Shift - Omnibus Edition (8 page)

‘
Little bunker?
’ Donald held his blazer up over his mouth as a cloud of dust blew across them. ‘Do you know how many floors
deep
this thing is gonna be? If you set it on the ground, it’d be the tallest building in the world.’

Mick laughed. ‘Not for long it wouldn’t. Not if you designed it.’

The man in the cowboy hat drew closer. He smiled widely as he kicked through the packed dirt to meet them, and Donald finally recognized him from TV: Charles Rhodes, the governor of Oklahoma.

‘You Senator Thawman’s boys?’

Governor Rhodes smiled. He had the authentic drawl to go with the authentic hat, the authentic boots and the authentic buckle. He rested his hands on his wide hips, a clipboard in one of them.

Mick nodded. ‘Yessir. I’m Congressman Webb. This is Congressman Keene.’

The two men shook hands. Donald was next. ‘Governor,’ he said.

‘Got your delivery.’ He pointed the clipboard at the staging area. ‘Just shy of a hundred containers. Should have somethin’ rollin’ in about every week. Need one of you to sign right here.’

Mick reached out and took the clipboard. Donald saw an opportunity to ask something about Senator Thurman, something he figured an old war buddy would know.

‘Why do some people call him Thawman?’ he asked.

Mick flipped through the delivery report, a breeze pinning back the pages for him.

‘I’ve heard others call him that when he wasn’t around,’ Donald explained, ‘but I’ve been too scared to ask.’

Mick looked up from the report with a grin. ‘It’s because he was an ice-cold killer in the war, right?’

Donald cringed. Governor Rhodes laughed.

‘Unrelated,’ he said. ‘True, but unrelated.’

The governor glanced back and forth between them. Mick passed the clipboard to Donald, tapped a page that dealt with the emergency housing facility. Donald looked over the materials list.

‘You boys familiar with his anti-cryo bill?’ Governor Rhodes asked. He handed Donald a pen, seemed to expect him to just sign the thing and not look over it too closely.

Mick shook his head and shielded his eyes against the Georgia sun. ‘Anti-cryo?’ he asked.

‘Yeah. Aw, hell, this probably dates back before you squirts were even born. Senator Thawman penned the bill that put down that cryo fad. Made it illegal to take advantage of rich folk and turn them into ice cubes. It went to the big court, where they voted five–four, and suddenly tens of thousands of popsicles with more money than sense were thawed out and buried proper. These were people who’d frozen themselves in the hopes that doctors from the future would discover some medical procedure for extracting their rich heads from their own rich asses!’

The governor laughed at his own joke and Mick joined him. A line on the delivery report caught Donald’s eye. He turned the clipboard around and showed the governor. ‘Uh, this shows two thousand spools of fiber optic. I’m pretty sure my plans call for forty spools.’

‘Lemme see.’ Governor Rhodes took the clipboard and procured another pen from his pocket. He clicked the top of it three times, then scratched out the quantity. He wrote in a new number to the side.

‘Wait, will the price reflect that?’

‘Price is the same,’ he said. ‘Just sign the bottom.’

‘But—’

‘Son, this is why hammers cost the Pentagon their weight in gold. It’s government accounting. Just a signature, please.’

‘But that’s
fifty times
more fiber than we’ll need,’ Donald complained, even as he found himself scribbling his name. He passed the clipboard to Mick, who signed for the rest of the goods.

‘Oh, that’s all right.’ Rhodes took the clipboard and pinched the brim of his hat. ‘I’m sure they’ll find a use for it somewhere.’

‘Hey, you know,’ Mick said, ‘I remember that cryo bill. From law school. There were lawsuits, weren’t there? Didn’t a group of families bring murder charges against the Feds?’

The Governor smiled. ‘Yeah, but it didn’t get far. Hard to prove you killed people who’d already been pronounced dead. And then there were Thawman’s bad business investments. Those turned out to be a lifesaver.’

Rhodes tucked his thumb in his belt and stuck out his chest.

‘Turned out he’d sunk a fortune into one of these cryo companies before digging deeper and reconsidering the …
ethical
considerations. Old Thawman may have lost most of his money, but it ended up savin’ his ass in Washington. Made him look like some kinda saint, suffering a loss like that. Only defense better woulda been if he’d unplugged his dear momma with all them others.’

