Hugh Howey - Shift

He knew he needed to get out. He hadn’t heard any activity in the halls of late, no one trying the door. But the room that had once felt like a prison now felt like the only safe place to be. And the idea of leaving, once desirable, now turned his insides to water. The routines were all he knew. Doing something different seemed insane.

He put it off for two days by making a Project out of preparing. He took his favourite rifle apart and oiled all the pieces before putting it back together. There was a box of lucky ammo where very few had failed or jammed during games of Kick the Can, so he emptied two clips and filled them with only these magic bullets. A spare set of overalls was turned into a backpack by knotting the arms to the legs for loops and cinching up the neck. The zipper down the front made for a nice enclosure. He filled this with two cans of sausage, two of pineapple and two of tomato juice. He didn’t think he’d be gone that long, but he couldn’t know.

Patting his chest, he made sure he had his key around his neck. It never came off, but he habitually patted his chest anyway to make sure it was there. A purple bruise on his sternum hinted that he did this too often. He placed a fork and a rusty screwdriver in his breast pocket, the latter for jabbing open the cans. Jimmy really needed to find a can opener. That and batteries for his flashlight were the highest of priorities. The power had only gone out twice over the years, but both times had left him terrified of the dark. And checking to make sure his flashlight worked all the time tended to wear down the batteries.

Scratching his beard, he thought of what else he would need. He didn’t have much water left in the cistern, but maybe he’d find some out there, so he threw in two empty bottles from years prior. These took some digging. He had to rummage behind the hill of empty cans in one corner of the storeroom, the flies pestering him and yelling at him to leave them alone.

‘I see you, I see you,’ he told them. ‘Buzz off.’

Jimmy laughed at his own joke.

In the kitchen, he grabbed the large knife, the one he hadn’t broken the tip off, and put that in his pack as well. By the time he worked up his nerve to leave on the second day, he decided it was too late to get started. So he took his gun apart and oiled it up one more time and promised himself that he would leave in the morning.

Jimmy didn’t sleep well that night. He left the radio on in case there was any chatter, and the hissing made him dream of the air from the outside leaking in through the great steel door. He woke up more than once gasping for a breath and found it difficult to get back to sleep.

In the morning, he checked the cameras, but they were still not working. He wished he had the one of the hallway. All it showed was black. He told himself there was no one there. But soon he would be. He was about to go outside. Outside .

‘It’s okay,’ he told himself. He grabbed his rifle, which reeked of oil, and lifted his home-made pack, which he thought suddenly he could wear as clothes in a pinch, if he had to. He laughed some more and headed for the ladder.

‘C’mon, c’mon,’ he said, urging himself as he climbed up. He tried to whistle, was normally a very good whistler, but his mouth was too dry. He hummed a tune his parents had used to sing to him instead.

The pack and the gun were heavy. Dangling from the crook of his elbow, they made it difficult to unlock the hatch at the top of the ladder. But he finally managed. He stuck his head out and paused to admire the gentle hum of the machines. Some of them made little clicking sounds as if their innards were busy. He’d taken most of the backs off over the years to peer inside and see if any contained secrets, but they all looked like the guts of the computers his dad used to build.

The stench of his own waste greeted him as he moved between the tall towers. That wasn’t how you were supposed to greet someone, he thought. The black boxes radiated an awful heat, which only made the smell worse.

He stood in front of the great steel door and hesitated. Jimmy’s world had been shrinking every day. First he had been comfortable on these two levels, the room with the black machines and the labyrinth beneath. And then he’d only been comfortable below. And then even the dark passageway and the tall ladder had frightened him. And soon, he had limited himself to the back room with all the beds and the storerooms with their funny smells, until the only place he felt safe was on his makeshift cot by the computer desk, the sound of the radio crackling in the background.

And now he stood before that door his father had dragged him through, the place where he’d killed three men, and he thought about his world expanding.

His palms were damp as he reached for the keypad. A part of him feared the air outside would be toxic, but he was probably breathing the same air, and people had lived for years out there, talking now and then on the radio. He keyed in the first two digits, level twelve, then thought about the next two. Eighteen. Jimmy imagined going home and getting some different clothes, using a toilet in a bathroom. He pictured his mother sitting on his parents’ bed, waiting for him. He saw her lying on her back, arms crossed, nothing but bones.

His hand trembled as he reached for the 1 and hit the 4 instead. He wiped his hands on his thighs and waited for the keypad to time out with a buzz. ‘There’s no one on the other side,’ he told himself. ‘No one. I’m alone. I’m alone.’

Somehow, this comforted him.

He entered the two digits again for school, and then the digits of his home.

The keypad beeped. The door began to make noises. And Jimmy Parker took a step back. He thought of school and his friends, wondered if any of them were still alive. If anyone was still alive. He hooked his finger under the strap of his rifle and pulled it over his head, tucked it against his shoulder. The door clanked free. All he had to do was pull.

THERE WERE SIGNS of life and death waiting for him in the hall. A charred ring on the tile and a scatter of ash marked the corpse of an old fire. The outside of the steel door was lined with scratches and marked with dents. The latter reminded him of his misses during Kick the Can, the ineffectual kiss of bullet against solid steel. Right by his feet, Jimmy noticed a stain on the floor — a patch of dappled brown — and remembered a man dying there. Jimmy looked away from these signs of the living and the dying and stepped into the hall.

As he began to pull the door shut, something made him hesitate. Jimmy wondered if perhaps his code wouldn’t work from the outside. What if the door locked and he could never get back in? He checked the keypad and saw the gouges around its steel plate where someone had tried to prise it off the wall. He was reminded how desperately so many others had wanted in over the years. Remembering this made him feel crazy for wanting out.

Before he could worry further, he shut the steel door and his heart sank a little as the gears whirred and the locks slid into the wall. There was a hollow thunk , the sound of awful finality.

Jimmy rushed to the keypad, his chest pounding in his throat, the feeling of men running down all three hallways to get him, blood-curdling screams and bludgeoning weapons held high over their heads—

He entered the code and the door whirred open. Pushing on the handle, he took a few deep breaths of home… and nearly gagged on the smell of his own waste warmed by the hot servers.

There was no one running down the halls. He needed a new can opener. He needed to find a toilet that worked. He needed overalls that weren’t worn to tatters. He needed to breathe and find another stash of canned food and water.