by David Koepp
“I can’t do all that without multiple authorizations.”
“What’s your name?”
“You know we’re not—”
“Just your first one. Even a fake one. Something to call you.”
She hesitated. “Abigail.”
Definitely not her real name, the slight rise in her voice gave that away. She enjoyed the flight of fancy. Good for her, it’s probably why she got into this line of work and she didn’t get to use it much, handling dead-file outcalls at Fort Belvoir in the middle of the night.
“Okay, Abigail. Remember those good grades you got in high school? And the sports you trained your ass off for? The college you fought to get into. The number of times you said no when people wanted to go out and party and you knew you had to stay in and study. Remember the looks your family gave you when you told them what you wanted to do for a living, the abuse you put up with your first year in the department, and the personal life you’ve given up for the last, I don’t know, from your voice it sounds like maybe ten, twelve years now?”
“Eight.”
“Okay, so it’s getting to you quick. That happens. But all those sacrifices, all the shit you’ve had to eat just because you wanted to do what was right for your country? This is what it was for, Abigail.”
“Yes, sir.”
He could tell by the tiny quaver in her voice that he could still give a good we’re in the shit now speech when he needed it.
“Get the stuff on the list. I’ll be at Seymour at two fifteen A.M. EST.”
He hung up.
ANNIE WOKE UP, UNPROMPTED, ABOUT TWO HOURS LATER. FAST ASLEEP one second, wide-awake the next. She came out to the kitchen, where there was one light on, over the sink. She knew what she’d find in there even before she came in the room. Roberto would have washed and dried the mug from his tea and put it away, the same with the strainer. The kitchen would be unchanged from the way they’d left it when they went to bed, except for the snow globe. It would be sitting on the counter next to the coffee machine, on top of a single sheet of plain white paper, on which he would have drawn a heart with a red Sharpie.
That’s how it was.
Annie stared at the snow globe for a moment. She picked it up and gave it a shake. Snow fell on the kids and their sleds. On the one hand, it was kind of nice to see the thing again; it had been more than three years since it had been out of the safe.
On the other hand, she wished to hell they’d picked something else to use for the signal.
The Next Four Hours
Thirteen
However long most people imagine it takes to chip half a dozen coats of dried paint and a thin overspread of concrete away from the grooved edge that runs around a manhole cover, it was way longer than Teacake and Naomi had figured. If they hadn’t found the wide-slotted screwdriver in the tool cabinet, they might never have gotten it open at all.
They took turns with the tools. You couldn’t strike more than six or seven hammer blows in a row without needing a break from the painful vibrations that shot through your hands, as if you’d just hit an inside fastball with the thin end of the bat. Twice Teacake hit the screwdriver too hard. He’d thrown both tools down and rolled around on the floor, clutching his palms between his thighs, showing off the breadth and originality of his curse-word vocabulary. Naomi was more methodical, aiming her blows carefully and measuring their impact. Her progress was steady and considered, and hers was the final blow, the one that chipped away the last chunk of paint and concrete and made the cover move a fraction of an inch.
“You got it.”
“Get the pry bar,” she said.
He grabbed it from the closet, wedged it into one of the four slots evenly spaced around the circumference of the cover. The metal disk came up with a slight whoosh of decompression as the fetid air from below swapped places with the clean air above. Teacake wedged the bar in farther, pushed down on it as hard as he could, and got the handle end almost all the way down to the floor.
“Stand on it!” he told her.
She did, one foot at a time, pinning the bar to the ground once all her weight was on it. Teacake wiggled his fingers into the three-inch gap between the cover and the ground.
“Don’t put your fingers in there,” she said, but he didn’t answer, because they were this far, and there was no other obvious, easy way. Plus she hadn’t said it with much conviction, and he knew that what she really meant was “Put your fingers in there!”
But that was okay, because they were on the same page at this point, in it together all the way.
He strained like hell, wishing he’d stayed with the chest and upper-body work he’d done for a year and a half at Ellsworth. He would have dearly loved for her to see some of that now, because he had been cut, man, and he’d been really proud of it, it was such a change, he’d been a skinny kid for as long as he could remember. But almost the minute he got out he felt puffy and ridiculous, so he’d cut out the gym work and hadn’t missed it at all. Well, maybe he missed the feelings right after, when everything was flowing and you felt sort of happy and angry at the same time, that sensation was cool, but really, if she could have seen him then although you know I don’t look that bad now, was she just looking at my biceps a second ago? or, oh shit! His mind had wandered and he was losing his grip, the thing was slipping, he was going to drop it.
Teacake dug in, snapped back into the moment, bent his knees, and got the cover up past the tipping point. He leveraged it onto its edge and had planned to lay it down the same way he picked it up, but his muscles were screaming at him now: Why didn’t you do this when we were built for it, asshole?! As soon as he got it all the way up on its edge, he gave the manhole cover a shove and it rolled away, toward the wall.
It didn’t go far, though. It must have weighed two hundred pounds, maybe two-fifty, and after six or seven feet it started to tilt over and arc back, rolling right toward them. They danced out of the way, absurdly, as the thing chased them for a few feet, pissed off at having been awakened from its comfortable slumber. The metal rim ground across the floor a few inches from their toes, described one last dying circle in the hallway, and very nearly fell right back into the hole it had just been covering. That would have been a scream.
