David Koepp - Cold Storage

She nodded, taking the gun. She’d never held one before and had always hated them on principle. She still did. “I’m not going to fire it,” she said.

“You will if you need to,” Roberto replied.

“I doubt it,” she said.

Roberto continued. “When you put somebody down, you aim for the chest, it’s the biggest target. Wait till they get close enough and you won’t miss. Two shots in the chest, then, once they’re on the floor, another one in the head. No more than that. That’s four people per clip. Count your shots. If you get below three shots left, you change clips. Understood?”

She nodded.

Roberto looked at them. “You two may have started the night as minimum-wage security guards, but you’re ending it as a Green Light Team. America’s finest. Now put on the suits.”

At that moment, there existed on Earth four distinct colonies of Cordyceps novus, each with its own chromosomal characteristics, growth rate, and ambitions for expansion. Deep underground, in sub-level 4, the original colony, or more accurately the original American colony, remained in a multiplication phase, though its growth had plateaued since its expansion into the hallway outside the cell in which it had first escaped from the biotube. In terms of organic nutrients, the rats it had infested and fused together were far and away the most abundant source of fuel, but that had been exhausted. The Rat King mass was already in stasis, the precursor to decay and disintegration. A tributary of growth was making its way across the dry cement floor, toward a puddle of water beneath one of the sweaty overhead water pipes that made up the cooling system, but it hadn’t reached it yet. Once it did, it was hard to predict the fungus’s reaction, since it had never encountered water in its pure form before, only as a component of a human body. Safe to say it was going to like it, but it wasn’t there yet.

This colony of Cordyceps novus was a bit like Reno, Nevada—popular once, but limited by location and climate, and not anywhere a serious person would want to go.

Aboveground, on the hillside behind Roberto’s van, was the second colony, the one C-nRoach1 had founded a little over fifteen hours ago. This colony had begun in the trunk of Mike’s car, where it still maintained a strong presence. But after the deer and Mr. Scroggins had taken off, the fungus had to content itself with feeding on old towels, steel, rubber, and other unsexy fuels.

More successful was the outpost begun by Mr. Scroggins when he had exploded at the top of the tree. It had spattered in all directions and fallen to earth as far as seventy-five feet from the tree itself. It currently thrived on the moist, humid forest floor, spreading at a rate of three to four feet per hour. It was a nearly ideal environment for the fungus, but its expansion was held tenuously in check by the lack of carriers with rapid and independent locomotion. The whole area was just one stray coyote or ill-fated squirrel away from boomtown status, but for the moment the fungus had to be content to continue its leisurely but steady growth here. Still, given enough time, there was no telling how far its sprawl would spread.

This colony was similar to Los Angeles—slow, inevitable, and in no one’s best interests.

On the main floor of the storage facility, the third colony was enjoying the least success. Spread out over the cement walls and floor, the Jackson Pollock painting that was once Mike Snyder was now largely inert, at least by human time standards. It wasn’t dead or even dormant, but its growth had slowed to a barely perceptible rate. The floor and walls were made of Portland cement, the industry standard, composed primarily of lime, silica, and alumina—about as nutritious for a growing fungus as a sand sandwich. Still, Cordyceps novus was no stranger to adverse conditions—it had grown its way out of a biotube; it could certainly handle a hallway. It festered and burrowed and shifted as best it could, but the kind of booming growth it had experienced when it first entered Mike’s living body was long over. Maybe it would get lucky, hit a vein of ironstone somewhere in the cement floor in ten years or so and enjoy a comeback, but until that happened, it was going nowhere fast.

In urban terms, this third colony was Atlantic City. Used to be a big deal, dead on its feet now.

As for the fourth colony—that was another story.

In 1950, Shenzhen, China, was a fishing village with three thousand inhabitants. By 2025, twelve million people will live there. In terms of rampant, unchecked, dangerous growth, there’s no place on earth like it. Except for what was going on inside unit G-413 at Atchison Storage.

From the moment Mike’s wide-patterned projectile vomit had launched from the open doorway, the fungus had found abundant organic nutrients. The spray had landed on all five of the occupants of the locker, but Cedric, Wino, and Garbage had been caught openmouthed. Infection was immediate in their cases, and the fungus penetrated the complex substrate of their biological systems with zeal and aptitude. It produced immediate and exponential growth. Ironhead and Cuba, who had no cuts, crevices, or orifices through which the molecules could enter them without effort, were a few minutes behind. Cordyceps novus had to deploy Benzene-X to first burn a pathway through their pores, which took a bit longer.

But within minutes there was a fungal party raging inside all five of their systems that could not be stopped or curfewed. The fungus entered the most productive phase in its history, joyfully increasing its biomass through the perfectly balanced human carbon-nitrogen ratio of 12:1. It started with a familiar, if accelerated, growth-expansion-expulsion pattern inside Wino, whose blood alcohol content provided additional glucose. While Griffin was outside the locker door, ordering Teacake to remove the lock, Wino was bulging, screaming, and bursting inside the locker, to the extreme consternation of the others. Cedric and Garbage went in the next thirty seconds, swelling and rupturing in quick succession. Ironhead and Cuba, their systems lagging behind, were left to scream in horror.

But then something extraordinary happened. The growth in the last two human hosts slowed down . Intentionally. Perhaps the fungus recognized the limited supply of human tissue and the confined space of the storage locker. Or maybe it registered that the walls of the locker, to which it was now largely affixed, were of limited food value, or maybe it even bore some sort of cellular memory of the successful result of the slowed-down fruiting and bursting process it had gone through with Mike. Whatever the reason, it tamped down its formerly unbridled surge of growth. The processes consuming the bodies and minds of Cuba and Ironhead, the last remaining humans inside the locker, actually decelerated. This implied, if not volition, then at least airborne endocrine signaling—a cell’s ability to transmit information and instructions beyond its own walls. Cordyceps novus had, for the first time since its initial human contacts in the Australian outback, modified its mechanism of control.

The fungus racing through the brains of Ironhead and Cuba got the message and curtailed its development. Their brains were allowed to retain a measure of autonomous control, but the fungus wiped out massive portions of their amygdalas, home to their fear and panic centers. As a result, they thought everything was okay. They thought they were still in charge.

“All’s cool, man,” Ironhead said through the door, to Griffin. “Just got a little hairy there for a second.”

Griffin turned the key in the lock and unlocked the door.