by James Axler
"Move it out," Ryan ordered.
* * *
Some years earlier, in wind-washed Wisconsin, Ryan had led a hunting party through the ruins of a deserted ville, and they'd come across the tumbled stones of what had once been a large hospital. One wing had been freakishly protected from the worst of the nuke blasting. He still remembered the cold wind blowing along the corridors and the look and feel of the place.
Now, on the fringes of the deep redoubt, there was a similar feeling.
Ryan almost felt that he could even catch the long-gone scent of disinfectant lingering in the dull, reprocessed air.
"Looks like they cleared up rather carefully here," Doc observed. "Look in here. Everything copybook neat and trim. Like they were hoping one day to come back and pick up where they left off."
It was true. Word processors stood at the ready, under plastic covers; phones waited for the next call; filing cabinets were closed and orderly; an operating room waited for a new patient, rustless scalpels and probes lying in glittering ranks with other nameless tools of the surgeon.
"Gives me creepies." Lori shuddered. "Reminds me of the redoubt I came from. Cold and... and watching us."
Ryan knew what the girl meant. It was oddly sinister the way that everything in this section was so perfect. It was almost as if they'd slipped through into a time warp. At any moment a sec man or a doctor or a nurse would walk along the antiseptic corridor and challenge them.
They reached another air-locked door.
Krysty was in the lead, but she faltered and stopped, putting her hand to her forehead.
"What is it?" Ryan asked, moving quickly to her side.
"Don't know, lover, but... Gaia! Something strange is... living and partly living. Dead and yet... not dead."
"Freezies," Doc said. "They must be what Krysty can 'see' in there."
"Could it?.."
She shook her head, the mass of crimson hair dancing across her shoulders like filaments spun from fire. "How the?.. I don't know, lover. I just tell you that there's something up ahead of us that's not like anything I ever sensed before."
"Could go back," J.B. suggested, the tone of his voice making it obvious that he wanted to keep going on.
"No. Krysty says that what's through there isn't alive, so it can't hurt us."
"But said not dead, as well," Jak pointed out, lips peeling back off his sharp teeth in a feral grin of anticipation.
"So, let's move on," Ryan said.
There were two air locks close together, each with its own set of instructions about making sure no clothing was trapped in closing doors and not attempting to leave until pressure equalizer had fully returned to zero.
Beyond the second set was an ordinary pair of double swing-doors. Now the humming and hissing sounds that they'd heard from way back had become much louder, as though they were closing in on the heart of a sleeping giant.
Ryan took the lead, pushing the doors open and stepping cautiously through, into a huge control room, much like the one that ran the gateway.
"This is it."
The other five filed in after him, stopping to gaze around at the amazing complex of comp-panels with lights, buttons and switches. The humming was louder.
"Look." Krysty pointed across at the long side wall of clear glass. Behind it, angled on a raised platform, were about twenty silvered capsules, looking like sci-fi coffins.
"Freezies," Doc breathed. "So, the stories were true. They exist, and there they are. By the three Kennedys, they're freezies!"
Chapter Seven
The control room contained everything needed to being functioning again immediately. Everything except instructions. The consoles held clues to how they might have operated, but nothing more.
"This one's marked Coolants Input," J.B. called to the others, who were wandering around the room.
"How d'you open up the doors here?" Lori asked, raiding a black handle on the glass wall in front of the capsules.
"Leave it, dearest!" Doc instructed. "We must exercise some care. A rash and hasty move could lead to an unimagined disaster."
"There's twenty-five of these metal boxes, Doc, but it looks like only nine of them are operational. Five got a liquid display saying Not in Use. Eleven got a red malfunction sign glowing, like something went wrong over the years."
"What about those nine?"
"Just a steady green. Lots of dials and bleepers, but they're all static."
"How 'bout unfreezing 'em, Doc," Jak yelled. "See what hundred-year man looks like."
Ryan smiled at the boy's enthusiasm. "What'd happen if we tried to let 'em out, Doc?"
