Second Shift - Order

•24•

Mission’s throat itched and his eyes stung, the smoke growing heavier and the stench stronger as he approached Lower Dispatch. At least the pursuit from above seemed to have faltered, perhaps from the gap in the rails that had claimed a life.

Cam was gone, of that he felt certain. How many others? A twinge of guilt accompanied the sick thought that the fallen would have to be carried up to the farms in plastic bags. Someone would have to do that job, and it wouldn’t be a pretty one.

He shook this thought away as he got within a level of Dispatch. Tears streamed down his face and mixed with the sweat and grime of the long day’s descent. He bore bad news. A shower and clean clothes would do little to alleviate the weariness he felt, but there would be protection here, help in clearing up the confusion about the blast. He hurried down the last half flight and remembered, perhaps due to the rising ash that reminded him of a note he’d torn to confetti, the reason he’d been chasing after Cam in the first place.

Rodny. His friend was locked away in IT, and his plea for help had been lost in the din and confusion of the explosion.

The explosion. Cam. The package. The delivery.

Mission wobbled and clutched the railing for balance. He thought of the ridiculous fee for the delivery, a fee that perhaps was never meant to be paid. He gathered himself and hurried on, wondering what in the depths was going on, what kind of trouble his friend might be in, and how to help him. How, even, to get to him.

The air grew thick and it burned to breathe as he arrived at Dispatch. A small crowd huddled on the stairway. They peered across the landing and into the open doors of one-twenty-two. Mission coughed into his fist as he pushed his way through the gawkers. Had the wreckage from above landed here? Everything seemed intact. Two buckets lay on their sides near the door, and a gray fire hose snaked over the railing and trailed inside. A blanket of smoke clung to the ceiling; it trailed out and up the wall of the stairwell shaft like water from a giant faucet defying gravity.

Mission pulled his ‘chief up over his nose, confused. The smoke was coming from inside. He breathed in through his mouth, the fabric pressing against his lips and lessening the sting in his throat. Dark shapes moved inside the hallway. He unsnapped the strap that held his knife in place and crossed the threshold, keeping low to stay away from the smoke.

Eli, one of the senior dispatchers, met him in the hall. He had a basket of scorched paper in his hands, a mournful look on his face. The floors were everywhere wet and squished with the traffic from deeper inside. It was dark, but cones of light danced around like fretful things.

“Look what you’ve done,” Eli cried to Mission. “Look what you’ve done.”

Mission hurried past him and toward the flashlights. The smoke was thicker, the water on the floor deeper. Bits of pulp worth saving floated on the surface. He passed one of the dormitories, the sorting hall, the front offices.

Lily, an elder porter, ran by in slaps and spray, recognizable only at the last moment as the beam from her flashlight briefly lit her face. There was someone lying in the water, pressed up against the wall. As Mission approached and a passing light played over the form, he saw that they weren’t lying there at all. It was Hackett, one of the few dispatchers who treated the young shadows with respect and never seemed to take delight in their burdens. The glimpse Mission got revealed half a face recognizable, the other half a red blister. Deathdays. Lottery numbers flashed in Mission’s vision.

“Porter! Get over here.”

It was Morgan’s voice. The old man’s cough joined a chorus of others. The hallway was full of ripples and waves, splashes and hacks, smoke and commands. Mission hurried toward the familiar silhouette, his eyes burning.

“Sir? It’s Mission. The explosion—” He pointed toward the ceiling.

“I know my own shadows, boy.” A light was trained on Mission’s eyes, a physical lash of sorts. “Get in here and give these lads a hand.”

The smell of cooked beans and burnt and wet paper was overpowering. There was a hint of fuel behind it all, a smell Mission knew from the Down Deep and its generators. He had lugged a massive filter once that reeked of this. And there was something else: the smell of the bazaar during a pig roast, a foul and unpleasant odor.

The water in the main hall was deep. It lapped up over Mission’s halfboots and filled them with muck. Drawers of files were being emptied into buckets. An empty crate was shoved into his hands, cones of light swirling in the mist, shapes moving and kicking up splashes, his nose burning and running, tears on his cheeks unbidden.

