by Hugh Howey
She broke from her trance and stared at him a moment, then nodded her head. “If they’ll power up.”
“They will.” He watched the light above the lift controls flash while Charlotte settled behind one of the stations. The room felt overly quiet and empty with all those other stations sitting under sheets of plastic. The dust was gone from them, Donald saw. The place was recently lived in. He thought of the requisitions he’d signed for flights, each one at considerable cost. Eren had stressed the one-use nature of the drones. The air outside was bad for them, he’d said. Their range was limited. Donald had thought about why this might be as he dug through Thurman’s files.
Charlotte flicked several switches, the neat clicks breaking the silence, and the control station whirred to life.
“The lift takes a while,” he told her. He didn’t say how he knew, but he thought back to that ride up all those years ago. He remembered his breath fogging the dome of his helmet as he rose to what he had hoped might be his death. Now he had a different hope. He thought of what Erskine had told him about wiping the Earth clean. He thought about Victor’s suicide note to Thurman. This project of theirs was about resetting life. And Donald, whether by madness or reason, had grown convinced that the effort was more precise than anyone had rights to imagine.
Charlotte adjusted her screen. She flicked a switch, and a light bloomed on the monitor. It was the glare of the steel door of the lift, lit up by the drone’s headlamp and viewed by its cameras.
“It’s been so long,” she said. Donald looked down and saw that her hands were trembling. She rubbed them together before returning them to the controls. Wiggling in her seat, she located the pedals with her feet, and then adjusted the brightness of the monitor so it wasn’t so blinding.
“Is there anything I can do?” Donald asked.
Charlotte laughed and shook her head. “No. Feels strange not to be filing a flight plan or anything. I usually have a target, you know?” She looked back at Donald and flashed a smile.
He squeezed her shoulder. It felt good to have her around. He thought of their parents and Helen and everyone else he’d let down. She was all he had left. “Your flight plan is to fly as far and as fast as you can,” he told her. His hope was that without a bomb, the drone would go farther. His hope was that the limited range wasn’t programmed somehow. There was a flashing light from the lift controls. Donald hurried over to check them.
“The door’s coming up,” Charlotte said. “I think we’ve got daylight.”
Donald hurried back over. He glanced out the door and down the hall, thinking he’d heard something.
“Engine check,” Charlotte said. “We’ve got ignition.”
She wiggled in her seat. The coveralls he’d stolen for her were too big, were bunched around her arms. Donald stood behind her and watched the monitor, which showed a view of swirling skies up a sloped ramp. He remembered that view. It became difficult to breathe, seeing that. The drone was pulled from the lift and arranged on the ramp. Charlotte hit another switch.
“Brakes on,” she said, her leg straightening. “Applying thrust.”
Her hand slid forward. The camera view dipped as the drone strained against its brakes.
“Been a long time since I’ve done this without a launcher,” she said nervously.
Donald was about to ask if that was a problem when she shifted her feet and the view on the screen lifted. The metal shaft he remembered climbing up vibrated and began to race by. The swirling clouds filled the viewscreen until that was all that existed. Charlotte said, “Liftoff,” and worked the yoke with her right hand. Donald found himself leaning to the side as the view banked and the ground came into view.
“Which way?” she asked.
“I don’t think it matters,” he said. “Just straight.” He leaned closer to watch the strange but familiar landscape slide by. There were the great divots he had helped create. There was another tower down in the middle of a depression. The remnants of the convention—the tents and fairgrounds and stages—were long gone, eaten by the tiny machines in the air. “Just a straight line,” he said, pointing. It was a theory, a crazy idea, but he needed to see before he dared say anything. There was the danger of making it not true by voicing his most cherished hope. The world seemed to sense these things from him. He had learned to guard his wishes, just to be safe. Thinking them was like shining a light out to sea, and Donald lived among reef and rock. Drawing good things toward him was unwise.
