by Hugh Howey
“Just take me in,” Charlotte begged. She was getting scared.
“In a minute.” He studied the radio, found the volume, turned it down. He put his back to the desk and leaned against it, the pistol held casually by his hip. He was going to drop his pants, Charlotte realized. He was going to force her to her knees. He hadn’t seen a woman in several hundred years, was wanting to understand how to wake them up. That’s what he wanted. Charlotte considered running for the door, hoping he might shoot her, hoping he would either miss or hit her square—
“What’s your name?” he asked.
Charlotte felt tears roll down her cheeks. Her voice quivered, but she managed to whisper her name.
“Mine’s Darcy. Relax. I’m not going to hurt you.”
Charlotte began to shake. It was exactly what she imagined a man would say before doing something vile.
“I just want to understand what the hell’s going on before I turn you over. Because everything I’ve seen today suggests this is bigger than you and your brother. Bigger than my job. Hell, for all I know, the moment I take you up to the office, they’re going to put me under and put you back to work down here.”
Charlotte laughed. She turned her head and wiped the tears hanging from her jaw onto her shoulder. “Not likely,” she said. And she began to suspect that this man really wasn’t going to hurt her, that he was just as curious as he seemed. Her gaze drifted back to the folders. “Do you know what they have planned for us?” she asked.
“Hard to say. You killed a very important man. You shouldn’t be up. They’ll put you in Deep Freeze would be my guess. Alive or dead, I don’t know.”
“No, not what they’re gonna do to me and my brother — what they have planned for all of us. What happens after our last shift.”
Darcy thought for a moment. “I… I don’t know. Never thought about it.”
She nodded to the folders beside him. “It’s all in there. When I go back to sleep, it won’t matter if I’m alive or dead. I’ll never get up again. Neither will your sister or mom or wife or whoever they have here.”
Darcy glanced at the folders, and Charlotte realized his not taking her in right away was an opportunity, not a problem. This is why they couldn’t let anyone know the truth. If people knew, they wouldn’t stand for it.
“You’re making this up,” Darcy said. “You don’t know what will happen after—”
“Ask your boss. See what he says. Or your boss’s boss. And keep asking. Maybe they’ll give you a pod down in Deep Freeze next to mine.”
Darcy studied her for a heartbeat. He set his pistol down and unbuttoned the top button on his coveralls. And then the next. He kept unbuttoning them down to his waist, and Charlotte knew she’d been right about what he planned to do. She prepared to jump him, to kick him between the legs, to bite him—
Darcy took the folders and slid them around his back, tucked them into his shorts. He began buttoning up his coveralls.
“I’ll look into it. Now let’s go.” He picked up the gun and gestured toward the door, and Charlotte took a grateful breath. She walked around the drone control stations. Inside, she felt torn. She had wanted this man to take her in, but now she wanted to talk more. She had feared him, but now she wanted to trust him. Salvation seemed to come from being arrested, from being put back to sleep, and yet some other salvation seemed to lie within reach.
Her heart pounded as she was marched into the hallway. Darcy shut the door to the control room. She passed the bunkrooms and the bathrooms, waited at the end of the hall for him to open the door to the armory, her hands useless behind her back.
“I knew your brother, you know,” Darcy said as he held the door for her. “He never seemed like the sort. Neither do you.”
Charlotte shook her head. “I never wanted to hurt anyone. We were only ever after the truth.” She passed through the armory and toward the lift.
“That’s the problem with the truth,” Darcy said. “Liars and honest men both claim to have it. It puts people in my position in something of a predicament.”
Charlotte pulled to a stop. This seemed to startle Darcy, who took a step back and tightened his grip on his pistol. “Let’s keep moving,” he told her.
“Wait,” Charlotte said. “You want the truth?” She turned and nodded at the drones beneath their tarps. “How about you stop trusting what people are telling you? Stop deciding who to believe with your gut. Let me show you. See what’s out there for yourself.”
52
Donald’s side was a sea of purples, blacks, and blues. He held his undershirt up, his coveralls hanging from his hips, and inspected his ribs in the bathroom mirror. In the center of the bruise there was a patch of orange and yellow. He touched this — barely a brush of his fingertips — and a jolt of electricity shot down his legs and into his knees. He nearly collapsed, and it took a moment to gather his breath. He lowered his shirt gingerly, buttoned his coveralls up, and hobbled back to his cot.
His shins hurt from protecting himself from Thurman’s blows. There was a knot on his forearm like a second elbow. And every time a coughing fit seized him, he wanted to die. He tried to sleep. Sleep was a vehicle for passing the time, for avoiding the present. It was a trolley for the depressed, the impatient, and the dying. Donald was all three.
He turned out the light beside his cot and lay in the darkness. The cryopods and shifts were exaggerated forms of sleep, he thought. What seemed unnatural was more a matter of degree than of kind. Cave bears hibernated for a season. Humans hibernated each night. Daytime was a shift, each one endured like a quantum of life, all the short-term planning leading up to another bout of darkness, little thought given to stringing those days into something useful, some chain of valuable pearls. Just another day to survive.
