Chapter2

On the second morning of the apocalypse, I found Old Grey.

He was curled up under a bench in the prison chapel, knees pressed to his chest, his gray beard caked with dust. When I approached, he woke with a start, his cloudy blue eyes going wide, his bony hands clutching a Bible—ready to use it as a brick to swing. As he crawled out from under the bench, his right knee dragged behind him; he crawled a few strokes, then paused, the knee swollen so full it stretched the leg of his trousers.

"Hey," he said first, his voice like two pieces of sandpaper rubbing together. "You a cop?"

"There are no cops anymore."

"Then you're an inmate?"

"No inmates either. Welcome to hell."

He crawled out slowly, his movements stiff. Later he told me he had been hiding in the prison for three days. After the prison closed, he would occasionally sneak in to find a place to sleep, and he happened to be here on the day the apocalypse began. For the first two days, he had stayed hidden in the maintenance tunnels, too afraid to come out. Today, hunger had finally driven him out. I said you hid for three days and no one found you? He said thirty years as a janitor taught him how to disappear in a place.

I looked at his graying hair and crooked knuckles, and it came back to me.

The security company building, the night shift at three in the morning. A nighttime janitor had pushed his mop cart down the hallway and asked if he could use the break room microwave. I said go ahead. He heated a cup of milk, sat across from me, and said young people working the night shift don't have it easy. I offered him a cup of coffee.

He was ten years older now.

"What's your name?" I asked him.

"Grey," he said. "They all call me Old Grey."

I pushed a bottle of water and a piece of bread toward him. He ate two-thirds of it and put the rest in his inner jacket pocket.

After he finished eating, he asked me: "Do you know where the underground cistern is?"

I said I knew the entrance, but the latch was rusted shut.

He stood up and motioned for me to follow. We ducked through a side door of the chapel into a narrow maintenance tunnel, past a row of rusted pipes, and finally found the cistern entrance beneath the generator room floor. The water in the tank wasn't clean, but it could be filtered. Old Grey said no one had remembered to shut the water valve when the prison closed, and plenty of water was still stored in the underground pipes. He tapped the pipes with his knuckles. "Enough for one person to drink for half a year. For two people, four months. More than that, and it gets tricky."

When he said "two people," he wasn't looking at me, and his fingers paused on the pipes.

A numbness spread from behind my ear.

A tingling sensation, like a mild electric current, spread from behind my ear across the entire auricle. The surrounding noise layered itself out. The low-frequency resonance of the pipes overhead, the rustle of the cold storage door gasket flapping in the wind, the faint sound of Old Grey's nostril hairs shifting with his breath—all the sounds rushed in at once, but they didn't tangle into chaos. Each sat on its own frequency, like a radio tuned to the right channel.

I glanced automatically at where the panel was. The gray bars hadn't moved. But the silver edge was slightly brighter than before.

I kept listening to Old Grey talk about the valves. The numbness behind my ear lasted about thirty seconds, then slowly faded. The layers of sound didn't disappear; they just receded to where I couldn't notice them—they were still there, but I no longer consciously distinguished them.

Over the next three days, Old Grey took me through every part of the prison.

Most of what he showed me were things I had already confirmed during my first survey—the cold storage, the equipment room, the supply closets. But he filled in the critical details. I had found the cold storage door three days earlier; he taught me how to use a manual wrench to free the frozen valve. I had seen the old monitors in the security room; he spent a full day fixing the backup generator—cleaning the carburetor of the diesel engine, siphoning half a tank of fuel from an old truck in the garage. The closed-circuit system didn't rely on the internet; six old monitors flickered back to life, covering the gate, the exercise yard, and a dozen angles around the outer walls.

Whenever he explained some piece of equipment, he would habitually touch his right ear. His right ear had worse hearing than his left—a boiler explosion in his younger days.

On the third evening, the camera feed switched to an exterior angle.

A figure appeared on the southeastern wall, binoculars raised, looking toward the prison's main building. About twenty meters behind him, two more figures crouched by a bush. Their posture wasn't that of fleeing survivors—survivors walked in a panic, looking around nervously. These people moved steadily.

I had Old Grey zoom in.

The figure lowered his binoculars, revealing his face. A dark blue T-shirt, close-cropped hair. He stared at the prison for a long time, then turned and spoke to the people behind him. I couldn't hear what he said, but his expression was calm, like someone inspecting a package waiting to be signed for.

It was him.

His lips moved a few times, and the three of them withdrew from the wall, disappearing into the shrubbery.

I stared at the empty stretch of wall. He knew someone was in the prison. He didn't know it was me.

Old Grey stood behind me, silent for a moment. "A friend of yours?"

"A former colleague."

He didn't press further. He switched the monitor feed to loop mode, sat down in the chair beside me. After a moment, he stood up again, pulled a portable radio from his toolbox, set it on the table, and began tuning channels. White noise diffused through the monitoring room.

"He'll be back," Old Grey said, not looking at me.

"I know."

Outside the window, the setting sun stained the prison walls the color of rust. The searchlight from the distant fire station hadn't come on yet—it always lit up at eight, burning through the night. It was still a quarter hour away.