by Hugh Howey
“Coming, coming,” he said into the radio.
The man yelled something back. All Jimmy could hear was his mother screaming and his pulse ringing in his ears. He ran beneath the angry lights and between the dark machines. The laces on one of his boots had come undone. They whipped about while he ran, and he thought of his mother’s legs, up in the air like that, kicking and fighting.
Jimmy crashed into the door. He could hear muffled shouts on the other side. They came through the radio as well. His mother’s screams could be heard both places at once, crackling and hissing in one ear and dull and distant in the other.
Jimmy slapped the door with his palm and shouted into his portable. “I’m here, I’m here!”
“The code!” the man screamed.
Jimmy went to the control pad. His hands were shaking, his vision blurred. He imagined his mother on the other side, the gun aimed at her. He could feel his father lying a few feet away, just on the other side of that wall of steel. Tears streamed down his cheeks. He put in the first two numbers, the level of his school, and hesitated. That wasn’t right. It was twelve-eighteen, not eighteen-twelve. Or was it? He put in the other two numbers, and the keypad flashed red. The door didn’t open.
“What did you do?” the man yelled through the radio. “Just tell me the code!”
Jimmy fumbled with the portable, brought it to his lips. “Please don’t hurt her—” he said.
The radio squawked. “If you don’t do as I say, she’s dead. We’ll all be dead. Do you understand?”
The man sounded terrified. Maybe he was just as scared as Jimmy. Jimmy nodded and reached for the keypad. He entered the first two numbers correctly, then thought about what his father had said. They would kill him. They would kill him and his mother both if he let these men inside. But it was his mom—
The keypad blinked impatiently. The man on the other side of the door yelled for him to hurry, yelled something about three wrong tries in a row and having to wait another day. Jimmy did nothing, paralyzed with fear. The keypad flashed red and fell silent.
There was a bang on the other side of the door, a muffled pop, a blast from a gun. Jimmy squeezed the radio and screamed. When he let go, he could hear his mom shrieking on the other side.
“The next one won’t be a warning,” the man said. “Now don’t touch that pad. Don’t touch it again. Just tell me the code. Hurry, boy.”
The man was panicked, and Jimmy blubbered. He tried to form the sounds, to tell the numbers in the right order, but nothing came out. With his forehead pressed against the wall, he could hear his mother struggling and fighting on the other side.
“The code,” the man said, calmer now.
Jimmy heard a distant grunt. He heard someone yell “Bitch,” heard his mother scream for Jimmy not to do it, and then a slap on the other side of the wall, someone pressed up against it, his mother inches away. And then the muffled beeps of numbers being entered, four quick taps of the same number, and an angry buzz from the keypad as a third attempt failed.
More shouts. And then the roar of a gun, louder and angrier with his head pressed to the door. Jimmy screamed and beat his fists against the cold steel. The men were yelling at him through the radio. There were a lot of screams coming through the portable, screams leaking through the heavy steel door, but none of them came from his mother.
Jimmy slid to the floor. The angry yells bled through the wall. They bled and bled. They crackled from the radio in hissing bursts, and Jimmy buried the portable against his belly and curled into a ball. His body quivered with sobs and strange sounds, the floor grating rough against his cheek. And while the violence so very close raged impotently, the lights overhead continued to throb at him. They throbbed steady. They weren’t like a pulse at all.
Silo 1
10
There was a plastic bag waiting on Donald’s bunk when he got back to his room. He shut the door to block out the cacophony of traffic and office chatter, searched for a lock, and saw that there wasn’t one. Here was a lone bedroom among workspaces, a place for men who were always on call, who were up for as long as they were needed.
Donald imagined this was where Thurman stayed when he was called forth in an emergency. He remembered the name on his boots and realized he didn’t have to imagine; it was happening.
