by Hugh Howey
Page 16
He nearly dropped the flashlight as he turned to run. The rifle knocked against the doorjamb and pressed into his finger. There was a blinding flash in the coal-dark corridor, a bang like the end of the world, a kick from the rifle. And then Solo was running. Running back toward the shelves with their trickle of stairlight. Running away while imaginary things chased him, no room in his startled mind for the truth that he had brought terror to those who lived there, that his swinging new flashlight, bright and harmonious, had left someone else in the echoing bang and the pitch black that he left behind.
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He fled from Supply and headed deeper, a second flashlight his reward for the scare. On one-twenty-eight, he stopped in an apartment to empty his bladder, which seemed to fill whenever he was afraid. There was a thought of getting some rest on the apartment’s bare mattress, but he suspected it wasn’t yet nighttime. It was just the fading adrenaline that made him feel sleepy.
Back on the landing, he considered his options. He had seen almost all that was left of the silo. It was just him and the ghosts. He had plenty of notes in his head on where things were, had discovered a second farm full of food, had found the water stock on one-twelve, had used his gun to bust open a door. Still no can opener, but he could make do with his screwdriver and hammer. Things were looking up the more he explored down, so that’s the way he went.
A dozen levels deeper, the temperature really began to dip. The air grew cool and moist and blossomed in clouds when he blew his breath. An emergency fire hose had been left out on one-thirty-six, unspooled from its little rusted closet. The hose lay tangled on the landing. Water dripped from the nozzle, and Solo could hear the plummeting impacts ring out like tiny bells somewhere farther below. He was almost at the end. The Deep. He had never been to the Deep before.
He filled his water jug from the nozzle. Normally, even a slight crack from those valves would let loose a powerful torrent. Solo was able to open this one all the way, and even then he had to lift the tangle of hose from the landing and coax out half a jugful. He took a few sips, wincing at the bitter taste of the hose’s fabric, then screwed the lid back on the jug. It hung from his pack, which jangled with the odds and ends he’d picked up since he’d left home the day before. Along with the rifle, it was a lot to carry.
Solo peered over the railing and spotted the bottom of the silo below: the floor of the Deep, slick and shiny. All he knew of Mechanical—the levels beneath the last twist of the stairway—was that power and air came from there. Since there was still some of both, maybe that meant people. Solo clutched his rifle warily. He wasn’t sure if he ever wanted to see people again, ever.
He twisted his way down another few flights, his boots clomp-clomping. Anyone with an ear pressed to the railing would hear his progress. The thought sent chills down his arms. Solo imagined ten thousand people lining the rail, noses touching the crowns of those before them, all listening to him as he descended, an uninterrupted spiral of disembodied noggins attuned to his every move.
“Go away, ghosts,” he whispered. He hugged the inner rail, just in case. The steps made less noise near the post. He flashed back to years ago when there’d been no space on the steps, when it’d been hard to breathe as people packed in around him, and his mother had yelled for him to go on without her. Solo felt sixteen again, except his tears disappeared into his beard where before he could wipe them away. He was sixteen again. Would always be sixteen.
His boots splashed into cold water. Solo startled and lost his grip on the rail. He slid, fought for balance, and fell to one knee, water soaking him up to his crotch, his rifle slipping off his shoulder, his bag getting wet.
Cursing, he struggled to his feet. Water dripped from the barrel of his rifle, a stream of liquid bullets. His coveralls were freezing cold and clung to his skin where they’d gotten soaked. Solo wiped at his eyes, which were full of tears, and wondered briefly if all that water at his feet had come from his years of crying.
“Stupid,” he said. It was a stupid thought. The water had probably drained from all the toilets that didn’t work. Or maybe this is where they flushed to, and now the mechanics weren’t around to filter it and pump it back to the Top.
He retreated up a step and watched the agitated surface slowly settle. This was the shiny floor he’d seen from above. Peering through its murky surface—a colorful film across the top with all the colors that existed—he saw that the stairs spiraled out of sight and into the dark depths of the water. The silo was flooded.
Solo watched where the water met the railing and waited to see if the flood was rising. If so, it was far slower than he could tell. It was slower than he was patient enough to sit and stare.
