Third Shift - Pact

•23•

Something bad was happening with the cans. Jimmy couldn’t be sure at first. He had noticed little brown spots on a can of beets months ago and hadn’t thought anything of it. Now, there were more and more cans getting like that. And some of the contents tasted a little different, too. That part may’ve been his imagination, but he was for sure getting sick to his stomach more often, which was making the server room smell awful. He didn’t like getting anywhere near the poop corner—the flies were getting bad over there—which meant going number two farther and farther out. Eventually he would be going everywhere, and the flies didn’t carry his poop as fast as he made it. Especially not once he discovered that hidden cache of beef stew in the back of the soup shelves.

And so it was decided that he needed to go out. He hadn’t heard any activity in the halls of late, no one trying the door. But what had once felt like a prison now felt like the only safe place to be. And the idea of leaving, once desirable, now turned his insides to water. The sameness, the routines, were all he knew. Doing something different seemed insane.

He put it off for two days by making a Project out of preparing. He took his favorite rifle apart and oiled all the pieces before putting it back together. There was a box of lucky ammo where very few had failed or jammed during games of Kick the Can, so he emptied two clips and filled them with only these magic bullets. A spare set of coveralls was turned into a backpack by knotting the arms to the legs for loops and cinching up the neck. The zipper down the front made for a nice enclosure. He filled this with two cans of sausage, two of pineapple, and two of tomato juice. He didn’t think he’d be gone that long, but one never knew.

Patting his chest, he made sure he had his key around his neck. It never came off, but he habitually patted his chest anyway to make sure it was there. A purple bruise on his sternum hinted that he did this too often. A fork and a rusty screwdriver went in his breast pocket, the latter for jabbing open the cans. Jimmy really needed to find a can opener. That and batteries for his flashlight were the highest of priorities. The power had only gone out twice over the years, but both times had left him terrified of the dark. And checking to make sure his flashlight worked all the time tended to wear down the batteries.

Scratching his beard, he thought of what else. He didn’t have much water left in the cistern, but maybe he’d find some out there, so he threw in two empty bottles from years prior. These took some digging. He had to rummage behind the hill of empty cans in one corner of the storeroom, the flies pestering him and yelling at him to leave them alone.

“I see you, I see you,” he told them. “Buzz off.”

Jimmy laughed at his own joke.

In the kitchen, he grabbed the large knife, the one he hadn’t broken the tip off of. He put that in his pack as well. By the time he worked up his nerve to leave on the second day, he decided it was too late to get started. So he took his gun apart and oiled it up one more time and promised himself that he would leave in the morning.

Jimmy didn’t sleep well that night. He left the radio on in case there was any chatter, and the hissing made him dream of the air from the outside leaking in through the great steel door. The air hissed and hissed and filled his home with poison. He woke up more than once gasping for a breath and found it difficult to get back to sleep.

In the morning, he checked the cameras, but they were still broken. He wished he had the one of the hallway. All it showed was black. He told himself there was no one there. But soon, he would be. He was about to go outside. Outside. Was it okay to think that?

“It’s okay,” he told himself. He grabbed his rifle, which reeked of oil, and lifted his homemade pack, which he thought suddenly he could wear as clothes in a pinch, if he had to. He laughed some more and headed for the ladder.

“C’mon, c’mon,” he said, urging himself as he climbed up. He tried to whistle, was normally a very good whistler, but his mouth was too dry. He hummed, instead.

The pack and the gun were heavy. Dangling from the crook of his elbow, they made it difficult to unlock the hatch at the top of the ladder. But he finally managed. He stuck his head out and he paused to admire the gentle hum of the machines. Some of them made little clicking sounds as if their innards were busy. He’d taken most of the backs off over the years to peer inside and see if any contained secrets, but they all looked like the guts of the computers his dad used to build.

The stench of his own waste greeted him as he moved between the tall towers. That wasn’t how you were supposed to greet someone, he thought. His poop was rude. And the black boxes radiated an awful heat, which only made the smell worse.

He stood in front of the great steel door and hesitated. Jimmy’s world had been shrinking every day. It had been these two levels, the room with the black machines and the labyrinth beneath. And then he’d only been comfortable below. And then even the dark passageway and the tall ladder had frightened him. And soon it was the back room with all the beds and the storerooms with their funny smells, until the only place he felt safe was on his makeshift cot by the computer desk, the sound of the empty radio crackling in the background.

And now he stood before that door his father had dragged him through, the place where he’d killed a man, and he thought about his world expanding.

