Third Shift: Pact (Silo #2C)(34)
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.