Cold Storage

by David Koepp

  Because the outer box, the big one, the crate Roberto and Trini had watched so carefully in the back of the truck twenty-seven years before, was made of carbon fiber.

  Superfood.

  The fungus was out of containment and loose in the sealed room at this point, but still slowed by the underground temperature. Slowed, not stopped. The powerful cold spring, fed by the deeper undercurrents of the Missouri River, had spent most of the twenty-first century warming up along with the rest of the planet. The river surface got hotter; the spring got hotter. The ambient temperature inside sub-level 4 had risen seven degrees since the fungus had first been incarcerated, and the temperature only went up as the fungus produced its own chemical reactions. Its conquest of the sealed room was completed by midsummer of 2018.

  The fungus oozed through the wiring in the wall in the autumn of that year and spread into the main corridor of SB-4 in November. An unusually cold winter delayed its growth briefly, but when a record-breaking heat wave hit in early March of this year, Cordyceps novus got the few extra degrees it needed to crank up its metabolic machinery. It infected organic matter again for the first time since its birth in Australia.

  That was when it found the roach.

  The American cockroach has several impressive evolutionary characteristics, besides its ability to survive a nuclear winter. One is that it can live without its head for up to a week. Respiration occurs through small holes in each of its body segments, so even after the first Cordyceps novus/cockroach hybrid was decapitated in a snarl of mayhem with a dozen other infected roaches who attacked and tried to consume each other, C-nRoach1 was able to continue on its purposeful way.

  And it did have a purpose. From the moment of its hijacking, C-nRoach1 became imbued with a biological purpose greater than any roach in history. That’s saying something, for a 280-million-year-old genus.

  Cordyceps novus was driven. Over thirty-two years of isolation, it had changed very little, except to note that its growth environment was for shit. Its epigenetic memory of its initial expansion, back in Kiwirrkurra Community, was one of extreme fertility. The first living thing it had come into contact with was Enos Namatjira’s uncle, whom it had entered through a loose flap of skin under a torn fingernail on his right hand. The warmth and fetidity of the inside of a human body had caused explosive proliferation.

  Human beings were also highly mobile and, as a species, had a tendency to congregate. It was as if God had drawn these creatures up specifically to make life easy for the fungus. The complete takeover of twenty-seven human fleshpots was fast and easy; oh, how glorious things had been back then, before the fungus was jailed inside this tin can. If there’s one thing prison gives you, it’s plenty of time to sit around and long for the good old days.

  Cordyceps novus had tasted humans, and it wanted more.

  First it had to get out of here, and C-nRoach1 was a means to that end. The headless insect had moved methodically back and forth across the floor of SB-4 for four days, skirting a path around the shrieking, cannibalistic Rat King, until it reached the far end of the corridor. There the roach discovered a four-centimeter tube opening at the base of the wall, covered by a small metal grille. The tube was required by law in any underground structure more than fifty feet below ground level, in order to prevent the type of CO2 buildup that had killed so many mine workers in the nineteenth century. From a containment point of view, the opening was a terrible idea, but the sub-level had never been designated for storage of biohazards, and the opening was just small enough to have escaped the notice of the team that had entombed the fungus thirty-two years ago.

  C-nRoach1 didn’t care why the tube was there; it just sensed fresh oxygen, crawled inside, and followed an upward curve in the pipe, which rose gradually to vertical.

  The insect climbed.

  Two days later, nearing the end of its life but about to achieve its greatest success—and late success really is the sweetest—C-nRoach1 reached the ground-level grating of the ventilation tube’s emission port and wriggled out onto the surface of the hot, loamy earth. It was fifty yards from the entrance to Atchison Storage on a warm late-winter afternoon.

  What a piece of work was this roach! It had endured infection by a hostile fungus, it had survived its own decapitation, it had methodically searched for and found a way out of a prison specifically designed by intellects far superior to its own to allow no escape. But little C-nRoach1 had done just that. Headless, dehydrated, and dying, it had climbed 323 feet, straight up, on a slick surface. Given its tiny size, this feat was the human equivalent of climbing Kilimanjaro on your knees right after going to the guillotine. The tiny roach had performed perhaps the greatest act of physical conquest in the history of earthly life.