The wheelchair had been removed, he saw, and a glass of water stood on the nightstand. His caretakers had been upgraded from the sort who locked him away, who pinned him to gurneys, who dragged him kicking and screaming down dusty hills. He tossed the folders Eren had given him on the bed, sat down beside them, and picked up the curious plastic bag.
Shift, it read, in large stenciled letters. The clear plastic was heavily wrinkled, a few items appearing inside as inscrutable bulges. Donald slid the plastic seal to the side and peeled open the bag. Turning it over, there was a jingle of metal as a pair of dog tags rattled out, a fine chain slithering after them like a startled snake. Donald inspected the tags and saw that they were Thurman’s. Dented and thin, and without the rubber edging he remembered from his sister’s tags, they seemed like antiques. Which he supposed they were.
A small pocketknife was next. The handle looked like ivory but was probably a substitute. Donald opened the blade and tested it. Both sides were equally dull. The tip had been snapped off at some point, used to pry something open, perhaps. It had the look of a memento, no longer good for cutting. Like an old man who had seen war but would no longer be useful in one.
The only other item in the bag was a coin, a quarter. The shape and heft of something once so common made it difficult to breathe. Donald thought of an entire civilization, gone. It seemed impossible for so much to go away completely, but then he remembered Roman coins and Mayan coins and who knew what else pulled from the ocean floors and unearthed in deserts and jungles. He turned the coin over and over and contemplated the only thing unusual about him holding a trinket from a world fallen to ashes—and that was him being around to marvel at the loss. It was supposed to be people who died and cultures that lasted. Now, it was the other way around.
Something about the coin caught Donald’s attention as he turned it over and over. It was heads on both sides. He laughed and inspected it more closely, wondering if it was a gag item, but the feel of the thing seemed genuine. On one of the sides, there was a faint arc where the stamp had missed its mark. A mistake coin. Perhaps a gift from a friend in the Treasury?
He placed the items on the bedside table and remembered Anna’s note to her father. He was surprised there wasn’t a locket in the bag. The note had been marked urgent and had mentioned a locket with a date. Donald folded the bag marked Shift and slid it beneath his glass of water. People hurried up and down the hall outside. The silo was in a panic. He supposed if the real Thurman were there, the old man would be storming up and down as well, barking orders, shutting down facilities, commanding lives to be taken.
Donald coughed into the crook of his arm, his throat tickling. Someone had put him in this position. Erskine, or Victor beyond the grave, or maybe a hacker with more nefarious designs. He had nothing to go on.
Lifting the two folders, he thought of the panic roused by a person meandering out of sight. He thought about the violence brewing in the depths of another silo. These were not his mysteries, he thought. What he wanted to know was why he was awake, why he was even alive. What exactly was out there beyond those walls? What was the plan for the world once these shifts were over? Was it getting better out there? Would there be a day when the people underground would be set free? What would be expected of them?
Something didn’t sit right with him, imagining how that last shift would play out. There was a nagging suspicion that things wouldn’t end so simply. Every layer he’d peeled back so far, every skin of this onion, possessed the sting of a lie. And he didn’t think he’d reached the core just yet. Perhaps someone had placed him in Thurman’s boots to keep digging.
He recalled what Erskine had said about peop
le like himself being in charge. Or was it Victor who said it to Erskine? He couldn’t remember. What he did know, patting his pocket for the badge there, a badge that would open doors previously locked to him, was that he was very much in charge now. There were questions he wanted answers to. And he was in a position to ask them.
Donald coughed into the crook of his elbow once more, an itch in his throat he couldn’t quite soothe. He opened one of the folders and reached for his glass. Taking a few gulps of water and beginning to read, he failed to notice the faint stain left behind, the spot of blood in the crook of his elbow.
Silo 17
Week One
11
Jimmy didn’t want to move. He couldn’t move. He remained curled on the steel grating, the lights flashing overhead, on and off, on and off, the color of crimson.
