Half Way Home

by Hugh Howey

  “Rogers, Oliver,” I yelled, “there’s something coming!” I pointed back down the tunnel. Three figures emerged from the other side of the darkness and ran in front of me. Leila, Karl, and Samson. They began scampering up toward the tractor, but the two enforcers yelled down at them.

  “Get back!” Oliver shouted, his gun twitching across the group. I turned to see Tarsi and Mindy at the edge of the other shaft, their hands next to their ears. Dust rained down around them as the tremors transformed into violent shakes. Bright specks of powder caught in the beam of the idling tractor. It fell everywhere like a waterfall of crushed stone.

  “Get out of here!” I yelled to Tarsi, pointing over the rubble behind the two girls.

  “Nobody move!” Oliver roared. We could barely hear him over the grumbling of crunched rock. A shot rang out, causing those running up the curved wall to fall flat, their hands on their heads. I whirled in place, noise and action on all sides, fear holding me in place. I felt trapped in the center of several dangers as the loud noise continued to grow.

  “Oliver, let us up, we’ll come in peace, I swear!”

  The silhouettes conferred, the sight of so many of us obviously giving them pause, fearful we might overwhelm them. I turned to see if Tarsi and Mindy had used the confusion to get away, but they remained motionless. A chunk of rock fell from the ceiling and crashed nearby. Oliver yelled down for none of us to move until the earthquake was over. Everyone around me started shouting that it wasn’t an earthquake. A few of them even made a mad dash toward the shaft, trying to get out of the round tunnel.

  A bullet was fired at their feet, which caused them to pull up and reconsider. I could see in several sets of eyes that they were about to decide, as a group, to run for the two enforcers anyway, bullets be damned. Staying where we were seemed worse.

  A deafening roar shattered all those thoughts. Through the side of the mineshaft, the side Oliver and Rogers stood in, a circle of destruction appeared. It came through the solid stone: concentric rows of glimmering steel that vibrated and seemed to grind together.

  The two silhouettes turned and fired, their bullets zinging off something shiny, metallic, and alive.

  Oliver froze. Rogers backed away and aimed his flashlight at the creature, which gave us all a surreal view of the impossible shimmering thing. The floor of the mineshaft tilted up ahead of its arrival, throwing Oliver back. I watched his arms pinwheel in slow motion, an arc of glimmering gold sailing out of sight as he lost the gun—and then his balance.

  He danced in Rogers’s spotlight. The stage tilted, a massive chuck of rock falling toward the beast. Oliver’s arms went forward, as if to ward off the indomitable. A thing that could eat through solid rock caught his hands and seemed to suck him forward.

  His body popped. The skin was pulled off first, the weak lining of him yanked away like a parlor trick. Meat and muscle were left, and then that went as well, pulled into the ferocious spinning and grinding. There was a squirt of blood, the clanging of grinding bone, and a horrible shower of gore. Then he was gone. Oliver had become nothing but a smear. A memory. A shape in my recollection but no longer anywhere in the actual world. The great metal beast roared by, never slowing, never noticing. It had encountered a soft pocket of no resistance during its jaunt through solid earth. A lazy bit of air to bite through. Mere flesh.

  It kept moving, crashing into the tractor, which splintered in an explosion of mechanical bits. The groan and shriek of bending, shattering steel pierced the rumbles, drowning out the screams from Rogers, whose life winked out as quickly as his flashlight.

  Those of us in the old tunnel fell back, away from the wall of moving alloy in front of us as the glimmering skin of the great creature slid by. The thing was a massive cylinder of waving metal plates that overlapped and rubbed against each other, shrieking with the sound of steel sliding against steel. I called out for Oliver, felt the words in my head, but couldn’t hear anything over the maelstrom of noise.

  The hellish scene was over in mere moments. And then we were left in a darkness full of receding thunder. I found myself on my back but couldn’t remember falling. I groped in the pitch black for my flashlight, the complete absence of light as bewildering as the blue sky had been the day before. I felt worse than blind—I felt cursed with an inability to perceive even the void.

