David Koepp - Cold Storage

This was the spot. He’d treat those poor dead souls properly, dig them a hole down under the frost line right here on this glorious, unbuildable bluff that overlooked the river on one side and a mountain of rock on the other. Those were two natural wonders that he could count on to stay exactly where they were, unchanged, for a good forty or fifty thousand years. The corpses would be undisturbed.

Yes. This place would do nicely.

So now he was back, under cover of darkness and with a shovel. He pulled off the driveway fifty yards short of the eastern entrance and killed the lights around ten P.M. There was just one car down below in the parking lot, probably the guard’s, and it looked kind of familiar. But nobody guards an unlit bluff on the wrong side of the Missouri River, so Mooney figured he was safe over here.

He got out of the car, went around to the trunk, and winced at the foul smell that was seeping out of the cracks along the edges of the metal. He turned his head away, took an enormous gulp of fresh air, turned back, opened the trunk in one swift motion, and got smacked in the face with the most assaultive stench he’d ever smelled in his entire life. It wasn’t just that it smelled bad— you couldn’t just say bad, that didn’t come anywhere close to covering it. It’s that the smell hurt, it was so powerful. It had a thickness to it, a body and form; the smell was all hands and they were all over him, grabbing him by the face and throat and nostrils and lungs and forcing their thick fingers into him.

Mooney snapped his head away as fast as he could, barely getting a glimpse of the rapidly decaying contents of the trunk. He fumbled around for the shovel. It should have been right on top, that was where he’d left it, how could it have moved, Jesus Christ, where was the goddamn shovel? Face still averted, he slapped his hand around the trunk a few times, an angry dad swatting at the kids in the back seat while trying to keep his eyes on the road, but every place his hand landed was worse than the place before—that part was wet, and this part was hot (not just warm, mind you, but hot )—but wait, here it was, hard and wooden and shovel ! His fingers closed around the handle and he yanked it out of the trunk, slammed the lid, and practically collapsed, gasping for air.

This couldn’t be right. This smell could not be normal. Then again, what experience did he have? What did he know, maybe this was how it went down when you died. If it was, quick mental note: he definitely wanted to eat better and exercise four or five times a week from now on, because death was no party. Okay. When did he fire the last kill shot, what was that, two days ago? Less than that; he’d loaded both corpses into the car at two in the morning on Wednesday—that’s forty-four hours. How fast does a body decompose? He actually pulled out his phone and was about to google that very question when the essential insanity of that act somehow managed to announce itself through the fog of his stench-choked brain. He put the phone away and started the walk up the hill with the shovel to dig the grave.

He was ten steps away when he heard the first thump. He turned.

It had come from the trunk of the car.

Teacake knew from bitter experience that your head could get only so small. Everything else can squeeze, suck in, twist around; people can get pretty sideways when they want to or have to. But with your head there was no negotiation.

Teacake had direct knowledge of this from the fence that had run along the back of his high school. At the edge of the fence there was a pipe, set just a few inches too far off the brick facade, that left a nine-inch gap between the school building and freedom. Determined weed smokers used to be able to get off the bus in the morning, cruise through the front doors of the school, sign in for homeroom, and split out the rear fire doors before the handles got chained for the day (totally illegal, by the way). From there it was just a matter of a shoulder shimmy, a gut suck-in for Big Jim Schmittinger, and a willingness to scrape the shit out of both ears as you popped your head through to the other side. If you did all that, boom, you were loose in the open field behind the school building, where you could blaze away in peace. The size of his skull was the main reason Teacake, as toasty a burnout as you would ever find, actually managed to swing a 3.5 GPA in high school—his head was just too goddamn big to get through the fence. So Teacake never got high during the day. It does wonders for your concentration. Some of the math and science even stuck, and when he joined the navy he remembered just enough of it to qualify for duty on a ballistic missile sub. It was a plus. At least he had the same bunk every night.

Nothing he did manage to learn about Lord of the Flies, though, was of use in his present situation, where his great big fucked-up head had done him in again. Stuck, he called out to Naomi from the space between the walls.

“What about Vageline? You got any Vageline?”

“Do I have any what?”

“That greasy shit you put on your lips! Get me out of here!”

“Are you trying to say ‘Vaseline’?”

“Whatever the fuck it’s called, Naomi, get some lotion or grease or butter and get me out of here!”

She’d been trying like hell not to laugh for the better part of the last few minutes, and it was a battle she now lost.

“Oh, yeah, no, definitely, yes, do that,” Teacake sputtered. “Yeah, laugh, ’cause this shit is, like, hilarious .”

He was still in the gap in the walls, and he’d wedged himself in good, in the precisely nine-inch space between two I beams. He’d done well up to that point, sliding and twisting and pretzeling his body through the tiny open area toward what looked like an enormous map at the far end of the control panel wall. It was dark inside the gap and hard to tell, but it looked like a map, anyway, and he had been only a few feet from it when he’d gotten stuck between the beams, and the entirety of his high school experience came flooding back to him. Now he couldn’t move his goddamn head.

“Lube! You gotta have some lube, right? Throw me it!”

Naomi took a moment to make sure she’d understood him properly before she poked her head in through the hole in the wall.

“I’m sorry, did you just suggest that I carry lubricant around with me?”

“I didn’t— I wasn’t—”

“’Cause that’s some offensive shit, Teacake.”

“I’d like to apologize and start over.”

“I mean, I don’t know, you got any dental dams in your pocket?”

“Naomi. Um, ma’am. I’m kind of freaking out here.”

She took a step back, looked up and down the length of the wall, and thought.

“Are you good for another twelve bucks?” she asked. “Although we wouldn’t have to buy the roll of tape again.”

Teacake was in no position to negotiate. “Do what you gotta do, lady. Just promise me you’re not gonna pull on me, because at this point I think if the angle’s wrong my left ear is just gonna tear right the—”

The legs of the metal stool crashed through the drywall three feet in front of him and startled him so badly he wrenched his body backward, ripping himself free from the head vise. He fell again, on his ass, in the narrow space that he was now more than ready to evacuate. As he got to his feet, he saw Naomi, standing in the new opening ( that repair was going to cost more than twelve bucks, by the way; she’d hit a seam right between two panels and they were gonna need three four-by-eights now, minimum). She was staring in amazement at the wall beyond.