Dust

Page 31

“Wait,” Donald said. “I have a question.”
Thurman hesitated, his hand on the door.
“What’s wrong with me?” Donald asked.
Thurman looked down at the red rag in the plastic bag. “Have you ever seen what the land looks like after a battle?” His voice had grown quiet. Subdued. “Your body is a battlefield now. That’s what’s going on inside of you. Armies with billions to a side are waging war with one another. Machines that mean to rip you apart and those that hope to keep you together. And their boots are going to turn your body into shrapnel and mud.”
Thurman coughed into his fist. He started to pull the door open.
“I wasn’t going over the crest that day,” Donald said. “I wasn’t going out there to be seen. I just wanted to die.”
Thurman nodded. “I thought as much later. And I should’ve let you. But they sounded the alarm. I came up and saw my men struggling with suits and you halfway gone. There was a grenade in my foxhole and years of knowing what I’d do if that ever happened. I threw myself on it.”
“You shouldn’t have,” Donald said.
Thurman opened the door. Brevard was standing on the other side, waiting.
“I know,” he said. And then he was gone.
45
Darcy worked on his hands and knees. He dunked his crimson rag into the bucket of red water and wrung it out until it was pink, then went back to scrubbing the mess inside the lift. The walls were already clean, the samples sent out for analysis. While he worked, he grumbled to himself in a mockery of Brevard’s voice: “Take samples, Darcy. Clean this up, Darcy. Fetch me a coffee, Darcy.” He didn’t understand how fetching coffee and mopping up blood had become part of his job description. What he missed were the uneventful night shifts; he couldn’t wait for things to get back to normal. Amazing what can begin to feel normal. He almost couldn’t smell the copper in the air anymore, and the metallic taste was gone from his tongue. It was like those daily doses in the paper cups, the bland food every day, even the infernal buzzing from the elevator with its doors jammed open. All these things to get used to until they disappeared. Things that faded into dull aches like memories from a former life.
Darcy didn’t remember much of his old life, but he knew he was good at this job. He had a feeling he used to work security a long time ago, back in a world no one talked about, a world trapped in old films and reruns and dreams. He vaguely remembered being trained to take a bullet for someone else. He had one solid and recurring dream of jogging in the morning, the way the air cooled the sweat from his brow and neck, the chirping of birds, running behind some older man in sweatpants and noticing how this man was going bald. Darcy remembered an earpiece that grew slick and wouldn’t stay in place, always falling out of his ear. He remembered watching crowds, the way his heart raced when balloons burst and relic scooters backfired, forever waiting for the chance to take a—
Bullet.
Darcy stopped scrubbing and dabbed his face with his sleeve. He stared at the crack between the floor and the wall of the lift where something bright was lodged, a little stone of metal. He tried to secure it with his fingers, but they wouldn’t fit in the crack. A bullet. He shouldn’t be touching it anyway.
The rag fell with a splash into the bucket. Darcy grabbed the sample kit from the hallway. The elevator continued to buzz and buzz, hating this standing still, wishing it could go places. “Cool your jets,” Darcy whispered. He pulled one of the sample bags from the small box inside the kit. The tweezers weren’t where they were supposed to be. He dug in the bottom of the kit until he found them, cursed the men on other shifts with no respect for their colleagues. It was like living in a dorm, Darcy thought. No, not the right word, the right memory. Like living in a barracks. It was the semblance of order over an underlying mess. Crisp sheets with folded corners over stained mattresses. That’s what this was, people not putting things back where they belonged.
He used the tweezers to grab the bullet and drop it into the plastic bag. It was slightly misshapen but not severely. Hadn’t hit anything solid, but it’d hit something. Rubbing the bag around the bullet and holding it up to the light, he saw how a pink stain appeared on the plastic. There was blood on the bullet. He checked the floor to see if he’d slopped any of the bloody water near where the bullet had been wedged, if the blood had perhaps gotten there due to his carelessness.
