Killing Frost (After the Shift Book 2)

by Grace Hamilton

  Strickland smiled gently as every weapon was located and put aside. “I am fully aware of how difficult it is to build trust in these troubled time, Mr. Tolley, and I completely appreciate how you might initially want to circumvent our rules here. I assure you, we mean you no harm. Quite the opposite, in fact. Now please, let us offer you and your group some hospitality in the mess. I’m sure we have much to teach each other.”

  Nathan felt deflated at the whole turn of events, and if he was being honest with himself, a little stupid for trying to smuggle any kind of weapon into the silo. How did it look to these folks he had just met? It didn’t transmit the idea of trust to these people, and had already gotten them off on the wrong foot. If this facility was anything like what Lucy had described, then it was certainly a viable option for them getting some rest, and perhaps even remaining within until they’d made copies of Elm’s ledger and were ready to plan how they could disseminate his knowledge to as many people as possible. To have possibly fouled up an opportunity from the get-go, by feeding into the paranoia of the land and the people they’d witnessed taking advantage of others, was already a misstep. Sure, the Granges and their people were slightly odd, but he hadn’t seen a single weapon on their persons or on those operating the security systems.

  “I’m sorry,” Nathan said sincerely. “Force of habit, Mr. Grange. We’ve had some tough times recently, and it’s hard to trust people at face value. But that’s our weapons now,” Nathan offered, holding open his coat as one of the security team patted him down.

  “You won’t be the first, Mr. Tolley, and please call me Strickland; no need to be so formal. We’re trying to build something unique here at Calgary, and we have to be very careful ourselves. Hence our desire not to let weapons of any kind into the facility. Everybody ready? Excellent. The elevators are this way.”

  The smell hit them first as the elevator doors opened on the lowest level of the silo, which Strickland informed them held the mess room, the administration office, and the communal kitchen. The smell wasn’t horrendous, but it was sour. A combination of old sweat, cooking grease, and wet hay was the best Nathan could offer as description as his nose wrinkled and he exchanged glances with Cyndi.

  Brandon didn’t appreciate the aroma of the mess area any more than they did and immediately began to cry. Pamela fussed over him and Michaela gave a matronly smile as they walked out into the deepest space in the silo.

  The walls were circular, unfaced concrete walls, with a military and almost utilitarian feel. Steel benches filled the central area with integral bench seating, there was a boarded-off section of the arc walls with two doors on one side of the space, and Nathan saw an open-plan kitchen on the other end, where two women in boiler suits were cooking below intensely humming extractors.

  The area was a good thirty yards across, and lit with migraine-level LED lighting. Even to light a deep space underground, though, it felt like overkill to Nathan. There were a few more boiler-suited figures sitting at the benches, and a couple of them looked up at the crying baby, but most of the others were at the tables reading. Engrossed, rather than merely interested.

  “We’re eleven stories below the surface here; there’s one other level below us with direct access to the aquifer, and deeper level pipes and construction to take advantage of geothermic exchanges for heat and power. That said, if the ground water were to become contaminated, we have three years’ worth of water in backup tanks and enough food to see your baby son there through until he starts school. Perhaps beyond that, as we’re not at capacity yet.”

  Strickland took them to an empty bench and sat down with them as Cyndi asked, “How many of you are there here?”

  Strickland had the answer immediately in his mouth in anticipation; this was a spiel he had delivered many times before, Nathan thought. If Strickland hadn’t been a salesman before the Big Winter, he’d been someone used to selling something, he was so open and persuasive. And yet Nathan wondered what it was about the man that was making him feel uneasy. Perhaps it wasn’t the man at all—perhaps it was the residents who’d taken no notice of them as they’d come in. Or maybe it was the smell or the two blonde women… but there was something about the place itching beneath Nathan’s thinking. He couldn’t put a finger on it yet, but there was definitely something being left unsaid.

  “We have a little over seventy residents at this time. But we think that if the water stays clean, and our hydroponics grow the requisite food, and the aquacultures behave themselves and provide renewable fish stocks, we have the ability to house perhaps one-hundred-and-fifty souls here, if we manage well, and live frugally but not abjectly.”

