The Day Out

Coop was making nervous fists as the huge steel door noisily squeaked open.

“You ready, Coop?” asked his partner, Chill.

Coop nodded, but his breath came quick and shallow in spite of all the ‘what to expect outside’ inductions the newly-minted techs received.

Chill heard the change in Coop’s breathing, rasping the filter on the masks they both had tightly clamped to their faces.

“Remember the training, Coop. Deep breaths, don’t use up your pads too quickly.”

The training seemed a long time ago now - he’d paid attention, listened to every detail, but standing here before the opening? This was for real, and the anticipation of walking under a sky last seen over two decades ago twisted his insides like a wrung cloth.

“Close your eyes and count to twelve. In for three, out for three,” said Chill. “You’re not the first, you won’t be the last.”

“How many is this for you?” Asked Coop?

“No idea, dozens, hundreds,” replied Chill. “I’ve been doing this since the beginning. First rescue, then salvage, and now repairs and escort. You get used to it.”

With a loud clank, the door stopped. The sudden hush dropped like a stone and sent Coop’s anxiety spiking again. Life in the tunnels was a life surrounded by noise – no matter where you were in the complex there was the constant drone of air exchangers, the gush and wash of water pipes, generators clattering and all of that and more even without considering the general murmur of close to a thousand people living cheek by jowl. Some nights you could even hear the lowing of livestock from the low levels when the air flow was right and they were venting the methane. The silence was an alien thing, like a sense was suddenly turned off making the constant din of survival oppressive by its absence.

“It’s quiet,” he said dumbly.

“It’s like fresh snow,” said Chill. “Do you remember snow?”

Coop shook his head. He’d barely been four when he was scooped up by his parents and they’d made their way to the shelter. What did he remember? Vague worry permeating from far away events on the television, growing panic, the sky darkening.

“C’mon, Coop,” said Chill, looking at his watch. “Time to get going.”

Chill walked out of the door. Coop closed his eyes, counted to twelve and then followed.

It was like a landscape from a dream – great banded drifts of blacks, greys and white covered every inch of the ground until it disappeared from view a few tens of meters away, lost and consumed into the grey haze of the thick, gritty air.

“It constantly changes, depending on the wind,” said Chill. “It’s never the same twice. It’s easy to lost out here if you don’t know what to look for, so keep up and don’t wander off, yeah?”

Chill set off into the crazed landscape with Coop following on behind, their feet kicking up fine clouds of dust that hung in the air like small ghosts haunting their tracks.

Progress to the comms array, and Coop’s task, was slow. They would walk for a while, mostly in silence, the only sounds the soft crumping of their feet on the unmarked skin of dust. Occasionally they stopped and rested – a few minutes grabbed to lean against a forgotten wall and draw at the water tubes in their masks before swiping clean their visors and patting the worst of the grit from their clothes and setting off again.

It was a couple of hours past their last stop when vague shapes started to appear at the edge of the opaque range of vision. As they moved forwards Coop realized they were looking at low houses, broken and empty, roofs dropped in and violated by the all-consuming, ever falling residue from a different continent and a different age.

There were more low buildings becoming visible and Chill said they were cutting through the outskirts of a small town, its name lost and forgotten, it’s population and anyone who remembered it gone. Something nagged at him.

“Why are the houses all so low?” he asked

“They’re not,” replied Chill, “The ash is two or three meters deep.”

“What happened to the people?”

Chill just shook his head.

The relic of the town was an hour ago and as they crested a hill Coop saw the domes and dishes of the comms system looming out of the haze.

Coop busied himself moving from panel to panel at the bottom of the idly tilted dishes, opening a case every now and again to connect on to the internal systems with the screen he retrieved from his rucksack. There were a few repairs he could accomplish with his limited tools and available parts kept in each of the tower bases, but four of this group were showing multiple reds and it was going to take a full tech crew and a few days work to bring them back online, if it were possible at all. He made notes on the screen then closed the last panel.

“I’m done,” he said.

“Do anything for them?”

Coop just shook his head.

They were back in the outskirts of the town, following their tracks when Chill suddenly stopped.

Lost in his thoughts, Coop failed to notice Chill stood still and bumped into him.

“What is it?” he asked nervously.

“Do you fancy a drink?” asked Chill.

“From the tube?” confusion prompted.

“No, I mean a real drink.”

Coop was still confused and looked mutely back.

“Follow me,” said Chill, turning and walking off at a tangent from the lines of steps they’d made a few hours earlier, already being smoothed by the ever-present dust’s gentle, remorseless descent.

