Hugh Howey - Third Shift - Pact

Within five years, even the clothes would break down. After ten, it was mostly bones. These days, so very long after the silo had gone dark and quiet—over twenty years since he’d been shown the secret lair beneath the servers—it was only the bones. Except for up in the cafe. The rot everywhere else made those bodies behind that door curiouser and curiouser.

Solo held up his parachute, a paper tent with little strings fastened to a tiny washer. He had dozens and dozens of bits of string laying in tangles across the open book. A handful of washers remained. He gave one of the strings on his parachute a tug and thought of the bodies up in the cafeteria. Behind that door, there were dead people who wouldn’t break down like the others. When he and Shadow had first discovered them, he’d assumed they’d recently passed. Dozens of them, dying together and piled on one another like they’d been tossed in there or had been crawling atop the others. The door to the forbidden outside was just beyond them, Solo knew. But he hadn’t gone that far. He had closed the door and left in a hurry, spooked by the lifeless eyeballs and the strange feeling of seeing a face other than his own peering back at him like that. He had left the bodies and not come back for a long time. He had waited for them to become bones. But they refused.

He went to the rail and peered over, made sure the piece of paper was tented, ready to grab the air. There was a cool updraft from the flooded deep. Solo leaned out beyond the third level railing, the fine paper pinched in one hand, the washer resting in his other palm. He wondered why some people rotted and others kept going. What made them break down?

“Break down,” he said aloud. He liked the way his voice sounded sometimes. He was an expert in how things broke down. Shadow should’ve been there, rubbing against his ankles, but he wasn’t.

“I’m an expert,” Solo told himself. “Breaking down, breaking down.” He stretched out his arms and released the parachute, watched it plummet for a moment before the strings went taut. And then it bobbed and twisted in the air as it sank into the dwindling depths. “Down down down,” he called after the parachute. All the way to the bottom. Sinking until it splashed invisible or got caught up along the way.

Solo knew well how bodies rot. He scratched his beard and squinted after the disappearing chute, then sat back down and crossed his legs, the knee torn completely out of his old coveralls. He mumbled to himself, delaying what needed to be done, his Project for the day, and instead tore another page from the shrinking book, trying not to think about yet another carcass that would soon dwindle with time.

There had been items Solo spent days and weeks searching for. There had been some things he’d needed that had consumed his hunts for years. Often, he found useful things much later, when he needed them no longer. Like the time he had come across a stash of razors. A great big bin of them in a doctor’s office. All the important stuff—the bandages, medicine, the tape—had long ago been snagged by those fighting over the scraps. But a bin of new razors, many of the blades still shiny, taunted him. He had long before resigned himself to his beard, but there had been times before that when he would’ve killed for a razor.

Other times, he found a thing before he even knew he needed it. The machete was like that. A great blade found beneath the body of a man not long dead. Solo had taken it simply so nobody else would have the murderous thing. He had locked himself below the server room for three days, terrified of the sight of another still-warm body. That had been many years ago. It took a while longer for the farms to thicken up where the machete became necessary. By then, he had taken to leaving his gun behind—no longer any use for it—and the machete became a constant companion. Something found before he knew he needed it.

Solo set the last of the parachutes free and watched as it narrowly missed the landing on level nine. The folded paper vanished out of sight. He thought of the things Shadow had helped him find over the years, mostly food, but then the one bonanza. He laughed and recalled the prick of claws from the cat climbing up and riding on his shoulders, or curling up in his arms, purring happily at the luxury of being ported.

Most days, Shadow followed him. Some days, the cat slunk off on his own. And then there were the days when no Projects loomed and Solo was the one who followed along behind. Some days he was the shadow.

Like the day after fishing when Shadow had run off with a mind of his own. It was on the way back up to Supply, with his belly full of fish and Solo stuffed on corn and beans, that Shadow had raced ahead and had disappeared across a landing. Solo had followed with his flashlight to what he later would suspect to have been the cat’s home. Otherwise, how would he know what was there?

Mewing and mewing by a door—Solo wary of another pile of bodies—but the apartment had been empty. Up on the kitchen counter, twirling, pawing at a cabinet full of little cans. Ancient and spotted with rust, but with pictures of cats on them. A madness in Shadow, and there, with a short cord plugged into the wall, a battered contraption, a mechanized can opener.

Solo smiled and gazed over the rail, thinking on the things found and lost over the years. He remembered pressing the button on the top of that gadget the first time, and how Shadow had whipped into a frenzy, how neatly the tops had come off. He remembered not being impressed at all with how the stuff in the cans tasted, but Shadow had a mind of his own.

Solo turned and studied the book with the torn pages. He was out of washers, so he left the book behind and reluctantly headed down to the farms. He headed off to do what needed to be done.

Hacking at the greenery with his machete, Solo marveled that the farms hadn’t long ago rotted to ruin without people around to tend them. But the lights were rigged to come on and off, and more than half of them still could. Water continued to dribble from pipes. Pumps kicked on and off with angry buzzes and loud grumbles. Electricity stolen from his realm down below was brought up on wires that snaked the stairwell walls. Nothing worked perfectly, but Solo saw that man’s relationship to the crops mostly consisted of eating them. Now it was only him eating. Him and the rats and the birds and the worms and the other loose and lonely things.

The crops, with less tending and much less eating, were doing quite well. Life seemed to have some things figured out. But the machete knew the way through, and for years and years Solo whistled while he worked, tomatoes and corn falling at his feet with the great green stalks and vines until time and critter carried it all away.

He did not whistle this day. Even the machete sang a dull lament as it listlessly beat on stalk and vine. Clang clang where once it was shing shing. A sad sound from sad steel swung by a sad arm.

He continued through the thickest plots, needing to reach the far corners of the farm where the lights no longer burned, where the soil was cool and damp, where nothing grew anymore. A special place. Away from his weekly trips to gather food. A place he would come to as a destination rather than simply pass because it was along the way. Nothing lazy like that. He had passed enough death during his days, enough rusted patches and remnants of old bones. Every spot of the silo seemed to bear a stain, a spot the color of rust, where he could remember finding a body or a tangle of bones. Reminders. Reminders with no good memories.

A stalk of corn rebounded and swung at Solo’s face with its leafy fingers. He batted it away and said nothing. He was in no mood to curse the corn. On happier days, maybe.