Hugh Howey - Dust

“So we should hide again,” Rickson said. He looked to the others. “Right?”

“How much food do you have left in the pantry?” Juliette asked Solo. “Assuming the fire didn’t get to it.”

He pulled on his beard. “Three years’ worth. Maybe four. But just for me.”

Juliette did the math. “Let’s say two hundred people made it over, though I don’t think it was that many. What’s that? Maybe five days?” She whistled. A new appreciation for all the various farms of her old home dawned on her. To provide for thousands of people for hundreds of years, the balance was meticulous. “We need to stop hiding altogether,” she said. “What we need…” She studied the faces of these few who trusted her completely. “We need a Town Hall.”

Raph laughed, thinking she was joking.

“A what?” Solo asked.

“We need a meeting. With everyone. Everyone left. We need to decide if we’re gonna stay hidden or get out of here.”

“I thought we were going to dig to another silo,” Raph said. “Or dig to this other place.”

“I don’t think we have time for digging. It would take weeks, and the farms are ravaged. Besides, I’ve got a better idea. A quicker way.”

“What about those sticks of dynamite you’ve been hauling? I thought we were going after the people who did this.”

“That’s still an option. Look, we need to do this anyway. We need to get out of here. Otherwise, Jimmy’s right. We’ll just kill each other. So we need to round everyone up.”

“We’ll have to do it back down in the generator room,” Raph said. “Someplace big enough. Or maybe the farms.”

“No.” Juliette turned and surveyed the room around her. She saw past the tall servers to the far walls, saw how wide the space was. “We’ll do it here. We’ll show them this place.”

“Here?” Solo asked. “Two hundred people? Here?” He seemed visibly shaken, began tugging on his beard with both hands.

“Where will everyone sit?” Hannah asked.

“How will they see?” Elise wanted to know.

Juliette studied the wide hall with the tall, black machines. Many of them clicked and whirred. Wires trailed from the tops and wove their way through the ceiling. She knew from tracing the camera feeds in her old home that they were all interconnected. She knew how the power fed into the bases, how the side panels came off. She ran her hand across one of the machines Solo had marked with the days of his youth. They had added up to years.

“Go to the Suit Lab and grab my tool bag,” she told Solo.

“A Project?” he asked.

She nodded, and Solo disappeared amid the tall machines. Raph and the kids studied her. Juliette smiled. “You kids are going to enjoy this.”

With the wires cut from the top and the bolts removed from the base, all it took was a good shove. It went over much easier than the comm hub. Juliette watched with satisfaction as the machine tipped, trembled, and then crashed down with a bang felt through her boots. Miles and Rickson slapped hands and whooped in the manner of boys destroying things. Hannah and Shaw had already moved on to the next server. Elise scampered up on top with a boost from Juliette, wire cutters in her hand, Puppy barking at her to be safe.

“Like cutting hair,” Juliette said, watching Elise work.

“We could do Solo’s beard next,” Elise suggested.

“I doubt he’d like that,” Raph said.

Juliette turned to see that the miner had returned from his errand. “I dropped over a hundred notes,” he told her. “Couldn’t write more than that. My hand was cramping. I sprinkled them around so some will be sure to get to the bottom.”

“Good. And you wrote that there was food up here? Enough for everyone?”

He nodded.

“Then we should get that machine off the hatch and make sure we can deliver. Otherwise, we’re going to have to raid the farms above us.”

Raph followed her to the comm hub. They made sure the smoke wasn’t curling up, and Juliette ran her hand along the base, feeling for heat. Solo’s hovel was metal on all sides, so her hope was that the fire didn’t spread past the pile of books. But there was no telling. The fallen hub made a horrible screech as it was shoved to the side. A cloud of dark smoke billowed out.

Juliette waved her hand over her face and coughed. Raph ran to the other side of the server and made as if to shove it back. “Wait,” Juliette said, ducking out of the cloud. “It’s clearing.”

The server room grew hazy, but there was no great outpouring of smoke. Just a leak from what had been trapped down there. Raph started to lower himself into the hole, but Juliette insisted on going first. She clicked her flashlight on and descended into the dissipating smoke.

She crouched at the bottom and breathed through her undershirt. The beam of her flashlight stood out like a solid thing, as if she could strike someone with it if they came at her. But no one was coming. There was a form in the middle of the hall, still shouldering. The smell was awful. The smoke cleared further, and Juliette yelled up to Raph that it was okay to descend.

He clanged down noisily while Juliette stepped over the body and surveyed the damage in the room. The air was warm and muggy, and it was difficult to breathe. She imagined for a moment what Lukas had gone through, down there and choking. More than smoke brought tears to her eyes.

“Those were books.”

Raph joined her and stared at the black patch in the center of the room. He must’ve seen that they were books when he rescued her, because there was no sign of them left. Those pages were in the air now. They were in their lungs. Juliette choked on memories of the past.

She went to the wall and studied the radio. The metal cage was still bent back from where she’d busted it off the wall so long ago. She flipped the power switch, but nothing happened. The plastic knob was tacky and warm. The insides of the thing were probably a single blob of rubber and copper.

“Where’s this food?” Raph asked.

“Through there,” Juliette said. “Use a rag on the door.”

He went off to explore the apartment and pantry while Juliette studied the remains of an old desk, a misshapen computer monitor sitting in the center, the panel shattered from the heat. There was no sign of Solo’s bedding, just a pile of metal boxes that once held books, some of them sagging from the extreme heat. Juliette saw black footprints trailing behind her and realized the rubber on the soles of her boots was melting from the heat. She heard Raph yelling excitedly from the next room. Juliette passed through the door and found him clutching an armload of cans, his chin pressed to the ones on top of the pile, a goofy grin on his face.

“There’s shelves of this,” he said.

Juliette went to the pantry door and shined her light inside. It was a vast cavern with an odd can here or there. But some of the shelves in the back appeared fuller. “If everyone shows up, it’ll last us a few days, no more,” she said.

“Maybe we shouldn’t have called for everyone.”

“No,” Juliette said. “We’re doing the right thing.” She turned to the wall by the small eating table. The fire hadn’t made it through the door. The tall schematics the size of blankets hung there, perfectly intact. Juliette flipped through them, looking for the ones she needed. She found them and ripped them free. Folding them up, she heard a muted thud far above them, the sound of another server falling.

They arrived in a trickle, and then in clumps, and then in crowds. They marveled at the steady lights in the hallways and explored the offices. None of these people had ever seen the inside of IT. Few of them had spent much time in the Up Top, except on pilgrimages after a cleaning. Families wandered from room to room; kids clutched reams of paper; many came to Juliette or the others with the notes Raph had folded and dropped, asking about the food. In just a few days, they looked different. Coveralls were stained and torn, faces stubbled and gaunt, eyes ringed with dark circles. In just a few days. Juliette saw that they had only a few days more before things grew desperate. Everyone saw that.