Dust by Hugh Howey EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Hugh Howey
- Language: English
- Formats: PDF / EPUB
- Genre: Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction
- Price: Free
- File Size: 2 MB
- Published Date: March 22, 2016
Dust rained in the halls of Mechanical; it shivered free from the violence of
the digging. Wires overhead swung gently in their harnesses. Pipes rattled.
And from the generator room, staccato bangs filled the air, bounced off the
walls, and brought to mind a time when unbalanced machines spun
dangerously.
At the locus of the horrible racket, Juliette Nichols stood with her coveralls
zipped down to her waist, the loose arms knotted around her hips, dust and
sweat staining her undershirt with mud. She leaned her weight against the
excavator, her sinewy arms shaking as the digger’s heavy metal piston
slammed into the concrete wall of Silo 18 over and over.
The vibrations could be felt in her teeth. Every bone and joint in her body
shuddered, and old wounds ached with reminders. Off to the side, the miners
who normally manned the excavator watched unhappily. Juliette turned her
head from the powdered concrete and saw the way they stood with their arms
crossed over their wide chests, their jaws set in rigid frowns, angry perhaps
for her appropriating their machine. Or maybe over the taboo of digging
where digging was forbidden.
Juliette swallowed the grit and chalk accumulating in her mouth and
concentrated on the crumbling wall. There was another possibility, one she
couldn’t help but consider. Good mechanics and miners had died because of
her. Brutal fighting had broken out when she’d refused to clean. How many
of these men and women watching her dig had lost a loved one, a best friend,
a family member? How many of them blamed her? She couldn’t possibly be
the only one.
The excavator bucked and there was the clang of metal on metal. Juliette
steered the punching jaws to the side as more bones of rebar appeared in the
white flesh of concrete. She had already gouged out a veritable crater in the
outer silo wall. A first row of rebar hung jagged overhead, the ends smooth
like melted candles where she’d taken a blowtorch to them.
Two more feet of
concrete and another row of the iron rods had followed, the silo walls thicker
than she’d imagined. With numb limbs and frayed nerves she guided the
machine forward on its tracks, the wedge-shaped piston chewing at the stone
between the rods. If she hadn’t seen the schematic for herself – if she didn’t
know there were other silos out there – she would’ve given up already. It felt
as though she were chewing through the very earth itself. Her arms shook,
her hands a blur. This was the wall of the silo she was attacking, ramming it
with a mind to pierce through the damn thing, to bore clear through to the
outside.
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