Shadows

by Peter Cawdron

  “Didn't expect to see you up here,” a familiar voice said as the sheriff sat down beside her.

  “Morning, sheriff,” she said, finally turning to look at him. She wasn't sure what expression he saw on her face, but he seemed heartbroken to see her ragged features. The old man reached around and hugged her, pulling her shoulder in toward him. She rested her head on his chest.

  “He was a good man,” Sheriff Cann said.

  Susan didn’t replied. Her hurt was too raw.

  “Damn, it was good to see him make the top of that ridge.”

  The sheriff laughed at the thought. Looking up at him, Susan could see the reflection of the wall-screen in his glassy eyes.

  “If anyone could do it, I knew Charlie would,” he continued. “You know, I shouldn't be telling you this, but ... Did you notice the color of his oxygen tank?”

  Susan sat bolt upright. She turned and looked at the screen, even though Charlie wasn't there, he'd made it over the hill before dying. The other cleaners, though, lay motionless with their silver oxygen bottles still strapped to their backs.

  “Black,” she said, remembering but not understanding.

  “I may not be the sheriff anymore,” the old man said. “But thirty years in this job gets you some connections. I called in a few debts, pulled a few strings and got Supply to switch cylinders. Normally, cleaners only get five minutes, but Charlie ... Oh, I so wanted to see him make it over that damn ridge. Charlie got a scuba tank, the ones they use to repair the pumps during a flood.”

  “Hah,” Susan cried, unable to suppress her surprise.

  The sheriff smiled, adding, “You should have seen the look on old Hammond's face when he saw Charlie out there with a black cylinder. He knew what that meant.”

  Susan slapped the sheriff's thigh playfully as though she were scolding him.

  “Yeah, the old geezer knew. Gave me the evil eye. Oh, Sue, I'm sorry I couldn't have done more, but at least I could make sure he'd get over that damn ridge.”

  “How much air did he have?” she asked, astonished by the sheriff's admission.

  “Dunno. An hour, maybe an hour and a half.”

  Susan sighed.

  “What do you think he saw from up there?” the sheriff asked.

  Susan thought about it for a second before answering, “Freedom.”

  The sheriff never took his eyes off the wall-screen, he simply nodded slowly in agreement.

  Behind them, there were more footsteps, only these steps were lighter and the footfalls were quicker, closer together. Neither Susan nor the sheriff felt compelled to turn around.

  “This had better be good, Herman,” a woman's voice snapped.

  They turned to see the mayor standing there with a scrap of paper in her hand. Susan reached into her pocket and pulled out the recycled paper that had been shoved under her door.

  “Well, I'll be,” the sheriff said, pulling out a similar piece of paper as he addressed Susan. “I thought you'd slipped this under my door.”

  “Me?” Susan said, holding her scrap of paper up in defense.

  “What is going on, sheriff?” the mayor demanded.

  Shadows moved in the kitchen.

  Someone walked out of the darkness, saying, “Perhaps I can explain.”

  “CHARLIE!” Susan screamed, jumping up from the bench seat and sprinting over to him. She threw her arms around his neck and almost knocked him off his feet, causing him to stagger backwards. The rush of adrenalin she felt translated into what must have amounted to a crushing hug, but she didn't care. To feel him beneath her arms and pressed against her chest gave her an overwhelming sense of joy.

  “Hey,” he said, gently resting one arm around her back. “It’s good to see you too, Susan.”

  “Oh, Charlie,” she cried, madly kissing him on the lips and cheeks. “Is it you? Is it really you?”

  Charlie just smiled. He was wearing the white coveralls of an IT worker, but the pristine coveralls had patches of blood smeared on them, seeping through from beneath.

  Susan couldn't let go of him. She had to touch him, if only to convince herself he was real, that she wasn't trapped in some cruel dream. Her fingers brushed against the thick bandages on his arm and he winced with pain, which horrified her. Sweeping her hair behind her ears, she pulled back, saying, “Are you OK?”

