Hugh Howey - Dust

Their guns were trained on him, waiting for him to make a move, ready to end his life. Donald put every ounce of his strength into lifting that pistol. He watched Thurman come at him, this man he had shot and killed once before, and he lifted his gun, struggled to raise it, could lift it no more than six inches off the ground.

But it was enough.

Donald steered his arm wide, aimed at the cone of that great bomb designed to bring down monsters such as these, and pulled the trigger. He heard a bang, but he could not tell what from.

The earth lurched and Charlotte fell forward on her hands and knees. There was a thwump like a grenade tossed into a deep lake. The hillside shuddered.

Charlotte turned on her side and glanced down the hill. A crack opened along the flat earth. Another. The concrete tower at the center listed to one side, and then the earth yawned open. A crater formed, and then the center of the scooped-out earth between those hills sank and tugged at the land further out, clawed and grabbed at the soil and pulled it down as if it were a giant sinkhole, plumes of white powdered concrete jetting up through the cracks.

The hill rumbled. Sand and tiny rocks slid downward, racing each other toward the bottom as the land became something that moved . Charlotte scrambled backwards, up the hill and away from the widening pit, her heart racing and her mind awed.

She turned and rose to her feet and climbed as fast as she could, a hand on the earth in front of her, crouched over, the land slowly becoming solid again. She climbed until she reached the crest, her sobs swallowed by the shock of witnessing this scene of such powerful destruction, the wind strong against her, the suit cold and bulky.

At the top of the hill, she collapsed. “Donny,” she whispered. Charlotte turned and gazed down at the hole in the world her brother had left. She lay on her back while the dust peppered her suit and the wind screamed against her visor, her view of the world growing more and more blurred, the dust clouding all.

Juliette remembered a day meant for dying. She had been sent to clean, had been stuffed in a suit similar to this one, and had watched through a narrow visor as a world of green and blue was taken from her, color fading to gray as she crested a hill and saw the true world.

And now, laboring through the wind, the hiss of sand against her visor, the roar of her pulse and heavy breathing trapped in that dome, she watched as brown and gray relented and drained away.

The change was gradual at first. Hints of pale blue. Hard to be sure that’s even what it was. She was in the lead group with Raph and her father and the other seven suited figures tethered to the shared bottle of air they lugged between them. A gradual change, and then it became sudden, like stepping through a wall. The haze lifted; a light was thrown; the wind buffeting her from all sides halted as stabs of color erupted, shards of green and blue and pure white, and Juliette was in a world that was almost too vivid, too vibrant, to be believed. Brown grasses like withered rows of corn brushed against her boots, but these were the only dead things in sight. Further away, green grasses stirred and writhed. White clouds roamed the sky. And Juliette saw now that the bright picture books of her youth were in fact faded, the pages muted compared to this.

There was a hand on her back, and Juliette turned to see her father staring wide-eyed at the vista. Raph shielded his eyes against the bright sun, his exhalations fogging his helmet. Hannah smiled down her collar at the bulge cradled to her chest, the empty arms of her suit twisting in the breeze as she held her child. Rickson wrapped his arm around her shoulder and stared at the sky while Elise and Shaw threw their hands up as if they could gather the clouds. Bobby and Fitz set the oxygen bottle down for a moment and simply gaped.

Behind her group, another emerged from the wall of dust. Bodies pierced a veil — and labored and weary faces lit up with wonder and new energy. One figure was being helped along, practically carried, but the sight of color seemed to lend them new legs.

Looking up behind her, Juliette saw a wall of dust reaching into the sky. All along the base, the life that dared approach this choking barrier crumbled, grass turning to powder, occasional flowers becoming brown stalks. A bird turned circles in the open sky, seemed to study these bright intruders in their silvery suits, and then banked away, avoiding danger and gliding through the blue.

Juliette felt a similar tug pulling her toward those grasses and away from the dead land they had crawled out of. She waved to her group, mouthed for them to come on, and helped Bobby with the bottle. Together they lumbered down the slope. After them came others. Each group paused in much the way Juliette had heard cleaners were prone to staggering about. One of the groups carried a body, a limp suit, the looks on their faces sharing grim news. Everywhere else was euphoria, though. Juliette felt it in her fizzing brain, which had planned to die that day; she felt it across her skin, her scars forgotten; she felt it in her tired legs and feet, which now could march to the horizon and beyond.

She waved the other groups down the slope. When she saw a man fiddling with his helmet latches, Juliette motioned for those in his group to stop him, and word spread by hand signal from group to group. Juliette could still hear the hiss from the air bottle in her own helmet, but a new urgency seized her. This was more than hope at their feet, more than blind hope. This was a promise. The woman on the radio had been telling the truth. Donald had truly been trying to help them. Hope and faith and trust had won her people some reprieve, however short. She pulled the map out of a numbered pocket meant for cleaning and consulted the lines. She urged everyone along.

There was another rise ahead, a large and gentle hill. Juliette aimed for this. Elise ranged ahead of her, tugging at the limits of her air hose and kicking up startled insects from the tall grass that came up past her knees. Shaw chased after her, their hoses near to tangling. Juliette heard herself laugh and wondered when she’d last made such a noise.

They struggled up the hill, and the land to either side seemed to grow and widen with the altitude. It wasn’t just a hill, she saw as she reached the crest, but rather one more ring of mounded earth. Beyond the summit, the land swooped down into a bowl. Turning to take in the entire view around her, Juliette saw that this single depression was separate from the fifty. Back the way she had come, across a valley of verdant green, rose a wall of dark clouds. Not just a wall, she saw, but a giant dome, the silos at its center. And in the other direction, beyond the ringed hill, a forest like those from the Legacy books, a distant groundcover of giant broccoli heads whose scale was impossible to fathom.

Juliette turned to the others and tapped her helmet with her palm. She pointed to the black birds gliding on the air. Her father lifted a hand and asked her to wait. He understood what she was about to do. He reached for the latches of his own helmet instead.

Juliette felt the same fear he must’ve felt at the thought of a loved one going first, but agreed to let him. Raph helped with her father’s latches, which were nearly impossible to work with the thick gloves. Finally, the dome clicked free. Her father’s eyes widened as he took an exploratory breath. He smiled, took another, deeper one, his chest swelling, his hand relaxing, the helmet falling from his fingers and tumbling into the grass.

A frenzy broke, people groping at one another’s collars. Juliette set her heavy pack down in the grass and helped Raph, who helped her in turn. When her helmet clicked free, it was the sounds she noticed first. It was the laughter from her father and Bobby, the happy squeals from the children. The smells came next, the odor of the farms and the hydroponic gardens, the scent of healthy soil turned up to claim its seed. And the light, as bright and warm as the grow lights but at a diffused distance, wrapping all around them, an emptiness above her that stretched out into forever, nothing above their heads but far clouds.