Dust

by Hugh Howey

Page 11

 

  “They didn’t give me a chance to explain—” she started, swiping at her eyes. “Dad, there are other worlds out there like our own. It’s crazy to sit here, fighting amongst ourselves, when there are other worlds—”

  “I’m not talking about the digging,” her father said. “I heard what you’re planning up top. ”

  “You heard …” She wiped her eyes again. “Lukas—” she muttered.

  “It wasn’t Lukas. That technician, Nelson, came by for a check-up, asked me if I was going to be on standby in case anything went wrong. I had to pretend to know what he was talking about. I assume you were going to announce your plans out there just now?” He glanced toward the cloakroom.

  “We need to know what’s out there,” Juliette said. “Dad, they haven’t been trying to make it better. We don’t know the first thing—”

  “Then let the next cleaner see. Let them sample when they’re sent out. Not you. ”

  She shook her head. “There won’t be anymore cleaning, Dad. Not while I’m mayor. I won’t send anyone out there. ”

  He placed a hand on her arm. “And I won’t let my daughter go. ”

  She pulled away from him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I have to. I’m taking every precaution. I promise. ”

  Her father’s face hardened. He turned his hand over and gazed at his palm.

  “We could use your help,” she said, hoping to bridge any new rift she feared she was creating. “Nelson’s right. It would be nice to have a doctor on the team. ”

  “I don’t want any part in this,” he said. “Look what happened to you the last time. ” He glanced at her neck, where the suit’s metal collar had left a hook of a scar.

  “That was the fire,” Juliette told him, adjusting her coveralls.

  “And the next time it’ll be something else. ”

  They studied one another in that chamber where people were quietly judged, and Juliette felt a familiar temptation to run away from conflict. It was countered by a new desire to bury her face in her father’s chest and sob in a way that women her age weren’t allowed, that mechanics never could.

  “I don’t want to lose you again,” she told her dad. “You’re the only family I’ve got left. Please support me in this. ”

  It was difficult to say. Vulnerable and honest. A part of Lukas now lived inside of her – this was something he had imparted.

  Juliette waited for the reaction and saw her father’s face relax. It may have been her imagination, but she thought he moved a step closer, let down his guard.

  “I’ll give you a check-up before and after,” he said.

  “Thank you. Oh, speaking of a check-up, there’s something else I wanted to ask you about. ” She worked the long sleeve of her coveralls up her forearm and studied the white marks along her wrist. “Have you ever heard of scars going away with time? Lukas thought—” She looked up at her father. “Do they ever go away?”

  Her father took a deep breath and held it awhile. His gaze drifted over her shoulder and far away.

  “No,” he said. “Not scars. Not even with time. ”

  Silo 1

  16

  Captain Brevard was nearly through his seventh shift. Only three more to go. Three more shifts of sitting behind security gates reading the same handful of novels over and over until the yellowed pages gave up and fell out. Three more shifts of whipping his deputies at table tennis – a new deputy on each shift – and telling them that it’d been forever since he’d last played. Three more shifts of the same old food and the same old movies and the same old everything else bland that greeted him when he woke. Three more. He could make it.

  Silo 1’s Security chief now counted down shifts much as he had once counted down years to retirement. Let them be uneventful, was his mantra. The blandness was good. Vanilla was the taste of passing time. Such was his thought as he stood before an open cryopod splattered with dried blood, a foul taste very un-vanilla-like in his mouth.

  A pop of blinding light erupted from Deputy Stevens’s camera as the young man took another shot of the pod’s interior. The body had been removed hours ago. A med tech had been servicing a neighboring pod when he noticed a smear of blood on the lid of this one. He had cleaned half the smear away before he realized what it was. Brevard now studied the tracks that the med tech’s cleaning rag had left behind. He took another bitter sip of coffee.

