by Hugh Howey
Donald nodded. “I did even more of it before I woke you, back when this level was crawling with pilots.”
“So that’s what happened to these silos? They were collapsed?”
“That’s what Anna said. Everything looked good. The people in charge over here were relying on her, taking her word. We were all put back to sleep. I figured it was my last snooze, that I’d never wake up again. Deep Freeze. But then I was brought out for another shift, and people were calling me by a different name. I woke up as someone else.”
“Thurman,” Darcy said. “The Shepherd.”
“Yeah, except I was the sheep in that story.”
“You were the one who nearly got over the hill?”
Donald saw the way Charlotte stiffened. He returned his attention to the folders and didn’t answer.
“This woman you’re talking about,” Darcy said. “Was she the same one who messed up the database?”
“Yeah. They gave her full access to fix this problem they were having; it was that severe. And her curiosity got her looking in other places. She found this note about what her father and others had planned, realized these collapse codes and gas systems weren’t just for emergencies. We were all one big ticking time bomb, every single silo. She realized that she was going to be put in cryo and never wake up again. And even though she could change anything she wanted, she couldn’t change her gender. Couldn’t make it so that anyone would wake her up, and so she tried to get me to help. She put me in her father’s place.”
Donald paused and fought back the tears. Charlotte rested her hand on his back. The room was quiet for a long moment.
“But I didn’t understand what she wanted me to do. I started digging on my own. And meanwhile, Silo 40 isn’t gone at all. The place is still standing. I realize this when another silo goes dark.” Donald paused. “I was acting head at the time, wasn’t thinking straight, and I signed off on a bombing. Whatever it took to make it all go away. I didn’t care about the tremors, being spotted, just ordered it done. We cratered anything over there that was still standing. Drones and bombs started thinning them out.”
“I remember,” Darcy said. “That was about when I got on shift. There were pilots up in the cafeteria all the time. They worked a lot in the middle of the night.”
“And they worked down here. When they were done and went back under, I woke up my sister. I was just waiting for them to leave. I didn’t want to drop bombs. I wanted to see what was out there.”
Darcy checked the clock on the wall. “And now we’ve all seen it.”
“There’s another two hundred years or so before all the silos go down,” Donald said. “You ever think about why this silo only has lifts, doesn’t have any stairs? You want to know why they call it the express but the damn thing still takes forever to get anywhere?”
“We’re rigged to blow,” Darcy said. “There’s that same mass of concrete between every level.”
Donald nodded. This kid was fast. “If they let us walk up a flight of stairs, we’d see. We’d know. And enough people here would know what that was for, what this meant. They might as well put the countdown clock on every desk. People would go insane.”
“Two hundred years,” Darcy said.
“That might feel like a lot of time to others, but that’s a couple naps for us. But see, that’s the whole point. They need us dead so no one remembers. This whole thing—” Donald waved at the conference table with the depiction of the silos. “It’s as much a time machine as a ticking clock. It’s a way of wiping the earth clean and propelling some group of people, some tribe chosen practically at random, into a future where they inherit the world.”
“More like sending them back into the past,” Charlotte said. “Back into some primitive state.”
“Exactly. When I first learned about the nanos, it was something Iran was working on. The idea was to target an ethnic group. We already had machines that could work on a cellular level. This was just the next step. Going after a species is even easier than targeting a race. It was child’s play. Erskine, the man who came up with this, said it was inevitable, that someone would eventually do it, create a silent bomb that wipes out all of humanity. I think he was right.”
“So what’re you looking for in these folders?” Darcy asked.
“Thurman wanted to know if Anna ever left the armory. I’m pretty sure she did. Things would show up down here that I couldn’t find on the shelves. And he said something about gas lines—”
“We’ve got an hour and a half before I need to get you back,” Darcy said.
“Yeah, okay. So Thurman found something here in this silo, I think. Something his daughter did, something she snuck out and did. I think she left another surprise. When they gassed eighteen, Thurman mentioned that they did it right this time. That they undid someone’s mess. I thought he was talking about my mess, my fighting to save the place, but it was Anna who had changed things. I think she moved some valves around, or if it’s all computerized, just changed some code. There are two types of machines, both of which are in my blood right now. There are those that keep us together, like in the cryopods. And then there are the machines outside around the silos, those we pump inside them to break people down. It’s the ultimate haves versus the have-nots. I think Anna tried to flip this around, tried to rig it up so the next silo we shut down would get a dose of what we get. She was playing Robin Hood on a cellular level.”
He finally found the report. It was well-worn. It had been looked through hundreds of times.
“Silo seventeen,” he said. “I wasn’t around when it was put down, but I looked into this. There was a guy there who answered a call after the place was gassed. But I don’t think it was gassed. Not correctly. I think Anna took what we get in our pods to stitch us up and sent that instead.”
“Why?” Charlotte asked.
Donald looked up. “To stop the world from ending. To not murder anyone. To show people some compassion.”
“So everyone at seventeen is okay?”
