Third Shift - Pact Read Online Free Page A

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