by Hugh Howey
A smile was flashed, as white as his hair, wrinkles forming around his lips and eyes. The chair in the hallway squeaked as it was pushed away, off to retrieve someone else, never sleeping. The door clicked shut. Donald thought he heard a lock engage, but his teeth still chattered occasionally, and his ears were full of lead.
“Thurman,” the man said, correcting him. “But I don’t go by that anymore. Just as you don’t go by Donald.”
“But I remember,” Donald said. More came back to him. He remembered his office, the one upstairs and some other office far away, some place where it still rained and the grass grew. This man had been a Senator. But of what? Donald remembered drawing this place.
“And that’s a mystery we need to solve.” The senator of nothing tilted his head. “For now, it’s good that you do. We need you to remember.”
Thurman leaned against the metal dresser. He looked as though he hadn’t slept in days. His hair was unkempt, not quite how Donald remembered it. There were dark circles beneath his sad eyes. He seemed much… older, somehow.
Donald peered down at his own palms, the springs in the bed making the room feel as though it were swaying. He flashed again to the horrible sight of a man remembering his own name and wanting to be free.
“Who am I?” he asked. He had felt so certain a moment before. Had he swallowed those pills? No, he remembered them rattling back into that orderly’s coat. That doctor’s coat. This was just the waking confusion. It would pass, he told himself. This was the groggy morning after a century of vivid dreams.
“Who do you think you are?” the Thaw Man asked. He produced a folded piece of paper and waited for an answer. Recollections came back and then receded like a sea swelling in and out against a pier.
“My name is Donald Keene.”
“So you do remember. And you know who I am.”
Donald nodded.
“Good.” The Thaw Man turned and placed the folded piece of paper on the dresser. He arranged it on its bent legs so it tented upward, toward the ceiling. “We need you to remember everything,” he said. “Study this report when the fog clears, see if it jars anything loose. Once your stomach is settled, I’ll have a proper meal brought down.”
Donald rubbed his temples. The sea drew away from the pier.
“You’ve been gone for some time,” the Thaw Man said. He rapped his knuckles on the door.
Donald wiggled his bare toes against the carpet. The sensation was returning to his feet. The door clicked before swinging open, and the Senator once again blocked the light spilling from the hallway. He became a shadow for a moment.
“Rest, and then we’ll get our answers together. There’s someone who wants to see you.”
The room was sealed tight before Donald could ask what that meant. And somehow, with the door shut and him gone, there was more air to breathe in that small space. Donald took a few deep breaths. He waited for the world to change, for the snarling dogs with the bat-like wings to return, for the mountain of skulls to reappear beneath his scrambling hands and knees, that interminable climb upward to a peak that would not come. But the room was too solid for that. After a long while, he grabbed the frame of the bed and struggled to his feet. He stood there a moment, swaying.
“Get our answers,” he repeated aloud. Someone wants to see him.
He shook his head, which made the world spin. As if he had any answers. All he had were questions. He remembered the orderlies who woke him saying something about a silo falling. He couldn’t remember which one. Why would they wake him for that?
He moved unsteadily to the door, tried the knob, confirmed what he already knew. He went to the dresser where the piece of paper stood on its remembered folds.
“Get some rest,” he said, laughing at the suggestion. As if he could sleep. He felt as though he’d been asleep forever. He picked up the piece of paper and unfolded it.
A report. Donald remembered this. It was a copy of a report. A report about a young man doing horrible things. The room twisted around him as if he stood on some great pivot, the memory of men and women trampled and dying, of giving some awful order, faces peering in at him from a hallway somewhere far in the past. Somewhere like yesterday.
Donald blinked away a curtain of tears and studied the trembling report. Hadn’t he written this? He had signed it, he remembered. But that wasn’t his name at the bottom. It was his handwriting, but it wasn’t his name.
Troy.
