Second Shift: Order

He turned and studied the scrawl of red marks on the wall schematic. There were Xs and question marks. There were notes in red ink with lines and arrows. Ten or a dozen of the silos were marked up to hell.



“How many?” he asked, trying to count, to multiply the thousands. “Are they gone?”



She took a deep breath. “We don’t know.” She finished her water, walked down the long line of chairs pushed up against the table, and reached down into the seat of one. She procured a bottle and poured a few fingers into her plastic cup. Better than a blue pill, Donald thought.



“It started with Silo 40,” she said. “It went dark about a year ago—”



“Went dark?”



Anna took a sip of the scotch and nodded. She licked her lips. “The camera feeds went out first. Not at once, but eventually they got them all. We lost contact with the heads over there. Couldn’t raise anyone. Erskine was running the shift at the time. He followed the Order and gave the okay to shut the silo down—”



“You mean kill everyone.”



Anna shot him a look. “You know what had to be done.”



Donald remembered Silo 12. He remembered making that same decision. As if there had been a decision to make. The system was automatic, wasn’t it? Wasn’t he just doing what came next, following a set of procedures written down by someone else? He remembered a debate from a history class in college, a group of students arguing that the first president to drop a bomb hadn’t had any other choice. All that time and money invested, the military saying this was the only way. What was heroic or brave about carrying out the inevitable? What kind of man would it have taken to have bucked the expected? What if he hadn’t aborted Silo 12? What if those people had scurried over the hills and had realized they weren’t alone? Who would be the hero then? Who the villain?



He studied the poster with the red marks. “And the rest of them? The other silos?”



Anna finished the drink with one long pull and gasped for air afterward. Donald caught her eyeing the bottle. “They woke up Dad when 42 went. Two more silos had gone dark by the time he came for me—”



Two more silos. “Why you?” he asked.



She tucked a strand of loose hair behind her ear. “Because there was no one else. Because everyone who had a hand in designing this place was either gone or at their wits’ end. Because Dad was desperate.”



“He wanted to see you.”



She laughed. “It wasn’t that. Trust me.” She waved her empty cup at the arrangement of circles on the table and the spread of papers. “They were using the radios at high frequencies. We think it started with 40, that maybe their IT Head went rogue. They hijacked their antenna and began communicating with the other silos around them, and we couldn’t cut them off. They had taken care of that as well. As soon as Dad suspected this, he argued with the others that wireless networks were my specialty. They eventually relented.”



“The others? Who all knows you’re here?” Donald couldn’t help but think how dangerous this could get, but maybe that was his own weakness screaming at him.



“My dad, Erskine, Dr. Henson, his assistants who brought me out. But those assistants won’t work another shift—”



“Deep freeze?”



Anna frowned and splashed her cup, and it occurred to Donald how much could take place while a man slept. Entire shifts had gone by. Another silo had been lost, another red X drawn on the map. An entire corner of silos had run into some kind of trouble. Thurman, meanwhile, had been awake for a year, dealing with it. His daughter as well. So much had happened while Donald had dreamt of snarling dogs with bat-like wings and piles of bones. He waved his arm at the room. “You’ve been stuck in here for a year. Working on this.”



She jerked her head at the door and laughed. “I’ve been cooped up in worse for a lot longer. But yeah, it sucks. I’m sick of this place.” She took another sip, her cup hiding her expression, and Donald wondered if perhaps he was awake because of her weakness just as she might be awake because of her father’s. What was next? Him searching the deep freeze for his sister Charlotte? How would it end?



“We’ve lost contact with eleven silos so far.” Anna peered into her cup. “I think I’ve got it contained, but we’re still trying to figure out how it happened or if anyone’s still alive over there. I don’t think so, but Dad wants to send scouts. Others say that’s a bigger risk. And now it looks like 18 is going to burn itself to the ground.”



“And I’m supposed to help? What does your dad think I know?” He stepped around the planning table and waved for the bottle. Anna splashed her cup and handed the drink to him; she reached for another cup by her monitor while Donald collapsed onto her cot. It was a lot to take in.



“It’s not Dad who thinks you know anything. He didn’t want you up at all. No one’s supposed to come out of deep freeze.” She screwed the cap back on the bottle. “It was his boss.”



Donald nearly choked on his first sip of the scotch. He sputtered and wiped his chin with his sleeve while Anna looked on with concern.



“His boss?” he asked, gasping for air.



She narrowed her eyes. “Dad told you why you’re here, right?”



He fumbled in his pocket for the report. “Something I wrote during my last . . . during my shift. Thurman has a boss? I thought he was in charge.”



Anna laughed, but there was no humor there. “Nobody’s in charge,” she told him. “The system’s in charge. It just runs. We built it to just go.” She got up from her desk and studied something on the wall for a moment, then walked over and joined him on the cot, the springs squeaking in complaint. Donald slid over to give her more room.



“Dad was in charge of digging the holes, that was his job. There were three of them who planned most of this. The other two had ideas for how to hide this place. Dad convinced them they should just build it in plain sight. The nuclear containment facility was his idea, and he was in a position to make it happen.”



A flood of memories washed over Donald. He remembered being convinced to run for office. Was it Mick who had goaded him into it? Or was it Thurman?



“You said three. Who were the others?”



“Victor and Erskine.” Anna adjusted a pillow and leaned back against the wall. “Not their real names, of course. But what does it matter? A name is a name. You can be anyone down here. Erskine was the one who discovered the original threat, who told Victor and Dad about the nanos. You’ll meet him. He’s been on a double shift with me, working on the loss of these silos, but it’s out of his area of expertise. Do you need more?” She nodded at his cup.



