Second Shift: Order Read online

Page 10

 

  “Let’s go,” Jeffery said, clearly annoyed.

  Mission hurried after him. He glanced back once at the window, then over at the noisy crowd jostling against the temporary barriers by the door. An IT tech approached the crowd with a computer, wires coiled neatly on top, and a woman reached out desperate arms from behind the barrier like a mother yearning for her baby.

  “Since when did people start bringing their own computers up?” he asked, curious as a seasoned porter about how things got from there to here and back again. It felt as though he were witnessing yet another loop his kind was being sliced out of. Roker would have a fit.

  “Yesterday. Mr. Wyck stopped sending our techs out. He says it’s safer this way. People being robbed out there and not enough security to go around. ”

  Jeffery was waved through the gates, Mission as well. They wound in silence through the hallways, every office full of clacking sounds or people arguing. Mission saw electrical parts and paper strewn everywhere. He wondered which office was Rodny’s and why nobody else was having their food delivered. Maybe his friend was in trouble. That was it. Made sense of everything. Maybe he had pulled one of his stunts. Did they have a holding cell on thirty-four? He didn’t think so. He was about to ask Jeffery if Rodny was in the pen when the old security guard stopped at an imposing steel door.

  “Here. ” He held the tray out to Mission, who stuck the letter between his lips and accepted it. Jeffery glanced back, blocked Mission’s view of a keypad with his body, and tapped in a code. A series of clunks sounded in the jamb of the heavy door. Fucking right, Rodny was in trouble. What kind of pen was this?

  The door swung inward. Jeffery grabbed the tray and told Mission to wait there. Mission still had the taste of milk paste on his lips as he watched the security chief step inside a room that seemed to go back quite a ways. The lights inside pulsed as if something was wrong, red warning lights like a fire alarm. Jeffery called out for Rodny while Mission tried to peek around the guard for a better look.

  Rodny arrived a moment later, almost as if expecting them. His eyes widened when he saw Mission standing there. Mission fought to close his own mouth, which he could feel hanging open at the sight of his friend.

  “Hey. ” Rodny opened the heavy door a little further and glanced down the hallway. “What’re you doing here?”

  “Good to see you, too,” Mission said. He held out the letter. “The Crow sent this. ”

  “Ah, official business. ” Rodny smiled. “You’re here as a porter, eh? Not a friend?”

  Rodny smiled, but Mission could see that his friend was beat. He looked like he hadn’t slept for days. His hair had been chopped short as if to keep it out of the way, but there was the shadow of a beard on his chin. Mission glanced into the room, wondering what they had him doing in there. Tall black metal cabinets were all he could see. They stretched out of sight, neatly spaced.

  “You learning to fix refrigerators?” Mission asked.

  Rodny glanced over his shoulder. He laughed. “Those are computers. ” He still had that tone like one who thought himself older or better. Mission nearly reminded his friend that today was his birthday, that they were the same age. Rodny was the only one he ever felt like reminding. Jeffery cleared his throat impatiently, seemed annoyed by the chatter.

  Rodny turned to the security chief. “You mind if we have a few seconds?” he asked.

  Jeffery shifted his weight, the stiff leather of his boots squeaking. “You know I can’t,” he said. “I’ll probably get chewed out for allowing even this. ”

  “You’re right. ” Rodny shook his head like he shouldn’t have asked. Mission studied the exchange. He sensed that his friend was the same one he’d ever known. He was in trouble for something, probably being forced to do the most reviled task in all of IT for a brash thing he’d said or done. He smiled at the thought.

  Rodny tensed suddenly as though he’d heard something deep inside the room. He held up a finger to the others and asked them to wait there. “Just a second,” he said, rushing off, bare feet slapping on the steel floors.

  Jeffery crossed his arms and looked Mission up and down unhappily. “You two grow up down the hall from each other?”

  “Went to school together,” Mission said. “So what did Rod do? You know, Mrs. Crowe used to make us sweep the entire Nest and clean the blackboards if we cut up in class. We did our fair share of sweeping, the two of us. ”

  Jeffery appraised him for a moment. And then his expressionless face shattered into tooth and grin. “You think your friend is in trouble,” he said. He seemed on the verge of laughing. “Son, you have no idea. ”

  Before Mission could inquire, Rodny returned, smiling and breathless.

