by Hugh Howey
“Yeah, yeah, man. I think you’re gonna be over the character limit, though. This better come out of your pay.”
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Mission said, careful to release the mic first.
“Now what?” Lyn asked as he hung up the receiver. She played her flashlight around the sorting room, the beam catching in the smoke and dancing across the ripples in the water. Joel’s boots had thrown the wet film into chaos. He had gotten most of the sorting crates moved up so they wouldn’t get wet.
“I need coveralls,” Mission said. He splashed around the counter and joined Joel by the shelves, began looking through the nearest crates. “They’re looking for me, so I’m gonna need new colors if I’m getting up there.”
“We,” Lyn told him. “We need new colors. If you’re going to the Nest, I’m coming with you.”
“Me too,” Joel said.
“I appreciate that,” Mission said, “but company might make it more dangerous. We’d be more conspicuous.”
“Yeah, but they’re looking for you,” Lyn said.
“Hey, we have a ton of these new whites.” Joel pulled the lid off a sorting bin. “But they’ll just make us stand out, won’t they?”
“Whites?” Mission headed over to see what Joel was talking about.
“Yeah. For Security. We’ve been moving a ton of these lately. Came down from Garment a few days ago. No idea why they made up so many.”
Mission checked the coveralls. The ones on top were covered in soot, more gray than white. There were dozens of them stacked in the reusable sorting crate. He remembered all the new hires. It was like they wanted half the silo to be dressed in white, the other half fighting one another. It made no sense. Unless the goal was simply to get everyone dead.
“Dead,” Mission said out loud.
The others swung their flashlights at him. Mission was already splashing down the shelves to another crate. “I’ve got a better idea,” he called out. A coughing fit seized him as he found the right bin. He and Cam had been given one of these just a few days ago. He reached in and pulled out a bag. “How would you two like to make some money?”
Joel and Lyn hurried over to see what he’d found, and Mission held up one of the heavy plastic bags with the bright silver zipper and the hauling straps.
“Three-hundred and eighty-four chits to divide between you,” he promised. “Every chit I own. I just need you for one last tandem.”
The two porters played their lights across the object in his hands. It was a black bag. A black bag made for hauls such as these.
•26•
The ground was too wet to roll it out proper, so Mission used the main counter, instead. He promised Lyn and Joel that he would transfer every chit in his account as soon as they got to a working computer. Joel told him to save his breath. They were just as eager as he was to get to higher levels. The bag, with all of death’s taboo, would afford protection to them all.
Lyn worked the bright zipper loose, and Joel peeled the flaps back. Mission sat on the counter and worked the laces on his boots free. They were soaked, his socks as well. He shucked them off to keep the water out of the bag and to save the weight. Always a porter, thinking about weight. Lyn handed him one of the Security coveralls, an extra precaution. He wiggled out of his porter blues and tugged the whites on while Lyn looked the other way. His knife, he strapped back to his waist.
Outside, flashlights danced in the main hall, the other porters still recovering from the damage wrought by fire and flood. Mission coughed into his palm and snapped up the coveralls, which were at least a size too big for him. “You guys sure you’re up for this?” he asked.
Lyn helped him slide his feet into the bag and worked the inside straps around his ankles. Never before had a corpse made it so easy. “Are you sure?” she asked, cinching the straps tight.
Mission laughed, his stomach fluttering with nerves. He stretched out and let them work the top straps under his shoulders. It felt surreal to be placing himself inside one of the bags. He had never heard of anyone getting in one willingly.
“Have you both eaten?” he asked.
“We’ll be fine,” Joel said. “Stop worrying.”
“If it gets late—”
“Lie your head back,” Lyn told him. She began working the zipper from his feet. “And don’t talk unless we tell you it’s okay. You’ll have people jumping the rails out there if they hear you or see you move.”
“We’ll take a break every twenty or so,” Joel added. “We’ll bring you into a restroom with us. You can stretch and get some water.”
Mission lifted a hand out to stop the zipper from passing his stomach. “Don’t mention water,” he said. He listened to the sounds of lapping ripples against the counter, the squish of the other two porters moving about in their boots. He begged his bladder to ignore the cues.
“Get your hand inside,” Lyn told him. She worked the zipper up over his chest to his chin, hesitated, then kissed the pads of her fingers and touched his forehead the same way he’d seen countless loved ones and priests bless the dead. “May your steps rise to the heavens,” she whispered.
Her wan smile caught in the spill of Joel’s flashlight before the bag was sealed up over Mission’s face.
“Or at least until Upper Dispatch,” Joel added.
****
Getting out of the lower waystation proved simple. Their fellow porters made way for the dead, maybe thinking Roker was the one in the bag. Several hands reached out and touched Mission through the plastic, showing respect, and he fought not to flinch nor cough. It felt as though the smoke was trapped in the bag with him. It pervaded his hair and skin, despite the brand new coveralls.
Joel took the lead, which meant Mission’s shoulders were pressed against his. He faced upward, his body swaying in time to their steps, the straps beneath his armpits pulling the opposite way he was used to. It grew more comfortable as they hit the stairs and began the long spiral up. His feet were lowered until the blood no longer pooled in his head. Lyn carried her half of his weight from several steps below.
