The door made noises, and Jimmy wondered if he’d missed a day or two. There was the time he’d gotten sick and had a fever. There was the day he fell asleep reading and couldn’t remember what day it was when he woke. Maybe he’d missed a day. Maybe the people in the hall had skipped a number. The door opened a crack.
Jimmy wasn’t ready. His palms were slick on the gun, his heart racing. This was one of those things expected and expected. Expected so hard, with so much fervour and concentration, like blowing up a plastic bag over and over, watching it stretch out big and thin in front of your eyes, knowing it was about to burst, knowing, knowing, and when it comes, it scares you as if it’d never been expected at all.
This was one of those things. The door opened further. There was a person on the other side. A person. And for a moment, for the briefest of pauses, Jimmy reconsidered a year of planning, a calendar of fear. Here was someone to talk to and listen to. Someone to take a turn with the screwdriver and hammer now that the can opener was broke. Someone with a new can opener, perhaps. Here was a Project Partner like his dad used to—
A face. A man with an angry sneer. A year of planning, of shooting empty tomato cans, of ringing ears and reloading, of oiling barrels and reading — and now a human face in a crack in the door.
Jimmy pulled the trigger. The barrel leapt upward. And the angry sneer turned to something else: startlement mixed with sorrow. The man fell down, but another was pushing past him, bursting into the room, something black in his hand.
Again, the barrel leapt and leapt, and Jimmy’s eyes blinked with the bangs. Three shots. Three bullets. The running man kept coming, but he had the same sad look on his face, a look fading as he fell, crumbling just a few paces away.
Jimmy waited for the next man. He heard him out there, cursing loudly. And the first man he’d shot was still moving around, like an empty can that danced and danced long after it was hit. The door was open. The outside and the inside were connected. The man who had opened the door lifted his head, something worse than sorrow on his face, and suddenly it was his father out there. His father lying just beyond the door, dying in the hallway. And Jimmy didn’t know why that would be.
The cursing grew faint. The man out in the hallway was moving away, and Jimmy took his first full breath since the door had beeped and the light had turned green. He didn’t have a pulse; his heart was just one long beat that wouldn’t stop. A thrumming like the insides of a whirring server.
He listened to the last man slink away, and Jimmy knew he had his chance to close the door. He got up and ran around the dead man who had fallen inside the server room, a black pistol near his lifeless hand. Lowering his gun, Jimmy prepared to shoulder the door shut, when the thought of tomorrow, or that night, or the next hour occurred to him.
The retreating man now knew the number. He was taking it with him.
‘Twelve-eighteen,’ Jimmy whispered.
He poked his head out the door for a quick look. There was a brief glimpse of a man disappearing into an office. Just a flash of green overalls, and then an empty hall, impossibly long and bright.
The dying man outside the door groaned and writhed. Jimmy ignored him. He pulled the gun against his arm and braced it like he’d practised. The little notches lined up with each other and pointed towards the edge of the office door. Jimmy imagined a can of soup out there, hovering in the hall. He breathed and waited. The groaning man on the other side of the threshold crawled closer, bloody palms slapping a spot of floor. There was that ache in the centre of his skull, an ancient scar across his memories. Jimmy aimed at the nothingness in the hallway and thought of his mother and father. Some part of him knew they were gone, that they had left somewhere and would never return. The notches dropped out of alignment as his barrel trembled.
The man by his feet drew closer. Groans had turned to a hissing. Jimmy glanced down and saw red bubbles frothing on the man’s lips. His beard was fuller than Jimmy’s and soaked in blood. Jimmy looked away. He watched the spot in the hallway where his rifle was trained and counted.
He was at thirty-two when he felt fingers pawing weakly at his boots.
It was on fifty-one that a head peeked out like a sneaky soup can.
Jimmy’s finger squeezed. There was a kick to his shoulder and a blossom of bright red down the hall.
He waited a moment, took a deep breath, then pulled his boot away from the hand reaching up his ankle. He placed his shoulder against a door hanging dangerously open and pushed. Locks whirred and made thunking sounds deep within the walls. He only heard them dimly. He dropped his gun and covered his face with his palms while nearby a man lay dying in the server room. Inside the server room. Jimmy wept, and the keypad chirped happily before falling silent, patiently waiting for yet another day.
78
2345
• Silo 1 •
AROW OF FAMILIAR clipboards hung on the wall in Dr Wilson’s office. Donald remembered scratching his name on them with mock ceremony. He remembered signing off on himself once, authorising his own deep freeze. There was a twinge of unease at the thought of signing those forms right then. What would he write? His hand would shake as he scribbled someone else’s name.
In the middle of the office, an empty gurney brought back bad memories. A fresh sheet had been tucked military crisp on top of it, ready for the next to be put to sleep. Dr Wilson checked his computer for the next to be woken while his two assistants prepped. One of them stirred two scoops of green powder into a container of warm water. Donald could smell the concoction across the room. It made his cheeks pucker, but he took careful note of which cabinet the powder came from, how much was spooned in, and asked any question that came to mind.
The other assistant folded a clean blanket and draped it over the back of a wheelchair. There was a paper gown. An emergency medical kit was unpacked and repacked: gloves, meds, gauze, bandages, tape. It was all done with a quiet efficiency. Donald was reminded of the men behind the serving counter who laid out breakfast with the same habitual care.
A number was read aloud to confirm who they were waking. This reactor tech, like Donald’s sister, had been reduced to a number, a place within a grid, a cell in a spreadsheet. As if made-up names were any better. Suddenly, Donald saw how easily his switch could’ve taken place. He watched as paperwork was filled out — his signature not needed — and dropped into a box. This was a part of the process he could ignore. There would be no trace of what he had planned.
Dr Wilson led them out the door. The assistants followed with their wheelchair full of supplies, and Donald trailed behind.
The tech they were waking was two levels down, which meant taking the lift. One of the assistants idly remarked that he had only three days left on his shift.
‘Lucky you,’ the other assistant said.
‘Yeah, so be easy with my catheter,’ he joked, and even Dr Wilson laughed.
Donald didn’t. He was busy wondering what the final shift would be like. Nobody seemed to think much past the next shift. They looked forward to one ending and dreaded seeing another. It reminded him of Washington, where everyone he worked alongside hoped to make it to the next term even as they loathed running for another. Donald had fallen into that same trap.
The lift doors opened on another chilled hall. Here were rooms full of shift workers, the majority of the silo’s population-in-waiting spread out across two identical levels. Dr Wilson led them down the hall and coded them through the third door on the right. A hall of sleeping bodies angled off into the distance until it met the concrete skin of the silo. ‘Twenty down and four over,’ he said, pointing.