Third Shift - Pact

by Hugh Howey

  The lights overhead were like bright heat. They reminded him of the farms, of the time years ago that his class had gone on a trip to the Mids and planted seeds beneath those harsh lights.

  Jimmy turned to the server with the open back and fumbled for the jack inside. He hated the flashing lights, but he didn’t want to get yelled at. So he jabbed the headphone jack into the socket marked “40” until he felt a click.

  The lights stopped blinking immediately. There was a muffled voice from the headset, which lay in the bottom of the server. Jimmy ignored that. He took a step away from the machine, watching the overhead lights warily, waiting on the nice white ones to shut off again or the angry red ones to return. But everything stayed the same. The jack sat in its socket, the wire dangling, the voice in the headset distant now, unable to be heard.

  12

  Jimmy worked his way down the ladder, wondering how long it’d been since he last ate. He couldn’t remember. Breakfast before school, but that was a day ago, maybe two. Halfway down the ladder, he thought of himself as a piece of food sliding through some great metal neck. This was what a swallowed bite felt like. At the bottom of the ladder, he stood in the bowels of the silo, a hollow thing lost in a hollow thing. There would be no end to the silo’s hunger, chewing on something empty like him. They would both starve, he thought. His stomach grumbled; he needed to eat. Jimmy staggered down the dark corridor and through the silo’s guts.

  The radio on the wall continued to hiss. Jimmy turned the volume down until the spitting noise could barely be heard. His father wouldn’t be calling him ever again. He wasn’t sure how he knew this, but it was a Rule of the World.

  He entered the small apartment. There was a table big enough for four with the pages of a book scattered across it, a needle and thread coiled on top like a snake guarding its nest. Jimmy thumbed the pages and saw that the place where the pages met was being repaired. His stomach hurt, it was so empty. His mind was beginning to ache as well.

  Across the room, the ghost of his father stood and pointed out doors, told him what was behind each. Jimmy patted his chest for the key, remembered what he’d been told. “Don’t open the door for anyone,” he said out loud. He promised. His father smiled at him as Jimmy used the key to unlock the pantry. Food enough for two people for ten years, he’d said. Was that right?

  The room made a sucking sound as he cracked the pantry door, and there was the tickle of a breeze against his neck. Jimmy found the lights on the outside of the door—plus a switch that ran a noisy fan. He turned the fan off, which only reminded him of the radio. Inside the room, he found shelves bulging with cans that receding so far he had to squint to see the back wall. These were cans like he’d never seen before. He squeezed between the tight shelves and searched up and down, his stomach begging him to choose and be quick about it. “Eat, eat,” his belly growled. Jimmy said to give him a chance.

  Tomatoes and beets and squash, stuff he hated. Recipe food. He wanted food food. There were entire shelves of corn with labels like colorful sleeves of paper, not the black ink scrawled on a tin like he was used to. Jimmy grabbed one of the cans and studied it. A large man with green flesh smiled at him from the label. Tiny words like those printed in books wrapped all around. The cans of corn were identical. They made Jimmy feel out of place, like he was asleep and dreaming every bit of this.

  He kept one of the corn and found an aisle of labeled soups in red and white, grabbed one of these. Back in the apartment, he rummaged for an opener. There were drawers around the stove full of knives and forks and serving spoons. There was a cabinet with pots and lids. A bottom drawer held charcoal pencils, a spool of thread, batteries bulging with age and covered in gray powder, a child’s whistle, a screwdriver, and myriad other things.

  He found the can opener. It was rusty and appeared as if it hadn’t been used in years. But the dull cutter still sank through the soft tin when he gave it a squeeze, and the handle turned if given enough force. Jimmy worked it all the way around and cursed when the lid sank down into the soup. He fished a knife out of the drawer to lever the lid out with the tip. Food. Finally. He plopped a pot onto the stove and turned the burner on, thinking of his apartment, of his mother and father. The soup heated. Jimmy waited, stomach growling, but some part of him was dimly aware that there was nothing he could put inside himself to touch the real ache, this mysterious urge he felt every moment to scream at the top of his lungs or to collapse to the floor and cry.

