Dust s-9

by Hugh Howey

  “You setting off?” Juliette’s father asked.

  She nodded. “Just came to tell you goodbye.”

  “You say that like I’ll never see you again. I’ll be up to check on the kids once I get things sorted down here. Once we have our new arrival.” He smiled at Raylee and her husband.

  “Just goodbye for now,” Juliette said. She had made the others swear not to tell anyone, especially Court and her father, about what she had planned. As she gave her father a final squeeze, she tried not to let her arms betray her.

  “And just so you know,” she told him, letting go, “those kids are the nearest thing I’ll ever have to children of my own. So whenever I’m not there to look after them, if you can lend Solo a hand… Sometimes I think he’s the biggest kid of the lot.”

  “I will. And I know. And I’m sorry about Marcus. I blame myself.”

  “Don’t, Dad. Please don’t. Just… look after them when I’m too busy to. You know how I can get into some fool project.”

  He nodded.

  “I love you,” she said. And then she turned to go before she betrayed herself and her plans any further. In the hallway, Raph shouldered a heavy bag. Juliette grabbed the other. The two of them walked beyond the current string of lights and into the near-darkness, neither of them employing their flashlights, the halls familiar enough, their eyes soon adjusting.

  They passed through an unmanned security station. Juliette spotted the breathing hose doubling back on itself, remembered swimming through that very spot. Ahead, the stairwell glowed a dull green from resilient emergency lights, and she and Raph began the long slog up. Juliette had a list in her head of who she needed to see and what she needed to grab on the way. The kids would be in the lower farms, back at their old home. Solo as well. She wanted to see them, and then head up and grab a charger and hopefully another radio at the deputy station. If they were lucky and made good time, she’d be in her old home in the cleaning lab later that night, assembling one last suit.

  “You remember to grab the detonators from Walker?” Juliette asked. She felt as though she was forgetting something.

  “Yup. And the batteries you wanted. And I topped up our canteens. We’re good.”

  “Just checking.”

  “How about for modding the suits?” Raph asked. “You sure you have everything up there you need? How many of them are left, anyway?”

  “More than enough,” Juliette said. She wanted to tell him right then that two suits would be more than enough. She was pretty sure Raph thought he was coming with her the whole way. She was steeling herself for that fight.

  “Yeah, but how many? I’m just curious. Nobody was allowed to talk about those things before…”

  Juliette thought of the stores between thirty-four and thirty-five, the in-floor bunkers that seemed to go on forever. “Two… maybe three hundred suits,” she told him. “More than I could count. I only modded a couple.”

  Raph whistled. “That’s enough for a few hundred years of cleanings, eh? Assuming you were sending ’em out one a year.”

  Juliette thought that was about right. And she supposed, now that she knew how the outside air got poisoned, that this was probably the plan: a steady flow of the exiled. Not cleaning, but doing the exact opposite. Making the world dirty.

  “Hey, do you remember Gina from Supply?”

  Juliette nodded, and the past tense was a busted knuckle. Quite a few from Supply had made it down, but Gina hadn’t.

  “Did you know we were seeing each other?”

  Juliette shook her head. “I didn’t. I’m sorry, Raph.”

  “Yeah.”

  They made a turn of the staircase.

  “Gina did an analysis once of a bunch of spares. You know they had this computer just to tally everything, where it was located, how many were on order, all of that? Well, IT had burned through a few chips for their servers, bang, bang, bang, just one of those weeks where failures crop up all in a row—”

  “I remember those weeks,” Juliette said.

  “Well, Gina wondered how long before they were gonna run out of these chips. This was one of those parts they couldn’t make more of, you know? Intricate things. So she looked at the average failure rate, how many they had in the pens, and she came up with two hundred and forty-eight years.”

  Juliette waited for him to continue. “That number mean something?” she asked.

