by David Koepp
Two of them hit her, but the gun’s recoil triggered a spasm of hideous pain in Roberto’s back. His hand twitched and the gun jumped to the side. The other two shots hit the doorjamb, shattering the lower hinge and sparking off its metal surface. One of the slugs ricocheted back at Roberto, slamming into the dirt just a few inches from his face.
Ironhead and Cuba fell backward, out of his line of fire, but the few seconds he’d used to adjust his aim had given the third guy time to flee. Griffin was on the move, heading for the front desk, and was nearly there already. Roberto sucked his breath in, held it, and fired unsteadily at Griffin as he vaulted over the counter. Roberto counted seven shots, all of which went wide of their mark, smashing through the broken drywall behind the counter but missing Griffin. Somehow, the lucky bastard had threaded the needle; he’d made it over the counter unhurt and landed on the other side, out of harm’s way.
Shit. Roberto had just used, to the best of his knowledge, twenty-eight shots, which left just two in the clip. There was an armed man who had taken cover behind a wooden counter that completely obscured him. And Roberto still couldn’t get off the ground.
The situation was less than ideal.
Roberto blinked as something pattered onto the lens of the goggles. He looked up at the sky, and a few drops of water appeared in his field of vision, accompanied by a low rumble somewhere in the distance.
It was starting to rain.
Hearing a sound from his left, Roberto turned and looked over at the body of Dr. Steven Friedman. The green globules of fungus were swelling outward off his dead flesh, ballooning up as the raindrops hit them, as if activated. Cordyceps novus greeted the rain with unbridled joy. The fungal mass, re-energized, dripped off the dentist and moved, expanding across the gravel driveway on the light carpet of water that the rain was laying down.
It moved toward Roberto.
Thirty-Seven
Teacake and Naomi had both stepped in smears of active fungal colonies when they were in the main hallway of sub-level 4. It would have been impossible not to, even if they had been aware that Benzene-X had the adaptive capability to eat through the thick rubber soles of the boots. The bottoms of all four of their boots were alive with that process even now, as they made their frantic way back up the tube ladder. They didn’t know it, but they had less than a minute to get out of the suits before Benzene-X finished its work and the fungus would be able to pass through and make contact with their flesh.
That wasn’t the only clock they were on. As soon as they’d seen that the timer on the T-41 was already activated, the only thing left for them to do was to get the hell back upstairs and get out. Teacake was livid, cursing Roberto with every step, but Naomi saw the logic behind what he’d done. They’d had limited time to do the job, he couldn’t take the chance that they’d fail to activate the device correctly, and so he’d made a judgment call. All he really needed them for was transportation and placement of the device anyway, and he’d gambled they had a better chance of getting it down there quickly than he did. And, more important, that they could get back up even faster. Tactically speaking, it made sense.
Teacake fairly flew up the ladder, fifty-eight pounds lighter than when he’d climbed down. Naomi, who still had to hold the gun in one hand, was a bit slower, but only a dozen rungs behind him. She looked up and could see the small round circle of light where they’d removed the manhole cover. They climbed fast, both running mental timers that told them they had at best three minutes to get in a car and get a survivable distance away from the underground blast.
Whatever the hell that was going to be like.
Teacake got to the top and pulled himself up through the manhole cover with all the grace of a dog climbing out of a swimming pool. He got the bulk of his body up onto the floor, rolled over on his back, and unzipped the neck area of his hazmat suit, ripping the helmet off his head. The burst of fresh air was great, but having clear vision again was even better. He slid his body over, clearing the way for Naomi to come up through the manhole, and he started wriggling out of the suit, rolling it down over his torso and hips.
Naomi came out of the hole a few seconds later, and the first thing she saw was the moving green ooze on the bottoms of Teacake’s boots. She gasped and shouted, but he could only hear her muted voice from inside her mask. He got the gist, though—there was something on his boots—and he didn’t bother to look, just moved even faster, wriggling desperately to get the suit and the contaminated boots off him. Naomi shouted louder from inside her mask, and this time he could hear her. “What are you doing?! You can’t take it off!”
