Cold Storage

Twenty-Five

The loading of the Samsung boxes had gone pretty well so far but was taking longer than Griffin wanted. The renegotiation had slowed everything down. After all the work of finally selling these bozos on the TVs, that prick Ironhead had tried to lower the price to $75 at the last minute. And it wasn’t like he did it quietly either—everybody heard, and everybody wanted the same. Ironhead was good at this; they didn’t call him Ironhead just because of the bike he rode. He worked in sales at IRT and negotiating was second nature to him, so he’d waited till they were standing in the unit, took one look around at the overstock, and knew he had Griffin over a barrel. They haggled for a couple minutes, but Griffin’s head was throbbing by this point, and the idea of everybody walking out of here and leaving these things was unthinkable. So $75 it was, the grand total take-home for the night was going to be $450 instead of $600, but whatever, Griffin took it.

The TVs were heavy and awkwardly shaped, so it took two people to carry them out, one at a time. Cedric and Wino had taken the first one out, Cuba and Garbage the second, Shorty and the Rev the third, and Griffin and Dr. Steven Friedman had made two trips already. Ironhead had somehow managed to cast himself in more of a supervisory capacity and was leaning against the inside wall of the unit grabbing a quick vape when Mike showed up in the doorway.

Mike stood there for a long moment, his breath wheezing in and out. He stared at Ironhead, who looked back at him. “What the fuck do you want?”

Mike didn’t answer, just stared. Ironhead blew out a cloud of smoke. “I asked you a question, dickhead.”

Mike still didn’t answer. Ironhead took a step forward. “You are about to have a serious problem, man. Privacy of the eyes, motherfucker, either you take two steps back and look away from me right this fucking second, or I will bounce your head off that wall till it goes pop. You understand?”

Mike turned away and looked down the hallway, not because Ironhead told him to, but because he heard voices. Cedric, Wino, Cuba, and Garbage were headed back from their first load to the truck, coming for more, and they were drawing close. They saw Mike, but he took a few steps back, giving them plenty of space. Ironhead assumed he had managed to intimidate the psycho who’d been staring at him.

“That’s what I thought,” he said to Mike as the others came back into the unit to get another TV. Cuba looked over her shoulder, recognizing the weirdo who had watched them earlier. His shirt was even tighter than before, two of the buttons already popped over his swollen midsection, and a couple others looking like they were about to give way.

“What does that guy want?” she asked Ironhead. “I saw him before.”

“Fuck if I know. Don’t worry about him. Just keep going, we don’t got all night.”

Cedric had seen enough of Ironhead’s bossy behavior over the years to be sick of it. “When are you gonna grab one, you lazy piece of shit?”

“Hey, I’m coordinating. You should be thanking me. I should be charging you a commission for the money I saved you.”

From outside, they heard shouts, two voices somewhere far away, and they looked again, past that weird staring guy, but didn’t see anybody. Ironhead turned back to the others, waving them along with some urgency. “Get a TV, come on, let’s get the hell out of here.”

There was a low tearing sound, like a sheet ripping in half, and they all turned at the same time. Mike was back in the doorway, and the sound had come from his midsection. His stomach lining, stretched beyond its elastic capacity, had finally separated from the stomach wall and was now a free-floating mass of viscous jelly inside his abdomen.

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 COME out 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 AND the 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.

“Active shooter,” Griffin said.

He hadn’t felt this good in years.

Twenty-Six

Roberto was on Highway 73, just eight miles outside of Atchison, when Abigail’s call came. His cell phone was still sealed in the pouch, so he’d left his laptop open on the passenger seat, using an AT&T card to stay connected to the internet. He put in his Bluetooth, hit the space bar to answer, and listened while she explained the latest development from inside the storage place.

He wasn’t quite sure he actually understood. “They left? What do you mean they left?”

“They’re not in the unit.”

“Why the hell not?”

“She said there were others inside the facility and they had to warn them.”

“Great. They’re noble. How many others?”

“She didn’t say.”

“Can you get her back on the phone?”

