Second Shift - Order

•6•

The wheelchair squeaked as its wheels went ‘round and ‘round. With each revolution there was a sharp peal of complaint followed by a circuit of deathly silence. Donald lost himself in this rhythmic sound. He began to anticipate each chirp, like a lonely bird crying for its mate. Chirp and silence. Chirp and silence. As he was pushed along, his breath puffed out into the air, the room harboring the same deep chill as his bones.

There were rows and rows of pods stretched out to either side. Names glowed orange on tiny screens. Made-up names. Phony names designed to sever the past from the now. Donald watched them slide by as they pushed him toward the exit. His head felt heavy, his neck inadequate for propping up his skull, the weight of remembrance replacing the wisps of dreams that coiled away and vanished like vaporous smoke.

The men in the pale blue coveralls guided him through the door and into the hallway, and Donald seemed to float along like a ghost, like a man disturbed from his grave. He was steered into a familiar room with a familiar table. Boots kicked here—he remembered from a dream. In one dream, he was the one holding the boots still, bones like a bird’s struggling beneath his grip, and he was the enemy. In another dream it was his boots doing the kicking. He could see them at the ends of his own legs while ice burned in his veins.

The wheelchair shimmied as they removed his bare feet from the footrests. He asked how long it’d been, how long he’d been asleep.

“Seventy years,” someone said. He did the math. A hundred and twenty since orientation. No wonder the wheelchair felt unsteady—it was older than he was. Its screws had worked loose over the long decades that Donald had been asleep.

They helped him stand. His feet were still numb from his hibernation, the cold fading to painful tingles. A noisy curtain was drawn. They asked him to urinate in a cup, which came as glorious relief. The sample was the color of charcoal, dead machines flushed from his system. The paper gown wasn’t enough to warm him, even though he knew the cold was in his flesh, not in the room. They gave him more of the bitter drink.

“How long before his head is clear?” someone asked.

“A day,” the doctor said. “Tomorrow at the earliest.”

They had him sit while they took his blood. A man in white coveralls with hair just as stark stood in the doorway, frowning. “Save your strength,” the man said. He nodded to the doctor to continue his work and disappeared before Donald could place him in his faltering memory. He felt dizzy and watched as his blood, blue from the cold, was taken from him.

They rode a familiar elevator. The men around him talked, but their voices were drones behind a slowly parting fog. Donald felt as though he had been drugged, but he remembered that he had stopped taking their pills. He reached for his bottom lip, finger and mouth both tingling, and felt for an ulcer, that little pocket where he kept his pills unswallowed.

But the ulcer wasn’t there. It would’ve healed in his sleep decades ago. The lift dinged, the doors parted, and Donald felt more of that dreamtime fade.

They pushed him down another hall, scuff marks on the walls the height of the wheels, black arcs where rubber had once met the paint. His eyes roamed the walls, the ceiling, the tiles, all bearing centuries of wear. Like the wheelchair, these halls never slept. Yesterday, they were almost new. Now they were heaped with abuse, a jarring eyeblink of decrepitude, a sudden crumbling into ruin. Donald remembered designing halls just like these. He remembered thinking they were making something to last for ages. The truth was there all along. The truth was in the design, staring back at him, too insane to be taken seriously.

The wheelchair slowed.

“The next one,” a voice behind him said, a gruff voice, an exhausted and familiar voice. Donald was pushed past one closed door to another. One of the orderlies bustled around the wheelchair, a ring of keys jangling from his hip. A key was selected and slotted into the knob with a series of neat clicks. Hinges cried out as the door was pushed inward. The lights inside were turned on.

It was a room like a cell, musky with the scent of disuse. There was a narrow double bunk in the corner, a side table, a dresser, a bathroom. The light overhead flickered before it came on, like a tingling hand that needed a moment before forming a fist.

“Why am I here?” Donald asked, his voice cracking.

“This will be your room,” the orderly said, putting away his keys. His young eyes darted up to the man steering the wheelchair as if unsure of the rightness of his answer. Another young man in pale blue hurried around and removed Donald’s feet from the stirrups and placed them on carpet worn flat by the years.

Donald’s last memory was of being chased by snarling dogs with leathery wings, chased up a mountain of bones. But that was a dream. What was his last real memory? It was the one of being put to sleep for good. He remembered a needle. He remembered dying. That felt real.

“I mean—” Donald swallowed painfully. “Why am I… awake?”

He almost said alive. The two orderlies exchanged glances as they helped him from the chair to the lower bunk. The wheelchair squeaked once as it was pushed back into the hallway. The man guiding it paused, his broad shoulders making the doorway appear small.

One of the orderlies held Donald’s wrist—two fingers pressing lightly on ice-blue veins, lips silently counting. The other orderly dropped two pills into a plastic cup and fumbled with the cap on a bottle of water.

“That won’t be necessary,” the silhouette in the doorway said.

The orderly with the pills glanced over his shoulder, and Donald remembered that these weren’t orderlies at all. They were the other kind of doctors. Doctors of the body, not of the mind.

“I remember,” Donald muttered. He pictured himself inside a straw plunged deep into the dirt. There were other straws around him, concrete tombs lined with pipe and wire, things that he could draw, that he had designed.

The man in the doorway stepped inside the small room, and some of the air was displaced. “Good,” he said, in that familiar voice, that old voice. The room shrank further. It became more difficult to breathe.

“You’re the Thaw—” Donald whispered.

