Building C - Part One

Coy Shumate clocked in at 10:47 PM on a Tuesday in March. Thirteen minutes early because the bus ran ahead of schedule and the break room had coffee and he didn't have coffee at home. The temp agency had emailed his start date, his shift, and the address. Third shift, 11 PM to 7 AM. Piedmont Chemical Solutions. Building C.

The parking lot was mostly empty. Second shift had cleared out by ten. The building sat at the back of the complex, past two newer warehouses with roll-up doors and LED floods that turned the asphalt white. Building C was older. Block walls with the mortar joints showing. Metal roof. Sodium lights that turned everything orange. It had been a furniture warehouse before the industry pulled out, and the company had converted it for chemical storage without changing much. The floor was sealed concrete with cracks running through the sealant. The racks were bolted to the slab but not plumb. Some leaned a quarter inch. The building smelled like floor seal and something sharper underneath — the chemicals, capped and labeled, still leaking their signatures through shrink-wrap and cardboard.

Grimes met him at the dock door. Fifties. Steel-toed boots with the leather cracking at the toe box. The laces were the wrong color — replacements from a different pair. He shook Coy's hand without squeezing and handed him a reflective vest and an RF scanner.

"You pick to the staging lane. Forklift moves pallets to the dock. You don't touch the forklift."

Coy nodded.

"Steel-toes required. Hard hat in aisles nine through fourteen — overhead stock. No earbuds. No phone on the floor except break. You get two fifteens and a thirty."

They walked the floor. Grimes pointed out the pick zones, the hazmat placards, the eyewash station with its yellowed instruction card. He moved through the building without looking at anything. He indicated things. Pointed, kept walking.

"Fire exits here and here. Restroom through that door — don't use the one by the compressor room, the lock sticks. Spill kits on every end cap. If you bust a drum, you don't clean it. You call me."

They turned the corner past aisle sixteen. The back third of Building C was storage — no pick activity, pallets stacked three high, shrink-wrapped drums of industrial degreaser and floor stripper. The sodium lights were spaced wider here. The shadows between racks were longer. Grimes walked faster through this section. Not rushing. Covering ground.

"Back here's dead stock. Slow movers. You won't pull from here much. If you do, check dates — some of it's been sitting since before I started."

At the far wall, between the last rack and the block wall, there was a hatch in the floor. Metal. Maybe three feet square. It had a latch but no padlock, and someone had positioned a pallet of five-gallon buckets over it so the hatch was mostly covered. You could see the edge of the frame if you were standing at the right angle.

Grimes stopped walking but didn't turn toward it.

"Don't go in the crawlspace beneath Building C."

He said it the same way he'd said steel-toes required. Same cadence. Same volume. No emphasis on any word. Then he walked on, already talking about the break schedule, and Coy followed. He looked back once at the hatch. The pallet covered most of it. The edge of the metal was thick with paint — not one coat but layers, each a slightly different shade of the same industrial gray, built up so the latch sat in a shallow valley of dried enamel.

---

The work was simple. Scanner beeped. Screen showed a location and a quantity. Walk to the location, scan the barcode, place the product on the cart, push the cart to staging. The scanner tracked his picks per hour. Forty-two was the target. Coy hit thirty-eight his first night, which Grimes said was fine for the first week.

There were eleven people on third shift in Building C. Coy learned some of the names. Moss worked the same zone. Quiet. Maybe thirty. He moved through the aisles with the efficiency of someone who'd stopped thinking about the work years ago, his body doing the picking while the rest of him waited somewhere else. He showed Coy where the good carts were — second row back from the dock, the ones with wheels that tracked straight.

"The ones by the door are trash," Moss said. "Bearings are shot."

"Got it. Thanks."

Coy settled in. The shifts had a rhythm. Clock in. Vest. Scanner. Pick until first break at 1 AM — fifteen minutes in the break room, which was a partitioned corner of the warehouse with a microwave, two vending machines, and a folding table with a wobble that everyone compensated for without mentioning. Lunch at 3:30 — the thirty. Second break at 5:15. Pick until 7. Clock out. Walk to the bus stop on Regional Road. The 7:40 ran late more often than not.

He took the bus home to a one-bedroom off Trindale Road. The apartment was on the second floor of a building that had been a dentist's office in the nineties — you could still see the outline of the old sign on the brick. The kitchen had a stove with one working burner. The hot water took four minutes. He slept until four, ate whatever was in the cabinet, and caught the 9:50 bus back.

Before the warehouse he'd been at a fulfillment center in Kernersville that closed its night operation without notice. Before that, a plastics plant in Thomasville where the temp contract ended at sixty days and they hired the other guy. Before that, a lumberyard, a food distributor, a machine shop that smelled like coolant, and three others he didn't list on applications anymore because the gaps between them looked worse than the jobs themselves. Nine in five years. The jobs were unreliable. He showed up.

He didn't mind the work at Piedmont Chemical. The pay was $16.50 through the temp agency. After ninety days, if they converted him to permanent, it would go to $17.75 plus benefits — dental, vision, the health plan with the $3,000 deductible that at least existed, which was more than most of the nine had offered. Ninety days. He marked them off on his phone calendar. He could do ninety days.

---

The hum was there on his third shift. Or he noticed it on his third shift. He was pulling from aisle fourteen, near the back wall where the dead stock started, and the sound was there. Had probably been there since his first shift. He just hadn't isolated it.

