by David Koepp
“Margo is under the weather? I’m sorry to hear that.” Still with the stilted voice—she wasn’t alone in the bathroom.
“That’s it. Then tell her what you know, she’ll help you with the list. Even number seven. Especially number seven. We’re under two hours, so you have to move fast.”
In the background, he heard a toilet flush. He continued.
“Text your burner number to me through a Mixmaster and I’ll call you when I’m rolling.”
Water ran in the bathroom. Someone was washing her hands.
Abigail sighed. “I understand, Mom, I just think it’s kind of soon after your knee replacement.”
Roberto smiled. She was pretty good, all things considered. “I’m dying to know why you decided to believe me, but that can wait. Doesn’t matter, I guess.” He could hear the bathroom door open and close again.
Abigail’s tone changed. “Is it as bad as what you wrote in the report?”
“Every bit. And none of the people who understand that are in power anymore. Jerabek is not going to bed, he’ll keep an eye on things, and he will not be helpful. But believe it or not, I’ve done all this before.”
“Including item seven?”
He didn’t answer that. “Trini Romano.”
He hung up.
Seventeen
When Teacake was fourteen, he fell in love for the first time. Patti Wisniewski was seventeen and he never really had much of a shot with her, but he’d started hanging around with seniors when he was a freshman, thanks to his overpowering sex drive. Like any fourteen-year-old boy, Teacake had powerful erections and he followed his dick wherever it led him. One day it dragged him to auditions for the school play, of all places. It was the last thing a frankly thuggish kid like Teacake would have done under normal circumstances, but he had an angle to work. The whole school had to watch the fall musical one afternoon, and he would have been blind not to have noticed that there was an inordinately high percentage of attractive young women up there onstage, almost entirely surrounded by losers. Three weeks later, he went to auditions for the new play.
Because he was a human male and alive on the planet, he was cast immediately. It was some shitty old play about a bunch of actresses sitting around a New York City apartment waiting for their big break. He barely knew the name of it then and certainly couldn’t remember it now. He’d played Frank the Butler and had exactly two lines:
“Shall I call a taxi, Miss Louise?”
And, in the second act, the kicker—
“Taxi’s waiting, Miss Louise.”
One night he screwed them up and switched the order around, which should have brought the play to a crashing halt, but nobody really noticed. He never talked loud enough anyway. The other two shows he managed to deliver both lines at the right times and without laughing.
But his real accomplishment was getting himself accepted into the sex-and-drug-filled paradise of seventeen-year-old life. He was kind of cute for his age, smart enough from hanging around his older brother to know what to say and what not to say, and the seniors took him under their wing as a sort of mascot. He wasn’t fully developed, so his sexuality wasn’t particularly threatening, and that gave him all sorts of access to older women. He worked it as hard as he’d ever worked anything in his life, and at the cast party on opening night, Patti Wisniewski gave him a mercy hand job in the bathroom of Kres Peckham’s stepdad’s house. The only shame was that he was too drunk to remember it.
That was the thing. If asked, Teacake would be hard-pressed to come up with a single sexual encounter or romantic overture in high school that wasn’t fueled by booze or drugs. He started smoking weed in seventh grade, like most people he knew, but that was the sort of thing you did with your buddies, when you didn’t care how stupid you came off. With women you wanted to be drunk. Coke was nice if you could get it, but there was such an ugly price to pay for it, some creepy twentysomething asshole you’d have to hang around with, or cash that had to be scooped out of the till at work or stolen from somebody’s parents. Too much hassle involved. Rock was cheaper, for sure, but you didn’t have to be a genius to see that smoking that shit would take you no place good. That kind of high had nothing to do with getting off, anyway; you lost interest in sex almost immediately.
