Henson turned to Troy. His jowls sagged with disappointment. ‘I hate to ask you to sign off on this…’
Troy wiped his face with the front of his shirt and nodded. The losses had been accounted for — individual losses as well as silos, spares stocked accordingly — but they all stung.
‘Of course,’ he said. This was his job, right? Sign this. Say these words. Follow the script. It was a joke. They were all reading lines from a play none of them could remember. But he was beginning to. He could feel it.
Henson shuffled through a drawer of forms while his assistant unbuckled Hal’s overalls. The men from Security asked if they were needed, checked the restraints a final time and were waved away. One of them laughed out loud over something the other said as the sound of their boots faded towards the lift.
Troy, meanwhile, lost himself in Hal’s slack face, the slight rise and fall of his old and narrow chest. Here was the reward for remembering, he thought. This man had woken up from the routine of the asylum. He hadn’t gone crazy; he’d had a sudden bout of clarity. He’d cracked open his eyes and seen through the mist.
A clipboard was procured from a peg on the wall, the right form shoved into its metal jaws. Troy was handed a pen. He scratched his name, passed the clipboard back and watched the two doctors work; he wondered if they felt any of what he felt. What if they were all playing the same part? What if each and every one of them was concealing the same doubts, none of them talking because they all felt so completely alone?
‘Could you get that one for me?’
The medical assistant was down on his knees, twisting a knob on the base of the table. Troy saw that it was on wheels. The assistant nodded at Troy’s feet.
‘Of course.’ Troy crouched down to free the wheel. He was a part in this. It was his signature on the form. It was him twisting the knob that would free the table and allow it to roll down the hall.
With Hal under, the restraints were loosened, his overalls peeled off with care. Troy volunteered with the boots, unknotting the laces and setting them aside. There was no need for a paper gown — his modesty was no longer a concern. An IV needle was inserted and taped down; Troy knew it would plug into the cryopod. He knew what it felt like to have ice crawl through his veins.
They pushed the gurney down the hall and to the reinforced steel doors of the deep freeze. Troy studied the doors. They seemed familiar. He seemed to remember speccing something similar for a project once, but that was for a room full of machines. No — computers.
The keypad on the wall chirped as the doctor entered his code. There was the heavy thunk of rods withdrawing into the thick jamb.
‘The empties are at the end,’ Henson said, nodding into the distance.
Rows and rows of gleaming and sealed beds filled the freezing chamber. His eyes fell to the readout screens on the bases of each pod. There were green lights solid with life, no space needed for a pulse or heartbeat, first names only, no way to connect these strangers to their past lives.
Cassie, Catherine, Gabriella, Gretchen.
Made-up names.
Gwynn. Halley. Heather.
Everyone in order. No shifts for them. Nothing for the men to fight over. It would all be done in an instant. Step inside the lifeboat, dream a moment, step out onto dry land.
Another Heather. Duplicates without last names. Troy wondered how that would work. He steered blindly between the rows, the doctor and his assistant chatting about the procedure, when a name caught his peripheral vision and a fierce tremor vibrated through his limbs.
Helen. And another: Helen.
Troy lost his grip on the gurney and nearly fell. The wheels squealed to a stop.
‘Sir?’
Two Helens. But before him, on a crisp display showing the frozen temps of a deep, deep slumber, another:
Helena.
Troy staggered away from the gurney and Hal’s naked body. The echo of the old man’s feeble screams came back to him, insisting he was someone named Carlton. Troy ran his hands along the curved top of the cryopod.
She was here.
‘Sir? We really need to keep moving—’
Troy ignored the doctor. He rubbed the glass shield, the cold inside leaching into his hand.
‘Sir—’
A spiderweb of frost covered the glass. He wiped the frozen film of condensation away so he could see inside.
‘We need to get this man installed—’
Closed eyes lay inside that cold and dark place. Blades of ice clung to her lashes. It was a familiar face, but this was not his wife.
‘Sir!’
Troy stumbled, hands slapping at the cold coffin for balance, bile rising in his throat with remembrance. He heard himself gag, felt his limbs twitch, his knees buckle. He hit the ground between two of the pods and shook violently, spit on his lips, strong memories wrestling with the last residue of the drugs still in his veins.
The two men in white shouted at each other. Footsteps slapped frosted steel and faded towards the distant and heavy door. Inhuman gurgles hit Troy’s ears and sounded faintly as though they came from him.
Who was he? What was he doing there? What were any of them doing?
This was not Helen. His name was not Troy.
Footsteps stomped towards him in a hurry. The name was on his tongue as the needle bit his flesh.
Donny.
But that wasn’t right, either.
And then the darkness took him, tightening down around anything from his past that his mind deemed too awful to bear.
19
2052
Fulton County, Georgia
SOME MASH-UP of music festival, family reunion and state fair had descended on the southernmost corner of Fulton County. For the past two weeks, Donald had watched while colourful tents sprang up over a brand-new nuclear containment facility. Fifty state flags flew over fifty depressions in the earth. Stages had been erected, an endless parade of supplies flowing over the rolling hills, golf carts and four-wheelers forming convoys of food, Tupperware containers, baskets of vegetables — some even pulled small enclosed trailers loaded with livestock.
Farmers’ markets had been staked out in winding corridors of tents and booths, chickens clucking and pigs snorting, children petting rabbits, dogs on leashes. Owners of the latter guided dozens of breeds through the crowds. Tails wagged happily, and wet noses sniffed the air.
On Georgia’s main stage, a local rock band performed a sound check. When they fell quiet to adjust levels, Donald could hear the twangs of bluegrass spilling over from the general direction of North Carolina’s delegation. In the opposite direction, someone was giving a speech on Florida’s stage while the convoys moved supplies over the rise, and families spread blankets and picnicked on the banks of sweeping bowls. The hills, Donald saw, formed stadium seating, as if they’d been designed for the task.
What he couldn’t figure out was where they were putting all those supplies. The tents seemed to keep gobbling them up with no end in sight. The four-wheelers with their little boxed trailers had been rumbling up and down the slopes the entire two weeks he’d been there helping prep for the National Convention.
Mick rumbled to a stop beside him, sitting atop one of the ubiquitous all-terrain vehicles. He grinned at Donald and goosed the throttle while still holding the brakes. The Honda lurched, tyres growling against the dirt.
‘Wanna go for a ride to South Carolina?’ he yelled over the engine. He shifted forward on the seat to make room.