He coughed, which brought bolts of agony to his ribs and flashes of light to his vision. Donald prayed to black out, to pass away, but the gods in charge of his fate were expert torturers. Just enough — but not too much. Don’t kill the man, he could hear his wounds whispering to one another. We need him alive so that he can suffer for what he’s done.
The coughing passed with the taste of copper on his lips, blood misting his coveralls — but he didn’t care. He laid his head back, soaked in sweat from pain and exertion, and listened to the feeble groans escaping his lips.
Hours or minutes passed. Days. There was a rap at the door, the slide and click of a tumbler, someone flicking on the lights. It would be a guard with dinner or breakfast or some other meaningless designation of time of day. It would be Thurman to lecture him, to grill him, to take him and put him to sleep.
“Donny?”
It was Charlotte. The hall behind her was third-shift dim. As she came to him, a man filled the doorway, one of the security officers. They had discovered her and were locking her up as well. But they were giving him this moment at least. He sat up too quickly, nearly lost his balance, but their arms found one another, both of them wincing in the embrace.
“My ribs,” Donald hissed.
“Watch my arm,” his sister said.
She untangled herself and stepped back, and Donald was about to ask her what was wrong with her arm, but she pressed a finger to her lips. “Hurry,” she said. “This way.”
Donald peered past her to the man in the doorway. The guard gazed up and down the hallway, was more concerned about someone coming than about him or his sister escaping. The ache in Donald’s ribs lessened as he realized what was going on.
“We’re leaving?” he asked.
His sister nodded and helped him stand. Donald followed her into the hall.
So many questions, but silence was paramount. Now wasn’t the time. The security officer closed the door and locked it. Charlotte was already heading toward the lifts. Donald limped after her, barefoot, his left leg singing with every step. They were on the admin level. He passed the accounting offices where spares and supplies were managed; Records, where the major happenings of every silo were tallied a
nd entered into the servers; Population Control, where so many of his reports had once originated. All the offices quiet at what must’ve been an early-morning hour.
The security station was unmanned. Beyond it, a lift was waiting for them, persistently buzzing in a hold state. Donald noted a strong odor of cleaning agent in the lift. Charlotte slammed the hold button back in, scanned her ID, and pressed the armory level. The guard slid through the closing doors sideways, and Donald noticed the gun in his hand. It wasn’t for fear of being discovered by others that he was carrying that gun, Donald realized. They weren’t quite free. The young man stood on the other side of the lift and watched him and his sister warily.
“I know you,” Donald said. “You work the late shift.”
“Darcy,” the guard said. He didn’t offer his hand. Donald thought of the empty security station and realized this man should’ve been there.
“Darcy, right. What’s going on?” He turned to his sister. A gauze wrapping could be seen peeking out from her short-sleeved undershirt. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” She watched the floors light up and slide by with obvious trepidation. “We flew another drone.” She turned to Donald, her eyes on fire. “It made it through.”
“You saw it?” His wounds were forgotten; the man standing in the lift with the gun was forgotten. It had been so long since that first flight gave him a brief glimpse of blue skies that he had grown to doubt it, had come to think it had never happened at all. The other flights had failed, had never reached as far. The elevator slowed as it approached the storehouse.
“The world isn’t gone,” Charlotte confirmed. “Just our piece of it.”
“Let’s get off the lift,” Darcy said. He waved the gun. “And then I want to understand what the hell is going on. And look, I’m not above having you both locked up before the morning shift comes on. I’ll deny we ever talked like this.”
Just inside the armory, Donald took a deep, wheezing breath and patted his back pocket. He pulled out the cloth and coughed, bent over to reduce the strain on his ribs. He folded the cloth away quickly so Charlotte couldn’t see.
“Let’s get you some water,” she said, looking to the storehouse of supplies.
Donald waved her off and turned to Darcy. “Why are you helping us?” he asked, his voice hoarse.
“I’m not helping you,” Darcy insisted. “I’m hearing you out.” He nodded to Charlotte. “Your sister has made some bold claims, and I did a little reading while she put her bird together.”
“I gave him some of your notes,” Charlotte said. “And the drone flight. He helped me launch it. I put her down in a sea of grass. Real grass, Donny. The sensors held out for another half hour. We just sat there and stared at it.”
“But still,” Donald said, looking to Darcy. “You don’t know us.”
“I don’t know my bosses, either. Not really. But I saw the beating you took, and it didn’t sit right with me. You two are fighting for something, and it might be something bad, something I’m going to stop, but I’ve noticed a pattern. Any question I ask outside of my duties, and the flow of information stops. They want me to work the night shift and have a fresh pot on in the morning, but I remember being something more in a different life. I was taught to follow orders, but only up to a point.”
Donald nodded grimly. He wondered if this young man had been deployed overseas. He wondered if he’d suffered from PTSD, had been on any meds. Something had come back to him, something like a conscience.
“I’ll tell you what’s going on here,” Donald said. He led them away from the lift doors and toward the aisle of supplies that held canned water and MREs. “My old boss — the man you watched give me this limp — explained some things. More than he likely meant to. Most of this is what I’ve put together, but he filled in some blanks.”