They were walking deeper into the town – the ruined buildings becoming denser, but no less broken. It was impossible to tell how big the place had been from the small vignetted view, but Coop knew they’d walked a way into it and through many silent streets. He remembered that shake of the head from Chill. What happened to the people? How many were somewhere beneath their feet, fixed in time where they fell, starved and choked? Now just them, crawling across a sterile land, across the graveyard of humanity.

“Up here,” said Chill as he scrambled up a large drift of ash and started to feel around a large board on an exposed wall. It swung open and he climbed through, Coop following.

It was light inside, a smallish room, with a table, a couple of plastic chairs against one wall and a door in another.

“What is this place?”

“It was a staging post for the salvage operation, we ran power to it and based out of here when we had to.” Chill dusted himself down as much as possible and gestured for Coop to do the same. When they were both a bit cleaner, he unzipped his jacket and hung it on a nail amongst a few others hammered into one of the walls. Coop did the same.

Chill opened the door.

“After you,” he said.

Coop stepped through, Chill followed and closed the door behind.

“You can take your mask off in here,” he said. “There’s a scrubber cleaning the air.”

With relief Coop removed the mask and massaged at the red welts on his neck and face. The air felt good, cooler and purer than in the tunnels. Less used somehow and he took longing deep breaths as he surveyed the room. There were a few chairs, soft and tired looking and a couple of tables that were crowded with objects. One wall was lined with racks of bottles and Chill was contemplating them before he reached for one.

“Claret alright?” he asked. “It’s a twenty-four, an excellent year,”

“I don’t know what that is,” replied Coop.

“Booze, son. French booze. Very expensive French booze. Priceless now, in fact. Finest contraband salvage.”

Chill proceeded to open the bottle and poured out two generous portions into a couple of enamel mugs. He handed one to Coop who sniffed at it then took a sip. Flavors ever untasted flooded his mouth.

“Good, yeah?”

“Good,” he drank more.

They soon emptied the bottle and as Chill wobbled over to the racks for another, Coop studied the objects on the table as the numbing warmth spread through him. There were watches and phones, rings and bracelets, keys and chains and a dozen other things – artefacts of a different time collected together with no reason or order. Coop picked up a chain, a delicate gold thing with a tiny heart hanging from it.

“It’s a locket,” said Chill.

“A what?”

“It opens up so you can put a picture in it. Pass it here.”

Coop handed over. Chill fumbled with it until it opened in two halves. He passed it back and Coop could see the faded images of a man and a woman, each occupying a half.

“Who are they?”

“No idea,” slurred Chill as he poured another two drinks.

“What is all this stuff?”

“Memories, I guess. Stuff and things.” He handed Coop the cup. “There will come a time, in not too many years when everyone who remembers this,” he gestured at the table, “will be gone. Only those that were born after, or like you were too young to really know will be left. These small things had meaning to people once. We thought they needed to be kept.”

Coop put the locket back on the table and sat down in one of the chairs.

“Why does everyone call you Chill?”

Chill laughed then sat down himself.

“My name is…” he caught himself. “My name was Craig Hill. When I joined the army, on the first day of basic training I received my fatigues and on it was printed initial then surname. That was it. No one has called me anything else since.”

They sat in silence for a while, sipping at their drinks.

“Do you think we’re going to make it?” asked Coop.

“Huh?”

“People, us.”

“I don’t know,” said Chill after a moment of reflection. “We’ve made it this far. If we can cling on for a few more years until the dust settles and the weather comes back, I don’t see why not.”

“You think?”

“I hope,” he said. “Funny thing is, right, I remember how it was before. We were killing this planet, us humans. The forests we weren’t hacking down were on fire, the poles were melting and we were already losing cities to the sea. Nearly eight billion people all fighting for whatever they could get with little concern for the true cost. And then this,” he waved his arms at the room, “The biggest volcanic eruption in this planet’s history, and its suddenly all over, gone within a few weeks. Don’t you think that’s funny?”

“Not really.”

“No, you’re probably right.” Chill stood up. “Come on, drink up. We’d best get back before they think we’ve got lost.”

They walked back in silence, each man lost in his own thoughts and woozy from the wine. Coop was mulling over Chill’s words - Maybe he was right, the dust would stop eventually and they could start to reclaim the surface? Live under a sky again? Open the seed vaults and plant the world anew?

Whether it was the wine or not, he couldn’t be sure, but the top of the valley leading to the entrance to the tunnels seemed clearer than before – less hazy, and brighter. As the door slowly rolled open, shrieking and tormented, he thought about the room and the watches and the locket, about the people above no more and the hope of the people below. His eyes filled with tears and he turned them to the sky to hide them from Chill’s view and for a moment, just a fleeting, tiny moment, between the grey and the haze and the dust, he saw a patch of blue.