His palms were damp as he reached for the keypad. A part of him feared the air outside would be toxic, but he was probably breathing the same air, and people had lived for years out there, talking now and then on the radio. He keyed in the first two digits, level 12, his home. Jimmy thought about going home to get some different clothes, to go to the bathroom in a toilet. He pictured his mother sitting on his parents’ bed, waiting for him. He saw her lying on her back, arms crossed, nothing but bones.

He messed up the next two digits, hitting the 4 instead of the 1, and wiped his hands on his thighs. “There’s no one on the other side,” he told himself. “No one. I’m alone. I’m alone.”

Somehow, this comforted him.

He entered the two digits again, and then the digits of his school.

The keypad beeped. The door began to make noises. And Jimmy Parker took a step back. He thought of school and his friends, wondered if any of them were still alive. If anyone was still alive. He hooked his finger under the strap of his rifle and pulled it over his head, tucked it against his shoulder. The door clanked free. All he had to do was pull.

•24•

There were signs of life and death waiting for him in the hall. A charred ring on the tile and a scatter of ash marked the corpse of an old fire. The outside of the steel door was lined with scratches and marked with dings. The latter reminded him of his misses during Kick the Can, the ineffectual kiss of bullet against solid steel. Right by his feet, Jimmy noticed a stain on the floor—a patch of dappled brown—that touched some small broken bone deep within his brain. He remembered a man dying there with his father’s face. Jimmy looked away from these signs of the living and the dying and stepped into the hall.

As he began to pull the door shut, something made him hesitate, some worry in the fiber of his muscles, some constriction of blood vessels. Jimmy wondered if perhaps his code wouldn’t work from the outside. What if the door locked and he could never get back in? He checked the keypad and saw the gouges around its steel plate where someone had tried to pry it off the wall. He was reminded how desperately so many others had wanted in over the years. Remembering this made him feel crazy for wanting out. He was wanting in the wrong direction.

Before he could worry further, he shut the steel door, and his heart sank a little as the gears whirred and the locks slid into the wall. There was a hollow thunk, like a period on the end of a dreadful thought, the sound of awful finality.

Jimmy rushed to the keypad, his chest pounding in his throat, the feeling of men running down all three hallways to get him, blood-curdling screams and bludgeoning weapons held high over their heads—

He entered the code, and the door whirred open. Pushing on the handle, he took a few deep breaths of home, and nearly gagged on the smell of his own waste warmed by hot and buzzing servers.

There was no one running down the halls. He needed a new can opener. He needed to find a toilet that worked. He needed coveralls that weren’t worn to tatters. He needed to breathe and find another stash of canned food and water.

Jimmy reluctantly closed the door again. And even though he had just tested the keypad, the fear that he would never get back inside returned. The gears would be worn out. The code would only work from the outside once per day, once per year. A part of him knew—the obsessive part of him knew—that he could check the code a hundred times and still worry it wouldn’t work the very next. He could check forever and never be satisfied. His pulse pounded in his ears as he tore himself from the door.

The hallway was brightly lit. Jimmy kept his rifle against his arm and slid silently past ransacked offices. Everything was quiet except for the buzzing of one light fixture on its last leg and the flutter of a piece of paper on a desk beneath a gushing vent. The security station was unmanned. Jimmy crawled over the gate, remembering Yani, imagining the stairwell outside crowded with people, a man in a cleaning suit barging out and wading into the masses, but when he opened the door and peered outside, the landing was empty.

It was also dim. Only the green emergency lights were on. Jimmy shut the door slowly so that rusty hinges would groan rather than squeal. There was a roll of paper on the grating by his feet. Not a roll of paper. Jimmy nudged the object with his boot, a white cylinder the length of his forearm with knobby ends. A bone. He recognized it from the jumble of a man who had wasted away by the servers, dragged close to his piles of shit.

Jimmy felt with keen surety that his bones would be exposed someday. Perhaps this day. He would never make it back inside his sturdy little home beneath the servers. And this frightened him less than it should have. The heady rush of being out in the open, the cool air and the green glow of the stairwell, even the remnants of another human being, were a sudden and welcome relief from the insanity of being closed in. What had once been his pen—the floors and levels of the silo—was now the great outside. Here was a land of death and of hopeful opportunity.

