by Lyndon Perry
The Last Prayer
( Silo )
Lyndon Perry
Inspired by Hugh Howey’s world of Wool, “The Last Prayer” features…
…A Different Silo, A Different Threat.
In the post-apocalypse, society continues in underground silos, kept safe from the toxic world above by a simple hatch door and a strict set of rules. For generations, an oligarchy of priests and politicians preserved their standing while the common workers lived in ignorance.
When a young girl starts speaking of heaven as if it were just outside, the rigid caste system begins to crack. Sides are quickly drawn. The only thing preventing a violent upheaval is an old priest’s confession and the child’s last prayer. But will such simple faith be enough to save them all?
THE LAST PRAYER
A Silo Story by Lyndon Perry
For those who are reaching beyond their own silos…
-1-
The gaunt priest set up his makeshift confessional in silence.
It had been quite a few years since the last cleaning—
“Ten or so?” Elias had asked his younger companion when the sheriff had informed him of the recent verdict.
Samuel didn’t hesitate. “Twelve,” his secretary had responded, always accurate, always prompt.
The responsibility, grim as it was, had sparked in the frail servant of God a sense of somber purpose. One he’d thought he’d lost. His previous act of ministry had been declined, well, twelve years earlier—politely, but a rejection nevertheless—and Elias had discovered, time and again, various confirmations of his suspected irrelevance to life in the underground community.
Beads of perspiration dotted the priest’s balding pate as he finished erecting the booth. His secretary handed him the curtain that would provide the confessor a semblance of privacy for the last prayer.
“I hope we’re not disappointed again, Samuel. I fear if our services are ignored our standing in the silo may wane.” The older man sighed. “Maybe I’m fooling myself. Maybe our days are already past and I’m just a relic of a bygone era. Has the sun already set for us, Samuel? Has it?” The priest’s eyes begged for contradiction.
“Elias…” Always accurate. Always circumspect. “…it may be that a new day will soon dawn.”
But both of them knew the truth of it. The number of candidates entering seminary training had been on the decline for years—twenty-seven straight, he’d been informed. And that despite the inclusion of women and the nongendered.
Hell, they’ve even allowed nonbelievers into the priesthood! Elias couldn’t help but be cynical. Dispensing liturgical compassion and rote absolution was a role any literate person could fill, the mayor had told him. But, God Almighty, that wasn’t him! He was a believer, he was one of the faithful….
“Father?” Jedediah Alston knocked at the door, interrupting Elias’s thoughts. Peeking his head into the converted storage room, the broad-shouldered sheriff said, “The condemned has agreed to confession. You ready?”
Elias hid a satisfied tremor with a lift of his shoulders and gave his secretary a flushed smile. Maybe he was needed after all. Maybe he could help direct this one soul—terrified, surely, and lost—toward peace before the cleaning.
“Send him in. All is prepared.”
The sheriff replied with a curt nod and retreated down the hall, passing empty cells until he reached the one that held the prisoner.
“I’ll be just outside the door if you have any need,” Samuel said as he left the temporary chapel adjacent to the near-empty jail. Crime had decreased along with faith, it seemed.
Elias nodded and entered his half of the confessional, settling himself to hear the final prayer of a desperate man. Just as he pulled the door to, he caught a glimpse of Sheriff Alston escorting a young girl into the room and pointing her toward the booth.
This can’t be right. But then he realized he never thought to ask who the condemned person was. Was he addled or simply a foolish and self-absorbed old man? He shook his head to clear it.
The priest heard Alston leave and the girl enter her side of the confessional.
“Father?” she asked in a whisper.
Confidence flooded his veins. Here was a frightened soul needing assurance. Here was his duty. “Yes, my child? Do you wish to make a confession?”
Silence met his anticipation and disassembled it.
“No, Father,” the girl said, her voice bold now, urgent. “I’ve come to ask you to help me clean.”
Elias wasn’t one to sputter. On this occasion it couldn’t be helped. “What in heaven’s name do you mean, child?”
“Yes! That’s it, heaven. We have to scrub heaven’s window.”
So innocent, so troubling.
The small booth grew stifling and more than a few beads of sweat hurdled the priest’s pinched brow and escaped down his sharply chiseled nose. Elias pushed at his door for air and impulsively pulled the curtain aside. Before him was a girl of perhaps ten or eleven, dressed in dreary garb—a sweeper’s daughter to be sure—with an uncertain yet expectant look playing across her face.
“I… I know you.”
“Yes, Father. You said words at my sister’s funeral last year.”
He remembered. The girl’s twin. Blondish hair, the both of them. Spry, wiry things. Inseparable, from what their parents said. The sister had died helping her father in an unauthorized sweep.
“Lorna, wasn’t it? She must have been about ten years old.”
“Lenora, but everyone calls her Lonni. I’m Hanna. And yes, we’re both eleven now. ” She sat up straight, waiting for the priest, meeting his gaze.
Elias coughed. “You’re both… yes, of course.” His eyes flitted to the door that led back to the jailhouse. Straying a bit from his liturgical script, he asked, “So why are you here, Hanna? Why were you condemned?”
