Dust

“What the fuck?” the man said.

Charlotte threw her knee up between his legs, hoping to cripple him, but he turned his hips and jumped back. She caught him on the thigh, instead. She fumbled for the pistol – but the pouch was snapped shut. Never thought she’d need to draw it in a hurry. She got the pouch open and the pistol free as the man slammed into her, knocking the wind out of her lungs and the gun from her hand. The gun and the radio parts clattered to the floor. Boots squeaked as the two of them wrestled, but she was vastly overpowered. His hands gripped her wrists painfully. She screamed, her high-pitched voice a confession. The elevator slowed to a stop on his level, and the doors dinged open.

“Hey!” Eren yelled. He tried to drag Charlotte through the doors, but she placed a boot on the panel and kicked off, attempting to wrench free of his grip. “Help!” he shouted over his shoulder and down the dim and empty hall. “Guys! Help!”

Charlotte bit his hand at the base of his thumb. There was a pop as her teeth punctured his flesh, and then the bitter taste of blood. He cursed and lost his grip on her wrist. She kicked him back through the door, lost her cap, felt her hair spill down to her neck as she reached for the gun.

The doors began to close, leaving the man out in the hallway. He lurched from his hands and knees and was back through the doors before they could bang shut. He slammed into Charlotte, and she hit the back wall as the elevator continued its merry jaunt down the silo.

A blow caught her in the jaw. Charlotte saw a flash of bright light. She jerked her head back before the next punch landed. The man pressed her against the back of the lift, was grunting like a crazed animal, a sound of fury and terror and startlement. He was trying to kill her, this thing he couldn’t understand. She had attacked him, and now he was trying to kill her. A blow to her ribs, and Charlotte cried out and clutched her side. She felt hands around her neck, squeezing, lifting her off the floor. Her palm settled on a screwdriver slotted into her coveralls.

“Hold … still,” the man grunted through clenched teeth.

Charlotte gagged. Couldn’t breathe. Could barely make a sound. Her windpipe was being crushed. Screwdriver in her right fist, she brought it up over his shoulder and slammed it at his face, hoping to scratch him, hoping to scare him, to make him let go. She drove it with all the strength she had left in her, with the last of her consciousness, as the dark tunnel of her vision began to iris shut.

The man saw the strike coming and turned his head to the side, eyes wide as he sought to avoid the blow. She missed his face. The screwdriver buried itself in his neck instead. He lost his grip on her, and Charlotte felt the screwdriver twist and tear inside his throat as she clung to it to keep from falling.

There was a flash of warmth on her face. The elevator came to a sudden stop, and both of them fell to the ground. There was a gurgling sound, and the heat on Charlotte’s face was the man’s blood, which jetted out in crimson spurts. They both gasped for air. Beyond, there was laughter in a hallway, loud voices booming, a gleaming floor that reminded her of the medical wing in which she’d woken up.

She staggered to her feet. The man in gray who had attacked her kicked and squirmed on the ground, his life spilling out of his neck, his eyes wide and beseeching her – anyone – for help. He tried to speak, to cry out to the people down the hall, but it was little more than a gurgle. Charlotte stooped and grabbed him by the collar. The doors were closing. She jammed her boot between them, and they opened again. Tugging on the man – who slipped and slid in his own blood, heels slamming against the floor of the lift – she pulled him into the hallway, made sure his boots were free of the doors. The lift began to close again, threatening to leave her there with him. There was more laughter from a nearby room, a group of men cracking up over some joke. Charlotte dove for the closing doors, stuck her arm between them, and they opened once more. She staggered inside, numb and exhausted.

There was blood everywhere. Her boots slipped in the stuff. Looking at the horror on the ground, she realized something was missing. The pistol. Panic tightened her chest as she glanced up, the doors shuddering together a final time. There was a deafening bang from the gun, hate and fear in a dying man’s eyes, and then she was thrown back, a fire erupting in her shoulder.

••••

“Fuck.”