  Then a car parked on top of it.

  C-nRoach1 died with a squishy pop beneath the right rear tire.

  The car was Mike’s, and this was this afternoon, when he’d come to Atchison Storage, looking to bury the cat and deer he’d murdered. While Mike walked up to the hilltop and searched for the right spot, Cordyceps novus faced the latest obstacle in its thirty-two-year journey: 10/32 of an inch of thick rubber car tire. But it had been confronted with something similar once and knew just who to call.

  The sheen of Benzene-X that lived on the surface of the fungus activated almost immediately. It invaded the rubber in the tire, ate its way through, and opened a doorway for the fungus to pass into the airy interior of the wheel. Cordyceps novus floated upward, and the fungus and its endosymbiont repeated the penetrative process through the tread at the top of the wheel. From there they rode along a bit of wiring that led into the trunk of the Chevy Caprice, where Cordyceps novus discovered abundant consumable organic matter in the form of a dead deer and Mr. Scroggins, the former cat.

  That was more like it.

  Nineteen

  The fucking deer just took the fucking elevator.”

  Naomi, who was still staring at the closed doors in amazement, didn’t even look at Teacake, still trying to digest what had happened. She murmured, “You said that already.”

  “I think it is a hundred percent worth repeating. The fucking deer just took the fucking elevator.”

  Naomi looked back at the phone in her right hand. She didn’t know exactly what the Defense Threat Reduction Agency did, but it was a safe bet that a Rat King and a deer that knows how to work an elevator were probably right up their alley. She turned her phone around and showed him the website. “We need to call this place.”

  “Be my fucking guest.”

  “Do you mind, with the language?”

  “Sorry.” He was. Anything for her. “Please call them.”

  Naomi scrolled to the “Contact Us” header, clicked on it, and a list of phone numbers popped up. “There’s gotta be a hundred numbers listed here.”

  “Like what?”

  Naomi thumbed her phone again, rolling past the numbers and job titles. “‘Director,’ ‘Deputy Director,’ ‘Command Senior Enlisted Leader,’ ‘Counter-WMD Technologies’?”

  Teacake looked around, nervous as hell. “What about, like, green shit leaking everywhere and animals acting all fucked up?”

  “‘Chem/Bio Analysis Center’? ‘DOJ Radiation Exposure Program’?”

  From the elevator shaft, they heard an inhuman caterwauling echoing off the concrete walls. They took a step back.

  “Or,” Teacake offered, “maybe we put a couple miles between us and this place and then we call them.”

  “I’m cool with that.” Another howl came from inside the elevator shaft. “Stairwell?” Naomi suggested.

  “This way.” He led her down the hall at a run, around the first corner, and they reached the locked stairwell. Teacake zipped his key off the ring (still loved that sound, no matter what else was going on), unlocked the door, and they pushed through. They bounded up two flights of stairs, reached ground level, and he used his key to open the door there. They stepped out into the all-white hallway, never so gratefu
l to be aboveground in their lives. He took her by the hand (Damn, she’s got some soft skin, soft but strong hands, you can feel it, I wonder if that’s from carrying her kid around?, nah, that’d make your arms strong but not necessarily your hands, how come she’s got such strong hands?, wait, focus, man, we gotta get out of here) and led her down the hallway, headed for the lobby.

  Not far away, the deer stood in the elevator, awaiting further instruction. It’s not that the deer was sentient; it had no sense of selfhood. What it had was a clearly articulated purpose. As long as it was moving toward fulfillment of that purpose, the pain in its belly was not as intense. The deer didn’t have the faintest idea why any of this should be the case, but then it didn’t understand much of what had happened to it in the last forty-eight hours.