“We’ll never get out of here in these things! Take yours off!”
She saw his point—they were hard enough to walk in, forget running. She rolled herself the rest of the way out of the hole, pulling off her helmet. Teacake, freed from his suit, got the hell away from it and its contamination and moved over to her. Avoiding her boots, he ripped the suit off her as fast as their combined efforts would allow. She kicked the suit away, got to her feet, and they took off down the hallway in their socks.
Downstairs, there was less than two minutes showing on the timer.
But Roberto’s voice floated through Naomi’s mind as she ran.
“The timer duration is unstable,” he’d said.
Thirty-Eight
In front of the building, the rain was falling harder now, and the creeping fungus was bubbling across the gravel in lively fashion, only a foot or two from Roberto. Through the thermal imaging goggles, he saw it as a blazing white foam, headed right for him. He turned his head and looked toward the lobby entrance again. The shooter was still out of sight, hidden somewhere behind the front counter, but Roberto had a more immediate concern. And an idea. His eyes went to the front door, the lower hinge of which had been shot off by the errant rounds he’d fired at Cuba. The glass door was hanging at an angle, held in its frame by just its upper hinge now. The door was designed to open inward, and Roberto was lying directly in front of it. Or at least he hoped he was.
He glanced over at the advancing fungus, which was dancing exuberantly in the falling rain. It was only a foot or so from his left hand now, and Roberto took a breath and dragged his arm closer to his body. The movement produced a stabbing pain that radiated all the way down his left leg and caused his foot to spasm, which in turn produced a fresh round of torment. But that gave him a few more seconds.
He looked back up at the top door hinge, tilted the barrel of the gun upward, steadied his aim on it as best he could, and prayed he’d counted the shots correctly.
He had.
The two remaining rounds tore into the metal of the top hinge, blasting it off the doorframe, and the glass door fell over like a domino, straight toward him. Roberto closed his eyes as the heavy door whooshed downward, slamming into his body hard. He screamed underneath the heavy glass as his body torqued unnaturally, but he made use of the moment of agony, dragging himself to his right as far as he could so that the door settled on top of him at an angle.
Its left edge bit into the gravel; it sloped upward over his left arm, hip, and leg and angled out at its top edge, like a lean-to. It now lay like a shield between him and the advancing fungus.
And just in time. The fungus oozed up onto the doorframe, slithering and spreading over the glass just above Roberto. Benzene-X got down to business immediately, trying to decipher this new silicon-based barrier and how it might burrow its way through it.
Roberto hadn’t bought much time, but a little was better than nothing.
Inside the lobby, Griffin poked his head up over the counter. Whoever was out there shooting at him, he’d heard their gun go dry with a series of soft clicks. Griffin didn’t so much care if the guy lived or died, he just wanted to get out of there before he ended up dead like everybody else. He’d seen the pile of trashed Harleys so he knew that was a no-go, but whoever that was, lying out there, they had to have gotten here somehow. Which meant they had car keys.
>
Griffin straightened, holding his gun in front of him, and headed for the space where the front door had been. He stepped over the bodies of Ironhead and Cuba, trying not to look at them, instead keeping the gun trained on the figure beneath the glass door. Somehow, the dumb shit had managed to miss him with an automatic weapon, and in his last desperate act the guy had shot a door off its hinges and pinned himself beneath it. Joke’s on you, motherfucker.
Griffin stepped through the door and looked left and right, to make sure there was no one else outside. He saw Dr. Friedman’s dead body, covered with the same bizarre foam that had been spattered all over the inside of the storage locker. Griffin shuddered: Teacake had been right, there was some zombie shit going on here, all right, and he needed out, fast. He double-checked the bikes, confirmed they were all down and unusable, and then spotted the minivan parked a little way up the hill. It must belong to the shooter trapped under the door.
