“What is it?” Art asked.
“Same as in the city, only not so strong.” Seth pulled the double doors open wide and grunted in disgust. “Except now it is.”
Dana gagged and put her hand to her mouth. Even Art couldn’t miss it. A ripe, sweet smell of rotting flesh surged out from the opened door and hit him in the face like a hand from the grave.
“Put somethin’ round your nose.” Seth was tying a scarf around his head. “We have to find out. Is it all of ’em dead or just some?”
Dana shook her head and stepped back again. “I can’t. I’m sorry, but I just can’t.”
“You stay here.” Art squeezed her hand. “Watch the doors. Shout if anyone comes.”
He tied a cloth around his own face, though he was not sure he would need it. He and Seth went forward. Shouts from Dana would do no good, because if they were caught inside there was no other door. It was just a way to make her feel better.
He was more than pleased when a few seconds later she caught up with him.
“You’re a gutsy lady,” he said. “Will you be all right?”
She nodded. She was veiled up to her eyes. Even he could smell her. “Drenched my head scarf in the only perfume I have.” Her speech was muffled. “I was saving it for some big seduction scene, but I guess I’ve blown that chance.”
“Perfume’s wasted on me. I can’t smell worth a damn, you know that.” He nodded forward, to where Seth had taken out his flashlight and was shining it around. “Save it for him.”
Her eyes rolled. “Don’t make me laugh, or I’ll have to breathe.”
Cheerful small talk. The surest sign that you were edgy.
The inside of the syncope facility matched the outside: gray, drab, and utilitarian. One long corridor led to the left, a matching one to the right. From each, all the way to the back of the building, side aisles ran off at sixteen-foot intervals. They held the body drawers, two feet by two feet by eight, packed side by side and one on top of the other like a library stack of stored humans.’
The elevators for higher floors were on either side of the main doors. They were not working now, but iron stairs for use in emergencies stood next to them, rising up and up in dizzying turns until they vanished in the upper gloom. Seth’s flashlight was not strong enough to carry its beam the full twenty floors to the dark ceiling.
“We still got the same problems.” Seth stopped cranking the light. They stood together in the faint light coming in through the open double doors and waited for their eyes to adjust. “We didn’t solve ’em comin’ here, and I don’t see we’re nearer to solvin’ ’em now. How do we find Oliver Guest? How can we be sure we got the right man? I’m not even askin’ how we revive him when we find him.”
“There has to be a filing system.” It seemed gruesome to apply that term to stored people, but Art couldn’t think of a better one. “And I bet it’s simple, because the only people you can get to work in a place like this have to be morons.”
“Or necrophiliacs,” added Seth. “I doubt if most of them are any too bright, though.”
They walked slowly to the first tier of body drawers and picked the third one from the bottom. Its aluminum end contained a grille for the circulation of air and was held shut by a cheap catch at the top. Seth shone his flashlight on the square panel.
“Not wasting the public’s money on extras, are we?” he said. “Here’s one question answered. This is an ID plate. 1-0128-394, that has to be a prisoner number. And Desmond Lota must be his name. And here’s a date, 27/04/11. That has to be when he gets out. He’s a JS short-timer, can’t have been in for much. A year from now he’ll be up and moving.”
He placed his light flat on the grille and bent beside it. He shook his head. “Can’t see a thing. Oh, well.”
He reached up and turned the catch. The end panel dropped vertically until the drawer was fully open. Seth leaned forward, but at once jerked back and took two steps away. “Shit.” He was coughing and choking behind his scarf. “It’s putrid. I think I’m gonna puke.”
“Let me.” Art grabbed the light, worked the crank, and stepped to peer into the open drawer. The judicial sleep criminals were stored feetfirst and he was staring at the top of Desmond Lota’s head, hairless and purple-blotched in the pale beam of the flashlight.
The drawers sat on lubricated runners that must have been designed for ease of maintenance and were useful now. An easy pull brought the drawer out until Art could see the whole body. It lay naked, with IVs and sprays still in position. Desmond Lota’s skin sagged on his arms and legs, but bulged tight on his grossly swollen belly. The pneumatic system that rotated the criminals to prevent sores was still functioning at some level, because as the drawer reached the end of its travel the body was rolled through thirty degrees on its air pad. That led to a loud belch of escaping gases and a smell that made even Art blench and step back.
“This one won’t be coming out — not next year or in a hundred years.” Art pushed the drawer hard and closed the end panel as soon as he could work the catch.
“Do you think they’re all like that?” Dana stood half a dozen steps away and had avoided the worst of the stench. Seth was apparently still speechless, hands covering his nose and mouth.
“I might, except for one thing.” Art was walking along the aisle, shining the light on each end panel’s ID plate. “The people who were here before us took something or somebody away with them. We saw the marks in the snow. I can’t see anybody stealing a rotting corpse.”
“Why would some people have survived, when others died?”
“I can only guess. But the nutrients and somnol and ion balancers probably go to the IVs in each drawer through a gravity-assist delivery. Without a working heating system, you’ll also find temperature differences from top to bottom of the building. If that’s the case, different levels would be treated differently when the chips died in the monitoring system.”
“Higher levels would do better than ground-floor ones?”
“Or worse.”
“Let’s go find out.” Seth had recovered enough to grab his flashlight back from Art. “If Oliver Guest is dead meat, the sooner we’re out of here the better.”
“One other thing.” Art followed as Seth headed for the metal staircase. “Do you remember how long his sentence was?”
“Hell, I don’t know. A gazillion years. He didn’t just kill a whole bunch, he picked teenagers. Pretty ones. He’d be iced down to the max. Why you want to know?”
“We might get lucky. I noticed every ID in the first aisle had a wake-up time in the next year or two. It would make sense to stow short-timers on the lowest level, and a five-hundred-year sentence up where you don’t need to check it so often. And the longer terms use different drugs to maintain judicial sleep.”
They were climbing the open lattice of the metal staircase as they spoke. Art, last behind Dana, found it hard work. Serb, was well ahead but paused at the fifth level, not to let the others catch up but to inspect one of the aisles and its body drawers.
“Fourteen years to go on this one. Comin’ along.” He was shining the flashlight on a plate. “Like to take a look?”
Art nodded. The rest for his lungs was welcome. He started to open the drawer, and at once knew he did not need to go any farther.
Seth was backing away. “Don’t tell me, I can smell it. Another maggoty one. Let’s go.”
This time they plodded up another eighty feet before Seth halted and shone his flashlight along an aisle. “We got problems. No ID plates.”
“Then we must have gone too far.” Dana was a full level below, on one of the staircase landings. “They wouldn’t use the highest levels until the facility was filled all the way up. Shine the light back here, let me take a look.” And, a moment later, “This shows a 2735 revival date. Fat chance he’s got. He’s going to die.”