In the Event of a Failed Cleaning:
Prepare for War.
48
Juliette followed Solo through the hole in the server-room floor. There was a long ladder there and a passageway that led to thirty-five, a part of thirty-five she suspected was not accessible from the stairwell. Solo confirmed this as they ducked through the narrow passageway and followed a twisting and brightly lit corridor. A blockage seemed to have come unstuck from the man’s throat, releasing a lone-stricken torrent. He talked about the servers above them, saying things that made little sense to Juliette, until the passageway opened into a cluttered room.
“My home,” Solo said, spreading his hands. There was a mattress on the floor in one corner, a tangled mess of sheets and pillows trailing from it. A makeshift kitchen had been arranged across two shelving units: jugs of water, canned food, empty jars and boxes. The place was a wreck and smelled foul, but Juliette figured Solo couldn’t see or smell any of that. There was a wall of shelves on the other side of the room stocked with metal canisters the size of large ratchet sets, some of them partially open.
“You live here alone?” Juliette asked. “Is there no one else?” She couldn’t help but hear the thin hope in her voice.
Solo shook his head.
“What about further down?” Juliette inspected her wound. The bleeding had almost stopped.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Sometimes I do. I’ll find a tomato missing, but I figure it’s the rats.” He stared at the corner of the room. “Can’t catch them all,” he said. “More and more of them—”
“Sometimes you think there’s more of you, though? More survivors?” She wished he would focus.
“Yeah.” He rubbed his beard, looked around the room like there was something he should have been doing for her, something you offered guests. “I find things moved sometimes. Find things left out. The grow lights left on. Then I remember I did them.”
He laughed to himself. It was the first natural thing she’d seen him do, and Jules figured he’d been doing a lot of it over the years. You laughed either to keep yourself sane or because you’d given up on staying that way. Either way, you laughed.
“Thought the knife in the door was something I did. Then I found the pipe. Wondered if it was left behind by a really, really big rat.”
Juliette smiled. “I’m no rat,” she said. She adjusted her tablecloth, patted her head, and wondered what had happened to her other scrap of cloth.
Solo seemed to consider this.
“So how many years has it been?” she asked.
“Thirty-four,” he said, no pause.
“Thirty-four years? Since you’ve been alone?”
He nodded, and the floor seemed to fall away from her. Her head spun with the concept of that much time with no other person around.
“How old are you?” she asked. He didn’t seem all that much older than her.
“Fifty,” he said. “Next month, I’m pretty sure.” He smiled. “This is fun, talking.” He pointed around the room. “I talk to things sometimes, and whistle.” He looked straight at her. “I’m a good whistler.”
Juliette realized she probably had only just been born when whatever happened here took place. “How exactly have you survived all these years?” she asked.
“I dunno. Didn’t set out to survive for years. Tried to last hours. They stack up. I eat. I sleep. And I . . .” He looked away, went to one of the shelves and sorted through some cans, many of them empty. He found one with the lid hinged open, no label, and held it out toward her. “Bean?” he asked.
Her impulse was to decline, but the eager look on his poor face made it impossible. “Sure,” she said, and she realized how hungry she was. She could still taste the brackish water from earlier, the tang of stomach acid, the unripe tomato. He stepped closer, and she dug into the wet juice in the can and came out with a raw green bean. She popped it into her mouth and chewed.
“And I poop,” he said bashfully while she was swallowing. “Not pretty.” He shook his head and fished for a bean. “I’m by myself, so I just go in apartment bathrooms until I can’t stand the smell.”
“In apartments?” Juliette asked.
Solo looked for a place to set down the beans. He finally did, on the floor, among a small pile of other garbage and bachelor debris.
“Nothing flushes. No water. I’m by myself.” He looked embarrassed.
“Since you were sixteen,” Juliette said, having done the math. “What happened here thirty-four years ago?”
He lifted his arms. “What always happens. People go crazy. It only needs to happen once.” He smiled. “We get no credit for being sane, do we? I get no credit. Even from me. From myself. I hold it together and hold it together and I make it another day, another year, and there’s no reward. Nothing great about me being normal. About not being crazy.” He frowned. “Then you have one bad day, and you worry for yourself, you know? It only takes one.”
He suddenly sat down on the floor, crossed his legs, and twisted the fabric of his overalls where they bunched up at his knees. “Our silo had one bad day. Was all it took.” He looked up at Juliette. “No credit for all the years before that. Nope. You wanna sit?”
He gestured at the floor. Again, she couldn’t say no. She sat down, away from the reeking bed, and rested her back against the wall. There was so much to digest.
“How did you survive?” she asked. “That bad day, I mean. And since.”
She immediately regretted asking. It wasn’t important to know. But she felt some need, maybe to glimpse what awaited her, maybe because she feared that surviving in this place could be worse than dying on the outside.
“Staying scared,” he said. “My dad’s caster was the head of IT. Of this place.” He nodded. “My dad was a big shadow. Knew about these rooms, one of maybe two or three who did. In just the first few minutes of fighting, he showed me this place, gave me his keys. He made a diversion, and suddenly I became the only one who knew about this place.” He looked down at his lap a moment, then back up. Juliette realized why he seemed so much younger. It wasn’t just the fear, the shyness, that made him seem that way—it was in his eyes. He was locked in the perpetual terror of his teenage ordeal. His body was simply growing old around the frozen husk of a frightened little boy.
He licked his lips. “None of them made it, did they? The ones who got out?” Solo searched her face for answers. She could feel the dire hope leaking out of his pores.
“No,” she said sadly, remembering what it felt like to wade through them, to crawl over them. It felt like weeks ago rather than days.
“So you saw them out there? Dead?”
She nodded.
He dipped his chin. “The view didn’t stay on for long. I only snuck up once in the early days. There was still a lot of fighting going on. As time went by, I snuck out more often and further. I found a lot of the mess they made. But I haven’t found a body in”—he thought carefully—“maybe twenty years?”
“So there were others in here for a while?”
He pointed toward the ceiling. “Sometimes they would come in here. With the servers. And fight. They fought everywhere. Got worse as it went along, you know? Fight over food, fight over women, fight over fighting.” He twisted at the waist and pointed back through another door. “These rooms are like a silo in a silo. Made to last ten years. But it lasts longer if you’re solo.” He smiled.