by Hugh Howey
The next two doors were more of the same, except for a row of urinals in the bathroom. The sight of these made Donald need to go. He crept inside and tested one, was mildly surprised when it flushed and was startled by how loud it was. While he went, he had a fear that Anna was looking for him, that she might hear the water banging through the pipes and barge in.
He finished and flushed, then noted the layer of dust on the handle of the neighboring urinal. Perhaps this place had been taken off the maintenance rounds while Anna was awake. Maybe people had lived down here and kept up with the munitions once but had relocated to make room for her secret presence. But Donald didn’t remember anyone coming to this level during his first shift. No, these were quarters kept for another time, much like the machines beneath the tarps. And rather than put Donald where it made the most sense, where there was plenty of room and a second shower, Anna had kept him in the suite she’d long ago made for herself. To keep him near, perhaps. And Donald wondered for the first time if he was awake not because he held the answer to any mystery, but simply because she wanted him to be.
He washed his hands and studied himself in the mirror. His eyes were red and puffy, his hair disheveled, his cheeks gaunt and bearing three days of growth. He was turning gray, he saw. The centuries spent asleep were aging him. He laughed at this, laughed at the idea that the man in the mirror was him at all, that he was still alive, his wife gone, that any of this were more than a dream. Flicking off the light, he left the bathroom to the ghosts and checked the door at the end of the hall.
Inside, he found furniture locked in ice, the light from the hallway shimmering as it caught what looked like massive cubes of frozen water. The illusion was dispelled as he fumbled for the switch. It was sheets of plastic thrown over tables and chairs, a fine mist of dust settled on top. Donald approached one of the tables and saw the computer display beneath the sheet. The chairs were attached to the desks, and there was something familiar about the knobs and levers. He knelt and fumbled for the edge of the plastic and peeled it up noisily. He turned and checked the empty hallway, unable to shake the feeling of others being present.
The flight controls he revealed took him back to another life. Here was the stick his sister had called a yoke, the pedals beneath the seat she had called something else, the throttle and all the other dials and indicators. Donald remembered touring her training facility after she graduated flight school. They had flown to Colorado for her ceremony. He remembered watching a screen just like this as her drone took to the air and joined a formation of others. He remembered the view of Colorado from the nose of her graceful machine in flight.
He glanced around the room at the dozen or so stations. The obvious need for the place slammed into what had felt like a secret discovery. He imagined voices in the hallway, men and women showering and chatting, towels being snapped at asses, someone looking to borrow a razor, a shift of pilots sitting at these desks where coffee could lie perfectly still in steaming mugs as death was rained down from above.
Donald returned the plastic sheet. Dust shivered off and ran down the gleaming material like an avalanche on a snowy hillside. He thought of his sister, asleep and hidden some levels below where he couldn’t find her, and he wondered if she hadn’t been brought there as a surprise for him at all. Maybe she had been brought as a surprise for some future others.
And suddenly, thinking of her, thinking of a time lost to dreams and lonely tears, Donald found himself patting his pockets in search of something. Pills. An old prescription with her name on it. Helen had forced him to see a doctor, hadn’t she? And Donald suddenly knew why he couldn’t forget, why their drugs didn’t work on him. The realization came with a powerful longing to see his sister. Charlotte was the why. She was the answer to one of Thurman’s riddles.
•22•
“I want to see her first,” Donald demanded. “Let me see her, and then I’ll tell you.”
He waited for Thurman or Dr. Henson to reply. The three of them stood in Henson’s office on the cryopod wing. Donald had bargained his way down the lift with Thurman, and now he bargained further. His sister was the answer to why he couldn’t forget. He would exchange that answer for another. He wanted to know where she was, to see her.
Something unspoken passed between the two men. Thurman turned to Donald with a warning. “She will not be woken,” he said. “Not even for this.”
Donald nodded. He saw how only those who made the laws were allowed to break them.
Henson turned to the computer on his desk. “I’ll look her up.”
“No need,” Thurman said. “I know where she is.”
He led them out of the office and down the hall, past the main shift rooms where Donald had awoken as Troy all those years ago, past the deep freeze where he had spent nearly a century asleep, all the way to another door just like the others.
The code Thurman entered was different; Donald could tell by the discordant four-note song the buttons made. Above the keypad in small stenciled letters he made out the words: Emergency Personnel. Locks whirred and ground like old bones, and the door gradually opened.
Steam followed them inside, the warm air from the hallway hitting the mortuary cool. There were fewer than a dozen rows of pods, perhaps fifty or sixty units total, little more than a full shift. Donald peered into one of the coffin-like units, the ice a spiderweb of blue and white on the glass, and saw inside a thick and chiseled visage. A frozen soldier, or so his imagination informed him.
Thurman led them through the rows and columns before stopping at one of the pods. He rested his hands on its surface with something like affection. His exhalations billowed into the air. It made his white hair and stark beard appear as though they were frosted with ice.