One of the open doors on level one-thirty-seven moved back and forth with the waves his splashing had caused. He watched this gentle undulation, which made him sleepy. The water was two feet or more above the level of the landing. It was that high inside the door as well. The entire silo was filling up with water, he thought. It had taken years for it to get this high. Would it go on forever? How long before it filled his home up on thirty-four? How long before it reached the Top?
Thinking of slowly drowning elicited a strange sound from Solo’s mouth, a noise like a sad whimper. His clothes dripped water back to where it had come from, and then Solo heard the whimpering sound again. It wasn’t coming from him at all.
He crouched down and peered into the flooded level, listening. There. The sound of someone crying. It was coming from inside the flooded levels, and Solo knew he was not alone.
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It sounded like an infant. Solo peered down at the water. He would have to wade through it to get inside the level. The dim green lights overhead lent the world a ghostly pallor. The air was cold, and the water colder.
He retreated up the steps and left his heavy pack on one of the dry treads—toward the outside, where the steps were wider. He lowered himself, his gun clattering on the stairs. The cuffs of his coveralls were soaked. He rolled them up over his calves, then began unknotting the laces of his boots.
He listened for the cry again. It did not come. He wondered if he would be braving the wet and cold for something he’d imagined, for another ghost who would disappear as soon as he paid it any mind. He dumped the water out of his boots before setting them aside. He pulled off his socks—his big toe poking through a hole in one of them. He squeezed and twisted these, then draped them across the railing to dry.
He left his bag four steps above the waterline. Surely it wasn’t coming up fast enough to worry. It didn’t appear to have moved since he’d arrived. He glanced at the doorway again, noted the height of the waterline, and imagined the flood surging up while he was trapped inside. Solo shivered, and not from the cold. He thought he heard the baby cry again.
He was enough years old to have a baby, he thought. He did the math. He rarely did this math. Was he twenty-six? Twenty-seven? Another birthday had come and gone with no one to remind him. No sweetbread, no candle lit and just as quickly blown out. “Blow it quick,” his mother used to say. His father would barely get the thing lit before Jimmy leaned forward to puff it out. Just an instant of fire, barely a warming of the wax, and the family candle would be put away for his father, whose birthday came next.
A silly tradition, he thought. But supposedly each family had as many birthdays among them as there was wax. The Parker candle was many generations old and not yet half gone. Jimmy used to think he’d live forever if he blew swiftly enough. He and his parents would all live forever. But none of that was true. It would only be him until he died, and so the candle had been a lie.
He stepped into the water and waded toward the door, his feet shocked half-numb from the cold. The colorful film on the surface of the water swirled and mixed and flowed around the stanchions that held up the landing rail. Solo paused and peered beyond the landing. It seemed strange to be so high off the bottom of the silo
and see this fluid stretching out to the concrete walls. If he were to fall over, would the water slow his plummet to the bottom? Or would he bob on the surface like that bit of trash over there? He thought he would sink. The most water he’d ever been in before was a tubful, and he’d sat right on the bottom. He was sinking up to his shins right then. The fear of slipping through some unseen crack and dropping to his death caused him to shuffle his feet cautiously. He fought to feel the metal grating beneath his soles, even as his feet grew colder and colder. Something silver seemed to flash beneath the grating, but he thought it was just his reflection or the dance of the metallic sheen on the surface.
“You better be worth this,” he told the ghost of some baby down the hall.
He listened for the ghost to call back, but it was no longer crying. The light beyond the doors fell away to blackness, so he pulled his flashlight out of his chest pocket and turned it on. The layer of rippling water caught the beam and magnified it. Waves of light danced across the ceiling in a display so mesmerizing and beautiful that Solo forgot the freezing water. Or perhaps it was that his feet no longer had any feeling at all.
“Hello?” he called out.
His voice echoed softly back to him. He played the light down the hall, which branched off in three directions. Two of the paths curved around as if to meet on the other side of the stairwell. It was one of the hub-and-spoke levels. Solo laughed. Bi for Bicycles. He thought of that entry and realized where the words hub and spoke came from. These were magical discoveries, how old words came to be—
A cry.
