by David Koepp
Yes, God had most certainly taken note of what Mooney had done tonight, disapproved, and started unleashing His righteous fury. Bringing the innocent creatures back to life to torture him had been step one, spattering his face with offal was step two, and Mooney knew for certain he didn’t want to wait for steps three, four, and five, whatever they might be.
He needed to apologize.
The last time he’d decided he owed God a mea culpa it had cost him almost four years of his life, but he was hoping he could wrap this one up in a couple hours on his knees. St. Benedict’s Abbey on Second Street was open all night, and he’d used it before when he needed to atone. The place was run by actual monks, a Franciscan order, and the black cowled robes conveyed a judgmental asceticism that felt pretty legit. The modish wooden pews couldn’t have been Vatican approved, but there was a granite slab that ran the length of the floor in front of the altar, and Mooney had spent many hours on his knees there, praying for divine forgiveness of one sort or another. The stone was pockmarked and uneven, so after the first five minutes his knees would start to ache, and by the time a full hour had passed he would be in so much pain he couldn’t focus. When his transgression was bad enough, Mooney would stay so long that the skin would grind into the inside of his pants, and when he stood, whole layers of flesh would tear away. By the time he got in the car, the blood would be seeping through the knees of his pants, and that was the sign that he’d done things right and they were square.
Of course, there was the time no amount of penance at the abbey was enough. To all of those prayers, God’s answer had been a consistent “Fuck no.” Half an hour on his knees, to ask for the strength to resist her? No. A full hour on his knees, to ask for forgiveness after he fucked her and, more important, might I please just this one time have a pass on consequences, could she please not be pregnant? Nope. Another two hours, to ask God to guide her with His wisdom and judgment and convince her to marry him? Forget it, asshole. And, finally, he’d spent three days on his knees, coupled with fasting so severe that he’d fainted; he fainted so many times that Brother Dennis had asked him to either stop coming or at least use a kneeler.
But the object of those prayers was vehemently denied as well. The baby did not die in utero, the baby was not stillborn, the baby was healthy and was his daughter, his bastard daughter with Naomi Williams. Though the entire rest of the Snyder family had forgiven him, it was abundantly clear that God in Heaven had not and did not intend to do so for a good long while.
Mike—he was still Mike back then—came across Luke 12:48 the day after she’d brought the baby home from the hospital. “But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows. From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.”
Clearly, God was not screwing around this time. He was demanding an Isaac-in-the-desert-type sacrifice, and Mike Snyder just had to figure out what it was.
The advantages of joining the Peace Corps were numerous—escape, the chance to serve his fellow man, escape, a settling of accounts with the Lord, and, oh yeah, escape.
Sadly, they rejected him. Turns out the Peace Corps looks for college graduates with decent résumés and real skills. You know, people who actually have something to offer. Who knew?
Service Brigade, Inc., however, would take just about anybody, provided you were not currently under indictment in your country of origin. The brigade had a contract with the Ugandan government to build affordable housing for a modest fee, which in local terms meant a fee that was highly inflated and heavily kicked back to the government officials who distributed it. Whatever, Mike was out of a bad situation at home, Service Brigade was willing to pay him a decent amount under the table, and his family thought he was a saint, so he took it.
Within a few weeks of his arrival in Uganda, the local workers he was teamed with started calling him Muni, short for Muniyaga. He liked the sound of it, so even after he found out that Muniyaga means “one who bothers other people” in some goddamn African language or another, he stayed with his new name.
He was Mooney. It was a fresh start.
He’d returned home to Atchison just a few months ago, was given a hero’s welcome and drawn into the uncomfortably tight embrace of his family once again. He’d regretted coming back almost the minute he got there, as soon as he felt their brimming eyes on him, judging the living shit out of him, telling him they forgave him for everything, for his weakness, for his cowardice, for what had turned out to be his complete lack of artistic ability.
They’d tried to get him to take an interest in his daughter, to at least go see Sarah, but that wasn’t going to happen. Her mother, sure, that’d be hot, but not the kid, never the kid. But Naomi wouldn’t see him at all.
Three days after coming home, Mike had started planning how to get out again. Maybe he’d meet his buddy Daniel Mafabi back in Budadiri, where Mafabi had worked out a sweet deal with the Ministry of Works and Transport to build schools all across the country at double cost. There were a lot of Ugandan shillings sloshing around the budget since Nakadama took office, and Mike knew the people who knew the people. Another couple of years over there and he’d be sitting on enough cash to split on his family for good, to never ever have to hear that they’d forgiven him again.
But God was another matter. Those eyes followed him wherever he went, so tonight he needed to get his ass to St. Benedict’s, make his apologies, and call this awful night to an end.
He got in the car, turned the key, and it clicked.
Of course.
He tried again.
Not even a grind, just a click. Dead starter. He got out of the car and slammed the door as hard as he could. It bounced open, so he slammed it even harder, then kicked it square in the middle, leaving a good-sized dent. One more thing for the insurance report. He looked around, assessing the middle-of-nowhereness of it all.
