Icebreakers

And then the bunker doors are down and cold air hits us from inside. Cryo air, tasting as if from a different world. Clean and crisp and inorganic. The shelter’s entrance is wide, but as the crowd squeezes forward, I feel myself being pulled in against my will, like something being sucked down a plughole, deep beneath the Earth.

Soph sees me panicking. She elbows her way through to me and grabs my hand, the one that isn’t clutching the crowbar tight to my chest. Our fingers slot together with big-sister-little-sister ease, calluses scraping together.

“Come on,” she says. “We’re so close now.”

I allow myself to be swept along beside her. There are hundreds of us surging inside: limping, maimed, scarred, incomplete, or combinations thereof. We trample the gleaming floors with our grime, the dry air soaking up the sweat and moisture from our giddy exhalations.

There’s no one here that I can see, even with my good eye. Storerooms and offices are open and empty; the place looks like it was abandoned in a hurry. Perhaps here, at the end of the line, more of the bastards have read the writing on the wall than we gave them credit for. Maybe we’ll be lucky, and the cryo chambers will be unguarded.

I was reluctant to come here with her, knowing what this mob is capable of. Soph and her people say this is justice, or something close enough to feel good. We’re on the right side of history. I know it. But I have to keep her safe from what it will do to her.

The corridor tilts to the left, slowly spiralling downwards. Still clutching Soph’s hand, I’m crushed against the inside curve of the wall, and it scrapes the scar tissue layered thickly across my shoulder. I cry out and twist away, but for a moment, I’m reminded of our high-rise where we had lived in the hot gasping years between ‘52 and ‘63: me and Soph, and Mum, too, when she was . . . well, before.

I remember how the emergency escape routes to the communal safe-air room in the basement had coiled down, just like this, but around the outside of the building. I had held Soph’s hand when she was scared, and promised her we would be okay, that the creaking stairway would hold. Those were the years when Mum told us stories about the not-wildfire seasons of her youth. Did I ever tell you girls about the not-wildfire season in 2039? I never knew one like it. At night, I saw the stars.

I bump into the back of someone, their shirt sticking to mine for a moment. The crowd is slowing, compressing. Around the bend, I can hear dozens of different raised voices, overlapping and incoherent. Soph releases my hand and pushes her way through, eager, half-wild. I call out to her but can’t hear myself over the shouting and screaming coming from up ahead. I have no choice but to follow her, worming myself sideways and slipping between the sweat-slicked people in front of me. Pulling my shirtfront up over my mouth, I shield myself from our collective stench of fresh exertion and older body odors.

We are closer to the front than I thought. The crowd stops just as the corridor flattens and straightens out, coming to an end in front of a set of enormous white blast doors. Two men in black tactical gear are standing to either side. Dark bags ring their eyes, their faces unshaven, and they’re pointing heavy rifles at us.

There are a dozen meters of no-man’s land between us and the guards, but the crowd is roaring some chant in unison, Soph among them. Does she know how vulnerable she is? I try to glimpse the firearms the two men hold; they’re smart models, locked to their fingerprints, the aim AI-assisted. They could close their eyes, hold down their triggers, and each bullet would find a home within a unique skull. But one of the guards’ hands is trembling. I can see his eyes darting across the crowd, counting heads, running the numbers, trying to calculate which way we’ll run when he opens fire.

I grab Soph and pull her back, to shield her with my body, but she resists. The people around me are ready to charge, even knowing what it will mean, and then the guards will have no choice.

But the first man lowers his rifle to the concrete, kicks it away, and sticks his hands up. The other one, seeing his kill quota suddenly double, does the same. He holds empty palms out to us, saying something over and over again in a language I don’t understand. Perhaps please, or mercy.

We don’t have guns; the restrictions banned them for the proletariat long ago. We have farming implements and power tools. I clamp my arms around Soph’s shoulders and pull her back while the frontmost members of the crowd get to work using them.

