by David Koepp
“On the ground in Atchison. Someone made a call to Belvoir from inside the facility.”
“Who?”
“A civilian. Twenty-three-year-old woman.”
“That’s too bad. How’d she get your number?”
“She googled DTRA off a door.”
“Okay, she’s not stupid. What’d you do?”
Abigail paused, and Roberto could hear voices on the other end as people hurried past her in the rain. When they faded, Abigail went on. “I hung up on her, came outside, and called her back on one of the burners I got. I have her on the other line now. Want to talk to her?”
Roberto continued to be impressed by Abigail, but this was going to be even more complicated than he’d thought, and he knew he’d need her again. He was careful not to overpraise. “Yes. What’s her name?”
“Naomi.”
“Toss your burner into the back of a moving truck when we’re done and text me a new number.”
“Will do. Hang on.”
Roberto waited. Trini looked at him and inclined her chin: What’s up? He covered the phone’s mic with his thumb. “Civilian. Inside the mines.”
Trini winced. “I hope she’s enjoyed a full life.”
The connection worsened, and the frightened voice of a young woman came through Roberto’s earpiece, trying hard to sound authoritative. “Okay, who is this now?”
“Hello, Naomi. My name’s Roberto. I’d like to talk to you about what’s going on.”
“Okay, why did that first lady hang up on me?”
“Because she cares about your situation and wants to see it resolved in the right way, like I do.” In the background, Roberto could hear shouting, a man’s voice, something along the lines of “Ask him what the fuck is going on!” or words to that effect. “I hear someone there with you. What’s his name?”
“Travis. We’re security guards here.”
“Okay. Could you do me a favor and ask Travis to shut up while I’m talking to you?”
Her voice was fainter as she turned her head and said, “He says you should shut up.” Then a pause, some mumbling, and she spoke into the phone again. “We have a serious problem here. There’s this virus, or a fungus—”
“Right on the second one. I know all about it. I know more about it than anyone else. Are you somewhere safe right now?”
“We’re locked in a storage unit.”
“Okay. Could be worse. Stay in there.”
“No kidding. For how long? Are you sending people?”
“Has anyone come into direct physical contact with it? You’d know if they had because they’d have—”
“Yes.”
Roberto mouthed shit silently. Trini looked at him as often as she dared while driving at seventy miles per hour over Centennial Bridge.
“Hello?” Naomi asked.
“Yes, I was just calling something up on my screen,” he lied. “How many people have been infected?”
“Just one, I think.”
“And is that person still inside the facility?”
“Yes. He keeps trying to get in here. Where we are.” In the background, he heard more shouting—the ranting guy was at it again. Naomi conferred with him quickly, said, “Okay, okay, okay,” and came back on the line. “Also, there was a deer. A deer was infected.”
“Where is the deer now?”
“It blew up.”
“Outside or inside?”
“Did you hear me? I said it blew up.”
“Yes, I heard. Can you tell me where it blew up?”
“In the hallway.” Her tone said like that matters, but Roberto breathed a tiny sigh of relief that it was still inside the building.
He continued. “Okay, listen to me, Naomi. You’re going to be all right. You called exactly the right place, and you’re speaking to exactly the right person. You have some excellent instincts, and they’ve served you well so far. Now it’s time to trust somebody else. I’m on my way there, and I know what it takes to resolve this situation. There are several of us who have encountered this before, and we’ve planned for a situation where we might have to deal with it again. I’m going to be there in—” He looked at Trini.
“Less than an hour,” she said.
He spoke back into the phone. “A little over an hour. Stay right where you are. Don’t open the door. Don’t call anyone else. Not even Fort Belvoir. The woman who put us in touch will call you every ten minutes. Speak only to her or to me. Don’t pick up your phone again unless it rings. Do you understand?”
“What are you going to do?”
“Tell me you understand.”
“I understand.”
“Who should you call?”
“Nobody. You’ll call me every ten.”