Mick and the governor laughed. Donald didn’t see what was so funny.

‘All right, now, you boys take care. The good state of Oklahoma’ll have another load for ya in a few weeks.’

‘Sounds good,’ Mick said, grasping and pumping that huge Midwestern paw.

Donald shook the governor’s hand as well, and he and Mick trudged off toward their rental. Overhead, against the bright blue Southern sky, vapor trails like stretched ropes of white yarn revealed the flight lines of the numerous jets departing the busy hub of Atlanta International. And as the throaty noise of the construction site faded, the chants from the anti-nuke protestors could be heard outside the tall mesh of security fences beyond. They passed through the security gate and into the parking lot, the guard waving them along.

‘Hey, you mind if I drop you off at the airport a little early?’ Donald asked. ‘It’d be nice to get a jump on traffic and get down to Savannah with some daylight.’

‘That’s right,’ Mick said with a grin. ‘You’ve got a hot date tonight.’

Donald laughed.

‘Sure, man. Abandon me and go have a good time with your wife.’

‘Thanks.’

Mick fished out the keys to the rental. ‘But you know, I was really hoping you’d invite me to come along. I could join you two for dinner, crash at your place, hit some bars like old times.’

‘Not a chance,’ Donald said.

Mick slapped the back of Donald’s neck and squeezed. ‘Yeah, well, happy anniversary anyway.’

Donald winced as his friend pinched his neck. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I’ll be sure to give Helen your regards.’

10

2110

Silo 1

Troy played a hand of solitaire while Silo Twelve collapsed. There was something about the game that he found blissfully numbing. The repetition held off the waves of depression even better than the pills. The lack of skill required moved beyond distraction and into the realm of complete mindlessness. The truth was, the player won or lost the very moment the computer shuffled the deck. The rest was simply a process of finding out.

For a computer game, it was absurdly low-tech. Instead of cards, there was just a grid of letters and numbers with an asterisk, ampersand, percent, or plus sign to designate the suit. It bothered Troy not to know which symbol stood for hearts or clubs or diamonds. Even though it was arbitrary, even though it didn’t really matter, it frustrated him not to know.

He had stumbled upon the game by accident while digging through some folders. It took a bit of experimenting to learn how to flip the draw deck with the space bar and place the cards with the arrow keys, but he had plenty of time to work things like this out. Besides meeting with department heads, going over Merriman’s notes, and refreshing himself on the Order, all he had was time. Time to collapse in his office bathroom and cry until snot ran down his chin, time to sit under a scalding shower and shiver, time to hide pills in his cheek and squirrel them away for when the hurt was the worst, time to wonder why the drugs weren’t working like they used to, even when he doubled the dosage on his own.

Perhaps the game’s numbing powers were the reason it existed at all, why someone had spent the effort to create it, and why subsequent heads had kept it secreted away. He had seen it on Merriman’s face during that lift ride at the end of his shift. The chemicals only cut through the worst of the pain, that indefinable ache. But lesser wounds resurfaced. The bouts of sudden sadness had to be coming from somewhere.

The last few cards fell into place while his mind wandered. The computer had shuffled for a win, and Troy got all the credit for verifying it. The screen flashed
good job!
in large block letters. It was strangely satisfying to be told this by a home-made game – told that he had done a good job. There was a sense of completion, of having
done
something with his day.

He left the message flashing and glanced around his office for something else to do. There were amendments to be made in the Order, announcements to write up for the heads of the other silos, and he needed to make sure the vocabulary in these memos adhered to the ever-changing standards.

He got it wrong himself, often calling them bunkers instead of silos. It was difficult for those who had lived in the time of the Legacy. An old vocabulary, a way of seeing the world, persisted despite the medication. He felt envious of the men and women in the other silos, those who were born and who would die in their own little worlds, who would fall in and out of love, who would keep their hurts in memory, feel them, learn from them, be changed by them. He was jealous of these people even more than he envied the women of his own silo who remained in their long-sleep lifeboats—

There was a knock on his open door. Troy looked up and saw Randall, who worked across the hall in the psych office, standing in the doorway. Troy waved him inside with one hand and minimized the game with the other. He fidgeted with the copy of the Order on his desk, trying to look busy.

