Hugh Howey - Dust

Another level went past, alone and empty, and Jimmy remembered that this wasn’t new. This wasn’t sudden. Elise was forever coming and going however she liked. He had just never worried about her when the silo was empty. It made him reconsider what made a place dangerous. Maybe it wasn’t the place at all.

“You!”

Jimmy rose to another landing, one-twenty-two. A man waved from the doorway. He had gold coveralls on, which meant something back when things had meaning. It was the first face Jimmy had seen in a dozen levels.

“Have you seen a girl?” Jimmy asked, ignoring the fact that this man seemed to have a question of his own. Jimmy held his hand at his hip. “This high. Seven years old. Missing a tooth.” He pointed past his beard at his own teeth.

The man shook his head. “No, but you’re the man who used to live here, right? The survivor?” The man had a knife in his hand, which flashed silver like a fish in water. The man in gold then laughed and peered beyond the landing’s rail. “I guess we’re all survivors, aren’t we?” Reaching out, he took hold of one of the rubber hoses Jimmy and Juliette had affixed to the wall to carry off the floods. With a deft swipe of the knife, the hose parted. He began hauling up the lower part, which dangled free far below.

“That was for the floods—” Jimmy began.

“You must know a lot about this place,” the man said. “I’m sorry. My name’s Terry. Terry Harlson. I’m on the Planning Commi—” He squinted at Jimmy. “Hell, you don’t know or care, do you? We’re all from the same place to you.”

“Jimmy,” he said. “My name’s Jimmy, but most people call me Solo. And that hose—”

“You have any idea where this power is coming from?” Terry jerked his head at the green lights that dotted the underside of the stairs. “We’re up another forty levels from here. Radio there’s got power. Some of these wires strung up all over the place got juice too. You do that?”

“Some of it,” Jimmy said. “Some was already like that. A little girl named Elise came this way. Did you—?”

“I reckon the power’s coming from above, but Tom told me to check down here. He says the power always came from below in our silo, should be the same in this one. Everything else is. But I saw the high-water mark down there where this place was full of water. I don’t think power’s been coming from there in a while. But you should know, right? This place got any secrets you can tell us about? Love to know about that power.”

The hose lay in a coil at the man’s feet. The knife was back out, glimmering in his hand. “You ever thought of being on a committee?”

“I need to find my friend,” Jimmy said.

Another swipe, but the electrical cord put up more resistance. It was the copper at the center. The man held a loop of the black wire in his hand and sawed back and forth, great muscles bulging beneath an undershirt stained with sweat. After some exertion, the knife burst free, the cord severed in two.

“If your friend ain’t with the men in the farms, she’s probably up with the chanters. I passed them on my way down. They found a chapel.” Terry jabbed the knife skyward before stuffing it away and looping wire around his arm.

“A chapel,” Jimmy said. He knew the one. “Thank you, Terry.”

“Only fair,” the man said, shrugging. “Thanks for telling me where all this power comes from.”

“The power—?”

“Yeah, you said it came from above. From level…”

“Thirty-four? I said that?”

The man smiled. “I believe you did.”

Elise had watched the people in the bottom where the floods used to be — the ones who were working to dig their way out and get the power going, get the lights on. She had also seen people at the farms harvesting a bunch of food and figuring out how to get people fed. And now there was this third group of people arranging furniture and sweeping the floors and making things tidy. She had no clue what they were trying to do.

The nice man who had last seen Puppy was off to one side, speaking with another man in a white outfit who had a bald circle in the center of his head even though he looked too young to be bald. The outfit was strange. Like a blanket. Instead of two legs, it had only one, and it was big enough that it swirled around him and made it so you couldn’t hardly see his feet. The nice man with the dark whiskers seemed to be arguing a point. The man in the white blanket just frowned and stood there. Now and then, one or both of them would glance at Elise, and she worried they were talking about her. Maybe they were talking about how to find Puppy.

The furniture grew into straight lines, all facing the same way. There weren’t any tables like the rooms she used to eat in behind the farms, the places where she would hide under furniture and pretend she was a rat with a whole rat family, all of them talking and twitching their whiskers. Here, it was just chairs and benches facing a wall where a colorful glass picture stood with some of the glass broken out. A man in coveralls worked behind that wall, was visible through the broken glass and hazy behind the part that remained. He spoke to someone else, who passed a black cord through a door. They were working on something, and then a light burst on back there, throwing colorful rays across the room, and a few people moving furniture stopped and stared. Some of them whispered. It sounded like they were all whispering the same thing.

“Elise.”

The man with the dark whiskers knelt down beside her. Elise startled and clutched her bag to her chest. “Yes?” she asked, her voice a whisper.

“Have you heard of the Pact?” the man asked. The other man with no hair on the center of his head and the white blanket around his shoulders stood behind, that same frown on his face. Elise imagined that he never smiled.

She nodded. “A pack is a bunch of animals, like deer and dogs and puppies.”

The man smiled. “Pact, not pack.” But it all sounded the same to Elise. “And dogs and puppies are the same animal.”

She didn’t feel like correcting him. She’d seen what dogs looked like in her book and in the bizarre, and they were scary. Puppies weren’t scary.

“Where did you hear about deer?” the man in the white blanket asked. “Do you have children’s books over here?”

Elise shook her head. “We have real books. I’ve seen deer. They’re tall and funny with skinny legs, and they live in the woods.”

The man with the whiskers in the orange coveralls didn’t seem to care about deer. Not as much as the other man. Elise looked to the door, wondered where everyone she knew was. Where was Solo? He should’ve been helping her find Puppy.

“The Pact is a very important document,” said the man in orange. She suddenly remembered his name was Mr. Rash. He had introduced himself, but she was bad with names. Only ever needed to know a few. Mr. Rash was very nice to her. “The Pact is like a book but only smaller,” he was saying. “Similar to how you’re like a woman but only smaller.”

“I’m seven,” Elise said. She wasn’t small anymore.

“And you’ll be seventeen before you know it.” The man with the whiskers reached out and touched Elise’s cheek. Elise pulled back, startled, which made the man frown. He turned and looked up at the man in the white blanket, who was studying Elise.

“What books were these?” the man in white asked. “The ones with these animals, they were here in this silo?”

Elise felt her hands drop to her bag and rest protectively there, rest on her Memory Book. She was pretty sure the page with the deer had gone into her book. She liked the things about the green world, the things about fishing and animals and the sun and stars. She bit her lip to keep from saying anything.