Shadows

by Peter Cawdron

  She could kill him. All she had to do was squeeze the trigger. He was no more than ten feet away with his back to her. She could end this now. All it would take is a little more pressure on the curved steel trigger.

  Her finger tightened on the trigger, slowly building pressure as she held her arms out before her with her elbows locked. When the trigger finally relented to her gentle squeeze, the shot rang out and her arms flew up with the recoil.

  The bullet struck its mark, following her aim and crashing through the control panel. The LED screen went black.

  Hammond swung around and she fired a second time. Once again she struck the junction box. Sparks flew. Susan had no idea how the silo's automated systems operated, but she seriously doubted circuit boards could work with lead slugs shattering their delicate wiring.

  “Drop it,” she cried, lowering her aim and pointing her revolver at the center of his chest. Smoke drifted from the barrel of her gun.

  Hammond winced. He let go of the pistol grip, but his index finger remained inside the trigger guard, causing the revolver to swing around and point at the ground without dropping to the metal grating.

  “I said drop it!” she repeated, yelling at him, surprising herself with the vehemence of her demand. Her finger tightened on the trigger of her gun.

  The revolver slipped from his finger, bouncing as it clattered off the metal grate.

  “What's the matter, little girl? Can't kill someone in cold blood?”

  “No,” she said. This was the first time she'd replied to him. Up until now she'd ignored his taunts. Deep down, she knew it was a mistake to engage in conversation because it would only play in his favor.

  “It takes guts to squeeze the trigger and end a life,” he said, inching toward her. His hair was wild, blood streaked and matted. Crimson blood seeped from his lip into his grey beard. He'd been shot in the upper chest, near his left shoulder. Deep red stains marred his white coveralls.

  “It would be easy to kill you,” she said, backing away from him, wanting to keep some distance between them. “Far too easy.”

  “So what are you going to do, Missy?”

  Susan felt her heart in her throat. She could barely speak, but she had to. In the depths of her mind, she felt he had to understand. “If you die, you'll never know what's really out there, you'll never know how wrong you were. The worst punishment I can think of is for you to live, to understand that through all this you were wrong, that you willingly maintained a lie. There's no greater punishment than to live with remorse.”

  “You're pathetic,” Hammond said, sneering from behind his full beard. Blood dripped from his mouth, staining the white, matted hair hiding his jawline. “I heard your little speech on the landing the other day. You don't get it, do you? Your type never does. You don't have the conviction to do whatever it takes to win. Don't you know? Someone always has to die for an ideal to live.”

  Susan stepped back, keeping her gun trained on him. Her boots caught on the loose wiring she'd dragged from between the servers, causing her to stumble backwards.

  Hammond lunged at her, knocking the gun from her hands. He grabbed at the front of her coveralls and charged, picking her up off the ground, surprising her with his strength. He ran, building up speed as he thundered down the walkway before slamming her into the steel wall, knocking the breath out of her.

  Susan slumped to the ground, clutching at the back of her head. Blood seeped through her straggly hair.

  Hammond stepped back, towering over her as he said, “Don’t you see? Ideals outlive us all. For this ideal to live, you must die.”

  Susan turned toward Charlie, helpless and stunned by the blow to her head. Charlie was crawling across the metal grates, past the fire extinguisher, trying to get to her, but he couldn't help. He couldn't even get to his feet. He'd lost so much blood. With all his might, he raised himself up on his trembling arms, but there was nothing he could do to take on Hammond and he fell back to the floor.

  Outside, Susan could hear Jules yelling over the sound of a welding torch cutting away at the door. Smoke drifted within the room.

  “Hang in there!” Jules cried.

  “Too late,” Hammond said bending over and grabbing at Susan's throat.

  Susan fought to pull his fingers away from her neck, but his hands were like a steel vise, clamping down over her windpipe. His fingernails dug into her throat as she choked, gasping for air. She struck out with her hands, smacking his face, trying to scratch at his eyes and force him to retreat. Susan lashed out with her legs, but to no effect. Hammond fought to hold her still as she thrashed around, slowly weakening beneath his iron grip.

