Here's the first chapter of a story I really like that I've been writing. I'd love to know what you think.

Ch1

The city was dark and hollow, a vast grey fossil of an extinct civilization. A permanent dusk shadowed the Earth, light from the sun was smothered by thick clouds of ash and toxic gases. Nearly everything living had withered and died years ago when the radio storm began.

Sparks sat on the edge of a concrete bridge, overhanging the river. Her bulky plastic boots dangled above the inky black water that shimmered and rippled along with the tide. A thin layer of oil covered the entire surface of the river, having leaked from one sunken ship or another. Perhaps a destroyed oil platform off the coast. Or perhaps some yet unknown particle in the radio storm had reacted with the water or something in it, transmuting it into an oil slick. She didn't know where the oil had come from, but she didn't want to take the chance that it would just wash off. Her airtight plastic suit was heavy, and ten sizes too big for her, and it baked her in the direct sunlight.

She couldn't take it off though, not yet. She shifted her gaze regularly, from the shadow of an iron bar jutting from the bridge, to the grooves chiseled into the concrete in an intricate banded figure eight, with nine X's carved along it. It was an Analemmatic sundial, tracing the projection of the tip of the iron bar's shadow throughout the solar year. Around the Analemma was a series of carved rings, marked with quarters of hours. The third quarter of the ninth hour was marked with a notch, and punctuated with red dye. The shadow of the iron bar was gradually approaching the red notch.

Sparks panted heavily, and scrunched up her nose as prickles of sweat itched her skin and stung her eyes. It wouldn't be long now. She gazed down at the greasy water, fifteen meters below her, and sighed.

A hissing, cracking sound became audible to her, and she looked up as the sky began to fracture and fall apart. The phase shift was beginning. She watched the sky carefully, waiting for the colours to come. The clouds were low, she would have little warning, and would have to be quick if she was to live through the shift. Flashes of purple and teal broke through the clouds, gaining intensity, punctuated by orange beams like lasers lasting fractions of a second, tearing angularly across the sky in angry bursts. Sparks stood up awkwardly in her big plastic suit, and shuffled close to the edge of the concrete bridge, still watching the sky.

The clouds began to glow a burnt orange colour, and Sparks knew there would be only a few seconds before the shift came. She braced herself around the chest. Then it happened. The clouds shimmered and turned from puffy grey cottonballs into harsh, blood-red wisps. The entire sky shimmered as the shift raced earthward. Sparks took one last breath, held it, and stepped off the bridge.

She had timed it well. The shift ripped through her as she dropped past the halfway mark. The water below her flashed brilliantly as the shift raced through it, releasing tremendous amounts of energy. Sparks felt the burning sensation of plastic fusing with skin, but could only gasp and choke. She hit the now foaming river water with a heavy splash, ejecting pink foam in a small geyser above her. She struggled to swim in the muck, feeling skin tear from her body in hundreds of tiny patches where it had contacted the plastic. She flailed wildly, trying and failing to block out the pain, before a calm came over her, and she allowed her body to float. She reached out blindly where she knew she should, and felt the hard steel bar where she'd expected it, and it gave her comfort. She dragged herself through the foam, and hoisted her body up a few ladder rungs, onto a concrete platform.

She tore at the rubber seal around her neck, and ripped the head piece free, gasping at the cool, damp air that flooded in. Her pain transformed to anger, and for a few minutes, she cursed and spat and thumped the concrete with her fist until she had expended all of her rage, and flopped back to a supine position on the platform. The patches of skin where the plastic had fused with it would heal in a week, but in another forty days, she'd have to do it all again.

The shift had been a particularly intense one. Not the worst she'd experienced - she still had scars on her feet from the first shift - but it was worse than usual. Sparks spent the next hour carefully and painfully peeling off the big rubber suit, wadding it up, and stuffing it into the storage bag she'd left high up on the bridge, where it too had also lightly fused to the concrete. She had little difficulty peeling it off, though. Some materials shifted harder than others. Plastic wasn't so bad. Steel and concrete shifted much harder. Dirt, plain old dusty earth shifted the hardest. Some objects, which were bonded so solidly to another surface that they couldn't be moved, slowly sank further and further with each shift. A nearby car, which had been stopped on the bridge when the radio storm began, was sunk nearly a meter deep at the front, where the heavy engine was, into the concrete. Sparks wondered how many more shifts it would be until the car finally shifted right through the bridge and dropped into the river. She'd guessed at least fifty.

Her thoughts turned to friends from the past, who had been shifted into the ground just like that car, kept alive for months by the sympathy of those around them, shifting ever deeper into the earth until they finally stopped living. A chill raced down her spine.

There was no formal scientific explanation of the shift, mostly because there was no formal science anymore. She had read scattered articles of news which claimed to have clues to the nature of the shift, citing physics terms and properties of matter that she did not fully understand. This gave little comfort to Sparks, who had spent three days with the soles of her feet welded to her bathroom floor before she'd torn herself free.

