by Hugh Howey
•24•
There were signs of life and death waiting for him in the hall. A charred ring on the tile and a scatter of ash marked the corpse of an old fire. The outside of the steel door was lined with scratches and marked with dings. The latter reminded him of his misses during Kick the Can, the ineffectual kiss of bullet against solid steel. Right by his feet, Jimmy noticed a stain on the floor—a patch of dappled brown—that touched some small broken bone deep within his brain. He remembered a man dying there with his father’s face. Jimmy looked away from these signs of the living and the dying and stepped into the hall.
As he began to pull the door shut, something made him hesitate, some worry in the fiber of his muscles, some constriction of blood vessels. Jimmy wondered if perhaps his code wouldn’t work from the outside. What if the door locked and he could never get back in? He checked the keypad and saw the gouges around its steel plate where someone had tried to pry it off the wall. He was reminded how desperately so many others had wanted in over the years. Remembering this made him feel crazy for wanting out. He was wanting in the wrong direction.
Before he could worry further, he shut the steel door, and his heart sank a little as the gears whirred and the locks slid into the wall. There was a hollow thunk, like a period on the end of a dreadful thought, the sound of awful finality.
Jimmy rushed to the keypad, his chest pounding in his throat, the feeling of men running down all three hallways to get him, blood-curdling screams and bludgeoning weapons held high over their heads—
He entered the code, and the door whirred open. Pushing on the handle, he took a few deep breaths of home, and nearly gagged on the smell of his own waste warmed by hot and buzzing servers.
There was no one running down the halls. He needed a new can opener. He needed to find a toilet that worked. He needed coveralls that weren’t worn to tatters. He needed to breathe and find another stash of canned food and water.
Jimmy reluctantly closed the door again. And even though he had just tested the keypad, the fear that he would never get back inside returned. The gears would be worn out. The code would only work from the outside once per day, once per year. A part of him knew—the obsessive part of him knew—that he could check the code a hundred times and still worry it wouldn’t work the very next. He could check forever and never be satisfied. His pulse pounded in his ears as he tore himself from the door.
The hallway was brightly lit. Jimmy kept his rifle against his arm and slid silently past ransacked offices. Everything was quiet except for the buzzing of one light fixture on its last leg and the flutter of a piece of paper on a desk beneath a gushing vent. The security station was unmanned. Jimmy crawled over the gate, remembering Yani, imagining the stairwell outside crowded with people, a man in a cleaning suit barging out and wading into the masses, but when he opened the door and peered outside, the landing was empty.
It was also dim. Only the green emergency lights were on. Jimmy shut the door slowly so that rusty hinges would groan rather than squeal. There was a roll of paper on the grating by his feet. Not a roll of paper. Jimmy nudged the object with his boot, a white cylinder the length of his forearm with knobby ends. A bone. He recognized it from the jumble of a man who had wasted away by the servers, dragged close to his piles of shit.
Jimmy felt with keen surety that his bones would be exposed someday. Perhaps this day. He would never make it back inside his sturdy little home beneath the servers. And this frightened him less than it should have. The heady rush of being out in the open, the cool air and the green glow of the stairwell, even the remnants of another human being, were a sudden and welcome relief from the insanity of being closed in. What had once been his pen—the floors and levels of the silo—was now the great outside. Here was a land of death and of hopeful opportunity.
•25•
He had no great plan, no real direction, but the tug was upward. His flashlight was on its dimward way to death, so he explored the levels cautiously. Groping in an apartment, he fumbled for a toilet, took a crap the way God intended, and was disheartened by the lack of a flush. The sink didn’t run, either. Neither did the wash nozzle beside the toilet, which left him using a bedsheet in perfect darkness.
He continued up. There was a general store on nineteen, just below his home. He would check there for batteries, though he feared most useful things would be quite consumed by now. The garment district would have coveralls, though. He felt sure of that. A plan was forming.
Until a vibration in the steps altered them.
Jimmy stopped and listened to the clang of footsteps. They were coming from above. He could see the next landing jutting off overhead, one turn around the central post. It was nearer than the landing below. So he ran, rifle clattering against the jugs tied to his makeshift backpack, boots clomping awkwardly on the treads, his heart both fearful and relieved to not be alone.
He tugged the doors open on the next landing and pulled them shut all but a crack. Pressing his cheek against the door, he peered through the slit, listening. The clanging grew louder and louder. Jimmy held his breath. A figure flew by, hand squeaking along the railing, and then another figure close behind, shouting threats. Both were little more than blurs. Once the noise faded, Jimmy decided they might’ve been ghosts. He remained in the darkness at the end of a strange and silent hall until he could feel things creeping across the tile toward him, hands with claws reaching through the inky black to tangle up in his wild and long hair, and Jimmy found himself back on the landing in the dull green glow of emergency lights, panting and not knowing what to believe.
He was alone, one way or the other. Even if people survived around him, the only company one found was the kind that chased you or killed you. He would rather remain alone.
