by Hugh Howey
Someone on the North Carolina stage checked her microphone with a squawk of feedback.
“We’ll see.”
Anna wrapped her coat tighter against the early morning breeze. “Isn’t Helen coming?”
“Yeah. Senator Thurman insisted. She’s not gonna be happy when she sees how many people are here. She hates crowds. She won’t be happy about the mud, either.”
Anna laughed. “I wouldn’t worry about the conditions of the grounds after this.”
Donald thought about all the loads of radioactive waste that would be trucked in. “Yeah.” He thought he saw her point.
Turning away from the parking lot for a moment, he peered down the hill toward the Georgia stage. It would also be the site of the first national gathering of delegates later that day, all the most important people under one tent. Behind the stage and among the smoking food tents, the only sign of the underground containment facility was a small concrete tower rising up from the ground, a bristle of antennas sprouting from the top. Donald thought of how much work it would take to haul away all the flags and soaked buntings before the first of the spent fuel rods could finally be brought in.
“It’s weird to think of a few thousand people from the state of Tennessee stomping around on top of something we designed,” Anna said. Her arm brushed against Donald’s. He stood perfectly still, wondering if it had been an accident. “I wish you’d seen more of the place.”
Donald shivered, more from fighting to remain still than from the cold and moist morning air. He hadn’t told anyone about Mick’s tour the day before. It felt too sacred. He would probably tell Helen about it and no one else. “It’s crazy how much time went into something nobody will ever use,” he said.
Anna murmured her agreement. Her arm was still touching his. There was no sign of Helen making her way through the security complex. Donald felt irrationally that he would somehow spot her among the crowds. He usually could. He remembered the high balcony of a place they’d stayed in during their honeymoon in Hawaii. Even from up there, he could spot her taking her early morning walks along the foam line, looking for seashells. There might be a few hundred strollers out on the beach, and his eyes would be immediately drawn to her form, her singular gait.
“It’s weird how much pressure was on us to get everything right, don’t you think?”
“Mmm,” Anna said.
“I guess the only way they were going to build any of this was if we gave them the right kind of insurance.” Donald repeated what the Senator had told him, but it still didn’t feel right.
“People want to feel safe,” Anna said. “They want to know, if the worst thing possible happens, they’ll have someone—something—to fall back on.”
There was pressure against his arm. Definitely not an accident, not a breeze or gust of wind pushing her into him. Donald felt himself withdraw and knew she would sense it, too.
“I was really hoping to tour one of the other bunkers,” he said, changing the subject. “It’d be cool to see what the other teams came up with. Apparently, though, I don’t have the clearance.”
Anna laughed. “I tried the same thing. I’m dying to see our competition. But I can understand them being sensitive. There’s a lot of eyes on this joint.” She leaned into him again, ignoring the space he’d made.
“Don’t you feel that?” she asked, glancing up at the bottom of the umbrella. “Like there’s some huge bull’s-eye over this place? I mean, even with the fences and walls down there, you can bet the whole world is gonna be keeping an eye on what happens here.”
Donald nodded. He knew she wasn’t talking about the convention but about what the place would be used for afterward.
“Hey, it looks like I’ve got to get back down there.”
He turned to follow her gaze, saw Senator Thurman climbing the hill on foot, a massive black golf umbrella shedding the rain around him. The man seemed impervious to the mud and grime in a way no one else was, the same way he seemed oblivious to the passing decades.
Anna reached over and squeezed Donald’s arm. “Congrats again. It was fun working together on this.”
“Same,” he said. “We make a good team.”
She smiled. He wondered for a moment if she would lean over and kiss his cheek. It would feel natural in that moment, and then that moment irised shut. Anna left his protective cover and headed off toward the Senator.
Thurman lifted his umbrella and smiled at his daughter, and Donald watched as he tried to make her take the umbrella from him, but she refused in a way that he knew quite well. Stubborn and proud. Thurman kissed his daughter’s cheek and watched her descend the hill a ways, then he hiked up to join Donald.
They stood beside each other a pause, their umbrellas overlapping, the rain dripping off the Senator’s and onto Donald’s with a muted patter.
“Sir,” Donald finally said. He felt newly comfortable in the man’s presence. The last two weeks had been like summer camp, where being around the same people almost every hour of the day brought a level of familiarity and intimacy that knowing them casually for years could never match. There was something about forced confinement that really brought people together. Beyond the obvious, physical ways.
“Damn rain” was Thurman’s reply.
“You can’t control everything,” Donald said.
The Senator grunted as if he disagreed. “Helen not here yet?”
“Nossir.” Donald fished in his pocket and felt for his phone. “I’ll message her again in a bit. Not sure if my texts are getting through or not—the networks are absolutely crushed. I’m pretty sure this many people descending on this corner of the county is unprecedented.”
