Hugh Howey: Third Shift - Pact

Donald remained half asleep, sitting on a bed, his consciousness floating somewhere above the floor. Deep exhaustion gripped him. He was back to aboveground days, back when stirring and waking were two separate things. Mornings when he gained consciousness in the shower or behind the wheel on his way into work, long after he had begun to move. The mind lagged behind the body; it swam through the dust kicked up by numb and shuffling feet. Waking from decades of freezing cold felt like this. Dreams of which he was dimly aware slipped from his grasp, and Donald was eager to let them go.

The apartment they’d brought him to was down the hall from his old office. They had passed it along the way. That meant he was on the operations wing, a place he used to work. An empty pair of boots sat on the foot of the bed. Donald stared at them numbly. The name “Thurman” wrapped around the back of each ankle in faded black marker. Somehow, these boots were meant for him. They had been calling him Mr. Thurman since he woke up, but that was not who he was. A mistake had been made. A mistake or a cruel trick. Some kind of game.

Fifteen minutes to get ready. That’s what they’d said. Ready for what? Donald sat on the double cot, wrapped in a blanket, occasionally shivering. The wheelchair had been left with him. Thoughts and memories reluctantly assembled like exhausted soldiers roused from their bunks in the middle of the night and told to form ranks in the freezing rain.

My name is Donald , he reminded himself. He must not let that go. This was the first and most primal thing. Who he was.

Sensation and awareness gathered. Donald could feel the dent in the mattress the size and shape of another’s body. This depression left behind by another tugged at him. On the wall behind the door, a crater stood where the knob had struck, where the door had been flung open. An emergency, perhaps. A fight or an accident. Someone barging inside. A scene of violence. Hundreds of years of stories he wasn’t privy to. Fifteen minutes to get his thoughts together.

There was an ID badge on the bedside table with a barcode and a name. No picture, fortunately. Donald touched the badge, remembered seeing it in use. He left it where it was and rose shakily on unsure legs, held the wheelchair for support, and moved toward the small bathroom.

There was a bandage on his arm where the doctor had drawn his blood. Doctor Wilson. He’d already given a urine sample, but he needed to pee again. Allowing his blanket to fall open, he stood over the toilet. The stream was pink. Donald thought he remembered it being the color of charcoal on his last shift. When he finished, he stepped into the shower to wash off the stink of flesh in a cast too long, that film of death on the surface of something that refuses to die.

The water was hot, his bones cold. Donald shivered in a fog of steam. He opened his mouth and allowed the spray to hit his tongue and fill his cheeks. He scrubbed at the memory of poison on his flesh, a memory that made it impossible to feel clean. For a moment, it wasn’t the scalding water burning his skin—it was the air. The outside air. But then he turned off the flow of water and the burning lessened.

He toweled off and found the coveralls left out for him. They were too big. Donald shrugged them on anyway, the fabric rough against skin that had lain bare for a century. There was a knock at the door as he worked the zipper up to his neck. Someone called a name that was not his, a name scrawled around the backs of the boots lying perfectly still on the bed, a name that graced the badge sitting on the bedside table.

“Coming,” Donald croaked, his voice thin and weak. He slid the badge into his pocket and sat heavily on the bed. He rolled up his cuffs, all that extra material, before pulling the boots on one at a time. He fumbled with the laces, stood, and found that he could wiggle his toes in the space left behind by another.

Many years ago, Donald Keene had been elevated by a simple change in title. Power and importance had come in an instant. For all his life, he had been a man to whom few listened. A man with a degree, a string of jobs, a wife, a modest home. And then one night, a computer tallied stacks of ballots, and Donald Keene became Congressman Keene. He became one of hundreds with his hand on some great tiller—a struggle of hands pushing, pulling, and fitfully steering.

It had happened overnight, and it was happening again.

“How’re you feeling, sir?”

The man outside his apartment studied Donald with concern. The badge around his neck read “Eren.” He was the Ops Head, the one who manned the shrink’s desk down the hall, one among the pairs of boots that had woken him.

“Still groggy,” Donald said quietly. A gentleman in bright blue coveralls raced by and disappeared around the bend. A gentle breeze followed, a stir of air that smelled of coffee and perspiration, and then was gone.

“Are you good to walk? I’m sorry about the rush, but then I’m sure you’re used to it.” Eren pointed down the hall. “They’re waiting in the comm room.”

Donald nodded and followed. He remembered these halls being quieter, remembered them without the stomping and the raised voices. There were scuff marks on the walls that he thought were new. Reminders of how much time had passed.

In the comm room, all eyes turned to him. Someone was in trouble—Donald could feel it. Eren led him to a chair, and everyone watched and waited. He sat down and saw that there was a frozen image on the screen in front of him. A button was pressed, and the image lurched into motion.

Thick dust tumbled and swirled across the view, making it difficult to see. Clouds flew past in unruly sheets. But there, through the gaps, a figure in a bulky suit could be seen on a forbidding landscape, picking their ponderous way up a gentle swell, heading away from the camera. It was someone outside. Donald could sense that they shouldn’t be. He wondered if this was him out there, if he was the one in trouble. He had lumbered up a hill like that once before. The suit looked familiar. Perhaps they’d caught his foolish act on camera, his attempt to die a free man. And now they’d woken him up to show him this damning bit of evidence. Donald braced for the accusation, for his punishment—

“This was earlier this morning,” Eren said.

Donald nodded and tried to calm himself. This wasn’t him on the screen. He had been asleep for longer than a day, which meant this was not him. They didn’t know who he was. A surge of relief washed over him, a stark contrast to the nerves in the room and the shouts and hurrying boots in the hallway. Donald remembered being told that someone had disappeared over a hill when they’d pulled him from the pod. It was the first thing they’d told him. This was that person on the screen. This was why he’d been woken. He licked his lips and asked who it was.

“We’re putting a file together for you now, sir. Should have it soon. What we do know is that there was a cleaning scheduled in eighteen this morning. Except …”

Eren hesitated. Donald turned from the screen and caught the Ops Head looking to the others for help. One of the operators—a large man in orange coveralls with wiry hair and headphones around his neck—was the first to oblige. “The cleaning didn’t go through,” the operator said flatly.

Several of the men in boots stiffened. Donald glanced around the room at the crowd that had packed into the small comm center, and he saw how they were watching him. Waiting on him. The Ops Head looked down at the floor in defeat. He appeared to be Donald’s age, late thirties, and he was waiting to be chastised. These were the men in trouble, not him.

Donald tried to think. The people in charge were looking to him for guidance. Something was wrong with the shifts, something very wrong. He had worked with the man they thought he was, the man whose name graced his badge and his boots. A senator. Senator Thurman. It felt like yesterday that Donald had stood in that very same comm room and had felt that man’s equal but for a moment. He had helped save a silo on his previous shift. And even though his head was in a mist and his legs were weak, he knew this charade was important to uphold. At least until he understood what was going on.