36
Besides food, Shadow had a nose for trouble. A nose for causing it. Jimmy woke one morning to an awful screeching sound, a pathetic and plaintive hiss spilling down the corridor. Jimmy had climbed the ladder half-asleep to find Shadow stuck near the top rung. He didn’t know how the cat had got there, and the cat didn’t know how to get down. Jimmy released the hatch over their heads and threw it aside. He watched as Shadow clawed up the metal mesh behind the ladder, his back pressed against the rungs, and scampered over the top.
Two mornings later, the same thing happened, and that’s when Jimmy decided to leave the hatch open all the time. He was sick of opening and closing as he came and went, and Shadow liked being able to explore the server room whenever he liked. There hadn’t been any fighting in a long time, and the great steel door still winked red.
Shadow loved the servers. Most times, Jimmy would find him up on server number 40, where the metal was so hot Jimmy could hardly touch. But Shadow didn’t mind. He slept up there or peered over the edge at the ground far below, watching for bugs and mice on which to pounce.
Other times, Jimmy found him standing in the corner where that man he’d shot forever ago had wasted away. Shadow liked to sniff the rust stains and touch his tongue to the grating, divining what had happened there. It was for these freedoms that the hatch remained off. And this was how, when the power went out big-time, the bad men got inside. This was how Jimmy woke up one morning with a stranger standing over his bed.
****
The outage had woken him in the middle of the night. Jimmy slept with the lights full-on, keeping the ghosts at bay. He even liked a little of the radio static to fill the room, so he couldn’t hear any whisperings. When the silence and darkness hit at once with a loud thump, Jimmy had startled awake and scrambled for his flashlight, stepping on Shadow’s tail in the process. He waited for the lights to come on, but they never did. Too tired to think what to do, he went back to sleep, both hands wrapped around his torch, Shadow curling up warily against his neck.
The noise of someone coming down the ladder was likely what stirred him later. Jimmy was dimly aware of a presence in the room. It was a sensation often felt, but this presence seemed to change the way the silence bounced around, the way even the noise of his breathing echoed. He opened his eyes to find a flashlight shining down on him, a man standing at the foot of his bed.
Jimmy screamed, and the man pounced with half a mind to silence him. A bearded snarl of yellowed teeth caught the beam of light, and then the arc of a steel rod—
There was a flash of pain in Jimmy’s shoulder. The man hauled back to hit him again with his length of pipe. Jimmy got his arms up to protect his head. The pipe cracked him on the wrist. There was a screech and a hiss by his head, and then a darting piece of black amid the shadows.
The man with the pipe screamed and dropped his flashlight, which doused itself in the bedsheets. Jimmy scrambled away, his mind unable to come to grips with a person in his home. A person in his home. The fear of years and years came true in an instant. All his precautions had loosened. All the venturing out. Slack, slack, he told himself, crawling on his hands and knees.
Shadow screeched an awful sound, the noise he made when his tail got stepped on. A howl of pain followed. Jimmy felt anger rise up and mix with fear, a potent brew. He crawled toward the corner, banged into the desk, reached for where it should be propped—
His hands settled around the gun. It’d been years since he’d fired it. Couldn’t remember if it was even loaded. But he could still swing it like a club if he had to. He cradled it against his shoulder and waved the barrel through the pitch black. Shadow screeched again. There was a thump of a small body hitting something hard. Jimmy couldn’t breathe or swallow. He couldn’t see anything but the dim glow of light rising up from the folds of his bed.
He pointed the barrel at a patch of blackness that seemed to move, and squeezed the trigger. There was a blinding flash of light from the muzzle, a roar that filled the small space to the seams. In that brief strobe flashed the searing image of a man whirling toward him. Another wild shot. Another glimpse of this stranger in Jimmy’s space, a thin man with a long beard and white eyes. And now Jimmy knew where he was, and the third shot did not zing. Its impact was lost in screams. The screams filled the darkness, and then a final shot put an end to even these.
****
Shadow’s eyes glowed beneath the desk. He peered our warily at Jimmy and his new flashlight.
“You okay?” Jimmy asked.
The cat blinked.
“Stay here,” Jimmy whispered.
He cradled the flashlight between his cheek and shoulder and checked the clip. Before he left, he nudged the man who was bleeding on his sheets. Jimmy felt a strange numbness at seeing someone down there, even dead. He listened for more intruders as he stole his way toward the ladder.
The power outage and this attack were no coincidence, he told himself. Someone had gotten the door open. They had figured the keypad or pulled a breaker. Jimmy hoped this man had done it alone. He didn’t recognize the face, but a lot of years had passed. Beards got long and turned gray. The silver coveralls hinted at someone who might know how to break in. The pain in his shoulder and wrist hinted at no friend of his.
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.