Jack was riveted. “So by now the ground is rumbling, trees at the top of the hill are shaking, scaring flocks of birds from their nests, and this cloud of dust and debris is rolling over the top of the hill! I don’t know about Chuck, but I was about to shit myself. You know that moment of sudden calm when shit is about to get real? When it is like everything pauses for just a second and then explodes into chaos?” Jack knew exactly what he was talking about. “Well that was exactly what happened. It was like everything stopped for just a fraction of a second and BOOM, out of this cloud of dirt explodes this huge herd of deer! There must have been over fifty of them! As they burst into our clearing they scattered every which way, and in seconds the clearing is filled with utter chaos. Then as if that weren’t enough, two mountain lions crest the hill and come charging down into the clearing after them!
“Before we could really react, Jonas, who had climbed on top of the crate when he couldn’t push it down off the ramp, opens fire, tearing these deer apart! He’s yelling ‘Goddamn! Goddamn! Fuckin Mutes!’ as he blasts away!” Emmet was laughing so hard he could barely talk and Chuck’s shoulders were shaking as he joined in. Getting his hysteria under control, he says, “We just looked at each other, and Chuck turns to Jonas, and says ‘You Freezer burnt moron!’ grabs his rifle, which was still slung around his shoulder, and yanks him clean off the crate! Then he grabs him by the collar and drags his ass over to one of the dead deer and says, ‘does this look like a fuckin Mute to you?’.” Emmet wiped a tear from his eye, still trying to keep his laughter in check. “So Jonas looks at the dead deer, then at Chuck, then the deer again, then back at Chuck and finally pushes himself off the ground, dusts himself off and says ‘How the hell should I know, I’m from Miami!’.” He burst out in laughter again and Chuck and Jack joined in.
Emmet calmed down and got a look of nostalgia on his face. “That dumb sonofabitch took down seven deer! We left that supply crate and crammed the hold full of deer. We ate venison for a month!”
* * *
The entrance to the complex was an unassuming door. At least it would look like any old rusty and weathered door if it wasn’t embedded in the side of a small hill in the middle of nowhere. Crusty dirt and rust covered the bottom half of the door, as if it had been buried for many years; the top was heavily weathered, and if anything had ever been painted on it, it had long since worn away. Despite the rust and other patina, it was obvious the door was still rock solid and sturdy. The entrance would not be visible from the sky, and even from the ground it was hard to spot. There was heavy brush all over the area. Someone had dug out the dirt that had drifted up to the door over the years, and a path had been stomped into the brush. As he looked around the area, Jack remarked at how different it looked. A week and a half ago he was in this very spot, but most of the hill to his left was an open pit almost a hundred feet deep, and the hill in front of him didn’t exist. They had planned to use the soil and rock they had excavated to make natural looking hills to hide the entrance, and it looked like whoever finished did a damn fine job. Of course, three hundred years of weather helped to blend it into the surrounding landscape as well.
“How often do you guys come up here?”
A heavy steel bar that had obviously been installed fairly recently secured the door. Emmet went to unlock it while Chuck answered, “Every couple weeks, lately. We’ve gotten pretty good at picking candidates that will survive, and we have staggered the birthing chambers so that we can cycle a new one every two weeks. It’s been almost six months since the doc had a failure. Before that we would collect six at a time and if we were lucky, two would make it. It was slow going at first, but in another year we’ll have over a hundred reborn.”
“What changed to get the failure rate so low?” Emmet had finished unlocking the door, and Chuck moved to it to help swing it open. A loud groan echoed between the hills as the heavy steel door swung on rusty hinges.
Chuck dusted off his gloved hands and said, “The selection process changed. We now have tools to examine the tissue before harvesting, and we leave the ones that we are not sure we can bring back. About one in three are no good to us because of injury or the nature of their disease. Another third are ‘Freezer Burnt’ leaving the rest as viable candidates. We harvested one that was questionable about two years ago and when he woke up he only had memories to the age of five.” Jack shuddered at that thought. “We don’t even try the questionable ones any more. Well, except you.”
“Freezer burn? I caught that term in Emmet’s story earlier, what exactly does that mean?”
“Ever eat a steak that was in the freezer too long? The meat isn’t the same after that. Same kind of thing can happen to a corpse in deep freeze, and when it comes to recovering the memories from a frozen brain, that isn’t good. Sometimes it results in some lost memories, sometimes far worse. Some of the native born started using it as a slur against the reborn, and it sort of caught on as a general insult whenever someone did something really stupid.”
Chuck pulled out his PDP, and tapped a few times on the screen, then put it to his ear like a telephone. “We’re at the entrance, shouldn’t take more than an hour.” He put the PDP away and looked at Jack. “They are in constant contact with our PDPs but once we go in there they will lose contact and we will not have communications with them. If we don’t report back in an hour, they will send someone to investigate. We learned a long time ago that it’s better to be safe than sorry.”
“What happened?”