“Here, here,” someone said, urging him forward. They warned him not to touch the filing cabinet. Piles of paper went into the crate, heavier than they should be. Mission didn’t understand the rush. The fire was out. The walls were black where the flames must’ve licked them with their orange tongues, and the grow plots along the far wall where rows of beans had run up tall trestles were all ash. The trestles stood like black fingers, those that stood at all.

The porter beside him, Mission couldn’t see who, cursed the farmers before leaving with a load. Amanda was there at the filing cabinet, her ‘chief wrapped around her hand, managing the drawers as they were emptied. The crate filled up fast. Mission spotted someone emptying the wall safe of its old books as he turned back toward the hallway. There was a body in the corner covered in a sheet. Nobody was in as much of a hurry to remove that.

He followed the others toward the landing, but they did not go all the way out. The emergency lights in the dorm room were on, mattresses stacked up in the corner. Carter, Lyn, and Jocelyn were spreading the files out on the springs. Mission unloaded his crate and went back for another load. He asked Amanda what had happened, if this was retribution of some sort.

“They came for the beans,” she said. She used her ‘chief to wrestle with another drawer. “They came for the beans, and they burned it all.”

Mission took in the wide swath of damage. He recalled how the stairwell had trembled during the blast, still saw the bodies falling and screaming to their deaths. Something was going on. The months of small violences had ramped up like a switch had been flipped. He wasn’t convinced that this was about the beans at all.

“So what do we do now?” Carter asked. He was a powerful porter, in his early thirties where men find their strength and have yet to lose their joints, but he looked absolutely beat. His hair clung to his forehead in wet clumps. There were black smears on his face, and you could no longer tell what color his ‘chief had been. All signs that he had been present for and had fought back the fire.

“Now we burn their crops,” someone suggested.

“The crops we eat?”

“Just the upper farms. They’re the ones that did this.”

“We don’t know who did this,” Morgan said.

Mission caught his old caster’s eye. “In the storehouse,” he said. “I saw— Was that—?”

Morgan nodded. “Hendricks. Aye.”

Carter slapped the wall and barked profanities. “I’ll kill ‘em!” he yelled.

“So you’re…” Mission wanted to say Lower Chief, but it was too soon for that to make sense.

“Aye,” Morgan said, and Mission could tell it made little sense to him as well.

“People will be carrying whatever they like for a few days,” Joel said. He coughed into his palm while Lyn looked on with concern. “We’ll appear weak if we don’t strike back.”

Mission had other concerns besides appearing weak. The people above thought a porter had attacked them. And now this with the farmers, so far from where they’d been hit the night before. Porters were the nearest thing to a roaming sentry, and they were being knocked out by someone, purposefully he thought. There were all those boys being recruited into IT. It wasn’t computers they were being hired to fix. It was something else.

“I need to get home,” Mission said. It was a slip. He meant to say Up Top. He worked to unknot his ‘chief. The thing reeked of smoke, as did his hands and his coveralls. He would need to find another color to don. He needed to get in touch with his friends.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Morgan asked. His former caster seemed ready to say something else as Mission tugged the ‘chief away. Instead, the old man’s eyes fell to the bright red whelp around Mission’s neck, the stain of a rope’s embrace.

“I don’t think this is about us at all,” he said. “I think this is bigger than that. A friend of mine’s in trouble. He’s at the heart of all that’s going wrong. I think something bad is going to happen to him or that he might know something. They won’t let him talk to anyone.”

“Rodny?” Lyn asked. She and Joel had been two years ahead of him, but they both knew he and Rodny from the Nest.

He nodded. “And Cam is dead,” he told the others. He explained what’d happened on his way down, the blast, the people chasing him, the gap in the rails. Hands covered gaping mouths. Someone whispered Cam’s name in disbelief. “I don’t think anyone cares that we know,” Mission added. “I think that’s the point. Everyone’s supposed to be angry. As angry as possible.”

“I need time to think,” Morgan said. “To plan.”

“I don’t know that there is much time,” Mission said. He told them about the new hires at IT. He told Morgan about seeing Bradley there, about the young porter applying for a different job.

“What do we do?” Lyn asked, looking to Joel and the others.

