Dust s-9

by Hugh Howey

  ••••

  “Fuck.”

  Charlotte staggered across the lift, her first thought to get it moving, to flee. She could feel the man on the other side of the door, could picture him clutching his neck with one hand and holding that pistol in the other, could imagine him fumbling for the lift call button, leaving a smear of blood on the wall. She pressed a handful of buttons, marking them with blood, but none of the floors lit up. Cursing, she fumbled for her ID. One arm wouldn’t respond. She reached awkwardly across herself with the other, dug the ID out, nearly dropped it, ran it through the scanner.

  “Fuck. Fuck,” she whispered, her shoulder on fire. She jabbed the button for fifty-four. Home. Her prison had become home, a safe place. By her feet lay the radio parts. The control board was cracked in half from someone’s boot. She slid down to her heels, cradling her other arm, fighting the urge to pass out, and scooped up the microphone. She draped this by its cord around the back of her neck, left the other parts. There was blood everywhere. Some of it had to be hers. Reactor red. It blended right in with her coveralls. The lift rose, slowed to a stop, and opened on the dark supply room on fifty-four.

  Charlotte staggered out, remembered something, and stepped back inside. She kicked the doors open as they tried to shut, was angry with them now. With her elbow, she tried to wipe the lift buttons clean. There was a smear of blood, a fingerprint, on button fifty-four, a sign pointing to where she had gone. It was no use. The doors again tried to close, and again she kicked them for their effort. Desperate, Charlotte bent and ran her palm through the man’s spilled blood, returned to the panel, and covered every button with a great dose of the stuff. Finally, she scanned her ID and pressed the top level, sending the goddamn thing far away, as far away as she could. Staggering out, she collapsed to the ground. The doors began to close, and she was glad to let them.

  39

  They would look for her. She was a fugitive locked in a cage, in a single, giant building. They would hunt her down.

  Charlotte’s mind raced. If the man she attacked died there in the hallway, she might have until the end of shift before he was discovered and they started looking for her. If he found help, it could be hours. But they had to have heard the gun going off, right? They would save his life. She hoped they would save his life.

  She opened a crate where she’d seen a medical kit. Wrong crate. It was the next one. She dug the kit out and undid her coveralls, tearing at the snaps. Wiggling her arms out, she saw the grisly wound. Dark red blood puckered from a hole in her arm and streaked down to her elbow. She reached around and winced as her fingers found the exit. Her arm was numb from the wound down. From the wound up, it was throbbing.

  She tore a roll of gauze open with her teeth, then wrapped it under her armpit and around and around, sent the roll behind her neck and across her other shoulder to keep it all in place. Finally, another few laps across the wound. She’d forgotten a pad, a compress, didn’t feel like doing it again. Instead, she just made the last wrap as tight as she could tolerate before cinching the end. As far as dressings went, it was a train wreck. Everything from basic training had gone out the window during the fight and after. Just impulse and reflex. Charlotte closed the lid on the bin, saw the blood left on the latch, and realized she’d have to think more clearly to get through this. She opened the case back up, grabbed another roll of gauze, and cleaned up after herself, then checked the floor outside the elevators.

  It was a mess. She went back for a small bottle of alcohol, remembered where she’d seen a huge jug of industrial cleaner, grabbed that plus more gauze, wiped everything up. Took her time. Couldn’t get in too big a hurry.

  The bundle of soiled and stained cloth went back in the bin, the lid kicked shut. Satisfied with the condition of the floor, she hurried to the barracks. Her cot made it obvious that someone lived there. The other mattresses were bare. Before she fixed this, she stripped down, grabbed another pair of coveralls, and went to the bathroom. After washing her hands and face, and the bright spill of blood down her neck and between her breasts, she cleaned the sink and changed. The red coveralls went into her footlocker. If they looked in there, she was screwed.

