Cold Storage

by David Koepp

  BANG. The gun went off while he was still midthought, and it hit the wounded animal in the gut. It screamed.

  Oh, great, now I gutshot the fucking thing—how can this have happened? I am a warm and sensitive and humane person and— Oh my God, what is that horrible sound this disgusting animal is making at me now? I feel bad enough, what is it, hacking spit at me? And Mooney filled with some other feeling, not guilt, not tortured reflection, not the milk of human kindness, but a new one, for him.

  Rage. Pure, undiluted rage at this senseless animal that had ruined his night, his mental state, and the front left end of his car. He raised the gun again, put it to the deer’s brain this time, and blasted away, more than once, way more than once. In spirit it was more of a murder than a mercy killing, if anybody was keeping karmic score.

  The crying jag Mooney had afterward in the car lasted a good ten or fifteen minutes. Truth is, it felt pretty good as guilt flooded through his veins again; it was at least a familiar feeling, much better than the out-of-body experience he’d been having before that. Now, what to do? You can’t leave a dead deer by the side of the road with three broken legs, a bullet in its stomach, and four more in its head. That’s just, I mean, that’s sick. Mooney needed time to think, which meant that deer had to get off the shoulder of the road and into the trunk of his car.

  The sight of Mooney, 180 pounds and half in the bag, trying to get a dead, gangly one-eighth-ton deer into the trunk of his car would have made for some pretty brilliant silent comedy. It may well have taken all night if not for Tommy Seipel, the driver of a 2015 Lexus. Tommy saw what was happening, pulled over immediately, asked one question—

  “You loaded?”

  —and, sensing Mooney’s answer would be in the affirmative, threw his own considerable bulk into helping hoist the mangled deer into the trunk. He slammed the lid on it, wiped his bloody hands on Mooney’s T-shirt, spoke a handful more words—

  “I’d get the fuck outta here if I was you.”

  —and went back on his way. Mooney occasionally knew good advice when he heard it, and this was the best advice he’d heard in years. He jumped behind the wheel, slammed his door, and did as told, driving off with the dead deer in his trunk.

  As he drove—where to, exactly?—he started thinking about the deer in those last gutshot moments, when it seemed to be spitting at him, and he got enraged all over again. What exactly had gotten to him about that? Was it the temerity of the animal to accuse him of not being able to handle so simple an act as a mercy killing? Was that thing calling him inept, unable, telling him he couldn’t hold up his end of the deal? Something had triggered a rush of bad, inadequate memories, but he’d taken care of that, hadn’t he? He’d answered any questions quite definitively, with one or two or, okay, fine, four more squeezes of the trigger. No, I am capable. Quite capable, thank you. I settled that shit but good, and hey, what about my parents’ fucking cat while I’m at it?

  Mr. Scroggins was fourteen years old and had been sick for the last, say, twelve of those. He was a diseased and expensive pet; the bills from the animal hospital were about $400 just since the beginning of this calendar year. Though his father would have taken out a second mortgage to keep that ugly cat in the world, Mooney knew the toll the financial strain was taking on his mother. Plus, c’mon, life couldn’t be any kind of fun for Mr. Scroggins either, all riddled with disease and shit. Mooney was headed home with a dead deer in the trunk, a loaded .22 that he knew how to use, and a head full of righteous killing fury.

  He liked it.

  Mr. Scroggins was executed down at the public lake access boat ramp, where the shot might not be heard. Mooney tossed him in the trunk with the mangled deer, and so began the forty-four-hour odyssey of manly pride and horrified remorse that eventually brought Mooney to the grassy knoll here at Atchison Storage. All he wanted to do was give these two innocent dead animals the Christian burial they deserved.

  But now Mr. Scroggins was alive again, standing on top of the once-dead deer in the trunk of the car, and he seemed royally pissed off.

