4
Present Time
Holston sat on the lone steel bench in the airlock, his brain numb from lack of sleep and the surety of what lay before him. Nelson, the head of the cleaning lab, knelt in front of him and worked a leg of the white hazard suit over Holston’s foot.
“We’ve played around with the joint seals and added a second spray-on lining,” Nelson was saying. “It should give you more time out there than anyone has had before.”
This registered for Holston, and he remembered watching his wife go about her cleaning. The top floor of the silo with its great screens showing the outside world was usually empty for cleanings. The people inside couldn’t bear to watch what they’d done—or maybe they wanted to come up and enjoy a nice view without seeing what it took to get it. But Holston had watched; there was never any doubt that he would. He couldn’t see Allison’s face through her silver-masked helmet, couldn’t see her thin arms through the bulky suit as she scrubbed and scrubbed with her wool pads, but he knew her walk, her mannerisms. He had watched her finish the job, taking her time and doing it well, and then she had stepped back, looked in the camera one last time, waved at him, then turned to walk away. Like others before her, she had lumbered toward a nearby hill and had begun climbing up, trudging toward the dilapidated spires of that ancient and crumbling city just visible over the horizon. Holston hadn’t moved the entire time. Even as she fell on the side of the hill, clutching her helmet, writhing while the toxins first ate away the spray-on linings, then the suit, and finally his wife, he hadn’t moved.
“Other foot.”
Nelson slapped his ankle. Holston lifted his foot and allowed the tech to bunch the rest of the suit around his shins. Looking at his hands, at the black carbon undersuit he wore against his skin, Holston pictured it all dissolving off his body, sloughing away like flakes of dried grease from a generator’s pipe while the blood burst from his pores and pooled up in his lifeless suit.
“If you’ll grab the bar and stand—”
Nelson was walking him through a routine he’d seen twice before. Once with Jack Brent, who had been belligerent and hostile right up to the end, forcing him as sheriff to stand guard by the bench. And once with his wife, whom he had watched get ready through the airlock’s small porthole. Holston knew what to do from watching these others, but he still needed to be told. His thoughts were elsewhere. Reaching up, he grabbed the trapeze-like bar hanging above him and pulled himself upright. Nelson grabbed the sides of the suit and yanked them up to Holston’s waist. Two empty arms flapped to either side.
“Left hand here.”
Holston numbly obeyed. It was surreal to be on the other side of this—this mechanical death-walk of the condemned. Holston had often wondered why people complied, why they just went along. Even Jack Brent had done what he was told, as foul mouthed and verbally abusive as he’d been. Allison had done it quiet, just like this, Holston thought as he inserted one hand and then the other. The suit came up, and Holston thought maybe that people went along because they couldn’t believe it was happening. None of it was real enough to rebel against. The animal part of his mind wasn’t made for this, to be calmly ushered to a death it was perfectly aware of.
“Turn.”
He did.
There was a tug at the small of his back, and then a noisy zipping sound up to his neck. Another tug, another zip. Two layers of futility. The crunch of industrial Velcro over top. Pats and double-checks. Holston heard the hollow helmet slide off its shelf; he flexed his fingers inside the puffy gloves while Nelson checked over the dome’s innards.
“Let’s go over the procedure one more time.”
“It’s not necessary,” Holston said quietly.
Nelson glanced toward the airlock door leading back to the silo. Holston didn’t need to look to know someone was likely watching. “Bear with me,” Nelson said. “I have to do it by the book.”
Holston nodded, but he knew there wasn’t any “book.” Of all the mystic oral traditions passed through silo generations, none matched the cult-like intensity of the suit makers and the cleaning techs. Everyone gave them their space. The banned might do the physical cleaning, but these were the people who made it possible. These were the men and women who maintained the view to that wider world beyond the silo’s stifling confines.
Nelson placed the helmet on the bench. “You got your scrubbers here.” He patted the wool pads stuck to the front of the suit.
