Sub-Zero

by Robert W. Walker

  Tim ran around to the concave glass window, and through the haze he saw Joanna’s nude body lying perfectly still. He yelled her name and banged with his bandaged hands on the doorway glass. He tried frantically to pull the heavy teakwood door open, but he couldn’t grasp it with his hands. The door wasn’t locked but it was semi-sealed by the special liner around its edges, like a vault door on a refrigerator.

  Tim continued crying out her name, trying to get her to move, to show some sign of life. Mark Wertman came rushing into the room. He immediately grasped the situation, moving like a thunderbolt to the door and yanking it open swiftly. He went to the control panel and shut down the box, while Tim placed his bandaged hands under Joanna’s armpits and pulled her into the air, a blast of steam pursuing her.

  Tim carried Joanna’s limp, nude body to the couch and stared at her for a moment. He shook himself. Staring at her, he thought she looked like a beautiful, storybook Sleeping Beauty. She was hardly breathing. He felt for a pulse. Minimal.

  “God, she’s beautiful,” he kept saying over and over like a man who habitually sings a line from a song.

  Wertman had found a huge woolen blanket and he threw it over Joanna. He sat down on the couch beside her and tucked it around her form. He was repeating her name louder and louder, trying to wake her.

  “I’ll get a doctor!” shouted Tim.

  Wertman buried his head in the blanket over Joanna, repeating her name.

  Tim dialed for the personnel desk downstairs, hoping Walsh would be there. But when he put the earphone to his head, he realized there was no way Walsh would answer the phone. Still, he let it ring.

  Finally, someone picked it up. “Hello.”

  It was Walsh. “It’s me, Tim Crocker. We need you on the hundredth floor, weather room. Quickly!”

  “Your interrupting my sleep is getting to be a habit, Mr. Crocker,” said Walsh.

  “There’s been an accident up here. I think it’s an Enviro-box coma.”

  “Damn machines,” growled Walsh as he hung up.

  13

  At the switchboard on the 10th floor, a gloved, white hand dropped the headphone set onto the large console carelessly.

  The room was still in semidarkness, as Tim Crocker had found it earlier. The figure in the room moved with precision, even grace, stepping over and around upturned chairs, upended trash cans, and litter. The movements of the person in the room were those of a dancer-s-lilting and energetic.

  Clad in a tweed print overcoat, the gloved figure leaned against the wall near the door and stared across the room at the switchboard lighting up with calls that were going unanswered.

  In a high piercing voice the dancer, pressed against the wall laughed and said, “FBC Enterprises, FBC Enterprises!”

  Suddenly the figure was pacing the room again, uncertain whether to stay or to go, darting glances at the switchboard lights. The figure hesitated for only a moment at the door before pulling it open. A beam of light from the hallway shot across the face. The head was covered in a hood attached to the coat. Long, stringy hair fell about the forehead and spilled out of the hood at the ears. The bloodshot eyes were bulging, wild, and animated. The nostrils flared with every breath and the mouth was contorted in a silent scream.

  The gloved hands went over the eyes as though the light hurt them. Searching both directions, the figure dashed down the corridor to the Exit sign.

  14

  Marlo Cigliani stepped over the snow-packed ice cautiously. The snow-covered expanse of the Eisenhower Expressway was difficult to maneuver even with his snow shoes. He was never without a pair of the best made; they were part of his survival kit which he kept in his helicopter.

  He was approaching the Cyclone jeep for the second time, a shovel in hand. Earlier, he’d torn away enough ice from the left front corner of the windshield to peer inside. He had used his old, conventional window scraper, the sort that was hard to get nowadays. He liked the width of the metal blade, the weight and the feel of it in his hand.

  Marlo expected to find the jeep empty. What he saw through the square of cleared glass made his chest swell as if his heart had become heavier. There was a child inside, an infant. The infant was strapped in a car seat with a plastic carriage and vinyl upholstery, black against his light blue snowsuit. The baby’s small head, the size of a softball, had fallen forward in the appearance of sleep, or death.

  Marlo cursed the snow as he fought to get back to the stranded vehicle. The ice ripped at his face, the cold wind paralyzed his legs, utterly stopping him in his tracks several times. He’d had to stand still against the wind and helplessly curse it until it allowed him to take another step in the direction he wanted to go. The deep snow pulled him down several times the way a murky swamp tugs at a man who tries to traverse it. All of this, despite his equipment and his snow shoes. The powerful wind snatched up his shovel and held it in the air, trying, it seemed, to take it away from him. He held onto the shovel but was knocked down by the thrust on it. He fought to his feet. After several more steps it happened again. He fought up to his feet once more and continued.

  When he reached the jeep he stood over it, the snow was so high. He bent down to the section of windshield he’d cleared earlier. He saw that it was already covered with ice again. He crawled around the top of the jeep, his knees pulling snow with them, forming small honey- colored lines. Except for the marks his legs made over the top of the jeep, it was virtually buried.