  The deer, whose mortal injuries had been far worse, flailed all four legs at once, trying to stand up in the trunk, but its broken limbs collapsed underneath it. Mr. Scroggins staggered off him but caught himself on the rear lip of the trunk and clung there, hissing. It had probably been a long ride for these two, and they were sick of each other.

  Motivated by something other than normal locomotive powers, the deer vaulted itself out of the trunk. It fell flat onto the gravel, its legs splaying outward, cracking again—there had to be a couple new breaks in there somewhere. Then it hauled itself up on all fours, bounded up the hill, and just kept running upward, disappearing into the night.

  Mooney had staggered back when the trunk first flew open, and good thing he’d put six or seven feet between himself and the car, because Mr. Scroggins just missed him when he sprang off the rear bumper, claws extended, half jaw snarling and spitting.

  Apparently, Mooney’s apology had not been accepted.

  Mr. Scroggins landed on all four paws, turned as if in reaction to a sound, and ran up the hill in the same direction the deer had gone. But the cat stopped at the first tree he reached, a tall pine, and threw himself at it, catching hold of the bark and starting to climb. Mooney got up and walked closer, staring in amazement as the cat climbed the tree with incredible determination. There were no stops, no hesitation, no second thoughts, only upward movement. The branches thinned near the top, but still the dead cat climbed, swaying on this one, nearly breaking that one, but losing no speed and no sense of purpose. He reached the top of the tree, the trunk spindly up there, but still strong enough to hold an eight-pound cat. Possibly seven and a half after recent events.

  Mr. Scroggins finally stopped at the top when there was nowhere else to go. He paused and took a look around, as if to make sure that this was it, there really were no new mountains to climb, not for him, anyway. Satisfied, he opened his mutilated jaws as wide as they would go. He turned back to the thinning central trunk of the tree, to its tippy-top, and snapped his head forward, impaling himself on the treetop. He squeezed, with a furious might and indignation, sinking his fangs into the bark as far as they’d go, clamping himself down there.

  From below, Mooney watched, slack-jawed. You almost never see this kind of behavior from a common house cat.

  Thus secured to the very top of the very tall tree by his embedded fangs and his commitment to his cause, Mr. Scroggins began to grow. His remaining cheek billowed, his legs swelled up like four-by-fours, his stomach ballooned out in both directions, and if you were close to him, which thank God you were not, you would have heard his tiny ribs snapping like matchsticks, one after the other, broken by the tremendous gastric pressure from within.

  Mooney was unaware of even the existence of Cordyceps novus, much less how it had apparently come to penetrate the trunk of his car. He just stared, dumbfounded, at the swollen, once-dead cat at the top of the tree. “How in the name of Jesus—”

  Mr. Scroggins burst.

  Had Mooney not felt the need to express his understandable amazement in audible terms, his mouth would not have been open when the cat guts hit him in the face.

  Eleven

  The central hallway through the ground-floor level of Atchison Storage was two hundred feet long, with white louvered garage doors running the length of it, thirty per side. There was a pristine beauty to it, if you were into symmetry and the vanishing point, that optical illusion that makes a pair of infinite-seeming parallel lines appear to intersect, far on the horizon. If you had to walk that hallway and a few others like it a dozen times every night for your job, it was boring as shit.

  But tonight, Teacake was walking it with Naomi. They were headed for the elevator at the other end, impossibly far away. Naomi had the picture she’d taken of the schematic up on her phone, and she scooched the image around, finding the elevator on the map and sliding it down to sub-basement 1, where the tube ladder�
��s top entrance point seemed to be.

  Teacake was nervous-talking.

  “Gets down to it, the whole thing is just a terrible idea. Don’t pay for storage. Don’t ever pay for storage. I’ve seen a half a mountain of shit come into this place, and almost none of it ever comes out, except for the super-short-term stuff. People pay anywhere from forty to five hundred dollars a month, depending on the space and the climate controls, and it’s all for garbage they one hundred percent do not need.”

  “That’s a little judgmental, isn’t it?”

