First Shift: Legacy (Shift, #1)(7)

The button for the top floor clicked and glowed to life as he applied pressure. Something loomed above him. He could feel an attraction upward, a thread running clear through the top of his skull and yanking him like a puppet. There was something there he needed to see, something he’d left behind.

Troy struggled to remember as the lift lurched upward. He groped for this gossamer and fading dream, this glimpse through the mist—but the bitterness in his throat and the pills in his stomach were a tide tugging him away from the shore. Why had he been crying earlier? Or had he cried? He couldn’t remember. His stomach grumbled around the shake he’d been forced to drink. He shivered but was not cold.

The elevator accelerated up the shaft. There was a whooshing sound as another car or maybe the counterweight zoomed by. He knew these things. The round buttons flashed as the floors passed. There was an enormous spread of them, seventy in all. The centers of many were dull from years of rubbing. This didn’t seem right. Just yesterday, the buttons were shiny and new. Just yesterday, everything was.

The elevator slowed. Troy palmed the wall for balance, his legs still uncertain.

The door dinged and slid open. Troy blinked at the bright lights in the hallway. He left the elevator and followed a short walk toward a room leaking chatter. His new boots were stiff on his feet, the generic gray coveralls itchy. He tried to imagine four more times of waking up like this, feeling this weak and disoriented. Five shifts of six months each. Five shifts he hadn’t volunteered for. He wondered if it would get progressively easier or if it would only get worse.

The bustle in the cafeteria seemed to modulate as he entered. A few heads turned his way, utensils pausing. He saw at once that his gray coveralls weren’t so generic. There was a scattering of colors seated at the tables, forks paused between plate and mouth. A large cluster of reds, quite a few yellows. No other grays.

That first meal of sticky paste he’d been given rumbled once more in his stomach. He wasn’t allowed to eat anything else for six hours, which made the aroma from the canned foods overwhelming. He remembered the fare, had lived on it during his orientation. His orientation after—

He couldn’t remember. It was there, but he was losing it. And the food he had once grown tired of suddenly seemed appetizing.

“Sir.”

A young man nodded to Troy as he walked past, angling for the elevators. Troy thought he recognized the man, couldn’t be sure. Dreams intervened. The gentleman certainly seemed to have recognized him. Or was it the gray coveralls that stood out?

“First shift?”

An older gentleman approached, thin, with white and wispy hair that circled his head from temple to temple. He held a tray in his hands, smiled at Troy. Pulling open a recycling bin, he slid the entire tray inside and dropped it with a clatter.

“Come up for the view?” the man asked.

Troy nodded. It was all men throughout the cafeteria. All men. They had explained why this was safer. He tried to remember as the man with the splotches of age on his skin crossed his arms and stood beside him. There were no introductions. Troy wondered if names meant less amid the short shifts and long dreams. He gazed out over the bustling tables toward the massive screen that covered the far wall.

Here was the shoreline and the edge of the woods—some part of the thing that was wrong. And sure enough, a real mist roamed the view, whirls of dust and hanging clouds over a field of scattered and half-eaten debris. A few metal poles bristled from the ground and sagged lifeless, the tents and flags long vanished. Troy remembered. He couldn’t name it, but his stomach twisted in recognition; it tightened like a fist around the paste and the bitter pill.

“This’ll be my second shift,” the man said.

Troy barely heard. His watering eyes drifted across the lifeless hills, the gray slopes rising up toward dark clouds full of menacing and invisible things. The debris scattered everywhere was rotting away, molecules taking flight. Next shift, or the one after, it would all be gone.

“You can see further from the lounge.” The man turned and gestured along the wall. Troy knew well enough what room he was referring to. This part of the building was familiar to him in ways this man could hardly guess.

“No, but thanks,” he stammered. Troy waved him off. “I think I’ve seen enough.”

Curious faces returned to their trays; the chatter resumed. It was sprinkled with the clinking of spoons and forks on metal bowls and plates. Troy turned and left without saying another word. He put that hideous view behind him—turned his back on the unspoken eeriness of it. He hurried, shivering, toward the elevator, knees weak with more than the long rest. He needed to be alone, didn’t want anyone around him this time, didn’t want sympathetic hands comforting him while he cried.

3


2049 ? Washington, D.C.

Donald kept the thick folder tucked inside his jacket and hurried through the rain. He had chosen to get soaked crossing the square rather than face his claustrophobia in the tunnels.

Traffic hissed by on the wet asphalt. He waited for a gap, ignored the crosswalk signals, and scooted across.

Rayburn’s marble steps gleamed treacherously wet. A woman in a black dress clopped up them in heels, an umbrella held low, and Donald wondered how this mad dash of his made more sense than the carpeted hallway beneath the streets. By avoiding an irrational fear, he was putting himself in real danger. Slick steps and cutting through traffic—the banal claimed far more than the subject of strange phobias.