Hugh Howey - Third Shift - Pact

The list.

And the reason it all fell together for Donald so easily was because he always knew. He had to know. How could it be otherwise? They had no plan, these bastards, of allowing the men and women of the silos to go free. No. There could be only one. For what would they do to each other if they met on the landscape? What would they do if they met hundreds of years hence? Donald had drawn this place. He should’ve always known. He was an architect of death.

He thought about the list, the rankings of the silos. The one at the top was the only one that mattered. But what was their metric? How arbitrary would that decision be? All those eggs slaughtered except for one. With what hope? What plan? That the differences and struggles among a silo’s people can be overcome? And yet the differences between the silos themselves was too much?

Donald coughed into his trembling hand. He understood what Anna was trying to tell him. And now it was too late. Too late for answers. This was the way of life and death, and in a place that ignored both, he’d forgotten. There was no waking anyone. Just confusion and grief. His only ally, gone.

But there was another he could wake, the one he’d hoped to from the beginning. This was a grave power, this ability to bestir the dead. And weren’t they all? Donald shivered as he realized what the Pact truly meant, this pact between the madmen who had conspired to destroy the word.

“It’s a suicide pact,” he whispered, and the concrete walls of the silo closed in around him; they wrapped him like the shell of an egg. An egg never meant to be hatched. For they were the most dangerous of them all, this pit of vipers, and no world would ever be safe with them in it. The women and children were in lifeboats only to urge the men of Silo 1 to keep working their shifts. But they were all meant to drown. Every last one of them.

Solo didn’t set out one day to plumb the silo’s depths—it simply happened. He had explored enough in both directions over the years, had hidden from the sound of others fighting, had found the messes they left behind, but such encounters grew rarer, and so his explorations grew bolder. It was curiosity as much as gravity and despair that drove him down. It was these things that ended his days alone.

He scavenged as he went. On one-twenty he discovered the lower farms and the signs of those who had lived there. This was farther than he’d ever been before. Those who had survived the early days had rigged the farms with wires and makeshift pipes. Solo took some carrots and beets from the overgrowth and left with the feeling of ghosts watching him. Outside, realizing how close he was to fabled Supply—the subject of so much radio chatter—he spiraled deeper. Supply was the land of plenty, or so they used to say. The promise of batteries and a can opener tugged him along.

The door to Supply was locked. Solo felt eyes on him as he crouched by the entrance and pressed his ear against the cool steel. There was a thrumming he felt as much as heard. It seemed far away, like the lungs of the silo somewhere distant rattling and wheezing. He tried the door again. It wouldn’t budge. There were no locks visible on the outside, just the standard vertical handles big enough for one hand to grab and pull.

Solo retreated to the staircase. He lightly gripped the railing with both hands and listened. He listened hard. Eventually, he heard his own pulse in his ears. That’s when he knew he was listening best.

No ghosts. No tremble to the rail. He checked his rifle, made sure the safety was off, then pulled it tight against his shoulder. He aimed for the place between the double doors where the handles met. He pictured a can sitting there, imagined kicking it, tried not to see the chest of a man. He squeezed the trigger so lightly and gradually that when the bullet exploded out the barrel, it startled him. The boom of the shot reverberated up and down the silo. A loud crack, and then a dozen echoes. Solo took aim again and fired a second round. A third. BOOM. BOOM. The ghosts would be everywhere cowering, he figured. He was Solo, but his rifle gave him noisy company.

He slipped the rifle strap over his head and tried the doors. One of them moved a little. Solo stepped back and kicked the door, even though they opened outward, just to put some violence into whatever bits continued to hold. When he pulled it the next time, the door came free with a grinding noise. Debris rained out of the insides and clattered onto the landing. The holes on the inside of the door were much larger than the holes on the outside, and the metal was bright and shiny where it had peeled away. Sharp to the touch, too, Solo discovered, sucking on his finger.

The silence within Supply seemed powerful after the boom of his rifle. Solo approached the counter that stretched from wall to wall. There were places he could crawl under where the counter wasn’t solid. Then he saw the metal hinges and how the surface lifted up and folded away so he could step through.

Behind the counter were tall shelves and aisles littered with odds and ends. Solo thought he heard a scratching noise, but it was just one of the doors pulling itself shut on its spring-loaded hinges. He tiptoed through the debris and removed his rifle from his back. Just in case.

The bins on the shelves had been rummaged through. Many were missing altogether. Some were upside down, their contents scattered across the floor. To Solo’s eye, Supply looked like little more than a bolt and screw store. Bins full of machined metal—rivets, nuts, bolts, washers, hooks and hinges. He dipped his hand into a tub of tiny washers and scooped up a fistful, allowed them to spill out between his fingers. They made a clumsy song as they landed.

Farther down the aisle, the parts became larger. There were pumps and lengths of pipe, bins full of attachments to split the pipe, make it turn corners, and cap it. Solo made mental note of where things were. He thought of all the incredible Projects he could start.

Beyond the aisles, a corridor stretched in both directions with doors on either side. It was dark down the halls. He fished his flashlight from his breast pocket and trained the feeble beam on the pitch black. He should be searching the shelves for another battery, but something tugged him down the corridor. There was something wrong. Trash on the ground. It was the smell of tomatoes. The canned kind, the kind that smelled sweet like the sauce it was preserved in, not sweet like the vine.

He bent and picked up a discarded can. Red tomato paste clung to the lid. Dabbing it with his finger, he found it wet, not hardened like he knew it got within days. Solo touched his finger to his tongue, the taste a jolt to his senses, awareness a shock to his nerves. He clutched his rifle and pulled the strap over his head, wedged the stock against his shoulder. Holding the flashlight and the grip of the gun in the same hand, he balanced the barrel on top of the light. The barrel split the beam in two where it hit the ceiling, leaving a dark shadow above him.

Solo trained the sights down the hall and listened. His flashlight wavered. He crept down a corridor that seemed to be holding its breath.

The doorknobs he tried were all unlocked. He pushed the doors inward, his finger resting on the trigger, finding rooms full of shadows. There were machines on stands with no power. Cutting and welding machines, shaping and joining machines, all splashed with orange rust. They revealed themselves only as his flashlight danced across them. For a split second, each machine loomed in the darkness as a man with his arms up and ready to pounce. There were more doors off the backs of these rooms. A labyrinth of storerooms. Debris scattered everywhere. Evidence of the original exodus was lost amid the struggle to survive ever since.