  She pulled the covers off her bed, grabbed her pillow, and made sure everything else was straight. Back in the warehouse, she opened the hangar door on the drone lift and threw her things inside. She went to the shelves and gathered rations and water, added this. Another small medical kit. Inside the bin of first-aid gear, she discovered the microphone, which she must’ve dropped earlier while grabbing the gauze. This and two flashlights and a spare set of batteries went inside the lift as well. It was the last place anyone would look. The door was practically invisible unless you knew what to search for. It only came up to her knees and was the same color as the wall.

  She considered crawling inside right then, would just need to outlast the first thorough search of the level. They would concentrate on the shelving units, the stacks, and think the place was clear, move on to the many other warrens in which she could be hiding. But before she waited that out, there was the microphone coiled up that she had worked so hard to acquire. There was the radio. She had a few hours, she told herself. This wouldn’t be the first place they’d check. Surely she had a few hours.

  Dizzy from lack of sleep and loss of blood, she made her way to the flight control room and pulled the plastic sheet from the radio. Patting her chest, she remembered she’d changed coveralls. And besides, that screwdriver was gone. She searched the bench for another, found one, and removed the panel from the side of the unit. The board she wasn’t sure about was already installed. It was a simple matter of plugging the microphone in. She didn’t bother with affixing it to the side panel or closing anything up.

  She checked the seating of the control boards. It was a lot like a computer, all the parts slotting together, but she was no electrician. She had no idea if there was anything else, anything missing. And no way in hell was she going on another run for parts. She powered up the unit and selected the channel marked “18”.

  She waited.

  Adjusting the squelch, she brought enough static into the speakers to make sure the unit was on. There was no traffic on the channel. Squeezing the microphone put an end to the static, which was a good sign. Weary and hurting and fearful for herself as well as her brother, Charlotte managed a smile. The click of the microphone back through the speakers was a small victory.

  “Can anyone read me?” she asked. She propped one elbow on the desk, her other arm hanging useless by her side. She tried again. “Anyone out there with ears on? Please come back.”

  Static. Which didn’t prove anything. Charlotte could very well imagine the radios sitting miles away in this silo somewhere, all the operators around them slouched over, dead. Her brother had told her about the time he had ended a silo with the press of a button. He had come to her with his eyes shining in the middle of the night and told her all about it. And now this other silo was gone. Or maybe her radio wasn’t broadcasting.

  She wasn’t thinking straight. Needed to troubleshoot before she jumped to conclusions. Reaching for the dial, she immediately thought of the other silo she and her brother had eavesdropped in on, this neighboring silo with a handful of survivors who liked to chat back and forth and play games like Hide and Find with their radios. If she remembered right, the mayor of 18 had somehow transmitted on this other frequency before. Charlotte clicked over to “17” to test her mic, see if anyone would respond, forgetting the late hour. She used her old call sign from the Air Force out of habit.

  “Hello. Hello. This is charlie two-four. Anyone read me?”

  She listened to static, was about to switch over to another channel when a voice broke through, shaky and distant:

  “Yes. Hello? Can you hear us?”

  Charlotte squeezed the microphone again, the pain in her shoulder momentarily gone, this connection with a strange voice like a shot of adrenaline.

  “I hear you. Yes. Yo
u can read me okay?”

  “What the hell is going on over there? We can’t get through to you. The tunnel… there’s rubble in the tunnel. No one will respond. We’re trapped over here.”

  Charlotte tried to make sense of this. She double-checked the transmit frequency. “Slow down,” she said and took a deep breath, took her own advice. “Where are you? What’s going on?”

  “Is this Shirly? We’re stuck over here in this… other place. Everything’s rusted. People are panicking. You’ve gotta get us out of here.”

  Charlotte didn’t know whether to answer or simply power the unit down and try again later. It felt as though she had butted into the middle of a conversation, confusing one of the parties. Another voice chimed in, supporting her theory:

  “That’s not Shirly,” someone said, a woman’s voice. “Shirly’s dead.”