Low. Steady. Not mechanical — not the cycling of a compressor or the rattle of ductwork expanding. It didn't have the rhythm of a machine. It was one continuous tone, no cycling, no variation. It came from the floor.

He stopped the cart and listened. The sound didn't change.

He finished the pick and moved forward two aisles. The sound was fainter. He went back. Louder. Loudest near the hatch, where the five-gallon buckets sat on their pallet gathering dust that the hatch itself didn't gather.

He found Grimes at the dock, checking a bill of lading against a screen.

"There's a sound back by the wall. A hum."

Grimes marked something on the clipboard. "HVAC."

"It doesn't sound like the HVAC. The HVAC cycles. This doesn't."

"Building's old. Makes noise." Grimes initialed the sheet and moved to the next pallet. The conversation was over.

Coy went back to picking.

---

Over the next three weeks, Coy watched.

Nobody pulled from the back third of Building C unless the scanner routed them there, and even then they moved fast. Moss, who was unhurried everywhere else, picked from aisles fifteen and sixteen with his shoulders up near his ears. A woman named Patrice who ran the forklift — nine years on the shift — turned her machine around at the end of fourteen and backed down sixteen rather than driving past the hatch. Grimes wrote the rotation so that dead-stock inventory checks fell to new temps, the ones still in their first thirty days. After that, people seemed to know without being told. A guy named Rick who'd been there four years once dropped a case in aisle fifteen and left it on the floor for the rest of the shift rather than walk back toward the hatch to get a broom. He swept it up the next night, from the other direction.

Nobody talked about it. The hum was there every shift. Same tone. Same volume. The HVAC cycled on and off, the blower kicking in with a clatter and shutting down with a descending whine. The hum had nothing to do with any of it. The hum didn't fluctuate with temperature or the number of people on the floor or the time of night. It sat under the other sounds of the building — the scanner chirps, the forklift backing alarm, the shrink-wrap gun — patient, outlasting all of them.

Coy noticed other things. The concrete around the hatch was clean. Not cleaned — clean, in a way that had nothing to do with maintenance. Five feet out in any direction, the floor had the usual grime — scuff marks, forklift tire dust, the residue of whatever gets tracked across a warehouse floor over decades. The area around the hatch looked new. He ran his boot across it once on his way to aisle sixteen. No resistance. No grit. The surface was smooth in a way that the rest of Building C's floor had not been smooth in thirty years.

One night during first break, he walked to the back of the warehouse with his phone light. He crouched by the hatch and examined the paint layers. Smooth. Old. Each coat applied directly over the last without scraping. Where the colors shifted at the edges you could count them — seven coats, each one the same institutional gray but from a different batch, a different year. The latch was functional. The paint didn't seal it shut, not quite, but it would take force. The pallet of buckets sat on top. The bucket labels had faded to the point where the product name was guesswork. The dust on the buckets was thick and undisturbed. The hatch had no dust at all.

He went back to work.

---

On a Thursday, five weeks in, Coy arrived early. Moss was already in the break room with a mug from the shelf above the microwave — the row of mugs nobody owned, all facing the same direction, all different. Coy poured coffee. The pot was burned. He drank it anyway.

"You ever been under Building C?" Coy said.

Moss looked at the coffee machine. Adjusted the filter basket that didn't need adjusting.

"Under it."

"The crawlspace. The hatch in the back."

Moss brought his mug to the table. Sat. Looked at Coy for a long time without changing his expression.

"No," Moss said.

"The hum. You hear it."

Moss drank his coffee.

"I went down," Coy said. "Last Tuesday. On my thirty. Moved the pallet. Opened the hatch — had to crack through a paint layer but the latch worked. Went down with my phone light."

Moss held the mug with both hands.

"There's nothing down there. Concrete floor. Conduit runs along the block walls. Drain pipes in the northeast corner. I walked the whole space, maybe forty by sixty. Swept the light across everything. No equipment. No storage. No source for the sound. Every pipe I checked was PVC, standard, nothing vibrating, nothing carrying flow. The air was cool — cooler than the warehouse floor, cooler than it should've been for an enclosed space with no ventilation I could find. And it was quiet. The hum stopped the second I was down there. Or it was down there with me and I couldn't locate it anymore — I couldn't tell which. But I walked every foot of that crawlspace and there is nothing in it. Concrete and conduit and pipes going nowhere."

Moss set the mug down.

"Sure it is," he said.

Quiet. Not dismissive.

"There's nothing down there. I'm telling you. I looked."

Moss stood. Rinsed the mug at the utility sink. Dried it with a paper towel from the wall dispenser and set it back on the shelf, handle facing left, where they all faced. He looked at Coy once on his way out. Then he looked at the floor.

"Have a good shift," Moss said.

He walked out. The break room door swung shut on its pneumatic closer, slow, the last inch of light narrowing to a seam and then gone. The fluorescent above the table ticked — a ballast issue, the kind that maintenance notes and never repairs because the light still works. The vending machine compressor cycled on.

Coy sat alone at the folding table. Through the partition wall, through forty feet of racked drums and sealed concrete and seven coats of paint applied over years by people who understood exactly what they were covering and chose to cover it again, the hum held, steady the way it was always steady because it had never been anything other than steady, and the air in his chest wouldn't release — it sat behind the sternum, caught on a sound that offered no rhythm to sync to, no downbeat where the diaphragm could open, no pause in the tone where the body could find the seam between one breath and the next and push through it.

He sat with that. The break ended. He went back to work.
 

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