Shattered Roads

by ALICE HENDERSON

  Grabbing his arm, she stopped. A sound echoed up from beneath her. A beeping sound. She paused, listening. It was muffled, like it wasn’t coming from this unit. Cautiously, she stood up and walked back into the hall. Craning her neck, she tried to pinpoint the sound. She moved back toward the hole in the wall, thinking it might be coming from the next living pod, but it wasn’t. She walked back toward the bathroom. The beeping grew louder. She walked past the bathroom toward the man’s bedroom. She stopped at the end of the hallway, just before its doorway. The sound was loudest here, an incessant, unfamiliar beeping. She knelt down, and it stopped.

  She waited, but after minutes of silence, she stood up and returned to the bathroom. Stooping down, she rolled the body into the bag. She began zipping it up and looked back at the man’s head. The wound was circular and clean, right where his implant should have been. Curious, she leaned closer, staring at the hole. The man’s implant hadn’t malfunctioned; it was completely gone, and something had seared his brain tissue. She stared down at the blackened flesh, wrinkling her nose at the acrid smell that wafted up.

  She looked around the bathroom, seeing a shattered vase, a group of towels spilling out of the hutch above the toilet. Her gut roiled around inside her. Something wasn’t right. This wasn’t a natural death or an accident.

  His brain had been destroyed, violently. He had struggled, fought against someone.

  Who had removed his implant? And where was it now? Who would have had access to his pod? Only her employers or a worker like herself. Maybe someone had tried to save him when his implant shorted out. She didn’t like it, and she grew nervous, wanting to finish the job.

  She finished zipping him up inside the thick plastic, then tugged him out into the hallway. Straightening up, she looked back into the bathroom. Blood had pooled under him, crusted and dried. She pulled out the bleach and scrub brush and went to work. When a new person was installed in this living pod, it had to look spotless.

  She scrubbed and wiped until the white tile floor gleamed. Then she went through the whole pod, righting an upended lamp in the hallway. Housekeeping would take care of the rest, resupplying the bathroom with new linens and other necessities.

  She returned to the body bag. He was heavy. She’d have to drag him out with the harness. She pulled it out of her bag and stepped into it. Tightening it around her chest, she was glad he lived near the corner of the building. Even so, it would take a lot of effort to get him down the exterior hallway to the incinerator.

  She pulled out tow ropes and attached them to the body bag with carabiners. She was about to attach him to her harness when the beeping started again. She stood silently in the darkened hallway, listening. She waited for it to stop, but it didn’t this time. Dropping the ropes, she walked to the end of the hallway where it was loudest. A red-and-black carpet covered the floor there. The sound was coming from underneath. She was sure of it. She knew the utility tunnels well, having been navigating them since she was four. They didn’t run under this part of the building. It should be just dirt under there.

  She peeled the carpet back and stared at the floorboards. Faint scratches marred their plastic edges. While all the planks still lay flush together, she noticed their nails had been removed. As she bent lower, she found a broken fingernail. She leaned back on her heels. Stood up. On a thought, she returned to the body bag and unzipped it. Pulling out the man’s cold arm, she found all of his fingernails bloody and torn. He’d been scratching at the floor.

  The beeping continued, insistent, demanding. What was it?

  Then, just as suddenly as it started, it came to an end. She waited, but it didn’t resume.

  Taking a knee, she traced her fingers along one of the boards. At the end she tugged upward, and it came free, revealing a support beam beneath. Under it lay darkness. She lifted up a few more boards, laying them quietly to one side. Glancing back toward the hole in the wall, she made out the faint glow from the man’s display in the next pod. He had taken no notice of her. She felt exposed, crouching there, exploring, not doing her job. Her heart hammered, and her mouth went dry at the thought of him peeking through the hole, or, worse, her employers showing up for an inspection. But no one came through the ragged hole in the wall.

  She grabbed her headlamp and her tool bag and returned to the opening in the floor. Donning the light, she switched it on and pointed it down into the darkness. The beam traveled over rubble from an ancient ceiling, more support beams, and strange shapes clustered in shadow. It was a whole other room, she realized, a room beneath this one. Her nose wrinkled as a moldy odor stirred upward.