  “I'm a little sore,” he confessed, and Susan struggled to imagine what must have happened to him and what horrible injuries lay beneath his bandages. Blood seeped from around the bandage reaching down to his wrist, while his left hand had been wrapped in a ball so that none of the fingers protruded.

  “Come with me,” he said. “There's a lot we need to talk about.”

  They walked over to the table where the sheriff and the mayor were seated. Charlie had a slight limp and must have been in considerable pain.

  He sat on the opposite side of the table facing the sheriff and the mayor, with his back to the wall-screen. In the pale light, Susan could see bandages wrapped around his neck and up over his head, covering one of his ears. In her rush to greet him, she'd missed how badly injured he was. She'd only seen what she wanted to see.

  “What happened?” she asked, sitting beside him, straddling the seat so she faced him as he spoke.

  Charlie raised his bandaged arms and hands, saying, “I was right about the seals. Even with extra rubber, they don't last long. I lost most of the skin off my arms, burned off by that poisonous air.”

  The mayor was conspicuously silent. She looked pale.

  “I don't understand,” the sheriff said. “How did you survive?”

  Charlie smiled. It was good to see him smile, thought Susan, and she couldn't help herself, she had to keep touching him. She reached out and rested her hands gently on his thigh as he explained.

  “I didn't know what to expect when I got to the top of the ridge, but it certainly wasn't what I saw. Standing there, I looked out over a field of silos reaching as far as I could see through the smoke and haze. They were staggered, slightly offset from each other so that the rows between them curled and curved around the various sunken concrete bunkers. Each silo was identical, sitting at the bottom of a broad dustbowl with the bodies of cleaners scattered across the hillside.”

  He paused.

  Looking in his eyes, Susan could see he was reliving the moment, describing precisely what he could see.

  “I staggered on, following the ridge line, shocked by the realization there were so many other silos. The wind came in gusts, howling like a ghost. The only other sound was the gentle hiss of oxygen inside my suit.

  “I thought I was going to die out there, on the rim of some other silo, just a stranger staggering into view, but then I saw footprints. Someone else had made it out of the dustbowls. By this time, the poison was seeping in around my gloves, eating away at my hands, and I felt myself becoming delirious. My breathing became labored.

  “I followed the footprints. There were so many of them. Hundreds of cleaners had walked this way. I thought I was dreaming. I couldn't understand how there could be so many of them, and the footsteps had to be fresh as there were spots where the wind had blown them away, but they'd appear again, just a few feet further along the dusty ridge line.”

  Sheriff Cann leaned forward on his elbows with his chin resting on his clenched hands. The mayor didn’t move. Susan didn't see her so much as blink.

  “As I staggered on, the haze slowly faded. The dust gave way to rocks. The rocks gave way to grass. At first, I didn't believe it, but the grass wasn't green, it wasn't like the counterfeit images fed to the cleaners.”

  The sheriff looked surprised. He turned to the mayor, looking for some kind of acknowledgement or explanation, but she simply dropped her head in shame, tacitly verifying Charlie's claim.

  “The grass was yellow and sickly, but it was alive. I looked up and the sky was no longer yellow. Patches of clear blue broke through the dust as I stumbled on. At some point, I collapsed. I don't know if I was o
ut of oxygen or weakened by the poison, but I felt like I was going to die, only the leaks that allowed the poison to burn my arms now allowed fresh air to seep through the gaps. I'm not sure how long I laid there, but I woke to the smell of flowers. There was a meadow covered in more flowers than I had ever seen in my life. Someone was carrying me over their shoulder, carrying me away from the dust storm.”

  “There are others?” Susan cried, her heart racing at the thought.

  Charlie turned to her, smiling as he said. “Hundreds of them.”

  “I,” the sheriff began. “I don't know what to say.”

  “What proof do we have?” the mayor asked.

  “What more proof do you need?” Charlie replied, holding his arms apart and gesturing to himself.

  “So you're saying, all this is over?” she asked. “The Great Dying has finished?”

