Season 03 - Episode 06

‘inwards eventually he’

Silence.

Deep, thick, endless silence.

In every direction.

Forever.

Ak is trudging down a bare, barren corridor, his footsteps uneven from one black boot and one brown shoe, a bundle of plastic slung over one shoulder. The silence around him is thick and pressed close. He approaches a door on the left and mutters to himself.

He tries the door and finds it locked. His mutters turn to hums as he stiffly twists to lay down his bundle and open it, spreading out the plastic and the objects within with reverence. There's a bottle, wrapped so many times in plastic as to be almost as wide as it long, several labelless food tins and a series of ugly, twisted pieces of metal.

He kneels, resting back on his heels, hands on thighs, inspecting these objects. After a while he selects a piece of metal with a protruding, flattened edge and turns to the door. With audible effort, he attempts to wedge the piece in between the door and the frame.

“Opening the door,” he sings to himself as he works, in a strange little voice. “Opening the door. Here we go, here we go. Opening the door.”

After a while, Ak begins to huff, abandoning his song and raising a knee to plant a foot on the floor, leaning in to force the metal inwards. Eventually he manages it and then freezes, drawing his hands away from the metal with a fearful slowness, eyes begging it not to fall.

He takes up another piece, this one with a long, thin spike and begins to try and wedge it into the lock. Several more efforts of straining effort follow, culminating in the first piece of metal dropping to the floor. The resulting clang echoes for several seconds.

Ak sags to sit cross legged, panting, then snatches the second piece of metal from the lock angrily but resists the urge to throw it. He rests and sulks then starts all over again. After what feels like hours, Ak hears the self-satisfied little click of the lock and the door swings inwards. For a few seconds he simply sits, breathing and nodding to himself. Then he gathers up his bundle and searches the room.

He's been doing this for almost a month now and almost starved to death before he worked out how to open the locked doors. Even since then though, the majority of rooms he searches yield nothing. The whole place has been meticulously stripped.

The boots he'd found and then later the shoes, appeared to have been left behind only because one of each was ruined. When he realised the good boot and the good shoe not only fit him but were for opposite feet, he actually cried.

He also cried the first time he found a stash of food. Most of it had long since rotted, but there were a few tin cans in there. Before this place had been cleared, people had been hiding food but he hadn't thought about that until later.

Instead he'd spent days working out how to open the cans with ragged shards of metal torn and prised from fixtures and fittings. Once opened, the past-its-best soup inside that first can had tasted better than the most expensive meal he'd ever eaten.

No matter how far he travels in any direction, he cannot find a way up. Eventually, on every floor, he encounters steel shutters, boxing him in. The only way is down and so down he goes. Every floor also includes a pile of long dead bodies but he knows the smell now and can usually avoid them without having to see them.

This latest room yields a new bottle, a little less cracked than the one he already has. He takes his time, tightly wrapping strips torn from his plastic sheet around the new bottle. Then, with infinite care, transfers the last of the rin he collected from the nearest Scapes from the old bottle to the new.

He leaves the old bottle on the floor in the corridor then gathers everything up and sets off once more. Above him, unseen and unheard, a tiny metal creature bearing a tiny red light scuttles from one light fitting to the next, watching Ak's every move. The pair move along the corridor and eventually turn the corner at the far end.

Neither notice that the old bottle Ak left on the floor has gone.

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