People on the other side of the door yelled at him and at each other. Jimmy slept in fits. There were dull pops from guns and zings that rang against the door. The keypad buzzed. Only a single digit entered, and it buzzed. The whole world was angry with him.
Jimmy dreamt of blood. It seeped under the door and filled the room. It rose up in the shape of his mother and father, and they stood there, great red puddles with arms and legs, and they lectured him, mouths yawning open in anger. But Jimmy couldn’t hear.
He awoke to a great pressure in his skull. Clasping his hands over his eyes, he curled into a tighter and tighter ball, knees against his chin. Jimmy felt something crack within his skull, a pop like the sound a too-big yawn makes deep behind his ear. There was a great release of pressure that had built up and built up—and it sent him back to sleep.
There were no days, no time. The yelling on the other side of the door came and went. They were fighting, these men. Fighting to get inside where it was safe. Jimmy didn’t feel safe. He felt hungry. He needed to pee.
Standing was the hardest thing he’d ever done. Jimmy’s cheek made a tearing sound as he lifted it from the grating. He wiped the drool from the side of his face and felt the ridges there, the deep creases and the places his skin puffed out. His joints were stiff. His eyes were crusted together from crying. Jimmy staggered toward the far corner of the room and tugged at his coveralls, tried to get them free before he accidentally went with them on.
The great black machines hummed and whirred and watched him go. Urine splashed through the grating and trickled down on bright runs of wires in neat channels. His stomach rumbled and spun inside his belly, but he didn’t want to eat. He wanted to not eat and to waste away completely. He glared up at the annoying lights overhead trying to drill into his skull. His stomach was angry with him. Everything was angry with him.
Back at the door, he waited for someone to call his name. He went to the keypad and pressed the number “1.” The door buzzed at him immediately. It was angry, too.
Jimmy wanted to lie back down on the grating and curl back into a ball, but his stomach said to look for food. Below. There were beds and food below. Jimmy walked in a daze between the black machines. He touched their warm skin for balance, heard them clicking and whirring like everything was normal. The red lights flashed over and over. Jimmy weaved his way until he found the hole in the ground.
He lowered his feet to the rungs of the ladder and noticed the buzzing noise. It came and went in time with the throbbing lights. He pulled himself out of the shaft and crawled across the floor in pursuit of the sound. It was coming from the server with its back off. His father had called it a comm something. Where had his father gone? Off to find his mother. There was something else—
Jimmy couldn’t remember. He patted his chest and felt the key against his breastbone. The buzzing came and went with the flashing lights in perfect synchrony. This machine was making that overhead throb drilling into his skull. He peered inside the machine. A comm hub, that’s what his father had called it. There was a headset hanging on a hook. He wished his father were there, but that seemed an impossible wish. Jimmy fumbled with the headset. There was a wire dangling from it. The piece on the end looked like something from computer class. He searched for a place to plug it in and saw a bank of sockets. One of them was blinking. The number “40” was lit up above it.
Jimmy adjusted the headset around his ears. He lined up the jack with the socket and pressed in until he felt a click. The lights overhead fell silent immediately. A voice came through, like the radio, only clearer.
“Hello?” the voice asked.
Jimmy didn’t say anything. He waited.
“Is anyone there?”
Jimmy cleared his throat. “Yes,” he said, and it felt strange to talk to an empty room. Stranger even than the radio with its hissing. It felt like Jimmy was talking to himself.
“Is everyone okay?” the voice asked.
“No,” Jimmy said. He remembered the stairs and falling and Yani and something awful on the other side of the door. “No,” he said again, wiping tears from his cheeks. “Everyone is not okay!”
There was muttering on the other side of the line. Jimmy sniffled. “Hello?” he asked.
“What happened?” the voice demanded. Jimmy thought it was an angry voice. Just like the people outside the door. Scared and angry, both.
“Everyone was running—” Jimmy said. He wiped his nose. “They were all heading up. I fell. Mom and Dad—”
“There were casualties?” the man from level 40 asked.
