Hugh Howey - Half Way Home

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Stevens,” she gasped. “He—he’s dead.”

I shook my head and tried to pull my arm free, my body revolting. “No,” I said. “I was just with him, not three or four hours ago.” I looked back to Terri, hoping she would back me up, but she remained by the last grate she’d opened, her face slack, her eyes out of focus.

Tarsi pulled me past our old adjoining vats and through the door. I stumbled along, my brain reeling with the idea that someone I had just come to know might be gone forever.

I ran alongside Tarsi and noticed many others hurrying in the same direction. Several groups of colonists were walking the opposite way, their hands over their mouths or tangled up in their hair. We, the running, had a shared look of doubting shock on our faces. The others—the walking—had a similar, horrified expression, but with all the disbelief removed.

I followed Tarsi around a large brown puddle of yesterday’s rain and across the packed earth. We crested a rise and came to a broad clearing, the spot they’d chosen for the rocket pad. Several tractors and dozers idled there, puffing smoke into the sky like huffs of anxious energy. Near one of the tractors, a small cluster of colonists stood around a tarp. A tarp that covered something.

I shuffled down the slope and stopped one of the female colonists who was wandering back up. “What happened?” I asked.

“One of the tractors lurched,” she said. “He fell off and got caught under the treads—”

Tarsi dragged me away from the girl and toward the scene.

“We’re supposed to get back to work—” the girl called after us.

I stopped at the edge of a small group that had formed near the tarp. Myra sat on the other side of the covered hump, sobbing into her hands, her shoulders shaking. I could see a hand sticking out of the tarp, half opened. The fingers curling up from the ground were perfectly still.

“How?” I asked. It didn’t make sense. Someone so alive, so in control, and all so recently, was no more. He would never again move of his own volition. Never speak to us with his calm voice. Never lead us to all the hopeful futures he seemed intent on taking us. I found myself passing through the denial stage, and completely aware of it.

“It wasn’t an accident,” someone in the group said.

Several other people arrived at a run, while others shuffled off in a state of shock. I was dead-still, undergoing the transformation.

“It was a fluke,” another person said. “He fell. I saw it happen.”

“Hickson was on the platform with him,” the first boy said. “No way was this an accident.”

I turned to tell the two guys to leave it alone, then saw Oliver. Our eyes met, and he came over to me; he wrapped both hands around my elbow, the weight of his thin arms pulling down on mine.

“The gods hath more need of him than we,” he said, the barest of smiles on his lips.

“Not now,” I told Oliver. I approached the two arguing colonists. They were both males—large, like members of the working class. “Which of you saw what happened?” I asked.

“We both did, I guess.”

“I was on the rise,” one of them said. “I was over there, diverting the water. I heard gears grinding and looked up. Stevens was in the air. Hickson was leaning out over the landing with his arms out. The tractor was moving forward and—”

“That was after ,” the other boy said, shaking his head. “I saw the whole thing. Hickson was reaching out to grab him, to help him. The tractor just lurched. I swear, it was an accident.”

“No way was that an accident,” the first boy said. “You saw them this morning, and who’s gonna be in charge now?”

“You can’t go making those claims,” the other boy said, his voice rising. “Especially if you didn’t see—”

“Calm down,” I told them. “None of this is going to help. We don’t need to spread divisive rumors, okay?”

One of the boys nodded. The other shook his head, but it seemed to be more out of an unwillingness to accept the coincidence than anything else. He let the matter go and the two turned away from each other, going back to their duties, probably with a mind of seeding their individual version of events among the other colonists.

When I turned back, I saw Tarsi and Kelvin clinging to one another, both looking to the tarp. We had already begun burying the more than four hundred dead from the previous day, but this one would be different. This would be someone we knew, however briefly. More chilling was that with Stevens’s passing, we would be reducing our number by one.

And burying a bit of our hope along with him.

Oliver insisted his profession made him the expert on funerals, but none of what he said at the service made sense to me. He recited memorized passages with an odd syntax, his voice rising and falling theatrically. There was a lot of thanking and rejoicing and talk of Stevens living on in another place. It made for an uncomfortable scene, especially with most of us fidgeting in our new wardrobe.

The supply group had stitched together pants and tops from the headliners of the tractors and the sound-dampening fabric stapled to the engine compartments. While the material was more pliable than the tarps, it was also itchy and abrasive. I scratched my thigh while one of the dozers pushed dirt over the hole we had lowered Stevens into, a hole apart from the nearby pits of ash and bone. The machine roared noticeably louder than it had the day before, what with us wearing the fabric that once lined its hood. It was almost loud enough to drown out the sniffles from the crowd and Myra’s heart-wrenching sobs.

I watched Hickson as the hole gradually became a mound. He seemed distraught enough until I followed his gaze and realized his dour expression was aimed at Myra, and not the grave before her.

After the funeral, we ate the same thing we’d had for lunch: a paste made from the green fruits that fell from the canopy above, washed down with bowls of boiled water. It was hard to judge the taste of the fruit, having never really eaten anything else in my life, but the fact that I only looked forward to sating the grumbling in my stomach surely said something. We ate out of necessity rather than desire, which was not what I knew of hunger.

There was talk of venturing out in the coming days to search for meat, but Colony was being extremely secretive about what we might find. And with the vat module half-ruined and scavenged for supplies, it would be a very long time before we could raise what few Earth animal blastocysts had survived the fires.

“I don’t think Myra wants the job of leading us,” I heard Tarsi tell Kelvin between bites of paste. I pushed the rest of mine away and drank from one of the many gold bowls the construction crew had stamped out. We were arranged in several clusters, each group sitting around raised sheets of gold alloy that served as tables.

“I don’t think she should have to lead us,” Kelvin said. “Not if she doesn’t want to.”

“We should vote on it,” another at our table said.

“Colony is in charge,” someone reminded us. “Let it decide who’s next in line.”

Kelvin reached across and rapped his knuckles on the bright surface in front of me. When I looked up, he asked me, quietly: “What are our chances?”

“For what?” I asked.

He looked around. Our entire table had fallen silent. Everyone shifted their gazes back and forth between us. Amid all the noisy banter, a whisper had somehow caught everyone’s attention.

“For surviving ,” Kelvin said. “For making it long-term. For not ending up like Stevens.”