Shift - Omnibus Edition (57 page)

The wheelchair rattled out the door and down the hall, and Donald’s palms felt sweaty against the handles. To keep the front wheels silent, he rocked the chair back on its large rubber tires. The small wheels spun lazily in the air as he hurried.

He entered his code into the keypad and waited for a red light, for some impediment, some blockade. The light winked green. Donald pulled the door open and swerved between the pods toward the one that held his sister.

There was a mix of anticipation and guilt. This was as bold a step as his run up that hill in a suit. The stakes were higher for involving family, for waking someone into this harsh world, for subjecting her to the same brutality Anna had foisted upon him, that Thurman had foisted upon her, on and on, a never-ending misery of shifts.

He left the wheelchair in place and knelt by the control pad. Hesitant, he lurched to his feet and peered through the glass porthole, just to be sure.

She looked so serene in there, probably wasn’t plagued by nightmares like he was. Donald’s doubts grew. And then he imagined her waking up on her own; he imagined her conscious and beating on the glass, demanding to be let out. He saw her feisty spirit, heard her demand not to be lied to, and he knew that if she were standing there with him, she would ask him to do it. She would rather know and suffer than be left asleep in ignorance.

He crouched by the keypad and entered his code. The keypad beeped cheerfully as he pressed the red button. There was a click from within the pod, like a valve opening. He turned the dial and watched the temperature gauge, waited for it to start climbing.

Donald rose and stood by the pod, and time slowed to a crawl. He expected someone to come find him before the process was complete. But there was another clack and a hiss from the lid. He laid out the gauze and the tape. He separated the two rubber gloves and began pulling them on, a cloud of chalk misting the air as he snapped the elastic.

He opened the lid the rest of the way.

His sister lay on her back, her arms by her sides. She had not yet moved. A panic seized him as he went over the procedure again. Had he forgotten something? Dear God, had he killed her?

Charlotte coughed. Water trailed down her cheeks as the frost on her eyelids melted. And then her eyes fluttered open weakly before returning to thin slits against the light.

‘Hold still,’ Donald told her. He pressed a square of gauze to her arm and removed the needle. He could feel the steel slide beneath the pad and his fingers as he extracted it from her arm. Holding the gauze in place, he took a length of tape hanging from the wheelchair and applied it across. The last was the catheter. He covered her with the towel, applied pressure and slowly removed the tube. And then she was free of the machine, crossing her arms and shivering. He helped her into the paper gown, left the back open.

‘I’m lifting you out,’ he said.

Her teeth clattered in response.

Donald shifted her feet toward her butt to tent her knees. Reaching down beneath her armpits – her flesh cool to the touch – and another arm under her legs, he lifted her easily. It felt like she weighed so little. He could smell the cast-stink on her flesh.

Charlotte mumbled something as he placed her in the wheelchair. The blanket was draped across so that she sat on the fabric rather than the cold seat. As soon as she was settled, he wrapped the blanket around her. She chose to remain in a ball with her arms wrapped around her shins rather than place her feet on the stirrups.

‘Where am I?’ she asked, her voice a sheet of crackling ice.

‘Take it easy,’ Donald told her. He closed the lid on the pod, tried to remember if there was anything else, looked for anything he’d left behind. ‘You’re with me,’ he said as he pushed her toward the exit. That was where both of them were: with each other. There was no home, no place on the earth to welcome one to any more, just a hellish nightmare in which to drag another soul for sad company.

96

The hardest part was making her wait to eat. Donald knew what it felt like to be that hungry. He put her through the same routine he’d endured a number of times: made her drink the bitter concoction, made her use the bathroom to flush her system, had her sit on the edge of the tub and take a warm shower, then put her in a fresh set of clothes and a new blanket.

He watched as she finished the last of the drink. Her lips gradually faded to pink from pale blue. Her skin was so white. Donald couldn’t remember if she’d been so pale before orientation. Maybe it had happened overseas, sitting in those dark trailers with only the light of a monitor to bathe in.

‘I need to go make an appearance,’ he told her. ‘Everyone else will be getting up. I’ll bring you breakfast on my way back down.’

