Third Shift - Pact

him dream of the air from the outside leaking in through the great steel door. The air hissed and hissed and filled his home with poison. He woke up more than once gasping for a breath and found it difficult to get back to sleep.

In the morning, he checked the cameras, but they were still broken. He wished he had the one of the hallway. All it showed was black. He told himself there was no one there. But soon, he would be. He was about to go outside. Outside. Was it okay to think that?

“It’s okay,” he told himself. He grabbed his rifle, which reeked of oil, and lifted his homemade pack, which he thought suddenly he could wear as clothes in a pinch, if he had to. He laughed some more and headed for the ladder.

“C’mon, c’mon,” he said, urging himself as he climbed up. He tried to whistle, was normally a very good whistler, but his mouth was too dry. He hummed, instead.

The pack and the gun were heavy. Dangling from the crook of his elbow, they made it difficult to unlock the hatch at the top of the ladder. But he finally managed. He stuck his head out and he paused to admire the gentle hum of the machines. Some of them made little clicking sounds as if their innards were busy. He’d taken most of the backs off over the years to peer inside and see if any contained secrets, but they all looked like the guts of the computers his dad used to build.

The stench of his own waste greeted him as he moved between the tall towers. That wasn’t how you were supposed to greet someone, he thought. His poop was rude. And the black boxes radiated an awful heat, which only made the smell worse.

He stood in front of the great steel door and hesitated. Jimmy’s world had been shrinking every day. It had been these two levels, the room with the black machines and the labyrinth beneath. And then he’d only been comfortable below. And then even the dark passageway and the tall ladder had frightened him. And soon it was the back room with all the beds and the storerooms with their funny smells, until the only place he felt safe was on his makeshift cot by the computer desk, the sound of the empty radio crackling in the background.

And now he stood before that door his father had dragged him through, the place where he’d killed a man, and he thought about his world expanding.

His palms were damp as he reached for the keypad. A part of him feared the air outside would be toxic, but he was probably breathing the same air, and people had lived for years out there, talking now and then on the radio. He keyed in the first two digits, level 12, his home. Jimmy thought about going home to get some different clothes, to go to the bathroom in a toilet. He pictured his mother sitting on his parents’ bed, waiting for him. He saw her lying on her back, arms crossed, nothing but bones.

He messed up the next two digits, hitting the 4 instead of the 1, and wiped his hands on his thighs. “There’s no one on the other side,” he told himself. “No one. I’m alone. I’m alone.”

Somehow, this comforted him.

He entered the two digits again, and then the digits of his school.

The keypad beeped. The door began to make noises. And Jimmy Parker took a step back. He thought of school and his friends, wondered if any of them were still alive. If anyone was still alive. He hooked his finger under the strap of his rifle and pulled it over his head, tucked it against his shoulder. The door clanked free. All he had to do was pull.

•24•

There were signs of life and death waiting for him in the hall. A charred ring on the tile and a scatter of ash marked the corpse of an old fire. The outside of the steel door was lined with scratches and marked with dings. The latter reminded him of his misses during Kick the Can, the ineffectual kiss of bullet against solid steel. Right by his feet, Jimmy noticed a stain on the floor—a patch of dappled brown—that touched some small broken bone deep within his brain. He remembered a man dying there with his father’s face. Jimmy looked away from these signs of the living and the dying and stepped into the hall.

As he began to pull the door shut, something made him hesitate, some worry in the fiber of his muscles, some constriction of blood vessels. Jimmy wondered if perhaps his code wouldn’t work from the outside. What if the door locked and he could never get back in? He checked the keypad and saw the gouges around its steel plate where someone had tried to pry it off the wall. He was reminded how desperately so many others had wanted in over the years. Remembering this made him feel crazy for wanting out. He was wanting in the wrong direction.

Before he could worry further, he shut the steel door, and his heart sank a little as the gears whirred and the locks slid into the wall. There was a hollow thunk, like a period on the end of a dreadful thought, the sound of awful finality.

Jimmy rushed to the keypad, his chest pounding in his throat, the feeling of men running down all three hallways to get him, blood-curdling screams and bludgeoning weapons held high over their heads—

He entered the code, and the door whirred open. Pushing on the handle, he took a few deep breaths of home, and nearly gagged on the smell of his own waste warmed by hot and buzzing servers.

There was no one running down the halls. He needed a new can opener. He needed to find a toilet that worked. He needed coveralls that weren’t worn to tatters. He needed to breathe and find another stash of canned food and water.

Jimmy reluctantly closed the door again. And even though he had just tested the keypad, the fear that he would never get back inside returned. The gears would be worn out. The code would only work from the outside once per day, once per year. A part of him knew—the obsessive part of him knew—that he could check the code a hundred times and still worry it wouldn’t work the very next. He could check forever and never be satisfied. His pulse pounded in his ears as he tore himself from the door.

The hallway was brightly lit. Jimmy kept his rifle against his arm and slid silently past ransacked offices. Everything was quiet except for the buzzing of one light fixture on its last leg and the flutter of a piece of paper on a desk beneath a gushing vent. The security station was unmanned. Jimmy crawled over the gate, remembering Yani, imagining the stairwell outside crowded with people, a man in a cleaning suit barging out and wading into the masses, but when he opened the door and peered outside, the landing was empty.

It was also dim. Only the green emergency lights were on. Jimmy shut the door slowly so that rusty hinges would groan rather than squeal. There was a roll of paper on the grating by his feet. Not a roll of paper. Jimmy nudged the object with his boot, a white cylinder the length of his forearm with knobby ends. A bone. He recognized it from the jumble of a man who had wasted away by the servers, dragged close to his piles of shit.

Jimmy felt with keen surety that his bones would be exposed someday. Perhaps this day. He would never make it back inside his sturdy little home beneath the servers. And this frightened him less than it should have. The heady rush of being out in the open, the cool air and the green glow of the stairwell, even the remnants of another human being, were a sudden and welcome relief from the insanity of being closed in. What had once been his pen —the floors and levels of the silo—was now the great outside. Here was a land of death and of hopeful opportunity.

•25•

He had no great plan, no real direction, but the tug was upward. His flashlight was on its dimward way to death, so he explored the levels cautiously. Groping in an apartment, he fumbled for a toilet, took a crap the way God intended, and was disheartened by the lack of a flush. The sink didn’t run, either. Neither did the wash nozzle beside the toilet, which left him using a bedsheet in perfect darkness.

He continued up. There was a general store on nineteen, just below his home. He would check there for batteries, though he feared most useful things would be quite consumed by now. The garment district would have coveralls, though. He felt sure of that. A plan was forming.

Until a vibration in the steps altered them.