Hugh Howey - Shift

Cassie, Catherine, Gabriella, Gretchen.

Made-up names.

Gwynn. Halley. Heather.

Everyone in order. No shifts for them. Nothing for the men to fight over. It would all be done in an instant. Step inside the lifeboat, dream a moment, step out onto dry land.

Another Heather. Duplicates without last names. Troy wondered how that would work. He steered blindly between the rows, the doctor and his assistant chatting about the procedure, when a name caught his peripheral vision and a fierce tremor vibrated through his limbs.

Helen . And another: Helen .

Troy lost his grip on the gurney and nearly fell. The wheels squealed to a stop.

‘Sir?’

Two Helens. But before him, on a crisp display showing the frozen temps of a deep, deep slumber, another:

Helena .

Troy staggered away from the gurney and Hal’s naked body. The echo of the old man’s feeble screams came back to him, insisting he was someone named Carlton. Troy ran his hands along the curved top of the cryopod.

She was here .

‘Sir? We really need to keep moving—’

Troy ignored the doctor. He rubbed the glass shield, the cold inside leaching into his hand.

‘Sir—’

A spiderweb of frost covered the glass. He wiped the frozen film of condensation away so he could see inside.

‘We need to get this man installed—’

Closed eyes lay inside that cold and dark place. Blades of ice clung to her lashes. It was a familiar face, but this was not his wife.

‘Sir!’

Troy stumbled, hands slapping at the cold coffin for balance, bile rising in his throat with remembrance. He heard himself gag, felt his limbs twitch, his knees buckle. He hit the ground between two of the pods and shook violently, spit on his lips, strong memories wrestling with the last residue of the drugs still in his veins.

The two men in white shouted at each other. Footsteps slapped frosted steel and faded towards the distant and heavy door. Inhuman gurgles hit Troy’s ears and sounded faintly as though they came from him.

Who was he? What was he doing there? What were any of them doing?

This was not Helen. His name was not Troy.

Footsteps stomped towards him in a hurry. The name was on his tongue as the needle bit his flesh.

Donny .

But that wasn’t right, either.

And then the darkness took him, tightening down around anything from his past that his mind deemed too awful to bear.

SOME MASH-UP of music festival, family reunion and state fair had descended on the southernmost corner of Fulton County. For the past two weeks, Donald had watched while colourful tents sprang up over a brand-new nuclear containment facility. Fifty state flags flew over fifty depressions in the earth. Stages had been erected, an endless parade of supplies flowing over the rolling hills, golf carts and four-wheelers forming convoys of food, Tupperware containers, baskets of vegetables — some even pulled small enclosed trailers loaded with livestock.

Farmers’ markets had been staked out in winding corridors of tents and booths, chickens clucking and pigs snorting, children petting rabbits, dogs on leashes. Owners of the latter guided dozens of breeds through the crowds. Tails wagged happily, and wet noses sniffed the air.

On Georgia’s main stage, a local rock band performed a sound check. When they fell quiet to adjust levels, Donald could hear the twangs of bluegrass spilling over from the general direction of North Carolina’s delegation. In the opposite direction, someone was giving a speech on Florida’s stage while the convoys moved supplies over the rise, and families spread blankets and picnicked on the banks of sweeping bowls. The hills, Donald saw, formed stadium seating, as if they’d been designed for the task.

What he couldn’t figure out was where they were putting all those supplies. The tents seemed to keep gobbling them up with no end in sight. The four-wheelers with their little boxed trailers had been rumbling up and down the slopes the entire two weeks he’d been there helping prep for the National Convention.

Mick rumbled to a stop beside him, sitting atop one of the ubiquitous all-terrain vehicles. He grinned at Donald and goosed the throttle while still holding the brakes. The Honda lurched, tyres growling against the dirt.

‘Wanna go for a ride to South Carolina?’ he yelled over the engine. He shifted forward on the seat to make room.

‘You got enough gas to make it there?’ Donald held his friend’s shoulder and stepped on the second set of pegs. He threw his leg over the seat.

‘It’s just over that hill, you idiot.’

Donald resisted the urge to assure Mick he’d been joking. He held on to the metal rack behind him as Mick shifted through the gears. His friend stuck to the dusty highway between the tents until they reached the grass, then angled towards the South Carolina delegation, the tops of the buildings of downtown Atlanta visible off to one side.

Mick turned his head as the Honda climbed the hill. ‘When is Helen getting here?’ he yelled.

Donald leaned forward. He loved the feel of the crisp October morning air. It reminded him of Savannah that time of year, the chill of a sunrise on the beach. He had just been thinking of Helen when Mick asked about her.

‘Tomorrow,’ he shouted. ‘She’s coming on a bus with the delegates from Savannah.’

They crested the hill, and Mick throttled back and steered along the ridgeline. They passed a loaded-down ATV heading in the opposite direction. The network of ridges formed an interlocked maze of highways high above each containment facility’s sunken bowl.

Peering into the distance, Donald watched the ballet of scooting ATVs weave across the landscape. One day, he imagined, the flat roads on top of the hills would rumble with much larger trucks bearing hazardous waste and radiation warnings.

And yet, seeing the flags waving over the Florida delegation to one side and the Georgia stage to the other, and noting the way the slopes would carry record crowds and afford everyone a perfect view of each stage, Donald couldn’t help but think that all the happy accidents had some larger purpose. It was as if the facility had been planned from the beginning to serve the 2052 National Convention, as if it had been built with more than its original goal in mind.

A large blue flag with a white tree and crescent moon swayed lazily over the South Carolina stage. Mick parked the four-wheeler in a sea of other ATVs ringing the large hospitality tent.

Following Mick through the parked vehicles, Donald saw that they were heading towards a smaller tent, which was swallowing a ton of traffic.

‘What kind of errand are we on?’ he asked.

Not that it mattered. In recent days they’d done a little of everything around the facility: running bags of ice to various state headquarters, meeting with congressmen and senators to see if they needed anything, making sure all the volunteers and delegates were settling into their trailers okay — whatever the Senator needed.

‘Oh, we’re just taking a little tour,’ Mick said cryptically. He waved Donald into the small tent where workers were filing through in one direction with their arms loaded and coming out the other side empty-handed.

The inside of the small tent was lit up with floodlights, the ground packed hard from the traffic, the grass matted flat. A concrete ramp led deep into the earth, workers with volunteer badges trudging up one side. Mick jumped into the line heading down.

Donald knew where they were going. He recognised the ramp. He hurried up beside Mick.

‘This is one of the rod storage facilities.’ He couldn’t hide the excitement in his voice, didn’t even try. He’d been dying to see the other design, either on paper or in person. All he was privy to was his bunker project; the rest of the facility remained shrouded in mystery. ‘Can we just go in ?’