“There you go. A-plus. Keep Travis calm, he sounds like the type who might want to try to leave. Don’t let him.”
“The deer exploded.”
“I know, some crazy shit, right? I’ll tell you all about it when I see you. You’re going to be fine. One hour.” He closed the computer, took out the earpiece, and rubbed his head.
Trini looked at him. “Three people and a deer?”
“One person infected, still in the building. The other two are clean, locked in a storage unit. The deer burst, but it was contained.”
“I guess that’s workable.”
He looked at her. “Are you kidding? It’s a gift from God. Let’s hope it lasts an hour.”
Trini nodded, eyes on the road, weighing it all. Finally, she spoke, just a few words. “They’re dead, aren’t they?”
He thought. “Probably.”
He didn’t like that answer, so he thought some more. He thought it all the way through but came up with the same conclusion.
“Probably.”
Twenty-One
The hour’s first fifteen minutes had gone pretty well. Mike had settled down outside, just sitting on the floor across the hall from unit 231–232, staring at the metal door. He didn’t know much anymore, only that he had to get in there.
I have to get in there the door is closed I have to get in I have to door closed
As for a solution to that problem, his complex reasoning and problem solving weren’t firing on all cylinders, but they were grinding away as best they could and had come up with a few different approaches. The first strategy had been based on a fragment of a song his father used to love that was bouncing around somewhere in Mike’s subconscious, something about throwing yourself against a wall, but that strategy hadn’t worked out very well. He’d likely separated his shoulder when he crashed his body into the metal door, and for sure he broke two fingers underneath himself when he fell to the cement. The pinkie finger on his right hand stuck out at an angle Mike had never seen before, but he didn’t give it much thought. He didn’t have the thought to spare.
have to get in door closed get in
Strategy number two involved more vomit, this time by lifting up the garage door a crack and trying some target-specific barfing through the half-inch space underneath it. But the appeal of that approach had been dimmed by the sensory memory of his fingers, which had been crushed beneath the door when Naomi had slammed it down, and he never tried it. Strategy number three was, as they say, still in development.
While Mike waited for that idea to come, he sat and stared at the corrugated metal door, dead-eyed. He’d wait.
Behind the door, Naomi and Teacake were considerably more comfortable, but their minds were no more at ease. The unit in which they’d taken refuge was a lucky choice: it looked like someone’s overflow furniture from when they’d had to move to a smaller house. Maybe the renters were sure the move was only temporary, that they’d be back on top one day soon and they’d need all their stuff again. The extra couches and chairs had been in there for a few years now, but they didn’t stink, the owners had covered them loosely and loaded the cushions up with silica packets, the way you’re supposed to. There was even a dehumidifier plugged into one of the outlet
s. Naomi and Teacake had thrown the cheap sheets off a couple of the armchairs, shoved them toward the back of the unit, to stay as far away from the door as possible, and even found a lamp with a bulb in it that still worked. They sat there, armchair to armchair, lamp on a box between them, and they stared at each other, wondering how it had all come to this.
Teacake, who abhorred silence, was the first to speak. “So that’s Dad.”
“Please stop saying that.”
“Sorry, it’s just kinda hard to get my head around, that’s all. How does that guy have a chance with you?”
She looked at him. “He wasn’t always like that.”
“Well, yeah, obviously I get that, I don’t think anybody on earth has ever been quite like that. But, I mean, he had to be some version of that, right?”
“I guess so.”
“And you’re, you know, you.”
“Thank you.” She wished he’d stop talking.
“And she’s a beautiful kid.”
Oops.
Naomi tilted her head, looking at him, thinking.
Oh God, how he wished he could snatch those last five words out of the air before they found her ears, how he wished he could go back in time, just three seconds would do it. But he couldn’t, he’d said it, she’d heard it, and she understood what it meant.
