Hugh Howey: Shift

‘Altitude fifty feet. Gonna touch down hard.’

Donald blinked away tears as the drone plummeted and the earth rushed up to meet the machine. He blinked away tears at the sight on the monitor, nothing wrong with the camera at all.

‘Blue—’ he said.

It was an utterance of confirmation just before a vivid green landscape swallowed the dying drone. The monitor faded from colour to darkness. Charlotte released the controls and cursed. She slapped the console with her palm. But as she turned and apologised to Donald, he was already wrapping his arms around her, squeezing her, kissing her cheek.

‘Did you see it?’ he asked, his voice a breathless whisper. ‘Did you see?’

‘See what?’ Charlotte pulled away, her face a hardened mask of disappointment. ‘Every gauge was toast there at the end. Blasted drone. Probably been sitting too long—’

‘No, no,’ Donald said. He pointed to the screen, which was now dark and lifeless. ‘You did it,’ he said. ‘I saw it. There were blue skies and green grass out there, Charla! I saw it!’

WITHOUT WANTING TO, Solo became an expert in how things broke down. Day by day, he watched steel and iron crumble to rust, watched paint peel and orange flecks curl up, saw the black dust gather as metal eroded to powder. He learned what rubber hoses felt like as they hardened, dried up and cracked. He learned how adhesives failed, things appearing on the floor that once were affixed to walls and ceilings, objects moved suddenly and violently by the twin gods of gravity and dilapidation. Most of all, he learned how bodies rot. They didn’t always go in a flash — like a mother pushed upward by a jostling crowd or a father sliding into the shadows of a darkened corridor. Instead, they were often chewed up and carried off in invisible pieces. Time and maggots alike grew wings; they flew and flew and took all things with them.

Solo tore a page from one of the boring articles in the Ri–Ro book and folded it into a tent. The silo, he thought, belonged to the insects in many ways. Wherever the bodies were gathered, the insects swarmed in dark clouds. He had read up on them in the books. Somehow, maggots turned into flies. White and writhing became black and buzzing. Things broke down and changed.

He threaded lengths of string into the folded piece of paper to give something to hang the weight on. This was when Shadow would normally get in the way, would come and arch his back against Solo’s arm, step on whatever he was doing, make him annoyed and make him laugh at the same time. But Shadow didn’t interrupt.

Solo made small knots in the string to keep them from pulling through. The paper was doubled over across the holes so it wouldn’t tear. He knew well how things broke down. He was an expert in things he wished he could unlearn. Solo could tell at a glance how long it’d been since someone had died.

The people he’d killed years back had been stiff when he moved them, but this only lasted a while. People soon swelled up and stank. Their bodies let off gasses and the flies swarmed. The flies swarmed and the maggots feasted.

The stench would make his eyes water and his throat burn. And the bodies would soon grow soft. Solo had to move some bodies on the stairs once, tangled where they lay and difficult to step over, and the flesh came right apart. It became like cottage cheese he’d had back when there was still milk and goats to get it from. Flesh came apart once the person was no longer inside, holding themselves together. Solo concentrated on holding himself together. He tied the other ends of the strings to one of the small metal washers from Supply. Chewing his tongue, he made the finest of knots.

String and fabric didn’t last either, but clothes stayed around longer than people. Within a year, it was clothes and bones that were left. And hair. The hair seemed to go last. It clung to bones and sometimes hung over empty and gazing sockets. The hair made it worse. It lent bones an identity. Beards on most, but not on the young or on the women.

Within five years, even the clothes would break down. After ten, it was mostly bones. These days, so very long after the silo had gone dark and quiet — over twenty years since he’d been shown the secret lair beneath the servers — it was only the bones. Except for up in the cafeteria. The rot everywhere else made those bodies behind that door all the more curious.

Solo held up his parachute, a paper tent with little strings fastened to a tiny washer. He had dozens and dozens of bits of string lying in tangles across the open book. A handful of washers remained. He gave one of the strings on his parachute a tug and thought of the bodies up in the cafeteria. Behind that door, there were dead people who wouldn’t break down like the others. When he and Shadow had first discovered them, he’d assumed they’d recently passed. Dozens of them, dying together and piled on one another as though they’d been tossed in there or had been crawling atop the others. The door to the forbidden outside was just beyond them, Solo knew. But he hadn’t gone that far. He had closed the door and left in a hurry, spooked by the lifeless eyeballs and the strange feeling of seeing a face other than his own peering back at him like that. He had left the bodies and not come back for a long time. He had waited for them to become bones. They never had.

He went to the rail and peered over, made sure the piece of paper was tented, ready to grab the air. There was a cool updraught from the flooded deep. Solo leaned out beyond the third-level railing, the fine paper pinched in one hand, the washer resting in his other palm. He wondered why some people rotted and others kept going. What made them break down?

‘Break down,’ he said aloud. He liked the way his voice sounded sometimes. He was an expert in how things broke down. Shadow should’ve been there, rubbing against his ankles, but he wasn’t.

‘I’m an expert,’ Solo told himself. ‘Breaking down, breaking down.’ He stretched out his arms and released the parachute, watched it plummet for a moment before the strings went taut. And then it bobbed and twisted in the air as it sank into the dwindling depths. ‘Down down down,’ he called after the parachute. All the way to the bottom. Sinking until it splashed invisible or got caught up along the way.

Solo knew well how bodies rot. He scratched his beard and squinted after the disappearing chute, then sat back down and crossed his legs, the knee torn completely out of his old overalls. He mumbled to himself, delaying what needed to be done, his Project for the day, and instead tore another page from the shrinking book, trying not to think about yet another carcass that would soon dwindle with time.

THERE HAD BEEN items Solo spent days and weeks searching for. There had been some things he’d needed that had consumed his hunts for years. Often, he found useful things much later, when he needed them no longer. Like the time he had come across a stash of razors. A great big bin of them in a doctor’s office. All the important stuff — the bandages, medicine, the tape — had long ago been snagged by those fighting over the scraps. But a bin of new razors, many of the blades still shiny, taunted him. He had long before resigned himself to his beard, but there had been times before that when he would’ve killed for a razor.

Other times, he found a thing before he even knew he needed it. The machete was like that. A great blade found beneath the body of a man not long dead. Solo had taken it simply so nobody else would have the murderous thing. He had locked himself below the server room for three days, terrified of the sight of another still-warm body. That had been many years ago. It took a while longer for the farms to thicken up where the machete became necessary. By then, he had taken to leaving his gun behind — no longer any use for it — and the machete became a constant companion, something found before he knew he needed it.