Charlotte sat quietly in one of the leather chairs around the old war planning table, her feet tucked up under her. She tugged at the collar of the overalls as if they itched her skin. ‘Mom and Dad are gone,’ she said, repeating what he’d told her earlier. Donald wasn’t sure what she would and wouldn’t remember. She hadn’t been on her stress medications as long or as recently as him. But it didn’t matter. He could tell her the truth. Tell her and hate himself for doing it.

‘I’ll be back in a little bit. Just stay here and try to get some rest. Don’t leave this room, okay?’

The words echoed hollow as he hurried through the warehouse and toward the lift. He remembered hearing from others as soon as they woke him that he should get some rest. Charlotte had been asleep for three centuries. As he scanned his badge and waited for the lift, Donald thought on how much time had passed and how little had changed. The world was still the ruin they’d left it. Or if it wasn’t, they were about to find out.

He rode up to the operations level and checked in with Eren. The Ops head was already at his desk, surrounded by files, one hand tangled in his hair, his elbow on piles of paperwork. There was no steam from his mug of coffee. He’d been at his desk for a while.

‘Thurman,’ he said, glancing up.

Donald startled and glanced down the hall, looking for someone else.

‘Any progress with eighteen?’

‘I, uh …’ Donald tried to remember. ‘Last I heard, they’d breached the barrier in the lowest levels. The head over there thinks the fighting will be over in a day or two.’

‘Good. Glad the shadow is working out. Scary time not to have one. There was this one time on my third shift I think it was when we lost a head while he was between shadows. Helluva time finding a recruit.’ Eren leaned back in his chair. ‘The mayor wasn’t an option; the head of Security was as bright as a lump of coal; so we had to—’

‘I’m sorry to interrupt,’ Donald said, pointing down the hall. ‘I need to get back to—’

‘Oh, of course.’ Eren waved his hand, seemed embarrassed. ‘Right. Me too.’

‘—just a lot to do this morning. Grabbing breakfast and then I’ll be in my room.’ He jerked his head toward the empty office across the hall. ‘Tell Gable I took care of myself, okay? I don’t want to be disturbed.’

‘Sure, sure.’ Eren shooed him with his hand.

Donald spun back to the lift. Up to the cafeteria. His stomach rumbled its agreement. He’d been up all night without eating. He’d been up and empty for far too long.

97

He was pushing the time limit by letting her eat an hour early, but it was difficult to say no. Donald encouraged her to take small bites, to slow down. And while Charlotte chewed, he brought her up to date. She knew about the silos from orientation. He told her about the wallscreens, about the cleaners, that he had been woken because someone had disappeared. Charlotte had a hard time grasping these things. It took saying them several times until they became strange even to his ears.

‘They let them see outside, these people in the other silos?’ she asked, chewing on a small bite of biscuit.

‘Yeah. I asked Thurman once why we put them there. You know what he told me?’

Charlotte shrugged and took a sip of water.

‘They’re there to keep them from wanting to leave. We have to show them death to keep them in. Otherwise, they’ll always want to see what’s over the rise. Thurman said it’s human nature.’

‘But some of them go anyway.’ She wiped her mouth with her napkin, picked up her fork, her hand trembling, and pulled Donald’s half-eaten breakfast toward her.

‘Yeah, some of them go anyway,’ Donald said. ‘And you need to take it easy.’ He watched her dig into his eggs and thought about his own trip up the drone lift. He was one of those people who had gone anyway. It wasn’t something she needed to know.

‘We have one of those screens,’ Charlotte said. ‘I remember watching the clouds boil.’ She looked up at Donald. ‘Why do we have one?’

Donald reached quickly for his handkerchief and coughed into its folds. ‘Because we’re human,’ he answered, tucking the cloth away. ‘If we think there’s no point in going out there – that we’ll die if we go – we’ll stay here and do what we’re told. But I know of a way to see what’s out there.’

‘Yeah?’ Charlotte scraped the last of his eggs onto her fork and lifted them to her mouth. She waited.

‘And I’m going to need your help.’

••••

They pulled the tarp off one of the drones. Charlotte ran a trembling hand down its wing and walked unsteadily around the machine. Grabbing the flap on the back of a wing, she worked it up and down. She did the same for the tail. The drone had a black dome and nose that gave it something like a face. It sat silently, unmoving, while Charlotte inspected it.