  She swung her legs over into the darkness. Sitting on the edge, she hovered between two worlds. What lay beneath this living pod? She always thought it had been built on the ground floor.

  Before she even knew she’d made the decision, she gripped the edge of the floor with her hands and lowered her legs down into the unknown.

  Chapter 3

  H124’s feet thrashed inside the hole until they found a stable spot on the rubble. Slowly she lowered her full weight onto it. With only her head above the floor of the deceased man’s living pod, she glanced one more time toward the hole at the end of the hallway. Nothing had changed.

  She turned away, aiming her light down into the black. The rubble angled downward, so she slid and stumbled her way to the base of the pile, reaching a sloping floor. Dust motes hung in the air, and a thick blanket of gray covered strange rectangular shapes around the room. Stopping to listen for any sounds above, she stared up through the hole. Then she turned, playing her light over the shapes. A large desk stood against one wall with a chair in front of it. Two items sat on top of the desk. She brushed the thick layer of dust off them. The larger one was a plastic box with black glass on one side. In front of it lay a flat plastic rectangle with buttons. Each button had a letter on it, along with some other symbols she didn’t recognize. As she moved around the room, her light dancing over more strange shapes, the headlamp’s beam fell on a door. Another room? She rushed to the door. It had no theta wave receiver. She pushed against it, and it swung open, revealing another room beyond. This one held a number of large tables, each with its own sink. Posters hung on the walls. She studied each one, but she couldn’t make sense of them. One showed a series of color-coded squares with letters and numbers in them: Ag 47. He 2. C 6. Most of the poster was ripped, decaying, pieces of it lying on the floor. Another showed a diagram of a circular object with smaller circles surrounding it.

  She couldn’t believe it when her light fell on yet another door. The hole in the floor hadn’t simply led to another room. This was vast. She was sure she was under one of the adjoining pods. The whole living unit building had been built on the ruins of some other structure. The place was ancient. Of that much she was sure. It smelled old, musty. She walked up to one of the large tables and wiped away dust. Glancing back at the mysterious posters, she walked across the room. A glass case on the far wall held small silver rocks. They weren’t like the landscaping rocks outside of the living pod units. These were shiny, metallic-looking. She reached inside and picked one up, finding it unusually heavy. Uneasy, she slipped it inside her pocket.

  Even stranger shapes lay enshrouded in dust on a table along another wall. She brushed them off, finding equipment of some kind, but she had no idea what it was. She’d never seen anything like it, bizarre tubes of glass and metal with knobs and dials. She wondered if they powered on, so she sent theta wave signals to them. They didn’t respond. She touched the pieces, finding them clunky.

  She passed into the next room. Shivering in the damp, she noticed signs and drawings covering the walls. Another desk sat against the far wall with the same ancient equipment sitting under a layer of dust, a tall black rectangle standing on its end, and a bigger rectangle on a stand of some sort. Shelves stood on either side of the old desk, filled with peculiar objects. She walked to one of the walls
, her feet kicking up dust. She coughed. The signs on the wall were very thin, tacked there with rusted metal pins. She recognized letters on the page, but didn’t understand most of the words. One sign focused on an image of a huge rock pocked with holes. She walked along the wall, taking in the images when she couldn’t make out the words. The next showed a destroyed building with a massive pit next to it. An inset image showed another giant rock with a burned crust. The next few signs held images of fires consuming city blocks. She tried to read the writing beneath the images, but other than building, fire, and fell, she didn’t understand them. She’d never seen so many different words in her life. Some of them were so long, an archaic form of English. Her written instructions always came to her in abbreviated format, like today: Crps clnp bldg A pod 25. These words were long, clustered together in dense sections.