“No. I’m already feeling dizzy.” He didn’t add that it wasn’t from the alcohol. “I remember a Victor from my shift. He worked across the hall from me.”



“The same.” She looked away for a moment. “Dad refers to him as the boss, but I’ve been working with Victor for a while, and he never thought of himself that way. He thought of himself as a steward, joked once about feeling like Noah. He wanted to wake you months ago because of this Silo 18, but Dad vetoed the idea. I think Victor was fond of you. He talked about you a lot.”



“Victor talked about me?” Donald remembered the man across the hall from him, the shrink. Anna reached up and wiped at the bottom of her eyes.



“Yes. He was a brilliant man, could tell what you were thinking, what anyone was thinking. He planned most of this. Wrote the Order, the original Pact. It was all his design.”



“What do you mean was?”



Her lip trembled. She tipped her cup, but there was little solace left in it.



“Victor’s dead,” she said. “He shot himself at his desk two days ago.”



•9•



“Victor? Shot himself?” Donald tried to imagine the composed man who had worked across the hall from him doing such a thing. “Why?”



Anna sniffed and slid closer to Donald. She twisted the empty cup in her hands. “We don’t know. He was obsessed with that first silo we lost. Obsessed. It broke my heart to see how he blamed himself. He used to say that he could see certain things coming, that there were . . . probabilistic certainties.” She said these two words in a mimic of his voice, which brought the old man’s face even more vividly to Donald’s mind.



“But it killed him not to know the precise when and where.” She dabbed her eyes. “He would’ve been better off if it’d happened on someone else’s shift. Not his. Not where he’d feel guilty.”



“He blamed me,” Donald said, staring at the floor. “It was on my shift. I was such a mess. I couldn’t think straight.”



“What? No. Donny, no.” She rested a hand on his knee. “There’s no one to blame.”



“But my report—” He still had it in his hand, folded up and dotted here and there with pale blue.



Anna’s eyes fell to the piece of paper. “Is that a copy?” She sniffed and reached for it, brushed the loose strands of hair off her face. “Dad had the courage to tell you about this but not about what Vic did.” She shook her head. “Victor was strong in some ways, so weak in others.” She turned to Donald. “He was found at his desk, surrounded by notes, everything he had on this silo, and your report was on top.”



She unfolded the page and studied the words. “Just a copy,” she whispered.



“Maybe it was—” Donald began.



“He wrote notes all over his copy.” She slid her finger across the page. “Right about here, he wrote ‘This is why.’”



“This is why? As in why he did it?” Donald waved his hand at the room. “Shouldn’t this be why? Maybe he realized he’d made a mistake.” He held Anna’s arm. “Think about what we’ve done. What if we followed a crazy man down here? Maybe Victor had a sudden bout of sanity. What if he woke up for a second and saw what we’d done?”



“No.” Anna shook her head. “We had to do this.”



He slapped the wall behind the cot. “That’s what everyone keeps saying.”



“Listen to me.” She placed a hand on his knee, tried to soothe him. “You need to keep it together, okay?” She glanced toward the door, a fearful look in her eyes. “I asked him to wake you because I need your help. I can’t do all of this alone. Vic was working on Silo 18. If it’s up to Dad, he’ll just terminate the place not to have to deal with it. Victor didn’t want that. I don’t want that.”



Donald thought of Silo 12, which he’d terminated. But it was already falling, wasn’t it? It was already too late. They had opened the airlock. He looked toward the schematic on the wall and wondered if it was too late for this silo as well. Maybe when they put him down again, maybe he would dream better dreams if this place could be saved. Maybe the pile of bones would have a summit this time.



“What did he see in my report?” he asked.



“I don’t know. But he wanted to see you weeks ago. He thought you touched on something.”



“Or maybe it was just because I was around at the time.”



Donald looked at the room of clues. Anna had been digging, tearing into a different problem. So many questions and answers. His mind was clear, not like last time. He had questions of his own. He wanted to find his sister, find out what happened to Helen, dispel this crazy thought that she was still out there somewhere. He wanted to know more about this damnable place he’d helped build.



“You’ll help us?” Anna asked. She rested her hand on his back. Her touch was comforting for a moment, and then he thought of Helen. He startled as if bit, some wild part of him thinking for a moment that he was still married, that she was alive out there, maybe frozen and waiting for him to wake her.



“I need—” He stood and glanced around the room. His eyes fell to the computer on the desk. “I need to look some things up.”



Anna rose beside him. She fumbled for his hand. “Of course. I can fill you in with what we know so far. Victor left a series of notes. He wrote all over your report. I can show you. And maybe you can convince Dad that he was onto something, that this silo is worth saving—”



“Yes,” Donald said. He would do it. But only so he could stay awake. That was his motivation. And he wondered for a moment if it was Anna’s as well. To keep him around.



An hour ago, all he had wanted was to go back to sleep, to escape the world he had helped create. But now he wanted answers. He would look into this silo with its problems, but he would find Helen as well. Find out what’d happened to her, where she was. He thought of Mick, and Tennessee flashed in his mind. He turned toward the wall schematic with all the silos, tried to remember which state went with which number.



“What can we access from here?” he asked. His skin flushed with heat as he thought of the answers at his disposal. Maybe this computer wouldn’t be locked down like his last one. No games of solitaire to subdue curious minds.



Anna turned toward the door. There were footsteps out there in the darkness.



“Dad. He’s the only one with access to this level anymore.”



“Anymore?” He turned back to Anna.



“Yeah. Where do you think Victor got the gun?” She lowered her voice. “I was in here when he came down and cracked open one of the crates. I never heard him. Look, my father blames himself for what happened, and he still doesn’t believe this has anything to do with you or your report. But I know Vic. He wasn’t crazy. If there’s anything you can do, please. For me.”