by Hugh Howey
Page 35
The hose lay in a coil at the man’s feet. The knife was back out, glimmering in his hand. “You ever thought of being on a committee?”
“I need to find my friend,” Jimmy said.
Another swipe, but the electrical cord put up more resistance. It was the copper at the center. The man held a loop of the black wire in his hand and sawed back and forth, great muscles bulging beneath an undershirt stained with sweat. After some exertion, the knife burst free, the cord severed in two.
“If your friend ain’t with the men in the farms, she’s probably up with the chanters. I passed them on my way down. They found a chapel. ” Terry jabbed the knife skyward before stuffing it away and looping wire around his arm.
“A chapel,” Jimmy said. He knew the one. “Thank you, Terry. ”
“Only fair,” the man said, shrugging. “Thanks for telling me where all this power comes from. ”
“The power—?”
“Yeah, you said it came from above. From level …”
“Thirty-four? I said that?”
The man smiled. “I believe you did. ”
50
Elise had watched the people in the bottom where the floods used to be – the ones who were working to dig their way out and get the power going, get the lights on. She had also seen people at the farms harvesting a bunch of food and figuring out how to get people fed. And now there was this third group of people arranging furniture and sweeping the floors and making things tidy. She had no clue what they were trying to do.
The nice man who had last seen Puppy was off to one side, speaking with another man in a white outfit who had a bald circle in the center of his head even though he looked too young to be bald. The outfit was strange. Like a blanket. Instead of two legs, it had only one, and it was big enough that it swirled around him and made it so you couldn’t hardly see his feet. The nice man with the dark whiskers seemed to be arguing a point. The man in the white blanket just frowned and stood there. Now and then, one or both of them would glance at Elise, and she worried they were talking about her. Maybe they were talking about how to find Puppy.
The furniture grew into straight lines, all facing the same way. There weren’t any tables like the rooms she used to eat in behind the farms, the places where she would hide under furniture and pretend she was a rat with a whole rat family, all of them talking and twitching their whiskers. Here, it was just chairs and benches facing a wall where a colorful glass picture stood with some of the glass broken out. A man in coveralls worked behind that wall, was visible through the broken glass and hazy behind the part that remained. He spoke to someone else, who passed a black cord through a door. They were working on something, and then a light burst on back there, throwing colorful rays across the room, and a few people moving furniture stopped and stared. Some of them whispered. It sounded like they were all whispering the same thing.
“Elise. ”
The man with the dark whiskers knelt down beside her. Elise startled and clutched her bag to her chest. “Yes?” she asked, her voice a whisper.
“Have you heard of the Pact?” the man asked. The other man with no hair on the center of his head and the white blanket around his shoulders stood behind, that same frown on his face. Elise imagined that he never smiled.
She nodded. “A pack is a bunch of animals, like deer and dogs and puppies. ”
The man smiled. “Pact, not pack. ” But it all sounded the same to Elise. “And dogs and puppies are the same animal. ”
She didn’t feel like correcting him. She’d seen what dogs looked like in her book and in the bizarre, and they were scary. Puppies weren’t scary.
“Where did you hear about deer?” the man in the white blanket asked. “Do you have children’s books over here?”
Elise shook her head. “We have real books. I’ve seen deer. They’re tall and funny with skinny legs, and they live in the woods. ”
The man with the whiskers in the orange coveralls didn’t seem to care about deer. Not as much as the other man. Elise looked to the door, wondered where everyone she knew was. Where was Solo? He should’ve been helping her find Puppy.
“The Pact is a very important document,” said the man in orange. She suddenly remembered his name was Mr. Rash. He had introduced himself, but she was bad with names. Only ever needed to know a few. Mr. Rash was very nice to her. “The Pact is like a book but only smaller,” he was saying. “Similar to how you’re like a woman but only smaller. ”
“I’m seven,” Elise said. She wasn’t small anymore.
“And you’ll be seventeen before you know it. ” The man with the whiskers reached out and touched Elise’s cheek. Elise pulled back, startled, which made the man frown. He turned and looked up at the man in the white blanket, who was studying Elise.
“What books were these?” the man in white asked. “The ones with these animals, they were here in this silo?”
Elise felt her hands drop to her bag and rest protectively there, rest on her Memory Book. She was pretty sure the page with the deer had gone into her book. She liked the things about the green world, the things about fishing and animals and the sun and stars. She bit her lip to keep from saying anything.
The man with the whiskers – Mr. Rash – knelt beside her. He had a sheet of paper and a purple stick of chalk in his hands. He set these on the bench by her leg and rested his hand on Elise’s knee. The other man stepped closer.
“If you know of books in this place, it is your duty to God to tell us where they lie,” the man in the blanket said. “Do you believe in God?”
Elise nodded. Hannah and Rickson had taught her about God and the night prayers. The world blurred around her, and Elise realized she had tears in her eyes. She swiped them away. Rickson hated it when she cried.
“Where are these books, Elise? How many of them are there?”
“A lot,” she said, thinking of all the books she’d stolen pages out of. Solo had been so angry with her when he’d found out she was taking pictures and the How-To’s from them. But the How-To’s showed her a better way to fish, and then Solo had shown her how to stitch the pages in and out of books proper and they had fished together.
The man in the white blanket knelt down in front of her. “Are these books all over the place?”
“This is Father Remmy,” Mr. Rash said, making room for the man with the bald patch and introducing him to Elise. “Father Remmy is going to guide us through these troubling times. We are a flock. We used to follow Father Wendel, but some leave the flock and some join. Like you. ”
“These books,” Mr. Remmy said, who seemed young to be a father, didn’t seem all that much older than Rickson. “Are they near us? Where might we find them?” He swept his hand from the wall to the ceiling, had a strange way of talking, a loud voice that could be felt in Elise’s chest, a voice that made her want to answer. And his eyes – green like the flooded depths she and Solo used to fish in – made her want to tell the truth.
