“Too late for what?” Jimmy asked.
There was a click, followed by a steady tone. The light above the socket marked “40” went out.
“Hello?”
Jimmy waited.
“Hello?”
He searched inside the box for some button to press, some way to make the voices come back. There were sockets with fifty numbers above them. Why only fifty levels? He glanced at the server behind him and wondered if there were other comm stations to handle the rest of the silo. This one must be for the Up Top. There would be one for the Mids and another for the Deep. He unplugged the jack, and the tone in the headset fell silent.
Jimmy wondered if he could call another level. Maybe the school. He ran his finger down the row looking for “18,” and noticed that “17” was missing. There was no jack for “17.” He puzzled over this as the overhead lights began to flash once more. Jimmy glanced at level 40’s socket, but it remained dark. It was the top level calling. The light over the number “1” blinked on and off. The cabinet was back to buzzing, the lights to flashing. Jimmy glanced at the jack in his hand, lined it up with the socket, and pressed in until he heard a click.
“Hello?” he said.
“What the hell is going on over there?” a voice demanded.
Jimmy shrunk within himself. His father had yelled at him like this before, but not for a long time. He suddenly needed to pee again. He didn’t answer because he didn’t know what to say.
“Is this Jerry? Or Russ?”
Russ was his dad. Jerry was his dad’s boss. Jimmy realized he shouldn’t be playing with these things.
“This is Jimmy,” he said.
“Who?”
“Jimmy. The guy on level forty said they were too late. I told him what happened.”
“Too late?” There was some distant talking. Jimmy jiggled the cord in the socket. He was doing something wrong. “How did you get in there?” the man asked.
“My dad let me in,” he said, the truth frightened out of him.
“We’re shutting you down,” the voice said. “Shut them down right now.”
Jimmy didn’t know what to do. There was a hiss somewhere. He thought it was from the headset until he noticed the white steam coming from the vents overhead. A fog descended toward him. Jimmy waved his hand in front of his face, expecting the sting of smoke like he’d smelled from a fire once as a kid, but the steam didn’t smell like anything. It just tasted like a dry spoon in his mouth. Like metal.
“—on my goddamn shift—” the person in his headset said.
Jimmy coughed. He tried to say something back, but he had swallowed wrong. The steam stopped leaking from the vents.
“That did it,” the man on the other line muttered.
Before Jimmy could say anything else, the various winking lights inside the box went dark. There was a click in the headset, and then it too fell silent. He pulled the headset off just as a louder “thunk” rang out in the ceiling and the lights in the room turned off. The whirring and clicking of the tall servers around him wound down. There was utter dark and complete silence. Jimmy couldn’t see his own nose, couldn’t see his hand as he waved it in front of his face. He thought he’d gone blind, wondered if this was what being dead was like, but then he heard his pulse, a thump-thump, thump-thump in his temples.
Jimmy felt a sob catch in his throat. He wanted his mother and father. He wanted his backpack, which he’d left behind like an idiot. For a long while, he sat there, waiting for someone to come to him, for an idea to form on what he should do next. He thought of the ladder nearby and the room below. As he began to crawl toward that hole, patting the grating ahead of him so he wouldn’t fall down the long drop, the clunking in the ceiling came back. There was a blinding flash as the lights overhead wavered, shimmered, blinked on and off several times, then burned steady.
Jimmy froze. The red and angry lights went to flashing again. He went back to the box and looked inside. It was the light over “40” going on and off like mad. He thought about answering it, seeing what these people were so angry about, but maybe the power was a warning. Maybe he’d said something wrong.
The lights overhead were like bright heat. They reminded him of the farms, of the time years ago that his class had gone on a trip to the Mids and planted seeds beneath those harsh lights.
Jimmy turned to the server with the open back and fumbled for the jack inside. He hated the flashing lights, but he didn’t want to get yelled at. So he jabbed the headphone jack into the socket marked “40” until he felt a click.
The lights stopped blinking immediately. There was a muffled voice from the headset, which lay in the bottom of the server. Jimmy ignored that. He took a step away from the machine, watching the overhead lights warily, waiting on the nice white ones to shut off again or the angry red ones to return. But everything stayed the same. The jack sat in its socket, the wire dangling, the voice in the headset distant now, unable to be heard.
•12•
Jimmy worked his way down the ladder, wondering how long it’d been since he last ate. He couldn’t remember. Breakfast before school, but that was a day ago, maybe two. Halfway down the ladder, he thought of himself as a piece of food sliding through some great metal neck. This was what a swallowed bite felt like. At the bottom of the ladder, he stood in the bowels of the silo, a hollow thing lost in a hollow thing. There would be no end to the silo’s hunger, chewing on something empty like him. They would both starve, he thought. His stomach grumbled; he needed to eat. Jimmy staggered down the dark corridor and through the silo’s guts.
The radio on the wall continued to hiss. Jimmy turned the volume down until the spitting noise could barely be heard. His father wouldn’t be calling him ever again. He wasn’t sure how he knew this, but it was a Rule of the World.
He entered the small apartment. There was a table big enough for four with the pages of a book scattered across it, a needle and thread coiled on top like a snake guarding its nest. Jimmy thumbed the pages and saw that the place where the pages met was being repaired. His stomach hurt, it was so empty. His mind was beginning to ache as well.
Across the room, the ghost of his father stood and pointed out doors, told him what was behind each. Jimmy patted his chest for the key, remembered what he’d been told. “Don’t open the door for anyone,” he said out loud. He promised. His father smiled at him as Jimmy used the key to unlock the pantry. Food enough for two people for ten years, he’d said. Was that right?
The room made a sucking sound as he cracked the pantry door, and there was the tickle of a breeze against his neck. Jimmy found the lights on the outside of the door—plus a switch that ran a noisy fan. He turned the fan off, which only reminded him of the radio. Inside the room, he found shelves bulging with cans that receding so far he had to squint to see the back wall. These were cans like he’d never seen before. He squeezed between the tight shelves and searched up and down, his stomach begging him to choose and be quick about it. “Eat, eat,” his belly growled. Jimmy said to give him a chance.
Tomatoes and beets and squash, stuff he hated. Recipe food. He wanted
He kept one of the corn and found an aisle of labeled soups in red and white, grabbed one of these. Back in the apartment, he rummaged for an opener. There were drawers around the stove full of knives and forks and serving spoons. There was a cabinet with pots and lids. A bottom drawer held charcoal pencils, a spool of thread, batteries bulging with age and covered in gray powder, a child’s whistle, a screwdriver, and myriad other things.
He found the can opener. It was rusty and appeared as if it hadn’t been used in years. But the dull cutter still sank through the soft tin when he gave it a squeeze, and the handle turned if given enough force. Jimmy worked it