The old man with the white hair waved a hand at the two doctors. “Give us a moment,” he said. The one with a grip on Donald’s wrist finished his counting and nodded to the other. Unswallowed pills rattled in a paper cup as they were put away.

“I remember everything,” Donald said, though he suspected this wasn’t quite true. “You’re the Thaw Man.”

A smile was flashed, as white as his hair, wrinkles forming around his lips and eyes. The chair in the hallway squeaked as it was pushed away, off to retrieve someone else, never sleeping. The door clicked shut. Donald thought he heard a lock engage, but his teeth still chattered occasionally, and his ears were full of lead.

“Thurman,” the man said, correcting him. “But I don’t go by that anymore. Just as you don’t go by Donald.”

“But I remember,” Donald said. More came back to him. He remembered his office, the one upstairs and some other office far away, some place where it still rained and the grass grew. This man had been a Senator. But of what? Donald remembered drawing this place.

“And that’s a mystery we need to solve.” The senator of nothing tilted his head. “For now, it’s good that you do. We need you to remember.”

Thurman leaned against the metal dresser. He looked as though he hadn’t slept in days. His hair was unkempt, not quite how Donald remembered it. There were dark circles beneath his sad eyes. He seemed much… older, somehow.

Donald peered down at his own palms, the springs in the bed making the room feel as though it were swaying. He flashed again to the horrible sight of a man remembering his own name and wanting to be free.

“Who am I?” he asked. He had felt so certain a moment before. Had he swallowed those pills? No, he remembered them rattling back into that orderly’s coat. That doctor’s coat. This was just the waking confusion. It would pass, he told himself. This was the groggy morning after a century of vivid dreams.

“Who do you think you are?” the Thaw Man asked. He produced a folded piece of paper and waited for an answer. Recollections came back and then receded like a sea swelling in and out against a pier.

“My name is Donald Keene.”

“So you do remember. And you know who I am.”

Donald nodded.

“Good.” The Thaw Man turned and placed the folded piece of paper on the dresser. He arranged it on its bent legs so it tented upward, toward the ceiling. “We need you to remember everything,” he said. “Study this report when the fog clears, see if it jars anything loose. Once your stomach is settled, I’ll have a proper meal brought down.”

Donald rubbed his temples. The sea drew away from the pier.

“You’ve been gone for some time,” the Thaw Man said. He rapped his knuckles on the door.

Donald wiggled his bare toes against the carpet. The sensation was returning to his feet. The door clicked before swinging open, and the Senator once again blocked the light spilling from the hallway. He became a shadow for a moment.

“Rest, and then we’ll get our answers together. There’s someone who wants to see you.”

The room was sealed tight before Donald could ask what that meant. And somehow, with the door shut and him gone, there was more air to breathe in that small space. Donald took a few deep breaths. He waited for the world to change, for the snarling dogs with the bat-like wings to return, for the mountain of skulls to reappear beneath his scrambling hands and knees, that interminable climb upward to a peak that would not come. But the room was too solid for that. After a long while, he grabbed the frame of the bed and struggled to his feet. He stood there a moment, swaying.

“Get our answers,” he repeated aloud. Someone wants to see him.

He shook his head, which made the world spin. As if he had any answers. All he had were questions. He remembered the orderlies who woke him saying something about a silo falling. He couldn’t remember which one. Why would they wake him for that?

He moved unsteadily to the door, tried the knob, confirmed what he already knew. He went to the dresser where the piece of paper stood on its remembered folds.

“Get some rest,” he said, laughing at the suggestion. As if he could sleep. He felt as though he’d been asleep forever. He picked up the piece of paper and unfolded it.

A report. Donald remembered this. It was a copy of a report. A report about a young man doing horrible things. The room twisted around him as if he stood on some great pivot, the memory of men and women trampled and dying, of giving some awful order, faces peering in at him from a hallway somewhere far in the past. Somewhere like yesterday.

Donald blinked away a curtain of tears and studied the trembling report. Hadn’t he written this? He had signed it, he remembered. But that wasn’t his name at the bottom. It was his handwriting, but it wasn’t his name.

Troy.

Donald’s legs went numb. He sought the bed—but collapsed to the floor instead. He kept saying he remembered even as more and more washed over him. Troy and Helen. Helen and Troy. He remembered his wife. He saw her disappearing over a hill, her arm raised to the sky where bombs were falling, his sister and some dark and nameless shadow pulling him back as people spilled like marbles down a slope, spilled and gathered, plunking through a funnel and into some deep hole filled with white mist.

Donald remembered. He remembered all that he had helped do to the world. There was a troubled boy in a silo full of the dead, a shadow among the servers. That boy had brought an end to silo number 12. But Donald— What had he done? There were no numbers to contain all the dead. Their skulls made a pile that reached to the heavens. And the tears that popped against the trembling report, they were tinged a pale blue.

•7•

A doctor brought soup and bread a few hours later, plus a tall glass of water. Donald ate hungrily while the man checked his arm. The warm soup felt good. It slid to his center and seemed to radiate its heat outward. He tore at the bread with his teeth and chased it with the water. Somehow these things were going to keep his flesh from collapsing inward. Donald ate with the desperation of so many years of fasting.

“Thank you,” he said between bites. “For the food.”

The doctor glanced up from checking his blood pressure. He was an older man, heavyset, with great bushy eyebrows and a fine wisp of hair clinging to his scalp like a cloud to a hilltop.

“I’m Donald,” he said, introducing himself.

