Shift

by Hugh Howey

Page 20

 

  Husband and wife.

  Helen!

  Donald yelled her name over the crowd. He turned and tried to swim against the flowing torrent of the frightened mob. Anna and his sister pulled on him. People fighting to get below pushed from above. Donald was forced downward, into the depths. He wanted to go under with his wife. He wanted to drown with her.

  ‘Helen!’

  Oh, God, he remembered.

  He remembered what he had left behind.

  Panic subsided and fear took its place. He could see. His vision had cleared. But he could not fight the push of the inevitable.

  Donald remembered a conversation with the Senator about how it would all end. There was an electricity in the air, the taste of dead metal on his tongue, a white mist rising around him. He remembered most of a book. He knew what this was, what was happening.

  His world was gone.

  A new one swallowed him.

  SECOND SHIFT – ORDER

  24

  2212

  • Silo 1 •

  TROY STARTED AWAKE from a series of terrible dreams. The world was on fire, and the people who had been sent to extinguish it were all asleep. Asleep and frozen stiff, smoking matches still in their hands, wisps and grey curls of evil deeds.

  He had been buried, was enveloped in darkness, could feel the tight walls of his small coffin hemming him in.

  Dark shapes moved beyond the frosted glass, the men with their shovels trying to free him.

  Troy’s eyelids seemed to rip and crack as he fought to open them fully. There was crust in the corners of his eyes, melting frost coursing down his cheeks. He tried to lift his arms to wipe it away, but they responded feebly. An IV tugged at his wrist as he managed to raise one hand. He was aware of his catheter. Every inch of his body tingled as he emerged from the numbness and into the cold.

  The lid popped with a hiss of air. There was a crack of light to his side that grew as the shadows folded away.

  A doctor and his assistant reached in to tend to him. Troy tried to speak but could only cough. They helped him up, brought him the bitter drink. Swallowing took effort. His hands were so weak, arms trembling, that they had to help him with the cup. The taste on his tongue was metallic. It tasted like death.

  ‘Easy,’ they said when he tried to drink too fast. Tubes and IVs were carefully removed by expert hands, pressure applied, gauze taped to frigid skin. There was a paper gown.

  ‘What year?’ he asked, his voice a dry rasp.

  ‘It’s early,’ the doctor said, a different doctor. Troy blinked against the harsh lights, didn’t recognise either man tending to him. The sea of coffins around him remained a hazy blur.

  ‘Take your time,’ the assistant said, tilting the cup.

  Troy managed a few sips. He felt worse than last time. It had been longer. The cold was deep within his bones. He remembered that his name wasn’t Troy. He was supposed to be dead. Part of him regretted being disturbed. Another part hoped he had slept through the worst of it.

  ‘Sir, we’re sorry to wake you, but we need your help. ’

  ‘Your report—’

  Two men were talking at once.

  ‘Another silo is having problems, sir. Silo eighteen—’

  Pills were produced. Troy waved them away. He no longer wished to take them.

  The doctor hesitated; the two capsules rested in his palm. He turned to consult with someone else, a third man. Troy tried to blink the world into focus. Something was said. Fingers curled around the pills, filling him with relief.

  They helped him up, had a wheelchair waiting. A man stood behind it, his hair as stark white as his overalls, his square jaw and iron frame familiar. Troy recognised him. This was the man who woke the freezing.

  Another sip of water as he leaned against the pod, knees trembling from being weak and cold.

  ‘What about silo eighteen?’ Troy whispered the question as the cup was lowered.

  The doctor frowned and said nothing. The man behind the wheelchair studied him intently.

  ‘I know you,’ Troy said.

  The man in white nodded. The wheelchair was waiting for Troy. Troy felt his stomach twist as dormant parts of him stirred.

  ‘You’re the Thaw Man,’ he said, even though this didn’t sound quite right.

  The paper gown was warm. It rustled as his arms were guided through the sleeves. The men working on him were nervous. They chattered back and forth, one of them saying a silo was falling, the other that they needed his help. Troy cared only about the man in white. They helped him towards the wheelchair.

