Dust s-9

by Hugh Howey

  He used the tweezers to grab the bullet and drop it into the plastic bag. It was slightly misshapen but not severely. Hadn’t hit anything solid, but it’d hit something. Rubbing the bag around the bullet and holding it up to the light, he saw how a pink stain appeared on the plastic. There was blood on the bullet. He checked the floor to see if he’d slopped any of the bloody water near where the bullet had been wedged, if the blood had perhaps gotten there due to his carelessness.

  It hadn’t. The man they’d found dead had been stabbed in the neck, but a gun had been discovered nearby. Darcy had sampled the blood inside the elevator in a dozen places. A med tech had picked the samples up, and Stevens and the chief had told him that all the samples matched the victim. But now Darcy very likely had a blood sample from the attacker, who was still at large. The man who’d killed Eren. A real clue.

  ••••

  He clutched the sample bag and waited for the express to arrive. He considered for a moment handing this over to Stevens, which would be protocol, but he had found the bullet, knew what it was, had been careful in collecting it. He ought to be the one to see the results.

  The express arrived with a cheerful ding. An exhausted-looking man in purple coveralls guided a wheeled bucket out, steered it with the handle of a mop. Instead of calling in his find, Darcy had called down backup. The night custodian. The two men shook hands. Darcy thanked him for staying on shift late, said he owed him a big one. He took the man’s place inside the express.

  He only had to go down two levels. It felt crazy, taking the express two levels. What the silo needed was stairs. There were so many times he just needed to go up or down a single level and found himself waiting five minutes for a blasted lift. It made no sense. He sighed and pressed the button for the medical wing. Before the doors shut, he heard a wet slap from the mop next door.

  Dr. Whitmore’s office was crowded. Not with workers — it was just Whitmore and his two med techs busying about — but with bodies. Two extra bodies on slabs. One was the woman discovered dead the day before; Darcy remembered her name being Anna. The other was Eren, the former silo head. Whitmore was at his computer, typing up notes while the lab techs worked on the deceased.

  “Sir?”

  Whitmore turned. His eyes went from Darcy’s face to his hands. “Whatcha got?”

  “One more sample. On a bullet. Can you run it for me?”

  Whitmore waved at one of the men in the operating room, who exited with his hands held by his shoulders.

  “Can you run this for the officer?”

  The lab tech didn’t seem thrilled. He tugged his bloodstained gloves off with loud thwacks and threw them in the sink to be washed and sterilized. “Let’s see it,” he said.

  The machine didn’t take long. It beeped and whirred and made purposeful sounds, and then spit out a piece of paper in jittery fits. The tech reached for the results before Darcy could. “Yup. Got a match. It belongs to… Huh. That’s weird.”

  Darcy took the report. There was the bar graph, that unique UPC code of a man’s DNA. Amounts and percentages of various blood levels were written in inscrutable code: IFG, PLT, Hgb. But where the system should have listed the details of the matching personnel record, it simply said on one of the many lines: Emer. The rest of the bio fields were blank.

  “Emer,” the lab tech said. He crossed to the sink and began washing the gloves and his hands. “That’s a weird name. Who would pick a name like that?”

  “Where are those other results?” Darcy asked. “From earlier.”

  The tech nodded to the recycle bin at Dr. Whitmore’s feet, who continued to clack away at his keyboard. Darcy sifted through the bin, found one of the results sheets from earlier. He held the two side by side.

  “It’s not a name,” Darcy said. “That would be on the top line. This is where the location should be.” On the other report, the name Eren stood above a line listing the freeze hall and the coordinates of the dead man’s storage pod. Darcy remembered what one of the smaller freeze halls was called.

  “Emergency Personnel,” he said with satisfaction. He had solved a small mystery. He smiled at the room, but the other men had already returned to their work.

  ••••

  Emergency Personnel was the smallest of the freeze halls. Darcy stood outside the metal door, his breath visible in the air and clouding the steel. He entered his code, and the keypad blinked red and buzzed its disapproval. He tried the master security code next, and the doors clunked open and slid into the walls.

  His heart raced with a mix of fear and excitement. It wasn’t simply being on this trail of clues, it was where that trail was taking him. Emergency Personnel had been set aside for the most extreme of cases, for those times when Security was deemed insufficient. Through a dense haze, he remembered a time when cops stepped aside while heavily armored men emerged from vans and took down a building with military precision. Had that been him? In a former, former life? He couldn’t remember. And anyway, these men in the emergency hall were different. Many of them had been up and about recently. Darcy remembered from when he got on shift. They were pilots. He recalled seeing ripples in his mug of coffee one day and finding out that bombs had been dropped from drones. Moving from one pod to the next, he searched for an empty one. Someone had not gone back to sleep when they should have, he suspected. Or someone had been stirred to do bad things.

  It was this last possibility that filled him with fear. Who had access to such personnel? Who had the ability to awaken them without anyone knowing? He suspected that no matter whom he reported his findings to, as those findings went up and up the chain of command, they would possibly reach the person or people responsible. It also occurred to him that the man who had been killed was the on-shift head of the entire silo, the head of all the silos. This was big. This was huge. A feud between silo heads? This could get him off coffee-brewing and blood-mopping duty forever.