  He began shoveling in earnest at the point where he judged the passenger window to be, the one closest to the child. Even as he dug, Marlo dug, was pushed again and again from behind by the overpowering wind. He fell several times. The snow was wet and heavy. It kept sticking to the shovel. Marlo cursed it. As he continued to dig he became angrier and angrier. He wondered who the little child was and whether it was a boy or a girl. He wondered who the baby belonged to. Who could have left him here, alone? He’d read about it happening, people, driven by circumstances, unable to cope, to feed their children, placing them in a snow bank to die. He’d seen cases where both parents maintained that they were told to do what they did by voices, or by God.

  Marlo kept the shovel moving up and down like a tireless machine. He thought of his own childhood, so much better than that of kids today. Sure he’d had to wonder all his life if his father loved him, if the old man cared one way or another about him. But kids nowadays didn’t even have that luxury-the luxury to gripe, to question, to fight.

  “The sons-of-bitches!” shouted Cigliani at the top of his lungs. His shout was drowned out by the screaming winds around him. “How could they do this to a baby?”

  Cigliani recognized his anguish for what it was. True, he was concerned about the child but he also remembered vividly a day in his past when his mother and father left him at a military academy, the Lakehurst Boy’s Academy. I t was like being packaged and sent off to the post office, the way his parents treated him. He’d sworn to never have children of his own.

  The shovel was halfway down the side of the car now, reaching the rim of the window and the door latch. Marlo was cutting wide, trying to form a boxlike square around the entire frame of the window. He knew he could never get the car door open. But if he could clear away the window, smash it out and reach in, he might be able to undo the child’s seat belt and pull him out. Still, the digging was near impossible.

  Slowly, grudgingly, the snow began to pull away from the jeep’s window. Marlo set his goal at a three by three square around the window. He wanted to see the entire metal stripping around the window before he would shatter the glass. He’d need the whole space to put his arms in and pull the child free.

  The snow he pulled out of the hole was carefully thrown over the car top, ahead of him. When he placed it elsewhere it fell back in or the wind drove it into him. If he’d gone by in his copter now, rather than forty minutes earlier, he could never had spotted the jeep.

  Marlo began to see the entire molding around the window. He dug
furiously now. Despite the heavy shovel and water-laden snow, Marlo was not breathing hard. He’d trained for such emergencies, and he’d remained in good physical health.

  His shovel was cutting in deeper now. The icy square hole he cut looked like an ice cube turned inside out, he thought. He kept wondering if he should cut it wider before breaking the glass. But how much oxygen was left in the jeep? He decided he could not wait another moment. He pulled out his scraper again, feeling he must dear away the glass so he could at least make out the child’s form so as to not smash the glass too close to his head. He intended using the handle of his shovel to break the glass. He prayed the glass would break apart in chunks that could be peeled off, avoiding any real danger to the child. He judged that the jeep had ice-glass which should crackle into a matted sheet of broken, tile-like fragments. But ice-glass behaved oddly sometimes.

  Marlo upended his shovel and was about to smash the window when he watched it slowly move, a fraction of an inch at a time, grinding against the ice packed inside the door as it lowered. The window was being opened from inside.

  “Help! Please, help!” someone began crying.

  Marlo went to his knees, his head and shoulders against the small section of opened window. He saw Arlene Stephanuk staring back at him.

  “My baby, for God’s sake, help my baby,” she was pleading with him.

  “Calm down, take it easy, Miss,” said Marlo. “I’ll get you both out, but we’ll have to hurry.”

  “No, don’t worry about me. Just get Steve out,” she was crying.

  Her face was smudged with a mixture of dirt and tears. Marlo guessed that she was in pain and that she’d fallen to the floorboard when the accident occurred.

  “All right, we’ll get Steve,” he reassured her. “The important thing is you’re both alive and well.”

  The little boy began to rouse and was crying low, complaining. Marlo felt good. They would be all right, he was sure.

  “Can you roll the window down further?” “I don’t think so,” said Arlene.

  “Try, try hard.”

  “I’m trying.”

  The window grated harshly but moved very little.

  Marlo groaned. It was worse to smash the window half open than if it were closed tightly. “If you can get it down more I can reach in and turn it the rest of the way,” he told her.

  Suddenly it gave and the window slid down a little more. Marlo was relieved, but the baby boy began screaming with the cold blast of ice pellets and wind that hit his face. He howled above the roar of the wind, a great deal louder than Cigliani thought possible.

  “Now, now,” cooed the burly helicopter pilot. “Everything’s going to be all right. Just take it easy. Marlo’s going to get you out of here.”

  In a matter of seconds Marlo had lowered the window all the way, reached in to the child, unstrapped his seat belt, and surveyed the condition of his mother. “You’re all right,” he said to Arlene. “You have a bad gash in your left leg but it’s stopped bleeding. Try to get yourself together. I’m taking Steve to my helicopter and then I’ll be back for you. Do you understand?”

