Dust s-9

by Hugh Howey

  “Have you seen the kids?” she yelled over the crowd.

  “They’re already through!” Courtnee yelled back. “With your father.”

  Juliette squeezed her arm and hurried into the darkness. There were lights flashing ahead — the few who had battery-powered torches, those with miner’s hats on — but between these beams were wide swaths of pitch black. She jostled with the invisible others who materialized solidly out of shadow. Rocks clattered down from the piles of tailings to either side; dust and debris fell from the ceiling, eliciting shrieks and curses. The passage was narrow between the rows of rubble. The tunnel had been made for a handful of people to pass through, no more. Most of the massive hole bored through the earth had been left full of the scraps the digging had generated.

  Where logjams formed, some people attempted to scamper up and along the tops of these piles. This just pushed heaps of dirt and rock down on those between, filling the tunnel with screams and curses. Juliette helped dig someone out and urged everyone to stay in the center, not to shove, even as someone practically climbed over her back.

  There were others who tried to turn back, afraid and confused and distrusting of this dark run in a straight line. Juliette and others yelled for them to continue on. A nightmare formed of bumping into the support beams hastily erected in the center of the tunnel, of crawling on hands and knees over tall piles from partial cave-ins, of a baby crying at the top of its lungs somewhere. The adults did a better job of dampening their sobs, but Juliette passed by dozens crying. The journey felt interminable, as if they would crawl and stumble through that tunnel for the rest of time, until the poisonous air caught them from behind.

  A jam of foot traffic formed ahead, people shoving at each others’ backs, and flashlight beams played over the steel wall of the digger. The end of the tunnel. The access door at the back of the machine was open. Juliette found Raph standing by the door with one of the flashlights, his pale face aglow in the darkness, eyes wide and white.

  “Jules!”

  She could barely hear him over the voices echoing back and forth in the dark shaft. She made her way to him, asked him who had already passed through.

  “It’s too dark,” he said. “They can only get through one at a time. What the hell is going on? Why all the people? We thought you said—”

  “Later,” she told him, hoping there would be a later. She doubted it. More likely, there would be piles of bodies at both ends of this silo. That would be the great difference between 17 and 18. Bodies at both ends. “The kids?” she asked, and as soon as she did, she wondered why with all the dead and dying she would concentrate on so few. The mother she never was, she suspected. The primal urge to look after her brood when far more than that was in peril.

  “Yeah, quite a few kids came through.” He paused and shouted directions to a couple who didn’t want to enter the metal door at the back of this digger. Juliette could hardly blame them. They weren’t even from Mechanical. What did these people think was going on? Just following the panicked shoutings of others. Probably thought they were lost in the mines. It was a wild experience even for Juliette, who had scaled hills and seen the outside.

  “What about Shirly?” Juliette asked.

  He aimed his torch inside. “Saw her for sure. I think she’s in the digger. Directing traffic.”

  She squeezed Raph’s arm, looked back at the writhing darkness of shadowy forms behind her. “Make sure you get through,” she told him, and his pale face nodded his consent.

  Juliette squeezed into the queue and entered the back of the digger. Cries and shouts rattled within like children screaming into empty soup cans. Shirly was at the back of the power plant, directing the shuffling and shoving mass of people through a crack in the darkness so narrow that everyone had to turn sideways. The lights that’d been rigged up inside the digger to work the tailings were off, the backup generator idle, but Juliette could feel the residual heat from it having been run. She could hear the clicking of metal as it cooled. She wondered if Shirly had been operating the unit in order to move the machine and its power plant back toward Silo 18. She and Courtnee had been arguing over where the digger belonged.

  “What the hell?” Shirly asked Juliette when she spotted her.

  Juliette felt like bursting into tears. How to explain what she feared, that this was the end of everything they’d ever known? She shook her head and bit her lip. “We’re losing the silo,” she finally managed. “The outside’s getting in.”