His mind sorted through options. His ordinary instinct would have been to keep talking, to paper over it with more and more fulminations, to bury the slip of the tongue so deeply in blather that she might not notice or would forget that he’d just announced he not only knew she had a child prior to tonight, but had actually seen that child, a clandestine event she had most certainly been unaware of till now.
He was about to turn on the fire hose of lies, but something stopped him. This had been a long and bizarre night, and Naomi was different, and it occurred to him that maybe his instincts all these years had been the wrong ones. Maybe those instincts were the reason he had a shit job and no girlfriend. Maybe, Teacake thought, he should go with the truth for once, maybe he should admit an unpleasant reality before it became impossible to do so, maybe he should speak frankly and self-deprecatingly and forthrightly as soon as it was necessary. He could actually show a little fucking class for once, he thought, maybe he could speak with such charm and grace, such wit and style, that this moment, this admission, this candor, might actually win her over rather than drive her away.
“I followed your ass home one morning it was fucked up sorry.”
Or, you know, he could do it that way.
Naomi’s phone buzzed. She picked it up immediately, glanced at the number, and answered. “Hello.” She paused, listening, staring at Teacake. She continued the perfunctory conversation, her eyes pinning him to his chair the whole time.
“Yes. Yes. Same as ten minutes ago. No, he hasn’t tried. I assume he is, we haven’t heard him walk away. Yes. Okay.” She hung up.
Teacake tipped his chin for information. “She say anything new?”
“No.”
“So, like, are they getting here soon, or what?” He made an exaggerated show of checking the time on his phone, profoundly grateful for the change in subject. She’d forget, maybe she forgot already! He kept talking. “Like, forty-five minutes from now? So, okay, it was, like, around four when you talked to the guy, so—”
“You’re flip-phone guy.”
She hadn’t forgotten.
He sighed. “I apologize, Naomi. I get—I do dumb stuff sometimes. I wasn’t, I didn’t . . . ah, shit.”
“In the parking lot of my building, right? About a week ago. Staring at your flip phone.”
“You saw me?”
“Yeah, I saw you. I knew you looked familiar tonight, but I couldn’t figure out where I saw you before. I should have got it when you pulled your phone out. Nobody has those anymore.”
“I’m sorry, I—”
“Are you a stalker, Travis?”
“No. I swear.”
“Because that’s creepy.”
“I know. I apologize. I never did that before.”
“I would hope not.”
“I just wanted to talk to you. And then I got—in a jam, and I didn’t know how to get out. I am sorry.”
She looked at him for a long moment, analytically, as if evaluating every piece of him, dissecting his entire character based on the look on his face in that one moment. Finally—
“Okay. Don’t do it again.”
And it was done. He was stunned. This was not how he’d expected this to go. She was letting him off the hook. She was really, truly, for serious letting him take a pass, she wasn’t repulsed or any shit like that. He’d told the truth and it worked. He smiled, and for nearly a full minute, the two of them had forgotten where they were and what was happening.
Then they heard it. It was faint and far away, but it was so deep and down low that it vibrated through the entire cement-and-metal building. The overhead door rattled in its tracks ever so slightly. They both looked at it and then at each other at the same time. Is this what it sounds like when the cavalry arrives?
Teacake stood, almost involuntarily. “They’re here!”
Naomi checked the time on her phone. This didn’t feel right. “I don’t think so.”
On the other side of the metal door, Mike had heard it too. It’d be impossible not to, it was louder out here, the brrrrap echoing off the cinder block. The dull roar was getting louder fast and coming from outside. There were vehicles approaching, Mike knew that much, and vehicles meant there were people in them, and people meant grouping and spread and migration. That was all good and much easier to deal with than the metal door that made his whole body hurt just from looking at it.
I don’t have to get in there after all don’t have to other people
He turned and walked away down the corridor, toward the sound.