It settled like a spinning quarter on a tabletop, making a grinding cast-iron racket until it finally came to a rest, upside down, just in front of them.
When the echo faded, Teacake spoke. “You know, like, looking back? Maybe I could have just slid it to the side a little bit.”
“Well, sure, we know that now.”
If he didn’t love her already, he loved her for not telling him he was a fucking idiot the way his old man would have. She didn’t say much, but when she did talk it wasn’t to give anybody shit, not even as a joke.
Naomi picked up the flashlight, the one he’d grabbed upstairs. She clicked it on. They walked forward to the edge of the hole, got down on all fours, and shined the light down into it.
The light was bright, the batteries fresh, but there isn’t much any flashlight can do to illuminate a vertical cylindrical shaft that runs three hundred feet straight down into the earth. The metal ladder ran along one side of it. A ton of newly raised dust floated in the stale air, stirred by the removal of the lid, but other than that there was only the dark.
They looked at each other. Neither one of them wanted to back down, and neither wanted to go first.
“Climb fifty feet down and then we talk again?” she proposed.
“How many rungs is that on the ladder?”
She shined the light down at the corrugated metal rungs and estimated. “Fifty, probably. Why?”
“I don’t know, I was hoping it would help.”
She shined the light down into the hole again, playing it around the edges this time instead of straight into the black. Some distance below, there was the dim outline of an indentation in the side of the shaft, too far away to see clearly, but there was at least something there,
some kind of goal.
“Okay, look. Let’s go to that thing—”
“What thing?”
“Over here.”
She gestured for him to come around to her side and he did, moving up against her on the floor. His leg touched hers, just barely, but he was keenly aware of it. She traced the light beam around the edges of the indentation.
“There. What is that, thirty feet maybe? We’ll climb down to that, see what it is.”
“And then what?”
“Then we’ll talk. If it’s cool, we keep going. If it isn’t—”
He waved off the rest of her sentence. “I get it.” He took the light from her, swung his legs around, and started to climb down into the hole.
“You don’t have to go first.”
“I’m a gentleman. I’ll go first and shine the light up, so you can see.”
“You have to admit,” she said. “So far this is cool.”
“So far, I have to admit this is cool.”
“You really think so?”
“No, I’m just repeating what you told me I had to say. See you in thirty feet.”
She laughed, and he started down into the shaft.
Climbing with one hand was harder than he thought, but he was so afraid of dropping the flashlight he didn’t even try to use the other. One hand holding tight on the light and the other clamped in a death lock on the vertical bar of the metal ladder, he broke a sweat within ten or fifteen rungs, more from fear than anything else.
Then his mind got the best of him. It started to wander, as it did, and he thought about falling. First a foot slipping off a rung, then his shin banging into it, the painful stretch of tendons as his legs split apart, both hands flailing at the bars, maybe one or two fingers snapping, trying to support his falling weight as his body gained momentum. And then the moment of detachment—the cartoon suspension as his hands flailed at empty space and his feet popped free. Would he scream? Or would he go silent, would all sound drain away as his eyes popped wide and his mouth opened in a horrified, perfect round O shape, making a soundless plea for help as he began to drop, into the darkness, a hundred, five hundred, a thousand feet straight down, until he hit the cement floor at the bottom, feet first, his legs accordioning into his body, the long bones slamming upward into his internal organs, his femur or tibia or whatever the big one was slicing up, through his intestines, piercing his heart and driving itself up into the base of his skull.
Official cause of death: “man killed by own leg bone.”
Then another scenario occurred to him, one in which he did not fall free. In this chain of events, one foot wouldn’t slip away clean, it’d get hung up in the rungs instead. He’d fall, but his body would flop over backward, bending at the left knee, and he’d hear the ligaments on both sides of the kneecap pop as it wrenched at an unnatural angle, bearing weight and torque it had never been designed to withstand. In this version he’d scream, all right, shriek like a wounded animal as he hung there, his shredded knee holding him, upside down, head banging against the metal rungs beneath him. The flashlight would slip from his hand and fall, the beam throwing crazy, bouncing light over the inside of the shaft as it dropped, finally smashing to bits on the floor far below.
Naomi would shout from above and try to save him. She’d climb down three rungs, loop one arm in, and lean down as far as she could, flailing for Teacake in the near-total darkness. But she’d miss his outstretched hand and lose her own grip. Now she’d fall, and she would fall clean, down three feet and right into Teacake. Their combined weight would dislocate his knee and break the tibia of his trapped leg (in both versions the tibia lost big), and the fractured leg would slither, formless, through the rungs of the ladder. They’d both pull free. The ending would be pretty much the same as before, it wouldn’t be the fall that did it so much as the sudden stop at the end. Except this time Teacake would land upside down and the cause of death would be changed to “man falls on head,” while hers would read “woman dies from hanging out with moron who climbed down a dark, vertical cement shaft with one hand.”
