by Hugh Howey
“Is it food?” he asked. With Shadow, it was almost always food. His companion was drawn to meals like a magnet, which Jimmy had come to find quite handy. Approaching the door, he saw the remnants of a rope looped around the handle, the years reducing it to tatters. Jimmy tried the handle and found it unlocked. He eased it open.
The room beyond was dark, none of the emergency lights like at the top of the stairwell. Jimmy fumbled for his flashlight while Shadow disappeared through the cracked door, his tail swishing into the void.
There was a startled hiss just as the flashlight came on. Jimmy paused, a boot nearly through the door, as the cone of his flashlight fell upon a face staring up at him with open and lifeless eyes. Bodies shifted against the door, and an arm flopped out against his foot.
Jimmy screamed and fell backward. He kicked at the pale and fleshy hand and called for Shadow, who came screeching out the door, fur standing on end. There was the taste of metal on Jimmy’s tongue, a rush of adrenaline as he scrambled to get the door shut. He lifted the limp arm and shoved it back inside, the clothes disintegrating at his touch, the flesh beneath whole and spongy.
Open mouths and curled fingers were the last things he saw. Piles of bodies, as fresh as the morning dead, frozen where they’d crawled over one another, hands reaching for the door.
Once it clicked shut, Jimmy began sliding tables and chairs against the door. He created a huge tangle of them, tossing more chairs on top of the pile, shivering and cursing beneath his beard while Shadow spun in circles.
“Gross, gross, gross,” he told Shadow, whose hair had not yet settled. He studied his barricade against the piles of dead and hoped it would be adequate, that he hadn’t let out too many ghosts. The remnants of old rope swayed on the door’s handle, and Jimmy thanked whomever had kept these people at bay.
“Let’s go,” he said, and Shadow swished against his leg for comfort. There was no view on the wallscreen to see, no food or tools of any use. He’d had quite enough of the Top, which suddenly felt crowded to the walls with the dead.
36
Besides food, Shadow had a nose for trouble. A nose for causing it. Jimmy woke one morning to an awful screeching sound, a pathetic and plaintive hiss spilling down the corridor. Jimmy had climbed the ladder half-asleep to find Shadow stuck near the top rung. He didn’t know how the cat had got there, and the cat didn’t know how to get down. Jimmy released the hatch over their heads and threw it aside. He watched as Shadow clawed up the metal mesh behind the ladder, his back pressed against the rungs, and scampered over the top.
Two mornings later, the same thing happened, and that’s when Jimmy decided to leave the hatch open all the time. He was sick of opening and closing as he came and went, and Shadow liked being able to explore the server room whenever he liked. There hadn’t been any fighting in a long time, and the great steel door still winked red.
Shadow loved the servers. Most times, Jimmy would find him up on server number 40, where the metal was so hot Jimmy could hardly touch. But Shadow didn’t mind. He slept up there or peered over the edge at the ground far below, watching for bugs and mice on which to pounce.
Other times, Jimmy found him standing in the corner where that man he’d shot forever ago had wasted away. Shadow liked to sniff the rust stains and touch his tongue to the grating, divining what had happened there. It was for these freedoms that the hatch remained off. And this was how, when the power went out big-time, the bad men got inside. This was how Jimmy woke up one morning with a stranger standing over his bed.
****
The outage had woken him in the middle of the night. Jimmy slept with the lights full-on, keeping the ghosts at bay. He even liked a little of the radio static to fill the room, so he couldn’t hear any whisperings. When the silence and darkness hit at once with a loud thump, Jimmy had startled awake and scrambled for his flashlight, stepping on Shadow’s tail in the process. He waited for the lights to come on, but they never did. Too tired to think what to do, he went back to sleep, both hands wrapped around his torch, Shadow curling up warily against his neck.
The noise of someone coming down the ladder was likely what stirred him later. Jimmy was dimly aware of a presence in the room. It was a sensation often felt, but this presence seemed to change the way the silence bounced around, the way even the noise of his breathing echoed. He opened his eyes to find a flashlight shining down on him, a man standing at the foot of his bed.
