Hugh Howey - Shift

‘You feeling okay, sir?’

‘Hmm? Oh, yeah.’

Troy leaned forward and pressed sixty-eight. The man’s concern for his well-being must’ve had him thinking of the doctor, even though Henson wouldn’t be on shift for several hours. But there was something else nagging him, something he felt he needed to see, a dream slipping away.

‘Must not have taken the first time,’ he explained, glancing at the button.

‘Mmm.’

The silence lasted one or two floors.

‘How much longer you got?’ the reactor mechanic asked.

‘Me? Just another couple of weeks. How about you?’

‘I just got on a week ago. But this is my second shift.’

‘Oh?’

The lights counted downward in floors but upward in number. Troy didn’t like this; he felt as if the lowest level should be level one. They should count up .

‘Is the second shift easier?’ he asked. The question came out unbidden. It was as though the part of him dying to know was more awake than the part of him praying for silence.

The mechanic considered this.

‘I wouldn’t say it’s easier. How about… less uncomfortable?’ He laughed quietly. Troy felt their arrival in his knees, gravity tugging on him. The doors beeped open.

‘Have a good one,’ the mechanic said. They hadn’t shared their names. ‘In case I don’t see you again.’

Troy raised his palm. ‘Next time,’ he said. The man stepped out, and the doors winked shut on the halls to the power plant. With a hum, the lift continued its descent.

The doors dinged on the medical level. Troy stepped out and heard voices down the corridor. He crept quietly across the tile, and the voices became louder. One was female. It wasn’t a conversation; it must have been an old movie. Troy peeked into the main office and saw a man lounging on a gurney, his back turned, a TV set up in the corner. Troy slunk past so as not to disturb him.

The hallway split in two directions. He imagined the layout, could picture the pie-shaped storerooms, the rows of deep-freeze coffins, the tubes and pipes that led from the walls to the bases, from the bases into the people inside.

He stopped at one of the heavy doors and tried his code. The light changed from red to green. He dropped his hand, didn’t need to enter this room, didn’t feel the urge, just wanted to see if it would work. The urge was elsewhere.

He meandered down the hall past a few more doors. Wasn’t he just here? Had he ever left? His arm throbbed. He rolled back his sleeve and saw a spot of blood, a circle of redness around a pinprick scab.

If something bad had happened, he couldn’t remember. That part of him had been choked off.

He tried his code on this other pad, this other door, and waited for the light to turn green. This time, he pushed the button that opened the door. He didn’t know what it was, but there was something inside that he needed to see.

LIGHT RAINS ON the morning of the convention left the man-made hills soggy, the new grass slick, but did little to erode the general festivities. Parking lots had been emptied of construction vehicles and mud-caked pickups. Now they held hundreds of idling buses and a handful of sleek black limos, the latter splattered with mud.

The lot where temporary trailers had served as offices and living quarters for construction crews had been handed over to the staffers, volunteers, delegates and dignitaries who had laboured for weeks to bring that day to fruition. The area was dotted with welcoming tents that served as the headquarters for the event coordinators. Throngs of new arrivals filed from the buses and made their way through the CAD-FAC’s security station. Massive fences bristled with coils of razor wire that seemed outsized and ridiculous for the convention but made sense for the storing of nuclear material. These barriers and gates held at bay an odd union of protestors: those on the Right who disagreed with the facility’s current purpose and those on the Left who feared its future one.

There had never been a National Convention with such energy, such crowds. Downtown Atlanta loomed beyond the treetops, but the city seemed far removed from the sudden bustle in lower Fulton County.

Donald shivered beneath his umbrella at the top of a knoll and gazed out over the sea of people gathering across the hills, heading towards whichever stage flew their state’s flag, umbrellas bobbing and jostling like water bugs.

Somewhere, a marching band blared a practice tune and stomped another hill into mud. There was a sense in the air that the world was about to change — a woman was about to win nomination for president, only the second such nomination in Donald’s lifetime. And if the pollsters could be believed, this one had more than a chance. Unless the war in Iran took a sudden turn, a milestone would be reached, a final glass ceiling shattered. And it would happen right there in those grand divots in the earth.

More buses churned through the lot and let off their passengers, and Donald pulled out his phone and checked the time. He still had an error icon, the network choked to death from the overwhelming demand. He was surprised, with so much other careful planning, that the committee hadn’t accounted for this and erected a temporary tower or two.

‘Congressman Keene?’

Donald started and turned to find Anna walking along the ridgeline towards him. He glanced down at the Georgia stage but didn’t see her ride. He was surprised she would just walk up. And yet, it was like her to do things the difficult way.

‘I couldn’t tell if that was you,’ she said, smiling. ‘Everyone has the same umbrella.’

‘Yeah, it’s me.’ He took a deep breath, found his chest still felt constricted with nerves whenever he saw her, as though any conversation could get him into trouble.

Anna stepped close as if she expected him to share his umbrella. He moved it to his other hand to give her more space, the drizzle peppering his exposed arm. He scanned the bus lot and searched impossibly for any sign of Helen. She should have been there by now.

‘This is gonna be a mess,’ Anna said.

‘It’s supposed to clear up.’

Someone on the North Carolina stage checked her microphone with a squawk of feedback. ‘We’ll see,’ Anna said. She wrapped her coat tighter against the early morning breeze. ‘Isn’t Helen coming?’

‘Yeah. Senator Thurman insisted. She’s not gonna be happy when she sees how many people are here. She hates crowds. She won’t be happy about the mud, either.’

Anna laughed. ‘I wouldn’t worry about the conditions of the grounds after this.’

Donald thought about all the loads of radioactive waste that would be trucked in. ‘Yeah.’ He saw her point.

He peered down the hill again at the Georgia stage. It would be the site of the first national gathering of delegates later that day, all the most important people under one tent. Behind the stage and among the smoking food tents, the only sign of the underground containment facility was a small concrete tower rising up from the ground, a bristle of antennae sprouting from the top. Donald thought of how much work it would take to haul away all the flags and soaked buntings before the first of the spent fuel rods could finally be brought in.

‘It’s weird to think of a few thousand people from the state of Tennessee stomping around on top of something we designed,’ Anna said. Her arm brushed against Donald’s. He stood perfectly still, wondering if it had been an accident. ‘I wish you’d seen more of the place.’

Donald shivered, more from fighting to remain still than from the cold and moist morning air. He hadn’t told anyone about Mick’s tour the day before. It felt too sacred. He would probably tell Helen about it and no one else. ‘It’s crazy how much time went into something nobody will ever use,’ he said.