Cold Storage

Thirteen

However long most people imagine it takes to chip half a dozen coats of dried paint and a thin overspread of concrete away from the grooved edge that runs around a manhole cover, it was way longer than Teacake and Naomi had figured. If they hadn’t found the wide-slotted screwdriver in the tool cabinet, they might never have gotten it open at all.

They took turns with the tools. You couldn’t strike more than six or seven hammer blows in a row without needing a break from the painful vibrations that shot through your hands, as if you’d just hit an inside fastball with the thin end of the bat. Twice Teacake hit the screwdriver too hard. He’d thrown both tools down and rolled around on the floor, clutching his palms between his thighs, showing off the breadth and originality of his curse-word vocabulary. Naomi was more methodical, aiming her blows carefully and measuring their impact. Her progress was steady and considered, and hers was the final blow, the one that chipped away the last chunk of paint and concrete and made the cover move a fraction of an inch.

“You got it.”

“Get the pry bar,” she said.

He grabbed it from the closet, wedged it into one of the four slots evenly spaced around the circumference of the cover. The metal disk came up with a slight whoosh of decompression as the fetid air from below swapped places with the clean air above. Teacake wedged the bar in farther, pushed down on it as hard as he could, and got the handle end almost all the way down to the floor.

“Stand on it!” he told her.

She did, one foot at a time, pinning the bar to the ground once all her weight was on it. Teacake wiggled his fingers into the three-inch gap between the cover and the ground.

“Don’t put your fingers in there,” she said, but he didn’t answer, because they were this far, and there was no other obvious, easy way. Plus she hadn’t said it with much conviction, and he knew that what she really meant was “Put your fingers in there!”

But that was okay, because they were on the same page at this point, in it together all the way.

He strained like hell, wishing he’d stayed with the chest and upper-body work he’d done for a year and a half at Ellsworth. He would have dearly loved for her to see some of that now, because he had been cut, man, and he’d been really proud of it, it was such a change, he’d been a skinny kid for as long as he could remember. But almost the minute he got out he felt puffy and ridiculous, so he’d cut out the gym work and hadn’t missed it at all. Well, maybe he missed the feelings right after, when everything was flowing and you felt sort of happy and angry at the same time, that sensation was cool, but really, if she could have seen him then although you know I don’t look that bad now, was she just looking at my biceps a second ago? or, oh shit! His mind had wandered and he was losing his grip, the thing was slipping, he was going to drop it.

Teacake dug in, snapped back into the moment, bent his knees, and got the cover up past the tipping point. He leveraged it onto its edge and had planned to lay it down the same way he picked it up, but his muscles were screaming at him now: Why didn’t you do this when we were built for it, asshole?! As soon as he got it all the way up on its edge, he gave the manhole cover a shove and it rolled away, toward the wall.

It didn’t go far, though. It must have weighed two hundred pounds, maybe two-fifty, and after six or seven feet it started to tilt over and arc back, rolling right toward them. They danced out of the way, absurdly, as the thing chased them for a few feet, pissed off at having been awakened from its comfortable slumber. The metal rim ground across the floor a few inches from their toes, described one last dying circle in the hallway, and very nearly fell right back into the hole it had just been covering. That would have been a scream.

It settled like a spinning quarter on a tabletop, making a grinding cast-iron racket until it finally came to a rest, upside down, just in front of them.

When the echo faded, Teacake spoke. “You know, like, looking back? Maybe I could have just slid it to the side a little bit.”

“Well, sure, we know that now.”

If he didn’t love her already, he loved her for not telling him he was a fucking idiot the way his old man would have. She didn’t say much, but when she did talk it wasn’t to give anybody shit, not even as a joke.

Naomi picked up the flashlight, the one he’d grabbed upstairs. She clicked it on. They walked forward to the edge of the hole, got down on all fours, and shined the light down into it.

The light was bright, the batteries fresh, but there isn’t much any flashlight can do to illuminate a vertical cylindrical shaft that runs three hundred feet straight down into the earth. The metal ladder ran along one side of it. A ton of newly raised dust floated in the stale air, stirred by the removal of the lid, but other than that there was only the dark.

They looked at each other. Neither one of them wanted to back down, and neither wanted to go first.

“Climb fifty feet down and then we talk again?” she proposed.

“How many rungs is that on the ladder?”

She shined the light down at the corrugated metal rungs and estimated. “Fifty, probably. Why?”

“I don’t know, I was hoping it would help.”

She shined the light down into the hole again, playing it around the edges this time instead of straight into the black. Some distance below, there was the dim outline of an indentation in the side of the shaft, too far away to see clearly, but there was at least something there, some kind of goal.

“Okay, look. Let’s go to that thing—”

“What thing?”

“Over here.”

She gestured for him to come around to her side and he did, moving up against her on the floor. His leg touched hers, just barely, but he was keenly aware of it. She traced the light beam around the edges of the indentation.

“There. What is that, thirty feet maybe? We’ll climb down to that, see what it is.”

“And then what?”

“Then we’ll talk. If it’s cool, we keep going. If it isn’t—”

He waved off the rest of her sentence. “I get it.” He took the light from her, swung his legs around, and started to climb down into the hole.

“You don’t have to go first.”

“I’m a gentleman. I’ll go first and shine the light up, so you can see.”

“You have to admit,” she said. “So far this is cool.”

“So far, I have to admit this is cool.”

“You really think so?”

“No, I’m just repeating what you told me I had to say. See you in thirty feet.”

She laughed, and he started down into the shaft.

Climbing with one hand was harder than he thought, but he was so afraid of dropping the flashlight he didn’t even try to use the other. One hand holding tight on the light and the other clamped in a death lock on the vertical bar of the metal ladder, he broke a sweat within ten or fifteen rungs, more from fear than anything else.

Then his mind got the best of him. It started to wander, as it did, and he thought about falling. First a foot slipping off a rung, then his shin banging into it, the painful stretch of tendons as his legs split apart, both hands flailing at the bars, maybe one or two fingers snapping, trying to support his falling weight as his body gained momentum. And then the moment of detachment—the cartoon suspension as his hands flailed at empty space and his feet popped free. Would he scream? Or would he go silent, would all sound drain away as his eyes popped wide and his mouth opened in a horrified, perfect round O shape, making a soundless plea for help as he began to drop, into the darkness, a hundred, five hundred, a thousand feet straight down, until he hit the cement floor at the bottom, feet first, his legs accordioning into his body, the long bones slamming upward into his internal organs, his femur or tibia or whatever the big one was slicing up, through his intestines, piercing his heart and driving itself up into the base of his skull.

Official cause of death: “man killed by own leg bone.”

Then another scenario occurred to him, one in which he did not fall free. In this chain of events, one foot wouldn’t slip away clean, it’d get hung up in the rungs instead. He’d fall, but his body would flop over backward, bending at the left knee, and he’d hear the ligaments on both sides of the kneecap pop as it wrenched at an unnatural angle, bearing weight and torque it had never been designed to withstand. In this version he’d scream, all right, shriek like a wounded animal as he hung there, his shredded knee holding him, upside down, head banging against the metal rungs beneath him. The flashlight would slip from his hand and fall, the beam throwing crazy, bouncing light over the inside of the shaft as it dropped, finally smashing to bits on the floor far below.

Naomi would shout from above and try to save him. She’d climb down three rungs, loop one arm in, and lean down as far as she could, flailing for Teacake in the near-total darkness. But she’d miss his outstretched hand and lose her own grip. Now she’d fall, and she would fall clean, down three feet and right into Teacake. Their combined weight would dislocate his knee and break the tibia of his trapped leg (in both versions the tibia lost big), and the fractured leg would slither, formless, through the rungs of the ladder. They’d both pull free. The ending would be pretty much the same as before, it wouldn’t be the fall that did it so much as the sudden stop at the end. Except this time Teacake would land upside down and the cause of death would be changed to “man falls on head,” while hers would read “woman dies from hanging out with moron who climbed down a dark, vertical cement shaft with one hand.”

Teacake’s mind hadn’t just drifted, it had gone off on a little Wanderjahr, but at least it had killed some time and they’d already gone down thirty-four rungs, reaching the gray indentation they’d seen from above. Crooking one arm through the rungs, Teacake brought his feet together, steadied himself, and turned the light to shine it on the side of the concrete shaft.

“It’s a door.”

Naomi came down to just above him and looked at it. Three characters, and in retrospect they didn’t have to climb down here to hazard a good guess as to what they said.

SB-2.

She nodded. “Yeah, that’s what I figured. Want to keep going?”

Teacake didn’t think he’d gotten what he’d paid for yet. He hadn’t smashed up his employer’s wall, hammered through a cement floor, and vividly pictured two distinct and gruesome versions of his own death so he could stare at a closed door with SB-2 written on it in faded black letters.

Without answering her, he shoved the flashlight in his pants pocket, still switched on and with the beam pointing upward so it could light her way. With both hands free, he’d move a lot faster.

They continued down.

Fourteen

After Mooney had thrown up onto the gravel behind the tailpipe, after he’d hacked and spit and blown his nose till it was raw inside, after he’d used the dirty beach towel from the back seat to clean every speck of cat gut off his face, he was able to think straight. Sort of. He couldn’t get a handle on the whole thing, because it was ungraspable, but he’d at least managed to calm his breathing and get his heart rate down to almost normal levels, and to stop squealing “God, Jesus, oh Jesus, God, what the fuck,” or close variations thereof, every few seconds.

As soon as he was clean, a powerful thirst overtook him, and he was relieved to see the lone remaining wine cooler was still mostly full, the cap only loosened in the moment before he hit the deer. He picked it up out of the Exotic Berry puddle it had made on the passenger-side floor mat and finished it in one long gulp. It was warm now, which made the liquor feel stronger, and stronger was what he needed. A little courage washed through his brain, a familiar feeling, but different too. He could feel himself becoming stronger, calmer, better.

He was also becoming a walking dispersal mechanism for Cordyceps novus. Mooney was the twenty-eighth human being to be infected by the fungus, but there was an important difference between him and the others. Bartles & Jaymes, like many wine coolers and wine products in general, uses the maximum amount of sulfur dioxide permitted by FDA regulations as a preservative. SO₂ is one of the most effective antimicrobials on the planet and is highly antagonistic to growth. In its gaseous form, SO₂ can be lethal to any air-breathing creature and is in fact the leading cause of death in a volcanic eruption. It’s the poison gas that gets you, not the lava.

