ust (Silo, #3)(60)

He gasped and wheezed between every other word. The radio clicked off. Juliette screamed into the handset a few times, but she couldn’t raise him. Gazing up the stairwell, she saw the fog overhead. The smoke pouring out into the stairway seemed to thicken. It grew more and more dense as Juliette watched, horrified.

And then something dark punched through – a shadow amid the white. It grew. There was a scream, a terrible peal as it flew down and down, past the landings, on the other side of the stairwell, and then a thudding boom as a person slammed into the deck. The violence of the impact was felt in Juliette’s boots.

More screams. This time from those nearby, those dozens spilling down the stairwell, the few who had made it. They crawled over one another in a dash for Mechanical. And the white smoke, it descended down the stairwell like a hammer.





35



Juliette followed the others into Mechanical – she was the last one through. The arms on one of the security gates had been busted backward. A crowd surged over the gates while some hopped sideways through the gap. The guard who was meant to prevent this helped people down on the other side and directed them where to go.

Juliette threw herself over and hurried through the crowd toward the bunkroom where the kids had been put up. Someone was clattering around in the break room as she passed, hopefully looting needed things. Hopefully looting. The world had gone suddenly mad.

The bunkroom was empty. She assumed Courtnee had already gotten there. No one was getting out of Mechanical, anyway. And it was probably already too late. Juliette doubled back down the hall and headed for the winding stairs that penetrated the levels of Mechanical. She surged with a packed crowd down to the generator room and the site of the dig.

There were piles of tailings and chunks of concrete studded with rebar around the oil rig, which continued to bob its head up and down as if it knew the sad ways of the world, as if depressedly resigned to what was happening, as if saying: “Of course. Of course.”

More tailings and rubble from the dig formed piles inside the generator room, everything that hadn’t yet been shoveled down the shaft to mine six. There was a scattering of people, but not the crowds Juliette had hoped. The great crowds were likely dead. And then a fleeting thought, an urge to laugh and feel ridiculous, the idea that the smoke was nothing, that the airlock up top had held, that everything was okay and that her friends would soon rib her about this panic she had caused.

But this hope vanished as quickly as it came. Nothing could cut through the metallic fear on her tongue, the sound of Peter’s voice telling her that the airlock was wide open, that people were collapsing, Lukas telling her that Sims was dead.

She pushed through the crowd pouring into the tunnel and called out for the children. Then she spotted Courtnee and Walker. Walker was wide-eyed, his jaw sagging. Juliette saw the crowds through his eyes and realized the burden she had left Courtnee with, the challenge of dragging this recluse once again from his lair.

“Have you seen the kids?” she yelled over the crowd.

“They’re already through!” Courtnee yelled back. “With your father.”

Juliette squeezed her arm and hurried into the darkness. There were lights flashing ahead – the few who had battery-powered torches, those with miner’s hats on – but between these beams were wide swaths of pitch black. She jostled with the invisible others who materialized solidly out of shadow. Rocks clattered down from the piles of tailings to either side; dust and debris fell from the ceiling, eliciting shrieks and curses. The passage was narrow between the rows of rubble. The tunnel had been made for a handful of people to pass through, no more. Most of the massive hole bored through the earth had been left full of the scraps the digging had generated.

Where logjams formed, some people attempted to scamper up and along the tops of these piles. This just pushed heaps of dirt and rock down on those between, filling the tunnel with screams and curses. Juliette helped dig someone out and urged everyone to stay in the center, not to shove, even as someone practically climbed over her back.

There were others who tried to turn back, afraid and confused and distrusting of this dark run in a straight line. Juliette and others yelled for them to continue on. A nightmare formed of bumping into the support beams hastily erected in the center of the tunnel, of crawling on hands and knees over tall piles from partial cave-ins, of a baby crying at the top of its lungs somewhere. The adults did a better job of dampening their sobs, but Juliette passed by dozens crying. The journey felt interminable, as if they would crawl and stumble through that tunnel for the rest of time, until the poisonous air caught them from behind.

A jam of foot traffic formed ahead, people shoving at each others’ backs, and flashlight beams played over the steel wall of the digger. The end of the tunnel. The access door at the back of the machine was open. Juliette found Raph standing by the door with one of the flashlights, his pale face aglow in the darkness, eyes wide and white.

“Jules!”

She could barely hear him over the voices echoing back and forth in the dark shaft. She made her way to him, asked him who had already passed through.

“It’s too dark,” he said. “They can only get through one at a time. What the hell is going on? Why all the people? We thought you said—”

“Later,” she told him, hoping there would be a later. She doubted it. More likely, there would be piles of bodies at both ends of this silo. That would be the great difference between 17 and 18. Bodies at both ends. “The kids?” she asked, and as soon as she did, she wondered why with all the dead and dying she would concentrate on so few. The mother she never was, she suspected. The primal urge to look after her brood when far more than that was in peril.