  “Sorry,” he said to Jeffery. “I had to get that. ” He turned to Mission. “Thanks for coming by, man. Good to see you. ”

  That was it?

  “Good to see you, too,” Mission sputtered, surprised that their visit would be so brief. “Hey, don’t be a stranger. ” He went to give his old friend a hug, but Rodny stuck out a hand instead. Mission looked at it for a pause, confused, wondering if they’d grown apart so far so fast.

  “Give my best to everyone,” Rodny said, as if he might never see them again himself.

  Jeffery cleared his throat, clearly annoyed and ready to go.

  “I will,” Mission said, fighting to keep the sadness out of his voice. He accepted his friend’s hand. They shook like strangers, the smile on Rodny’s face quivering, the folds of the note hidden in his palm digging sharply into Mission’s hand.

  •12•

  It was a miracle Mission didn’t drop the note as it was passed to him, a miracle that he knew something was amiss, to keep his mouth closed, to not stand there a fool in front of Jeffery and say, “Hey, what’s this?” Instead, he kept the wad of paper balled in his fist as he was escorted back toward the security station. They were nearly there when someone called “Porter!” from one of the offices they passed.

  Jeffery placed a hand on Mission’s chest, forcing him to a stop. They turned, and a familiar man strode down the hallway to meet them. It was Mr. Wyck, Head of IT, familiar to most porters. The endless shuffle of broken and repaired computers once kept the Upper Dispatch as busy as Supply kept the lower. Mission gathered that may have changed since yesterday.

  “You on duty, son?” Mr. Wyck studied the porter’s ’chief knotted around Mission’s neck.

  “Yessir. ” Mission hid the note from Rodny behind his back. He pressed it into his pocket with his thumb, like a seed going to soil. “You need something moved, sir?”

  “I do. ” Mr. Wyck studied him for a moment. “You’re the Jones boy, right? The zero. ”

  Mission felt a flash of heat around his neck at the use of the term, a reference to the fact that no lottery number had been pulled for him. “Yessir. It’s Mission. ” He offered his hand. Mr. Wyck accepted it.

  “Yes, yes. I went to school with your father. And your mother, of course. ”

  He paused to give Mission time to respond. Mission ground his teeth together and said nothing. He let go of the man’s hand before his sweaty palms had a chance to speak for him.

  “Say I wanted to move something without going through Dispatch. ” Mr. Wyck smiled. “And say I wanted to avoid the sort of nastiness that took place last night a few levels up from here. ”

  Mission glanced over at Jeffery, who seemed disinterested in the conversation. It was strange to hear this sort of offer from a man of authority in front of a member of Security, but there was one thing Mission had discovered since he emerged from his shadowing days: things only got darker.

  “I don’t follow,” Mission said. He fought the urge to turn and see how far they were from the security gate. A woman emerged from an office down the hall, behind Mr. Wyck. Jeffery made a gesture with his hand, and she stopped and kept her distance, out of earshot.

&
nbsp; “I think you do, and I admire your discretion,” Mr. Wyck said. “Two hundred chits to move a package a half dozen levels from Supply. ”

  Mission tried to remain calm. Two hundred chits. A month’s pay for half a day’s work. But he feared this was some sort of test. Maybe Rodny had gotten in trouble for flunking a similar one.

  “I don’t know—” he said.

  “It’s an open invite,” Wyck said. “The next porter that comes through will get the same offer. I don’t care who does it, but the first will get the chits. You don’t have to answer me. Just show up and ask for Joyce at the Supply counter. Tell her you’re doing a job for Wyck. There’ll be a delivery report detailing the rest. ”

  “I’ll think about it, sir. ”

  “Good. ” Mr. Wyck smiled.

  “Anything else?”

  “No, no. You’re free to go. ” He nodded to Jeffery, who snapped back from wherever he’d checked out to.

