David Koepp - Cold Storage

“It was.”

“Good. So you’re not violent. Now will you please pick up that chair and throw it through the wall for me? Please?”

She fixed her brown eyes on him, and he looked into them.

THE LEGS WERE SPINDLY METAL AND THEY WENT THROUGH THE DRYWALLeasy enough, and the biggest chunk of gypsum came off when he pulled it back out. The real challenge was not to pull too much, so they wouldn’t have to replace more than one panel. They didn’t need the chair after that first blow; they used their hands, carefully tearing away a few larger pieces until there was a hole big enough for Teacake to get his head and shoulders through.

There was a space back here all right, about sixteen inches of gap between this wall and the far one, and it was dark except for a red flashing light at eye height, three feet to his left.

BEEP.

It was much louder now, and a tiny light strobed white in sync with the sound. Teacake and Naomi looked across the concealed interior wall, checking it out. It was covered with dials and gauges, long out of use and cut off from power. They were set in an industrial-looking corrugated metal framework of some kind, painted in the sickly institutional green used back in the ’70s because some study said it was supposed to be soothing. Or maybe the paint was just cheap.

BEEP.

Both their gazes turned back to the flashing light. There was writing etched into a panel underneath it, but they couldn’t quite read it from here.

“You got a flashlight on your phone?” he asked Naomi.

She dug her phone out of her pocket, turned on the flashlight feature, and shined the beam through the hole, but they still couldn’t read the words underneath the panel.

“Hang on to the thing,” Teacake said. He put one foot on the stool, grabbed the edges of the hole, and hoisted himself up and through without waiting for a response. The stool pitched and started to fall. Naomi caught it, but not before it had knocked Teacake off balance and dumped him, upside down, into the space between the walls.

“I said hang on to the thing!”

“Yeah, I didn’t say ‘okay.’ Traditionally, you want to wait for that.”

Teacake sneezed six times. When he recovered, he looked up from his semi-inverted position and saw Naomi’s hand holding out a Kleenex through the hole in the wall. He looked at it, impressed. Who has a Kleenex in this situation?

“Thank you.” He took it and blew his nose. He offered the soiled Kleenex back to her.

“You can go ahead and keep that one,” she said. “Can you get up?”

He shimmied himself into an upright position and scooted sideways down the wall through the tight space, moving toward the flashing panel.

“Shine the light over there,” he said.

She did, moving the beam onto the panel beneath the blinking light.

He read it. “‘NTC Thermistor Breach. Sub-basement Level Four.’”

From the hole, she turned her light on him.

He winced. “Could you get that out of my eyes?”

“Sorry. Thermistor what?”

“‘NTC Thermistor Breach.’ There’s a whole bunch of stuff back here.”

She moved the light back onto the board and he looked up and down it, where a number of other monitors and displays were stacked.

“‘Airtight Integrity,’ ‘Resolution’ with a plus sign that’s, like, underlined—”

“Plus or minus.”

“Okay, ‘plus or minus 0.1 degree Celsius.’” Naomi kept the light moving and he read the stamped letters under each of the deactivated gauges and displays. “‘Cold Chain Synchronicity,’ ‘Data Logger Validation,’ ‘Measurement Drift Ratio,’ ‘LG Internal,’ ‘LG Probe,’ ‘LE1 Probe,’ ‘LE2 Probe,’ ‘LD Internal,’ Jesus, there’s, like, twenty of ’em.” He turned back to the gauge right in front of him as it beeped and flashed again. “But this is the only one that’s flashing.”

“NTC Thermistor Breach.”

“Yeah. You know what that means?”

She thought a moment. “A thermistor is part of an electrical circuit. There’s two kinds, the positive kind, their resistance rises with temperature, and the negative kind, their resistance falls if the temperature goes up.”

“So it’s a thermometer?”

“No. It’s a circuit that’s reactive to temperature.”

“Like a thermometer.”

“It is not a thermometer.”

He turned and looked at her. “What are you, all science-y and shit?”

“I wouldn’t say ‘and shit,’ but I take a lot of science. Prerequisites for vet school.”

The alarm beeped again, and Teacake turned back to it. “This is thirty or forty years old. How come it’s still on?”

She shrugged. “Guess they wanted to keep an eye on temperature.”

BEEP.

“Why?” he asked.

“Good question. And what the hell is sub-basement four?” She shined her light in his eyes again. “I thought there was only one.”

Mooney had been driving around with the bodies in the trunk for two days and they were starting to reek. At first, he’d been able to pretend the smell wasn’t there, or that it was the brewery on the other side of the river, or maybe it was that weird syrupy smell that had been blowing in and out of the river valley for the past couple of years, or even that it was he himself, just smelling like a man during a heat wave, as one does in these complicated climatic times we live in. But he knew it wasn’t any of that.

Mooney never did well in the heat, which was what had made Uganda such an odd choice, but hey, you don’t always choose your path in life; sometimes it chooses you. Right now, life had selected him to be the custodian of the mortal remains of the two unlucky bastards in the trunk of his car, and so far, he was doing a shitty job of it. A final goddamn resting spot was harder to find than you’d think, once you ruled out all official channels (for obvious reasons), garbage dumps (out of respect for the dead), and anyplace that smacked of future housing or commercial development (for fear of eventual disinterment). That didn’t leave a hell of a lot of Pottawatomie County open to surreptitious burial, and Mooney was starting to wonder if the whole car wasn’t going to have to end up in the river when he saw the ad for the self-storage place on TV.

The first and most obvious thought that crossed his mind was that he’d buy some kind of airtight vault, seal them both up inside it, wheel the thing into the smallest possible unit they had, lock the door, toss the key, and never think about it again. But on his first scouting mission out to Atchison Storage, earlier this afternoon, the smell had really started to settle itself into the metal and fabric and fiber of the car, and he just didn’t see anything made by God or man that would hold that stench in forever and ever. Except for Mother Earth herself.

Plus there were the storage bills: $49.50 a month? To hell with that. He’d buy a couple gallons of gas and torch them in his parents’ backyard first.

He’d turned around in the driveway and was on his way out of the eastern side of the storage place when he saw the wooded glade, up on the hillside near the crest of the bluff. Immediately, he knew the two rotting corpses in the trunk had just found their personal Valhalla. He hiked up onto the bluff, took a look around at the trees and the view and the peacefulness under the whispering pines, and he hugged himself. It was something he did sometimes; he’d wrap both arms around himself and squeeze, sometimes making a little cooing noise, just something to let him know he was alive and he was loved, even if only by himself at times. But from tiny acorns great oak trees of love do grow, right?