  While he waited for the soup to bubble, he inspected the sheets of paper the size of small blankets hanging on one wall. It looked like they’d been hung out to dry, and he thought at first that the thick books must be made by folding up or cutting these. But the large sheets were already printed on, the drawings continuous. Jimmy ran his hands down the smooth paper and studied the details of a schematic, an arrangement of circles with fine lines inside each and labels everywhere. There were numbers over the circles. Three of them were crossed out with red ink. Each was labeled a “silo,” but that didn’t make any sense.

  Behind him, a hissing like the radio, like someone calling for him, the whisperings of ghosts. Jimmy turned from the strange drawing to find his soup spitting bubbles, dripping down the edge and sizzling on the glowing-hot burner. He left the drawing alone for now.

  13

  Days passed until they threatened to make a week, and Jimmy could glimpse how weeks might eventually become months. Outside the steel door in the upper room, the men outside were trying to get in. On the radio, they yelled and argued. Jimmy listened sometimes, but all they talked about were the dead and dying and forbidden things, like the great outside.

  Jimmy cycled through camera angles of quietude and vast emptiness. Sometimes, these still views were interrupted with bursts of activity and violence. Jimmy saw a man held down on the ground and beaten by other men. He saw a woman dragged down a hall, feet kicking, and had to turn the cameras off. His heart raced the rest of the day and into the night, and he resolved to not look at the cameras anymore. That night, alone in the bunk room with all the empty beds, he hardly slept. But when he did, he dreamt of his mother.

  The days would be like this, he thought the next morning. Each day would stretch out forever, but their counting would not take long. Their counting would run out for him. He felt it.

  He moved one of the mattresses out into the room with the computer and the radio. There was a semblance of company in that room. Angry voices and scenes of violence were better than the emptiness of the other bunks. He forgot his promise to himself and ate warm soup in front of the cameras, looking for people. He listened to their soft voices bicker on the radio. When he dreamed that night, his dreams were filled with little square views of a distant past. A younger self stood in those windows, peering back at him.

  In forays to the room above, Jimmy crept silently to the steel door and listened to men argue on the other side. They tried codes, three beeping entries at a time, followed by three angry buzzes. Jimmy rubbed the steel door and thanked it for staying shut.

  Padding away quietly, he explored the grid of machines. They whirred and clicked and blinked their flashing eyes, but they didn’t say anything. They didn’t move. Their presence made Jimmy feel even more alone, like a classroom of large boys who all ignored him. Just a handful of days like this, and Jimmy felt a new Rule of the World: Man wasn’t meant to live alone. This was what he discovered, day by day. He discovered it and just as soon forgot, for there was no one around to remind him. He spoke with the machines, instead. They clacked back at him and hissed deep in their metal throats that man wasn’t supposed to live at all.

  The voices on the radio seemed to believe this. They reported deaths and promised more of them to each other. Some of them had guns from the deputy stations. There was a man on the ninety-first who wanted to make sure everyone else knew he had a gun. Jimmy felt like telling this man about the storage facility his key had unlocked beyond the bunk room. There were racks and racks of gun
s like his father had used to kill Yani. And countless boxes of bullets. He felt like telling the entire silo that he had more guns than anyone, that he had the key to the silo, so please stay away, but something told him that these men would just try harder to reach him if he did. So Jimmy kept his secrets.

  On the sixth night of being alone, unable to sleep, Jimmy tried to make himself drowsy by flipping through the book on the desk. It was a strange read. Each page referenced other pages. What dead ends he discovered were just that: they ended in death. Accounts of all the horrible things that could happen, how to prevent them, how to mitigate inevitable disaster. Jimmy looked for an entry on finding oneself completely and utterly alone. There was nothing in the index. And then Jimmy remembered what was in all the hundreds of metal cases lining the bookshelf beside the desk. Maybe there was something in one of those books that could help him.