  ‘Is it over?’ he asked. He watched the colourless man, his vision clearing, his voice growing stronger. He dearly hoped that he had slept through it all.

  The Thaw Man shook his head sadly as Troy was lowered into the chair.

  ‘I’m afraid, son,’ a familiar voice said, ‘that it’s only begun. ’

  25

  The year of the Great Uprising

  • Silo 18 •

  DEATHDAYS WERE BIRTHDAYS. That’s what they said to ease their pain, those who were left behind. An old man dies and a lottery is won. Children weep while hopeful parents cry tears of joy. Deathdays were birthdays, and no one knew this better than Mission Jones.

  Tomorrow was his seventeenth. Tomorrow, he would grow a year older. It would also mark seventeen years to the day since his mother had died.

  The cycle of life was everywhere – it wrapped around all things like the great spiral staircase – but nowhere was it more evident, nowhere could it be seen so clearly that a life given was one taken away, than in him. And so Mission approached his birthday without joy, with a heavy load on his young back, thinking on death and celebrating nothing.

  Three steps below him and matching his pace, Mission could hear his friend Cam wheezing from his half of the load. When Dispatch assigned them a tandem, the two boys had flipped a coin – heads for heads, and Cam had lost. That left Mission out in front with a clear view of the stairs. It also gave him rights to set the pace, and his dark thoughts made for an angry one.

  Traffic was light on the stairwell that morning. The children were not yet up and heading to school, those of them who still went any more. A few bleary-eyed shopkeeps staggered to work. There were service workers with grease stains on their bellies and patches sewn into their knees coming off late shifts. One man descended bearing more than a non-porter should, but Mission was in no mood to set down his burden and weigh another’s. It was enough to glare at the gentleman, to let him know that he’d been seen.

  ‘Three more to go,’ he huffed to Cam as they passed the thirty-fifth. His porter’s strap was digging into his shoulders, the load a heavy one. Heavier still was its destination. Mission hadn’t been back to the farms in near on four months, hadn’t seen his father in just as long. His brother, of course, he saw at the Nest now and then, but it’d still been a few weeks. To arrive so near to his birthday would be awkward, but there was no avoiding it. He trusted his father to do as he always had and ignore the occasion altogether, to ignore the fact that he was getting any older.

  Past the thirty-fifth they entered another gap between the levels full of graffiti. The noxious odour of home-mixed paint hung in the air. Recent work dribbled in places, parts of it done the night before. Bold letters wrapped across the curving wall of concrete far beyond the stairway railing that read:

  This is our ’Lo.

  The slang for silo felt dated, even though the paint was not yet dry. Nobody said that any more. Not for years. Further up and much older:

  Clean this, Mother—

  The rest was obscured in a wash of censoring paint. As if anyone could read it and not fill in the blank. It was the first half that was the killing offence, anyway.

  Down with the Up Top!

  Mission laughed at this one. He pointed it out to Cam. Probably painted by som
e kid born above the mids and full of self-loathing, some kid who couldn’t abide their own good fortune. Mission knew the kind. They were his kind. He studied all this graffiti painted over last year’s graffiti and that from all the many years before. It was here between the levels, where the steel girders stretched out from the stairwell to the cement beyond, that such slogans went back generations.

  The End is Coming . . .

  Mission marched past this one, unable to argue. The end was coming. He could feel it in his bones. He could hear it in the wheezing rattle of the silo with its loose bolts and its rusty joints, could see it in the way people walked of late with their shoulders up around their ears, their belongings clutched to their chests. The end was coming for them all.

  His father would laugh and disagree, of course. Mission could hear his father’s voice from all the levels away, telling him how people had thought the same thing long before he and his brother were born, that it was the hubris of each generation to think this anew, to think that their time was special, that all things would come to an end with them. His father said it was hope that made people feel this, not dread. People talked of the end coming with barely concealed smiles. Their prayer was that when they went, they wouldn’t go alone. Their hope was that no one would have the good fortune to come after and live a happy life without them.

  Thoughts such as these made Mission’s neck itch. He held the hauling strap with one hand and adjusted the ’chief around his neck with the other. It was a nervous habit, hiding his neck when he thought about the end of things.

