17
“Poor living corpse, closed in a dead man’s tomb!”
Juliette followed Solo through the hole in the server room floor. There was a long ladder there and a passageway that led to thirty-five, a part of thirty-five she suspected was not accessible from the stairwell. Solo confirmed this as they ducked through the narrow passageway and followed a twisting and brightly lit corridor. A blockage seemed to have come unstuck from the man’s throat, releasing a lone-stricken torrent. He talked about the servers above them, saying things that made little sense to Juliette, until the passageway opened into a cluttered room.
“My home,” Solo said, spreading his hands. There was a mattress in one corner resting directly on the floor, a tangled mess of sheets and pillows trailing off. A makeshift kitchen had been arranged across two shelving units: jugs of water, canned food, empty jars and boxes. The place was a wreck and smelled foul, but Juliette figured Solo couldn’t see or smell any of that. There was a wall of shelves on the other side of the room stocked with metal canisters the size of large ratchet sets, some of them partially open.
“You live here alone?” Juliette asked. “Is there no one else?” She couldn’t help but hear the thin hope in her voice.
Solo shook his head.
“What about further down?” Juliette inspected her wound. The bleeding had almost stopped.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Sometimes I do. I’ll find a tomato missing, but I figure it’s the rats.” He stared at the corner of the room. “Can’t catch them all,” he said. “More and more of them—”
“Sometimes you think there’s more of you, though? More survivors?” She wished he would focus.
“Yeah.” He rubbed his beard, looked around the room like there was something he should be doing for her, something you offered guests. “I find things moved sometimes. Find things left out. The grow lights left on. Then I remember I did them.”
He laughed to himself. It was the first natural thing she’d seen him do, and Jules figured he’d been doing a lot of it over the years. You either laughed to keep yourself sane or you laughed because you’d given up on staying that way. Either way, you laughed.
“Thought the knife in the door was something I did. Then I found the pipe. Wondered if it was left behind by a really, really big rat.”
Juliette smiled. “I’m no rat,” she said. She adjusted her tablecloth, patted her head and wondered what had happened to her other scrap of cloth.
Solo seemed to consider this.
“So how many years has it been?” she asked.
“Thirty-four,” he said, no pause.
“Thirty-four years? Since you’ve been alone?”
He nodded, and the floor seemed to fall away from her. Her head spun with the concept of that much time with no other person around.
“How old are you?” she asked. He didn’t seem all that much older than her.
“Fifty,” he said. “Next month, I’m pretty sure.” He smiled. “This is fun, talking.” He pointed around the room. “I talk to things sometimes, and whistle.” He looked straight at her. “I’m a good whistler.”
Juliette realized she probably wasn’t even born when whatever happened here took place. “How exactly have you survived all these years?” she asked.
“I dunno. Didn’t set out to survive for years. Tried to last hours. They stack up. I eat. I sleep. And I—” He looked away, went to one of the shelves and sorted through some cans, many of them empty. He found one with the lid hinged open, no label, and held it out toward her. “Bean?” he asked.
Her impulse was to decline, but the eager look on his poor face made it impossible. “Sure,” she said, and she realized how hungry she was. She could still taste the brackish water from earlier, the tang of stomach acid, the unripe tomato. He stepped closer, and she dug into the wet juice in the can and came out with a raw green bean. She popped it into her mouth and chewed.
“And I poop,” he said bashfully while she was swallowing. “Not pretty.” He shook his head and fished for a bean. “I’m by myself, so I just go in apartment bathrooms until I can’t stand the smell.”
“In apartments?” Juliette asked.
Solo looked for a place to set down the beans. He finally did, on the floor, among a small pile of other garbage and bachelor debris.
“Nothing flushes. No water. I’m by myself.” He looked embarrassed.
“Since you were sixteen,” Juliette said, having done the math. “What happened here thirty four years ago?”
He lifted his arms. “What always happens. People go crazy. It only takes once.” He smiled. “We get no credit for being sane, do we? I get no credit. Even from me. From myself. I hold it together and hold it together and I make it another day, another year, and there’s no reward. Nothing great about me being normal. About not being crazy.” He frowned. “Then you have one bad day, and you worry for yourself, you know? It only takes one.”
He suddenly sat down on the floor, crossed his legs, and twisted the fabric of his coveralls where they bunched up at his knees. “Our silo had one bad day. Was all it took.” He looked up at Juliette. “No credit for all the years before that. Nope. You wanna sit?”
He waved at the floor. Again, she couldn’t say no. She sat down, away from the reeking bed, and rested her back against the wall. There was so much to digest.
“How did you survive?” she asked. “That bad day, I mean. And since.”
She immediately regretted asking. It wasn’t important to know. But she felt some need, maybe to glimpse what awaited her, maybe because she feared that surviving in this place could be worse than dying on the outside.
“Staying scared,” he said. “My dad’s caster was the head of IT. Of this place.” He nodded. “My dad was a big shadow. Knew about these rooms, one of maybe two or three who did. In just the first few minutes of fighting, he showed me this place, gave me his keys. He made a diversion, and suddenly I became the only one who knew about this place.” He looked down at his lap a moment, then back up. Juliette realized why he seemed so much younger. It wasn’t just the fear, the shyness, that made him seem that way—it was in his eyes. He was locked in the perpetual terror of his teenage ordeal. His body was simply growing old around the frozen husk of a frightened little boy.