  Dots appeared before her eyes. Oxygen starvation caused her head to throb as her arms fell limp.

  An explosion of white gas erupted from beside her. The freezing cold gas caught Hammond on the face, causing him to yell and jump back, releasing her. Charlie kept his hand firmly around the handle of the fire extinguisher. White clouds of gas billowed through the air, but their initial effect on Hammond had already worn off. He staggered backwards through the mist, rubbing his eyes and swearing.

  Susan struggled to her feet, gasping for air.

  A dark shadow loomed through the white haze.

  A light frosting of ice clung to the side of Hammond's beard. He sprang forward out of the billowing white cloud as Susan ducked, avoiding a fist coming out of the mist. She grabbed the fire extinguisher, wrenching it from Charlie's feeble hand and swung it up with all her might, catching Hammond on the side of the head.

  Hammond staggered under the force of the blow, reaching out for the wall to steady himself.

  “This is for Barney,” she cried, wielding the fire extinguisher in two hands and striking him on the chest, thrusting hard and aiming for his bleeding wound. She caught him against the wall. Her blow thundered into his ribs.

  Hammond rocked backwards, his feet shuffling beneath him as he fought not to fall.

  “This is for Charlie,” she yelled, winding up with the fire extinguisher and catching him on the shoulder with a glancing blow that deflected up and clipped his head.

  She’d put so much force into swinging the heavy, metal fire extinguisher that it was difficult to arrest the motion once she’d struck Hammond. Susan was aware Hammond could come back at her with vengeance. She had to take advantage of whatever edge she had during those fleeting seconds.

  “And this,” she screamed, readying herself as she brought the fire extinguisher back around again. “This is for me.”

  Her final blow pinned him against one of the servers. It was a clumsy swing, but she connected with his upper shoulder, smashing him against one of the dark server towers. The sound of his collar bone breaking and sheet metal crumpling was sickening to hear.

  Hammond collapsed on the grates lining the floor.

  Wisps of gas drifted through the air, dissipating and disappearing from sight.

  Hammond groaned.

  Susan was enraged. She stood before him with every muscle in her body flexed. Veins bulged in her neck. With her teeth bared, she snarled, consumed with anger, yelling at him incoherently. As a porter, she clocked almost forty thousand stairs a month, hauling hundreds of pounds up and down the silo every day. Now, every fiber of her being stood poised to unleash her fury upon him if he so much as thought about getting up.

  Behind her dark eyes there was a primal, visceral instinct more animal than human, prepared to do whatever it took to survive. Hammond was right, and she knew it. There were ideals worth fighting for, worth killing or dying for if need be, and in that moment she would have killed him without blinking.

  She towered over him as he had once stood over her. The fire extinguisher in her hand felt light, as though she could throw it across the room like an empty rucksack. With tense muscles and clenched fists, she fought to hold herself back. The smallest twitch, the slight twist of his head, or the spasm of his feet, each of these seemingly involuntary motions had her on the verge of be
ating him to death. Her breathing was rushed, almost panting through flared nostrils.

  A hand rested gently on her shoulder.

  Jules stood beside her, she had one hand on the fire extinguisher, the other on Susan’s shoulder, saying, “It's OK. It's over.”

  It took Susan a few seconds for those words to register. The fire surging through her veins would not be so easily quenched. She dared to relax, to stand down, and her muscles almost gave out. The fire extinguisher fell to the metal grate. Jules put her arm around her waist, catching her and preventing her from falling.

  “Hey,” Jules said, taking her weight. “We did it. We won.”

  “Charlie,” Susan cried, turning and staggering over to him. She fell to her knees, struggling not to collapse next to him.

  “Look at you,” he managed, reaching out and brushing her bloodied hair to one side. Susan tried not to cry, but she couldn’t help herself. Tears streamed from her eyes. An overwhelming sense of release washed over her and she wept, sobbing into her hands.