  Suddenly the beeping noise returned, louder than ever. She was in the room with it. She snapped her head toward the ancient desk. A tiny red light glowed. Quickly she moved to it, afraid someone above would hear her. The beeping came from one of two little boxes next to the bigger rectangles. She sent it a theta wave command to lower its volume, but nothing happened. Then she sent an off signal, to no avail. Finally she sought out the red light, finding a dial on one of the little boxes, which she tried to push, but ultimately twisted. The beeping grew much quieter, then with a click, it went away entirely. She turned it back on, leaving the volume very low. She felt along the bigger rectangle with the glass, finding a small button. She pushed it, and it began to glow beneath the dust. Wiping it off with her sleeve, she found a blank blue square staring back at her. It was a screen, she realized—an ancient one. It didn’t hover in the air, but glowed outward from the sheet of glass, held within a plastic casing.

  She moved her hands over the upright rectangle next to it, feeling for another button. She found one and pushed it. Something hummed, then the sound of a small fan filled the silence. In a few moments, the screen showed symbols, circles.

  She couldn’t believe the equipment could still be turned on. But she knew the whole building had been nuclear powered for a long time. She didn’t know for how long, only that the maintenance crew for the power plant had tales going back generations. This thing must still be plugged into that power source.

  The words Sentry System appeared at the top of the screen. Below them was a bright yellow circle. The third dot read Earth. She’d heard an old man in the laundry facility once talk about how there were more planets than theirs, perhaps as many as nine. But this diagram showed smaller objects among the planets. Three of them were flashing red and black, two small dots followed by a very big one. As she stared at the moving diagram, the flashing triad moved ever closer to Earth, crossing into its orbit. The three smaller dots collided with Earth. A series of numbers flashed across the screen: Fragment 1: 3.7 km. 0.00002 lunar distance. COLLISION CERTAIN. Torino Scale 9. Regional Damage. Fragment 2: 3.2 km. 0.00031 lunar distance. COLLISION CERTAIN. Torino Scale 8. Regional Damage. Fragment 3: 942 m. 0.00014 lunar distance. COLLISION CERTAIN. Torino Scale 8. Regional Damage.

  The animation continued. The big dot missed the earth and continued its loop around the sun. It wheeled around, repeating its orbit. Once again it entered Earth’s trajectory, but this time they collided. A series of numbers read: Main asteroid: 9.2 km. 0.00011 lunar distance. COLLISION CERTAIN. Torino Scale 10. Global Climatic Catastrophe.

  The diagram changed now, zooming in to the little dot that was Earth. As the detail increased, drawn outlines appeared on the earth, forming different shapes. She thought they might be the profiles of the lands. Then the animation showed exactly where the first two fragments would hit. A large portion of one of the landmasses bloomed red. Then she saw where the main object would strike on its next swing around the earth. As it struck the planet, a red circle bloomed out from the area of impact. It swept outward, covering the entire earth.

  She looked at the dates on the collisions. The first fragment was due to hit in two months, the main asteroid the next time it swung around the sun. She brushed off a lump in the dust, finding a plastic oval with two buttons. A wire ran out from it, plugging into the upright metal box. She clicked on one of the buttons, and the diagram with the circles vanished. The beeping stopped at once. She stared at a black screen with a blue icon that read Previous Impact. When she moved the oval, an arrow moved on the screen. She clicked on the icon, and several small images appeared. She hovered over one of them, then clicked the button again. Something new filled the screen: a movie. It was just like the videos she could create on her personal recording device, but instead of emanating on a floating display as it did on her PRD, it appeared on the glass screen itself.

  A woman was standing before a burning building, smoke billowing upward, the sky filled with black ash. The woman’s voice came from the beeping device: “Since the catastrophic disaster on the mining asteroid Free Enterprise was first reported, we have been dreading this day. As underfunded government space agencies raced unsuccessfully to prevent the impacts, this nightmare has become a reality. Several fragments of the asteroid have landed here in Chicago, destroying a huge part of the downtown area. Residents have evacuated as more debris is expected to fall. Critics blame the current administration for not granting NASA enough funding to track near-Earth objects.”

  H124 could hear strange wailing noises in the background, mechanical and haunting. Flashing lights reflected off the building, and she could hear people screaming.

  “More fragments fell north of this location, causing a factory to catch fire and burn down several city blocks.”

  The movie finished.

