Apocalypse: Zero Empathy

The Level Below

Pike carried the lantern because Silas wanted both hands free.

They went down by the service stairs behind the reactor, a narrow iron spiral that rang under their boots. The old commander had painted a number on the wall at every landing in white stencil, and Silas watched them count down: three, then four. At the fourth there was no door, only a heavy steel curtain, the kind that rolls up on a chain.

"What's in there?" Pike asked. His voice was careful. He had learned in two days to speak as if every word cost money.

"The commander wrote that only his crew knew."

"They're all gone."

"Yes."

Silas took hold of the chain. It was cold and greasy, and it took both his arms to haul it. The curtain rose a foot at a time, rattling, and a smell came out from under it that he had not smelled in three months. Wet earth. Green things.

He stopped pulling.

"Sir?" Pike said, and then seemed to hear himself and went red. "Sorry. I don't know what to call you."

"Don't call me anything."

He heaved the curtain the rest of the way up, and they stepped through.

The hall was enormous. Silas had expected a storeroom. Instead the ceiling rose twenty feet above them, ribbed with steel beams, and under it ran row after row of long metal troughs, each lined with pale plastic and stacked four high. Grow lamps hung over them on chains, dark now, their glass beaded with dust. Hoses ran between the troughs like veins. At the far end stood a bank of tanks, and beside them a workbench with a microscope still under its cloth cover.

Nothing in the troughs was alive. Brown stalks lay in the gravel, dry and bent. But the smell was real, and the air was damp, and when Silas knelt and pushed his fingers into the dead mulch, it was soft.

"It's a farm," Pike whispered.

"It was."

"Can it be again?"

Silas did not answer at once. He was thinking of the woman's son on the heap of coats, the ribs like a comb. Two hundred grams of peaches had been the last food in his shelter, and he had given it away, and it had cost him everything. Down here, under the dead lamps, there was enough ground to feed a town.

He had not known he was holding his breath until it left him.

"Find the breaker panel," he said. "There will be a wall of switches near the door. Throw them one at a time and tell me what lights."

Pike went. Silas heard the switches clack, one after another, a long patient sound. Fans came on. A pump began to chug somewhere in the floor. Then, with a stuttering hum, the first row of lamps flickered into a harsh violet-white, and then the next, and the hall bloomed with light as though someone had thrown open a shutter on a summer day.

Silas stood up slowly with the dust of the dead plants on his hands.

Behind the tanks, along the back wall, he found a steel door marked SEED STORE in the commander's careful stencil. It was locked with an ordinary padlock. He broke it with a crowbar from the workbench, and the cold that rolled out was dry and clean.

Rows of narrow drawers ran from floor to ceiling, hundreds of them, each with a paper label in faded ink. Wheat. Barley. Lentil. Kale. Potato eyes in sealed tubes of sand. At the end of the room sat a refrigerator the size of a coffin, humming faintly on the reactor's new power, and inside it, in racks of glass vials, were things Silas did not know the names of.

"That's more than anyone has seen in a year," Pike said from the doorway. His voice shook.

"Don't touch anything."

"I won't."

"I know you won't," Silas said. "That's why you're standing in the doorway."

Pike gave a startled breath that was almost a laugh, and shut his mouth.

They worked for hours. Silas had no plan for it, only a conviction that the room wanted attention. He found a logbook on the workbench, thinner than the commander's, kept by someone with a looping, friendlier hand. A botanist, by the entries. She wrote about germination rates and the strange comfort of watching lettuce grow underground while the world burned. The last page ended in the middle of a sentence: We have been told the surface is not coming back, and I keep thinking that

He closed it and put it in his pocket with the drawing.

Near the back of the hall, behind a sheet of plastic, they found the thing that made Pike stop breathing.

It was a tunnel mouth, round, three feet across, set low in the wall. The edges of the concrete around it were scored with long parallel gouges, deep as a hand. Fresh gray dust lay in a drift across the floor, and in the dust, going in and out, were tracks. Wide pads, four toes, claws like hooks.

"That's from the stairwell," Pike said. "That thing, the one that took Mercer."

"It nests down here."

"Then it's still here."

Silas crouched and laid his palm flat in one of the prints. The dust was cold. Not recent. The creature had come through, learned that nothing in this hall was edible, and gone away again by whatever road it had used.

"It left," he said.

"How do you know?"

"Because if it were here, it would have taken you when you threw the first switch."

Pike went the color of paper.

Silas stood and looked down the tunnel. It ran straight into the dark, and a thin, steady draught came out of it, carrying the smell of ash and cold. He had not seen the lower level's other exits yet. There was a way in that was not the hatch and not the vents, and the bunker had not been sealed as well as the commander had believed.

He would have to close it, or learn to use it.

He did not say so to Pike. The boy had enough to carry. But he remembered the long wet breath in the storm, and the face that had turned toward the camera, and he understood something that made his skin go tight and quiet: the thing had been curious. It had looked at him, and it had gone away.

Nothing in the Dead Zone left a place it could starve in unless it had somewhere better to go.

"Come," he said. "The lamps can run. Let them. We have more to see."

They climbed back toward the reactor with the green smell still in their clothes. At the top of the stairs Pike paused and looked down at the glowing hall, the rows of troughs lit violet and gold, the first small miracle in ninety-one days.

"It's beautiful," he said.

"It's ours," Silas said.

He said it without thinking, and it was only after the words were out that he noticed the word. Ours. He did not take it back. Behind them, the tunnel breathed, and the lamps hummed, and far above, a hundred feet of rock and ash held up a sky that had forgotten how to be blue.