  Charlotte adjusted the volume. She listened intently. For a moment, she forgot the man dying in the hallway below, the man she had stabbed, the wound in her arm. She forgot about those who must be coming after her, searching for her. She listened instead with great interest to this conversation on channel 17, this voice that sounded vaguely familiar.

  “Who is this?” the first voice — the male voice — asked.

  There was a pause. Charlotte didn’t know whom he was asking, whom he expected an answer from. She lifted the microphone to her lips, but someone else answered.

  “This is Juliette.”

  The voice was labored and weary.

  “Jules? Where are you? What do you mean, Shirly’s dead?”

  Another burst of static. Another dreadful pause.

  “I mean they’re all dead,” she said. “And so are we.”

  A burst of static.

  “I killed us all.”

  Silo 17

  40

  Juliette opened her eyes and saw her father. A white light bloomed and passed from one of her eyes to the other. Several faces loomed behind him, peering down at her. Light blue and white and yellow coveralls. What seemed a dream at first gradually coalesced into something real. And what was sensed as nothing more than a nightmare hardened into recollection: Her silo had been shut down. Doors had been opened. Everyone was dead. The last thing she remembered was clutching a radio, hearing voices, and declaring everyone dead. And she had killed them.

  She waved the light away and tried to roll onto her side. She was on damp steel plating, someone’s undershirt tucked under her head, not on a bed. Her stomach lurched, but nothing came out. It was hollow, cramping, heaving. She made gagging noises and spat on the ground. Her father urged her to breathe. Raph was there, asking her if she’d be all right. Juliette bit down the urge to yell at them all, to yell at the world to leave her the hell alone, to hug her knees and weep for what she’d done. But Raph kept asking if she was okay.

  Juliette wiped her mouth with her sleeve and tried to sit up. The room was dark. She was no longer inside the digger. A lambent glow beat from somewhere, like an open flame, the smell of burning biodiesel, a home-made torch. And in the gloom, she saw the dance and swing of flashlights at the ends of disembodied hands and on miners’ helmets as her people tended to one another. Small groups huddled here and there. A stunned silence sat like a blanket atop the scattered weeping.

  “Where am I?” she asked.

  Raph answered. “One of the boys found you in the back of that machine. Said you were curled up. They thought you were dead at first—”

  Her father interrupted. “I’m going to listen to your heart. If you can take deep breaths for me.”

  Juliette didn’t argue. She felt young again, young and miserable for breaking something, for disappointing him. Her father’s beard twinkled with silver from Raph’s flashlight. He plugged his stethoscope into his ears, and she knew the drill. She parted her coveralls. He listened as she swallowed deep gulps of air and let them out slowly. Above her, she recognized enough of the pipes and electrical conduit and exhaust ducts to locate herself. They were in the large pump facility adjacent to the generator room. The ground was wet because all this had been flooded. There must be water trapped above here, a slow leak somewhere, a reservoir gradually emptying. Juliette remembered all the water. She had donned a cleaning suit and had swum past this room in some long-ago life.

  “Where are the kids?” she asked.

  “They went with your friend Solo,” her father said. “He said he was taking them home.”

  Juliette nodded. “How many others made it?” She took another deep breath and wondered who was still alive. She remembered herding all that she could through the dig. She had seen Courtnee and Walker. Erik and Dawson. Fitz. She remembered seeing families, some of the kids from the classrooms, and that young boy from the bazaar in shopkeep brown coveralls. But Shirly… Juliette reached up and gingerly touched her sore jaw. She could hear the blast and feel the rumbles in the ground again. Shirly was gone. Lukas was gone. Nelson and Peter. Her heart couldn’t hold it all. She expected it to stop, to quit, while her father was listening to it.

  “There’s no telling how many made it,” Raph said. “Everyone is… it’s chaos out there.” He touched Juliette’s shoulder. “There was a group that came through a while back, before everything went nuts. A priest and his congregation. And then a bunch more came after. And then you.”

