Third Shift: Pact

by Hugh Howey

Page 20

 

  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 itself 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.

  Silo 1

  38

  Donald set his alarm for three in the morning, but there was little chance of him falling asleep. He’d waited weeks for this. A chance to give a life rather than take one. A chance at redemption and a chance for the truth, a chance to satisfy his growing suspicions.

  He stared at the ceiling and considered what he was about to do. It wasn’t what Erskine or Victor had hoped he would do if someone like him was ever in charge, but those men had gotten a lot wrong, least of all who he was. This wasn’t the end of the end of the world. This was the beginning of something else. An end to the not knowing what was out there.

  He studied his hand in the dim light spilling from the bathroom and thought of the outside. At two-thirty, he decided he’d waited long enough. He got up, showered and shaved, put on a fresh pair of coveralls, tugged on his boots. He grabbed his badge and clipped it to his collar. He had a mind to sneak out, to slink down the hallway, but that was the wrong way. He left his apartment with his head up and shoulders back, instead. Long strides took him down a hall with a few lights still on and the distant clatter of a keyboard, someone working late. The door to Eren’s office was closed. Donald called for the elevator and waited.

  Before heading all the way down, he checked to see if it would be all for naught by scanning his badge and pressing the shiny button marked fifty-four. The light flashed, and the lift lurched into motion. So far, so good. The elevator didn’t stop until it reached the armory. The doors opened on a familiar darkness studded with tall shadows—black cliffs of shelves and bins. Donald held his hand on the edge of the door to keep it from shutting and stepped out into the room. The vastness of the space could somehow be felt, like the echoes of his racing pulse were being swallowed by the distance. He waited for a light to flick on at the far end, for Anna to walk out brushing her hair or with a bottle of scotch in her hand. But nothing in that room moved. Everything was quiet and still. The pilots and the temporary activity were gone.

  He returned to the lift and pressed another button. The elevator sank. It drifted past more storage levels, past the reactor. The doors cracked on the medical wing. Donald could feel the tens of thousands of bodies arranged all around him, all facing the ceiling, eyelids closed. Some of them were well and truly dead, he thought. One was about to be woken.

  He went straight to the doctor’s office and knocked on the jamb. The assistant on duty lifted his head from behind the monitor.
He wiped his eyes behind his glasses, adjusted them on his nose, and blinked at Donald.

  “How’s it going?” Donald asked.

  “Hmm? Good. Good. ” The young man shook his wrist and checked his watch, an ancient thing. “We got someone going into deep freeze? I didn’t get a call. Is Wilson up?”

  “No, no. I just couldn’t sleep. ” Donald pointed at the ceiling. “I went to see if anyone was up at the cafeteria, then figured since I was restless, I might as well come down here and see if you wanted me to finish out your shift. I can sit and watch a film as well as anyone. ”

  The assistant glanced at his monitor and laughed guiltily. “Yeah. ” He checked his watch again, had somehow already forgotten what it just told him. “Two hours left. I wouldn’t mind slagging off. You’ll wake me if anything pops up?” He stood and stretched, covered his yawn with his hand.

  “Of course. ”

  The medical assistant staggered out from behind the desk. Donald stepped around and pulled the seat away, sat down and propped up his feet as though he wouldn’t be going anywhere for hours.

  “I owe you one,” the young man said, collecting his coat from the back of the door.

  “Oh, we’re even,” Donald said under his breath as soon as the man was gone.

  He waited for the elevator to chime before launching into action. There was a plastic drink container on the drying rack by the sink. He grabbed this and filled it with water, the musical pitch of the vessel filling like a rising anxiety.

  The lid came off the powder. Two scoops. He stirred with one of the long plastic tongue depressors and twisted the lid on, put the powder back in the fridge. The wheelchair wouldn’t budge at first. He saw that the brakes were on, the little metal arms pressing into the soft rubber. He freed these, grabbed one of the blankets from the tall cabinet and a paper gown, tossed them onto the seat. Just like before. But he’d do it right this time. He collected the medical kit, made sure there was a fresh set of gloves.

  The wheelchair rattled out the door and down the hall, and Donald’s palms felt sweaty against the handles. To keep the front wheels silent, he rocked the chair back on its large rubber tires. The small wheels spun lazily in the air as he hurried.

  He entered his code into the keypad and waited for a red light, for some impediment, some blockade. The light winked green. Donald pulled the door open and swerved between the pods toward the one that held his sister.

  There was a mix of anticipation and guilt. This was as bold a step as his run up that hill in a suit. The stakes were higher for involving family, for waking someone into this harsh world, for subjecting her to the same brutality Anna had foisted upon him, that Thurman had foisted upon her, on and on, a never ending misery of shifts.

  He left the wheelchair in place and knelt by the control pad. Hesitant, he lurched to his feet and peered through the glass porthole, just to make sure.

  She looked so serene in there, probably wasn’t plagued by nightmares like he was. Donald’s doubts grew. And then he imagined her waking up on her own; he imagined her conscious and beating on the glass, demanding to be let out. He saw her feisty spirit, heard her demand not to be lied to, and he knew that if she were standing there with him, she would ask him to do it. She would rather know and suffer than be left asleep in ignorance.

  This is what Donald told himself, anyway. He crouched by the keypad and entered his code. The keypad beeped cheerfully as he pressed the red button. There was a click from within the pod, like a valve opening. He turned the dial and watched the temperature gauge, waited for it to start climbing.

  Donald rose and stood by the pod, and time slowed to a crawl. He expected someone to come find him before the process was complete. But there was another clack and a hiss from the lid. He laid out the gauze and the tape. He separated the two rubber gloves and began pulling them on, a cloud of chalk misting the air as he snapped the elastic.

  He opened the lid the rest of the way.

  His sister lay on her back, her arms by her side. She had not yet moved. Donald seemed to remember having moved by the time the lid opened, but he couldn’t remember. A panic seized him as he went over the procedure again. Had he forgotten something? Dear god, had he killed her?

  Charlotte coughed. Water trailed down her cheeks as the frost on her lids melted. And then her eyes fluttered open weakly before returning to thin slits against the light.

  “Hold still,” Donald told her. He pressed a square of gauze to her arm and removed the needle. He could feel the steel slide beneath the pad and his fingers as he extracted it from her arm. Holding the gauze in place, he took a length of tape hanging from the wheelchair and applied it across the gauze. The last was the catheter. He covered her with the towel, applied pressure, and slowly removed the tube. And then she was free of the machine, crossing her arms and shivering. He helped her into the paper gown, left the back open.

  “I’m lifting you out,” he said.

  Her teeth clattered in response.

  Donald shifted her feet toward her butt to tent her knees. Reaching down beneath her armpits—her flesh cool to the touch—and another arm under her legs, he lifted her easily. It felt like she weighed so little. He could smell the cast-stink on her flesh.

  Charlotte mumbled something as he placed her in the wheelchair. The blanket was draped across so that she sat on the fabric rather than the cold seat. As soon as she was settled, he wrapped the blanket around her. She chose to remain in a ball with her arms wrapped around her shins rather than place her feet on the stirrups.

  “Where am I?” she asked, her voice a sheet of crackling ice.

  “Take it easy,” Donald told her. He closed the lid on the pod, tried to remember if there was anything else, looked for anything he’d left behind. “You’re with me,” he said as he pushed her toward the exit. That was where both of them were: with each other. There was no home, no place on the Earth to welcome one to anymore, just a hellish nightmare in which to drag another for sad company.