“I’ve tried four times. She doesn’t answer.”

“How long ago was this?”

“Less than two minutes.”

“What about the other person?” he asked. “The infected one, outside their door.”

“She didn’t say.”

“You didn’t ask?”

“It was a very short conversation. She hung up on me. You know everything I know.”

“Okay,” he said, thinking. “Okay. Okay.” He repeated everything she’d just said, because that’s what he’d been taught forty years ago. “Naomi told you she and the other clean body were leaving the storage unit because they heard others had arrived. She did not say how many. You have not had contact with her since. This was about two minutes ago. Do I have that right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you know their names?” he asked.

“Yes.”

Roberto thought quickly. Damage assessment, diminishing returns, risk versus reward, evaluating the rotten situation and deciding on the least rotten course of action. He had an idea, but it meant widening the circle. Could help, but it would have to be a cloudless night. He put down his window, stuck his head outside, and looked up. The sky directly overhead was clear, a brilliant canopy of stars. Okay, they got lucky on the weather. He put the window back up.

“I’m going to need some aerial help,” he said into the phone.

There was a pause on the other end. “I don’t see how that’s possible.”

“Anything’s possible, Abigail. Some things are just more possible than others.”

“I don’t have those types of resources.”

“I know exactly what kinds of resources you do and do not have, okay?” He didn’t mean to snap at her, and he softened his tone. He had exactly one ally at the moment and couldn’t afford to lose her.

“You want satellite reconnaissance.” She said it the way someone would say, “You want a billion dollars.”

“I want a Global Hawk directly overhead at ten thousand feet, but we’d never get one here from Edwards in time. I’ll settle for a Keyhole. A ten-minute redirect would do it.”

“That would require attorney general approval.”

“Yeah, if we were going that route. But we’re a little more informal on this one.”

“You’re crazy. Operationally, I mean. You’re almost delusional.”

“No, I’m ambitious, Abigail, and so are you. Come on, who do you know at the NRO?” The National Reconnaissance Office handled coordination of surveillance satellites and dissemination of data within and among the NSA, CIA, FBI, and Homeland Security.

“I don’t know anybody there,” she said with irritation.

“Can you please lose the attitude? I will be on-site in nine minutes.” He looked down at his speed and saw he was over eighty. He lightened up on the gas.

There was another pause on the other end of the line, then Abigail’s voice came back, still tentative, but he could almost feel her mind engaging with the problem. “My friend Stephanie dates a guy at the ADF-E.” The Aerospace Data Facility–East was located just on the other side of Fort Belvoir and was the operational hub of reconnaissance satellites all over the world.

“See?” Roberto said. “You see what you can do?”

“But I’d have to wake her up—he’d have to be on duty—”

“We’ll need a few things to break our way, no question.”

“I’ll call you back.”

“Wait,” he said. “Have you ever met this guy?”

“No. I saw a picture of him once.”

“Who’s better looking, him or Stephanie?”

“I don’t know. Do we really have time for that?”

“Stephanie, I mean, Abigail—goddammit.” He was getting tired and seriously cranky. “Please just answer the question. Who is better looking?”

“Stephanie is gorgeous. She’s way out of his league.”

“That’s our first break right there. Wake her up. You have the coordinates already. I need eyes overhead in five minutes. If any infected people leave that place, I need to know how many there are and where they go. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“And get me some personal information on both of the people inside that place. The clean ones. Work history, favorite ice cream, whatever you can come up with, I might need it. Understood?”

“Understood.” Abigail hung up to get to work.

Roberto pulled out the earpiece and closed the laptop. He allowed himself a tiny sigh. This was sort of, possibly, maybe going to work out. He’d forgotten how many people he knew and how good he was at getting the best out of the ones he didn’t. Wrinkles appeared, and he ironed them out. There’s just no substitute for experience. You take a lifetime of acquired skills, season it with the wisdom of age, throw in some good instincts and reflexes—you can’t learn those, you have to bring ’em to the party—and you’ve got yourself a pretty damn effective operative. Hell, maybe he never should have retired in the first place. He’d be there in eight minutes and have this resolved within the hour. He smiled.