  “I'm saying it's confined. We don't see the whole world. We see just a fragment of it. Out beyond the dust, there's life.”

  The mayor turned to Sheriff Cann who, without hesitation said, “I believe him.”

  “There's one thing I don't understand,” the mayor said. “How did you get back? You said you were out of oxygen. You said your suit was leaking. How did you get back in here without using the airlock?”

  Charlie turned toward the darkened kitchen and called out, “Jules.”

  The lights in the kitchen flickered. Four dark figures stood by the wall as the lights came up to strength. Two men and two women had been waiting there for Charlie's signal.

  “Get the stairs,” one of the women said, and the two men ran over to the stairwell and headed down the steps. Susan couldn't imagine what they would do to anyone climbing the stairs to open the kitchen or reach the sheriff's office, but she had no doubt from the conviction with which the men moved that no one would be disturbing their conversation by the wall-screen.

  The two women walked over. One of them was dressed in the dark blue coveralls of a mechanic while the other was wearing a drab, olive green pair of coveralls unlike anything Susan had ever seen before.

  “This is Juliette and Charlotte,” Charlie said, gesturing toward the women.

  “Just Jules,” the woman in the blue coveralls insisted, walking over with a friendly smile on her face.

  “I ... I've never seen you before,” the mayor said as the realization sank in that this was someone from outside their silo.

  “Nope, you certainly haven't,” Jules replied, coming around and sitting on the other side of Charlie. Charlotte stood at the end of the table with a long cylinder tucked under her arm. Her formality surprised Susan, there was something different about Charlotte, something beyond her strange coveralls, something that spoke of life beyond the silo.

  Jules reached out across the table, offering a friendly hand first to the mayor and then the sheriff. The mayor responded timidly, weakly, while the sheriff raised himself, partially standing up as he shook Jules' hand vigorously.

  “I'm the mayor of what was once Silo Eighteen,” Jules began. “Charlotte is from Silo One.”

  Charlie spoke to Mayor Johns, saying, “I know this is difficult. I know this is a lot to accept all at once, but we didn't know how else to break this to you. We figured the quiet of the morning would be best, when there was no one else around.”

  “There are other silos?” the mayor replied, still caught up by what Jules had said.

  Jules nodded.

  Susan should have been more prepared for this revelation, based on what Charlie had told her about seeing a flying machine. They both suspected there were more silos, but to actually see people from those silos was overwhelming. There were dozens of silos out there, each with a Great Fall, a grand staircase, farms and garment factories, cafeterias and wall-screens along with thousands of people living their lives in ignorance. The concept was bewildering. She could understand the mayor's stunned look.

  Sheriff Cann seemed to grasp the concept quicker. He didn't look shaken at all.

  “I may be late to the party,” he said, pointing at Charlotte. “But I know she's not from any silo.”

  His words weren't an accusation, they were an observation, as though he had already pieced together what was happening.

  Charlotte stiffened, saying, “Captain Charlotte Keene, United States Air Force.”

  “United,” the mayor said, struggling to add, “States.”

  “What are these United ... States?” the sheriff asked, like the mayor he articulated each word individually, as though they didn't belong together in the same sentence.

  “This,” Charlotte began, pointing at the table but clearly intending the ground beneath them. “This is the United States of America. You are all that remains of a nation that once numbered in excess of three hundred million people, you and fifty other silos out there, with each silo representing one of those states. You guys are all that remains of the Great State of Alabama.”

  Susan noticed the patches on Charlotte's coveralls, something she'd never seen on coveralls before. There were three colorful patches breaking up the drab olive uniform, and they weren't coveralls as they had sleeves.

  One of the patches depicted a pair of golden wings with the words, “Capt. Keene” displayed proudly beneath. Another displayed the head of a bird she didn't recognize: a dark eye peered out from behind white feathers, with a curved, yellow beak looking proud and defiant. What the designation L-39 meant on that particular patch was something lost in the mists of time.

