But some part of him knew, in a jolting flash, what it meant. He knew it was too late. The others had heard. Everyone had heard. His wife had signed her death certificate, and right before him. The room spun around Holston as he begged Allison to be quiet. It was like he had arrived at the scene of some horrible accident—some mishap in the machine shop—to find a person he loved wounded. Arrived to find them alive and kicking, but knowing at a glance that the injury was a mortal one.
Holston felt warm tears streak down his cheeks as he tried to wipe the hair from her face. Her eyes finally met his, stopped their fevered swirling and locked onto his with awareness. And for a moment, just a second, before he could wonder if she’d been drugged or abused in any way, a spark of calm clarity registered there, a flash of sanity, of cool calculation. And then it was blinked away and her eyes went wild again as she begged to be let out, over and over.
“Lift her up,” Holston said. His husband eyes swam behind tears while he allowed his dutiful, sheriff-self to intervene. There was nothing for it but to lock her up, even as he wanted nothing else but room enough to scream. “That way,” he told Connor, who had both hands under her twisting shoulders. He nodded toward his office and the holding cell beyond. Just past that, down at the end of the hall, the bright yellow paint on the great airlock door stood out, serene and menacing, silent and waiting.
Once in the holding cell, Allison immediately calmed. She sat on the bench, no longer struggling or blabbering, as if she’d only stopped in to rest and enjoy the view. Holston was now the writhing wreck. He paced outside the bars and asked unanswered questions while Deputy Marnes and the Mayor handled his procedural work. The two of them were treating Holston and his wife both like patients. And even as Holston’s mind spun with the horror of the past half hour, in the back of his sheriff brain, where he was always alert for the rising tensions in the silo, that part of him was dimly aware of the shock and rumors trembling through walls of concrete and rebar. The enormous pent-up pressure of the place was now hissing through the seams in whispers.
“Sweetheart, you’ve gotta talk to me,” he pleaded again and again. He stopped his pacing and twisted the bars in his hands. Allison kept her back to him. She gazed at the wall screen, at the brown hills and gray sky and dark clouds. Now and then a hand came up to brush hair out of her face, but otherwise she didn’t move or speak. Only when Holston’s key had gone into the lock, not long after they had wrestled her in and shut the door, did she utter a single “don’t” that had convinced him to remove it.
While he pleaded and she ignored, the machinations of the looming cleaning gyred through the silo. Techs rumbled down the hallway as a suit was sized and readied. Cleaning tools were prepped in the airlock. A canister hissed somewhere as argon was loaded into the flushing chambers. The commotion of it sporadically rumbled past the holding cell where Holston stood gazing at his wife. Chattering techs went dreadfully silent as they squeezed past—they didn’t even seem to breathe in his presence.
Hours went by and Allison refused to talk—a behavior that created its own stir in the silo. Holston spent the entire day blubbering through the bars, his brain on fire with confusion and agony. It had happened in a single moment, the destruction of all that he knew. He tried to wrap his brain around it while Allison sat in the cell, gazing out at the dismal land, seemingly pleased with her far worse status as someone doomed.
It was after dark when she finally spoke, after her last meal had been silently refused for the final time, after the techs had finished in the airlock, closing the yellow door and retiring for a sleepless night. It was after his deputy had gone for the night, patting Holston on the shoulder twice. What felt like many hours after that, when Holston was near to passing out in fatigue from his crying and hoarse remonstrations, long after the hazy sun had settled over the hills visible from the cafeteria and lounge—the hills that hid the rest of that distant, crumbling city. In the near-dark left in the holding cell, Allison whispered something almost inaudible:
“It’s not real.”
That’s what Holston thought he heard. He stirred.
“Baby?” He gripped the bars and pulled himself up to his knees. “Honey,” he whispered, wiping the crust from his cheeks.
She turned. It was like the sun changing its mind and rising back over the hills. To acknowledge him gave him hope. It choked him up, causing him think this had all been a sickness, a fever, something they could have Doc write up to excuse her for everything she’d uttered. She’d never meant it. She was saved just by snapping out of it, and Holston was saved just by seeing her turn to him.