Holston pulled one off with a ripping sound, studied the whorls and curls of the rough material, then stuck it back on.
“Two squirts from the cleaning bottle before you scrub with the wool, then dry with this towel, then put the ablating films on last.” He patted the pockets in order, even though they were clearly labeled and numbered—upside down so Holston could read them—and color-coded.
Holston nodded and met the tech’s eyes for the first time. He was surprised to see fear there, fear he had learned well to notice in his profession. He almost asked Nelson what was wrong before it occurred to him: The man was worried all these instructions were for naught, that Holston would walk out—like everyone in the silo feared all prisoners would—and not do his duty. Not clean up for the people whose rules had killed him. Or was Nelson worried that the expensive and laborious gear he and his colleagues had built, using those secrets and techniques handed down from well before the uprising, would go away and rot to no purpose?
“You okay?” Nelson asked. “Anything too tight?”
Holston glanced around the airlock. My life is too tight, he wanted to say. My skin is too tight. The walls are too tight.
He just shook his head.
“I’m ready,” he whispered.
It was the truth. Holston was oddly and truly very much ready to go.
And he remembered, suddenly, how ready his wife had been as well.
5
Three Years Earlier
“I want to go out. I want to go out. Iwanttogoout.”Holston arrived at the cafeteria in a sprint. His radio was still squawking, Deputy Marnes yelling something about Allison. Holston hadn’t even taken the time to respond, had just bolted up three flights of stairs toward the scene.
“What’s going on?” he asked. He swam through the crowd by the door and found his wife writhing on the cafeteria floor, held down by Conner and two other food staff employees. “Let her go!” He slapped their hands off his wife’s shins and nearly got one of her boots to his chin. “Settle down,” he said. He reached for her wrists, which were twisting this way and that to get out of the desperate grips of grown men. “Baby, what the hell is going on?”
“She was running for the airlock,” Conner said through grunts of exertion. Percy corralled her kicking feet, and Holston didn’t stop him. He saw now why three men were needed. He leaned close to Allison, making sure she saw him. Her eyes were wild, peeking through a curtain of disheveled hair.
“Allison, baby, you’ve gotta settle down.”
“I want to go out. I want to go out.”
Her voice had quieted, but the words kept tumbling out.
“Don’t say that,” Holston told her. Chills ran through his body at the sound of the grave utterances. He held her cheeks. “Baby, don’t say that!”
But some part of him knew, in a jolting flash, what it meant. He knew it was too late. The others had heard. Everyone had heard. His wife had signed her death certificate, and right before him. The room spun around Holston as he begged Allison to be quiet. It was like he had arrived at the scene of some horrible accident—some mishap in the machine shop—to find a person he loved wounded. Arrived to find them alive and kicking, but knowing at a glance that the injury was a mortal one.
Holston felt warm tears streak down his cheeks as he tried to wipe the hair from her face. Her eyes finally met his, stopped their fevered swirling and locked onto his with awareness. And for a moment, just a second, before he could wonder if she’d been drugged or abused in any way, a spark of calm clarity registered there, a flash of sanity, of cool calculation. And then it was blinked away and her eyes went wild again as she begged to be let out, over and over.
“Lift her up,” Holston said. His husband eyes swam behind tears while he allowed his dutiful, sheriff-self to intervene. There was nothing for it but to lock her up, even as he wanted nothing else but room enough to scream. “That way,” he told Conner, who had both hands under her twisting shoulders. He nodded toward his office and the holding cell beyond. Just past that, down at the end of the hall, the bright yellow paint on the great airlock door stood out, serene and menacing, silent and waiting.
Once in the holding cell, Allison immediately calmed. She sat on the bench, no longer struggling or blabbering, as if she’d only stopped in to rest and enjoy the view. Holston was now the writhing wreck. He paced outside the bars and asked unanswered questions while Deputy Marnes and the Mayor handled his procedural work. The two of them were treating Holston and his wife both like patients. And even as Holston’s mind spun with the horror of the past half hour, in the back of his sheriff brain, where he was always alert for the rising tensions in the silo, that part of him was dimly aware of the shock and rumors trembling through walls of concrete and rebar. The enormous pent-up pressure of the place was now hissing through the seams in whispers.
