Hugh Howey: Dust

“Just go?”

Juliette scanned the audience and saw that it was one of the men from the Planning Committee.

“I think it might be safer out there for us than if we stay. I know what will happen if we stay. I want to see if it’s better if we leave.”

“You hope it’s safer,” someone said.

Juliette didn’t search for the voice. She let her gaze drift across the crowd. Everyone was thinking the same thing, herself included.

“That’s right. I hope. I have the word of a stranger. I have whispers from someone I’ve never met. I have a feeling in my gut, in my heart. I have these lines that cross on a map. And if you think that’s not enough, then I agree with you. I’ve lived my entire life only believing what I can see. I need proof. I need to see results. And even then I need to see them a second and a third time before I get a glimpse of how things truly are. But this is a case where what I know for certain — the life that awaits us here — is not worth living. And there’s a chance that a better one can be found elsewhere. I’m willing to go see, but only if enough of you are with me.”

“I’m with you,” Raph said.

Juliette nodded. The room blurred a little. “I know you are,” she said.

Solo raised his hand. With his other, he tugged on his beard. Juliette felt Elise take her hand. Shaw held a squirming puppy, but still managed to raise his.

“How will we get there if we don’t aim to dig?” one of the miners hollered.

Juliette bent at the waist to grab something at her feet. While her head was down, she wiped at her eyes. She stood and lifted one of the cleaning suits, held it in one hand, a helmet in the other.

“We’re going outside,” she said.

The food dwindled while they worked. It was a grim countdown, these disappearing cans and what had been rounded up from the farms. Not everyone in the silo participated; many never came to the Town Hall; many more simply wandered off, realizing they could grab more grow plots if they hurried. Several mechanics asked for permission to head back down to Mechanical and round up those who had refused to make the climb, to try and convince them to come, to see if Walker could be stirred. Juliette was overjoyed with the prospect of gathering more people to go. She also felt the pressure mount as everyone worked.

The server room became a massive workshop, something like you’d see down the halls of Supply. Nearly a hundred and fifty cleaning suits were laid out, all of them needing to be sized and adjusted. Juliette was sad to see that it was more than they needed, but also a little relieved. It would’ve been a problem the other way around.

She had shown a dozen mechanics how the valves went together like she and Nelson had used to breathe in the Suit Lab. There weren’t enough of the valves in IT, so porters were given samples and sent down to Supply, where Juliette was sure there would be more of these parts otherwise useless for survival. Gaskets, heat tape, and seals were needed. They were also told to secure and haul up the welding kits in both Supply and Mechanical. She showed them the difference between the acetylene bottles and the oxygen and said they wouldn’t need the acetylene.

Erik calculated the distance using the chart hanging on the wall and reckoned they could put a dozen people to a bottle. Juliette said to make it ten to be safe. With fifty or so people working on the suits — the fallen servers acting as workbenches as they knelt or sat on the floor — she took a small group up to the cafeteria for what she knew would be a grim job. Just her father, Raph, Dawson, and two of the older porters whom she figured had handled bodies before. On the way up, they stopped below the farms and went to the coroner’s office past the pump rooms. Juliette found a supply of folded black bags and pulled out five dozen. From there they climbed in silence.

There was no airlock attached to Silo 17, not anymore. The outer door remained cracked open from the fall of the silo decades before. Juliette remembered squeezing through that door twice before, her helmet getting stuck the first time. The only barriers between them and the outside air were the inner airlock door and the door to the sheriff’s office. Bare membranes between a dead world and a dying one.

Juliette helped the others remove a tangle of chairs and tables from around the office door. There was a narrow path between them where she had come and gone over a month ago, but they needed more room to work. She warned the others about the bodies inside, but they knew from collecting the bags what they were in for. A handful of flashlights converged on the door as Juliette prepared to open it. They all wore masks and rubber gloves at her father’s insistence. Juliette wondered if they should’ve donned cleaning suits instead.

The bodies inside were just as she remembered them: a tangle of gray and lifeless limbs. The stench of something both foul and metallic filled her mask, and Juliette had a memory of dumping fetid soup on herself to drown the outside air. This was the stench of death and something besides.

They hauled the bodies out one by one and placed them in the funeral bags. It was grisly work. Limp flesh sloughed off bones like a slow roast. “The joints,” Juliette cautioned, her voice hot and muffled by her mask. “Armpits and knees.”

The bodies held together barely and enough, the tendons and bone doing most of the work. Black zippers were pulled shut with relief. Coughing and gagging filled the air.

Most of the bodies inside the sheriff’s office had piled up by the door as if they’d crawled over one another in an attempt to get back inside, back into the cafeteria. Other bodies were in a state of more serene rest. A man slouched over on the tattered remnants of a cot in the open holding cell, just the rusted frame, the mattress long gone. A woman lay in the corner with her arms crossed over her chest as if sleeping. Juliette moved the last of the bodies with her father, and she saw how wide her father’s eyes were, how they were fixed on her. She glanced over his shoulder as she shuffled backwards out of the sheriff’s office, staring at the airlock door that awaited them all, its yellow skin flaking off in chips of paint.

“This isn’t right,” her father said, his voice muffled and his mask bobbing up and down with the movement of his jaw. They tucked the body into an open bag and zipped it up.

“We’ll give them a proper burial,” she assured him, assuming he meant it wasn’t right how the bodies were being handled — stacked like bags of dirty laundry.

He removed his gloves and his mask, rested back on his heels, and wiped his brow with the back of his hand. “No. It’s these people. I thought you said this place was practically empty when you got here.”

“It was. Just Solo and the kids. These people have been dead a long time.”

“That’s not possible,” her father said. “They’re too well preserved.” His eyes drifted across the bags, wrinkles of concern or confusion in his brow. “I’d say they’ve been dead for three weeks. Four or five at the most.”

“Dad, they were here when I arrived. I crawled over them. I asked Solo about them once, and he said he discovered them years ago.”

“That simply can’t be—”

“It’s probably because they weren’t buried. Or the gas outside kept the bugs away. It doesn’t matter, does it?”

“It matters plenty when something isn’t right like this. There’s something not right about this entire silo, I’m telling you.” He stood and headed toward the stairwell where Raph was ladling hauled water into scrounged cups and cans. Her father took one for himself and passed one to Juliette. He was lost in thought, she could tell. “Did you know Elise had a twin sister?” her father asked.