Hugh Howey: First Shift: Legacy

“Let go,” Donald demanded, as Anna grabbed him and scrambled to pull him back down the hill.

—and the hooome of the… braaaaave…

Miles of applause bubbled up together. The air shook from the grumble of the perfectly timed fly-by. Afterburners screamed as the jets peeled apart and curved upward into the white clouds.

Anna was practically wrestling him, arms wrapped around his shoulders. Donald snapped out of a trance induced by the passing jets, the beautiful rendition of the anthem amplified across half a county, the struggle to spot his wife in the bowl below.

“Goddamnit, Donny, we’ve got to get down —”

The first flash came before she could get her hands over his eyes. A bright spot in the corner of his vision in the direction of downtown Atlanta. It was a daytime strike of lightning. Donald turned toward it, expecting thunder. The flash of light had become a blinding glow. Anna’s arms were around his waist, jerking him backward. His sister was there, panting, covering her eyes, screaming, What the fuck?

Another pop of light like being punched in the face, starbursts in one’s vision. Sirens spilled out of all the speakers, a grating noise compared to the sweet voice they replaced. It was the recorded sound of air raid klaxons.

Donald felt half blinded. Even when the mushroom clouds rose up from the earth—impossibly large to be so distant—it still took a heartbeat to figure out what was going on.

They pulled him down the hill. Applause had turned to screams audible over the rise and fall of the blaring siren. Donald could hardly see. He stumbled backward and nearly fell as the three of them slipped and slid down the bowl, the wet grass funneling them toward the stage. The puffy tops of the swelling mushrooms rose up higher and higher, staying in sight even as the rest of the hills and the trees disappeared from view.

“Wait!” he yelled.

There was something he was forgetting. He couldn’t remember what. He had an image of his ATV sitting up on the ridge. He was leaving it behind. How did he get up there? What was happening?

“Go. Go. Go,” Anna was saying.

His sister was cussing. She was frightened and confused, just like him. He had never known his sister to be either one.

“The main tent!”

Donald spun around, his heels slipping in the grass, hands wet with rain and studded with mud and grass. When had he fallen?

The three of them tumbled down the last of the slope as the sound of distant thunder finally reached them. The clouds overhead seemed to race away from the blasts, pushed aside by an unnatural wind. The undersides of the clouds strobed and flashed as if more strikes of lightning were hitting, more bombs detonating. The air growled with the force of the earlier blows. Down by the stage, people weren’t running to escape the bowl—they were instead flowing into tents, guided by volunteers with waving arms, the markets and food stalls clearing out, the rows of wooden chairs now a heaped and upturned tangle, a dog still tied to a post, barking.

Some people still seemed to be aware, to have their faculties intact. Anna was one of them. Donald saw the Senator by a smaller tent coordinating the flow of traffic. Where was everyone going? Donald felt disembodied as he was ushered along with the others. It took long moments for his brain to process what he’d seen. Nuclear blasts. The live view of what had forever been resigned to grainy wartime video. Real bombs going off in the real air. Nearby. He had seen them. Why wasn’t he completely blind? Was that even what happened?

The raw fear of death overtook him. Donald knew, in some recess of his mind, that they were all dead. The end of all things was coming. There was no outrunning it. No hiding. Paragraphs from a book he’d read came to mind, thousands of paragraphs memorized. He patted his pants for his pills, but they weren’t there. Looking over his shoulder, he fought to remember what he’d left behind—

Anna and his sister pulled him past the Senator, who wore a hard scowl of determination, who frowned at his daughter. The tent flap brushed Donald’s face, the darkness within interspersed with a few hanging lights. The spots in his vision from the blasts made themselves known in the blackness. There was a crush of people, but not as many as there should have been. Where were the crowds? It didn’t make sense until he found himself shuffling downward.

A concrete ramp, bodies on all sides, shoulders jostling, people wheezing, yelling for one another, hands outstretched as the flowing crush drove loved ones away, husband and wife separated, some people crying, some perfectly poised—

Husband and wife.

Helen!

Donald heard her name over the crowd. But it was his voice. He was yelling it. He turned and tried to swim against the flowing torrent of the frightened. Anna and his sister pulled on him. People fighting to get below pushed from above. Donald was forced to move his feet the opposite direction of his will. He was drowning. The tide was pulling him beneath the waves, a white mist rising up around him like sea foam. He wanted to go under with his wife. He wanted to drown with her.

“Helen!”

Oh, God, he remembered.

He remembered what he had left behind.

Panic subsided and fear took its place. He could see. His vision had cleared. But he could not swim up the ramp, could not fight the push of the inevitable. His world was gone.

Donald remembered a conversation with the Senator about how it would all end. There was an electricity in the air, the taste of dead metal on his tongue. He remembered most of a book. He knew what this was, what was happening.

His world was gone.

A new one swallowed him.

In 2007, the Center for Automation in Nanobiotech (CAN) outlined the hardware and software platforms that would one day allow robots smaller than human cells to make medical diagnoses, conduct repairs, and even self-propagate.

That same year, CBS re-aired a program about the effects of propranolol on sufferers of extreme trauma. A simple pill, it had been discovered, could wipe out the memory of any traumatic event.

At almost the same moment in humanity’s broad history, mankind had discovered the means for bringing about its utter downfall. And the ability to forget it ever happened.

Troy startled awake from a series of terrible dreams. The world was on fire, and the people who had been sent to put it out were all asleep. Asleep and frozen stiff, smoking matches still in their hands, wisps and gray curls of evil deeds.

He had been buried, was enveloped in darkness, could feel the tight walls of his small coffin like a closed fist.

The confinement brought a scream to his lips, but his fearful cries leaked out in a trembling whimper.

Dark shapes moved beyond the frosted glass, the men with their shovels trying to free him.

Troy’s eyelids seemed to rip and crack as he fought to open them fully. There was crust in the corners of them, melting frost coursing down his cheek. He tried to lift his arms to wipe it away, but they responded feebly. An IV tugged at his wrist as he managed to raise one hand. He was aware of his catheter. Every inch of his body tingled as he emerged from the numbness and into the cold.

The lid popped with a hiss of air. There was a crack of light to his side that grew as the suffocating shadows folded away.

A doctor and his assistant reached in to tend to him. Troy remembered this. This was real. So were the nightmares. He tried to speak but could only cough. They helped him up, brought him the bitter drink. Swallowing took effort. His hands were so weak, arms trembling, they had to help him with the cup. The taste on his tongue was metallic. It tasted like the death of a machine.