From his other hand came a flash and a roar. Remy flew back into April, who knocked her head against the open lid, nearly blacking out. The animal slumped against the edge of the pod, a clawed hand splayed open, before collapsing to the floor.
“What the fuck!” Remy shouted. He scrambled after the pistol, which had flown from his grip. His other hand was tucked under his armpit, rivulets of blood tracking down his bare ribs.
“Your hand,” April said. She pulled one of the clean, folded shirts from the bin and made her husband hold out his hand. She wrapped the shirt as tight as she could and knotted the ends. Blood pooled and turned the fabric red. “Is it dead?” she asked. She braved a glance over the lip of the pod. The beast wasn’t moving. And now that she could study it, she saw that it wasn’t half-beast at all. It was mostly man. But naked, covered in hair, a scraggly beard, sinewy and lean.
Remy straightened his arms and pointed the gun at the door, his bandaged hand steadying his good one. April saw that there was another beast there. Another person on all fours. Less hairy. A woman.
The woman sniffed the air, studied them, and then peered at the dead man-creature. “Feef-deen,” she said. She snarled, showing her teeth, and her shoulders dipped as she tensed her muscles and readied for a leap. Remy, bless him, didn’t allow her to make the jump. The gun went off again, deafening loud. The woman collapsed. April and Remy watched the door, frozen, and after an agonizing dozen throbs of her pulse, April saw the next one.
“How many bullets do you have?” she asked Remy, wondering where he learned to shoot like that, if it was as easy as he made it seem.
He didn’t answer. He was too busy lining up his shot. But this next creature, another woman, studied the room, the two dead creatures and the two living ones, and made the same noise but without the rage. Without the snarling.
“Feef-deen,” she said, before turning and wandering off. Almost as if satisfied. Almost as if all were right with the world.
“Who goes there?” Elise asked. She watched the shapes beyond the foliage—it appeared to be two men. Pressing an arrow into the dirt, she left the shaft where she could grab it in a hurry, and then withdrew another from her quiver and notched it on to the bowstring. She drew the string taut but kept the arrow aimed to the side. “Rickson? Is that you?”
“Hello,” a voice called. A woman’s voice. “We’re coming out. Don’t shoot.”
A couple stepped around a tree. Elise saw that they were holding hands. They kept their free palms up to show that they were empty. Both wore backpacks. Both looked like they’d been living in the bush for ages, like the people who’d made it out of Silo 37 a few years ago. A thrill ran through Elise with the chance that these were new topsiders.
“Where are you from?” she asked. The couple had stopped twenty paces away. They looked rough. And there were only two of them. Elise recalled how back when she lived in Silo 17, every stranger was to be feared. But the people who dared to free themselves from their silos ended up being good people. It was a truth of the world. The bad people stayed right where they were.
“We’ve been… underground for a long time,” the man said.
He didn’t give a number. Sometimes they didn’t know their number. Sometimes they had to be told by finding their silo on a map; there were fifty of them, the silos, buried underground. Elise fought the temptation to flood this couple with too much all at once. When she was younger, that had been her way. But she was learning to be more than quiet just in the hunt, to be as soft of tongue as she was of foot.
“Are you alone?” she asked, scanning the woods.
“We met another group northwest of here,” the man said. He must’ve run into Debra’s scouting party, which had been gone for a week. “They told us the people in charge lived by the coast. We’ve been looking for them for a long time. A very long time. Can you take us to your city?”
Elise put her notched arrow away and then retrieved the one she’d left in the dirt. “It’s a village,” she said. “Just a village.” The memory of where she used to live, in one of those fifty silos, all cut off from each other, seemed forever ago. That life had grown hazy. Time formed some gulfs that not even recollection could span.
“Do you need help with the deer?” the man asked. “That’s a lot of food.”
Elise saw that he had a knife on his hip and that both of them bore the shrunken frames of the famished. She wondered what he could possibly know about deer. She’d had to consult her books to learn about deer, how to hunt them, how to clean them, how best to cook them. Maybe he too had pages from his silo’s Legacy, that great set of books about the old world. Or maybe his silo had a herd of them.
“I’d love the help,” she said, putting away the other arrow, comfortable that these people meant no harm and also that she could take the both of them with her bow or knife if she had to. “My name’s Elise.”
“I’m Remy,” the man said, “and this is my wife, April.”
Elise closed the distance between them. She shook their hands one at a time, the woman’s first. As she shook the man’s, she noticed something strange about his hand. He was missing two of his fingers.
Elise and Remy carved the choice cuts of meat and wrapped them in the deer’s stripped hide. Elise secured the bundle with bark twine from her pack, and hung the bundle from a thick branch. The couple insisted on carrying the meat, resting it on their shoulders. Elise walked ahead, showing the way back to camp.
She resisted the urge to badger the couple with questions about their silo, how many were left there, what jobs they held, what level they lived on. When she was younger, she would have talked their ears off. But Juliette had a way about topsiders. There were unspoken rules. The people of the buried silos joined the rest when they were ready. They spoke when they were ready. “We all have our demons,” Juliette liked to say. “We have to choose when to share them. When to let others in on the wrestling.”
Elise often suspected that Juliette was holding out the longest. She had been their mayor for years and years. No one hardly voted for anyone else. But there was something in the woman’s frown, a hardness in her eyes, a furrow in her brow, that never relaxed. Juliette was the reason any of them escaped from the silos, and the reason there was something to escape to for the rest. But Elise saw a woman still trapped by something. Held down by demons. Secrets she would never share.
The night fires were times for sharing. Elise told the couple this as they approached camp. She told them about the welcome they would receive, and that they could say as much or as little as they like. “We’ll take turns telling you our stories,” Elise said. “I’m from Silo 17. There are only a few of us. There are a lot more from Silo 18. Like Juliette.”
She glanced back at the couple to see if they were listening. “Like I said, you don’t have to say anything if you don’t want. Don’t have to say what you did or how you got here. Not until you’re ready. Don’t have to say how many of you are left—”
“Fifteen,” the woman said. She’d barely said a word while the deer was being cleaned and packed. But she said this. “There were fifteen of us for the longest time. Now there are only two.”
This sobered Elise. She herself had come from a silo that only offered five survivors. She couldn’t imagine a world with just two people.
“How many are you?” Remy asked.