But in liquid form, and in the right concentration, SO₂ can be quite helpful. It not only prevents invasive microbial growth in human digestive systems, but it can actually clean and preserve a glass wine container itself, during both the fermentation and the storage process.

Mooney’s last bottle of Exotic Berry, aside from being tasty and intoxicating, was also a superb growth inhibitor. Whereas the fungus’s takeover of its previous human victims had been a blitzkrieg, in Mooney’s wine-cooler-besotted state, it was more of a slow and steady infantry assault through mud. The invading army of Cordyceps novus was going to win, Mooney was going to lose, but it would take a while.

Having unwittingly bought himself a few extra hours on the planet, he stood back from the car to review the events of the previous couple of hours.

There was a lot to review. The deer had been dead, there was no question about it. Same for Mr. Scroggins; the cat was missing half a face and skull. The notion of him surviving that kind of mutilation was laughable. That could only mean that something otherworldly was going on, something unholy. Whatever. The universe was a fucked-up place, with lots of shit he’d never understand.

But what about me? Specifically, me, Mooney, where do I stand in all this? What did I really do, after all? Mooney had an analytical mind, sometimes, so he put it to use. What’s the worst that can happen to me? Yes, I hit a deer; yes, I pumped it full of lead; and yes, I killed a sick cat, but none of these were crimes. Burying them on somebody else’s privately owned land probably was, but he hadn’t done that, he hadn’t had a chance. The dead deer had run away, and the half cat climbed a tree and exploded. It’s as simple as that, Officer.

So, Fear of Police could be dismissed. He’d done nothing illegal. That left only Fear of Societal Condemnation and Fear of God. Well, the only way society was going to condemn him was if it knew he was a weirdo and an animal killer, and there was no evidence of that other than whatever was left in the trunk. He edged over to the car, the first time he’d come within six feet of it since its occupants decamped. There were no guts in the empty trunk, that was good, but the deer had bled a fair amount. It had also left some weird green-brown ooze that covered half the floor of the trunk. Must be the shit that comes out of you when you die or something.

Whatever, this could all be cleaned up, this was totally doable. This was a garden hose, a couple of old towels, and maybe twenty minutes of his time. Nobody would ever know. So Fear of Societal Condemnation was off the list too.

Unfortunately, that left the biggie. God knew. God knew all this shit, and He could not possibly be pleased. It wasn’t that Mooney feared for his soul; his personal concept of God was a bit more baroque, more Old Testament. He’d seen enough of life to know that God was big into retribution, and the sicker and more ironic the better. Yes, He was kind and loving, but He also invented colorectal cancer, and is there a supervillain anywhere, ever, who came up with a more diabolical way to take somebody out than that? Don’t bother checking, there isn’t.

Yes, God had most certainly taken note of what Mooney had done tonight, disapproved, and started unleashing His righteous fury. Bringing the innocent creatures back to life to torture him had been step one, spattering his face with offal was step two, and Mooney knew for certain he didn’t want to wait for steps three, four, and five, whatever they might be.

He needed to apologize.

The last time he’d decided he owed God a mea culpa it had cost him almost four years of his life, but he was hoping he could wrap this one up in a couple hours on his knees. St. Benedict’s Abbey on Second Street was open all night, and he’d used it before when he needed to atone. The place was run by actual monks, a Franciscan order, and the black cowled robes conveyed a judgmental asceticism that felt pretty legit. The modish wooden pews couldn’t have been Vatican approved, but there was a granite slab that ran the length of the floor in front of the altar, and Mooney had spent many hours on his knees there, praying for divine forgiveness of one sort or another. The stone was pockmarked and uneven, so after the first five minutes his knees would start to ache, and by the time a full hour had passed he would be in so much pain he couldn’t focus. When his transgression was bad enough, Mooney would stay so long that the skin would grind into the inside of his pants, and when he stood, whole layers of flesh would tear away. By the time he got in the car, the blood would be seeping through the knees of his pants, and that was the sign that he’d done things right and they were square.

Of course, there was the time no amount of penance at the abbey was enough. To all of those prayers, God’s answer had been a consistent “Fuck no.” Half an hour on his knees, to ask for the strength to resist her? No. A full hour on his knees, to ask for forgiveness after he fucked her and, more important, might I please just this one time have a pass on consequences, could she please not be pregnant? Nope. Another two hours, to ask God to guide her with His wisdom and judgment and convince her to marry him? Forget it, asshole. And, finally, he’d spent three days on his knees, coupled with fasting so severe that he’d fainted; he fainted so many times that Brother Dennis had asked him to either stop coming or at least use a kneeler.

But the object of those prayers was vehemently denied as well. The baby did not die in utero, the baby was not stillborn, the baby was healthy and was his daughter, his bastard daughter with Naomi Williams. Though the entire rest of the Snyder family had forgiven him, it was abundantly clear that God in Heaven had not and did not intend to do so for a good long while.

Mike—he was still Mike back then—came across Luke 12:48 the day after she’d brought the baby home from the hospital. “But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows. From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.”

Clearly, God was not screwing around this time. He was demanding an Isaac-in-the-desert-type sacrifice, and Mike Snyder just had to figure out what it was.

The advantages of joining the Peace Corps were numerous—escape, the chance to serve his fellow man, escape, a settling of accounts with the Lord, and, oh yeah, escape.

Sadly, they rejected him. Turns out the Peace Corps looks for college graduates with decent résumés and real skills. You know, people who actually have something to offer. Who knew?

Service Brigade, Inc., however, would take just about anybody, provided you were not currently under indictment in your country of origin. The brigade had a contract with the Ugandan government to build affordable housing for a modest fee, which in local terms meant a fee that was highly inflated and heavily kicked back to the government officials who distributed it. Whatever, Mike was out of a bad situation at home, Service Brigade was willing to pay him a decent amount under the table, and his family thought he was a saint, so he took it.

Within a few weeks of his arrival in Uganda, the local workers he was teamed with started calling him Muni, short for Muniyaga. He liked the sound of it, so even after he found out that Muniyaga means “one who bothers other people” in some goddamn African language or another, he stayed with his new name.

He was Mooney. It was a fresh start.

He’d returned home to Atchison just a few months ago, was given a hero’s welcome and drawn into the uncomfortably tight embrace of his family once again. He’d regretted coming back almost the minute he got there, as soon as he felt their brimming eyes on him, judging the living shit out of him, telling him they forgave him for everything, for his weakness, for his cowardice, for what had turned out to be his complete lack of artistic ability.

They’d tried to get him to take an interest in his daughter, to at least go see Sarah, but that wasn’t going to happen. Her mother, sure, that’d be hot, but not the kid, never the kid. But Naomi wouldn’t see him at all.

Three days after coming home, Mike had started planning how to get out again. Maybe he’d meet his buddy Daniel Mafabi back in Budadiri, where Mafabi had worked out a sweet deal with the Ministry of Works and Transport to build schools all across the country at double cost. There were a lot of Ugandan shillings sloshing around the budget since Nakadama took office, and Mike knew the people who knew the people. Another couple of years over there and he’d be sitting on enough cash to split on his family for good, to never ever have to hear that they’d forgiven him again.

But God was another matter. Those eyes followed him wherever he went, so tonight he needed to get his ass to St. Benedict’s, make his apologies, and call this awful night to an end.

He got in the car, turned the key, and it clicked.

Of course.

He tried again.

Not even a grind, just a click. Dead starter. He got out of the car and slammed the door as hard as he could. It bounced open, so he slammed it even harder, then kicked it square in the middle, leaving a good-sized dent. One more thing for the insurance report. He looked around, assessing the middle-of-nowhereness of it all.

The car at the bottom of the hill caught his eye again. It was parked near the entrance to the storage place, just under a mercury-vapor light that lit up the parking lot. In the yellowy haze of the light, he could see the rear end of the car, a ten-year-old Toyota Celica. It rang a distant bell somewhere in his mind. He started walking down the driveway, toward the car, and as he got closer he saw a sticker on the back left bumper. Closer still and he could make out what it said.

PROUD PARENT OF AN AHS HONOR ROLL STUDENT 2012.

Unbelievable. He knew that car; it was Naomi’s parents’ car, or it used to be. It was probably hers now. He’d had some good times in that car. He started to smile and walk faster, drawn to the car as if by the ghosts of make-outs past. He’d heard she was going to school and working nights someplace; evidently she was here, right here where he needed her, when he needed her, and if that wasn’t Providence speaking to him, what was? Mike took a deep breath of the moist night air, feeling better now, definitely better, thinking more clearly—

go inside and find Naomi, that’s what I’ll do, find Naomi, find Naomi

—growing more comfortable in his body and mind, improving by the minute. He walked faster, stretching out his neck.

Everything was going to be okay. Naomi would be so happy to see him.

Things were clarifying.

Fifteen

Teacake and Naomi had reached the bottom of the ladder, and damn it felt good to put his feet on solid ground again. The flashlight in his pocket had been shining upward the whole way and Teacake had long since settled into a kind of trance, his body moving mechanically—step down, slide hands, step down, slide hands, step down, slide hands—no use looking down since it was all just a big black inky puddle down there. Step down, slide hands. He’d hesitated briefly when they reached the gray door for SB-3, but Naomi hadn’t even bothered to look down, and if she had he would’ve grinned and kept on, knowing perfectly well neither one of them would settle for anything less than making it all the way to the bottom at this point.

So they’d continued on, and that’s when the climb got long. Really long. From the schematic he would have guessed the lowermost floor to be about a hundred feet below SB-3, but now that he thought about it, that section of the drawing had been broken by a jagged line with a space through it, which must have meant a whole lot of earth was left out. Step down, slide hands, keep going. His mind had gone for a little stroll, a pleasant one this time, since the only thing that was illuminated in the area was above him, and the only thing he could see clearly up there was Naomi’s backside. He refrained from calling it or thinking about it as her ass, it was her backside, and it was a very nice one, but hang on, that’s exactly what he was trying not to think about, out of respect.