“We take it easy,” Morgan said, but he didn’t seem so sure. The confidence he displayed as a senior porter and caster seemed shaken now that he was a chief. It was how knees got wobbly when that last bit of weight went onto a heavy load.

“I can’t stay down here,” Mission said flatly. “You can have every vacation chit I own, but I’ve got to get up-top. I don’t know how, but I have to.”

•25•

Before he went anywhere, Mission needed to get in touch with friends he could trust, anyone who might be able to help, the old gang from the Nest. As Morgan urged everyone on the landing back to work, Mission slunk down the dark and smoky hallway toward the sorting room, which had a computer he might use. Lyn and Joel followed, more eager to help Rodny than to clean up after the fire.

They checked the monitor at the sorting counter and saw that the computer was down, possibly from the power outage the night before. Mission remembered all those people with their broken computers earlier that morning at IT and wondered if there would be a working machine anywhere on five levels. Since he couldn’t send a wire, he picked up the hard line to the other Dispatch offices to see if they could get a message out for him.

He tried Central, first. Lyn stood with him at the counter, her flashlight illuminating the dials and highlighting the haze of smoke in the room. Joel splashed among the shelves, moving the reusable sorting crates on the bottom higher up to keep them from getting wet. There was no response from Central.

“Maybe the fire got the radio, too,” she whispered.

Mission didn’t think so. The power light was on and the thing was making that crackling sound when he squeezed the button. He heard Morgan splash past in the hallway, yelling and complaining that his workforce was disappearing. Lyn cupped her hand over her flashlight. “Something is going on at Central,” he told Lyn. He had a bad feeling.

The second waystation he tried up-top finally won a response. “Who’s this?” someone asked with none of the formality nor the jargon radio operators were known for.

“This is Mission. Who’s this?”

“Mission? You’re in big trouble, man.”

Mission glanced at Lyn. “Who is this?” he asked.

“This is Robbie. They left me alone up here, man. I haven’t heard from anybody. But everyone’s looking for you. What’s going on down there?”

Joel stopped with the crates and trained his flashlight on the counter.

“Everyone’s looking for me?” Mission asked.

“You and Cam, a few of the others. There was some kind of fight at Central. Were you there for that? I can’t get word from anyone!”

Mission told him to calm down, which seemed an unfair thing to expect when he could hardly think straight himself. “Robbie, I need you to get in touch with some friends of mine. Can you send out wires? Something’s wrong with our computers down here.”

“No, ours are all kind of sideways. We’ve been having to use the terminal up at the mayor’s office.”

“The mayor’s office? Okay, I need you to send a couple of wires, then. You got something to write with?”

“Wait,” Robbie said. “These are official wires, right? If not, I don’t have the authority—”

“Damnit, Robbie, this is important! Grab something to write with. I’ll pay you back. They can dock me for it if they want.” Mission glanced up at Lyn, who was shaking her head in disbelief. He coughed into his fist, the smoke tickling his throat. They should be moving, not explaining this to someone else.

“All right, all right,” Robbie said. “Who’m I sending this to? And you owe me for this piece of paper because it’s all I have to write on.”

Mission let go of the transmit button to curse the kid. Joel laughed from behind the sorting stacks. Composing himself a moment, Mission thought about who would be most likely to get a wire and send it along to the others. He ended up giving Robbie three names, then told him what to write. He would have his friends meet him at the Nest, or meet each other if he couldn’t make it there himself. The Nest had to be safe. Nobody would mess with the school or the Crow. Once the gang was together, they could figure out what to do. Maybe the Crow would know what to do. The hardest part for Mission would be figuring out how to join them.

“You got all that?” he asked Robbie, when the boy didn’t reply.

“Yeah, yeah, man. I think you’re gonna be over the character limit, though. This better come out of your pay.”

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Mission said, careful to release the mic first.

“Now what?” Lyn asked as he hung up the receiver. She played her flashlight around the sorting room, the beam catching in the smoke and dancing across the ripples in the water. Joel’s boots had thrown the wet film into chaos. He had gotten most of the sorting crates moved up so they wouldn’t get wet.

