God, bless the government in waiting with Your wisdom and Your greater knowledge.
Nathan reached the door of his apartment and opened it. The ten-by-ten cube was dim. Nathan liked the safety he felt within it when the door was closed. He had everything he needed, too—a bed, a washbasin, a closet, and a shelf on which he kept his bible, his spare clothes, and the photograph he had of Cyndi, Tony, and Brandon, which had been taken the day they had entered the silo.
And finally, Jesus, please bless by family now they are with You in death as they were in life. God, bless Cyndi and my boys. I know you will look after them now they are gone. I know it’s just Your plan working out, and the accident was just Your way of making sure only the right ones survived to live inside the silo.
Nathan smiled, blew a kiss to his dead wife and children, picked up his bible from the shelf, and sat down on the bed to read.
Nathan didn’t dream often. He awoke in the same fashion every day, with his heart swelling with love for the Lord and a fervent desire to follow His demands through the direction of Mr. Grange or his beautiful wives. They were all so wise and thoughtful. They always had a smile or a bright word for Nathan whenever he met them in the corridors, or in the plant room where Nathan spent much of his time after treatment with Michaela.
Today would be no exception to that routine.
He met Pamela on his way into the mess hall from the elevator, though, and felt concerned to see that her face was a mask of fury. She was speaking quickly and quietly into her walkie-talkie, and Nathan thought it was impolite for him to interrupt; plus, he didn’t really understand the words she was saying. She just looked angrier than he had seen her before. She even brushed by him without saying good morning.
Now that was very unusual indeed, he thought as he collected his breakfast of salty porridge and diluted orange juice concentrate.
There wasn’t the usual number of people in the mess hall this morning. It was easy to find a seat at a table, whereas usually the place would be so packed that Nathan might have to wait for a space to become free, which in turn mean that his porridge would be cold and his juice would be room temperature and not as refreshing as when it was nicely chilled.
Chilled.
Chilled.
It’s funny, Nathan thought, how much he appreciated some cold things like his morning orange juice. How the chill of it in his mouth, swilling around his teeth, made him… not nostalgic exactly, but pushed him to yearn for something other than the constant warmth and humidity and smell of the silo. Of course, he was grateful to have been given a home after the accident, but there was still… still…
Nathan shook his head and raised the recently acquired glass of orange juice to his lips. The coldness felt good on his lips and across his tongue. He smiled, savoring every moment.
He’d been told that the accident, of which he had no memory, had occurred when he’d been working on an electrical fault in the room he’d shared with Cyndi and Tony and the baby, Brandon.
He wasn’t entirely sure how it had killed everyone else, just leaving him barely alive with electrical burns to his feet and hands. But somehow, the metal bed on which his family had lain had become live, and they’d died before anyone had gotten a chance to turn off the power.
He himself, he’d been told by Michaela, had been unconscious, and shouldn’t worry that his family had suffered. They were with the Lord now, and were sitting at His side in Heaven. They were looking down on Nathan and they were smiling.
Nathan couldn’t help smiling broadly at this thought. Of course, the Lord was looking after his family, and one day, when the plan decreed—the Lord’s plan that they all followed through Strickland and the Calgary colony—Nathan would be able to join them in Heaven.
That was a day he looked forward to with immense pleasure. To sit with the Lord and Cyndi and Tony and Bran…
Nathan blinked.
Family f… family… f…
The headache again. It cut across his skull like a ragged and rusty knife through old flesh. He rubbed at his temple, felt the scarring there, and closed his eyes.
Michaela had said the headache could be neuralgia because Nathan insisted on drinking his orange juice when it was just freshly constituted with ice water.
“When that coldness hits your teeth, and stimulates the nerves in your face, you get a kind of ice cream headache,” she’d said on the occasions when he’d told her about it. Michaela was an excellent doctor, and Nathan had no need to doubt what she said. After all, the Lord’s plan had decreed that Michaela would be wise and kind and full of medical knowledge. Nathan knew that perhaps he should wait to drink his juice, but, man… he liked the cold…. he… missed the cold.
