Hugh Howey - Dust

Her wrench slipped off the cable stay — her knuckles banging the fuselage. Charlotte cursed and studied her hand, saw blood welling up. She sucked on her knuckle and remembered another injustice that had once given her pause. She remembered being on deployment and feeling grateful that she was born in the States, not in Iraq. A roll of the dice. Invisible borders drawn on maps that were as real as the walls of silos. Trapped by circumstance. What life you lived was divined by some calculus of your people, your leaders, like computers tallying your fate.

She crawled out once again and tried the wing. The play in the cable was gone. The drone was in the best condition Charlotte could make her. She gathered the wrenches she would no longer need and began slotting them into her tool bag when there was a ding at the end of the shelves, off toward the elevators.

Charlotte froze. Her first thought was of food. The ding meant Donny bringing her food. But her brother’s shadow could be seen down the hall.

She heard a lift door slide open. Someone was running. Several someones. Boots rang out like thunder, and Charlotte risked yelling Donald’s name. She shouted it down the hall once before rushing around the drone and grabbing the tarp. She spun the tarp like a fisherman’s net across the wide wings and the scattering of parts and tools. Had to hide. Hide her work and then herself. Donny had heard her. He would hide as well.

The tarp drifted to the ground on a cushion of trapped air; it billowed out and settled. Charlotte turned toward the hallway to run to Donny just as men spilled from the tall shelves. She fell to the ground at once, certain she’d been spotted. Boots clomped past. Gripping the edge of the tarp, she lifted it slowly and curled her knees against her body. She used her shoulder and hip to wiggle underneath the tarp to join the drone. Donny had heard her call out. He would hear the boots and hide in the bathroom attached to the conference room, hide in the shower. Somewhere. They couldn’t know they were down there. How had these people gotten in? Her brother said he had the highest access.

The running receded. They were heading straight to the back of the warehouse, almost as if they knew. Voices nearby. Men talking. Slower footsteps shuffling past the drone. Charlotte thought she heard Donny cry out as he was discovered. Crawling on her belly, she scooted beneath the drone to the other edge of the tarp. The voices were fading, slow footsteps walking past. Her brother was in trouble. She remembered a conversation from a few days prior and wondered if he’d been recognized in the elevator. A handyman had seen him. The darkness beneath the tarp closed in around her at the thought of being left alone, of him being taken. She relied on him. She was going crazy enough locked in that warehouse with him to keep her company. Without him — she didn’t want to imagine.

Resting her chin on the cool steel plating, she slid her arms forward and lifted the tarp with the backs of her hands. A low sliver of the world was exposed. She could see boots dangerously close. She could smell oil on the decking. Ahead of her, it looked like a man having a hard time walking, another man in silver coveralls helping to support him, their feet shuffling along as if with a single mind.

Beyond them, a hallway was thrown into brightness; all the overhead lights Donny preferred to leave off were now on. Charlotte sucked in her breath as her brother was pulled from the conference room. One of the men in the bright silver coveralls punched him in the ribs. Her brother grunted, and Charlotte felt the blow to her own side. She dropped the tarp with one hand and covered her mouth in horror. The other hand trembled as it lifted the tarp further, not wanting to see but needing to. Her brother was hit again, but the shuffling man waved an arm. She could hear a feeble voice commanding them to stop.

The two men in silver held her brother down on the ground and did as they were told. Charlotte forgot to breathe as she watched the man who shuffled along as if weak — watched him march into the lit hallway. He had white hair as brilliant as the bulbs overhead. He labored to walk, leaned on the young man beside him, arm draped across his back, until he came to a stop by her brother.

Charlotte could see Donny’s eyes. He was fifty meters away, but she could see how wide they were. Her brother stared up at this old and feeble man, didn’t look away even as he coughed, a bad fit from the blow to his ribs, drowning out something being said by the man who could barely stand.

Her brother tried to speak. He said something over and over, but she couldn’t hear. And the thin man with the white hair could barely stand, could barely stand but could still swing his boots. The young man beside him propped him up, and Charlotte watched, cowed and trembling, as a leg was brought back over and over before lashing forward, a heavy boot slamming into her brother with ferocious might, Donny’s own legs scrambling to shield himself, hugging his shins as two men pinned him to the ground, giving him nowhere to hide from kick after brutal, stomping, and angry kick.

“Are you sure you should be digging around in there?” Lukas asked.

“Hold the light still,” Juliette said. “I’ve got one more to go.”

“But shouldn’t we talk about this?”

“I’m just looking, Luke. Except that right now, I can’t see a damn thing.”

Lukas adjusted the light, and Juliette crawled forward. It was the second time she’d explored beneath the floor grates at the bottom of the server room ladder. It was here that she’d traced the camera feeds over a month ago, soon after Lukas made her mayor. He had shown her how they could see anywhere within the silo, and Juliette had asked who else could see. Lukas had insisted no one until she found the feeds disappearing through a sealed port where the outer edge of the silo wall should be. She remembered seeing other lines in that bundle. Now she wanted to make sure.

She worked the last screw on the cover panel. It came off, exposing the dozens of wires she’d cut, each of them bursting with hundreds of tiny filaments like silver strands of hair. Running parallel to the bundles were thick cables that reminded her of the main feeds from the two generators in Mechanical. There were also two copper pipes buried in there.

“Have you seen enough?” Lukas asked. He crouched down behind her where the floor grating had been removed and aimed the light over her shoulder.

“In the other silo, this level still has power. All of thirty-four has full power with no generator running.” She tapped the thick cables with her screwdriver. “The servers over there are still humming as well. And some of the survivors tapped into that power to run pumps and things up and down the silo. I think all that juice comes from here.”

“Why?” Lukas asked. He played the light across the bundle and seemed more interested now.

“Because they needed the power for the pumps and grow lights,” Juliette said, amazed she had to spell it out.

“No, why are they providing this power in the first place?”

“Maybe they don’t trust us to keep things running on our own. Or maybe the servers require more juice than we can generate. I don’t know.” She leaned to the side and peered back at Lukas. “What I want to know is why they left it running after they tried to kill everyone. Why not shut it off with everything else?”

“Maybe they did. Maybe your friend hacked in here and turned it back on.”

Juliette laughed. “No. Not Solo—”

There was a voice down the hall. The crawl space grew dark as Lukas spun the flashlight around. There shouldn’t have been anyone else down there.