“All in one place,” Elise said, sniffling.
“Where?” the man whispered. He was holding her hands, and the other man was watching this with a funny expression. “Where are the books? It is so important, my daughter. There is only one book, you know. All these others are lies. Now tell me where they are. ”
Elise thought of the one book in her bag. It was not a lie. But she didn’t want this man touching her book. Didn’t want him touching her at all. She tried to pull away, but his large hands gripped her more firmly. Something swam behind his eyes.
“Thirty-four,” she whispered.
“Level thirty-four?”
Elise nodded, and his hands loosened on hers. As he pulled away, Mr. Rash moved closer and rested a hand on Elise’s hand, covering the place the other man had hurt.
“Father, can we … ?” Mr. Rash asked.
The man with the bald circle nodded, and Mr. Rash picked up the piece of pape
r from the bench. One side was printed on. The other side had been written on by hand. There was a purple chalk, and Mr. Rash asked Elise if she could spell, if she knew her letters.
Elise bobbed her head. Her hand once again fell to her bag, guarding her book. She could read better than Miles. Hannah had made sure of that.
“Can you spell your name for me?” the man asked. He showed her the piece of paper. There were lines drawn at the bottom. Two names had already been signed. Another line was blank. “Right here,” he said, indicating that line. He pressed the chalk into Elise’s hand. She was reading some of the other words, but the writing was messy. It had been written quickly and on a rough surface. Plus, her vision was blurry. “Just your name,” he said once more. “Show me. ”
Elise wanted to get away. She wanted Puppy and Solo and Jewel and even Rickson. She wiped her tears and swallowed a sob that was trying to choke her. If she did what they wanted, she would be free to go. There were more and more people in that room. Some of them were watching her and whispering. She heard a man say that someone else was lucky, that there were more men than women, that people would get left out if they weren’t careful. They were watching her and waiting, and the furniture was now straight, the floors swept, some green leaves from plucked plants scattered around the stage.
“Right here,” Mr. Rash said. He held her wrist and forced the chalk until it hovered over the line. “Your name. ” And everyone was watching. Elise knew her letters. She could read better than Rickson. But she could hardly see. She was a fish like she used to catch, under the water, looking up at all these hungry people. But she printed her name. She hoped it would make them go away.
“Good girl. ”
Mr. Rash bent forward and kissed her on the cheek. People started clapping. And then the man in the white blanket with the fascination for books chanted some words, that voice booming and pretty at the same time. His words felt deep within her chest as he pronounced someone in the name of the Pact, husband and wife.
Part IV ~ Dust
Silo 1
51
Darcy rode the elevator up to the armory. He put the small bag with the bullet away and stuffed the blood results into his pocket, stepped out of the elevator and fumbled for the wide bank of light switches. Something told him the pilot missing from the cryopod in Emergency Personnel was hiding on this level. It was the level where they’d found the man posing as the Shepherd. It was also where a handful of pilots had been stationed a month or so ago during a flurry of activity. He and Stevens and a few of the others had searched the level several times already, but Darcy had a feeling. It started with the fact that the lift required a security override before it would even bring him to that level.
Only a handful of top personnel and those in Security could manage that sort of override, and on his previous visits Darcy had seen why. Crates of munitions and ammo lined the shelves. There were tarps draped over what appeared to be military drones. Pyramids of bombs sitting on racks. Not anything you wanted the kitchen staff stumbling across when they came down for a can of powdered potatoes and jabbed the wrong button in the lift.
Previous searches hadn’t turned up anyone else, but there had to be thousands of places among the tall shelves with their large plastic bins. Darcy peered into these shelves as the lights overhead flickered on. He imagined that he was this pilot, moments after he’d killed a man, arriving there in a lift splattered with blood, on the run and looking for a place to hide.
Crouching, he examined the polished concrete outside the lift. Stepping back and tilting his head, he studied the shine. There was a bit more gleam in front of the door. Perhaps it was from the uneven traffic, the shuffle of boots, the gradual wear. He lowered himself to the floor and took a deep sniff, noted the smell of leaves and pine trees, of lemon and a time forgotten, back when things grew and the world smelled fresh.
Someone had cleaned the floor here. Recently, he thought. He remained crouched and peered through the aisles of weapons and emergency gear, aware that he wasn’t alone. What he should do is head straight for Brevard and bring in backup. There was a man in here capable of killing, someone from Emergency Personnel with military training, someone with access to every weapon in those crates. But this man was also wounded, hiding, and scared. And backup seemed like a bad idea.
It wasn’t so much that Darcy was the one who had pieced this together and deserved the credit, it was his increasing certainty that these murders pointed straight to the top. The people involved in this were of the highest rank. Files had been tampered with, Deep Freeze disturbed, neither of which should’ve been possible. The people he reported to might be involved. And Darcy had stood there propping up the real Shepherd while the old man laid boots into his impostor. Nothing about that was protocol. That shit was personal. He knew the guy that took the beating, used to see him up late shifts all the time, had spoken with him now and then. It was hard to imagine that guy killing people. Everything was upside down.
Darcy pulled his flashlight off his hip and began to search the shelves. He needed something more than a bright light, something more than they assigned to night guards. There were designations on the bins from a different life, one barely remembered. He pried open the lids on several bins – the vacuum seals softly popping – before he found what he was looking for: An H&K . 45, a pistol both modern and ancient. Top of the line when it rolled off the factory floor, but those factories were little more than memories. He slotted a clip into the weapon and hoped the ammo was good. He felt more confident with the firearm and crept through the storeroom with renewed purpose, not the cursory laps from the day before when eighty levels needed searching.