There was a wrinkle of confusion on the old man’s brow. His gray eyes strayed toward his clipboard as if either it or his patient couldn’t be trusted. The needle on the gauge jumped with Donald’s pulse.

“Who’re you?” Donald asked.

“I’m Doctor Henson,” he finally said, though without confidence.

Donald took a long swig on his water, thankful they’d left it at room temperature. He didn’t want anything cold inside him ever again. “Where’re you from?”

The doctor removed the cuff from Donald’s arm with a loud rip. “Level ten. But I work out of the shift office on sixty-eight.” He put his tools back in his bag and made a note on the clipboard.

“No, I mean, where are you from. You know… before.”

Dr. Henson patted Donald’s knee and stood. The clipboard went on a hook on the outside of the door. “You might have some dizziness the next few days. Let us know if you experience any trembling, okay?”

Donald nodded. He remembered being given the same advice earlier. Or was that his last shift? Maybe the repetition was for those who had trouble remembering. He wasn’t going to be one of those people. Not this time.

A shadow fell into the room. Donald looked up to see the Thaw Man in the doorway. He gripped the meal tray to keep it from sliding off his knees.

The Thaw Man nodded to Dr. Henson, but this was not their names. Thurman, Donald told himself. Senator Thurman. He knew this.

“Do you have a moment?” Thurman asked the doctor.

“Of course.” Henson grabbed his bag and stepped outside. The door clicked shut, leaving Donald alone with his soup.

He took quiet spoonfuls, trying to make anything of the murmurs on the other side of the door. Thurman, he reminded himself again. And not a senator. Senator of what? Those days were gone. Donald had drawn the plans.

The report stood tented on the dresser, returned to its spot. Donald took a bite of bread and remembered the floors he’d laid out. Those floors were now real. They existed. People lived inside them, raising their children, laughing, having fights, singing in the shower. People lived in the things he’d made, in the holes he’d dug. Those people—and no more.

A few minutes passed before the knob tilted and the door swung inward. The Thaw Man entered the room alone. He pressed the door shut and frowned at Donald. “How’re you feeling?”

The spoon clacked against the rim of the bowl. Donald set the utensil down and gripped the tray with both hands to keep them from shaking, to keep them from forming fists.

“You know,” Donald hissed, teeth clenched together. “You know what we did.”

Thurman showed his palms. “We did what had to be done.”

“No. Don’t give me that.” Donald shook his head. The water in his glass trembled as if something dangerous approached. “The world…”

“We saved it.”

“That’s not true!” Donald’s voice cracked. He tried to remember. “There is no world.” He recalled the view from the top, from the cafeteria. He remembered the hills a dull brown, the sky full of menacing clouds. “We ended it. We killed everyone.”

“They were already dead,” Thurman said. “We all were. Everyone dies, son. The only thing that matters is—”

“No.” Donald waved the words away as if they were buzzing things that could bite him. “There’s no justifying this—” He felt spittle form on his lips, wiped it away with his sleeve. The tray on his lap slid dangerously, and Thurman moved swifter than his years to catch it. He placed what was left of the meal on the bedside table, and up close, Donald could see that he had gotten older. The wrinkles were deeper, the skin hanging from the bones. He wondered how much time Thurman had spent awake while Donald slept.

“I killed a lot of men in the war,” Thurman said, looking down at the tray of half-eaten food.

Donald found himself focused on the old man’s neck. He interlocked his hands to keep them still. This sudden admission about killing made it seem as if he could read Donald’s mind, like this was some kind of a warning for Donald to stay his murderous plans.

Thurman turned to the dresser and picked up the folded report. He opened it, and Donald caught sight of the pale blue dollops, his ice-tinged tears from earlier.

“Some say killing gets easier the longer you’re at it,” Thurman said. He sounded sad, not threatening. Donald looked down at his own knees and saw that they were bouncing. He forced his heels against the carpet and tried to pin them there.

“For me, it only got worse. There was a man in Iran—”

“The entire goddamn planet,” Donald whispered, stressing each word. This was what he said, but all he could think about was his wife. Bombs going off, the plans he’d drawn, Helen pulled down the wrong hill, marbles rolling apart, everything that had ever existed crumbling to ruin. “We killed everyone.”

The senator took in a deep breath and held it a moment. “I told you,” he said. “They were already dead.”

Donald’s knees began bouncing again. There was no controlling it. Thurman studied the report, seemed unsure of something. The paper faintly shook, but maybe it was the overhead vent blowing, which also stirred his hair.

“We were outside of Kashmar,” Thurman said. “This was toward the end of the war, when we were getting our butts kicked and telling the world we were winning. I had a corporal in my squad, our team medic, a James Hannigan. Young. Always cracking jokes but serious when he needed to be. The kind of guy everyone likes. The hardest kind to lose.”

Thurman shook his head. He stared off into the distance. The vent in the ceiling quieted, but the report continued to quiver.

“I killed a lot of men during the war, but only once to really save a life. The rest, you never knew what you were doing when you pulled the trigger. Maybe the guy you take out is never gonna find his own target, never hurt a soul. Maybe he’s gonna be one of the thousands who drop their rifles and blend in with the civvies, go back to their families, open a kasava stand near the embassy and talk basketball with the troops stationed outside. A good man. You never knew. You’re killing these men, and you never knew if you were doing it for a good reason or not.”

“How many billions—?” Donald swallowed. He slid to the edge of the bed and reached toward the tray. Thurman knew what he was after and passed the glass of water, half empty. He continued to ignore Donald’s complaints.