The dark and quiet overtook him as they left the chaos of the waystation. The two porters didn’t talk as some tandems might. They saved their lungs and kept their thoughts to themselves. Joel set an aggressive pace. Mission could almost hear Morgan’s metronome ticking, that silver arm that rocked back and forth with the time. Mission was that arm, now. He could sense the pace in his own gentle swaying, his body suspended in space above the steel treads.
As the steps passed, the intolerableness grew. It wasn’t the difficulty breathing, for he had been shadowed well to manage his lungs on a long climb. And he could handle the stuffiness with the plastic pressed against his face. Nor was it the dark; his favorite hour for porting had always been the dim-time, being alone with his thoughts, stirring while others slept. It wasn’t the stench of plastic and smoke, the tickle in his throat, or the pain of the straps.
It took several spirals around the central post to put his finger on what discomforted him so, what caused a hollow pit to form in his stomach, a likewise gaping void in his chest, that mix of feelings he got when he had free time and nothing to fill it with. His entire body felt like his legs sometimes did when they needed to twitch but he forced them still. It was an anxiety, and one that went beyond fearing for his friends, beyond the death of Cam, beyond the terror of a silo crumbling down around him. He placed the sensation as he listened to Joel’s heavy and steady breathing, as he felt in his motionless legs the work and agony of his friends’, as he endured doing nothing while they hauled his burdens. This was what Mission felt knotting his gut above all else: It was the act of lying still. Of being carried.
He was a burden. A burden.
The straps pinched his shoulders until his arms fell numb, and he swayed in the darkness, the sounds of boots on steel, of breathing, as he was lifted toward the heavens. Too great a burden. This was his weakness, his inability to be carried.
Missi
on felt like sobbing—but the tears would not come. He thought of his mother carrying him for all those months, no one to tell and no one to support her. Not until his father found out, and by then it was too late. He wondered how long his father had hated the bulge in her belly, how long he had wanted to cut Mission out like some cancer. Until it was too late and this was all his dad was left with, a tumor to raise, a reminder. Mission had never asked to be carried like that. And he had never wanted to be ported by anyone ever again.
Two years ago to the day. That was the last time he had felt this, this sense of being a burden to all. Two years since he had proved too much for even a rope to bear.
It was a poor knot he had tied. Morgan would’ve been disgusted by the effort. But his hands had been trembling and he had fought to see the knot through a film of tears. When it failed, the knot didn’t come free so much as slide, and it left his neck afire and bleeding. His great regret was having jumped from the lower stairwell in Mechanical, the rope looped over the pipes above. If he had gone from a landing, the slipping knot wouldn’t have mattered. The fall would’ve claimed him.
Now he was too scared to try again. He was as scared of trying again as he was of being a burden to another. Was that why he avoided seeing Allie, because she longed to care for him? To help support him? Was that why he ran away from home? Why he pined for a girl that he knew deep down cared more for another?
The intolerableness grew until Mission began to hate the boy stuffed in that bag with him. A boy too scared to live, too frightened to die.
The tears finally came. His arms were pinned, so he couldn’t wipe them away. He thought of his mother, about whom he could only piece together a few details. But he knew this of her: She hadn’t been afraid of life or death. She had embraced both in an act that he knew he would never make worthy.
More tears. And there weren’t enough chits in the silo to pay back the debt of being carried by others. The silo spun slowly around him; the steps sank one at a time; and Mission endured the suffering of this self-discovery. He labored not to sob, seeing himself for the first time in that utter darkness, knowing his soul more fully in that deathly ritual of being ported to his grave, this sad awakening on his birthday.
Silo 1
Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.
-Baruch Spinoza
•27•
Finding one among ten thousand should’ve been more difficult than this. It should’ve taken months of crawling through reports and databases, of querying the Head of 18 and asking for personality profiles, of looking at arrest histories, cleaning schedules, who was related to whom, where people spent their time, and all the gossip and chatter compiled from monthly reports.
But Donald found an easier way. He simply searched the database for himself.
One who remembers. One full of fear and paranoia. One who tries to blend in but is subversive. He looked for a fear of doctors, teasing out those residents who never went to see them. He looked for someone who shunned medication and found one who did not even trust the water. A part of him expected he might find several people to be causing so much havoc, a pack, and that locating one among them would lead to the rest. He expected to find them young and outraged with some way of handing down what they knew from generation to generation.
This was what he expected, and so he put it out of mind. He did not act on what was probable. He stayed up for most of the night searching simply for himself. He searched for himself the way he had searched for Helen and his sister. And what he found was both eerily similar and not like him at all.
The next morning, he showed his results to Thurman, who stood perfectly still for a long while.
“Of course,” he finally said. He looked at Anna, his daughter, with tears in his eyes. “Of course.”
A hand on Donald’s shoulder was all the congratulations he got. Thurman explained that the reset was well underway. He admitted that it had been underway since Donald had been woken. Erskine and Dr. Henson were working through the night to make changes, to come up with a new formulation, but this component might take weeks. Looking over what Donald had found, he said he was going to make a call to 18.
