Apocalypse: Zero Empathy

Beneath the Ash

The storm erased the world in minutes.

Silas crawled on his elbows through the drift, one arm dragging, the other pressed over his mouth. Ash worked its way under his collar and into his sleeves. His jaw throbbed where the rifle stock had landed, and every breath tasted like burnt metal and old pennies.

He did not look back at the shelter. There was nothing there to look at.

Move. Stillness is death.

His coat was gone, taken with everything else, and the cold went through his shirt as though it weren't there. Within a hundred meters he could no longer feel his fingers. Within two hundred, his feet. He catalogued the losses with a distant, clinical interest, as if reading an inventory about someone else. Toes, fingertips, lips. Next would come the shivering, and then the warm lie of sleep that killed more people in the Dead Zone than any raider.

He had to keep moving. He had to stay quiet. The rules had not changed just because the world had broken his faith in them.

Somewhere to his left, something exhaled.

Silas froze.

It was a long, wet, rattling sound, the breath of something large and patient. He pressed his face into the ash and held his own breath until white spots swam across his vision. A shape moved through the gray, slow and heavy, claws dragging furrows in the drift. Too tall to be a dog. Too many joints in the legs to be anything born in the old world. It paused ten meters from him. Its head turned. It sniffed.

Silas did not move. He had seen what happened to people who ran. A neighbor's brother, three weeks ago, had bolted at the sight of a shadow in the ash, and his scream had been the last loud thing the street ever heard.

So he lay still and thought of the stillness in his chest, and found, to his surprise, that it helped. There was no panic to betray him. No hammering heart that needed quieting. Fear had gone out with everything else, and in its place was a cold, patient attention, like a hand that did not shake.

The creature's breath washed over him, hot and rotten. Ash drifted onto his eyelashes. He did not blink.

A minute passed. Another.

Then the thing grunted, lost interest, and moved on, its claws receding into the white.

Silas let his breath out in a thread and kept crawling, away from the shape, deeper into the storm.

He lost track of time. The wind pushed him sideways and he let it. Once he found a stretch of frozen road and followed it past the husks of cars, their windows black, their doors hanging open like mouths. In one he saw a skeleton still buckled into the driver's seat, a scarf wound around its skull. He felt nothing, not even pity. Only calculation: no coat, no boots, nothing worth the time.

The road ended at a collapsed overpass, a tangle of rebar and slabs, and he climbed it because it was the only direction left. His hands bled. He didn't notice. Somewhere in the climb the memory of the shelter surfaced, and he let it, studied it the way a surgeon studies a wound. Garrick's lantern. The scarred man laughing at the charcoal rule. The woman at the top of the stairs, her son's head on her shoulder.

The strange part was that he understood them. They had been hungry and afraid, and he had been the nearest door. There was no mystery in it. The only mystery was that he had ever expected otherwise.

Never again, he thought. Not as a vow. Vows were for people who still hoped. It was simply a fact now, set into him like a bolt.

He had decided to die twice already, and twice his body had refused to listen.

His legs gave out near the top. He slumped against a slab of broken concrete and tasted blood. The wind dropped to a whisper, and he thought: here, then. This is as good a place as any.

It was on the third decision that his glove caught on something.

Metal.

He dug with numb fingers. The ash was shallow here, as if the wind had scoured the spot for years and left a seam. Under it lay a rectangle of steel, riveted at the corners, with a faded stencil he could just read through the grime:

RESTRICTED. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

A wheel lock sat at the center of the hatch, crusted with rust. Beneath the lettering, smaller, was a serial number and a symbol he half recognized: three triangles in a circle. Military. Civil defense. Something built by people who had known this was coming and had told no one.

Silas stared at it for a long moment. Then he wrapped both hands around the wheel and pulled.

It didn't move.

He braced his boots against the concrete and pulled again. Nothing. His arms shook. Blood ran from his split knuckles down the steel and froze in thin red threads. He thought of Garrick's lantern, of the woman on the stairs, of the boy with his ribs like a comb. He thought of the tin of peaches, and the warm thing that had moved in his chest when he gave it away.

He pulled a third time, and he pulled with that memory, using it like fuel.

Something deep in the lock cracked. The wheel turned.

The hatch swung open on darkness and a breath of stale, warm air that smelled of oil and old machinery. Warm. He nearly wept at it, and was distantly pleased to find he couldn't. A ladder descended into the black, its rungs worn bright. Far below, so faint he wondered if he had imagined it, a single amber light blinked once.

Then he heard it, rising up the shaft. Footsteps. Slow, unhurried, boots on grating. And voices, low and bored, speaking aloud, without fear of anything.

Someone was already living down there. Someone who was not afraid of making noise.

Silas considered the ladder, the cold, the dead storm behind him. There was no real choice. He slid through the opening feet first and lowered the hatch over his head with infinite care, sealing out the wind.

He descended hand over hand, counting rungs, listening. Thirty. Forty. The warmth thickened until his fingers began to burn with returning blood, a pain so sharp it nearly pulled a sound from him. He bit down on his sleeve and let it pass. Fifty rungs down came a steel landing, a corridor lit by a strip of failing amber bulbs, and at its end a door ajar, firelight leaking through.

Somewhere beyond it, a man laughed.

Silas Thorne, who had not smiled in ninety-one days, smiled. It was not a kind smile.