David Koepp - Cold Storage

What mattered was that he couldn’t move.

Afew minutes earlier, outside unit G-413, Griffin had removed the lock from the hasp on the door, turned the handle, and swung the overhead door open. He and Dr. Friedman both recoiled, involuntarily falling back a few steps. The visual was bad enough—there were three dead bodies in there, or at least their barely recognizable remains—but what had overcome them was the stench. Intense chemical reactions give off intense odors, densely packed clouds of fetid molecules that invade the nasal passages and cling to the olfactory sensors. The rancid waves of smell that rolled out of the storage unit were dense and alive. They overwhelmed all other senses for a moment.

The now highly mobile Cordyceps novus, hitchhiking aboard the bodies of the people once known as Ironhead and Cuba, stepped calmly out of the unit and smiled.

“What up, Griff?” Ironhead asked.

Cuba winked at Dr. Friedman.

The uninfected stared at the infected with horror. Though Cuba’s and Ironhead’s outward expressions were calm, friendly even, there was no mistaking their sickness. A strange color had seeped into their faces, and the telltale swelling of their abdomens had begun, albeit more slowly and smaller, since the fungus had modified its takeover approach. Still, there were vast and rapid changes occurring in the victims’ body chemistry, and beneath the skin of their faces, necks, and hands, there was movement—a seethe, a roiling of their bloodstreams that was visible to the naked eye.

Dr. Friedman, who had seen a lot of rotted gums and decayed molars in his day, had never seen this. He staggered back, screaming. Afraid to turn his back on Ironhead and Cuba, he failed to notice he was moving directly toward Mike Snyder’s remains, which were now a viscous, slippery coating on the floor and wall of the hallway behind him. Dr. Friedman hit the edge of the slick and his feet went out from under him. He fell, spinning, and landed facedown in the murk of green. He screamed again, lifted his hands, and stared in terror at the excited fungal residue there. He whipped his hands around in the air, trying to shake the clingy substance off, but it held fast. He slapped his hands back down, right in the middle of it, to push off the floor and stand up. His right hand slipped out from under him, he fell back down, onto his side, rolled over onto his back, and thrust himself back up on his feet.

Now covered front and back in fungus, Dr. Friedman looked up at Griffin and the others, eyes wide, mouth agape, struck mute.

Griffin, who still had his gun in his right hand, swung it around and pointed it at Dr. Friedman, then panicked as he realized he was leaving Ironhead and Cuba uncovered and swung it back to them. “What the fuck is going on what the fuck what the fuck?” was all he could spit out.

Blind with panic, Dr. Friedman turned and ran. The others stood between him and the main exit, but he’d seen both Teacake and Naomi run in the other direction, which meant there was probably a side entrance to be found someplace. He barreled down the hallway, around the corner, and saw a red Exit sign lit up at the far end. He ran toward it as fast as he could. Raising his right hand, he looked at the fungus while he ran. It was on the move too, wrapping around his fingers and penetrating his pores, pushing the openings in his skin wider and wider, clawing its way into his system.

Through bobbing vision, he saw a door up ahead, the one with the hole in the glass that Mike had smashed earlier. He ran toward it, knowing only that if he could get to his Harley he could go someplace safe, somewhere he could wash this stuff off him and figure out what the hell was happening. Maybe he would drive straight to the hospital.

He banged through the door, hit the night air, and felt a tiny bit better. Still moving as fast as he could, he cut right and ran along the outer edge of the building. Motion sensor lights flicked on as he passed them. There was a strange warmth spreading in his chest—maybe it was just the exertion, he thought, but then he got the distinct and unsettling feeling that his scalp was crawling. It was as if he wore a toupee and it had come to life, moving around his head at will. Yes, for sure the hospital, he told himself as he neared the corner of the building, I am definitely going to the hospital—where am I again? which one is closest?—oh yeah, Waukesha Memorial on Highway 18, that’s it, I’ll go straight there, but shit, I wonder if I can still ride, he thought as a dizzy fog started to descend on his brain.

He rounded the corner of the building, now certain that he couldn’t handle a Harley in this condition—hell, he could barely ride one when he was in full possession of his faculties. So when he saw the guy standing there, the guy with the funny goggles on and something in his right hand, he was relieved— This guy can help me, this guy can do something.

“Get this shit off me!” he shouted to the man in the goggles.

Then the something in the guy’s right hand spat fire a few times, something heavy and hot slammed into the dentist’s chest, and he started to fall. That’s weird, he thought as the ground came up at him. I get that I’ve just been shot, but why is the guy with the gun falling too?

Dr. Friedman hit the ground, still alive for a few more seconds, and saw his right hand erupt in what looked like green mushrooms. He knew he was dying.

Probably just as well, he thought.

Teacake and Naomi were halfway down the tube ladder when Teacake realized he was going to have to get the rest of the way there mostly blind. It was too bad, because their entrance into the building and move to the elevator had gone more smoothly than they’d anticipated. Hearing the shouts from the hallway near Griffin’s storage locker, they’d cut to the left, gone down a parallel hallway, and made it to the elevator without incident.

Teacake had insisted on going down the ladder first, because the T-41 was a son of a bitch on his back, and his legs were trembling with lactic acid before they got to the first rung. He was by no means confident he was going to be able to make it all the way down without slipping and falling, and the backpack was so large it was pressed firmly up against the wall of the tube. If he fell and Naomi was below him, he would take her all the way down too. Couldn’t let that happen.

Everything about the suit made the climb down difficult. The gloves were clunky, and his hands moved around inside them, which made his grip on the ladder uncertain. Shifting his weight from one rung to the next required full concentration and a bit of luck. The pack scraped along the wall as he went down, producing friction that slowed him and made every movement harder than it needed to be. But worst of all was the clouded mask.

The effort of lugging the extra ninety pounds that far had been grueling, and he was sweating profusely by the time they started down the ladder. The sweat wasn’t the problem—that was just uncomfortable—but the inside of the plastic shield was fogging up from his labored breathing. The suit’s oxygen recirculating system had been designed with some amount of condensation in mind, but not this much. The designers had never anticipated a full-body workout while wearing the suit, and the heat and CO 2that Teacake was throwing off were more than it could compensate for.

“I can’t see,” he said to Naomi through the radio.

“What?” she replied.

“I can’t see!” he shouted into the mask. Great, he thought, one of us is blind and the other one’s deaf. This should be a breeze.