Cold Storage

by David Koepp

  And then there was her hearing. She was still deaf in her left ear, and the ringing in the right, though it had abated, intensified whenever the radio frequency was activated. It was as if the suit was deliberately trying to mute everything Teacake said, raising the level of the ringing to obscure his words, then going back down when he was silent.

  But his second shouted “I can’t see!” had gotten through—clearly enough, anyway—and she shouted back, “Why not?”

  “Sweat. Fogged up. Can you?”

  “Yeah. Mostly.”

  “How much farther?” he asked.

  She paused, wrapping her left arm through the rungs of the ladder, bending her torso back and to the right as much as she possibly could, and strained her eyes all the way to the edge of her mask. “About fifty rungs. Maybe less.”

  “Okay.” He kept climbing down.

  Naomi’s left arm shook violently, and she knew she’d have to take a chance and switch gun hands. She pulled her right arm up and reached behind the rungs, to pass the gun to her left. It clanked against the rungs and she lost her grip on it. Her hand lashed out, pinning the gun against the wall. She was no longer holding it; she was just sort of trapping it there with pressure.

  Teacake must have heard the clank and he asked her something in the headset, but it was lost to her under the ringing sound. She ignored him, eyes focused on the gun, still held tenuously up against the cement wall of the tube. She stretched out the fingers of her left hand, got one of them through the trigger housing, and pulled her right arm free. The gun spun over, upside down, held up only by her left index finger. She readjusted her grip on the ladder, now with her freed right arm, and slowly withdrew her left from behind the ladder.

  She closed her left hand around the handle of the gun and moved that arm free of the ladder. Blood flowed through her left biceps again, washing away enough of the built-up acid to give her some amount of relief. She closed her eyes, grateful. She looked down. Teacake was about ten rungs below her. She continued her descent.

  Thirty-Four

  Flat on his back, Roberto stared up at the sky. This is why, he thought. This is why I didn’t take the backpack. In case this happened. God, I hate being right all the time.

  There weren’t as many stars out as before; heavy clouds had blown in and obscured them, making the night darker. He looked up at the heavens and wondered if the satellite look-down window was still open, if the thing was somewhere overhead right now. Were Ozgur Onder and his girlfriend, Stephanie, watching him at this very moment on Ozgur’s laptop, sitting up in bed, wondering why the hell the guy who fired the gun was just lying there on his back, not doing anything?

  Being right was little comfort to Roberto, given his current position. Initially, he’d thought he was paralyzed from the waist down, but after a minute or two some of the tingling had eased, replaced by intense, paralyzing pain in the lower half of his body. Getting up was out of the question, as were crawling, rolling, and any other form of locomotion he could think of. He was on his back with his head near the front door of the building, and if he turned it to the left—which was only possible with its own unique hell of shooting pain—he could see Dr. Friedman’s dead body on the ground five or six feet away from him.

  Okay, Roberto thought. Okay. He counted breaths to steady himself. I’m here now. I’m here now.

  He was still wearing the thermal imaging goggles, and he could see that the dense amount of thick fungus on the dead man’s body was very much alive and quite industrious. The churning ooze was already moving off the corpse to explore its environment, but it seemed to have slowed as soon as it hit the gravel on the ground beneath him. Slowed, but not stopped.

  Roberto heard a chirping sound from nearby and his eyes searched the area around him. His Bluetooth had been knocked out when he hit the ground, and lay about five feet from him, lighting up with a soft blue glow as it rang. It would be Abigail, calling in to say, “What are you doing, man? Why don’t you get up?” But getting himself five feet across the gravel to answer a phone call was beyond his capabilities.

  Roberto turned his head again, this time craning it backward, digging the back of his skull into the gravel as hard as he could and rolling his eyes up, to get a look at the entrance to the building. It was upside down, but he could see it. The lights were on inside, and he could hear screaming and shouting. No one appeared to be coming out, at least not yet, and he wasn’t sure what he would do if they did.