He wondered what they would do if they went out on a date, since she didn’t drink. Truth was, he didn’t like alcohol as much as he used to; it made his moods unpredictable. He’d get mad when he shouldn’t, happy for no reason, and wasted people bugged him more as he got older. Plus there was the waking up in the night—he couldn’t sleep twelve hours at a time like he could even a few years ago. Too bad, he missed those days, but he’d noticed the mornings when he was 100 percent clearheaded were kind of cool. So, okay, that’s all right, but when people don’t drink or get high, like, what do they do around here?

He imagined the two of them jacked out of their minds on coffee, but who wants that?, and then he pictured them working out together and she was very sweaty and glisteny man was she put together tight and whoops, hang on, things were headed off in that direction again, so then he saw them taking her daughter to the movies. And maybe the kid got scared at one point and jumped in his lap, and he’d say that’s okay, you’re okay, kid, turn your head away, hide your eyes and I’ll cover your ears, I’ll tell you when it’s safe to come out, I’ll protect you, and Naomi would look over at him and she’d smile, he was good with kids, he didn’t mind them after all, maybe he could actually—

In the end, he did fall. But it was only one step. His right foot hit bottom, hard, he hadn’t seen it coming, he lost his balance, and his left slipped off the last rung. He oofed, Naomi turned, and he reached a hand up to help her.

“Careful.”

She took his hand, he helped her off the last rung, and they stood together at the bottom. It was colder down here, maybe sixty degrees, and surprisingly humid. He pulled the flashlight out of his pocket and shined it upward, till the light disappeared into the endless black tunnel, now above them. He turned it toward the door in front of them. It was another gray indentation, but this one was bigger than the others, heavily reinforced with a series of bars and levers, and had a black stencil spray-painted across it: DTRA ACCESS ONLY.

“What’s DTRA?” he asked.

“Let’s find out.”

She pulled out her phone to google it.

“No signal.”

“Shocker.”

He thought. He looked at the door, which was more like a submarine hatch, crisscrossed with a complex latticework of steel slats, all joined together at the corners and leading to a large black handle. Pull on the handle, the hinged slats pull against each other, the door opens.

“You want to do it?” she asked him.

“I’d really like to know what those letters stand for.”

“Me too.”

“I get the feeling that I’d like to know more.”

“What if it’s ‘Don’t Touch, Radiation, Asshole’?”

“Yeah, that would be some amusing shit,” he said.

“I’m cool if you want to just go back up.”

Yeah, yeah. Like that was going to happen. He reached for the handle, but she put her hand on his arm and caught his eye.

“I mean it.”

He looked back at her and thought about that for a nanosecond or two, and really, could things have been going any better at this point? There was a kiss moment coming, there had to be, or at least a gripping-each-other-in-fear moment, and he wondered, these kinds of moments with a woman like Naomi, did he think they grew on fucking trees? Not in the barren, rocky ground that had been his love life, they didn’t; the seeds of romance had found no purchase there since, oh God, the middle of high school.

No, he was not going back up. They were going to finish this.

The handle moved so much more easily than he thought it would; the door-opening mechanism was a work of engineering genius. You gave one gentle pull on the black bar and the rest of the pieces glided about their business, each tugging on the other with just the right amount of force at precisely the correct angle. Even after decades of disuse, the high-quality metal had not yielded to rust, even in the humid environment. The dozen moving pieces struck up the music in their symphony of movement, and eight dead-bolt locks pulled out of the recessed metal slots in the doorjambs where they had rested for the last thirty years. Teacake pushed the door open.

Something rushed out and slammed into them, but it wasn’t anything nearly as horrible as what their imaginations had been conjuring. It was cold air. Cool, really, maybe fifty degrees. After the climb down, they’d both worked up a half-decent sweat, so when the blast hit them it woke them right up.

After the cold, the second thing they noticed was the sound, a whooshing that was coming from right over their heads, like water rushing through pipes. Teacake raised his flashlight toward the source of the sound and saw that was exactly what it was. They were standing under water pipes, a dozen of them, side by side, lining the ceiling of the underground tunnel, and water was circulating through them, fast. It was a low ceiling down here, so Teacake stretched up to reach them, and his hand came away wet. The pipes were sweating.

Naomi looked at him. “Hot?”

“Cold. Freezing.”

“I don’t hear any pumps or anything.”

Teacake looked at the moisture on his hand. “But they’re sweating. Must be humid down here.”

“It is. I can feel it.”

“Why would it be humid underground?” he asked.

“Can I see that?”

She meant the flashlight. He handed it to her and she shined it around the place. They were in another long tunnel, a mammoth, concrete-lined underground space. She looked up at the pipes, rushing with water.

“Where’s it coming from?” she asked. “Like, an underground cold spring?”

“Guess so.”

From the far end of the corridor, they heard a familiar sound.

BEEP.

The goddamn beep again, accompanied simultaneously by a pinpoint of white light, a superbright strobe about twenty yards away.

Naomi turned and looked at him. “Dude, we are so close.”

BEEP.

He took the light back. “I carry this.”

He started down the hallway, shining the light in front of him, following the pipes as they went. She stayed close. The beeping got louder, the strobe brighter as they moved toward it. Farther in, they could make out the shapes of other doorways; it wasn’t just a long tunnel, but another level of a storage complex. There were half a dozen doorways on either side of the corridor, all heavily reinforced steel with the same kind of complicated locking mechanism as the entry door had. There were panels and sensors outside each door, but they were all deactivated.

Two of the doors had been left open altogether, but a quick shine of the light inside showed them to be empty, just blank concrete walls and vacant space. To be fair, there could have been more to the rooms than that, but Teacake had little interest in going into them, or even diverting the light away from the path ahead for long enough to get a good look. He had a plan, a very clear plan, both short term and long term—shine light, walk forward, figure out goddamn beeping, get your ass back upstairs, ask for her number, call it a night.

Steps one and two of his plan were going fine. The beeping continued to get louder, the strobing light brighter. As they drew close to the source, though, step three was looking to be a real bitch. They slowed to a stop at the last door on the right, where there was a vertical display panel similar to the one they’d seen upstairs, but more detailed and covering only the room beyond this door. Many of the sensors and indicators had been deactivated, but there was one that still worked, and it was going off now—NTC Thermistor Breach.

Teacake looked up, because the whooshing of water through corrugated metal pipes was even louder down at this end of the hall. He shined his light up at the ceiling and saw that the pipes, all of them, made a right turn just over their heads and went directly into this room, through half a dozen specially cut holes in the thick concrete outer wall.

BEEP.

There was only one door left. Teacake and Naomi looked at each other. To open or not to open?

She spoke first. “Nah, I’m good.”

“Me too.”

They turned to get out of there at almost exactly the same moment, like a couple of synchronized swimmers. Enough is enough. Although he had to admit that was fun, of course he’d thought something awful was going to happen, but what do you know, it didn’t for once, and no, they still didn’t know what was defrosting, but they knew enough and they both felt alive and he was definitely getting a phone number out of this.

That’s when they heard the squeaking. It had been there all along, they just didn’t pick it up until the moment they turned away from the door. It was the squeak of an animal. Or many animals. Teacake swung his flashlight beam over toward it fast, and the light fell on a lump of fur on the floor a few feet behind them.

It looked just like that at first, a chunk of mohair or animal hide, but this thing was moving, writhing on the floor. They edged closer, in spite of themselves, the flashlight’s pool of light getting smaller and brighter as they drew up on the thing. There was a lot of movement there; the center of the object was fairly still, but all around its edges there were irregular shapes moving independently, stretching and snapping.

They were rats’ heads. There were a dozen of them, arranged in a rough circle around a tangled mass of ropy cartilage in the center. It was like staring at an optical illusion at first, trying to figure out what in God’s name this thing could be.

It was a rat. It was one rat, but it was also a dozen rats, fused together into one body at the tails, all screeching and snarling and biting at each other. Two or three of the heads were still, cannibalized by their neighbors. Blood dripped from the rats’ teeth and flowed from missing ears. The pile of snarling rodents was bound together at their conjoined tails by a strange greenish sap that had oozed over them.

Teacake expressed his feelings. “Jesus fucking CHRIST!”

Naomi was repulsed but also fascinated. “It’s a Rat King.”

“A what?!”

“A Rat King. It’s a—well, that.” She gestured, because there were no words that could take the place of one quick look at the horrific thing. “They wrote about them in the Middle Ages, during the Black Plague. People thought they were a bad omen.”

“No shit it’s a bad omen! It’s called a fucking Rat King!”

Naomi leaned in to get a closer look. There was an intellectual detachment to her; she was going to make a good vet if she ever got that far. She could look at pain and deformity and see the clinical side of it rather than the emotional one.

Teacake had no clinical side, he was all feeling and freakout, so he kept his distance. “How do they get like that?”

“Nobody knows for sure. Their tails get knotted and stuck together. Like from pine sap or something.”

She looked around and picked up a long piece of scrap metal from the floor nearby. She prodded the mass of fused tails. “If they found a dead one of these, they used to preserve it and put it in a museum.”

“Yeah, well, that one’s not dead, would you get the fuck back, please?”

“What are they gonna do, run up my leg? They can’t even move.” She got closer, turning on her phone’s flashlight again and shining it on the fused tails. From this close she could see that the dull pink cords of the tails were covered over with a lime-green growth of some kind.

“That’s not pine sap,” she said. She bent closer. “It’s like a—a slime mold.”

“Yeah? Cool.” He looked around. “Coming up on time to go.”

But she moved even closer to the squirming rats. They squeaked louder as she drew toward them, thrashing, trying to get at her or get away from her, it was hard to tell which.

“Um, it seems like you’re pissing them off.”

Naomi’s light was close to the snarl of tails. “No, it’s not a slime mold, there’s no froth. And it seems like it’s… moving a little bit. Like a fungal ooze, but God, that’s a lot of fungus.”

Teacake edged a tiny bit closer, shining the more powerful flashlight’s beam on the wriggling mass. Moving the light around to get another angle on it, he noticed that the fungal growth wasn’t only on the rats’ tails. There was a thin smear of it that ran across one side of the Rat King, covering two or three of the entangled animals, and continued onto the floor below. A jagged ribbon of green led away from the rodents, toward the wall. Teacake raised the flashlight beam, following the trail to the wall, where it had crept up onto—or down from—the wall itself, and then across a groove in between cement slabs, all the way to the edge of the door to the sealed room.