  “Not at first, no. But the number got her curious because she’d run a similar report a few months prior, again out of curiosity, and the number had been close to that. A few weeks later, a bulb goes out in her office. Just a bulb. It winks out while she’s working on something, and it got her thinkin’. You’ve seen the storehouse of bulbs they’ve got, right?”

  “I haven’t, actually.”

  “Well, they’re vast. She took me down there once. And…”

  Raph fell quiet for a few treads.

  “Well, the storehouse is about half empty. So Gina runs the figures for a simple bulb for the whole silo and comes up with two hundred and fifty-one years’ supply.”

  “About the same number.”

  “That’s right. And now she’s real curious — you’d have loved this about her — she started running reports like this in her spare time, big-ticket items like fuel cells and pregnancy implants and timer chips. And they all converge at right about two-fifty. And that’s when she figures we’ve got that much time left.”

  “Two hundred and fifty years,” Juliette said. “She told you this?”

  “Yeah. Me and a few others over drinks. She was pretty drunk, mind you. And I remember…” Raph laughed. “I remember Jonny saying that she was remembering the hits and forgetting the misses, and speaking of forgetting the missus, he needed to get back to his. And one of Gina’s friends from Supply says that people’ve been saying stuff like this since her grandmother was around, and they would always be saying that. But Gina says the only reason this wasn’t occurring to everyone at once is because it’s early. She said to wait two hundred years or so, and people would be going down into empty caverns to get the last of everything, and then it would be obvious.”

  “I’m truly sorry she’s not here,” Juliette said.

  “Me too.” They climbed a few steps. “But that’s not why I’m bringing this up. You said there were a couple hundred suits. Seems like the same count, don’t it?”

  “It was just a guess,” Juliette told him. “I only went down there the couple of times.”

  “But it seems about right. Don’t it seem like a clock ticking down? Either the gods knew how much to stock away, or they don’t have plans for us past a certain date. Makes you feel like pig’s milk, don’t it? Anyhow, that’s how it seems to me.”

  Juliette turned and studied her albino friend, saw the way the green emergency lights gave him a sort of eerie glow. “Maybe,” Juliette said. “Gina may’ve been on to something.”

  Raph sniffed. “Yeah, but fuckit. We’ll be long dead before then.”

  He laughed at this, his voice echoing up and down the stairs, but the sentiment made Juliette sad. Not just that everyone she knew would be dead before that date ever happened, but that this knowledge made it easier to stomach an awful and morbid truth: Their days were counted. The idea of saving anything was folly, a life especially. No life had ever been truly saved, not in the history of mankind. They were merely prolonged. Everything comes to an end.

  49

  The farms were dark, the overhead lights sleeping on their distantly clicking timers. Down a long and leafy hall, voices spilled as grow plots were claimed and those claims were just as quickly disputed. Things that were not owned by anyone became owned. It reminded Hannah of troubling times. She clutched her child to her chest and stuck close to Rickson.

  Young Miles led the way with his dying flashlight. He beat it in his palm whenever it dimmed, which somehow coaxed more life out of it. Hannah glanced back in the direction of the stairwell. “What’s taking Solo so long?” she
asked.

  Nobody answered. Solo had chased after Elise. It was common enough for her to run off after some distraction, but it was different with all these people everywhere. Hannah was worried.

  The child in her arms wailed. It did this when it was hungry. It was allowed to. Hannah clamped down on her own complaints; she was hungry too. She adjusted the child, unhooked one strap of her overalls, and gave the infant access to her breast. The hunger was worse with the pressure of eating for two. And where crops had once brushed against her arms along that hall — where an empty stomach was one of the few things she never need fear — burgeoning plots stood startlingly empty. Ravaged. Owned.

  Stalk and leaf rustled like paper as Rickson climbed over the rail and explored the second and third rows, hunting for a tomato or cucumber or any of the berries that had gone wild and had spread through the other crops, their curly arms twining around the stalks of their brethren. He returned noisily and pressed something into Hannah’s hand, something small with a soft spot where it had rested on the ground for too long. “Here,” he said, and went back to searching.

