She grinned and shook her head, confirming his suspicions.
“See if I do you any more favors.”
“She needs to know you’re her dad, Wayne.”
The remark struck him differently coming from Melissa, knowing that she had lost her father. “I suppose you’re probably right.”
“Can I ask a question?”
“Shoot.”
“Are we going to have to eat the rats pretty soon?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“I won’t have to help butcher them, will I?”
“No. The men will take care of that.”
“Thank God,” she said, going back to her book.
After he was gone, she read for a while longer then checked her watch and saw it was time for the second half of the school day to begin. She closed the book and went to the classroom to help Andie with the day’s reading lesson, like she did every other day.
Today Andie was focusing on phonics. Most of the children were already reading at a third-grade level, but she wanted to enhance their understanding of the sound values for individual letters because some of the students were having a difficult time sounding out multisyllabic words.
“So what are the vowels again?” she asked them, preparing to write them out with a blue marker on her dry-eraser board.
“A . . . E . . . I . . . O . . . and U,” the children said together as Andie wrote them out.
“And sometimes Y,” one of them added.
“That’s, right,” Andie said, “and sometimes Y.”
Melissa looked up from the lesson she was preparing to help with, her mind’s eye suddenly seeing a stream of numeric code. “Vowels,” she muttered. “What’s the most common vowel?”
She excused herself, slipped out of the room and into the adjacent common room, taking her laptop from the box beneath her bedroll and disappearing all the way to the very top level of silo number two, where she often went to be alone. She sat down in her private nook between two stacks of cardboard boxes and opened the file containing the cipher work she had done on the code months before.
The first thing she did was bring up the same stream of code she had been working on since the beginning:
924913024024812824012924811636025913013011404925036712036824824
Next, she brought up one of the very first ciphers she had created on her own, the same cipher now flashing in her brain for reasons she did not yet understand:
A
B
C
D
E F
G H
I J
K L
M N O
P Q R
S T U
V W Y
Then she sat staring at the code and instinctively broke it up into units of three for perhaps the two hundredth time:
924-913-024-024-812-824-012-924-811-636-025-913-013-011-404-925-036-712-036-824-824
She scanned the string of numbers just as she had so often before, allowing her brain to process them with something specific to focus on this time, her subconscious thought no longer hindered by Ulrich’s discouraging remarks about the infinite number of possible algorithms.
“The most common vowel is E,” she muttered, pulling on her lower lip. “So is it zero-two-four? It does appear twice.”
But what about 824? she wondered. That appeared twice as well, and both sets appeared in tandem, so they might just as easily be consonants. L’s perhaps.
She set the computer aside, ran back down the stairs to the tunnel, then down the tunnel to the main corridor and into the first common room, to retrieve a sheaf of worn papers from inside the computer box.
“What are you up to?” Taylor asked her with a smile.
Taylor had been talking with Jenny and Michelle when Melissa had left in a hurry before with the computer, and she could sense that Melissa was still in a hurry even though she was trying not to look it now. Her query drew the attention of some of the other adults in the room, and Melissa was suddenly acutely aware of how crowded the complex was; she normally kept everyone largely blocked from her conscious thoughts by daydreaming of things like string theory and dark matter. Even her uncle Michael was looking at her funny.
“Nothing,” she said curtly, and walked out of the room.
When she got back up to her nook she sat down and began scanning the myriad pages of code, mentally dividing the numbers into groups of three, seeking out the digit sequence of 024 and spotting it over and over again, whereas she saw the occurrence of 824 only very rarely.
“So 024 has to be the letter E. How did I not see it before?”
The question was easy enough to answer—she had been thinking too far outside the box—and only partially on account of Ulrich’s gainsaying. Sometimes straightforward solutions to complicated issues simply avoided her, something her father had enjoyed teasing her about.
Now she needed to come up with a cipher in which E was equal to 024. She decided to add a numerical value directly to each subgroup of the early cipher merely as a jumping off point.
0
1
2
3
A
B
C
D
E F
G H
I J
K L
M N O
P Q R
S T U
V W Y
Then she assigned E a value of 022 as a place to start: Group 0, second row down, second letter in the subgroup. She could just as easily have assigned it a value of 021: Group 0, second row down, first letter in the row, but she needed to start somewhere and one place was as good as another.
After deciding she was in the right neighborhood, it occurred to her for the first time to invert the subgroups within the cipher.
0
1
2
3
M N O
P Q R
S T U
V W Y
E F
G H
I J
K L
A
B
C
D
And suddenly there it was: E = 024. Group 0, second row down, fourth letter in the subgroup.
“Okay,” she muttered, her stomach filling with an eager anxiety, “but how do I find values for all these stupid nines, eights, and sevens?”
Her mind began to clutter again, so she closed the laptop and drew a breath to clear it before opening the lid for another look. And just like that she saw the numerical values in her mind’s eye.
0
9
&n
bsp; 8
7
M N O
P Q R
S T U
V W Y
E F
G H
I J
K L
A
B
C
D
“Yes!” she said, jumping up to do a quick dance before sitting back down to decipher the initial string of code.
G
R
E
E
T
I
N
G
S
924-
913-
024-
024-
812-
824-
012-
924-
811-
636-
?
F
R
O
M
H
A
W
A
I
I
025-
913-
013-
011-
404-
925-
036-
712-
036-
824-
824
?
