The Shift

My name is Heather. Today is my 18th birthday. And it’s the last day of the world.

The beginning of the end started six years ago, millions of miles away, before I was 12. Back then, my father was a project engineer in communications and a major in the Army reserves. My brother had just completed a six-year stint in the Army himself and was just starting his own life with a new wife and baby. My mother, the skeptical over-protector of our family, struggled with not being the most important woman in my brother’s life anymore as I stubbornly (and quite involuntarily) barreled headlong into the arms of puberty.

The end started innocently enough one night... One scientist saw something on the surface of the sun that worried him. By noon the next day, the world barely acknowledged this thing he called a Coronal Mass Ejection. Some said there was nothing to worry about; others worried it was something that had never been witnessed in the history of humanity. Maybe it was ignorance. Or hope. Or hubris. Maybe a combination. Whatever you call it, humanity didn’t stand a chance.

Some say we didn’t have a choice: we’d painted ourselves into a corner as we advanced as a civilization. Our demise was fait accompli. But, in the blink of an eye, the electrical backbone of life as we knew it collapsed. Catastrophically. Every machine failed; fires erupted, heating and cooling systems exploded, dams burst, safety systems suddenly became very unsafe. In the chaos that followed, they say a quarter of the planet’s population perished within that first week. Nations and governments collapsed like cards, one after another, overwhelmed by devastation, leaving citizens to fight for survival at its most base level. It seemed that not even God could help us.

Before long, the event was neutered into a common term: The Shift.

By the end of the first year, my brother’s wife and baby fell victim to a small group of marauding opportunists, killed for a bag of dried beans. My brother avenged them soon after, an act that sent him down a path of self-destruction as he became the protector of everyone. A desperate loner split his skull when he got too close to his shelter. He never saw it coming.

The loss of my brother destroyed my parents. They’d already been drifting apart as my father spent time leading a small army to protect what was left of our community. Or, as my mother put it, “leaving us to fend for ourselves while he plays hero to everyone else.” What she couldn’t see through that red veil of perceived betrayal was that he was protecting everyone, including us.

As the human machine faltered, disease started creeping back to the fore, snowballing into what everyone called “The Fever” by the third year. As if we didn’t have enough reasons to be suspicious and avoid one another.

After years of fires, air quality above ground degraded so drastically that we were forced to wear masks to filter out particulates. By the time I turned 16, our town of 20,000 had dwindled to just over 200. Those that remained lived out of the shells of their former homes or were forced underground into abandoned drainage and sewer systems. Down there, holding vaults became shelters connected by tunnels. The water was gone. Even the rare rainstorm amounted to nary a trickle down there - mostly just an inconvenience.

By then, my mother was blind. Most days, she drifted in and out of consciousness, struggling to breathe. Most of her wakeful minutes were punctuated by congested gasps and crippling delusions; she became deranged and abusive, unable to care for herself. Lucid moments were rare, interrupted by vitriol and accusations of being abandoned and neglected. My father was more often the target; though I was the reason she was still alive, I, too, occasionally ended up in her crosshairs. Most nights, as I watched her drift uneasily into her fitful slumber, I’d pray she wouldn’t wake the next morning, releasing me and my father of her burden.

While my father had stopped coming around, he and I maintained a close relationship. We’d meet up every few days, sometimes at “our” tree. Before The Shift, it was a large and gnarled old thing with a tire swing that somehow, year after year, burst to life with brilliant spring colors. The colors went away after The Shift, but its spot in the world was somehow sheltered from the destruction that followed. My father and I would go maskless for a time, reminiscing about long summer days when he pushed me and my brother on that swing and talked about life and tomorrows.

I still tear up when I stumble through the nostalgia of those times.

More often these days, we’d meet in a sort of the general store, surreptitiously located in the underground tank of a former above-ground fueling station. The fuel that had once occupied the tank had been siphoned off and/or burned after The Shift, just one desperate rung of many toward the valley of what had become our meager existence.

The Laslow family ran the store. For almost a generation before The Shift, they operated an antique shop in town. After the sun turned against us, they provided citizens with tools for survival. Before The Shift, Mr. Laslow was active and healthy. His wife, Bunny, was already frail and dying; she was dead within a month after The Shift. Their son, Tristan, was a high school athlete - a star in baseball and cross country. He was five years older than me, and I crushed hard on him. In the before times, I’d beg my parents to take me to the antique store to browse through antique toys and old comics. And to gawk at Tristan.

After Bunny passed, Mr. Laslow and Tristan spent more time above ground, rummaging through the remnants of life before The Shift. They collected useful items for survivors: weapons, cooking implements, and basic electronics that could be hand-cranked or powered by recovered batteries. Once in a while, they’d stumble across caches of food or drink.