“Hannigan got hit with shrapnel outside of Kashmar. If we could get him to a medic, it was the kind of wound you survived, the kind you lift your shirt in a bar to show off the scars one day. But he couldn’t walk, and it was too hot to send in an airlift. Our squad was hemmed in and would need to fight our way out. I didn’t think we could get to a safe LZ in time to save him. But what I knew, because I’d seen it too many damn times before, is that two or three of my men would die trying to get him out. That’s what happens when you’re lugging a soldier instead of a rifle.” Thurman pressed his sleeve to his forehead. “I’d seen it before.”

“You left him behind,” Donald said, seeing where this was going. He took a sip of water. The surface was agitated.

“No. I killed him.” Thurman stared at the foot of the bed. He stared at nothing. “The enemy wouldn’t have let him die. Not there, not like that. They would’ve patched him up so they could catch it on film. They would’ve stitched up his belly so they could open his throat.” He turned to Donald. “I had to make a decision, and I had to make it fast. And the longer I’ve lived with it, the more I’ve come to agree with what I did. We lost one man that day. I saved two or three others.”

Donald shook his head. “That’s not the same as what we— what you—”

“It’s precisely the same. Do you remember Safed? What the media called the outbreak?”

Donald remembered Safed. An Israeli town near Nazareth. Near Syria. The deadliest WMD strike of the war. He nodded.

“The rest of the world would’ve looked just like that. Just like Safed.” Thurman snapped his fingers. “Ten billion lights go out all at once. We were already infected, son. It was just a matter of triggering it. Safed was… like a beta test.”

Donald shook his head. “I don’t believe you. Why would anyone do that?”

Thurman frowned. “Don’t be naive, son. This life means nothing to some. You put a switch in front of ten billion people, a switch that kills every one of us the moment you hit it, and you’d have thousands of hands racing to be the one. Tens of thousands. It would only be a matter of time. And that switch existed.”

“No.” Donald flashed back to the first conversation he’d ever had with the senator as a member of Congress, after winning office the first time. It had felt like this, the lies and the truth intermingling and shielding one another. “You’ll never convince me,” he said. “You’ll have to drug me or kill me. You’ll never convince me.”

Thurman nodded as if he agreed. “Drugging you doesn’t work. I’ve read up on your first shift. There’s a small percentage of people with some kind of resistance. I’d love to know why.”

Donald laughed. He settled against the wall behind the cot and nestled into the darkness the top bunk provided. “Maybe I’ve seen too much to forget,” he said.

“No, I don’t think so.” Thurman lowered his head so he could still make eye contact. Donald took a sip of water, both hands wrapped around the glass. “The more you see,” Thurman said, “the worse the trauma is, the better it works. Except for some people. Which is why we took a sample.”

Donald glanced down at his arm. A small square of gauze had been taped over the spot of blood left by the doctor’s needle. He felt a caustic mix of helplessness and fear well up, the mix that moves caged animals to bite at curious hands. “You woke me to take my blood?”

“Not exactly.” Thurman hesitated. “Your resistance is something I’m curious about. The reason you’re awake is because I was asked to wake you. We’re losing silos—”

“I thought that was the plan,” Donald spat. “Losing silos. I thought that was what you wanted.” He remembered crossing one out with red ink, all those many lives lost. They had accounted for this. Silos were expendable. That’s what he’d been told.

Thurman shook his head. “Whatever’s happening out there, we need to understand it. And there’s someone here who… who thinks you may have stumbled onto the answer. A few questions, and then we can put you back under.”

Back under. So he wasn’t going to be out for long. They woke him to take his blood and to drill into his mind, and then back to sleep. Donald rubbed his arms, which felt thin and atrophied. He was dying in that pod. Only, more slowly than he would like.

“We need to know what you remember about this report.” Thurman held it out. Donald waved the thing away.

“I already looked it over,” he said. He didn’t want to see it again. He could close his eyes and see people spilling out onto the dusty land, a cloud of killing mist, the people that he had ordered dead, more people being trampled inside.

“We have other medications that might ease the—”

“No. No more drugs.” Donald crossed his wrists and spread his arms out, slicing the air with both hands. “Look, I don’t have a resistance to your drugs.” The truth. He was sick of the lies. “There’s no mystery. I just stopped taking the pills.”

It felt good to admit it. What were they going to do, anyway? Put him back to sleep? That was the answer no matter what. He took another sip of water while he let the confession sink in. He swallowed.

“I kept them in my gums and spat them out later. It’s as simple as that. Probably the case with anyone else remembering. Like Hal, or Carlton, or whatever his name was.”

Thurman regarded him coolly. He tapped the report against his open palm, seeming to digest this. “We know you stopped taking the pills,” he finally said. “And when.”

Donald waved his hand. “Mystery solved, then.” He finished his water and put the empty glass back on his tray. It felt good to have that out in the open.

“The drugs you have a resistance to are not in the pills, Donny. The reason people stop taking the pills is because they begin to remember, not the other way around.”

Donald studied Thurman, disbelieving.

“Your urine changes color when you get off them. You develop sores on your gums. These are the signs we look for.”

“What?”

“There are no drugs in the pills, Donny.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“We medicate everyone. There are those of us who are immune. But you shouldn’t be.”

“Bullshit. I remember. The pills made me woozy. As soon as I stopped taking them, I got better.”