Donald’s legs went numb. He sought the bed—but collapsed to the floor instead. He kept saying he remembered even as more and more washed over him. Troy and Helen. Helen and Troy. He remembered his wife. He saw her disappearing over a hill, her arm raised to the sky where bombs were falling, his sister and some dark and nameless shadow pulling him back as people spilled like marbles down a slope, spilled and gathered, plunking through a funnel and into some deep hole filled with white mist.
Donald remembered. He remembered all that he had helped do to the world. There was a troubled boy in a silo full of the dead, a shadow among the servers. That boy had brought an end to silo number 12. But Donald— What had he done? There were no numbers to contain all the dead. Their skulls made a pile that reached to the heavens. And the tears that popped against the trembling report, they were tinged a pale blue.
•7•
A doctor brought soup and bread a few hours later, plus a tall glass of water. Donald ate hungrily while the man checked his arm. The warm soup felt good. It slid to his center and seemed to radiate its heat outward. He tore at the bread with his teeth and chased it with the water. Somehow these things were going to keep his flesh from collapsing inward. Donald ate with the desperation of so many years of fasting.
“Thank you,” he said between bites. “For the food.”
The doctor glanced up from checking his blood pressure. He was an older man, heavyset, with great bushy eyebrows and a fine wisp of hair clinging to his scalp like a cloud to a hilltop.
“I’m Donald,” he said, introducing himself.
There was a wrinkle of confusion on the old man’s brow. His gray eyes strayed toward his clipboard as if either it or his patient couldn’t be trusted. The needle on the gauge jumped with Donald’s pulse.
“Who’re you?” Donald asked.
“I’m Doctor Henson,” he finally said, though without confidence.
Donald took a long swig on his water, thankful they’d left it at room temperature. He didn’t want anything cold inside him ever again. “Where’re you from?”
The doctor removed the cuff from Donald’s arm with a loud rip. “Level ten. But I work out of the shift office on sixty-eight.” He put his tools back in his bag and made a note on the clipboard.
“No, I mean, where are you from. You know… before.”
Dr. Henson patted Donald’s knee and stood. The clipboard went on a hook on the outside of the door. “You might have some dizziness the next few days. Let us know if you experience any trembling, okay?”
Donald nodded. He remembered being given the same advice earlier. Or was that his last shift? Maybe the repetition was for those who had trouble remembering. He wasn’t going to be one of those people. Not this time.
A shadow fell into the room. Donald looked up to see the Thaw Man in the doorway. He gripped the meal tray to keep it from sliding off his knees.
The Thaw Man nodded to Dr. Henson, but this was not their names. Thurman, Donald told himself. Senator Thurman. He knew this.
“Do you have a moment?” Thurman asked the doctor.
“Of course.” Henson grabbed his bag and stepped outside. The door clicked shut, leaving Donald alone with his soup.
He took quiet spoonfuls, trying to make anything of the murmurs on the other side of the door. Thurman, he reminded himself again. And not a senator. Senator of what? Those days were gone. Donald had drawn the plans.
The report stood tented on the dresser, returned to its spot. Donald took a bite of bread and remembered the floors he’d laid ou
t. Those floors were now real. They existed. People lived inside them, raising their children, laughing, having fights, singing in the shower. People lived in the things he’d made, in the holes he’d dug. Those people—and no more.
A few minutes passed before the knob tilted and the door swung inward. The Thaw Man entered the room alone. He pressed the door shut and frowned at Donald. “How’re you feeling?”
The spoon clacked against the rim of the bowl. Donald set the utensil down and gripped the tray with both hands to keep them from shaking, to keep them from forming fists.
“You know,” Donald hissed, teeth clenched together. “You know what we did.”
Thurman showed his palms. “We did what had to be done.”
“No. Don’t give me that.” Donald shook his head. The water in his glass trembled as if something dangerous approached. “The world…”
“We saved it.”
“That’s not true!” Donald’s voice cracked. He tried to remember. “There is no world.” He recalled the view from the top, from the cafeteria. He remembered the hills a dull brown, the sky full of menacing clouds. “We ended it. We killed everyone.”
