Second Shift: Order (Shift, #2)(39)

Thurman stared at the stainless steel doors, a greasy palm print there from where someone had caught their balance.

“Vic wanted to try another reset on 18,” he said. “I never saw the point. But after his death—“ Thurman hesitated. “Maybe we give them one more chance.”

“What’s involved in a reset”

“You know what’s involved.” Thurman faced him. “It’s what we did to the world, just on a smaller scale. Reduce the population, wipe the computers, their memories, try it all over again. We’ve done that several times before with this silo. There are risks involved. You can’t create trauma without making a mess. At some point, it’s simpler and safer to pull the plug.”

“End them,” Donald said, and he saw what Victor had been up against, what he had worked to avert. He wished he could speak to the old man, now that he knew what he knew. Anna said Victor had spoken of him often. And Erskine had said he wished people like Donald were in charge. What did that mean, all that nonsense about names being all that mattered and doing what was right for a change

The elevator opened on the top level. Donald stepped out, and it was strange to walk among those on their shift, to be present and at the same time invisible, a body moving among the chatter while not a part of it all.

He noticed that no one here looked to Thurman with deference. He was not that shift’s head, and no one knew him as such. They were just two men, one in white and one in beige, grabbing food and glancing at the ruined wasteland on the wallscreen.

Donald took one of the trays and noticed again that most people sat facing the view. Only one or two ate with their backs to it, preferring not to see. He followed Thurman back to the elevator while longing to speak to these handful, to ask them what they remembered, what they were afraid of, to tell them that it was okay to be afraid.

“Why do the other silos have screens” he asked Thurman, keeping his voice down. The parts of the facility he’d had no hand in designing made little sense to him. “Why show them what we did”

“To keep them in,” Thurman said. He balanced the tray with one hand and pressed the call button on the express. “It’s not that we’re showing them what we did. We’re showing them what’s out there. Those screens and a few taboos are all that contain these people. Humans have this disease, Donny, this compulsion to move until we bump into something. And then we tunnel through that something, or we sail over the edge of the oceans, or we stagger across mountains—”

The elevator arrived. A man in reactor red excused himself and stepped between the two. They boarded, and Thurman fumbled for his badge. “Fear,” he said. “Even the fear of death is barely enough to counter this compulsion of ours. If we didn’t show them what was there, they would go look for themselves. That’s what we’ve always done.”

Donald considered this. He thought about his own desire, his mad urge, to escape the confines of all that pressing concrete. Even if it meant death out there. The slow strangulation was worse, he decided. It was all about choosing the lesser of two evils.



“I’d rather see a reset than extinguish the entire silo,” he said, watching the numbers race by. He didn’t mention that he’d been reading up on the people who lived there. Bad things would happen to many of them, but there would be a chance at life afterward.

“I’m less and less eager to gas the place, myself,” Thurman admitted. “When Vic was around, all I did was argue against wasting our time with any one silo like this. Now that he’s gone, I find myself pulling for these people. It’s like I have to honor his last wishes. And that’s a dangerous trap to fall into.”

The elevator stopped on twenty and picked up two workers, who ceased a conversation of their own and fell silent for the ride. Donald thought about this process of cleansing a silo only to watch the violence repeat itself. The great wars he remembered from the old days came like this, a new generation unremembering, so that sons marched into the wars their fathers had fought before them.

The two workers got off at the rec hall, resuming their conversation as the doors closed. Donald remembered how much he enjoyed punishing himself in the weight room. Now he was wasting away with little appetite, nothing to push against, no resistance.

“It makes me wonder sometimes if that was why he did what he did,” Thurman said. The elevator slid toward fifty-five. “Vic calculated everything. Always with a purpose. Maybe his way of winning this argument of ours was to ensure he had the last word.” Thurman glanced at Donald. “Hell, it’s what finally got me to agree to wake you up.”

Donald didn’t say out loud how crazy that sounded. He thought Thurman just needed some way to make sense of the unthinkable. Of course, there was another way Victor’s death had ended the argument. Not for the first time, Donald imagined that it hadn’t been a suicide at all. But he didn’t see where such doubts could get him except in trouble.

They got off on fifty-five and carried the trays through the aisles of munitions. As they passed the sleeping drones, Donald thought of his sister, similarly sleeping. It was good to know where she was, that she was safe. A small comfort.

They ate at the war table. Donald pushed his dinner around his plate while Thurman and Anna talked. The two reports sat before him, constant companions, a bevy of notes with a splatter of blood, a report that he’d been reading too much into, notes about him remembering, about this being the great why of it all.