by Hugh Howey
“You’re early.”
Helen wrapped her arms around his neck as he stood. Karma sat down and whined at them, tail swishing on the concrete. Helen’s kiss tasted like coffee.
“I took an earlier flight.”
He glanced over his shoulder at the dark streets of his neighborhood. As if anyone needed to follow him.
“Where’re your bags?”
“I’ll get ’em in the morning. C’mon, Karma. Let’s go inside.” He steered his dog through the door.
“Is everything okay?” Helen asked.
Donald went to the kitchen. He set the book down on the island and fished in the cabinet for a glass. Helen watched him with concern as he pulled a bottle of brandy out of the cabinet.
“Baby. What’s going on?”
“Maybe nothing,” he said. “Lunatics—” He poured three fingers of brandy, looked to Helen and raised the bottle to see if she wanted any. She shook her head. “Then again,” he continued, “maybe there’s something to it—” He took more than a sip. His other hand hadn’t left the neck of the bottle.
“Baby, you’re acting strange. Come sit down. Take off your coat.”
He nodded and let her help him remove his jacket. He slid his tie off, saw the worry on her face, knew it was a reflection of his own. He tried to relax the knot he could feel above his nose, the scrunched brow that was frozen on his forehead—it was the emotional and physical antithesis of sore cheeks from smiling too much.
“What would you do if you thought it all might end?” he asked his wife. “What would you do?”
“If what? You mean us? Oh, you mean life. Honey, did someone pass away? Tell me what’s going on.”
“No, not someone. Everyone. Everything.”
He tucked the bottle under his arm, grabbed his drink and the book, and went to the living room. Helen and Karma followed. Karma was already on the sofa waiting for him to plop down before he got there, a goofy smile, oblivious to anything he was saying, just thrilled for the pack to be reunited.
“It sounds like you’ve had a very long day;” Helen said, trying to find excuses for him.
Donald sat on the sofa and put the bottle and book on the coffee table. He pulled his drink away from Karma’s curious nose.
“I have something I have to tell you,” he said.
Helen stood in the middle of the room, her arms crossed. “That’d be a nice change.” She smiled to let him know it was meant in jest. Donald nodded.
“I know, I know,” he said. His eyes fell to the book, then drifted toward what he figured was the general direction of Atlanta. “This isn’t about that project. And honestly, do you think I enjoy keeping my life from you?”
Helen crossed to the recliner next to the sofa and sat down. “What is this about?” she asked.
“I’ve been told it’s okay to tell you about a...promotion. Well, more of an assignment than a promotion. Not an assignment, really, more like being on the National Guard. Just in case—”
Helen reached over and squeezed his knee. “Take it easy,” she whispered. Her eyebrows were lowered, confusion and worry lurking in the shadows there.
Donald took a deep breath. He was still revved up from running the conversation over in his head, from driving too fast. The weeks since his meeting with Thurman were a blur, a blur of reading too much into the book and too much into that conversation. He couldn’t tell if he was piecing something together or just mentally falling apart.
“How much have you followed what’s going on in Iran?” he asked, scratching his arm. “And Korea?”
She shrugged. “I see blurbs online.”
“Mmm.” He took a burning gulp of liquor, smacked his lips, and tried to relax and enjoy the numbing chill as it traveled through his body. “They’re working on ways to take everything out,” he said.
“Who? We are?” Helen’s voice rose. “We’re thinking of taking them out?”
“No, no—”
“Are you sure I’m allowed to hear this—?”
“No, sweetheart, they’re designing weapons to take us out. Weapons that can’t be stopped, that can’t be defended against.”
Helen leaned forward, her hands clasped, elbows on her knees. “Is this stuff you’re learning in Washington? Classified stuff?”
He waved his hand. “Beyond classified. Look, you know why we went into Iran—”
“I know why they said we went in—”
“It wasn’t bullshit,” he said, cutting her off. “Well, maybe it was. Maybe they hadn’t figured it out yet, hadn’t mastered how—”
“Honey, slow down.”
“Yeah.” He took another deep breath. He had an image in mind of a large mountain out west, a concrete road disappearing straight into the rock, thick vault doors standing open as files of politicians crowded inside with their families and just a handful of belongings.
“I met with the Senator a few weeks ago.” He stared down into the ginger-colored liquor in his glass.
“In Boston,” Helen said.
He nodded. “Right. Well, he wants us to be on this alert team—”
“You and Mick.”
He turned toward his wife. “No, us.”
“Us?” Helen placed a hand on her chest. “What do you mean, us? You and me?”
“Now listen—”
“You’re volunteering me for one of his—?”
“Sweetheart, I had no idea what this was all about.” He set his glass on the coffee table and grabbed the book. “He gave me this to read.”
Helen frowned. “What is that?”
“It’s like an instruction manual for the—well, for the after. I think.”
