The Freezer (Genesis Endeavor Book 1) (23 page)

“Before we could really react, Jonas, who had climbed on top
of the crate when he couldn’t push it down off the ramp, opens fire, tearing
these deer apart! He’s yelling ‘Goddamn! Goddamn! Fuckin Mutes!’ as he blasts
away!” Emmet was laughing so hard he could barely talk and Chuck’s shoulders
were shaking as he joined in. Getting his hysteria under control, he says, “We
just looked at each other, and Chuck turns to Jonas, and says ‘You Freezer
burnt moron!’ grabs his rifle, which was still slung around his shoulder, and
yanks him clean off the crate! Then he grabs him by the collar and drags his
ass over to one of the dead deer and says, ‘does this look like a fuckin Mute
to you?’.” Emmet wiped a tear from his eye, still trying to keep his laughter
in check. “So Jonas looks at the dead deer, then at Chuck, then the deer again,
then back at Chuck and finally pushes himself off the ground, dusts himself off
and says ‘How the hell should I know, I’m from Miami!’.” He burst out in
laughter again and Chuck and Jack joined in.

Emmet calmed down and got a look of nostalgia on his face. “That
dumb sonofabitch took down seven deer! We left that supply crate and crammed
the hold full of deer. We ate venison for a month!”

* * *

The entrance to the complex was an unassuming door. At least
it would look like any old rusty and weathered door if it wasn’t embedded in
the side of a small hill in the middle of nowhere. Crusty dirt and rust covered
the bottom half of the door, as if it had been buried for many years; the top
was heavily weathered, and if anything had ever been painted on it, it had long
since worn away. Despite the rust and other patina, it was obvious the door was
still rock solid and sturdy. The entrance would not be visible from the sky,
and even from the ground it was hard to spot. There was heavy brush all over
the area. Someone had dug out the dirt that had drifted up to the door over the
years, and a path had been stomped into the brush. As he looked around the
area, Jack remarked at how different it looked. A week and a half ago he was in
this very spot, but most of the hill to his left was an open pit almost a
hundred feet deep, and the hill in front of him didn’t exist. They had planned
to use the soil and rock they had excavated to make natural looking hills to
hide the entrance, and it looked like whoever finished did a damn fine job. Of
course, three hundred years of weather helped to blend it into the surrounding
landscape as well.

“How often do you guys come up here?”

A heavy steel bar that had obviously been installed fairly
recently secured the door. Emmet went to unlock it while Chuck answered, “Every
couple weeks, lately. We’ve gotten pretty good at picking candidates that will
survive, and we have staggered the birthing chambers so that we can cycle a new
one every two weeks. It’s been almost six months since the doc had a failure. Before
that we would collect six at a time and if we were lucky, two would make it. It
was slow going at first, but in another year we’ll have over a hundred reborn.”

“What changed to get the failure rate so low?” Emmet had
finished unlocking the door, and Chuck moved to it to help swing it open. A
loud groan echoed between the hills as the heavy steel door swung on rusty
hinges.

Chuck dusted off his gloved hands and said, “The selection
process changed. We now have tools to examine the tissue before harvesting, and
we leave the ones that we are not sure we can bring back. About one in three
are no good to us because of injury or the nature of their disease. Another third
are ‘Freezer Burnt’ leaving the rest as viable candidates. We harvested one
that was questionable about two years ago and when he woke up he only had
memories to the age of five.” Jack shuddered at that thought. “We don’t even
try the questionable ones any more. Well, except you.”

“Freezer burn? I caught that term in Emmet’s story earlier,
what exactly does that mean?”

“Ever eat a steak that was in the freezer too long? The meat
isn’t the same after that. Same kind of thing can happen to a corpse in deep
freeze, and when it comes to recovering the memories from a frozen brain, that
isn’t good. Sometimes it results in some lost memories, sometimes far worse. 
Some of the native born started using it as a slur against the reborn, and it
sort of caught on as a general insult whenever someone did something really
stupid.”