"Who on God's green earth knows, my old comrade in arms? With nothing to guide us, I fear that it would not be a likely success."
"Could try, though," Ryan insisted, fascinated by the thought that the gleaming capsules might contain men and women from a hundred years ago, people with all the scientific knowledge and wisdom that they'd had in those days. Who knew what information they might be able to convey?
"I think not. To tamper with such things, far beyond our wisdom, Ryan... This could be a fearful Pandora's box of evil or disease. How can we take on that weighty responsibility?"
"We got every right, Doc. There's nobody else here but us. I say let's try and defrost 'em."
The old-timer sighed. "This is madness, my friend. Madness. But we don't even know how to begin to release them from their eternal durance."
"Ounce of plas-ex and they'll pop open like the belly of a drowned dog," J.B. said.
"Here," Krysty called. "Sealed panel says Emergency Mass Release Controls. This has got to be it."
They all gathered around.
The control was on what looked to be the master console. Certainly the chair in front of it was larger and more plush than any of the others. And smack in the center was the panel that Krysty had noticed. It was locked and had an intricate sec key attached to it by a steel chain.
"One key and three locks," observed Krysty.
"Not uncommon, my dear. Many high-security establishments will have a similar system. It prevents a single fit of schizoid psychotic madness. No one person can operate the master key. Or press the red button reading 'Do not pass Go and do not destroy the world.' We'll probably find a time delay on a single key that will shut down the whole override system."
"So where's other keys, Doc?" Jak asked. "Round here?"
"In the ruins of what was once the Pentagon? Or Washington? Camp David? Nevada? Air Force One? I can tell you, my snow-headed colleague, that those missing keys will remain missing until Gabriel blows his horn. And probably after that as well."
"Plas-ex time," J.B. announced, fumbling in the lining of his leather jacket.
Ryan was about to warn the Armorer to be careful, then decided to keep his mouth shut. J.B. would be as careful as he could be without needing to be told about it.
He teased out a tiny piece of the gray explosive, rolling it between his fingers. He worked the thin worm of plas-ex into a triangular shape, pressing it to the top of the sec-locked control. He took out a detonator, which was no larger than a thumbtack, and pushed one end into the gray strip.
"Ten seconds," he said. "Ready? Go." The Armorer tweaked the end of the detonator to activate its timing mechanism.
They all ducked behind the desks for protection, though the explosion was barely noticeable.
But it did the trick.
A three-sided section of the cover had been lifted off, exposing a single red switch beneath it. On the console, a number of lights flashed furiously.
Doc laughed. "One hundred years ago, a whole peck of telephones would have been ringing all over the shop. This must have been one of the most secret places on the planet."
"Not anymore. You figure this'll start to thaw out the freezies, Doc?"
"Kill or cure," the old man replied.
"Do it, Ryan," Lori said imperiously.
Moving carefully to avoid cutting his hand on the shar
p edges of the torn cover, Ryan gripped the red switch and pulled it firmly toward himself, hearing the solid click of the contact being made, somewhere beneath the top of the desk.
"There she blows," J.B. shouted, taking off his fedora and waving it in the air in a most uncharacteristic display of enthusiasm. Lights flashed above each of the nine silver pods that the companions had assumed were occupied. What looked like steam was released in hissing, blinding clouds, concealing everything behind the great glass wall of the control chamber.
"Coolant release," Doc shouted. "Guess it must have been something like liquid nitrogen after all. It's being vented right now. My stars, but this is exciting!"
"Others opening too," Jak called, pointing to the rest of the capsules, whose lids were visibly beginning to lift.
"What are they going to be like?" Krysty asked nobody in particular.
Doc fielded the question. "Those that have already ceased the cryogenic process will obviously be exceedingly defunct. Dead. Gone before. Joined the choir celestial. Sleeping with their Maker. Resting the rest that has no awakening. Dived into the last great darkness. Savoring the enigma of the journey from which no man has yet returned. Plucking at the harp where..."