  “Not bad for a couple of shadows,” he said, gently taking her hand and pulling her fingers away from her face. Was it shock? Was it shame? Was it the exhaustion and relief of surviving? She wasn’t sure, but having him there to comfort her soothed her troubled soul.

  She smiled in reply, saying, “Not bad at all.”

  Someone was tending to Charlie's wound, applying a large, sterile pad. They began winding a compression bandage around his shoulder to stop the bleeding. Susan didn’t recognize the man, but he was wearing white IT coveralls and kneeling in the deep, crimson blood covering the grating.

  “You’re not getting that stain out,” she said to the man.

  “Least of my worries,” the man replied. “I’m just glad we got to you guys in time.”

  “I don’t understand,” Susan said as Jules crouched down beside them. The server room was full of IT staff in white overalls. They were still carrying rifles and handguns but they were ignoring Susan, Charlie and Juliette. Their focus was on Hammond, but not as though they were guarding him, it was as though they were arresting him.

  “It was the mayor,” Jules said. “When Hammond shot her, they knew. He may have held an iron grip on a few, but everyone loved Mayor Johns. When Hammond murdered her, they knew they were on the wrong side of the silo and the fighting came to an eerie halt. They just stood there, gathered around her crumpled body in disbelief. Someone tried to revive her, but it was too late.”

  “And Charlotte?” Susan asked.

  “Charlotte’s fine. She was hit in the arm. But what about you?”

  Jules pulled back Susan’s hair, looking at her throat with concern.

  “I’m fine,” Susan insisted, but her voice sounded hoarse, deeper than usual.

  A couple of the younger IT workers pulled Hammond to his feet, not so much helping him as dragging him away. He winced in agony and protested, yelling, "Get your hands off me, you damn shadow."

  The shadows, though, would not be deterred. They no longer felt threatened or bullied by him. The spell had been broken. Susan caught glimpses of Hammond being led around the back of the server room so that he didn't pass near them.

  “Shadows,” Hammond continued to mumble as he was led away with his arms bound behind his back. His head hung low, his shoulders were lopsided and he walked with a limp as he mumbled, “Damn the shadows.”

  Epilogue

  The sun shone in a clear blue sky. Birds flittered through the air, chasing tiny insects. Susan hadn’t seen any of the brilliant, colorful birds she’d admired in the books below IT, but even the subtle browns and blues of the swallows were fascinating to her. She doubted she’d ever tire of seeing their streamlined form darting back and forth through the sky.

  She rested her hand on her swollen belly. Susan was six months pregnant and life had never felt so good.

  Charlie sat at an outdoor table in the shadow of an oak tree, talking with Jules and a few others about how to rescue the occupants of another silo. The general consensus had been to wait until they had established a working community beyond the dust storm before rescuing anyone else. Without basic constructs like markets and housing an influx of thousands of people was a logistical nightmare.

  In the year since they'd escaped Silo Two, a lot had changed. There were seven villages now. Porters no longer climbed stairs, they walked the grassy hills. A band of engineers had rigged a turbine in the river, harvesting electricity like the farmers picked fields.

  Susan and Charlie still lived in a tent, but it was home, their home. The lottery for children had been replaced with a lottery for housing, where the community would band together to build a new home every fortnight. Their number would come up, Susan had no doubt about that, so she was in no rush.

  Charlie had found a telescope in the storage silo and set it up outside their tent. Most nights, the teens would come to hear him talk about the stars and line up for a brief glimpse of Saturn and her rings, or of the Orion Nebula. As stargazing meant extinguishing all lights, teen couples took full advantage of the dark. Some nights, Susan doubted they saw anything beyond the stars in each other's eyes.

  Lisa came running up to her, cutting through a meadow dotted in wild flowers.

  “Hey,” Susan said, joining her old porting buddy in a warm embrace. “How are you?”

  “Never been better,” Lisa said excitedly. “They're accepting applications for shadows. I've been picked.”