He walked closer and saw that the green trail of oozing fungal matter led into one of the dead-bolt slots and disappeared into the room itself. From this close, he could feel something emanating from the door.

Heat.

Slowly, he reached out his hand and laid his palm flat against the metal.

BEEP.

He jerked his hand away from the door and nearly jumped out of his skin at that one, because he was standing just a few inches from the thermistor alarm when it went off, and the sound was right in his ear. He shouted in surprise.

Naomi looked up. “What?”

“Door’s hot. I mean, the door is hot. And the green shit is coming out of that room, and there’s a fucking Rat King, and curiosity is awesome and everything, but I feel like this is about as far as this shit goes for me.”

She stood. “Me too.”

“Let’s get out of here.”

“We can’t leave them like that, though.” She gestured to the rats.

He looked at her, uncomprehending. “What, you want to take them with us?”

“Of course not. But they’re suffering.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t have any Oxy on me.”

“I can do it,” she said.

He looked down at the metal pipe in her hand. “Are you serious?”

“You want to leave a dozen animals in agony? To starve to death?”

“No, I would like to get the fuck out of here and not think about them.”

“Wait by the door, I’ll be right there.”

“Fine. Cool. You’re weird as fuck, but, I don’t know, I’m cool with it.” He started to walk away.

“Can I have the flashlight?”

“Hell no.”

She looked at him.

He clarified. “I mean, um, wouldn’t it be better without it? You know, just get the job done? Not have to look at a lot of gross shit?”

“I’m fine. Go ahead.”

He felt like a heel and a coward, but he also felt like getting as far away from the whole situation as humanly possible. As far as the fight between his competing needs went, his need to put some distance between himself and the hot room and its weird fungal shit beat his need to impress Naomi in a first-round knockout. He covered the length of the tunnel in about thirty seconds, looking back over his shoulder only once. He caught just a glimpse of her, bending down over the Rat King, staring at it, enthralled. He reached the hatch at the far end and came out into the dark space at the base of the tube ladder.

He’d never been so glad to be at the bottom of a three-hundred-foot concrete shaft in his life. He closed the door most of the way, just enough to not see or hear whatever it was she felt she had to do, and he waited. It took her longer than he thought it should have. But then he’d never had to put a dozen conjoined rats out of their misery, so what did he know about how much time a person needed to get that shit done?

After a few minutes, he got impatient and opened the door to take a look, but he could already see the weak beam of Naomi’s phone light coming at him, bouncing as she walked. As she drew close, she switched off her phone and he waved the flashlight beam in her direction, to light her steps. He raised it to her as she got close.

“You get any of that shit on you?” he asked.

“No.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.” She came through the hatch and he closed it, shoving the big black handle into place. The locking mechanism did its job again; it must have been thrilled to get to open and close twice in ten minutes, after decades of just sitting there minding the store. It sealed up the tunnel with a reassuring chunk of metal in metal.

Teacake shined the light up the ladder, assessing the climb ahead of them. “You want to go first this time or—”

He didn’t see the kiss coming, and if he had the moment to live over again, of course he would have done his part differently. One second he was looking up and talking, and the next he felt her lips on his cheek and her hand on his other cheek, turning him softly toward her. Then they were kissing—well, she was kissing him, really—and it was a soft and sweet and full-lipped kiss, just the right kind. It was over before he’d had a chance to get his bearings, and maybe for that reason it was the perfect first kiss, the kind that leaves you feeling fresh and alive and wanting another one exactly like it.

Because he could not help himself, he spoke.

“Wait, what?”

She smiled. “Thank you. That was bizarre and cool.”

Without another word she turned away and started climbing back up the ladder toward the top.

Teacake grinned. Some things you just couldn’t call.

“So are you, lady.”

He shoved the flashlight back in his pocket and followed her. He smiled all the way up, and he did not look at her ass, not even one time.

Sixteen

The moment he pulled onto the base, Roberto knew that Abigail hadn’t called Gordon Gray after all. If she had, they wouldn’t have stopped him at the back gate on Andrews and sent him around to the main entrance on Pope. He wouldn’t have had to wait ten minutes for the two base security lunkheads to put him in a jeep and drive him to the runway, and STRATCOM certainly would not have put him in the care of the 416th Fighter Squadron, with a priority clearance and a passenger manifest that showed up on every screen in Omaha.

Gordon would have moved with speed and with stealth. Roberto would have taken off fifteen minutes ago on an already scheduled flight of the 916th Air Refueling Wing, just another retired officer hitching a free ride west to see the kids. He would have been the kind of old duffer the pilots barely even notice and certainly don’t chart. Instead, he was alone in the back of a C-40A, as obvious and traceable as the air force could possibly make him.

Darn it. It was such a good speech to Abigail too; he’d really thought he’d put the fear of God into her. Six or seven minutes after takeoff, the phone rang in the burnished walnut cabinet next to his absurdly comfortable leather chair, and he picked it up.

“Hello.”

“Designator, please?”

“I had such high hopes for you, Abigail.”

“Could you please tell me your designator?”

“I guess I might have done the same thing at your age. All right, we can recover. Makes everything a little harder, but we’ll fix it.”

She hung up.

Of course, he’d known she’d hang up. She had to. He was just having a little fun with her. He had to admit, even though he was tired and even though the fate of everybody he could possibly think of was hanging in the balance, it was nice to feel useful again. Retirement had been a little disorienting so far. He’d looked forward to it for years, but he hadn’t really prepared. He knew deep down that all the work on the house had been something of a dodge. And now even that was done. You can’t just go from forty years of movement and activity and forced but enjoyable camaraderie with an unbelievably varied cast of characters from all over the world to—well, sitting in a chair. Not overnight, and not without motion-induced nerve damage from the sudden stop. No matter how nice the chair is. He adored his wife, any day spent in conversation with her was a good day by him, but a person’s got his habits, and Roberto Diaz was used to being in motion.

The phone rang again. He was still holding it, so he tapped the button with his thumb and answered midway through the first ring. He spared her the fucking around this time.

“Zero-four-seven-four blue indigo.”

“Thank you.”

“Qué pasó, Abigail? I was very specific.”

“Is there a problem with the transport? My screen has you over Fayetteville already.”

“You didn’t call Gordon Gray,” he said.

“He was unavailable.”

“Of course he’s unavailable, it’s two A.M., everybody’s unavailable, until they aren’t. You found me, I’m sure you could have—”

“Mr. Gray passed away in January.”

His brain processed that statement in three distinct steps. The first two were achingly familiar, because they’d happened so often over the past ten years. Step one was the absorption of the information. Gordon Gray was dead. The man who had once refused to cross a casino picket line out of moral principle was gone. “Gordon,” Roberto had said at the time, “you’re drunk as a skunk, you’re gambling with your rent money, you just broke a guy’s nose because he stepped on your foot, and you’re in Las Vegas. Why exactly are you making a stand here?”

Gordon had just smiled at him and shrugged. “I’m full of contradictions.”

There were a thousand other memories, most of them far less benign, but that was how he always chose to remember Gordon, as a pretty amusing bundle of nonmatching character traits. Now that particular molecular combination of soul and folly no longer existed. Once Roberto forgot about that endearing moment in Las Vegas, it would be gone into the ether. It would never have occurred. That was step one, the sudden and vertiginous emptiness of death.

Step two came close on the heels of that feeling, and it was compassion. He was sad about the hole that Gordon’s death must have left behind with his family, his friends, his brothers and sisters in arms. Roberto now had some people to belatedly console, a few phone calls to make.

And that was what brought on step three, which was an entirely new thought, one he hadn’t had with any friend’s death till this moment. Roberto had the grim feeling that he’d just moved into a new phase of proximity to death. Because no one had called him to say, “Gordon’s dead.” When you’re young, the reaction is “Holy shit, so-and-so is dead, can you believe it?” Then you get older and start glancing at the obituaries to see if there’s anybody you know in there, but that stage doesn’t come as a surprise, because every middle-aged person you’ve ever met tells you they do that. Then, when you’re older still, starts the sad litany of phone calls coming in as nature’s sniper starts picking off your friends and family one by one. You buy a funeral suit and then a couple of different ties for it so you don’t have to wear the same thing every time. You get used to all that.

But this thing, this was brand new—at sixty-eight, Roberto had reached the age where somebody died and nobody called, not because they didn’t care, but because it’s Too Fucking Depressing.

That was a new one.

He didn’t say any of this to Abigail. To her he said, “I see.”

“In January,” she repeated.

“Who did you call instead?”

A man’s voice answered for her. “Thank you, Belvoir, you can clear the line.”

Roberto kicked himself for imagining they’d been alone on the line. Only a few years out and his edges had been dulled already. There was a faint click as Abigail disconnected, and Roberto could hear the colonel breathing on the other end.

“Hello, Roberto.”

“Hey, Jerabek, how’s that rash?”

“Your wife said put some cream on it, it’s fine now.”

Why did men talk like this to each other? Why not just agree to meet up and punch each other in the face until they felt better about things?

Jerabek went on, enjoying the role reversal. When Roberto had retired, the colonel had moved up, and that was the spot from which he looked down at this time. “I thought you put this one to bed thirty years ago.”

“Apparently it woke up,” Roberto said.

“Sounds like a broken thermistor to me.”

“That would be nice to think.”

“I’ll be frank with you, Roberto. You’re on that airplane as a gesture of respect to Gordon Gray. No other reason.”

Again, why the fuck had no one called to tell him Gordon was dead? People sucked.

“Threat assessment and sober report. That’s what I want, and that’s all I want. Clear?”

“Gotcha,” Roberto said. “Hey, you got a cell number for Loeffler?”

“See, you’re saying that to irritate me, Roberto, and I understand. I would do the same thing. That is the sort of jocular back-and-forth I so enjoy with you. But I’m not kidding around. This is going to go quietly and quickly. Assess and report. No off-the-books stuff.”

“Phil, I’m fucking with you. It’s probably nothing. I’ll check it out and go home. And by the way, you’re welcome. I’m not exactly on the clock anymore.”

Jerabek took a moment, deciding whether or not to trust him, and opted for some of both. “I know that. Thank you for making yourself available.”

“You should probably take me off the file.”

“I will do that. Keep in touch.”

The phone went dead. Roberto held it for a moment, thinking. He looked out the window, at the lights of Charlotte down below, off to his right. Broken thermistor my ass.