  She clicked the little button on the hand device, and the video played again. Now she clicked on a different image on the screen. Another movie opened. A man stood in front of more burning wreckage, the blackened shell of a building behind him. She heard his voice coming through and adjusted the small dial so it would be quieter. “The fourth of the huge fragments has devastated downtown Chicago,” he said. “These are just small parts of the asteroid that have broken off after the catastrophic disaster on Free Enterprise. Scientists at NASA are now saying that the asteroid and its remaining fragments, far larger than the ones that have crashed here, have been knocked into an unknown orbit. NASA and the Jet Propulsion Lab will have to calculate their new trajectory before we know if these disastrous pieces of space rock will endanger our planet in the future. Though from what we’ve been told by our Washington, D.C. affiliate, while this has certainly been a devastating day for the city of Chicago, scientists have at least eighty years—possibly as long as two hundred and thirty-two—before the main asteroid and its larger fragments pass this close again.”

  The movie stopped, and she watched it again. She didn’t understand a lot of the words the man and the woman had said. Chicago? Asteroid? NASA? Washington?

  She clicked on the other image, and the animation opened again, showing the orbits of the planets and the flashing dots. She now knew what she was looking at. Those eighty years—or two hundred and thirty-two—had elapsed, and these things were coming fast.

  She whipped out her personal recording device. The room’s technology was so old that she couldn’t find a way to pair her PRD with the screen itself, so she had to settle for just using her camera. She filmed the animation, then the two movies.

  Plugged into the upright machine was a small metal-and-plastic device. It glowed along one side. She found several more in one of the drawers. On one end of each device was a shiny metal plug. She grabbed all of them and pulled the other one out of the machine. Something beeped when she did. In the drawers beneath the little devices was a small binder full of gleaming discs. She put that in her bag as well.

  She was just figuring out how to detach the machine itself when she heard shuffling on the floor above. She froze. She guessed that someone was coming down the hallway that led to the dead man’s living pod. Only two pe
ople would use that hallway: another cleaner or one of her employers. Maybe they were checking up on her progress. If they found her down here . . . She shuddered. She slung her bag over her shoulder and raced through the doorways back the way she’d come.

  Chapter 4

  When H124 reached the rubble at the bottom of the hole, she stood, listening. All she could hear were the building’s ventilation humming and the distant sounds from the neighbor’s display. She climbed the pile of old rubble and peeked out into the man’s living pod. She tensed, listening. Nothing unusual met her ears. The body still lay in the middle of the hallway, sealed inside the body bag. The smell of bleach hung heavily in the air. She didn’t catch the sound of any more footsteps. Maybe they’d gone past this place, heading for a different living pod.

  She pulled herself out and quickly replaced the floorboards, slinging the carpet back in place. The foreign devices weighed heavily in her bag, even though she knew they were only a couple of ounces. She had to get out of there fast.

  She strapped the body bag to her harness and began dragging the man down the hall. She peered out through the hole in the wall. The neighbor still sat on his couch, display gleaming in front of him. He entered text in one small window while watching a show about two girls shopping in a megamall.

  He didn’t turn as she hefted the body through the hole and hurried toward his front door. She started to close her eyes to use the theta wave receiver to open the door, but instead leaned forward, staring through the peephole. The hallway was clear. She sent the message to the TWR to unlock the door, and it hissed open. Glancing up and down the empty hall, she lugged the body out, dragging it along the floor. The incinerator stood at the end. She bent with the effort, clenching her teeth. Her mind sped along, wondering what to do. Her body was on autopilot, dragging the corpse toward the incinerator the way she had countless times before in other living pods. The corridor lighting flickered overhead. If she told her employers about the asteroid, they’d know that she had been exploring, not just doing her job. She’d heard about other people who got distracted from their day-to-day tasks. Some were repurposed, moved into other, more menial positions. Others simply vanished. She knew she couldn’t tell them. Even if they listened, could she trust them to go to Public Programming Control so they could broadcast the information? Her best bet was to go straight to the PPC herself. After she incinerated the body, she’d head to the media building, and her employers would be none the wiser.