  I bumped into someone else as each of us crawled through the thundering, vibrating darkness. In the new tunnel that had erupted parallel to our own—cut right through solid stone—I could hear loose rocks clattering to the ground. I finally found the cylinder of blessed plastic, flicked the switch, and sobbed with relief when the bulb burst with light. Bodies crowded close, like night bugs to a flame. I heard something slide behind us, turned and saw Mindy stumbling forward, away from the ledge. Tarsi followed before I could yell for her to wait. She slid straight down, then churned her legs, grabbing Mindy for balance as the two joined us in my puddle of light.

  “Whatthefuckwhatthefuckwhatthefuck,” mumbled Jorge. He and Leila were wrapped around each other, all of us cowering as a small shower of dust continued to rain down. Every ounce of meat inside my skin felt like it wanted to rush off in all directions, but the terrified shell of me somehow kept all the bits contained, holding me in the center of some fear-filled paralysis.

  Tarsi clutched to me and Kelvin and pulled us close. Karl and Mindy rose and turned to the edge of the light; they peered in the direction of the passing monster.

  “We need to get out of here,” Karl said, his voice high and tight. He came back and reached for me—grabbed my wrist to aim the flashlight toward the destruction. “We need to go,” he repeated.

  “What the hell was that?” someone asked.

  I stood and ran the light around the space where the tractor had been. The curving wall no longer ran up to a square shaft with a tractor inside it. It ran up half that length before opening up into a parallel tunnel of missing rock. The interior was a cloud of dust with larger rocks falling down through it, stirring the powdery mist. I could still feel the ground vibrating beneath my feet as the creature moved away.

  “That’s why the colony was aborted,” someone said. “Not the ore.”

  I stepped toward the new tunnel and half-expected Oliver to come over the lip, swimming through the dust with his golden gun and yelling at me to stop moving. Part of me wanted it to happen. The rest of me knew it was impossible. I’d seen him disappear. Seen it in the worst way possible. He was gone, and my mind continued to wrestle with the idea, struggling to pin it down.

  The others coalesced around my light. We moved as one toward the parallel tube, our hands linking us together in a web of confused and stunned silence. Jorge broke it with whispered curses as he reached the edge where the two tunnels met. We joined him along the sharp ridge where the curve of our tunnel rose up to meet the neighboring one. I directed the flashlight down the new tunnel, marveling at the way the creature had traveled through solid rock rather than slide through its old hole. I had been sure it was going to eat us, not them.

  “The tractor,” Kelvin whispered.

  I played the light across the floor of the new tunnel. There was nothing there but a few scraps of metal scattered among the rubble. It reminded me of the mess Tarsi and Mindy had been crawling over in the shaft behind us.

  “Shit,” someone whispered.

  A few people pushed themselves over the ridge and shuffled down into the new tunnel. Somehow, the receding noise and the leftover vibrations weren’t enough to keep us out of the new tube. Or perhaps their lessening presence served as a comforting reminder of the thing’s whereabouts.

  “Over there,” Jorge said. He grabbed my wrist and aimed the light. I complied, allowing him to shine it across the floor in the direction the creature had gone. Something glimmered—a small hunk of gold. Jorge ran over to it and bent down. “It’s one of the guns,” he said. He reached down and grabbed it, then came away howling, shaking his hand in the air.

  “W
hat happened?” Leila asked, running over to help him.

  “Damn thing burned me,” he said.

  I moved closer and focused the light on it. The thing had a wet sheen, like it was covered in something. I moved to nudge the gun with my bare foot, but Tarsi pulled me back.

  “Don’t touch it,” she said.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” someone else insisted.

  I moved the light over to see if the square shaft we had entered from was still passable. It was. A small line of debris could be seen scattered along the edge as the new chewed-out tunnel had moved the entrance back, but the darkness beyond beckoned as a passage to safety.

