Hugh Howey - Third Shift - Pact

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 person, 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.

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.