Apocalypse: Zero Empathy

What Lies Behind the Vault

The sergeant did not answer at once.

He sat against the stairwell wall with his good hand clamped over his wounded arm, staring up at the camera. Blood ran between his fingers and pooled on the steel step. Pike stood beside him, rifle trembling, tears cutting clean lines through the grime on his face.

"You're the scavenger," the sergeant said at last. A whisper, hoarse.

"I was," Silas said.

The words came out flat through the old speaker, stripped of anything human. He had expected to feel something at the sound of it, power or satisfaction. There was only a tool in his hand and a task in front of him.

"Whatever you want," the sergeant said, "we can deal. We've got ammunition. Food stores. Dev had a map of the surface routes, there's a depot north of here, a day's walk, we could take you—"

"Dev is dead. The map is in my pocket."

The sergeant's mouth closed.

"Harlan is dead. Mercer is dead." Silas let that settle. "You told me last night that every one of my kind shares their food. That it's always the same. You were right. I did. It nearly killed me."

"Look, kid—"

"I'm not finished."

The sergeant went quiet. It was a strange thing to watch, a man who had spent a lifetime being the loudest voice in every room learning to wait for permission to speak.

"You are going to put your rifle on the floor," Silas said. "Both of you. Then you will walk back up the stairs, through the common room, and out the hatch I came in by. You will not take food. You will not take coats. The storm is thick today, and I'm told it is very quiet out there."

Pike made a sound like a hiccup. "He'll kill us out there, Sarge. He's sending us to die."

"I'm sending you where I was sent," Silas said. "The difference is, I'm giving you a rifle's worth of warning."

It was not mercy. He knew it, and he suspected the sergeant did too. Mercy would have been a bullet. This was something colder: the clean transfer of a debt.

The sergeant stared into the lens for a long time. Then something in his face shifted, a flicker of the old cunning.

"Pike," he said, almost gently. "Go on up. Do what he says."

"Sarge, I can't—"

"Go."

Pike backed up two steps, then three, rifle lowered. He turned and ran. His boots rang up the stairwell and across the common room, and Silas watched him on the monitor, a small green figure fleeing through the dark.

The sergeant waited until the footsteps faded. Then he levered himself upright, drew a pistol from his boot, and said in a voice entirely without fear, "Now it's just us."

Silas had been waiting for that.

The sergeant was not a fool. He had spent years in uniform before he spent them as a thief, and he knew that a man who talks through a speaker is a man who cannot see his whole position. He started down the stairwell with his back to the wall, eyes on the ceiling, listening, reading the room the way a soldier does. At the landing he stopped, sniffed the air, and grinned.

"Cold," he said. "You've been playing with the thermostat." He pulled a flashlight from his vest and swept it down the corridor. "I know where you are. That's the only room on this level that has a working light."

He was right, of course. There was nowhere to hide. Silas had known that from the start.

So he stood.

He crossed the control room, lifted the pistol from the console, and checked the chamber. One and a half magazines. He opened the door and stepped into the corridor, into the thin gray light of the stairwell, and stood facing the sergeant across forty meters of steel grating.

The sergeant stopped. The flashlight beam found Silas's face, and for a heartbeat the older man's expression went blank.

"Huh," he said. "You're smaller than I thought."

"Most people say so."

"You know what the problem is?" The sergeant raised his pistol, almost casually. "You waited too long to shoot."

He fired.

The shot struck the wall by Silas's head. Concrete chips stung his cheek. Silas did not move. He raised his own weapon, steadied it on his forearm as he had seen done in a hundred old movies, and found with some surprise that he remembered how.

He squeezed once.

The sergeant looked down. A dark stain bloomed on his vest, below the sternum. He opened his mouth to say something, and what came out was a cough. He took a step forward, then another. The flashlight rolled from his fingers.

"Should've," he began, and then folded.

Silas stood over him for a long moment. The man's eyes were open, fixed on the amber bulbs overhead. He was breathing in small, wet pulls.

"You said I'd share my food," Silas told him quietly. "You were wrong about one thing. I won't do it again."

The breathing stopped.

Silence settled over the corridor, the first real silence since he had entered the bunker. He listened to it for a while. Far above, a hatch clanged. Pike had made his choice.

Silas knelt, took the sergeant's rifle, his ammunition, the flashlight, and a battered pocketknife. He took the man's boots too, because his own feet were still numb, and found that they fit.

Then he walked to the end of the corridor, where the vault door waited with its glowing red keypad.

He had not forgotten the vault. Neither had the dead commander's logbook, which had called it **Level 4**. A man who hid a reactor behind a vault door did so for a reason.

On the control room's console, the one locked menu item still blinked: **POWER (LOCKED, LEVEL 4 AUTH REQUIRED)**. Silas pressed Dev's card against the reader beside the keypad.

Nothing.

He frowned. Turned the card over. LVL 2 ONLY. Of course.

He tried the passphrase on the keypad. **MARA7**. The light flickered amber, then settled back to red, and a small line of text scrolled across the panel: *Partial match. Secondary key required.*

Silas stood very still. A secondary key. In the logbook, the commander had written *Passphrase changed*. Not passphrases. A second authority, somewhere in the bunker, was the other half of the lock.

He thought about Mara, age six. About a man who had held a door against the end of the world and left a daughter behind. About a drawer that had been jammed shut, and a drawing pinned to the wall of a room no one visited.

He walked back to the control room. Pulled the child's drawing from the console and turned it over.

On the back, in the same tired hand, were a dozen digits and a single line: For whoever holds.

Silas stared at it, and the corner of his mouth lifted, very slightly.

He carried it to the vault, and he typed.

The red light turned green. Deep within the wall something heavy released, and the door swung open on a long, cold, humming dark.

Beyond it, a ramp descended into a cavern of pipes and cables, and at the bottom, enormous and silent, sat the reactor.

Silas stood at the threshold with the dead man's rifle in his hands and the commander's drawing in his pocket.

Mine, he thought.

He walked in.