Helen got up from the recliner and stepped between him and the coffee table. She nudged Karma out of the way, the dog grunting at being disturbed. Sitting down beside him, she put a hand on his back, her eyes shiny with worry.
“Donny, were you drinking on the plane?”
“No.” He pulled away. “Dammit baby, listen to me. It doesn’t matter who has them, it only matters when. Don’t you see? This is the ultimate threat. A world-ender. I’ve been reading about the possibilities on this website—”
“A website,” she said, voice flat with skepticism.
“Yeah. Listen. Remember those treatments the Senator takes? These nanos are like synthetic life. Imagine if someone turned them into a virus that didn’t care about its host, that didn’t need us in order to spread. They could be out there already—” He tapped his chest, glanced around the room suspiciously, took a deep breath. “They could be in every one of us right now, little timer circuits waiting for the right moment—”
“Sweetheart—”
“Very bad people are working on this, trying to make this happen.” He reached for his glass. “We can’t sit back and let them strike first. We can’t let them strike first. So we’re gonna do it.” There were ripples in the liquor. His hand was shaking. “God, baby, I’m pretty sure we’re gonna do it before they can—”
“You’re scaring me, honey—”
“Good.” Another burning sip. He held the glass with both hands to keep it steady. “We should be scared.”
“Do you want me to call Dr. Martin?”
“Who?” He tried to make room between them, bumped up against the armrest. “Charlotte’s doctor? The shrink?”
She nodded gravely.
“I need you to listen to me for one second,” he said, holding up a finger. “Listen to what I’m telling you. These tiny machines are real.” He thought about the comparison Thurman had made to Alfred Nobel and TNT, how good inventions could be hijacked and steered in dangerous ways. His mind was racing. It would be easy to babble and convince her of nothing but his insanity.
“Look,” he said. “We use them in medicine, right?”
Helen nodded. She was giving him a chance, a slim one. But he could tell she really wanted to go call someone. Her mother, a doctor, his mother.
“It’s like when we discovered radiat
ion, okay? The first thing we thought was that this would be a cure, a medical discovery. X-rays, and then people were taking drops of radium like an elixir—”
“They poisoned themselves,” Helen said, “thinking they were doing something good.”
She seemed to relax a little. “Is this what you’re worried about?” she asked him. “That the nanos are going to mutate and turn on us? Are you still freaked out from being inside that machine?”
Her worry had turned to sympathy, her fear melting into compassion. Donald remembered the call he’d made after his meeting in the RYT, how he’d been freaking out and acting hysterical from his claustrophobia and an attack of the heebie-jeebies.
“No, nothing like that. I’m talking about how we looked for medicinal uses first, then ended up building the bomb. This is the same thing.” He paused, hoping she would get it. “I’m starting to think we’re building them, too. Tiny machines, just like the ones in the nanobaths that stitch up people’s skin and joints, only these would tear people down. And they would be able to unstitch anything.”
Helen didn’t react. Didn’t say a word. Donald realized he sounded crazy, that every bit of this was already online and in podcasts that radiated out from lonely basements on lonely airwaves. The Senator had been right. Mix truth and lies and you couldn’t tell them apart. The book on his coffee table and a zombie survival guide were the same things.
“I’m telling you they’re real,” he said, unable to stop himself. “They’ll be able to reproduce. They’ll be invisible. There won’t be any warning when they’re set loose, just dust in the breeze, okay? Reproducing and reproducing, this invisible war will wage itself all around us while we’re turned to mush.”
Helen was a statue. She was a pier withstanding the tide. He knew what was happening, could see it from the outside like an observer. She was waiting for him to finish, for him to stop crashing against her, and then she would call her mom and ask what to do. She would call Dr. Martin and get his advice.
Donald started to complain, could feel the anger welling up, and knew that anything he said would confirm her fears rather than convince her of his own.
He looked around the room, around the house that was becoming more and more foreign to him. The table beside the front door was different. He hadn’t noticed that when he entered.
“Is there anything else?” she whispered. She was looking for permission to leave and make her phone calls, to talk to someone rational.
Donald felt numb. Helpless and alone. He felt like crying but knew that would seal the deal.
“The National Convention is going to be held in Atlanta.” He wiped at the bottoms of his eyes, tried to make it look like weariness, like the strain of travel. “The DNC hasn’t announced it yet, but I heard from Mick before I got on the flight. The Senator wants us there, is already planning something big.”
He turned to Helen, saw that she was blurry, knew his eyes must be shining from holding back the madness. “The Senator wants us both there, okay?”
“Of course, baby.” She rested her hand on his thigh and looked at him like he was her patient, or some kind of invalid.
“And I’m going to ask that I spend more time down here, maybe do some of my work from home on weekends, keep a closer eye on the project.”
