Silo 17
Week One
11
Jimmy didn’t want to move. He couldn’t move. He remained curled on the steel grating, the lights flashing overhead, on and off, on and off, the color of crimson.
People on the other side of the door yelled at him and at each other. Jimmy slept in fits. There were dull pops from guns and zings that rang against the door. The keypad buzzed. Only a single digit entered, and it buzzed. The whole world was angry with him.
Jimmy dreamt of blood. It seeped under the door and filled the room. It rose up in the shape of his mother and father, and they stood there, great red puddles with arms and legs, and they lectured him, mouths yawning open in anger. But Jimmy couldn’t hear.
He awoke to a great pressure in his skull. Clasping his hands over his eyes, he curled into a tighter and tighter ball, knees against his chin. Jimmy felt something crack within his skull, a pop like the sound a too-big yawn makes deep behind his ear. There was a great release of pressure that had built up and built up—and it sent him back to sleep.
There were no days, no time. The yelling on the other side of the door came and went. They were fighting, these men. Fighting to get inside where it was safe. Jimmy didn’t feel safe. He felt hungry. He needed to pee.
Standing was the hardest thing he’d ever done. Jimmy’s cheek made a tearing sound as he lifted it from the grating. He wiped the drool from the side of his face and felt the ridges there, the deep creases and the places his skin puffed out. His joints were stiff. His eyes were crusted together from crying. Jimmy staggered toward the far corner of the room and tugged at his coveralls, tried to get them free before he accidentally went with them on.
The great black machines hummed and whirred and watched him go. Urine splashed through the grating and trickled down on bright runs of wires in neat channels. His stomach rumbled and spun inside his belly, but he didn’t want to eat. He wanted to not eat and to waste away completely. He glared up at the annoying lights overhead trying to drill into his skull. His stomach was angry with him. Everything was angry with him.
Back at the door, he waited for someone to call his name. He went to the keypad and pressed the number “1.” The door buzzed at him immediately. It was angry, too.
Jimmy wanted to lie back down on the grating and curl back into a ball, but his stomach said to look for food. Below. There were beds and food below. Jimmy walked in a daze between the black machines. He touched their warm skin for balance, heard them clicking and whirring like everything was normal. The red lights flashed over and over. Jimmy weaved his way until he found the hole in the ground.
He lowered his feet to the rungs of the ladder and noticed the buzzing noise. It came and went in time with the throbbing lights. He pulled himself out of the shaft and crawled across the floor in pursuit of the sound. It was coming from the server with its back off. His father had called it a comm something. Where had his father gone? Off to find his mother. There was something else—
Jimmy couldn’t remember. He patted his chest and felt the key against his breastbone. The buzzing came and went with the flashing lights in perfect synchrony. This machine was making that overhead throb drilling into his skull. He peered inside the machine. A comm hub, that’s what his father had called it. There was a headset hanging on a hook. He wished his father were there, but that seemed an impossible wish. Jimmy fumbled with the headset. There was a wire dangling from it. The piece on the end looked like something from computer class. He searched for a place to plug it in and saw a bank of sockets. One of them was blinking. The number “40” was lit up above it.
Jimmy adjusted the headset around his ears. He lined up the jack with the socket and pressed in until he felt a click. The lights overhead fell silent immediately. A voice came through, like the radio, only clearer.
“Hello?” the voice asked.
Jimmy didn’t say anything. He waited.
“Is anyone there?”
Jimmy cleared his throat. “Yes,” he said, and it felt strange to talk to an empty room. Stranger even than the radio with its hissing. It felt like Jimmy was talking to himself.
“Is everyone okay?” the voice asked.
“No,” Jimmy said. He remembered the stairs and falling and Yani and something awful on the other side of the door. “No,” he said again, wiping tears from his cheeks. “Everyone is not okay!”
There was muttering on the other side of the line. Jimmy sniffled. “Hello?” he asked.
“What happened?” the voice demanded. Jimmy thought it was an angry voice. Just like the people outside the door. Scared and angry, both.
“Everyone was running—” Jimmy said. He wiped his nose. “They were all heading up. I fell. Mom and Dad—”
“There were casualties?” the man from level 40 asked.
Jimmy thought of the body he’d seen on the stairway with the awful wound on his head. He thought of the woman who had gone over the rails, her scream fading to a crisp silence. “Yes,” he said.
