legends · 4 min read ·
Cold Chain
A cold-store picker is sent to a pallet whose scanned contents are a person's name.
The cold store at Dunmore Distribution is minus twenty-two Celsius, all day, all year. They issue you a suit for it, a padded orange thing like a spacesuit, and a hat, and gloves that make you feel like you are wearing mittens made of bread. The rule is forty minutes in, twenty out. The twenty is spent in a heated cabin with a kettle and a laminated sign about frostbite.
I was a picker. I walked the aisles with a handheld scanner, pulling pallets of frozen peas and chicken nuggets and ice cream, and putting them on the dock for the lorries. It's good money for the hours. Everyone says it gets into your bones.
The first thing you learn in the cold is that sound behaves differently. Everything is muffled and then suddenly clear. The forklifts are distant, then right next to your ear. You can hear a pallet creak a hundred metres off.
On the night shift in the third week I heard someone knocking.
It was not in the aisle where I was. It was further off, on the far wall, behind the racking. Three knocks, deliberate. A pause. Three knocks. The unmistakable sound of knuckles on a door.
There is a door in the far wall. Everyone knows it. It's a heavy steel door with an insulated frame, painted grey, with a handle on the cold side and a hazard sign. It goes nowhere. The warehouse is a rectangle, and the door opens on to the outside wall, which has been bricked up. Management say it was a fire exit from an earlier layout. It's been bricked since before anyone currently works there.
I asked Danny, the shift lead, about the knocking.
"Don't worry about it," he said. "It's the pipes. Contraction."
"Three knocks and a pause."
"Pipes do that."
But I had noticed that nobody went to that end of the store after ten o'clock. Product stored there was picked in the day. The stock was a bit odd too: lines nobody ordered, pallets of single items, wrapped in blue plastic, unlabelled.
On the Thursday I went down. I had a legitimate reason. A pick on my scanner, a pallet code in row Z. I walked the aisle with the cold working at my cheeks and the strip lights buzzing. The knocking stopped as I approached. At the end of the row, there was the door. Grey, steel, a sheet of frost along its seam.
On the floor in front of it, someone had swept. A small clean half-circle on the ice, as though a door had been opening inwards. I stood there. I looked at the scanner. Row Z, position 14. I looked up and found the pallet, in blue wrap, at shoulder height, on the bottom beam.
The pallet code matched. I read the contents on the screen: *Quantity 1. Item: Haley.*
I want you to think of that for a moment. I did not think anything. I stood in the cold and read the word again. A name, in a stock field, in a system that holds nothing but product codes. I put my hand on the blue plastic and felt through my glove an enormous, polite stillness, the stillness of something that has been very patient indeed.
Behind me the knocking began, from inside the door. Three knocks. A pause.
I did the sensible thing. I put the scanner on the shelf and I walked back down the aisle without running, and I clocked out, and I did not go back. I rang an agency and found other work in a car park. I never collected my last week's pay.
But I looked at the dock the next morning on my way past, and there was a lorry, white, with a company name I didn't recognise, backing in at door seven, and the loaders were wheeling out a pallet of blue plastic. It was heavier than it should have been. It rode low on the truck.
The driver slammed the doors and checked his clipboard. He was a thin man in a high-vis jacket, and as he walked past me to the cab, with the sheet in his hand, I saw the line he was ticking.
*One Haley. Delivered to: whoever knocks.*