  He checked the small labels on the lower portion of each tin, went to the Li - Lo box for loneliness. There was a soft sigh as he cracked the tin, like a can of soup sucking at the air. Jimmy slid the book out and flipped toward the back where he thought he’d find the entry, the help on what to do.

  He found a window on the world, instead. A view of a great machine with large wheels like the wooden toy dog he’d owned as a kid. Fearsome and black with a pointy nose, the machine loomed impossibly large over the man standing in front of it. Jimmy waited for the man to move, but rubbing the view, he found it to be a picture, just like on his dad’s work ID. But a picture in bright color and such gloss that it looked to be real.

  “Locomotive,” Jimmy read. He knew these words. The first part meant “crazy.” The second part was a person’s reason for doing something. He studied this image, wondering what crazy reason someone would have of making this picture. It couldn’t be real. Jimmy flipped a handful of pages, hoping to find more on this loco motive—

  He screamed and dropped the book when he saw the next picture. Jimmy hopped around and brushed himself with both hands, waiting for the bug to disappear down his shirt or bite him. He stood on his mattress and waited for his heart to stop pounding. Turning to the books for sleep was having the opposite effect. Jimmy eyed the flopped-open tome on the ground, expecting a swarm to fly out like the pests in the farms, but nothing moved. The radio quietly hissed.

  He approached the book and flipped it over with his foot. The damn bug was a picture, the page folded over and creased where he’d dropped it. Jimmy smoothed the page, read the word “locust” out loud, and wondered just what sort of book this was supposed to be. It was nothing like the children’s books he’d grown up with, nothing like the pulp paper they taught with at school.

  Flipping the cover over, Jimmy saw that this was different from the book on the desk, which had been embossed with the word “Order.” This one was labeled “Legacy.” He flipped through it a pinch at a time, bright pictures on every page, paragraphs of words and descriptions, a vast fiction of impossible deeds and impossible things, all in a single book.

  Not in a single book, he told himself. Jimmy glanced up at the massive shelves bulging with metal tins, each one labeled and arranged in alphabetical order. He searched again for the locomotive, a machine on wheels that dwarfed a grown man. He found the entry and shuffled back to his mattress and his twisted tangle of sheets. A week of solitude was drawing to a close, but there was no chance that Jimmy would be getting any sleep. Not for a very long while.

  Silo 1

  14

  Donald waited in the comm room for his first briefing with the Head of 18. To pass the time, he twisted the knobs and dials that allowed him to cycle through that silo’s camera feeds. From a single seat—like a throne but with torn upholstery and squeaky wheels—he had a view of all a world’s residents. He could nudge their fates from a distance if he liked. He could end them all with the press of a button. While he lived on and on, freezing and thawing, these mortals went through routines, lived and died, unaware that he even existed.

  “It’s like the afterlife,” he muttered.

  The operator at the next station turned and regarded him silently, and Donald realized he’d spoken aloud. He faced the man, whose bushy black hair looked like it’d last been combed a century ago. “It’s just that … it’s like a view from the heavens,” he explained, indicating the monitor.

  “It’s a view of something,” the operator agreed. He took another bite of his sandwich. On his screen, one woman seemed to be yelling at another, a finger jabbed in the other woman’s face. It was a sitcom without the laugh track.

  Donald worked on keeping his mouth shut. But it really did seem like an afterlife of sorts. He dialed in the cafeteria on 18 and watched its people huddle around a wallscreen. It was a small crowd. They gazed out at the lifeless hills, perhaps awaiting their departed cleaner’s return, perhaps silently dreaming about what lay beyond those quiet crests. Donald wanted to tell them that she wouldn’t be coming back, that there was nothing beyond that rise, even though he secretly shared their dreams. He longed to send up one of the drones to look, but Eren had told him the drones weren’t for sightseeing—they were for dropping bombs. They had a limited range, he said. The air out there would tear them to shreds. Donald wanted to show Eren his hand, mottled and pink, and tell him that he’d been out on that hill and back. He wanted to ask if the air outside was really so bad.