Donald lifted the lid on one of the wooden crates his sister had pried open. He winced in pain, and Charlotte rushed to help him. He grabbed a can of water and popped the lid, took a long swig while Charlotte pulled out two more cans. Darcy switched his gun to his other hand to accept a can, and Donald felt the presence of crate after crate of guns around him. He was sick of the things. Somehow, the fear of the one in Darcy’s hand was gone. The pain in his chest was a different sort of bullet wound. A quick death would be a blessing.
“We aren’t the first people to try and help a silo,” Donald said. “That’s what Thurman told me. And a lot more makes sense now. C’mon.” He led them off that aisle and down another. A light flickered overhead. It would die soon. Donald wondered if anyone would bother to replace it. He found the plastic crate he was looking for hidden among a sea of others, tried to pull it down, and felt a cry from his ribs. He sucked it up and hauled it anyway, his sister helping with one hand, and together they carried it to the conference room. Darcy followed.
“Anna’s work,” he grunted, hefting the container onto the conference table while Darcy hit the lights. There was a schematic of the silos beneath a thick sheet of glass, and the glass was marked with old wax notes, scratched into illegibility by elbows and folders and glasses of whisky. All of his other notes were gone, but that was okay. He needed to look for something old, something from the past, from his previous shift. He pulled out several folders and flopped them onto the table. Charlotte began looking through them. Darcy remained by the door and glanced occasionally at the floor in the hall, which remained splattered with dried blood.
“There was a silo shut down a while back for broadcasting on a general channel. Not on my shift.” He pointed to Silo 10 on the table, which bore the remnants of a red X. “A burst of conscience broadcast on a handful of channels, and then it was shut down. But it was Silo 40 that kept Anna busy for the better part of a year.” He found the folder he was looking for, flipped it open. Seeing her handwriting blurred his vision. He hesitated, ran his hands across her words, remembering what he’d done. He had killed the one person trying to help him, the one person who loved him. The one person reaching out to these silos to help. All because of his own guilt and self-loathing for loving her back. “Here’s a rundown of the events,” he said, forgetting what he was looking for.
“Get to the point,” Darcy said. “What’s this all about? My shift is up in two hours, and it’ll be daylight soon. I’ll need both of you under lock and key before then.”
“I’m getting there.” Donald wiped his eyes and composed himself, waved his hand at a corner of the table. “All of these silos went dark a long time ago. A dozen or so of them. It started with 40. They must’ve had some kind of silent revolution. A bloodless one, because we never got any reports. They never acted strange. A lot like what’s going on in eighteen right now—”
“Was,” Charlotte said. “I heard from them. They’ve been shut down.”
Donald nodded. “Thurman told me. I meant to say ‘was’. Thurman also hinted that they were originally going to build fewer silos but kept adding more for redundancy. There are a few reports I found that suggested this as well. You know what I think? I think they added too many. They couldn’t monitor them all closely enough. It’s like having a camera on every street corner, but you don’t have enough people watching the feeds. And so this one slipped under the rails.”
“What do you mean when you say these silos went dark?” Darcy asked. He sidled closer to the table and studied the layout under the glass.
“All the camera feeds went out at the same time. They wouldn’t answer our calls. The Order mandated that we shut them down in case they’d gone rogue, so we gassed the place. Popped the doors. And then another silo went dark. And another. The heads on shift here figured that in addition to the camera feeds, they’d sorted out the gas lines as well. So they sent the collapse codes to all of these silos—”
“Collapse codes?”
Donald nodded and drowned a cough with a gulp of water. He wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve. It was comforting to see all the notes out on the table. The pieces were fitting t
ogether.
“The silos were built to fail, and all but one of them will. There’s no gravity to take them down, so they had us build them — they had me design them — with great slabs of concrete between the levels.” He shook his head. “It never made sense at the time. It made the dig deeper, increased costs, it’s an insane amount of concrete. I was told it had something to do with bunker busters or radiation leaks. But it was worse than that. It was so they’d have something to take down. The walls aren’t going anywhere — they’re tied to the earth.” He took another sip of water. “That’s why the concrete. And it was because of the gas that they didn’t want lifts. Never understood why they had us take them out. Said they wanted the design more ‘open’. It’s harder to gas a place if you can block off the levels.”
He coughed into the crook of his arm, then drew a finger around a portion of the conference table. “These silos were like a cancer. Forty must’ve communicated with its neighbors, or they just took them offline as well, hacked them remotely. The heads on shift here in our silo started waking people up to deal with it. The collapse codes weren’t working, nothing was. Anna figured they’d discovered the blast charges in forty and had blocked the frequency — something like that.”
He paused and remembered the sound of static from her radio, the jargon she’d used that gave him headaches but made her seem so smart and confident. His gaze fell to the corner of the room where a cot once lay, where she used to sneak over in the middle of the night and slip into his arms. Donald finished his water and wished he had something stronger.
“She finally managed to hack the detonators and bring the silos down,” he said. “It was this or they were going to risk sending drones up or boots over, which is last-page Order stuff. Back of the book.”
“Which is what we’ve been doing,” Charlotte said.