Family fir…
Nathan shook his head to free it of the errant words. The Devil would sometimes walk into his thoughts when he least expected it and try to turn his thinking in a different direction. Away from total devotion to the Lord and Mr. Grange. But Nathan had grown adept at just flushing the words out of his head, almost as soon as they had arrived.
Famil… NO.
After leaving the mess hall, Nathan made his way to the medical unit for his daily treatment. Treatment consisted now of a counseling session with Michaela, where he would talk about how he was feeling, how to be a better member of the community, and how to worship the Lord better through His representative on Earth, Strickland Grange.
Occasionally, if he stumbled or was interrupted in his head by the Devil, then he would settle on the gurney and put the eye protectors on himself, slip the rubber gag into his mouth and wait calmly for Michaela and Frances, Michaela’s nurse in the medical unit, to administer the treatment.
It was painful, and Nathan felt drained and aching afterwards, but these days it was definitely happening less often. Nathan was no longer stumbling over his devotions on a regular basis.
That thought made him proud in the extreme.
Then he remembered that pride was a sin and said two prayers of contrition to rid himself of the feeling.
The door to the medical unit was locked.
That was odd.
Michaela would usually be there waiting for their morning appointment to commence, and the door would not only be unlocked, but usually ajar, and Nathan would just walk in unbidden.
Nathan hadn’t been told Michaela wouldn’t be there this morning, so perhaps she was inside; he knocked on the door and waited.
The floor for the medical unit was often a busy one, too. But, as with the mess, there were very few people about this morning. Nathan smiled at one, Graham, who was a janitor who dealt with general cleanliness around the silo. He doubled when needed, Nathan had been told, as one of the workers on the security team up at the entrance to the silo. Right now, he didn’t return Nathan’s smile.
Nathan shrugged. No matter.
He was probably busy and distracted. His face was very serious as he came by Nathan, though, and so Nathan vowed to seek Graham out later and make sure he was okay. He didn’t look very happy at all. Not a bit.
The door to the medical unit stayed steadfastly closed. Nathan wondered if his knock had been too gentle, so this time he rapped firmly on the aluminum fascia.
After thirty seconds, it became very clear that the door was not going to be opened.
Nathan was now at something of a loss as to what to do with his time now. He looked at his watch. He wasn’t due in the plant room for work for another hour, though then he’d be there for as long as he could before he became exhausted, working on some circuit boards in the lighting system that had failed. There were plenty of spares, but the work was difficult, fiddly, and Nathan found it challenging.
What to do with this spare hour?
It was an obvious decision to go to the chapel and spend an hour in silent contemplation and prayer. Members of the community often went there for devotional moments outside of the three regular daily services that Mr. Grange or one of his deputies would perform. It was open to the
community at all times. Nathan walked towards the elevator, heading off along the near deserted corridors, and wondered where everyone was again. It was impossible to tell what time of day it was in the silo without reference to a clock, and Nathan found himself checking his watch again to ensure he hadn’t woken up in the middle of the night by mistake, in which case everyone was still asleep! But no, it was just after 8 a.m. in the morning. The place should have been buzzing, and it just wasn’t.
A man Nathan didn’t recognize, who was not dressed in the regulation blue boiler suit, appeared around the curved corridor ahead. He was tall and wild-haired. Perhaps a little older than Nathan, with a full black beard, intense brown eyes, and a baseball cap worn backwards on his head. There was something incongruous about the man’s features—and not just because he wasn’t wearing a boiler suit. He had the high cheekbones, the broad nose, and the bearing of someone with Native American heritage, but it looked like the man had deliberately hidden this behind a mask of pure redneck.
Nathan stopped in his tracks as the man, who he didn’t recognize but who certainly seemed to recognize him, yanked Nathan sideways by the collar and slammed him into the wall.
“You Nathan Tolley?”
The man’s voice, which Nathan wouldn’t have expected to come out of this mouth in a thousand years, was a broad Texan drawl, and he smelled of tobacco mixed with fresh sweat. There were beads of it standing out on his forehead, and the man was breathing hard, as if he’d been running.