  ‘You doing okay up there?’ Cam asked.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Mission called back, realising he’d slowed. He gripped his strap with both hands and concentrated on his pace, on the job. There was a metronome in his head from his shadowing days, a tick-tock, tick-tock for tandem hauls. Two porters with good timing could fall into a rhythm and wind their way up a dozen flights, never feeling a heavy load. Mission and Cam weren’t there yet. Now and then one of them would have to shuffle his feet or adjust his pace to match the other. Otherwise, their load might sway dangerously.

  Their load. It was easier to think of it that way. Better not to think of it as a body – a dead man.

  Mission thought of his grandfather, whom he’d never known. He had died in the uprising of ’78, had left behind a son to take over the farm and a daughter to become a chipper. Mission’s aunt had quit that job a few years back; she no longer banged out spots of rust and primed and painted raw steel. Nobody did. Nobody bothered. But his father was still farming that same plot of soil, that same plot generations of Jones boys had farmed, forever insisting that things would never change.

  ‘That word means something else, you know,’ his father had told him once, when Mission had spoken of revolution. ‘It also means to go around and around. To revolve. One revolution, and you get right back to where you started. ’

  This was the sort of thing Mission’s father liked to say when the priests came to bury a man beneath his corn. His dad would pack the dirt with a shovel, say that’s how things go, and plant a seed in the neat depression his thumb made.

  Mission had told his friends this other meaning of revolution. He had pretended to come up with it himself. It was just the sort of pseudo-intellectual nonsense they regaled each other with late at night on dark landings while they inhaled potato glue out of plastic bags.

  His best friend Rodny had been the only one unimpressed. ‘Nothing changes until we make it change,’ he had said with a serious look in his eye.

  Mission wondered what his best friend was doing now. He hadn’t seen Rodny in months. Whatever he was shadowing for in IT kept him from getting out much.

  He thought back to better days, growing up in the Nest with friends tight as a fist. He remembered thinking they would all stay together and grow old in the up top. They would live along the same hallways, watch their eventual kids play the way they had.

  But they had all gone their separate ways. It was hard to remember who had done it first, who had shaken off the expectations of their parents to follow in their footsteps, but eventually most of them had. Each of them had left home to choose a new fate. Sons of plumbers took up farming. Daughters of the cafeteria learned to sew. Sons of farmers became porters.

  Mission remembered being angry when he left home. He remembered a fight with his father, throwing down his shovel, promising he’d never dig a trench again. He’d learned in the Nest that he could be anything he wanted, that he was in charge of his own fate. And so when he grew miserable, he assumed it was the farms that made him feel that way; he assumed it was his family.

  He and Cam had flipped a dime back in Dispatch, heads for heads, and Mission had wound up with a dead man’s shoulders pressed against his own. When he lifted his gaze to survey the steps ahead, the back of his skull touched a corpse’s crown through a plastic bag – birthdays and deathdays pressed tight, two halves of a single coin. Mission carried them both, this load meant for two. He took the stairs a pair at a time, a brutal pace, up towards the farm of his youth.

  26

  • Silo 18 •

  THE CORONER’S OFFICE was on thirty-two, just below the dirt farm, tucked away at the end of those dark and damp halls that wound their way beneath the roots. The ceiling was low in that half-level. Pipes hung visible from above and rattled angrily as pumps kicked on and moved nutrients to distant and thirsty roots. Water dripped from dozens of small leaks into buckets and pots. A recently emptied pot banged metallic with each strike. Another overflowed. The floors were slick, the walls damp like sweaty skin.

  Inside the coroner’s office, the boys lifted the body onto a slab of dented metal, and the coroner signed Mission’s work log. She tipped them for the speedy delivery, and when Cam saw the extra chits, his grumpiness over the pace dissolved. Back in the hallway, he bid Mission good day and splashed towards the exit.

  Mission watched him go, feeling much more than a year older than his friend. Cam hadn’t been told of the evening’s plans, the midnight rendezvous of porters. It made him envy the lad for what he didn’t know.