“Well, this will be an unprecedented day,” Thurman said. “Nothing like it ever before.”
“It was mostly your doing, sir. I mean, not just building this place, but choosing to not run. This country could’ve been yours for the taking this year.”
The Senator laughed. “That’s true most years, Donny. But I’ve learned to set my sights higher than that.”
Donald shivered again. He couldn’t remember the last time the Senator had called him that. Maybe that first meeting in his office, more than two years ago? The old man seemed unusually tense or oddly relaxed. It was strange that Donald couldn’t tell which.
“When Helen gets here, I want you to come down to the state tent and see me, okay?”
Donald pulled out his phone and checked the time. “You know I’m supposed to be at the Tennessee tent in an hour, right?”
“There’s been a change of plans. I want you to stay close to home. Mick is going to cover for you over there, which means I need you with me.”
“Are you sure? I was supposed to meet with—”
“I know. This is a promotion, trust me. I want you and Helen near the Georgia stage with me. And look—”
The Senator turned to face him. Donald peeled his eyes away from the last of the unloading buses. The rain had picked up a little.
“You’ve contributed more to this day than you know,” Thurman said.
“Sir?”
“The world is going to change today, Donny. You deserve this.”
Donald wondered if the Senator had been skipping his nanobath treatments. His eyes seemed dilated and focused on something in the distance. He appeared older, somehow.
“I’m not sure I understand—”
“You will. Oh, and a surprise visitor is coming. She should be here anytime.” He smiled. “The national anthem starts at noon. There’ll be a flyover from the 141st after that. I want you nearby when that happens.”
Donald nodded. He had learned when to stop asking questions and just do what the Senator expected of him.
“Yessir,” he said, shivering against the cold.
Senator Thurman left, and the sound of the rain on Donald’s umbrella shifted with the new bombardment from above. Turning his back to the stage, Donald scanned the last of the buses and wondered where in the world Helen was
.
22
2110 • Silo 1
Troy walked down the line of cryopods as if he knew where he was going. It was just like the way his hand had drifted to the button that had brought him to that floor. There were made-up names on each of the panels. He knew this somehow. He remembered coming up with his name. It had something to do with his wife, some way to honor her, or some kind of secret and forbidden link so that he might one day remember.
This all lay in the past, deep in the mist, a dream forgotten. Before his shift there had been an orientation. There were familiar books to read and re-read. That’s when he had chosen his name.
A bitter explosion on his tongue brought him to a halt. It was the taste of a pill dissolving. Troy stuck out his tongue and scraped it with his fingers, but there was nothing there but a memory of forgetting. He could feel the ulcers on his gums against his teeth but couldn’t recall how they’d formed.
He walked on. Something wasn’t right. These things weren’t supposed to come back. He pictured himself on a gurney, screaming, someone strapping him down, stabbing him with needles. That wasn’t him. He was holding that man’s boots.
Troy stopped at one of the pods and checked the name. Helen. There was something wrong. His gut lurched and groped for its medicine. He didn’t want to remember. That was a secret ingredient: the not wanting to remember. Those were the parts that slipped away, the parts the drugs wrapped their tentacles around and pulled beneath the surface. But now, there was some small part of him that was dying to know, some shard that wanted to rise up through the dark and murky waters. It was a nagging doubt, a feeling of having left some important piece of himself behind. And if the only way to resurface was to bob up as a corpse, this part of him didn’t mind. It was willing to drown the rest of him for the answers.
The frost on the glass wiped away with a squeak. He didn’t recognize this person, but he was close to remembering. He tried the next one.
What had the orientation been about? How to do new jobs. Some of them already knew, were prepared. Troy had spent two years studying for a similar job. Different but similar. He should have been the head of a single silo, not all of them. This was too much.
He remembered packed halls of people crying, grown men sobbing, pills that dried their eyes. Fearsome clouds rose on a videoscreen, a view of the outside, of what they’d done. The suffering and the medicine were caustic together. They made people forget. Troy remembered thinking the bombs were useful more for their fear than the harm they contained. They were a prop. Flesh for the forgetting, for the medicine to sink its teeth into.
The women were put away for safety. That’s how the deep-freeze was explained: like lifeboats, women and children first.
Troy remembered. It wasn’t an accident. He remembered a talk in another pod, a bigger pod in the shape of a pill, about the coming end of the world, about making room, about ending it all before it ended on its own.
A controlled explosion. Bombs were sometimes used to put out fires.
He remembered clouds pushed aside by other clouds. Decoys. The machines were already in the air. He could taste them on his tongue, remembered urine the color of charcoal.
Troy wiped another frost-covered sheet of glass. The sleeping form in the next chamber had eyelashes that glittered with ice. She was a stranger. He moved on. It was coming back to him. His arm throbbed. The shakes were gone.
