David Koepp - Cold Storage

“Holy shit.”

Teacake got to his feet, rubbing his ears in pain, and slid forward till he was alongside her. The broken panels had opened up a section directly in front of the maplike thing he’d been trying to move closer to, and it was bigger and more detailed than he’d been able to see by the light of Naomi’s phone’s flashlight. It was an enormous, hyperdetailed floor plan depicting every room, conduit, pipe, and piece of wiring in what must have been the old military storage complex. There were hundreds of LED lights painstakingly placed all over the map marking God knows what, but they were all long since deactivated or burned out.

Except for one, all the way down at the bottom right corner. Its tiny bulb strobed white, in sync with the light on the warning panel nearby.

Teacake came over to the schematic, kicked out the remnants of the broken drywall, and stepped out of the inner space, moving back into the reception area. He got a few feet away from the thing to get a better look. He stood shoulder to shoulder with Naomi. She looked at him.

“Your ear is bleeding.”

He reached up to his right ear, but she meant the left. She pulled another Kleenex from the pack she kept in her pocket, wiped his ear gently, folded it over and pressed it there. “Hold that.”

He did. He looked at her.

No one had put a bandage on one of Teacake’s wounds with their own hand since he was eleven years old. It almost moved him to tears. In fact, he thought he felt the first sting of a couple of them in the corners of his eyes. That was the last thing he needed, to bust out crying in front of her, what is the matter with me?

“What’s the matter?” she asked. She didn’t miss much.

“Huh?”

“You okay?”

“Yeah. Just—ouch. Whatever.”

She turned and looked at the map. “It’s a schematic.”

She leaned through the wall and ran her hands along it, starting at the top, which was the ground floor. “How many levels are there supposed to be in this place?”

“Three. Main floor and two belowground.”

“There used to be six. And they watched this stuff.”

“Yeah, it was military storage, since World War II. You know, weapons and what have you. They cleaned it out and sold it about twenty years ago.”

“And they must have sealed up everything below here.” She ran her hand down the schematic to the lower levels. “Which was the part they really cared about. See all the sensors? They’re all in bunches down here.”

She was right. By far the greatest concentration of LEDs was on the lower three levels, the additional sub-basements. SB-2 and SB-3 were apparently sealed off and all their monitor lights were dark. The single flashing white bulb was on the very bottom level, marked SB-4. But there was a large blank space, two feet of map at least, between SB-3 and SB-4. Tiny scribbles of rock shapes seemed to indicate it was earthen.

Teacake studied it, trying to figure it out. “Who builds a sub-basement a hundred feet below the other basements? You’d have to dig the whole thing out, build the bottom floor, then fill in again above it. That makes no sense.”

“You wanna go down and see it?”

He looked at her. “How? It’s sealed.”

“That.” She pointed to the far left side of the map, where a thin vertical column rose up from SB-4, through the earthen portion, and skirted along the edges of the other sub-basement levels. It was narrow, with hatch marks drawn evenly between the long parallel lines all the way up.

“What is it?”

“A tube ladder.”

“How do you know?”

“It’s shaped like a tube, and it looks like a ladder. How else would they get down there?” She pointed to the hatchings. “Look, these are the rungs.”

He was impressed. “You must go to college, right? It’s a waste if you don’t.”

“I go as much as I can, yeah.”

“Then you should be smart enough to not wanna go down there.”

“C’mon,” she said. “This is the most fun I’ve had in years. This is a night out for me.”

“Jesus. That’s depressing. You don’t go out?”

“Not really.”

“What about just, like, for a beer?”

“I don’t drink.”

He persisted. “Not even for one beer?”

“That would be drinking.”

“You never go out for one beer?”

“This is getting off the point.”

But he was determined. “What about a coffee?”

“I thought you were fun, Teacake. You started out fun.”

“Me? I’m totally fun. I’m huge fun. You’re the one who just said your best night out in years is vandalizing your workplace.”

“I have an inquisitive nature.” She held up her phone and snapped a picture of the schematic.

“Yeah, I can see that, and that’s cool, and I’m, like, cooperating. You look at me with those eyes you got and say, ‘Please throw your chair through the wall,’ and you know, I’m on board, I throw my chair through the wall, and then you say, ‘Go crawl into that weird space and check it out,’ still good, I’m into it, but then you come at me like, ‘Go climb down the tube ladder a couple hundred feet into the blocked-off part of the fucked-up government shit and see why the thermistor alarm is going off,’ and, you know, a man’s gonna take a second to think things through, you feel me?”

She waited a moment. “You like my eyes?”

“In fact, I do.”

“That’s very sweet.”

“My point is, I’m kinda easy to talk into things, that’s why I got the problems I got. People say shit like, ‘Wait in the car and keep it running, I just gotta run in and do something,’ or ‘I know this guy in Dousman needs a favor,’ and I say, ‘Yeah, sure, I just point the gun at my foot and pull the trigger, is that what I do?’ Bang! ‘Ow! What a surprise, I blew my toe off. Should I do it again? Okay!’ But I have spent a lot of time working on my personal self and talking to smart people and learning to ask what’s good for me and to not just dive into shit. Which is what I am doing right now, okay? I am taking a fucking moment.”

“I understand. I respect that.”

“It is very, very important to learn to tell everybody in the whole world to fuck off all the time. It took me forever to learn that.”

“I’m not sure that was the exact message you were supposed to—”

But he glared at her, so she stopped and recharted her course.

“I’m sorry. I get you had some bad stuff happen to you. I was not being cool.”

“Okay. Good. That’s more like it.” He took a deep breath and let it out again, then pulled a flashlight off a battery charger on the wall next to the desk and headed for the gate that led deeper into the building.

“You coming or what?”

Mooney must have stared at the trunk of his car for a solid five minutes. The thumps would come in bursts, just one or two, randomly, then a whole furious burst of them, till it sounded like half a dozen Dutchmen in there with wooden shoes were clogging on the inside of the metal trunk lid. The whole car would rock like crazy, then it’d stop again and everything would go still for ten or fifteen seconds while Mooney pondered the impossible nature of what was occurring. He’d use that moment to question his sanity, his judgment, his ability to correctly perceive reality, his past history with drug use and abuse, and then the dancing Dutchmen would start back up again.

Of course, it was not possible. Not in the slightest. Dead things don’t come back to life; decaying corpses don’t reanimate. But there was something alive in his trunk, two somethings, wedged in there with the spare tire and the toolbox and the gun case, and they weren’t having any fun. In the end, it was Mooney’s essential decency that made him open the trunk, his goodness and kindness as a human being. Because the level of suffering going on three feet away from him was intense, and what kind of person allows another living thing to endure that sort of agony? What kind of person stands by and does nothing? Mooney didn’t open the trunk because he was stupid, and he didn’t open the trunk because he was scared, and he didn’t open it so that he could kill them again. He opened the trunk because we are all God’s creatures.