  “So why send them this way?” Shirly had to yell over the clamor of voices. She pulled Juliette to the other side of the generator, away from all the shouting.

  “The air is coming down the stairwell,” Juliette said. “There’s no stopping it. I’m going to seal off the dig.”

  Shirly chewed on this. “Take down the supports?”

  “Not quite. The charges you wanted rigged up—”

  Shirly’s face hardened. “Those charges are rigged from the other side. I rigged them to seal off this side, to seal off this silo, to protect us from the air over here.”

  “Well, now all we have is the air over here.” Juliette passed Shirly the radio, which was all she’d taken from her home. Shirly cradled it in her arms. She balanced it atop her torch, which bloomed against Juliette’s chest. In the light that spilled back, Juliette could see a mask of confusion on her poor friend’s face. “Watch over everyone,” Juliette told her. “Solo and the kids—” She eyed the generator. “The farms here are salvageable. And the air—”

  “You’re not going to—” Shirly started.

  “I’ll make sure the last of them get through. There were a few dozen behind me. Maybe another hundred.” Juliette grasped her old friend’s arms. She wondered if they were still friends. She wondered if there was still that bond between them. She turned to go.

  “No.”

  Shirly grabbed Juliette’s arm, the radio falling and clattering to the floor. Juliette tried to yank free.

  “I’ll be damned,” Shirly shouted. She spun Juliette around. “I’ll be goddamned if you’re leaving me to this, in charge of this. I’ll be goddamned—”

  There were cries somewhere, from a child or an adult, it was impossible to tell. Just a cacophony of confused and terrified voices echoing in the packed confines of that great steel machine. And in the darkness, Juliette couldn’t see the blow coming, couldn’t see Shirly’s fist. She just felt it on her jaw, marveled at the bright flash of light in the pitch black, and then remembered nothing for a while.

  ••••

  She came to moments or minutes later — it was impossible to tell. Curled up on the steel deck of the digger, the voices around her subdued and far away, she lay still while her face throbbed.

  Fewer people. Just the ones who’d made it, and they were moving on through the bowels of the digger. She had been out for a minute or two, it seemed. Maybe longer. Much longer. Someone called her name, was looking for her in the black, but she was invisible curled up on the far side of the generator in the shadow of shadows. Someone called her name.

  And then a great boom in the distance. It was like a sheet of three-inch steel falling and banging next to her head. A great rumble in the earth, a tremor felt right through the digger, and Juliette knew. Shirly had gone to the control room and had taken her place. She had set off the charges meant to protect her old home from this new one. She had doomed herself with the others.

  Juliette wept. Someone called her name, and Juliette realized it was coming from the radio near her head. She reached for it numbly, her senses scrambled. It was Lukas.

  “Luke,” she whispered, squeezing the transmit button. His voice meant he was outside the steel locker, the airtight pantry full of food. She thought of Solo surviving for decades on those cans. Lukas could too, if anyone could. “Get back inside,” she said, sobbing. “Seal yourself off.” She cradled the radio in both hands and remained curled up on the deck.

  “I can’t,” Lukas said. There was
coughing, an agonizing wheeze. “I had to… had to hear your voice. One last time.” The next bout of coughing could be felt in Juliette’s own chest, which was full to bursting. “I’m done, Jules. I’m done…”

  “No.” She cried this to herself, and then squeezed the radio. “Lukas, you get inside that pantry right now. Lock it and hold on. Just hold on—”

  She listened to him cough and struggle to find his voice. When it came, it was a rattle. “Can’t. This is it. This is it. I love you, Jules. I love you…”

  The last was a whisper, barely more than static. Juliette wept and slapped the floor and screamed at him. She cursed him. She cursed herself. And through the open door of the digger, a cloud of dust billowed in on a cool breeze, and Juliette could taste it on her tongue, on her lips. It was the dry chalk of crushed rock, the remnants of Shirly’s blast far down the tunnel, the taste of everything she had ever known… dead.