  Hope. That’s what this was. Dangerous hope. He watched the people watch a wallscreen, feeling a kinship with them. This was how the gods of old got in trouble, how they ended up smitten with mortals and tangled in their affairs. Donald laughed to himself. He thought of this cleaner with her two-inch folder and how he might’ve intervened if he’d had the chance. He might’ve given her a gift of life if he were able. Apollo, doting on Daphne.

  The comm officer glanced over at Donald’s monitor, that view of the wallscreen, and Donald felt himself being studied. He switched to a different camera. It was the hallway of what looked like a school. Lockers lined either side. A child stood on her tiptoes and opened one of the upper ones, pulled out a small bag, turned and seemed to say something to someone off-camera. Life going on as usual.

  “The call’s coming through now,” the operator behind them said. The man with the sandwich put it away and sat forward. He brushed the crumbs off his chest and switched the soap opera scene to a room full of black cabinets. Donald grabbed a pair of headphones and pulled the two folders off the desk. The one on the top was two inches thick. It was about his doomed mortal, the missing cleaner. Beneath that was a much thinner folder with a potential shadow’s name on it. A man’s voice came through his headphones.

  “Hello?”

  Donald glanced up at his monitor. A figure stood behind one of the black cabinets. He was pudgy and short, unless it was the distortion from the camera lens.

  “Report,” Donald said. He flipped open the folder marked Lukas. He knew from his last shift that the system would make his voice sound flat, make all their voices sound the same.

  “I picked out a shadow as you requested, sir. A good kid. He’s done work on the servers before, so his access has already been vetted.”

  How meek this man. Donald reckoned he would feel the same way, knowing his world could be smote at the press of a button. Fear like that puts a man at odds with his ego.

  The operator beside Donald leaned over and peeled back the top page in the folder for him. He tapped his finger on something a few lines down. Donald scanned the report.

  “You looked at Mr. Kyle as a possible replacement two years ago.” Donald glanced up to watch the man behind the comm server wipe the back of his neck.

  “That’s right,” the Head of 18 said. “We didn’t think he was ready.”

  “Your office filed a report on Mr. Kyle as a possible gazer. Says here he’s logged a few hundred hours in front of the wallscreen. What’s changed your mind?”

  “That was a preliminary report, sir. It came from another … potential shadow. A bit overeager, a gentlema
n we found more suited for the security team. I assure you that Mr. Kyle does not dream of the outside. He only goes up at night—” The man cleared his throat, seemed to hesitate. “To look at the stars, sir.”

  “The stars.”

  “That’s right.”

  Donald glanced over at the operator beside him, who polished off his sandwich. The operator shrugged. The silo Head broke the silence.

  “He’s the best man for the job, sir. I knew his father. Stern sonofabitch. You know what they say about the treads and the rails, sir.”

  Donald had no idea what they said about the treads and the rails. It was nothing but stair analogies from these silos. He was reminded of how city people used to make him feel, growing up in Savannah. He wondered what this Bernard would say if the man ever saw an elevator. It would be like magic. The thought nearly elicited a chuckle.

  “Your choice of shadow has been approved,” Donald said. “Get him on the Legacy as soon as possible.”

  “He’s studying right now, sir.”

  “Good. Now, what’s the latest on this uprising?” Donald felt himself hurrying along, performing rote tasks so he could get back to his more interesting studies. This truly had become a job.

  The silo Head glanced back toward the camera. This mortal knew damn well where the eyes of gods lay hidden. “Mechanical is holed up pretty tight,” he said. “They put up a fight on their retreat down, but we routed them good. There’s a … bit of a barricade, but we should be through it any time now.”

  The operator leaned forward and grabbed Donald’s attention. He pointed two fingers at his eyes, then at one of the blank screens on the top row, indicating one of the cameras that had gone out during the uprising. Donald knew what he was getting at.