  THE ELEVATOR DOORS OPENED AT THE FAR END OF THE GROUND-FLOOR level of Atchison Storage and Teacake and Naomi both screamed. They had taken the stairs specifically to avoid the disfigured, resourceful deer that seemed to know how to operate an elevator, and now that deer was standing right in front of them.

  “How the FUCK?!” Teacake shouted at the deer, which took three shaky steps toward them, making a phlegmy hacking sound at the back of its throat.

  Teacake and Naomi stared in horrified fascination. From this closer perspective they could see the deer had numerous gunshot wounds to its head, and one hindquarter appeared to have been completely crushed and then reinflated, somewhat off-shape. The deer’s belly seemed to expand as they watched, and its once-spindly limbs had taken on the shape of piano legs.

  Naomi held her hands out, one toward the deer and one toward Teacake. “Just—just—just—”

  Teacake looked at her, his voice an octave higher than usual. “Yeah?”

  “Don’t—don’t—don’t—”

  “Are you talking to me or the thing?!”

  She wasn’t sure.

  The deer took another few steps toward them, and they, in turn, took a few steps back. They continued to back away, moving toward the T-junction of the hallway.

  Inside the deer’s head, a civil war was taking place. Every one of the animal’s natural instincts was screaming at it to turn and run away from these scary two-legged creatures, but an even stronger instinct, a new one that had taken hold only recently, insisted on just the opposite. And this new voice was loud and firm.

  Move forward, the new voice said, get as close as you can, go to them, go to them, walk, walk, walk. And then the pain will stop.

  Cordyceps novus knew what it wanted, and it wasn’t a cockroach, cat, or deer; it was the intelligent, highly ambulatory, communal creatures that were ten yards away at the end of the hall.

  The deer kept moving toward them, and Teacake and Naomi continued to back up, until they reached the cinder block wall at the end of the corridor. They could have turned and run in either direction, but that would have meant tearing their eyes away from the unnatural spectacle that was unfolding in front of them, and that they could not do.

  The deer was still swelling, its body creaking and groaning and snapping on the inside. It was puffing up like a water balloon at the end of a hose; there were just a few seconds left before its gut let go. Naomi and Teacake were directly within its spatter radius and didn’t realize how close they were to a certain and painful death.

  But at the very last moment, Naomi’s four-year-old daughter, Sarah, stepped in and saved both of their lives.

  For the last three months, Sarah had been deep in the throes of a Willy Wonka obsession. Sarah, and therefore her mother, had watched the 1971 version of that movie, in whole or in part, more times than Naomi cared to count. Sometimes Naomi was awake, actually watching it with her daughter. Sometimes she was asleep, dreaming it, or folding laundry in the other room, the audio bouncing off the walls and into her head. Naomi knew every line, every lyric, every part of it by heart, and the parts she knew best were the parts that scared Sarah. The parts where she needed her mama to come over and sit down and pull her onto her lap and stroke her hair and tell her it was all just pretend.

  Naomi didn’t mind. She actually liked her kid best of all in those moments, because those were the times she felt like a halfway-okay mother. The scary parts of Willy Wonka were some of the most peaceful moments of Naomi’s life, which of course made her feel guilty. Does my kid have to be terrified and clingy in order for me to be happy? Well, no, but sometimes it helps.

  What mattered now was the part of the movie that scared Sarah the most: when Violet Beauregarde stole the Three-Course-Dinner Gum and began to swell and blow up into an enormous blueberry. Sarah would cover her eyes and scream in panic, “She’s going to pop! She’s going to pop! Mama, she’s going to pop!”

  The deer was going to pop.

  Naomi grabbed Teacake by the arm and hauled him to the side, pulling him around the corner and slamming them both up against the wall, hard, just as the deer’s overtaxed frame gave out. It isn’t accurate to say that the deer burst, like Mr. Scroggins and Enos Namatjira’s uncle had. This was different. One second the deer stood there, swollen nearly to round, like Violet Beauregarde. And the next second, the deer was not standing there, but the ceiling, floor, and walls of the hallway were painted with thick, foamy green fungus. Naomi held Teacake pressed firmly against the wall, inches out of the line of fire, safe behind their blast shield when the goo flew.

