Dust

by Hugh Howey

Page 44

 

  “I think it might be safer out there for us than if we stay. I know what will happen if we stay. I want to see if it’s better if we leave. ”

  “You hope it’s safer,” someone said.

  Juliette didn’t search for the voice. She let her gaze drift across the crowd. Everyone was thinking the same thing, herself included.

  “That’s right. I hope. I have the word of a stranger. I have whispers from someone I’ve never met. I have a feeling in my gut, in my heart. I have these lines that cross on a map. And if you think that’s not enough, then I agree with you. I’ve lived my entire life only believing what I can see. I need proof. I need to see results. And even then I need to see them a second and a third time before I get a glimpse of how things truly are. But this is a case where what I know for certain – the life that awaits us here – is not worth living. And there’s a chance that a better one can be found elsewhere. I’m willing to go see, but only if enough of you are with me. ”

  “I’m with you,” Raph said.

  Juliette nodded. The room blurred a little. “I know you are,” she said.

  Solo raised his hand. With his other, he tugged on his beard. Juliette felt Elise take her hand. Shaw held a squirming puppy, but still managed to raise his.

  “How will we get there if we don’t aim to dig?” one of the miners hollered.

  Juliette bent at the waist to grab something at her feet. While her head was down, she wiped at her eyes. She stood and lifted one of the cleaning suits, held it in one hand, a helmet in the other.

  “We’re going outside,” she said.

  60

  The food dwindled while they worked. It was a grim countdown, these disappearing cans and what had been rounded up from the farms. Not everyone in the silo participated; many never came to the Town Hall; many more simply wandered off, realizing they could grab more grow plots if they hurried. Several mechanics asked for permission to head back down to Mechanical and round up those who had refused to make the climb, to try and convince them to come, to see if Walker could be stirred. Juliette was overjoyed with the prospect of gathering more people to go. She also felt the pressure mount as everyone worked.

  The server room became a massive workshop, something like you’d see down the halls of Supply. Nearly a hundred and fifty cleaning suits were laid out, all of them needing to be sized and adjusted. Juliette was sad to see that it was more than they needed, but also a little relieved. It would’ve been a problem the other way around.

  She had shown a dozen mechanics how the valves went together like she and Nelson had used to breathe in the Suit Lab. There weren’t enough of the valves in IT, so porters were given samples and sent down to Supply, where Juliette was sure there would be more of these parts otherwise useless for survival. Gaskets, heat tape, and seals were needed. They were also told to secure and haul up the welding kits in both Supply and Mechanical. She showed them the difference between the acetylene bottles and the oxygen and said they wouldn’t need the acetylene.

  Erik calculated the distance using the chart hanging on the wall and reckoned they could put a dozen people to a bottle. Juliette said to make it ten to be safe. With fifty or so people working on the suits – the fallen servers acting as workbenches as they knelt or sat on the floor – she took a small group up to the cafeteria for what she knew would be a grim job. Just her father, Raph, Dawson, and two of the older porters whom she figured had handled bodies before. On the way up, they stopped below the farms and went to the coroner’s office past the pump rooms. Juliette found a supply of folded black bags and pulled out five dozen. From there they climbed in silence.

  ••••

  There was no airlock attached to Silo 17, not anymore. The outer door remained cracked open from the fall of the silo decades before. Juliette remembered squeezing through that door twice before, her helmet getting stuck the first time. The only barriers between them and the outside air were the inner airlock door and the door to the sheriff’s office. Bare membranes between a dead world and a dying one.

  Juliette helped the others remove a tangle of chairs and tables from around the office door. There was a narrow path between them where she had come and gone over a month ago, but they needed more room to work. She warned the others about the bodies inside, but they knew from collecting the bags what they were in for. A handful of flashlights converged on the door as Juliette prepared to open it. They all wore masks and rubber gloves at her father’s insistence. Juliette wondered if they should’ve donned cleaning suits instead.

  The bodies inside were just as she remembered them: a tangle of gray and lifeless limbs. The stench of something both foul and metallic filled her mask, and Juliette had a memory of dumping fetid soup on herself to drown the outside air. This was the stench of death and something besides.