"Doc," Krysty interrupted irritably, "answer the bastard question, will you? What are they going to be like? The ones that unfreeze?"
"Ah, yes. Bear in mind that the probability is that they will have been frozen either at a point near death or at a point where a disease had them severely in its grip. Perhaps some illness that had not yet run its course, but for which medical science had, then, no hope of cure."
"Fucking sickies, Doc?" Jak said.
"In a word... yes."
"What if it's catching?"
Krysty's question stopped everyone in their tracks. Suppose these illnesses from before sky-dark were hideously contagious? None of them had thought about that.
"Can't be," Ryan denied with a positive degree of false confidence.
She persisted. "Why, lover?"
"Too much risk to anyone here or in the freezing part of the redoubt."
"Ever hear of LIDS?" Doc asked thoughtfully. "Perhaps not. Lethal Immune Deficiency Syndrome. The government suppressed the facts about it, trying to avoid a panic."
"What was?.." asked Jak.
"Your body's resistance to illness vanished overnight. Caught by walking through someone's sneeze. Easy as that. And you reallycould get it from toilet seats. If the nukes hadn't ended civilization, it could have chilled more people than the Black Death."
"What if one of them in those there are got it?" Lori asked, glancing toward the exit.
"As I said. There were many ways you could pick it up. Any sort of contact, no matter how casual, spread the virus, which was always a hundred percent terminal. But it was easily detected, as I recall. So, they'd not have let anyone in here with it. At least I remember from some of the scuttlebutt whispers at the time... Where was I? Oh, yes. When the sons of bitches fired me forward, they were talking about concentration camps and portable crematoria and even IE."
"What was that, Doc?" Krysty asked. The old man's horror tale from the past had caught everyone's attention. Nobody was even bothering to look at the fog-filled cubicles and the ponderously opening streamlined freezing chambers.
"Involuntary Euthanasia. It never got quite that bad, but there was martial law in the air, my friends, and a cold hand around your heart if you tested positive. Bad days."
He shook his head sadly, tapping at the floor with the metal ferrule of his cane. The dismal insight that he'd given into the past of their country held everyone in silence, a silence that was broken by a yelp from Lori.
"Look!"
The inactive or malfunctioned capsules were now completely open. The other nine were still hidden behind the veiling torrents of released coolant.
The blond teenager led the way to peer into the open containers, her spurs jingling merrily as she ran. The others joined her, staring into the padded interiors of the frozen coffins.
Some were quite empty.
Some were not.
"Bones, bones, dried lazy bones," Doc Tanner whispered, turning away with a sigh.
Hermetically sealed for a hundred years, the failures of the cryogenic experiments had become perfectly mummified. The skulls were encased in a tight mask of brown leather, the eyes long vanished into the shadowed sockets. The jaw gaped, held in place only by shreds of gristle, like old whipcord. The bodies had been wrapped in a shroud of thin plasticized cloth that had probably been white but had deteriorated to a patchy yellow. The skeletal hands and feet emerged from under the bindings, hooked and sere.
"Take a look at this double-poor bastard," Ryan suggested. "Seems like he sort of recovered some, when the machine folded up."
Doc was at his side, wiping at the smeared glass. "Lord, Lord," he said quietly. "It puts me in mind of a tale from Mr. Poe, concerning a premature burial of a wretch who... Oh, dear."
It was a dreadful sight.
The person, male by the short strands of straggling hair that clung to the top of the wrinkled skull, had made a fight of it. The winding-cloth was torn and bunched near the feet. The knees were drawn up and the back arched, the arms lifted, hands pressed toward the sky, as he had attempted to lift the massive weight of the locked lid. The head was tilted, jaw yawning in what must have been the last muffled, choking scream for air, the dying calling out to a world that was already dead.
"I'd hate to get chilled in a metal box," Lori said. "When I'm gone I want it with children all around and friends and a hill covering by heather with the sun and a big watery fall. That's how I'm going to be gone."
