Shadows by Peter Cawdron Read Free Book Online Page A

of the silo. Pretty cool, huh? The whole silo
could collapse, and this apartment would remain
intact. ”
    “ Wow, ” she replied, stepping forward out of
the tunnel and into the apartment. There was a neatly made cot to
one side, along with several shelves full of books and binders and
glossy folders. In front of her were two desks, while on the other
side of the apartment there was a kitchenette complete with a large
walk-in-pantry.
    “ What is this
place? ” Susan asked.
    “ Best we
understand it, ” Charlie continued. “ It's designed to ensure the knowledge from before lives
on. ”
    “ But
why? ” Susan asked as Charlie handed her a book.
    “ Why? ” Charlie repeated. “ So that knowledge isn't lost forever. ”
    “ No, ” Susan replied, flicking through the
largest book she'd ever seen, seeing dozens of colored images
flickering before her, their colors bursting before her
eyes. “ Why hide this? ”
    “ Ah,
yes, ” Charlie replied. “ That is a very good
question. Why indeed. ”
    He pulled a chair over for
her to sit in. Susan felt conflicted. On one hand, she wanted to
read each page and carefully scrutinize every picture, on the other
she wanted to flick through and take in the whole. There were
animals she'd never dreamed existed, some with spots, some with
stripes. She'd heard of birds, but never with the array of colors
she saw before her, and there were fish that looked like they'd
been painted in the brightest of reds and yellows.
    “ I ...
I. ”
    “ Yeah, ” Charlie said. “ I was the
same when Barney first showed me this stuff. Takes a while to get
your head around it all. Don't rush. Take your
time. ”
    Susan felt
giddy. She lost track of time. She wasn ’ t sure how long
she sat there looking through those books, picking up one after the
other and losing herself in the glossy pages. Charlie was so
engrossed reading something that on those rare occasions when she
looked up she didn ’ t want to disturb
him so she just kept browsing, feeling a sense of awe and
astonishment at all she was seeing.
    Giraffes.
Susan didn ’ t want to hazard a guess at how to pronounce
such an unusual name, but there were several images of these lanky
creatures. Their legs looked impossibly thin, with thigh muscles up
high, but below their knees their their legs looked like bone
wrapped in skin. The absurd length of their necks compared with
their heads looked almost comical, as though they were the product
of some child ’ s imagination. If
she doodled with a crayon she couldn ’ t have come up with
an animal this outlandish. The patches of color on the
giraffe ’ s coat reminded Susan of the paint blistering
and peeling off the wall in her parent ’ s apartment. How did
animals like this arise? She would love to learn more about not
only them but all the astonishing diversity she saw in the animal
kingdom.
    She flicked through a few
more pages.
    Snakes looked
like coils of rope, but they had no arms or legs. How did they
move? They seemed to be so astonishingly flexible she wondered if
they had bones. And their eyes were like nothing
she ’ d ever seen, matching the color of their skin but with
a tiny black slit for a pupil. Susan wasn ’ t sure what was
more bizarre, that these impossible creatures were covered in tiny
plates that looked like fingernails or that their tongue split in
two when they stuck it out.
    Charlie had
put down one book and picked up another. Out of curiosity, Susan
grabbed his old book, wondering what he ’ d been looking
at.
    Rockets were long, thin
cylinders that shot up into the sky, riding on a fiery, flaming
tail that glowed like the sun. It was difficult to judge their
size, but they looked huge. Some of them were clearly split into
segments that served some obscure function that had been lost in
time.
    There were
photos of Earth as seen from space. White clouds floated below a
night blacker than any she ’ d ever seen, even
when the lights went out in the silo.