With her ugly plastic suit stowed, and her sweat-drenched overalls slowly steaming dry in the sun, Sparks set off for her new home. She hurried along, always wary of her surroundings. She walked in a slight crouch, close to the walls and doing her best not to be seen. She was taking a different route back to the apartment building, just in case she was being watched or followed.

She peered carefully around a corner, ensuring that the street was deserted, save for the abandoned and derelict cars and buses scattered about. She followed the street in the shadows, glancing behind her at regular intervals. She stumbled over something in her path, a dark lump in the sidewalk. It was the shoulders and head of a corpse, now desiccated and rotted. The lower half of the body was sunk well into the concrete. Sparks swallowed hard, forcing her throat closed, to repress the urge to scream or gag. She turned away from the carcass and carried on, giving up on her circuitous route, and headed right back to her home.

Sparks had made her new home in the twelfth floor of a modern apartment building. She’d chosen it because she reasoned that the twenty-four flights of stairs generally discouraged other survivors from bothering to search so high. She exhaled, and began to run up the steps, two at a time, breathing rhythmically and keeping a steady pace. She’d made it to the twelfth floor in just a few minutes. She reasoned that it was still worth it to be fast on her feet, and to that end, endeavoured to keep as fit as possible.

Her apartment was at the far end of the corridor, and she kept the door closed, but not locked. There were a thousand other apartments that all looked just the same, but a locked door could imply that something worth protecting was inside, if somebody else did happen to come across it. Eager for food and to treat her wounded skin she reached for the knob, then, eyes widening as she noticed something troubling, snapped her hand back to her chest. She leaned close to the door knob, confirming her fears, and whimpered “Oh no...”

Each time she left her apartment, she brought with her a small tin of paper that she had burned and then ground to a fine grey ash. She’d gather a small pinch, and blow it gently onto the knob, leaving a thin and almost unnoticeable layer, into which she would trace a unique symbol with her fingertip. Any intruder would almost certainly not see the ash in the dim corridor before grabbing and turning it, and even if they tried to deposit a fresh layer after disturbing it, nobody but Sparks would know the correct symbol to use. The ash layer had been smeared and mostly wiped away.

As silently as she could, Sparks turned and dashed off back along the corridor. She intended to leave the building and find a safe place to spend the next few nights, while she determined who had invaded her home. As her feet hit the first landing though, a bang resonated up the stairwell, The ground floor fire door had just slammed shut. She listened carefully, then stifled a groan when she heard heavy footfalls ascending the stairs below her. Her last recourse was the apartment at the opposite end of the corridor. She kept the door on it locked, to keep out the mildly curious survivor who might be looking for a home, but it was empty of anything valuable that violent looters might want.

She dashed over to it, reaching into her deep pockets searching for the key amongst the rest of her things. It had bonded to the lining of her jeans pocket lightly, and she growled with frustration as she roughly tore it free, slicing the tip of her finger a little. There was a creak behind her, and she glanced back to see the door to her own apartment swing open. It was dark inside. From the shadows stepped a large figure in an orange plastic suit. The faceplate was large and tinted, however the boots and suit seemed to fit much better than her own did. She heard the wooshing sound of air being vented as the person inside it breathed.

“Stop!” It shouted in a loud, muffled, male voice.

Sparks gripped the door handle and violently jammed the key into the lock. She heard loud clomping footsteps as the man came running down the hallway. She turned the key, shouldered the door open, tumbled inside, and slammed it shut again. She twisted the deadbolt to lock the door, then slid one of the security bolts shut as the door shook with a violent bang as the man in the orange suit threw himself against it. She shrieked, then, growling at herself, slid the second security bolt shut.

The door continued to tremble each time the man crashed his shoulder into it. Sparks ignored it for the moment, she knew it was probably strong enough to resist a single man. Two or three, perhaps, would get through it easily enough though. She hoped to leave before that happened, and she had prepared for a siege like this. In the kitchen drawer there was a knife, which she grabbed and took to the bedroom. She attacked the mattress, ripping a long gash down the center, reached in amongst the springs and fluff, and pulled out the red fire axe she’d hidden there.

She took it to the bathroom, where she swung it at a small metal ventilation grill in the wall, smashing it apart. She stood on the toilet, and reached inside, where she’d hidden a policeman’s pistol. She headed back to the living room, tossed the axe over the couch near the balcony, and worked the action on the top of the pistol to ensure it still moved freely. She aimed low on the front door, shin-height, and snapped off three shots in quick succession, then sprinted to the balcony. She wouldn’t know if she’d hit the man, but at least the banging on the door had stopped for now.

