For a long time our cell meetings were jokingly referred to as the stitch and bitch sessions, where we didn’t really stitch anything, but we freely bitched about all manner of things going on in the Silo. I suspect this meeting is going to be different.
“Grandma,” Abe nods as I walk in.
I look over at Ruth and she gives me a tight grin. Why do I feel like we have a tiger by the tail here?
“Welcome,” I say to the group. “And thanks for coming.” The tallest Dagger, the one I saw dangle a Gear member over the railing only a few weeks ago, nods his head at me, and I repress the memory of the scene.
“I’m going to cut right to the chase.” There is a quick nervous laugh from one of the women, which she stifles quickly. “We are the resistance movement. This is not an art class.” Brief smiles from the women, bored stares from the young men against the wall. “We’re not about killing, and we’re not about starting a new uprising. We are a peaceful movement.”
I see some restless shrugs from the Dagger bunch, and some subtle eye rolling. The tall one gives them a look, and all motion stops.
“And we need your help.”
Their eyes are on me now.
“Here’s the short version. Some of you may know this, and some of you may find it difficult to believe. But this is the truth.”
I move over to stand in front of the big board at the front of the classroom, without a plan for what I’ll do there. I pick up a piece of chalk.
“I grew up in the time before. Before we lived underground. Maybe some of your grandparents, if they’re still living, remember this as well.”
There are a few nods, and a few raised eyebrows.
“We lived in a country called the United States of America, and it was only a tiny part of the whole world. There were millions of people. We grew crops on the surface, like we grow in the farms here, on huge plots of land. There were trees, some equal to four Silo levels in height, and even bigger. Whole forests of trees.” I draw a tree on the board. It looks ridiculous, like a child’s drawing. “There were oceans, so vast there’s no comparison I can draw you that you would understand. The oceans are still there… I think.” I blink for a moment, and push away any emotion about what has been lost.
Crazy lady looks are passed among the Daggers.
“I know it’s hard to believe.” What can I tell them? The truth is in fact unbelievable. “The sun was bright in the sky… so bright you couldn’t look at it directly or it would injure your eyes. There were clouds, like the ones you see on the wallscreen, but white, or gray with rain, or sometimes pink and orange and purple when the sun was rising or setting…”
They are restless. They don’t believe me, and they aren’t interested in pretty pictures. What would teen boys be interested in? What would they be able to imagine?
“There were cars. That raced along on fast tracks. There were movies, and television… and the internet….” None of this means anything to them. What would?
“There were mountains to climb. Young men like you would climb mountains the equivalent of ten, twenty, fifty silos in height.”
They look bored. There is shuffling and a slant of shoulders that means I’m losing them.
“Or you could fly airplanes, and go out into space.”
No spark.
“No one wore coveralls. Well, they did, for work, but only sometimes. And girls wore… girls wore short skirts….” I know they’ve seen the occasional dress, for a wedding or the rare play performance. And everyone has seen a sleep shift, which is considered quite spicy in the Silo, with nothing more salacious to compare it to. I notice that the body language of our gang guests is becoming a little more attentive.
“And when the girls went to swim in these oceans, they wore hardly anything. Just like… something like underwear.” The absurdity of describing bikinis to these guys as a way to turn them on to our cause is not lost on me. But it seems to be working.
“With nothing else?” It is the leader. I figure he is about seventeen, and with the strict Puritanism in the Silo, he is probably pretty curious.
“Right. And in many places, they swam completely nude.”
This seems to interest them.
Ruth comes to the front of the room to stand beside me. “Give me that chalk,” she whispers, “before you start drawing naked women for these kids.”
I realize I’m still clutching the chalk. I pass it to Ruth.
“So here’s what we hope you can help us with,” Ruth says. She takes in a big breath and lets it out. It is the sound you make just before going all in.
“We’re not the only Silo, Daggers. We believe there are fifty silos total. One of them runs the rest of us. One of them set this all up. Blew up everything we used to have on the surface. Locked us underground and made the rules about who was in charge. It is called, of course, Silo 1. And they’ve been calling the shots.”
Everyone is paying attention now. This is blasphemy. This is a Cleaning offense, and Ruth is standing there in front of all these people—some of them strangers—saying it out loud.
“I don’t like the idea of someone else telling us what to do,” she says, looking directly at the head Dagger. “Do you?”
She has their attention. A few mumble, “No,” or shake their heads. Their bodies grow defiant.
“I think we should be in charge of ourselves,” Ruth says. “Don’t you?”
“Yes.” There is no more slouching. They are alert, angry.
“We need your help.”
They lean in.
“We’ve discovered…” and now she uses the chalk, sketching quickly while she speaks, “that the levels are thicker than they need to be for housing and all the other purposes—offices, classrooms, farms, and so on. There’s a lot of extra weight in concrete on every floor. Suggesting that destruction of the Silo—which is totally dependent upon a single central staircase—would be easily accomplished if the right bursts of explosive energy were detonated in the right spots.”
