by Hugh Howey
He listened to the last man slink away, slink away, and now Jimmy could close the door. He got up and ran around the dead man who had fallen inside the server room, a black pistol near his lifeless hand. Lowering his gun, Jimmy prepared to shoulder the door shut, when the thought of tomorrow, or that night, or the next hour occurred to him.
The retreating man now knew the number. He was taking it with him.
“Twelve-eighteen,” Jimmy whispered.
He poked his head out the door for a quick look. There was a brief glimpse of a man disappearing into an office. Just a flash of green coveralls, and then an empty hall, impossibly long and bright.
The dying man outside the door groaned and writhed. Jimmy ignored him. He pulled the gun against his arm and braced it like he’d practiced how. The little notches lined up with each other and pointed toward the edge of the office door. Jimmy imagined a can of soup out there, hovering in the hall. He breathed and waited. The groaning man on the other side of the threshold crawled closer, bloody palms slapping a spot of floor that made Jimmy feel funny to look at. There was that ache in the center of his skull, an ancient scar across his memories. Jimmy aimed at the nothingness in the hallway and thought of his mother and father. Some part of him knew they were gone, that they had left somewhere and would never return, and the notches became unaligned as his barrel trembled.
The man by his feet drew closer. Groans had turned to a hissing. Jimmy glanced down and saw red bubbles frothing on the man’s lips. His beard was fuller than Jimmy’s and soaked in blood. Jimmy looked away before his father’s face appeared on the man again. He watched the spot in the hall and counted.
He was at thirty-two when he felt fingers pawing weakly at his boots.
It was on fifty-one that a head peeked out like a sneaky soup can.
Jimmy’s finger squeezed. There was a kick to his shoulder and a blossom of bright red down the hall.
He waited a moment, took a deep breath, then pulled his boot away from the hand reaching up his ankle. He placed his shoulder against a door hanging dangerously open and pushed. Locks whirred and made thunking sounds deep within the walls. He only heard them dimly. He dropped his gun and covered his face with his palms while nearby, a man lay dying in the server room. Inside the server room. Jimmy wept, and the keypad chirped happily before falling silent, patiently waiting for yet another day.
Silo 1
•20•
A row of familiar clipboards hung on the wall in Dr. Wilson’s office. Donald remembered scratching his name on them with mock ceremony. He remembered signing off on himself once, authorizing his own deep freeze. There was a twinge of unease at the thought of signing those forms right then. What would he write? His hand would shake as he scribbled someone else’s name, and it would strike midnight at the masquerade ball.
In the middle of the office, an empty gurney brought back bad memories. A fresh sheet had been tucked military crisp on top of it, ready for the next body. Dr. Wilson checked his computer to find that next body while his two assistants prepped. One of them stirred two scoops of green powder into a container of warm water. Donald could smell the concoction across the room. It made his cheeks pucker, but he took careful note of which cabinet the powder came from, how much was spooned in, and asked any question that came to mind.
The other assistant folded a clean blanket and draped it over the back of a wheelchair. There was a paper gown. An emergency medical kit was unpacked and repacked. Gloves, meds, gauze, bandages, tape. It was all done with a quiet efficiency. Donald was reminded of the men behind the serving counter who laid out breakfast with the same habitual care.
A number was read aloud to confirm who they were waking. This reactor tech, like Donald’s sister, had been reduced to a number, a place within a grid, a cell in a spreadsheet. As if made-up names were any better. Suddenly, Donald saw how easily his switch could’ve taken place. He watched as paperwork was filled out—his signature not needed—and dropped into a box. This was a part of the process he could ignore. There would be no trace of what he had planned.
Dr. Wilson led them out the door. The wheelchair full of supplies followed, with Donald trailing behind.
The tech they were waking was two levels down, which meant taking the lift. One of the assistants idly remarked that he had only three days left on his shift.
“Lucky you,” the other assistant said.
“Yeah, so be easy with my catheter,” he joked, and even Dr. Wilson laughed.
