Apocalypse: Zero Empathy

Cold Start

The reactor did not wake easily.

Silas spent an hour in the cavern below the vault just learning its shape. It was a squat steel cylinder the size of a delivery truck, ringed with catwalks and coolant lines, and everything about it had been built to be operated by a trained crew of six. He had a rifle, a dead man's boots, and a logbook.

He found the procedures in a steel binder chained to the main console, its pages laminated and its corners softened by years of handling. The old commander had tabbed them in colored plastic. A note was clipped to the front in the same tired hand: *Cold start requires two operators. Solo start is possible but not advised. If you are alone, go slowly. Fear is the only thing that has ever broken one of these.*

Silas read it and felt nothing at all. *Then I'm qualified,* he thought.

He went slowly.

He checked the coolant loops first, walking the catwalks with the flashlight, tapping each gauge and writing the readings on his palm with the sergeant's pencil stub. Most of the lines held pressure. One valve had seized, and he spent forty minutes freeing it with a pipe wrench and his full weight, his shoulders burning, until it gave with a groan that echoed up the shaft like a dying animal. He froze, listening. Nothing answered. Down here, noise belonged to him.

The startup sequence ran to thirty-one steps. He performed them one at a time and checked each against the binder twice. At step nineteen the main console lit up, amber digits stuttering across a dead panel. At step twenty-six, something deep inside the cylinder began to hum, a low note that he felt in his sternum before he heard it. At step thirty, the lights along the catwalks flickered, steadied, and bloomed white.

He stood in the sudden brightness with his heart finally, faintly, hammering. It was the first time in days his body had remembered what excitement felt like. He noted it the way he noted everything, and set it aside.

The bunker came alive around him. Fans spun up in the ducts. A pump coughed, caught, and ran. Far above, through the floor, he heard the quiet, steady tick of heaters warming forgotten rooms.

Warm air began to move. For the first time since the ash had fallen, Silas Thorne was not cold.

He sat down on the bottom step of the catwalk and shook, once, hard, from his shoulders to his boots. Then he stood up, because there was still the matter of Pike.

---

He returned to the control room with the rifle slung and the commander's drawing folded in his breast pocket. The monitors had changed. With power restored, a dozen more feeds had come alive, and he found what he wanted on the fourth screen: the surface hatch from the outside, seen through a camera wedged under a slab of concrete.

The storm was worse than before. Ash blew across the lens in gray sheets. Beside the hatch, curled in the lee of a broken wall, was a shape.

Pike had not gone far. He sat with his knees drawn to his chest and his rifle across his lap, and his whole body shook so hard that even through the static Silas could see it. He had no coat. Someone, probably the sergeant, had made certain of that. His lips were already blue.

Silas watched him for several minutes.

*Dead in an hour,* he judged. *Less, if the wind shifts.*

He ought to have let it happen. That was the law he had written for himself in the ash: the world had taught him what kindness cost, and he would not pay it twice. The boy had stood by while Silas was bleeding. He had brought a blanket and said *sorry about your face*, and then let the sergeant draw the line of what was permitted. In every way that counted, Pike was Garrick.

But Silas was not choosing from feeling. He was counting.

The bunker had three levels he had not yet seen and a reactor that wanted six operators. He had one pair of hands. He needed to eat, and sleep, and he would not be able to do either safely while he was the only living person in a fortress with a dozen unknown doors. A man who flinched was a man who could be trained. A man who owed his life could be made to work.

And a man who knew exactly what happened to those who crossed Silas Thorne would never again be tempted to try.

*Not mercy,* he told himself. *Inventory.*

He found the surface hatch controls in **DOOR MANAGEMENT** and cycled the outer lock open. On the screen, the hatch rose with a muffled clank. Pike's head jerked up. He stared at the dark rectangle as if it were a trick of the storm.

Silas took the microphone.

"Come down."

Pike flinched at the voice. His mouth worked. When he spoke, the word came out in a ragged croak that the camera's tiny microphone barely caught. "You're not— you said you'd—"

"I said I'd send you out. You're still outside. I'm changing the terms."

A long silence, filled with static.

"Leave the rifle on the ground," Silas said. "Climb down. At the bottom there is a sealed room. Go in and close the door behind you. If you step anywhere else, the ventilation will do to you what it did to Harlan."

Pike hesitated, and Silas watched the whole argument cross his face: the cold, the fear, the thing in the vents. Then the boy dropped the rifle in the ash like something that had begun to burn his hands. He crawled to the hatch, shoved himself through, and disappeared down the ladder.

Silas tracked him on the feeds, a small trembling figure working his way through the airlock. He went where he was told. He did not look back. When he reached the sealed room, a bare steel cell with a bench and a drain in the floor, he pulled the door shut and slid down against it, sobbing in great dry gasps.

Silas locked the door from the console. Then he turned up the heat in the cell by ten degrees and sent a ration bar through the delivery slot.

He did not watch the boy eat it.

---

He slept six hours on a cot in the commander's quarters with the rifle on the floor beside his hand and the door bolted twice. He dreamed of nothing. When he woke, the bunker hummed around him, steady as a heartbeat, and he lay a while listening.

Then he got up, washed in a steel basin of hot water that did not run out, and walked the corridor to the cell.

Pike was awake. He sat with his back to the wall and his arms wrapped around his knees. He looked up when the slot opened and said nothing. His eyes were red-rimmed and very old.

"You can speak," Silas said.

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me. You're here because I need your hands." Silas let that land. "You'll do what I say, when I say it. You'll make no noise I haven't asked for. If you lie, I will know. If you steal, I will know. If you run, you'll find the surface hatch locked, and what's behind the vents is hungry."

Pike nodded. Then he said, so softly it barely carried, "Why did you let me in?"

Silas considered the question. He could have said *because I'm not a monster*, and it would have been the most convenient lie available. He found, to his mild interest, that he did not want to say it.

"Because the dead don't do dishes," he said.

He turned and walked away, and behind him, to his own surprise, he thought he heard the boy laugh. A broken, uncertain, human sound, quickly choked off.

Silas did not look back. But he noted it, the way he noted everything, and added it to the list of things he did not understand.