After a while, Mr. Laslow’s health deteriorated; he started to lose hair and slough off small chunks of gray flesh. No one knew what it was, but we knew it was only a matter of time before he laid down for his eternal slumber. He stopped going above ground, leaving the “treasure hunting” to Tristan. He needed a cane to get around and spent most of his time behind a table sorting through items Tristan brought back.

On one visit to the shop, Tristan excitedly pushed an item toward my father. “You, of all people, would appreciate this most!”

My father studied the item.

“Looks military, right?” Tristan flashed a boyish grin at me. I melted inside, wanting so desperately to put my lips on his at that moment.

“It does. Where’d you find it?” My father scrolled through various displays on the gadget, watching what looked like real-time data come to life on colorful, dynamic gauges and graphs.

“In The Silo. Beside a dead soldier. Looked like he had The Fever.” Tristan saw my father’s worried expression. “Don’t worry, I was wearing gloves and a mask. I cleaned it off. Really well.”

“The Silo,” my father said thoughtfully.

Before The Shift, The Silo was a defense fortification on the outskirts of town, about a day’s walk across a perilous landscape. In the years before The Shift, The Silo spewed questionable exhaust into the air, eventually descending further into disuse and disrepair. After The Shift, the government and military used it as an outpost to store weapons and noxious chemicals. One building was converted to barracks for a small contingent of troops, allowing them a location to repel bandits and opportunists who dared enter our fair city (or what remained of it). For a time, my brother was one of their most fervent volunteers.

One night, an explosion rocked the facility, vaporizing at least a dozen soldiers, sending flames thousands of feet into the air for a week before it was extinguished. We never found out what happened that night, only further contributing to the mystique of The Silo. Eventually, the remaining soldiers disappeared, killed under mysterious circumstances, or dying of The Fever. Talk around town was that it was filled with weapons that were leaching deadly chemicals into the air and soil. Some suggested conditions there may have made the troops go insane and kill each other and/or themselves. Others feared that exposing the materiel there could unleash a hell storm upon the remaining populace.

While my father was all that remained of any organized army in these parts, he stayed away from The Silo.

“Definitely military,” my father affirmed, the cogs of his mind whirring.

In the ensuing weeks, I watched my father play with The Toy. He and Tristan prodded at it. But it never ceded any secrets.

On my 17th birthday, my father gave me a heart-shaped locket. We were at our tree; he was pushing me on the swing, a faraway look in his eyes.

“I know you’re only 17 now, but there are things I need to tell you. Things your mother, most likely, can’t. Or won’t.” This was one of the few times he wasn’t preoccupied with The Toy; his attention was on me. The Toy leaned with its display against the trunk of that gnarled old tree.

“Daddy,” I blinked away tears. I was afraid he was getting ready to tell me he was going to die. I wasn’t ready for that. Even living in the apocalypse, I still wasn’t prepared for the end of him. Or me.

“You haven’t called me Daddy in years.” I could see him fighting his own emotions. He wiped his eyes, steeling himself. “I want you to know what real love is. If only for one night. Tristan —“

Since my father and Tristan were spending time together working on The Toy, we had more chances to interact. In the weeks following The Discovery, there was a palpable attraction between us. There was a moment the day before when I was within kissing distance of Tristan; every inch of me wanted to kiss his lips - and every inch of him.

“Daddy,” I sobbed.

That’s when he folded the heart-shaped locket into my hand.

“There’s no way we can know what tomorrow will bring,” he started, choking up. “Promise me that, when you feel like you’re out of tomorrows, you’ll open that locket.”

I could only nod.

He pushed me on the swing. No more words passed between us. We parted ways after hugging for an eternity.

I never saw him again.

The next day, and every day for the next six months, Tristan and I spent every waking moment kissing each other. Everywhere.

Tristan’s father didn’t wake up three months later.

The morning after Mr. Laslow passed, Tristan brought me a flower. He kissed me for the rest of the day, then went back above and never came back again.

The day before my 18th birthday, my mother finally took her last breath. I felt relief - and a lot of other very complicated emotions.

As I blew out the candle on my birthday cake, I looked at another Toy that had, somehow, made its way to me after Tristan left.

The timer that had been counting backward since the moment my father first saw it ticked down to its last 24 hours. There weren’t any more tomorrows left.

I opened the heart-shaped locket and found a map. And a set of instructions in my father’s handwriting.

“If you follow me here, there may be another tomorrow. And another. And another. And another.”

I pulled on a mask, left the underground, walked past the gnarled old tree, then started running toward The Silo.

Toward my father.

Toward tomorrow.