21
When he could no longer look at the notes and see anything but blood, Donald went for what had become his customary stroll among the guns and dozing drones. This was his escape from the hiss of Anna’s work and the cramped confines of their makeshift home, and it was during these laps through the darkened storehouse that he came nearest to clearing his head from his dreams, from the prior night’s bottle of scotch, and from the mix of emotions he was beginning to feel for Anna.
Most of all, he walked those laps and tried to make sense of this new world. He puzzled over what Thurman and Victor had planned for the silos. Five hundred years below ground, and then what Donald desperately wanted to know. And here was when he felt truly alive: when he was taking action, when he was digging for answers. It was the same fleeting sense of power he had felt from refusing their pills, from staining his fingers purple and tonguing the ulcers that formed in his cheeks. It was the rattling of chains. Chains he could not hope to shake loose, but that he could shake nonetheless.
He passed the two lifts, feeling such courage, and tried both call buttons. He tried them several times a day, but neither would light without a badge. He was beginning to know the rules and secrets of that darkened place. In his explorations, he had discovered the plastic crate with the missing firearm, the one he assumed Victor had stolen. The airtight seal was broken, and the other guns inside reeked of grease. It seemed strange at first that he was a prisoner locked away with instruments of war, but then he realized that he and Anna had simply been cloistered away with all the other forbidden things. They had been tucked away where they wouldn’t be discovered.
It hadn’t kept him from prying open other crates to see what was inside. Some contained folded uniforms and suits like astronauts wore, all vacuum sealed in thick plastic. Another held helmets with large domes and metal collars. There were flashlights with red lenses, food and medical kits, backpacks, rounds and rounds of ammo, and myriad other devices and gadgets he could only guess at. The day before, he had found a laminated map in one crate, a chart of the fifty silos. There were red lines that radiated from the silos, one from each, and met at a single point in the distance. Donald had traced the lines with his finger, holding the map up to catch the light spilling from the distant offices. These things were puzzled over and put back in their place, clues to a mystery he couldn’t define.
He stopped during his lap to perform a set of jumping jacks in the wide aisles between the sleeping drones. The exercise had been a struggle just two days ago, but the chill seemed to be melting from his veins. And the more he pushed himself, the more awake and alert he seemed to become. He did seventy-five, which was ten more than yesterday. After catching his breath, he dropped down to see how many pushups he could do on his atrophied muscles. And it was here, on the third day of his captivity, that he discovered the launch lift, a garage door that barely came to his waist but was wide enough for the wings that lurked beneath the tarps.
Donald rose from his pushup and approached the low door. The entire storehouse was kept incredibly dim, this wall almost pitch black. He thought about going for one of the flashlights when he saw the red handle. A tug, and the door slid up into the wall. On his hands and knees, Donald explored the cavity beyond, which went back over a dozen feet. There were no buttons or levers that he could feel along the walls, no method of operating the lift.
Curious, he crawled out and decided to grab a flashlight. Before he turned, however, he saw another door along the darkened wall, a door he’d never noticed before, one he assumed led to a closet or a mechanical space. Donald tried the handle and found it unlocked, a dim hallway beyond. He glanced toward the spill of light in the direction of the offices, a barely audible hiss emanating from Anna’s work. Reaching inside the hall, he fumbled for a light switch, and the overhead bulbs flickered hesitantly. Shielding his eyes—having grown used to the darkness in the warehouse—he crept inside. He pulled the door shut behind him so as not to disturb the sleeping drones.
The hallway beyond possessed the eerie calm of a place haunted. It ran fifty paces to a door at the far end, with a pair of doors on either side. More offices, he assumed, similar to the small home Anna had carved out in the back of the warehouse. He tried the first door, and the odor of mothballs or some cleaning chemical wafted out. Inside, he discovered where his cot had come from. There were rows of bunks, the shuffle of recent footsteps in a layer of dust, and a place where two small beds formerly lay. There were dressers built into the walls and a trunk at the foot of each bed. The absence of people could be felt. This was a place meant for the living, and Donald wondered briefly why the two cots had been removed at all, why not sleep here His curiosity grew stronger as he peeked into the door across the hall and found bathroom stalls and a cluster of showers.
The next two doors were more of the same, except for a row of urinals in the bathroom. The sight of these made Donald need to go. He crept inside and tested one, was mildly surprised when it flushed and was startled by how loud it was. While he went, he had a fear that Anna was looking for him, that she might hear the water banging through the pipes and barge in.
He finished and flushed, then noted the layer of dust on the handle of the neighboring urinal. Perhaps this place had been taken off the maintenance rounds while Anna was awake. Maybe people had lived down here and kept up with the munitions once but had relocated to make room for her secret presence. But Donald didn’t remember anyone coming to this level during his first shift. No, these were quarters kept for another time, much like the machines beneath the tarps. And rather than put Donald where it made the most sense, where there was plenty of room and a second shower, Anna had kept him in the suite she’d long ago made for herself. To keep him near, perhaps. And Donald wondered for the first time if he was awake not because he held the answer to any mystery, but simply because she wanted him to be.
He washed his hands and studied himself in the mirror. His eyes were red and puffy, his hair disheveled, his cheeks gaunt and bearing three days of growth. He was turning gray, he saw. The centuries spent asleep were aging him. He laughed at this, laughed at the idea that the man in the mirror was him at all, that he was still alive, his wife gone, that any of this were more than a dream. Flicking off the light, he left the bathroom to the ghosts and checked the door at the end of the hall.
Inside, he found furniture locked in ice, the light from the hallway shimmering as it caught what looked like massive cubes of frozen water. The illusion was dispelled as he fumbled for the switch. It was sheets of plastic thrown over tables and chairs, a fine mist of dust settled on top. Donald approached one of the tables and saw the computer display beneath the sheet. The chairs were attached to the desks, and there was something familiar about the knobs and levers. He knelt and fumbled for the edge of the plastic and peeled it up noisily. He turned and checked the empty hallway, unable to shake the feeling of others being present.
The flight controls he revealed took him back to another life. Here was the stick his sister had called a yoke, the pedals beneath the seat she had called something else, the throttle and all the other dials and indicators. Donald remembered touring her training facility after she graduated flight school. They had flown to Colorado for her ceremony. He remembered watching a screen just like this as her drone took to the air and joined a formation of others. He remembered the view of Colorado from the nose of her graceful machine in flight.
He glanced around the room at the dozen or so stations. The obvious need for the place slammed into what had felt like a secret discovery. He imagined voices in the hallway, men and women showering and chatting, towels being snapped at asses, someone looking to borrow a razor, a shift of pilots sitting at these desks where coffee could lie perfectly still in steaming mugs as death was rained down from above.
Donald returned the plastic sheet. Dust shivered off and ran down the gleaming material like an avalanche on a snowy hillside. He thought of his sister, asleep and hidden some levels below where he couldn’t find her, and he wondered if she hadn’t been brought there as a surprise for him at all. Maybe she had been brought as a surprise for some future others.
And suddenly, thinking of her, thinking of a time lost to dreams and lonely tears, Donald found himself patting his pockets in search of something. Pills. An old prescription with her name on it. Helen had forced him to see a doctor, hadn’t she And Donald suddenly knew why he couldn’t forget, why their drugs didn’t work on him. The realization came with a powerful longing to see his sister. Charlotte was the why. She was the answer to one of Thurman’s riddles.