Third Shift: Pact (Silo #2C)(16)

The great black machines hummed and whirred and watched him go. Urine splashed through the grating and trickled down on bright runs of wires in neat channels. His stomach rumbled and spun inside his belly, but he didn’t want to eat. He wanted to not eat and to waste away completely. He glared up at the annoying lights overhead trying to drill into his skull. His stomach was angry with him. Everything was angry with him.

Back at the door, he waited for someone to call his name. He went to the keypad and pressed the number “1.” The door buzzed at him immediately. It was angry, too.

Jimmy wanted to lie back down on the grating and curl back into a ball, but his stomach said to look for food. Below. There were beds and food below. Jimmy walked in a daze between the black machines. He touched their warm skin for balance, heard them clicking and whirring like everything was normal. The red lights flashed over and over. Jimmy weaved his way until he found the hole in the ground.

He lowered his feet to the rungs of the ladder and noticed the buzzing noise. It came and went in time with the throbbing lights. He pulled himself out of the shaft and crawled across the floor in pursuit of the sound. It was coming from the server with its back off. His father had called it a comm something. Where had his father gone? Off to find his mother. There was something else—

Jimmy couldn’t remember. He patted his chest and felt the key against his breastbone. The buzzing came and went with the flashing lights in perfect synchrony. This machine was making that overhead throb drilling into his skull. He peered inside the machine. A comm hub, that’s what his father had called it. There was a headset hanging on a hook. He wished his father were there, but that seemed an impossible wish. Jimmy fumbled with the headset. There was a wire dangling from it. The piece on the end looked like something from computer class. He searched for a place to plug it in and saw a bank of sockets. One of them was blinking. The number “40” was lit up above it.

Jimmy adjusted the headset around his ears. He lined up the jack with the socket and pressed in until he felt a click. The lights overhead fell silent immediately. A voice came through, like the radio, only clearer.

“Hello?” the voice asked.

Jimmy didn’t say anything. He waited.

“Is anyone there?”

Jimmy cleared his throat. “Yes,” he said, and it felt strange to talk to an empty room. Stranger even than the radio with its hissing. It felt like Jimmy was talking to himself.

“Is everyone okay?” the voice asked.

“No,” Jimmy said. He remembered the stairs and falling and Yani and something awful on the other side of the door. “No,” he said again, wiping tears from his cheeks. “Everyone is not okay!”

There was muttering on the other side of the line. Jimmy sniffled. “Hello?” he asked.

“What happened?” the voice demanded. Jimmy thought it was an angry voice. Just like the people outside the door. Scared and angry, both.

“Everyone was running—” Jimmy said. He wiped his nose. “They were all heading up. I fell. Mom and Dad—”

“There were casualties?” the man from level 40 asked.

Jimmy thought of the body he’d seen on the stairway with the awful wound on his head. He thought of the woman who had gone over the rails, her scream fading to a crisp silence. “Yes,” he said.

The voice on the line spat an angry curse, angry but faint. And then: “We were too late.” Again, it sounded distant, like the man was talking to someone else.

“Too late for what?” Jimmy asked.

There was a click, followed by a steady tone. The light above the socket marked “40” went out.

“Hello?”

Jimmy waited.

“Hello?”

He searched inside the box for some button to press, some way to make the voices come back. There were sockets with fifty numbers above them. Why only fifty levels? He glanced at the server behind him and wondered if there were other comm stations to handle the rest of the silo. This one must be for the Up Top. There would be one for the Mids and another for the Deep. He unplugged the jack, and the tone in the headset fell silent.

Jimmy wondered if he could call another level. Maybe the school. He ran his finger down the row looking for “18,” and noticed that “17” was missing. There was no jack for “17.” He puzzled over this as the overhead lights began to flash once more. Jimmy glanced at level 40’s socket, but it remained dark. It was the top level calling. The light over the number “1” blinked on and off. The cabinet was back to buzzing, the lights to flashing. Jimmy glanced at the jack in his hand, lined it up with the socket, and pressed in until he heard a click.

“Hello?” he said.

“What the hell is going on over there?” a voice demanded.

Jimmy shrunk within himself. His father had yelled at him like this before, but not for a long time. He suddenly needed to pee again. He didn’t answer because he didn’t know what to say.

“Is this Jerry? Or Russ?”

Russ was his dad. Jerry was his dad’s boss. Jimmy realized he shouldn’t be playing with these things.

“This is Jimmy,” he said.

“Who?”

“Jimmy. The guy on level forty said they were too late. I told him what happened.”

“Too late?” There was some distant talking. Jimmy jiggled the cord in the socket. He was doing something wrong. “How did you get in there?” the man asked.