Donald didn’t. He was busy wondering what the final shift would be like. Nobody seemed to think much past the next shift. They looked forward to one ending and dreaded seeing another. It reminded him of Washington, where everyone he worked alongside hoped to make it to the next term even as they loathed running for another. Donald had fallen into that same trap.
The lift doors opened on another chilled hall. Here were rooms full of shift workers, the majority of the silo’s population-in-waiting spread out across two identical levels. Dr. Wilson led them down the hall and coded them through the third door on the right. A hall of sleeping bodies angled off into the distance until it met the concrete skin of the silo. “Twenty down and four over,” he said, pointing.
They made their way to the pod. It was the first time Donald had seen this part of the procedure. He had helped put others under, but had never helped wake anyone up. Storing Victor’s body away was something altogether different. That had been a funeral.
The assistants busied themselves around the pod. Dr. Wilson knelt by the control panel, paused, glanced up at Donald, waiting.
“Right,” Donald said. He knelt and watched over the doctor’s shoulder.
“Most of the process is automated,” the doctor admitted sheepishly. “Frankly, they could replace me with a trained monkey and nobody would know the difference.” He glanced back at Donald as he keyed in his code and pressed a red button. “I’m like you, Shepherd. Only here in case something goes wrong.”
The doctor smiled. Donald didn’t.
“It’ll be a few minutes before the hatch pops.” He tapped the display. “The temperature here will get up to thirty-one Celsius. The bloodstream is getting an injection when this light is flashing.”
The light was flashing.
“An injection of what?” Donald asked.
“The good little doctors. This procedure would kill a normal human being, which I suppose is why it was outlawed.”
A normal human being. Donald wondered what the hell that made him. He lifted his palm and studied the red splotchiness. He remembered a glove tumbling down a hill.
“Twenty-eight,” Dr. Wilson said. “When it hits thirty, the lid will release. Now’s when I like to go ahead and dial the pod back down, rather than wait until the end. Just so I don’t forget.” He twisted the dial below the temp readout. “It doesn’t stop the process. It only runs one direction once it starts.”
“What if something goes wrong?” Donald asked.
Dr. Wilson frowned. “I told you. That’s why I’m here.”
“But what if something happened to you? Or you got called away?”
Dr. Wilson tugged his earlobe, thinking. “I would advise putting them back under until I could get to them.” He laughed. “Of course, the little doctors might just fix what’s wrong before I could. As long as you dial it back down, all you have to do is close the lid. But I don’t see how that could come up.”
Donald did. He watched the temperature tick up to twenty-nine. The two assistants prepped while they waited for the pod to open. One had a towel set aside along with the blanket and the paper gown. The medical kit sat in the wheelchair, the top open. Both men wore blue rubber gloves. One of them peeled off strips of tape and hung them from the handle of the wheelchair. A packet of gauze was preemptively torn open, the bitter drink given a vigorous shake.
“And my code will start the procedure?” Donald asked, thinking of anything he might be missing.
Dr. Wilson chuckled. He placed
his hands on his knees and was slow to stand. “I imagine your code would open the airlock. Is there anything you don’t have access to?”
A glove was snapped. The hatch hissed as the lock disengaged.
The truth, Donald wanted to say. That was what he didn’t have access to. But he was planning on getting it soon.
The lid opened a crack on its own, and one of the assistants lifted it the rest of the way. A handsome young man lay inside, his cheeks twitching as he came to. The assistants went to work, and Donald tried to make note of every little part of the procedure. He thought of his sister in a hall above him, lying asleep, waiting.
“Once we get him up to the office, we’ll check his vitals and take our samples for analysis. If they have any items in their locker, I send one of the boys to retrieve them.”
“Locker?” Donald asked. He watched as a catheter was removed, a needle extracted from an arm. The tape and gauze were applied while the man in the pod sucked from a straw, wincing from the bitterness as he did so.
“Personal effects. Anything set aside from their previous shift. We retrieve those for them.”