He licked his lips. “None of them made it, did they? The ones who got out?” Solo searched her face for answers. She could feel the dire hope leaking out of his pores.
“No,” she said sadly, remembering what it felt like to wade through them, to crawl over them. It felt like weeks ago rather than days.
“So you saw them out there? Dead?”
She nodded.
He dipped his chin. “The view didn’t stay on for long. I only snuck up once in the early days. There was still a lot of fighting going on. As time went by, I went out more often and further. I found a lot of the mess they made. But I haven’t found a body in—” He thought carefully. “—maybe twenty years?”
“So there were others in here for a while?”
He pointed toward the ceiling. “Sometimes they would come in here. With the servers. And fight. They fought everywhere. Got worse as it went along, you know? Fight over food, fight over women, fight over fighting.” He twisted at the waist and pointed back through another door. “These rooms are like a silo in a silo. Made to last ten years. But it lasts longer if you’re solo.” He smiled.
“What do you mean? A silo in a silo?”
He nodded. “Of course,” he said. “Sorry. I’m used to talking with someone who knows everything I know.” He winked at her, and Juliette realized he meant himself. “You don’t know what a silo is.”
“Of course I do,” she said. “I was born and raised in a place just like this. Only, I guess you could say that we’re still having good days and not giving ourselves credit for them.”
Solo smiled. “Then what’s a silo?” he asked, that teenage defiance bubbling to the surface.
“It’s—” Juliette searched for the words. “It’s our home. A building like those over the hill, but underground. The silo is the part of the world you can live in. The inside,” she said, realizing it was harder to define than she thought.
Solo laughed.
“That’s what the word means to you. But we use words all the time without really knowing them.” He pointed toward the shelf with all the metal canisters. “All the real knowing is in those. Everything that ever happened.” He shot her a look. “You’ve heard the term ‘raging bull?’ Or someone being ‘bull-headed?’”
She nodded. “Of course.”
“But what’s a bull?” he asked.
“Someone who’s careless. Or mean, like a bully.”
Solo laughed. “So much we don’t know,” he said. He studied his fingernails. “A silo isn’t the world. It’s nothing. The term, this word, comes from a long time ago, back when crops grew in the outside farther than you could see—” He waved his hand over the floor like it was some vast terrain. “—back when there were more people than you could count, back when everyone had lots of kids—” He glanced up at her. His hands came together and kneaded one another, almost as if embarrassed to bring up the making of kids around a woman.
“They grew so much food,” he continued, “that even for all these people they couldn’t eat it all, not at once. So they stored it away in case times got bad. They took more seeds of grain than you could count and they would pour them into these great silos that stood aboveground—”
“Aboveground,” Juliette said. “Silos.” She felt as though he must be making this up, some delusion he’d concocted over the lonely decades.
“I can show you pictures,” he said petulantly, as if upset by her doubt. He got up and hurried to the shelf with the metal canisters. He read the small white labels on the bottom, running his fingers across them.
“Ah!” He grabbed one—it looked heavy—and brought it to her. The clasp on the side released the lid, revealing a thick object inside.
“Let me,” he said, even though she hadn’t moved a muscle to help. He tilted the box and let the heavy object fall onto his palm, where it balanced expertly. It was the size of a children’s book, but ten or twenty times as thick. Still, it was a book. She could see the edges of miraculously fine-cut paper.
“I’ll find it,” he said. He flipped pages in large chunks, each flap a fortune in pressed paper clapping solidly against more fortunes. Then he whittled his search down more finely, a pinch at a time, before moving to a single page at a time.
“Here.” He pointed.
Juliette moved closer and looked. It was like a drawing, but so exact as to almost seem real. It was like looking at the view of the outside from the cafeteria, or the picture of someone’s face on an ID, but in color. She wondered if this book had batteries in it.
“It’s so real,” she whispered, rubbing it with her fingers.
“It is real,” he said. “It’s a picture. A photograph.”
Juliette marveled at the colors, the green field and blue sky reminding her of the lie she had seen in her visor’s false video. She wondered if this was false as well. It looked nothing like the rough and smeared photos she’d ever seen.
“These buildings,” he pointed to what looked like large white cans sitting on the ground. “These are silos. They hold seed for during the bad times. For when the times get good again.”
He looked up at her. They were just a few feet apart, Juliette and him. She could see the wrinkles around his eyes, could see how much the beard concealed his age.
“I’m not sure what you’re trying to say,” she told him.
He pointed at her. Pointed at his own chest. “We are the seeds,” he said. “This is a silo. They put us here for the bad times.”
“Who? Who put us here? And what bad times?”
He shrugged. “But it won’t work.” He shook his head, then sat back on the floor and peered at the pictures in the massive book. “You can’t leave seeds this long,” he said. “Not in the dark like this. Nope.”
He glanced up from the book and bit his lip, water welling up in his eyes. “Seeds don’t go crazy,” he told her. “They don’t. They have bad days and lots of good ones, but it doesn’t matter. You leave them and leave them, however many you bury, and they do what seeds do when they’re left alone too long—”
He stopped. Closed the book and held it to his chest. Juliette watched as he rocked back and forth, ever so slightly.
“What do seeds do when they’re left too long?” she asked him.
He frowned.
“We rot,” he said. “All of us. We go bad down here, and we rot so deep that we won’t grow anymore.” He blinked and looked up at her. “We’ll never grow again.”