The pattern of depressions ended in the distance. Donald strained to see beyond when Charlotte let go of the throttle and reached for a bank of dials and indicators. “Uh … I think we have a problem.” She flipped a switch back and forth. “I’m losing oil pressure.”
“No.” Donald watched the screen as the clouds swirled and the land seemed to heave upward. It was too early. Unless he’d missed some step, some precaution, some way of turning off other, smaller, flying things. “Keep going,” he breathed, as much to the machine as to its pilot.
“She’s handling screwy,” Charlotte said. “Everything feels loose.”
Donald thought of all the drones in the hangar. They could launch another. But he suspected the results would be the same. He might be resistant to whatever was out there, but the machines weren’t. He thought of the cleaning suits, the way things were meant to break down at a certain time, a certain place. Invisible destroyers so precise that they could let loose their vengeance as soon as a cleaner hit a hill, reached a particular altitude, as soon as they dared to rise up. He reached for his cloth and coughed into it, and had a vague memory of them scrubbing the airlock after pulling him back inside.
“You’re at the edge,” he said, pointing to the last of the silos as its bowl disappeared beneath the drone’s camera. “Just a little further.”
But in truth, he had no idea how much further it might take. Maybe you could fly straight around the world and right back where you started, and that still wouldn’t be far enough. But he didn’t think so.
“I’m losing lift,” Charlotte said. Her hands were twin blurs. They went from the controls to switches and back again. Donald thought of the seals and gaskets. Maybe they could be replaced. Beefed up.
“Engine two is out,” she said. “Altitude oh-two-hundred.”
It looked like far less on the screen. They were beyond the last of the hills, now. There was a scar in the earth, a trench that may have been a river, black sticks like charred bones that stuck up in sharp points like pencil lead, all that remained of ancient trees, perhaps. Or the steel girders of a large security fence, eaten away by time.
“Go, go,” he whispered. Every second aloft was a new sight, a new vista. Here was a breath of freedom, a giant’s step, a leap of leagues. Here was escape from hell.
“Camera’s going. Altitude oh-one-fifty.”
There was a bright flash on the screen like the shock of dying electrics. A purplish cast followed from the frying sensors, then a wash of blue where once there was nothing but browns and grays.
“Altitude fifty feet. Gonna touch down hard.”
Donald blinked away tears as the drone plummeted and the earth rushed up to meet the machine. He blinked away tears at the sight on the monitor, nothing wrong with the camera at all.
“Blue—” he said.
It was an utterance of confirmation just before a vivid green landscape swallowed the dying drone, just as the monitor faded from color to black. Charlotte released the controls and cursed. She slapped the console with her palm. But as she turned and apologized to Donald, he was already wrapping his arms around her, squeezing her, kissing her cheek.
“Did you see it?” he asked, his voice a breathless whisper. “Did you see?”
“See what?” Charlotte pulled away, her face a hardened mask of disappointment. “Every gauge was toast there at the end. Blasted drone. Probably been sitting too long—”
“No, no,” Donald said. He pointed to the screen, which was now dark and lifeless. �
��You did it,” he said. “I saw it. There were blue skies and green grass out there, Charla! I saw it!”
Silo 17
Year Twenty
•41•
Without wanting to, Solo became an expert in how things broke down. Day by day, he watched steel and iron crumble to rust, watched paint peel and orange flecks curl up, saw the black dust gather as metal eroded to powder. He learned what rubber hoses felt like as they hardened, dried up, and cracked. He learned how adhesives failed, things appearing on the floor that once were affixed to walls and ceilings, objects moved suddenly and violently by the twin gods of gravity and dilapidation. Most of all, he learned how bodies rot. They didn’t always go in a flash—like a mother pushed upward by a jostling crowd or a father sliding into the shadows of a darkened corridor. Instead, they were often chewed up and carried off in invisible pieces. Time and maggots alike grew wings; they flew and flew and took all things with them.