Jimmy screamed, and the man pounced with half a mind to silence him. A bearded snarl of yellowed teeth caught the beam of light, and then the arc of a steel rod—
There was a flash of pain in Jimmy’s shoulder. The man hauled back to hit him again with his length of pipe. Jimmy got his arms up to protect his head. The pipe cracked him on the wrist. There was a screech and a hiss by his head, and then a darting piece of black amid the shadows.
The man with the pipe screamed and dropped his flashlight, which doused itself in the bedsheets. Jimmy scrambled away, his mind unable to come to grips with a person in his home. A person in his home. The fear of years and years came true in an instant. All his precautions had loosened. All the venturing out. Slack, slack, he told himself, crawling on his hands and knees.
Shadow screeched an awful sound, the noise he made when his tail got stepped on. A howl of pain followed. Jimmy felt anger rise up and mix with fear, a potent brew. He crawled toward the corner, banged into the desk, reached for where it should be propped—
His hands settled around the gun. It’d been years since he’d fired it. Couldn’t remember if it was even loaded. But he could still swing it like a club if he had to. He cradled it against his shoulder and waved the barrel through the pitch black. Shadow screeched again. There was a thump of a small body hitting something hard. Jimmy couldn’t breathe or swallow. He couldn’t see anything but the dim glow of light rising up from the folds of his bed.
He pointed the barrel at a patch of blackness that seemed to move, and squeezed the trigger. There was a blinding flash of light from the muzzle, a roar that filled the small space to the seams. In that brief strobe flashed the searing image of a man whirling toward him. Another wild shot. Another glimpse of this stranger in Jimmy’s space, a thin man with a long beard and white eyes. And now Jimmy knew where he was, and the third shot did not zing. Its impact was lost in screams. The screams filled the darkness, and then a final shot put an end to even these.
****
Shadow’s eyes glowed beneath the desk. He peered our warily at Jimmy and his new flashlight.
“You okay?” Jimmy asked.
The cat blinked.
“Stay here,” Jimmy whispered.
He cradled the flashlight between his cheek and shoulder and checked the clip. Before he left, he nudged the man who was bleeding on his sheets. Jimmy felt a strange numbness at seeing someone down there, even dead. He listened for more intruders as he stole his way toward the ladder.
The power outage and this attack were no coincidence, he told himself. Someone had gotten the door open. They had figured the keypad or pulled a breaker. Jimmy hoped this man had done it alone. He didn’t recognize the face, but a lot of years had passed. Beards got long and turned gray. The silver coveralls hinted at someone who might know how to break in. The pain in his shoulder and wrist hinted at no friend of his.
There was no one on the ladder. Jimmy slipped the rifle over his shoulder and doused the flashlight so no one would see him coming. His palms made the softest of rings on the metal rungs. He was halfway up when he felt Shadow slithering and clacking his way up between the ladder and the wall.
Jimmy hissed at the cat to stay put, but it disappeared ahead of him. At the top of the ladder, Jimmy unslung his rifle and held it in one hand. With the other, he pressed the flashlight against his stomach and turned it on. Peeling the lens away from his coveralls a little at a time, he cast just enough glow to pick his way through the servers.
There was a noise ahead of him, Shadow or another pers
on, he couldn’t tell. Jimmy hesitated before continuing on. It took forever to cross the wide room with the dark machines like this. He could hear them still clacking, still whirring, still putting off heat. But when he got close to the door, the keypad was no longer blinking its sentinel light at him. And there was a void beyond the gleaming door—a door that stood halfway open.
More noise outside. The rustle of fabric, of a person moving. Jimmy killed the flashlight and steadied his rifle. He could taste the fear in his mouth. He wanted to call out for these people to leave him alone. He wanted to say what he had done to all those who came inside. He wanted to drop his gun and cry and beg to never have to do it again.
He poked his head out into the hall and strained to see in the darkness, hoped this other person couldn’t see him back. The hall contained nothing but the sound of two people breathing. There was this growing awareness that a dark space was shared with another.