He slammed Nathan into the wall again. “I ain’t gonna ask you again, boy; who are you?”
“I’m Nathan.”
The man smiled and yelled back over his shoulder. “I got him! Hallelujah, Cyndi! I got your boy!”
22
Nothing could have prepared Nathan for what happened next. He fell to his knees as the sheer thud of the vision slammed into his head and his heart with equal ferocity.
Cyndi, who was dead and yet alive, walked around the same corner that the Native American dressed as a redneck had come around, and she crashed to her knees next to Nathan and threw her arms around him.
“Touching as this is,” Baseball Cap said, “we gotta get out of here.”
Cyndi’s face was buried in Nathan’s neck, the shock of it kicking him all around his sensibilities and wrenching apart all of his certainties.
“I… I…”
“Don’t speak,” Cyndi said—and then real Cyndi, not photograph Cyndi, not Cyndi in Heaven at the side of the Lord—pulled Nathan to his feet. His muscles were trembling, there was so little strength in them, and he was sure he’d forgotten how to walk. There was something he remembered called balance, which he had no idea how to do anymore. He thumped sideways into the wall, almost collapsing again. Baseball Cap held him up. He was strong and powerful, and he put Nathan’s arm around his shoulder and dragged him off down the corridor.
Cyndi walked beside them, her eyes sharp, with a machine gun—a machine gun!—in her hand. How had she gotten a machine gun in? Weapons were not allowed. Mr. Grange would be so angry.
“Cyndi… I…”
“Don’t talk. I know it’s hard, but just concentrate on walking and getting out of here.”
They passed the elevator and kept on walking. “But…” Nathan said, pointing at the door as they went past.
Baseball Cap’s voice was a low rumble, vibrating his chest, where Nathan, half stumbling, half being carried was resting his head. “That’s not how we got in, and that’s not how we’re getting out.”
Nathan’s legs were starting to give way again, the wave of exhaustion hitting in full force and the confusion in his mind overwhelming him.
Was he dreaming?
Was this an illusion?
Mr. Grange had said that Cyndi and Tony and Brandon—the chain of litany he repeated so often when he thought of his family—were dead. Why would the vessel of the Lord on Earth…
In Jesus’ name, blessed be.
…lie to him? And yet, here she was alive and talking.
In the end, Baseball Cap gave up on dragging Nathan and just hefted him onto his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. “Boy, you sure are heavy.”
And, like that, they moved down the corridor at a much faster pace. All Nathan could see was the horizon of Baseball Cap’s backside, and his and Cyndi’s feet clicking down the corridor between Nathan’s swinging hands.
They stopped at a door and, without preamble, Baseball Cap kicked it open. The door clanged open onto a red metal emergency stairwell which they began to climb.
Three floors later, with Nathan’s head still spinning from shock, and the nausea of his head swinging while he was being carried, Baseball Cap kicked open another door and they emerged into the chapel—which Nathan ascertained only because of the pattern of the carpet.
The room smelled odd.
It was a sharp… gunpowder smell… like fresh cordite, as if guns had been fired here recently. As Baseball Cap’s feet moved across the carpet, Nathan was anguished to see there were shards and slivers of smashed stained glass on the floor, crunching beneath Baseball Cap’s feet.
Jesus’ face stared up from the carpet, the screaming face from the station of the crucifixion almost shouting its rage and anger at being smashed.
Nathan made fists and thumped them into the bottom of Baseball Cap’s spine.
Either the man was immune to the pain or Nathan was badly overestimating his own strength, but the Texan with the redneck mask over the Native American body just laughed, heaved Nathan off of his shoulder, and dumped him down on a chair.
The chapel was a mess of broken glass, overturned chairs, and bodies. There had been a fierce battle here in the last few minutes. Three boiler-suited figures lay dead in the chaos, their eyes wide with the shock of dying and their chests ragged with bullet holes. One of them was Pamela, one of them was Graham, and the other Nathan couldn’t put a name to.