  Her father listened intently to her stubborn heartbeat. He moved the metal pad from one corner of her back to another, and Juliette took deep, dutiful breaths. “Some of your friends are trying to figure out how to turn that machine around and dig us out of here,” her father said.

  “Some are already digging,” Raph told her. “With their hands. And shovels.”

  Juliette tried to sit up. The pain of all she’d lost was hammered by the thought of losing those who remained. “They can’t dig,” she said. “Dad, it’s not safe over there. We have to stop them.” She clutched his coveralls.

  “You need to take it easy,” he said. “I sent someone to fetch you some water—”

  “Dad, if they dig, we’ll die. Everyone over here will die.”

  There was silence. It was broken by the slap of boots. A light slashed the darkness up and down, and Bobby arrived with a dented tin canteen sloshing with water.

  “We’ll die if they dig us out,” Juliette said again. She refrained from adding that they were all dead anyway. They were walking corpses in that shell of a silo, that home for madness and rust. But she knew she sounded just as mad as everyone else had, cautioning against digging because the air over here was supposed to be poison. Now they wanted to tunnel to their death as badly as she had wanted to tunnel to hers.

  She drank from the canteen, water splashing from her chin to her chest, and considered the lunacy of it all. And then she remembered the congregation that’d come over to exorcise this poisoned silo’s demons, or maybe to see the devil’s work for themselves. Lowering the canteen, she turned to her father, a looming silhouette in the spill of light from Raph’s torch.

  “Father Wendel and his people,” Juliette said. “Was that… ? They were the ones who came earlier?”

  “They were seen heading up and out of Mechanical,” Bobby said. “I heard they were looking for a place to worship. A bunch of the others went up to the farms, heard there was still something growing there. A lot of people are worried about what we’ll eat until we get out of here.”

  “What we’ll eat,” Juliette muttered. She wanted to tell Bobby that they weren’t getting out of there. Ever. It was gone. Everything they had known. The only reason she knew and they didn’t is because she had stumbled through the piles of bones and over the mounds of the dead getting into this silo. She had seen what becomes of a fallen world, had heard Solo tell his story of dark days, had listened on the radio as those events played out all over again. She knew the threats, the threats that had now been carried out, all because of her daring.

  Raph urged her to sip some more water, and Juliette saw in the flashlit faces around her that these survivor
s thought they were merely in a spot of trouble, that this was temporary. The truth was that this was likely all that remained of their people, this few hundred who had managed to get through, those lucky enough to live in the Deep, a startled mob from the lower Mids, a congregation of fanatics who had doubted this place. Now they were dispersing, looking to survive what they must hope would be over in a few days, a week, simply concerned with having enough to eat until they were saved.

  They didn’t yet understand that they had been saved. Everyone else was gone.

  She handed the canteen back to Raph and started to get up. Her father urged her to stay put, but Juliette waved him off. “We have to stop them from digging,” she said, getting to her feet. The seat of her coveralls was damp from the wet floor. There was a leak somewhere, pools of water trapped in the ceilings and the levels above them, slowly draining. It occurred to her that they would need to fix this. And just as quickly, she realized there was no point. Such planning was over. It was now about surviving the next minute, the next hour.

  “Which way to the dig?” she asked.

  Raph reluctantly pointed with his flashlight. She pulled him along, stopped short when she saw Jomeson, the old pump repairman, huddled against a wall of silent and rusted pumps, his hands cupped in his lap. Jomeson was sobbing to himself, his shoulders pumping up and down like pistons as he gazed into his hands.

  Juliette pointed her father to the man and went to his side. “Jomes, are you hurt?”

  “I saved this,” Jomeson blubbered. “I saved this. I saved this.”

  Raph aimed his flashlight into the mechanic’s lap. A pile of chits glimmered in his palms. Several months’ pay. They clinked as his body shook, coins writhing like insects.