  “Why would they take so much all at once?” Miles asked, digging for food of his own. Hannah sniffed the small offering from Rickson, which smelled vaguely like squash, but underripe. The voices in the distance lifted in argument. She took a small bite and recoiled at the bitter taste.

  “They took so much because they aren’t family,” Rickson said. His voice leaked from behind dark plants that trembled from his passing.

  Young Miles aimed his flashlight toward Rickson, who emerged from the rows of cornstalks empty-handed. “But we aren’t family,” Miles said. “Not really. And we never did this.”

  Rickson hopped over the rail. “Of course we’re family,” he said. “We live together and work together like families are supposed to. But not these people, haven’t you seen? Seen how they dress differently so they can be told apart? They don’t live together. These strangers will fight like our parents fought. Our parents weren’t family, either.” Rickson untied his hair and collected the loose strands around his face, then tied it all back up. His voice was hushed, his eyes peering into the darkness where voices argued. “They’ll do like our parents and fight over food and women until there aren’t any of them left. Which means we’ll have to fight back if we want to live.”

  “I don’t want to fight,” Hannah said. She winced and pulled the baby away from her sore nipple, began working her overalls to switch breasts.

  “You won’t have to fight,” Rickson said. He helped with her overalls.

  “They left us alone before,” Miles said. “We lived back here for years, and they came and took what they needed and didn’t fight us. Maybe these people will do the same.”

  “That was a long time ago,” Rickson said. He watched the baby settle into its mother’s breast, then ranged down the railing and into the darkness to forage some more. “They left us alone because we were young and we were theirs. Hannah and I were your age. You and your brother were toddlers. No matter how bad the fighting got, they left us kids alone to live or die by our own devices. It was a gift, the way they abandoned us.”

  “But they used to come,” Miles said. “And bring us things.”

  “Like Elise and her sister?” Hannah asked. And now she and Rickson had both brought up deceased siblings. That hall was full of the dead and gone, she realized, the plucked-from-above. “There will be fighting,” she told Miles, who still didn’t seem so sure. “Rickson and I aren’t kids any longer.” She rocked the baby in her arms, that suckling reminder of just how far from kids they had become.

  “I wish they’d just leave,” Miles said morosely. He banged the flashlight, which gave forth like a burped baby. “I wish it could all go back to normal. I wish Marcus was here. It don’t feel right without him.”

  “A tomato,” Rickson said, emerging victorious from the shadows. He held the red orb in the beam of Miles’s light, which threw a blush across all their faces. A knife materialized. Rickson cut the vegetable into thirds, with Hannah getting hers first. Red juice like blood dripped from his hand, from Hannah’s lips, and from the knife. They ate in relative quiet, the voices down the hall distant and scary, the knife dripping with life but capable of dripping with worse.

  ••••

  Jimmy cursed himself as he climbed the stairs. He cursed as he used to, with only himself to hear, with words that never had far to travel, moving from his lips to his own ears. He cursed himself and stomped around and around, sending vibrations up and down to mingle with others. Keeping an eye on Elise had turned into a bother. One glance in the other direction, and off she went. Like Shadow used to when all the grow lights popped on at once.

  “No, not like Shadow,” he mumbled to himself. Shadow had stayed underfoot most days. He had always been tripping over Shadow. Elise was something else.

  Another level went past, alone and empty, and Jimmy remembered that this wasn’t new. This wasn’t sudden. Elise was forever coming and going however she liked. He had just never worried about her when the silo was empty. It made him reconsider what made a place dangerous. Maybe it wasn’t the place at all.

  “You!”

  Jimmy rose to another landing, one-twenty-two. A man waved from the doorway. He had gold coveralls on, which meant something back when things had meaning. It was the first face Jimmy had seen in a dozen levels.

  “Have you seen a girl?” Jimmy asked, ignoring the fact that this man seemed to have a question of his own. Jimmy held his hand at his hip. “This high. Seven years old. Missing a tooth.” He pointed past his beard at his own teeth.

