Hugh Howey - Shift

THE LOUD CAME before the quiet. That was a Rule of the World, for the bangs and shouts need somewhere to echo, just as bodies need space in which to fall.

Jimmy Parker was in class when the last of the great Louds began. It was the day before a cleaning. Tomorrow, they would be off from school. For the death of a man, Jimmy and his friends would be gifted a few extra hours of sleep. His father would work overtime down in IT. And tomorrow afternoon, his mother would insist that they go up with his aunt and cousins to watch the bright clouds drift over the clear view of the hills until the sky turned dark as sleep.

Cleaning days were for staying in bed and for seeing family. They were for silencing unrest and quietening the Louds. That’s what Mrs Pearson told them as she wrote the rules from the Pact up on the blackboard. Her chalk clacked and squeaked and left dusty trails of all the whys for which a man could be put to death. Civics lessons on a day before a banishment. Warnings on the eve of graver warnings. Jimmy and his friends fidgeted in their seats and learned rules. Rules of the World that very soon would no longer apply.

Jimmy was sixteen. Many of his friends would move off and shadow soon, but he would need another year of study to follow in his father’s footsteps. Mrs Pearson marked the blackboard and moved on to the seriousness of choosing a life partner, of registering relationships according to the Pact. Sarah Jenkins turned in her seat and smiled back at Jimmy. Civics lessons and biology lessons intermingled, hormones spoken of alongside the laws that governed their excesses. Sarah Jenkins was cute. Jimmy hadn’t thought so at the beginning of the year, but now he was seeing it. Sarah Jenkins was cute and would be dead in just a few hours.

Mrs Pearson asked for a volunteer to read from the Pact, and that’s when Jimmy’s mother came for him. She burst in unannounced. An embarrassment. The end of Jimmy’s world began with hot cheeks and a burning collar and everyone watching. His mom didn’t say anything to Mrs Pearson, didn’t excuse herself. She just stormed through the door and hurried among the desks the way she walked when she was angry. She pulled Jimmy from his desk and led him out with his arm in her fist, causing him to wonder what he’d done this time.

Mrs Pearson didn’t speak. Jimmy looked back at his best friend Paul, caught him smiling behind his palm, and wondered why Paul wasn’t in trouble too. They rarely got in or out of a fix alone, he and Paul. The only person to utter a word was Sarah Jenkins. ‘Your backpack!’ she cried out just before the classroom door slammed shut, her voice swallowed by the quiet.

There were no other mothers pulling their children down the hallway. If they came, it would be much later. Jimmy’s father worked among the computers and knew things. His father knew things before anyone else. This time, it was only moments before. There were others scrambling on the stairwell already. The noise was frightening. The landing outside the school level thrummed with the vibrations of distant and heavy traffic. A bolt in one of the railing’s stanchions rattled as it worked its way loose. It felt as though the silo would simply shake itself apart. Jimmy’s mom took him by the sleeve and pulled him towards the spiral staircase as if he was still twelve.

Jimmy pulled against her for a moment, confused. In the past year, he had grown bigger than his mom, as big as his father, and it was strange to be reminded that he had this power, that he was nearly a man. He had left his backpack and his friends behind. Where were they going? The banging from below seemed to be getting louder.

His mother turned as he gave resistance. Her eyes, he saw, were not full of anger. There was no glare, no furrowed brow. They were wide and wet, shiny like the times Grandma and Grandpa had passed. The noise below was frightful, but it was the look in his mother’s eyes that placed fear in Jimmy’s bones.

‘What is it?’ he whispered. He hated to see his mother upset. Something dark and empty — like that stray and tailless cat that nobody could catch in the upper apartments — clawed at his insides.

His mother didn’t say. She turned and pulled him down the stairs, towards the thundering approach of something awful, and Jimmy realised at once that he wasn’t in trouble at all.

They all were.

JIMMY HAD NEVER felt the stairs tremble so. The entire spiral staircase seemed to sway. It turned to rubber the way a length of charcoal appears to bend between jiggled fingers, a parlour trick he’d learned in class. Though his feet rarely touched the steps — racing as he was to keep up with his mother — they tingled and felt numb from vibrations transmitted straight from steel to bone. Jimmy tasted fear in his mouth like a dry spoon on his tongue.

There were angry screams from below. Jimmy’s mother shouted her encouragement, told him to hurry, and down the staircase they spiralled. They raced towards whatever bad thing was marching upward. ‘Hurry,’ she cried again, and Jimmy was more scared of the tremor in her voice than the shuddering of a hundred levels of steel. He hurried.

They passed twenty-nine. Thirty. People ran by in the opposite direction. A lot of people in overalls the colour of his father’s. On the landing of thirty-one, Jimmy saw his first dead body since his grandpa’s funeral. It looked as if a tomato had been smashed on the back of the man’s head. Jimmy had to skip over the man’s arms, which stuck out into the stairwell. He hurried after his mother while some of the red dripped through the landing and splattered and slicked the steps below.

At thirty-two, the shake of the stairs was so great that he could feel it in his teeth. His mother grew frantic as the two of them bumped past more and more people hurrying upward. Nobody seemed to see anyone else. Everyone was looking out for themselves.

The stampede could be heard, a din of a thousand boots. There were loud voices among the ringing footfalls. Jimmy stopped and peered over the railing. Below, as the staircase augered into the depths, he could see the elbows and hands of a jostling crowd jutting out. He turned as someone thundered by. His mother called for him to hurry, for the crowd was already upon them, the traffic growing. Jimmy felt the fear and anger in the people racing past and it made him want to flee upward with them. But there was his mom yelling for him to come along, and her voice cut through his fear and to the centre of his being.

Jimmy shuffled down and took her hand. The embarrassment of earlier was gone. Now he wanted her clutching him. The people who ran past shouted for them to go the other way. Several held pipes and lengths of steel. There were some who were bruised and cut. Blood covered the mouth and chin of one man. A fight somewhere. Jimmy thought that only happened in the Deeps. Others seemed simply to be caught up in it all. They were without weapons and were looking over their shoulders. It was a mob scared of a mob. Jimmy wondered what had caused it. What was there to be afraid of?

Loud bangs rang out among the footfalls. A large man knocked into Jimmy’s mom and sent her against the railing. Jimmy held her arm, and the two of them stuck to the inner post as they made their way down to thirty-three. ‘One more to go,’ she told him, which meant it was his father they were after.

The growing throngs became a crush a few turns above thirty-four. People pressed four wide where there was only room for two. Jimmy’s wrist banged against the inner rail. He wedged himself between the post and those forcing their way up. Moving a few inches at a time — those beside him shoving, jostling and grunting with effort — he felt certain they would all become stuck like that. People crowded in and he lost his grip on her arm. She surged forward while he remained pinned in place. He could hear her yelling his name below.