Chuck pulled out his PDP, and tapped a few times on the
screen, then put it to his ear like a telephone. “We’re at the entrance,
shouldn’t take more than an hour.” He put the PDP away and looked at Jack. “They
are in constant contact with our PDPs but once we go in there they will lose
contact and we will not have communications with them. If we don’t report back
in an hour, they will send someone to investigate. We learned a long time ago
that it’s better to be safe than sorry.”

“What happened?”

“One of our exploration parties stumbled on a Mute camp. They
tried to retreat to their flyer but the Mutes pressed the attack and ended up
damaging the flyer. The next day we sent out a search party and found one of
them left, holed up in a small cave, down to just a sidearm and a handful of
ammo. He and his group been cornered and made their last stand. They fought
well, but Mutes are stubborn and mean, and once they start a fight, they don’t
let off until they win or die. By the time we got there, he was the lone
survivor. The last few Mutes were just about to storm his shelter when the
cavalry arrived.” He paused, a distant look in his eyes, and Jack could sense
he had a personal hand in the situation. “After that, we changed the rules to check
in at predetermined intervals and to start the rescue process as soon as someone
doesn’t check in.”

With that he grinned and marched through the door. Jack
followed, and Emmet walked to the wall just inside the door and flipped a big
lever. There was a thud and a whine and lights came on, illuminating the short
hallway that ended at a large door. They approached the door, and Chuck typed a
code in a keypad that looked out of place. The doors swung open to reveal a
large elevator car.

Before Jack could ask, Chuck volunteered, “They installed
this keypad and a security system when they figured out how valuable this place
is. There are automatic turret mounted rifles above the ceiling there and
there.” He pointed to small holes in the ceiling in front of the elevator. “Our
PDPs transmit a code that gives us a minute to get the system disarmed. If
someone finds this place and gets through the first door, they won’t make it
past this spot.”

Jack shivered at the brutality of such a security system. Chuck
seemed to be reading his mind and said, “For a group of people who are on the
verge of extinction, you would think they would take more precautions to NOT
kill each other, but that isn’t exactly the case. If I had my way, I would at
least put some kind of deterrent or warning system in so anyone who came across
this wouldn’t end up dead before they knew what was going on. I’m sure Teague
explained it to you, Jack, but if there is any question in your mind, put it to
rest, humanity lost its respect for life a long time ago, and this is not the
same world you and I grew up in.”

They climbed aboard the elevator and Chuck pressed the
second of five buttons. The complex was three levels deep, Jack recalled, the
third level was where all the utilities and the power plant were located. When
he was planning the construction, the drawings called for two large concrete
reservoirs surrounding a massive platform on the third floor. The level also
had plans for ventilation shafts that ran to the surface, and Jack had always assumed
they were putting in some huge diesel generators and using the reservoirs for
fuel storage.
They must have used the reservoirs for cooling the power
plant.
Assuming level one and two were for the storage of the bodies, that
left one button that didn’t belong. It was red and like the keypad above,
looked out of place. “What’s the last button for?”

“Panic Button.” Nobody said anything else, so Jack didn’t
ask further.

The doors opened to a small room with some old medical and
research equipment stashed along the walls. The technology was Jack’s era, and
it was in poor shape. There was another door in front of them, and Emmet pushed
through without a word, walking into a large chamber about five hundred feet
long and seven hundred feet wide. There was a heavy concrete column every
thirty feet spaced evenly over the whole level. In Jack’s day, they couldn’t
make a room this big underground and not have the supports. It reminded him of
the challenges ahead.

The room wasn’t quite what Jack expected. After hearing the
term ‘Freezer’, he sort of expected entire cold rooms filled with bodies.
Instead it was just a really big room filled with what appeared to be large,
cylindrical tubes, each about eight feet long and capped at both ends. They
were wider than they were tall, so not exactly cylindrical, more of an oval
shaped tube, like some kind of futuristic casket. There were hundreds, maybe
thousands, evenly spaced in rows, as far as the eye could see. Jack shivered.
That’s
exactly what these are, caskets
he thought to himself.