“One of our exploration parties stumbled on a Mute camp. They tried to retreat to their flyer but the Mutes pressed the attack and ended up damaging the flyer. The next day we sent out a search party and found one of them left, holed up in a small cave, down to just a sidearm and a handful of ammo. He and his group been cornered and made their last stand. They fought well, but Mutes are stubborn and mean, and once they start a fight, they don’t let off until they win or die. By the time we got there, he was the lone survivor. The last few Mutes were just about to storm his shelter when the cavalry arrived.” He paused, a distant look in his eyes, and Jack could sense he had a personal hand in the situation. “After that, we changed the rules to check in at predetermined intervals and to start the rescue process as soon as someone doesn’t check in.”
With that he grinned and marched through the door. Jack followed, and Emmet walked to the wall just inside the door and flipped a big lever. There was a thud and a whine and lights came on, illuminating the short hallway that ended at a large door. They approached the door, and Chuck typed a code in a keypad that looked out of place. The doors swung open to reveal a large elevator car.
Before Jack could ask, Chuck volunteered, “They installed this keypad and a security system when they figured out how valuable this place is. There are automatic turret mounted rifles above the ceiling there and there.” He pointed to small holes in the ceiling in front of the elevator. “Our PDPs transmit a code that gives us a minute to get the system disarmed. If someone finds this place and gets through the first door, they won’t make it past this spot.”
Jack shivered at the brutality of such a security system. Chuck seemed to be reading his mind and said, “For a group of people who are on the verge of extinction, you would think they would take more precautions to NOT kill each other, but that isn’t exactly the case. If I had my way, I would at least put some kind of deterrent or warning system in so anyone who came across this wouldn’t end up dead before they knew what was going on. I’m sure Teague explained it to you, Jack, but if there is any question in your mind, put it to rest, humanity lost its respect for life a long time ago, and this is not the same world you and I grew up in.”
They climbed aboard the elevator and Chuck pressed the second of five buttons. The complex was three levels deep, Jack recalled, the third level was where all the utilities and the power plant were located. When he was planning the construction, the drawings called for two large concrete reservoirs surrounding a massive p
latform on the third floor. The level also had plans for ventilation shafts that ran to the surface, and Jack had always assumed they were putting in some huge diesel generators and using the reservoirs for fuel storage. They must have used the reservoirs for cooling the power plant. Assuming level one and two were for the storage of the bodies, that left one button that didn’t belong. It was red and like the keypad above, looked out of place. “What’s the last button for?”
“Panic Button.” Nobody said anything else, so Jack didn’t ask further.
The doors opened to a small room with some old medical and research equipment stashed along the walls. The technology was Jack’s era, and it was in poor shape. There was another door in front of them, and Emmet pushed through without a word, walking into a large chamber about five hundred feet long and seven hundred feet wide. There was a heavy concrete column every thirty feet spaced evenly over the whole level. In Jack’s day, they couldn’t make a room this big underground and not have the supports. It reminded him of the challenges ahead.
The room wasn’t quite what Jack expected. After hearing the term ‘Freezer’, he sort of expected entire cold rooms filled with bodies. Instead it was just a really big room filled with what appeared to be large, cylindrical tubes, each about eight feet long and capped at both ends. They were wider than they were tall, so not exactly cylindrical, more of an oval shaped tube, like some kind of futuristic casket. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, evenly spaced in rows, as far as the eye could see. Jack shivered. That’s exactly what these are, caskets he thought to himself.
There was a thick layer of dust on most of them, and most of the floor was covered in the dust as well. Even underground with very little air circulation, three hundred years is enough time for dust to collect. Footprints drew a big tree on the ground, starting heavy at the door, and branching out across the floor in all directions for hundreds of feet.
Jack walked up to the first tube and examined it. The tube was sitting on an elevated base. The oval tube was about four feet wide and about three feet tall. It was all black except for a short window on the side that ran for six feet of the length. There were tubes and boxes mounted to various parts of the cylinder, and a control panel with a screen at the end. The one Jack was looking at was no longer covered in dust, and he paled when he peered into the window at a naked, headless, blue corpse lying inside. “What the hell?”
He jumped as Emmet seemed to appear at his side and said, “We don’t have room for the whole body, so we only take what we need. It’s kind of gruesome work, but you get used to it.” Jack shivered again, his stomach churning at the idea.
“How do you... remove them?” Jack only wanted to know out of morbid curiosity.
“There are two ways to do it. First way is to use a wide chisel and a hammer. The second way is to just grab them firmly and pull. They tend to break off pretty clean that way.”
“Oh my God! You just snap them right off?” This made him retch a little, and he had to walk away to settle his stomach. Chuck walked to him and handed him a bottle.
“Take a drink, it will pass. These folks have been dead for over three hundred years, they don’t feel a thing, and besides, they are usually pretty thankful when they wake up on a table back at New Hope.” Jack took a swallow, forcing the bile back down his throat. He thought about that for a second, realizing that as gruesome as it seemed, it was done to give these people another chance, and to save humanity.
He handed the bottle back to Chuck. “Thanks. Look, you aren’t going to make me break off someone’s head as some sort of weird initiation are you?” There was no way Jack was going to ‘harvest’ anyone.
