Apocalypse: Zero Empathy

The ash had been falling for ninety-one days, and Silas Thorne had learned to hate the quiet more than he had ever hated the screaming.

In the first weeks, the world still made noise. Sirens ran down their batteries. Car alarms wailed across the dead suburbs until they, too, went mute. Then came the screams, when the raiders swept through the apartment blocks. Those had ended as well, and the silence that replaced them was worse. It was not peace. It was the sound of everyone holding their breath.

He sat in the corner of the basement shelter with a tin of peaches cupped in his palms. Two hundred grams of syrup and fruit. The label had faded to a pale orange ghost, but he knew it by heart, the way he knew everything he owned down here: eleven water filters, a cracked radio, a medical kit with half its bandages gone, a pipe wrapped in electrical tape. Of all of it, the tin was the last thing that could be eaten.

He had written his rule on the wall in charcoal on the first day, in letters a hand tall. Make no noise. Open the door for no one. It had kept him alive when three families on his street had died. Sound brought the hunters. Doors brought the thieves. He had followed it so faithfully that he had begun to believe it was the only true thing left in the world.

Then someone knocked. Three taps, soft as a moth against glass.

He did not answer. He sat with his hand on the pipe and counted his heartbeats. Forty. Sixty. A hundred. The knocking came again, patient and trembling, and beneath it he heard something he had not heard in weeks: a child coughing, a wet, thin sound, quickly smothered in a sleeve.

Silas closed his eyes. Make no noise.

He opened the door.

The woman from the third floor stood on the landing. Behind her were two men he knew by sight: Garrick, who had once borrowed Silas's generator and never brought it back, and a gaunt stranger with frostbitten ears. The woman carried a boy against her shoulder. He was perhaps six. His lips had gone the gray of old dishwater, and his ribs showed through his shirt like the teeth of a comb.

"Please," the woman mouthed. Nobody spoke aloud anymore. Her lips were cracked and bleeding. Please. Only for him.

Silas looked at the boy. The boy looked back, too tired even to blink.

He ought to have shut the door. Every instinct he had built over ninety-one days screamed at him to. But he was a man who had once stopped on a highway to help a stranger change a tire, who had carried groceries for the old woman downstairs, who had believed, before the sky turned gray, that the point of surviving was to remain someone worth surviving as. He stepped aside.

They came in like ghosts, careful of their feet. Silas pulled the door closed and slid the bolt, then knelt and pried the lid of the tin back with a slow twist, wrapping his sleeve around the metal so it would not snap. He fed the boy first, one slice at a time, pressing the syrup against his tongue. The boy swallowed. A little color crept back into his face, or perhaps Silas only wanted to see it.

Then he passed the tin to the woman, who ate with shaking hands, and to the two men. Garrick wept silently into his fist as he chewed. The stranger would not meet Silas's eyes.

"Thank you," the woman signed, a flat palm against her chest. Thank you.

Silas nodded. For the first time in weeks, something warm moved beneath his ribs. He told himself this was what separated men from the things outside. That kindness, even now, was not weakness but the last proof that something human remained in him.

He would remember that thought later, in the dark, and it would almost make him laugh.

He let them rest an hour. When the boy's breathing had steadied, Silas gestured at the door, apologetic but firm. They could not stay. There was not enough air, not enough of anything. The woman nodded as if she understood. She gathered her son and walked out without a backward glance, and Garrick followed her, still not looking at him.

Silas locked the door behind them. He sat with his back against the concrete, listened to the dead hush of the shelter, and for the first time in a month let himself sleep.

He woke to the sound of hinges.

Not a crash. A careful, practiced click, the sound of someone who had done this before. His hand closed on the pipe, but there were too many boots on the stairs, too many shapes crowding the doorway. Lantern light spilled across the floor. Someone had worked the bolt from the outside. Someone had been shown how.

Garrick stood at the front, holding the lantern, his eyes fixed on the concrete.

"He's got more," Garrick said. Aloud. It was the first human voice Silas had heard in three months, and it was the sound of a man selling him.

Silas rose, swinging the pipe. He caught one man across the knee and heard the bone give. Then a rifle stock crashed into his jaw. The room swung. Light and teeth and blood. He hit the floor and the boots found his ribs, his back, his hands when he tried to cover his head.

Above him, the raiders tore through everything. Shelves went over. Water filters vanished into sacks. The medical kit. The radio. The blanket beneath him, dragged out as he lay on it. A man with a scarred face found the charcoal rule on the wall and laughed, silently, shoulders shaking.

There is nothing more, Silas tried to say, but his mouth only made a wet noise.

The woman from the third floor stood at the top of the stairs with her son in her arms. Silas found her eyes through the blood. She did not look away. She did not look sorry. She looked at him the way one looks at a door that has finally opened, and then she turned and carried the boy up into the dark.

Two raiders hauled him up through the hatch by his collar and threw him into the storm.

The cold hit like a blade. Ash filled his mouth, his nose, the raw edges of his eyes. Behind him, the door slammed shut on the only home he had left.

Silas lay in the gray drift and waited to feel rage.

It never came. What came instead was stillness, clean and total, like a lamp going out in an empty room. He searched himself for pity and found only the shape where it used to be. For mercy, for grief, for the warm thing that had stirred under his ribs an hour ago. Nothing. A hollow, tidy as a swept floor.

So that's what it costs, he thought. Good to know.

He began to crawl.