  Nathan smiled as Lucy’s eyes widened at the words ‘living frugally,’ and he immediately noticed her ‘I need two bloody Marys’ face.

  “I can see the world outside has fallen far since the commencement of the Big Winter. Across the globe, systems were already breaking down before it arrived. But while the shift in the Earth’s axis, or even only the crust, has taken away much, it’s true, it has given us an opportunity.”

  Here it comes. Nathan braced himself for the wing-nuttery about to be exposed. “What opportunity?” he asked, his cynicism reflecting the faces of his clan around the table.

  Strickland shrugged. “Nothing impossible or way out there, Mr. Tolley. I can see from your face you’re worried I’m about to tell you about the magic, or the aliens, or the gifts from the gods. No, we just think there’s an opportunity to teach, learn, and eventually emerge from this changed world with a group of people who can travel the land bringing help and, may I say, some hope. But they have to be the right people.”

  There it is again. The alarm bell. “That’s the bit that worries me. Who chooses who’s right and who’s not? You?”

  Strickland guffawed hard and had to reach into the top pocket of his boiler suit to pull out an immaculately laundered handkerchief and dab at the mirthful tears which had appeared in the corner of his eye. “Me? Oh, Mr. Tolley, what a card you are; of course not me! No, Mr. Tolley, a much higher and acceptable authority than me. You, Mr. Tolley. Your wife. Your children. Your friends. It will be they who decide, and the wonderful thing is, they won’t have to say a word. We’ll know with incredible detail and absolute surety. Mr. Tolley, you don’t know if you’re right. I don’t. But in the morning, I assure you, we’ll all know. Now, please, enough business. Let’s eat. I’m ravenous!”

  The last thing on Nathan’s mind right now was food. His head was spinning with what Strickland could mean by a higher and more acceptable authority—but before he could explore further, Tony, who was sitting with Freeson, hugged his own tummy, his eyes wide at the word ‘eat’. He was pretty much licking his lips in anticipation, and Nathan was suddenly reminded of how hungry he was, too.

  “Okay, Mr. Grange. Let’s eat. But I want to hear some solid facts about this place and what you’re proposing.”

  “All in good time, Mr. Tolley. All in good time.”

  After food—a meal of fish and vegetable stew that came in a rich gravy, which even Nathan had to admit was pretty good—Nathan was ready to find out more from their host.

  What wasn’t so good was that there was no digging down through the details to be had from Strickland. He insisted they ate and relaxed first. “I’ll hear of nothing else, Mr. Tolley. Let our hospitality wash over you with its bounty.”

  And so the party was led back to the elevator, and taken up three floors by Michaela Grange.

  The sourness of the air was soon acclimatized to, but the overly bright lighting was still an issue. When Nathan mentioned the brightness to Michaela, though, she shrugged and said, “It’s not my department. I think they have two settings, on and off. That’s all.”

  Nathan squinted up at the LEDs in the ceiling of the corridor. “I hope you have a lifetime’s supply of Advil to cope with the headaches.”

  Michaela smiled and said, without a trace of irony, “I don’t get headaches.”

  The
apartment they were shown to was unfinished. The lights worked, but a lot of the furniture hadn’t yet been assembled; it lay in flat packs against the gray concrete wall. There was a sink in the kitchen that produced cold water, but no warm water from the faucet. Cyndi informed them that the oven and the range were in working order, but that the refrigerator was not. There were cupboards full of tins and dried food packs, but no can opener in the kitchen drawers.

  The beds in the bedroom also had yet to be assembled, and there were mattresses on the floor without blankets. Everything was covered in a thin patina of concrete dust, and when Michaela had gone after promising to send someone up with more bedding, Lucy swore like a dock worker, causing Tony to look at his parents and not really know how to respond.

