by Hugh Howey
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.
31
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.
Jimmy screamed and threw up his hands. The flashlight tumbled end over end in the air. There was a splash as the cat disappeared. A shriek and a hiss, a violent noise, Jimmy fumbling beneath the water for the dull glow of the light, which flickered once, twice, then left him in darkness.
He groped blindly, seized a solid cylinder, and felt the knobby ends where the leg sockets into the hip. He dropped the bone in disgust. Two more bones before he found the flashlight, which was toast. He retrieved it anyway as the sound of frantic splashing approached. His arms were on fire; he had seen blood on them in the last of the spinning light. And then something was against his leg, up his shin, claws stinging his thighs, the damn cat climbing him like the leg of a table.
Jimmy reached for the poor animal to get its claws out of his flesh. The cat was soaked and hardly felt bigger around than his flashlight. It trembled in his arms and rubbed itself against a dry patch of his coveralls, mewing in complaint. It began to sniff at his breast pocket.
Jimmy held the animal with one forearm across his chest, making a perch, and reached inside his pocket for the other ration bar. It was perfectly dark in the room, so dark it made his ears ache. He ripped the package fr
ee and held the bar steady. Tiny paws wrapped around his hand, and there was a crunching sound.
Jimmy smiled. He worked his way toward where he thought the door might be, bumping through furniture and old bones as he went, Solo no more.
Silo 1
32
Donald’s apartment had transformed into a cave, a cave where notes lay strewn like bleached bones, where the carcasses of folders decorated his walls, and where boxes of more notes were ordered up from archives like fresh kill. Weeks had passed. The stomping in the halls had dwindled. Donald lived alone with ghosts and slowly pieced together the purpose of what he’d helped to build. He was beginning to see it, the entire picture, zooming out of the schematic until the whole was laid bare.
He coughed into a pink rag and resumed examination of his latest find. It was a map he’d come across once before in the armory, a map of all the silos with a line coming out of each and converging at a single point. Here was one of many mysteries left. The document was labeled Seed, but he could find nothing else about it.
He shuffled through his piles—he had a system, the stacks had meaning—and found what he was looking for. A list similar to the one he’d uncovered on his last shift. A ranking of all the silos. Victor had spent a lot of time looking at this list before he killed himself. The ordering was different than Donald remembered. Different silos were near the top of this one. It was a version of the list that’d been updated weeks ago by Eren. Or generated by a computer and signed off by him. Donald had printed it from the Ops directory, which his Thurman account had access to. He scratched his beard. Silo 18 was near the bottom, down near the silos that no longer harbored life. Silos 12, 17, 40, and a dozen others were labeled N/A. He could tell the list was gravely important by who had access to it and who didn’t. Silo 6 was at the very top. The one hopeful egg in the basket.
Donald could hear Anna approaching while he worked; he could hear her whispers getting louder. She had been trying to tell him something. The note in Thurman’s account, she was trying to say, it had been left for him. So obvious, now. She could never be woken, not a woman. She needed him, needed his help. Donald imagined her piecing all of this together on some recent shift, alone and terrified, scared of her own father, no one left to turn to. So she had taken her father out of power, had entrusted Donald, had left him a note. And what did Donald do?
He heard her whispers and did not startle as she burst up through the film of white pages, a swimmer emerging from a frothy sea. Her arms flailed and splashed as she gasped for air, as she came back to life. Donald watched her struggle for a while. He imagined a hand on her head, pushing her back under. He willed the guilt to subside until the splashes and ripples settled and were pages once more.
Scratching his beard, he looked elsewhere. He nearly told himself that he wasn’t mad, but that would be a small consolation. Sane people never said that to themselves.
The reports. Anna had spent a year like this once, down in the armory, surrounded by notes. Living alone, meals delivered, lonely and wishing for company. He was only a few weeks into what she had suffered and already cracking. Anna had been so much stronger than he, but now she was dead. She’d been dead for over two weeks, and nobody knew. Maybe they never would.
Donald groaned and picked up a piece of paper, a distraction.
It was from his Silo 18 stack, an old mystery he no longer cared about. They had sent drones up to look for a wayward cleaner. They had sent drones up to bomb Silo 40 because of a connection he’d made. There was no cleaner out there on the hills. The hills were littered with cleaners.
Donald remembered the video feed he’d been shown of a woman disappearing over a gray dune. Because of this, the residents of 18 had been filled with a dangerous hope—the sort of hope that leads to violence. And in the halls outside of Donald’s door, scraps of conversation passed with squeaking boots, rumors and stories about this cleaner surviving, making it somewhere, joining another silo.
It was nothing but legends made up and circulated to entertain bored minds. Poison. It was stupid to hope. Crazy to dream. The less he did it—the more the nightmares guided him—the more clearly he saw the danger in others. He was becoming the man whose boots he wore. Even as he sorted out what they’d done and what they had planned, he was becoming him. Donald sometimes embraced this, sometimes raged against it.
