Second Shift: Order (Shift, #2)(26)

The pipes squealed as Anna turned off the shower. Her singing subsided back into a hum, a song of sadness and grief, a hymn for the funeral they were about to attend. Donald tried a few more names, anxious to discover something, anything. He would search every night while the silo slept if he had to. He would search while he pretended to work on this problem with the silos. He wouldn’t sleep until he knew, until he found her.

“Do you need to shower before the service” Anna called out from the bathroom.

He didn’t want to go to the service, he nearly said. He knew Victor as someone to fear, a boss sitting across the hallway, always watching, dispensing drugs, manipulating him. At least, that’s how the paranoia of those days made it all seem.

“I’ll go like this,” he said. He still wore the beige coveralls they’d given him the day before. He flipped through random pictures again, starting at the top of the alphabet. What other name The fear was that he’d forget what she looked like. Or that she’d look more and more like Anna in his mind. He couldn’t let that happen.

“Find anything”

She snuck up behind him and reached for something on the desk. A towel was wrapped around her breasts and reached the middle of her thighs. Her skin was wet. She grabbed a hairbrush and walked, humming, back to the bathroom. Donald forgot to answer. His body responded to Anna in a way that made him furious and full of guilt. The monitor fogged from the steam. He felt clammy from something else.

He was still married, he reminded himself. He would be until he knew what’d happened to Helen. He would be loyal to her forever.

Loyalty.

On a whim, he searched for the name Karma.

One hit. Donald sat up straight. His palms felt damp. He hadn’t imagined a hit. It was their dog’s name, the nearest thing he and Helen ever had to a child of their own. He brought up the picture.

“I guess we’re all wearing these horrid outfits to the funeral, right” Anna passed the desk as she snapped up the front of her white coveralls. Donald only noticed in the corner of his tear-filled vision. He covered his mouth and felt his body tremble with suppressed sobs. On the monitor, in a tiny square of black and white pixels in the middle of a work badge, was his wife.

“You’ll be ready to go in a few minutes, won’t you”

Anna disappeared back into the bathroom, brushing her hair. Donald wiped his cheeks, salt on his lips while he read. Anna’s humming made it nearly impossible.

Karma Brewer. There were several occupations listed, with a badge photo for each. Teacher, School Master, Judge—more wrinkles in each picture but always the same half-smile. He opened the full file, thinking suddenly what it would’ve been like to have been on the very first shift in Silo 1, to watch her life unfold next door, maybe even reach out and contact her somehow. A judge. It’d been a dream of hers to be a judge one day. Donald wept while Anna hummed. Through a lens of tears, he read about his wife.



Married, it said, which didn’t throw up any flags at first. Married, of course. To him. Until he read about her death. Eighty-two years old. Survived by Rick Brewer and two children, Athena and Mars.

Rick Brewer.

The walls and ceiling bulged inward. Donald felt a chill, the cold of the pod and the deep sleep returning to his veins. There were more pictures. He followed the links to other files. To this husband’s files.

“Mick,” Anna whispered behind him.

Donald startled and turned to find her reading over his shoulder. Drying tears streaked his face, but he didn’t care. His best friend and his wife. Two kids. He turned back to the screen and pulled up the daughter’s file. Athena’s. There were several pictures from different careers and phases of her life. She had Helen’s mouth.

“Donny. Please don’t.”

A hand on his shoulder. Donald flinched from it and watched an animation wrought by furious clicks, this child growing into an approximation of his wife, until the girl’s own children appeared in her file.

“Donny,” Anna whispered. “We’re gonna be late for the funeral.”

Donald wept. Sobs tore through him as if he were made of tissue. “Late,” he cried. “A hundred years too late.” He sputtered this last, overcome with misery. There was a granddaughter on the screen that was not his, a great granddaughter one more click away. They stared out at him, all of them, none with eyes like his own.





14




Donald went to Victor’s funeral numb. He rode the elevator in silence, watched his boots kick ahead of himself as he teetered forward, but what he found on the medical level wasn’t a funeral at all—it was body disposal. It was them storing the remains back in a pod because they had no dirt in which to bury their dead. Their food came from cans. Their bodies returned to the same.

Donald was introduced to Erskine, who explained unprompted that the body would not rot. The same invisible machines that allowed them to survive the freezing process and turned their waking piss the color of charcoal would keep the dead as soft and fresh as the living. Donald heard all of this. He watched as the man he had known as Victor was prepped for deep freeze. As a reflex, he looked for something on a clipboard to sign, some nominal gesture that he was in charge, that anyone there was in charge.

They wheeled the body down a hall and through a sea of pods. The deep freeze was a cemetery, Donald saw. A grid of bodies laid flat, only a name to feebly encapsulate all that lay within. He wondered how many of the pods contained the dead. Some men must die on their shifts from natural causes. Some must break down as Victor had. They weren’t immortal, he and these people, they were simply skipping through time. And some of those skipping undoubtedly stumbled and fell.