"How long d'you figure the thawing's going to take, Doc?" Krysty asked, frowning through the glass at the wreathing coils of gas and steam that still encircled the remaining nine cubicles.
"I fear that I have no idea, my dear girl. Time past and time present are both perhaps... What am I saying? No. I can speculate that the full freezing process must have taken many, many hours. Perhaps even days. But we have pressed the emergency button and everything will... I suppose, be much speeded."
"But it'll still take some time?"
Doc shrugged his shoulders. "You are as wise as I in this, my dear. We must all wait for however long it takes."
* * *
The room contained nothing of interest to any of them, so the next few hours dragged slowly by.
Doc sat in a corner with his back against a wall, Lori's head in his lap. Jak pared his nails with one of his assortment of throwing knives. J.B. repeatedly stripped and reassembled his new blaster, eventually becoming so familiar with the weapon that he could do it with Ryan's scarf knotted tightly over his eyes.
Krysty and Ryan strolled together around the rows of control consoles, her hand resting lightly on his arm. She sang a childhood song that she said had been taught to her by her mother, in Harmony.
"It's an old ballad, from way, way back before sky-dark. About a baron who catches his young wife making love with another man. He bursts in on them — his wife and this Matty Groves — and he's got all his sec men with him. And he threatens him. Says they should have a fair fight."
"Doesn't sound very fair."
"It's not. But he says 'In England it shall not be said I slew a sleeping man.' But Matty Groves doesn't have a chance. He gets chilled, but the wife turns on her husband and says they're all through."
"Sing it, lover."
She did, her sweet voice flooding the room, rising over the mechanical hissing and throbbing of the thawing cryo capsules. The age-old song of passion, betrayal and death caught everyone's interest.
When it was over Doc led a round of applause. "Beautiful, my dear silver-throated Miss Wroth. I had heard the song before, sung by a maiden in the Ozarks, when I was a callow youth. But not so finely as you have sung it. Bravo, my dear, bravo!"
"Anything happening, Jak?" J.B. asked later, watching the teenager as the youth catfooted along the row
of containers.
"No. Can't see. Wait..." He pushed his face against the glass, trying the sec-locked handle. "Still shut tight. But looks like clearing."
"It's about time," Ryan said, levering himself up off the floor, where he'd been resting. He joined the young albino. "Yeah, I can see the lids up. Can't make anything inside 'em, yet. Too much of that mist."
"They going to be skeletons like the others, Doc?" Krysty asked.
"Frankly, ma'am, should any of them actually be returned to some sort of life, I think we might be more concerned about their brains than their bodies."
Doc continued to try to monitor the dials, seeking some kind of pattern that might tell him how the thawing was going.
"Looks to me like a basic draining of coolant, combined with some sort of bodily fluid replacement and reassessment. Blood coming in and the artificially frozen preservatives thawing and seeping out of the system. All sorts of artificial stimulants and nourishments pumping in, as well."
"Any signs of actual monitoring of the vital functions, Doc?" Ryan asked. "Those there?" He pointed at a number of display panels, each showing an unbroken line of pale green electrical light, accompanied by a thin, toneless bleeping.
"Could be. If they are, then we're not going to strike too much gold. I've seen more signs of life in a petrified dinosaur's dropping."
Another hour passed. The nine capsules were all open, but there was still too much mist in the cubicles to see what was happening. And the monitors remained stubbornly unchanged.
"Triple zero," J.B. muttered to Ryan. "Laid the ace on the line, best we could. Still got us a lot of nothing. Time we moved?"
"One more hour. Then we go. Krysty says she can still 'see' something. Like she's never seen before. They gotta come around, don't they?"
The Armorer pushed back the brim of his hat and shrugged his shoulders. "Mebbe, Ryan. Mebbe."
The big digital clock on the far wall of the control room clicked over another forty-two minutes, then things began to happen.
"The line's broke," Lori said, pointing at one of the monitors marked Vital Function 17. A blip had appeared, running slowly along, followed by another. And another. The tone changed to a more insistent cheeping, drawing attention to itself.