7
A doctor brought soup and bread a few hours later, plus a tall glass of water. Donald ate hungrily while the man checked his arm. The warm soup felt good. It slid to his center and seemed to radiate its heat outward. He tore at the bread with his teeth and chased it with the water. Somehow these things were going to keep his flesh from collapsing inward. Donald ate with the desperation of so many years of fasting.
“Thank you,” he said between bites. “For the food.”
The doctor glanced up from checking his blood pressure. He was an older man, heavyset, with great bushy eyebrows and a fine wisp of hair clinging to his scalp like a cloud to a hilltop.
“I’m Donald,” he said, introducing himself.
There was a wrinkle of confusion on the old man’s brow. His gray eyes strayed toward his clipboard as if either it or his patient couldn’t be trusted. The needle on the gauge jumped with Donald’s pulse.
“Who’re you” Donald asked.
“I’m Doctor Henson,” he finally said, though without confidence.
Donald took a long swig on his water, thankful they’d left it at room temperature. He didn’t want anything cold inside him ever again. “Where’re you from”
The doctor removed the cuff from Donald’s arm with a loud rip. “Level ten. But I work out of the shift office on sixty-eight.” He put his tools back in his bag and made a note on the clipboard.
“No, I mean, where are you from. You know . . . before.”
Dr. Henson patted Donald’s knee and stood. The clipboard went on a hook on the outside of the door. “You might have some dizziness the next few days. Let us know if you experience any trembling, okay”
Donald nodded. He remembered being given the same advice earlier. Or was that his last shift Maybe the repetition was for those who had trouble remembering. He wasn’t going to be one of those people. Not this time.
A shadow fell into the room. Donald looked up to see the Thaw Man in the doorway. He gripped the meal tray to keep it from sliding off his knees.
The Thaw Man nodded to Dr. Henson, but this was not their names. Thurman, Donald told himself. Senator Thurman. He knew this.
“Do you have a moment” Thurman asked the doctor.
“Of course.” Henson grabbed his bag and stepped outside. The door clicked shut, leaving Donald alone with his soup.
He took quiet spoonfuls, trying to make anything of the murmurs on the other side of the door. Thurman, he reminded himself again. And not a senator. Senator of what Those days were gone. Donald had drawn the plans.
The report stood tented on the dresser, returned to its spot. Donald took a bite of bread and remembered the floors he’d laid out. Those floors were now real. They existed. People lived inside them, raising their children, laughing, having fights, singing in the shower. People lived in the things he’d made, in the holes he’d dug. Those people—and no more.
A few minutes passed before the knob tilted and the door swung inward. The Thaw Man entered the room alone. He pressed the door shut and frowned at Donald. “How’re you feeling”
The spoon clacked against the rim of the bowl. Donald set the utensil down and gripped the tray with both hands to keep them from shaking, to keep them from forming fists.
“You know,” Donald hissed, teeth clenched together. “You know what we did.”
Thurman showed his palms. “We did what had to be done.”
“No. Don’t give me that.” Donald shook his head. The water in his glass trembled as if something dangerous approached. “The world . . .”
“We saved it.”
“That’s not true!” Donald’s voice cracked. He tried to remember. “There is no world.” He recalled the view from the top, from the cafeteria. He remembered the hills a dull brown, the sky full of menacing clouds. “We ended it. We killed everyone.”
“They were already dead,” Thurman said. “We all were. Everyone dies, son. The only thing that matters is—”
“No.” Donald waved the words away as if they were buzzing things that could bite him. “There’s no justifying this—” He felt spittle form on his lips, wiped it away with his sleeve. The tray on his lap slid dangerously, and Thurman moved swifter than his years to catch it. He placed what was left of the meal on the bedside table, and up close, Donald could see that he had gotten older. The wrinkles were deeper, the skin hanging from the bones. He wondered how much time Thurman had spent awake while Donald slept.
“I killed a lot of men in the war,” Thurman said, looking down at the tray of half-eaten food.
Donald found himself focused on the old man’s neck. He interlocked his hands to keep them still. This sudden admission about killing made it seem as if he could read Donald’s mind, like this was some kind of a warning for Donald to stay his murderous plans.
Thurman turned to the dresser and picked up the folded report. He opened it, and Donald caught sight of the pale blue dollops, his ice-tinged tears from earlier.
“Some say killing gets easier the longer you’re at it,” Thurman said. He sounded sad, not threatening. Donald looked down at his own knees and saw that they were bouncing. He forced his heels against the carpet and tried to pin them there.