It hadn’t. The man they’d found dead had been stabbed in the neck, but a gun had been discovered nearby. Darcy had sampled the blood inside the elevator in a dozen places. A med tech had picked the samples up, and Stevens and the chief had told him that all the samples matched the victim. But now Darcy very likely had a blood sample from the attacker, who was still at large. The man who’d killed Eren. A real clue.
••••
He clutched the sample bag and waited for the express to arrive. He considered for a moment handing this over to Stevens, which would be protocol, but he had found the bullet, knew what it was, had been careful in collecting it. He ought to be the one to see the results.
The express arrived with a cheerful ding. An exhausted-looking man in purple coveralls guided a wheeled bucket out, steered it with the handle of a mop. Instead of calling in his find, Darcy had called down backup. The night custodian. The two men shook hands. Darcy thanked him for staying on shift late, said he owed him a big one. He took the man’s place inside the express.
He only had to go down two levels. It felt crazy, taking the express two levels. What the silo needed was stairs. There were so many times he just needed to go up or down a single level and found himself waiting five minutes for a blasted lift. It made no sense. He sighed and pressed the button for the medical wing. Before the doors shut, he heard a wet slap from the mop next door.
Dr. Whitmore’s office was crowded. Not with workers – it was just Whitmore and his two med techs busying about – but with bodies. Two extra bodies on slabs. One was the woman discovered dead the day before; Darcy remembered her name being Anna. The other was Eren, the former silo head. Whitmore was at his computer, typing up notes while the lab techs worked on the deceased.
“Sir?”
Whitmore turned. His eyes went from Darcy’s face to his hands. “Whatcha got?”
“One more sample. On a bullet. Can you run it for me?”
Whitmore waved at one of the men in the operating room, who exited with his hands held by his shoulders.
“Can you run this for the officer?”
The lab tech didn’t seem thrilled. He tugged his bloodstained gloves off with loud thwacks and threw them in the sink to be washed and sterilized. “Let’s see it,” he said.
The machine didn’t take long. It beeped and whirred and made purposeful sounds, and then spit out a piece of paper in jittery fits. The tech reached for the results before Darcy could. “Yup. Got a match. It belongs to … Huh. That’s weird.”
Darcy took the report. There was the bar graph, that unique UPC code of a man’s DNA. Amounts and percentages of various blood levels were written in inscrutable code: IFG, PLT, Hgb. But where the system should have listed the details of the matching personnel record, it simply said on one of the many lines: Emer. The rest of the bio fields were blank.
“Emer,” the lab tech said. He crossed to the sink and began washing the gloves and his hands. “That’s a weird name. Who would pick a name like that?”
“Where are those other results?” Darcy asked. “From earlier.”
The tech nodded to the recycle bin at Dr. Whitmore’s feet, who continued to clack away at his keyboard. Darcy sifted through the bin, found one of the results sheets from earlier. He held the two side by side.
“It’s not a name,” Darcy said. “That would be on the top line. This is where the location should be.” On the other report, the name Eren stood above a line listing the freeze hall and the coordinates of the dead man’s storage pod. Darcy remembered what one of the smaller freeze halls was called.
“Emergency Personnel,” he said with satisfaction. He had solved a small mystery. He smiled at the room, but the other men had already returned to their work.
••••
Emergency Personnel was the smallest of the freeze halls. Darcy stood outside the metal door, his breath visible in the air and clouding the steel. He entered his code, and the keypad blinked red and buzzed its disapproval. He tried the master security code next, and the doors clunked open and slid into the walls.
His heart raced with a mix of fear and excitement. It wasn’t simply being on this trail of clues, it was where that trail was taking him. Emergency Personnel had been set aside for the most extreme of cases, for those times when Security was deemed insufficient. Through a dense haze, he remembered a time when cops stepped aside while heavily armored men emerged from vans and took down a building with military precision. Had that been him? In a former, former life? He couldn’t remember. And anyway, these men in the emergency hall were different. Many of them had been up and about recently. Darcy remembered from when he got on shift. They were pilots. He recalled seeing ripples in his mug of coffee one day and finding out that bombs had been dropped from drones. Moving from one pod to the next, he searched for an empty one. Someone had not gone back to sleep when they should have, he suspected. Or someone had been stirred to do bad things.
