Minus Eighty

The text says FREEZER 4 TEMP ALARM -51C and Nkechi is out of bed before she's finished reading it, because minus fifty-one is not a number, it's a countdown. Freezer 4 holds the longitudinal cohort. Twelve years of blood and plasma from four thousand people who agreed, in 2013, to let a research group follow their health, and who have come back every eighteen months since to have a needle put in their arm. Eleven hundred boxes. Each box a hundred tubes. If it gets above minus sixty for long enough, the proteins start to go, and twelve years of four thousand people's arms become a very expensive shelf of nothing. She drives. Twenty-two minutes at that hour. The building is dark except for the strip lights in the corridor that never turn off, and the freezer room smells of the compressor she can already hear straining, a sound like something trying not to cough. Minus forty-eight on the display now. The backup freezer is across the room. It's half full, which is the point of it. It has been half full for three years and every month she has argued with the finance office about the electricity cost of keeping an empty freezer cold and every month she has won, barely, and right now she'd like every one of those people to be standing in this room. She puts on the gloves, the thick ones, and the face shield, and she opens Freezer 4. The cold that comes out is a wall. Even at minus forty-eight it takes the breath out of her. The racks are steel, five shelves, each shelf holding boxes, each box frosted white, each with a label she wrote or someone before her wrote. She starts at the top. Two boxes at a time. That's the most she can carry without the gloves losing grip. Two boxes, six steps, into the backup, back. Two boxes, six steps. The racks have to go in the same order. If the order's wrong, the database is wrong, and the database is the cohort. She's got the layout on her phone propped on the bench and she checks it every third trip.

Trip forty. Her hands have gone past cold into something else. She takes the gloves off, puts her hands under her arms for sixty seconds, counts it out loud, puts the gloves back on. Trip ninety. Minus forty-two on Freezer 4. The backup is at minus seventy-nine and holding. She's thinking, because you do, about the people. Not abstractly. There's a box on the third shelf with a participant ID she recognises because it's the one that came back with the marker they'd been looking for, the one that became a paper, the one that got the group its renewal. There's a whole rack from 2016 that she processed herself, her first year, when she still labelled everything twice. Somewhere in there is a woman who'd told her, at a blood draw, that she was doing it for her daughter, who'd had the same thing. Trip two hundred. She's stopped counting. She's stopped thinking. Two boxes, six steps. At 5:40 the last box goes in. She closes the backup and stands with her hand flat on the door, feeling it be cold. At 6:15 she writes the incident report. At 6:30 the facilities manager arrives and finds her on the floor of the freezer room with her back against the wall and her hands in her armpits, and says, "Is it all in?" "It's all in." "Compressor?" "Gone. Bearing, I think." He looks at Freezer 4, then at the backup, then at her. "Good thing we kept that on." "Yeah," she says. "Good thing."