Cold Storage Read online

  He was ten steps away when he heard the first thump. He turned.

  It had come from the trunk of the car.

  Nine

  Teacake knew from bitter experience that your head could get only so small. Everything else can squeeze, suck in, twist around; people can get pretty sideways when they want to or have to. But with your head there was no negotiation.

  Teacake had direct knowledge of this from the fence that had run along the back of his high school. At the edge of the fence there was a pipe, set just a few inches too far off the brick facade, that left a nine-inch gap between the school building and freedom. Determined weed smokers used to be able to get off the bus in the morning, cruise through the front doors of the school, sign in for homeroom, and split out the rear fire doors before the handles got chained for the day (totally illegal, by the way). From there it was just a matter of a shoulder shimmy, a gut suck-in for Big Jim Schmittinger, and a willingness to scrape the shit out of both ears as you popped your head through to the other side. If you did all that, boom, you were loose in the open field behind the school building, where you could blaze away in peace. The size of his skull was the main reason Teacake, as toasty a burnout as you would ever find, actually managed to swing a 3.5 GPA in high school—his head was just too goddamn big to get through the fence. So Teacake never got high during the day. It does wonders for your concentration. Some of the math and science even stuck, and when he joined the navy he remembered just enough of it to qualify for duty on a ballistic missile sub. It was a plus. At least he had the same bunk every night.

  Nothing he did manage to learn about Lord of the Flies, though, was of use in his present situation, where his great big fucked-up head had done him in again. Stuck, he called out to Naomi from the space between the walls.

  “What about Vageline? You got any Vageline?”

  “Do I have any what?”

  “That greasy shit you put on your lips! Get me out of here!”

  “Are you trying to say ‘Vaseline’?”

  “Whatever the fuck it’s called, Naomi, get some lotion or grease or butter and get me out of here!”

  She’d been trying like hell not to laugh for the better part of the last few minutes, and it was a battle she now lost.

  “Oh, yeah, no, definitely, yes, do that,” Teacake sputtered. “Yeah, laugh, ’cause this shit is, like, hilarious.”

  He was still in the gap in the walls, and he’d wedged himself in good, in the precisely nine-inch space between two I beams. He’d done well up to that point, sliding and twisting and pretzeling his body through the tiny open area toward what looked like an enormous map at the far end of the control panel wall. It was dark inside the gap and hard to tell, but it looked like a map, anyway, and he had been only a few feet from it when he’d gotten stuck between the beams, and the entirety of his high school experience came flooding back to him. Now he couldn’t move his goddamn head.

  “Lube! You gotta have some lube, right? Throw me it!”

  Naomi took a moment to make sure she’d understood him properly before she poked her head in through the hole in the wall.

  “I’m sorry, did you just suggest that I carry lubricant around with me?”

  “I didn’t— I wasn’t—”

  “’Cause that’s some offensive shit, Teacake.”

  “I’d like to apologize and start over.”

  “I mean, I don’t know, you got any dental dams in your pocket?”

  “Naomi. Um, ma’am. I’m kind of freaking out here.”

  She took a step back, looked up and down the length of the wall, and thought.

  “Are you good for another twelve bucks?” she asked. “Although we wouldn’t have to buy the roll of tape again.”

  Teacake was in no position to negotiate. “Do what you gotta do, lady. Just promise me you’re not gonna pull on me, because at this point I think if the angle’s wrong my left ear is just gonna tear right the—”

  The legs of the metal stool crashed through the drywall three feet in front of him and startled him so badly he wrenched his body backward, ripping himself free from the head vise. He fell again, on his ass, in the narrow space that he was now more than ready to evacuate. As he got to his feet, he saw Naomi, standing in the new opening (that repair was going to cost more than twelve bucks, by the way; she’d hit a seam right between two panels and they were gonna need three four-by-eights now, minimum). She was staring in amazement at the wall beyond.

  “Holy shit.”

