Third Shift: Pact (Silo #2C)(58)

He pulled the trigger instead. He pulled the trigger before he could regret it.

The bang was unconscionably loud. There was a bright flash, a horrid noise echoing out across a thousand sleeping souls, and then a man slumping down into a coffin.

Donald’s hand trembled. He remembered his first days in office, all this man had done for him, that meeting very early on. He had been hired for a job for which he was barely qualified. He had been hired for a job he could not at first discern. That first morning, waking up a congressman, realizing he and only a handful of others stood at the helm of a powerful nation, had filled him with as much fear as accomplishment. And all along, he had been an inmate asked to erect the walls of his own cell. All along.

This time would be different. This time, he would accept responsibility and lead without fear. He and his sister in secret. They would find out what was wrong with the world and fix it. Restore order to all that had been lost. An experiment had begun in another silo, a changing of the guard, and Donald intended to watch it play out.

He reached up and closed the lid on the pod. There was pink spittle on its shiny surface. Donald coughed once, not a bad fit, and wiped his mouth. He stuffed the pistol away and left the pod behind, his heart racing from what he’d done, and the pod with a dead man inside—it quietly hummed.





Silo 17



Year Thirty-Four





44


Solo worked the rope through the handles of the empty plastic jugs. They rattled together and made a kind of sonorous music. Holding them up, he thought they looked like the silver fish that hung on a string in the book marked “Me” for Mediterranean. He laughed at this and jiggled the jugs. “Here, fishy,” he said. And then he grew sad. He remembered catching the fish and leaving the last of them all alone. All by himself.

Solo collected his canvas bag and stood there a moment, scratching his beard, forgetting something. What had he forgotten? Patting his chest, he made sure he had the key. It was an old habit from years ago that he couldn’t shake. The key, of course, was no longer there. He had tucked it in a drawer when things no longer needed locking, when there was no one left to be afraid of.

He took two bags of empty soup and veggie cans with him—hardly a dent in the massive pile of garbage. With his hands full and every step causing a clang and a clatter, he carried his things down the dark passage to the shaft of light at the far end.

It took two trips up the ladder to unload everything. He passed between the black machines, many of which had gone silent over the years, succumbing to the heat, perhaps. The filing cabinet had to be moved before the door would open. The silo had no locks and no people—but no dummies, either. He pulled the heavy door, could feel his father’s presence as always, and stepped out into the wide world crowded with nothing but ghosts and things so bad he couldn’t remember them.

The hallways were bright and empty. Solo waved to where he knew the cameras were as he passed. He often thought that he’d see himself on the monitors one day, but the cameras had quit working forever ago. And besides, there’d have to be two of him for that to happen. One to stand there and wave, another down by the monitors. He laughed at how silly he was. He was Solo.

Stepping out on the landing brought fresh air and a troubling sense of height. Solo thought of the rising water. How long before it reached him? Too long, he thought. He would be gone by then. But it was sad to think of his little home under the servers full of water one day. All the empty cans in the great pile by the shelves would float to the top. The computer and the radio would gurgle little bubbles of air. That made him laugh, thinking of them gurgling and the cans bobbing around on the surface, and he no longer cared if it happened or not. He tossed both bags of empty cans over the railing and listened for them to crunch down on the landing at fifty-two. They dutifully did. He turned to the stairs.

Up or down? Up meant tomatoes, cucumbers, and squash. Down meant berries, corn, and digging for potatoes. Down required more cooking. Solo marched up.

He counted the steps as he went. “Eight, nine, ten,” he whispered. Each of the stairs was different. There were a lot of stairs. They had all kinds of company, all kinds of fellow stairs like friends to either side. More things just like them. “Hello, step,” he said, forgetting to count. The step said nothing. He didn’t speak whatever they spoke, the ringing singing of lonely boots clanging up and down.

A noise. Solo heard a noise. He stopped and listened, but usually the noises knew when he was doing that and they got shy. This was another of those noises. He heard things that weren’t there all the time. And there were pumps and lights wired all over the place that turned on and off at their whim and choosing. One of these pumps had sprung a leak years ago, and Solo had fixed it himself. He needed a new Project. He was doing a lot of the same ones over and over, like chopping his beard when it got to his chest, and all of them were boring.

Only one break to drink and pee before he reached the farms. His legs were good. Stronger, even, than when he was younger and never got out. The hard things got easier the more you did them. It didn’t make it any more fun to do the hard things, though. Solo wished they would just be easy the first time.

He rounded the last bend before the landing on twelve, was just about to start whistling a harvest tune, when he saw that he’d left the door open. He wasn’t sure how. Solo never left the door open. Any doors.