‘What happened?’ Troy asked. He felt unusually calm.
‘Still trying to determine that, sir.’
A folder was pressed into his hands. A handful of people gathered in the hallway, peering in. News was spreading, a crowd gathering. Troy felt a trickle of sweat run down the back of his neck, but still that eerie calmness, that resignation to this statistical inevitability.
A desperate voice from one of the radios cut through the rest, the panic palpable:
‘—they’re coming through. Dammit, they’re bashing down the door. They’re gonna get through—’
Everyone in the comm room held their breath, all the jitters and activity ceasing as they listened and waited. Troy was pretty sure he knew which door the panicked man was talking about. A lone door stood between the cafeteria and the airlock. It should have been made stronger. A lot of things should have been made stronger.
‘—I’m on my own up here, guys. They’re gonna get through. Holy shit, they’re gonna get through—’
‘Is that a deputy?’ Troy asked. He flipped through the folder. There were status updates from silo twelve’s IT head. No alarms. Two years since the last cleaning. The fear index had been pegged at an eight the last time it’d been measured. A little high, but not too low.
‘Yeah, I think that’s a deputy,’ Saul said.
The man at the video feed looked back at Troy. ‘Sir, we’re gonna have a mass exodus.’
‘Their radios are locked down, right?’
Saul nodded. ‘We shut down the repeaters. They can talk among themselves, but that’s it.’
Troy fought the urge to turn and meet the curious faces peering in from the hallway. ‘Good,’ he said. The priority in this situation was to contain the outbreak: don’t let it spread to neighbouring cells. This was a cancer. Excise it. Don’t mourn the loss.
The radio crackled:
‘—they’re almost in, they’re almost in, they’re almost in—’
Troy tried to imagine the stampede, the crush of people, how the panic had spread. The Order was clear on not intervening, but his conscience was muddled. He held out a hand to the radioman.
‘Let me speak to him,’ Troy said.
Heads swivelled his way. A crowd that thrived on protocol sat stunned. After a pause, the receiver was pressed into his palm. Troy didn’t hesitate. He squeezed the mic.
‘Deputy?’
‘Hello? Sheriff?’
The video operator cycled through the feeds, then waved his hand and pointed to one of the monitors. The floor number ‘72’ sat in the corner of the screen, and a man in silver overalls lay slumped over a desk. There was a gun in his hand, a pool of blood around a keyboard.
‘That’s the sheriff?’ Troy asked.
The operator wiped his forehead and nodded.
‘Sheriff? What do I do?’
Troy clicked the mic. ‘The sheriff is dead,’ he told the deputy, surprised by the steadiness of his own voice. He held the transmit button and pondered this stranger’s fate. It dawned on him that most of these silo dwellers thought they were alone. They had no idea about each other, about their true purpose. And now Troy had made contact, a disembodied voice from the clouds.
One of the video feeds clicked over to the deputy, who was gripping a handset, the cord spiralling to a radio mounted on the wall. The floor number in the corner read ‘1’.
‘You need to lock yourself in the holding cell,’ Troy radioed, seeing that the least obvious solution was the best. It was a temporary solution, at least. ‘Make sure you have every set of keys.’
He watched the man on the video screen. The entire room, and those in the hallway, watched the man on the video screen.
The door to the upper security office was just visible in the warped bubble of the camera’s view. The edges of the door seemed to bulge outward because of the lens. And then the centre of the door bulged inward because of the mob. They were beating the door down. The deputy didn’t respond. He dropped the microphone and hurried around the desk. His hands shook so violently as he reached for the keys that the grainy camera was able to capture it.
The door cracked along the centre. Someone in the comm room drew in an audible breath. Troy wanted to launch into the statistics. He had studied and trained to be on the other end of this, to lead a small group of people in the event of a catastrophe, not to lead them all.
Maybe that’s why he was so calm. He was watching a horror that he should have been in the middle of, that he should have lived and died through.
The deputy finally secured the keys. He ran across the room and out of sight. Troy imagined him fumbling with the lock on the cell as the door burst in, an angry mob forcing their way through the splintered gap in the wood. It was a solid door, strong, but not strong enough. It was impossible to tell if the deputy had made it to safety. Not that it mattered. It was temporary. It was all temporary. If they opened the doors, if they made it out, the deputy would suffer a fate far worse than being trampled.
‘The inner airlock door is open, sir. They’re trying to get out.’
Troy nodded. The trouble had probably started in IT, had spread from there. Maybe the head — but more likely his shadow. Someone with override codes. Here was the curse: a person had to be in charge, had to guard the secrets. Some wouldn’t be able to. It was statistically predictable. He reminded himself that it was inevitable, the cards already shuffled, the game just waiting to play out.
‘Sir, we’ve got a breach. The outer door, sir.’
‘Fire the canisters now,’ Troy said.
Saul radioed the control room down the hall and relayed the message. The view of the airlock filled with a white fog.
‘Secure the server room,’ Troy added. ‘Lock it down.’
He had this portion of the Order memorised.
‘Make sure we have a recent backup just in case. And put them on our power.’
‘Yessir.’
Those in the room who had something to do seemed less anxious than the others, who were left shifting about nervously while they watched and listened.
‘Where’s my outside view?’ Troy asked.
The mist-filled scene of people pushing on one another’s backs through a white cloud was replaced by an expansive shot of the outside, of a claustrophobic crowd scampering across a dry land, of people collapsing to their knees, clawing at their faces and their throats, a billowing fog rising up from the teeming ramp.
No one in the comm room moved or said a word. There was a soft cry from the hallway. Troy shouldn’t have allowed them to stay and watch.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Shut it down.’
The view of the outside went black. There was no point in watching the crowd fight their way back in, no reason to witness the frightened men and women dying on the hills.
‘I want to know why it happened.’ Troy turned and studied those in the room. ‘I want to know, and I want to know what we do to prevent this next time.’ He handed the folder and the microphone back to the men at their stations. ‘Don’t tell the other silo heads just yet. Not until we have answers for the questions they’ll have.’
Saul raised his hand. ‘What about the people still inside twelve?’
‘The only difference between the people in silo twelve and the people in silo thirteen is that there won’t be future generations growing up in silo twelve. That’s it. Everyone in all the silos will eventually die. We all die, Saul. Even us. Today was just their day.’ He nodded to the dark monitor and tried not to picture what was really going on over there. ‘We knew this would happen, and it won’t be the last. Let’s concentrate on the others. Learn from it.’