A group of other boiler-suited members of the community had been corralled in the corner of the chapel, against the curving wall. They all had their hands on their heads, and two people—a plump, pretty young woman and a young black boy, whose names Nathan couldn’t find in the mess of his head— were pointing the muzzles of more machine guns in their direction. A taller, grizzled man with a hungry look and a limp was moving among the crowd, patting them down and checking for weapons.
On the dais, Nathan saw that Strickland Grange was on his knees, but he wasn’t praying. His hands were on his head and a woman who Nathan recognized but couldn’t name—thin-faced, beautiful, and wearing a thick fur coat—was covering Strickland and Michaela with a pistol. On seeing Nathan, she smiled and waved to him.
A name swam up through the murk of his memory.
Lucy…?
Yes. Lucy. That was it.
Where do I know her from?
But then the carnage in the room took hold of Nathan again as he looked around the chapel. Not a single Station of the Cross stained glass frieze had survived. He felt compelled by mixed feelings of anger and sadness to try to get to his knees and save what pieces he could, but Baseball Cap just put a hand on his shoulder to keep him seated, and because of his kittenish weakness, Nathan found he couldn’t move.
His eyes, however, could, and he looked to Strickland Grange on the dais to see what divine power could be transmitted from the man to Nathan to help him navigate a righteous path through the misery overwhelming him, but there was none.
All there was, was the crunch of broken glass, the stench of cordite, and the overwhelming sense in Nathan that nothing he’d thought was certain just a few minutes before would ever be certain again.
His name was Tommy Ben. He was of the Diné people—a Navajo by birth—but it was a heritage he didn’t ascribe to. “I’m a Texan, number one, number two, and number infinity, Nate. Everything else is secondary to being a Lone Star Statesman as far as I’m concerned.”
The wagon pitched, yawed, and rolled like a small boat tossed on a stormy sea.
Lucy, up front and outside of the canvas, shouted at the oxen to “Whoa!” and, thankfully, the wagon stopped moving.
The further they moved into the thaw, the muddier and more difficult the land had become.
Nathan lay back on the blanket roll and tried to settle his head. He’d woken in the camp that morning in the grip of a nightmare so vivid he’d woken Cyndi and Brandon with his yelling. He’d sat up, heart racing, guts knotting, and reached out in the still dark to make sure the cries of the baby and the concern of his wife were attached to real, tangible people and not the dregs of a tattered nightmare.
But they were real.
Real as they’d ever been.
They’d left the silo behind some five weeks before, but the nightmares still came, and Nathan’s recovery had been slow. The pieces of his memory that had been drowned by Michaela Grange’s electro-convulsive-therapy had been swimming back to the shores of his mind slowly, putting themselves back together in his head.
The recovery process had begun after the initial shock of finding his family, plus Lucy, Freeson, Dave, and Donie were alive if not well, and had teamed up with the blunt Texan, Tommy Ben, to lead an assault on the silo and rescue him from the lies, deceit, and mental torture of Strickland’s heinous regime.
The story of what had happened over the two months Nathan had been held captive in the silo was difficult to hear, but Cyndi had done her best to give it to him in digestible chunks. This had given him time to process the information and understand how thoroughly he’d been abused.
In short, Nathan had been the only one from their group whose DNA had proven his lineage was pure enough, Aryan enough, to join the Calgary community. His looks and his bearing had already alerted Strickland to his suitability, and a series of surreptitious lab tests by Michaela had confirmed the leader’s guess. The rest, Lucy had been utterly and incandescently angry to find out, had been termed to be a variety of half-breeds and mixed-up genealogies. Nathan had been the only one who’d checked out, so when they’d realized Nathan was about to leave, they’d drugged him—Michaela holding his shoulders in the chapel had given her the opportunity to give him enough fast-acting tranquilizer to drop him almost immediately, all through a hypodermic concealed in her hand. The rest of the group had been thrown out of the silo and told that if they tried to return to get Nathan, he would be executed immediately.
Killing Frost (After the Shift Book 2) Page 23