“They were already dead,” Thurman said. “We all were. Everyone dies, son. The only thing that matters is—”
“No.” Donald waved the words away as if they were buzzing things that could bite him. “There’s no justifying this—” He felt spittle form on his lips, wiped it away with his sleeve. The tray on his lap slid dangerously, and Thurman moved swifter than his years to catch it. He placed what was left of the meal on the bedside table, and up close, Donald could see that he had gotten older. The wrinkles were deeper, the skin hanging from the bones. He wondered how much time Thurman had spent awake while Donald slept.
“I killed a lot of men in the war,” Thurman said, looking down at the tray of half-eaten food.
Donald found himself focused on the old man’s neck. He interlocked his hands to keep them still. This sudden admission about killing made it seem as if he could read Donald’s mind, like this was some kind of a warning for Donald to stay his murderous plans.
Thurman turned to the dresser and picked up the folded report. He opened it, and Donald caught sight of the pale blue dollops, his ice-tinged tears from earlier.
“Some say killing gets easier the longer you’re at it,” Thurman said. He sounded sad, not threatening. Donald looked down at his own knees and saw that they were bouncing. He forced his heels against the carpet and tried to pin them there.
“For me, it only got worse. There was a man in Iran—”
“The entire goddamn planet,” Donald whispered, stressing each word. This was what he said, but all he could think about was his wife. Bombs going off, the plans he’d drawn, Helen pulled down the wrong hill, marbles rolling apart, everything that had ever existed crumbling to ruin. “We killed everyone.”
The senator took in a deep breath and held it a moment. “I told you,” he said. “They were already dead.”
Donald’s knees began bouncing again. There was no controlling it. Thurman studied the report, seemed unsure of something. The paper faintly shook, but maybe it was the overhead vent blowing, which also stirred his hair.
“We were outside of Kashmar,” Thurman said. “This was toward the end of the war, when we were getting our butts kicked and telling the world we were winning. I had a corporal in my squad, our team medic, a James Hannigan. Young. Always cracking jokes but serious when he needed to be. The kind of guy everyone likes. The hardest kind to lose.”
Thurman shook his head. He stared off into the distance. The vent in the ceiling quieted, but the report continued to quiver.
“I killed a lot of men during the war, but only once to really save a life. The rest, you never knew what you were doing when you pulled the trigger. Maybe the guy you take out is never gonna find his own target, never hurt a soul. Maybe he’s gonna be one of the thousands who drop their rifles and blend in with the civvies, go back to their families, open a kasava stand near the embassy and talk basketball with the troops stationed outside. A good man. You never knew. You’re killing these men, and you never knew if you were doing it for a good reason or not.”
“How many billions—?” Donald swallowed. He slid to the edge of the bed and reached toward the tray. Thurman knew what he was after and passed the glass of water, half empty. He continued to ignore Donald’s complaints.
“Hannigan got hit with shrapnel outside of Kashmar. If we could get him to a medic, it was the kind of wound you survived, the kind you lift your shirt in a bar to show off the scars one day. But he couldn’t walk, and it was too hot to send in an airlift. Our squad was hemmed in and would need to fight our way out. I didn’t think we could get to a safe LZ in time to save him. But what I knew, because I’d seen it too many damn times before, is that two or three of my men would die trying to get him out. That’s what happens when you’re lugging a soldier instead of a rifle.” Thurman pressed his sleeve to his forehead. “I’d seen it before.”
“You left him behind,” Donald said, seeing where this was going. He took a sip of water. The surface was agitated.
“No. I killed him.” Thurman stared at the foot of the bed. He stared at nothing. “The enemy wouldn’t have let him die. Not there, not like that. They would’ve patched him up so they could catch it on film. They would’ve stitched up his belly so they could open his throat.” He turned to Donald. “I had to make a decision, and I had to make it fast. And the longer I’ve lived with it, the more I’ve come to agree with what I did. We lost one man that day. I saved two or three others.”