  “Are you sure you want to do that?” Susan asked, stepping out of the sun into the shade of the supply silo that dominated the plain. The villages had been built around the silo, making that the central point for commerce and trade.

  “Why not?”

  “It's dangerous,” Susan replied, knowing the term shadow no longer applied to an apprentice. These days, the term was used to describe those advance scouts that would slip unseen into the various silos to assess their viability for rescue. It was important to understand the politics and dynamics within each silo, as they were all so different, and the need to transition an entire society to living beyond the dust was a delicate process.

  “If you can do it, I can too,” Lisa said.

  “Well, in my case it was hardly a choice,” Susan replied.

  “Anyway, gotta go,” Lisa added kissing Susan on the cheek. “Gotta get to training.”

  “You take care of yourself,” Susan cried after her as Lisa jogged away with a gait that still reminded her of the great stairs.

  There was quite a discussion going on over at the table, so Susan wandered over, hoping she wasn't intruding but intensely curious about the plans to liberate another silo.

  Sheriff Cann was pointing at a map that showed the various levels within the silo along with sewage lines, water pipes and power cables.

  Hammond scratched his bald head, saying, “I'm thinking a less direct approach to IT is going to be better.”

  Susan couldn't get used to him without his beard. Hammond had lost weight since his days as the head of IT. With his head shaved and no facial hair, he looked twenty years younger. These days, he never let his hair grow more than a fraction of an inch before shaving it. For him, short hair must have represented a break with the past, she figured.

  “Have you got the plans for level thirty-three as well as thirty-four?” he asked.

  Charlotte sorted through a series of schematics and pulled out two floor-plans, handing them to Jules.

  Jules laid the plans next to each other on the table, smoothing out the wrinkles and placing a weight at the edge to stop the gentle, cool breeze from lifting them.

  “There's three feet of reinforced concrete,” Charlotte said. “I don't see what we can do from thirty-three to get to IT on thirty-four.”

  “There,” Hammond said, looking at Charlotte as he tapped the edge of the schematic for the floor above IT. “You're brother might have been pretty sharp at designing these bunkers, but it's the additional renovations he didn't know about that will give us an ed
ge.”

  Bunkers, Susan hadn't heard the silos called that before, but she liked that. It was a nice touch, she thought, coming from a man that had lived and breathed every aspect of life underground.

  “You see, the problem is the server room,” Hammond continued. “They had to use a raised floor for the wiring, and then there was the hidden level. The builders focused on making room beneath their feet, but that meant they lost head-height. They had to work fire suppression systems and air conditioning ducts into the ceiling so they carved it out. That section of the slab can't be more than a foot thick, at best. I've been up in the crawl space. I could see light seeping in around the pipes from the floor above.”

  “I see where you're going with this,” Jules said, looking at the floor-plan for thirty-three. “This storage room is directly above the server room.”

  Hammond looked at her, grinning. She smiled at him, saying, “You want to blow the floor with mining charges, don't you?”

  “Absolutely,” Hammond said. “In a confined space like that, the blast will be magnified.”

  “Just don't stand in front of the door,” Charlotte said with a smile.

  Sheriff Cann added, “We're still going to have to figure out how to disarm IT and take the head of IT without igniting a firestorm.”

  “Yes,” Hammond agreed. “But this way, we hold all the cards. The blast will destroy most of the servers. All we have to do is drop down through the roof and disable the suicide panel. That effectively sidelines IT as a danger to the silo.”

  Charlotte added, “And they'll have no idea what's happening. This will come out of the blue. It won't be like your silo where you were already armed and expecting an assault.”

  “I've got it,” Jules said. “First, we sabotage the water supply on thirty-three, send a flood down to thirty-four.”

  “They'll call for mechanical,” Hammond said, smiling at her.

  “Exactly,” Jules replied. “They're going to welcome us onto the floor, so we're in place before the charges blow and shut down the whole level without too much fight.”