Fuck that guy. Off the books was exactly where he was going.

He’d be on the ground in Kansas in less than two hours. That would make it tight, but if Trini answered he had an outside shot at it. The trick would be coding the call, and he certainly couldn’t do it on the plane’s phone. He reached into his flight bag, took out the MacBook Air his son, Alexander, had given him for Christmas (too much, makes everybody uncomfortable, tone it down, Alexander), and turned it on. The plane’s Wi-Fi signal was half-decent, and he called up Tor2web without hitting a DoD net nanny, first stroke of luck. JonDonym and the two or three other .onion rerouters he knew were already dead. The dark net had pretty fast-moving currents, and he wasn’t surprised to see he was already out of date. He was trying to think of next steps when something in his jacket pocket buzzed.

It was the satellite phone, the one he’d taken out of the safe back in his kitchen. He looked at the screen, didn’t recognize the number. He made an educated guess.

“Abigail?”

“I can talk for two minutes.” It was her. Roberto was genuinely delighted.

“I think you have the wrong number,” he replied, and hung up the satellite phone, which was most certainly monitored. He tapped a few keys on the laptop, accessed a DeepBeep site he trusted—thank God that one was still there—and leached into the first number with at least ten nodes of encryption that scrolled by. He called her back and she picked up on the first ring.

“I’m on my personal cell in the ladies’ room.” He could hear the echo of her voice off the tile.

“I take it you read my white paper.”

“I did,” she said.

“And you believed it.”

“What do you need me to—” She stopped, and he could hear that the door to the bathroom had just opened. Someone had come in.

Roberto took over. “Okay, I’ll talk, you listen. Even with encryption, airplane Wi-Fi won’t be secure enough for the conversations I need to have, so you’ll have to make the calls for me. Find a reason to get yourself out of there on the double, go buy a burner, and call a former agent named Trini Romano. I’ll repeat that name before I hang up. When she answers, tell her ‘Margo is under the weather.’”

“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 up 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 alter 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.

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 grateful 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—

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.

Yes, get as close to them as you can as soon as you can, yes, please.

So Mike had moved. He was confident, he had a purpose, which was more than he’d been able to say for a long time. The locked front door of the storage facility hadn’t deterred him; he’d found a side door with a glass panel in it, smashed it with a rock, and wriggled through. The broken glass didn’t hurt that much when it sliced up his arms, and when he landed on the other side of the door and stood up, he’d been delighted to see the deer through the broken window, standing at the edge of the woods ten yards away, staring at him.

Mike was thrilled. He’d felt bad about the deer for two days, but there it was, alive, and—somehow he knew this—it was on his side. He’d opened the door, held it wide, and the deer trotted inside the building. Together, they walked the halls of Atchison Storage for a good twenty minutes, looking for Naomi but not finding her, or anyone else for that matter. They’d moved on, wordlessly, to the basement, taking the elevator down a level to continue their search. She had to be here somewhere. Mike and the deer had the same imperative—find a human and infect it, repeat as many times as possible until you’re dead—and goddammit they were going to carry it out. He was going to be good at something.

It was when they’d reached SB-1 and the elevator doors opened that Mike had frozen up. Because there he’d heard her voice, coming from around the corner, talking to Teacake, and the 49 percent of his brain that still contained useful human feelings like guilt and remorse kicked into overdrive. He remembered what he’d done and that he’d fled, and that he had a child, somewhere, whom he had failed to father. As Naomi’s voice drew closer, Mike had pressed his body back, against the wall of the elevator, out of sight next to the control panel, and prayed to be anywhere but here. Prayer is a powerful psychic force, more powerful even than Cordyceps novus, or at least it was for those sixty seconds or so. Mike cowered in the elevator, out of sight, able to temporarily fight back the urge to go get them.

When the deer walked back into the elevator and Mike was able to push Door Close, a wave of relief washed over him. He wouldn’t have to see her again, he wouldn’t have to face the weight of his sins. They’d reached ground level and the deer—God bless you, you beautiful, intrepid creature!—had strode out of the elevator toward the pair of humans, swelled up, and done its level best to coat them in fungus.

But it failed. And the religious rebellion in Mike’s brain was quashed under the boot heel of Cordyceps novus, which simply said, Next man up! and pushed Mike forward to do his biological duty.

Now Naomi waited for him to answer her questions. Any of them, really.

He blinked, just looking at her.

Teacake tried like hell to figure this out. “Are you okay, man?” he asked Mike, but Mike just opened his mouth and then closed it again. Teacake turned to Naomi. “You know this guy?”

“Yes.” She hesitated, because she hated saying it.

“Yeah?” Teacake was waiting.

“He’s my kid’s dad.”

Mike opened and closed his mouth three times, clicking his teeth.

Teacake took that in, then turned back to Naomi. “Uh—for real?”

Mike moved toward Naomi. “Open your mouth.”

She took a step back. “What?”

Teacake stepped in front of her, holding a hand out to Mike, palm out. “Whoa, dude, what kind of shit are you talking, what’s the matter with you?”

Mike opened his own mouth wide, as if stretching out his jaw muscles, then clicked his teeth at Naomi again. “Open your mouth.”

Of all the unpleasant things Naomi had seen and heard tonight, this was perhaps the unpleasantest. What the hell was wrong with her that she had ever given this jerk the time of day, much less conceived a child with him? Why was he now heaving his stomach in and out, like a cat trying to bring up a hairball? And why was he reaching around behind his back?

Teacake had been around guns in the military and spent his fair share of time on the rifle range, but mostly he saw a lot of movies, and he knew there was only one reason to make that gesture, ever. It wasn’t because you had a sudden itch at the top of your butt crack. While Mike sucked his gut in and out and closed his right hand around the handle of the .22 he’d shoved into the waistband in the back of his pants, Teacake studied the geography. Mike was between them and the exit, but just behind them was the open hallway that led to units 201 through 249, and at the end of that was the jog to the right, maybe that would buy them enough time, some units had dead bolts on the inside and they both had phones, so maybe—

Mike wedged words in between the heaves. “Open”—heave—“your”—heave—“mouth”—heave.

The gun came out, but Teacake had already turned and taken off, pulling Naomi along with him. The vomit that Mike finally succeeded in dredging up from his gut spewed a good eight or nine feet, but fell short, splatting on the cement in the spot they’d just vacated.

Teacake and Naomi turned the corner as Mike raised the gun, fired a shot at them, and took a chunk out of the cement block near their heads.

Neither one of them had ever been shot at before. It was not enjoyable. They raced down the corridor, no words, just flight, and could hear the anguished, angry cry of Mike as he chased after them. The only way out of the building was back the way they’d come, back where the guy with the gun and the barf and the exploding deer were, so that wasn’t happening. Teacake’s mind did the mental math and didn’t like the numbers, not one bit, these hallways were long, and wasn’t nobody could outrun a bullet. He’d be willing to take his chances if it were just him—what were the odds that pukey weirdo could actually land a shot on a moving target while running? But that wasn’t a risk he was willing to take with Naomi’s life.

He took the next corner hard, pulled them both to a stop in front of unit 231–232, a sweet combo unit eight feet wide and sixteen feet deep. He zipped the master key up off his hip, flicked the lock open, and yanked the door up a couple feet off the ground.

Naomi knew the only option when she saw it. She dropped to the floor and rolled under the door, into the darkness on the other side. Teacake didn’t open the door any farther; he didn’t want to in case he had to close it quickly and lock her in, which he was fully prepared to do. If Mike had been rounding the corner already, he would have done it and fought the fucker one-on-one, gun or no gun, but when he looked back the hallway was clear, though Mike’s semihuman cries of rage were coming this way fast.

Teacake dropped to the floor. As he hit the ground, he saw Mike’s feet come around the corner, they were only about ten feet away, and he heard the sharp cracks of three wild gunshots and the clang of bullets hitting metal. Teacake’s view of the feet spun over, upside down, as he rolled under the door and into the storage unit, then the feet were right outside the door and Mike’s hands were reaching down to rip the overhead door open the rest of the way, and Teacake knew he’d miscalculated, just by a few seconds, but it was enough, he’d fucked this up, he was in no physical position to get up and pull the door down before Mike succeeded in ripping it open the rest of the way, shit, great plan, asshole, he’d led them straight into a dead end, a sealed storage unit, they were cornered.

But Naomi was on her feet already, of course she was; she’d leaped to her feet as soon as she’d come through. She was up and braced and had both hands on the door’s center handle—She got leverage on you, motherfucker, Teacake thought—as she put everything she had into it and slammed the door down so hard the clang echoed all the way down the hall.

Mike howled in agony, his hands crushed underneath the metal lip of the door, pinned there for a moment. Naomi pulled it back up three inches, not out of sympathy, but just to let him get his sorry-ass hands out of there. Mike yanked them back, Naomi slammed the door again, and Teacake, now on his feet, threw the metal locking pin at one end of the door, then darted over and threw the pin on the other.

The two of them stood in the pitch dark for a few seconds, breathing heavily, listening while Mike yowled and raged in the hallway outside. He banged on the metal with both fists; it rattled and clanged. He fired another half dozen gunshots at it, and dimples bloomed on the inside of the door as bullets slammed into the thin metal. Mike kicked it, then he tried like crazy to open it again. Light from outside streaked underneath as the door lifted and fell, but it would rise only a half inch, and the steel pins at either end had no intention of ever giving more ground than that.

Teacake spoke first, still out of breath. “So that’s Dad, huh?”

“I know, right?”

Outside the door, it went quiet. They waited.

After almost a minute, they heard footsteps as Mike walked away. They waited another thirty seconds, then they both pulled out their phones and the screens lit up their faces.

Teacake looked at his first. “Griffin called me eleven times.”

“Do you really give a shit right now?” she asked.

“Yeah, just, I need to keep this job.”

“You’ve mentioned.” She squinted at her phone, which was still showing the DTRA website. “There’s a number for a place called Fort Belvoir.”

“Fort Belvoir? That’s an army base.”

“Should I call it? Or the cops?”

Outside the door, they heard the faint patter of footsteps approaching again, fast. Someone was running straight toward them. The footsteps abruptly stopped as the someone launched himself into the air, there was a split second of silence as he sailed toward the door, and then the corrugated metal shuddered with a tremendous vibration as he slammed into the middle of it, denting it inward ever so slightly. But the door held fast.