  There was a second there where Teacake could look into her eyes from up close without coming off as creepy, a second where it was just gratitude and connection. The first half of that second was thrilling—her eyes were home, they were the only place he ever wanted to be, and the last lines of the only poem he knew flitted through his mind—

  A mind at peace with all below,

  A heart whose love is innocent.

  But then came the other half second, and his mind was no longer at peace, it felt only sorrow. Because he knew no matter how she felt tonight, no matter the thrill or danger or exhilaration of discovery, inevitably tomorrow morning would come, those feelings would fade, and she would realize they couldn’t possibly be together. A single mother—no, an outstanding single mother—would not, could not, choose to be with a minimum-wage worker with a prison record.

  Specifically, she would not choose to be with him. If she did, she wouldn’t be her, and he wouldn’t respect her. He’d spare her the awkwardness of telling him once they got out of this; he’d just slip away. She wouldn’t know why, but maybe she’d know he’d saved her the trouble.

  From around the corner, they heard the elevator doors open again, and the sound of footsteps on the hard cement floor.

  What now? Naomi pulled back from Teacake, and they looked at each other in confusion and alarm. Still hidden around the corner, they stayed silent, gesturing to each other. Her furrowed brow and cocked head asked, Who the hell is that? and his upturned palms and quick shake of his head answered, Like I know?

  The footsteps drew closer and louder. They were definitely human, but there were no other workers in the place at this hour, and neither one of them had buzzed anyone in.

  Teacake called out from around the corner. “Hello?” He tried to sound authoritative, but stayed where he was, hidden from view.

  The footsteps paused, then started walking again. They heard a soft gush as the feet must have hit the edge of the wet carpet of fungus in the middle of the hall and kept coming toward them.

  Naomi’s turn, louder: “Who is that?”

  The footsteps stopped again, but only for a second before they resumed, faster, splatting through the fungus. They were just around the corner now. Teacake and Naomi backed up a few feet into the middle of the hallway, a safe enough distance away to still turn and run if they had to.

  A man came around the corner and stopped, staring at them.

  It took Naomi a moment to comprehend the weirdness of what she was seeing.

  “Mike?”

  Mike pulled back his lips and showed his teeth, which was not at all the same thing as a
smile, but it was the best he could do. “Hi, honey.”

  Teacake looked back and forth between them, three legitimate questions in his mind. He elected to skip two of the more mundane ones—You guys know each other? and “Honey”?—and move immediately to the more mysterious issue. “You were in the elevator with that thing?” he said to Mike.

  Mike turned his head, as if noticing Teacake for the first time. “I was in the elevator with that thing.”

  Teacake looked at Mike, then at Naomi. He’s your weirdo. But he pressed on, turning back to Mike. “So, you pushed the buttons?”

  Mike blinked. “I pushed the buttons. A deer can’t push buttons.”

  Teacake squinted. He had an odd conversational style, this guy, and he ended every sentence with that weird, half-open mouth, like he was trying to smile but his lips kept getting stuck to his teeth.

  “What are you doing here, Mike?” Naomi jumped in. “What the hell happened to that thing?” She pointed to the mass of goo that Mike had just walked through, then looked back at him, noticing the sleeves of his shirt were soaked red with blood that oozed out of a series of long, jagged cuts running up the lengths of both arms. “And what the hell happened to your arms?”

  That was way more interrogation than whatever was left of Mike’s brain could handle. He’d been feeling pretty good outside, especially when he saw Naomi’s car and realized there was another human being in the immediate vicinity. Not just any human, but one whom he knew and could get close to. That’s something I should do, right? he asked the feeling in his head. That’s something I should do right away, isn’t it?

  Oh yes, the feeling told him. Cordyceps novus, after the failure in Australia and the limited success with Mr. Scroggins, had lost interest in height as a prerequisite for contagion and had now seen the wisdom of lateral mobility.