Thurman tilted his head to the side. “The reason you stopped taking them was because you were… I won’t say getting better. It was because the fear had begun leaking through. Donny, the medication is in the water.” He waved at the empty glass on the tray. Donald followed the gesture and immediately felt sick, even though he didn’t believe him. The suspicion was enough.

“Don’t worry,” Thurman said. “We’ll get to the bottom of it.”

“I don’t want to help you. I don’t want to talk about this report. I don’t want to see whoever it is you need me to see.”

He wanted Helen. All he wanted was his wife.

“There’s a chance that thousands will die if you don’t help us. There’s a chance that you stumbled onto something with this report of yours, even if I don’t believe it.”

Donald felt the weight of the soil piled on them both. He glanced at the door to the bathroom, thought about locking himself inside and forcing himself to throw up, to expunge the food and the water. But it was an insane thought. Maybe Thurman was lying to him. Maybe he was telling the truth. A lie would mean the water was just water. The truth would mean that he did have some sort of resistance. Either way, there was nothing—and everything—to fear.

“I barely remember writing the thing,” he admitted. And who would want to see him? He assumed it would be another doctor, maybe a silo head, maybe whoever was running this shift.

He rubbed his temples, could feel the pressure building between them. Maybe he should just do this thing and go back to sleep, back to his skull-filled dreams. Now and then, he had dreamed of Helen. It was the only place left to see her. With this thought, his resistance crumbled like thousand-year-old bones.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll go. But I still don’t understand what I could possibly know.” He rubbed his arm where they’d taken the blood. There was an itch there. An itch so deep it felt like a bruise.

Senator Thurman nodded. “I tend to agree with you. But that’s not what she thinks.”

Donald stiffened. “She?” He searched Thurman’s eyes, wondering if he’d heard correctly. “She who?”

The old man frowned. “The one who had me wake you.” He waved his hand at the bunk. “Get some rest. I’ll take you to her in the morning.”

•8•

He couldn’t rest. How could he rest? The hours were cruel, slow, and unknowable. There was no clock to mark their passing, no answer to his frustrated slaps on the door. Donald was left to lie in his bunk and stare at the diamond patterns of interlocking wires holding the mattress above him, to listen to the gurgle of water in hidden pipes as it rushed to another room. He couldn’t sleep. He had no idea if it was the middle of the night or the middle of the day. The weight of the silo pressed down. The world was his bunkmate. It lay still as death in the bed above him.

When the boredom grew intolerable, Donald eventually gave in and looked over the report a second time. He studied it more closely. It wasn’t the original; the signature was flat, and he remembered using a blue pen. A red marker for the big X on the map and a blue pen for the reports. He was pretty sure.

He skimmed the account of the silo’s collapse and his theory that IT heads shadowed too young. His recommendation was to raise the age. He wondered if they had. Maybe so, but the problems were persisting. There was also mention of a young man he had inducted, a young man with a question. His grandmother was one of those who remembered, much like Donald. Like Hal or Carter or whatever his name had been. Donald had suggested in the report that entertaining one question from inductees might be a good idea. They were given the Legacy, after all. Their cruel test was a severe application of the truth. Why not show them, in that final stage of indoctrination, that there were more truths to be had?

It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but Donald remembered being a mess when he wrote the report. Maybe it had been his own questions, his own need for answers, that had driven him to suggest this.

The tiny clicks of a key entering a lock. Thurman opened the door as Donald folded the report away.

“How’re you feeling?” Thurman asked.

Donald didn’t say.

“Can you walk?”

He nodded. A walk. When what he really wanted was to run screaming down the hallway, to kick things over and punch holes in walls. But a walk would do. A walk before his next long nap.

They rode the elevator in silence. Donald noticed Thurman had scanned his badge before pressing one of the shiny buttons, level fifty-four. Its number stood bright and new while so many others had been worn away. There was nothing but supplies on that level if Donald remembered correctly, supplies they weren’t supposed to ever need. The lift slowed as it approached a level it normally skipped. The doors opened on a cavernous expanse of shelves stocked with instruments of death.

Thurman led him down the middle of it all. There were wooden crates with “AMMO” stenciled on the side, longer crates beside them with military designations like “M22” and “M19” that Donald recognized as being guns. Not that he knew what those guns looked like or how to operate them, but he had been to movies, and like any other young boy he had known what to call his stick while he fired imaginary bullets at his friends.

More shelves with armor and helmets, with supplies, some boxes unlabeled. And beyond the shelves, tarps that covered bulbous and winged forms that he knew to be drones. UAVs. His sister had flown them in a war that now seemed pointless and distant, part of ancient history. But here these relics stood, oiled and covered, waiting, both proud and paranoid, confident and reeking of grease and fear.

Beyond the drones, Thurman led the way through a murky dimness that made the wide storehouse seem to go on forever. Donald padded quietly behind, fearful of waking these demon sentinels, this aviary that promised hell-rain from the skies.

At the far end of the wide room, a hallway leaked a glow of light. An arrangement of offices, a wall lined with filing cabinets spotted with dots of rust, not greased like the other things. And in one wide room, the sounds of paper stirring, a chair squeaking as someone turned. Thurman rapped his knuckles on the doorframe. Donald rounded the corner and saw, inexplicably, her sitting there.

“Anna?”

He remained frozen in the doorway. Anna sat behind a huge conference table ringed with identical chairs. She looked up from a wide spread of paperwork and a computer monitor. There was no shock on her part, just a smile of acknowledgment and a weariness that the smile could not conceal.