  Lucy patted him on the head. “Don’t worry, kid—stick around with me and you’ll hear much worse. But come on, guys, look at this place. They haven’t even put the beds up! One-point-five-mil doesn’t get you what it used to, does it?” she breathed out, plonking herself down on a mattress and taking in the whole unfinished look of the curve-walled apartment.

  “It’s luxury after living in a tent for a month,” Donie commented.

  Lucy shrugged. “Your idea of luxury and mine aren’t even on the same Venn diagram, baby.”

  Dave had taken his laptop out of his bag and was setting it up on the dusty work surface in the kitchen area. “There’s Wi-Fi here, but it’s password protected.” He typed some complicated code, pressed enter, clicked his fingers, and then said, “Well, it was.”

  Donie high-fived her boyfriend and Freeson smiled widely at the little slice of rebellion playing out before him. Nathan loved his friend’s desire to walk an alternative path to those around him, and in very much the same way his relationship with Lucy was unexpected, Freeson’s fondness for the two young hackers was also difficult to have predicted. Politically, they were miles apart, and on different spectrums—in another life, Freeson would have called them snowflake dropout libtards or something similar, but his opportunity to rub along with the couple over the last few months and grown into a mutual respect and affection for them, especially after the role they’d played in the rescue from the clutches of the gang who had taken him, Cyndi, and Tony hostage at a truck stop way before they’d reached Detroit. Freeson had been tied to two gas pumps in the freezing cold without outside clothes or even shoes, and beaten savagely—just for fun, it had seemed—and Dave and Donie’s technical skills had provided the diversion Nathan needed to release his friend. Since then, Freeson had often hung out with the kids, as he called them, and they seemed to get as much out of it as he did. He high-fived Dave and Donie now, and Lucy just rolled her eyes.

  Dave worked at the computer for a few minutes while Nathan and Cyndi made an inventory of the apartment and checked it for cameras and bugs. Cyndi didn’t need to articulate the fact that she was as suspicious of Strickland as Nathan was. Even though he’d regretted smuggling in the guns, he wasn’t yet ready to take everything they were being told at face value.

  If the room was wired for sound, then he and Cyndi could find no evidence of it.

  “What do you think?” Cyndi asked him as Lucy cradled Brandon on a mattress and Dave and Donie worked at the laptop.

  “I honestly don’t know, but you can feel it, too, can’t you?”

  “Oh yes. There’s something… I dunno… skewed about this place, and for all his welcoming and openness, Strickland isn’t fooling me.” Cyndi dug her hands into the pockets of her jeans and rocked on her heels.

  Lucy, rocking Brandon gently and smoothing his hair over his scalp with a surprisingly gentle hand, offered, “I don’t trust him as far as I could throw him. Or his wives”

  Nathan raised his eyebrows at Lucy. “You think all three are…?”

  “Oh yes. That’s not a regular family unit. I have nothing against the idea in principle, Nathan—people can do what they want as long as it’s not imposed on me—but, man, Strickland? Yuck. The woman aren’t real blondes, either. Since when has hair dye and style mattered in the Big Winter? There’s a set of priorities that seem well out of whack.”

  “We’re still, what? Seven hundred miles from Casper?” Freeson asked, sitting down on a mattress with his legs crossed like a swami.

  Nathan nodded.

  “And we don’t even know what Casper is going to be like, or what the welcome is going to be. At least here there’s electricity, there’s food, shelter, security. Those plusses buy off a considerable amount of negative weird.”

  “We’re not saying that we should leave straightaway,” Cyndi said, stripping open one of the cardboard boxes containing a flat-packed bed, and beginning to search out the instruction sheet. “All we’re saying is, until we know what the real deal is here, we should not put all our eggs in one basket.”

  Lucy shook her head. “All I need to know is this. Is there gin? If there is, I could see myself staying for a very long time.”

  “I don’t think there’s gonna be gin,” Dave said, lifting his fingers from the keyboard. “I don’t think there’s going to be a lot of fun here at all. And I suspect I know exactly how the decision is going to be made about who the ‘right people’ are for this place. Look at this. I knew I’d heard the name Strickland Grange before. He’s a Nazi.”