  Teacake got to his feet, rubbing his ears in pain, and slid forward till he was alongside her. The broken panels had opened up a section directly in front of the maplike thing he’d been trying to move closer to, and it was bigger and more detailed than he’d been able to see by the light of Naomi’s phone’s flashlight. It was an enormous, hyperdetailed floor plan depicting every room, conduit, pipe, and piece of wiring in what must have been the old military storage complex. There were hundreds of LED lights painstakingly placed all over the map marking God knows what, but they were all long since deactivated or burned out.

  Except for one, all the way down at the bottom right corner. Its tiny bulb strobed white, in sync with the light on the warning panel nearby.

  Teacake came over to the schematic, kicked out the remnants of the broken drywall, and stepped out of the inner space, moving back into the reception area. He got a few feet away from the thing to get a better look. He stood shoulder to shoulder with Naomi. She looked at him.

  “Your ear is bleeding.”

  He reached up to his right ear, but she meant the left. She pulled another Kleenex from the pack she kept in her pocket, wiped his ear gently, folded it over and pressed it there. “Hold that.”

  He did. He looked at her.

  No one had put a bandage on one of Teacake’s wounds with their own hand since he was eleven years old. It almost moved him to tears. In fact, he thought he felt the first sting of a couple of them in the corners of his eyes. That was the last thing he needed, to bust out crying in front of her, what is the matter with me?

  “What’s the matter?” she asked. She didn’t miss much.

  “Huh?”

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah. Just—ouch. Whatever.”

  She turned and looked at the map. “It’s a schematic.”

  She leaned through the wall and ran her hands along it, starting at the top, which was the ground floor. “How many levels are there supposed to be in this place?”

  “Three. Main floor and two belowground.”

  “There used to be six. And they watched this stuff.”

  “Yeah, it was military storage, since World War II. You know, weapons and what have you. They cleaned it out and sold it about twenty years ago.”

  “And they must have sealed up everything below here.” She ran her hand down the schematic to the lower levels. “Which was the part they really cared about. See all the sensors? They’re all in bunches down here.”

  She was right. By far the greatest concentration of LEDs was on the lower three levels, the additional sub-basements. SB-2 and SB-3 were apparently sealed off and all their monitor lights were dark. The single flashing white bulb was on the very bottom level, marked SB-4. But there was a large blank space, two feet of map at least, between SB-3 and SB-4. Tiny scribbles of rock shapes seemed to indicate it was earthen.

  Teacake studied it, trying to figure it out. “Who builds a sub-basement a hundred feet below the other basements? You’d have to dig the whole thing out, build the bottom floor, then fill in again above it. That makes no sense.”

  “You wanna go down and see it?”

  He looked at her. “How? It’s sealed.”

  “That.” She pointed to the far left side of the map, where a thin vertical column rose up from SB-4, through the earthen portion, and skirted along the edges of the other sub-basement levels. It was narrow, with hatch marks drawn evenly between the long parallel lines all the way up.

  “What is it?”<
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  “A tube ladder.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s shaped like a tube, and it looks like a ladder. How else would they get down there?” She pointed to the hatchings. “Look, these are the rungs.”

  He was impressed. “You must go to college, right? It’s a waste if you don’t.”

  “I go as much as I can, yeah.”

  “Then you should be smart enough to not wanna go down there.”

  “C’mon,” she said. “This is the most fun I’ve had in years. This is a night out for me.”

  “Jesus. That’s depressing. You don’t go out?”

  “Not really.”

  “What about just, like, for a beer?”

  “I don’t drink.”

  He persisted. “Not even for one beer?”

  “That would be drinking.”

  “You never go out for one beer?”

  “This is getting off the point.”

  But he was determined. “What about a coffee?”

  “I thought you were fun, Teacake. You started out fun.”

  “Me? I’m totally fun. I’m huge fun. You’re the one who just said your best night out in years is vandalizing your workplace.”