They could hear Mike’s body crunch to the cement floor outside and he let loose an animal cry of frustration, a shriek that sounded unlike anything produced by human vocal cords.

Teacake looked at Naomi. “Yeah. Call the fucking army.”

Twenty

The runway rushed up at him and Roberto stretched one last time. He’d moved around as much as he could on the flight, but at sixty-eight his body stiffened up a lot quicker than it used to, and in surprising areas. Wait a minute, I pulled a muscle in my ass? How does that even happen? He and Annie talked about it all the time; they’d started to strain muscles in odd places or trigger back spasms by doing formerly uncontroversial things like, oh, standing up or opening a jar of peanut butter. That was the last thing he needed tonight, some pop-up infirmity to slow him down, and thirty thousand people die as a result.

The plane landed and taxied toward the far hangar, the one the airstrip at Leavenworth saved for visiting dignitaries and emergencies. Thanks a lot again, Jerabek, way to keep it all low profile. Roberto couldn’t wait to get off the government plane, drop his cell phone in a Faraday bag to block signal detection, and fail to call in for a good four or five hours. Until this was sorted. “Sorted”—he’d picked up that expression in London too and always loved it. Sorted. Handled, dealt with. Everything put in its proper place, quietly and efficiently, like a clerk in an office. Well, this one wouldn’t be quiet, but it would be thorough as hell, if all went according to plan. Permanent. Sorted.

He looked out the window and saw the open doors of the far hangar. The lights were on inside, but it appeared to be empty, just a large expanse of gleaming floor. There was a van parked in front and a figure in a dark coat standing beside it, a cloud of smoke curling up above the person’s head, backlit by the fluorescents inside.

The pickup truck with the airstair reached the plane just as it came to a stop. Inside, Roberto was already at the door. The copilot met him there with just a nod, no loose talk. That was one thing he missed about the service. Pleasantries were kept to an absolute minimum, which felt honest, and God knows it saved time. They both waited a few seconds for the tap-tap-pause-tap from outside, then the copilot flicked a few switches, pulled the handles, and the door sucked inward and rotated open. The copilot gave another nod and a tight “Good night, sir,” and Roberto stepped out into the four A.M. Kansas mist.

He hurried down the metal stairs, returned a salute from the airman at the bottom, and walked across the tarmac toward the van. He closed the distance between himself and Trini, and each of them was struck by how much older the other one looked. He hadn’t seen her in fifteen years, which meant Trini was in her seventies by now. Her health habits had never been good, and they had not improved, judging by the bright red glow at the end of the Newport Menthol King she was inhaling. The cigarette didn’t stand a chance.

Roberto reached her and stopped. He looked around the empty tarmac. “No base security escort?”

“Told ’em to buzz off and go back to bed.”

“And they did?”

She nodded. “I’m persuasive.” She went into a hacking cough and held up a finger—Hang on.

Roberto waited until she finished. “How is it possible you’re not dead yet?”

She shrugged. “Too mean.” She turned, opened the driver’s door, got in, and slammed it shut. Roberto walked around, eyeing the boxy white Mazda minivan with disdain, and got in the passenger side.

He settled into the white fake-leather passenger seat. “Cool wheels. This is your personal ride, right? You don’t expect me to drive it.”

Trini shook her head and put it in gear. “Oh, you’re a real beauty.” She hit the gas, cut the wheel, drove right through the open airplane hangar, and came out the far side. She took a left and headed for the Pope Avenue exit from the base.

“Seriously, Trini, I’m concerned. Didn’t you get lung cancer about ten years ago?”

“I do not have lung cancer, you inconsiderate prick, and I never have. I have emphysema, which is completely different and a hundred percent survivable.” She took another drag on her cigarette.

“Could you at least open a window?”

She opened his, and it sucked all the smoke right past his face.

“Come on.”

“Sorry.” She closed it and opened hers instead. “That tootsie from Belvoir sounded like you put the fear of God in her. What did you tell her?”

“Tiny bit of the truth.”

“Yeah, well, that’d do it.” She gestured toward the rear of the minivan. “It’s all there.”

Roberto turned and looked in the back. The rear seats were folded down and there was a tarp thrown over several storage crates that looked like about the right size and amount. “Including number seven?”

She shook her head. “We have to stop and pick that one up.”

He looked at his watch. “Are you kidding me? You know we’re critical, right?”

There’d been a shift in their power dynamic about twenty years earlier, when Trini stopped advancing in rank and Roberto continued his upward trajectory. He’d given the orders to her after that, not that she really cared all that much.

She turned to him now, offended. “The balls it takes for you to complain. Two hours ago, I was asleep. Now I’m driving you around at four A.M. with half a dozen contraband items that could get me sent to prison for the rest of my life.”

“So, what would that be, like three or four days?”

She laughed until she hacked so hard she almost had to pull over.

He smiled at her. “Do you miss it?”

“Like crazy.”

“Which part?”

She gestured back and forth between them. “This stuff. The bullshit.”

He enjoyed it too and hadn’t realized how much he’d missed her. “Gordon’s dead,” he said.

“Yeah, I know. It was a beautiful service.”

He looked at her, annoyed. “How does everybody know this except me? Why didn’t you call me?”

“Not my job to call around every time somebody dies. I’d never get off the fucking phone.”

Well, that was true. Roberto looked out the window for a moment, trying to remember the last time he’d seen or talked to Gordon, but he couldn’t call it up. He returned to the present and turned back to Trini. “You know, you actually look pretty good, kid.”

“I look like hell, fucker, and you know it. You look great. Sorta over-the-top handsome, as usual. Like a Mexican Ken doll. I picture you with no private parts.”

“Don’t picture that.”

“What should I picture?”

“Why do you have to picture anything at all?”

She shrugged. They reached the main gate and she opened her window the rest of the way, throwing a stern glance at Roberto. “See if you can shut up for a minute.”

While Trini signed them out of the base and discharged a wave of Newport smoke into the guard shack, Roberto took the Faraday pouch from his jacket pocket and opened the double-grade, military-tested fabric. Just as he was about to drop his phone inside, it buzzed. He looked at the screen. The number had a 703 area code. He plugged one ear, hit Answer, and listened for a moment.

A woman’s voice spoke. “Hello?”

Roberto listened. He heard the sound of wet tires on pavement on the other end.

“Two minutes,” he said into the phone. Then he hung up.

He went into the weather app on his phone, entered Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and saw that it was raining there. Satisfied the call came from where it said it was and had not been put through a rerouter, he dropped the government-issue cell phone into the Faraday bag and zipped it shut. He pulled his laptop out of his backpack, slipped a card into one of the free USB ports, put in a Bluetooth earpiece, and called up the DeepBeep site he’d accessed on the plane. He typed in the phone number that had just called him on his phone. It was answered on the first ring, but Roberto spoke first. “You’re outside now?”

Abigail’s voice replied. “Yes. In the rain.”

“Trini was here when I landed, and heavy. Well done. I don’t need anything else.” He was about to hang up, but Abigail spoke again.

“There’s been a development.”

Roberto tensed. “What kind of development?”

“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 outlets. 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.

Ironhead stepped up beside him. “Whoa, Griffin, your shit’s fucked up. What kind of place you run here?”

“I’m gonna fucking rip him a new one what the fuck did that little fucker do to my fucking place of business?!”

Cedric and Garbage seemed to think it was kind of funny. Ironhead hopped over the desk, drawn by the blinking lights behind the wall. “There’s a whole bunch of electronics and shit back here. What is this?”

Dr. Steven Friedman stepped up next to Griffin, sober and sympathetic. “Looks like you have some personnel problems, Darryl.” Griffin hated Dr. Friedman, even though he was the only one who used Griffin’s Christian name.

Griffin pulled out his phone and stabbed a thick finger at Teacake’s number again, but the Rev’s voice boomed through the lobby, impatient. “We doing this, or what?”

Griffin hung up. He would kill Teacake later. “Yeah. This way.” He walked to the gate that led to the storage units and swiped his card again. The gate buzzed, and they pushed through, headed into the back.

As they made their noisy way down the corridor and into the depths of the storage facility, Cuba heard a sound to her left and turned to look. They were passing the open mouth of another hallway. She got a glimpse of a person: not a security guard, but a slightly puffy guy in too-tight jeans and a work shirt that was green-spattered and strained at the buttons, as if he’d put on a lot of weight recently and refused to buy new clothes. The guy was looking their way as he walked through another intersection a hundred feet away. They made eye contact and she found his look disconcerting, his face as swollen as the rest of him and his stare a bit too intense. She saw him only for a second or two and then he passed out of sight, moving parallel to them in the same direction, as if following them from one corridor away.

Cuba—who had not one ounce of Latina blood in her but did enjoy ropa vieja—wondered what kind of weirdo would hang out in a self-storage place at four o’clock in the morning.

She hurried to catch up with the others.

Twenty-Two

Trini turned off the lights when they were half a block away and rolled to a quiet stop on the suburban street. Roberto, who’d known enough not to ask questions of Trini until they were immediately relevant, asked the obvious one now. “Where are we going?”

Trini killed the engine, unzipped her purse, and rummaged around until she found a small rolled leather pouch. “Where item seven is.” She got out of the car, looked up and down the deserted street, and headed off, staying just beyond the throw of the infrequent streetlights.

Roberto got out, closed his door softly, and caught up. He didn’t say anything, just kept pace with her as she counted off the houses. The lights were out in all of them, no respectable person up at this hour. Trini stopped just before a pleasant-looking two-story, stepped up off the street, and started across the grass toward the house. She didn’t bother with the front door; instead she went into the narrow yard, about fifty feet of space between the house and the one next to it. She reached a side door, dropped to her knees on the cement slab just outside it, and unrolled the leather pouch on the ground in front of her. “A little light, please?”

Roberto pulled out a key chain with a tiny Maglite on it and bent down, to contain the beam. He clicked it on and held the beam on the pouch. As it rolled open the light glinted off a pick set, half a dozen metal tools of varying shapes and sizes. “Forget your keys?” he whispered.

Trini didn’t answer. The less he knew the better, so she offered nothing. She skimmed her fingers over the torsion wrench and the offset pick, glanced up at the style of the lock on the door, and selected an L rake. She wiggled it into the lock and maneuvered it carefully, listening.