•25•

He had no great plan, no real direction, but the tug was upward. His flashlight was on its dimward way to death, so he explored the levels cautiously. Groping in an apartment, he fumbled for a toilet, took a crap the way God intended, and was disheartened by the lack of a flush. The sink didn’t run, either. Neither did the wash nozzle beside the toilet, which left him using a bedsheet in perfect darkness.

He continued up. There was a general store on nineteen, just below his home. He would check there for batteries, though he feared most useful things would be quite consumed by now. The garment district would have coveralls, though. He felt sure of that. A plan was forming.

Until a vibration in the steps altered them.

Jimmy stopped and listened to the clang of footsteps. They were coming from above. He could see the next landing jutting off overhead, one turn around the central post. It was nearer than the landing below. So he ran, rifle clattering against the jugs tied to his makeshift backpack, boots clomping awkwardly on the treads, his heart both fearful and relieved to not be alone.

He tugged the doors open on the next landing and pulled them shut all but a crack. Pressing his cheek against the door, he peered through the slit, listening. The clanging grew louder and louder. Jimmy held his breath. A figure flew by, hand squeaking along the railing, and then another figure close behind, shouting threats. Both were little more than blurs. Once the noise faded, Jimmy decided they might’ve been ghosts. He remained in the darkness at the end of a strange and silent hall until he could feel things creeping across the tile toward him, hands with claws reaching through the inky black to tangle up in his wild and long hair, and Jimmy found himself back on the landing in the dull green glow of emergency lights, panting and not knowing what to believe.

He was alone, one way or the other. Even if people survived around him, the only company one found was the kind that chased you or killed you. He would rather remain alone.

Upward again, listening more closely for footfalls, keeping a hand on the rail for a vibration, he spiraled his way past the dirt farm and water plant, past sanitation, keeping to the green light and aiming for the general store. The muscles in his legs grew warm from the use, but in a good way. He passed familiar landmarks that seemed out of time, levels from another life with an accumulation of wear and a tangle of wires and pipes. The world had grown as rusty as his memory of it.

He arrived at the general store to find it mostly bare, except for the remains of someone trapped under a spilled stand of shelves. The boots sticking out were small, a woman’s or a child’s. White ankle bones spanned the gap between boot and cuff. There were goods trapped underneath the shelf with the person, but Jimmy wasn’t about to investigate. He searched the scattering of items for batteries or a can opener. There were toys and trinkets and useless things. Jimmy sensed that many a shadow had fallen over those goods. He saved his flashlight by sneaking out in the darkness.

Searching his old apartment wasn’t worth the juice, either. It no longer felt like home. There was a sadness inside that he couldn’t name, a sense that he had failed his parents, an old ache in the center of his mind like he used to get from sucking on ice. Jimmy left the apartment and continued up. Something called to him from above. And it wasn’t until he got within half a spiral from the schoolhouse that he knew what it was. The distant past was reaching out to him. The day it all began. His classroom, where he could last remember seeing his mother, where his friends still sat in his disordered mind, where if he remained, if he could just go back and sit at his desk and unwind events once more, they would have to come out differently. The world would go to right if he could get back to the day when last the world had been right at all.

•26•

Jimmy kept his flashlight powered up as he made his way to the classroom. There was no going back, he quickly saw. There, in the middle of the room, his old backpack lay lifeless like a small animal abandoned and starved. Several of the desks were askew, the neat rows snapped like broken bones, and Jimmy could see in his mind his friends rushing out, could see the paths they took, could watch them spill toward the door like transparent ghosts. They had taken their bags with them. Jimmy’s remained and lay still as a corpse.

He could hear Sarah’s voice somehow, clear as glass. She called out as his mother pulled him away, called out that he was leaving his backpack. Jimmy stood frozen in the doorway. He thought maybe Sarah had been calling out not to leave her behind.

A step inside, the room aglow from his torch, Mrs. Pearson looked up from a book, smiled and said nothing. Barbara sat at her desk, right by the door. Jimmy remembered her hand in his during a class trip to the livestock pens. It was on the way back, after the strange smells of so many animals, hands reaching through bars to stroke fur and feather and fat, hairless pigs. Jimmy had been fourteen, and something about the animals had excited or changed him. So that when Barbara hung back at the end of the corkscrew of classmates making their way up the staircase and had reached for his hand, he hadn’t pulled back.

Jimmy didn’t think of Barbara the same way he dreamed about Sarah, but that prolonged touch was a taste of what-might-have-been with another. He brushed the surface of her desk with his fingertips and left tracks through the dust. Paul’s desk—his best friend’s—was one of those disturbed. He stepped through the gap it left, seeing everyone leaving at once, his mother giving him a head start, until he stood in the center of the room, by his bag, completely alone.

