Second Shift: Order

Page 11

“Do you need to shower before the service?” Anna called out from the bathroom.
He didn’t want to go to the service, he nearly said. He knew Victor as someone to fear, a boss sitting across the hallway, always watching, dispensing drugs, manipulating him. At least, that’s how the paranoia of those days made it all seem.
“I’ll go like this,” he said. He still wore the beige coveralls they’d given him the day before. He flipped through random pictures again, starting at the top of the alphabet. What other name? The fear was that he’d forget what she looked like. Or that she’d look more and more like Anna in his mind. He couldn’t let that happen.
“Find anything?”
She snuck up behind him and reached for something on the desk. A towel was wrapped around her breasts and reached the middle of her thighs. Her skin was wet. She grabbed a hairbrush and walked, humming, back to the bathroom. Donald forgot to answer. His body responded to Anna in a way that made him furious and full of guilt. The monitor fogged from the steam. He felt clammy from something else.
He was still married, he reminded himself. He would be until he knew what’d happened to Helen. He would be loyal to her forever.
Loyalty.
On a whim, he searched for the name Karma.
One hit. Donald sat up straight. His palms felt damp. He hadn’t imagined a hit. It was their dog’s name, the nearest thing he and Helen ever had to a child of their own. He brought up the picture.
“I guess we’re all wearing these horrid outfits to the funeral, right?” Anna passed the desk as she snapped up the front of her white coveralls. Donald only noticed in the corner of his tear-filled vision. He covered his mouth and felt his body tremble with suppressed sobs. On the monitor, in a tiny square of black and white pixels in the middle of a work badge, was his wife.
“You’ll be ready to go in a few minutes, won’t you?”
Anna disappeared back into the bathroom, brushing her hair. Donald wiped his cheeks, salt on his lips while he read. Anna’s humming made it nearly impossible.
Karma Brewer. There were several occupations listed, with a badge photo for each. Teacher, School Master, Judge—more wrinkles in each picture but always the same half-smile. He opened the full file, thinking suddenly what it would’ve been like to have been on the very first shift in Silo 1, to watch her life unfold next door, maybe even reach out and contact her somehow. A judge. It’d been a dream of hers to be a judge one day. Donald wept while Anna hummed. Through a lens of tears, he read about his wife.
Married, it said, which didn’t throw up any flags at first. Married, of course. To him. Until he read about her death. Eighty-two years old. Survived by Rick Brewer and two children, Athena and Mars.
Rick Brewer.
The walls and ceiling bulged inward. Donald felt a chill, the cold of the pod and the deep sleep returning to his veins. There were more pictures. He followed the links to other files. To this husband’s files.
“Mick,” Anna whispered behind him.
Donald startled and turned to find her reading over his shoulder. Drying tears streaked his face, but he didn’t care. His best friend and his wife. Two kids. He turned back to the screen and pulled up the daughter’s file. Athena’s. There were several pictures from different careers and phases of her life. She had Helen’s mouth.
“Donny. Please don’t.”
A hand on his shoulder. Donald flinched from it and watched an animation wrought by furious clicks, this child growing into an approximation of his wife, until the girl’s own children appeared in her file.
“Donny,” Anna whispered. “We’re gonna be late for the funeral.”
Donald wept. Sobs tore through him as if he were made of tissue. “Late,” he cried. “A hundred years too late.” He sputtered this last, overcome with misery. There was a granddaughter on the screen that was not his, a great granddaughter one more click away. They stared out at him, all of them, none with eyes like his own.
•14•
Donald went to Victor’s funeral numb. He rode the elevator in silence, watched his boots kick ahead of himself as he teetered forward, but what he found on the medical level wasn’t a funeral at all—it was body disposal. It was them storing the remains back in a pod because they had no dirt in which to bury their dead. Their food came from cans. Their bodies returned to the same.