  He looked down at the ground and saw the machine pistol, just a foot away from his right hand. A foot. Twelve inches. That was maybe possible. He dug his fingers into the gravel, summoned himself, and clawed toward it. His upper body moved an inch and a half, and he screamed in agony. His vision blurred and doubled, and he felt himself nearly pass out.

  But then it cleared, and he was an inch and a half closer.

  He raised his eyes, looking at the three still-operative Harleys, leaning on their kickstands, awaiting their riders.

  Nobody leaves.

  Roberto dug his fingers into the gravel again, repeated the motion, screamed again, and felt the darkness nearly descend.

  Nearly. But not quite. Nine inches to go.

  He would get to the gun or pass out trying.

  BACK IN THE HALLWAY OUTSIDE G-413, GRIFFIN HAD PIVOTED FROM Dr. Friedman as soon as the dentist had disappeared around the corner. He pointed the gun at Ironhead and Cuba, swinging it wildly from one to the other. “Stay the fuck away from me the fuck away from me stay the fuck!” he’d managed to spit out, though they were making no attempt to advance on him.

  Cuba raised her hands and spoke first. “Easy, man.”

  “Yeah, come on, Griff,” Ironhead chimed in soothingly. “We’re all in the same boat here.”

  Griffin looked at the locker behind them, its walls, ceiling, floor, and TV boxes covered with pulsating globs of fungus. “What boat, what the fuck kind of boat, what fucking boat are you fucking talking about?! What the fuck is going on?!”

  Ironhead took a step forward, his hands up, palms out, and his tone calm. “Definitely some strange what-have-you taking place here, my friend, I know. You weren’t even in there, man.”

  “That was horrible,” Cuba added, and she meant it.

  It’s okay, her brain told her. Everything’s fine. Better if you all just get out of here.

  “What do you say we all get out of here?” she suggested.

  “Yeah, no shit we’re leaving! You first!” Griffin said, gesturing with the gun. “You go ahead of me!”

  “Sure, man, no problem,” Ironhead said. He turned and looked at Cuba, nodded his head toward the entrance, and started walking that way. She fell into stride beside him.

  Ironhead was cool. Best he’d felt in a long time. That dude behind you is crazy, his brain told him. Don’t do anything to upset him. He doesn’t know up from down. Let’s just go.

  They kept walking. As they reached the corner, Griffin looked back over his shoulder, at the mess in the hallway, and the greater mess oozing out of the storage locker. Forget figuring out what was going on, none of it made any sense, he just wanted to get gone. He turned back to the front and watched Ironhead and Cuba as they walked ahead. There was something on the backs of their necks, or in the backs of their necks, maybe. The skin was mottled and moving, pulsating from underneath. He didn’t care what they did once they got outside, but for himself, he was getting on his Fat Boy and putting as many miles between him and this place as he possibly could. If anybody got in his way, they were going down.

  Ahead of him, Ironhead and Cuba were calm. They weren’t thinking much, but the thoughts they had were clean and focused. Cordyceps novus was a quick study and had modulated its technique with enormous success in the last twenty-four hours. The singular urge to climb that had been effective as a means of escape from sub-level 4 had proven less useful in the case of Mr. Scroggins, who blew his guts at the top of a tree for relatively little payoff. Mike Snyder, on the other han
d, had proven the vastly superior dispersal possibilities available in lateral movement, and the minicolonies of the fungus that had sprung up in human beings needed only to find others like themselves to ensure maximum spread and reproduction.

  Though it can’t think in those terms, or think at all, per se, a fungus knows what works and what doesn’t, and it pursues the former as vigorously and completely as it disregards the latter. Climbing houses and trees was out. Spreading further into the human population was in.

  Ironhead and Cuba were completely at peace, focused on one goal: leave.

  Go to town, their brains told them. Ride out of here and into town. Where more people are.

  They rounded another corner. Up ahead, the fluorescent lights of the lobby were visible. They headed toward them.

