They made their way to the pod. It was the first time Donald had seen this part of the procedure. He had helped put others under, but had never helped wake anyone up. Storing Victor’s body away was something altogether different. That had been a funeral.
The assistants busied themselves around the pod. Dr Wilson knelt by the control panel, paused, glanced up at Donald, waiting.
‘Right,’ Donald said. He knelt and watched over the doctor’s shoulder.
‘Most of the process is automated,’ the doctor admitted sheepishly. ‘Frankly, they could replace me with a trained monkey and nobody would know the difference.’ He glanced back at Donald as he keyed in his code and pressed a red button. ‘I’m like you, Shepherd. Only here in case something goes wrong.’
The doctor smiled. Donald didn’t.
‘It’ll be a few minutes before the hatch pops.’ He tapped the display. ‘The temperature here will get up to thirty-one Celsius. The bloodstream is getting an injection when this light is flashing.’
The light was flashing.
‘An injection of what?’ Donald asked.
‘Nanos. The freezing procedure would kill a normal human being, which I suppose is why it was outlawed.’
A normal human being. Donald wondered what the hell that made him. He lifted his palm and studied the red splotchiness. He remembered a glove tumbling down a hill.
‘Twenty-eight,’ Dr Wilson said. ‘When it hits thirty, the lid will release. Now’s when I like to go ahead and reset the dial, rather than wait until the end. Just so I don’t forget.’ He twisted the dial below the temp readout. ‘It doesn’t stop the process. It only runs one direction once it starts.’
‘What if something goes wrong?’ Donald asked.
Dr Wilson frowned. ‘I told you. That’s why I’m here.’
‘But what if something happened to you? Or you got called away?’
The doctor tugged his earlobe, thinking. ‘I would advise putting them back under until I could get to them.’ He laughed. ‘Of course, the nanos might just fix what’s wrong before I could. As long as you dial the temp back down, all you have to do is close the lid. But I don’t see how that could come up.’
Donald did. He watched the temperature tick up to twenty-nine. The two assistants prepped while they waited for the pod to open. One had a towel set aside, along with the blanket and the paper gown. The medical kit sat in the wheelchair, the top open. Both men wore blue rubber gloves. One of them peeled off a strip of tape and hung it from the handle of the wheelchair. A packet of gauze was pre-emptively torn open, the bitter drink given a vigorous shake.
‘And my code will start the procedure?’ Donald asked, thinking of anything he might be missing.
Dr Wilson chuckled. He placed his hands on his knees and was slow to stand. ‘I imagine your code would open the airlock. Is there anything you don’t have access to?’
A glove was snapped. The hatch hissed as the lock disengaged.
The truth, Donald wanted to say. But he was planning on getting it soon enough.
The lid popped open a crack, and one of the assistants lifted it the rest of the way. A handsome young man lay inside, his cheeks twitching as he came to. The assistants went to work, and Donald tried to make note of every little part of the procedure. He thought of his sister in a hall above him, lying asleep, waiting.
‘Once we get him up to the office,’ said Dr Wilson, ‘we’ll check his vitals and take our samples for analysis. If they have any items in their locker, I send one of the boys to retrieve them.’
‘Locker?’ Donald watched as a catheter was removed, a needle extracted from an arm. The tape and gauze were applied while the man in the pod sucked from a straw, wincing from the bitterness as he did so.
‘Personal effects. Anything set aside from their previous shift. We retrieve those for them.’
The assistants helped the man into the paper gown, then grunted as they lifted him from the steaming pod. Donald moved the medical kit and steadied the wheelchair for them. The blanket was already laid out across the seat. While they settled the man into place, Donald thought of the bag marked Shift left on his bed, the one with Thurman’s personal effects in them. There had been a small number marked on the bag similar to the one in Anna’s note. That number in the note wasn’t a date at all.
And then it hit him. Locket was a typo. He tried to picture where the R and T were on a keyboard, if this was a likely mistake. Had she meant to say locker instead?
The confluence of clues cut through the chill in the room, and for a moment, the idea of waking his sister was forgotten. Other sleeping ghosts were whispering to him, clouding his mind.
79
2345
• Silo 1 •
DONALD HELPED ESCORT the groggy man up to the medical offices while one of the assistants stayed behind to scrub the pod. Not caring to see Dr Wilson take his samples, Donald volunteered to go and grab the tech’s personal items. The assistant gave him directions to one of the storage levels in the heart of the silo.
There were sixteen levels of stores in all, not counting the armoury. Donald entered the lift and pressed the worn-out button for the storeroom on fifty-seven. The reactor tech’s ID number had been scribbled on a piece of paper. The number from Anna’s note to Thurman was vivid in his mind. He had assumed it was a date: 2 November 2039. It made the number easy to recall.
The lift slowed to a stop, and Donald stepped through the doors and into darkness. He ran his hand down the bank of light switches along the wall. The bulbs overhead sparked to life with the distant and muted thunks of ancient transformers and relays jolting into action. A maze of tall shelves revealed itself in stages as the lights popped on first in the distance, then close, then off to the right, like some mosaic unmasked one random piece at a time. The lockers were in the very back, past the shelves. Donald began the long walk while the last of the bulbs flickered on.
Cliffs of steel shelves laden with sealed plastic tubs swallowed him. The containers seemed to lean in over his head. If he glanced up, he almost expected the shelves to touch high above, to meet like train tracks. Huge swathes of tubs were empty and unlabelled, he saw, waiting for future shifts to fill them. All the notes he and Anna had generated on his last shift would be in tubs like these. They would preserve the tale of silo forty and all those unfortunate facilities around them. They would tell of the people of silo eighteen and Donald’s efforts to save them. And maybe he shouldn’t have. What if this current debacle, this vagabond cleaner, was his fault in some way?
He passed crates sorted by date, by silo, by name. There were cross-cuts between the shelves, narrow aisles wide enough for the carts used to haul blank paper and notebooks out and then bring them back in weighing just a little more from the ink. With relief from his claustrophobia, Donald left the shelves and found the far wall of the facility. He glanced back over his shoulder at how far he’d come, could imagine all the lights going out at once and him not being able to pick his way back to the lift. Maybe he would stagger in circles until he died of thirst. He glanced up at the lights and realised how fragile he was, how reliant on power and light. A familiar wave of fear washed over him, the panic of being buried in the dark. Donald leaned against one of the lockers for a moment and caught his breath. He coughed into his handkerchief and reminded himself that dying wouldn’t be the worst of things.