OUTSIDE THE ENTRANCE OF THE BUILDING, HEADLIGHTS SWEPT DOWN the driveway and splashed across the front facade. There were nine lights in all, a pair from the black half-ton pickup and one each from the seven Harleys, which were the ones making all the noise. Griffin’s Fat Boy, outfitted with the straight-pipe exhaust, was the loudest of them all, so loud that even his fellow riders would have told you that it was a little over the top. You know, dude, there are other people in the world.
Griffin banked the bike around in a semicircle by the front door, got off, tossed his goggles over the handlebars, and spit in the gravel. He’d been drunk for nearly ten hours at this point, which wasn’t that big a deal for him, but along with the weed he’d smoked and the half-pound beef burrito he’d wolfed down around two A.M., things were starting to repeat on him a little bit. Even a fat gut has its limits. The other Harleys rolled to a stop around him and the drivers got off one by one—Cedric, Ironhead, Wino, Cuba, Garbage, and Dr. Steven Friedman.
Dr. Friedman, like Griffin, was the sort of person who was impossible to nickname. Nothing seemed to stick, ever. There was just something about him that screamed Dr. Steven Friedman, and so Dr. Steven Friedman he remained, a reasonably nice dentist who liked to ride and wear leathers. Shorty and the Rev got out of the truck. Most of them were in various stages and types of inebriation, with the exception of Dr. Friedman, who had his eighteen-month chip, and Shorty, who was straight-edge.
The night had started innocently enough at Griffin’s rented house, a sparsely furnished two-bedroom ranch-style near Cedar Lake that was down a long driveway at the end of a cul-de-sac. The neighbors were far enough away that they didn’t complain about noise, and Griffin didn’t care what happened to the place or what you did. You could get wasted, pass out, score just about anything you wanted, and Griffin had fifty-five-inch curved Samsung Premium Ultra 4K TVs in the living room and both bedrooms, all three hooked up to bootleg cable, which meant nobody ever had to fight over what to watch.
They’d come to the storage place at four in the morning because of the TVs. After five months of sitting on a stash of two dozen hot Samsungs
, Griffin had finally sold half of them tonight. It hadn’t been easy; he’d been working on this group since midnight, and it wasn’t until he brought out the last of his meager supply of coke and passed it around that they all agreed to give him a hundred bucks each and take a TV home tonight in the Rev’s truck. That was one TV for everybody and five for Garbage, who thought he could unload them to his buddy in the electronics department at Walmart for sale out back. That would be pretty hilarious, as Griffin was pretty sure the Walmart resupply depot in Topeka was where the TVs had come from in the first place. But he knew better than to ask questions.
Griffin had agreed to store and sell the stolen TVs back in October and had grown to hate the things. They retailed for $799 and were supposed to be this big deal when they came out, but then nobody gave a shit that the screen was curved. Or that it was 4K, or LED, or Ultra any of that shit, because you could get almost the same TV anywhere for half the price and the picture looked exactly the same. The deal Griffin and the guy made was they would split any sales Griffin could make fifty-fifty, which meant that tonight, for his troubles, he would clear all of $600. It was barely more than the cost of the storage unit for the five months he’d had it, but at least he wouldn’t be underwater anymore, and he’d be halfway out of this problem.
He’d arrived at the storage place angry. He must have called that little turd Teacake a dozen times in the past hour, to tell him he was on his way with some Serious People, and if Teacake knew what was good for him he’d piss off to the other side of the complex and not see things he’d wish he hadn’t. But the kid never answered his phone. The shithead had apparently gotten the message, though, because as Griffin stomped to the door, he could see the front desk was unoccupied. But then he froze, passkey in midair, when he saw the wall. His already bulging eyes bulged out even farther.
There was a hole in the wall behind the desk. Two holes, as a matter of fact, big ones, messy four-foot-wide gashes in the drywall. Griffin’s entire bald head flushed crimson, hot blood rushing into it. “What the fuck that little shit what the fuck what the fuck?!” he wondered. He swiped his card through the reader, the door buzzed, and he stormed inside. He hunched like a boxer getting ready to throw a punch and stalked over to the desk, staring at the holes, aghast.