Donald flipped through the pages of the report. “No,” he said. “For whatever reason, she couldn’t stop the airlock from popping. That’s part of the procedure. And with the amount of gas outside, they didn’t stand a chance.”
“I spoke to someone at seventeen,” Charlotte said. “Your friend… that mayor is over there. There are people there. She said they tunneled their way over.”
Donald smiled. He nodded. “Of course. Of course. She wanted me to think she was coming after us.”
“Well, I think she’s coming after us now.”
“We need to get in touch with her.”
“What we need to do,” Darcy said, “is start thinking about the end of this shift. There’s going to be a helluva beating in about an hour.”
Donald and Charlotte turned to him. He was standing by the door, right near where Donald had been kicked over and over.
“I mean my boss,” Darcy said. “He’s gonna be pissed when he wakes up and discovers a prisoner escaped during my shift.”
Silo 17
53
Juliette and Raph stopped at the lower deputy station to look for another radio or a spare battery. They found neither. The charging rack was still on the wall, but it hadn’t been wired into the makeshift power lines trailing through the stairwell. Juliette weighed whether or not it was worth staying there and getting some juice in the portable or if she should just wait until they got to the Mids station or IT—
“Hey,” Raph whispered. “Do you hear something?”
Juliette shined her flashlight deep into the offices. She thought she heard someone crying. “C’mon,” she said.
She left the charger alone and headed back toward the holding cells. There was a dark form sitting in the very last cell, sobbing. Juliette thought it was Hank at first, that he had wandered up to the nearest thing like a home to him, only to realize what state this world was in. But the man wore robes. It was Father Wendel who peered up at them from behi
nd the bars. The tears in his eyes caught in the glare of the flashlight. A small candle burned on the bench beside him, wax dripping to the ground.
The door to the holding cell wasn’t shut all the way. Juliette pulled it open and stepped inside. “Father?”
The old man looked awful. He had the tattered remains of an ancient book in his hands. Not a book, but a stack of loose pages. There were pages scattered all over the bench and on the floor. As Juliette cast her light down, she could see that she was standing on a carpet of fine print. There was a pattern of black bars across all the pages, sentences and words made unreadable. Juliette had seen pages like this once in a book kept inside a cage, a book where only one sentence in five could be read.
“Leave me,” Father Wendel said.
She was tempted to, but she didn’t. “Father, it’s me, Juliette. What’re you doing here?”
Wendel sniffled and sorted through the pages as though he were looking for something. “Isaiah,” he said. “Isaiah, where are you? Everything’s out of order.”
“Where’s your congregation?” Juliette asked.
“Not mine anymore.” He wiped his nose, and Juliette felt Raph tug on her elbow to leave the man be.
“You can’t stay here,” she said. “Do you have any food or water?”
“I have nothing. Go.”
“C’mon,” Raph hissed.
Juliette adjusted the heavy load on her back, those sticks of dynamite. Father Wendel laid out more pages around his boots, checking the front and back of each as he did so.
“There’s a group down below planning another dig,” she told him. “I’m going to find them a better place, and they’re going to get our people out of here. Maybe you could come to one of the farms with us and see about getting some food, see if you can help. The people down below could use you.”
“Use me for what?” Wendel asked. He slapped a page down on the bench, and several other pages scattered. “Hellfire or hope,” he said. “Take your pick. One or the other. Damnation or salvation. Every page. Take your pick. Take your pick.” He looked up at them, beseeching them.
Juliette shook her canteen, cracked the lid, and held it out to Wendel. The candle on the bench sputtered and smoked, shadows growing and shrinking. Wendel accepted the canteen and took a sip. He handed it back.
“Had to see it with my own eyes,” he whispered. “I went into the dark to see the devil. I did. Walked and walked, and here it is. Another world. I led my flock to damnation.” He twisted up his face, studied one of the pages for a moment. “Or salvation. Take your pick.”
Plucking the candle from the bench, he held a page close to it in order to see it better. “Ah, Isaiah, there you are.” And with the baritone of a Sunday, he read: “In the time of my favor I will answer you, and in the day of salvation I will help you; I will keep you and will make you to be a covenant for the people, to restore the land and to reassign its desolate inheritances.” Wendel touched a corner of the page to the flame and roared again: “Its desolate inheritances!”
The page burned until he had to release it. It moved through the air like an orange, shrinking bird.
“Let’s go,” Raph hissed, more insistently this time.
Juliette held up a hand. She approached Father Wendel and crouched down in front of him, rested a hand on his knee. The anger she had felt toward him over Marcus was gone. The anger she had felt as he instilled outrage in his people toward her and her digging was gone. Replacing that anger was guilt — guilt from knowing that all of their fears and mistrust had been warranted.
“Father,” she said. “Our people will be damned if they stay in this place. I can’t help them. I won’t be here. They are going to need your guidance if they’re to make it to the other side.”
“They don’t need me,” he said.
“Yes, they do. Women in the depths of this silo weep for their babies. Men weep for their homes. They need you.” And she knew this was true. It was in the hard times that they needed him the most.
“You will see them through,” Father Wendel said. “You will see them through.”
