David Koepp - Cold Storage

Teacake didn’t care. If he were his old man, he would have gotten wasted every night too. The guy was a loser with a series of shit-ass jobs that kept going away, he was a cuckold who couldn’t hang on to a wife, and he was stuck raising a son to whom he could find nothing that he wanted to say. The closest they got to bonding was when his dad would stumble across a Three Stooges marathon on TV when he was half in the bag and shout upstairs to Teacake, “Get down here and watch this shit with me! I love these assholes!”

They tried to stay out of each other’s way as much as possible, and mostly succeeded. Both of them got fucked up. A lot.

What was there to stay sober for? Atchison had been nice once, but now it was your basic deserted Main Street with 30 percent unemployment. The majority of the populace saw inebriation of one kind or another as a valid survival mechanism. They weren’t wrong. It works. At least in the short term.

A few months after high school Teacake got his own place with a buddy, covered his end of the rent okay most of the time with a few different jobs, and got shit-faced. Of dates, there were none; hookups, a few, but always under the influence. Within a year and a half of graduation he was in front of the judge for a drunk and disorderly and resisting arrest, and that was when the judge said it’s the military or jail. Teacake said, “Hello, Drill Sergeant.” Although since he picked the navy, it was “Hello, Recruit Division Commander.”

Then it was two years moving from port to port overseas, where there were a surprising number of women and opportunities. The lady journalists in particular were always down for it, but they liked to get blitzed even more than he did.

Now Teacake was twenty-four. Ten years of romantic history were a cloud, a haze, a rush of dulled sensation only dimly remembered.

And then this. March 15, 2:26 A.M., standing at the bottom of a three-hundred-foot-deep concrete shaft. That was the time and place, that was the moment.

It was the first time Travis Meacham had ever kissed a woman sober.

There was an awful lot to be said for it.

For Naomi, the kiss was a momentary impulse that had been building for several hours. She’d come to work that night in a mood most foul, stuck in the fog of anger and despair in which she’d awakened that afternoon. She’d had a shift the night before, making this a rare and welcome two shifts in a row, which meant a better paycheck but worse sleep. After a night shift, she’d come home, get Sarah ready and take her to school, and with any luck she could be in bed by 8:30 A.M. That meant about five and a half hours of sleep, because she had to be back at the school to pick her up at 2:50. That was on a day with no classes for herself. A year ago, she would have been able to put Sarah in the after-school and not have to pick her up till 4:30 (luxury!), but the school lost its federal grant for that program at the end of last year. Now the after-school was called Extended Learning Opportunities, and it was run by a for-profit group that charged forty dollars a day. That was half a day’s after-tax wage for Naomi and made no economic sense whatsoever. She might as well not do the extra work.

Point is, today she woke up tired at two in the afternoon, and the last thing she needed was for one of the dark moods that had haunted her for the past several years to come roaring back. But she knew the moment she opened her eyes that the Black Dog had returned. That was Naomi’s private nickname for the depression that periodically engulfed her, and this thing was no friendly Labrador. It was a mangy, skeletal cur, all bones and teeth, and when it came she could see it loping at her out of the woods, tongue lolling off to one side, yellow eyes fixed on her.

The Black Dog would stick around, on average, three or four days. Sometimes there’d be a day of false hope in the middle, a day when she’d feel okay and assume it had gone back into the primordial forest where it lived. But no, the mutt had only been hiding, the better to screw with her head, and it would come back to finish its run of despair the following day. She knew she was impossible to be around during those periods, but she didn’t care. It was everyone else’s fault anyway; they were the ones who’d called the dog in the first place. How, exactly, she did not know, but rationality was in short supply when she was in a mood. She learned after a few years that the best thing was to just stay away from people as much as possible during those times, to hide in her room, curled up on the bed with the door shut.

“If you can’t be a pleasant part of things,” her mother used to say to her when she was little, “then you need to go somewhere else and leave us alone.”

That was before her mother decided that she herself could not be a pleasant part of things and went somewhere else for good.

So the Black Dog had followed Naomi to work that night, and it stuck around until the moment she started talking to Teacake. That hadn’t ever happened before; no one person could make the darkness go away—hell, fifty of them couldn’t. But Teacake had; she’d sensed it the moment they started chatting on the loading dock. She’d gone with him to check out the beeping sound in part because she was curious, but also because being around him made her feel better. The Black Dog in her mind had skittered away, back into the trees, and disappeared further and further into the forest the longer she talked to Teacake. Why? He wasn’t impossibly sexy and he wasn’t impossibly smart and he was, not to put too fine a point on it, an ex-con.

But he made her laugh and he kept the dog at bay. Whatever that mysterious thing was, Teacake had it, and Naomi wanted to be around it, at least for tonight, to see if it was real.

So, yes, a kiss is just a kiss, but this one meant something to both of them. Ground had been broken. More was expected.

They exited the top of the tube ladder through the open manhole in the floor of SB-1. They were laughing, exhilarated by the brush with weirdness down below. They’d talked about it all the way up, fast and excited. The obvious next move was to call Griffin. The broken wall was something they were prepared to live with, because they actually had found something, there was a real problem down there, and it would likely involve the police and corporate and God knows who else. They might even be rewarded for having found a gas leak or animal infestation or some other nightmare scenario in the making.

Naomi was first out of the manhole. She swung her legs around so they were out of Teacake’s way and sat cross-legged on the cement floor while she waited for him. She had her phone out of her pocket in a minute and typed in the four letters that were stenciled on the door down at the bottom of the tube. DTRA.

The first hit she got off Google was the Dirt Track Riders Association, but she didn’t even have to think about that one to know that wasn’t it. It was never a serious candidate, not even for the split second it took for her eyes to skip down to the second link on the page.

“Defense Threat Reduction Agency,” she read.

Teacake, just coming out of the manhole, didn’t respond right away, but she wouldn’t have heard him if he had, because she’d already hit the link and was scrolling through the U.S. government’s home page for the DTRA. Her attention was fully consumed by unreassuring headlines like “Stepnogorsk Biotoxin Production Facility Briefing Notes” and “Joint Improvised Threat Defeat Organization Links with DTRA” and “Death by Nerve Gas: Two Arrests, Many Questions.”

“Holy shit,” she said.

“Holy shit, ” he replied.

They’d said the same thing at more or less the same time, because they were each looking at something unexpected. For Naomi it was the DTRA website.