“For me, it only got worse. There was a man in Iran—”
“The entire goddamn planet,” Donald whispered, stressing each word. This was what he said, but all he could think about was his wife. Bombs going off, the plans he’d drawn, Helen pulled down the wrong hill, marbles rolling apart, everything that had ever existed crumbling to ruin. “We killed everyone.”
The senator took in a deep breath and held it a moment. “I told you,” he said. “They were already dead.”
Donald’s knees began bouncing again. There was no controlling it. Thurman studied the report, seemed unsure of something. The paper faintly shook, but maybe it was the overhead vent blowing, which also stirred his hair.
“We were outside of Kashmar,” Thurman said. “This was toward the end of the war, when we were getting our butts kicked and telling the world we were winning. I had a corporal in my squad, our team medic, a James Hannigan. Young. Always cracking jokes but serious when he needed to be. The kind of guy everyone likes. The hardest kind to lose.”
Thurman shook his head. He stared off into the distance. The vent in the ceiling quieted, but the report continued to quiver.
“I killed a lot of men during the war, but only once to really save a life. The rest, you never knew what you were doing when you pulled the trigger. Maybe the guy you take out is never gonna find his own target, never hurt a soul. Maybe he’s gonna be one of the thousands who drop their rifles and blend in with the civvies, go back to their families, open a kasava stand near the embassy and talk basketball with the troops stationed outside. A good man. You never knew. You’re killing these men, and you never knew if you were doing it for a good reason or not.”
“How many billions—” Donald swallowed. He slid to the edge of the bed and reached toward the tray. Thurman knew what he was after and passed the glass of water, half empty. He continued to ignore Donald’s complaints.
“Hannigan got hit with shrapnel outside of Kashmar. If we could get him to a medic, it was the kind of wound you survived, the kind you lift your shirt in a bar to show off the scars one day. But he couldn’t walk, and it was too hot to send in an airlift. Our squad was hemmed in and would need to fight our way out. I didn’t think we could get to a safe LZ in time to save him. But what I knew, because I’d seen it too many damn times before, is that two or three of my men would die trying to get him out. That’s what happens when you’re lugging a soldier instead of a rifle.” Thurman pressed his sleeve to his forehead. “I’d seen it before.”
“You left him behind,” Donald said, seeing where this was going. He took a sip of water. The surface was agitated.
“No. I killed him.” Thurman stared at the foot of the bed. He stared at nothing. “The enemy wouldn’t have let him die. Not there, not like that. They would’ve patched him up so they could catch it on film. They would’ve stitched up his belly so they could open his throat.” He turned to Donald. “I had to make a decision, and I had to make it fast. And the longer I’ve lived with it, the more I’ve come to agree with what I did. We lost one man that day. I saved two or three others.”
Donald shook his head. “That’s not the same as what we— what you—”
“It’s precisely the same. Do you remember Safed What the media called the outbreak”
Donald remembered Safed. An Israeli town near Nazareth. Near Syria. The deadliest WMD strike of the war. He nodded.
“The rest of the world would’ve looked just like that. Just like Safed.” Thurman snapped his fingers. “Ten billion lights go out all at once. We were already infected, son. It was just a matter of triggering it. Safed was . . . like a beta test.”
Donald shook his head. “I don’t believe you. Why would anyone do that”
Thurman frowned. “Don’t be naive, son. This life means nothing to some. You put a switch in front of ten billion people, a switch that kills every one of us the moment you hit it, and you’d have thousands of hands racing to be the one. Tens of thousands. It would only be a matter of time. And that switch existed.”
“No.” Donald flashed back to the first conversation he’d ever had with the senator as a member of Congress, after winning office the first time. It had felt like this, the lies and the truth intermingling and shielding one another. “You’ll never convince me,” he said. “You’ll have to drug me or kill me. You’ll never convince me.”
Thurman nodded as if he agreed. “Drugging you doesn’t work. I’ve read up on your first shift. There’s a small percentage of people with some kind of resistance. I’d love to know why.”
Donald laughed. He settled against the wall behind the cot and nestled into the darkness the top bunk provided. “Maybe I’ve seen too much to forget,” he said.
“No, I don’t think so.” Thurman lowered his head so he could still make eye contact. Donald took a sip of water, both hands wrapped around the glass. “The more you see,” Thurman said, “the worse the trauma is, the better it works. Except for some people. Which is why we took a sample.”