  His mug had lost its steam. It was the cold air in that warehouse of bodies. Brevard hated it down there. He hated waking up naked in that place, hated being brought back down and put to sleep, hated what the room did to his coffee. He took another sip. Three shifts left, and then retirement, whatever that meant. Nobody thought along that far. Only to their next shift.

  Stevens lowered his camera and nodded toward the exit. “Darcy’s back, sir. ”

  The two officers watched as Darcy, the night guard, crossed the hall of cryopods. Darcy had been first on the scene early that morning, had woken Deputy Stevens, who had woken his superior. Darcy had then refused to slag off and get some sleep as ordered. He had instead accompanied the body up to Medical and had volunteered to wait on test results while the other men went over the crime scene. Darcy now waved a piece of paper a bit too enthusiastically as he headed their way.

  “I can’t stand this guy,” Stevens whispered to his chief.

  Brevard took a diplomatic sip of his coffee and watched his night guard approach. Darcy was young – late twenties, early thirties – with blond hair and a permanent, goofy grin. Just the sort of inexperienced person police forces loved to place on night shifts when all the bad shit went down. It wasn’t logical, but it was tradition. Experience won you deep sleep for when the crazies were out.

  “You won’t believe what I’ve got,” Darcy said, twenty paces away and more than a touch overeager.

  “You’ve got a match,” Brevard said dryly. “The blood on the lid goes with the pod. ” He nearly added that what Darcy most certainly didn’t have was a hot cup of coffee for him or Stevens.

  “That’s part of it,” Darcy said, appearing vexed. “How’d you know?” He took a few deep breaths and handed over the report.

  “Because matches are exciting,” Brevard said, accepting the sheet. “You wave a match in the air like you’ve got something to say. Lawyers and jury members get excited over a match. ” And rookies, he wanted to add. He wasn’t sure what Darcy did before orientation, but it wasn’t police work. Glancing down at the report, Brevard saw a standard DNA match, a series of bars lined up with one another, lines drawn between the bars where they were identical. And these two were identical, the DNA on file for the pod and the blood sample taken from the lid.

  “Well, there’s more,” Darcy said. The night guard took another deep breath. He had obviously run down the hall from the lift. “Lots more. ”

  “We think we’ve got it pieced together,” Stevens said with confidence. He nodded toward the open cryopod. “It’s pretty clear that a murder took place here. It started—”

  “Not a murder,” Darcy interjected.

  “Give the deputy a chance,” Brevard said, lifting his mug. “He’s been looking at this for hours. ”

  Darcy started to say something but caught himself. He rubbed under his eyes, seemed exhausted, but nodded.

  “Right,” Stevens said. He pointed his camera at the cryopod. “Blood on the lid means the struggle began out here. The man we found inside must’ve been subdued by our killer after a fight, that’s how his blood got on the lid. And then he was tossed inside his own cryopod. His hands were bound, I’m assuming at gunpoint, because I didn’t note any marks around the wrists, no other sign of struggle. He was shot once in the chest. ” Stevens pointed to the streaks and spots of blood on the inside of the lid. “We’ve got splatter here, indicating the victim was sitting up. But the way it ran suggests the lid was shut immediately after. And the coloration tells me that
this likely happened on our shift, certainly within the past month. ”

  Brevard watched Darcy’s face the entire time, saw how it scrunched up in disagreement. The kid thought he knew better than the deputy.

  “What else?” Brevard asked Stevens, prodding his second-in-command along further.

  “Oh, yes. After murdering the victim, our perp inserted an IV and a catheter to keep the body from decomposing, so we’re looking at someone with medical training. He might, of course, still be on this shift. Which is why we thought it best to discuss this down here and not around the med team. We’ll want to question them one at a time. ”

  Brevard nodded and took a sip of coffee. He waited on the night guard’s reaction.

  “It wasn’t murder,” Darcy said, exasperated. “Do you guys want to hear what else I have? For starters, the blood on the lid matches the database entry for the pod, just like you said, but it doesn’t match the victim. The guy inside is someone else. ”

  Brevard nearly spat out his coffee. He wiped his moustache with his hand. “What?” he asked, not sure that he’d heard correctly.

