Dust

by Hugh Howey

Page 14

 

  She tried to shake those memories free. Glancing down at her pockets, she made sure the flaps on all the pouches were tightly sealed. Every step of the upcoming decontamination flitted through her mind. She trusted that everything would be in place.

  “Here we go,” Lukas radioed. Again, his voice was hollow and distant.

  On cue, the gears in the airlock door squealed, and a plume of pressurized argon spilled through the gap. Juliette threw herself into the mist, an intense sensation of relief accompanying the move indoors.

  “I’m in. I’m in,” she said.

  The doors thumped shut behind her. Juliette glanced at the inner airlock door, saw a helmet on the other side of the glass porthole, someone peering in, watching. Moving to the ready bench, she opened the airtight box Nelson had installed in her absence. Needed to be quick. The gas chambers and the flames were all automated.

  Ripping the sealed pouches off her thighs, she placed them inside. She unslung the borer with its sample and added that as well, then pushed the lid shut and engaged the locks. The practice run-through had helped. Moving in the suit felt comfortable. She had lain in bed at night thinking through each step until they were habit.

  Shuffling across the small airlock, she gripped the edge of the immense metal tub she’d welded together. It was still warm from the last bout of flames, but the water Nelson had topped it up with had sapped much of the heat. With a deep and pointless breath, she lowered herself over the edge.

  The water flooded against her helmet, and Juliette felt the first real onrush of fear. Her breath quickened. Being outside was nothing like being underwater again. The floods were in her mouth; she could feel herself taking tiny gulps of air, could taste the steel and rust from the steps; she forgot what she was supposed to be doing.

  Glimpsing one of the handles at the bottom of the tub, she reached for it and pulled herself down. One boot at a time, she found the bar welded at the other end of the tub and slipped her feet under, held herself to the bottom, trusting that her back was covered. Her arms ached as she strained against the suit’s buoyancy. And even through her helmet and beneath that water, she could hear displaced fluid splashing over the lip and onto the airlock floor. She could hear the flames kick on and roar and lick at the tub.

  “Three, four, five—” Lukas counted, and a painful memory flashed before her, the dull green emergency lights, the panic in her chest—

  “Six, seven, eight—”

  She could almost taste the oil and fuel from that final gasp as she emerged, alive, from the flooded depths.

  “Nine, ten. Burn complete,” he said.

  Letting go of the handles and kicking her boots free, she bobbed to the boiling surface, the heat of the water felt through her suit. She fought to get her knees and boots beneath her. Water splashed and steamed everywhere. She feared the longer this next step took, the more the air could attach itself to her, contaminating the second airlock.

  She hurried to the door, boots slipping dangerously, the locking wheel already spinning.

  Hurry, hurry, she thought to herself.

  It opened a crack. She tried to dive through, slipped, landed painfully on the door’s jamb. Several gloved hands grabbed at her as she clawed her way forward, the two suited technicians yanking her through before slamming the door shut.

  Nelson and Sophia – two of the former suit techs – had brushes ready. They dipped them into a vat of blue neutralizing agent and began scrubbing Juliette down before turning to themselves and each other.

  Juliette turned her back and made sure they got that as well. She went to the vat and fished out the third brush, turned and started scrubbing Sophia’s suit. And saw that it wasn’t Sophia in there.

  She squeezed her glove mic. “What the hell, Luke?”

  Lukas shrugged, a wince of guilt on his face. She imagined he couldn’t stand the thought of someone else risking themselves. Or probably just wanted to be there by the airlock door in case something went wrong. Juliette couldn’t blame him; she would’ve done the same thing.

  They scrubbed the second airlock while Peter Billings and a few others looked on from the sheriff’s office. Bubbles from the cleaning fluid floated up in the air, then trembled toward the vents where the air inside the new airlock was being pumped into the first. Nelson worked on the ceiling, which they’d kept low on purpose. Less air inside. Less volume. Easier to reach. Juliette searched Nelson’s face for any sign of trouble from his time in the inner airlock and blamed the flush and sweat on his energetic scrubbing.

