Karma of the Silo: The Collection Page 13

  The beauty of this photograph nearly makes me weep. Whether because I saw such scenes in the real world and never will again… or because so many never got the chance.

  When I walk back toward the cots where I sleep beside Rick, I hear an unfamiliar sound. It is the breathing of someone else in our space. Someone big. Someone loud.

  My own breath in my throat, I hurry over in the dark, trying to stay quiet, my light switched off.

  When I get there, I can see by the dim glow spilling into our little corner that it is Jeff. He’s pacing beside Rick’s cot.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask, hoping my voice doesn’t tremble.

  He turns to me, and I smell the alcohol on his breath, plus all the days of staying in this same close space together. His breathing is even louder now that I’m up close.

  Jeff laughs, a guttural sound that is not at all amused. “I’m doing whatever the fuck I want. And your hubby here, who’s kind of a moron—even more than he always was—isn’t going to stop me.”

  I back off, wondering how far he might go. Wondering what he wants, other than a little entertainment.

  I see his expression change. I realize that I’m in a sleep shift that I found in a closet here—extra clothes no doubt meant for emergencies. Jeff has been standing there in the semi-darkness, like me, but now he turns on his own light, and his smile becomes wider. His beam is focused not on my face but on my body.

  I get a shiver, an animal memory of what it means to be hunted. To be overpowered in a way I haven’t worried about in years. I’m a woman of fifty-seven, a mother of two adult children and a grandmother of a six-year-old. Unwelcome male attention hasn’t been an issue for me since… since I’ve been in the Silo.

  My mind tries to process this. He’s drunk, he’s angry, he’s been cooped up for a month. He’s twice my weight. I can only try to deflect, try to distract.

  “Jeff,” I say, “do you miss Delta?”

  His nostrils flair. Whatever he was going to do before, he’s now going to do it faster. He comes toward me and I turn to run but he grabs me by the bottom of my flowing sleep shift. There is a roar as I pull away and the thin fabric rips.

  Modesty is the last thing on my mind as I do my best to get away, heading for the servers, dodging between obstacles. He is bigger but I am more nimble. His legs are longer but I am sober. We are neither of us young. Out of the corner of my eye I see Hazen, sitting up on his cot on the other side of the room, looking bleary-eyed.

  “Hey… what the…?” he yells as we pass. He doesn’t move except to shake his head in surprise. No assistance coming from that quarter.

  Where is Mars? I can’t spare the air to scream for him. I can hear Jeff’s labored breathing right behind me and at every instant I imagine his long arms reaching out to grab me.

  I hear a noise from where I know the ladder is. Then there is a blur of speed to my left and Jeff goes down, with Mars on top.

  Fists fly, mostly from Mars, and soon Jeff is moaning, and finally still. Hazen has stirred himself to come witness the fight, but has stayed out of it. He stands beside the two men, shaking his head.

  Mars, his nose bloodied and sweat dripping from his forehead, looks up at me. It’s only when I see him avert his eyes that I realize my shift is only partially covering me.

  “Are you all right, Mom?” he asks.

  “I am. Thank you.”

  I wrap what fabric is left around me, ignoring Hazen’s sudden interest in my appearance, and walk back to our sleeping area. When I fall into my cot, exhaustion in every pore of my body, I realize that Rick is looking at me.

  What is he thinking? What does he know?

  He says nothing, but he hands me a kitchen knife with a six-inch blade. For the rest of our time down here, I will sleep with that knife in my hand.

  20

  It’s been two months down here. We are like tigers. We each pace, restlessly, around our underground cage.

  I now spend time in the big server room, just to have somewhere to go. Sometimes I climb the ladder to the upper level of our two floors. I watch and listen for action outside the door. There has been no gunfire for some time. No explosions sending tremors through our walls and floor since the last big one. But there is still occasional pounding on the door from wild-eyed men in coveralls whose colors we cannot trust.

  We never open it.

