“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.
“This is Juliette.”
The voice was labored and weary.
“Jules? Where are you? What do you mean, Shirly’s dead?”
Another burst of static. Another dreadful pause.
“I mean they’re all dead,” she said. “And so are we.”
A burst of static.
“I killed us all.”
Silo 17
40
Juliette opened her eyes and saw her father. A white light bloomed and passed from one of her eyes to the other. Several faces loomed behind him, peering down at her. Light blue and white and yellow coveralls. What seemed a dream at first gradually coalesced into something real. And what was sensed as nothing more than a nightmare hardened into recollection: Her silo had been shut down. Doors had been opened. Everyone was dead. The last thing she remembered was clutching a radio, hearing voices, and declaring everyone dead. And she had killed them.
She waved the light away and tried to roll onto her side. She was on damp steel plating, someone’s undershirt tucked under her head, not on a bed. Her stomach lurched, but nothing came out. It was hollow, cramping, heaving. She made gagging noises and spat on the ground. Her father urged her to breathe. Raph was there, asking her if she’d be all right. Juliette bit down the urge to yell at them all, to yell at the world to leave her the hell alone, to hug her knees and weep for what she’d done. But Raph kept asking if she was okay.
Juliette wiped her mouth with her sleeve and tried to sit up. The room was dark. She was no longer inside the digger. A lambent glow beat from somewhere, like an open flame, the smell of burning biodiesel, a home-made torch. And in the gloom, she saw the dance and swing of flashlights at the ends of disembodied hands and on miners’ helmets as her people tended to one another. Small groups huddled here and there. A stunned silence sat like a blanket atop the scattered weeping.
“Where am I?” she asked.
Raph answered. “One of the boys found you in the back of that machine. Said you were curled up. They thought you were dead at first—”
Her father interrupted. “I’m going to listen to your heart. If you can take deep breaths for me.”
Juliette didn’t argue. She felt young again, young and miserable for breaking something, for disappointing him. Her father’s beard twinkled with silver from Raph’s flashlight. He plugged his stethoscope into his ears, and she knew the drill. She parted her coveralls. He listened as she swallowed deep gulps of air and let them out slowly. Above her, she recognized enough of the pipes and electrical conduit and exhaust ducts to locate herself. They were in the large pump facility adjacent to the generator room. The ground was wet because all this had been flooded. There must be water trapped above here, a slow leak somewhere, a reservoir gradually emptying. Juliette remembered all the water. She had donned a cleaning suit and had swum past this room in some long-ago life.
“Where are the kids?” she asked.
“They went with your friend Solo,” her father said. “He said he was taking them home.”
Juliette nodded. “How many others made it?” She took another deep breath and wondered who was still alive. She remembered herding all that she could through the dig. She had seen Courtnee and Walker. Erik and Dawson. Fitz. She remembered seeing families, some of the kids from the classrooms, and that young boy from the bazaar in shopkeep brown coveralls. But Shirly … Juliette reached up and gingerly touched her sore jaw. She could hear the blast and feel the rumbles in the ground again. Shirly was gone. Lukas was gone. Nelson and Peter. Her heart couldn’t hold it all. She expected it to stop, to quit, while her father was listening to it.
“There’s no telling how many made it,” Raph said. “Everyone is … it’s chaos out there.” He touched Juliette’s shoulder. “There was a group that came through a while back, before everything went nuts. A priest and his congregation. And then a bunch more came after. And then you.”
Her father listened intently to her stubborn heartbeat. He moved the metal pad from one corner of her back to another, and Juliette took deep, dutiful breaths. “Some of your friends are trying to figure out how to turn that machine around and dig us out of here,” her father said.