  “I have an inquisitive nature.” She held up her phone and snapped a picture of the schematic.

  “Yeah, I can see that, and that’s cool, and I’m, like, cooperating. You look at me with those eyes you got and say, ‘Please throw your chair through the wall,’ and you know, I’m on board, I throw my chair through the wall, and then you say, ‘Go crawl into that weird space and check it out,’ still good, I’m into it, but then you come at me like, ‘Go climb down the tube ladder a couple hundred feet into the blocked-off part of the fucked-up government shit and see why the thermistor alarm is going off,’ and, you know, a man’s gonna take a second to think things through, you feel me?”

  She waited a moment. “You like my eyes?”

  “In fact, I do.”

  “That’s very sweet.”

  “My point is, I’m kinda easy to talk into things, that’s why I got the problems I got. People say shit like, ‘Wait in the car and keep it running, I just gotta run in and do something,’ or ‘I know this guy in Dousman needs a favor,’ and I say, ‘Yeah, sure, I just point the gun at my foot and pull the trigger, is that what I do?’ Bang! ‘Ow! What a surprise, I blew my toe off. Should I do it again? Okay!’ But I have spent a lot of time working on my personal self and talking to smart people and learning to ask what’s good for me and to not just dive into shit. Which is what I am doing right now, okay? I am taking a fucking moment.”

  “I understand. I respect that.”

  “It is very, very important to learn to tell everybody in the whole world to fuck off all the time. It took me forever to learn that.”

  “I’m not sure that was the exact message you were supposed to—”

  But he glared at her, so she stopped and recharted her course.

  “I’m sorry. I get you had some bad stuff happen to you. I was not being cool.”

  “Okay. Good. That’s more like it.” He took a deep breath and let it out again, then pulled a flashlight off a battery charger on the wall next to the desk and headed for the gate that led deeper into the building.

  “You coming or what?”

  Ten

  Mooney must have stared at the trunk of his car for a solid five minutes. The thumps would come in bursts, just one or two, randomly, then a whole furious burst of them, till it sounded like half a dozen Dutchmen in there with wooden shoes were clogging on the inside of the metal trunk lid. The whole car would rock like crazy, then it’d stop again and everything would go still for ten or fifteen seconds while Mooney pondered the impossible nature of what was occurring. He’d use that moment to question his sanity, his judgment, his ability to correctly perceive reality, his past history with drug use and abuse, and then the dancing Dutchmen would start back up again.

  Of course, it was not possible. Not in the slightest. Dead things don’t come back to life; decaying corpses don’t reanimate. But there was something alive in his trunk, two somethings, wedged in there with the spare tire and the toolbox and the gun case, and they weren’t having any fun. In the end, it was Mooney’s essential decency that made him open the trunk, his goodness and kindness as a human being. Because the level of suffering going on three feet away from him was intense, and what kind of person allows another living thing to endure that sort of agony? What kind of person stands by and does nothing? Mooney didn’t open the trunk because he was stupid, and he didn’t open the trunk because he was scared, and he didn’t open it so that he could kill them again. He opened the trunk because we are all God’s creatures.

  Thing of it is, even God would have taken one look at the cat and said, “That shit is not mine.”

  The trunk was only about six inches open when the first paw came out, claws flexed wide, slashing at the air like it wanted to rip the whole atmosphere a new one. Mooney fell back at that point and the cat did the rest. It leaped straight up, banging into the trunk lid and sending it swinging open the rest of the way. The cat landed on all fours, still in the trunk, and it snarled at him—a look of such profound, intense hatred that Mooney’s response came without thought of any kind, a purely synaptic reflex.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Yes, Mooney apologized to the cat, and it really was the only sensible response. The animal was a mess, and it was all his doing. He’d put the .22 slug through the side of the cat’s head, and even that small caliber was enough to blow off the other side of its face. Now the half cat would never wow the ladies again. Its fur was dark and matted with blood, its eyes a sickly bright yellow, and, unless Mooney was hallucinating (which he still imagined—hoped, really—was entirely possible), its midsection was expanding as he watched.

