Dust Read online

Page 8

 

  “Absolutely. ” Her brother rubbed his face, and Charlotte saw how tired he was. Her gaze fell back to the numbers while she ate.

  “It makes it seem arbitrary, doesn’t it?” she wondered aloud. “If these numbers mean what you think they mean. They’re functionally equivalent. ”

  “I doubt the people who planned all this look at it that way. All they need is one of them. It doesn’t matter which one. It’s like a bunch of spares in a box. You pluck one out, and all you care about is if it’ll work. That’s it. They just want to see everything is one hundred percent all the way down. ”

  Charlotte couldn’t believe that’s what they had in mind. But Donny had shown her the Pact and enough of his notes to convince her. All the silos but one would be exterminated. Their own included.

  “How long before the next drone is ready?” he asked.

  Charlotte took a sip of juice. “Another day or two. Maybe three. I’m really going light with this one. Not even sure if it’ll fly. ” The last two hadn’t made it as far as the first. She was getting desperate.

  “Okay. ” He rubbed his face again, his palms muffling his voice. “We’re gonna have to decide before too long what we’re gonna do. If we do nothing, this nightmare plays out for another two hundred years, and you and I won’t last that long. ” He started to laugh, but it turned into a cough. Donald fished into his coveralls for his handkerchief, and Charlotte looked away. She studied the dark monitors while he had one of his fits.

  She didn’t want to admit this to him, but her inclination was to let it play out. It seemed as if a bunch of precision machines were in control of humanity’s fate, and she tended to trust computers a lot more than her brother did. She had spent years flying drones that could fly themselves, that could make decisions on which targets to hit, could guide missiles to precise locations. She often felt less like a pilot and more like a jockey, a person on a beast that could race along on its own, that only needed someone there to occasionally take the reins or shout encouragement.

  She glanced over the numbers on the report again. Hundredths of a percentage point would decide who lived and who died. And most would die. She and her brother would either be asleep or long dead by the time it happened. The numbers made this looming holocaust seem so damn … arbitrary.

  Donald used the folder in his hand to point at the report. “Did you notice eighteen moved up two spots?”

  She had noticed. “You don’t think you’ve become too … attached, do you?”

  He looked away. “I have a history with this silo. That’s all. ”

  Charlotte hesitated. She didn’t want to press further, but she couldn’t help herself. “I didn’t mean the silo,” she said. “You seem … different each time you talk to her. ”

  He took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “She was sent to clean,” he said. “She’s been outside. ”

  For a moment Charlotte thought that was all he was going to say on the matter. As if this were enough, as if it explained everything. He was quiet a pause, his eyes flicking back and forth.

  “No one is supposed to come back from that,” he finally said. “I don’t think the computers take this into account. Not just what she survived, but that eighteen is hanging in there. By all accounts, they shouldn’t be. If they make it through this … you wonder if they don’t give us the best hope. ”

  “You wonder,” Charlotte said, correcting him. She waved the piece of paper. “There’s no way we’re smarter than these computers, brother. ”

  Donald appeared sad. “We can be more compassionate than them,” he said.

  Charlotte fought the urge to argue. She wanted to point out that he cared about this silo because of the personal contact. If he knew the people behind any of the other silos – if he knew their stories – would he root for them? It would be cruel to suggest this, however true.

  Donald coughed into his rag. He caught Charlotte staring at him, glanced at the bloodstained cloth, put it away.

  “I’m scared,” she told him.

  Donald shook his head. “I’m not. I’m not afraid of this. I’m not afraid of dying. ”

  “I know you’re not. That’s obvious, or you would see someone. But you have to be afraid of something. ”

  “I am. Plenty. I’m afraid of being buried alive. I’m afraid of doing the wrong thing. ”

  “Then do nothing,” she insisted. She nearly begged him right then to put a stop to this madness, to their isolation. They could go back to sleep and leave this to the machines and to the God-awful plans of others. “Let’s not do anything,” she pleaded.

  Her brother rose from his seat, squeezed her arm, and turned to leave. “That might be the worst thing,” he quietly said.