Things in his romantic life didn’t change all that much after high school, when he got the job at the asphalt place. By that time his moms had split, and his dad was enjoying his own intimate relationship with the sauce. He’d always drunk a lot, his old man, but Teacake didn’t think much of it, because everyone around here drank too much. Atchison was fucking bleak in the winter, dark side of the moon, there wasn’t anything else to do besides get loaded, and then it’s not like you’re going to give it up for the spring and summer. At best, his dad’s drinking became a little more joyful as the weather improved; he could at least hide it under the cover of celebration.
Teacake didn’t care. If he were his old man, he would have gotten wasted every night too. The guy was a loser with a series of shit-ass jobs that kept going away, he was a cuckold who couldn’t hang on to a wife, and he was stuck raising a son to whom he could find nothing that he wanted to say. The closest they got to bonding was when his dad would stumble across a Three Stooges marathon on TV when he was half in the bag and shout upstairs to Teacake, “Get down here and watch this shit with me! I love these assholes!”
They tried to stay out of each other’s way as much as possible, and mostly succeeded. Both of them got fucked up. A lot.
What was there to stay sober for? Atchison had been nice once, but now it was your basic deserted Main Street with 30 percent unemployment. The majority of the populace saw inebriation of one kind or another as a valid survival mechanism. They weren’t wrong. It works. At least in the short term.
A few months after high school Teacake got his own place with a buddy, covered his end of the rent okay most of the time with a few different jobs, and got shit-faced. Of dates, there were none; hookups, a few, but always under the influence. Within a year and a half of graduation he was in front of the judge for a drunk and disorderly and resisting arrest, and that was when the judge said it’s the military or jail. Teacake said, “Hello, Drill Sergeant.” Although since he picked the navy, it was “Hello, Recruit Division Commander.”
Then it was two years moving from port to port overseas, where there were a surprising number of women and opportunities. The lady journalists in particular were always down for it, but they liked to get blitzed even more than he did.
Now Teacake was twenty-four. Ten years of romantic history were a cloud, a haze, a rush of dulled sensation only dimly remembered.
And then this. March 15, 2:26 A.M., standing at the bottom of a three-hundred-foot-deep concrete shaft. That was the time and place, that was the moment.
It was the first time Travis Meacham had ever kissed a woman sober.
There was an awful lot to be said for it.
For Naomi, the kiss was a momentary impulse that had been building for several hours. She’d come to work that night in a mood most foul, stuck in the fog of anger and despair in which she’d awakened that afternoon. She’d had a shift the night before, making this a rare and welcome two shifts in a row, which meant a better paycheck but worse sleep. After a night shift, she’d come home, get Sarah ready and take her to school, and with any luck she could be in bed by 8:30 A.M. That meant about five and a half hours of sleep, because she had to be back at the school to pick her up at 2:50. That was on a day with no classes for herself. A year ago, she would have been able to put Sarah in the after-school and not have to pick her up till 4:30 (luxury!), but the school lost its federal grant for that program at the end of last year. Now the after-school was called Extended Learning Opportunities, and it was run by a for-profit group that charged forty dollars a day. That was half a day’s after-tax wage for Naomi and made no economic sense whatsoever. She might as well not do the extra work.
Point is, today she woke u
p tired at two in the afternoon, and the last thing she needed was for one of the dark moods that had haunted her for the past several years to come roaring back. But she knew the moment she opened her eyes that the Black Dog had returned. That was Naomi’s private nickname for the depression that periodically engulfed her, and this thing was no friendly Labrador. It was a mangy, skeletal cur, all bones and teeth, and when it came she could see it loping at her out of the woods, tongue lolling off to one side, yellow eyes fixed on her.
The Black Dog would stick around, on average, three or four days. Sometimes there’d be a day of false hope in the middle, a day when she’d feel okay and assume it had gone back into the primordial forest where it lived. But no, the mutt had only been hiding, the better to screw with her head, and it would come back to finish its run of despair the following day. She knew she was impossible to be around during those periods, but she didn’t care. It was everyone else’s fault anyway; they were the ones who’d called the dog in the first place. How, exactly, she did not know, but rationality was in short supply when she was in a mood. She learned after a few years that the best thing was to just stay away from people as much as possible during those times, to hide in her room, curled up on the bed with the door shut.