  They hauled the bodies out one by one and placed them in the funeral bags. It was grisly work. Limp flesh sloughed off bones like a slow roast. “The joints,” Juliette cautioned, her voice hot and muffled by her mask. “Armpits and knees. ”

  The bodies held together barely and enough, the tendons and bone doing most of the work. Black zippers were pulled shut with relief. Coughing and gagging filled the air.

  Most of the bodies inside the sheriff’s office had piled up by the door as if they’d crawled over one another in an attempt to get back inside, back into the cafeteria. Other bodies were in a state of more serene rest. A man slouched over on the tattered remnants of a cot in the open holding cell, just the rusted frame, the mattress long gone. A woman lay in the corner with her arms crossed over her chest as if sleeping. Juliette moved the last of the bodies with her father, and she saw how wide her father’s eyes were, how they were fixed on her. She glanced over his shoulder as she shuffled backwards out of the sheriff’s office, staring at the airlock door that awaited them all, its yellow skin flaking off in chips of paint.

  “This isn’t right,” her father said, his voice muffled and his mask bobbing up and down with the movement of his jaw. They tucked the body into an open bag and zipped it up.

  “We’ll give them a proper burial,” she assured him, assuming he meant it wasn’t right how the bodies were being handled – stacked like bags of dirty laundry.

  He removed his gloves and his mask, rested back on his heels, and wiped his brow with the back of his hand. “No. It’s these people. I thought you said this place was practically empty when you got here. ”

  “It was. Just Solo and the kids. These people have been dead a long time. ”

  “That’s not possible,” her father said. “They’re too well preserved. ” His eyes drifted across the bags, wrinkles of concern or confusion in his brow. “I’d say they’ve been dead for three weeks. Four or five at the most. ”

  “Dad, they were here when I arrived. I crawled over them. I asked Solo about them once, and he said he discovered them years ago. ”

  “That simply can’t be—”

  “It’s probably because they weren’t buried. Or the gas outside kept the bugs away. It doesn’t matter, does it?”

  “It matters plenty when something isn’t right like this. There’s something not right about this entire silo, I’m telling you. ” He stood and headed toward the stairwell where Raph was ladling hauled water into scrounged cups and cans. Her father took one for himself and passed one to Juliette. He was lost in thought, she could tell. “Did you know Elise had a twin sister?” her father asked.

  Juliette nodded. “Hannah told me. Died in childbirth. The mother passed as well. They don’t talk about it much, especially not with her. ”

  “And those two boys. Marcus and Miles. Another set of twins. The eldest boy Rickson says he thought he had a brother, but his father wouldn’t talk about it and he never knew his mother to ask her. ” Her father took a sip of water and peered into the can. Juliette tried to drown the metallic taste on her tongue while Dawson helped with one of the
bags. Dawson coughed and looked as though he were about to gag.

  “It’s a lot of dying,” Juliette agreed, worried where her father’s thoughts were going. She thought of the brother she never knew. She looked for any sign on her father’s face, any indication that this reminded him of his wife and lost son. But he was piecing together some other puzzle.

  “No, it’s a lot of living. Don’t you see? Three sets of twins in six births? And those kids are as fit as fiddles with no care. Your friend Jimmy doesn’t have a hole in his teeth and can’t remember the last time he was sick. None of them can. How do you explain that? How do you explain these bodies piled up like they fell over a few weeks ago?”

  Juliette caught herself staring at her arm. She gulped the last of her water, handed the tin to her father, and began rolling up her sleeve. “Dad, do you remember me asking you about scars, about whether or not they go away?”

  He nodded.

  “A few of my scars have disappeared. ” She showed him the crook of her arm as if he would know what was no longer there. “I didn’t believe Lukas when he told me. But I used to have a mark here. And another here. And you said it was a miracle I survived my burns, didn’t you?”