Donald was introduced to Erskine, who explained unprompted that the body would not rot. The same invisible machines that allowed them to survive the freezing process and turned their waking piss the color of charcoal would keep the dead as soft and fresh as the living. Donald heard all of this. He watched as the man he had known as Victor was prepped for deep freeze. As a reflex, he looked for something on a clipboard to sign, some nominal gesture that he was in charge, that anyone there was in charge.
They wheeled the body down a hall and through a sea of pods. The deep freeze was a cemetery, Donald saw. A grid of bodies laid flat, only a name to feebly encapsulate all that lay within. He wondered how many of the pods contained the dead. Some men must die on their shifts from natural causes. Some must break down as Victor had. They weren’t immortal, he and these people, they were simply skipping through time. And some of those skipping undoubtedly stumbled and fell.
Donald helped with the physical task of moving the body into the pod. There were only four of them present, only four who could know how Victor had gone. The illusion that someone was in charge must be maintained. Donald thought of his last job, sitting at a desk, hands on a rudderless wheel, pretending. He watched Thurman as the old man kissed his palm and pressed his fingers to Victor’s cheek. The lid was closed. The cold of the room made their exhalations visible, a funeral on a crisp fall day.
The others took turns speaking, but it was Helen’s funeral that Donald attended. He did not cry. He had sobbed on the elevator, Anna holding him. Now, it was only the shock and the long years between. He did the math. Helen had died almost a century ago. It had been longer than that since he’d lost her over that hill, since missing her messages, since not being able to get through to her. He remembered the national anthem and the bombs filling the air. He remembered his sister being there.
His sister.
It was more than a century since those bombs had gone off, but that girl who had sung the national anthem would be stored in one of these cavernous rooms. Donald’s sister would be there as well. Family. There was a fierce urge to find her and wake her, to bring someone he loved back to life. He wanted to hold a loved one while the last of the cold thawed from their veins.
Dr. Erskine paid his final respects. Only four of them present to mourn this man who had killed billions. Donald felt Anna’s presence beside him and wondered if maybe the lack of a crowd was in fact due to her. Here were the four who knew not only that a man had taken his life, but that a woman had been woken. Her father knew, Dr. Henson, who had performed the procedure, Erskine, whom she spoke of as a friend, and himself.
The absurdity of Donald’s existence, of the state of the world, swooped down on him in that gathering. He did not belong. He was only there because of a girl he had dated in college, a girl whose father was a senator, whose affections had likely gotten him elected, who had dragged him into a murderous scheme, and had now pulled him from a frozen death. All the great coincidences and marvelous achievements of his life disappeared in a flash. In their place were puppet strings. He was a pawn being shoved around a board while marveling at his great adventure. There was no coincidence at all, nothing to be amazed by, just dangerous affections.
“A tragic loss, this.”
Donald emerged from his ruminations to discover that the ceremony was over. Anna and her father stood two rows of pods away discussing something. Dr. Henson was down by the base of the pod, the panel beeping as he made adjustments. That left Donald with Dr. Erskine, a thin man with glasses and a British accent. He surveyed Donald from the opposite side of the pod. Donald had been introduced to him earlier as he stepped off the elevator, but he’d been in a mournful haze.
“He was on my shift,” Donald said inanely, trying to explain why he was present for the service. There was little else he could think to say of this man whom he had known as Victor. He stepped closer and peered through the little window at the calm face within.
“I know,” Erskine said. This wiry man, probably in his early to mid sixties, adjusted the glasses on his narrow nose and joined Donald in peering through the small window. “He was quite fond of you, you know.”
“I didn’t,” Donald blurted out, unable to censor himself. “I mean . . . he never said as much to me.”
“He was peculiar that way.” Erskine studied the deceased with a smile. “Brilliant perhaps for knowing the minds of others, just not so keen on communicating with them.”
Donald studied this Dr. Erskine. He tried to remember what little Anna had told him about the man. “Did you know him from before?” he asked. He wasn’t sure how else to broach the subject. The before seemed taboo with some, freely spoken of by others.
