Shift - Omnibus Edition (29 page)

Donald shook his head. He didn’t know what to believe. But then he thought about the fear and rage he’d felt when he thought he’d been infected by something in that chamber. Meanwhile, he never worried about the billions of creatures swimming in his gut and doing so since the day he was born.

‘We can’t tweak the genes of the food we eat without suspicion,’ Erskine said. ‘We can pick and choose until a blade of grass is a great ear of corn, but we can’t do it with
purpose.
Vic had dozens of examples like these. Vaccines versus natural immunities, cloning versus twins, modified foods. Or course he was perfectly right. It was the man-made part that would’ve caused the chaos. It would be knowing that people were out to get us, that there was danger in the air we breathed.’

Erskine paused for a moment. Donald’s mind was racing.

‘You know, Vic once said that if these terrorists had an ounce of sense, they would’ve simply announced what they were working on and then sat back to watch things burn on their own. He said that’s all it would take, us knowing that it was happening, that the end of any of us could come silent, invisible, and at any time.’

‘And so the solution was to burn it all to the ground
ourselves
?’ Donald ran his hands through his hair, trying to make sense of it all. He thought of a firefighting technique that always seemed just as confusing to him, the burning of wide swathes of forest to prevent a fire from spreading. And he knew in Iran, when oil wells were set ablaze during the first war, that sometimes the only cure was to set off a bomb, to fight the inferno with something greater.

‘Believe me,’ Erskine said, ‘I came up with my own complaints. Endless complaints. But I knew the truth from the beginning, it just took me a while to accept it. Thurman was won over more easily. He saw at once that we needed to get off this ball of rock, to start over. But the cost of travel was too great—’

‘Why travel through space,’ Donald interrupted, ‘when you can travel through time?’ He remembered a conversation in Thurman’s office. The old man had told him what he was planning that very first day, but Donald hadn’t heard.

Erskine’s eyes widened. ‘Yes. That was his argument. He’d seen enough war, I suppose. Me, I didn’t have Thurman’s experiences or the professional …
distance
Vic enjoyed. It was the analogy of the computer virus that wore me down, seeing these nanos like a new cyber war. I knew what they could do, how fast they could restructure themselves, evolve, if you will. Once it started, it would only stop when we were no longer around. And maybe not even then. Every defense would become a blueprint for the next attack. The air would choke with our invisible armies. There would be great clouds of them, mutating and fighting without need of a host. And once the public saw this and
knew
…’ He left the sentence unfinished.

‘Hysteria,’ Donald muttered.

Erskine nodded.

‘You said it might not ever end, even if we were gone. Does that mean they’re still out there? The nanos?’

Erskine glanced up at the ceiling. ‘The world outside isn’t just being scrubbed of humans right now, if that’s what you’re asking. It’s being reset. All of our experiments are being removed. By the grace of God, it’ll be a very long time indeed before we think to perform them again.’

Donald remembered from orientation that the combined shifts would last five hundred years. Half a millennium of living underground. How much scrubbing was necessary? And what was to keep them from heading down that same path a second time? How would any of them unlearn the potential dangers? You don’t get the fire back in the box once you’ve unleashed it.

‘You asked me if Victor had regrets—’ Erskine coughed into his fist and nodded. ‘I do think he felt something close to that once. It was something he said to me as he was coming off his eighth or ninth shift, I don’t remember which. I think I was heading into my sixth. This was just after the two of you worked together, after that nasty business with Silo Twelve—’

‘My first shift,’ Donald said, since Erskine seemed to be counting. He wanted to add that it was his only shift.

‘Yes, of course.’ Erskine adjusted his glasses. ‘I’m sure you knew him well enough to know that he didn’t show his emotions often.’

‘He was difficult to read,’ Donald agreed. He knew almost nothing of the man he had just helped to bury.

‘So you’ll appreciate this, I think. We were riding the lift together, and Vic turns to me and says how hard it is to sit there at that desk of his and see what we’re doing to the men across the hall. He meant you, of course. People in your position.’

Donald tried to imagine the man he knew saying such a thing. He wanted to believe it.