  “The blood on the outside was mixed with saliva. It came from a second person. Doc said it was probably a cough, maybe a chest wound. So our suspect is likely injured. ”

  “Wait. So who’s the guy we found in the pod?” Stevens asked.

  “They’re not sure. They ran his blood, but it seems his records have been tampered with. The guy this pod is registered to, he shouldn’t be on the executive wing at all. Should’ve been in Deep Freeze. And the blood from the inside of the lid matches a partial record from the executive files, which would place him in here somewhere—”

  “Partial record?” Brevard asked.

  Darcy shrugged. “The files are all kinds of fouled up. According to Doctor Whitmore. ”

  “Ah,” Deputy Stevens said, snapping his fingers. “I’ve got it. I know what happened here. ” He pointed his camera at the pod. “There’s a struggle out here, okay? A guy who doesn’t want to be put under. He manages to break free, knows how to hack the—”

  “Hold up,” Brevard said, raising a hand. He could see on Darcy’s face that there was more. “Why do you keep insisting this wasn’t a murder? We’ve got a gunshot wound, blood splatter, a closed lid, no weapon, a man with his hands bound, and blood on the lid of this pod, whoever the hell it’s registered to. Everything about this screams murder. ”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” Darcy said. “It wasn’t murder because the guy was plugged in. He was plugged in the entire time, even before he was shot. And the pod was still on and running. This Troy fellow – or whoever it is that we pulled out of there – he’s still alive. ”

  17

  The three men left the pod behind and headed for the medical wing and the operating room. Brevard’s mind raced. He didn’t need this crap on one of his shifts. This was not vanilla. He imagined the reports he would have to write after this, how much fun it would be to brief the next captain.

  “Do you think we should get the Shepherd involved?” Stevens asked, referring to the head executive up on the administration wing, a man who kept mostly to himself.

  Brevard scoffed. He coded open the Deep Freeze door and led the men out into the hallway. “I think this is a little below his pay grade, don’t you? Shepherd has entire silos to worry about. You can see how it wears on him, how he keeps himself locked up. It’s our job to handle cases like this. Even murder. ”

  “You’re right,” Stevens said.

  Darcy, still winded, labored to keep up.

  They rode the lift up two levels. Brevard thought about how the body with the gun wound had felt as he had inspected it. The man had been as cold as a stiff in a morgue, but then weren’t they all when they first woke up? He thought about all the damage the freezing and thawing produced, how the machines in their blood were supposed to keep them patched together, cell by cell. What if those little machines could do the same for a gunshot wound?

  The lift opened on sixty-eight. Brevard could hear voices from the OR. It was difficult to let go of the theories that’d been percolating between him and Stevens for the past hour. It was hard to let go and adapt to everything Darcy had told them. The idea of records being tampered with made this a much more complex problem. Only three shifts to go, and now all this. But if the victim was indeed alive, catching their perp was all but guaranteed. If he was in any condition to talk, he could ID the man who shot him.

  The doctor and one of his assistants were in the waiting room outside the little-used OR. Their gloves were off, the doctor’s gray hair wild and unkempt as if he’d been running his fingers through it. Both men appeared exhausted. Brevard glanced through the observation window and saw the same man they’d pulled from the pod. He was lying as if asleep, his color completely different, tubes and wires snaking inside a pale blue paper gown.

  “I hear we’ve had an extraordinary turnaround,” Brevard said. He crossed to the sink and dumped his coffee down the drain, looked around for a fresh pot and didn’t see one. He would’ve taken on another shift right then for a hot mug, a pack of smokes, and permission to burn them.

  The doctor patted his assistant on the arm and gave him instructions. The young man nodded and fished in his pocket for a pair of gloves before backing his way through the door and into the operating room. Brevard watched him check the machines hooked up to the man.