Hugh Howey - Shift

‘Hello?’ he called out.

His voice echoed back to him. He played the light down the hall, which branched off in three directions. Two of the paths curved around as if to meet on the other side of the stairwell. It was one of the hub-and-spoke levels. Solo laughed. Bi for ‘bicycles’. He thought of that entry and realised where the words hub and spoke came from.

There was a cry. For certain, this time, or he truly was losing his senses. Solo spun around and waited. Silence. The whisper of ripples as they crashed into the hallway wall. He picked his way in the direction he’d heard the noise, throwing up new waves with the push of his shins. He floated like a ghost. He couldn’t feel his feet.

It was an apartment level. But why would anyone live down here with the waters seeping in? He paused outside a community rec room and dispelled pockets of darkness with his flashlight. There was a tennis table in the middle of the room. Rust reached up the steel legs as if the water had chased it there. The paddles were still on the warped surface of the rotting green table. Green for grass , Solo thought. The Legacy books made his own world look different to him.

Something bumped into his shin and Solo started. He aimed his light down and saw a foam cushion floating by his feet. He pushed it away and waded to the next door.

A community kitchen. He recognised the layout of wide tables and all the chairs. Most of the chairs lay on their sides, partly submerged. A few legs stuck up where chairs had been overturned. There were two stoves in the corner and a wall of cabinets. The room was dark; almost none of the light from the stairwell trickled back this far. Solo imagined that if his batteries died, he would have to grope to find his way out. He should’ve brought the new flashlight, not his old one.

A cry. Louder this time. Near. Somewhere in the room.

Solo waved his flashlight about but couldn’t see every corner at once. Cabinets and countertops. A spot of movement, he thought. He trained his light back a little, and something moved on one of the counters. It leapt straight up, the sound of claws scratching as it caught itself on an open cabinet above the counter, then the whisking of a bushy tail before a black shadow disappeared into the darkness.

A CAT! A living thing. A living thing he need not fear, that could do him no harm. Solo trudged into the room, calling, ‘Kitty, kitty, kitty.’ He recalled neighbours trying to corral that tailless animal that lived down the hall from his old apartment.

Something rummaged around in the cabinets. One of the closed doors rattled open and banged shut again. He could only see a spot at a time, wherever he aimed the flashlight. His shins brushed against something. He aimed the beam down to see trash and debris floating in the water. There was a squeak and a splash. Searching with the flashlight, he saw a V of ripples behind what he took for a swimming rat. Solo no longer wanted to be in that room. He shivered and rubbed his arm with his free hand. The cat made a racket inside the cabinet.

‘Here, kitty,’ he said with less gusto. Reaching into his breast pocket, he pulled out one of his ration bars and tore the packaging off with his teeth. Taking a stale bite for himself, he chewed and held the rest out in front of him. The silo had been dead for twelve years. He wondered how long cats lived, how this one had made it so long. And eating what? Or were old cats having new cats? Was this a new cat?

His bare feet brushed through something beneath the water. The reflection of the light made it difficult to see, and then a white bone broke the surface before sinking again. There was a loose jumble of someone’s remains around his ankles.

Solo pretended it was just trash. He reached the cabinet that was making all the noise, grabbed a handle and pulled it open. There was a hiss from the shadows. Cans and rotting boxes shifted about as the cat retreated further. Solo broke off a piece of stale bar and set it on the shelf. He waited. There was another squeak from the corner of the room, the sound of water lapping at furniture, a stillness inside the cabinet. He kept the flashlight down so as not to spook the animal.

Two eyes approached like bobbing lights. They fixed themselves on Solo for a small eternity. He began to seriously wonder if his feet might fall off from the cold. The eyes drew closer and diverted downward. It was a black cat, the colour of wet shadow, slick as oil. The piece of ration bar crunched as the cat chewed.

‘Good kitty,’ he whispered, ignoring the scattered bones beneath his feet. He broke off another small piece of the bar and held it out. The cat withdrew a pace. Solo set the food on the edge and watched as the animal came forward more quickly this time. The next piece, the cat took from his palm. He offered the last piece, and as the cat came to accept it, Solo tried to pick it up with both hands. And this thing, this company he hoped would do him no harm, latched on to one of his arms and sank its claws into his flesh.

Solo screamed and threw up his hands. The flashlight tumbled end over end in the air. There was a splash as the cat disappeared. A shriek and a hiss, a violent noise, Solo fumbling beneath the water for the dull glow of the light, which flickered once, twice, then left him in darkness.

He groped blindly, seized a solid cylinder and felt the knobby ends where the leg sockets went into the hip. He dropped the bone in disgust. Two more bones before he found the flashlight, which was toast. He retrieved it anyway as the sound of frantic splashing approached. His arms were on fire; he had seen blood on them in the last of the spinning light. And then something was against his leg, up his shin, claws stinging his thighs, the damn cat climbing him as if he were the leg of a table.

Solo reached for the poor animal to get its claws out of his flesh. The cat was soaked and hardly felt bigger around than his flashlight. It trembled in his arms and rubbed itself against a dry patch of his overalls, mewing in complaint. It began to sniff at his breast pocket.

Solo held the animal with one forearm across his chest, making a perch, and reached inside his pocket for the other ration bar. It was perfectly dark in the room, so dark it made his ears ache. He ripped the package free and held the bar steady. Tiny paws wrapped around his hand, and there was a crunching sound.

Jimmy smiled. He worked his way towards where he thought the door might be, bumping through furniture and old bones as he went, Solo no more.

DONALD’S APARTMENT had transformed into a cave, a cave where notes lay strewn like bleached bones, where the carcasses of folders decorated his walls, and where boxes of more notes were ordered up from archives like fresh kill. Weeks had passed. The stomping in the halls had dwindled. Donald lived alone with ghosts and slowly pieced together the purpose of what he’d helped to build. He was beginning to see it, the entire picture, zooming out of the schematic until the whole was laid bare.

He coughed into a pink rag and resumed examination of his latest find. It was a map he’d come across once before in the armoury, a map of all the silos with a line coming out of each and converging at a single point. Here was one of many mysteries left. The document was labelled Seed , but he could find nothing else about it.

Donald could hear Anna whispering to him. She had been trying to tell him something. The note in Thurman’s account, she was trying to say, had been left for him. So obvious now. She could never be woken, not a woman. She needed him, needed his help. Donald imagined her piecing all of this together on some recent shift, alone and terrified, scared of her own father, no one left to turn to. So she had taken her father out of power, had entrusted Donald, had switched him with another man for the second time and had left him a note to wake her. And what did Donald do instead?