Scooping up her plastic suit, she slid open the balcony door and threw the bundle over the edge to the car park below. Sparks tucked the pistol into her pocket and zipped it shut. She collected the axe, and stepped out onto the balcony. She climbed onto the railing, then paused to take a few deep breaths. She’d practiced this before, but never under pressure. Balancing carefully on the railing, she steadied herself on the roof above her with one hand. With the other, she swung the axe up and over the edge of the balcony above her, hooking it on the edge of the concrete. She gradually applied her weight to the handle, ensuring it would hold, then lifted herself off the railing, climbing up the handle of the axe until she could reach the balcony edge.

Dangling by one hand, she dislodged the axe and tossed it clattering onto the balcony. Grunting with the effort, she hoisted herself up after it. When she was safely over the railing, she collected her axe and repeated the maneuver twice more, climbing to the fourteenth, and then fifteenth floors. The fifteenth floor was the penthouse, with nothing overhanging its balcony. Part of the sixteenth floor was the upper bedroom suite of the penthouse, the rest of it was building machinery. Here too she had locked and barricaded the front door, as well as the door to the stairwell. The penthouse elevator lobby attached directly to it.

Sparks jammed the axe blade between the lift doors, using a decorative marble column to hammer it in. She leaned against the handle, levering the doors open under her own power. They only opened a small distance, a safety mechanism near the bottom of the door kept them from opening more than an inch, though it was enough space for Sparks to swing her axe down and smash it. It took a few swings to fully chop through the mechanism, then she was able to easily slide the doors open the rest of the way. She knew the elevator was far below, at the third floor.

There were four cables, two standard, and two backup safety lines, which were not as taut. Hurriedly, she pulled the drawstring out of her jacket hood, tied one end to her belt and the other to the handle of the axe. Reaching out carefully from the edge, she used the axe to hook both of the backup cables. Once the cables were in her hand, she let the axe dangle below her by its drawstring, and let herself swing out over the void on the elevator cables. She wrapped her legs around it, and, hand over hand, lowered herself down the shaft.

Sparks reasoned that, even if the man in the plastic suit were to break down the door after she’d fired at him, and if he had company, he probably wouldn’t find the forced-open elevator door in the penthouse for a long time. She guessed she’d have at least ten minutes before her pursuers caught up with her.

Filthy black grease caked her bare hands and her jeans as she descended the cable, but she made rapid progress. She closed her eyes, concentrated on her breathing, ignored the burning ache in her arms and considered her options.

When her feet finally touched the steel box of the elevator car, she took up the axe, located the access cover, and chopped at the latch holding it shut. It broke off after three swings, and fell inward. She dropped the axe inside, then followed it herself. Once again, she pried the inner doors on the elevator apart, then smashed apart the mechanism holding the outer doors closed and levered them apart too. She stuck her head out into the hallway to make sure it was vacant, and tiptoed to the stairwell, abandoning her axe in the elevator. She pressed her ear to the fire door and waited. She heard only the dull thud of her own heart.

Sparks pushed against the door. It clicked and creaked annoyingly loud as it opened. She hoped that any of the plastic suit mans’ friends were now upstairs with him. She ran down three flights of stairs, and started down the fourth.

“Hey! You, stop!” A loud voice echoed down the stairwell. A head peered out over the railing at her.

“Oh no” Groaned Sparks. She leaped down the remaining stairs three at a time, heaved open the stairwell door on the ground floor and crashed into a man standing in the lobby, knocking him over. Sparks stumbled and regained her balance. Like the man on the twelfth floor, this one was also wearing an orange plastic suit. Another stood In front of the glass lobby doors, blocking her exit. He extended his hand out to her.

“Kid, stop, goddamn it!” He shouted out in a muffled voice.

Sparks tore off back into the stairwell, at the same time wrestling with the pocket zipper on her jacket. She pulled the pistol out again, and hearing heavy footsteps descending the stairs as well as following behind her, she cracked off two more shots over her head, to give them something to think about. She burst out back into the third floor corridor, considered the elevator, decided against it, dashed one way down the corridor, stumbling to a stop as she struggled to remember the building’s layout, ran back the other way. stumbling to a stop again as she realized she’d need her axe back, collected it from the elevator and smashed the handle off the door of the second apartment after the elevator, shouldering it open.

She ran across the living space, and threw her axe from a distance through the glass sliding door leading out onto the balcony. The pane burst into a thousand slivers, which she carefully navigated through, tossed her axe over the balcony, climbed on the railing, and leapt into the night.

Sparks fell three stories into the dirty swimming pool, her world went quiet as the cold water clawed at her, and she in turn clawed her way to the surface. She burst into the air with a spluttering gasp, as rotting wet leaves clung to her hair and face. She realized both her hands were empty, and that she must have dropped her pistol somewhere in the pool. Never mind, she thought, the water would probably ruin the rest of the bullets anyway. She splashed awkwardly to the edge of the pool and heaved herself with trembling, burning arms onto the edge.

Her face hurt, and she tasted blood. Ignoring it, she tore off her jacket, hung it sopping over her shoulder, and picked a direction. She ran.