For certain, this time, or he truly was losing his senses. Solo spun around and aimed his flashlight down the curving corridor. He waited. Silence. The whisper of ripples as they crashed into the hallway wall. He picked his way the direction he’d heard the noise, throwing up new waves with the push of his shins. He floated like a ghost. He couldn’t feel his feet.
It was an apartment level. But why would anyone live down here with the waters seeping in? He paused outside a community rec room and dispelled pockets of darkness with his flashlight. There was a tennis table in the middle of the room. Rust reached up the steel legs as if the water had chased it there. The paddles were still on the warped surface of the rotting green table. Green for grass, Solo thought. The Legacy books made his own world look different to him.
Something bumped into his shin, and Solo startled. He aimed his light down and saw a foam cushion floating by his feet. He pushed it away and waded toward the next door.
A community kitchen. He recognized the layout of wide tables and all the chairs. Most of the chairs lay on their sides, partly submerged. A few legs stuck up where chairs had been overturned. There were two stoves in the corner and a wall of cabinets. The room was dark; almost none of the light from the stairwell trickled back this far. Solo imagined that if his batteries died, he would have to grope to find his way out. He should’ve brought the new flashlight, not his old one.
A cry. Louder this time. Near. Somewhere in the room.
Solo waved his flashlight about but couldn’t see every corner at once. Cabinets and countertops. A spot of movement, he thought. He trained his light back a little, and something moved on one of the counters. It leapt straight up, the sound of claws scratching as it caught itself on an open cabinet above the counter, then the whisking of a bushy tail before a black shadow disappeared into the darkness.
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A cat! A living thing. A living thing he need not fear, that could do him no harm. Jimmy trudged into the room, calling “kitty, kitty, kitty. ” He recalled neighbors trying to corral that tailless animal that lived down the hall from his old apartment.
Something rummaged around in the cabinets. One of the closed doors rattled open and banged shut again. He could only see a spot at a time, wherever he aimed the flashlight. His shins brushed against something. He aimed the beam down to see trash and debris floating in the water. There was a squeak and a splash. Searching with the flashlight, he saw a V of ripples behind what he took for a swimming rat. Jimmy no longer wanted to be in that room. He shivered and rubbed his arm with his free hand. The cat made a racket inside the cabinet.
“Here, kitty, kitty,” he said with less gusto. Reaching into his breast pocket, he pulled out one of his ration bars and tore the packaging off with his teeth. Taking a stale bite for himself, he chewed and held the rest out in front of him. The silo had been dead for twelve years. He wondered how long cats lived, how this one had made it so long. And eating what? Or were old cats having new cats? Was this a new cat? They didn’t have a lottery, did they?
His bare feet brushed through something beneath the water. The reflection of the light made it difficult to see, and then a white bone broke the surface before sinking again. There was a loose jumble of someone’s remains around his ankles.
Jimmy pretended it was just trash. He reached the cabinet making all the noise, grabbed a handle, and pulled it open. There was a hiss from the shadows. Cans and rotting boxes shifted about as the cat retreated further. Jimmy broke off a piece of stale bar and set it on the shelf. He waited. There was another squeak from the corner of the room, the sound of water lapping at furniture, a stillness inside the cabinet. He kept the flashlight down so as not to spook the animal.
Two eyes approached like bobbing lights. They fixed themselves on Jimmy for a small eternity. He began to seriously wonder if his feet might fall off from the cold, if that’s what feet did when you subjected them to such abuse. The eyes drew closer and diverted downward. It was a black cat, the color of wet shadow, slick as oil. The piece of ration bar crunched as the cat chewed.
“Good kitty,” he whispered, ignoring the scattered bones beneath his feet. He broke off another small piece of the bar and held it out. The cat withdrew a pace. Jimmy set the food on the edge and watched as the animal came forward more quickly this time to snatch it up. The next piece, the cat took from his palm. He offered the last piece, and as the cat came to accept it, Jimmy tried to pick it up with both hands. And this thing, this company he hoped would do him no harm, latched onto one of his arms and sank its claws into his flesh.