  “Thank you, sir. ” Mission turned and followed the chief.

  “Oh, and happy birthday, son,” Mr. Wyck called out.

  Mission glanced back, didn’t say thanks, just hurried after Jeffery and through the security gate, past the crowds and out on the landing, down two turns of stairs, where he finally reached into his pocket for the note from Rodny. Paranoid he might drop it and watch it bounce off the stairs and through the rail, he gingerly and methodically unfolded the scrap of paper. It looked like the same rag blend Mrs. Crowe’s note had been written on, the same threads of purple and red mixed in with the rough gray weave. For a moment, Mission feared the note would be addressed to the Crow rather than to him, maybe more lines in old nursery rhymes. He worked the piece of paper flat, one side blank, turned it over to read the other.

  It wasn’t addressed to anyone. Just two words, and Mission remembered the way his friend’s smile had quivered while they shook hands.

  Mission felt suddenly alone. There was the smell of something burning lingering in the stairwell, a tinge of smoke that mixed with the paint from drying graffiti. He took the small note and tore it into ever smaller pieces. He kept tearing until there was nothing left to pinch with his fingers, nothing left to shred. He waited until a passing man spiraled out of sight and then sprinkled the dull confetti over the rail to drift down and disappear into the void.

  The evidence was gone, but the message lingered vividly in his mind. The hasty scrawl, the shadowy scratch the edge of a coin or a spoon made as it was dragged across paper, two words barely legible from his friend who never needed anybody or asked for anything:

  Help me.

  And that was all.

  Silo 1

  Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.

  -Henry Van Dyke

  •13•

  Finding the right silo was easy enough. Donald could look at the old schematic and remember standing on those hills, peering down into the wide bowls that held each facility. The sound of grumbling four-wheelers came back, the plumes of dust kicked up as they bounced across the ridges where the grass had not yet filled in. He remembered that they had been growing grass over those hills, straw and seed spread everywhere, a bit of an illusion, a task hindsight made both pointless and sad.

  Standing on that ridge in his memory, he was able to picture the Tennessee delegation. It would be Silo 2. Once he had this, he dug deeper. It took a bit of fumbling to remember how the computer program worked, how to sift through lives that lived in databases. There was an entire history there of each silo if you knew how to read it, all those souls trapped in little cells, but the history only went so far. It went back to made-up names, back to the orientation. It didn’t stretch to the Legacy beyond. The old world was hidden behind bombs and a fog of mist and forgetting.

  He had the right silo, but locating Helen might prove impossible. He worked frantically while Anna sang in the shower.

  She had left the bathroom door open, steam and her melodic humming both billowing out. Donald ignored what he took to be an invitation. He ignored the throbbing, the yearning, the hormonal rush of being near an ex-lover after centuries of need. He searched instead for his wife.

  There were four thousand names in that first generation of Silo 2. Four thousand, exactly. Roughly half were female. There were three Helens. Each had a grainy picture taken for her work ID stored on the servers. None of the Helens matched what he remembered his wife looking like, what he thought she looked like. Tears came unbidden. He wiped them away, furious at himself. From the shower, Anna sang a sad lament from long ago while Donald flipped through random photos. After a dozen, the faces of strangers began to meld together and threaten to erode the Helen in his memory. He went back to searching by name. Surely he could guess the name she would’ve chosen. He had picked Troy for himself those many years ago, a clue leading him back to her. He liked to think she would’ve done the same.

  He tried Sandra, her mother’s name, but neither of the two hits were right. He tried Danielle, her sister’s name. One hit. Not her.

  She wouldn’t come up with something random, would she? They had talked once of what they might name their kids. It was gods and goddesses, a joke at first, but Helen had fallen in love with the name Athena. He did a search. Zero hits in that first generation.

  The pipes squealed as Anna turned off the shower. Her singing subsided back into a hum, a song of sadness and grief, a hymn for the funeral they were about to attend. Donald tried a few more names, anxious to discover something, anything. He would search every night while the silo slept if he had to. He would search while he pretended to work on this problem with the silos. He wouldn’t sleep until he knew, until he found her.