Hugh Howey: Third Shift - Pact

“Been a long time since I’ve done this without a launcher,” she said nervously.

Donald was about to ask if that was a problem when she shifted her feet and the view on the screen lifted. The metal shaft he remembered climbing up vibrated and began to race by. The swirling clouds filled the viewscreen until that was all that existed. Charlotte said, “Liftoff,” and worked the yoke with her right hand. Donald found himself leaning to the side as the view banked and the ground came into view.

“Which way?” she asked.

“I don’t think it matters,” he said. “Just straight.” He leaned closer to watch the strange but familiar landscape slide by. There were the great divots he had helped create. There was another tower down in the middle of a depression. The remnants of the convention—the tents and fairgrounds and stages—were long gone, eaten by the tiny machines in the air. “Just a straight line,” he said, pointing. It was a theory, a crazy idea, but he needed to see before he dared say anything. There was the danger of making it not true by voicing his most cherished hope. The world seemed to sense these things from him. He had learned to guard his wishes, just to be safe. Thinking them was like shining a light out to sea, and Donald lived among reef and rock. Drawing good things toward him was unwise.

The pattern of depressions ended in the distance. Donald strained to see beyond when Charlotte let go of the throttle and reached for a bank of dials and indicators. “Uh … I think we have a problem.” She flipped a switch back and forth. “I’m losing oil pressure.”

“No.” Donald watched the screen as the clouds swirled and the land seemed to heave upward. It was too early. Unless he’d missed some step, some precaution, some way of turning off other, smaller, flying things. “Keep going,” he breathed, as much to the machine as to its pilot.

“She’s handling screwy,” Charlotte said. “Everything feels loose.”

Donald thought of all the drones in the hangar. They could launch another. But he suspected the results would be the same. He might be resistant to whatever was out there, but the machines weren’t. He thought of the cleaning suits, the way things were meant to break down at a certain time, a certain place. Invisible destroyers so precise that they could let loose their vengeance as soon as a cleaner hit a hill, reached a particular altitude, as soon as they dared to rise up. He reached for his cloth and coughed into it, and had a vague memory of them scrubbing the airlock after pulling him back inside.

“You’re at the edge,” he said, pointing to the last of the silos as its bowl disappeared beneath the drone’s camera. “Just a little further.”

But in truth, he had no idea how much further it might take. Maybe you could fly straight around the world and right back where you started, and that still wouldn’t be far enough. But he didn’t think so.

“I’m losing lift,” Charlotte said. Her hands were twin blurs. They went from the controls to switches and back again. Donald thought of the seals and gaskets. Maybe they could be replaced. Beefed up.

“Engine two is out,” she said. “Altitude oh-two-hundred.”

It looked like far less on the screen. They were beyond the last of the hills, now. There was a scar in the earth, a trench that may have been a river, black sticks like charred bones that stuck up in sharp points like pencil lead, all that remained of ancient trees, perhaps. Or the steel girders of a large security fence, eaten away by time.

“Go, go,” he whispered. Every second aloft was a new sight, a new vista. Here was a breath of freedom, a giant’s step, a leap of leagues. Here was escape from hell.

“Camera’s going. Altitude oh-one-fifty.”

There was a bright flash on the screen like the shock of dying electrics. A purplish cast followed from the frying sensors, then a wash of blue where once there was nothing but browns and grays.

“Altitude fifty feet. Gonna touch down hard.”

Donald blinked away tears as the drone plummeted and the earth rushed up to meet the machine. He blinked away tears at the sight on the monitor, nothing wrong with the camera at all.

“Blue—” he said.

It was an utterance of confirmation just before a vivid green landscape swallowed the dying drone, just as the monitor faded from color to black. Charlotte released the controls and cursed. She slapped the console with her palm. But as she turned and apologized to Donald, he was already wrapping his arms around her, squeezing her, kissing her cheek.

“Did you see it?” he asked, his voice a breathless whisper. “Did you see?”

“See what?” Charlotte pulled away, her face a hardened mask of disappointment. “Every gauge was toast there at the end. Blasted drone. Probably been sitting too long—”

“No, no,” Donald said. He pointed to the screen, which was now dark and lifeless. “You did it,” he said. “I saw it. There were blue skies and green grass out there, Charla! I saw it!”

Without wanting to, Solo became an expert in how things broke down. Day by day, he watched steel and iron crumble to rust, watched paint peel and orange flecks curl up, saw the black dust gather as metal eroded to powder. He learned what rubber hoses felt like as they hardened, dried up, and cracked. He learned how adhesives failed, things appearing on the floor that once were affixed to walls and ceilings, objects moved suddenly and violently by the twin gods of gravity and dilapidation. Most of all, he learned how bodies rot. They didn’t always go in a flash—like a mother pushed upward by a jostling crowd or a father sliding into the shadows of a darkened corridor. Instead, they were often chewed up and carried off in invisible pieces. Time and maggots alike grew wings; they flew and flew and took all things with them.

Solo tore a page from one of the boring articles in the Ri - Ro book and folded it into a tent. The silo, he thought, belonged to the insects in many ways. Wherever the bodies were gathered, the insects swarmed in dark clouds. He had read up on them in the books. Somehow, maggots turned into flies. White and writhing became black and buzzing. Things broke down and changed.

He threaded lengths of string into the folded piece of paper to give something to hang the weight on. This was when Shadow would normally get in the way, would come and arch his back against Solo’s arm, step on whatever he was doing, make him annoyed and make him laugh at the same time. But Shadow didn’t interrupt.

Solo made small knots in the string to keep them from pulling through. The paper was doubled over across the holes so it wouldn’t tear. He well knew how things broke down. He was an expert in things he wished he could unlearn. Solo could tell at a glance how long it’d been since someone had died.

The people he’d killed years back had been stiff when he moved them, but this only lasted a while. People soon swelled up and stank. Their bodies let off gasses, and the flies swarmed. The flies swarmed and the maggots feasted.

The stench would make his eyes water and throat burn. And the bodies would soon grow soft. Solo had to move some on the stairs once, tangled where they lay and difficult to step over, and the flesh came right apart. It became like cottage cheese he’d had back when there was still milk and goats to get them from. Flesh came apart once the person was no longer inside, holding themselves together. Solo concentrated on holding himself together. He tied the other ends of the strings to one of the small metal washers from Supply. Chewing his tongue, he made the finest of knots.

String and fabric didn’t last either, but clothes stayed around longer than people. Within a year, it was clothes and bones that were left. And hair. The hair seemed to go last. It clung to bones and sometimes hung over empty and gazing sockets. The hair made it worse. It lent bones an identity. Beards on most, but not on the young or the women.