  “Porter,” Jorge said. I swung the flashlight back around—the thing had definitely become my scepter of leadership. I considered passing it to Jorge and being done with it, but he had his arms tangled in his shirt as he pulled it off his back. He bent down and scooped up the gun and wrapped it in a ball. Others had already started forming by the wall leading up to the mineshaft; they teamed up like before to give others a boost to the edge.

  As we hoisted ourselves up, reaching down for the people that had done the lifting, the last of the tremors faded into nothingness, leaving me to shake only of my own accord. We gathered around my cone of light and moved quickly up the incline, hurrying back toward the exit.

  “What in the hell was that?” someone asked.

  “That could’ve been us.”

  “It could still be us. It came through solid rock.”

  I couldn’t help it. As soon as someone stated the obvious, my arm twitched to play the light over the walls to either side of us as if I would see the next one coming. As if it would approach silently, without the tremors of its destructive onrush. But these were mere shards of logic; they couldn’t pierce my fear. And the thought that such a beast could emerge through the wall to either side, or from above or below, made my guts fidget.

  Everyone quickly assumed the beast’s discovery had been the impetus for Colony’s abort procedure. While they argued the details, other thoughts rattled around in my head. I began to consider the far more vexing question of why Colony had stopped the abort process once it had been started. I tried slotting the facts together, arranging the clues in some readable order, but raw fear and leftover adrenaline made it hard to think. And other, older problems kept invading: Oliver was dead. Colony had sent for us. And something else . . .

  I traced the thread of concern to back before the creature’s appearance. Something bad had taken place prior to the tractor coming for us—something that seemed to tug at my subconscious for attention.

  Then I remembered.

  That single gunshot.

  • 31 • More Dead

  I could see the huddled forms of Mica and Peter on the small rise before we reached the fire pits. They were right where we had left them: close by one of the shaft walls. One body was bent over the other and a mournful moan—barely audible—emanated from one of them.

  We forgot our exhaustion from the long jog up the mine and broke out in a run, the light from my flashlight bouncing with my gait but increasingly unneeded as we approached the wan reach of daylight.

  As I got closer, I could see that it was Peter draped across Mica’s body, his shoulders shivering in time with the sobs. Leila and Tarsi reached him right before Kelvin and I got there. Their hands went to his back, trying to comfort him for his loss.

  Both of them pulled their arms away as if burned by the touch. Leila yelped, and Tarsi covered her mouth. I came to a stop as Mica’s arms moved across Peter’s back.

  She was alive.

  The shivering and sobs were coming from her.

  Jorge began cursing as I tried to help the girls tend to Mica. As weak as she’d been an hour before, we had a difficult time prying her arms off Peter. She probably would’ve chosen to stay there until the weight of him on her ribs finished her off.

  We finally got Peter’s body free, and two of the boys laid it by the black stain of an old fire. Mica’s moans turned to wails. She sat up, the front of her soaked in Peter’s blood. It looked like her bruises and injuries had leaked right through her clothes, but I had a glimpse of the damage on Peter’s chest—it looked like something had erupted through him and out his back.

  Tarsi and Leila tried to calm Mica down, and I moved in to help, but Vincent stepped in front of me, blocking me off. He knelt beside Mica, leaned forward, and wrapped her up in his arms. He began sobbing along with her. Mica’s hands went from fighting the girls to clutching Vincent’s back; her fingers squeezed the folds of his shirt into frantic clumps.

  The two of them shook from the hard cry, and I could hear Vincent whispering something to Mica between the sobs.

  I stood there, completely ineffectual. Someone thought to cover Peter’s body with a scrap of tarp, but I continued to remain rooted in place, my arms at my side as I watched two of my friends grieve together.

  I wanted to join them. I wanted to beat my fists against the mountain. I wanted to pound the image of Oliver’s death out of my memory. Part of me wanted to unleash pain on myself for failing my friend. For failing my profession. All the words and advice, all the grief tactics I’d tried to use with Vincent over the past few days as I attempted to chip away at his sullen silence—the very same things I had been about to employ with Mica—they all crumbled away like loose rock.

