Hugh Howey - Third Shift - Pact

There was a knock on his door.

“Who is it?” Donald asked, his voice not sounding like his own.

The door opened a crack. “It’s Eren, sir. We’ve got a call from eighteen. The shadow is ready.”

“Just a second,” he said.

Donald coughed into his handkerchief. He rose slowly and moved to the bathroom, stepping over two trays of old dishes. He emptied his bladder, flushed, and studied himself in the mirror. Gripping the edge of the counter, he grimaced at his reflection, this man with scraggly hair and the start of a beard. He looked insane, and yet people trusted him. That made them crazier than he was. But he was in charge, and the small duties that came from being in charge disturbed his private digging. Donald smiled a yellowing smile and thought of the long history of madmen who remained in charge simply because they already were.

Hinges squealed as Eren poked his head in the door.

“I’m coming,” Donald said. He pushed away from a stranger, who pushed away from him in equal measure. Stomping across the reports, leaving a trail of footprints behind, he also left a bloody palm print on the edge of the counter, the mark of a man getting worse.

Donald joined Eren in the hall. The state of his being was acutely felt in the presence of another. He wasn’t cycling his coveralls through the wash the way he should be. He smelled himself with another man’s nose—another man’s cleanliness—in his presence.

“They’re calling the shadow now, sir.”

Donald cringed at the “sir.” The deferential treatment felt more and more vacuous as the days wore on. Donald had been awoken for answers, but he had found nothing but questions. He sat alone in a room full of notes and pages, growing mad. He felt conspicuously mad.

“You want to freshen up?” Eren asked.

“No,” Donald said. “I’m good.” He stood in the doorway, struggling to remember what this meeting was about. A Rite of Initiation. He remembered those, thought it was something Raymond would handle. “Why am I needed, again?” he asked. “Shouldn’t our Head be conducting this?” Donald remembered being the one to conduct such a Rite on his first shift.

Eren popped something into his mouth and chewed. He shook his head. “You know, with all that reading you’re doing in there, you could bone up on the Order a bit. It sounds like it’s changed since the last time you read it. The ranking officer on shift completes the Rite. That would normally be me—”

“But since I’m up, it’s me.” Donald pulled his door shut. The two of them started down the hall.

“That’s right. The Heads here do less and less every shift. There have been … problems. I’ll sit in with you though, help you get through the script. Oh, and you wanted to know when the pilots were heading off-shift. The last one is going under right now. They’re just straightening up down there.”

Donald perked up at this. Finally. What he’d been waiting for. “So the armory’s empty?” he asked, unable to hide his delight.

“Yessir. No more flight requisitions. I know you didn’t like chancing them to begin with.”

“Right, right.” Donald waved his hand as they turned the corner. “Restrict access to the armory once they’re done. Nobody should be able to get in there but me.”

Eren slowed his pace. “Just you, sir?”

“For as long as I’m on shift,” Donald said.

They passed Raymond in the hall, who had three cups of coffee nestled in a web of fingers. Raymond smiled and nodded. Donald remembered fetching coffee for people when he was Head of the silo. Now, that was about all the Head did. Donald couldn’t help but think his first shift was partly to blame.

Eren lowered his voice. “You know the story behind him, right?” He took another bite of something and chewed.

Donald glanced over his shoulder. “Who, Raymond?”

“Yeah. He was in Ops until a few shifts back. Broke down. Tried to get himself into deep freeze. The duty doc at the time talked him into a demotion. We were losing too many people, and the shifts were starting to get some overlap.” Eren paused and took another bite. There was a familiar scent. Eren caught him watching and held out something. “Bagel?” he asked. “They’re fresh baked.”

Donald could smell it. Eren tore off a piece. The feeling of having become a stray animal or a homeless man was complete as he accepted the offering. It was still warm. “I didn’t know they could make these,” he said, popping the morsel into his mouth.

“New chef just came on shift. He’s been experimenting with all kinds of stuff. He—”

Donald didn’t hear the rest. He chewed on memories. A cool day in D.C., Helen up to visit, had the dog with her, drove all the way from Savannah. They walked around the Lincoln Memorial a week too early for the cherry blossoms, but still a spot of color here and there. Stopped for fresh bagels, still warm, the smell of coffee—

“Put an end to this,” Donald said, indicating the rest of Eren’s bagel.

“Sir?”

They were nearly to the bend in the hall that led to the comm room. “I don’t want this chef experimenting anymore. Have him stick to the usual.”

Eren seemed confused. After some hesitation, he nodded. “Yes sir.”

“Nothing good can come of this,” Donald explained. And while Eren agreed more strenuously this time, Donald realized he had begun to think like the people he loathed. A veil of disappointment fell over his face, this Ops Head, who in truth outranked him, who should by all rights be in charge, and Donald felt a sudden urge to take it back, to grab the man by the shoulders and ask him what the hell they thought they were doing, all this misery and heartache. They should eat memory foods, of course, and talk about the days they’d left behind.

Instead, he said nothing, and they continued down the hall in quiet and discomfort.

“Quite a few of our silo Heads came from Ops,” Eren said after a while, steering the conversation back to Raymond. “I was a comms officer for my first two shifts, you know. The guy I took over for, the Ops Head from the last shift, was from medical.”

“So you’re not a shrink?” Donald asked.

Eren laughed, and Donald thought of Victor, blowing his brains out. This wasn’t going to last, this place. There were cracked tiles in the center of the hall. Tiles that had no replacement. The ones at the edge were in much better shape, and Donald had an epiphany. He stopped outside the comm room and surveyed the wear on this centuries-old place. There were scuff marks low on the walls, hand-high, shoulder-high, fewer anywhere else. The traffic patterns on the floors throughout the facility showed where people walked. It wasn’t evenly distributed.

“Are you okay, sir?” Eren asked.

Donald held up his hand. He could sense those in the comm room were waiting on him. But he was thinking on how an architect designs a structure to last. A certain calculus was used, an averaging of forces and wear across an entire structure, letting every beam and rivet shoulder its share of the load. All together, the resulting building could take the force of a hurricane, an earthquake, with plenty of redundancies to boot. But real stress and strain weren’t as kind as the hurricanes computers simulated. Hidden in those calculus winds were hurtling rods of steel and two by fours. And where they slammed it was like bombs going off. Just as the center of a hall bore an unfortunate share of strain, some people would be on shift for the worst of it.

“I believe they’re waiting on us, sir.”

Donald looked away from the scuff marks to Eren, this young man with bright eyes and bagel on his breath. He was like a corner of the hall lightly touched, his hair full of color, an uptick at the corners of his mouth, a wan smile like a scar of hope.