Chuck laughed. “No, we’ll take care of that part. You just have yourself a look around. After we get what we need here we can go down below so you can see some of the inner workings and the modifications on that level.” He pulled out his PDP and tapped a few things. “Hey Emmet, this way. We are looking for Mr. Henry Halstead and Miss Irene Russell.”
Emmet’s eyebrows shot up. “Another woman? God I hope she’s hot and likes middle aged black men!” They both laughed and headed to the left back corner. Jack went the other way.
* * *
He wandered the first level for about ten minutes, noticing that the further back he got, the tubes changed more and more. The ones at the front had control panels with screens like the one on his datapad. The ones he was looking at now had screens but they were more like the television screens he was used to. Most of the units had lights on them, even the ones that had been harvested. Jack figured that they left the units running when they harvested so that the decaying bodies didn’t stink the place up. There were a few units where the light was off, and he surmised that those units had failed for some reason. Jack brushed the dust off one of the dead units and was shocked to see that the body was very well preserved in the tube. He would have thought that it would just be dust in there. He guessed that the tubes were vacuum sealed, and the extreme cold probably killed any bacteria that would have been around to consume the flesh. It was just a guess but it sounded good.
He reached the end of the room, and wandered along the wall for a while. There were few footprints back here, only a couple paths that led to a tube without any dust on it. He made his way back to the elevator, and waited for Chuck and Emmet. He could hear them in the distance talking, and even heard Emmet’s laugh. Chuck was a no bullshit kind of guy, and Jack figured that he could trust him to have his back in any situation. Emmet was a character, and although Jack liked him, he wasn’t sure if he would want to spend any serious time hanging around him. He was the kind of guy you loved to have drinks with but he didn’t seem to have an ‘off’ switch. It would get exhausting spending too much time with him. Despite his exuberant personality, Jack could see him as a competent soldier; he was alert and knew he had a job to do.
As interesting as this place was, he didn’t really have anything to do and his mind was on Wendy when the two men got back to the door. They were carrying what looked like two metal cases, each about the size of a bowling bag. They were flat black in color and had blinking lights on the side. Emmet looked at Jack and with a long face said, “She’s kinda homely”.
Jack shook his head, laughed, and said, “Maybe the doc can tweak her DNA a little and make her prettier.” Emmet’s expression suggested that he was giving it serious thought.
He looked at Chuck and said, “Do you think he can do that?” Chuck and Jack both laughed. “No, really, do you think he could make these women prettier? Think about it! If the women were hotter they could get laid more often and have more kids!”
Emmet was on a roll, but Chuck shut him up by saying, “I doubt it, I mean, just look at you! You think if he was gonna fix anything it would have been your ugly mug.” They all laughed and got on the elevator.
Chuck pushed the third button. “We don’t go down here much, there’s a lot more freezer burn here, and most of the people here can’t be recovered. This was where Wendy found your body. It’s way in the back.”
Jack was suddenly nervous. He wanted to see where he had been for the last few hundred years, but didn’t know what he would feel when he saw it.
The elevator stopped and opened, this time directly into the storage area. It was identical to the one upstairs, only the units in front were older and a little bigger, like the units toward the back of the first level. As they walked toward the back, the units got larger and more ominous looking. In the far back corner, the dust had been cleared away from a tube that was fifteen feet long and eight feet in diameter. This one was not ovular in shape, it just looked like a big chunk of pipe with caps bolted on to each end. There was no screen or fancy controls, just a panel with a lot of buttons and lights, none of which were lit. Fixed to the cap at one end of the tube was a metal box, about fifteen inches square and six inches thick. The door was hanging open and the box empty. Chuck and Emmet were hanging back a little, allowing Jack to make his peace with this on his own.
Despite seeing his own final resting place, he really didn’t feel anything. Morbid curiosity overwhelmed him again and he climbed up on a platform that was welded to the side of the tube and looked through the glass. The pale withered body did not look familiar in the least. Jack shook his head, thinking that he couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds when he died. “I’m glad I don’t remember those last few months,” he said out loud to nobody. He continued to stare at his body for a few more minutes then climbed down to leave. He took one last look around, but was satisfied there was nothing of importance here.
* * *
They rode the elevator to the third floor in silence. Jack figured that both these men had seen their own bodies and knew that he would probably not be in a bright and shiny mood. They were right. Despite not feeling much when seeing his own dead body, it had seemed to drive home the idea that this whole facility was basically a cemetery.
The third floor was familiar to Jack. He had more or less completed it by the time he found out about the cancer. The massive reactor and its steam powered generator sat side by side on the platform he had helped pour. They were quiet and cold now, having been shut down four years ago when they were replaced by new technology. Chuck showed him the unit that now powered the facility, providing lights and running the compressors that kept the liquid nitrogen cold and pumped through all the tubes in the levels above. The unit was about six feet by six feet by four feet, and the four inch thick main power lines that had been cut from the nuclear generator now fed off that little black box. Jack marveled at it for a while, thinking of the possibilities of such a small and powerful source of energy.
The Freezer (Genesis Endeavor Book 1) Page 23