Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [94]
Adrian hoisted the shovel up high and straight, and drove it down into the grass in front of the headstone. I did likewise. Together in the near-perfect dark, we swung and shoved, grunting and flinging dirt over our shoulders, onto the graves nearby. Every now and again one of us would hit a rock or a particularly tough root, and the steel shovels would chime like church bells—pinging loud and clear in the emptiness.
The whole time we worked, no one drove by on the road where we’d left the Cherokee. And even though I kept one eye on that road the whole time, I never saw a single person come or go, as if the cemetery and all its surroundings were truly abandoned, and forgotten, or avoided.
Finally, after fully four feet of mud, worms, and rocks as big as frogs, my shovel scraped up against something decidedly un-dirt-like.
I stopped. I tapped at the something and Adrian did likewise, probing at the mass with the tip of the shovel and prying out a corner on his side of the corpseless grave.
With some wiggling, cursing, and further excavation, we were able to pop it up out of its spot and onto the grass. I looked for a place to sit that wasn’t covered with loose dirt, but gave up and sat down on a little heap of it. Adrian came to sit beside me. He held the box on his lap and picked at the latches.
The box wasn’t terribly interesting; it was just a metal jobbie that he’d put inside a very thick plastic bag to keep the rust and rot off. The bag had mostly held up and the box was mostly intact, though threads of rust ate the corners and the latches. One of them broke off in his hand. The other took only a small tug to release.
Adrian had thoughtfully wrapped the interior contents in plastic, too, so they looked pretty good. Some of the edges were curling, and some of the pages were turning the color of an old photograph, but everything appeared intact.
Impatiently, I took the lump out of the box and set it in my own lap, peeling the plastic away even more. “Is this everything?” I asked.
“It’s everything I took. And if you want the truth, I don’t even know what most of it means,” he confessed. “It’s coded, like most of the paperwork they filed on me, too.”
And there was Ian’s serial number.
Right there, in black and white, 636-44-895. I dragged my finger down the page and stopped on it, then kept skimming. “It’s too dark to read much out here, right now,” I observed. Technically I could see it well enough to read, but Adrian was right and everything was coded anyway. I wanted to take the docs back to my condo and examine them in the comfort of my own home, with the help of my own artificial lighting.
“You promised,” Adrian said softly.
“What?”
“You promised you’ll use these to help your friend, or your client, or whatever he is. And you’ll try to shut the program down. That’s what you promised. Did you mean it, or did you only say it so I’d take you here?”
“Oh, I meant it. This—” I said, indicating the paperwork, the program, and everything that was wrapped up with it. “It horrifies me. Do you know what they were doing, here? In these tallies?”
“Not really.”
“They were classifying people like your sister, and my client, and me … as animals—and treating the documentation like this was all some experiment on apes. Some of the subjects didn’t survive. One of the ones who did survive is maimed for life.” I climbed to my feet, and used the plastic-wrapped papers to swat dirt off my pants. “Worse, really. He’s maimed for afterlife. And whatever you believe and however you feel about what your sister became, she was a person, and she could still feel pain. She could still be killed. And she deserved better.”
Adrian was still holding the empty box, at least until he gazed back down at the hole and tossed the container back inside it. He didn’t respond to anything I’d said, which was maybe a little uncool, but he was having a moment there so I didn’t disturb him. All he said was, “We should fill this