‘But that’s not what really struck me. I’ve never seen him sadder than when he said the following. He said …’ Erskine rested a hand on the pod. ‘He said that sitting there, watching you people work at your desks, getting to know you – he often thought that the world would be a better place with people like you in charge.’

‘People like me?’ Donald shook his head. ‘What does that even mean?’

Erskine smiled. ‘I asked him precisely that. His response was that it was a burden doing what he knew to be correct, to be sound and logical.’ Erskine ran one hand across the pod as if he could touch his daughter within. ‘And how much simpler things would be, how much better for us all, if we had people brave enough to do what was
right
, instead.’

39

That night, Anna came to him. After a day of numbness and dwelling on death, of eating meals brought down by Thurman and not tasting a bite, of watching her set up a computer for him and spread out folders of notes, she came to him in the darkness.

Donald complained. He tried to push her away. She sat on the edge of the cot and held his wrists while he sobbed and grew feeble. He thought of Erskine’s story, on what it meant to do the right thing rather than the correct thing, what the difference was. He thought this as an old lover draped herself across him, her hand on the back of his neck, her cheek on his shoulder, lying there against him while he wept.

A century of sleep had weakened him, he thought. A century of sleep and the knowledge that Mick and Helen had lived a life together. He felt suddenly angry at Helen for not holding out, for not living alone, for not getting his messages and meeting him over the hill.

Anna kissed his cheek and whispered that everything would be okay. Fresh tears flowed down Donald’s face as he realized that he was everything Victor had assumed he wasn’t. He was a miserable human being for wishing his wife to be lonely so that he could sleep at night a hundred years later. He was a miserable human being for denying her that solace when Anna’s touch made him feel so much better.

‘I can’t,’ he whispered for the dozenth time.

‘Shhh,’ Anna said. She brushed his hair back in the darkness. And the two of them were alone in that room where wars were waged. They were trapped together with those crates of arms, with guns and ammo, and far more dangerous things.

Silo 18

40

Mission wound his way toward Central Dispatch and agonized over what to do for Rodny. He felt afraid for his friend but powerless to help. The door they had him behind was unlike any he’d ever seen: thick and solid, gleaming and daunting. If the trouble his friend had caused could be measured by where they were keeping him—

He shuddered to continue that line of thought. It’d only been a few months since the last cleaning. Mission had been there, had carried up part of the suit from IT, a more haunting experience than porting a body for burial. Dead bodies at least were placed in the black bags the coroners used. The cleaning suit was a different sort of bag, tailored to a living soul that would crawl inside and be forced to die within.

Mission remembered where they had picked up the gear. It’d been a room right down the hall from where Rodny was being kept. Weren’t cleanings run by the same department? He shivered. One slip of a tongue could land a body out there, rotting on the hills, and his friend Rodny was known to wag his dangerously.

First his mother, and now his best friend. Mission wondered what the Pact said about volunteering to clean in one’s stead, if it said anything at all. Amazing that he could live under the rules of a document he’d never read. He just assumed others had, all the people in charge, and that they were operating by its codes in good faith.

On fifty-eight, a porter’s ’chief tied to the downbound railing caught his attention. It was the same blue pattern as the ’chief worn around his neck, but with a bright red merchant’s hem. Duty beckoned, dispelling thoughts that were spiraling nowhere. Mission unknotted the ’chief and searched the fabric for the merchant’s stamp. It was Drexel’s, the apothecarist down the hall. Light loads and lighter pay, normally. But at least it was downbound, unless Drexel had been careless again with which rail he tied it to.

Mission was dying to get to Central where a shower and a change of clothes awaited, but if anyone spotted him with a flat pack marching past a signal ’chief, he’d hear it from Roker and the others. He hurried inside to Drexel’s, praying it wasn’t a round of meds going to several dozen individual apartments. His legs ached just at the thought of it.

Drexel was at the counter as Mission pushed open the apothecarist’s squeaky door. A large man with a full beard and a balding head, Drexel was something of a fixture in the mids. Many came to him rather than to the doctors, though Mission wasn’t sure how sound a choice that was. Often, it was the man with the most promises who got the chits, not the one who made people better.