  On her shoulder, the third patch was a flag. The colors had faded, but the contrasting red and white stripes were still eye catching. On the top left of the flag, white dots sat on a dark blue background, and it took Susan a second to realize what they were. They were stars. Is that what the stars looked like in a clear sky? She couldn't imagine the stars were so uniformly distributed. She wanted to ask Charlotte about the stars on the flag, but she didn't want to sound stupid or off-topic.

  The mayor shifted on the bench seat, turning to face Charlotte as she said, “I don't understand. How can this be? The old world hasn't existed for centuries. How can you be standing here?”

  Charlotte replied, saying, “I'm 28 years old. I was born in 2026. I was frozen in 2054. Since then, over three hundred years have passed and through all those years I was asleep, never waking until now.”

  “I can't believe it!” the mayor cried. “You're from before? You knew the old world? You saw blue skies?”

  “I flew in blue skies!”

  Susan was speechless. Charlie was grinning from ear to ear.

  Jules sat forward with her hands together and elbows resting on the table. Susan could see she was itching to say something but she was giving them time to let the truth sink in.

  “All this,” Charlotte continued, gesturing around her. “This should have never happened. We should have continued on.”

  “How?” Susan blurted out. “How did it happen?”

  Charlotte pursed her lips for a moment, and Susan understood the absurdity of her question from Charlotte's perspective. There were so many questions all of them had, but answers were just words. Words could never convey all that had been lost. Words were a poor substitute for the billions that had died, for the various societies that had perished, for the loss of culture, of art, of music and literature. Just a few words from her lips could never do justice to the devastation that had befallen an entire planet.

  “We were afraid,” Charlotte said candidly. “We felt threatened. There was a conflict of ideals, an struggle between cultures and countries, between religions and concepts you couldn't even begin to fathom.

  “Tens of thousands of years ago, we wielded clubs of wood and blades of stone. Over time, we developed swords and spears. We built castle walls and battering rams.”

  Her hand rested on a firearm set in a holster on a belt drawn around her waist. Susan had seen guns before, but only ever the large, cumbersome revolvers carried by the sheriff and his deputies. This gun was different. The holster
didn't have a leather strap buttoned down to prevent the clunky revolver from being grabbed by someone else. This gun was exposed, with its black handle clearly visible. Only the barrel sat in a narrow plastic holder. It was clear the design allowed the gun to be drawn with astonishing speed.

  “We've always fought,” Charlotte continued, her voice carrying in the empty cafeteria. “We've always sought a means to fight, from guns to tanks, from airplanes to nukes.”

  These were terms Susan didn't understand. The only tanks she'd ever known were used to hold water or fuel, and she couldn't begin to imagine how such an item could be used offensively.

  “We laid waste to entire cities. A single bomb dropped from an airplane could kill hundreds of thousands of people in the blink of an eye, but that wasn't enough. We continued to devise ways to destroy each other until one day, we did.”

  Sheriff Cann spoke, saying, “You said, we ... We did this? We did this to ourselves?”

  Charlotte bit her lip, nodding.

  Jules spoke softly, saying, “I'm sorry. There's no easy way to say this. We're not lucky survivors, we're the descendants of those that perpetuated this madness on the world.”

  Susan swallowed the lump in her throat. In a matter of minutes, her world, her entire life had been cast into darkness. Everything she'd ever known had changed. The silo and everyone she knew took on an entirely different meaning.

  “Is it?” she whispered quietly to Charlie, wanting to ask, “Is it true?” but struggling to get the words out.

  He simply nodded.

  “But this isn't the end,” Jules said. “We have a chance to put things right, to end the madness. We can't change history, but we can change our future. There's a whole world out there waiting for us, but we need to leave this madness buried underground, entombed in these concrete silos.”

  Sheriff Cann nodded, as did the mayor.

  “What do we need to do?” he asked.

  “We need to get everyone out of here,” Jules said with a sense of authority that commanded respect. “We need to dismantle the power structures of our society and invent new ones, where transparency and accountability are the only agendas. No more lies. No more secrets. No more cleaning.”