  Mars tells me Jeff is waiting for a signal from someone outside the door, and since he hasn’t gotten the high sign, he’s apparently concluding that the good guys—or his idea of good guys—are not yet firmly in charge. Jeff won’t authorize the opening of the door until the code is given.

  “Do you think it’s over?” I ask Mars when I know Jeff and Hazen are on the other side of the server room.

  “I can’t tell. I only know that we have to stay down here so that we preserve what Silo 1 thinks is important. That would be me, in particular.” His stance is defiant, but there is something of despair there, too.

  “Because you’re the IT guy now.”

  He nods. “As long as I am down here, they won’t blow the whole thing to smithereens. And as long as the airlock to the Outside holds.”

  “Thank you, Mars.”

  He looks at me, surprised. “For what?”

  “For everything. For keeping us—me—safe down here. For taking over your father’s job. For keeping whoever the hell has that power from cancelling all of us… the Silo.”

  He nods.

  “How are you holding up?” I ask.

  “Fine,” he says, but his mouth makes a grim line, and I see him fighting for control. A moment passes. “It’s a lonely job,” he says finally.

  “I’m your mother,” I say, my eyes meeting his. “You can share whatever you want to with me.” And I smile, because it’s true. I know I can bear whatever burden he carries.

  Mars closes his eyes, and slumps against the wall. “I can’t, Mom.” He runs his fingers through long hair and rubs his now bearded chin. “I can’t tell you this.”

  His eyes open again and he looks at me.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  21

  Sometimes I wonder why I don’t care more. Perhaps because caring is futile. All I can do is take care of those I love. I would pray if I believed in praying. But I don’t. Not anymore.

  Rick has stopped mumbling in his sleep. He speaks very little, but his eyes seem to indicate he knows what’s going on. His arm is nearly healed.

  Mars did say there was a sort of ceremony, early on in our voluntary imprisonment, in which he was interviewed over the communications device that I now know is in the back of one of the servers. When the buzzing starts from that area, I scoot out of view but not out of hearing range. Before he picks up the phone I hear Jeff speak to him.

  “So you tell them that everything is going well here, you got me?”

  “All right,” Mars says.

  “Don’t mention me or anybody else.”

  “I know.” There is a pause, and then Mars speaks again to Jeff, his impatience clear. “I don’t want us to be shut down any more than you do.”

  The ringing stops and Mars answers. “Yes?”

  There is no sound for a moment. Then, “Right. I won’t open the door until I’m sure… yes. Correct. Two explosions, several weeks apart. No more gunfire recently. More than a week… right. Yes, I believe I can handle it. Understood.” There is nothing, and then, “By the letter, of course. Just as you say. Thank you, sir. Goodbye.”

  And then Jeff speaks. “Makes no sense to me that they need someone special to do all that sucking up. I could do that.” He laughs. “Hell, Hazen, you could do that.”

  Hazen chuckles, but he doesn’t sound amused. Mars is silent.

  22

  Every night now Jeff gets drunk. Hazen and he sit near the servers and open a couple of cans of something, then make the rest of their meal liquid. Sometimes they argue, and it gets loud.

  Mars eats with me and Rick, who is
docile but quiet, and then stays nearby until we fall into bed for the night. It is hard to sleep, with no exercise, no stimulation, and no privacy. It is hard to know what time it is. The lack of sun is nothing new—we’ve been living that way for years—but even with devices that tell us what time it is, figuring out where we are in the day gets confusing. There are no times of brighter lighting than others, like in the rest of the Silo. There is no routine of getting up in the morning and going to work. There is no quieting of the apartments around ours, to signal the calming down at the end of the day.

  The hours drag. The minutes drag. The seconds drag.

  I take up biting my nails, a habit I conquered decades ago. I walk, I bite my nails, I lie in my cot and think I will go crazy. Sometimes I fall into a restless nap, which means it’s even harder to get back to sleep at night. Some nights I don’t sleep at all.