“Charlotte,” Donald breathed, peering in at his sister. She hadn’t changed, hadn’t aged a bit. Even the blue cast of her skin seemed normal and expected, as he was growing used to seeing people this way.
He rubbed the small window to clear the web of frost and marveled at his thin hands and seemingly fragile joints. He had atrophied. He had grown older while his sister remained the same.
“I locked her away like this once,” he said, gazing in at her. “I locked her away in my memory like this when she went off to war. Our parents did the same. She was just little Charla. She was over there flying planes with her joystick like the video games she used to play.”
He thought of Charlotte in front of her computer as a kid. He had thought she was overseas doing something innocent like that. Glancing away from her, he studied the two men on the other side of the pod. Henson started to say something, but Thurman placed a hand on the doctor’s arm. Donald turned back to his sister.
“Of course, it wasn’t a game. She was killing people. We talked about it years later, after I was in office and she’d figured I’d grown up enough.” He laughed and shook his head. “My kid sister, waiting for me to grow up.”
A tear plummeted to the frozen pane of glass. The salt cut through the ice and left a clear track behind. Donald wiped it away with a squeak, then felt frightened he might disturb her.
“They would get her up in the middle of the night,” he said. “Whenever a target was deemed… what did she call it? Actionable. They would get her up. She said it was strange to go from dreaming to killing, how none of it made sense, how she would go back to sleep and see the video feeds in her mind—that last view from a missile’s nose as she guided it into its target—”
He took a breath and gazed up at Thurman.
“I thought it was good that she couldn’t be hurt, you know? She was safe in a trailer somewhere, not up there in the sky. But she complained about it. She told her doctor that it didn’t feel right, being safe and doing what she did. The people on the front lines, they had fear as an excuse. They had self-preservation. A reason to kill. Charlotte used to kill people and then go to the mess hall and eat a piece of pie. That’s what she told her doctor. She would eat something sweet and not be able t
o taste it.”
“What doctor was this?” Henson asked.
“My doctor,” Donald said. He wiped his cheek, but he wasn’t ashamed of the tears. Being by his sister’s side had him feeling brave and bold, less alone. He could face the past and the future, both. “Helen was worried about my reelection,” he explained. “Charlotte already had a prescription, had been diagnosed with PTSD after her first tour, and so we kept filling it under her name, even under her insurance.”
Henson waved his hand, stirring the air for more information. “What prescription?”
“Propra,” Thurman said. “She’d been taking Propra, hadn’t she? And you were worried about the press finding out.”
Donald nodded. “Helen was worried. She thought it might come out that I was taking medication for my… wilder thoughts. The pills helped me forget them, kept me level. I could study the Order, and all I saw were the words, not the implications. There was no fear.” He looked at his sister, understanding finally why she had refused to take the meds. She wanted the fear. It was necessary somehow. The medication they’d prescribed was the exact opposite of what she needed.
“I remember you telling me she was on them.” Thurman said. “We were in the bookstore—”
“Do you remember your dosage?” Henson asked. “How long were you on it?”
“I started taking it after I was given the Order to read.” He watched Thurman for any hint of expression and got nothing. “I guess that was two or three years before the convention. I took them nearly every day right up until then.” He turned to Henson. “I would’ve had some on me during orientation if I hadn’t lost them on the hill that day. I think I fell. I remember falling—”
Henson turned to Thurman. “There’s no telling what the complications might be. Victor was careful to screen psychotropics from administrative personnel. Everyone was tested—”
“I wasn’t,” Donald said.
Henson faced him. “Everyone was tested.”
“Not him.” Thurman studied the surface of the pod, spoke to Henson. “There was a last minute change. A switch. I vouched for him. And if he was taking her meds, there wouldn’t have been anything in his medical records.”
“We need to tell Erskine,” Henson said. “I could work with him. We might come up with a new formulation.” He turned away from the pod like he needed to get back to his office.
Thurman looked to Donald. “Do you need more time down here?”
Donald studied his sister a moment. He wanted to wake her, to talk to her. Maybe he could come back another time just to visit.
“I might like to come back,” he said.
“We’ll see.”
Thurman walked around the pod and placed a hand on Donald’s shoulder, gave him a light, sympathetic squeeze. He led Donald away from the pod and toward the door, and Donald didn’t glance back, didn’t check the screen for his sister’s new name. He didn’t care. He knew where she was, and she would always be Charlotte to him. She would never change.
“You did good,” Thurman said. “This is real good.” They stepped into the hall and closed the thick doors with their massive locks. “You may have stumbled on why Victor was so obsessed with that report of yours.”
“I did?” Donald didn’t see the connection.
“I don’t think he was interested in what you wrote at all,” Thurman said. “I think he was interested in you.”