Roberto looked around, then back at her in mild annoyance. “This is really the best storage plan you could come up with?”

“Worked for thirty years, didn’t it?” She kept wiggling the L rake but wasn’t getting anywhere, so she pulled it out, switched to a diamond offset pick, and went back to work with that. “Only pain in the ass was when they moved. Took me six weeks of very creative lying to get them to let me pack the basement by my— There we go!”

The lock had clicked. She turned it gently, using the pick. The door opened a crack. She slid the tools back into the leather roll, tied it quickly, and shoved it in the back of her pants as she stood up. She looked at Roberto, expecting praise but not getting any, then shrugged. There’s no pleasing some people. She opened the door and stepped inside. Roberto followed.

They were in a kitchen, a busy family one, from the looks of it. Even in the dark they could make out the counter, crowded with olive oil jugs and spice bottles and half-read books and somebody’s homework and assorted plastic crap. Trini nodded her head and Roberto followed her across the room, silently, to a section of the wall that was covered by a pinboard filled with kids’ drawings and ribbons and schedules and reminders. Trini reached down to a half-hidden handle, turned it, and opened the door. “Light again?”

Roberto shined his tiny Maglite ahead of them, revealing a staircase that led to a basement. They glided down the stairs. He kept his light on this time, shining a path ahead of Trini as she moved through the half-converted downstairs space, past the ratty sofa and the broken, permanently reclined recliner, around the bumper pool table, and to another door at the far end of the room.

She turned the handle and pushed into an unfinished storage room. The family had lived there for quite a while and there must have been a number of kids, spread out over a fairly wide age range, because there was everything down here from old Big Wheels to a rack of frequently used skis. The back half of the storage room was curtained off, and whatever was piled back there bulged, threatening to push right through the curtain. Trini pulled it aside.

The character of the stuff in the back half of the room was different. There was no kid paraphernalia back here, just a lot of beat-up old crates and cases packed on top of one another, unsentimental keepsakes like camp trunks and an old snowblower. There was a narrow path through the cases, a definite method to someone’s pack-rat madness, and Trini held her hand out for the light. Roberto gave it to her and she turned sideways, making her way between the cases toward the very back of the very back.

There was a large storage container there, locked in three places along its front edge. Trini pulled out a set of keys, handed the light back to Roberto, and opened the locks, then the lid. Inside the trunk was a large, flat wooden tray with divisions of all shapes and sizes, filled with colorful pieces of paper. Roberto’s first thought was that it was currencies—maybe Trini had a run box down here—but on closer examination the paper wasn’t money at all, it was much too small and square. Trini drew her breath in sharply, as if she’d forgotten what was in the box, and he flicked the light up to her face.

She was grinning like a six-year-old. “My stamp collection!” She ran her fingers lightly over the rows of neatly mounted stamps, sorted by country and continent, each one on a tiny piece of stiff cardboard, its date and origin neatly lettered beside it. She picked one up, fascinated. “Kampuchea! That’s rare!”

“Maybe not right this second?”

“Sorry. Forgot it was here.” She spread her arms out, reaching all the way to both sides of the five-foot-long box, and locked her hands around the wood frame of its top tray. She wiggled it a little and lifted, pulling the whole tray out, the way you would the top level of a footlocker. She turned, found a flat place nearby, and while she set it down, Roberto turned the light back to the trunk. Beneath the top shelf was a mountain of bubble wrap. He started pulling it aside, Trini turned back and pulled the rest out, and finally they uncovered what they’d come for.

The thing was big and shaped like a water barrel that had been cut in half vertically. The flat portion had a series of straps and ropes and buckles and clamps, and they wrapped around the barrel itself with three or four leather straps. As a container it was meant to be lightweight, but with that size there wasn’t much of a chance it actually was. The exterior was covered in a light-colored canvas, with some kind of hard shell underneath.

It was exactly as Roberto remembered it from thirty years ago. He wasn’t sure why he’d thought it would be any different. “Looks old.”

Trini shrugged. “So are we. We still work.”

True, but they were human bodies, meant to age and decay and malfunction from time to time, and the half-barrel backpack was a T-41 Cloudburst, a selectable-yield man-portable nuclear weapon. If Trini’s or Roberto’s body broke down, they’d die, and a few people would cry for a while. If the T-41 broke down, everybody within a ten-mile radius died.

The T-41 was a product of the Operation Nougat tests in the early 1960s, after Eisenhower had first authorized and implemented the concept of battlefield nuclear weapons. Subsequent models were refined and deployed throughout the late ’60s, most of them to various Western European hotspots. The idea behind the weapons was that they could be used to stave off a Russian invasion. They were to be delivered where needed by U.S. Army Green Light Teams, elite squads of soldiers specially schooled in the care and activation of portable nuclear weapons. The weapons were designed so that they could be carried behind enemy lines by a one- or two-man squad, set with a timer or radio detonator, and used to destroy strategic locations such as bridges, munitions dumps, or tank encampments. They could also be delivered by parachute or into water, or buried to a depth of up to twenty feet, although detonation was significantly less reliable than when accompanied by a technician.

The T-41, like most of the W54 series of special atomic demolition munitions, SADMs, could be adjusted to a yield as low as ten tons or as high as one kiloton, which was enough to destroy either two city blocks or the entirety of the country of Lichtenstein. In the latter circumstance, the safe escape of the Green Light Team was highly in doubt, and the soldiers who had taken the job had been told to view it as a kamikaze mission.

This particular T-41 had been built and deployed in 1971, for use in the Fulda Gap in West Germany. Strategically critical for most of the modern era, the Fulda Gap contains two corridors of lowlands through which it was feared Soviet tanks might drive in a surprise attack on the Rhine River Valley, their entrance to Western Europe. To prevent a drawn-out tank battle, the idea was that a single T-41 would remove the threat in a controlled burst of destruction. Nuclear weapons, in those early days, were viewed by some in the Pentagon as just bigger and more effective versions of conventional bombs. By 1988 sentiment had changed, the INF Treaty had taken firm hold, and the last three hundred SADMs were removed from Western Europe, decommissioned, and dismantled.

Except for this one. For three years after confirmation of the success of the Kiwirrkurra firebombing, Roberto, Trini, Gordon Gray, and two other cohorts in the DTRA had been on a fruitless and frustrating quest to warn their superiors of the need for a contingency plan should Cordyceps novus ever escape its confinement beneath the Atchison mines. The nature of the storage facility was ideally suited to a controlled detonation of a nuclear device, they’d argued. With proper planning and placement, they could closely limit loss of life. Even an underground nuclear blast would be impossible to conceal, they granted, but after all, this was a break-the-glass scenario that would likely never have to be used. Still, shouldn’t they be ready for it?

Rebuffed or ignored at every turn, they had finally taken matters into their own hands. As disarmament activities swept through Western Europe, they falsified movement records within the Joint Elimination Coordination Element, and, thirty years later, here it was. The contingency plan, in a box in a basement, underneath Trini’s stamp collection.

Roberto started to lift the unit out of the crate and felt a twinge in his back. He stopped immediately—Don’t push it, moron—bent his knees, straightened his torso to vertical, and lifted. The T-41 weighed fifty-eight pounds, heavier than he expected or remembered. He set it on the edge of the crate and looked up at Trini. “Hold on to that for a second, will ya?”

She reached out and steadied it. He turned around and squatted down, facing away from it. He looped his arms through the straps, tightened them as much as he could, exhaled, and stood up again. He could feel it in his thighs already. This thing was heavy, and he was not the man he used to be. “Okay to go.”

She turned, shined the light on him, and laughed.

“What?” he asked.

“The shit we get ourselves into.”

“Keeps retirement interesting,” he said. “After you.”

They headed off, back to the other side of the curtain in the unfinished storage area, around the bumper pool table, past the broken recliner, and to the stairs that led to the kitchen. She was on the fourth step up and Roberto had his foot on the very first one when the basement fluorescents all switched on.

They froze, momentarily blinded. They looked up, wincing at the light, and could make out the silhouette of a man at the top of the stairs, a guy in boxer shorts and a Kansas City Chiefs T-shirt, pointing a shotgun at them.

Roberto’s mind flicked through options and found none, not with this refrigerator strapped to his back, and not in this position, second up at the base of a flight of stairs facing a guy who already had the drop on him with a twelve gauge. For the first time in a long while, he searched his mind, instincts, and experiences and came up with exactly nothing. “Uh,” he said.

The guy at the top of the stairs sighed. He pulled the gun back, looking at Trini. “Mom. Really?”

Trini smiled. “Hi, sweetie.” She looked him up and down. “You look heavy.” It was true, Roberto noticed; that T-shirt was a little clingy in the paunch.

The man came down a few steps, cautious with the shotgun and even more careful with his voice, keeping it low. “What are you doing?”

Trini continued up the stairs toward him, and Roberto followed. “Oh, just grabbing something,” she said. “Out of your hair in two seconds.” Remembering she wasn’t alone, she turned around. “Sorry, Anthony, this is my friend Roberto—”

Roberto came up another step, reaching a hand past her to shake. “We met. I think you were about three years old.”

Anthony took it reflexively. “Uh-huh.” He turned back to Trini. “Janet would kill you. And me.”

Trini made a zipping motion across her lips, gestured up the stairs, and Anthony turned. He trudged back upstairs, reached the kitchen, and stepped out of the way, letting them pass. He couldn’t help but see the enormous military-looking thing Roberto had strapped to his back, but he just rolled his eyes and looked the other way. He went to the kitchen door and opened it, showing them out wordlessly. Trini turned back to him when they got outside.

“Maybe Thanksgiving?”

“Maybe. I’ll work on it.”

“Love you, sweetie.”

“Love you too, Mom.”

The door closed softly. As they made their way back across the darkened lawn to the minivan, Roberto couldn’t take the silence.

“Seems like he turned out nice.”

“Yeah, good kid.”

Roberto looked at her as they approached the van. “I’m just wondering…”

“Yeah?”

“Well, the, uh, location. That you chose to store this.”

“What about it?”

“Um—the children?”

Trini rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on. It’s not like they know how to activate it. Jesus, you’re overcautious.”

Roberto dropped it. Trini was Trini, and that’s what he liked about her.