Her father crossed the room while Donald gaped. Thurman squeezed her arm and kissed her on the cheek, but Anna’s eyes did not leave Donald’s. The old man whispered something to his daughter, then announced that he had work of his own to see to. Donald did not budge until the Senator had left the room, the armory swallowing an old soldier’s footsteps.

“Anna—”

She was already around the massive table, wrapping her arms around him. Donald sagged into her embrace, suddenly exhausted. She was whispering things, the sing-song tunes of placating mothers, the there-theres and shushes. It took this to inform Donald that he was shaking. He felt her hand come down the back of his head and rest on his neck, his own arms crossing her back like a spring-loaded habit. Here was why women didn’t pull shifts. Here was a truth the shrinks knew. Donald could feel himself grow both weak and bold. He had dangerous thoughts of giving in and more dangerous thoughts of lashing out. Here was the love and violence in the hearts of men, all for their women.

“What’re you doing here?” he whispered. Did she not know the danger? The disruptive power of her gender? And what weakness was this of a father to wake a child in the middle of a storm?

“I’m here for the same reason you are.” She pulled back from the embrace. “I’m looking for answers.” She stepped away and surveyed the mess on the table. “To different questions, perhaps.”

Donald finally saw what the table was, what the room was. A familiar schematic—a grid of silos—covered the table. Each silo was like a small plate, all of them trapped under the glass. A dozen chairs were gathered around. It was a war room, where generals stood and pushed plastic models and grumbled over lives lost by the thousands. He glanced up at the maps and schematics plastered on the walls. There was an adjoining bathroom, a towel hanging from a hook on the door. A cot had been set up in the far corner and was neatly made. There was a lamp beside it sitting on one of the wooden crates from the storeroom. Extension cords snaked here and there, signs of a room long converted into an apartment of sorts.

Donald wanted desperately to fall into the cot. He looked to Anna, made sure she was still there, and in a disturbed corner of his mind he thought this meant Helen must also be somewhere that he could wake her. Life, death, sleeping, rising, the passage of time, the workings of his own mind—all of it was soft and without meaning.

He turned to the nearest wall and flipped through some of the drawings. They were three layers deep in places and covered in notes. It didn’t look like a war was being planned. It looked like a scene from the crime shows that used to lull him to sleep in a former life.

“You’ve been up longer than me,” he said.

Anna stood beside him. Her hand lighted on his shoulder like a bird, and Donald felt himself startle to be touched at all.

“Almost a year, now.” Her hand slid down his back before falling away. “Can I get you a drink? Water? I also have a stash of scotch down here. Dad doesn’t know half the stuff they hid away in these crates.”

Donald shook his head. He turned and watched as she disappeared into the bathroom and ran the sink. She emerged, sipping from a glass.

“What’s going on here?” he asked. “Why am I up?”

She swallowed and waved her glass at the walls. “It’s—” She laughed and shook her head. “I was about to say it’s nothing, but this is the hell that keeps me out of one box and in another. It doesn’t concern you, most of this.”

Donald studied the room again. He could feel the dark halls of shelves and crates stretching back toward the elevator. A year, living like this. He turned his attention to Anna, the way her hair was balled up in a bun, a pen sticking out of it. Her skin was pale except for the dark rings beneath her eyes. He wondered how she was able to do this, live like this.

There was a printout on the far wall that matched the table, a grid of circles, the layout of the facilities. A familiar red X had been drawn across what he knew to be Silo 12 in the upper left corner. There was another X nearby, a new one. More lives lost while he slept. Thousands screaming while in his nightmares he could make no sound. And in the lower right-hand corner of the grid, a mess that made no sense. The room seemed to wobble a bit as he took a step closer.

“Donny?”

“What happened here?” he asked, his voice a whisper. Anna turned to see what he was looking at. She glanced at the table, and he realized that her paperwork was scattered around the same corner of the facility. The glass surface crawled with notes written in red and blue wax.

“Donny—” She stepped closer. “Things aren’t well.”

He turned and studied the scrawl of red marks on the wall schematic. There were Xs and question marks. There were notes in red ink with lines and arrows. Ten or a dozen of the silos were marked up to hell.

“How many?” he asked, trying to count, to multiply the thousands. “Are they gone?”

She took a deep breath. “We don’t know.” She finished her water, walked down the long line of chairs pushed up against the table, and reached down into the seat of one. She procured a bottle and poured a few fingers into her plastic cup. Better than a blue pill, Donald thought.

“It started with Silo 40,” she said. “It went dark about a year ago—”

“Went dark?”

Anna took a sip of the scotch and nodded. She licked her lips. “The camera feeds went out first. Not at once, but eventually they got them all. We lost contact with the heads over there. Couldn’t raise anyone. Erskine was running the shift at the time. He followed the Order and gave the okay to shut the silo down—”

“You mean kill everyone.”

Anna shot him a look. “You know what had to be done.”

Donald remembered Silo 12. He remembered making that same decision. As if there had been a decision to make. The system was automatic, wasn’t it? Wasn’t he just doing what came next, following a set of procedures written down by someone else? He remembered a debate from a history class in college, a group of students arguing that the first president to drop a bomb hadn’t had any other choice. All that time and money invested, the military saying this was the only way. What was heroic or brave about carrying out the inevitable? What kind of man would it have taken to have bucked the expected? What if he hadn’t aborted Silo 12? What if those people had scurried over the hills and had realized they weren’t alone? Who would be the hero then? Who the villain?