“The dreams I think. Lonni’s been telling me about heaven and how everyone in the silo needs to go there.”
Such faith. “Yes, child, this is what I try to tell everyone as well.” He attempted a smile.
“Then you’ll join me in the cleaning?” Hanna matched his smile and raised him a shining glow. “Thank you! Thank you!”
“No. I mean… I don’t understand.”
The glow never wavered. “It’s outside, Father. It’s just above us. We’re supposed to show them the way. Once we clean the window, they’ll see for themselves and follow us to heaven.”
-2-
“Sheriff, we must stop this madness. Young Hanna is clearly touched. In the name of God, why has this child been condemned?”
Hanna had been returned to her holding cell and both Elias and Samuel stood in the office of Jedediah Alston, who leaned back in his chair, boots propped atop his desk. Alston’s easy manner and simple speech belied his strict authority as sheriff, second only to the silo’s mayor in its reach and reputation.
“It’s in the report, Father.” He tossed a file onto a stack of paperwork that looked weeks behind attention. “Didn’t you read it?”
He, in fact, had not. So caught up in his most sacred duty—preparing for a condemned soul’s last prayer—he’d neglected a rather essential part of it: familiarizing himself with the person and the crime. He’d come to rely on Samuel far too heavily in recent months. Or perhaps it was years.
His negligence had caught up with him. Nothing about his encounter with Hanna was going well. It went off-rail when he broke protocol and conversed with the prisoner. The confession went down-silo from there and ended with him forgetting to lead the girl in her final words to God.
One positive outcome, if it could be called that, was that his failure probably negated his sacrosanct responsibility to hold in confidence w
hat was said to him. But looking into the steely eyes of the sheriff, Elias hesitated to let on how much he knew. Which was enough. After a brief conversation about Hanna’s trial with Samuel—always informed and ready to assist—he knew he couldn’t in good conscience agree with the verdict. He had questions. He had doubts.
“I’m familiar with the report, Sheriff. I want to hear it from you. It seems, if you don’t mind me saying so, a rather exceptional case and one that might have been handled, well, differently.”
Alston uncrossed his legs and removed them from his old wooden desk, pushed his swivel chair back, and slowly stood. His six-three frame offered a stark contrast to the stooped and shrinking figure before him. Even Samuel, who matched him in height but not in heft, was overshadowed.
“I do mind your saying so. We have a silo to run and you priests have a role to play. Or has age caused you to forget your place?”
Elias, frail as he was, took the dressing down in stride. He’d outlasted four sheriffs and two mayors in his forty-odd years as chief priest of the upper levels. It wasn’t their authority that intimidated him, it was something else entirely. The nagging feeling that the silo had moved on without him. But he put that concern behind him for now.
“The priesthood knows its place, young man. We all do,” Elias said.
That much he could affirm. His place, mimicked by every priest throughout the silo, was to work hand in hand with the authorities to maintain peace, order, and civility. But Elias also recognized a numinous component, even if the powers behind the curtain did not. He would provide—though some of his fellow name-only priests might scoff at the thought—spiritual guidance, edification, and instruction on things eternal.
He continued, “My job is to nurture faith among the flock under my care.”
“No. Your job is to make sure your flock knows the difference between what’s imagined and what is true. Hanna’s imagination is a dangerous thing. You know it and so do I. The sweepers are already too religious; talk of heaven only feeds their fanaticism. And who speaks of heaven except a priest?”
Elias came close to sputtering for the second time in one day. “Are you implying that my order is behind this somehow? That we want an uprising? That someone under my authority is stirring unrest by somehow influencing young Hanna to talk of the outside—”
“Watch your tongue, old man.”
“My…my apologies. I forget myself.” Elias produced a kerchief from a discreet pocket in his simple black robe and dabbed at his forehead.
“Did you also forget that you spoke at her sister’s funeral last year?”
“No, I remember.” He threw a sideways glance at Samuel, who was there as well and assisted in consoling the family. His shoulders began to sag.
“Was there talk of heaven?”
“But of course, the service requires a few words of comfort. Obviously I referred to it as a spiritual reality, not as a metaphor for….” Elias pursed his lips, close to defeat.
“But the connection was made.” Jedediah Alston turned abruptly to the secretary. “And what is your recollection of the events? Was this a simple homily by a sincere but misunderstood priest, or did he attempt to stir rebellion and discontent?” The small office took on the weight of a courtroom.
Samuel offered a sympathetic nod to his older mentor but Elias was staring at the floor, bent over, as if bearing the burdens of the silo itself. The secretary thought carefully before he spoke. “As you noted, Sheriff, the sweepers are quite…enthusiastic when it comes to their beliefs. A few aptly chosen words—and they need not be intentional—might foment their fervor.” Next to him, the priest withered. “But surely there is no warrant for accusing the priesthood. Otherwise, why has this child been brought forward and not the person responsible, if indeed there is someone responsible, for planting this seed in her mind? In fact, it isn’t clear from the report how her crime came to light.”