Upward again, listening more closely for footfalls, keeping a hand on the rail for a vibration, he spiraled his way past the dirt farm and water plant, past sanitation, keeping to the green light and aiming for the general store. The muscles in his legs grew warm from the use, but in a good way. He passed familiar landmarks that seemed out of time, levels from another life with an accumulation of wear and a tangle of wires and pipes. The world had grown as rusty as his memory of it.
He arrived at the general store to find it mostly bare, except for the remains of someone trapped under a spilled stand of shelves. The boots sticking out were small, a woman’s or a child’s. White ankle bones spanned the gap between boot and cuff. There were goods trapped underneath the shelf with the person, but Jimmy wasn’t about to investigate. He searched the scattering of items for batteries or a can opener. There were toys and trinkets and useless things. Jimmy sensed that many a shadow had fallen over those goods. He saved his flashlight by sneaking out in the darkness.
Searching his old apartment wasn’t worth the juice, either. It no longer felt like home. There was a sadness inside that he couldn’t name, a sense that he had failed his parents, an old ache in the center of his mind like he used to get from sucking on ice. Jimmy left the apartment and continued up. Something called to him from above. And it wasn’t until he got within half a spiral from the schoolhouse that he knew what it was. The distant past was reaching out to him. The day it all began. His classroom, where he could last remember seeing his mother, where his friends still sat in his disordered mind, where if he remained, if he could just go back and sit at his desk and unwind events once more, they would have to come out differently. The world would go to right if he could get back to the day when last the world had been right at all.
•26•
Jimmy kept his flashlight powered up as he made his way to the classroom. There was no going back, he quickly saw. There, in the middle of the room, his old backpack lay lifeless like a small animal abandoned and starved. Several of the desks were askew, the neat rows snapped like broken bones, and Jimmy could see in his mind his friends rushing out, could see the paths they took, could watch them spill toward the door like transparent ghosts. They had taken their bags
with them. Jimmy’s remained and lay still as a corpse.
He could hear Sarah’s voice somehow, clear as glass. She called out as his mother pulled him away, called out that he was leaving his backpack. Jimmy stood frozen in the doorway. He thought maybe Sarah had been calling out not to leave her behind.
A step inside, the room aglow from his torch, Mrs. Pearson looked up from a book, smiled and said nothing. Barbara sat at her desk, right by the door. Jimmy remembered her hand in his during a class trip to the livestock pens. It was on the way back, after the strange smells of so many animals, hands reaching through bars to stroke fur and feather and fat, hairless pigs. Jimmy had been fourteen, and something about the animals had excited or changed him. So that when Barbara hung back at the end of the corkscrew of classmates making their way up the staircase and had reached for his hand, he hadn’t pulled back.
Jimmy didn’t think of Barbara the same way he dreamed about Sarah, but that prolonged touch was a taste of what-might-have-been with another. He brushed the surface of her desk with his fingertips and left tracks through the dust. Paul’s desk—his best friend’s—was one of those disturbed. He stepped through the gap it left, seeing everyone leaving at once, his mother giving him a head start, until he stood in the center of the room, by his bag, completely alone.
“I am all alone,” he said. “I am solitude.”
His lips were dry and stuck together. They tore apart when he spoke as if opened for the very first time.
Approaching his bag, he noticed that it’d been gutted. He knelt down and tossed open the flap. There was a scrap of plastic like his mom used and reused to wrap his lunch, but his lunch was gone. Two cornbars and an oatmeal brownie. Amazing how he remembered some things and not others. Someone in the early days had taken his meal, and Jimmy was somewhat glad.
He dug deeper, wondering if they’d taken much else. The calculator his father had built from scratch was still in there, as were the glass figurine soldiers his uncle gave him on his thirteenth. He took the time to transfer everything from his makeshift bag to his old backpack. The zipper was stiff, but it still worked. He studied the knotted coveralls and decided they were in worse shape than the ones he had on, so he left them.
Jimmy stood and surveyed the room, sweeping his flashlight across the chaos. A part of him didn’t want to go. When he left, it would be as another ghost, and the room would be empty once more. On the blackboard, he saw someone had left their mark. He played the light across the scene and saw the word Fuck written over and over. It looked like a string of letters like that, fuckfuckfuckfuck. Someone having a bad day.
Jimmy found the erasing rag behind Mrs. Pearson’s desk. It was stiff and crusty, but the words still came off. Left behind was a smear, and Jimmy remembered the good days of writing on the board in front of the class. He remembered writing assignments. Mrs. Pearson complimented him on his poetry once, probably just to be nice. Licking his lips, he fished a nub of old chalk from the tray and thought of something to write. There were no nerves from standing before the class. No one was watching. He was well and truly all alone.
I am Jimmy, he wrote on the board, the flashlight casting a strange halo, a ring of dim light, as he wrote. The nub of chalk clicked and clacked as he made each stroke. It squeaked and groaned between the clicks. The noise was like company, and yet he wrote a poem of being alone, an assignment in front of an empty class, a mechanical act from bygone days.
The ghosts are watching, he wrote. The ghosts are watching. They watch me stroll alone. The corpses are laughing. The corpses are laughing. They go quiet when I step over them. My parents are missing. My parents are missing. They are waiting for me to come home.