“Holy shit!” she said, her face splitting into a grin. “That’s it!”
She grabbed the papers and began to decipher them as rapidly as she could. Oblivious as the hours passed, she didn’t stop to come up for air.
“Melissa!” Forrest shouted from three stories below.
She looked at her watch and was surprised to see how much time had passed. “Up here!”
“It’s time to eat!”
“Not hungry!”
“Too bad. Get down here!”
“No!”
She heard his boots trotting up the four flights of steel stairs and sat grinning until his face emerged over the deck. Laddie came trotting over and licked her face.
“I know I misunderstood you,” he said, a wry grin on his face. “Because from way down there it sounded like you told me no.”
“I can’t stop right now,” she said.
“You’re back at that goddamn code, aren’t you?”
“Can I please skip dinner just this once? Please?”
“Melissa . . . that code is going to drive you insane.”
“Dad, will you please trust me this one time?”
He saw a new kind of determination in her eyes now, something that said to him she finally had a legitimate reason for wanting to skip dinner. “Okay. I’ll put a plate in the oven for you. I want you to eat when you come down. Understood?”
She gave him a little salute, making him laugh as he turned and went back down the stairs.
“Laddie, you comin’?”
The dog sat beside Melissa and watched him, cocking his head to one side.
“Communist,” he said with a chuckle, and trotted down the stairs.
“Hey, know what?” she called when he stepped onto the deck below her, looking down at him through the grating.
“What?” he said, looking up.
“I’m gonna be seventeen pretty soon.”
“I know that,” he said with a smile.
“What are you getting me?”
“What do you want?”
“A car.”
He laughed and said, “I’ll see what I can do.”
When Forrest got back to the cafeteria he sat down beside Veronica, across from Karen and Michael. “She says she’s busy,” he said, lifting his fork from the steel tray.
The other three exchanged looks.
“You’ve never let her get away with that excuse before,” Karen said, grinning. “What’s different about today?”
Melissa was famous for trying to skip dinner a few times a week, and Forrest would never allow it.
“I’ve got a feeling she’s close to cracking that goddamn code,” he said quietly. “But don’t say anything to Wayne. She’ll want to tell him herself.”
“For real?” Michael asked, surprised.
Forrest shrugged, saying, “She didn’t actually say it, but I could tell by the light in her eyes.”
“Well, good for her,” Veronica said. “She’s sure lost enough sleep over that damn thing.”
After the children were put to bed that night, Forrest asked the women to join him, Ulrich, and Dr. West in the cafeteria for a meeting. Emory and the rest of the men stayed behind to watch over the sleeping children in the common rooms.
Melissa was still in the silo.
Formal meetings were rare events, so there was a lot of whispering as the women speculated over what it was about. The general consensus was that Forrest was going to announce a cut in the daily food allowance, a step that had not yet been taken and that most of them realized was probably long overdue.
“So,” Forrest said with a dubious kind of smile. “I suppose you’re all wondering why the three of us have gathered you here tonight.”
There were some chuckles.
“Okay, as I’m sure you’re all aware, we’ve consumed well over half of our original food stores. And I’m afraid that in order for us to stretch what we’ve got left through to the end of the summer, we’re going to have to take certain . . . certain measures.”
He glanced at the other two men sitting beside him to see if either of them wanted to jump in, but Ulrich only smiled at the women, and West maintained his usual passive demeanor.
“We know you’re going to reduce our rations,” Erin said, burping the baby over her shoulder, having only moments before gotten her back from Emory. “Just tell us by how much.”
“I’m afraid the measures are going to be a bit more radical than that, actually,” he replied. “At our present rate of consumption, we’ll be out of food around mid-May—which makes nearly two years. So we’ve done an excellent job of conserving while at the same time keeping everyone well nourished. But in order for us to stretch the food through the summer, we’re going to have to cut back to below what would be considered healthy by even minimal standards, which would put us all in jeopardy if we didn’t find a way to supplement our diet.”
“You’ve got plenty of vitamins stashed away,” Andie piped up from the back row.
“That’s right,” he said with a chuckle. “And
you can believe we’ll finally be breaking them out, but I’m afraid vitamins alone aren’t going to do the trick.”
The women began to murmur, their mutual concern steadily rising.
“And as we all know,” Forrest continued, “the skies have not cleared enough to—Okay, everyone, cut the chatter and give me a second to finish. We do have a plan. But it’s going to sound somewhat repugnant to you when you first hear it, so I want you to brace yourselves.”
He was trying to make the plan sound a tad worse than what he hoped it actually was, in order to keep the truth from coming as too great a shock.
“We’ve been raising a certain kind of animal in the cargo bay. And we’re pretty sure we can breed them fast enough to provide us with a viable source of nutrition through the winter. So long as we start a full-fledged breeding program right now.”
Not one of the women made a sound. None of them wanted to even speak the word rat, but there was no other animal Forrest could possibly have been talking about in this postasteroidal world.
Erin got up from her seat and took the baby with her into the common area without even meeting her husband’s eyes, furious with him for keeping such a disgusting secret from her.
“Look, these animals aren’t the demons they have been stigmatized to be,” Forrest said quietly. “In fact, they’re actually rather affectionate if they’re handled from birth, and they’re as clean as their environment will allow.”
Cannibal Reign Page 40