The car at the bottom of the hill caught his eye again. It was parked near the entrance to the storage place, just under a mercury-vapor light that lit up the parking lot. In the yellowy haze of the light, he could see the rear end of the car, a ten-year-old Toyota Celica. It rang a distant bell somewhere in his mind. He started walking down the driveway, toward the car, and as he got closer he saw a sticker on the back left bumper. Closer still and he could make out what it said.
PROUD PARENT OF AN AHS HONOR ROLL STUDENT 2012.
Unbelievable. He knew that car; it was Naomi’s parents’ car, or it used to be. It was probably hers now. He’d had some good times in that car. He started to smile and walk faster, drawn to the car as if by the ghosts of make-outs past. He’d heard she was going to school and working nights someplace; evidently she was here, right here where he needed her, when he needed her, and if that wasn’t Providence speaking to him, what was? Mike took a deep breath of the moist night air, feeling better now, definitely better, thinking more clearly—
go inside and find Naomi, that’s what I’ll do, find Naomi, find Naomi
—growing more comfortable in his body and mind, improving by the minute. He walked faster, stretching out his neck.
Everything was going to be okay. Naomi would be so happy to see him.
Things were clarifying.
Fifteen
Teacake and Naomi had reached the bottom of the ladder, and damn it felt good to put his feet on solid ground again. The flashlight in his pocket had been shining upward the whole way and Teacake had long since settled into a kind of trance, his body moving mechanically—step down, slide hands, step down, slide hands, step down, slide hands—no use looking down since it was all just a big black inky puddle down there. Step down, slide hands. He’d hesitated briefly when they reached the gray door for SB-3, but Naomi hadn’t even bothered to look down, and if she had he would’ve grinned and kept on, knowing perfectly well neither one of them would settle for anything less than making it all the way to the bottom
at this point.
So they’d continued on, and that’s when the climb got long. Really long. From the schematic he would have guessed the lowermost floor to be about a hundred feet below SB-3, but now that he thought about it, that section of the drawing had been broken by a jagged line with a space through it, which must have meant a whole lot of earth was left out. Step down, slide hands, keep going. His mind had gone for a little stroll, a pleasant one this time, since the only thing that was illuminated in the area was above him, and the only thing he could see clearly up there was Naomi’s backside. He refrained from calling it or thinking about it as her ass, it was her backside, and it was a very nice one, but hang on, that’s exactly what he was trying not to think about, out of respect.
He wondered what they would do if they went out on a date, since she didn’t drink. Truth was, he didn’t like alcohol as much as he used to; it made his moods unpredictable. He’d get mad when he shouldn’t, happy for no reason, and wasted people bugged him more as he got older. Plus there was the waking up in the night—he couldn’t sleep twelve hours at a time like he could even a few years ago. Too bad, he missed those days, but he’d noticed the mornings when he was 100 percent clearheaded were kind of cool. So, okay, that’s all right, but when people don’t drink or get high, like, what do they do around here?
He imagined the two of them jacked out of their minds on coffee, but who wants that?, and then he pictured them working out together and she was very sweaty and glisteny man was she put together tight and whoops, hang on, things were headed off in that direction again, so then he saw them taking her daughter to the movies. And maybe the kid got scared at one point and jumped in his lap, and he’d say that’s okay, you’re okay, kid, turn your head away, hide your eyes and I’ll cover your ears, I’ll tell you when it’s safe to come out, I’ll protect you, and Naomi would look over at him and she’d smile, he was good with kids, he didn’t mind them after all, maybe he could actually—
In the end, he did fall. But it was only one step. His right foot hit bottom, hard, he hadn’t seen it coming, he lost his balance, and his left slipped off the last rung. He oofed, Naomi turned, and he reached a hand up to help her.
“Careful.”
She took his hand, he helped her off the last rung, and they stood together at the bottom. It was colder down here, maybe sixty degrees, and surprisingly humid. He pulled the flashlight out of his pocket and shined it upward, till the light disappeared into the endless black tunnel, now above them. He turned it toward the door in front of them. It was another gray indentation, but this one was bigger than the others, heavily reinforced with a series of bars and levers, and had a black stencil spray-painted across it: DTRA ACCESS ONLY.
“What’s DTRA?” he asked.
“Let’s find out.”
She pulled out her phone to google it.
“No signal.”
“Shocker.”
He thought. He looked at the door, which was more like a submarine hatch, crisscrossed with a complex latticework of steel slats, all joined together at the corners and leading to a large black handle. Pull on the handle, the hinged slats pull against each other, the door opens.
“You want to do it?” she asked him.
“I’d really like to know what those letters stand for.”
“Me too.”
“I get the feeling that I’d like to know more.”
“What if it’s ‘Don’t Touch, Radiation, Asshole’?”
“Yeah, that would be some amusing shit,” he said.
“I’m cool if you want to just go back up.”
Yeah, yeah. Like that was going to happen. He reached for the handle, but she put her hand on his arm and caught his eye.
“I mean it.”
