David Koepp - Cold Storage

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.