David Koepp - Cold Storage

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.