Donald glanced down at his arm. A small square of gauze had been taped over the spot of blood left by the doctor’s needle. He felt a caustic mix of helplessness and fear well up, the mix that moves caged animals to bite at curious hands. “You woke me to take my blood”
“Not exactly.” Thurman hesitated. “Your resistance is something I’m curious about. The reason you’re awake is because I was asked to wake you. We’re losing silos—”
“I thought that was the plan,” Donald spat. “Losing silos. I thought that was what you wanted.” He remembered crossing one out with red ink, all those many lives lost. They had accounted for this. Silos were expendable. That’s what he’d been told.
Thurman shook his head. “Whatever’s happening out there, we need to understand it. And there’s someone here who . . . who thinks you may have stumbled onto the answer. A few questions, and then we can put you back under.”
Back under. So he wasn’t going to be out for long. They woke him to take his blood and to drill into his mind, and then back to sleep. Donald rubbed his arms, which felt thin and atrophied. He was dying in that pod. Only, more slowly than he would like.
“We need to know what you remember about this report.” Thurman held it out. Donald waved the thing away.
“I already looked it over,” he said. He didn’t want to see it again. He could close his eyes and see people spilling out onto the dusty land, a cloud of killing mist, the people that he had ordered dead, more people being trampled inside.
“We have other medications that might ease the—”
“No. No more drugs.” Donald crossed his wrists and spread his arms out, slicing the air with both hands. “Look, I don’t have a resistance to your drugs.” The truth. He was sick of the lies. “There’s no mystery. I just stopped taking the pills.”
It felt good to admit it. What were they going to do, anyway Put him back to sleep That was the answer no matter what. He took another sip of water while he let the confession sink in. He swallowed.
“I kept them in my gums and spat them out later. It’s as simple as that. Probably the case with anyone else remembering. Like Hal, or Carlton, or whatever his name was.”
Thurman regarded him coolly. He tapped the report against his open palm, seeming to digest this. “We know you stopped taking the pills,” he finally said. “And when.”
Donald waved his hand. “Mystery solved, then.” He finished his water and put the empty glass back on his tray. It felt good to have that out in the open.
“The drugs you have a resistance to are not in the pills, Donny. The reason people stop taking the pills is because they begin to remember, not the other way around.”
Donald studied Thurman, disbelieving.
“Your urine changes color when you get off them. You develop sores on your gums. These are the signs we look for.”
“What”
“There are no drugs in the pills, Donny.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“We medicate everyone. There are those of us who are immune. But you shouldn’t be.”
“Bullshit. I remember. The pills made me woozy. As soon as I stopped taking them, I got better.”
Thurman tilted his head to the side. “The reason you stopped taking them was because you were . . . I won’t say getting better. It was because the fear had begun leaking through. Donny, the medication is in the water.” He waved at the empty glass on the tray. Donald followed the gesture and immediately felt sick, even though he didn’t believe him. The suspicion was enough.
“Don’t worry,” Thurman said. “We’ll get to the bottom of it.”
“I don’t want to help you. I don’t want to talk about this report. I don’t want to see whoever it is you need me to see.”
He wanted Helen. All he wanted was his wife.
“There’s a chance that thousands will die if you don’t help us. There’s a chance that you stumbled onto something with this report of yours, even if I don’t believe it.”
Donald felt the weight of the soil piled on them both. He glanced at the door to the bathroom, thought about locking himself inside and forcing himself to throw up, to expunge the food and the water. But it was an insane thought. Maybe Thurman was lying to him. Maybe he was telling the truth. A lie would mean the water was just water. The truth would mean that he did have some sort of resistance. Either way, there was nothing—and everything—to fear.
“I barely remember writing the thing,” he admitted. And who would want to see him He assumed it would be another doctor, maybe a silo head, maybe whoever was running this shift.
He rubbed his temples, could feel the pressure building between them. Maybe he should just do this thing and go back to sleep, back to his skull-filled dreams. Now and then, he had dreamed of Helen. It was the only place left to see her. With this thought, his resistance crumbled like thousand-year-old bones.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll go. But I still don’t understand what I could possibly know.” He rubbed his arm where they’d taken the blood. There was an itch there. An itch so deep it felt like a bruise.
Senator Thurman nodded. “I tend to agree with you. But that’s not what she thinks.”
Donald stiffened. “She” He searched Thurman’s eyes, wondering if he’d heard correctly. “She who”
The old man frowned. “The one who had me wake you.” He waved his hand at the bunk. “Get some rest. I’ll take you to her in the morning.”