by Hugh Howey
Invisible machines rode the winds around the planet, destroying anything human, returning the world to wilderness. The people buried underground were dormant seeds that would have to wait another two hundred years before they sprouted. Two hundred years. Donald felt his throat begin to tickle once more and wondered if he had two days in him.
At that moment, he only had fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes before the operators would come back on shift. These sessions of his had grown regular. It was not unusual to clear everyone out for classified discussions, but it was beginning to seem suspicious that he did it every day at the same exact time. He could see the way they looked at one another as they took their mugs and filed out. Probably thought it was some romance. Donald often felt as if it were a romance of sorts. A romance of olden times and truth.
Now he was being stood up. Half of this session had been wasted on listening to the line buzz and go unanswered. Something was happening over there. Something bad. Or maybe he was on edge from the reports of a dead body found in his own silo, some murder the folks in Security were looking into. It was strange that this barely stirred him. He cared more about other silos, had lost all empathy for his own.
There was a click in his ringing headset. “Hello?” he asked, his voice tired and weak. He trusted the machines to make him sound stronger.
There was no reply, just the sound of someone breathing. But that was good enough for an introduction. Lukas never failed to say hello.
“Mayor,” he said.
“You know I don’t like being called that,” she said. She sounded winded, as though she’d been running.
“You prefer Juliette?”
Silence. Donald wondered why he preferred to hear from her. Lukas, he was fond of. He had been there when the young man took his Rite, and Donald admired his curiosity, his study of the Legacy. It filled him with nostalgia to talk about the old world with Lukas. It was a therapy of sorts. And Lukas was the one helping him pry the lid off those servers to study their contents.
With Juliette, the allure was something different. It was the accusations and abuse, which he knew he fully deserved. It was the harsh silences and the threats. There was some part of Donald that wanted her to come end him before his cough could. Humiliation and execution — that was his path to exoneration.
“I know how you’re doing it,” Juliette finally said, fire in her voice. Venom. “I finally understand. I figured it out.”
Donald peeled his headset from one ear and wiped a trickle of sweat. “What do you understand?” he asked. He wondered if Lukas had uncovered something in one of the servers, something to set Juliette off.
“The cleanings,” she spat.
Donald checked the clock. Fifteen minutes were going to slip by in a hurry. The person reading that novel would be back soon, as well as the techs in the middle of that game of cards. “I’m happy to talk about the cleanings—”
“I’ve just been outside,” she told him.
Donald covered his microphone and coughed. “Outside where?” he asked. He thought of the tunnel she claimed to be digging, the racket they had been making over there that had recently gone silent. He thought she meant she’d been beyond the boundaries of her silo.
“Outside outside. The hills. The world the ancients left behind. I took samples.”
Donald leaned forward in his seat. She meant to threaten him, but all he heard was a promise. She meant to torture him, but all he felt was excitement. Outside. And to take samples. He dreamed of such a venture. Dreamed of discovering what he had breathed out there, what they had done to the world, if it was getting better or worse. Juliette must think he held the answers, but he had nothing but questions.
“What did you find?” he whispered. And he damned the machines that would make him sound disinterested, that would make him sound as if he knew. Why couldn’t he just say that he had no idea what was wrong with the world or with himself and please, please help him? Help each other.
“You aren’t sending us out there to clean. You’re sending something else. I’ll tell you what I found—”
To Donald, her voice was the entire universe. The weight of the soil overhead vanished, as did the solidness beneath his feet. It was just him in a bubble, and that voice.
“—we took two samples and another from the airlock that should’ve been inert gas. We took a sample from the ramp and one from the hills.”
Suddenly, he was the silent one. His coveralls clung to him. He waited and waited, but she outlasted him. She wanted him to beg for it. Maybe she knew how lost he was.
“What did you find?” he asked again.