•23•
They rode the lift toward the cafeteria rather than drop Donald off on fifty-five. It was almost dinnertime, and he could help Thurman with the trays. While the lights behind the level numbers blinked on and off, following their progress up the shaft, the idea that Thurman might be right haunted him. What if Victor had been curious about his resistance to the medication? What if it wasn’t anything in that report at all?
They rode past level 40, its button winking bright and then going dark, and Donald thought of the silo that had done the same. “What does this mean for 18?” he asked, watching the next number flash by.
Thurman stared at the stainless steel doors, a greasy palm print there from where someone had caught their balance.
“Vic wanted to try another reset on 18,” he said. “I never saw the point. But after his death—“ Thurman hesitated. “Maybe we give them one more chance.”
“What’s involved in a reset?”
“You know what’s involved.” Thurman faced him. “It’s what we did to the world, just on a smaller scale. Reduce the population, wipe the computers, their memories, try it all over again. We’ve done that several times before with this silo. There are risks involved. You can’t create trauma without making a mess. At some point, it’s simpler and safer to pull the plug.”
“End them,” Donald said, and he saw what Victor had been up against, what he had worked to avert. He wished he could speak to the old man, now that he knew what he knew. Anna said Victor had spoken of him often. And Erskine had said he wished people like Donald were in charge. What did that mean, all that nonsense about names being all that mattered and doing what was right for a change?
The elevator opened on the top level. Donald stepped out, and it was strange to walk among those on their shift, to be present and at the same time invisible, a body moving among the chatter while not a part of it all.
He noticed that no one here looked to Thurman with deference. He was not that shift’s head, and no one knew him as such. They were just two men, one in white and one in beige, grabbing food and glancing at the ruined wasteland on the wallscreen.
Donald took one of the trays and noticed again that most people sat facing the view. Only one or two ate with their backs to it, preferring not to see. He followed Thurman back to the elevator while longing to speak to these handful, to ask them what they remembered, what they were afraid of, to tell them that it was okay to be afraid.
“Why do the other silos have screens?” he asked Thurman, keeping his voice down. The parts of the facility he’d had no hand in designing made little sense to him. “Why show them what we did?”
“To keep them in,” Thurman said. He balanced the tray with one hand and pressed the call button on the express. “It’s not that we’re showing them what we did. We’re showing them what’s out there. Those screens and a few taboos are all that contain these people. Humans have this disease, Donny, this compulsion to move until we bump into something. And then we tunnel through that something, or we sail over the edge of the oceans, or we stagger across mountains—”
The elevator arrived. A man in reactor red excused himself and stepped between the two. They boarded, and Thurman fumbled for his badge. “Fear,” he said. “Even the fear of death is barely enough to counter this compulsion of ours. If we didn’t show them what was there, they would go look for themselves. That’s what we’ve always done.”
Donald considered this. He thought about his own desire, his mad urge, to escape the confines of all that pressing concrete. Even if it meant death out there. The slow strangulation was worse, he decided. It was all about choosing the lesser of two evils.
“I’d rather see a reset than extinguish the entire silo,” he said, watching the numbers race by. He didn’t mention that he’d been reading up on the people who lived there. Bad things would happen to many of them, but there would be a chance at life afterward.
“I’m less and less eager to gas the place, myself,” Thurman admitted. “When Vic was around, all I did was argue against wasting our time with any one silo like this. Now that he’s gone, I find myself pulling for these people. It’s like I have to honor his last wishes. And that’s a dangerous trap to fall into.”
The elevator stopped on twenty and picked up two workers, who ceased a conversation of their own and fell silent for the ride. Donald thought about this process of cleansing a silo only to watch the violence repeat itself. The great wars he remembered from the old days came like this, a new generation unremembering, so that sons marched into the wars their fathers had fought before them
.
The two workers got off at the rec hall, resuming their conversation as the doors closed. Donald remembered how much he enjoyed punishing himself in the weight room. Now he was wasting away with little appetite, nothing to push against, no resistance.
“It makes me wonder sometimes if that was why he did what he did,” Thurman said. The elevator slid toward fifty-five. “Vic calculated everything. Always with a purpose. Maybe his way of winning this argument of ours was to ensure he had the last word.” Thurman glanced at Donald. “Hell, it’s what finally got me to agree to wake you up.”
Donald didn’t say out loud how crazy that sounded. He thought Thurman just needed some way to make sense of the unthinkable. Of course, there was another way Victor’s death had ended the argument. Not for the first time, Donald imagined that it hadn’t been a suicide at all. But he didn’t see where such doubts could get him except in trouble.
They got off on fifty-five and carried the trays through the aisles of munitions. As they passed the sleeping drones, Donald thought of his sister, similarly sleeping. It was good to know where she was, that she was safe. A small comfort.
They ate at the war table. Donald pushed his dinner around his plate while Thurman and Anna talked. The two reports sat before him, constant companions, a bevy of notes with a splatter of blood, a report that he’d been reading too much into, notes about him remembering, about this being the great why of it all.