“I am all alone,” he said. “I am solitude.”

His lips were dry and stuck together. They tore apart when he spoke as if opened for the very first time.

Approaching his bag, he noticed that it’d been gutted. He knelt down and tossed open the flap. There was a scrap of plastic like his mom used and reused to wrap his lunch, but his lunch was gone. Two cornbars and an oatmeal brownie. Amazing how he remembered some things and not others. Someone in the early days had taken his meal, and Jimmy was somewhat glad.

He dug deeper, wondering if they’d taken much else. The calculator his father had built from scratch was still in there, as were the glass figurine soldiers his uncle gave him on his thirteenth. He took the time to transfer everything from his makeshift bag to his old backpack. The zipper was stiff, but it still worked. He studied the knotted coveralls and decided they were in worse shape than the ones he had on, so he left them.

Jimmy stood and surveyed the room, sweeping his flashlight across the chaos. A part of him didn’t want to go. When he left, it would be as another ghost, and the room would be empty once more. On the blackboard, he saw someone had left their mark. He played the light across the scene and saw the word Fuck written over and over. It looked like a string of letters like that, fuckfuckfuckfuck. Someone having a bad day.

Jimmy found the erasing rag behind Mrs. Pearson’s desk. It was stiff and crusty, but the words still came off. Left behind was a smear, and Jimmy remembered the good days of writing on the board in front of the class. He remembered writing assignments. Mrs. Pearson complimented him on his poetry once, probably just to be nice. Licking his lips, he fished a nub of old chalk from the tray and thought of something to write. There were no nerves from standing before the class. No one was watching. He was well and truly all alone.

I am Jimmy, he wrote on the board, the flashlight casting a strange halo, a ring of dim light, as he wrote. The nub of chalk clicked and clacked as he made each stroke. It squeaked and groaned between the clicks. The noise was like company, and yet he wrote a poem of being alone, an assignment in front of an empty class, a mechanical act from bygone days.

The ghosts are watching, he wrote. The ghosts are watching. They watch me stroll alone.
The corpses are laughing. The corpses are laughing. They go quiet when I step over them.
My parents are missing. My parents are missing. They are waiting for me to come home.

He wasn’t sure about that last line. Jimmy ran the light across what he’d written, which he didn’t think was very good. More wouldn’t make it better, but he wrote more, anyway.

The silo is empty. The silo is empty. It’s full of death from pit to rim.
My name was Jimmy, my name was Jimmy. But nobody calls me any longer. I am alone, the ghosts are watching, and solitude makes me stronger.

The last part was a lie, but it was poetry, so it didn’t count. Jimmy stepped away from the board and studied the words with a flickering flashlight. The words were like a voice. His voice. They trailed off to the side and dipped down, each line sagging more than the last, the letters getting smaller toward the end of each sentence. It was a problem he always had with the blackboard. He started big and seemed to shrink as he went. Scratching the stubble on his chin, he wondered what this said of him, what it portended.

There was a lot wrong with what he’d written, he thought. The fifth line was untrue, the one about nobody calling him Jimmy. Above the poem, he had called himself this. I am Jimmy, he had written. He still thought of himself as Jimmy.

He grabbed the stiff rag he’d left in the chalk tray, stood before his poem, and went to erase the line that wasn’t right. But something stopped him. It was the fear of making the poem worse by attempting to fix it. The fear of taking a line away and having nothing good to put in its place. This was his voice, and it was too rare a thing to quash.

Jimmy felt Mrs. Pearson’s eyes upon him. He felt the eyes of his classmates. The ghosts were watching, the corpses laughing, while he studied the problem on the board.

When the solution came, it brought a familiar thrill of arriving at the right place, of connecting the dots. Jimmy reached up and slapped the dusty rag against the board and erased the first thing he’d written. The words I am Jimmy disappeared into a white smear and a tumbling haze of powder. He set the rag aside and began to write a truth in its place.

I am Solitude, he started to write. He liked the sound of that. It was poetic and full of meaning. But like all great poetry, the words had a mind of their own, his deep thoughts intervened, and so he wrote something different. He shortened it to two little neat circles, a swerve, and a slash. Grabbing his bag, he left the room and his old friends behind. All that remained was a poem and the call to be remembered, a mark to prove he’d been there.

I am Solo.

And a haze of chalk fell through the air like the ghost of unwritten words.