“That you’re a lying sack of ratshit. That everything we’ve been told, any time we’ve trusted you, we’ve been fools. We take for granted everything you show us, everything you tell us, and none of it’s true. Maybe there were no ancients. You know these goddamn books over here? Burn them all. And you let Lukas believe this crap—”
“The books are real,” Donald said.
“Ratshit. Like the argon? Is the argon real? What the hell are you pumping into the airlocks when we go out to clean?”
Donald repeated her question in his head. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“Stop with the games. I know what’s going on now. When you send us outside, you pump our airlocks full of something that eats away at us. It takes the seals and gaskets first, and then our bodies. You’ve got it down to a science, haven’t you? Well, I found the camera feeds you hid. I cut them weeks ago. Yeah, that was me. And I saw the power lines coming in. I saw the pipes. The gas is in the pipes, isn’t it?”
“Juliette, listen to me—”
“Don’t you say my name like you know me. You don’t know me. All these talks, telling me how my silo was built like you built it yourself, telling Lukas about a disappeared world like you’d seen it with your own eyes. Were you trying to get us to like you? To think you were our friend? Saying you want to help us?”
Donald watched the clock tick down. The techs would be back soon. He’d have to yell at them to get out. He couldn’t leave the conversation like this.
“Stop calling us,” Juliette said. “The buzzing and the flashing lights, it’s giving us headaches. If you keep doing this every day, I’m going to start tearing shit down, and I’ve got enough to worry about.”
“Listen… Please—”
“No, you listen. You are cut off from us. We don’t want your cameras, your power, your gas. I’m cutting it all. And no one will ever clean from here again. No more of this bullshit argon. The next time I go out, it’ll be with clean air. Now fuck off and leave us to it.”
“Juliette—”
But the line was dead.
Donald pulled his headset off and threw it against the desk. Playing cards scattered, and the book fell from its perch, losing someone’s place.
Argon? What the hell had come over her? The last time she’d been so angry was when she said she had found some machine, threatened to come after him. But this was something else. Argon. Pumped out with a cleaning. He had no idea what she was talking about. Pumped out with a cleaning—
A bout of dizziness struck him, and Donald sank back into his chair. His coveralls were damp with sweat. He clutched a bloody rag and remembered a fog-filled airlock. He remembered stumbling down a ramp with a jostling crowd, crying for Helen, the vision of bomb blasts seared in his retinas, Anna and Charlotte tugging him along, while a white cloud billowed out around him.
The gas. He knew how the cleanings went. There was gas to pressurize the airlock. Gas to push against the outside air. Gas to push out.
“The dust is in the air,” Donald said. He leaned against the counter, his knees weak. The nanos eating away at mankind, they were loosed on the world with every cleaning, little puffs like clockwork, tick-tock with each exile.
The headphones sat there quietly. “I am an ancient,” Donald said, using her words. He grabbed the headphones from the desk and repeated into the microphone, loudly,
“I am an ancient! I did this!”
He sagged once more against the desk, catching himself before he fell. “I’m sorry,” he muttered. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Louder, yelling it: “I’m sorry!”
But nobody was listening.
26
Charlotte worked the aileron on the drone’s left wing up and down. There was still a bit of play in the cables that guided the flap. She grabbed a work rag hanging from the drone’s tail and dabbed the back of her neck. Reaching into her tool bag, she chose a medium screwdriver. Beneath the drone lay a scattering of parts, everything she could find inside that the drone didn’t need. The bombing computer, the munitions mounts from the wings, the release servos. She’d taken out every camera but one, had even stripped out some of the bracing struts that helped the drone pull up to a dozen Gs. This would be a straight flight, no stress on the wings. They would go low and fast this time, not caring if the drone was spotted. It was important to see further, to make sure, to verify. Charlotte had spent a week working on the blasted thing, and all she could think about was how quickly the last two had broken down and how lucky that first flight now seemed.