  We have been here nearly three months now. I crave release. I know that the men are about to go mad. Only Rick is placid… I have no idea what he is feeling, or if he is feeling anything at all.

  I wake up with a start. It’s nighttime. I must have slept. There was some sort of noise. A loud bang. I hear it again.

  I sit up and see Rick looking at me, his eyes clear. I don’t see Mars in his cot nearby.

  There is a sound like choking, a struggle, large bodies. I stand up and I take the knife from beneath my pillow. Walking quietly, I head to the edge of the server room, where the lights are high. Across the room, Jeff and Hazen are fighting again. There is a certain balletic quality to their motions. They pull back and forth, each gaining the advantage in turn. It is like theatre… like a ritual played out by men since the beginning of time. The clashing of bodies to remind themselves that they are alive. Jeff is very powerful, but Hazen is fighting harder. I realize, as I watch and the dance changes, that Hazen is fighting for his life.

  Jeff has his hands around Hazen’s neck, and the latter is turning from red-faced to bloodless. His fingers claw at the strong grip cutting off his oxygen.

  “Yaaah. Yaaah.” Jeff is lifting the shorter man off his feet now, shaking him, practically making him rattle. He is shouting sounds like an insane man, caught in an ecstasy of visceral power. “No more,” he says. “No more!”

  I look at my knife and I know that I cannot stop him… I can only sacrifice myself. This, I am not willing to do. Not for this. Not for Hazen.

  My attention is diverted from the hypnotic scene before me to the ladder from the upper level. Mars is making his way quickly toward the two men fighting—the one man strangling, the other man dying. Mars hastens down the ladder and rushes over to Jeff, pulling him away from Hazen. But the damage is done.

  Hazen drops to the floor. He is dead.

  23

  A week has passed since Jeff killed Hazen. We do not speak except when it is absolutely necessary.

  Somehow, they have dealt with the body. The wise masters, whosoever they were, who designed this inmost circle of hell must have thought of even that. People cooped up for a long time together. Frustration… boredom… desperation. Fighting, murder, death. Mars located a body bag for Hazen and a powder that seems to mask the smell. They packed him up and somehow found a place to put the corpse.

  There was no ceremony.

  24

  I lie beside Rick in the narrow cot. It is the only way to get close enough to whisper to each other without being heard.

  For a week, I have been asking him questions. And he has, finally, been answering them.

  What happened to Donald?

  He is in Silo 1.

  What is Silo 1?

  Where the men live who control this entire experiment.

  Where is it?

  Just over the hill.

  You mean… the silo where the Georgia tent was?

  Yes.

  Why did you do it?

  Why did I do what?

  Separate me from Donald? Pretend you were my husband?

  I didn’t do it.

  How did it happen?

  The answers stop. I hear him breathing. I wait. The pent up questions of twenty-five years are being answered.

  He sighs.

  It is so complicated, Karma… Helen. It was so long ago. Thurman—

  Senator Thurman?

  Yes, Senator Thurman—

  He’s there too?

  Yes.

  I feel my hands ball into fists. An explosive anger pumps through my chest. If sheer adrenaline could boil over and burst out, I would launch out of this room, this silo, this depression in the earth, fly over to the neighboring silo where that monster still lives, and disembowel him with my hands.

  I try to breathe again. I try to make sense of it.

  So the Senator sent me over here and him over there.

  Not exactly.

  What then? Who?

  The Senator wanted Anna. Anna wanted Donald. I gave him my spot, and I took his, so that you would have someone.

  What?

  It was supposed to be me. Donald was supposed to be here with you. But when it was clear that Anna was going to have her way… she always did have her way… I told the Senator to send me here, to Silo 2, as your husband.

  I find myself standing up, my body instinctively pushing itself away from his. This man I have lived with, made love to, borne a son for… this man for whom I have deep feelings, if not exactly love… I cannot touch him now. I must get away before I start to pummel him. Someone. Something.

  I walk off into the deeper shadows of the storage area, my mind a chaotic tumble.