  Thirty-Five

  The floor of the sub-basement thunked into the bottom of Teacake’s boot. Didn’t see that last step coming this time either. He stepped off the ladder and wedged himself back against the wall of the tube as far as he could get, but it wasn’t far enough to clear any room for Naomi to join him. “Hang on,” he said into his helmet.

  Naomi winced at the screech and crackle in her ear and couldn’t make out the words, but she caught the meaning. She stopped and turned, looking down. She could see Teacake at the bottom, but the half-barrel-shaped pack was so big he could barely turn around, much less move enough to make room for her. Opening the pack and activating the device in that tiny space was out of the question.

  “You’re going to have to open the door,” she shouted into her microphone.

  An enraged, inarticulate screech came back from Teacake, but she understood perfectly well what it meant: under no circumstances would he open that door. She proceeded on that assumption and replied, “There’s no room to take that thing off!”

  Teacake looked up at her through the thickly clouded face mask. He could see the white blur of her suit and her arm, extended, pointing toward the heavy metal door. He turned, tried shaking his head in the hope that some beads of sweat would fly off his face, hit the mask, and streak paths through the condensation. It worked, sort of, and a tiny ribbon was wiped clear, just enough for him to get a sense of where the large handle was that would release the door mechanism. He reached out and gripped it. If he hadn’t been wearing the hazmat gloves, Teacake would have felt the heat immediately, and there’s no way in hell he would have opened the door. But through the thick plastic layer, he couldn’t tell there was any difference.

  On the other side of the door, the situation had changed radically in the past ten minutes. The trail of fungus that had been creeping across the floor from the depleted mass of the Rat King had reached the small puddle of water on the floor beneath one of the sweaty cooling pipes. Throughout its entire history as a species, Cordyceps novus, in all its mutated forms, had never run across pure H2O. From its birth inside a sealed oxygen tank, through its brief childhood in the arid Australian outback, and even in its recent experiences inside the bloodstream of human bodies, water had been a rare and heavily diluted substance. Even in abundance, inside a mammal, it was corrupted by other elements, its essential power limited.

  The moment the fungus broke the surface tension of the water molecules at the edge of the puddle, it had undergone a profound and spectacular blossoming. It bloomed into the puddle like a time-lapse film of a flower in springtime, it shot up the rivulet that had run down the wall within a matter of seconds, and it attacked the outside of the sweaty overhead pipe with fervor. It grew along the length of the pipe in both directions, sprouting and dripping onto the floor in great gobs of living organism. Everywhere it contacted the pipe, it set to work with great industry, deploying copious amounts of Benzene-X, now a steel-eating acidic substance determined to chew through the pipe and free the flowing waters within. Once it broke through, it would open the way for the fungus to spread like wildfire through the pipe, into the groundwater and then the Missouri River beyond.

  As the chemical reactions raged, the temperature in the hallway had risen. It topped 80 degrees when Teacake turned the handle on the door. The interlocking metal bolts slid out of their guide tracks, and the door swung inward.

  “Holy Jesus Christ,” he said, looking into the hothouse, now dense with active, visible growth. Aerosolized bits and spores hung and swirled heavily in the air all around him.

  Through Naomi’s headset, all she heard of his voice was a tooth-grinding shriek. But she saw what he saw and had no interest in pausing to admire it. She spun Teacake around, shouting into her microphone, “Unbuckle the front straps!”

  He set to work with fumbling hands to undo the leather straps and get the T-41 off his back so they could activate it and get the hell out of there. The buckles on the bottom came off easily enough, and his shoulders seemed to float as Naomi lifted the weight off from behind. He fell forward, his upper body surging with relief, and for a moment he felt like he was flying. He could hear the backpack thud to the cement floor behind him, and he stumbled forward against the tube wall, staring in disbelief at the gurgling mass of fungus covering the walls and floor of the hallway. He could hear the snap of the leather and the rustle of canvas as Naomi opened the pack in the way Roberto had demonstrated.

  “Son of a bitch!” she said.