Lying on her back, she worked her shoulders and hips and squirmed beneath the tail of the drone. The access panel was already open, the cables exposed. Every panel would get a fine bead of caulk before it went back together, sealing the machine against the dust. This’ll work, she told herself as she adjusted the servo arm holding the cable. It would have to. Seeing her brother, the state he was in, had her thinking they didn’t have another flight in them. It would be all or nothing. It wasn’t just the coughing — he now seemed to be losing his mind.
He had come back from his latest call and had forgotten to bring her dinner. He had also forgotten the last part for the radio he had promised. Now he paced around the drone while she worked, mumbling to himself. He paced down the hall to the conference room and dug through his notes. He stomped back toward the drone, coughing and picking up a conversation she didn’t feel a part of.
“—their fear, don’t you see? We do it with their fear.”
She peeked out from under the drone to see him waving his hands in the air. He looked ashen. There were specks of blood on his coveralls. It was almost time to throw in the towel, get in that lift, turn them both in. Just so he would see someone.
He caught her looking at him.
“Their fear doesn’t just color the world they see,” he said, his eyes wild. “They poison the world with it. It’s a toxin, this fear. They send their own out to clean, and that poisons the world!”
Charlotte didn’t know how to respond. She wiggled back out to work the aileron again, thinking of how much faster this would go with two people. She considered asking for his help, but her brother couldn’t seem to stand still, much less hold a wrench.
“And this got me thinking, about the gas. I mean, I should have known, right? We pump it into their homes when we’re done with them. That’s how we end their existence. It’s all the same gas. I’ve done it.” Donald walked in a tight circle, jabbing his chest with his finger. He coughed into the crook of his arm. “God knows I’ve done it. But that’s not the only thing!”
Charlotte sighed and pulled her driver back out. Still a touch too loose.
“Maybe they can twist this around, you know?” He began to wander back to the conference room. “They turned off their cameras. And there was that silo that turned off its demolitions. Maybe they can turn off the gas—”
His voice trailed off with him. Charlotte studied the hallway at the back of the warehouse. The light spilling from the conference room danced with his shadow as he paced back and forth among his notes and charts, walking in circles. They were both stuck in circles. She could hear him cursing. His erratic behavior reminded her of their grandmother, who had gone ungracefully. This would be how she remembered him when he was gone: coughing up blood and babbling nonsense. He would never be Congressman Keene in a pressed suit, never her older and competent brother, never again.
While he agonized over what to do, Charlotte had her own ideas. How about they wake everyone up like Donald had done for her? There were only a hundred or so men on shift at any one time. There were thousands of women asleep. Many thousands. Charlotte thought of the army she could raise. But she wondered if Donny was right — if they would refuse to fight their fathers and husbands and brothers. It took a strange kind of courage to do that.
The light down the hall wavered again with shadows. Pacing back and forth, back and forth. Charlotte took a deep breath and worked the flap on the wing. She thought about his other idea to set the world straight, to clear the air and free the imprisoned. Or at least to give them all a chance. An equal chance. He had likened it to knocking down borders in the old world. There was some saying he repeated about those who had an advantage and wanted to keep it, about the last ones up pulling the ladder after them. “Let’s lower the ladders,” he had said more than once. Don’t let the computers decide. Let the people.
Charlotte still didn’t get how that might work. And neither, obviously, did her brother. She wiggled back under the drone and tried to imagine a time when people were born into their jobs, when they had no choice. First sons did what their fathers did. Second sons went to war, to the sea, or to the Church. Any boy who followed was left on his own. Daughters went to the sons of others.
Her wrench slipped off the cable stay — her knuckles banging the fuselage. Charlotte cursed and studied her hand, saw blood welling up. She sucked on her knuckle and remembered another injustice that had once given her pause. She remembered being on deployment and feeling grateful that she was born in the States, not in Iraq. A roll of the dice. Invisible borders drawn on maps that were as real as the walls of silos. Trapped by circumstance. What life you lived was divined by some calculus of your people, your leaders, like computers tallying your fate.
