Hugh Howey - Shift

‘What’re you doing here?’ he whispered.

‘I’m here for the same reason you are.’ She pulled back from the embrace. ‘I’m looking for answers.’ She stepped away and surveyed the mess on the table. ‘To different questions, perhaps.’

A familiar schematic — a grid of fifty silos — covered the table. Each silo was like a small plate, all of them trapped under glass. A dozen chairs were gathered around. Donald realised that this was a war room, where generals stood and pushed plastic models and grumbled over lives lost by the thousands. He glanced up at the maps and schematics plastered on the walls. There was an adjoining bathroom, a towel hanging from a hook on the door. A cot had been set up in the far corner and was neatly made. There was a lamp beside it sitting on one of the wooden crates from the storeroom. Extension cords snaked here and there, signs of a room long converted into an apartment of sorts.

He turned to the nearest wall and flipped through some of the drawings. They were three layers deep in places and covered in notes. It didn’t look as if a war was being planned. It looked like a scene from the crime shows that used to lull him to sleep in a former life.

‘You’ve been up longer than me,’ he said.

Anna stood beside him. Her hand alighted on his shoulder, and Donald felt himself startle at being touched at all.

‘Almost a year now.’ Her hand slid down his back before falling away. ‘Can I get you a drink? Water? I also have a stash of Scotch down here. Dad doesn’t know half the stuff they hid away in these crates.’

Donald shook his head. He turned and watched as she disappeared into the bathroom and ran the tap. She emerged, sipping from a glass.

‘What’s going on here?’ he asked. ‘Why am I up?’

She swallowed and waved her glass at the walls. ‘It’s—’ She laughed and shook her head. ‘I was about to say it’s nothing, but this is the hell that keeps me out of one box and in another. It doesn’t concern you, most of this.’

Donald studied the room again. A year, living like this. He turned his attention to Anna, the way her hair was balled up in a bun, a pen sticking out of it. Her skin was pale except for the dark rings beneath her eyes. He wondered how she was able to do this, live like this.

There was a printout on the far wall that matched the table, a grid of circles, the layout of the facilities. A familiar red X had been drawn across what he knew to be silo twelve in the upper left corner. There was another X nearby, a new one in what looked to be silo ten. More lives lost. And in the lower right-hand corner of the grid, a mess that made no sense. The room seemed to wobble as he took a step closer.

‘Donny?’

‘What happened here?’ he asked, his voice a whisper. Anna turned to see what he was looking at. She glanced at the table, and he realised that her paperwork was scattered around the same corner of the facility. The glass surface crawled with notes written in red and blue wax.

‘Donny—’ She stepped closer. ‘Things aren’t well.’

He turned and studied the scrawl of red marks on the wall schematic. There were Xs and question marks. There were notes in red ink with lines and arrows. Ten or a dozen of the silos were heavily marked up.

‘How many?’ he asked, trying to count, to figure the thousands of lives lost. ‘Are they gone?’

She took a deep breath. ‘We don’t know.’ She finished her water, walked down the long table and reached into one of the chairs pushed up against it. She procured a bottle and poured a few fingers into her plastic cup.

‘It started with silo forty,’ she said. ‘It went dark about a year ago—’

‘Went dark?’

Anna took a sip of the Scotch and nodded. She licked her lips. ‘The camera feeds went out first. Not at once, but eventually they got them all. We lost contact with the heads over there. Couldn’t raise anyone. Erskine was running the shift at the time. He followed the Order and gave the okay to shut the silo down—’

‘You mean kill everyone.’

Anna shot him a look. ‘You know what had to be done.’

Donald remembered silo twelve. He remembered making that same decision. As if there had been a decision to make. The system ran automatically. Wasn’t he just doing what came next, following a set of procedures written down by someone else?

He studied the poster with the red marks. ‘And the rest of them? The other silos?’

Anna finished the drink with one long pull and gasped for air afterward. Donald caught her eyeing the bottle. ‘They woke up Dad when forty-two went. Two more silos had gone dark by the time he came for me.’

Two more silos . ‘Why you?’ he asked.

She tucked a strand of loose hair behind her ear. ‘Because there was no one else. Because everyone who had a hand in designing this place was either gone or at their wits’ end. Because Dad was desperate.’

‘He wanted to see you.’

She laughed. ‘It wasn’t that. Trust me.’ She waved her empty cup at the arrangement of circles on the table and the spread of papers. ‘They were using the radios at high frequencies. We think it started with forty, that maybe their IT head went rogue. They hijacked their antenna and began communicating with the other silos around them, and we couldn’t cut them off. They had taken care of that as well. As soon as Dad suspected this, he argued with the others that wireless networks were my speciality. They eventually relented. No one wanted to use the drones.’

‘Argued with what others? Who knows you’re here?’ Donald couldn’t help but think how dangerous this could get, but maybe that was his own weakness screaming at him.

‘My dad, Erskine, Dr Sneed, his assistants who brought me out. But those assistants won’t work another shift—’

‘Deep freeze?’

Anna frowned and splashed her cup, and it struck Donald how much had been lost while he had slept. Entire shifts had gone by. Another silo had gone dark, another red X drawn on the map. An entire corner of silos had run into some kind of trouble. Thurman, meanwhile, had been awake for a year, dealing with it. His daughter as well. Donald waved his arm at the room. ‘You’ve been stuck in here for a year? Working on this?’

She jerked her head at the door and laughed. ‘I’ve been cooped up in worse for a lot longer. But yeah, it sucks. I’m sick of this place.’ She took another sip, her cup hiding her expression, and Donald wondered if perhaps he was awake because of her weakness just as she might be awake because of her father’s. What was next? Him searching the deep freeze for his sister Charlotte?

‘We’ve lost contact with eleven silos so far.’ Anna peered into her cup. ‘I think I’ve got it contained, but we’re still trying to figure out how it happened or if anyone’s still alive over there. I personally don’t think so, but Dad wants to send scouts or drones. Everyone says that’s too big a risk. And now it looks like eighteen is going to burn itself to the ground.’

‘And I’m supposed to help? What does your father think I know?’ He stepped around the planning table and waved for the bottle. Anna splashed her cup and handed the drink to him; she reached for another cup by her monitor while Donald collapsed onto her cot. It was a lot to take in.

‘It’s not Dad who thinks you know anything. He didn’t want you up at all. No one’s supposed to come out of deep freeze.’ She screwed the cap back on the bottle. ‘It was his boss.’

Donald nearly choked on his first sip of the Scotch. He sputtered and wiped his chin with his sleeve while Anna looked on with concern.

‘His boss ?’ he asked, gasping for air.

She narrowed her eyes. ‘Dad told you why you’re here, right?’