  “You’ve got perfect vacuum,” Peter said, using the radio in his office. Juliette motioned to the others, drew her hand across her neck, then closed her fist. They both nodded and went back to scrubbing. While new air was cycled in from the cafeteria, they went over each other one more time, and Juliette finally had a moment to revel in the fact that she was back. Back inside. They had done it. No burns, no hospitals, no contamination. And now they would hopefully learn something.

  Peter’s voice filled her helmet again: “We didn’t want to tell you while you were suiting up, but the dig punched through to the other side about half an hour ago. ”

  Juliette felt a surge of both elation and guilt. She should’ve been down there. The timing was abysmal, but she had felt her window of opportunity closing there in the Up Top. She resigned herself to being happy for Solo and the kids, relieved by the end of their long ordeal.

  The second airlock – with the sealed glass door she’d fashioned from a shower stall – began to open. Behind her, a bright light bloomed inside the old airlock, and the small porthole glowed red. A second round of flames surged and raged in the small room, bathing the spoiled walls, charring the very air, boiling off the water Juliette had spilled on the floor, and throwing the vat into a cauldron of raging steam.

  Juliette waved the others out of the new airlock while she eyed the old one warily, remembering. Remembering being in there. Lukas came back and tugged her along, through the door and into the former jail cell where they stripped down to their undersuits for yet another round of showering. As she peeled off the soaking layers, all Juliette could think about was the sealed and fireproof box on the ready bench. She hoped it was worth the risk, that the answers to a host of cruel questions were tucked away, safely inside.

  Silo 17

  21

  The great digging machine stood quiet and still. Dust fell from where it had chewed through the ceiling, and the large steel teeth and spinning discs gleamed from their journey through solid rock. Between the discs, the digger’s face was caked with dirt, debris, torn lengths of rebar, and large rocks. By the edge of the machine, where it jutted out into the heart of Silo 17, there was a black crack that connected two very different worlds.

  Jimmy watched as strangers spilled from one of those worlds into his. Burly men with dark beards and yellow smiles, hands black with grease, stepped through and squinted up at the rusted pipes overhead, the puddles on the ground, the calm and quiet organs of a silo that had long ago rumbled and now sat deathly still.

  They clasped Jimmy’s hand, called him Solo, and squeezed the terrified children. They told him Jules said hello. And then they adjusted the lights on their helmets, which threw golden cones before them, and went splashing off into Jimmy’s home.

  Elise clutched Jimmy’s leg as another group of miners and mechanics squeezed past. Two dogs bounded with them, stopped to sniff at the puddles, then at a trembling Elise, before following their owners. Courtnee – Juliette’s friend – finished instructing a group before returning to Jimmy and the kids. Jimmy watched her move. Her hair was lighter than Juliette’s, her features sharper, she wasn’t quite as tall, but she had that same fierceness. He wondered if all the people from this other world would be the same: the men bearded and covered in soot, the women wild and resourceful.

  Rickson rounded up the twins while Hannah cradled her crying b
aby and tried to soothe it back to sleep. Courtnee handed Jimmy a flashlight.

  “I don’t have enough lights for all of you,” she said, “so you’ll want to stick close together. ” She held her hand over her head. “The tunnel is high enough, just mind the support columns. And the ground is rough, so go slow and stick to the center. ”

  “Why can’t we stay here and have the doctor come to us?” Rickson asked.

  Hannah shot him a look as she bounced the baby on her hip.

  “It’s much safer where we’re taking you,” Courtnee said, glancing around at walls slick and corroded. The way she looked at Jimmy’s home made him feel defensive. They’d been getting along just fine for some time now.

  Rickson flashed Jimmy a look like he had his own doubts about it being safer on the other side. Jimmy knew what he was scared of. Jimmy had heard the twins talking, and the twins had heard the older kids whispering. Hannah would have to get an implant in her hip like their mothers had. Rickson would be assigned a color and a job other than fending for his family. The young couple were just as wary of these adults as Jimmy was.

  Despite their fears, they donned hard hats borrowed from those pouring into their world, clung to one another, and squeezed through the gap. Beyond the digger’s teeth, there was a dark tunnel like the Wilds when all the lights were off. But there was a coolness, and an echo to their voices different than the Wilds. The earth seemed to swallow them as Jimmy tried to keep up with Courtnee, and the kids tried to keep up with him.