The voice on the line spat an angry curse, angry but faint. And then: “We were too late.” Again, it sounded distant, like the man was talking to someone else.
“Too late for what?” Jimmy asked.
There was a click, followed by a steady tone. The light above the socket marked “40” went out.
“Hello?”
Jimmy waited.
“Hello?”
He searched inside the box for some button to press, some way to make the voices come back. There were sockets with fifty numbers above them. Why only fifty levels? He glanced at the server behind him and wondered if there were other comm stations to handle the rest of the silo. This one must be for the Up Top. There would be one for the Mids and another for the Deep. He unplugged the jack, and the tone in the headset fell silent.
Jimmy wondered if he could call another level. Maybe the school. He ran his finger down the row looking for “18,” and noticed that “17” was missing. There was no jack for “17.” He puzzled over this as the overhead lights began to flash once more. Jimmy glanced at level 40’s socket, but it remained dark. It was the top level calling. The light over the number “1” blinked on and off. The cabinet was back to buzzing, the lights to flashing. Jimmy glanced at the jack in his hand, lined it up with the socket, and pressed in until he heard a click.
“Hello?” he said.
“What the hell is going on over there?” a voice demanded.
Jimmy shrunk within himself. His father had yelled at him like this before, but not for a long time. He suddenly needed to pee again. He didn’t answer because he didn’t know what to say.
“Is this Jerry? Or Russ?”
Russ was his dad. Jerry was his dad’s boss. Jimmy realized he shouldn’t be playing with these things.
“This is Jimmy,” he said.
“Who?”
“Jimmy. The guy on level forty said they were too late. I told him what happened.”
“Too late?” There was some distant talking. Jimmy jiggled the cord in the socket. He was doing something wrong. “How did you get in there?” the man asked.
“My dad let me in,” he said, the truth frightened out of him.
“We’re shutting you down,” the voice said. “Shut them down right now.”
Jimmy didn’t know what to do. There was a hiss somewhere. He thought it was from the headset until he noticed the white steam coming from the vents overhead. A fog descended toward him. Jimmy waved his hand in front of his face, expecting the sting of smoke like he’d smelled from a fire once as a kid, but the steam didn’t smell like anything. It just tasted like a dry spoon in his mouth. Like metal.
“—on my goddamn shift—” the person in his headset said.
Jimmy coughed. He tried to say something back, but he had swallowed wrong. The steam stopped leaking from the vents.
“That did it,” the man on the other line muttered.
Before Jimmy could say anything else, the various winking lights inside the box went dark. There was a click in the headset, and then it too fell silent. He pulled the headset off just as a louder “thunk” rang out in the ceiling and the lights in the room turned off. The whirring and clicking of the tall servers around him wound down. There was utter dark and complete silence. Jimmy couldn’t see his own nose, couldn’t see his hand as he waved it in front of his face. He thought he’d gone blind, wondered if this was what being dead was like, but then he heard his pulse, a thump-thump, thump-thump in his temples.
Jimmy felt a sob catch in his throat. He wanted his mother and father. He wanted his backpack, which he’d left behind like an idiot. For a long while, he sat there, waiting for someone to come to him, for an idea to form on what he should do next. He thought of the ladder nearby and the room below. As he began to crawl toward that hole, patting the grating ahead of him so he wouldn’t fall down the long drop, the clunking in the ceiling came back. There was a blinding flash as the lights overhead wavered, shimmered, blinked on and off several times, then burned steady.
Jimmy froze. The red and angry lights went to flashing again. He went back to the box and looked inside. It was the light over “40” going on and off like mad. He thought about answering it, seeing what these people were so angry about, but maybe the power was a warning. Maybe he’d said something wrong.
The lights overhead were like bright heat. They reminded him of the farms, of the time years ago that his class had gone on a trip to the Mids and planted seeds beneath those harsh lights.
Jimmy turned to the server with the open back and fumbled for the jack inside. He hated the flashing lights, but he didn’t want to get yelled at. So he jabbed the headphone jack into the socket marked “40” until he felt a click.
The lights stopped blinking immediately. There was a muffled voice from the headset, which lay in the bottom of the server. Jimmy ignored that. He took a step away from the machine, watching the overhead lights warily, waiting on the nice white ones to shut off again or the angry red ones to return. But everything stayed the same. The jack sat in its socket, the wire dangling, the voice in the headset distant now, unable to be heard.