  12

  That night, Charlotte awoke from a nightmare of flying. She sat up in her cot, springs crying out like a nest of birds, and could still feel herself swooping down through the clouds, the wind on her face.

  Always dreams of flying. Dreams of falling. Wingless dreams where she couldn’t steer, couldn’t pull up. A plummeting bomb zeroing in on a man with his family, a man turning at the last minute to shield his eyes against the noonday sun, a glimpse of Charlotte’s father and mother and brother and herself before impact and loss of signal—

  The nest of birds beneath her fell quiet. Charlotte untangled her fists from the sheets, which were damp with all that dreams wrung from terrified flesh. The room hung heavy and somber around her. She could feel the empty bunks all around, that sense that her fellow pilots had been summoned away in the night, leaving her alone. She rose and padded across the hall to the bathroom, feeling her way and sliding the switches up just a fraction to keep the lights dim. She understood sometimes why her brother had lived in the conference room at the other end of the warehouse. Shadows of un-people stalked those halls. She could feel herself pass through the ghosts of the sleeping.

  She flushed and washed her hands. There was no going back to her bunk, no chance of returning to sleep, not after that dream. Charlotte tugged on a pair of the red coveralls Donny had brought her, one of three colors, a little variety for her locked-up life. She couldn’t remember what the blue or gold ones were for, but she remembered reactor red. The red coveralls had pouches and slots for tools. She wore them while working, and so they were rarely the cleanest. Loaded up, the coveralls weighed near on twenty pounds, and they rattled as she walked. She zipped up the front and made her way down the hallway.

  Curiously, the lights in the warehouse were already on. It had to be in the middle of the night. She was good about turning them off, and nobody else had access to that level. Her mouth suddenly dry, she crept towards the nearby drones under their tarps, the sound of whispers leaking from the shadows.

  Beyond the drones – near the tall shelves with boxes of spares and tools and emergency rations – a man knelt over the still form of another. The figure turned at the sound of her jangling tools.

  “Donny?”

  “Yeah?”

  A flush of relief. The sprawling body beneath her brother wasn’t a body at all. It was a puffy suit laid out with its arms and legs spread, an empty and lifeless form.

  “What time is it?” she asked, rubbing her eyes.

  “Late,” he said. He dabbed his forehead with the back of his sleeve. “Or early, depending. Did I wake you?”

  Charlotte watched as he shifted his body to block her view of the suit. Flopping one leg up, he began to fold the outfit in on itself. A pair of shears and a roll of silvery tape sat by his knees, a helmet, gloves, and a bottle like a dive tank nearby. A pair of boots as well. The fabric whispered as it moved; it was this that she had mistaken for voices.

  “Hm? No, you didn’t wake me. I got up to go to the bathroom. Thought I heard something. ”

  It was a lie. She had come out to work on a drone in the middle of the night, anything to stay awake, to stay grounded. Donald nodded and pul
led a rag from his breast pocket. He coughed into this before stuffing it away.

  “What’re you doing up?” she asked.

  “I was just going through some supplies. ” Donny made a pile out of the suit parts. “Some things they needed above. Didn’t want to risk sending someone else down for them. ” He glanced at his sister. “You want me to fetch you something hot for breakfast?”

  Charlotte hugged herself and shook her head. She hated the reminder of being trapped on that level, needing him to get her things. “I’m getting used to the rations in the crates,” she told him. “The coconut bars in the MREs are growing on me. ” She laughed. “I remember hating them during basic. ”

  “I really don’t mind getting you something,” Donny said, obviously looking for an excuse to get out of there, some way to change topics. “And I should have the last of what we need for the radio soon. I put in a requisition for a microphone, which I can’t find anywhere else. There’s one in the comm room that’s acting up, which I might steal if nothing else works. ”

  Charlotte nodded. She watched her brother stuff the suit back into one of the large plastic containers. There was something he wasn’t telling her. She recognized when he was holding something back. It was what big brothers did.