Solo tore a page from one of the boring articles in the Ri - Ro book and folded it into a tent. The silo, he thought, belonged to the insects in many ways. Wherever the bodies were gathered, the insects swarmed in dark clouds. He had read up on them in the books. Somehow, maggots turned into flies. White and writhing became black and buzzing. Things broke down and changed.
He threaded lengths of string into the folded piece of paper to give something to hang the weight on. This was when Shadow would normally get in the way, would come and arch his back against Solo’s arm, step on whatever he was doing, make him annoyed and make him laugh at the same time. But Shadow didn’t interrupt.
Solo made small knots in the string to keep them from pulling through. The paper was doubled over across the holes so it wouldn’t tear. He well knew how things broke down. He was an expert in things he wished he could unlearn. Solo could tell at a glance how long it’d been since someone had died.
The people he’d killed years back had been stiff when he moved them, but this only lasted a while. People soon swelled up and stank. Their bodies let off gasses, and the flies swarmed. The flies swarmed and the maggots feasted.
The stench would make his eyes water and throat burn. And the bodies would soon grow soft. Solo had to move some on the stairs once, tangled where they lay and difficult to step over, and the flesh came right apart. It became like cottage cheese he’d had back when there was still milk and goats to get them from. Flesh came apart once the person was no longer inside, holding themselves together. Solo concentrated on holding himself together. He tied the other ends of the strings to one of the small metal washers from Supply. Chewing his tongue, he made the finest of knots.
String and fabric didn’t last either, but clothes stayed around longer than people. Within a year, it was clothes and bones that were left. And hair. The hair seemed to go last. It clung to bones and sometimes hung over empty and gazing sockets. The hair made it worse. It lent bones an identity. Beards on most, but not on the young or the women.
Within five years, even the clothes would break down. After ten, it was mostly bones. These days, so very long after the silo had gone dark and quiet—over twenty years since he’d been shown the secret lair beneath the servers—it was only the bones. Except for up in the cafe. The rot everywhere else made those bodies behind that door curiouser and curiouser.
Solo held up his parachute, a paper tent with little strings fastened to a tiny washer. He had dozens and dozens of bits of string laying in tangles across the open book. A handful of washers remained. He gave one of the strings on his parachute a tug and thought of the bodies up in the cafeteria. Behind that door, there were dead people who wouldn’t break down like the others. When he and Shadow had first discovered them, he’d assumed they’d recently passed. Dozens of them, dying together and piled on one another like they’d been tossed in there or had been crawling atop the others. The door to the forbidden outside was just beyond them, Solo knew. But he hadn’t gone that far. He had closed the door and left in a hurry, spooked by the lifeless eyeballs and the strange feeling of seeing a face other than his own peering back at him like that. He had left the bodies and not come back for a long time. He had waited for them to become bones. But they refused.
He went to the rail and peered over, made sure the piece of paper was tented, ready to grab the air. There was a cool updraft from the flooded deep. Solo leaned out beyond the third level railing, the fine paper pinched in one hand, the washer resting in his other palm. He wondered why some people rotted and others kept going. What made them break down?
“Break down,” he said aloud. He liked the way his voice sounded sometimes. He was an expert in how things broke down. Shadow should’ve been there, rubbing against his ankles, but he wasn’t.
“I’m an expert,” Solo told himself. “Breaking down, breaking down.” He stretched out his arms and released the parachute, watched it plummet for a moment before the strings went taut. And then it bobbed and twisted in the air as it sank into the dwindling depths. “Down down down,” he called after the parachute. All the way to the bottom. Sinking until it splashed invisible or got caught up along the way.
Solo knew well how bodies rot. He scratched his beard and squinted after the disappearing chute, then sat back down and crossed his legs, the knee torn completely out of his old coveralls. He mumbled to himself, delaying what needed to be done, his Project for the day, and instead tore another page from the shrinking book, trying not to think about yet another carcass that would soon dwindle with time.