  The man shook his head. “No, but you’re the man who used to live here, right? The survivor?” The man had a knife in his hand, which flashed silver like a fish in water. The man in gold then laughed and peered beyond the landing’s rail. “I guess we’re all survivors, aren’t we?” Reaching out, he took hold of one of the rubber hoses Jimmy and Juliette had affixed to the wall to carry off the floods. With a deft swipe of the knife, the hose parted. He began hauling up the lower part, which dangled free far below.

  “That was for the floods—” Jimmy began.

  “You must know a lot about this place,” the man said. “I’m sorry. My name’s Terry. Terry Harlson. I’m on the Planning Commi—” He squinted at Jimmy. “Hell, you don’t know or care, do you? We’re all from the same place to you.”

  “Jimmy,” he said. “My name’s Jimmy, but most people call me Solo. And that hose—”

  “You have any idea where this power is coming from?” Terry jerked his head at the green lights that dotted the underside of the stairs. “We’re up another forty levels from here. Radio there’s got power. Some of these wires strung up all over the place got juice too. You do that?”

  “Some of it,” Jimmy said. “Some was already like that. A little girl named Elise came this way. Did you—?”

  “I reckon the power’s coming from above, but Tom told me to check down here. He says the power always came from below in our silo, should be the same in this one. Everything else is. But I saw the high-water mark down there where this place was full of water. I don’t think power’s been coming from there in a while. But you should know, right? This place got any secrets you can tell us about? Love to know about that power.”

  The hose lay in a coil at the man’s feet. The knife was back out, glimmering in his hand. “You ever thought of being on a committee?”

  “I need to find my friend,” Jimmy said.

  Another swipe, but the electrical cord put up more resistance. It was the copper at the center. The man held a loop of the black wire in his hand and sawed back and forth, great muscles bulging beneath an undershirt stained with sweat. After some exertion, the knife burst free, the cord severed in two.

  “If your friend ain’t with the men in the farms, she’s probably up with the chanters. I passed them on my way down. They found a chapel.” Terry jabbed the knife skyward before stuffing it away and
looping wire around his arm.

  “A chapel,” Jimmy said. He knew the one. “Thank you, Terry.”

  “Only fair,” the man said, shrugging. “Thanks for telling me where all this power comes from.”

  “The power—?”

  “Yeah, you said it came from above. From level…”

  “Thirty-four? I said that?”

  The man smiled. “I believe you did.”

  50

  Elise had watched the people in the bottom where the floods used to be — the ones who were working to dig their way out and get the power going, get the lights on. She had also seen people at the farms harvesting a bunch of food and figuring out how to get people fed. And now there was this third group of people arranging furniture and sweeping the floors and making things tidy. She had no clue what they were trying to do.

  The nice man who had last seen Puppy was off to one side, speaking with another man in a white outfit who had a bald circle in the center of his head even though he looked too young to be bald. The outfit was strange. Like a blanket. Instead of two legs, it had only one, and it was big enough that it swirled around him and made it so you couldn’t hardly see his feet. The nice man with the dark whiskers seemed to be arguing a point. The man in the white blanket just frowned and stood there. Now and then, one or both of them would glance at Elise, and she worried they were talking about her. Maybe they were talking about how to find Puppy.

  The furniture grew into straight lines, all facing the same way. There weren’t any tables like the rooms she used to eat in behind the farms, the places where she would hide under furniture and pretend she was a rat with a whole rat family, all of them talking and twitching their whiskers. Here, it was just chairs and benches facing a wall where a colorful glass picture stood with some of the glass broken out. A man in coveralls worked behind that wall, was visible through the broken glass and hazy behind the part that remained. He spoke to someone else, who passed a black cord through a door. They were working on something, and then a light burst on back there, throwing colorful rays across the room, and a few people moving furniture stopped and stared. Some of them whispered. It sounded like they were all whispering the same thing.