  Crossing to the nearest drone, she pulled the tarp off and laid out a spanner set on the forward wing. She had always been clumsy with tools, but weeks of work on the drones, of persistence if not patience, and she was getting the hang of how they were put together. “So what do they need the suit for?” she asked, forcing herself to sound nonchalant.

  “I think it’s something to do with the reactor. ” He rubbed the back of his neck and frowned. Charlotte allowed the lie to echo a bit. She wanted her brother to hear it.

  Opening the skin of the drone’s wing, Charlotte remembered coming home from basic training with new muscles and weeks of competitive fierceness forged among a squad of men. This was before she’d let herself go while on deployment. Back then, she’d been a wiry and fit teenager, her brother off at graduate school, and his first teasing remark about her new physique had landed him on the sofa, his arm pinned behind his back, laughing and teasing her further.

  Laughing, that is, until a sofa cushion had been pressed to the side of his face, and Donny had squealed like a stuck pig. Fun and games had turned into something serious and scary, her brother’s fear of being buried alive awakening something primal in him, something she never teased him for and never wanted to see again.

  Now she watched as he sealed the bin with the suit inside and slid it back under a shelf. It wasn’t needed elsewhere in the silo, she knew. Donald fumbled for his rag, and his coughing resumed. She pretended to be fixated on the drone while he had his fit. Donny didn’t want to talk about the suit or the problem with his lungs, and she didn’t blame him. Her brother was dying. Charlotte knew her brother was dying, could see him like she saw him in her dreams, turning at the last minute to shield his eyes against the noonday sun. She saw him the way she saw every man in that last instant of their lives. There was Donny’s beautiful face on her screen, watching the inevitable fall from the sky.

  He was dying, which is why he wanted to stockpile food for her and make sure she could leave. It was why he wanted to make sure she had a radio, so she would have someone to talk to. Her brother was dying, and he didn’t want to be buried, didn’t want to die down there in that pit in the ground where he couldn’t breathe.

  Charlotte knew damn well what the suit was for.

  Silo 18

  13

  An empty cleaning suit lay spread across the workbench, one of its arms draped over the edge, elbow bent at an unnatural angle. The unblinking visor of the detached helmet gazed silently up at the ceiling. The small screen inside the helmet had been removed to leave a clear plastic window out on the real world. Juliette leaned over the suit, occasional drops of sweat smacking its surface, as she tightened the hex screws that held the lower collar onto the fabric. She remembered the last time she’d built a suit like this.

  Nelson, the young IT tech in charge of the cleaning lab, labored at an identical bench on the other side of the workshop. Juliette had selected him as her assistant for this project. He was familiar with the suits, young, and didn’t appear to be against her. Not that the first two criteria mattered.

  “The next item we need to discuss is the population report,” Marsha said. The young assistant – an assistant Juliette had never asked for – juggled a dozen folders until she found the right one. Recycled paper lay strewn across the neighboring workbench, turning an area for building things into a lowly desk. Juliette glanced up and watched as Marsha shuffled through a folder. Her assistant was a slight girl just out of her teens, graced with rosy cheeks and dark hair in tight coils. Marsha had been the assistant to the last two mayors, a short but tumultuous span of time. Like the gold ID card and the apartment on level six, she had come with the job.

  “Here it is,” Marsha said. She bit her lip and scanned the report, and Juliette saw that it was printed on one side only. The amount of paper her office went through and repulped could afford to feed an apartment level for a year. Lukas had once joked that it was to keep the recyclers in business. The chance he was right had kept her from laughing.

  “Can you hand me those gaskets?” Juliette asked, pointing to Marsha’s side of the workbench.

  The young girl pointed to a bin of lock washers. And then an assortment of cotter pins. Finally, her hand drifted over the gaskets. Juliette nodded. “Thanks. ”

  “So, we’re under five thousand residents for the first time in thirty years,” Marsha said, returning to her report. “We’ve had a lot of … passings. ” Juliette could feel Marsha glance up at her, even as she concentrated on seating the gasket into the collar. “The lottery committee is calling for an official count, just so we can get a sense of—”