Then the cop popped his lights.

Roberto looked up into the rearview mirror, a familiar sinking feeling in his stomach. The cop was so close behind him and the flashing red cherries so bright they stung his eyes. He looked down at the speedometer. The needle was pushing ninety. Speeding? He was speeding? Yeah, you’re a real genius, Roberto.

He banged a fist off the steering wheel and drove on for a moment, his mind racing in eighteen different directions, every single one of them a dead end. The cop double-tapped the siren, and the whoop whoop almost made Roberto jump out of his skin.

He had no choice. He pulled over.

The gravel shoulder crunched under Roberto’s tires and he brought the minivan to a smooth and responsible stop. He looked up into the rearview to see if there was anything he could learn. The cop’s car was a standard four-door sedan, probably a Chevy Impala. It had a red light bar on the roof, square headlights with alternately flashing high beams, and a blue zipper light in the front grille. This information, taken as a whole, was of absolutely no use whatsoever.

A look back over his shoulder was too much an admission of guilt, so Roberto switched to the side view, where the angle would mean he was a bit less blinded. The police car hadn’t pulled as far onto the shoulder as he had, so he could make out the cop’s silhouette through the windshield. The man was looking down, radio in hand, probably just ran the plates and was waiting for a response. Roberto steadied his breathing, running through options. There weren’t any good ones. Taking off was the worst—you can’t outrun radio waves. He’d end up in a high-speed chase that he would lose.

He thought about throwing the minivan in reverse and slamming into the cop’s front end, hoping he’d get lucky and pop a tire, but he was just as likely to blow one of his own, which would make it a real short chase. And even if he got lucky and disabled the police car without damaging his own, see section regarding radio waves.

Reluctantly, he thought about killing the cop. Even if he could get his head around murdering an innocent officer of the law who was just doing his job, he had no weapon on his person. The nearest gun would be an unloaded M9 in one of the trunks in back. Trini would have left a full clip in the foam packing beside it that he could slap in in a second, but getting to it would be a problem. If he made the slightest move toward the rear of the car, that cop would be out of his own vehicle and crouched behind his door with his weapon drawn in seconds.

And then there was that part about killing an innocent cop. He’d never done that before.

The door of the police car opened, and the cop got out. He was tall, maybe six feet four inches, and he had his round-brimmed hat in one hand. He paused, closed his door, and took a good long time putting on his hat and adjusting it just so. Great, he was a dick on top of everything else.

He started to walk toward Roberto’s car. Roberto watched in the side view, still thinking. A bribe seemed unlikely to have any effect, and he had only a few hundred dollars in his pocket anyway. As the cop reached his window, one last desperate thought popped into Roberto’s mind. Maybe try the truth?

Never work in a million years.

He opened the window. The cop glanced at him, bent down ever so slightly, and checked to reconfirm that Roberto was the only passenger. “License and registration, please.”

“Was I speeding?” Jesus, that was it? The skilled professional, and that was what he came up with, the exact same thing that every single motorist who has ever been pulled over in the history of the interstate highway system said? Was I speeding?!

“You were. License and registration?”

“I’m going to open my glove compartment,” Roberto said. See? I’m a good citizen. I’m a reasonable guy like you. You can trust me. See?

“Go ahead,” the cop replied.

Roberto leaned over and opened the glove compartment, having no idea what he would see inside. It occurred to him, as he pushed the button on the front, that there very well could be a weapon in there. Trini was thorough, and she would have sent him out into that good night fully prepared for any situation that might arise, including a sudden need to arm himself. He hesitated, his finger on the button of the glove compartment, and thought about how mistakes can cascade on you. He let it hang there for a second while he thought. Revealing a gun in the glove box was going to deteriorate this situation in a big hurry.

“Sir?” Roberto’s head was turned toward the glove compartment, so he couldn’t see the cop, but he could feel his presence, and he could hear the rustle of the man’s shirt as his arm moved. There was a very subtle creak of leather, and Roberto knew the cop’s right hand was now resting on the butt end of his sidearm, moving it infinitesimally in its holster to make sure it wasn’t stuck.