He studied the poster with the red marks. “And the rest of them? The other silos?”

Anna finished the drink with one long pull and gasped for air afterward. Donald caught her eyeing the bottle. “They woke up Dad when 42 went. Two more silos had gone dark by the time he came for me—”

Two more silos. “Why you?” he asked.

She tucked a strand of loose hair behind her ear. “Because there was no one else. Because everyone who had a hand in designing this place was either gone or at their wits’ end. Because Dad was desperate.”

“He wanted to see you.”

She laughed. “It wasn’t that. Trust me.” She waved her empty cup at the arrangement of circles on the table and the spread of papers. “They were using the radios at high frequencies. We think it started with 40, that maybe their IT Head went rogue. They hijacked their antenna and began communicating with the other silos around them, and we couldn’t cut them off. They had taken care of that as well. As soon as Dad suspected this, he argued with the others that wireless networks were my specialty. They eventually relented.”

“The others? Who all knows you’re here?” Donald couldn’t help but think how dangerous this could get, but maybe that was his own weakness screaming at him.

“My dad, Erskine, Dr. Henson, his assistants who brought me out. But those assistants won’t work another shift—”

“Deep freeze?”

Anna frowned and splashed her cup, and it occurred to Donald how much could take place while a man slept. Entire shifts had gone by. Another silo had been lost, another red X drawn on the map. An entire corner of silos had run into some kind of trouble. Thurman, meanwhile, had been awake for a year, dealing with it. His daughter as well. So much had happened while Donald had dreamt of snarling dogs with bat-like wings and piles of bones. He waved his arm at the room. “You’ve been stuck in here for a year. Working on this.”

She jerked her head at the door and laughed. “I’ve been cooped up in worse for a lot longer. But yeah, it sucks. I’m sick of this place.” She took another sip, her cup hiding her expression, and Donald wondered if perhaps he was awake because of her weakness just as she might be awake because of her father’s. What was next? Him searching the deep freeze for his sister Charlotte? How would it end?

“We’ve lost contact with eleven silos so far.” Anna peered into her cup. “I think I’ve got it contained, but we’re still trying to figure out how it happened or if anyone’s still alive over there. I don’t think so, but Dad wants to send scouts. Others say that’s a bigger risk. And now it looks like 18 is going to burn itself to the ground.”

“And I’m supposed to help? What does your dad think I know?” He stepped around the planning table and waved for the bottle. Anna splashed her cup and handed the drink to him; she reached for another cup by her monitor while Donald collapsed onto her cot. It was a lot to take in.

“It’s not Dad who thinks you know anything. He didn’t want you up at all. No one’s supposed to come out of deep freeze.” She screwed the cap back on the bottle. “It was his boss.”

Donald nearly choked on his first sip of the scotch. He sputtered and wiped his chin with his sleeve while Anna looked on with concern.

“His boss?” he asked, gasping for air.

She narrowed her eyes. “Dad told you why you’re here, right?”

He fumbled in his pocket for the report. “Something I wrote during my last… during my shift. Thurman has a boss? I thought he was in charge.”

Anna laughed, but there was no humor there. “Nobody’s in charge,” she told him. “The system’s in charge. It just runs. We built it to just go.” She got up from her desk and studied something on the wall for a moment, then walked over and joined him on the cot, the springs squeaking in complaint. Donald slid over to give her more room.

“Dad was in charge of digging the holes, that was his job. There were three of them who planned most of this. The other two had ideas for how to hide this place. Dad convinced them they should just build it in plain sight. The nuclear containment facility was his idea, and he was in a position to make it happen.”

A flood of memories washed over Donald. He remembered being convinced to run for office. Was it Mick who had goaded him into it? Or was it Thurman?

“You said three. Who were the others?”

“Victor and Erskine.” Anna adjusted a pillow and leaned back against the wall. “Not their real names, of course. But what does it matter? A name is a name. You can be anyone down here. Erskine was the one who discovered the original threat, who told Victor and Dad about the nanos. You’ll meet him. He’s been on a double shift with me, working on the loss of these silos, but it’s out of his area of expertise. Do you need more?” She nodded at his cup.

“No. I’m already feeling dizzy.” He didn’t add that it wasn’t from the alcohol. “I remember a Victor from my shift. He worked across the hall from me.”

“The same.” She looked away for a moment. “Dad refers to him as the boss, but I’ve been working with Victor for a while, and he never thought of himself that way. He thought of himself as a steward, joked once about feeling like Noah. He wanted to wake you months ago because of this Silo 18, but Dad vetoed the idea. I think Victor was fond of you. He talked about you a lot.”

“Victor talked about me?” Donald remembered the man across the hall from him, the shrink. Anna reached up and wiped at the bottom of her eyes.

“Yes. He was a brilliant man, could tell what you were thinking, what anyone was thinking. He planned most of this. Wrote the Order, the original Pact. It was all his design.”

“What do you mean was?”

Her lip trembled. She tipped her cup, but there was little solace left in it.

“Victor’s dead,” she said. “He shot himself at his desk two days ago.”

•9•

“Victor? Shot himself?” Donald tried to imagine the composed man who had worked across the hall from him doing such a thing. “Why?”

Anna sniffed and slid closer to Donald. She twisted the empty cup in her hands. “We don’t know. He was obsessed with that first silo we lost. Obsessed. It broke my heart to see how he blamed himself. He used to say that he could see certain things coming, that there were… probabilistic certainties.” She said these two words in a mimic of his voice, which brought the old man’s face even more vividly to Donald’s mind.