“What are you doing?” she screams, having to yell to be heard. “We’re not here for them.”

If she’s going to cross a line, do something she can’t take back, it has to be on someone who’s truly earned it.

That will come soon enough.

The mob pushes forward, the blast doors opening, and I let her go. We step over scraps of black fabric and wet viscera, the stench of liberated organs and bowels powerful in the confined space. My eyes water. In the moment that we cross the threshold, I feel the temperature drop again, wisps of mist dribbling out at ankle-height.

These are the levels that house the cryo chambers. There are other members of the bunker’s staff here, technicians and medical personnel, but no guns on this side of the divide. They back into corners, terrified, making themselves small. It doesn’t save them.

Nausea rises higher in my throat. My instinct is to throw myself in front of them and shield them with my body and my crowbar, the same way I would for Soph. They’re human beings, and I don’t know where the lines are anymore. There were typists and clerks at Auschwitz and Dachau, too.

There’s a grunt by my side as Soph stumbles and falls to her knees, and I drag her back to her feet before the swarm can crush her. She winces. Her leg is still troubling her, and for a second her face twists from pain to fear. Despite the burn scars, it’s a face I recognize from childhood—a constant backdrop to the smoke-infused stairwells and clean-air shelters, our silent walks through falling ash in the smothered light of mornings. As she realizes she’s safe, the expression is replaced with a glee that looks out of place.

“Thank you,” she says. I know she’s not only talking about pulling her to safety. She grins and limps away, at as close to a run as she can manage, to finally find her prey.

I move in the same direction as the crowd, the crowbar loose by my side. I feel like I’m walking in slow motion, like I’m underwater or in a dream. Others push past me, yelling and chanting.

We’re down into the heart of the facility now, and the space opens up into a great cavernous chamber lined with rows and rows and rows of them. The opulent dead. They’re housed in coffins of austenitic stainless steel for minimal thermal transfer, the ceilings of their graves a see-through composite of tempered glass and silicate aerogel.

The first row of cryo chambers are already being torn apart. Our people cheer as they bring down sledgehammers and bricks on the cryoglass lids. I see the first pod smashed open and a grey-blue cadaver pulled roughly from its housing, cables and tubes snapping, before being set upon with shears and knives and drills.

It’s a futile gesture—they’re already functionally dead, with a delicate series of retrocryo procedures their only route back to consciousness. Simply breaking the seal on the chambers and walking away would be enough to ensure that their occupants could never return to anything resembling life.

But they’ve had this coming.

To my right, another chamber is cracked open. Its tenant is dragged out and dumped on the floor. I catch a glimpse of her smooth, sleeping face, and recognise her with ease. She’s not as old as she should be, given the passage of time. The Vice President. Or she had been, long ago, back when they were still pretending it was a republic.

“Jenna says hello, bitch,” an old man standing astride her croaks into her slack face. Then he drives the ground end of a spade through it.

I don’t know who Jenna is, but I’m happy for her. All around me, tech giants and CEOs and billionaires are being wrenched from their chrysalises. The one percent of the one percent of the one percent, being rounded down to nothing.

I’ve tried to maintain some internal level of calm, to make sure I can get Soph safely in and out of here while she takes her vengeance. But precarious things inside me are boiling and tipping over at the sight of them, these smug dead people with their pristine, stainless bodies.

The arrogance, the audacity, to think that they could just fast-forward through the apocalypse, to freeze time while above their heads billions of us thrashed and died in the smoke and heat. Giving our only lives undoing everything they inflicted upon us. As we did, in the most literal possible terms, their dirty work. To even imagine that they could one day wander out of here—into a world of blue skies and clean air that everyone else spent flesh to fix—ready to suck it all dry again for the sake of their portfolios.

The horrors we’ve endured. The things we’ve lost. I look down with my good eye as my good hand tightens around the crowbar. My burned hand joins it, the shiny skin pulling taut.

Not. A. Fucking. Chance.

