First Shift - Legacy (Part 6 of the Silo Series) (Wool) (12 page)

“You fly back in the morning?”

“Yeah, but to Boston. I have a meeting with the Senator. Hey, were you thinking of a glass or do you wanna split a bottle?” He looked up from the wine list.

“Let’s stick with a glass. I’m still not comfortable letting the car drive at night. You heard about Wendy, right?”

“Yeah, but I heard
she
was the one driving.”

Helen frowned. “She told me it was the car. And why are you meeting in Boston?”

He waved his hand. “He’s having one of those nano treatments of his. I think he stays locked up in there for a week or so at a time. He still somehow gets his work done—”

“Yeah, by having his minions go out of
their
way—”

“We’re not his minions,” Donald said, laughing.

“—to come kiss his ring and leave gifts of myrrh.”

“C’mon, it’s not like that.”

She laughed. “I’m only kidding. I just worry that you’re pushing yourself too hard. How much of your free time are you spending on this project of his?”

A lot
, he wanted to say. He wanted to tell his wife how much time he was devoting to this, how grueling the hours were, but he knew what she would say. And so he protected the Senator and said, “It’s not as time-consuming as you’d think.”

He sipped his water, wishing he had someone to vent to.

“Really? Because it seems like it’s the only thing I hear you talking about. I don’t even know what else it is you do.”

Their waiter came by with a platter full of drinks and said it would be just a moment longer. Helen studied the menu.

“I’ll be done with my portion of the plans in another few months,” he told her. “And then I won’t bore you with it anymore.”

“Honey, you don’t bore me. I just don’t want him taking advantage of you. This isn’t what you signed up for. You decided
not
to become an architect, remember? Otherwise, you could’ve stayed home.”

Her gaze drifted over his shoulder again; Donald turned to see if the booth had emptied. He and Helen hadn’t even ordered their drinks yet—surely it wouldn’t be too late to ask if they could move. But the older couple was still sitting there, eating their food, eyes on their plates. Maybe they’d been together so long they no longer needed to talk to each other.

“Baby, I want you to know—” He turned back around. “This project we’re working on is—”

“It’s really important, I know. You’ve told me, and I believe you. And then in your moments of crippling self-doubt, you admit that your part in the entire scheme of things is superfluous anyway and will never be used.”

Donald forgot they’d had that conversation.

“I’ll just be glad when it’s done,” she said. “They can truck the fuel rods through our
neighborhood
for all I care. Just bury the whole thing and smooth the dirt over and stop talking about it.”

This was something else. Donald thought about the phone calls and emails he’d been getting from the district, all the headlines and fear mongering over the route the spent rods would take from the port as the trucks skirted Atlanta. Every time Helen heard a peep about the project, all she could likely think of was him wasting his time on it rather than doing his real job. Or the fact that he could’ve stayed in Savannah and done the same work. But wasn’t this all part of his elected duties? It had all begun to blend together.

Helen cleared her throat. “So—” She hesitated. “Was Anna at the job site today?”

She peered over the lip of her sweating glass, and Donald realized, in that moment, what his wife was
really
thinking when the CAD-FAC project and the fuel rods came up. It was the insecurity of him working with
her
, of being so far away from home. And he completely understood and sympathized with his wife’s discomfort.

“No.” He shook his head. “No, we don’t really see each other. We send plans back and forth. Mick and I went, just the two of us. He’s coordinating a lot of the materials and crews—”

The waiter arrived, pulled his black folio from his apron, and clicked his pen. “Can I start you off with drinks?”

Donald ordered two glasses of the house Merlot. Helen declined the offer of an appetizer.

“Every time I bring her up,” she said, once their waiter had angled off toward the bar, “you mention Mick. It’s like you’re trying to change the subject.”

“Can we not talk about her?” Donald folded his hands together on the table. “I’ve seen her once since we started working on this. I set it up so that we didn’t have to meet, because I knew you wouldn’t approve. I have zero feelings for her, honey. Zilch. Please. This is our night.”

“Is working with her giving you second thoughts?”

“Second thoughts about what? About taking on this job? Or about being an architect?”

“About...
anything
.” She glanced at the other booth, the booth he should’ve reserved.

“No. God, no. Honey, why would you even say something like that?”

