if it was a little too close to home, hop-skip-jumping through crap towns on I-70, six months waiting tables for truckers feeling like I was on one of those serial killer shows waiting for my big scene as a dumpster corpse, desert then mountains then plains, and everywhere I stopped, everyone I stopped for, promised me I’d be stopping forever. Remember when I popped your cherry and you told me you were going to chain me to the bed and keep me as your prisoner until I got old and wrinkled and ready to trade in for a new model? The pillow talk got better, but the men didn’t, and none of them kept me anymore than you did. Maybe people don’t change so much after all. (I’ve changed, you said, but it was only because I changed you, and if that skank you tutored wanted to fuck you, it was only because I made you throw out those orange clogs and stop whispering to yourself when you thought no one was looking.) To wrap this up: I came, they came, then they left. Until I threw in with the Children of Abraham, because Father Abraham said God would never leave me—but then Father Abraham left, and the fucking world ended, on exactly the day he predicted it would—so where does that leave me?
Here, in the Ark, locked up safe and sound in a mountain compound with Abraham’s kid and all of us who were fucked up enough to believe him when he and his dad said the end was nigh. The world left us, but we clued in and left it first. Followed that kid up a mountain, barricaded ourselves behind sheet metal and barbed-wire, waited for God’s wrath and wondered what form it would take. No shock he took us out just like he did the dinosaurs. There’s nothing much to read up here but the Bible, and I’ve read enough to know God likes repeating himself. He likes to smite, and very occasionally, he likes to save. I guess he must like us—the reformed hookers and crack addicts and embezzlers and sad sacks on the run from bad memories and worse husbands—because we’re the ones still here. You were always so pleased with yourself about your lack of fucked-up-edness. I would say look where it’s gotten you, but you wouldn’t exactly hear it, would you, because that’s the whole point of where it’s gotten you. Out in the world with the rest of the assholes, minding your non-fucked-up business when the shit came down. Isaac says we should imagine a happy and peaceful end for all the poor souls caught unaware. An aneurysm at the moment the sky exploded. Swift, unbloodied obliteration.
I would prefer not to.
You were in the basement when it happened—that’s how I prefer to imagine it. You’d been down there two days straight, fingers cramping on your joystick (and yes, I know it hasn’t been called a joystick since 1988 but fuck if you’re going to bully me into caring from beyond the grave), moldy pizza boxes at your feet, porn taped up to the wall because it’s been so many years and so many pounds since you’ve lured a girl down to your dungeon that there’s no point in keeping your inner perv on lockdown anymore. You were blowing shit up and giggling about it and when you heard the first explosions, you probably thought, dude, cool sound effects, whoa, while upstairs the sky fell down and then your roof fell down and it took another day before you thought to heave yourself off the couch and replenish the beer, and that’s when you discovered the door was blocked by ten tons of rubble and the phones were out and the wi-fi was dead and too bad for you, your emergency generator ran out before your food did, so you spent your last days on Earth in the dark, unplugged, fingers twitching at the joystick like you could turn the explosions back on, then eventually switching over to your own personal joystick, huffing and rubbing while you imagined me on my knees, blowing you while you shot the crap out of some imaginary kingdom, jerking off to some sad, faint echo of my voice because you never forget the first girl to get you off, thinking about how you pinned her down on the bathroom tile when she tried to dump your ass, crying and leaking snot and begging please baby don’t leave me while you jackhammered her into a concussion that made her foggy enough to say okay baby if you need me I’ll stay and then she did until you got bored and left her, instead, thinking now how if you’d kept her around you might not be shivering in the dark all alone, leaking sanity at a steady pace until the food runs out, and then the beer, and you die slow and whimpering, in a pool of your own puke and cum.
Thinking of you, keep in touch!
Love,
Heather
• • • •
Dear Moneybags,
Remember how you used to laugh at me for always ordering the same thing? You started ordering it for me, before I could get the words out. Wherever we went, you knew. Veal parmigiana. Pad Thai. Chicken Tikka Masala. I thought it was cute, at first, that you were pretending that it bothered you, because what kind of pretentious turd would actually be bothered by someone who knows what she wants and sticks with it? It’s not like I was bringing peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches with me to sneak from under the table while you ate sushi, so how was I supposed to know that every time I ordered Pad Thai, or let you order it for me, I was proving to you that I was unadventurous and dull and provincial and inflexible and “unwilling to let circumstances exercise their will” on me. I was embarrassing you, somehow, in front of the waiters or your friends or maybe just some all-seeing deity who expected better from you than a girlfriend who didn’t want to try veal kidney.
You wouldn’t much like it here.
Here we eat beans and more beans. Canned tuna and canned peaches. We eat peanut butter when we’ve been especially good; we eat nothing when we’ve been bad. Every day is the same. Sometimes, early on, the men would suit up and go shoot something, and there would be fresh meat for a night, but then winter was too long and too cold and they say the animals are all dead. They say we don’t need the outside, that’s the point of our Ark. We are prepared. Months go by without a dent in our food stores. We planned well—we have enough beans to last us for years.
Years of beans and tuna and peaches and peanut butter. Can you even begin to imagine that? You, who thought it was a hardship to eat the same thing two nights in a row. Leave that kind of thing to the poors, you said, even though when I tried to leave our
leftovers with an actual poor, you slapped it out of my hand and told me handouts only encouraged the weak, and left the guy to lick his veal parmigiana off the ground. That’s what I get for dating a Republican, you told me that night, when you had me spread-eagled on your Sleep Number mattress, because that was your idea of dirty talk.
You didn’t mind snorting the same drugs every night, I noticed. You loved the drugs; you loved that I had loser friends who could supply you with them. You loved that I looked pretty in the dresses you bought me and smiled pretty enough for your asshole buddies that they felt like shit and then went home and took it out on their ugly girlfriends; you loved that I fucked one of them when you asked me to as a special pretty-please for me baby favor; you loved that you could make me do that, but then you didn’t love that I’d done it. Done him. Put him in my mouth and in my ass, and let him cum on my tits, bad enough doing it, worse that you made me tell you about it, tell you while you were inside me, tell you how he felt and that he was smaller and softer than you, that he was flabby, with bad breath and thinning hair, that he made my nipple bleed, and after I told you what you wanted to hear, you threw me out of bed and said I’d never be with you if you weren’t rich, which was true, and that it made me a whore, which maybe was also. Now I think I liked your pool better than I liked you. Your pool and your stupid restaurants and your coke, even if you wouldn’t have had that last without me. I liked it best when you left for the weekend and I could float on the raft in the middle of the chlorine blue, drunk and sunburned, laughing at the clouds, at the gurgle of the pool filtration system and the way my fingers wrinkled up when I stayed in too long. I pretended it was my pool, my life; I imagined your plane flying into a mountain and some silver-haired lawyer showing up at the door to cup my hands in his and tell me, gently, that you’d left it all to me.
That’s a lie.
I imagined you coming back, but coming back different. Something new on your face when you looked at me, like you finally understood why you kept me around. I imagined us floating on the raft together, happy, that it would be like it was at the beginning, you bending me over the sink in gold-plated bathrooms while waiters tried not to wonder what was taking us so long, you tearing through some cheap K-Mart blouse like you were Tarzan and telling me I had a Michelangelo rack, that licking my nipples felt like desecrating priceless art, you wanting to ravish me, you wanting to My Fair Lady me, you wanting me. Instead you came back from that last trip and told me you wanted someone who better fit into your world, someone who knew enough to pick out her own sushi.
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