•42•
There had been items Solo spent days and weeks searching for. There had been some things he’d needed that had consumed his hunts for years. Often, he found useful things much later, when he needed them no longer. Like the time he had come across a stash of razors. A great big bin of them in a doctor’s office. All the important stuff—the bandages, medicine, the tape—had long ago been snagged by those fighting over the scraps. But a bin of new razors, many of the blades still shiny, taunted him. He had long before resigned himself to his beard, but there had been times before that when he would’ve killed for a razor.
Other times, he found a thing before he even knew he needed it. The machete was like that. A great blade found beneath the body of a man not long dead. Solo had taken it simply so nobody else would have the murderous thing. He had locked himself below the server room for three days, terrified of the sight of another still-warm body. That had been many years ago. It took a while longer for the farms to thicken up where the machete became necessary. By then, he had taken to leaving his gun behind—no longer any use for it—and the machete became a constant companion. Something found before he knew he needed it.
Solo set the last of the parachutes free and watched as it narrowly missed the landing on level nine. The folded paper vanished out of sight. He thought of the things Shadow had helped him find over the years, mostly food, but then the one bonanza. He laughed and recalled the prick of claws from the cat climbing up and riding on his shoulders, or curling up in his arms, purring happily at the luxury of being ported.
Most days, Shadow followed him. Some days, the cat slunk off on his own. And then there were the days when no Projects loomed and Solo was the one who followed along behind. Some days he was the shadow.
Like the day after fishing when Shadow had run off with a mind of his own. It was on the way back up to Supply, with his belly full of fish and Solo stuffed on corn and beans, that Shadow had raced ahead and had disappeared across a landing. Solo had followed with his flashlight to what he later would suspect to have been the cat’s home. Otherwise, how would he know what was there?
Mewing and mewing by a door—Solo wary of another pile of bodies—but the apartment had been empty. Up on the kitchen counter, twirling, pawing at a cabinet full of little cans. Ancient and spotted with rust, but with pictures of cats on them. A madness in Shadow, and there, with a short cord plugged into the wall, a battered contraption, a mechanized can opener.
Solo smiled and gazed over the rail, thin
king on the things found and lost over the years. He remembered pressing the button on the top of that gadget the first time, and how Shadow had whipped into a frenzy, how neatly the tops had come off. He remembered not being impressed at all with how the stuff in the cans tasted, but Shadow had a mind of his own.
Solo turned and studied the book with the torn pages. He was out of washers, so he left the book behind and reluctantly headed down to the farms. He headed off to do what needed to be done.
* * *
Hacking at the greenery with his machete, Solo marveled that the farms hadn’t long ago rotted to ruin without people around to tend them. But the lights were rigged to come on and off, and more than half of them still could. Water continued to dribble from pipes. Pumps kicked on and off with angry buzzes and loud grumbles. Electricity stolen from his realm down below was brought up on wires that snaked the stairwell walls. Nothing worked perfectly, but Solo saw that man’s relationship to the crops mostly consisted of eating them. Now it was only him eating. Him and the rats and the birds and the worms and the other loose and lonely things.
The crops, with less tending and much less eating, were doing quite well. Life seemed to have some things figured out. But the machete knew the way through, and for years and years Solo whistled while he worked, tomatoes and corn falling at his feet with the great green stalks and vines until time and critter carried it all away.
He did not whistle this day. Even the machete sang a dull lament as it listlessly beat on stalk and vine. Clang clang where once it was shing shing. A sad sound from sad steel swung by a sad arm.
He continued through the thickest plots, needing to reach the far corners of the farm where the lights no longer burned, where the soil was cool and damp, where nothing grew anymore. A special place. Away from his weekly trips to gather food. A place he would come to as a destination rather than simply pass because it was along the way. Nothing lazy like that. He had passed enough death during his days, enough rusted patches and remnants of old bones. Every spot of the silo seemed to bear a stain, a spot the color of rust, where he could remember finding a body or a tangle of bones. Reminders. Reminders with no good memories.
