Frozen Solid A Novel

16




HALLIE THOUGHT GRAETER MIGHT SAY HELLO. INSTEAD, HE POINTED at his wrist.

“You’re late. Doctor. Leland.”

“Actually, I’m not.” Having taken his measure yesterday, Hallie had made a point of being precisely on time this morning. She held up her wristwatch as proof. “Twelve noon.”

Graeter held up both hands. He wore two watches, one on each wrist. “My time is Pole time,” he said. “I have you two minutes late. You might want to synchronize your watch with mine.”

“Pole time,” she said. “Sounds like a beer commercial.” She didn’t touch her watch. He was a never-good-enough man, but he would get no bowing or scraping from her. Might mean butting heads, but she would rather butt than bow any day.

“Sleep well?” Graeter asked.

“Is that a joke?”

“It’ll pass. Or maybe not. Some never adjust.”

“I know altitude. But my mouth feels like I gargled with acid. Do people get sick that quickly here?”

“You’re probably not sick. Yet. It’s frostbite. When you stepped out of the plane, you went from sixty above to about seventy below. Sucked in air. Involuntary, like what happens if you jump into freezing water. It heals in a few days. Usually.”

“Comforting.”

“Have you—”

“Did you find out anything more about the women who died?” she asked.

“I thought we covered this yesterday.”

“We didn’t cover the possibility that some pathogen might have killed them. If that’s the case, it could happen to others.”

“That wasn’t it,” he said, much too casually for her mood just then.

“How could you know that? Just about everybody I’ve talked to so far has been sick with one thing or another.”

“Doc called. He said Lanahan had some kind of operation on her throat. Montalban had surgery, too—a C-section.”

The same things Merritt had said.

Should I tell him?

Merritt could not have been the killer; the one piece of real information Hallie had—thanks to Emily’s video—was that the killer was a man. Graeter—more likely than Merritt, obviously. She would tell him nothing.

He glanced at the watch on his left wrist again. “Let’s go. I have a station to run here.”

He brushed past her and was out the door before she could protest.

A few minutes later, they were walking along the main corridor when Rockie Bacon approached. She wore bunny boots and black insulated Carhartt coveralls over a red plaid shirt. She held a smartphone in one palm and was texting as she walked, oblivious to Hallie and Graeter.

“Good afternoon, Bacon,” Graeter said.

“Good afternoon to you, Mr. Graeter,” she said, no great pleasure in her voice. To Hallie: “We just can’t stop bumping into each other, can we?”

“Are you headed for the early grading?” Graeter asked.

“That’s right.”

“How’s the cold?”

“Can’t seem to shake it.”

“I could get Landis or Richards to handle it this morning.”

“Thanks, but it takes more than that to keep me off my Cat.”

After Bacon walked away, Hallie said, “I thought it was too cold for planes to land now.”

“It is.”

“So why send her out there, sick as she is, to grade the runway?”

“Not runway. Iceway.”

“To grade the iceway.”

“SORs say it gets graded twice a day. So we grade it twice a day.”

They walked on. As Graeter led them to the first level, Hallie asked, “Why are all the stairs yellow?”

“Human factors experts said fewer people would fall down them.”

“Did they do the decorating, too?” She was referring to the irregular polygons in clashing colors—deep blue, fire orange, blood-red, sharp purple—that covered the corridors’ walls and ceilings.

“Sort of. They also claimed that asymmetrical patterning warded off depression. In a place that goes dark for eight months, it’s a serious problem.”

“Reminds me of a badly lit elementary school decorated with paintings by disturbed children. Does it work?”

“Not hardly.”

They moved in their pool of light down dark corridors, past a grimy gym and weight room, offices, storage chambers. Descended stairs at one end of the station, came to an air-lock door with a sign:

ATTENTION! LABORATORY ZONE

AUTHORIZED PERSONS ONLY

DO NOT ENTER UNLESS YOU WANT TO GET BURNED BLOWN UP

OR INFEKTED

“Beaker humor. Merritt can take you in there,” Graeter said.

Minutes later, they stood beneath the station in a rectangular tunnel, eight feet wide and twelve feet high. The floor and walls were smooth, white ice. Icicles and frost formations dangled from the ceiling. Round metal tubes, two feet in diameter, hung from one wall.

“Welcome to the Underground,” Graeter said. “A labyrinth carved out over the years. This main tunnel runs under the length of the station. Other tunnels branch off, and still others branch off them. Imagine a Scrabble board late in the game.”

“What is that smell?”

“Sewage and diesel fuel.”

They walked on. Graeter turned right down one secondary corridor, right again into another, and kept turning into new corridors for several minutes. “Know where you are?”

“Do you mean could I find my way back to the stairs? Maybe.”

“Maybe isn’t good enough at Pole,” Graeter said.

“Why did I know you were going to say that?” Hallie asked.

“That’s what you need to know about the Underground. Let’s go back.”

“What else is down here?” Hallie asked as they walked.

“Bulk food storage. Generators, primary and backups. Fuel reservoirs. NCS holdings more than anything else.”

“NCS?”

“Non–cold sensitive. Everything from old furniture to files.”

They passed a chamber whose entrance was blocked by a sheet of heavy black canvas. The other “rooms” she’d seen were open.

“What’s in there?” she asked.

“That’s the morgue. Lanahan and Montalban are in there, until we get them on a flight out.”

She stopped. “Is that where Emily stayed?”

“Yes.”

He looked at the black sheet, then back at her. Turned and kept going. She lingered for a few moments, feeling tears start to well up, pushed them back down. Rage came, hot and red. Then grief, and then, last of all, horror.

Something touched her shoulder and she started. “Jesus!”

Graeter. He had come back without her hearing. “I told you about ghosts,” he said.