Apocalypse: Zero Empathy

The First Quiet

Silas waited until the snoring found a rhythm.

He had spent the night learning it. The sergeant's was a long, wet saw that stopped for three seconds every minute, when the man seemed to forget how to breathe. Another sleeper whistled through a broken nose. Pike, in the chair outside the closet, breathed shallow and even, his head tipped against the wall.

Four hours, by Silas's count, since the fire died. The deepest part of the night.

He rose off the cot one muscle at a time. His ribs complained, and he let them complain silently. He had folded the blanket into a pad on the floor earlier, so that when he stepped on the creaking boards his weight fell on wool. The closet door was unlocked, as promised. He eased it open a hand's width and looked.

Pike slept with his rifle across his knees and his mouth open. He looked about nineteen.

Silas watched him for a long moment. Then he stepped past without touching him. Not mercy. Pike was the one man in the room who had flinched, which made him the one man who might be useful alive. Silas filed the thought away beside the others.

The common room was black and warm. The drum fire had sunk to a bed of orange coals, and in its faint glow he counted the sleepers: sergeant on his cot, two men on the lower bunks, the fourth somewhere in the dark corner. The thin man's bunk was empty.

Silas smiled slightly. He had been waiting for that.

Twice the night before, the thin man had left to relieve himself down the side passage, alone, and he had come back both times after exactly six minutes. A man who cleaned his pistol with a rag every evening was a man of habits, and habits were a kind of door left unlocked.

Silas slid along the wall, keeping to the shadows under the bunks, and crept into the side passage.

It was narrow, barely shoulder width, lined with pipes that ticked as they cooled. Fifteen meters in, the corridor bent, and past the bend a trickle of water ran over concrete, and a man's shape stood with his back to the turn, humming under his breath.

Humming. In the Dead Zone. The sound crawled up Silas's spine like a cold insect.

On the floor beside the wall, within reach, lay a length of steel pipe, part of a broken railing. He lifted it. It was heavier than his own, and cold. He tested the weight once and did not like it. Too loud against bone.

He set it down.

The thin man finished, adjusted his belt, and turned. His eyes passed straight over the dark mouth of the passage and kept going. Humming still, he walked toward Silas, bootsteps unhurried. Two meters. One.

Silas stepped out of the dark and put his left hand over the man's mouth and his right hand around the belt knife, which he drew from its sheath in a single motion, and drove it up under the jaw.

It was not like the movies. There was a hot rush over his wrist, a spasm that nearly tore the blade from his grip, a muffled sound against his palm like a kettle starting to boil. The thin man's hands clawed at Silas's forearm. His heels drummed on the concrete, once, twice, a terrible small noise.

Silas held on. He bore the man down to his knees and kept the knife where it was and kept his palm tight, and counted, because counting was what he had left.

At forty, the drumming stopped.

He lowered the body to the floor and stayed crouched over it, listening. Water trickled. Pipes ticked. From the common room, faintly, the sergeant's snore hitched and resumed.

Nobody had woken.

Silas let out a breath. He waited for something to arrive: horror, nausea, the shaking that follows. His hands were steady. His stomach was calm. There was blood drying on his wrist and a dead man beneath him and, inside, only the clean, swept hollow he had found on the surface of the storm.

*So it's easy,* he thought. *That's good to know, too.*

He worked quickly. The pistol first, a compact military model, a magazine and a half. A folded map from the thin man's breast pocket. Two chocolate bars, which he swallowed whole, one after the other, hardly tasting them. In the man's other pocket was a flat plastic card on a lanyard, scratched, stamped with a three-triangle symbol and a name Silas didn't recognize. A clearance badge.

They never tried it on the keypad, he thought. Because he didn't tell them he had it.*

He turned the card over. A string of digits was handwritten on the back in faded ink, with a note beneath: **LVL 2 ONLY**.

So the thin man had known more than he shared. The deserters had not been quite as united as the sergeant liked to believe.

Silas wiped the knife on the dead man's sleeve and dragged the body into a maintenance alcove behind a stack of crates. He did it slowly, in pieces, pausing at every sound. Then he scrubbed the floor with the man's own jacket until the dark stain was just a damp patch among many. In the dim light, no one would notice.

He was back at the mouth of the passage when he heard a boot.

He froze. At the far end of the common room, the dark corner stirred, and a shape rose from a bunk, scratching. The fourth man. Big, heavy-shouldered, naked to the waist. He yawned loudly, shuffled to the table, and swigged from the bottle that sat there, then looked toward the side passage.

"Dev?" he said. Not quietly. "You fall in?"

Silas stood in the shadow of the corridor with the knife held low and the pistol tucked in his belt, and did not breathe.

The big man took two steps toward him. Three. His bare feet slapped the grating. He was squinting into the dark, one hand on his belly, in no particular hurry, because nothing in this place had ever given him a reason to hurry.

"Dev, I swear to God, if you're sleeping in there—"

A cough sounded from the other side of the room. The sergeant, rolling over. "Shut it, Mercer."

Mercer stopped. Cursed softly. Looked back at the bunks, then at the dark passage, and shrugged. He turned and lumbered back to his corner, bottle in hand, and sat on the edge of his bunk muttering.

Silas counted to two hundred before he moved again.

He did not go back to the closet. Not yet. Instead he crept the other direction, along the wall, past the sleeping sentry in his chair, to the open stairwell door marked **LEVEL 2 - CLEARANCE REQUIRED**. Beyond it, steps descended into blackness. At the bottom, a second door, heavier than any he had seen, with a reader mounted at its side.

The thin man's card slid into the slot with a faint, satisfied click.

A green light bloomed. The lock released with a sound like a held breath finally let go.

The door swung inward on a room that was not abandoned.

Banks of dark monitors lined the walls. Cables ran in neat bundles across the floor. Chairs sat tucked under consoles as if the crew had stepped out for lunch. And in the center, on a raised dais, one screen glowed pale green, steady, alive, waiting.

A single line of text blinked on its surface:

**MASTER ACCESS. ENTER PASSPHRASE.**

Silas stood in the doorway for a very long time.

Behind him, upstairs, four men who thought they owned a fortress snored in the dark. They did not know that one of them was already dead, or that the door they had spent weeks failing to open had just been unlocked from the inside.

He stepped into the room and closed the door behind him.