“Nothing you see is real,” she said quietly. She seemed calm of body even as her craziness continued, condemning her with forbidden words.
“Come talk to me,” Holston said. He waved her to the bars.
Allison shook her head. She patted the cot’s thin mattress beside her.
Holston checked the time. It was long past visiting hours. He could be sent to cleaning just for doing what he was about to do.
The key went into the lock without hesitation.
A metallic click rang out impossibly loud.
Holston stepped inside with his wife and sat beside her. It killed him to not touch her, to not wrap her up or drag her out to some safe place, back to their bed where they could pretend it had all been a bad dream.
But he didn’t dare move. He sat and twisted his hands together while she whispered:
“It doesn’t have to be real. Any of this. None of this.” She looked to the screen. Holston leaned so close he could smell the dried sweat from the day’s struggle.
“Baby, what’s going on?”
Her hair stirred with his words. She reached out and rubbed the darkening display, feeling the pixels.
“It could be morning right now and we’d never know. There could be people outside.” She turned and looked at him. “They could be watching us,” she said with a sinister grin.
Holston held her gaze. She didn’t seem crazy at all, not like earlier. Her words were crazy, but she didn’t seem to be. “Where did you get that idea?” he asked. He thought he knew, but he asked anyway. “Did you find something on the hard drives?” He’d heard that she had run straight from her lab toward the airlock, already barking her madness. Something had happened while she was at work. “What did you find?”
“There’s more deleted than just from the uprising,” she whispered. “Of course there would be. Everything is deleted. All the recent stuff, too.” She laughed. Her voice got suddenly loud and her eyes lost focus. “Emails you never sent me, I bet!”
“Honey.” Holston dared to reach for her hands, and she didn’t pull away. He held them. “What did you find? Was it an email? Who was it from?”
She shook her head. “No. I found the programs they use. The ones that make pictures on the screens that look so real.” She looked back to the quickening dusk. “IT,” she said. “Eye. Tee. They’re the ones. They know. It’s a secret that only they know.” She shook her head.
“What secret?” Holston couldn’t tell if this was nonsense or important. He only knew that she was talking.
“But now I know. And you will too. I’ll come back for you, I swear. This’ll be different. We’ll break the cycle, you and me. I’ll come back and we’ll go over that hill together.” She laughed. “If it’s there,” she said loudly. “If that hill is there and it’s green, we’ll go over it together.”
She turned to him.
“There is no uprising, not really, there’s just a gradual leak. Just the people who know, who want out.” She smiled. “They get to go out,” she said. “They get just what they ask for. I know why they clean, why they say they won’t but why they do. I know. I know. And they never come back, they wait and wait and wait, but I won’t. I’ll come right back. This’ll be different.”
Holston squeezed her hands. Tears were dripping off his cheeks. “Baby, why are you doing this?” He felt like she wanted to explain herself now that the silo
was dark and they were all alone.
“I know about the uprisings,” she said.
Holston nodded. “I know. You told me. There were others—”
“No.” Allison pulled away from him, but it was only to make space so she could look him in the eyes. Hers were no longer wild, as before.
“Holston, I know why the uprisings took place. I know why.”
Allison bit her lower lip. Holston waited, his body tense.
“It was always over the doubt, the suspicion, that things weren’t as bad out there as they seemed. You’ve felt that, right? That we could be anywhere, living a lie?”
Holston knew better than to answer, to even twitch. Broaching this subject led to cleaning. He sat frozen and waited.
“It was probably the younger generations,” Allison said. “Every twenty years or so. They wanted to push further, to explore, I think. Don’t you ever feel that urge? Didn’t you when you were younger?” Her eyes lost focus. “Or maybe it was the couples, newly married, who were driven to madness when they were told they couldn’t have kids in this damned, limited place. Maybe they were willing to risk everything for that chance—”
Her eyes focused on something far away. Perhaps she was seeing that lottery ticket they had yet to redeem and now never would. She looked back to Holston. He wondered if he could be sent to cleaning even for his silence, for not yelling her down as she uttered every one of the great forbidden words.