  “Not really. These are sick people, man, most of ’em, and the storage place, they’re slick, you know, it’s sales, they know what they’re doing. They handle it like they’re slinging rock on the corner. Take for example, somebody’s gotta move, right? They get foreclosed on or whatever. This place gives ’em the first thirty days free. People figure, ‘Hey, cool, I don’t have to throw nothin’ out, I’ll just move some of my extra stuff in here, figure it out for a month, no rush, then I can eBay some of it and toss the rest without ever paying a dime.’ But that never, ever happens. Nobody moves outta here. So your ratty couch that you don’t even like anymore and your old Christmas decorations and your parents’ sheets that you kept after they died for some reason—now they’re all just exhibits in your sad museum. Oh, hey no, that don’t fly, fuck nugget.”

  He’d stopped abruptly, seeing something on one of the white doors. He went to a storage closet, unlocked it, took out a heavy-duty bolt cutter, and returned to the third unit back on the left. There was a brass padlock hanging from the latch, sticking up at an angle—an extra lock put on there by the renter. Teacake snapped it off with one squeeze of the bolt cutters.

  “They ain’t supposed to add their own locks. Ours are the onliest ones you gotta use, so we have access. Like in case there’s illegalness going on in there.”

  “What kind of illegalness?”

  By way of an answer, Teacake pulled his master key out from the retractable key chain reel on his hip, put the key into the main lock on the unit, flicked it open, and cranked up the door. He immediately regretted it and proved the wisdom of the adage “Don’t open a door unless you know what’s on the other side,” if any such adage existed.

  Inside the unit, twenty-four fifty-five-inch Samsung flat-screen TVs, still in the factory packaging, were neatly stacked in rows, leaning against the walls.

  “My mistake,” Teacake said. “Everything’s cool.”

  He closed the door again and they continued down the hall. She looked at him.

  He shrugged. “I don’t care what they got, they just can’t hide it from me. Rules is rules.”

  She looked at him. “Why do you talk like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you’re from the hood.”

  “This is how everybody I know talks.”

  “You know me, and I don’t.”

  “You got any other objections to how I am?”

  She thought about it. “Not yet.”

  They got to the end of the corridor and pushed the button for the elevator. He looked at her while they waited.

  “You don’t talk much, do you?” he said.

  “Not as much as you.”

  “Nobody talks as much as me.”

  She looked back down at her phone, moving the image down the ladder, through the earthen part, toward SB-4.

  He had more questions. “So you got college, you do this sometimes, what else?”

  “That’s not enough?”

  “Not really. You don’t get many shifts.”

  “How do you know?”

  He shrugged. “My job is to watch the monitors.”

  “Yeah, I see you too.”

  The elevator arrived, and she got in first. He followed. The doors closed.

  “You get, what, maybe two nights a week?” he said.

  “So far.”

  “So, you got another job?”

  “Sorta.”

  “You got people?”

  “Do I have ‘people’? Of course I have people. Teacake, you’re— What’s your real name?”

  “Travis. Meacham.”

  “Travis, you’re kind of sucking all the fun out of this.”

  The truth was, he knew she had people, and he knew exactly which people she had, but there was no way to bring it up without seriously creeping her out. Her first night at work had been exactly two weeks ago, and he’d noticed her on the monitors immediately. She was taking a shift usually filled by Alfano Kalolo, an enormous Samoan who had to go three hundred pounds, easy.

  The camera in the eastern reception area was placed close to the desk, and Alfano so dominated the screen that his absence one night fairly screamed at Teacake to take notice. Truth, who would not notice a thing like that? When Alfano sat on the little metal stool, he was a man-mountain who appeared to be eating a four-legged metal insect with his ass. When, that Thursday two weeks ago, Teacake looked up and saw Naomi there instead, a heavenly choir sang in his head.