There was a thick layer of dust on most of them, and most of
the floor was covered in the dust as well. Even underground with very little
air circulation, three hundred years is enough time for dust to collect. Footprints
drew a big tree on the ground, starting heavy at the door, and branching out
across the floor in all directions for hundreds of feet.

Jack walked up to the first tube and examined it. The tube
was sitting on an elevated base. The oval tube was about four feet wide and
about three feet tall. It was all black except for a short window on the side
that ran for six feet of the length. There were tubes and boxes mounted to
various parts of the cylinder, and a control panel with a screen at the end. The
one Jack was looking at was no longer covered in dust, and he paled when he
peered into the window at a naked, headless, blue corpse lying inside. “What
the hell?”

He jumped as Emmet seemed to appear at his side and said,
“We don’t have room for the whole body, so we only take what we need. It’s kind
of gruesome work, but you get used to it.” Jack shivered again, his stomach churning
at the idea.

“How do you... remove them?” Jack only wanted to know out of
morbid curiosity.

“There are two ways to do it. First way is to use a wide
chisel and a hammer. The second way is to just grab them firmly and pull. They
tend to break off pretty clean that way.”

“Oh my God! You just snap them right off?” This made him
retch a little, and he had to walk away to settle his stomach. Chuck walked to
him and handed him a bottle.

“Take a drink, it will pass. These folks have been dead for
over three hundred years, they don’t feel a thing, and besides, they are
usually pretty thankful when they wake up on a table back at New Hope.” Jack
took a swallow, forcing the bile back down his throat. He thought about that
for a second, realizing that as gruesome as it seemed, it was done to give
these people another chance, and to save humanity.

He handed the bottle back to Chuck. “Thanks. Look, you aren’t
going to make me break off someone’s head as some sort of weird initiation are
you?” There was no way Jack was going to ‘harvest’ anyone.

Chuck laughed. “No, we’ll take care of that part. You just
have yourself a look around. After we get what we need here we can go down
below so you can see some of the inner workings and the modifications on that
level.” He pulled out his PDP and tapped a few things. “Hey Emmet, this way. We
are looking for Mr. Henry Halstead and Miss Irene Russell.”

Emmet’s eyebrows shot up. “Another woman? God I hope she’s
hot and likes middle aged black men!” They both laughed and headed to the left
back corner. Jack went the other way.

* * *

He wandered the first level for about ten minutes, noticing
that the further back he got, the tubes changed more and more. The ones at the
front had control panels with screens like the one on his datapad. The ones he
was looking at now had screens but they were more like the television screens
he was used to. Most of the units had lights on them, even the ones that had
been harvested. Jack figured that they left the units running when they
harvested so that the decaying bodies didn’t stink the place up. There were a
few units where the light was off, and he surmised that those units had failed
for some reason. Jack brushed the dust off one of the dead units and was
shocked to see that the body was very well preserved in the tube. He would have
thought that it would just be dust in there. He guessed that the tubes were
vacuum sealed, and the extreme cold probably killed any bacteria that would
have been around to consume the flesh. It was just a guess but it sounded good.

He reached the end of the room, and wandered along the wall
for a while. There were few footprints back here, only a couple paths that led
to a tube without any dust on it. He made his way back to the elevator, and
waited for Chuck and Emmet. He could hear them in the distance talking, and
even heard Emmet’s laugh. Chuck was a no bullshit kind of guy, and Jack figured
that he could trust him to have his back in any situation. Emmet was a
character, and although Jack liked him, he wasn’t sure if he would want to
spend any serious time hanging around him. He was the kind of guy you loved to
have drinks with but he didn’t seem to have an ‘off’ switch. It would get
exhausting spending too much time with him. Despite his exuberant personality,
Jack could see him as a competent soldier; he was alert and knew he had a job
to do.

As interesting as this place was, he didn’t really have
anything to do and his mind was on Wendy when the two men got back to the door.
They were carrying what looked like two metal cases, each about the size of a
bowling bag. They were flat black in color and had blinking lights on the side.
Emmet looked at Jack and with a long face said, “She’s kinda homely”.