“It could even have been the elderly residents,” she said, “cooped up too long, no longer afraid in their final years, maybe wanting to move out and make room for the others, for the few precious grandchildren. Whoever it was, whoever, every uprising took place because of this doubt, this feeling, that we’re in the bad place right here.” She looked around the cell.
“You can’t say that,” Holston whispered. “That’s the great offense—”
Allison nodded. “Expressing any desire to leave. Yes. The great offense. Don’t you see why? Why is that so forbidden? Because all the uprisings started with that desire, that’s why.”
“You get what you ask for,” Holston recited, those words drilled into his head since youth. His parents had warned him—their only precious child—to never want out of the silo. Never even think it. Don’t let it cross your mind. It was instant death, that thought, and it would be the destruction of their one and only.
He looked back to his wife. He still didn’t understand her madness, this decision. So she had found deleted programs that could make worlds on computer screens look real. What did that mean? Why do this?
“Why?” he asked her. “Why do it this way? Why didn’t you come to me? There has to be a better way to find out what’s going on. We could start by telling people what you’re finding on those drives—”
“And be the ones who start the next great uprising?” Allison laughed. Some of the madness was still there, or maybe it was just an intense frustration and boiling anger. Perhaps a great, multi-generational betrayal had pushed her to the edge. “No thanks,” she said, her laughter subsiding. “I wiped everything I found. I don’t want them to know. Damn them if they stay here. I’m only coming back for you.”
“You don’t come back from this,” Holston said angrily. “You think the banished are still out there? You think they choose to not come back because they feel betrayed by us?”
“Why do you think they do the cleaning?” Allison asked. “Why do they pick up their wool and set to work without hesitation?”
Holston sighed. He felt the anger in him draining away. “No one knows why,” he said.
“But why do you think?”
“We’ve talked about this,” he said. “How many times have we discussed this?” He was sure all couples whispered their theories when they were alone. He looked past Allison as he remembered those times. He looked to the wall and saw the moon’s position and read in it the night’s hour. Their time was limited. His wife would be gone tomorrow. That simple thought came often like lightning from stormy clouds.
“Everyone has theories,” he said. “We’ve shared ours countless times. Let’s just—”
“But now you know something new,” Allison told him. She let go of his hand and brushed the hair from her face. “You and I know something new, and now it all makes sense. It makes perfect sense. And tomorrow I’ll know for sure.” Allison smiled. She patted Holston’s hand as if he were a child. “And one day, my love, you will know it, too.”
6
Present Time
The first year without her, Holston had waited, buying into her insanity, hoping she’d come back. He’d spent the first anniversary of her death scrubbing the holding cell clean, washing the yellow airlock door, straining for some sound, some knock, that the ghost of his wife was back to set him free.
When it didn’t happen, he began to consider the alternative: Going out after her. He had spent enough days, weeks, months going through her computer files, reading some of what she had pieced together, making sense of half of it, to become half mad himself. His world was a lie, he came to believe, and without Allison in it he had nothing to live for even if it were truth.
The second anniversary of her departure was his year of cowardice. He had walked to work, the poisonous words in his mouth—his desire to go out—but he had choked them down at the last second. He and Deputy Marnes had gone on patrol that day with the secret of how near he’d come to death burning inside of him. That was a long year of cowardice, of letting Allison down. The first year had been her failure; last year had been his. But no more.
Now, one more year later, he was alone in the airlock, wearing a cleaning suit, full of doubts and convictions. The silo was sealed off behind him, that thick yellow door bolted tight, and Holston thought that this was not how he’d thought he’d die, or what he had hoped would become of him. He had thought he would remain in the silo forever, his nutrients going as the nutrients of his parents had—into the soil of the eighth floor dirt farm. It seemed a lifetime ago that he had dreamed of a family, of his own child, a fantasy of twins or another lottery win, a wife to grow old with—
A klaxon sounded on the other side of the yellow doors, warning everyone but him away. He was to stay. There was nowhere else for him to go.
