Hugh Howey - Dust

Juliette waited for the reaction and saw her father’s face relax. It may have been her imagination, but she thought he moved a step closer, let down his guard.

“I’ll give you a check-up before and after,” he said.

“Thank you. Oh, speaking of a check-up, there’s something else I wanted to ask you about.” She worked the long sleeve of her coveralls up her forearm and studied the white marks along her wrist. “Have you ever heard of scars going away with time? Lukas thought—” She looked up at her father. “Do they ever go away?”

Her father took a deep breath and held it awhile. His gaze drifted over her shoulder and far away.

“No,” he said. “Not scars. Not even with time.”

Captain Brevard was nearly through his seventh shift. Only three more to go. Three more shifts of sitting behind security gates reading the same handful of novels over and over until the yellowed pages gave up and fell out. Three more shifts of whipping his deputies at table tennis — a new deputy on each shift — and telling them that it’d been forever since he’d last played. Three more shifts of the same old food and the same old movies and the same old everything else bland that greeted him when he woke. Three more. He could make it.

Silo 1’s Security chief now counted down shifts much as he had once counted down years to retirement. Let them be uneventful , was his mantra. The blandness was good. Vanilla was the taste of passing time. Such was his thought as he stood before an open cryopod splattered with dried blood, a foul taste very un-vanilla-like in his mouth.

A pop of blinding light erupted from Deputy Stevens’s camera as the young man took another shot of the pod’s interior. The body had been removed hours ago. A med tech had been servicing a neighboring pod when he noticed a smear of blood on the lid of this one. He had cleaned half the smear away before he realized what it was. Brevard now studied the tracks that the med tech’s cleaning rag had left behind. He took another bitter sip of coffee.

His mug had lost its steam. It was the cold air in that warehouse of bodies. Brevard hated it down there. He hated waking up naked in that place, hated being brought back down and put to sleep, hated what the room did to his coffee. He took another sip. Three shifts left, and then retirement, whatever that meant. Nobody thought along that far. Only to their next shift.

Stevens lowered his camera and nodded toward the exit. “Darcy’s back, sir.”

The two officers watched as Darcy, the night guard, crossed the hall of cryopods. Darcy had been first on the scene early that morning, had woken Deputy Stevens, who had woken his superior. Darcy had then refused to slag off and get some sleep as ordered. He had instead accompanied the body up to Medical and had volunteered to wait on test results while the other men went over the crime scene. Darcy now waved a piece of paper a bit too enthusiastically as he headed their way.

“I can’t stand this guy,” Stevens whispered to his chief.

Brevard took a diplomatic sip of his coffee and watched his night guard approach. Darcy was young — late twenties, early thirties — with blond hair and a permanent, goofy grin. Just the sort of inexperienced person police forces loved to place on night shifts when all the bad shit went down. It wasn’t logical, but it was tradition. Experience won you deep sleep for when the crazies were out.

“You won’t believe what I’ve got,” Darcy said, twenty paces away and more than a touch overeager.

“You’ve got a match,” Brevard said dryly. “The blood on the lid goes with the pod.” He nearly added that what Darcy most certainly didn’t have was a hot cup of coffee for him or Stevens.

“That’s part of it,” Darcy said, appearing vexed. “How’d you know?” He took a few deep breaths and handed over the report.

“Because matches are exciting,” Brevard said, accepting the sheet. “You wave a match in the air like you’ve got something to say. Lawyers and jury members get excited over a match.” And rookies , he wanted to add. He wasn’t sure what Darcy did before orientation, but it wasn’t police work. Glancing down at the report, Brevard saw a standard DNA match, a series of bars lined up with one another, lines drawn between the bars where they were identical. And these two were identical, the DNA on file for the pod and the blood sample taken from the lid.

“Well, there’s more,” Darcy said. The night guard took another deep breath. He had obviously run down the hall from the lift. “Lots more.”

“We think we’ve got it pieced together,” Stevens said with confidence. He nodded toward the open cryopod. “It’s pretty clear that a murder took place here. It started—”

“Not a murder,” Darcy interjected.

“Give the deputy a chance,” Brevard said, lifting his mug. “He’s been looking at this for hours.”

Darcy started to say something but caught himself. He rubbed under his eyes, seemed exhausted, but nodded.

“Right,” Stevens said. He pointed his camera at the cryopod. “Blood on the lid means the struggle began out here. The man we found inside must’ve been subdued by our killer after a fight, that’s how his blood got on the lid. And then he was tossed inside his own cryopod. His hands were bound, I’m assuming at gunpoint, because I didn’t note any marks around the wrists, no other sign of struggle. He was shot once in the chest.” Stevens pointed to the streaks and spots of blood on the inside of the lid. “We’ve got splatter here, indicating the victim was sitting up. But the way it ran suggests the lid was shut immediately after. And the coloration tells me that this likely happened on our shift, certainly within the past month.”

Brevard watched Darcy’s face the entire time, saw how it scrunched up in disagreement. The kid thought he knew better than the deputy.

“What else?” Brevard asked Stevens, prodding his second-in-command along further.

“Oh, yes. After murdering the victim, our perp inserted an IV and a catheter to keep the body from decomposing, so we’re looking at someone with medical training. He might, of course, still be on this shift. Which is why we thought it best to discuss this down here and not around the med team. We’ll want to question them one at a time.”

Brevard nodded and took a sip of coffee. He waited on the night guard’s reaction.

“It wasn’t murder,” Darcy said, exasperated. “Do you guys want to hear what else I have? For starters, the blood on the lid matches the database entry for the pod , just like you said, but it doesn’t match the victim. The guy inside is someone else.”

Brevard nearly spat out his coffee. He wiped his moustache with his hand. “What?” he asked, not sure that he’d heard correctly.

“The blood on the outside was mixed with saliva. It came from a second person. Doc said it was probably a cough, maybe a chest wound. So our suspect is likely injured.”

“Wait. So who’s the guy we found in the pod?” Stevens asked.

“They’re not sure. They ran his blood, but it seems his records have been tampered with. The guy this pod is registered to, he shouldn’t be on the executive wing at all. Should’ve been in Deep Freeze. And the blood from the inside of the lid matches a partial record from the executive files, which would place him in here somewhere—”

“Partial record?” Brevard asked.

Darcy shrugged. “The files are all kinds of fouled up. According to Doctor Whitmore.”

“Ah,” Deputy Stevens said, snapping his fingers. “I’ve got it. I know what happened here.” He pointed his camera at the pod. “There’s a struggle out here, okay? A guy who doesn’t want to be put under. He manages to break free, knows how to hack the—”