“I need coveralls,” Mission said. He splashed around the counter and joined Joel by the shelves, began looking through the nearest crates. “They’re looking for me, so I’m gonna need new colors if I’m getting up there.”

“We,” Lyn told him. “We need new colors. If you’re going to the Nest, I’m coming with you.”

“Me too,” Joel said.

“I appreciate that,” Mission said, “but company might make it more dangerous. We’d be more conspicuous.”

“Yeah, but they’re looking for you,” Lyn said.

“Hey, we have a ton of these new whites.” Joel pulled the lid off a sorting bin. “But they’ll just make us stand out, won’t they?”

“Whites?” Mission headed over to see what Joel was talking about.

“Yeah. For Security. We’ve been moving a ton of these lately. Came down from Garment a few days ago. No idea why they made up so many.”

Mission checked the coveralls. The ones on top were covered in soot, more gray than white. There were dozens of them stacked in the reusable sorting crate. He remembered all the new hires. It was like they wanted half the silo to be dressed in white, the other half fighting one another. It made no sense. Unless the goal was simply to get everyone dead.

“Dead,” Mission said out loud.

The others swung their flashlights at him. Mission was already splashing down the shelves to another crate. “I’ve got a better idea,” he called out. A coughing fit seized him as he found the right bin. He and Cam had been given one of these just a few days ago. He reached in and pulled out a bag. “How would you two like to make some money?”

Joel and Lyn hurried over to see what he’d found, and Mission held up one of the heavy plastic bags with the bright silver zipper and the hauling straps.

“Three-hundred and eighty-four chits to divide between you,” he promised. “Every chit I own. I just need you for one last tandem.”

The two porters played their lights across the object in his hands. It was a black bag. A black bag made for hauls such as these.

•26•

The ground was too wet to roll it out proper, so Mission used the main counter, instead. He promised Lyn and Joel that he would transfer every chit in his account as soon as they got to a working computer. Joel told him to save his breath. They were just as eager as he was to get to higher levels. The bag, with all of death’s taboo, would afford protection to them all.

Lyn worked the bright zipper loose, and Joel peeled the flaps back. Mission sat on the counter and worked the laces on his boots free. They were soaked, his socks as well. He shucked them off to keep the water out of the bag and to save the weight. Always a porter, thinking about weight. Lyn handed him one of the Security coveralls, an extra precaution. He wiggled out of his porter blues and tugged the whites on while Lyn looked the other way. His knife, he strapped back to his waist.

Outside, flashlights danced in the main hall, the other porters still recovering from the damage wrought by fire and flood. Mission coughed into his palm and snapped up the coveralls, which were at least a size too big for him. “You guys sure you’re up for this?” he asked.

Lyn helped him slide his feet into the bag and worked the inside straps around his ankles. Never before had a corpse made it so easy. “Are you sure?” she asked, cinching the straps tight.

Mission laughed, his stomach fluttering with nerves. He stretched out and let them work the top straps under his shoulders. It felt surreal to be placing himself inside one of the bags. He had never heard of anyone getting in one willingly.

“Have you both eaten?” he asked.

“We’ll be fine,” Joel said. “Stop worrying.”

“If it gets late—”

“Lie your head back,” Lyn told him. She began working the zipper from his feet. “And don’t talk unless we tell you it’s okay. You’ll have people jumping the rails out there if they hear you or see you move.”

“We’ll take a break every twenty or so,” Joel added. “We’ll bring you into a restroom with us. You can stretch and get some water.”

Mission lifted a hand out to stop the zipper from passing his stomach. “Don’t mention water,” he said. He listened to the sounds of lapping ripples against the counter, the squish of the other two porters moving about in their boots. He begged his bladder to ignore the cues.

“Get your hand inside,” Lyn told him. She worked the zipper up over his chest to his chin, hesitated, then kissed the pads of her fingers and touched his forehead the same way he’d seen countless loved ones and priests bless the dead. “May your steps rise to the heavens,” she whispered.

Her wan smile caught in the spill of Joel’s flashlight before the bag was sealed up over Mission’s face.

“Or at least until Upper Dispatch,” Joel added.