I join the nearest group and slam my crowbar down on the glass, a two-handed executioner’s swing that seems to come from a body far stronger than my own. A shockwave flashes up my arms, and a flowering of cracks appear, but the glass holds. I swing again, a noise I don’t recognise coming from my mouth. Another swing. Another. I’m sobbing.

I stagger back as someone else pushes in, and a moment later, the coffin is open. They don’t bother pulling this one out, but take it in vague, overlapping turns to maul and hack at what’s inside, stripping the carcass of its structural integrity.

I’m shaking, my legs feeling weak—an adrenaline crash. I look around, breathing heavily. The crowd has been working their way outward from the entrance, mechanically but organically, like a mycelial network. But Soph is over in the distance, almost to the back of the vast library of pods. Alone. She’s staring down into one of the coffins. From here, I can see the rapid rise and fall of her chest.

She’s found him.

I go over and put my arms around her. She returns the gesture, clinging to me, the claw hammer in her grip pressing into my back. Despite everything happening around us, my heartbeat begins to slow. Over her shoulder, I look down at him through the glass, regarding the strangeness of the corpse inside. Biologically, at least, younger than either of us.

“I can’t do it,” she says.

I want to tell her that I can do it for her, but I’m not sure I can either. It’s one thing to think about embedding the curved end of a crowbar into some crypto heir or oligarch that hid themselves away while the world gasped for air, but this is different. Personal.

“What would Mum want us to do?” I say. I don’t mean it to dissuade her one way or the other. It’s a genuine question.

“She would want to do it herself,” Soph says.

But she isn’t here. Even when she was alive, her lungs were too scarred by smoke and the motor centers of her cortex too laced with nanoplastics for her to make a journey like this invasion, this death-heist. I haven’t vocalised any of this, but I know the same thoughts are going through Soph’s head.

We could crack his pod open and tear his body apart like jackals, like he deserves. We could walk away, forget him, cast him from our history, like he deserves. What we can’t do is wake him up and demand that he explain, like we deserve. But we don’t need to turn savage, to stoop to his level.

“Stand back,” I say. Soph detaches from me, her face wet. She looks at me strangely, but nods.

I ram the point of my crowbar into the thin gap where the coffin shuts, twisting, boring through the hermetic seal. Something gives, and there’s a hiss of freezing air as the contents of the pod are exposed to the world outside.

I let go of the crowbar, and it clangs against the floor.

“That’s it,” I say. “That’s all we need to do. He’s not coming back now.”

Soph drops her hammer. We stand side-by-side for a moment, not saying anything, just breathing, looking at him.

The crowd is slowing now, the sense of mania gone. The urge for physical revenge, for blood, has passed. Now, this is a case of logical, measured extermination. Like ours, most of the pods are just being pierced, their lids breached and the occupants left to defrost and shrivel in one piece. None of them are waking up. None of them ever will.

“You coming?” Soph asks as she steps away, wiping her eyes on her sleeve.

“Just a minute.” I look back at the coffin. “I’ll meet you by the doors, ‘kay?”

She gives me a questioning look.

“Don’t be too long,” she says. “He’s not worth anything you have to say.”

And she leaves.

Down through the cryoglass, I want to see the color rush back into his cheeks before his body is ready to accommodate it. I want to see liquefying blood fatally overload constricted arteries, his brain tissue crashing and stalling before it can find a solid grip on first gear. But he looks the same. The same as I remember, beside his deathly pallor; maybe smaller, somehow. It’ll take a while, and he won’t be aware of the transition. Ice-sleep is indistinguishable from the final sleep.

I lose the urge to make a closing remark. There’s a world outside that I’ve given half my life to mending, that billions have given their full lives for, who have cut short their futures to give one to their children.

The dead here are the monsters of the past, and they don’t deserve another second in our present. I have a husband at home who loves me, who has no idea I’m involved with any of this. And I have a sister over by the doors who is waiting for me. I go to her.