She crawled out once again and tried the wing. The play in the cable was gone. The drone was in the best condition Charlotte could make her. She gathered the wrenches she would no longer need and began slotting them into her tool bag when there was a ding at the end of the shelves, off toward the elevators.
Charlotte froze. Her first thought was of food. The ding meant Donny bringing her food. But her brother’s shadow could be seen down the hall.
She heard a lift door slide open. Someone was running. Several someones. Boots rang out like thunder, and Charlotte risked yelling Donald’s name. She shouted it down the hall once before rushing around the drone and grabbing the tarp. She spun the tarp like a fisherman’s net across the wide wings and the scattering of parts and tools. Had to hide. Hide her work and then herself. Donny had heard her. He would hide as well.
The tarp drifted to the ground on a cushion of trapped air; it billowed out and settled. Charlotte turned toward the hallway to run to Donny just as men spilled from the tall shelves. She fell to the ground at once, certain she’d been spotted. Boots clomped past. Gripping the edge of the tarp, she lifted it slowly and curled her knees against her body. She used her shoulder and hip to wiggle underneath the tarp to join the drone. Donny had heard her call out. He would hear the boots and hide in the bathroom attached to the conference room, hide in the shower. Somewhere. They couldn’t know they were down there. How had these people gotten in? Her brother said he had the highest access.
The running receded. They were heading straight to the back of the warehouse, almost as if they knew. Voices nearby. Men talking. Slower footsteps shuffling past the drone. Charlotte thought she heard Donny cry out as he was discovered. Crawling on her belly, she scooted beneath the drone to the other edge of the tarp. The voices were fading, slow footsteps walking past. Her brother was in trouble. She remembered a conversation from a few days prior and wondered if he’d been recognized in the elevator. A handyman had seen him. The darkness beneath the tarp closed in around her at the thought of being left alone, of him being taken. She relied on him. She was going crazy enough locked in that
warehouse with him to keep her company. Without him — she didn’t want to imagine.
Resting her chin on the cool steel plating, she slid her arms forward and lifted the tarp with the backs of her hands. A low sliver of the world was exposed. She could see boots dangerously close. She could smell oil on the decking. Ahead of her, it looked like a man having a hard time walking, another man in silver coveralls helping to support him, their feet shuffling along as if with a single mind.
Beyond them, a hallway was thrown into brightness; all the overhead lights Donny preferred to leave off were now on. Charlotte sucked in her breath as her brother was pulled from the conference room. One of the men in the bright silver coveralls punched him in the ribs. Her brother grunted, and Charlotte felt the blow to her own side. She dropped the tarp with one hand and covered her mouth in horror. The other hand trembled as it lifted the tarp further, not wanting to see but needing to. Her brother was hit again, but the shuffling man waved an arm. She could hear a feeble voice commanding them to stop.
The two men in silver held her brother down on the ground and did as they were told. Charlotte forgot to breathe as she watched the man who shuffled along as if weak — watched him march into the lit hallway. He had white hair as brilliant as the bulbs overhead. He labored to walk, leaned on the young man beside him, arm draped across his back, until he came to a stop by her brother.
Charlotte could see Donny’s eyes. He was fifty meters away, but she could see how wide they were. Her brother stared up at this old and feeble man, didn’t look away even as he coughed, a bad fit from the blow to his ribs, drowning out something being said by the man who could barely stand.
Her brother tried to speak. He said something over and over, but she couldn’t hear. And the thin man with the white hair could barely stand, could barely stand but could still swing his boots. The young man beside him propped him up, and Charlotte watched, cowed and trembling, as a leg was brought back over and over before lashing forward, a heavy boot slamming into her brother with ferocious might, Donny’s own legs scrambling to shield himself, hugging his shins as two men pinned him to the ground, giving him nowhere to hide from kick after brutal, stomping, and angry kick.
