David Koepp - Cold Storage

“Less than an hour,” she said.

He spoke back into the phone. “A little over an hour. Stay right where you are. Don’t open the door. Don’t call anyone else. Not even Fort Belvoir. The woman who put us in touch will call you every ten minutes. Speak only to her or to me. Don’t pick up your phone again unless it rings. Do you understand?”

“What are you going to do?”

“Tell me you understand.”

“I understand.”

“Who should you call?”

“Nobody. You’ll call me every ten.”

“There you go. A-plus. Keep Travis calm, he sounds like the type who might want to try to leave. Don’t let him.”

“The deer exploded.”

“I know, some crazy shit, right? I’ll tell you all about it when I see you. You’re going to be fine. One hour.” He closed the computer, took out the earpiece, and rubbed his head.

Trini looked at him. “Three people and a deer?”

“One person infected, still in the building. The other two are clean, locked in a storage unit. The deer burst, but it was contained.”

“I guess that’s workable.”

He looked at her. “Are you kidding? It’s a gift from God. Let’s hope it lasts an hour.”

Trini nodded, eyes on the road, weighing it all. Finally, she spoke, just a few words. “They’re dead, aren’t they?”

He thought. “Probably.”

He didn’t like that answer, so he thought some more. He thought it all the way through but came up with the same conclusion.

“Probably.”

The hour’s first fifteen minutes had gone pretty well. Mike had settled down outside, just sitting on the floor across the hall from unit 231–232, staring at the metal door. He didn’t know much anymore, only that he had to get in there.

I have to get in there the door is closed I have to get in I have to door closed

As for a solution to that problem, his complex reasoning and problem solving weren’t firing on all cylinders, but they were grinding away as best they could and had come up with a few different approaches. The first strategy had been based on a fragment of a song his father used to love that was bouncing around somewhere in Mike’s subconscious, something about throwing yourself against a wall, but that strategy hadn’t worked out very well. He’d likely separated his shoulder when he crashed his body into the metal door, and for sure he broke two fingers underneath himself when he fell to the cement. The pinkie finger on his right hand stuck out at an angle Mike had never seen before, but he didn’t give it much thought. He didn’t have the thought to spare.

have to get in door closed get in

Strategy number two involved more vomit, this time by lifting up the garage door a crack and trying some target-specific barfing through the half-inch space underneath it. But the appeal of that approach had been dimmed by the sensory memory of his fingers, which had been crushed beneath the door when Naomi had slammed it down, and he never tried it. Strategy number three was, as they say, still in development.

While Mike waited for that idea to come, he sat and stared at the corrugated metal door, dead-eyed. He’d wait.

Behind the door, Naomi and Teacake were considerably more comfortable, but their minds were no more at ease. The unit in which they’d taken refuge was a lucky choice: it looked like someone’s overflow furniture from when they’d had to move to a smaller house. Maybe the renters were sure the move was only temporary, that they’d be back on top one day soon and they’d need all their stuff again. The extra couches and chairs had been in there for a few years now, but they didn’t stink, the owners had covered them loosely and loaded the cushions up with silica packets, the way you’re supposed to. There was even a dehumidifier plugged into one of the outlets. Naomi and Teacake had thrown the cheap sheets off a couple of the armchairs, shoved them toward the back of the unit, to stay as far away from the door as possible, and even found a lamp with a bulb in it that still worked. They sat there, armchair to armchair, lamp on a box between them, and they stared at each other, wondering how it had all come to this.

Teacake, who abhorred silence, was the first to speak. “So that’s Dad.”

“Please stop saying that.”

“Sorry, it’s just kinda hard to get my head around, that’s all. How does that guy have a chance with you?”

She looked at him. “He wasn’t always like that.”

“Well, yeah, obviously I get that, I don’t think anybody on earth has ever been quite like that. But, I mean, he had to be some version of that, right?”

“I guess so.”

“And you’re, you know, you.”

“Thank you.” She wished he’d stop talking.

“And she’s a beautiful kid.”

Oops.

Naomi tilted her head, looking at him, thinking.

Oh God, how he wished he could snatch those last five words out of the air before they found her ears, how he wished he could go back in time, just three seconds would do it. But he couldn’t, he’d said it, she’d heard it, and she understood what it meant.

His mind sorted through options. His ordinary instinct would have been to keep talking, to paper over it with more and more fulminations, to bury the slip of the tongue so deeply in blather that she might not notice or would forget that he’d just announced he not only knew she had a child prior to tonight, but had actually seen that child, a clandestine event she had most certainly been unaware of till now.

He was about to turn on the fire hose of lies, but something stopped him. This had been a long and bizarre night, and Naomi was different, and it occurred to him that maybe his instincts all these years had been the wrong ones. Maybe those instincts were the reason he had a shit job and no girlfriend. Maybe, Teacake thought, he should go with the truth for once, maybe he should admit an unpleasant reality before it became impossible to do so, maybe he should speak frankly and self-deprecatingly and forthrightly as soon as it was necessary. He could actually show a little fucking class for once, he thought, maybe he could speak with such charm and grace, such wit and style, that this moment, this admission, this candor, might actually win her over rather than drive her away.

“I followed your ass home one morning it was fucked up sorry.”

Or, you know, he could do it that way.

Naomi’s phone buzzed. She picked it up immediately, glanced at the number, and answered. “Hello.” She paused, listening, staring at Teacake. She continued the perfunctory conversation, her eyes pinning him to his chair the whole time.

“Yes. Yes. Same as ten minutes ago. No, he hasn’t tried. I assume he is, we haven’t heard him walk away. Yes. Okay.” She hung up.

Teacake tipped his chin for information. “She say anything new?”

“No.”

“So, like, are they getting here soon, or what?” He made an exaggerated show of checking the time on his phone, profoundly grateful for the change in subject. She’d forget, maybe she forgot already! He kept talking. “Like, forty-five minutes from now? So, okay, it was, like, around four when you talked to the guy, so—”

“You’re flip-phone guy.”

She hadn’t forgotten.

He sighed. “I apologize, Naomi. I get—I do dumb stuff sometimes. I wasn’t, I didn’t… ah, shit.”

“In the parking lot of my building, right? About a week ago. Staring at your flip phone.”

“You saw me?”

“Yeah, I saw you. I knew you looked familiar tonight, but I couldn’t figure out where I saw you before. I should have got it when you pulled your phone out. Nobody has those anymore.”