“That’d be great.” She rested her other hand on his arm. The concern on her face was of icy calmness, that pier riding out the tide. What he thought he knew seemed to crumble; the secrets burning in his blood began to temper. Donald felt himself on the verge of sobbing.
“I want us to be good to each other,” he said. “For whatever time we have left—”
“Shh, baby, it’s okay.” She wrapped her arm around his back and shushed him again, trying to soothe him.
“I love you,” she said.
He wiped at his eyes.
“We’ll get through this,” she told him.
Donald bobbed his head. “I know,” he said. “I know we will.”
The dog grunted and nuzzled her head into Helen’s lap, could sense something was wrong. Donald scratched the pup’s neck. He looked up at his wife, tears in his eyes. “I know we will,” he said again, trying to calm himself. “But what about everyone else?”
16
2110 • Silo 1
Troy needed to see a doctor. Ulcers had formed in both sides of his mouth, down between his gums and the insides of his cheeks. He could feel them like little wads of tender cotton embedded in his flesh, little puckers of numbness. Between breakfast and dinner, he alternated. In the morning, he kept the pill tucked down on the left side. For supper, he squirreled it away on the right. On either side, it would burn and dry out his mouth with the bitter bite of the medicine, but he would endure it.
He rarely employed napkins during meals, a bad habit he had formed long ago. They went into his lap to be polite and then went on his plate when he was done. Now he had a different routine. One quick small bite of something, wipe his mouth, spit out the burning blue capsule, take a huge gulp of water, swish it around.
It was a dereliction of duty, he knew. He was the captain of a creaking ship long at sea, and here he was tonguing a loose tooth and refusing to swallow his daily allotment of lime. The scurvy was taking him and he was letting it, even though this placed the others at risk. He knew this and felt bad about it, but he couldn’t will himself to do anything else.
The hard part was not checking to see if anyone was watching while he spit it out. He sat with his back to the wallscreen and went through this process while he imagined eyes in white coveralls drilling through the side of his head.
But he didn’t look. He chewed his food. He remembered to use his napkin occasionally, to wipe with both hands, always with both hands, pinching across his mouth, staying consistent. He smiled at the man across from him and made sure the pill didn’t fall out. The man’s gaze drifted over Troy’s shoulder as he stared at the view.
Troy didn’t turn to look. There was still the same draw, the same compulsion to be as high as possible, to escape the suffocating depths, but he no longer felt any desire to see outside. Something had changed.
He spotted Hal at the next table over—recognized his bald and splotchy scalp. The old man was sitting with his back to Troy. Troy waited to catch his eye, but Hal never turned to look.
He finished his corn and worked on his beets. It had been long enough since spitting out his pill to risk a glance toward the serving line. Tubes spat food; plates rattled on trays; one of the doctors from Victor’s office stood beyond the glass serving line, arms crossed, a wan smile on his face. He was scanning the men in line and looking out over the tables. Why? What was there to keep an eye on? Troy wanted to know. He had dozens of burning questions like this; answers sometimes rose toward the surface, but they skittered away if he trained his thoughts on them.
The beets were awful.
He ate the last of them while the gentleman across the table stood with his tray. It wasn’t long before someone took his place. Troy looked up and down the row of adjoining tables. The vast majority of the workers sat on the other side so they could see out. Only a handful sat like Hal and himself. It was strange that he’d never noticed this before.
In the past weeks, it seemed patterns were becoming easier to spot, even as other faculties slipped and stumbled. He cut into a rubbery hunk of canned ham, his knife screeching against his plate, and wondered when he’d get some real sleep. He couldn’t ask the doctors for anything to help, couldn’t show them his gums. They might find out he was off his other meds. The insomnia was awful. It was as though his body had grown scared of the dreams that awaited. He might doze off for a minute or two, but deep sleep eluded him. And instead of remembering anything concrete, all he had were these dull aches, these bouts of sadness, the feeling that something was wrong, that he’d known what was going on a week ago, maybe even a month ago, but no further back than that.
He chewed on this thought and his ham both. He caught one of the d
octors watching him. Troy looked down the table and saw men shoulder to shoulder on the other side, empty seats lined up across from them. It wasn’t long ago that he wanted to sit and stare, mesmerized by the gray hills. And now he felt sick when he caught even a glimpse; the view brought him close to tears. He eyed the corner of the room where he knew a camera was hidden. Troy had an idea of what they were looking for. They were looking for signs of remembrance.
He stood immediately with his tray, then worried he was being transparent. Obvious. The napkin fell from his lap and landed on the floor, and something skittered away from his foot.
Troy’s heart skipped a beat. He bent and snatched the napkin, hurried down the line, looking for the pill. He bumped into a chair that had been pulled back from the table, felt all eyes on him, the sailors watching their captain dance drunkenly across the deck, losing his mind, teeth falling out and clattering away.