David Koepp - Cold Storage

He had less than ninety seconds to live.

Jaws dropped open, but only Ironhead managed to get a couple of words out. “What the f—”

He cut off, because all at once Mike’s stomach collapsed inward as his body forced his insides up, through his throat, into his mouth, and out into the air at twenty-five miles per hour. That’s not very fast for a car, but for puke it’s super quick, and it covered the distance between Mike and the rest of them in less than a second. Certainly, it was less time than any of them had to react, and the spray of the droplets was wide, so they were all caught and contaminated by the blast. They screamed, staggered back, and Mike reached up, slamming the overhead door and slipping the padlock back through the hole—he wasn’t exactly sure why, but he knew he had more work to do and needed them to stay out of the way.

The evolved form of Cordyceps novus inside Mike was racking up one positive growth experience after another, and now it had learned the value of not detonating a host’s body at the very first opportunity. Mike’s spread of the fungal mass had proven just as effective via vomit as it would have been by the fruiting burst of his entire body, plus it had the additional advantage of leaving him somewhat intact and mobile for at least another sixty seconds.

The fungus was an excellent student. It learned.

From inside the storage locker, Mike heard shouts and screams, but they were contained. They just needed to stay that way for a minute or two. Mike didn’t have much left inside; he was consuming and expelling himself rapidly, and he had to make sure that what little there was left of him went to a good cause.

The other humans.

He turned toward where the shouts had come from.

LESS THAN TWO MINUTES EARLIER, NAOMI AND TEACAKE HAD COMEout of the storage unit. Naomi had answered Abigail’s call, hung up on her, and they’d pressed on, making their way cautiously down the corridor. Naomi’s phone buzzed again, but she ignored it this time, hit the button on the side and sent the call to voice mail. From up ahead, they heard voices. Teacake moved to an intersection, leaned around the edge, and looked down the next hallway, where he knew Griffin kept the storage unit with the stolen TVs.

The unit was about fifty feet away, and he could see the door to it was wide open. Mike was standing in the open doorway, looking inside, and Teacake could see shapes inside the unit, four or five people. They were doing something, but they sure as hell weren’t paying attention to Mike, which was what they should have been doing. Naomi came around the corner as Mike started to suck his gut in and out. They both knew what was coming next and shouted at the same time to the poor bastards inside the unit— look out, get away, get the hell out of there —but they were too late. They could only watch as Mike’s stomach emptied itself and the fungus sprayed into the storage unit. They watched as he reached up, slammed the door, locked it, and turned to them.

He stared at them for a moment.

Then he ran at them.

From the looks of Mike’s decomposing body, it didn’t seem like he’d be capable of running, but he was, in a rapid, shambling sort of way, coming at them hard and fast. He was already too close for them to turn and run themselves, and Teacake realized, with some regret, that his grand heroic plan had consisted of almost zero real ideas. Leave the unit, tell the others, save the earth? Honestly, that was a for shit plan, it didn’t deserve the word plan, it didn’t deserve to be mentioned in the context of real plans. He’d convinced Naomi, this totally decent woman and awesome mother who actually mattered on this earth, to leave the safety of their hiding place and step out into a dangerous situation with no concrete strategy and nobody but him, the Planless Wonder, to protect her. Teacake heard his father’s voice in his head, telling his idiot son the same thing he’d told him for the last fifteen years.

“If you didn’t have shit for brains you’d have no brains at all.”

Mike was only a second away from them now and Teacake squatted low, to lunge himself at their attacker, to at least block him long enough so that Naomi would have time to run. He tensed his legs, ready to spring forward.

Naomi heard the gunshots first, because they came from a foot and a half behind her left ear. They were so loud they burst her left eardrum and temporarily deafened her in the right.

A Glock 21SF .45 automatic has been standard issue for the Kansas Highway Patrol since 2009. Nobody really had any idea why they felt they needed quite that much firepower, but the last people who would complain tonight were Teacake and Naomi. Six slugs from the .45 whistled past Naomi’s head, over Teacake’s shoulder, and slammed into Mike’s chest with such force that they reversed his course of motion. They lifted him off his feet, blew him back two yards in the air, and dropped him to the cement floor, dead. His fungus-riddled body was in such a state of disrepair and disarray that he nearly disintegrated on impact.

Naomi, completely deaf in her left ear and overwhelmed by a loud ringing in her right, turned and saw the woman standing behind her, holding the smoking weapon.

Teacake rose, looking at the woman with eyes wide.

“Mrs. Rooney?!”

Mary Rooney lowered her dead husband’s service weapon, the one she had reported lost rather than turn in when he died, the one she’d brought to the storage unit in the shoebox that very day.

She turned from Mike’s scattered remains and looked back at Naomi and Teacake. “That boy just wasn’t right.”

THE GUNSHOTS WERE STILL ECHOING IN THE LOBBY WHEN SHORTY ANDthe Rev turned on their heels and took off for the pickup truck. The situation wasn’t the sort of thing you needed to stick around and try to figure out. Six gunshots—like cannon shots, these things—coming from what sounded like a semiautomatic weapon somewhere a hundred feet ahead of you, while you were in the process of loading stolen merchandise into your truck in the middle of the night? Yeah, you go ahead and get the hell out of there as fast as you can.

They jumped in the truck, Shorty threw it in reverse and stomped on the gas, and gravel flew so hard and so far that it left a spatter of cut marks in the glass entry doors. She spun the wheel, the truck skidded around in a neat 180, and they took off up the driveway without a look back.

Griffin and Dr. Steven Friedman weren’t positionally advantaged in the same way, however. They were already on their way back to the storage locker for another load of TVs, just around the corner from it when they heard the blasts. Dr. Friedman ducked low and threw his hands up to cover his ears, a biologically useless response that left him a sitting duck in the middle of the hallway, but his years in dental school included no training for this sort of predicament.

Griffin was different. Griffin had gamed out this kind of scenario a hundred times while playing School Shooter: North American Tour 2012, a modification for Half-Life 2 that he’d downloaded off the internet. He responded instinctively, joyfully, flattening himself against the wall and pulling the Smith & Wesson M&P 40C from the shoulder holster under his jacket. Before the shots had faded, he’d done a quick recon, left-right-left, and saw the hallway was clear except for Dr. Friedman, who was still crouched in the middle of it. Griffin took one step forward, grabbed the dentist by the collar with his hammy left hand, and dragged him back against the wall.

Dr. Friedman looked up at him, still crouched, terrified. “What the hell is going on?” he asked in a trembling whisper.