The argon chambers hissed, pumping the room full of the inert gas. After a minute of this, Holston could feel the pressure of the air as it crinkled the cleaning suit tight around his joints. He breathed the oxygen circulating inside his helmet and stood before the other door, the forbidden door, the one to the awful outside world, and waited.
There was a metal groan from pistons deep within the walls. The sacrificial plastic curtains covering the interior of the airlock wrinkled from the pressure of the built up argon. These curtains would be incinerated inside the airlock while Holston cleaned. The area would be scrubbed clean before nightfall, ready for the next cleaning.
The great metal doors before him shuddered, and then a shaft of incredible space appeared at their joint, widening as the doors withdrew into the jamb. They wouldn’t open all the way, not like they were once designed to—the risk of invading air had to be minimized.
An argon torrent hissed through the gap, dulling to a roar as the space grew. Holston pressed close, as horrified at himself for not resisting as he’d previously been perplexed by the actions of others. Better to go out, to see the world one time with his own eyes, than to be burned alive with the plastic curtains.
As soon as the opening was wide enough, Holston squeezed through, his suit catching and rubbing at the doors. There was a veil of fog all around him as the argon condensed in the less pressurized air. He stumbled forward blindly, pawing through the soft cloud.
While still in that mist, the outer doors groaned and began closing. The klaxon howls behind were swallowed by the press of thick steel against thick steel, locking him out forever while cleansing fires began to rage inside the airlock.
Holston found himself at the bottom of a concrete ramp, a ra
mp that led up. His time felt short—there was a constant reminder thrumming in the back of his skull—hurry! Hurry! His life was ticking away. He lumbered up the ramp, confused to not already be above ground, so used as he was to seeing the world and the horizon from the cafeteria and lounge, which were on the same level as the airlock.
He shuffled up the narrow ramp, walls of chipped concrete to either side, his visor full of a confusing, brilliant light. At the top of the ramp, Holston saw the heaven into which he’d been condemned for his simple sin of hope. He whirled around, scanning the horizon, his head dizzy from the sight of so much green!
Green hills, green grass, green carpet beneath his feet. Holston whooped in his helmet. His mind buzzed with the sight. Hanging over all the green, there was the exact hue of blue from the children’s books, the white clouds untainted, the movement of living things flapping in the air.
Holston turned around and around, taking it in. He had a sudden memory of his wife doing the same; he had watched her awkwardly, slowly turning, almost as if she were lost or confused or considering whether to do the cleaning at all.
The cleaning!
Holston reached down and pulled a wool pad from his chest. The cleaning! He knew, in a dizzying rush, a torrent of awareness, why, why. Why!
He looked where he always assumed the tall circular wall of the uppermost silo floor would be, but of course that wall was buried. All that stood behind him was a small mound of concrete, a tower no more than eight or nine feet tall. A metal ladder ran up one side; antenna bristled from the top. And on the side facing him—on all the sides he saw as he approached—were the wide, curving, fisheye lenses of the silo’s powerful cameras.
Holston held out his wool and approached the first. He imagined the view of himself from inside the cafeteria, staggering forward, becoming impossibly large. He had watched his wife do the same thing three years ago. He remembered her waving, he had thought at the time for balance, but had she been telling him something? Had she been grinning like a fool, as wide as he was grinning now, while she remained hidden behind that silver visor? Had her heart been pounding with foolish hope while she sprayed, scrubbed, wiped, applied? Holston knew the cafeteria would be empty; there was no one left who loved him enough to watch, but he waved anyway. And for him, it wasn’t the raw anger he imagined many might have cleaned with, it wasn’t the knowledge that they in the silo were condemned and the condemned set free, it wasn’t the feeling of betrayal that guided the wool in his hand in small, circular motions. It was pity. It was raw pity and unconstrained joy.
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