  “You received good attention straight away—”

  “And Fitz didn’t believe me when I told him about the dive I made to fix the pump. He said he’s worked flooded mineshafts and has seen men twice my size get sick from breathing air just ten meters deep, much less thirty or forty. He says I would’ve died if I’d done what I did. ”

  “I don’t know the first thing about mining,” her father said.

  “Fitz does, and he thinks I should be dead. And you think these people should be rotted—”

  “They should be bones. I’m telling you. ”

  Juliette turned and gazed at the blank wallscreen. She wondered if it was all a dream. This was what happened to the dying soul; it scrambled for some perch, some stairway to cling to, some way not to fall. She had cleaned and died on that hill outside her silo. She had never loved Lukas at all. Never gotten to know him properly. This was a land of ghosts and fiction, events held together with all the vacant solidarity of dreams, all the nonsense of a drunken mind. She was long dead and only just now realizing it—

  “Maybe something in the water,” her father said.

  Juliette turned away from the blank wall. She reached out to him, held his arms in her hands, then stepped closer. He wrapped his arms around her and she wrapped hers around him. His stubble scratched her cheek, and she fought hard not to cry.

  “It’s okay,” her father said. “It’s okay. ”

  She wasn’t dead. But things weren’t right.

  “Not in the water,” she said, though she’d swallowed her fair share in that silo. She released her father and watched the first of the bags head to the stairwell. Someone was rigging up spliced electrical cables for rope and running it over the rail to lower a body. Porters be damned, she saw. Even the porters were saying porters be damned.

  “Maybe it’s in the air,” she said. “Maybe this is what happens when you don’t gas a place. I don’t know. But I think you’re right that there’s something wrong with this silo. And I think it’s high time we get out of here. ”

  Her father took a last swig of water. “How long before we leave?” he asked. “And are you sure this is a good idea?”

  Juliette nodded. “I’d rather we died out there trying than in here killing each other. ” And she realized she sounded like all those who had been sent to clean, all the dangerous dreamers and mad fools, those she had mocked and never understood. She sounded like a person who trusted a machine to work without peeking inside, without first tearing it completely apart.

  Silo 1

  61

  Charlotte slapped the elevator door with her palm. She had jabbed the call button right as her brother disappeared, but it was too late. She hopped on one foot to keep her balance, her suit only half on. Down the aisle behind her, Darcy was struggling into his suit. “Will he do it?” Darcy called out.

  Charlotte nodded. He would. He had pulled the other suit out for Darcy. This was his plan all along. Charlotte slapped the door again and cursed her brother.

  “You need to get dressed,” Darcy said.

  She turned and sank to the ground, hugged her shins. She didn’t want to move. She watched Darcy wriggle into his suit and get the collar over his head. He stood and tried to reach around for the zipper, finally gave up. “Was I supposed to put this backpack on first?” He grabbed one of the bundles her brother had packed and opened it up. He pulled out a can, put it back. Brought out a gun, kept this out. He worked his head and arms back out of the suit. “Charlotte, we’ve got half an hour. How’re we getting out of here?”

  Charlotte wiped her cheeks and struggled to her feet. Darcy didn’t have the first clue about how to get suited up. She worked her legs into her suit and left the sleeves and collar off, hurried down the aisle toward him. There was a ding behind her. She stopped and turned, thinking Donald had come back, had changed his mind, forgetting that she had pressed the call button.

  Two men in light blue coveralls gaped at her from inside the express lift. One of them peered at the buttons in confusion, looked back to Charlotte – this woman with a silver suit half on and half off – and then the doors slowly closed.

  “Shit,” Darcy said. “We really need to go. ”

  A panic stirred in Charlotte, an internal countdown. She thought of the way her brother had looked at her from inside the lift, the way he had kissed her goodbye. Her chest felt as though it might implode, but she hurried to Darcy and helped him get his arms out and his pack on. Once he was in fully, she zipped up the back. He helped her do the same, then followed her to the end of the aisle. Charlotte pointed to the low hangar and handed him both helmets. The bin her brother had left was right where he’d said it would be. “Open that door up and jam the bin halfway inside. I’ll go start the lift. ”