“If you can’t be a pleasant part of things,” her mother used to say to her when she was little, “then you need to go somewhere else and leave us alone.”
That was before her mother decided that she herself could not be a pleasant part of things and went somewhere else for good.
So the Black Dog had followed Naomi to work that night, and it stuck around until the moment she started talking to Teacake. That hadn’t ever happened before; no one person could make the darkness go away—hell, fifty of them couldn’t. But Teacake had; she’d sensed it the moment they started chatting on the loading dock. She’d gone with him to check out the beeping sound in part because she was curious, but also because being around him made her feel better. The Black Dog in her mind had skittered away, back into the trees, and disappeared further and further into the forest the longer she talked to Teacake. Why? He wasn’t impossibly sexy and he wasn’t impossibly smart and he was, not to put too fine a point on it, an ex-con.
But he made her laugh and he kept the dog at bay. Whatever that mysterious thing was, Teacake had it, and Naomi wanted to be around it, at least for tonight, to see if it was real.
So, yes, a kiss is just a kiss, but this one meant something to both of them. Ground had been broken. More was expected.
They exited the top of the tube ladder through the open manhole in the floor of SB-1. They were laughing, exhilarated by the brush with weirdness down below. They’d talked about it all the way up, fast and excited. The obvious next move was to call Griffin. The broken wall was something they were prepared to live with, because they actually had found something, there was a real problem down there, and it would likely involve the police and corporate and God knows who else. They might even be rewarded for having found a gas leak or animal infestation or some other nightmare scenario in the making.
Naomi was first out of the manhole. She swung her legs around so they were out of Teacake’s way and sat cross-legged on the cement floor while she waited for him. She had her phone out of her pocket in a minute and typed in the four letters that were stenciled on the door down at the bottom of the tube. DTRA.
The first hit she got off Google was the Dirt Track Riders Association, but she didn’t even have to think about that one to know that wasn’t it. It was never a serious candidate, not even for the split second it took for her eyes to skip down to the second link on the page.
“Defense Threat Reduction Agency,” she read.
Teacake, just coming out of the manhole, didn’t respond right away, but she wouldn’t have heard him if he had, because she’d already hit the link and was scrolling through the U.S. government’s home page for the DTRA. Her attention was fully consumed by unreassuring headlines like “Stepnogorsk Biotoxin Production Facility Briefing Notes” and “Joint Improvised Threat Defeat Organization Links with DTRA” and “Death by Nerve Gas: Two Arrests, Many Questions.”
“Holy shit,” she said.
“Holy shit,” he replied.
They’d said the same thing at more or less the same time, because they were each looking at something unexpected. For Naomi it was the DTRA website.
For Teacake it was the bloated deer.
The animal was standing at the end of the short hallway, just staring at them. This in itself wasn’t a big deal, that was sort of what deer did, they stood there and stared at you, frozen, wondering how it’s all come to this. But this deer’s insides were moving, you could see it in every breath it took. Either it was about to give birth, or it had eaten something that seriously disagreed with it.
Naomi saw it and stood, slowly, phone in one hand and the other held out to the deer as if to say, Wait. You don’t make sense.
The deer lifted its chin and made a grotesque hacking sound at them.
Teacake climbed out of the manhole, slowly, and stood next to Naomi.
“What’s the matter with it?” he asked.
“It’s sick. Distended belly.”
The deer took a couple of steps toward them, hacking some more. Teacake picked up the pry bar he’d used to open the manhole cover.
“Don’t,” Naomi said.
“Tell it not to come any closer.”
She looked at him. “Like I talk to animals?”
“Wait a minute,” Teacake said. The deer froze again, as if obeying him. Teacake thought. So, okay, sick deer staring at them, but this sick deer was in an underground storage facility, all the way down in sub-basement 1. There’s only one way it could have gotten to SB-1. The elevator.