Getting out of the lower waystation proved simple. Their fellow porters made way for the dead, maybe thinking Roker was the one in the bag. Several hands reached out and touched Mission through the plastic, showing respect, and he fought not to flinch nor cough. It felt as though the smoke was trapped in the bag with him. It pervaded his hair and skin, despite the brand new coveralls.

Joel took the lead, which meant Mission’s shoulders were pressed against his. He faced upward, his body swaying in time to their steps, the straps beneath his armpits pulling the opposite way he was used to. It grew more comfortable as they hit the stairs and began the long spiral up. His feet were lowered until the blood no longer pooled in his head. Lyn carried her half of his weight from several steps below.

The dark and quiet overtook him as they left the chaos of the waystation. The two porters didn’t talk as some tandems might. They saved their lungs and kept their thoughts to themselves. Joel set an aggressive pace. Mission could almost hear Morgan’s metronome ticking, that silver arm that rocked back and forth with the time. Mission was that arm, now. He could sense the pace in his own gentle swaying, his body suspended in space above the steel treads.

As the steps passed, the intolerableness grew. It wasn’t the difficulty breathing, for he had been shadowed well to manage his lungs on a long climb. And he could handle the stuffiness with the plastic pressed against his face. Nor was it the dark; his favorite hour for porting had always been the dim-time, being alone with his thoughts, stirring while others slept. It wasn’t the stench of plastic and smoke, the tickle in his throat, or the pain of the straps.

It took several spirals around the central post to put his finger on what discomforted him so, what caused a hollow pit to form in his stomach, a likewise gaping void in his chest, that mix of feelings he got when he had free time and nothing to fill it with. His entire body felt like his legs sometimes did when they needed to twitch but he forced them still. It was an anxiety, and one that went beyond fearing for his friends, beyond the death of Cam, beyond the terror of a silo crumbling down around him. He placed the sensation as he listened to Joel’s heavy and steady breathing, as he felt in his motionless legs the work and agony of his friends’, as he endured doing nothing while they hauled his burdens. This was what Mission felt knotting his gut above all else: It was the act of lying still. Of being carried.

He was a burden. A burden.

The straps pinched his shoulders until his arms fell numb, and he swayed in the darkness, the sounds of boots on steel, of breathing, as he was lifted toward the heavens. Too great a burden. This was his weakness, his inability to be carried.

Mission felt like sobbing—but the tears would not come. He thought of his mother carrying him for all those months, no one to tell and no one to support her. Not until his father found out, and by then it was too late. He wondered how long his father had hated the bulge in her belly, how long he had wanted to cut Mission out like some cancer. Until it was too late and this was all his dad was left with, a tumor to raise, a reminder. Mission had never asked to be carried like that. And he had never wanted to be ported by anyone ever again.

Two years ago to the day. That was the last time he had felt this, this sense of being a burden to all. Two years since he had proved too much for even a rope to bear.

It was a poor knot he had tied. Morgan would’ve been disgusted by the effort. But his hands had been trembling and he had fought to see the knot through a film of tears. When it failed, the knot didn’t come free so much as slide, and it left his neck afire and bleeding. His great regret was having jumped from the lower stairwell in Mechanical, the rope looped over the pipes above. If he had gone from a landing, the slipping knot wouldn’t have mattered. The fall would’ve claimed him.

Now he was too scared to try again. He was as scared of trying again as he was of being a burden to another. Was that why he avoided seeing Allie, because she longed to care for him? To help support him? Was that why he ran away from home? Why he pined for a girl that he knew deep down cared more for another?

The intolerableness grew until Mission began to hate the boy stuffed in that bag with him. A boy too scared to live, too frightened to die.

The tears finally came. His arms were pinned, so he couldn’t wipe them away. He thought of his mother, about whom he could only piece together a few details. But he knew this of her: She hadn’t been afraid of life or death. She had embraced both in an act that he knew he would never make worthy.

More tears. And there weren’t enough chits in the silo to pay back the debt of being carried by others. The silo spun slowly around him; the steps sank one at a time; and Mission endured the suffering of this self-discovery. He labored not to sob, seeing himself for the first time in that utter darkness, knowing his soul more fully in that deathly ritual of being ported to his grave, this sad awakening on his birthday.