David Koepp - Cold Storage

They were rats’ heads. There were a dozen of them, arranged in a rough circle around a tangled mass of ropy cartilage in the center. It was like staring at an optical illusion at first, trying to figure out what in God’s name this thing could be.

It was a rat. It was one rat, but it was also a dozen rats, fused together into one body at the tails, all screeching and snarling and biting at each other. Two or three of the heads were still, cannibalized by their neighbors. Blood dripped from the rats’ teeth and flowed from missing ears. The pile of snarling rodents was bound together at their conjoined tails by a strange greenish sap that had oozed over them.

Teacake expressed his feelings. “Jesus fucking CHRIST !”

Naomi was repulsed but also fascinated. “It’s a Rat King.”

“A what ?!”

“A Rat King. It’s a—well, that.” She gestured, because there were no words that could take the place of one quick look at the horrific thing. “They wrote about them in the Middle Ages, during the Black Plague. People thought they were a bad omen.”

“No shit it’s a bad omen! It’s called a fucking Rat King !”

Naomi leaned in to get a closer look. There was an intellectual detachment to her; she was going to make a good vet if she ever got that far. She could look at pain and deformity and see the clinical side of it rather than the emotional one.

Teacake had no clinical side, he was all feeling and freakout, so he kept his distance. “How do they get like that?”

“Nobody knows for sure. Their tails get knotted and stuck together. Like from pine sap or something.”

She looked around and picked up a long piece of scrap metal from the floor nearby. She prodded the mass of fused tails. “If they found a dead one of these, they used to preserve it and put it in a museum.”

“Yeah, well, that one’s not dead, would you get the fuck back, please?”

“What are they gonna do, run up my leg? They can’t even move.” She got closer, turning on her phone’s flashlight again and shining it on the fused tails. From this close she could see that the dull pink cords of the tails were covered over with a lime-green growth of some kind.

“That’s not pine sap,” she said. She bent closer. “It’s like a—a slime mold.”

“Yeah? Cool.” He looked around. “Coming up on time to go.”

But she moved even closer to the squirming rats. They squeaked louder as she drew toward them, thrashing, trying to get at her or get away from her, it was hard to tell which.

“Um, it seems like you’re pissing them off.”

Naomi’s light was close to the snarl of tails. “No, it’s not a slime mold, there’s no froth. And it seems like it’s… moving a little bit. Like a fungal ooze, but God, that’s a lot of fungus.”

Teacake edged a tiny bit closer, shining the more powerful flashlight’s beam on the wriggling mass. Moving the light around to get another angle on it, he noticed that the fungal growth wasn’t only on the rats’ tails. There was a thin smear of it that ran across one side of the Rat King, covering two or three of the entangled animals, and continued onto the floor below. A jagged ribbon of green led away from the rodents, toward the wall. Teacake raised the flashlight beam, following the trail to the wall, where it had crept up onto—or down from—the wall itself, and then across a groove in between cement slabs, all the way to the edge of the door to the sealed room.

He walked closer and saw that the green trail of oozing fungal matter led into one of the dead-bolt slots and disappeared into the room itself. From this close, he could feel something emanating from the door.

Heat.

Slowly, he reached out his hand and laid his palm flat against the metal.

BEEP.

He jerked his hand away from the door and nearly jumped out of his skin at that one, because he was standing just a few inches from the thermistor alarm when it went off, and the sound was right in his ear. He shouted in surprise.

Naomi looked up. “What?”

“Door’s hot. I mean, the door is hot. And the green shit is coming out of that room, and there’s a fucking Rat King, and curiosity is awesome and everything, but I feel like this is about as far as this shit goes for me.”

She stood. “Me too.”

“Let’s get out of here.”

“We can’t leave them like that, though.” She gestured to the rats.

He looked at her, uncomprehending. “What, you want to take them with us?”

“Of course not. But they’re suffering.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t have any Oxy on me.”

“I can do it,” she said.

He looked down at the metal pipe in her hand. “Are you serious?”

“You want to leave a dozen animals in agony? To starve to death?”

“No, I would like to get the fuck out of here and not think about them.”

“Wait by the door, I’ll be right there.”

“Fine. Cool. You’re weird as fuck, but, I don’t know, I’m cool with it.” He started to walk away.

“Can I have the flashlight?”

“Hell no.”

She looked at him.

He clarified. “I mean, um, wouldn’t it be better without it? You know, just get the job done? Not have to look at a lot of gross shit?”

“I’m fine. Go ahead.”

He felt like a heel and a coward, but he also felt like getting as far away from the whole situation as humanly possible. As far as the fight between his competing needs went, his need to put some distance between himself and the hot room and its weird fungal shit beat his need to impress Naomi in a first-round knockout. He covered the length of the tunnel in about thirty seconds, looking back over his shoulder only once. He caught just a glimpse of her, bending down over the Rat King, staring at it, enthralled. He reached the hatch at the far end and came out into the dark space at the base of the tube ladder.

He’d never been so glad to be at the bottom of a three-hundred-foot concrete shaft in his life. He closed the door most of the way, just enough to not see or hear whatever it was she felt she had to do, and he waited. It took her longer than he thought it should have. But then he’d never had to put a dozen conjoined rats out of their misery, so what did he know about how much time a person needed to get that shit done?

After a few minutes, he got impatient and opened the door to take a look, but he could already see the weak beam of Naomi’s phone light coming at him, bouncing as she walked. As she drew close, she switched off her phone and he waved the flashlight beam in her direction, to light her steps. He raised it to her as she got close.

“You get any of that shit on you?” he asked.

“No.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.” She came through the hatch and he closed it, shoving the big black handle into place. The locking mechanism did its job again; it must have been thrilled to get to open and close twice in ten minutes, after decades of just sitting there minding the store. It sealed up the tunnel with a reassuring chunk of metal in metal.

Teacake shined the light up the ladder, assessing the climb ahead of them. “You want to go first this time or—”

He didn’t see the kiss coming, and if he had the moment to live over again, of course he would have done his part differently. One second he was looking up and talking, and the next he felt her lips on his cheek and her hand on his other cheek, turning him softly toward her. Then they were kissing—well, she was kissing him, really—and it was a soft and sweet and full-lipped kiss, just the right kind. It was over before he’d had a chance to get his bearings, and maybe for that reason it was the perfect first kiss, the kind that leaves you feeling fresh and alive and wanting another one exactly like it.