  But the cat looked good compared to the deer it was standing on.

  Tuesday night had started out substantially better than this for Mooney, just over forty-eight hours ago. In need of a little distraction, he’d taken himself to the movies, with a real quick stop at Turdyk’s Liquor & Cheese first, where he’d picked up a six-pack of Bartles & Jaymes Exotic Berry wine coolers. He didn’t love flavored booze, but they were the only wine coolers that were cold and came in plastic bottles. The plastic ones had screw-off tops and didn’t make a racket if you happened to drop, say, the fourth one on the floor of the movie theater. At his last Mooney’s Private Movie Night & Wine Party, a bottle had slipped through his popcorn-greased hands, and the excruciating clatter of it hitting the cement and rolling down the sloping theater floor felt like it had lasted half an hour. Just about every head in the place turned, and that kind of silent group disapproval was something he could have gotten at home for free.

  So, he was no dummy. Plastics.

  Wine coolers go down easy; the problem is the sugar headache, but if you bring five or six Advil, you’re fine. Mooney was a big fan of the A vitamin and never left the house without it, so by the time he drove away from the Regal 18 on Highway 16, he was more than fine. He had a nice buzz, and the movie wasn’t half-bad either: mindless enough that you could tune out for whole chunks and not get lost, but not so stupid that you felt bad about yourself afterward. He could have done without some of the language.

  But the best part of all was he still had one wine cooler left for the drive home, and it wasn’t even completely warm. Life could be kind. He waited till he got through all three stoplights in town before he opened it. Mooney had a hard-and-fast rule: he never, ever drank while driving in the busy part of town, and he rarely texted or went online behind the wheel unless, you know, it was going to be super quick. He was a concerned citizen who cared about his fellow man, so he didn’t crack the plastic lid on his sixth wine cooler until he’d hit the long flat dark stretch of 16, where it started the big bend.

  You’re going to want to, but you just can’t blame the accident on the Bartles & Jaymes. That wouldn’t be fair.
Yes, Mooney’s blood alcohol was flirting with 0.15 and his reaction time was down, but 250 pounds of aggressively stupid animal that springs out of nowhere and stands frozen on the center stripe of a dark highway, right in the middle of an unlit curve, I mean, that asshole has to be factored into the equation too. Character is destiny, and that dumbass deer—sorry, that beautiful creature of God—that thing’s character was drawn within the limitations of a non-sentient brain. It stood there, unmoving, as the car closed the last fifty feet on it; it just hunched there, watching Death come hurtling at it, staring at the car like, well, like exactly what it was, there’s a goddamn good reason for that cliché, so maybe it was fitting that the first thing that hit the deer was the headlight.

  The rest was a gruesome blur, and Mooney panicked and blacked out most of it, as he did sometimes when things got weird. Next thing he knew he was standing over the wounded animal on the shoulder, staring down at its broken, twitching form and holding his father’s .22 pistol. He kept it in the trunk for situations just like this, which, believe it or not, were not all that uncommon around here. Mooney knew what he had to do. It wasn’t hard; you point the thing and pull the trigger and put the beast out of its misery, that’s what any decent human being would do, and there was no law against it, neither God’s nor man’s. The animal was clearly suffering, its mouth opening and closing soundlessly, steam rising from its blood as it spilled out onto the asphalt, still hot from the exceptional heat of the day.

  Just kill it already, but Mooney had never killed before, never knowingly; he didn’t even like swatting flies, it tended to send him off into flights of creepy reverie, reflections on his place in the universe. He’d always figured he was a Buddhist at heart—weren’t they the ones who were on about reincarnation all the time, or was that the Hindus? Whichever. The ones who cared, the ones who loved all living things. That was him. But now here he was, faced with the—