“But it killed him not to know the precise when and where.” She dabbed her eyes. “He would’ve been better off if it’d happened on someone else’s shift. Not his. Not where he’d feel guilty.”

“He blamed me,” Donald said, staring at the floor. “It was on my shift. I was such a mess. I couldn’t think straight.”

“What? No. Donny, no.” She rested a hand on his knee. “There’s no one to blame.”

“But my report—” He still had it in his hand, folded up and dotted here and there with pale blue.

Anna’s eyes fell to the piece of paper. “Is that a copy?” She sniffed and reached for it, brushed the loose strands of hair off her face. “Dad had the courage to tell you about this but not about what Vic did.” She shook her head. “Victor was strong in some ways, so weak in others.” She turned to Donald. “He was found at his desk, surrounded by notes, everything he had on this silo, and your report was on top.”

She unfolded the page and studied the words. “Just a copy,” she whispered.

“Maybe it was—” Donald began.

“He wrote notes all over his copy.” She slid her finger across the page. “Right about here, he wrote ‘This is why.’”

“This is why? As in why he did it?” Donald waved his hand at the room. “Shouldn’t this be why? Maybe he realized he’d made a mistake.” He held Anna’s arm. “Think about what we’ve done. What if we followed a crazy man down here? Maybe Victor had a sudden bout of sanity. What if he woke up for a second and saw what we’d done?”

“No.” Anna shook her head. “We had to do this.”

He slapped the wall behind the cot. “That’s what everyone keeps saying.”

“Listen to me.” She placed a hand on his knee, tried to soothe him. “You need to keep it together, okay?” She glanced toward the door, a fearful look in her eyes. “I asked him to wake you because I need your help. I can’t do all of this alone. Vic was working on Silo 18. If it’s up to Dad, he’ll just terminate the place not to have to deal with it. Victor didn’t want that. I don’t want that.”

Donald thought of Silo 12, which he’d terminated. But it was already falling, wasn’t it? It was already too late. They had opened the airlock. He looked toward the schematic on the wall and wondered if it was too late for this silo as well. Maybe when they put him down again, maybe he would dream better dreams if this place could be saved. Maybe the pile of bones would have a summit this time.

“What did he see in my report?” he asked.

“I don’t know. But he wanted to see you weeks ago. He thought you touched on something.”

“Or maybe it was just because I was around at the time.”

Donald looked at the room of clues. Anna had been digging, tearing into a different problem. So many questions and answers. His mind was clear, not like last time. He had questions of his own. He wanted to find his sister, find out what happened to Helen, dispel this crazy thought that she was still out there somewhere. He wanted to know more about this damnable place he’d helped build.

“You’ll help us?” Anna asked. She rested her hand on his back. Her touch was comforting for a moment, and then he thought of Helen. He startled as if bit, some wild part of him thinking for a moment that he was still married, that she was alive out there, maybe frozen and waiting for him to wake her.

“I need—” He stood and glanced around the room. His eyes fell to the computer on the desk. “I need to look some things up.”

Anna rose beside him. She fumbled for his hand. “Of course. I can fill you in with what we know so far. Victor left a series of notes. He wrote all over your report. I can show you. And maybe you can convince Dad that he was onto something, that this silo is worth saving—”

“Yes,” Donald said. He would do it. But only so he could stay awake. That was his motivation. And he wondered for a moment if it was Anna’s as well. To keep him around.

An hour ago, all he had wanted was to go back to sleep, to escape the world he had helped create. But now he wanted answers. He would look into this silo with its problems, but he would find Helen as well. Find out what’d happened to her, where she was. He thought of Mick, and Tennessee flashed in his mind. He turned toward the wall schematic with all the silos, tried to remember which state went with which number.

“What can we access from here?” he asked. His skin flushed with heat as he thought of the answers at his disposal. Maybe this computer wouldn’t be locked down like his last one. No games of solitaire to subdue curious minds.

Anna turned toward the door. There were footsteps out there in the darkness.

“Dad. He’s the only one with access to this level anymore.”

“Anymore?” He turned back to Anna.

“Yeah. Where do you think Victor got the gun?” She lowered her voice. “I was in here when he came down and cracked open one of the crates. I never heard him. Look, my father blames himself for what happened, and he still doesn’t believe this has anything to do with you or your report. But I know Vic. He wasn’t crazy. If there’s anything you can do, please. For me.”

She squeezed his hand. Donald looked down, didn’t realize she’d been holding it. The folded report was in her other hand. The footsteps approached. Donald nodded his assent.

“Thank you,” she said. She dropped his hand, grabbed his empty cup from the cot, and nested hers with it. The cups and the bottle were tucked into one of the chairs, which slid against the table as Thurman arrived at the door and rapped the jamb with his knuckles.

“Come in,” Anna said, brushing loose hair off her face.

Thurman studied the two of them a moment. “Erskine is planning a small ceremony,” he said. “Just us. Those of us who know.”

Anna nodded. “Of course.”

Thurman narrowed his eyes and glanced from his daughter to Donald. Anna seemed to take it as a question.

“He thinks he can help,” she said. “We both think it’s best for him to work down here with me. At least until we make some progress.”

Donald turned to her in shock. Thurman said nothing.

“We’ll need another computer,” she added. “If you bring one down, I can set it up.”

That, Donald liked the sound of.

“And another cot, of course,” Anna added with a smile.