TEN MINUTES LATER, THEY WERE PARKED OUTSIDE TRINI’S HOUSE, HER work done. Roberto was behind the wheel now, item number seven in the back. He’d been on the ground in Kansas for thirty-two minutes.

Trini gestured, pointing down the street. “Turn right here, second left after that, you hit the on-ramp in about half a mile. It’s a straight shot up the 73.”

“How long to Atchison?”

“Twenty-five minutes. Sure you don’t want me to—” She cut off, going into a hacking cough that sounded painful.

Roberto looked at her. The night had drained her almost completely, and they both knew there was no way she could or should go with him. “I’ll be okay,” he said. “You still got it, you know.”

She shook another cigarette out of the box and lit it. “You will try to get those two out, won’t you?”

He thought for a moment. “I don’t know if I can.”

“Try. Okay?”

He looked at her. “You’re getting soft in your sunset years.”

Trini smiled. “Sun’s already down, guapo. The fireflies are out.” She took a deep drag off the cigarette and blew out a big, billowy cloud. It swirled and wrapped around her head in the still night air.

Roberto reached a hand out the window and rested it on her shoulder. She tilted her head toward it, grateful for the human touch. “You call me up any time you want,” he said. “I’ll sling all the bullshit you can handle.”

She smiled. “That’d be nice.”

Twenty-Three

Mary Rooney had fallen asleep on the daybed in her storage unit hours ago and might well have slept there all night, if it weren’t for Mike’s gunshots. It wouldn’t have been the first time she’d spent the night in good old SB-211; in fact, she’d found that lately it was the only place she slept well at all anymore. She’d started with short naps every once in a while, just taking a few extra minutes to spend with her lifetime of memories. But once she’d moved the daybed out of the guest room at home and into storage, things got awfully cozy in here. The naps got longer and longer. Where else was it completely peaceful, where else could she be surrounded by her loved ones’ things, and where else did she feel as safe? Certainly not in her apartment, with the ill-advised roommate she’d taken in at the insistence of her kids, who were worried about her living alone. Mary had come in today with the last of Tom’s things, a couple of shoeboxes filled with his mementos and certificates of meritorious service from his time on the force. As she’d set about putting it all in its proper bin, the walk down memory lane became exhausting, and she’d lain down and drifted off.

She was awake now, that was for sure. The first report from the .22 had done the trick. This place was an echo chamber and there was no mistaking a gunshot. Mary had sat up, wide-awake for the next half dozen shots, which fully answered the question Did I dream that? No, she had not. Someone was shooting out there from somewhere up above her. Who the hell was robbing a storage facility in the middle of the night, and why were they killing people to do it? That made no sense to her at all.

Or maybe, she thought, it was one of those crazy mass shooters you see all the time, but that made even less sense—didn’t they want to kill a lot of people? Wasn’t that sort of the whole point? She’d never seen more than two people in this place at a time. Mary had sat stock-still for the next fifteen minutes or so, not daring to leave her locked storage unit, but there was no way she was going to be able to go back to sleep either.

When the roar of the motorcycles echoed from outside, she’d heard voices in the hallway, a lot of voices, and she’d started trying to come up with a plan. Staying in here all night until the situation resolved was probably the best idea, but what if there were people in danger? What could she do about it? A better question—what would Tom do? She looked at her husband’s things, sorted and piled so neatly and lovingly on the metal-and-particle-board storage racks she’d ordered off Amazon and assembled all by herself. She tried to put Tom in her shoes.

Because Tom would definitely do something.

Twenty-Four

Nearby, Teacake and Naomi had been sorting through plans of their own ever since they’d heard the sound of the Harleys. They’d heard Mike’s footsteps as he headed off down the hallway, apparently drawn by the sound himself. Teacake had come to a conclusion about it all that he was unwilling to be moved off of.

“This is like some kinda zombie shit.”

Naomi was feeling more reasonable. “Okay, first of all, zombies are not real.”

“Zombies are real. Zombies are a hundred percent real.”

“No, they’re not, Travis. That’s TV. That’s movies.”

“Yes, and some really fucking excellent TV and movies, I’d like to point out, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Zombies are totally real, they’re based on this shit in Haiti, it’s like common knowledge or whatever. It’s dead bodies they make into slaves with magic. I cannot believe you don’t know that. And you want to be a vet?”

She looked at him. “Do you actually believe that is what’s going on here? Haitian magic?”

“What? Fuck no. I’m not an idiot.” He was getting impatient.

“So what is your point?”

“I said this is like some kinda zombie shit, as opposed to exact zombie shit, which I understand is, like, not a thing in Kansas, okay? Whereas, i.e., that is to say, in reality here tonight, there is some growing green fungus and a Rat King and an exploding deer and a dude that wants to throw up in your fucking mouth.” He made a gesture that said his point was proven.

“Right. And?”

“The thing—whatever it is—it’s spreading. It wants to spread. Call it whatever you want, but the thing is in here, in this building, and it wants to get out there, into the world. So what are we gonna do about it? Twenty years from now, when you and me are sitting around the fire and our great-grandchildren are asking us what we did way back in the great big zombie war, what are we gonna be able to tell ’em?” She opened her mouth to speak, but he held up a hand to stop her and kept talking. “And yeah, I know, my math doesn’t add up on the great-grandchildren thing, so don’t even start.”

She wasn’t going to quibble with his math; she had been about to point out that he had just assumed they were going to have children together. But that seemed beside the point, and kind of sweet anyway, so she let him keep going.

“We gotta go out there and stop that dude before he throws up in somebody else’s mouth.”

“Why do we have to do it? The guy on the phone said he’ll be here in twenty minutes.”

“Yeah, and who is that, exactly?” he asked. “A guy on the phone who talks a big game? A lady at Fort Belvoir who had to hang up on you and call you back on her cell phone? Why would she do that? These are fucking amateurs, man, they’re just as scared as we are. I don’t know why, but they are. Now, if you’d talked to Colonel Dick Steel or whoever, and he said there were a half a dozen Sikorskys flying in here with missiles armed and playing ‘Don’t Fear the Reaper’ on big speakers, I’d maybe wait around and let that happen. But I don’t think we have time to sit here hoping a couple freelancers show up and don’t get eaten before they get out of their own car. We gotta go out there and do something.”

The debate bounced back and forth for another minute or two. Teacake had by now played Griffin’s messages and knew it was him and his lowlife biker buddies who had arrived, probably to pick up the stolen merchandise. It was all Teacake’s fault, of course, because he’d been unwilling to bend the rules, yet another example of doing the right thing and getting screwed because of it. But he and Naomi finally agreed that Griffin and his friends, though admittedly detestable, were human beings and didn’t deserve to die. Or, if they must, it would be great if they didn’t spread a deadly fungus to the rest of the world on their way out. They agreed that starting with a phone call made sense.

Teacake hit Call Back on Griffin’s last incoming call to him and waited. The phone rang twice before Griffin answered. He was talking before the phone got to his mouth, so it picked up midsentence. “—you fuckwit you ever ignore my calls again and I’ll fucking fire you think this is some kinda fucking game I promise you it—” and then his voice faded away again as he lowered the phone and hung it up, also midsentence.

Teacake looked at the phone. “Wow.”

“What?”

“He’s just such an asshole. I’m always kinda taken aback.”

“He hung up?”

Teacake nodded and called again. It went straight to voice mail. Teacake lowered his phone, stumped. “I have to admit, I did not see that coming.”

“Did he sound all right?”

“Well, he sounded like a jerkoff. So I guess it was him and he’s all right. Let’s get to him before your friend does.”

“He’s not my friend,” she said, indignant.

“Whatever. The guy you had a baby with. Let’s stop him.” He went to the door and threw the bolt on one end. She stepped in front of the bolt on the other end, not done talking about this yet.

“He has a gun.”

“He has a .22. Yes, a .22 can fuck you up, but the magazine only holds ten rounds, and I think he used them all.”

“How do you know?” she asked.

“Because while we sat here for the last fifteen minutes I counted ’em in my head. One in the hallway, when we were running away from him. Three outside the door, when I was rolling under it. And six that he shot at the door after we had it locked. Look, you can see where every one of ’em hit.”

She looked up and, indeed, there were six little dimples, spread out over a three-foot area in the metal door, where the slugs had dented the outside. She was impressed.

Teacake continued. “So, he can’t shoot us, right? He can only barf at us or blow up on us, but if we stay far enough away that’s not gonna matter. We get Griffin and whatever shitheads he showed up with to clear out, keep your baby daddy inside this place—”

“Please stop that.”

“—and wait for the cavalry to come. If they know what they’re doing, then boom. We saved the world. Or at least eastern Kansas.” He paused. When a good salesman knew he had a kicker, he always saved it till last and used as few words to express it as possible. Teacake knew he had it, so he took a suitable pause and then deployed it. “And your kid too.”

Naomi looked at him, touched.

Teacake went on, and this was the part that meant more to him than all the rest. It was the part he hadn’t realized until he got almost all the way through his speech and understood why he was selling so hard, why he was campaigning for the right to open the door and go risk his life when he didn’t absolutely have to. This bit came from the heart.

“Look, I know they pay us for shit here, but this place hired me straight outta jail, and nobody else would do that. I’m supposed to take care of it, and for once in my life, it would be nice to not fuck something up. This is my one job, and yes, it’s a shitty one, but it’s the only one I’ve got or that I’m gonna get. You don’t have to come with. I’ll leave, you lock the door, I’ll come back and get you when it’s clear.”

Naomi looked at him, and she thought, It’s funny. Some things improve with closer inspection. He sure did.

She threw the bolt on the other side of the door and, together, they pulled it up over their heads and stepped out into the hallway.

Immediately, Teacake was proven right about one thing—the gun must have been empty, because Mike had left it behind, on the floor where he’d sat. They started down the corridor. They’d taken only three or four steps when Naomi’s phone buzzed.

She signaled to Teacake, stopped, and answered it, whispering, “Still here.”

It was Abigail, ten minutes on the dot since she had last called. “Good. Just checking. Is your situation unchanged?”

Naomi hesitated. “Not exactly.”

“What does that mean?”

“We left the locker.”

Abigail paused, thinking. “I am at a loss as to why you would do that.”

“There are more people here now. We gotta tell ’em.”

“How many people?”

“I don’t know. Call me back.” She hung up and looked at Teacake. “She was not happy.”

Teacake shrugged. “Who is?”