He looked back at her and thought about that for a nanosecond or two, and really, could things have been going any better at this point? There was a kiss moment coming, there had to be, or at least a gripping-each-other-in-fear moment, and he wondered, these kinds of moments with a woman like Naomi, did he think they grew on fucking trees? Not in the barren, rocky ground that had been his love life, they didn’t; the seeds of romance had found no purchase there since, oh God, the middle of high school.
No, he was not going back up. They were going to finish this.
The handle moved so much more easily than he thought it would; the door-opening mechanism was a work of engineering genius. You gave one gentle pull on the black bar and the rest of the pieces glided about their business, each tugging on the other with just the right amount of force at precisely the correct angle. Even after decades of disuse, the high-quality metal had not yielded to rust, even in the humid environment. The dozen moving pieces struck up the music in their symphony of movement, and eight dead-bolt locks pulled out of the recessed metal slots in the doorjambs where they had rested for the last thirty years. Teacake pushed the door open.
Something rushed out and slammed into them, but it wasn’t anything nearly as horrible as what their imaginations had been conjuring. It was cold air. Cool, really, maybe fifty degrees. After the climb down, they’d both worked up a half-decent sweat, so when the blast hit them it woke them right up.
After the cold, the second thing they noticed was the sound, a whooshing that was coming from right over their heads, like water rushing through pipes. Teacake raised his flashlight toward the source of the sound and saw that was exactly what it was. They were standing under water pipes, a dozen of them, side by side, lining the ceiling of the underground tunnel, and water was circulating through them, fast. It was a low ceiling down here, so Teacake stretched up to reach them, and his hand came away wet. The pipes were sweating.
Naomi looked at him. “Hot?”
“Cold. Freezing.”
“I don’t hear any pumps or anything.”
Teacake looked at the moisture on his hand. “But they’re sweating. Must be humid down here.”
“It is. I can feel it.”
“Why would it be humid underground?” he asked.
“Can I see that?”
She meant the flashlight. He handed it to her and she shined it around the place. They were in another long tunnel, a mammoth, concrete-lined underground space. She looked up at the pipes, rushing with water.
“Where’s it coming from?” she asked. “Like, an underground cold spring?”
“Guess so.”
From the far end of the corridor, they heard a familiar sound.
BEEP.
The goddamn beep again, accompanied simultaneously by a pinpoint of white light, a superbright strobe about twenty yards away.
Naomi turned and looked at him. “Dude, we are so close.”
BEEP.
He took the light back. “I carry this.”
He started down the hallway, shining the light in front of him, following the pipes as they went. She stayed close. The beeping got louder, the strobe brighter as they moved toward it. Farther in, they could make out the shapes of other doorways; it wasn’t just a long tunnel, but another level of a storage complex. There were half a dozen doorways on either side of the corridor, all heavily reinforced steel with the same kind of complicated locking mechanism as the entry door had. There were panels and sensors outside each door, but they were all deactivated.
Two of the doors had been left open altogether, but a quick shine of the light inside showed them to be empty, just blank concrete walls and vacant space. To be fair, there could have been more to the rooms than that, but Teacake had little interest in going into them, or even diverting the light away from the path ahead for long enough to get a good look. He had a plan, a very clear plan, both short term and long term—shine light, walk forward, figure out goddamn beeping, get your ass back upstairs, ask for her number, call it a night.
Steps one and two of his plan were going fine. The beeping continued to get louder, the strobing light brighter. As they drew close to the source, though, step three was looking to be a real bitch. They slowed to a stop at the l
ast door on the right, where there was a vertical display panel similar to the one they’d seen upstairs, but more detailed and covering only the room beyond this door. Many of the sensors and indicators had been deactivated, but there was one that still worked, and it was going off now—NTC Thermistor Breach.
Teacake looked up, because the whooshing of water through corrugated metal pipes was even louder down at this end of the hall. He shined his light up at the ceiling and saw that the pipes, all of them, made a right turn just over their heads and went directly into this room, through half a dozen specially cut holes in the thick concrete outer wall.
BEEP.
There was only one door left. Teacake and Naomi looked at each other. To open or not to open?
She spoke first. “Nah, I’m good.”
“Me too.”
They turned to get out of there at almost exactly the same moment, like a couple of synchronized swimmers. Enough is enough. Although he had to admit that was fun, of course he’d thought something awful was going to happen, but what do you know, it didn’t for once, and no, they still didn’t know what was defrosting, but they knew enough and they both felt alive and he was definitely getting a phone number out of this.
That’s when they heard the squeaking. It had been there all along, they just didn’t pick it up until the moment they turned away from the door. It was the squeak of an animal. Or many animals. Teacake swung his flashlight beam over toward it fast, and the light fell on a lump of fur on the floor a few feet behind them.
It looked just like that at first, a chunk of mohair or animal hide, but this thing was moving, writhing on the floor. They edged closer, in spite of themselves, the flashlight’s pool of light getting smaller and brighter as they drew up on the thing. There was a lot of movement there; the center of the object was fairly still, but all around its edges there were irregular shapes moving independently, stretching and snapping.