Charlotte staggered across the lift, her first thought to get it moving, to flee. She could feel the man on the other side of the door, could picture him clutching his neck with one hand and holding that pistol in the other, could imagine him fumbling for the lift call button, leaving a smear of blood on the wall. She pressed a handful of buttons, marking them with blood, but none of the floors lit up. Cursing, she fumbled for her ID. One arm wouldn’t respond. She reached awkwardly across herself with the other, dug the ID out, nearly dropped it, ran it through the scanner.

“Fuck. Fuck,” she whispered, her shoulder on fire. She jabbed the button for fifty-four. Home. Her prison had become home, a safe place. By her feet lay the radio parts. The control board was cracked in half from someone’s boot. She slid down to her heels, cradling her other arm, fighting the urge to pass out, and scooped up the microphone. She draped this by its cord around the back of her neck, left the other parts. There was blood everywhere. Some of it had to be hers. Reactor red. It blended right in with her coveralls. The lift rose, slowed to a stop, and opened on the dark supply room on fifty-four.

Charlotte staggered out, remembered something, and stepped back inside. She kicked the doors open as they tried to shut, was angry with them now. With her elbow, she tried to wipe the lift buttons clean. There was a smear of blood, a fingerprint, on button fifty-four, a sign pointing to where she had gone. It was no use. The doors again tried to close, and again she kicked them for their effort. Desperate, Charlotte bent and ran her palm through the man’s spilled blood, returned to the panel, and covered every button with a great dose of the stuff. Finally, she scanned her ID and pressed the top level, sending the goddamn thing far away, as far away as she could. Staggering out, she collapsed to the ground. The doors began to close, and she was glad to let them.

39

They would look for her. She was a fugitive locked in a cage, in a single, giant building. They would hunt her down.

Charlotte’s mind raced. If the man she attacked died there in the hallway, she might have until the end of shift before he was discovered and they started looking for her. If he found help, it could be hours. But they had to have heard the gun going off, right? They would save his life. She hoped they would save his life.

She opened a crate where she’d seen a medical kit. Wrong crate. It was the next one. She dug the kit out and undid her coveralls, tearing at the snaps. Wiggling her arms out, she saw the grisly wound. Dark red blood puckered from a hole in her arm and streaked down to her elbow. She reached around and winced as her fingers found the exit. Her arm was numb from the wound down. From the wound up, it was throbbing.

She tore a roll of gauze open with her teeth, then wrapped it under her armpit and around and around, sent the roll behind her neck and across her other shoulder to keep it all in place. Finally, another few laps across the wound. She’d forgotten a pad, a compress, didn’t feel like doing it again. Instead, she just made the last wrap as tight as she could tolerate before cinching the end. As far as dressings went, it was a train wreck. Everything from basic training had gone out the window during the fight and after. Just impulse and reflex. Charlotte closed the lid on the bin, saw the blood left on the latch, and realized she’d have to think more clearly to get through this. She opened the case back up, grabbed another roll of gauze, and cleaned up after herself, then checked the floor outside the elevators.

It was a mess. She went back for a small bottle of alcohol, remembered where she’d seen a huge jug of industrial cleaner, grabbed that plus more gauze, wiped everything up. Took her time. Couldn’t get in too big a hurry.

The bundle of soiled and stained cloth went back in the bin, the lid kicked shut. Satisfied with the condition of the floor, she hurried to the barracks. Her cot made it obvious that someone lived there. The other mattresses were bare. Before she fixed this, she stripped down, grabbed another pair of coveralls, and went to the bathroom. After washing her hands and face, and the bright spill of blood down her neck and between her breasts, she cleaned the sink and changed. The red coveralls went into her footlocker. If they looked in there, she was screwed.

She pulled the covers off her bed, grabbed her pillow, and made sure everything else was straight. Back in the warehouse, she opened the hangar door on the drone lift and threw her things inside. She went to the shelves and gathered rations and water, added this. Another small medical kit. Inside the bin of first-aid gear, she discovered the microphone, which she must’ve dropped earlier while grabbing the gauze. This and two flashlights and a spare set of batteries went inside the lift as well. It was the last place anyone would look. The door was practically invisible unless you knew what to search for. It only came up to her knees and was the same color as the wall.