She looks around the room, catching the eyes of the Daggers. “Do you have guys on your team who are capable of conducting discreet… investigations into where such charges might be located? A lot of them would be here in the Up Top, we’re thinking.”
Her son Abe steps forward, facing the other teens. “I can help get you started. If you’re interested. Tell you what to look for.”
The head Dagger speaks. “Why don’t we just go after these… Silo 1 guys? Why sneak around looking for what they’ve done to booby trap this place? We should just take ‘em on.”
Abe nods. “Derek, is it? Taking them on is just what we’re doing. But we have to position ourselves first. The initial step—so they don’t annihilate us before we can make our move—is to discover and dismantle anything they planted in our silo that would destroy our ability to survive. We can’t take them on if we’re all dead.”
Derek crosses his arms and nods, somewhat reluctantly. His gang is taking their cues from him.
“Second step,” Abe says, “find and control the pipes bringing in outside gas.”
“Gas? What kind of gas?” Now another one of the Dagger gang steps forward. He’s blond, and thin.
“Well, we don’t know. We do know that there are pipes that have been discovered that come from… sources we can’t identify. And until we know they’re benign, we want to find them all and be sure of what they’re bringing into the Silo.”
I turn to Ruth and quietly ask her how Abe learned all this.
“It’s intelligence that’s coming up from the cells in the Down Deep,” she answers by tilting her mouth near my ear. “They’ve been finding things… for some time.”
“The last step,” Abe says, “is to take out the camera feeds. Which we have to scope out, first. But we won’t do that until we’re completely secure. Because as soon as they can’t see us, they’ll get suspicious. And it takes nothing but the flick of a button over there to bring this entire place down in an instant.”
“And how do you know all this? What makes you the expert?” Derek says.
“There are people all over the Silo who’ve been working on this problem since… since they discovered we weren’t alone. Trying to unravel all the ways we’re tied to Silo 1.”
There is a moment where I can sense that the head Dagger is balancing his interests. I find myself holding my breath.
“Me and my guys,” Derek says, gesturing with his chin toward his buddies. “We could do this. Explosives, gas lines, cameras. But we aren’t going to cooperate with other gangs.”
The blond teen steps up beside Derek. “This is our territory. As long as they stay away, we’ll play detective for you.”
Abe nods slowly. “I think we can work with that. Ben?”
Ben walks to the front of the room. “I have connections with the people in the Mids—”
“Are you a Dirtbagger?” Derek takes a step toward Ben.
Ben raises both hands. “I’m not a member of the Daggers and I’m not a member of the Dirts. Or a Gear. I’m from here—the Up Top, just like you—and I’m a citizen of the Silo.”
“I’ve seen you down there, though,” Derek says, and his blond second chimes in.
“Right. First time I saw you in the Mids, I thought you were your brother,” the other Dagger says, nodding toward Abe.
“We get that a lot,” the twins say at the same time, and there is a moment of laughter that breaks the tension.
“But you have a girlfriend down there. A Dirt girl,” Derek says.
Ben blushes. I catch his mother’s eye, and it looks like this is news to her. “Look, I have no loyalties except to the Silo. I’m from seventeen, and I live in the Mids for now. I work on a farm—but that’s not going to keep me from doing what I can do to help us get out from under the thumb of people we’ve never met, and who shouldn’t be able to tell us what to do.”
Murmurs of agreement come from the gang members.
Abe walks directly in front of Derek and I see the Daggers bristle in anticipation of a challenge. Derek is taller but Abe is a year older, and has a maturity that compares well to the head Dagger’s attitude.
“Derek, this work we’re doing—finding and reporting on things they don’t think we should know about—is dangerous. We have to watch out for the Sheriff and the Deputies—and we have to watch out for IT security. You need to be smart, and you need to keep your mouths shut. If you’re caught, they’ll send you out to Clean. Can your guys handle that?”
Derek turns to his buddies. “Can we handle that?”
There is a collective growl of “Yes” and “of course” along with a toughening of posture.
The blond Dagger speaks up. “But your dad is head of IT, right? Are you working against your own father?”
I watch my grandson carefully, but he doesn’t flinch. He must have anticipated this question.
“I don’t see it that way,” Abe says. “I see it as working for the Silo.”
“What if he catches you?” It’s Derek, stepping closer to Abe now. “Aren’t you worried he’s going to send you Outside if he finds out what you’re doing?”
Abe nods. “I’m not worried about it… I’m sure of it. That’s why I don’t want him to find out. About me… or about you.” He looks toward Ruth and then back at the head Dagger.
“So don’t screw up. Or we’ll all be sent out to Clean.”
12
“Rick,” I reach over to touch his hand before he falls asleep. “I have a question.”
“Yes,” he says, and turns to me, smiling. His hair is white now, and thin, but he’s still handsome. “Is it one of those questions you’ve been saving up forever?”
I laugh. “Yes. I guess it is. For so long you wouldn’t answer those questions.” I look at him in the dim light left from the candle on our bedside. “Why did you start answering me?”
“Is that your question?” he asks, and I can see the twinkle in his eye.
I give him a mock punch in the shoulder. “No. That is not my question.”