Things were falling apart fast. Again, he had no choice. He had to open the glove compartment and hope. He released the button, it clicked, and the door fell open.

There was no gun. He closed his eyes and willed himself to breathe. Still okay. Not only was there no gun, but there was a neat yellow rental car jacket, the paperwork exactly where it should be. Roberto picked it up, turned, and offered it out the window to the cop. “It’s a rental.”

The cop took the papers. “Your license?”

“Inside my jacket.” He held up his hand, just outside his jacket—May I?

“Go ahead.”

Roberto reached into his jacket, took out his wallet, removed his license, and handed that out the window too. The cop took it.

Roberto waited while the cop inspected the documents. If Trini had rented the car in her own name, he would have some explaining to do, but that was the least of his problems at the moment. That one he could talk his way out of. He looked at the dashboard clock. He’d lost three minutes already, he needed to be rolling in another two or the satellite window he’d asked for, which he had no reason to think Abigail was even going to be able to open, would be closed by the time he needed it.

How could everything be so much worse now than it was just 180 seconds ago?

“Thank you, Mr. Diaz.” Roberto heard a slight pause and the tiny bit of spin the cop put on his last name, tried to think about whether that casual racism would help or hurt matters, and concluded it made no difference. The policeman handed him back his documents, saying nothing about the rental car registration. Damn, Trini was a star, she’d even put the car in his name. Roberto took the papers.

As the cop turned his focus from the documents to the inside of the car, his gaze stopped abruptly on the back. The tarp that Trini had thrown over the military crates wasn’t big enough to completely conceal them, not with the addition of the half-barrel-shaped T-41. To anyone who had any experience at all, or even watched the right kind of TV shows, the stuff in back looked exactly like what it was—crated weapons.

The cop pulled a flashlight from his belt and clicked it on. He couldn’t look in a trunk without permission or cause, but he could sure as hell look into a car through an open window. Roberto glanced up at the cop, taking advantage of the momentary distraction to size up his opponent. He thought briefly about throwing open the driver’s door, slamming it into the cop hard enough to knock him over or wind him or get a lucky door handle in the guy’s balls. If that went his way, he’d keep his momentum going, lunge out of the door, disarm the cop, and pop him twice in the head with his own gun. That was a lot of ifs, and most likely it ended with Roberto dead by the side of the road or stuck in a Kansas jail cell while a plague-like fungus ravaged the land.

So, not so good, that one.

But then he saw the tattoo. Because the cop had to keep his right hand near his weapon at all times, he’d pulled the flashlight with his left and had to reach across his body to shine it into the back of the car. The warm weather meant he was wearing his summer uniform, a short-sleeved light blue shirt that cut just below the biceps. His arms were big, worked, and as the cop moved his arm around with the light, the sleeve slipped up over the curve of muscle, revealing an extra four inches of bare skin.

Roberto saw the thick black X tattooed there, meant to fall just above the line of the uniform, discreetly kept under the fabric. But tonight, at this moment, in this position, it was revealed, lit by the red flashing lights of the cop’s own cherries.

The X was just two thick bars, their tips pointed into triangles at either end. Nothing fancy, nothing colorful, just black ink, but Roberto was reasonably certain it was a southern nationalist flag symbol. The bars were meant to evoke the St. Andrew’s Cross and the blue star-spangled X of the Confederate battle flag. But the color and stars had been removed for those who wanted or needed to keep their alt-right political views to themselves in certain situations. Like being at work, when you’re a police officer.

The cop shifted the flashlight back to the front seat, momentarily shining it right in Roberto’s face as he put it away. “What have you got back there, Mr.… Diaz?”

Aha! The pause was longer this time, and the tiny emphasis on Roberto’s last name confirmed any lingering suspicions. Aha, you racist son of a bitch, I got you figured out now. You’re a white nationalist. Okay. That was something. Roberto could work with that.

“You got me, brother.”