“Hank?” someone whispered.
Jimmy turned and squeezed the trigger. There was a flash of light. The rifle kicked him in the shoulder and kicked someone else worse. He retreated into the server room and waited for screams and stomping boots. He waited what felt like forever. Something touched his boot, and Jimmy screamed. It was Shadow purring and rubbing against him.
Chancing his torch, he peered around the corner and allowed some light to dribble out. There was a form there, a person on their back. He checked the deep and dark hallways and saw nothing. “Leave me alone!” he yelled out to all the ghosts and more solid things.
Not even his echo called back.
Jimmy looked over this second man only to discover it wasn’t a man at all. It was a woman. Her eyes had thankfully fallen shut. A man and a woman coming for his food, coming to steal from him. It made Jimmy angry. And then he saw the woman’s swollen and distended belly, and got doubly angry. It wasn’t like they were hurting for food, he thought.
37
After the incident with the bad people, it was good to get away for a while. Locating the missing breaker hadn’t fixed the doors, and two days of playing with the wires hanging from the keypad had gotten him nowhere. It made a night of sound sleep impossible, even with the grate back in place. Shadow climbed to the top of the ladder at night and mewed and mewed. Jimmy thought they needed to get away and go do their favorite thing.
Sitting on the lowest of the dry landings, Jimmy watched flashes of silver dart below, watched them twist beneath and through the flooded stairs. They looked like flashlights aimed from the drowned deep, like beams pointed skyward toward him and Shadow as the two of them peered over the edge of the landing.
Shadow’s black tail swished back and forth in the air. His paws hugged the edge of the rusted steel grating, whiskers twitching. For all his consternation, however, Jimmy’s bobber remained unmoved.
“Not hungry today,” Jimmy said. He whistled a tune for the fish, a catching-fish tune, and Shadow peered up at him, a critic with an unreadable face. Jimmy’s stomach growled. “I don’t mean us,” he told Shadow. “We’re plenty hungry. I mean the fish.”
Jimmy was hungry from digging for worms all morning. They were hard to find among the overgrowth of the farms. It was hot work when the lights were on, but it kept his mind off the people he’d hurt. He’d been so consumed by that and the promise of a day fishing that he hadn’t eaten the veggies that were right there as he dug with his shovel. It was a lot of damn work, catching these fish. First, you had to catch the worms! Jimmy wondered, if the fish liked them so much, why he and Shadow didn’t save themselves the trouble and just eat worms. But when he’d held one out, the cat had looked at him like he was crazy.
“I’m not crazy,” he had assured Shadow.
He found himself insisting this more and more.
While Jimmy explained that it was the fish that weren’t hungry that day, Shadow went back to studying the darting swimmers below. Jimmy did the same. They reminded him of spilled mercury, of a thermometer he broke years back. They changed directions and moved so fast.
He grabbed his pole, lifted his bobber out of the water, and checked the hook. The worm was still on there. Good thing. He only had a few left, and the nearest dirt was a dozen flights up. He lowered the line back into the water, the ping-pong ball resting on the surface. He had learned about fishing from the Legacy. Learned how to tie knots and fix a bobber and sinker, what kind of bait to use, all these instructions that came in perfect handy. It was as if the people who wrote those books somehow knew these things would be important some day.
He watched the fish swim and wondered how they’d gotten in the water. The tanks were a bunch of levels up above the farms, and now they were empty of fish. Jimmy had checked. All he found was algae that looked awful but that made the water in the vats taste pretty good. There were cups and jugs and even the beginnings of a hose to carry the water off to other levels, a Project someone had abandoned years back. Jimmy wondered if they’d dumped the fish over the railing, and now here they were. However it’d happened, he was glad.
There were only a dozen or so of them left. They didn’t breed as fast as he could catch them. And the ones that remained were the hardest to catch. They’d watched what happens. They’d seen. They were like Jimmy in those early days, watching the people spiral up to their deaths. They knew like his mother had known that they didn’t want to go that way. So they nibbled and nibbled until the worms were gone. But sometimes they couldn’t help themselves. They’d get a taste and take a bite instead of a nibble, and then Jimmy would have them up in the air, dripping and dancing, flopping on the rusted grate until he could wrangle their slippery flesh in his fist and work the hook loose.