The assistants helped the man into a paper gown, then grunted as they lifted him from the steaming pod. Donald moved the medical kit and steadied the wheelchair for them. The blanket was already laid out across the seat. While they settled the man into place, Donald thought of the bag marked Shift left on his bed, the one with Thurman’s things in them. There had been a small number marked on the bag similar to the one in Anna’s note. That number in the note wasn’t a date at all.
And then it hit him. It hit with such surety that he didn’t trust the conclusion at all. Locket was a typo. He tried to picture where the R and T were on a keyboard, if this was a likely mistake. Had she meant to say locker, instead?
The confluence of clues cut through the chill in the room, and for a moment, the idea of waking his sister was forgotten. Other sleeping ghosts were whispering to him, clouding his mind.
•21•
Donald helped escort the groggy man up to the medical offices while one of the assistants stayed behind to scrub the pod. Not caring to see Dr. Wilson take his samples, he volunteered to go grab the tech’s personal items. The assistant gave him directions to one of the storage levels in the heart of the silo.
There were sixteen levels of stores in all, not counting the armory. Donald entered the lift and pressed the worn out button for the storeroom on fifty-seven. The reactor tech’s ID number had been scribbled on a piece of paper. The number from Anna’s note to Thurman was vivid in his mind. He had assumed it was a date: November 2nd, 2039. It made the number easy to recall.
The lift slowed to a stop, and Donald stepped through the doors and into darkness. He ran his hand down the bank of light switches along the wall. The bulbs overhead sparked to life with the distant and muted thunks of ancient transformers and relays jolting into action. A maze of tall shelves revealed itself in stages as the lights popped on first in the distance, then close, then off to the right, like some mosaic unmasked one random piece at a time. The lockers were in the very back, past the shelves. Donald began the long walk while the last of the tremulous bulbs flickered on.
Cliffs of steel shelves laden with sealed plastic tubs swallowed him. The containers seemed to lean in over his head. If he glanced up, he almost expected the shelves to touch high above, to meet like train tracks. Huge swaths of tubs were empty and unlabeled, he saw, waiting for future shifts to fill them. All the notes he and Anna had generated on his last shift would be in tubs like these. They would preserve the tale of Silo 40 and all those unfortunate facilities around them. They would tell of the people of Silo 18 and Donald’s efforts to save them. And maybe he shouldn’t have. What if this current debacle, this vagabond cleaner, was his fault in some way?
He passed crates sorted by date, by silo, by name. There were cross-cuts between the shelves, narrow aisles wide enough for the carts used to haul blank paper and notebooks out and then bring them back in weighing just a little more from the ink. With relief from his claustrophobia, Donald left the shelves and found the far wall of the facility. He glanced back over his shoulder at how far he’d come, could imagine all the lights going out at once and him not being able to pick his way back to the elevator. Maybe he would stagger in circles until he thirsted to death. He glanced up at the lights and realized how fragile he was, how reliant on power and light. A familiar wave of fear washed over him, the panic of being buried in the dark. Donald leaned against one of the lockers for a moment and caught his breath. He coughed into his handkerchief and reminded himself that dying wouldn’t be the worst of things.
Once the panic faded and he’d fought off the urge to sprint back to the lift, Donald entered the rows of lockers. There must’ve been thousands of them. Many were small, like post office boxes, six or so inches to a side and probably as deep as his arm judging by the width of the units. He mumbled the number from Anna’s note to himself. Erskine’s would be down here as well, and Victor’s. He wondered if those men had any secrets squirreled away and reminded himself to come back and check.
The numbers on the lockers ascended as he walked down one of the rows. The first two digits were far away from Anna’s number. He turned down one of the connecting aisles to search for the correct row and saw a group that started with 43. His ID number started with 44. Perhaps his locker was near here.