A handful of the seemingly sick sat on Drexel’s waiting room bench, sniffling and coughing. Mission felt the urge to cover his mouth with his ’chief. Instead, he innocuously held his breath and waited while Drexel filled a small square of paper with ground powder, folding it neatly before handing it to the woman waiting. The woman slid a few chits across the counter. When she walked away, Mission tossed the signal ’chief on top of the money.

‘Ah, Mish. Good to see you, boy. Looking fit as a fiddle.’ Drexel smoothed his beard and smiled, yellow teeth peering out from cornrows of drooping whiskers.

‘Same,’ Mission said politely, braving a breath. ‘Got something for me?’

‘I do. One sec.’

Drexel disappeared behind a wall of shelves crammed full of tiny vials and jars. The apothecarist reappeared with a small sack. ‘Meds for down below,’ he said.

‘I can take them as far as Central and have Dispatch send them from there,’ Mission told him. ‘I’m just finishing up a shift.’

Drexel frowned and rubbed his beard. ‘I suppose that’ll do. And Dispatch’ll bill me?’

Mission held out a palm. ‘If you tip,’ he said.

‘Aye, a tip. But only if you solve a riddle.’ Drexel leaned on the counter, which seemed to sag beneath his bulk. The last thing Mission wanted to hear was another of the old man’s riddles and then not get paid. Always an excuse with Drexel to keep a chit on his side of the counter.

‘Okay,’ the apothecarist began, tugging on his whiskers. ‘Which one weighs more, a bag full of seventy-eight pounds of feathers, or a bag full of seventy-eight pounds of rocks?’

Mission didn’t hesitate with his answer. ‘The bag of feathers,’ he declared. He’d heard this one before. It was a riddle made for a porter, and he had thought on it long enough between the levels to come up with his own answer, one different from the obvious.

‘Incorrect!’ Drexel roared, waving a finger. ‘It isn’t the rocks—’ His face dimmed. ‘Wait. Did you say the feathers?’ He shook his head. ‘No, boy, they weigh the
same
.’

‘The contents weigh the same,’ Mission told him. ‘The bag of feathers would have to be bigger. You said they were both full, which means a bigger bag with more material, and so it weighs more.’ He held out his palm. Drexel stood there, chewing his beard for a moment, thrown off his game.

Begrudgingly, he took two coins from the lady’s pay and placed them in Mission’s hand. Mission accepted them and stuffed the sack of meds into his pack before cinching it up tight.

‘The bigger bag—’ Drexel muttered, as Mission hurried off, past the benches, holding his breath again as he went, the pills rattling in his sack.

The apothecarist’s annoyance was worth far more than the tip, but Mission appreciated both. The enjoyment faded, however, as he spiraled down through a tense silo. He saw deputies on one landing, hands on their guns, trying to calm down fighting neighbors. The glass on the windows peeking into a shop on forty-two were broken and covered with a sheet of plastic. Mission was pretty sure that was recent. A woman on forty-four sat by the rails and sobbed into her palms, and Mission watched as people passed her by without stopping. On down he went as well, the stairway trembling, the graffiti on the walls warning him of what was yet to come.

He arrived at Central Dispatch to find it eerily quiet, made his way past the sorting rooms with their tall shelves of items needing delivery and went straight to the main counter. He would drop off his current package and pick out his next job before changing and showering. Katelyn was working the counter. There were no other porters queued up. Off licking their wounds, perhaps. Or maybe seeing to their families during this recent spate of violence.

‘Hey, Katelyn.’

‘Mish.’ She smiled. ‘You look intact.’

He laughed and touched his nose, which was still sore. ‘Thanks.’

‘Cam just passed through asking where you were.’

‘Yeah?’ Mission was surprised. He figured his friend would be taking a day off with the bonus from the coroner. ‘Did he pick something up?’

‘Yup. He requested anything heading toward Supply. Was in a better mood than usual, though he seemed miffed to have been left out of last night’s adventures.’

‘He heard about that, huh?’ Mission sorted through the delivery list. He was looking for something upbound. Mrs. Crowe would know what to do about Rodny. Maybe she could find out from the mayor what he was being punished for, perhaps put in a good word for him.