“Sweetheart, you’ve gotta talk to me,” he pleaded again and again. He stopped his pacing and twisted the bars in his hands. Allison kept her back to him. She gazed at the wall screen, at the brown hills and gray sky and dark clouds. Now and then a hand came up to brush hair out of her face, but otherwise she didn’t move or speak. Only when Holston’s key had gone into the lock, not long after they had wrestled her in and shut the door, did she utter a single “don’t” that had convinced him to remove it.
While he pleaded and she ignored, the machinations of the looming cleaning gyred through the silo. Techs rumbled down the hallway as a suit was sized and readied. Cleaning tools were prepped in the airlock. A canister hissed somewhere as argon was loaded into the flushing chambers. The commotion of it sporadically rumbled past the holding cell where Holston stood gazing at his wife. Chattering techs went dreadfully silent as they squeezed past—they didn’t even seem to breathe in his presence.
Hours went by and Allison refused to talk—a behavior that created its own stir in the silo. Holston spent the entire day blubbering through the bars, his brain on fire with confusion and agony. It had happened in a single moment, the destruction of all that he knew. He tried to wrap his brain around it while Allison sat in the cell, gazing out at the dismal land, seemingly pleased with her far worse status as someone doomed.
It was after dark when she finally spoke, after her last meal had been silently refused for the final time, after the techs had finished in the airlock, closing the yellow door and retiring for a sleepless night. It was after his deputy had gone for the night, patting Holston on the shoulder twice. What felt like many hours after that, when Holston was near to passing out in fatigue from his crying and hoarse remonstrations, long after the hazy sun had settled over the hills visible from the cafeteria and lounge—the hills that hid the rest of that distant, crumbling city. In the near-dark left in the holding cell, Allison whispered something almost inaudible:
“It’s not real.”
That’s what Holston thought he heard. He stirred.
“Baby?” He gripped the bars and pulled himself up to his knees. “Honey,” he whispered, wiping the crust from his cheeks.
She turned. It was like the sun changing its mind and rising back over the hills. To acknowledge him gave him hope. It choked him up, causing him to think this had all been a sickness, a fever, something they could have Doc write up to excuse her for everything she’d uttered. She’d never meant it. She was saved just by snapping out of it, and Holston was saved just by seeing her turn to him.
“Nothing you see is real,” she said quietly. She seemed calm of body even as her craziness continued, condemning her with forbidden words.
“Come talk to me,” Holston said. He waved her to the bars.
Allison shook her head. She patted the cot’s thin mattress beside her.
Holston checked the time. It was long past visiting hours. He could be sent to cleaning just for doing what he was about to do.
The key went into the lock without hesitation.
A metallic click rang out impossibly loud.
Holston stepped inside with his wife and sat beside her. It killed him to not touch her, to not wrap her up or drag her out to some safe place, back to their bed where they could pretend it had all been a bad dream.
But he didn’t dare move. He sat and twisted his hands together while she whispered:
“It doesn’t have to be real. Any of this. None of this.” She looked to the screen. Holston leaned so close he could smell the dried sweat from the day’s struggle.
“Baby, what’s going on?”
Her hair stirred with his words. She reached out and rubbed the darkening display, feeling the pixels.
“It could be morning right now and we’d never know. There could be people outside.” She turned and looked at him. “They could be watching us,” she said with a sinister grin.
Holston held her gaze. She didn’t seem crazy at all, not like earlier. Her words were crazy, but she didn’t seem to be. “Where did you get that idea?” he asked. He thought he knew, but he asked anyway. “Did you find something on the hard drives?” He’d heard that she had run straight from her lab toward the airlock, already barking her madness. Something had happened while she was at work. “What did you find?”