Donald imagined it would be empty, even as he found himself honing in on his ID number. He had never carried anything from shift to shift. The numbers marched in a predictable series until he found himself standing before a small metal door with his ID number on it, Troy’s ID number. There was no latch, only a button. He pressed it with his knuckle, worried it might have a fingerprint scanner or something equally deserving of his paranoia. What would someone think if they saw Thurman looking in this man’s locker? It was easy to forget the ruse. It was similar to the delay between hearing the senator’s name and realizing Donald was the one being spoken to.
There was a soft sigh as the locker cracked open, and then the squeak of old and unused hinges. The sigh reminded Donald that everything down there—the bins and tubs and lockers—was protected from the air. The good, normal air. Even the air they breathed was caustic and full of invisible things, like corrosive oxygen and other hungry molecules. The only difference between the good air and the bad air was the speed at which they worked. People lived and died too quickly to see the difference.
At least they used to, Donald thought as he reached inside his locker.
Surprisingly, it wasn’t empty. There was a plastic bag inside, crinkled and vacuum-packed like Thurman’s. Only, this bag read Legacy across the top rather than Shift. Inside, he could see a familiar pair of tan slacks and a red shirt. The clothes hammered him with memories. They reminded him of a man he used to be, a world he used to live in. Donald squeezed the bag, which was dense from the absence of air, and glanced up and down the empty aisle.
Why would they keep these things? Was it so he could emerge from deep underground dressed just as he had been when he arrived? Like an inmate staggering out, blinking and shielding his eyes, having served his penance and now dressed in outdated fashion. Or was it because storage was the same thing as disposal? There were two entire levels above this one where unrecyclable trash was compacted into cubes as dense as iron and stacked to the ceiling. Where else were they supposed to put their garbage? In a hole in the ground? They lived in a hole in the ground.
Donald puzzled over this as he fumbled with the plastic zipper at the top and slid the bag open. A faint odor of mud and grass escaped, a whiff of bygone days. Donald vividly remembered a slick hill, falling down, and then his nostalgia was pierced by the dropping of bombs, by screams, by the image of a dog staked out to a tent pole, barking and left behind. He opened the bag further, and his clothes blossomed to life as air seeped inside. There was an impulse to change into this costume of normalcy, to pretend, to fake like his world wasn�
��t dead. Instead, he began to shove the bag back into the locker—and then a glimmer caught his eye, a flash of yellow.
Donald dug down past his clothes and reached for the wedding ring. As he was pulling it out, he felt a hard object inside the slacks. He palmed the ring and reached inside again, felt around, squeezed the folds of his clothes. What had he been carrying that day? Not his pills. He’d lost those in a fall. Not the keys to the quad, Anna had taken those from him. His own keys and wallet had been in his jacket, had never even made it beneath the earth to orientation—
His cell phone. Donald found it in the pocket of his slacks. The heft of the thing, the curve of the plastic shell, felt right at home in his hand. He returned the bag to the locker, tucked the wedding ring into the pocket of his coveralls, and pressed the power button on the old phone. But of course it was dead. Long-dead. It hadn’t even been working the day he’d lost Helen.
Donald placed the phone in his pocket out of habit, the sort of habit that time could not touch. He felt the ring in his pocket and pulled it out, made sure it still fit, and thought of his wife. Thoughts of her led to thoughts of she and Mick having children together. Sadness and sickness intermingled. He stuffed his clothes deep into the locker and shut the door, took the ring off and slipped it into his pocket with the old phone. Donald turned and headed off in search of Anna’s locker. He still had to get the tech’s personal items as well—
As he tracked down their lockers, something nagged at him, some connection, but he couldn’t sort out what.
Off to one side, there was a patch of the storeroom still in darkness, a lightbulb out, and Donald thought of Silo 40 and the spread of darkness on a previous shift. Eren had brought an end to whatever was going on over there. A bomb had caused dust to shiver from overhead pipes. And now his deep mind whirred and made deeper connections. He could feel some thought attempting to notify his consciousness. Something about Anna. Some reason he’d been drawn to his locker. He wrapped his hand around the phone in his pocket and remembered why she’d been woken the last time. He remembered her expertise with wireless systems, with hacking.