Hugh Howey - Half Way Home

The hellish scene was over in mere moments. And then we were left in a darkness full of receding thunder. I found myself on my back but couldn’t remember falling. I groped in the pitch black for my flashlight, the complete absence of light as bewildering as the blue sky had been the day before. I felt worse than blind—I felt cursed with an inability to perceive even the void.

I bumped into someone else as each of us crawled through the thundering, vibrating darkness. In the new tunnel that had erupted parallel to our own—cut right through solid stone—I could hear loose rocks clattering to the ground. I finally found the cylinder of blessed plastic, flicked the switch, and sobbed with relief when the bulb burst with light. Bodies crowded close, like night bugs to a flame. I heard something slide behind us, turned and saw Mindy stumbling forward, away from the ledge. Tarsi followed before I could yell for her to wait. She slid straight down, then churned her legs, grabbing Mindy for balance as the two joined us in my puddle of light.

“Whatthefuckwhatthefuckwhatthefuck,” mumbled Jorge. He and Leila were wrapped around each other, all of us cowering as a small shower of dust continued to rain down. Every ounce of meat inside my skin felt like it wanted to rush off in all directions, but the terrified shell of me somehow kept all the bits contained, holding me in the center of some fear-filled paralysis.

Tarsi clutched to me and Kelvin and pulled us close. Karl and Mindy rose and turned to the edge of the light; they peered in the direction of the passing monster.

“We need to get out of here,” Karl said, his voice high and tight. He came back and reached for me—grabbed my wrist to aim the flashlight toward the destruction. “We need to go,” he repeated.

“What the hell was that?” someone asked.

I stood and ran the light around the space where the tractor had been. The curving wall no longer ran up to a square shaft with a tractor inside it. It ran up half that length before opening up into a parallel tunnel of missing rock. The interior was a cloud of dust with larger rocks falling down through it, stirring the powdery mist. I could still feel the ground vibrating beneath my feet as the creature moved away.

“That’s why the colony was aborted,” someone said. “Not the ore.”

I stepped toward the new tunnel and half-expected Oliver to come over the lip, swimming through the dust with his golden gun and yelling at me to stop moving. Part of me wanted it to happen. The rest of me knew it was impossible. I’d seen him disappear. Seen it in the worst way possible. He was gone, and my mind continued to wrestle with the idea, struggling to pin it down.

The others coalesced around my light. We moved as one toward the parallel tube, our hands linking us together in a web of confused and stunned silence. Jorge broke it with whispered curses as he reached the edge where the two tunnels met. We joined him along the sharp ridge where the curve of our tunnel rose up to meet the neighboring one. I directed the flashlight down the new tunnel, marveling at the way the creature had traveled through solid rock rather than slide through its old hole. I had been sure it was going to eat us, not them.

“The tractor,” Kelvin whispered.

I played the light across the floor of the new tunnel. There was nothing there but a few scraps of metal scattered among the rubble. It reminded me of the mess Tarsi and Mindy had been crawling over in the shaft behind us.

“Shit,” someone whispered.

A few people pushed themselves over the ridge and shuffled down into the new tunnel. Somehow, the receding noise and the leftover vibrations weren’t enough to keep us out of the new tube. Or perhaps their lessening presence served as a comforting reminder of the thing’s whereabouts.

“Over there,” Jorge said. He grabbed my wrist and aimed the light. I complied, allowing him to shine it across the floor in the direction the creature had gone. Something glimmered—a small hunk of gold. Jorge ran over to it and bent down. “It’s one of the guns,” he said. He reached down and grabbed it, then came away howling, shaking his hand in the air.

“What happened?” Leila asked, running over to help him.

“Damn thing burned me,” he said.

I moved closer and focused the light on it. The thing had a wet sheen, like it was covered in something. I moved to nudge the gun with my bare foot, but Tarsi pulled me back.

“Don’t touch it,” she said.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” someone else insisted.

I moved the light over to see if the square shaft we had entered from was still passable. It was. A small line of debris could be seen scattered along the edge as the new chewed-out tunnel had moved the entrance back, but the darkness beyond beckoned as a passage to safety.

“Porter,” Jorge said. I swung the flashlight back around—the thing had definitely become my scepter of leadership. I considered passing it to Jorge and being done with it, but he had his arms tangled in his shirt as he pulled it off his back. He bent down and scooped up the gun and wrapped it in a ball. Others had already started forming by the wall leading up to the mineshaft; they teamed up like before to give others a boost to the edge.

As we hoisted ourselves up, reaching down for the people that had done the lifting, the last of the tremors faded into nothingness, leaving me to shake only of my own accord. We gathered around my cone of light and moved quickly up the incline, hurrying back toward the exit.

“What in the hell was that?” someone asked.

“That could’ve been us.”

“It could still be us. It came through solid rock.”

I couldn’t help it. As soon as someone stated the obvious, my arm twitched to play the light over the walls to either side of us as if I would see the next one coming. As if it would approach silently, without the tremors of its destructive onrush. But these were mere shards of logic; they couldn’t pierce my fear. And the thought that such a beast could emerge through the wall to either side, or from above or below, made my guts fidget.

Everyone quickly assumed the beast’s discovery had been the impetus for Colony’s abort procedure. While they argued the details, other thoughts rattled around in my head. I began to consider the far more vexing question of why Colony had stopped the abort process once it had been started. I tried slotting the facts together, arranging the clues in some readable order, but raw fear and leftover adrenaline made it hard to think. And other, older problems kept invading: Oliver was dead. Colony had sent for us. And something else…

I traced the thread of concern to back before the creature’s appearance. Something bad had taken place prior to the tractor coming for us—something that seemed to tug at my subconscious for attention.

Then I remembered.

That single gunshot.

I could see the huddled forms of Mica and Peter on the small rise before we reached the fire pits. They were right where we had left them: close by one of the shaft walls. One body was bent over the other and a mournful moan—barely audible—emanated from one of them.

We forgot our exhaustion from the long jog up the mine and broke out in a run, the light from my flashlight bouncing with my gait but increasingly unneeded as we approached the wan reach of daylight.

As I got closer, I could see that it was Peter draped across Mica’s body, his shoulders shivering in time with the sobs. Leila and Tarsi reached him right before Kelvin and I got there. Their hands went to his back, trying to comfort him for his loss.

Both of them pulled their arms away as if burned by the touch. Leila yelped, and Tarsi covered her mouth. I came to a stop as Mica’s arms moved across Peter’s back.