The stench of his own waste greeted him as he moved between the tall towers. That wasn’t how you were supposed to greet someone, he thought. The black boxes radiated an awful heat, which only made the smell worse.
He stood in front of the great steel door and hesitated. Jimmy’s world had been shrinking every day. First he had been comfortable on these two levels, the room with the black machines and the labyrinth beneath. And then he’d only been comfortable below. And then even the dark passageway and the tall ladder had frightened him. And soon, he had limited himself to the back room with all the beds and the storerooms with their funny smells, until the only place he felt safe was on his makeshift cot by the computer desk, the sound of the radio crackling in the background.
And now he stood before that door his father had dragged him through, the place where he’d killed three men, and he thought about his world expanding.
His palms were damp as he reached for the keypad. A part of him feared the air outside would be toxic, but he was probably breathing the same air, and people had lived for years out there, talking now and then on the radio. He keyed in the first two digits, level twelve, then thought about the next two. Eighteen. Jimmy imagined going home and getting some different clothes, using the bathroom in a toilet. He pictured his mother sitting on his parents’ bed, waiting for him. He saw her lying on her back, arms crossed, nothing but bones.
His hand trembled as he reached for the 1 and hit the 4 instead. He wiped his hands on his thighs and waited for the keypad to time out with a buzz. “There’s no one on the other side,” he told himself. “No one. I’m alone. I’m alone.”
Somehow, this comforted him.
He entered the two digits again for school, and then the digits of his home.
The keypad beeped. The door began to make noises. And Jimmy Parker took a step back. He thought of school and his friends, wondered if any of them were still alive. If anyone was still alive. He hooked his finger under the strap of his rifle and pulled it over his head, tucked it against his shoulder. The door clanked free. All he had to do was pull.
82
There were signs of life and death waiting for him in the hall. A charred ring on the tile and a scatter of ash marked the corpse of an old fire. The outside of the steel door was lined with scratches and marked with dents. The latter reminded him of his misses during Kick the Can, the ineffectual kiss of bullet against solid steel. Right by his feet, Jimmy noticed a stain on the floor—a patch of dappled brown—and remembered a man dying there. Jimmy looked away from these signs of the living and the dying and stepped into the hall.
As he began to pull the door shut, something made him hesitate. Jimmy wondered if perhaps his code wouldn’t work from the outside. What if the door locked and he could never get back in? He checked the keypad and saw the gouges around its steel plate where someone had tried to prise it off the wall. He was reminded how desperately so many others had wanted in over the years. Remembering this made him feel crazy for wanting out.
Before he could worry further, he shut the steel door and his heart sank a little as the gears whirred and the locks slid into the wall. There was a hollow thunk, the sound of awful finality.
Jimmy rushed to the keypad, his chest pounding in his throat, the feeling of men running down all three hallways to get him, blood-curdling screams and bludgeoning weapons held high over their heads—
He entered the code, and the door whirred open. Pushing on the handle, he took a few deep breaths of home . . . and nearly gagged on the smell of his own waste warmed by the hot servers.
There was no one running down the halls. He needed a new can opener. He needed to find a toilet that worked. He needed overalls that weren’t worn to tatters. He needed to breathe and find another stash of canned food and water.
Jimmy reluctantly closed the door again. And even though he had just tested the keypad, the fear that he would never get back inside returned. The gears would be worn out. The code would only work from the outside once per day, once per year. A part of him knew—the obsessive part of him knew—that he could check the code a hundred times and still worry it wouldn’t work the very next. He could check forever and never be satisfied. His pulse pounded in his ears as he tore himself from the door.
The hallway was brightly lit. Jimmy kept his rifle against his arm and slid silently past ransacked offices. Everything was quiet except for the buzzing of one light fixture on its last leg and the flutter of a piece of paper on a desk beneath a blowing vent. The security station was unmanned. Jimmy crawled over the gate, remembering Yani, imagining the stairwell outside crowded with people, a man in a cleaning suit barging out and wading into the masses, but when he opened the door and peered outside, the landing was empty.
It was also dim. Only the green emergency lights were on. Jimmy shut the door slowly so that the rusty hinges would groan rather than squeal. There was an object on the grating by his feet. Jimmy nudged it with his boot, a white cylinder the length of his forearm with knobby ends. A bone. He recognized it from the jumble of a man who had wasted away by the servers, dragged close to his piles of shit.
Jimmy felt with keen surety that his own bones would be exposed someday. Perhaps this day. He would never make it back inside his sturdy little home beneath the servers. And this frightened him less than it should have. The heady rush of being out in the open, the cool air and the green glow of the stairwell, even the remnants of another human being, were a sudden and welcome relief from the claustrophobia of being imprisoned. What had once been his pen—the floors and levels of the silo—was now the great outside. Here was a land of infinite death and of hopeful opportunity.
83
He had no great plan, no real direction, but the tug was upward. His flashlight was running out of juice, so he knew to explore the levels cautiously. Groping in an apartment, he fumbled for a toilet, relieved himself the way God intended, and was disheartened by the lack of a flush. The sink didn’t run either. Neither did the wash nozzle beside the toilet, which left him using a bedsheet in perfect darkness.
He started up. There was a general store on nineteen, just below his home. He would check there for batteries, though he feared most useful things would have been consumed by now. The garment district would have overalls, though. He felt sure of that. A plan was forming.
Until a vibration in the steps altered it.
Jimmy stopped and listened to the clang of footsteps. They were coming from above. He could see the next landing jutting off overhead, one turn around the central post. It was nearer than the landing below. So he ran, rifle clattering against the jugs tied to his makeshift backpack, boots clomping awkwardly on the treads, both fearful and relieved not to be alone.
He yanked the doors open on the next landing and pulled them to, leaving a small crack. Pressing his cheek against the door, he peered through the gap, listening. The clanging grew louder and louder. Jimmy held his breath. A figure flew by, hand squeaking along the railing, and then another figure close behind, shouting threats. Both were little more than blurs. He remained in the darkness at the end of a strange and silent hall until the noise faded and he could feel things creeping across the tile toward him, hands with claws reaching through the inky black to tangle up in his wild and long hair, and Jimmy found himself back on the landing in the dull green glow of emergency lights, panting and not knowing what to believe.
He was alone, one way or the other. Even if people survived around him, the only company one found was the kind that chased you or killed you.