“Hey, fucker!” Griffin said, and Roberto squirmed, turning his head slightly to look up at him. Griffin edged closer, the gun shaking in front of him. He’d kill this guy if he had to; he’d kill anybody who got in his way now. Griffin came around to the side, staring warily at the green ooze that was moving over the glass, just a few inches above the guy’s face.
Roberto looked up at him. His eyes asked for help, but he wasn’t saying so. Wouldn’t matter if he did, Griffin thought. Fuck you I’m gonna help you. This is some every-man-for-himself kind of shit going on here. He squatted down and shoved his hand inside the guy’s right pants pocket, feeling around for his car keys.
Roberto screamed in pain at the movement. Griffin didn’t care—the others were all dead, and he didn’t plan on joining them. He felt the fob of the car keys and yanked them out. Still squatting, he turned and pointed his gun at Roberto’s head. The last thing he needed was this guy surviving the night by some miracle and pointing a finger at him in a courtroom and saying, “That’s him, Your Honor, that’s the guy who left me to die.” Griffin wasn’t sure what crime that would be exactly, but why take chances?
“Don’t look at me!” he shouted, and stiffened his arm, aiming the gun at the center of Roberto’s forehead.
“Griffin!”
The voice called from behind him, a woman’s voice, and Griffin turned. It was her, the hottie; somehow she’d come back. She had a gun too, but she wasn’t bothering to point it at him, it was dangling at her side. “We have to get out of here!”
Griffin looked at her, cold.
Well, you know what? She was gonna have to go too, and that little shit Teacake along with her, because he wasn’t taking any chances with any more semi-infected motherfuckers. Once a life-or-death situation starts, you gotta play it out, all the way down the line. And was she or was she not coming at him with a gun? Those two had to go. If that made him an asshole, so be it.
Griffin started to stand, springing out of his crouch. The barrel of his gun, which had been just underneath the lip of the glass, caught there, just by an inch or so and only for a second, but combined with the force of his rapid rise, it was enough to tip its aim downward, pointing it straight at the ground. The sudden unpredictable movement in his hand caused Griffin to tense up his grip, and he blasted off a shot as he stood up.
Straight into his foot.
Griffin screamed as an angry fire erupted in his foot, and he hopped up, to take the weight off. He lost balance, windmilled his arms, and toppled over onto his right side. His gun hand pinned beneath him, the barrel pressed against his chest, the thick, fleshy weight of his torso crushed his fingers, and the gun fired again. This time, the bullet went into his heart.
In this way, Darryl Griffin became the latest in a long line of Homo sapiens killed not for being an asshole, but by being an asshole.
Teacake turned away and saw the green foam on the glass, just over Roberto’s face. He ran to the fallen door, dug his fingers underneath the edge, and flipped it off, freeing him.
Roberto shouted up at them. “Car keys are in his hand!”
Naomi clawed the keys out of Griffin’s exposed left hand and looked back at Roberto. “Get up!”
“I can’t. Drag me.”
Figuring he’d been shot but knowing there was no time to dwell on it, they each grabbed him by an arm and dragged him, screaming, up the short driveway to the minivan. The heat-vision goggles had fallen off Roberto’s head, but he didn’t need them to see the fungal growth anymore. As they hauled him up the hillside, he could see the forest floor lit up with its glowing green tendrils, spreading rapidly in the now-heavy rain.
They reached the minivan and threw him into the back, producing more screams. Teacake jumped in beside him, Naomi slid behind the wheel, and she started the engine.
Teacake shouted at Roberto, “You started the timer on us!”
“I knew you could get out.”
“You did not know that!”
“But you did.”
“But you didn’t know!”
“But you did.”
Naomi dropped the van in reverse, threw her arm over the seat, and floored it, backing up at top speed. “Guys, shut up.” She reached the top of the driveway, spun the wheel, and the minivan slid around, almost knocking Roberto and Teacake out the still-open side door. “How much time do we have?” she asked Roberto.
He turned his head, painfully, and looked at the timer that he’d set on his watch when he first activated the device. It was at –1:07 and counting. “It should have gone off a minute ago.”
