The Dark Dark by Samantha Hunt

Author:Samantha Hunt
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

LOVE MACHINE

Once upon a time two men lived at the bottom of a nuclear missile silo. They were barely men, just out of their teens, yet their job required them to push the button when it came time for nuclear apocalypse. Really there are no buttons. They used the word “button” so civilians, friends, could visualize what they were doing in the missile silo. In actuality, each man would have to insert his own key and turn it. Together they would decide whether or not to destroy the world.

Wayne and Dwight paid attention in alternating shifts, ready to wake the other if the signal to act ever came. They were not allowed to leave the missile silo, and so each night and each day—the sixteen-inch poured-concrete walls made it hard to tell which—they slept locked underground, not too far from the huge hole that cradled a massive warhead loaded and aimed.

When Wayne and Dwight were both awake they either played Nerf basketball on a small court they’d rigged in the control room or shot the bull. They’d discussed the moment they were waiting for. They had decided they would do their duty. They would turn their keys and end the world. But then they would forsake the canned provisions stocked to survive the months after the apocalypse safe in the silo. They thought instead they would turn their keys, open the hatch, climb up to the surface of the earth as she died.

Having settled on that plan allowed Dwight to ask Wayne the big questions, like “Why do you think we’re here?” or “Do you believe in God?” or “What are you most afraid of?” Wayne always tried his best to answer Dwight’s questions but sometimes he didn’t know what to say and the two men would listen to the quiet clicks and whirls that the control console made inside their silo.

The call never came. The keys remained on chains around their necks, never sinking into the dark keyholes that Wayne had spent hours, days, and weeks studying. And then their time in the military was up and then Dwight and Wayne drifted apart as people will. But Wayne remembered.

On their last night in the silo they’d opened up a bottle of sparkling cider to celebrate the end of their orders. Soon they would be seeing the sun again on a regular basis. They would see other people as well, and, while it was a little frightening to leave their secured zone after two years together, they both tried to smile and concentrate on the good that would come from returning to the surface. Dwight and Wayne were close that night in a way Wayne’s not been able to recall since, as if there were a small man in Wayne’s brain who remembers exactly what happened that last night down in the silo, but whenever Wayne tries to remember for himself the little man says, “Well, I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”

What Wayne remembers is

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