“How the fuck did it get down here?”
The deer cocked its head suddenly, as if called, then turned around and trotted back toward the mouth of the hallway, throwing a look back over its shoulder to hack at them one more time. It rounded the corner, only a bit unsteady, considering deer hooves were not at all made for concrete, and then clattered off and out of sight, its steps echoing off the walls.
Teacake and Naomi glanced at each other, but neither one needed any convincing. They followed it.
They came around the corner but were falling behind the thing. It had picked it up to a trot and was just now turning a second corner, at the far end of the hallway. They walked faster. They turned a final corner, and this one came to a dead end at the only elevator. The deer trotted toward it.
Teacake and Naomi slowed, approaching it warily.
“Uh, what do we do once we catch it?” he asked.
“I don’t want to catch it,” she said. “I want to help it get out of here.”
The deer reached the elevator doors at the far end and stopped, looking back over its shoulder at them.
Teacake walked even slower. “I’m not getting in an elevator with that thing.”
At that moment, the elevator doors binged and slid open. The deer turned, as if fully expecting that, click-clacked its way into the elevator, turned back around to face them, and, swear to God, it glanced up at the floor numbers as the doors slid shut.
Teacake and Naomi stared.
Teacake spoke first. “The fucking deer just took the fucking elevator.”
Naomi looked around, as if seeing the walls on either side of her for the first time.
“What the hell is this place?”
Eighteen
Consider the night the deer was having. After the animal’s execution by Mike’s handgun at the side of Highway 16, it had gone through a period of blackness from which it abruptly awakened in the trunk of a car with a lunatic, half-faced cat standing on top of it. Cordyceps novus, having pulled off the seemingly impossible migration into the trunk of the car, had spent more than eight hours marinating inside the helpless creature’s brain. The fungus had gone to work to repair damage from the bullets, in the process rewiring neural connections to alte
r the animal’s behavior. The amygdala was expanded; the frontal cortex was inhibited. All the animal’s basic instincts—eat, reproduce, run away—had been subordinated to the primary goal of helping the fungus sporulate and disperse.
The deer didn’t have much in the sense of wonder, so it had no interest in trying to puzzle out how a pathogenic, mutating fungus that had been stored in a sealed subterranean environment ended up aboveground in the trunk of a ’96 Chevy Caprice in the first place. Still, it’s a question worth asking.
By the early 1990s, the Cordyceps novus sample that had been recovered in Australia and stored at Atchison was brutally unhappy. When you have one biological imperative and that imperative is thwarted, it gets pretty depressing. But even though the temperature inside the biosealed tank was fourteen degrees below zero and the fungus was nearly inert, fourteen below zero is still a lot warmer than absolute zero. And nearly inert is not at all the same thing as completely inert.
Deep underground, sealed in a tank that was shut in a box that was locked in a crate, the fungus continued its pattern of consumptive evolution, albeit slowly, given the temperature and the inhospitable chemical composition of the stainless steel tube itself. Manganese and aluminum were abundant in its makeup, but they were of almost no use, given their nonreactive nature. A full 16 percent of the tube was chromium, which was actually a growth inhibitor for Cordyceps novus, so that was a downer, and carbon, which was what the fungus truly craved, made up a scant 0.15 percent of its chemical surroundings.
The fungus did grow. But barely.
Still, time marched on. By 2005, after almost twenty years of ceaseless effort, the fungus had managed to transform and occupy an area of the tube a few microns square. Through that tiny opening the fungus trickled out into the larger storage container in which the tube rested. It picked up a little nourishment from the polyurethane foam in which the tube was nestled—at least poly had more than two reactive hydroxyl groups per molecule, a fungus could work with that—but it wasn’t until it made its way through the portable sample kit’s outer shell, in late 2014, that Cordyceps novus hit its digestive stride.