Elias raised his head at that and the sheriff met both their expectant looks. He picked up the folder he’d tossed aside earlier and flipped through it, his eyes not alighting on anything in particular.
“There is one omission,” Alston conceded. “It was Hanna’s father who turned her in.”
-3-
Samuel took each step seriously as, floor by floor, he wound his way down the silo. The hand railings smooth, the metal steps worn, these stairs had given themselves over to untold generations of people who traveled to wherever work or pleasure took them. The constant traffic up and down—even to the lower depths more than a hundred floors below—was a reminder of the silo’s stifling reality: there were plenty of places to go, but no ultimate destination.
This particular journey weighed heavily on the frail priest’s representative. Elias, grateful for any excuse to avoid a taxing excursion, had promptly accepted his apprentice’s offer to meet with Hanna’s parents. They were in a temporary residence on the fifth level. Samuel would go and offer comfort as he accompanied them to the top floor viewing screen to witness their daughter’s march outside the hatch.
During his eighteen years as shadow—the last six as confidant and secretary—he’d often ministered in his mentor’s stead. Soon, however, Samuel would take over all the priestly functions, having been groomed since childhood for the role. He took the inevitable promotion in stride. Holding the title was of little consequence at this point; he already held the power.
The thirty-year-old, dark-haired minister stepped off the stairwell and into a smallish commons area on the third floor for a short break and drink of water. The sound of children playing greeted him and, remembering to smile, he waved to the nearest group.
“Brother Sam, Brother Sam,” shouted one boy. The six-year-old, full of life and hope, broke away from his friends and gave Samuel a hug around the legs.
“Why, hello Seth. How are you?”
“Great!”
And then the boy was off, merging once again with the other giggling children who would soon shed their laughter and innocent joy when they became shadows themselves on their way to productive members of society. Samuel frowned as he considered their future. Awaiting them were various apprenticeships and eventual jobs as porters, dirt-farmers, and nursery-attendants—even mechanics, engineers, and IT-workers for the more promising youngsters—but no future. Important roles, to be sure, if a life of meaningless drudgery toiling for a faceless, impersonal silo was your dream.
They don’t know any different… Samuel took a sip from his canteen and considered his own dream, big enough for all of them. …But they will. The future chief priest strapped his canteen back in place and continued his serious journey down-silo.
Adin and Ester greeted him solemnly after a gentle knock at their door. The small sleeping quarters, wedge-shaped like everyone’s living space in this cramped, circular world, was utilitarian and bleak. Offering as few amenities as possible, the room was meant to host its guests for no more than a week. Hanna’s parents needed only half the night.
They’d traveled up from thirty-eight, one of three sweepers’ floor, earlier that day and would trek the final four levels before dawn. They would then enter the largest room in the underground complex, the cafeteria and lounge, and find their seats in front of the view screen that projected the reality of that toxic world just outside their bunker. That noxious world their ancestors had created. One that, it was said, claimed the lives of countless billions and would now claim the life of one more. Adin and Ester would march, and sit, and then they would watch their daughter die.
“My deepest sympathies,” the priestly representative said. He stood, back to the door, while the couple retreated to a dingy couch and leaned into each other, exhausted from their long walk.
Adin grunted. “A lot of good that will do us.”
“Adin,” Ester murmured. She looked into Samuel’s eyes, searching, pleading for some form of hope he knew he couldn’t provide.
He offered her instead a sorrowful shake of the head. “I can’t imagin
e what you are going through. First, with Lonni, now with Hanna. I’m truly sorry for—”
“Yes, yes! You’re sorry for us, for our loss, for our miserable lives. You stand there all high and mighty but you don’t give a damn, really. You just preach your sacred platitudes, your damned pieties, while we sweep and wait and grunt and toil and wait for some…” Adin’s voice broke off, rasping as if he’d swallowed a woolen scrub pad.
Samuel stifled a reply. Yes, the sweepers had worked and waited and worked some more. And the time was coming very soon when they would act. It was a cyclical occurrence, he’d discovered. Every twenty or thirty years. All it took was for massive discontent to meet widespread fanaticism. Both ingredients had increased in tandem in recent years among this particular caste, especially since Lonni’s unfortunate accident.
The sweepers’ lives were no worse, really, than all the other segments of society. But they were held in no high regard. Responsible for cleaning the underbelly of the silo, their class of workers would literally sweep the detritus, filth, and grime out from the crawlspaces that had accumulated between levels. It was dirty work and sometimes dangerous, as this couple well knew.
But change was always dangerous.
“…When will the waiting be over?” Adin demanded.
The man’s anguished voice interrupted Samuel’s musings, but he kept silent. He’d been waiting as well. The room was stuffy with tension, sweat, and fear.
“What? No words of comfort?” Adin mocked. “No talk of heaven?”
Ester tried to quiet her husband with a pat on the shoulder. He pushed her hand away and stood before the future priest, rage and grief and anguish flickering in turn across his face. “What about the changes you said would come, when we sweepers would no longer live as silo rats, scurrying underneath the feet of our neighbors.” Fists clenched and unclenched. “I sacrificed my own daughter, Samuel. Dear God, you owe me….”