She considered crawling inside right then, would just need to outlast the first thorough search of the level. They would concentrate on the shelving units, the stacks, and think the place was clear, move on to the many other warrens in which she could be hiding. But before she waited that out, there was the microphone coiled up that she had worked so hard to acquire. There was the radio. She had a few hours, she told herself. This wouldn’t be the first place they’d check. Surely she had a few hours.

Dizzy from lack of sleep and loss of blood, she made her way to the flight control room and pulled the plastic sheet from the radio. Patting her chest, she remembered she’d changed coveralls. And besides, that screwdriver was gone. She searched the bench for another, found one, and removed the panel from the side of the unit. The board she wasn’t sure about was already installed. It was a simple matter of plugging the microphone in. She didn’t bother with affixing it to the side panel or closing anything up.

She checked the seating of the control boards. It was a lot like a computer, all the parts slotting together, but she was no electrician. She had no idea if there was anything else, anything missing. And no way in hell was she going on another run for parts. She powered up the unit and selected the channel marked “18”.

She waited.

Adjusting the squelch, she brought enough static into the speakers to make sure the unit was on. There was no traffic on the channel. Squeezing the microphone put an end to the static, which was a good sign. Weary and hurting and fearful for herself as well as her brother, Charlotte managed a smile. The click of the microphone back through the speakers was a small victory.

“Can anyone read me?” she asked. She propped one elbow on the desk, her other arm hanging useless by her side. She tried again. “Anyone out there with ears on? Please come back.”

Static. Which didn’t prove anything. Charlotte could very well imagine the radios sitting miles away in this silo somewhere, all the operators around them slouched over, dead. Her brother had told her about the time he had ended a silo with the press of a button. He had come to her with his eyes shining in the middle of the night and told her all about it. And now this other silo was gone. Or maybe her radio wasn’t broadcasting.

She wasn’t thinking straight. Needed to troubleshoot before she jumped to conclusions. Reaching for the dial, she immediately thought of the other silo she and her brother had eavesdropped in on, this neighboring silo with a handful of survivors who liked to chat back and forth and play games like Hide and Find with their radios. If she remembered right, the mayor of 18 had somehow transmitted on this other frequency before. Charlotte clicked over to “17” to test her mic, see if anyone would respond, forgetting the late hour. She used her old call sign from the Air Force out of habit.

“Hello. Hello. This is charlie two-four. Anyone read me?”

She listened to static, was about to switch over to another channel when a voice broke through, shaky and distant:

“Yes. Hello? Can you hear us?”

Charlotte squeezed the microphone again, the pain in her shoulder momentarily gone, this connection with a strange voice like a shot of adrenaline.

“I hear you. Yes. You can read me okay?”

“What the hell is going on over there? We can’t get through to you. The tunnel … there’s rubble in the tunnel. No one will respond. We’re trapped over here.”

Charlotte tried to make sense of this. She double-checked the transmit frequency. “Slow down,” she said and took a deep breath, took her own advice. “Where are you? What’s going on?”

“Is this Shirly? We’re stuck over here in this … other place. Everything’s rusted. People are panicking. You’ve gotta get us out of here.”

Charlotte didn’t know whether to answer or simply power the unit down and try again later. It felt as though she had butted into the middle of a conversation, confusing one of the parties. Another voice chimed in, supporting her theory:

“That’s not Shirly,” someone said, a woman’s voice. “Shirly’s dead.”

Charlotte adjusted the volume. She listened intently. For a moment, she forgot the man dying in the hallway below, the man she had stabbed, the wound in her arm. She forgot about those who must be coming after her, searching for her. She listened instead with great interest to this conversation on channel 17, this voice that sounded vaguely familiar.

“Who is this?” the first voice – the male voice – asked.

There was a pause. Charlotte didn’t know whom he was asking, whom he expected an answer from. She lifted the microphone to her lips, but someone else answered. ns class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block" data-ad-client="ca-pub-7451196230453695" data-ad-slot="9930101810" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true">