It was this last possibility that filled him with fear. Who had access to such personnel? Who had the ability to awaken them without anyone knowing? He suspected that no matter whom he reported his findings to, as those findings went up and up the chain of command, they would possibly reach the person or people responsible. It also occurred to him that the man who had been killed was the on-shift head of the entire silo, the head of all the silos. This was big. This was huge. A feud between silo heads? This could get him off coffee-brewing and blood-mopping duty forever.
He was two thirds of the way through the grid of cryopods, making a circuit back and forth, when he started to suspect that he might’ve been wrong. It was all so tenuous. He was playing at someone else’s job. There wouldn’t be anyone missing, no grand conspiracy, nobody up killing people—
And then he peered inside a pod with no face there, with no frost on the glass. A palm on the skin of the pod confirmed that it was off. It was the same temperature as the room: cool but not freezing. He checked the display, fearing that it would be off and blank as well, but it showed power. Just no name. Only a number.
Darcy pulled out his report pad and clicked a pen. Only a number. He suspected any name that went with the pod would be classified. But he had his man. Oh, he had his man. And even if he couldn’t get a name, he knew where these pilots spent their time when they were on shift. He had a very good idea of where this missing man with his bullet wound might be hiding.
46
Charlotte waited until morning before trying the radio again. This time, she knew what she wanted to say. She also knew her time was short. She had heard people outside the drone lift again that morning, looking for her.
Waiting until she was sure they were gone, she nosed about and saw that they’d cleaned out the rest of Donald’s notes in the conference room. She went to the bathroom and took the time to change her bandage, found her arm a scabbed mess. At the end of the hall, she expected to find the radio missing, but the control room was undisturbed. They probably never looked under the plastic sheet, just assumed that everything in the room was part of the drone operations. She uncovered the radio, and the unit buzzed when she powered it on. She arranged Donny’s folders across her scattering of tools.
Something Donny had told her came back. He had said they wouldn’t live forever, the two of them. They wouldn’t live long enough outside the pods to see the results of their actions. And that made it hard to know how best to act. What to do for these people, these three dozen or so silos that were left? Doing nothing doomed so many of them. Charlotte felt her brother’s need to pace. She picked up the mic and considered what she was about to do, reaching out to strangers like this. But reaching out was better than just listening. The day before, she had felt like a 911 operator who could only listen while a crime was being committed, unable to respond, powerless to send help.
She made sure the knob was on seventeen, adjusted the volume and squelch until she was rewarded with a soft hiss of static. Somehow, a handful of people had survived the destruction of their silo. Charlotte suspected they had crossed overland. Their mayor – this Juliette her brother had spoken with – had proved it was possible. Charlotte suspected it was this that had drawn her brother’s attention. She knew from the suit Donny had been working on that he had dreamed of escaping somehow. These people may have found a way.
She opened his folders and spread out her brother’s discoveries. There was a ranking of the silos sorted by their chance of survival. There was a note from the Senator, this suicide pact. And the map of all the silos, not with X’s but with the red lines radiating out to a single point. Charlotte arranged the notes and composed herself before making the call. She didn’t care if she was discovered. She knew damn well what she wanted to say, what she thought Donny was dying to say but didn’t know how.
“Hello, people of silo eighteen. People of silo seventeen. My name is Charlotte Keene. Can you hear me? Over.”
She waited, a rush of adrenaline and a flood of nerves from broadcasting her name, for being so bold. She had very likely just poked the hornets’ nest in which she hid. But she had truths to tell. She had been woken up by her brother into a nightmare, and yet she remembered the world from before, a world of blue skies and green grass. She had glimpsed that world with her drone. If she had been born into this, had never known anything else, would she want to be told? To be awoken? Would she want someone to tell her the truth? For a moment, the pain in her shoulder was forgotten. The throbbing was pushed aside by this mix of fear and excitement—