  All these years. All these years! Donald has been right over the hill, a pawn in a scheme set out by that slime, that Machiavellian manipulator, Senator Thurman. And Rick took me on as some sort of babysitting duty, a debt he owed to his old college buddy. Who was living another life… with another wife! Anna… perhaps the wife he always wanted. Over in Silo 1, where they are still in control of all the rest of us.

  Grief wars with fury in my breast as I pace, walking down the hall through the only spaces I dare travel. Back and forth I go, trying to wrap my mind around the blasphemy… the betrayal. The shock.

  Donald is right there. Donald, for whom I have pined these last twenty-five years. Whose daughter is growing up—has grown up—a few hundred yards away from him, with a granddaughter whom he’s never met, in a separate world.

  A world of which he was the architect. I shove my fist in my mouth and chomp down on my knuckles as I realize the irony. An architect, of course. All those blueprints. All those important meetings. All those busy days in Washington while he was supposedly serving his constituents.

  While instead he was part of a mind-bending scheme to… what? Destroy the world, get the girl he always wanted, and live a life apart from me in the master silo? It sounded ridiculous. It sounded like the plot of a bad comic book. Except that my husband was the evil nemesis. And there were no superheroes in sight.

  I walk until my feet start to blister, and then bleed. I am numb, but I see the trail of red drops when I turn back to retrace my steps. I see the pattern I am making, that of an animal caged in a long corridor, going round and round.

  I drop to the cold floor beside a shelf. Wrapping my arms around my knees I weep for the life I never had with Donald. I weep in anger for all the wrongs that were done to me. And to my daughter—our daughter, Athena, who was the product of my love for Donald.

  In my mind, I travel back through the years of confusion and unhappiness with where I was and how I got here. The first months filled with drug-addled puzzlement and forgetfulness, when I could barely remember the time before. My first pregnancy, when I was so eager to protect my baby but could not make sense of memories and dreams about a world very different from the one in which I was living. My years of hope and belief that talking to those rare children who remembered the outside would be helpful, and not too dangerous, for them.

  So much fear. So much loss.

  Ethel, murdered for remembering. Andy, sacr
ificed for being naïve and too curious. Delta, jumping to her death because her love was forbidden.

  And when my life had finally seemed to make some sense—when the pain of losing Donald had faded and the joys of being a mother and a grandmother, a judge and a woman allowed to use her brain—had balanced, if not erased, the tragedies… now this. Now I find myself locked in a prison with a man who was part of the grand plan to put us here. I learn that my first love has been a brief walk away for the last twenty-five years. And I discover that the wise mentor to my husband—both of my husbands!—was the megalomaniac who concocted this hellish scheme.

  Hot tears seep out from under my eyelids and my throat sobs without any input from me. It is my body weeping. My mind is numb.

  I finally curl up into a fetal position and lie there, feeling my pulse in my temples, and thinking about the sharp knife lying in the bed under my pillow.

  25

  I awaken with swollen eyes and a sore throat, my neck aching from the position I have been in for… how long? I don’t know. Every muscle is sore. It feels as though my body is my very sorrow.

  And then I hear it.

  A muffled scream.

  26

  I raise myself up, an animal poised for flight. Death is in the air, and I can smell it.

  Creeping back to the beds, staying to the shadows, I pause until my eyes adjust.

  A bulky figure—Jeff—stands over the cot where Rick lies. He has a pillow over Rick’s face, and the frantic actions of Rick’s legs and arms signal the body’s last fight for air and life.

  I remember my knife.

  The only advantage I have is surprise.

  I move as silently as possible to my bed. I slide my hand under the pillow. Jeff has not turned. I can smell the booze. He’s drunk. That’s in my favor.

  He is very close. The cots were set up so that they’re nearly touching. I try not to breathe.

  The knife. Where the hell is the knife? I pat around wildly, trying to be quiet. My heart is so loud I think Jeff will hear it.