  20

  “Oh no, no, no. Please excuse a case of youthful exuberance on my part. That was twenty or more years ago. Back before I found my true calling.”

  Nathan pointed to the picture on the screen of the laptop. “But that is you, Strickland?”

  The picture Dave had managed to find on what was left of the internet showed Strickland Grange from some years past. His mouth was screaming. The camera had caught spittle flying from his lips like snake venom and his eyes were alight, reflecting the flickering flames of the torch in his left hand. His right arm was raised in the straight-armed salute of another time, another war, and another abomination.

  “Yes, that is me. But the rashness of youth should not be used to color judgements against a man who has lived his life in a very different way since. Surely, you did things in your early youth that you would not want held against you now, Mr. Tolley?”

  “I was never a Nazi,” Nathan said.

  “I didn’t even know what the word meant. I was just following my friends, seeking affirmation and camaraderie.”

  They were back in the mess, but it had been cleared of the other residents. Even the cooks from the kitchen were no longer there. Nathan, Dave, and Cyndi had been taken from the apartment upon their request for a meeting with Strickland after Dave had shown them what he had uncovered.

  “It may have been before I was born,” Dave said, his eyes burning into Strickland, “but that doesn’t look like youthful hijinks to me. That looks like a lot of hate and rage balled up into one face. And it’s people with my skin color, and others who have taken the brunt of that hatred for a very long time, Mr. Grange. If you’re going to want us to take up with you, then you’re going to have to convince us that what’s in your heart now doesn’t match what was in your heart then.”

  Strickland smiled. If he was being thrown by Nathan’s and Dave’s questions, he was making a pretty good attempt at not showing it. Michaela, who stood behind him at one shoulder while Pamela stood at his other, bent over and whispered into his ear.

  Strickland gave an almost imperceptible shake of the head and waved her to back up away from him with a gentle twirl of his index finger. “Mr. Tolley, I assure you, I am no longer concerned with the things I was concerned with back then. I am a changed… no, a reformed character now. Perhaps if I were to show you something that would put all of this doubt you are feeling to bed, it would convince you?”

  “It would have to be pretty convincing,” Nathan said truthfully, because right now he was all for heading towards the door and getting the hell out of this place, safety and security be damned.

  “Then, if you will follow me, it’s about time you met the others, and ge
t yourself a slice of life from here in Calgary. See how the land lies. Normally, we wouldn’t invite you along to a gathering until you were accepted into the fold, so to speak, but I can see I’m going to have to be extra open with you, your wife, and the young man. So be it. Please, if you will, follow me.”

  Strickland led them to the elevator and pressed for five floors above the mess. “The very center of our world. Please, all I ask is that you be respectful of the people you see here and what they are doing, and once you have seen how truly wonderful this place is, then I’m sure any issues you have with my past transgressions can be viewed with a sense of forgiveness. Yes?”

  “I hope so,” Nathan said as the elevator door swished open.

  There was no quick acclimatizing to the smell of the people in the room. The elevator opened onto a wide, concrete-lined area with a wide semi-circle of chair rows arranged to seat their occupants all pointing in the same direction, to a raised dais covered in pots of rubber plants and other foliage growing against and curling around a latticework of white, wooden screens. Stained glass friezes were hung around the room at regular intervals on the wide sweep of the arcing walls. The glass in the friezes offered representations of the Stations of the Cross, with the figure of Jesus moving towards his eventual crucifixion. Nathan felt Dave stiffen next to him and suddenly recalled finding the boy nailed to the tenement floor in Detroit. It wasn’t reasonable to think Dave wouldn’t be reminded of what had happened to him at regular intervals, but the final frieze was so agonizingly detailed… the light from the LEDs in the ceiling sparkled and twinkled over it, so that Jesus’ form seemed to writhe and strain against his fixing points, and his eyes, black and glassy, stared out across the room imploringly. There was nowhere in the room that, if you were sitting in the chairs and facing the dais, would leave you in any doubt of the utter brutality of crucifixion, and Dave was being fully reminded of it now.