It meant that the world had a stake in the project’s success.

$first shift legacy hugh howey$

Spent nuclear fuel rods from the world over would one day end up buried beneath the pristine soil of Fulton County. This was where men-and a handful of women-could ditch their hard hats, where everyone lived in pre-fabbed cans like sardines that had been salted and packed away for later.įlags flew over many of the trailers, the workforce as multinational as an Olympic village.

They formed a temporary city built for thousands. The plans he had been ordered to draw up practically begged for proportions of insanity, and his weren’t even a necessary component of the facility, not really.īetween Donald and the field of shipping containers stood another impressive array of boxes: trailers, a few used as offices but most of them serving as housing. Everything was done in excess or not at all. But he was learning by the hour that this was the way of government projects, where public expectations were as high as the spending limits. A pile of stripped trees was being craned onto trucks by a machine with a maw like a beetle’s.ĭown the slope of that first hill, near the main parking lot, a staging zone the size of several football fields held thousands of shipping containers packed with building supplies, more than Donald thought necessary.

Remnants of a golf course were still visible at one end where the machines had yet to disturb the land. An entire corner of sparsely populated Fulton County had been cleared. Past the massive clearing of rising hills and over the treetops still denuded from fading winter rose the glass and steel spires of the old Southern city. He and Mick, blazers tucked under their arms, sweat stains spreading in the humid Georgia heat, were aliens from another land who were somehow-nominally, at least-supposed to be in charge of that ungodly commotion.Īnother loader released a bite of soil as Donald shifted his gaze toward downtown Atlanta. The men in hardhats with the leather faces, calloused hands, and busted knuckles belonged. In their white shirts and flapping ties, the two congressmen seemed incongruous. Standing on one of these growing mounds, Donald watched the choreographed ballet of heavy machinery while Mick Webb spoke with a contractor about the delays.

First shift legacy hugh howey