Troy remembered a calamity, but it was all for show. The real threat was in the air, invisible. The bombs were to get people to move, to make them afraid, to get them crying and forgetting. People had spilled like marbles down a bowl. Not a bowl, a funnel. And the air had erupted on cue, invisibly. Someone explained why they were spared. He remembered a white fog, walking through a white fog. The death was already in them. Troy remembered a taste on his tongue metallic.
The ice on the next pane was already disturbed, had been wiped away by someone recently. Beads of condensation stood like tiny lenses warping the light. He rubbed the glass and knew what had happened. He saw the woman inside with the auburn hair that she sometimes kept in a bun. This was not his wife. This was someone who wanted that, wanted him like that. The name meant nothing. The name was a reminder to them both.
“Hello?”
Troy turned toward the voice. The night shift doctor was heading his way, weaving between the pods, coming for him. Troy clasped his hand over the soreness on his arm. He didn’t want to be taken again. They couldn’t make him forget.
“Sir, you shouldn’t be in here.”
Troy didn’t answer. The doctor stopped at the foot of the pod. Inside, a woman who wasn’t his wife lay in slumber. Wasn’t his wife, but had wanted to be.
“Why don’t you come with me?” the doctor asked.
“I’d like to stay,” Troy said. He felt a bizarre calmness. All the pain had been ripped away. This was more forceful than forgetting. He remembered everything. His soul was cut free. His body was a shell, a walking pod, nothing inside but the cold. The important parts were soaring up, now. Soaring up that straw shoved deep into the dirt—
“I can’t have you in here, sir. Come with me. You’ll freeze in here.”
Troy glanced down. He had forgotten to put on shoes. He curled his toes away from the floor...then let them settle.
“Sir? Please.” The young doctor gestured down the aisle. Troy let go of his arm and saw that things were handled as needed. No kicking meant no straps. No shivering meant no shots.
He heard the squeak of hurrying boots out in the hallway. A large man from Security appeared by the open vault door, visibly winded. Troy caught a glimpse of the doctor waving the man down. They were trying not to scare him. They didn’t know that he couldn’t be scared anymore. That part of him had drowned. Their medicine had killed it.
“You’ll put me away for good,” Troy said. It was something between a statement and a question. It was a realization. He wondered if he was like Hal—like Carlton—if the pills would never take again. He glanced toward the far end of the room, knew the empties were kept there. This was where he would be buried.
“Nice and easy,” the doctor said.
He led Troy toward the exit; he would embalm him with that bright blue sky. The pods slid by as the two of them walked in silence.
The man from Security took deep breaths as he filled the doorway, his great chest heaving against his coveralls. There was a squeak from more boots as he was joined by another. Troy saw that his shift was over. Two weeks to go. He’d nearly made it.
The doctor waved the large men out of the way, seemed to hope they wouldn’t be needed. They took up positions to either side; they seemed to think otherwise. Troy was led down the hallway, hope guiding him and fear flanking him.
“You know,” Troy told the doctor, turning to study him. “You remember everything, don’t you?”
The doctor didn’t turn to face him. He simply nodded.
This felt like a betrayal. It wasn’t fair.
“Why do you get to remember?” Troy asked. He wanted to know why those dispensing the medicine didn’t have to take some of their own.
The doctor waved him into his office. His assistant was there, wearing a sleepshirt and hanging an IV bag bulging with blue. Troy had disturbed their sleep—just as they had once disturbed his.
“Some of us remember,” the doctor said, “because we know this isn’t a bad thing we’ve done.” He frowned as he helped Troy onto the gurney. He seemed truly sad about Troy’s condition. “We’re doing good work, here,” he said. “We’re saving the world, not ending it. And the medicine only touches our regrets.” He glanced up. “Some of us don’t have any.”
The doorway was stuffed with Security. It overflowed. The assistant unbuckled Troy’s coveralls. Troy watched numbly.
“It would take a different kind of drug to touch what we know,” the doctor said. He pulled a clipboard from the wall. A sheet of paper was fed into its jaws. There was a pause, a silent moment of comedic irony, and t
hen a pen pressed into Troy’s palm.
Troy laughed as he signed off on himself. This reminded him of his last job: the insane pretending to be sane, the world run from an asylum, a fetid swamp.
“Then why me?” he asked. “Why am I here?” He had always wanted to ask this of someone who might know. These were the prayers of youth, but now with a chance of some reply.
The doctor smiled and took the clipboard. He was probably in his late twenties. Troy was a handful of years shy of forty. And yet this man had all the wisdom, all the answers.
“It’s good to have people like you in charge,” the doctor said, and he seemed to genuinely mean it. The clipboard was returned to its peg. One of the Security men yawned and covered his mouth. Troy watched as his coveralls flopped to his waist. A fingernail makes a distinct click when it taps against a needle.