Teacake’s mind hadn’t just drifted, it had gone off on a little Wanderjahr, but at least it had killed some time and they’d already gone down thirty-four rungs, reaching the gray indentation they’d seen from above. Crooking one arm through the rungs, Teacake brought his feet together, steadied himself, and turned the light to shine it on the side of the concrete shaft.
“It’s a door.”
Naomi came down to just above him and looked at it. Three characters, and in retrospect they didn’t have to climb down here to hazard a good guess as to what they said.
SB-2.
She nodded. “Yeah, that’s what I figured. Want to keep going?”
Teacake didn’t think he’d gotten what he’d paid for yet. He hadn’t smashed up his employer’s wall, hammered through a cement floor, and vividly pictured two distinct and gruesome versions of his own death so he could stare at a closed door with SB-2 written on it in faded black letters.
Without answering her, he shoved the flashlight in his pants pocket, still switched on and with the beam pointing upward so it could light her way. With both hands free, he’d move a lot faster.
They continued down.
Fourteen
After Mooney had thrown up onto the gravel behind the tailpipe, after he’d hacked and spit and blown his nose till it was raw inside, after he’d used the dirty beach towel from the back seat to clean every speck of cat gut off his face, he was able to think straight. Sort of. He couldn’t get a handle on the whole thing, because it was ungraspable, but he’d at least managed to calm his breathing and get his heart rate down to almost normal levels, and to stop squealing “God, Jesus, oh Jesus, God, what the fuck,” or close variations thereof, every few seconds.
As soon as he was clean, a powerful thirst overtook him, and he was relieved to see the lone remaining wine cooler was still mostly full, the cap only loosened in the moment before he hit the deer. He picked it up out of the Exotic Berry puddle it had made on the passenger-side floor mat and finished it in one long gulp. It was warm now, which made the liquor feel stronger, and stronger was what he needed. A little courage washed through his brain, a familiar feeling, but different too. He could feel himself becoming stronger, calmer, better.
He was also becoming a walking dispersal mechanism for Cordyceps novus. Mooney was the twenty-eighth human being to be infected by the fungus, but there was an important difference between him and the others. Bartles & Jaymes, like many wine coolers and wine products in general, uses the maximum amount of sulfur dioxide permitted by FDA regulations as a preservative. SO2 is one of the most effective antimicrobials on the planet and is highly antagonistic to growth. In its gaseous form, SO2 can be lethal to any air-breathing creature and is in fact the leading cause of death in a volcanic eruption. It’s the poison gas that gets you, not the lava.
But in liquid form, and in the right concentration, SO2 can be quite helpful. It not only prevents invasive microbial growth in human digestive systems, but it can actually clean and preserve a glass wine container itself, during both the fermentation and the storage process.
Mooney’s last bottle of Exotic Berry, aside from being tasty and intoxicating, was also a superb growth inhibitor. Whereas the fungus’s takeover of its previous human victims had been a blitzkrieg, in Mooney’s wine-cooler-besotted state, it was more of a slow and steady infantry assault through mud. The invading army of Cordyceps novus was going to win, Mooney was going to lose, but it would take a while.
Having unwittingly bought himself a few extra hours on the planet, he stood back from the car to review the events of the previous couple of hours.
There was a lot to review. The deer had been dead, there was no question about it. Same for Mr. Scroggins; the cat was missing half a face and skull. The notion of him surviving that kind of mutilation was laughable. That could only mean that something otherworldly was going on, something unholy. Whatever. Th
e universe was a fucked-up place, with lots of shit he’d never understand.
But what about me? Specifically, me, Mooney, where do I stand in all this? What did I really do, after all? Mooney had an analytical mind, sometimes, so he put it to use. What’s the worst that can happen to me? Yes, I hit a deer; yes, I pumped it full of lead; and yes, I killed a sick cat, but none of these were crimes. Burying them on somebody else’s privately owned land probably was, but he hadn’t done that, he hadn’t had a chance. The dead deer had run away, and the half cat climbed a tree and exploded. It’s as simple as that, Officer.
So, Fear of Police could be dismissed. He’d done nothing illegal. That left only Fear of Societal Condemnation and Fear of God. Well, the only way society was going to condemn him was if it knew he was a weirdo and an animal killer, and there was no evidence of that other than whatever was left in the trunk. He edged over to the car, the first time he’d come within six feet of it since its occupants decamped. There were no guts in the empty trunk, that was good, but the deer had bled a fair amount. It had also left some weird green-brown ooze that covered half the floor of the trunk. Must be the shit that comes out of you when you die or something.
Whatever, this could all be cleaned up, this was totally doable. This was a garden hose, a couple of old towels, and maybe twenty minutes of his time. Nobody would ever know. So Fear of Societal Condemnation was off the list too.
Unfortunately, that left the biggie. God knew. God knew all this shit, and He could not possibly be pleased. It wasn’t that Mooney feared for his soul; his personal concept of God was a bit more baroque, more Old Testament. He’d seen enough of life to know that God was big into retribution, and the sicker and more ironic the better. Yes, He was kind and loving, but He also invented colorectal cancer, and is there a supervillain anywhere, ever, who came up with a more diabolical way to take somebody out than that? Don’t bother checking, there isn’t.