“No, I won’t. You are their salvation. I am off to damn those who did this. I’m going to send them straight to hell.”
Wendel looked up from his lap. Hot wax flowed over his fingers, but he didn’t seem to notice. The smell of burnt paper filled the room, and he rested a hand on Juliette’s head.
“In that case, my child, I bless your journey.”
••••
The trip up the stairwell was heavier with that blessing. Or maybe it was the weight of the explosives on her back, which Juliette knew would’ve been useful for the tunneling below. They could be used for salvation, but she was using them for damnation. They were like the pages of Wendel’s book in that they offered plenty of both. As she approached the farms, she reminded herself that Erik had insisted she take the dynamite. There were others eager to see her pull this off.
She and Raph arrived at the lower farms, and she knew something was wrong the moment they stepped inside. Cracking the door released a surge of heat, a blast of angry air. Her first thought was a fire, and she knew from living in that silo that there were no longer any water hoses that worked. But the bloom of bright lights down the hall and along the outer grow plots hinted at something else.
There was a man lying on the ground by the security gates, his body sideways across the hall. Stripped down to his shorts and undershirt, Juliette didn’t recognize Deputy Hank until she was nearly upon him. She was relieved when he moved. He shielded his eyes and tightened his grip on the pistol resting on his chest; sweat soaked his clothes.
“Hank?” Juliette asked. “Are you okay?” She was already feeling sticky herself, and poor Raph seemed liable to wilt.
The deputy sat up and rubbed the back of his neck. He pointed to the security gates. “You get a little shade if you crowd up against them.”
Juliette looked down the hall at the lights. They were drawing a ton of power. Every plot appeared to be lit at once. She could smell the heat. She could smell the plants roasting in it. She wondered how long the skimpy wiring job in the stairwell could withstand such a draw of current.
“Are the timers stuck? What’s going on?”
Hank nodded down the hallway. “People’ve been staking plots. A fight broke out yesterday. You know Gene Sample?”
“I know Gene,” Raph said. “From Sanitation.”
Hank frowned. “Gene’s dead. Happened when the lights went out. And then they fought over who had rights to bury him, treated poor Gene like fertilizer. Some folks banded together and hired me to restore order. I told them to keep the lights on until things got settled.” He wiped the back of his neck. “Before you lay into me, I know it ain’t good for the crops, but they were already ravaged. My hope is to sweat these people out, make enough of them move on to give everyone some breathing space. I give it another day.”
“In another day, you’ll have a fire somewhere. Hank, the wiring outside runs hot enough already with the lights cycling. I’m shocked they can power all of this. When a breaker goes out up on the thirties, you’re gonna have nothing but dark for a very long time down here.”
Hank peered down the hall. Juliette saw rinds and cores and scraps of food on the other side of the gates. “How’re they paying you? In food?”
He nodded. “The food’s all gonna go bad. They plucked everything. People were just actin’ crazy when they got here. I think a few headed up, but there are all these rumors that the door to this silo is open and if you go up much further, you die. And if you go down, you die. Lots of rumors.”
“Well, you need to dispel those rumors,” Juliette said. “I’m sure it’s better up or down than it is here. Have you seen Solo and the kids, the ones who used to live here? I heard they came up this way.”
“Yup. A few of those kids were staking a plot right down the hall before I rigged the lights. But they left a few hours ago.” Hank eyed Juliette’s wrist. “Wha
t time is it, anyway?”
Juliette glanced at her watch. “It’s a quarter past two.” She saw he was about to ask another question. “In the afternoon,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“We’re going to try and catch up with them,” Juliette said. “Can I leave you to handle these lights? You can’t draw this much power. And get more people to move up from here. The farms in the Mids are doing much better, or they were when I was here. And if you have people looking for work, they can use hands in Mechanical.”
Hank nodded and struggled to his feet. Raph was already heading to the exit, his coveralls spotted with sweat. Juliette clasped Hank on the shoulder before heading off as well.
“Hey,” Hank called out. “You said what time it was. But what day is it?”
Juliette hesitated at the door. She turned and saw Hank gazing at her, his hand shielding his eyes. “Does it matter?” she asked. And when Hank didn’t respond, she supposed it didn’t. All the days were the same now, and every one numbered.
54
Jimmy decided to search for Elise on two more levels before turning back. He had begun to suspect that he’d missed her, that she’d run inside a level after her animal or to use the bathroom and he’d gone right by. Most likely, she was back at the farms with everyone else while he was stomping up and down the silo alone.
At the next landing, he checked inside the main door, saw nothing but darkness and silence, called out for Elise, and debated going even one level further. Turning back to the stairwell, a flash of brown caught his eye above. He shielded his old eyes and peered up through the green gloom to see a boy peering over the rails at him. The kid waved. Jimmy did not wave back.
He headed for the stairs with a mind of returning to the lower farms, but he soon heard the patter of light footsteps spiraling down toward him. Another kid to look after, he thought. He didn’t wait for the boy, but continued along. It took a turn and a half before the child caught up to him.