Free Silo 49: Going Dark by Ann Christy Page B

overtaken by the urge but not committed to the act.
    Graham was sweating and his hands were raw and sore from the ropes as he unloaded the last of the produce from the lift bag on his level. He thanked the farmer for his help and watched as the younger man almost skipped away, the metal of the stairs ringing with his rapid descent and quick, easy steps. Graham almost felt envious for a moment but that feeling was replaced with a hope that the young man would one day be as old as he and living in a silo where there was life and noise and not just sadness and impending death.
    He pulled his attention away from the energy of youth and back to the problem at hand. He needed to get the radio out of the bread bag discreetly before the others came for their portions. He decided the best way to do this without raising a spectacle was to just do it. He pulled his own empty pack out of the messy pile by the double doors, opened the bread bag and fished out his radio. He gathered all the other pieces that went with it, along with a hefty helping of crumbs, and put those in his pack too. He kept his back to the landing and hoped that it looked like he was dividing the food up just as he was supposed to.
    Then he started the sorting and filling of everyone else's sack in earnest. It was mostly guess work since he never knew how many sacks would be out on the landing or how big that person might be. Each sack was an old produce bag and marked somehow with a name and compartment number. Everyone could put one out no matter if they were a little child or a full size adult and the food would be divided the same. There just wasn't enough manpower to get too fussy with the details and this seemed to work best. Graham knew that other levels, ones still fairly thick with residents, had more problems and tighter controls on food portions, but his level had no need of that.
    There was no meat in this load but there was an entire plastic bin full of hard boiled eggs, two eggs packed per hard shell case. No wonder the load had been so heavy. He put a couple of those in each sack as well as a few rounds of bread and a smaller sack of breakfast grains with dried fruit bits. He estimated the oranges, tomatoes and other vegetables and put those in the sacks too. It wasn't a small amount this time and he was surprised that he had actually been able to get those lifts up so many levels.
    Even using the pulleys that vastly increased the amount of weight one person could lift, he wasn't a young man and this was a lot of food. It was enough to eat for several days if people didn't gorge, and then someone else would make the trip and do it all over again. Individuals did go to the farms or aquaponics or anywhere else they wanted to get more or different foodstuffs, but this main lift was what they had come up with to replace the convenience of the cafeteria, however inadequately.
    Once the bags were filled and he checked the sacks one more time, he grabbed one of the two metal bars that hung suspended from a pipe near the ceiling. He rapidly smacked it against a metal plate attached to the pipe and winced at the loud clanging that echoed all around him. It created a clang very different from the dinging of the bells they had installed on the lifts, and it would echo along the pipe as it ran the length of the hall in the residential area. It was a surprisingly effective method for rough communication. He let the bar go and it rang discordantly as it swung against its mate a few times before it eventually came to rest. Whoever brought the lift was also responsible for ensuring the bags were distributed. Graham hoped that a lot of people would answer his clanging call so he wouldn't have to walk around the level knocking and dropping off sacks as he went.
    He waited and tried not to think about the radio in his sack. People did make their way out of the interior to gather their sacks, some grabbing sacks for other people or families and showing the notes that gave