He picked up the folder on Silo 17. As he did, he noticed the splotches on the back of his hand. Purplish and red, it looked like a rash. He held his hand up and studied the patterns, remembered tugging a glove off and watching it tumble down a windswept hill. Donald wanted to die up there with that view, anywhere but buried. Flexing his hand into a fist, squeezing the air and relaxing over and over, he waited for the blood to return to his hand, to normalize. He should see the doctor, but tell him what? When Donald coughed up blood, his greatest fear was that he would be discovered. Death was no longer a thing.
There was a knock on his door.
“Who is it?” Donald asked, his voice not sounding like his own.
The door opened a crack. “It’s Eren, sir. We’ve got a call from eighteen. The shadow is ready.”
“Just a second,” he said.
Donald coughed into his handkerchief. He rose slowly and moved to the bathroom, stepping over two trays of old dishes. He emptied his bladder, flushed, and studied himself in the mirror. Gripping the edge of the counter, he grimaced at his reflection, this man with scraggly hair and the start of a beard. He looked insane, and yet people trusted him. That made them crazier than he was. But he was in charge, and the small duties that came from being in charge disturbed his private digging. Donald smiled a yellowing smile and thought of the long history of madmen who remained in charge simply because they already were.
Hinges squealed as Eren poked his head in the door.
“I’m coming,” Donald said. He pushed away from a stranger, who pushed away from him in equal measure. Stomping across the reports, leaving a trail of footprints behind, he also left a bloody palm print on the edge of the counter, the mark of a man getting worse.
33
Donald joined Eren in the hall. The state of his being was acutely felt in the presence of another. He wasn’t cycling his coveralls through the wash the way he should be. He smelled himself with another man’s nose—another man’s cleanliness—in his presence.
“They’re calling the shadow now, sir.”
Donald cringed at the “sir.” The deferential treatment felt more and more vacuous as the days wore on. Donald had been awoken for answers, but he had found nothing but questions. He sat alone in a room full of notes and pages, growing mad. He felt conspicuously mad.
“You want to freshen up?” Eren asked.
“No,” Donald said. “I’m good.” He stood in the doorway, struggling to remember what this meeting was about. A Rite of Initiation. He remembered those, thought it was something Raymond would handle. “Why am I needed, again?” he asked. “Shouldn’t our Head be conducting this?” Donald remembered being the one to conduct such a Rite on his first shift.
Eren popped something into his mouth and chewed. He shook his head. “You know, with all that reading you’re doing in there, you could bone up on the Order a bit. It sounds like it’s changed since the last time you read it. The ranking officer on shift completes the Rite. That would normally be me—”
“But since I’m up, it’s me.” Donald pulled his door shut. The two of them started down the hall.
“That’s right. The Heads here do less and less every shift. There have been … problems. I’ll sit in with you though, help you get through the script. Oh, and you wanted to know when the pilots were heading off-shift. The last one is going under right now. They’re just straightening up down there.”
Donald perked up at this. Finally. What he’d been waiting for. “So the armory’s empty?” he asked, unable to hide his delight.
“Yessir. No more flight requisitions. I know you didn’t like chancing them to be
gin with.”
“Right, right.” Donald waved his hand as they turned the corner. “Restrict access to the armory once they’re done. Nobody should be able to get in there but me.”
Eren slowed his pace. “Just you, sir?”
“For as long as I’m on shift,” Donald said.
They passed Raymond in the hall, who had three cups of coffee nestled in a web of fingers. Raymond smiled and nodded. Donald remembered fetching coffee for people when he was Head of the silo. Now, that was about all the Head did. Donald couldn’t help but think his first shift was partly to blame.
Eren lowered his voice. “You know the story behind him, right?” He took another bite of something and chewed.
Donald glanced over his shoulder. “Who, Raymond?”
“Yeah. He was in Ops until a few shifts back. Broke down. Tried to get himself into deep freeze. The duty doc at the time talked him into a demotion. We were losing too many people, and the shifts were starting to get some overlap.” Eren paused and took another bite. There was a familiar scent. Eren caught him watching and held out something. “Bagel?” he asked. “They’re fresh baked.”
Donald could smell it. Eren tore off a piece. The feeling of having become a stray animal or a homeless man was complete as he accepted the offering. It was still warm. “I didn’t know they could make these,” he said, popping the morsel into his mouth.
“New chef just came on shift. He’s been experimenting with all kinds of stuff. He—”
Donald didn’t hear the rest. He chewed on memories. A cool day in D.C., Helen up to visit, had the dog with her, drove all the way from Savannah. They walked around the Lincoln Memorial a week too early for the cherry blossoms, but still a spot of color here and there. Stopped for fresh bagels, still warm, the smell of coffee—
“Put an end to this,” Donald said, indicating the rest of Eren’s bagel.