Erskine nodded. “We worked together. Well, in the same hospital. We orbited each other for quite a few years until my . . . discovery.” He reached out and touched the glass, a final farewell to an old friend, it seemed.
“What discovery?” He vaguely remembered Anna mentioning something.
Erskine glanced up. Looking closer, Donald thought he may have been in his seventies. It was hard to tell. He had some of the agelessness of Thurman, like an antique that patinas and will grow no older.
“I’m the one who discovered the great threat,” he said. It sounded more an admission of guilt than a proud claim. It was said with sadness. At the base of the pod, Dr. Henson finished his adjustments, stood, and excused himself. He steered the empty gurney toward the exit.
“The nanos.” Donald remembered; Anna had said as much. He watched Thurman debate something with his daughter, his fist coming down over and over into his palm, and a question came to mind. He wanted to hear it from someone else. He wanted to see if the lies matched, if that meant they might be the truth.
“You were a medical doctor?” he asked.
Erskine considered the question. It seemed a simple enough one to answer.
“Not precisely,” he said, his accent thick. “I built medical doctors. Wee ones.” He pinched the air and squinted through his glasses at his own fingers. “We were working on ways to keep soldiers safe. Until I found someone else’s handiwork in a sample of blood. It wasn’t long before I was finding the little bastards everywhere.”
Anna and Thurman headed their way, Anna with her cap donned once more, her hair in a bun that bulged noticeably through the top. It was little disguise for what she was, useful perhaps at a distance.
“I’d like to ask you about that sometime,” Donald said hurriedly. “It might help my . . . help me with this problem the silos are having.”
“Of course,” Erskine said. His accent made him sound cheerier than he appeared.
“I need to get back,” Anna told Donald. She set her lips in a thin grimace, like a scar on her face, a wound from the argument with her father, and Donald finally appreciated how powerless and trapped she truly was. He imagined a year spent in that warehouse of war, clues scattered across that planning table, sleeping on that small cot, not able even to ride up to the cafeteria to see the hills and the dark clouds or have a meal at the time of her own choosing, relying on others to bring her everything.
“I’ll escort the young man up,” Donald heard Erskine say, his hand resting on Donald’s shoulder. “I’d like to chat with our boy for a bit.”
Thurman narrowed his eyes but relented. Anna squeezed Donald’s hand a final time, glanced at the humming pod, and headed toward the exit. Her father followed a few quiet paces behind.
“Come with me.” Erskine’s breath fogged the air. “I want to show you someone.”
They left the cooling pod, and now it was just one of many. Identical. There were no flowers to mark what had happened, no mound of moist soil standing out like a brown scab on green grass. There was simply a lid closed on a life, no different from so many others. And a name. A made-up and pointless name.
•15•
Erskine picked his way through the grid of pods with purpose as though he’d walked the route dozens of times. Donald followed after, rubbing his arms for warmth. He had been too long in that crypt-like place. The cold was leeching back into his flesh.
“Thurman keeps saying we were already dead,” he told Erskine, attacking the question head-on. “Is that true?”
Erskine looked back over his shoulder. He waited for Donald to catch up, seemed to consider this question.
“Well,” Donald asked. “Were we?”
“I never saw a design with a hundred percent efficiency,” Erskine said. “We weren’t there with our own work, and theirs was much cruder. But what they had already would’ve taken out most. That part’s true enough.” He resumed his walk through the field of sleeping corpses. “Even the most severe epidemics burn themselves out,” he said, “so it’s difficult to say. I argued for countermeasures. Victor argued for this.” He spread his arms over the quiet assembly.
“And Victor won.”
“Indeed.”
“Do you think he . . . had second thoughts? Is that why . . . ?”
Erskine stopped at one of the pods and placed both hands on its icy surface. “I’m sure we all have second thoughts,” he said sadly. “But I don’t think Vic ever doubted the rightness of this mission. I don’t know why he did what he did in the end. It wasn’t like him.”