  Replacing them was the knowledge that even though such things were useful, the first thing Vincent had needed—and what I needed right then—was someone to feel his pain. An honest outlet for his heart-rending torture. He needed something the rest of us had worked as a group to protect him from, maybe because we were scared of it ourselves. He needed to feel it. To be allowed.

  There were times when I wanted to grieve with him, to share just such an outpouring of sadness, but I had walled it off. I had hid it away with that secret me I had become ashamed of. Maybe I was wrong to have done so. Maybe I shouldn’t have tried so hard. Maybe it was the death of my former friend on top of so many other gruesome ordeals that finally had me realizing that maybe—

  Maybe I wasn’t broken after all. Maybe the things I was scared of could be part of some solution, rather than a problem.

  Tarsi and Kelvin sought me out, the numb confusion I felt reflected in their faces. And that’s when I saw that I wasn’t alone, that I didn’t have to suffer by myself. I reached for them.

  And I cried.

  • 32 • The Reason

  We sat in a cluster by the mine’s entrance as the day outside began to fade, the sun slinking back behind the mountains. Vincent and Mica had fallen asleep—passed out, really—in each other’s arms, and none of us could stomach to move them. Some of the others had taken Peter’s body deeper into the mine. The thought of him back there—dead and covered in a tarp—made me feel sick. It made me think of Oliver and the other enforcer. I took a deep, shuddering breath, but my face was already chapped with a week’s supply of tears.

  “It’s getting cold,” Leila said. I looked over and saw she was addressing Jorge. He still had his shirt off and bundled around the gun, which rested in his lap.

  She helped him with it. They unwrapped the weapon, and it clattered to the stone floor. Nobody moved to retrieve it as she flapped the shirt in the air, trying to work the kinks out.

  Those who had drifted off into their thoughts hours ago took notice of the sudden activity—several of them frowned in Leila’s direction. She held the shirt up in front of her and I could see her face through the large holes that had been eaten away from it. Our eyes met, and we both looked to the gold gun in front of her.

  She reached out. “Don’t touch it,” I said. I crawled forward to inspect it. A light sheen remained on the weapon; it still looked as if it were covered in a layer of wax. “Let me have the shirt,” I said. I became numbly aware of the audience stirring around me as I took the ruined article of clothing from Leila.

  I rubbed the side of the gun with the shirt and the shi
ny stuff came away.

  “What is it?” Kelvin asked, leaning forward to inspect it.

  “It’s wet,” I said.

  Jorge leaned forward and showed us one of his hands. Several of his fingers were bright red and raw-looking. “Shit burned me,” he said.

  “An acid?” Tarsi asked.

  I shook my head, but not to answer her question. I could feel bits and pieces of a larger picture coming together in my mind, like drops of condensation flowing downward with the pull of logic—meeting and growing and becoming an awful realization:

  The reason.

  “Am I going to be okay?” Jorge asked me. “What do you think it is?”

  “The reason,” I repeated to myself, thinking aloud.

  “Yeah, it burned me. I thought it was just hot from firing. Am I gonna die?” Jorge looked around at us. “Aren’t one of you a chemist or something?”

  “Quiet,” Kelvin said. I turned to see him staring at me, his hand on my shoulder. “What is it?” he asked me. “The reason for what?”

  “For aborting the colony,” I whispered. “For changing its mind. For everything.”

  Before anyone could respond, I added, as it had just occurred to me: “It’s the reason for the rocket.”

  I sat back, leaving the gun where it was, and tossed Jorge what remained of his shirt. I pressed my palms flat against the cool rock and closed my eyes, my entire being weary with all the new awareness coursing through my veins. Just as with the setting sun, I could feel some source of light dying within me, leaving me dark and cold.

  “So fucking tell us,” Jorge said.

  “I’m trying to figure out where to start.” I opened my eyes and glanced around at the others. “It’s still rattling around in my head.”

  “I’ll say,” said Jorge. He rubbed his hand against his pants before inspecting his palm again.