“Ten seconds,” he said. “Ready? Go.” The Armorer tweaked the end of the detonator to activate its timing mechanism.
They all ducked behind the desks for protection, though the explosion was barely noticeable.
But it did the trick.
A three-sided section of the cover had been lifted off, exposing a single red switch beneath it. On the console, a number of lights flashed furiously.
Doc laughed. “One hundred years ago, a whole peck of telephones would have been ringing all over the shop. This must have been one of the most secret places on the planet.”
“Not anymore. You figure this’ll start to thaw out the freezies, Doc?”
“Kill or cure,” the old man replied.
“Do it, Ryan,” Lori said imperiously.
Moving carefully to avoid cutting his hand on the sharp edges of the torn cover, Ryan gripped the red switch and pulled it firmly toward himself, hearing the solid click of the contact being made, somewhere beneath the top of the desk.
“There she blows,” J.B. shouted, taking off his fedora and waving it in the air in a most uncharacteristic display of enthusiasm. Lights flashed above each of the nine silver pods that the companions had assumed were occupied. What looked like steam was released in hissing, blinding clouds, concealing everything behind the great glass wall of the control chamber.
“Coolant release,” Doc shouted. “Guess it must have been something like liquid nitrogen after all. It’s being vented right now. My stars, but this is exciting!”
“Others opening too,” Jak called, pointing to the rest of the capsules, whose lids were visibly beginning to lift.
“What are they going to be like?” Krysty asked nobody in particular.
Doc fielded the question. “Those that have already ceased the cryogenic process will obviously be exceedingly defunct. Dead. Gone before. Joined the choir celestial. Sleeping with their Maker. Resting the rest that has no awakening. Dived into the last great darkness. Savoring the enigma of the journey from which no man has yet returned. Plucking at the harp where”
“Doc,” Krysty interrupted irritably, “answer the bastard question, will you? What are they going to be like? The ones that unfreeze?”
“Ah, yes. Bear in mind that the probability is that they will have been frozen either at a point near death or at a point where a disease had them severely in its grip. Perhaps some illness that had not yet run its course, but for which medical science had, then, no hope of cure.”
“Fucking sickies, Doc?” Jak said.
“In a wordyes.”
“What if it’s catching?”
Krysty’s question stopped everyone in their tracks. Suppose these illnesses from before sky-dark were hideously contagious? None of them had thought about that.
“Can’t be,” Ryan denied with a positive degree of false confidence.
She persisted. “Why, lover?”
“Too much risk to anyone here or in the freezing part of the redoubt.”
“Ever hear of LIDS?” Doc asked thoughtfully. “Perhaps not. Lethal Immune Deficiency Syndrome. The government suppressed the facts about it, trying to avoid a panic.”
“What was ?” asked Jak.
“Your body’s resistance to illness vanished overnight. Caught by walking through someone’s sneeze. Easy as that. And you really could get it from toilet seats. If the nukes hadn’t ended civilization, it could have chilled more people than the Black Death.”
“What if one of them in those there are got it?” Lori asked, glancing toward the exit.
“As I said. There were many ways you could pick it up. Any sort of contact, no matter how casual, spread the virus, which was always a hundred percent terminal. But it was easily detected, as I recall. So, they’d not have let anyone in here with it. At least I remember from some of the scuttlebutt whispers at the time Where was I? Oh, yes. When the sons of bitches fired me forward, they were talking about concentration camps and portable crematoria and even IE.”
“What was that, Doc?” Krysty asked. The old man’s horror tale from the past had caught everyone’s attention. Nobody was even bothering to look at the fog-filled cubicles and the ponderously opening streamlined freezing chambers.
“Involuntary Euthanasia. It never got quite that bad, but there was martial law in the air, my friends, and a cold hand around your heart if you tested positive. Bad days.”