“I want to come with you,” Donald said. “It’s my theory.”
What he wanted to say was that he wouldn’t take the coward’s way. If someone was to be executed on his account—a life taken in order to save others—he didn’t want to remove himself, to hide from it.
Thurman agreed.
They rode the lift almost as equals. Donald asked why Thurman had started the reset, but he thought he knew the answer.
“Vic won,” was Thurman’s reply.
Donald thought of the lives in a database that were now thrown into chaos. This is what generals and politicians felt, sitting in a room some comfortable distance away, gathered around a table where death was planned and hoped against. He made the mistake of asking how the reset was going, and Thurman told him about the bombs and the recruits, how these things typically went, that the recipe was as old as time.
“The combustibles are always there,” he said. “You’d be surprised at how few sparks it takes.”
They exited the lift and walked down a familiar hallway. This was Donald’s old commute. Here, he had worked under a different name. He had worked without knowing what he was doing. They passed offices full of people clacking on keyboards and chatting with one another. Half a millennium of people coming on and off shifts, doing what they were told, following orders.
He couldn’t help himself as they approached his old office: he paused at the door and peered in. A thin man with a halo of hair that wrapped from ear to ear, just a few wisps on top, looked up at him. He sat there, mouth agape, hand resting on his mouse, waiting for Donald to say or do something.
Donald nodded a sympathetic hello. He turned and looked through the door across the hall where a man in white sat behind a similar desk. The puppeteer. It was a wonder people didn’t trip on the strings.
Thurman spoke to the man in white, who got up from his desk and joined them in the hall. Here was one who seemed to know that Thurman was in charge. Tiers of puppets.
Donald followed the two of them to the comm room, leaving the balding man at his old desk to his game of solitaire. He felt a mix of sympathy and envy for the man, this captain at a rudderless wheel. Sympathy and envy for those who don’t remember. As they turned the corner, Donald thought back to those initial bouts of awareness on his first shift. He remembered speaking with a doctor who knew, and having this sense of wonder that anyone could cope with such knowledge. And now he saw that it wasn’t that the pain grew tolerable or the confusion went away. Instead, it simply became familiar. It became a part of you. It was a nasty scar that still flared up now and then but that you lived with.
The comm room was quiet. Heads swiveled as the three of them entered. One of the operators hurriedly removed his feet from his desk. Another took a bite of his protein bar and turned back to his station.
“Get me Eighteen,” Thurman said.
Eyes turned to the other man in white, who waved his consent. A call was patched through. Thurman held half a headset to one ear while he waited. He caught the expression on Donald’s face and waved the operator for another set. Donald stepped forward and accepted it while the cable was slotted into the receiver. He could hear the familiar beeping of a call being placed, and his stomach fluttered as doubts began to surface. Finally, a voice answered. A shadow.
Thurman asked him to get Mr. Wyck, the silo Head.
“He’s already coming,” the shadow said.
When Wyck joined the conversation, Thurman told the Head what Donald had found, but it was the shadow who responded. The shadow knew the one they were after. He said that they were close. There was something in his voice, some shock or hesitation, and Thurman waved at the operator to get the sensors in his headset going. Suddenly, it was a Rite of Initiation they were conducting. This shadow became Thurman’s target, and Donald watch
ed a master at work.
“Tell me what you know,” he said. Thurman leaned over the operator and peered at a screen that monitored skin conductivity, heartbeat, and perspiration. Donald was no expert at reading the charts, but he knew something was up by the way the lines spiked up and down while the shadow spoke. He feared for the young man. He wondered if someone would die then and there.
But such was not Thurman’s intent. Within moments, he had the boy speaking of his childhood, had him admitting to this rage he harbored, a sense of not belonging, the need to act up and lash out. He spoke of a childhood that seemed both ideal and frustrating, and Thurman was like a gentle but firm drill sergeant working with a troubled recruit: tearing him down, building him back up.
“You’ve been fed the truth,” he told the young man. “And now you see why it must be divvied out carefully or not at all.”
“I do.”
The shadow sniffed as though he were crying. And yet: the jagged lines on the screen formed less precipitous peaks, less dangerous valleys.
Thurman spoke of sacrifice, of the greater good, of individual lives proving meaningless in the far stretch of time. He took that shadow’s rage and redirected it until the work of being locked up for months with the Legacy was distilled down to its very essence. And through it all, it didn’t sound as though the silo Head breathed once.
“Tell me what needs to be fixed,” Thurman said, after their discussion. He laid the problem at the shadow’s feet. Donald saw how this was better than simply handing him the solution.
The shadow spoke of a culture forming that overvalued individuality, of children that wanted to get away from their families, of generations living levels apart and independence stressed until no one relied on anyone and everyone was dispensable.
The sobs came. Donald watched as Thurman’s face tightened, and he wondered again if he was about to see a death ordered, a young man put out of his misery. Instead, the white-haired general, this senator of another time, released the radio for a moment and said to those gathered around, simply, “He’s ready.”