  Teacake pushed himself against the wall and turned around. Naomi was on her knees, bent over the backpack. Its top was opened, a tangle of belts, ropes, and buckles dripping off its sides. There were enough warning stickers plastered to the inside of the lid to scare off all but the most dedicated kamikaze soldier. Nestled on the padded bottom of the pack was an impossibly antiquated-looking pair of metal tubes lying side by side. There was a small square box beside each of them, a neutron generator, and a red fitted cap at one end of each, the “bullet” that would fire into the tube’s fissile core. There was a snarl of wires that led from the explosive caps to a thing that looked suspiciously like an on/off switch, set in its downward position. It seemed like it could be maneuvered manually if necessary, but it was also connected by a web of wires to a small, square digital timer.

  The timer was the problem. It was set at four minutes and forty-seven seconds.

  And it was already counting down.

  Naomi looked up at Teacake.

  “The son of a bitch started it!”

  Thirty-Six

  Upstairs, the son of a bitch sincerely hoped they’d reached the bottom, opened the pack, and seen the timer by now. He’d hated to do it to them, but there really was no other choice. They’d looked strong and fit, and if they’d made it this far through the night without dying, he’d figured, it was reasonable to think they’d be resourceful enough to get themselves out in time. He truly believed that.

  Or maybe he’d just decided to believe it.

  As for himself, things didn’t look promising. He finally had his fingers on the butt end of the machine pistol, but the darkness kept creeping in around the corners of his consciousness every time he moved. The kind of pain he’d experienced in moving his body twelve inches across the gravel had been entirely new to him, an intensity of discomfort he hadn’t dreamed possible. Still, he’d managed to get his hand on the gun, and with one last superhuman effort he brought it up, off the ground, aiming it unsteadily at the last three motorcycles and squeezing the trigger. The Heckler & Koch could hold magazines of either fifteen, thirty, or forty rounds, but Roberto didn’t know which was in at the moment. There’s no way Trini would have left him with just fifteen, but the forty had an extra couple of inches that made the gun harder to maneuver, so he was betting on thirty.

  The first two-shot burst collapsed the front end of the first bike, which toppled over into the second. As the second bike fell away from him, he closed one eye and aimed for its rear tire, but on its side, it now offered a more slender angle. It took three shots for him to be certain that bike was disabled, and when it fell it left a clear path to the third bike. That one was farthest away, and the thermal imaging goggle
s weren’t helpful with no heat coming off the thing, so he sprayed four shots along the length of the Harley to be sure it was left unusable. If his count was true, he had used fourteen shots, which left him with sixteen for anybody who came out the door.

  Behind him, he heard voices. He arched his head back again, digging the back of his skull into the gravel and looking at the door to the lobby, upside down through the heat-vision goggles. He blinked the sweat out of his eyes and could make out figures coming this way—a man and a woman in front and someone behind them. They’d heard the gunshots and were running.

  The man and woman were infected. They glowed red hot, not quite as vivid as Dr. Friedman had been, but clearly alive with mutating fungus. The figure behind them looked normal, but the angle of his arm suggested that he had a gun. Roberto sucked in his breath, and with a great groan of pain, he flopped the machine pistol over onto his chest. Gritting his teeth so hard he thought he might crack a molar, he slid the gun up the length of his body and over his left shoulder, trying to get the barrel as far away from his ear as possible. That wasn’t very far, maybe six inches at the most.

  The lobby door swung open, inward. The man was in front of the woman, a blurry red-hot target, almost impossible to miss. Roberto knew that as soon as he fired, the others would start to disperse, so it was going to have to be three very short and precise bursts of gunfire rather than one long one. He squeezed the trigger as the first man came out the door.

  Ironhead’s chest exploded and he staggered back, into Cuba. That was a bad bit of luck for Roberto, as it meant his aim was obscured and he’d need to take a moment to wait for another clean window. He found it quickly, as Cuba moved to the side, against the doorframe, burdened by Ironhead’s weight as he fell, dead, into her. Three shots had been spent on Ironhead, and four more ought to take out Cuba quickly enough.