“So get to it, woman. I need my sleep.”
I shake my head at him, smiling. “What happened to the drugs?”
“Ah. The drugs. They’re only needed during… times of difficulty.”
“And what times wouldn’t be difficult down here?”
“The first generation inside—like you and me—and those living through the years immediately after an uprising are the only ones who get the drugs. We call it a reset.”
“So no drugs now?”
“No. Which is why we’re probably heading for more violence. More than we’re already seeing, that is.”
“Why don’t you just tell everyone what you know, Rick? You know more than anyone in the Silo… you know the whole story.”
Rick looks over at me in the dim candlelight and takes my hand. “Karma, I have wrestled with that question for decades. I could tell everyone all of it. Everything I know, from the earliest political tinkering to the hellish reality we now live. And the next day the Silo would erupt with rage.” He kisses my hand. “And you can understand why. It would only fuel the fury.”
I nod. “So you leave them to figure it out for themselves?”
“I leave them to do what they can to reinvent our future. And let’s hope they do better than we did. Nothing that I could disclose would explain anything except the madness of the plan that got us here.”
I blow out the candle and lie on my back, staring into the darkness.
“What do you miss most?” I ask him.
“Everything,” he says. “I miss everything.”
13
Six of us sit around the table in the classroom. My daughter Athena, my daughter-in-law Ruth, and Abe, along with Rose and Steph from the original group.
“We got a message carried up by a porter from Mechanical. Using the code.” Ruth says as she passes me a folded piece of paper.
1:40 tomorrow. Let’s talk briefly. Meet me in south hall.
I read it out loud and pass it back. “Interpret for me, please?”
Abe speaks up. “Level one forty heard some brief radio chatter coming from the south. Right, Mom?” He looks to Ruth for confirmation.
“Exactly. This would be chatter on one of the irregular frequencies. We’ve been working at eliminating those used by Silo 1 to communicate with the other silos. Trying to find out if there are any back-channel discussions happening… or to find a safe spot for our own dispatches if we ever manage to detect friendly contact.”
“Aren’t you worried that this could put us in danger?” Athena asks.
Ruth shakes her head. “At this point, we’re just receiving. They wouldn’t know if we were listening at all… and frankly, I think Silo 1 has its hands full with official communications. Keep in mind that they have to keep track of everything going on in all the other silos.”
For a moment there is silence. The thought of so many other silos out there, populated with strangers, is still sinking in.
“How’s the work going up here, Abe?” It’s Rose, who was my first member as a little girl and the reason I started holding “art class” decades ago as a cover for meeting to talk about the time before. “I hear the Daggers are helping.”
Abe stands up, his energy palpable. “They’re more than helping. They’re amazing. These guys can get anywhere—and they know their territory really well, which I guess makes sense. They’ve helped us map the Up Top in way more detail than we were able to on our own.” He sits down again, flipping the small chair around so he leans on the back. “They’ve pointed out stuff like closets and passageways that they knew about, and we never suspected were there. They’re experts at just hanging around, looking dangerous. Everyone clears out when they see a couple Daggers nearby. It’s perfect.”
“Except when they start really being dangerous.”
“Yeah. Well. We’re working on that.” He runs his fingers through his hair, which is hanging over his eyes. “I’m trying to
get a summit meeting together with the head of the Dirt gang and the lead Dagger. Ben’s helping me. His girl—Sheela—knows some Dirts.”
“Do they consider themselves allied with us at this point?” Athena asks. “I mean… can we count on their keeping quiet if someone questions what they’re doing?”
“If there’s one thing you can rely on with guys like this, it’s the oath to protect one another.”
“Sure,” Athena says. “They’ll protect each other. But will they stand up for us? Or will they sell us all out?”
“I think we can trust them,” Abe says. “They’d rather do anything than snitch.”
“Do they know the oath?” Rose says this with a smile. “Or the song? We could teach them our song.”
Ruth shakes her head and smiles. “Somehow I don’t see them joining us in song.”
“I don’t know—if Sheela comes to the meeting, she can be pretty persuasive. I think the head of the Dirts might have a crush on her,” Abe says.
“Well then, he’d better watch out for your brother,” Ruth says. “Because I think Ben has staked a claim.”
Abe grins and then looks pensive “I’m hoping that the question of which boy gets the girl will be safely established before the meeting. Because we’ve got other important things to talk about. Like how to get these guys to cooperate peacefully.”
14
We blow out the bedroom candle and I snuggle beside Rick. Times like this feel safe and cozy—as if I could be in any room anywhere, even aboveground.
Rick reaches his arm behind my back and pulls me closer.
“What do you miss most?” he asks.
I always try to say something different each time we play. It’s easy. There is so much to miss.
“Hot buttered corn. Apples picked from a tree. Cranberries—do you remember cranberries?”
“Yes,” he says. “Do you remember cigars?”
“Ugh. Yes!”
“The taste of a good cigar… I miss that.”
“I don’t miss the smell,” I say, “Donald used to come home… once in a while… stinking of cigars. After some political function.”
Karma of the Silo: The Collection Page 20