Jimmy thought of the body he’d seen on the stairway with the awful wound on his head. He thought of the woman who had gone over the rails, her scream fading to a crisp silence. “Yes,” he said.
The voice on the line spat an angry curse, angry but faint. And then: “We were too late.” Again, it sounded distant, like the man was talking to someone else.
“Too late for what?” Jimmy asked.
There was a click, followed by a steady tone. The light above the socket marked “40” went out.
“Hello?”
Jimmy waited.
“Hello?”
He searched inside the box for some button to press, some way to make the voices come back. There were sockets with fifty numbers above them. Why only fifty levels? He glanced at the server behind him and wondered if there were other comm stations to handle the rest of the silo. This one must be for the Up Top. There would be one for the Mids and another for the Deep. He unplugged the jack, and the tone in the headset fell silent.
Jimmy wondered if he could call another level. Maybe the school. He ran his finger down the row looking for “18,” and noticed that “17” was missing. There was no jack for “17.” He puzzled over this as the overhead lights began to flash once more. Jimmy glanced at level 40’s socket, but it remained dark. It was the top level calling. The light over the number “1” blinked on and off. The cabinet was back to buzzing, the lights to flashing. Jimmy glanced at the jack in his hand, lined it up with the socket, and pressed in until he heard a click.
“Hello?” he said.
“What the hell is going on over there?” a voice demanded.
Jimmy shrunk within himself. His father had yelled at him like this before, but not for a long time. He suddenly needed to pee again. He didn’t answer because he didn’t know what to say.
“Is this Jerry? Or Russ?”
Russ was his dad. Jerry was his dad’s boss. Jimmy realized he shouldn’t be playing with these things.
“This is Jimmy,” he said.
“Who?”
“Jimmy. The guy on level forty said they were too late. I told him what happened.”
“Too late?” There was some distant talking. Jimmy jiggled the cord in the socket. He was doing something wrong. “How did you get in there?” the man asked.
“My dad let me in,” he said, the truth frightened out of him.
“We’re shutting you down,” the voice said. “Shut them down right now.”
Jimmy didn’t know what to do. There was a hiss somewhere. He thought it was from the headset until he noticed the white steam coming from
the vents overhead. A fog descended toward him. Jimmy waved his hand in front of his face, expecting the sting of smoke like he’d smelled from a fire once as a kid, but the steam didn’t smell like anything. It just tasted like a dry spoon in his mouth. Like metal.
“—on my goddamn shift—” the person in his headset said.
Jimmy coughed. He tried to say something back, but he had swallowed wrong. The steam stopped leaking from the vents.
“That did it,” the man on the other line muttered.
Before Jimmy could say anything else, the various winking lights inside the box went dark. There was a click in the headset, and then it too fell silent. He pulled the headset off just as a louder “thunk” rang out in the ceiling and the lights in the room turned off. The whirring and clicking of the tall servers around him wound down. There was utter dark and complete silence. Jimmy couldn’t see his own nose, couldn’t see his hand as he waved it in front of his face. He thought he’d gone blind, wondered if this was what being dead was like, but then he heard his pulse, a thump-thump, thump-thump in his temples.
Jimmy felt a sob catch in his throat. He wanted his mother and father. He wanted his backpack, which he’d left behind like an idiot. For a long while, he sat there, waiting for someone to come to him, for an idea to form on what he should do next. He thought of the ladder nearby and the room below. As he began to crawl toward that hole, patting the grating ahead of him so he wouldn’t fall down the long drop, the clunking in the ceiling came back. There was a blinding flash as the lights overhead wavered, shimmered, blinked on and off several times, then burned steady.
Jimmy froze. The red and angry lights went to flashing again. He went back to the box and looked inside. It was the light over “40” going on and off like mad. He thought about answering it, seeing what these people were so angry about, but maybe the power was a warning. Maybe he’d said something wrong.