Third Shift: Pact (Silo #2C)(29)

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.