  He was two thirds of the way through the grid of cryopods, making a circuit back and forth, when he started to suspect that he might’ve been wrong. It was all so tenuous. He was playing at someone else’s job. There wouldn’t be anyone missing, no grand conspiracy, nobody up killing people—

  And then he peered inside a pod with no face there, with no frost on the glass. A palm on the skin of the pod confirmed that it was off. It was the same temperature as the room: cool but not freezing. He checked the display, fearing that it would be off and blank as well, but it showed power. Just no name. Only a number.

  Darcy pulled out his report pad and clicked a pen. Only a number. He suspected any name that went with the pod would be classified. But he had his man. Oh, he had his man. And even if he couldn’t get a name, he knew where these pilots spent their time when they were on shift. He had a very good idea of where this missing man with his bullet wound might be hiding.

  46

  Charlotte waited until morning before trying the radio again. This time, she knew what she wanted to say. She also knew her time was short. She had heard people outside the drone lift again that morning, looking for her.

  Waiting until she was sure they were gone, she nosed about and saw that they’d cleaned out the rest of Donald’s notes in the conference room. She went to the bathroom and took the time to change her bandage, found her arm a scabbed mess. At the end of the hall, she expected to find the radio missing, but the control room was undisturbed. They probably never looked under the plastic sheet, just assumed that everything in the room was part of the drone operations. She uncovered the radio, and the unit buzzed when she powered it on. She arranged Donny’s folders across her scattering of tools.

  Something Donny had told her came back. He had said they wouldn’t live forever, the two of them. They wouldn’t live long enough outside the pods to see the results of their actions. And that made it hard to know how best to act. What to do for these people, these three dozen or so silos that were left? Doing nothing doomed so many of them. Charlotte felt her brother’s need to p
ace. She picked up the mic and considered what she was about to do, reaching out to strangers like this. But reaching out was better than just listening. The day before, she had felt like a 911 operator who could only listen while a crime was being committed, unable to respond, powerless to send help.

  She made sure the knob was on seventeen, adjusted the volume and squelch until she was rewarded with a soft hiss of static. Somehow, a handful of people had survived the destruction of their silo. Charlotte suspected they had crossed overland. Their mayor — this Juliette her brother had spoken with — had proved it was possible. Charlotte suspected it was this that had drawn her brother’s attention. She knew from the suit Donny had been working on that he had dreamed of escaping somehow. These people may have found a way.

  She opened his folders and spread out her brother’s discoveries. There was a ranking of the silos sorted by their chance of survival. There was a note from the Senator, this suicide pact. And the map of all the silos, not with X’s but with the red lines radiating out to a single point. Charlotte arranged the notes and composed herself before making the call. She didn’t care if she was discovered. She knew damn well what she wanted to say, what she thought Donny was dying to say but didn’t know how.

  “Hello, people of silo eighteen. People of silo seventeen. My name is Charlotte Keene. Can you hear me? Over.”

  She waited, a rush of adrenaline and a flood of nerves from broadcasting her name, for being so bold. She had very likely just poked the hornets’ nest in which she hid. But she had truths to tell. She had been woken up by her brother into a nightmare, and yet she remembered the world from before, a world of blue skies and green grass. She had glimpsed that world with her drone. If she had been born into this, had never known anything else, would she want to be told? To be awoken? Would she want someone to tell her the truth? For a moment, the pain in her shoulder was forgotten. The throbbing was pushed aside by this mix of fear and excitement—

  “I’m picking you up nice and clear,” someone answered, a man’s voice. “You’re looking for someone on eighteen? I don’t think anyone’s up there. Who did you say this was?”

  Charlotte squeezed the mic. “My name is Charlotte Keene. Who is this?”

  “This is Tom Higgins, head of the Planning Committee. We’re up here at the deputy station on seventy-five. We’re hearing there’s been some kind of collapse, that we shouldn’t head back down. What’s going on below?”

  “I’m not below you,” Charlotte said. “I’m in another silo.”

  “Say again. Who is this? Keene, you say? I don’t recognize your name from the census.”

  “Yes, Charlotte Keene. Is your mayor there? Juliette?”

  “You say you’re in our silo? Is this someone from the Mids?”

  Charlotte started to say something, realized how difficult this was going to be, but another voice cut in. A familiar voice.

  “This is Juliette.”

  Charlotte leaned forward and adjusted the volume. She squeezed the mic. “Juliette, my name is Charlotte Keene. You’ve been speaking with my brother, Donny. Donald, I mean.” She was nervous. She paused to wipe her palms on the leg of her coveralls. When she let go of the mic, the man from earlier could be heard talking on the same frequency:

  “—heard our silo is gone. Can you confirm? Where are you?”

  “I’m in Mechanical, Tom. I’ll come see you when I can. Yes, our silo is gone. Yes, you should stay where you are. Now let me see what this person wants.”

  “What do you mean, ‘gone’? I don’t understand.”