  Part III ~ Home

  Silo 1

  36

  Charlotte leaned away from the radio, stunned. She stared at the crackling speaker, listened to the hiss of static, and played the scene over and over in her head. An open door, toxic air leaking in, people dying, a stampede, a silo gone. A silo her brother had labored to save was gone.

  Her hand trembled as she reached for the dial. Flipping through channels, she heard other voices from other silos, little snippets of conversation and silence with no context, proof that elsewhere, life continued apace:

  “—second time this month this has happened. You let Carol know—”

  “—if you’ll hold it for me until I get there, I’d sure appre—”

  “…”

  “—roger that. We have her in custody now—”

  Bouts of static between these conversations held the place of silos full of dead air. Silos full of the dead.

  Charlotte dialed back to 18. The repeaters were still working up and down that silo; she could tell from the hiss. She listened for that voice to return, the woman calling for everyone to head to the bottom levels. Charlotte had heard someone say her name. It was strange to think she’d heard the voice of this woman her brother was obsessed with, this rogue mayor as he called her, this cleaner-come-home.

  It could’ve been someone else, but Charlotte didn’t think so. Those were commands from someone in charge. She imagined a woman huddling down in the depths of a distant silo, someplace dark and lonely, and felt a sudden kinship. What she wouldn’t give to be able to transmit rather than just listen, some way to reach out.

  Leaning forward, she rubbed the side of the radio where the mic would wire up. It was suspicious that her brother saved this part for last. Almost as if he didn’t trust her not to speak with someone. Almost as if he wanted her simply to listen. Or maybe it was himself he was worried about. Perhaps he didn’t trust what he would do if he could broadcast his thoughts over the air. This wasn’t the heads of the silos listening in, this was anyone with a radio.

  Charlotte patted her chest and felt for the ID he had given her, and images flashed before her of a boot rising and falling, of a wall and a floor spotted with blood. In the end, he hadn’t been given a chance. But she had to do something. She couldn’t sit there listening to static forever, listening to people die. Donny said her ID would work the elevators. The urge to take action was overpowering.

  She powered the radio down and covered it with the sheet of plastic. She arranged the chair so it appeared undisturbed and studied the drone control room for signs of habitation. Back at her bunk, she opened her trunk and studied the outfits. She chose reactor red. It fitted her more loosely than the others. Pulling it out, she inspected the name patch. Stan. She could be a Stan.

  She got dressed and went to the storeroom. There was plenty of grease to be had from the disassembled drone. She collected some on her palm, searched one of the supply bins for a cap, and went to the bathroom. The men’s room. Charlotte used to enjoy putting on make-up. That seemed like a different lifetime, a different person. She remembered moving from playing video games to trying to be pretty, shading her cheeks so they didn’t look so chubby. This was before basic training made her lean and hard for a brief time. It was before two tours of duty helped her to regain her natural body, get used to that body, accept it, even love it.

  She used the grease to deaccentuate her cheekbones. A little on her eyebrows made them appear fuller. A foul-tasting smear on her lips so they weren’t so red. It was the opposite of any make-up job she’d ever applied. She stuffed her hair inside the cap and pulled the brim down low, adjusted her coveralls until those looked like folds of fabric rather than breasts.

  It was a pathetic disguise. She saw through it immediately. But then, she knew. In a world where women weren’t allowed, would any suspect? She wasn’t sure. She couldn’t know. She longed for Donny to be there so she could ask him. She imagined him laughing at her, which was nearly enough to make her cry.

  “Don’t you fucking cry,” she told the mirror, dabbing at her eyes. She was worried what the crying might do to her make-up. But the tears came anyway. They came and disturbed nothing. They were drops of water gliding over grease.

