David Koepp - Cold Storage

She shook another cigarette out of the box and lit it. “You will try to get those two out, won’t you?”

He thought for a moment. “I don’t know if I can.”

“Try. Okay?”

He looked at her. “You’re getting soft in your sunset years.”

Trini smiled. “Sun’s already down, guapo . The fireflies are out.” She took a deep drag off the cigarette and blew out a big, billowy cloud. It swirled and wrapped around her head in the still night air.

Roberto reached a hand out the window and rested it on her shoulder. She tilted her head toward it, grateful for the human touch. “You call me up any time you want,” he said. “I’ll sling all the bullshit you can handle.”

She smiled. “That’d be nice.”

Mary Rooney had fallen asleep on the daybed in her storage unit hours ago and might well have slept there all night, if it weren’t for Mike’s gunshots. It wouldn’t have been the first time she’d spent the night in good old SB-211; in fact, she’d found that lately it was the only place she slept well at all anymore. She’d started with short naps every once in a while, just taking a few extra minutes to spend with her lifetime of memories. But once she’d moved the daybed out of the guest room at home and into storage, things got awfully cozy in here. The naps got longer and longer. Where else was it completely peaceful, where else could she be surrounded by her loved ones’ things, and where else did she feel as safe? Certainly not in her apartment, with the ill-advised roommate she’d taken in at the insistence of her kids, who were worried about her living alone. Mary had come in today with the last of Tom’s things, a couple of shoeboxes filled with his mementos and certificates of meritorious service from his time on the force. As she’d set about putting it all in its proper bin, the walk down memory lane became exhausting, and she’d lain down and drifted off.

She was awake now, that was for sure. The first report from the .22 had done the trick. This place was an echo chamber and there was no mistaking a gunshot. Mary had sat up, wide-awake for the next half dozen shots, which fully answered the question Did I dream that? No, she had not. Someone was shooting out there from somewhere up above her. Who the hell was robbing a storage facility in the middle of the night, and why were they killing people to do it? That made no sense to her at all.

Or maybe, she thought, it was one of those crazy mass shooters you see all the time, but that made even less sense—didn’t they want to kill a lot of people? Wasn’t that sort of the whole point? She’d never seen more than two people in this place at a time. Mary had sat stock-still for the next fifteen minutes or so, not daring to leave her locked storage unit, but there was no way she was going to be able to go back to sleep either.

When the roar of the motorcycles echoed from outside, she’d heard voices in the hallway, a lot of voices, and she’d started trying to come up with a plan. Staying in here all night until the situation resolved was probably the best idea, but what if there were people in danger? What could she do about it? A better question—what would Tom do? She looked at her husband’s things, sorted and piled so neatly and lovingly on the metal-and-particle-board storage racks she’d ordered off Amazon and assembled all by herself. She tried to put Tom in her shoes.

Because Tom would definitely do something.

Nearby, Teacake and Naomi had been sorting through plans of their own ever since they’d heard the sound of the Harleys. They’d heard Mike’s footsteps as he headed off down the hallway, apparently drawn by the sound himself. Teacake had come to a conclusion about it all that he was unwilling to be moved off of.

“This is like some kinda zombie shit.”

Naomi was feeling more reasonable. “Okay, first of all, zombies are not real.”

“Zombies are real. Zombies are a hundred percent real.”

“No, they’re not, Travis. That’s TV. That’s movies.”

“Yes, and some really fucking excellent TV and movies, I’d like to point out, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Zombies are totally real, they’re based on this shit in Haiti, it’s like common knowledge or whatever. It’s dead bodies they make into slaves with magic. I cannot believe you don’t know that. And you want to be a vet?”

She looked at him. “Do you actually believe that is what’s going on here? Haitian magic?”

“What? Fuck no. I’m not an idiot.” He was getting impatient.

“So what is your point?”

“I said this is like some kinda zombie shit, as opposed to exact zombie shit, which I understand is, like, not a thing in Kansas, okay? Whereas, i.e., that is to say, in reality here tonight, there is some growing green fungus and a Rat King and an exploding deer and a dude that wants to throw up in your fucking mouth.” He made a gesture that said his point was proven.

“Right. And?”

“The thing —whatever it is—it’s spreading. It wants to spread. Call it whatever you want, but the thing is in here, in this building, and it wants to get out there, into the world. So what are we gonna do about it? Twenty years from now, when you and me are sitting around the fire and our great-grandchildren are asking us what we did way back in the great big zombie war, what are we gonna be able to tell ’em?” She opened her mouth to speak, but he held up a hand to stop her and kept talking. “And yeah, I know, my math doesn’t add up on the great-grandchildren thing, so don’t even start.”

She wasn’t going to quibble with his math; she had been about to point out that he had just assumed they were going to have children together. But that seemed beside the point, and kind of sweet anyway, so she let him keep going.

“We gotta go out there and stop that dude before he throws up in somebody else’s mouth.”

“Why do we have to do it? The guy on the phone said he’ll be here in twenty minutes.”

“Yeah, and who is that, exactly?” he asked. “A guy on the phone who talks a big game? A lady at Fort Belvoir who had to hang up on you and call you back on her cell phone? Why would she do that? These are fucking amateurs, man, they’re just as scared as we are. I don’t know why, but they are. Now, if you’d talked to Colonel Dick Steel or whoever, and he said there were a half a dozen Sikorskys flying in here with missiles armed and playing ‘Don’t Fear the Reaper’ on big speakers, I’d maybe wait around and let that happen. But I don’t think we have time to sit here hoping a couple freelancers show up and don’t get eaten before they get out of their own car. We gotta go out there and do something.”

The debate bounced back and forth for another minute or two. Teacake had by now played Griffin’s messages and knew it was him and his lowlife biker buddies who had arrived, probably to pick up the stolen merchandise. It was all Teacake’s fault, of course, because he’d been unwilling to bend the rules, yet another example of doing the right thing and getting screwed because of it. But he and Naomi finally agreed that Griffin and his friends, though admittedly detestable, were human beings and didn’t deserve to die. Or, if they must, it would be great if they didn’t spread a deadly fungus to the rest of the world on their way out. They agreed that starting with a phone call made sense.

Teacake hit Call Back on Griffin’s last incoming call to him and waited. The phone rang twice before Griffin answered. He was talking before the phone got to his mouth, so it picked up midsentence. “—you fuckwit you ever ignore my calls again and I’ll fucking fire you think this is some kinda fucking game I promise you it—” and then his voice faded away again as he lowered the phone and hung it up, also midsentence.