New to the story? Start here: Memorial Day Chapter 1: Welcome to Bright Hill

Previous chapters: 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 – At a Macro Level

The hasty plan was still hasty, but it was sneaking up on being an actual plan, as opposed to a thought said in a fancy accent.

He pulled the balaclava down so it covered his eyes, which is normally how one avoids wearing a balaclava. It bunched up around his mouth and chin and was immediately uncomfortable.  He closed his eyes gently, not clamping them shut.  Just closed peacefully.

He opened the door to the fighting room and stepped through it.

It was exceptionally disorienting.  The complete lack of any visual reference whatsoever made him feel like he was struggling to even walk.

He knew humans could see far better in the dark than they thought they could.  He’d learned how to navigate terrain by starlight during a new moon.  By starlight.  But vision is dependent on the tiny clues the brain is very good at latching on to.  Even in a dark room, there’s almost always something.  The glow of a self-illuminating watch face, or moonlight diffused by clouds, coming in a window in another room and through a doorway.  In absolute terms there is an embarrassment of light around everyone at all times of the day or night.

With your eyes shut under a balaclava there’s none of that, he realized.

He crept through the fighting room, aware of the flanking wall but not having cared enough about the room to intuit where it was relative to the apartment’s door.  He felt the sump under his toe and shuffled carefully around it until he felt the end of the wall.

He knew where the keypad was.  Typing his code wasn’t particularly challenging, it just took concentration.  The maglock slammed open and reverberated off the bare concrete.

The wheel was easy enough to find, very tactile.  The hatch opened just like he expected it to.

He wasn’t certain how high the sill was, so he stepped over it like he was going over a waist-height hurdle.  He was sure the video of this was going on the annual blooper reel, he thought mid-step.  Balanced on one leg, the other awkwardly suspended in the air as he tried not to trip over the sill, he felt his way over it and into the vestibule.

Closing and locking the hatch was more or less routine, just slow.  The keypad was pure hardware; once he had his hands on it he knew where the buttons were and it wasn’t difficult to press the right ones with some effort.

He had planned to stop and listen before he left the fighting room, which seemed like a good idea at the time.  He hadn’t accounted for the noise of the hatch, and it seemed anticlimactic to stand there in the fatal funnel of the open hatch, blindfolded, and listen.

But he did it anyway once he was firmly in the anteroom.  He stood as still as he could, breathing as little as he could, and listened.  He didn’t know if the thing even made a noise.  If it even could.  What are you expecting to hear?  He asked himself.  Footsteps?  Talking?  Animal noises?  Weird scraping sounds?

Standing still, trying to listen over his breathing and his ever-present tinnitus, he felt a brief wave of disorientation.  Like he was moving, but he knew his arms and legs were still.  He lifted his chin and that felt normal enough after a moment. 

What he heard was nothing, only the background hum of the environmental systems.  Not even a drip from the hose spigot on the wall, which still wasn’t leaking.

The blind walk through the anteroom was agonizingly slow.  There were things to trip on here, and they were there mostly out of laziness and only partly from necessity.  He could have hung up the hose last time, but he didn’t, and he justified it by saying it needed to be there and ready for use.

He had an entire conversation with himself as he carefully crossed the long, narrow room.  He knew someone who had a personal productivity philosophy, and it was Never Put Something Off.  If it needs to be done, and you have the means and the opportunity, you do it.

Sounds great, he thought.  Noble.  Super-moto.  It’s also how you end up painting your siding at twenty-two hundred on a Sunday.

The metal stairs in there had a handrail on both sides, because they were built to comply with industrial safety standards.  It made the ascent easier.  He still hadn’t heard anything, and it wasn’t eerily quiet, it was just quiet.

He hurdled carefully over the sill of the outer hatch, shut it behind him, and locked it.

He stood at the bottom of the cement stairwell, having committed to a regimented pause to listen and orient himself.  He thought it was a good idea to get a feel for the space since he was missing every single visual clue that might contribute to his situational awareness.  He didn’t spend enough time down here, in the interstitial areas, to intrinsically know what was normal and what wasn’t.

He continued to not hear anything.  Anything of note, at least.  There was nothing unnatural about it.  He heard himself breathing, heard his pulse in his left ear, heard his tinnitus.

He was beginning to wonder if he should even expect to hear anything.  And from that, he began to wonder if expecting a noise at all was a cognitive trap, a trick of psychology to try to fit the…thing…into a comfortable, physics-based reality.  Intellectually he knew better.  That was first-year stuff.  It was tempting, though—a reflex, or something like it.

There were no handrails on the lower stairs, the old ones.  He kept the fingers of his left hand in contact with the wall as he felt his way up.  His footsteps, though he was treading very lightly and slowly, sounded painfully loud.

He never thought about how noisy a person inside this stairwell was.  He never cared about being quiet in here.  His mind had apparently edited out the booming of boots or sneakers in the winding vertical shaft, bouncing off every wall all the way up and all the way back down like a reverb tank.

As he slowly ascended, that led him from Why should I expect to hear anything? To Why am I trying to be quiet?

But that, he concluded after only a few seconds, was perfectly justifiable.

Humans were unpredictable at the micro-scale, he believed.  You absolutely could not predict a human’s behavior with any kind of useful certainty, except inside some very general and categorical bounds.  The further from the norm the stimulus was, the less predictable they became, as far as he could tell.  Point a rifle at one person and get mocking laughter, he thought*.  Point it at another and they have a religious reckoning.*

But humans in crisis at a macro level, he felt, followed patterns.  A big enough crisis strips everyone’s composure away no matter how strong they are as individuals.  Systemic paralysis at upper echelons.  Mass hysteria.  Real, nihilistic, visceral panic in the streets.  Desperation.  But then acceptance, adaptation.

That was his personal thesis, anyway.

He thought societies were more resilient than they gave themselves credit for.  He figured there could have been a nuclear war in the Seventies, five hundred million people dead, and by now people would still be getting up in the morning and eating breakfast and going to work.  Humans, he thought, just had a way of…existing that was hard to see when you looked at them up close.

He came to the security gate.  The one in the upper stairwell that led into the house’s basement.