  ••••

  There was a schematic somewhere. Charlotte searched Donny’s folder of notes by the radio and didn’t see it. She tried the conference room where her brother had spent much of his time poring through boxes of files. The place was a wreck. Most of his notes had been hauled off. They must be planning on coming back for the rest, probably in the morning. Or they could arrive right then, and Charlotte would have to explain what she was doing there:

  “I was sent down here to retrieve… uh…” Her lowered voice sounded ridiculous. She shuffled through the opened folders and loose pages and tried again, this time with her normal voice just slightly flattened. “I was told to take this to recycling,” she explained to nobody. “Oh? And what level is recycling on?” she asked herself. “I have no fucking clue,” she admitted. “That’s why I’m looking for a map.”

  She found a map. It wasn’t the right one, though. A grid of circles with red lines radiating out to a single point. She only knew it was a map because she recognized the layout with its grid of letters down the side and numbers across the top. The Air Force had once assigned daily targets on grids like these. She would grab a bagel and coffee in the mess hall, and then a man and his family from D-4 would die in a fiery maelstrom. Break for lunch. Ham and cheese on rye.

  Charlotte recognized the circles laid out across the grid. It was the silos. She had flown three drones over depressions in hills just like this. The red lines were odd. She traced one with her finger. They reminded her of flight lines. They extended off every silo except for the one near the center, which she thought might be the one she was in. Donald had shown her this layout once on the big table, the one now buried under the loose pages. She folded the map and stuffed it into her breast pocket and kept looking.

  The Silo 1 schematic she had seen before seemed lost, but she found the next best thing. A directory. It listed personnel by rank, shift assignment, occupation, living level, and work level. It was the size of a phone book for a small town, a reminder of how many people were taking turns running the silo. Not people — men. Scanning the names, Charlotte saw that it was all men. She thought of Sasha, the only other woman who’d gone through boot camp with her. Strange to think that Sasha was dead, that all the men in her regiment, everyone from flight school, all of them were dead.

  She found the name of a reactor mechanic and his work level, looked for a pen amid the chaos, found one, and jotted the level number down. Administration, she discovered, was on level thirty-four. A comms officer worked on the same level, which sucked. She hated to think of the comm room right down the hall from the people who ran the joint. A security officer worked on twelve. If Donny was being held, maybe he’d be there. Unless they’d put him back to sleep. Unless he was in whatever passed for a hospital there. Cryo was down below, she thought. She remembered coming up the li
ft after he’d woken her. She found the level for the main cryo office by locating someone who worked there, but that probably wasn’t where the bodies were kept. Was it?

  Her notes became a mess of scribbles, a rough outline of what was where above and below her. But where to start in her search? She couldn’t find mention of the supply and spares rooms her brother had been raiding, probably because no one actually worked on those levels. Starting over on a fresh piece of paper, she drew a cylinder and made the best schematic she could, filling in the floors she knew from Donny’s routine and the ones from the directory. Starting with the cafeteria at the very top, she worked her way down to the cryo office, which was as far down as her notes took her. The empty levels were her best bet. Some of those would be storerooms and warehouses. But the lift could just as easily open to a roomful of men playing cards — or whatever it was they did to kill the time while they killed the world. She couldn’t just roll the dice; she needed a plan.

  She studied the map and considered her options. One place for sure would have a mic, and that was the comm room. She checked the clock on the wall. Six twenty-five. Dinnertime and end of shift, lots of people moving about. Charlotte touched her face where she had smudged grease to dull her cheekbones. She wasn’t thinking straight, probably shouldn’t go anywhere until after eleven. Or was it better to be lost in a jostling crowd? What was out there? She paced and debated. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” she said, testing her new voice. It sounded like she had a cold. That was the best way to sound male: like she had a cold.

  She returned to the storeroom and studied the elevator doors. Someone could burst out right then, and her decision would be made for her. She should wait until later. Returning to the drones, she pulled the tarp off the one she’d been working on and studied the loose panels and scattering of tools. Glancing back at the conference room, she saw Donny curled there on the floor, trying to fend off the kicks with his shins, two men holding him down, a man who could barely stand landing sickening blows.