First Shift: Legacy (Shift, #1)(22)

“Little bunker?” Donald held his blazer up over his mouth as the cloud of dust blew across them. “Do you know how many floors deep this thing is gonna be? If you set it on the ground, it’d be the tallest building in the world—!”

Mick laughed. “Not for long it wouldn’t. Not if you designed it. It’d be the tallest pile of rubble in the world.”

Donald didn’t find this or Mick’s nonchalance amusing. The man in the cowboy hat drew closer. He smiled as he kicked through the packed dirt to meet them, and Donald finally recognized him from TV: Charles Rhodes, the governor of Oklahoma.

“You need to keep some perspective,” Mick added under his breath. “How many bunkers has this country seen that were never used? Not even once? So relax. You’re stressing me out.”

“You Senator Thawman’s boys?”

Governor Rhodes smiled. He had the authentic drawl to go with the authentic hat, the authentic boots, and the authentic buckle. He rested his hands on his hips, a clipboard in one of them.

Mick nodded. “Yessir. I’m Congressman Webb. This is Congressman Keene.”

The two men shook hands. Donald was next. “Governor,” he said.

“Got your delivery.” He pointed the clipboard back toward the staging area. “Just shy of a hundred containers. Should have somethin’ rollin’ in about every week. Need one of you to sign right here.”

Mick reached out and took the clipboard. Donald saw an opportunity to ask something about Senator Thurman, something he figured an old war buddy would know.

“Why do some people call him that?”

Governor Rhodes laughed. “You mean Thaw-man?”

“Yeah.”

Mick flipped through the delivery report, a breeze pinning back the pages for him.

“I’ve heard others call him that when he wasn’t around,” Donald explained, “but I’ve been too scared to ask.”

Mick looked up from the report with a grin. “It’s because he was an ice-cold killer in the war, right?”

Donald cringed. Governor Rhodes laughed.

“Unrelated,” he said. “True, but unrelated.”

The Governor glanced back and forth between them. Mick passed the clipboard to Donald, tapped a page that dealt with the emergency housing facility. Donald looked over the materials list.

“You boys familiar with his anti-cryo bill?” Governor Rhodes asked. He handed Donald a pen, seemed to expect him to just sign the thing and not look over it too closely.

Mick shook his head and shielded his eyes against the Georgia sun. “Anti-cryo?” he asked.

“Yeah. Aw, hell, this probably dates back before you squirts were even born. Senator Thawman penned the bill that put down that cryo fad. Made it illegal to take advantage of rich folk and turn them into ice cubes. It went to the big court, where they voted five–four, and suddenly tens of thousands of popsicles with more money than sense were thawed out and buried proper. These were people, mind you, who’d frozen themselves in the hopes that doctors from the future would discover some medical procedure for extracting their rich heads from their own rich asses!”

The Governor laughed at his own joke, and Mick joined him. A line on the delivery report caught Donald’s eye. He turned the clipboard around and showed the Governor. “Uh, this shows two thousand spools of fiber-optic. I’m pretty sure my plans call for forty spools.”

“Lemme see.” Governor Rhodes took the clipboard and procured another pen from his pocket. He clicked the top of it three times, then scratched out the quantity. He wrote in a new number to the side.

“Wait, will the price reflect that?”

“Price is the same,” he said. “Just sign the bottom.”

“But—”

“Son, this is why hammers cost the Pentagon their weight in gold. It’s government accounting. Just a signature, please.”

“But that’s fifty times more fiber than we’ll need,” Donald complained, even as he found himself scribbling his name. He passed the clipboard to Mick, who signed for the rest of the goods.

“Oh, that’s all right.” Rhodes took the clipboard and pinched the brim of his hat. “I’m sure they’ll find a use for it somewhere.”

“Hey, you know,” Mick said, “I remember that cryo bill. From law school. There were lawsuits, weren’t there? Didn’t a group of families bring murder charges against the Feds?”

The governor laughed. “Yeah, but it didn’t get far. Hard to prove you killed people who’d already been pronounced dead. And then there were Thawman’s bad business investments. Those turned out to be a lifesaver.”

Rhodes tucked his thumb in his belt and stuck out his chest.

“Turned out he had sunk a fortune into one of these cryo companies before digging deeper and reconsidering the...ethical considerations. Old Thawman may have lost his financial skin, but it ended up savin’ his political hide. Made him look like some kinda saint, suffering a loss like that. Only defense better woulda been if he’d unplugged his dear momma with all them others.”

Mick and the Governor laughed. Donald didn’t see what was so funny.

“All right, now, you boys take care. The good state of Oklahoma’ll have another load for ya in a few weeks.”