Donald noticed that three of the other drones were missing – the floor glossy where their tarps used to drape. And the neat pyramid of bombs in the munitions rack was missing a few from the top. Signs of the armory’s use these past weeks. Donald went to the hangar door and worked it open.

‘No hardware?’ Charlotte asked. She peered under one of the wings where bad things could be attached.

‘No,’ Donald said. ‘Not for this.’ He ran back and helped her push. They steered the drone toward the open maw of the lift. The wings just barely fitted.

‘There should be a strap or a linkage,’ she said. She lowered herself gingerly and crawled behind the drone, worked her way beneath the wing.

‘There’s something in the floor,’ Donald said, remembering the nub that moved along the track. ‘I’ll get a light.’

He retrieved a flashlight from one of the bins, made sure it had a charge and brought it back to her. Charlotte hooked the drone into the launch mechanism and squirmed her way out. She seemed slow to stand and he lent her his hand.

‘And you’re sure this lift’ll work?’ She brushed hair, still wet from the shower, off her face.

‘Very sure,’ Donald said. He led her down the hall, past the barracks and bathrooms. Charlotte stiffened when he led her into the piloting room and pulled back the plastic sheets. He flipped the switch on the lift controls. She stared blankly at one of the stations with its joysticks, readouts and screens.

‘You can operate this, right?’ he asked.

She broke from her trance and stared at him a moment, then nodded her head. ‘If they’ll power up.’

‘They will.’ He watched the light above the lift controls flash while Charlotte settled behind one of the stations. The room felt overly quiet and empty with all those other stations sitting under sheets of plastic. The dust was gone from them, Donald saw. The place was recently lived in. He thought of the requisitions he’d signed for flights, each one at considerable cost. He thought of the risk of them being spotted in the wallscreens, the need to fly deep in the swirling clouds. Eren had stressed the one-use nature of the drones. The air outside was bad for them, he’d said. Their range was limited. Donald had thought about why this might be as he’d dug through Thurman’s files.

Charlotte flicked several switches, the neat clicks breaking the silence, and the control station whirred to life.

‘The lift takes a while,’ he told her. He didn’t say how he knew, but he thought back to that ride up all those years ago. He remembered his breath fogging the dome of his helmet as he rose to what he had hoped might be his death. Now he had a different hope. He thought of what Erskine had told him about wiping the earth clean. He thought about Victor’s suicide note to Thurman. This project of theirs was about resetting life. And Donald, whether by madness or reason, had grown convinced that the effort was more precise than anyone had rights to imagine.

Charlotte adjusted her screen. She flicked a switch, and a light bloomed on the monitor. It was the glare of the steel door of the lift, lit up by the drone’s headlamp and viewed by its cameras.

‘It’s been so long,’ she said. Donald looked down and saw that her hands were trembling. She rubbed them together before returning them to the controls. Wiggling in her seat, she located the pedals with her feet, and then adjusted the brightness of the monitor so it wasn’t so blinding.

‘Is there anything I can do?’ Donald asked.

Charlotte laughed and shook her head. ‘No. Feels strange not to be filing a flight plan or anything. I usually have a target, you know?’ She looked back at Donald and flashed a smile.

He squeezed her shoulder. It felt good to have her around. She was all he had left. ‘Your flight plan is to fly as far and as fast as you can,’ he told her. His hope was that without a bomb, the drone would go further. His hope was that the limited range wasn’t preprogrammed somehow. There was a flashing light from the lift controls. Donald hurried over to check them.

‘The door’s coming up,’ Charlotte said. ‘I think we’ve got daylight.’

Donald hurried back over. He glanced out the door and down the hall, thinking he’d heard something.

‘Engine check,’ Charlotte said. ‘We’ve got ignition.’

She wiggled in her seat. The overalls he’d stolen for her were too big, were bunched around her arms. Donald stood behind her and watched the monitor, which showed a view of swirling skies up a sloped ramp. He remembered that view. It became difficult to breathe, seeing that. The drone was pulled from the lift and arranged on the ramp. Charlotte hit another switch.