Donald shook his head. “That’s not the same as what we— what you—”
“It’s precisely the same. Do you remember Safed? What the media called the outbreak?”
Donald remembered Safed. An Israeli town near Nazareth. Near Syria. The deadliest WMD strike of the war. He nodded.
“The rest of the world would’ve looked just like that. Just like Safed.” Thurman snapped his fingers. “Ten billion lights go out all at once. We were already infected, son. It was just a matter of triggering it. Safed was… like a beta test.”
Donald shook his head. “I don’t believe you. Why would anyone do that?”
Thurman frowned. “Don’t be naive, son. This life means nothing to some. You put a switch in front of ten billion people, a switch that kills every one of us the moment you hit it, and you’d have thousands of hands racing to be the one. Tens of thousands. It would only be a matter of time. And that switch existed.”
“No.” Donald flashed back to the first conversation he’d ever had with the senator as a member of Congress, after winning office the first time. It had felt like this, the lies and the truth intermingling and shielding one another. “You’ll never convince me,” he said. “You’ll have to drug me or kill me. You’ll never convince me.”
Thurman nodded as if he agreed. “Drugging you doesn’t work. I’ve read up on your first shift. There’s a small percentage of people with some kind of resistance. I’d love to know why.”
Donald laughed. He settled against the wall behind the cot and nestled into the darkness the top bunk provided. “Maybe I’ve seen too much to forget,” he said.
“No, I don’t think so.” Thurman lowered his head so he could still make eye contact. Donald took a sip of water, both hands wrapped around the glass. “The more you see,” Thurman said, “the worse the trauma is, the better it works. Except for some people. Which is why we took a sample.”
Donald glanced down at his arm. A small square of gauze had been taped over the spot of blood left by the doctor’s needle. He felt a caustic mix of helplessness and fear well up, the mix that moves caged animals to bite at curious hands. “You woke me to take my blood?”
“Not exactly.” Thurman hesitated. “Your resistance is something I’m curious about. The reason you’re awake is because I was asked to wake you. We’re losing silos—”
“I thought that was the plan,
” Donald spat. “Losing silos. I thought that was what you wanted.” He remembered crossing one out with red ink, all those many lives lost. They had accounted for this. Silos were expendable. That’s what he’d been told.
Thurman shook his head. “Whatever’s happening out there, we need to understand it. And there’s someone here who… who thinks you may have stumbled onto the answer. A few questions, and then we can put you back under.”
Back under. So he wasn’t going to be out for long. They woke him to take his blood and to drill into his mind, and then back to sleep. Donald rubbed his arms, which felt thin and atrophied. He was dying in that pod. Only, more slowly than he would like.
“We need to know what you remember about this report.” Thurman held it out. Donald waved the thing away.
“I already looked it over,” he said. He didn’t want to see it again. He could close his eyes and see people spilling out onto the dusty land, a cloud of killing mist, the people that he had ordered dead, more people being trampled inside.
“We have other medications that might ease the—”
“No. No more drugs.” Donald crossed his wrists and spread his arms out, slicing the air with both hands. “Look, I don’t have a resistance to your drugs.” The truth. He was sick of the lies. “There’s no mystery. I just stopped taking the pills.”
It felt good to admit it. What were they going to do, anyway? Put him back to sleep? That was the answer no matter what. He took another sip of water while he let the confession sink in. He swallowed.
“I kept them in my gums and spat them out later. It’s as simple as that. Probably the case with anyone else remembering. Like Hal, or Carlton, or whatever his name was.”
Thurman regarded him coolly. He tapped the report against his open palm, seeming to digest this. “We know you stopped taking the pills,” he finally said. “And when.”
Donald waved his hand. “Mystery solved, then.” He finished his water and put the empty glass back on his tray. It felt good to have that out in the open.
“The drugs you have a resistance to are not in the pills, Donny. The reason people stop taking the pills is because they begin to remember, not the other way around.”