Naomi dropped the van in drive and they took off, down White Clay Road and toward the highway. For a moment, nobody spoke.
Finally, Naomi did. “Well. The timer is unstable. You said.”
“Yep,” Roberto replied.
They drove. Still nothing. No bright light, no tremors in the earth, no fire and brimstone. Nothing.
“How will we know if it goes off?” Teacake asked.
“You’ll know,” Roberto said. He looked at his watch again: –1:49.
Naomi drove, fast. They rode in silence, waiting.
Every second seemed to take forever, and Teacake’s vivid imagination went to work. He had time to imagine three possible scenarios, each more vivid than the last. In the first scenario, the T-41 failed to detonate. The pipes in the basement buckled under Cordyceps novus’s assault within a few minutes, and the fungus exploded in growth, billowing through the water in the pipes, flowing into the groundwater and eventually into the Missouri River. Within a matter of days, the powerful waterway would be converted to a carpet of solid green fungal matter, which would spread over the surrounding lands, unchecked and unstoppable, rewriting the rules for life on the planet and bringing about a Sixth Extinction, a mass die-off that this time would include all human and animal life on Earth.
So that one was pretty bad.
In the second scenario, Teacake imagined the blasting caps went off and the device detonated as planned. But a few hundred feet underground wasn’t nearly deep enough for a nuclear explosion, and in this version, he imagined the explosion erupting out of the ground, billowing up into the sky in a massive mushroom cloud just like the ones he’d seen in movies and on TV. The poisonous cloud of radiation would blow eastward on prevailing winds, spreading death and disease over the eastern half of the United States.
Admittedly, this scenario wasn’t as bad as the first one, but it wasn’t a lot of fun either.
The third scenario was Teacake’s favorite, and it was for this that he now prayed to a God he didn’t believe in. In this version, the blasting caps went off, better late than not at all, exploding inward on the metal tubes and beginning the process of nuclear compression. The chain reaction commenced, producing an outpouring of heat somewhere between 50 million and 150 million degrees Fahrenheit. The sub-basement and the layers of rock closest to the backpack would be vaporized instantly, forming a crater into which the entire contents of the storage facility would collapse.
All the unneeded furnit
ure, the contents of homes that would never be reoccupied, the pack-rat hoardings of a thousand unhappy people, the stolen Samsung TVs, Mrs. Rooney’s twenty-seven banker’s boxes filled with her children’s school reports and holiday cards, her forty-two ceramic coffee mugs and pencil jars made at Pottery 4 Fun between 1995 and 2008, her seven nylon duffel bags stuffed with newspapers from major events in world history, and even her vinyl Baywatch pencil case stuffed with $6,500 in cash she was saving for the day the banks crashed For Real—all of it, all the junk in all the sealed boxes in all the lockers, some of their contents long forgotten, all the shit, shit, shit, shit—all of it would melt, collapsing downward into the cavity, forming a rubble chimney that would swell upward.
From ground level, Teacake imagined, a perfectly round crater might emerge, sucking the entire facility and the hillside all around down into it in a matter of seconds, as if it were on some giant round elevator, as if God had pushed the Down button and called everything back inside Mother Earth to be reconfigured, repurposed, used another day for a greater end. The fungus itself would be incinerated, Teacake thought, burned off the face of the planet for good, and as the explosion settled, a harmless cloud of dirt and dust would rise up, all that was left of the Atchison Storage Facility and this fucked-up night.
And in the end, two minutes and twenty-six seconds behind schedule, that was exactly what happened.
Afterwards
Thirty-Nine
The snow globe was back in the cabinet. Roberto had upgraded the emergency cell phone and given it a fresh charge, just in case. Both were locked away in the secret kitchen cupboard again, and on most days, he hoped they’d never come back out. On the other days, the days when he felt particularly proud of himself, he’d muse about how awfully good he was at his job after all and what a shame it would be to park those skills on a shelf forever.