  He’d stared at her image that night with the intensity of a teenager monitoring his Facebook likes. She sat, she stood, she did her rounds, and always she walked in beauty, like the night. He’d memorized that poem in Ellsworth; they’d had to pick something and learn it by heart for Explorations in Poetry, and that was the shortest of the ones you could pick. He knew the poem, but he didn’t know the poem until he saw Naomi on the monitor.

  When she showed up for work again two days later, he studied her on the monitors for hours, absorbing as much detail as one possibly could from a 540-pixel image. She had a book with her that night. He couldn’t quite get the title, but he loved her focus, the way her brow furrowed up at parts. He loved the way she turned the pages; he loved that she even read at all and didn’t just stare at her phone like everybody else. When she wasn’t back until the following Sunday, he realized that she was a fill-in, that she was grabbing shifts when and if she could get them, and that there was a very real possibility that she would never be back again.

  So, he told himself, it wasn’t really that he followed her after work. Yes, he did leave five minutes early so he could zip around to the other side of the bluffs and be near her parking lot when she left. And yes, he did swing out onto the highway just after she did and keep his car a safe and unthreatening distance behind hers on the road at all times, and yes, he did speed up when she sped up and slow down when she slowed down and make the same turns that she made, until he eventually reached her place of residence. But he knew in his heart it wasn’t with weird intent—he was trying to engineer a casual run-in.

  It just didn’t work out. Once Naomi left the Atchison parking lot, it was kind of hopeless, all country highways till he got to her apartment complex, and then how on earth could he pull up in the car next to her at her building and say, “Oh, hey! Don’t you work where I do? Didn’t I watch—I mean see you on the monitor a couple times, and man, isn’t it weird that you live here, twelve miles away, and I was going that exact same way but my car started making this weird sound so I had to stop right here, in the parking lot of the very same apartment building where you live? Isn’t that bizarre?”

  He couldn’t say that. The smoothest motherfucker in human history (arguably Wilt Chamberlain) couldn’t have pulled that one off.

  So, rather than scare her, Teacake had just sat in the car, waiting till she went in, pretending to be absorbed in his phone. It was a flip, by the way, so if she’d noticed him she might well have wondered what the hell he was staring at. He waited till she got inside, then he waited some more, just to see which light went on, then he waited a teensy bit more, just to see if, well, because he did, and before he knew it almost an hour had gone by, and he really honestly was about to go when the door of the place opened again, and he saw her come out with the little girl.

  There was no question that the girl was her daughter. Some things you can just tell. They looked alike, for starters, but also it was the way Naomi held the little girl�
��s hand. Nobody holds your hand like that except your mama.

  The little girl was cute as hell and dressed in clean, pressed clothes, a detail Teacake noticed because his own clothes when he was a kid had always been dirty as shit. He blushed, right there in his car, embarrassed, not because he was stalking this poor woman and, now, her kid, but because of all the times that he went to school in filthy clothes and with an unwashed face. But this little girl was what a kid was supposed to look like. She was clean and bright and her mom had given her a good breakfast, he just knew she had, even though she’d come off a twelve-hour shift and hadn’t slept since God knows when. Naomi had come home and made breakfast, and maybe even put some cinnamon sugar on the kid’s toast, the way she liked.

  The little girl was talking a mile a minute, and Naomi was listening. Not “uh-huh, uh-huh, yeah, cool” kind of listening, but trying to actually make sense of what the kid was saying, which had to be nonsense. I mean, how much can a four-year-old say that matters, anyway? He didn’t know, but from what he’d heard, the percentage was pretty low, mostly it was just “I want more frosting” or some shit.

  They got to the car, the little girl got into a car seat in the back, and Naomi stood there, waiting, her hand on the door, as her daughter finished her pointless point.

  Teacake rolled down his window, just a little. He was close enough, just barely, to make out a few words. Not the little girl’s—those were all faint and little-girly and coming too fast from inside the car—but he could hear what Naomi said in response, after waiting till her daughter stopped for a breath.

  “I hear you, sweetie. That stinks.”

  And then she closed the door.