Hugh Howey - Dust

Where logjams formed, some people attempted to scamper up and along the tops of these piles. This just pushed heaps of dirt and rock down on those between, filling the tunnel with screams and curses. Juliette helped dig someone out and urged everyone to stay in the center, not to shove, even as someone practically climbed over her back.

There were others who tried to turn back, afraid and confused and distrusting of this dark run in a straight line. Juliette and others yelled for them to continue on. A nightmare formed of bumping into the support beams hastily erected in the center of the tunnel, of crawling on hands and knees over tall piles from partial cave-ins, of a baby crying at the top of its lungs somewhere. The adults did a better job of dampening their sobs, but Juliette passed by dozens crying. The journey felt interminable, as if they would crawl and stumble through that tunnel for the rest of time, until the poisonous air caught them from behind.

A jam of foot traffic formed ahead, people shoving at each others’ backs, and flashlight beams played over the steel wall of the digger. The end of the tunnel. The access door at the back of the machine was open. Juliette found Raph standing by the door with one of the flashlights, his pale face aglow in the darkness, eyes wide and white.

“Jules!”

She could barely hear him over the voices echoing back and forth in the dark shaft. She made her way to him, asked him who had already passed through.

“It’s too dark,” he said. “They can only get through one at a time. What the hell is going on? Why all the people? We thought you said—”

“Later,” she told him, hoping there would be a later. She doubted it. More likely, there would be piles of bodies at both ends of this silo. That would be the great difference between 17 and 18. Bodies at both ends. “The kids?” she asked, and as soon as she did, she wondered why with all the dead and dying she would concentrate on so few. The mother she never was, she suspected. The primal urge to look after her brood when far more than that was in peril.

“Yeah, quite a few kids came through.” He paused and shouted directions to a couple who didn’t want to enter the metal door at the back of this digger. Juliette could hardly blame them. They weren’t even from Mechanical. What did these people think was going on? Just following the panicked shoutings of others. Probably thought they were lost in the mines. It was a wild experience even for Juliette, who had scaled hills and seen the outside.

“What about Shirly?” Juliette asked.

He aimed his torch inside. “Saw her for sure. I think she’s in the digger. Directing traffic.”

She squeezed Raph’s arm, looked back at the writhing darkness of shadowy forms behind her. “Make sure you get through,” she told him, and his pale face nodded his consent.

Juliette squeezed into the queue and entered the back of the digger. Cries and shouts rattled within like children screaming into empty soup cans. Shirly was at the back of the power plant, directing the shuffling and shoving mass of people through a crack in the darkness so narrow that everyone had to turn sideways. The lights that’d been rigged up inside the digger to work the tailings were off, the backup generator idle, but Juliette could feel the residual heat from it having been run. She could hear the clicking of metal as it cooled. She wondered if Shirly had been operating the unit in order to move the machine and its power plant back toward Silo 18. She and Courtnee had been arguing over where the digger belonged.

“What the hell?” Shirly asked Juliette when she spotted her.

Juliette felt like bursting into tears. How to explain what she feared, that this was the end of everything they’d ever known? She shook her head and bit her lip. “We’re losing the silo,” she finally managed. “The outside’s getting in.”

“So why send them this way?” Shirly had to yell over the clamor of voices. She pulled Juliette to the other side of the generator, away from all the shouting.

“The air is coming down the stairwell,” Juliette said. “There’s no stopping it. I’m going to seal off the dig.”

Shirly chewed on this. “Take down the supports?”

“Not quite. The charges you wanted rigged up—”

Shirly’s face hardened. “Those charges are rigged from the other side. I rigged them to seal off this side, to seal off this silo, to protect us from the air over here .”

“Well, now all we have is the air over here.” Juliette passed Shirly the radio, which was all she’d taken from her home. Shirly cradled it in her arms. She balanced it atop her torch, which bloomed against Juliette’s chest. In the light that spilled back, Juliette could see a mask of confusion on her poor friend’s face. “Watch over everyone,” Juliette told her. “Solo and the kids—” She eyed the generator. “The farms here are salvageable. And the air—”

“You’re not going to—” Shirly started.

“I’ll make sure the last of them get through. There were a few dozen behind me. Maybe another hundred.” Juliette grasped her old friend’s arms. She wondered if they were still friends. She wondered if there was still that bond between them. She turned to go.

“No.”

Shirly grabbed Juliette’s arm, the radio falling and clattering to the floor. Juliette tried to yank free.

“I’ll be damned,” Shirly shouted. She spun Juliette around. “I’ll be goddamned if you’re leaving me to this, in charge of this. I’ll be goddamned—”

There were cries somewhere, from a child or an adult, it was impossible to tell. Just a cacophony of confused and terrified voices echoing in the packed confines of that great steel machine. And in the darkness, Juliette couldn’t see the blow coming, couldn’t see Shirly’s fist. She just felt it on her jaw, marveled at the bright flash of light in the pitch black, and then remembered nothing for a while.

She came to moments or minutes later — it was impossible to tell. Curled up on the steel deck of the digger, the voices around her subdued and far away, she lay still while her face throbbed.

Fewer people. Just the ones who’d made it, and they were moving on through the bowels of the digger. She had been out for a minute or two, it seemed. Maybe longer. Much longer. Someone called her name, was looking for her in the black, but she was invisible curled up on the far side of the generator in the shadow of shadows. Someone called her name.

And then a great boom in the distance. It was like a sheet of three-inch steel falling and banging next to her head. A great rumble in the earth, a tremor felt right through the digger, and Juliette knew. Shirly had gone to the control room and had taken her place. She had set off the charges meant to protect her old home from this new one. She had doomed herself with the others.

Juliette wept. Someone called her name, and Juliette realized it was coming from the radio near her head. She reached for it numbly, her senses scrambled. It was Lukas.

“Luke,” she whispered, squeezing the transmit button. His voice meant he was outside the steel locker, the airtight pantry full of food. She thought of Solo surviving for decades on those cans. Lukas could too, if anyone could. “Get back inside,” she said, sobbing. “Seal yourself off.” She cradled the radio in both hands and remained curled up on the deck.

“I can’t,” Lukas said. There was coughing, an agonizing wheeze. “I had to… had to hear your voice. One last time.” The next bout of coughing could be felt in Juliette’s own chest, which was full to bursting. “I’m done, Jules. I’m done…”

“No.” She cried this to herself, and then squeezed the radio. “Lukas, you get inside that pantry right now. Lock it and hold on. Just hold on—”