The waiter came back with their wine. He flipped open his black notebook and eyed the two of them. “Have we decided?”

Helen opened her menu and looked from the waiter to Donald. “I’m going to get my usual,” she said. She pointed to what had once been a simple grilled cheese sandwich with fries that now involved fried green heirloom tomatoes, Gruyère cheese, a honey-maple glaze, and matchstick frites with tartar.

“And for you, sir?”

Donald allowed his eyes to roam the menu. The conversation had him flustered, but he felt the pressure to choose and to choose swiftly.

“I think I’m going to try something different,” he said, picking his words poorly.

2110 • Silo 1

Silo 12 was collapsing, and by the time Troy and the others arrived, the communication room was awash in overlapping radio chatter and the smell of sweat. Four men crowded around a comm station normally manned by a single operator. The men looked precisely how Troy felt: panicked, out of their depth, ready to curl up and hide somewhere. And for whatever reason, it had a calming effect on him. Their panic was his strength. He could fake this. He could hold it together.

Two of the men wore sleepshirts, suggesting that the late shift had been woken up and called in. Troy wondered how long Silo 12 had been in trouble before they finally came and got
him
.

“What’s the latest?” Saul asked an older gentleman who was holding a headphone cupped to one ear.

The gentleman turned, his bald head shining in the overhead light, sweat in the wrinkles of his brow, his white eyebrows high with concern. “I can’t get anyone to answer the server,” he said.

“Give us
just
the feeds from 12,” Troy said, pointing to one of the other three workers. A man he had met just a week or so ago pulled off his headset and flipped a switch. The speakers in the room buzzed with overlapping shouts and orders. The others stopped what they were doing and listened.

One of the other men, in his thirties, Troy recognized him from the cafeteria, cycled through dozens of video feeds. It was a chromatic channel-surf of chaos. There was a shot of a spiral staircase crammed with people pushing and shoving. A head disappeared, someone falling down, presumably being trampled as the rest moved on. Across the crowd, eyes were wide in fear, jaws clenched or shouting.

“Let’s see the server room,” Troy said.

The man at the controls typed something on his keypad. The crush of people disappeared and was replaced with a still view of quiet cabinets, each machine upright, the crystal-like precision and rigidity of the layout slightly warped by the wide angle of the lens. The server casings and the grating on the floor throbbed from the blinking overhead lights of an unanswered call.

“What happened?” Troy asked. He felt unusually calm. He was less nervous now with a disaster unfolding than he had been moments ago losing at solitaire.

“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. 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 the IT Head of Silo 12. No alarms. Two years since the last cleaning. The fear index was pegged at an eight the last time it had been measured. A little high, but thankfully not too low.

“Yeah, I think that’s a deputy,” Saul said.

The man at the video feed looked back over his shoulder. “Sir, we’re gonna have a mass exodus.”

“Their radios are locked down, right?”

Saul nodded. “We shut down the repeater. They can talk among themselves, and that’s it.”

Troy fought the urge to turn and meet the curious faces peering in from the hallway. “Good,” he said. The calm was eerie. The priority in this situation was to contain the outbreak: don’t let it spread to neighboring cells. This was a cancer. Excise it. Cut the tumor free. Don’t mourn the loss. It was just meat. It wasn’t the whole body.

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. He remembered waking up in that god-awful cryopod some months ago, remembered the cold in his bones, the long nightmare still trapped behind the lids of his eyes. The Order was clear on not intervening, but his conscience was muddled. He held out a hand toward the radioman.

“Let me speak to him,” Troy said.

Heads swiveled 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 man with the bald and perspiring head cycled through video 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 coveralls lay slumped over a desk. There was a gun in his hand, a pool of blood around a keyboard.

“That’s him?” Troy asked.

The video 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 people thought they were alone in the universe. They had no idea about each other, about their true purpose, and Troy was a god staring down at an anthill. There was another colony a pace away, but the two would never cross. And now he had made contact, a voice from the clouds.

One of the video feeds clicked over to a man holding a handset, the cord spiraling to a radio mounted on the wall. The floor number in the corner read: “1.” Troy’s connection to this deputy became even more real.

“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 bulged outward because of the lens. The center of the door bulged
inward
because of the mob outside. 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.