‘I’ve got that beliefs report you wanted.’ Randall waved a folder.

‘Oh, good. Good.’ Troy took the folder. Always with the folders. He was reminded of the two groups that had built that place: the politicians and the doctors. Both were stuck in a prior era, a time of paperwork. Or was it possible that neither group trusted any data they couldn’t shred or burn?

‘The head of Silo Six has a new replacement picked out and processed. He wants to schedule a talk with you, make the induction formal.’

‘Oh. Okay.’ Troy flipped through the folder and saw typed transcripts from the comm room about each of the silos. He looked forward to another induction ceremony. Any task he had already done once before filled him with less dread.

‘Also, the population report on Silo Thirty-Two is a little troubling.’ Randall came around Troy’s desk and licked his thumb before sorting through the reports. Troy glanced at his monitor to make sure he’d minimized the game. ‘They’re getting close to the maximum and fast. Doc Haines thinks it might be a bad batch of birth control implants. The head of Thirty-Two, a Biggers … Here we go.’ Randall pulled out the report. ‘He denies this, says no one with an active implant has gotten pregnant. He thinks the lottery is being gamed or that there’s something wrong with our computers.’

‘Hmm.’ Troy took the report and looked it over. Silo Thirty-Two had crept above nine thousand inhabitants, and the median age had fallen into the low twenties. ‘Let’s set up a call for first thing in the morning. I don’t buy the lottery being gamed. They shouldn’t even be running the lottery, right? Until they have more space?’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘And all the population accounts for every silo are run from the same computer.’ Troy tried not to make this sound like a question, but it was. He couldn’t remember.

‘Yup,’ Randall confirmed.

‘Which means we’re being lied to. I mean, this doesn’t happen overnight, right? Biggers had to see this coming, which means he knew about it earlier, so either he’s complicit, or he’s lost control over there.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Okay. What do we know about Biggers’s second?’

‘His shadow?’ Randall hesitated. ‘I’d have to pull that file, but I know he’s been in place for a while. He was there before we started our shifts.’

‘Good. I’ll speak with him tomorrow. Alone.’

‘You think we should replace Biggers?’

Troy nodded grimly. The Order was clear on problems that defied explanation:
Start at the top. Assume the explanation is a lie
. Because of the rules, he and Randall were talking about a man being put out of commission as if he were broken machinery.

‘Okay, one more thing—’

The thunder of boots down the hallway interrupted the thought. Randall and Troy looked up as Saul bolted into the room, his eyes wide with fear.

‘Sirs—’

‘Saul. What’s going on?’

The communications officer looked like he’d seen a thousand ghosts.

‘We need you in the comm room, sir. Right now.’

Troy pushed away from his desk. Randall was right behind him.

‘What is it?’ Troy asked.

Saul hurried down the hallway. ‘It’s Silo Twelve, sir.’

The three of them ran past a man on a ladder who was replacing a long light bulb that had gone dim, the large rectangular plastic cover above him hanging open like a doorway to the heavens. Troy found himself breathing hard as he struggled to keep up.

‘What
about
Silo Twelve?’ he huffed.

Saul flashed a look over his shoulder, his face screwed up with worry. ‘I think we’re losing it, sir.’

‘What, like contact? You can’t reach them?’

‘No. Losing
it
, sir. The
silo
. The whole damn thing.’

11

2049

Savannah, Georgia

Donald wasn’t one for napkins, but he obeyed decorum by shaking the folded cloth loose and draping it in his lap. Each of the napkins at the other settings around the table had been bent into a decorative pyramid that stood upright amid the silverware. He didn’t remember the Corner Diner having cloth napkins when he was in high school. Didn’t they used to have those paper napkin dispensers that were all dented up from years of abuse? And those little salt and pepper shakers with the silver caps, even those had gotten fancier. A dish of what he assumed was sea salt sat near the flower arrangement, and if you wanted pepper, you had to wait for someone to come around and crack it on your food for you.