  They entered a metal door and passed through the long digging machine, which was warm inside. Down a narrow corridor, people squeezing past in the other direction, and finally out another door and back into the cool and dark of the tunnel. Men and women shouted to one another, lights dancing from their helmets as they wrestled with piles of rubble that climbed toward the ceiling and out of sight. Rocks shifted and clattered. There were mounds of them on either side, leaving a precarious pathway in the center. Workers filed past, smelling of mud and sweat. There was a boulder taller than Jimmy that the foot traffic had to bend around.

  It felt odd to walk straight ahead in one direction like that. They walked and walked without ever bumping into a wall or bending back around. It was unnatural. That lateral void was more frightening than the darkness with its occasional lights. It was scarier than the veil of dust drifting from the ceiling or the occasional rock tumbling down from the piles. It was worse than the strangers bumping past them in the dark, or the steel beams in the middle of the passage that leapt up from the swirling shadows. It was the eeriness of there being nothing to stop them. Walk and walk and walk in one direction, no end to it all.

  Jimmy was used to the up-and-down of the spiral staircase. That was normal. This was not. And yet he stumbled along across the rough surface of the chewed rock, past men and women calling to one another in the flash-beam-studded darkness, between piles of earth crowding the narrow center. They overtook men and women carrying parts of machines and lengths of steel taken from his silo, and Jimmy wanted to say something to them. Elise sniffled and said she was scared. Jimmy scooped her up and let her cling to his neck.

  The tunnel went on and on. Even when a light could be seen at the end, a rough square of light, it took countless steps to make that bright maw grow larger. Jimmy thought of Juliette walking this far in the outside. It seemed impossible that she had survived such an ordeal. He had to remind himself that he had heard her voice dozens of times since, that she had really done it, had gone off for help and had kept her promise to come back for him. Their two worlds had been made one.

  He dodged another steel column in the center of the tunnel. Aiming his flashlight up, he could see the overhead beams these columns supported. The loose rocks crumbling down gave Jimmy new cause for alarm, and he found himself less reluctantly following Courtnee. He pressed forward, toward the promise of light ahead, forgetting what he was leaving behind and where he was going and thinking only about getting out from underneath the tenuously held earth.

  Far behind them, a loud crack sounded out, followed by the rumble of shifting rock and then shouts from workers to get out of the way. Hannah brushed past him. He set Elise down, and she and the twins rushed ahead, dancing in and out of the beam of Courtnee’s flashlight. Streams of people filed past, lights affixed to their hard hats, heading toward Jimmy’s home. He patted his chest reflexively, feeling for the old key that he had put on before leaving the server room. His silo was unprotected. But the fear he could sense in the kids somehow made him stronger. He wasn’t as terrified as they were. It was his duty to be strong.

  The tunnel came to a blessed end, the twins scampering out first. They startled the gruff men and women in their dark blue coveralls with knee patches of grease and their leather aprons slotted with tools. Eyes grew wide on faces white with chalk and black from soot. Jimmy paused at the mouth of the tunnel and let Rickson and Hannah out first. All work ceased at the sight of the bundle cradled in Hannah’s arms. One of the women stepped forward and lifted a hand as if to touch the child, but Courtnee waved her back and told the rest to return to their work. Jimmy scanned the crowd for Juliette, even though he’d been told she was up top. Elise begged to be carried again, her tiny hands stretched up in the air. Jimmy adjusted his pack and obliged, ignoring the pain in his hip. The bag around Elise’s neck banged his ribs with its heavy book.

  He joined the procession of little ones as they wove through the walls of workers frozen in place, workers who tugged their beards and scratched their heads and watched him as if he were a man from some fictional land. And Jimmy felt at his core that this was a grave mistake. Two worlds had been united, but they were not anything alike. Power surged here. Lights burned steady, and it was crowded with grown men and women. It smelled different. Machines rumbled rather than sat quiet. And the long decades of growing older sloughed off him in a sudden panic as Jimmy hurried to catch up with the others, just one of a number of frightened youth, emerging from shadows and silence into the bright and crowded and noisy.