One series of racks held smaller containers, each about a third the size of a normal cryopod. I said: “Please tell me those aren’t babies.”
“Oh no,” said Dr. Ogilvy. “Children are kept in Cryostasis B. This is an adults-only chamber. Those are heads. The, uh, budget option,” he explained, wincing a little. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that, you understand—once we have the means to reanimate a dead body, growing an entirely new one shouldn’t be much harder. Personally, though, I’d rather not present a revival team with any unnecessary challenges.”
Cryostasis B was almost identical to Cryostasis A, except that the racks were spaced farther apart to make room for padded benches. “For visitors,” Dr. Ogilvy explained. “Friends and loved ones of our adult clients are welcome to visit at any time as well, but for reasons I’m sure you can appreciate, visits here in the nursery are much more common. Incidentally, purchase of a Platinum Lazarus or higher-premium plan entitles you to unlimited shuttle service to and from McCarran Airport…”
Figuring it might blow our cover if I slugged him, I stepped away while Ogilvy continued his pitch. I went over to the nearest rack and pretended to examine one of the pods.
A clanging noise caught my attention. I leaned sideways and looked around the rack to where a maintenance hatch had just opened in the floor. Another moon-suit guy climbed up out of it. As he turned to drop the hatch cover back in place, I saw his face.
Jacob Carlton.
“Mrs. Doe?” Dr. Ogilvy said. “I was just telling your husband something that I think you—”
“Be with you in a minute!” I drew my NC gun and stepped quickly around the rack, but Carlton had vanished.
“Jane?” said Wise. “What is it?”
A loud boom! from beneath the floor shook the pods in their racks. The lights flickered, and the steady hum of air-conditioning and refrigeration units gave way to a sick stutter.
“It’s you-know-who!” I called to Wise. “I think he just sabotaged the electricity!”
“What?” said Dr. Ogilvy. “Oh no, sabotage is impossible here, we have excellent security! And the power system has two backup generators.”
On cue, a second explosion rocked the building. An alarm sounded.
“Oh dear,” said Dr. Ogilvy. “Perhaps we’d better—urk!”
“Wise?” Gun at the ready, I stepped back around the rack and saw the doctor lying facedown on the floor. Wise, who’d dived for cover behind a batch of frozen heads, mouthed the words Over there and pointed.
I made my way from rack to rack towards Carlton’s hiding place. I was nearly there when a third explosion knocked out the last of the power. In the seconds of pitch-blackness that followed, I heard running footsteps.
Battery-operated safety lights came on. I ducked past the last rack in time to see an emergency-exit door swinging closed. I shouted to Wise, “I’m going after him,” but when I reached the door I paused to look back. The room was already noticeably warmer, and wisps of vapor were curling off the cryopods.
I went through the door. A twisting corridor led me back out to the main hallway, where I found two more bodies on the ground, another doctor and a security guard. The guard had gone down swinging, a nightstick still clutched tightly in his fist. Right next to him on the floor, nearly invisible in the amber glow of the safety lights, was an orange pistol.
I tucked Carlton’s NC gun in my waistband and followed the signs to the nearest exit. Carlton was stuck there, his final escape from the building blocked by a set of automatic doors that were no longer automatic. You’re supposed to be able to slide those things open manually, but it helps to have both hands, and Carlton’s right arm hung limp, a casualty of the guard’s nightstick. Now he’d pulled out a club of his own—a monkey wrench—and was using it to bash out the door glass. I snuck up behind him and waited until he’d removed enough of the glass to give me a clear field of fire. Then I put him to sleep.
A hot desert wind blew in through the shattered door. Looking out, I realized that the power failure had killed the garden’s sprinkler system, so the plants were doomed, too. But it wasn’t the fruit trees I was worried about.
“We blew it, didn’t we?” I said, as Wise came up behind me. “They’re all going to thaw out.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in the resurrection.”
Wise crouched down, pulled the hood off Carlton’s moon suit, and laid a pair of fingers on Carlton’s jugular. “God damn it! I told you we wanted him alive!”
“He is alive. He’s just sleeping.”
“Yeah, sleeping like those corpsicles back there.”
“No…I had it on stun, see?” I turned the gun to show him, but the dial was on the MI setting. “Oh shit…”
“Oh shit what?”
“This must be his gun. I picked it up back there, and…Christ, I must have confused it with mine.”
“Good job.”
“Look, I’m sorry. It was an accident.”
“Yeah, you’re prone to those, aren’t you?” He stood up. “All right, let’s get out of here.”
“What about him?”
“Leave him. He’s useless to us now.”
“And what about…?” I gestured in the direction of the cryostasis rooms.
“Nothing we can do.”
“The organization doesn’t have some kind of crack repair team that could get the power back online? What about the Good Samaritans, isn’t this right up their alley?”
“Nothing we can do,” Wise repeated. “Now come on.” He stepped through the door into the dying garden. “We can’t stay here.”
white room (vi)
“ARE YOU READY TO TALK ABOUT what happened to Phil?” the doctor asks.
Yet another evidence folder lies open on the table, turned so she can read the top page of the police report inside. But she refuses to look at it. She hunches back in her chair, keeping her eyes downcast, fixed on the cuffed hands in her lap.
“Jane,” the doctor prompts her.
“It’s a free country,” she finally says. “You talk about whatever you like.”
“All right…Let’s start with what didn’t happen. Your brother wasn’t swept up in some comical marijuana raid. And despite what you seemed to be suggesting in our last session—”
“I didn’t suggest anything.”
“—he wasn’t in an accident. Your mother thought you had done something to him—that’s what she told the 911 operator when she first reported him missing, and it’s why she attacked you in the police station. But she was wrong, too. According to witnesses, your brother left the community garden in the company of a man whose description matched that of a recently paroled felon, a convicted child molester and suspected child murderer named John Doyle.
“A child molester,” the doctor says. “But I doubt the police would use that expression in front of a fourteen-year-old girl, particularly one who was wracked with guilt. They’d probably just refer to him as a bad man…or a bad monkey.”
She still won’t look up, but her lips curl in a bitter smile. “Theory number 257,” she says. “Jane’s psychotic break begins with euphemism.”
“Well you tell me, Jane: is it just a coincidence that all your missions for the organization somehow involve threats to children or young men?”
She doesn’t answer.
“Something else I found interesting…” He lays a hand on the folder. “The reporting officer: Buster Keaton Friendly. That really was his name…But you’ve been lying about yours, haven’t you? Or at least, not telling the whole truth. Charlotte is your middle name. Your full name is Jane Charlotte—”
“Don’t,” she says, at last raising her eyes to meet his. “Just don’t. That’s not my name. She made that very clear.”