He wasn’t sure about that last line. Jimmy ran the light across what he’d written, which he didn’t think was very good. More wouldn’t make it better, but he wrote more, anyway.
The silo is empty. The silo is empty. It’s full of death from pit to rim. My name was Jimmy, my name was Jimmy. But nobody calls me any longer. I am alone, the ghosts are watching, and solitude makes me stronger.
The last part was a lie, but it was poetry, so it didn’t count. Jimmy stepped away from the board and studied the words with a flickering flashlight. The words were like a voice. His voice. They trailed off to the side and dipped down, each line sagging more than the last, the letters getting smaller toward the end of each sentence. It was a problem he always had with the blackboard. He started big and seemed to shrink as he went. Scratching the stubble on his chin, he wondered what this said of him, what it portended.
There was a lot wrong with what he’d written, he thought. The fifth line was untrue, the one about nobody calling him Jimmy. Above the poem, he had called himself this. I am Jimmy, he had written. He still thought of himself as Jimmy.
He grabbed the stiff rag he’d left in the chalk tray, stood before his poem, and went to erase the line that wasn’t right. But something stopped him. It was the fear of making the poem worse by attempting to fix it. The fear of taking a line away and having nothing good to put in its place. This was his voice, and it was too rare a thing to quash.
Jimmy felt Mrs. Pearson’s eyes upon him. He felt the eyes of his classmates. The ghosts were watching, the corpses laughing, while he studied the problem on the board.
When the solution came, it brought a familiar thrill of arriving at the right place, of connecting the dots. Jimmy reached up and slapped the dusty rag against the board and erased the first thing he’d written. The words I am Jimmy disappeared into a white smear and a tumbling haze of powder. He set the rag aside and began to write a truth in its place.
I am Solitude, he started to write. He liked the sound of that. It was poetic and full of meaning. But like all great poetry, the words had a mind of their own, his deep thoughts intervened, and so he wrote something different. He shortened it to two little neat circles, a swerve, and a slash. Grabbing his bag, he left the room and his old friends behind. All that remained was a poem and the call to be remembered, a mark to prove he’d been there.
I am Solo.
And a haze of chalk fell through the air like the ghost of unwritten words.
Silo 1
•27•
Donald steered the empty wheelchair back to Dr. Wilson’s office. A damp blanket was draped over the armrests and dragged across the tile. He felt numb. His dream that morning had been to give life, not take it. The permanence of what he’d done began to set in, and Donald found it difficult to swallow, to breathe. He stopped in the hallway and took stock of what he’d become. Unknowing architect. Prisoner. Puppet. Hangman. He wore a different man’s clothes. The transformation horrified him. Tears welled up in his eyes, and he wiped them away angrily. All it took was thinking of Helen and Mick, of the life taken from him, to renew the justification. Everything leading up to that point in time, to him awakening in that silo, had been someone else’s doing. He could feel parted strings dangling from his elbows and knees. He was a loose puppet steering an empty wheelchair back to where it belonged.
Donald parked the chair and set the brakes. He took the plastic vial out of his pocket and considered stealing another dose or two. Sleep would be hard to come by, he feared.
The vial went back into the cabinet full of empties. Donald turned to go when he saw the note left in the middle of the gurney.
You forgot this.
— Wilson
The note was stuck to a slender folder. Donald remembered handing it to Dr. Wilson along with the reactor tech’s belongings. The trip to the other two lockers had been a blur. All he could remember was clutching his cell phone, facts coming together, realizing that Anna had played Mick and Thurman to engineer a last-minute switch that made no sense, that could only happen with a daughter bending her father’s ear, and thus his life had been stolen away.
The folder had been in the locker Anna had mentioned to her father in the message. It seemed inconsequential, now. Donald balled up the note from Dr. Wilson and tossed it in the recy
cling bin. He grabbed the folder with the intention of staggering back to his cot and searching for sleep. But he found himself opening it up, instead.
There was a single sheet of paper inside. An old sheet of paper. It had yellowed, and the edges were rough where bits had flaked off over the years. Small pieces were still in the folder, caught in its spine. Below the single-spaced typing there were five signatures, a mix of florid and subdued penmanship. At the top of the document, boldly typed, it read: RE: THE PACT.
Donald glanced up at the door. He turned and went to the small desk with the computer, placed the folder by the keyboard, and sat down. Anna’s note to her father had the same words in the subject line, along with Urgent. He had read the note a dozen times to try and divine its meaning. And the number in the note had led him to this folder.
He was familiar enough with the Pact of the silos, the governing document that kept each facility’s inhabitants in line, that managed their populations with lotteries, that dictated their punishments from fines to cleanings. But this was too brief to be that Pact. It looked like a memo from his days on Capitol Hill.
Donald read:
All—
It has been previously discussed that ten facilities would suffice for our purposes, and that a time frame of one century would perform an adequate cleanse. With members of this pact both familiar with budget under-runs and how battle plans prove fruitless upon first firing, it should surprise no one that facts have changed our forecast. We are now calling for thirty facilities and a two century time frame. The tech team assures me their progress makes the latter feasible. These figures may be revisited once again.