  “Dead, Tom. Everyone is dead. You can tear up your fucking census. Now please stay off the air. In fact, can we change channels?”

  Charlotte waited to hear what the man would say. And then she realized the mayor was speaking to her. She hurriedly squeezed the mic before the other voice could step on her transmission.

  “I… uh, yes. I can transmit on all frequencies.”

  Again, the head of the planning committee, or whatever he’d called himself, stepped in: “Did you say dead? Was this your doing?”

  “Channel eighteen,” Juliette said.

  “Eighteen,” Charlotte repeated. She reached for the knob as a burst of questions spilled from the radio. The man’s voice was silenced by a twist of Charlotte’s fingers.

  “This is Charlotte Keene on channel eighteen, over.”

  She waited. It felt as though a door had just been pulled tight, a confidant pulled inside.

  “This is Juliette. What’s this about me knowing your brother? What level are you on?”

  Charlotte couldn’t believe how difficult this was to get across. She took a deep breath. “Not level. Silo. I’m in Silo 1. You’ve spoken with my brother a few times.”

  “You’re in Silo 1. Donald is your brother.”

  “That’s right.” And finally, it sounded as if this was established. It was a relief.

  “Have you called to gloat?” Juliette asked. There was a sudden spark of life in her voice, a flash of violence. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done? How many people you’ve killed? Your brother told me he was capable of this, but I didn’t believe him. I never believed him. Is he there?”

  “No.”

  “Well, tell him this. And I hope he believes me when I say it: My every thought right now is how best to kill him, to make sure this never happens again. You tell him that.”

  A chill spread through Charlotte. This woman thought her brother had brought doom on them. Her palms felt clammy as she cradled the mic. She pressed the button, found it sticking, knocked it against the table until it clicked properly.

  “Donny didn’t… He may already be dead,” Charlotte said, fighting back the tears.

  “That’s a shame. I guess I’ll be coming for whoever’s next in line.”

  “No, listen to me. Donny… it wasn’t him who did this. I swear to you. Some people took him. He wasn’t supposed to be talking to you at all. He wanted to tell you something and didn’t know how.” Charlotte released the mic and prayed that this was getting through, that this stranger would believe her.

  “Your brother warned me he could press a button and end us all. Well, that button has been pressed, and my home has been destroyed. People I care about are now dead. If I wasn’t coming after you bastards before, I sure as hell am now.”

  “Wait,” Charlotte said. “Listen. My brother is in trouble. He’s in trouble because he was talking to you. The two of us… we aren’t involved in this.”

  “Yeah, right. You want us talking. Learn what you can. And then you destroy us. It’s all games with you. You send us out to clean, but you’re just poisoning the air. That’s what you’re doing. You make us fear each other, fear you, and so we send our own people out, and the world gets poisoned by our hate and our fear, doesn’t it?”

  “I don’t— Listen, I swear to you, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I… this will be hard for you to believe, maybe, but I remember when the world out there was very different. When we could live and breathe out there. And I think part of it can be like that again. Is like that right now. That’s what my brother wanted to tell you, that there’s hope out there.”

  A pause. A heavy breath. Charlotte’s arm was back to throbbing.

  “Hope.”

  Charlotte waited. The radio hissed at her like an angry breath forced through clenched teeth.

  “My home, my people, are dead and you would have me hope. I’ve seen the hope you dish out, the bright blue skies we pull down over our heads, the lie that makes the exiled do your bidding, clean for you. I’ve seen it, and thank God I knew to doubt it. It’s the intoxication of nirvana. That’s how you get us to endure this life. You promise us heaven, don’t you? But what do you know of our hell?”

  She was right. This Juliette was right. How could such a conversation as this take place? How did her brother manage it? It was alien races who somehow spoke the same tongue. It was gods and mortals. Charlotte was attempting to commune with
ants, ants who worried about the twists of their warrens beneath the soil, not the layout of the wider land. She wouldn’t be able to get them to see—

  But then Charlotte realized this Juliette knew nothing of her own hell. And so she told her.

  “My brother was beaten half to death,” Charlotte said. “He could very well be dead. It happened before my own eyes. And the man who did it was like a father to us both.” She fought to hold it together, to not let the tears creep into her voice. “I’m being hunted right now. They will put me back to sleep or they will kill me, and I don’t know that there’s a difference. They keep us frozen for years and years while the men work in shifts. There are computers out there that play games and will one day decide which of your silos is allowed to go free. The rest will die. All of the silos but one will die. And there’s nothing we can do to stop it.”

  She fumbled through the folder for the notes, the list of the rankings, and couldn’t find it through her blurred vision. She grabbed the map instead. Juliette was saying nothing, was likely just as confused by Charlotte’s hell as Charlotte was of hers. But it needed to be said. These awful truths discovered needed to be told. It felt good.

  “We… Donny and I were only ever trying to figure out how to help you, all of you, I swear. My brother… he had an affinity for your people.” Charlotte let go of the mic so this person couldn’t hear her cry.

  “My people,” Juliette said, subdued.