  Arlene raised her blue eyes up to his. She looked like a princess, Marlo thought, and so helpless. Her long, soft-looking brown hair covered her shoulders and part of her cheek. She tried to smile and reached out to touch his arm. The tears came again. Marlo understood their meaning.

  “It may take a little more digging to get you out through this hole,” he said, “but for now, I’ll get the boy to my warm helicopter.”

  She responded by pulling herself up to the seat and sitting upright.

  “Yes,” she finally managed to say. “Please, take care of my baby.”

  But Marlo was already gone and all she was able to see was the whiteness around the hole and the window. The raging wind came at her. Marlo rushed back to the copter, Stephen held tightly against his fur-lined parka. Under his breath he cursed the woman’s husband, the boy’s father, wherever he was.

  15

  “Lack of oxygen,” announced Walsh, standing over Joanna’s prone body.

  “J don’t get it,” said Tim.

  “Too much carbon dioxide, maybe some carbon monoxide and no air.” Walsh began talking to Crocker in the tone of a parent speaking to a child.

  “But she’ll be all right?” asked Wertman.

  Walsh nodded several times in succession. “I think so. She’ll probably have one hell of a headache for some time. She’ll be woozy and maybe hallucinate a little. Keep her down for awhile after she recovers. She’s not comatose. She’s just unconscious. She’ll come out of it quickly now. That’ll make her a little sick.”

  “But how the hell could this have happened, Doc?” asked Tim.

  “I’ve only heard of one other such case,” began Walsh, “involving a hot box. It was caused by a hell of a bad mistake in the installation of the box. The pipe which was supposed to carry in fresh air and take out the stale air wasn’t hooked up properly. Made a fine lawsuit for the owner’s wife but didn’t do him any good.”

  “But this unit’s been here for years without the least difficulty,” countered Wertman.

  “When’s the last time it was checked?” Wertman shook his head. He didn’t know.

  “Who knows how defective it’s become?” said Walsh with a shrug of his shoulders.

  “Either that or someone’s tampered with it,” said Tim. “That’s not an impossibility either,” said Walsh, “the way things are going around here.”

  “Maybe it was Joraski,” muttered Wertman. “Who?” asked Tim.

  “Joraski, the man in the basement.” “The blue man? The dead guy?”

  “Yeah,” nodded Wertman. “He could have gotten in here and tampered with it. Then, upstairs, he saw me and decided to make sure I was dead.”

  “How do you know his name?” asked Tim suspiciously. “1 dug out his wallet. Why the hell do you suppose I called Kennelly?”

  “Only trouble with your theory, Mr. Wertman, is that such a machine as this can’t be so easily tampered with,” interrupted Walsh, stepping from between the two others who seemed on the verge of a fist fight. “This system is controlled elsewhere. It’s the only safe way to run such a contraption. It may even be borrowing off the normal fresh air sources of the building!’

  “Some of these systems have their own intake, though,” said Tim. “That must be the case, or else we’d all be suffering from a lack of oxygen, Doc.”

  “Not necessarily, Tim,” answered Walsh, stretching out on one of Wertman’s soft chairs. “The box is limited in space. It follows that it would fill up Miss Sommer’s lungs with deadly gases a great deal faster than, say, this office would from the three of us breathing. The only thing that saved her is your quick action and the steamy water. Water carries oxygen and as it evaporated around her, she could take in some of it.”

  “You’re telling me that the entire air supply in this building may be diminishing as we sit here and talk?” asked Tim.

  Walsh shrugged. “Depends on the way this system is tied into the main air vents. There might just be a hole in the system somewhere, preventing fresh air from outside coming in and possibly preventing carbon dioxide from being taken out.”

  “Why wouldn’t we know? I mean, we’d notice wouldn’t we?”

  “Some of the people on the lower floors have,” said Walsh, sitting calmly. “We just may have to knock out a few windows.”

  “You can’t in this building,” said Wertman. “Permafrost glass,” said Tim, “a foot thick.”

  “We could open the door above the observation deck,” said Wertman.

  “Who’s going to decide who gets to go up and who gets to stay down here?” asked Tim coldly.

  “Look, it’s not too bad yet, and with that hole in the wall on the lower level, we may have a chance to get down to the source and see if anything can be done,” began Walsh, getting to his feet. “It may be nothing, just claustrophobia.”

  “Joanna’s condit
ion is not just claustrophobia,” said Tim.

  “No, but we don’t know for sure about the building,” answered Walsh.

  “You seem to know a lot about buildings and air ducts,” said Wertman in a strained voice.

  “I got through two years of medical school working on construction jobs. But now, nobody’s building anything anymore. Not around here, anyway. Construction costs have more than quadrupled since 2006. Plumbing and water mains require a lot of protection from the cold. I don’t know so much about heating and cooling systems, but I’m sure they need as much inspection as any.”