First, though, the waiting. Jimmy’s bobber sat motionless on the rainbow-hued water. Shadow mewed impatiently.
“Listen to you,” Jimmy said. “Two years ago, you didn’t know what a fish tasted like.”
Shadow crouched down on his belly and pawed at the air between the landing and the water as if to say, “I used to catch these all the time.”
“I’m sure you did,” Jimmy said, rolling his eyes. He watched the water, which had come up quite a ways since his first time down. The level he had rescued Shadow from was now completely gone. Fish likely lived in the room he’d found Shadow in. He peered down at his feline friend, a new thought coming to him.
“Is that what you were doing in there all that time ago?” he asked.
Shadow looked up at him with a face full of innocence.
“You devil.”
The cat licked his paw, turned a circle, and watched for the bobber to move.
It moved.
Jimmy gave the pole a yank and felt resistance, the weight of a fish on his hook. He squealed and lifted the pole and reached out over the rail to grab the line. Shadow mewed and danced and tried to help by swiping at the air and swishing his tail.
“Here, here,” Jimmy told the fish. He hauled the line up and rested the pole against the railing, reached over and grabbed more line, the flopping of the fish causing it to dig into his fingers. “Easy, now.” He pursed his lips, could never feel like he’d truly caught one of the buggers until he got them over the rail and above the grate of the landing. Sometimes they spit the hook and got the worm for free and laughed at him as they splashed back home.
“Here we go,” he told Shadow. He lowered the fish to the metal and got a boot on its tail. He hated this part. The fish looked so upset. This was when he would change his mind and wish he could throw the thing back, but Shadow was already swirling around his legs and swishing his tail. Jimmy held the fish still with his boot and dug the homemade hook out of its lip. The little barb he’d made by bending the needle back before pounding a new point made it hard to get free, but Jimmy had learned that this was the point.
“The point,” he said, laughing at his own joke.
Shadow told him to hurry up.
Jimmy tossed the hook and line over the top of the rail to get it out of the way. The fish threw its
elf against the grating a few times. It peered up at him with its wide eye, its mouth panting frantically. Jimmy reached for his knife.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “So, so sorry.”
He stuck the knife in the fish’s head to stop its pain. He looked away while he did this. So much death. Lifetimes of death. But Shadow was already acting so happy. The life dribbled out of the fish and into the water below. The handful of fish that remained darted up to gobble at the places the blood hit the water, and Jimmy wondered why they did that. There was none of this that he enjoyed, not the digging for worms, or the long hike, or the setting of hooks, or the killing, or the cleaning—but he did it anyway.
He cleaned the fish the way the Legacy showed, a slice behind the gills, and then a swipe along the bone toward the tail. Two runs of the knife like this, and he had two pieces of meat. He left the scales on, since Shadow never touched that part. Both fillets went onto a chipped plate near the stairwell.
Shadow spun in circles a few times, his belly making that thrumming noise, then began tearing at the flesh with his teeth.
Jimmy retired to the other end of the railing. He had a towel there. He wiped his hands of the foul slickness and sat down, his back against the closed doors of level one-thirty-one, and watched the cat eat. Silvery shapes darted below. The landing and all else seemed calm in the pale green glow of the emergency stairwell lights.
Before long, there wouldn’t be any fish left. Another year at this rate, and Jimmy figured he’d catch them all.
“But not the last one,” he told himself as he watched Shadow eat. Jimmy hadn’t tasted a fish yet and didn’t think he ever would. The catching of them was too much work, little of it fun, much of it disgusting. But he thought, when he came down one day with his rod and his jar of dirt and worms and saw only one fish remained, that he would leave it alone. Just the one, he thought, as he watched Shadow eat. It would be scared enough down there. No need to go yanking it out into the frightful air. Just let the poor thing be.