The cop looked at him. Brother? That was starting out awfully strong, but hey, when you’ve got only one card, you play it for all it’s worth.

“I got you doing what, Mr. Diaz?” The cop’s face was unreadable. He gave nothing away.

“Being ready.”

“For what, sir?”

“For when the day comes.”

The cop stared at him for a long moment. He gave no reason for Roberto to feel encouraged, but he didn’t ask him to get out of the car either. Roberto took that as license to continue. He shoved the rest of his chips into the middle of the table.

“Saw your tattoo. If we lived in a free country, I’m guessing you’d put III% on there, am I right?”

The cop just held eye contact, thinking.

Over the last seven or eight years Roberto was at DTRA, there had been a sharp increase in reporting on weapons acquisitions by well-armed domestic militias. He’d read those sections of the daily security briefings only cursorily, as his purview was almost exclusively overseas, but he knew enough to know the names of a few of the more prominent nationalist movements, which included the Three Percenters. An American paramilitary movement, its members pledged armed resistance against any attempts to limit private gun ownership by a tyrannical government. The name was derived from the claim that only 3 percent of the population of the original thirteen colonies fought against and defeated Great Britain in the Revolutionary War. In truth, the number was closer to 15 percent, but who’s counting when there’s a rhetorical point to be made.

The Three Percenters counted among their numbers a fair amount of law enforcement, and in fact a group of Jersey City police officers had been suspended in 2013 for wearing patches that read ONE OF THE 3%. Since then, members in public roles knew better and kept their beliefs on the down low. The southern nationalist flag tat was a popular and subtle marking.

Roberto had no doubt the cop was in. The only question was how far.

The cop held eye contact with him for a good ten seconds. Roberto looked back steadily. “The day’s coming, my man. The country we love and honor needs us to be ready.”

The cop turned the flashlight on again, playing it over the military crates in the back, taking one more look.

He turned back to Roberto. The only question was: Did Roberto look white enough to this prick to overcome his last name? The cop thought for a long moment.

“Drive safe, patriot.”

Apparently, he did. The cop clicked off the light, turned, and walked back to his car, his shoes crunching on the gravel.

Roberto didn’t stick around for confirmation. He put the minivan in gear and pulled away, not too fast and not too slow, lifting his hand up into the beam of the cop’s lights and giving a little thank-you wave as he put distance between them.

In his mind, he reverted back to his original position. I am very good at my job.

He’d be in Atchison in seven minutes.

Twenty-Seven

Within thirty seconds of when Mary Rooney fired six shots into the chest of the weird guy who’d exploded, a thought occurred to her. She’d just killed a man. The unreal fact that he’d burst in a haze of green goo was less relevant to her than the objective reality of her situation. She had committed murder—okay, possibly manslaughter, depending on how you slice it, and he had been running at them at the time. But he was also clearly unarmed, and she was holding a weapon that, in the law’s eyes, had been stolen from the State of Kansas. You didn’t have to be a legal scholar to know this would not hold up well in a courtroom.

Naomi was doubled over, holding her ears in pain, some blood seeping between her fingers. Teacake turned to Mrs. Rooney, eyes wide. “Mrs. Rooney Jesus thank you God where the hell did you get that?!” he asked, all at once, his eyes fixed on the smoking cannon in her hand.

“I have to get out of here,” she said.

“No no no, you’re fine, you’re cool, you had to, this guy, he’s infected with, like, this horrible zombie shit, there was this deer that blew up, and weird shit in the basement, and he was—he was trying to barf on us, and…” She was just staring at him. He trailed off, hearing how he must sound. “You’re right. You gotta get out of here.”

From around the corner ahead of them, they heard voices, low and muttering. Teacake thought he recognized Griffin’s guttural grunting. He turned back to Mrs. Rooney, took her by the shoulders, and talked fast. “Not the front, go back that way, turn right twice, go out the side door.” He pointed to the gun, still in her hand. “Dump that in the river.” She didn’t move.

From around the corner, Griffin raised his voice. “I’m armed, motherfucker!” He was full of bravado, but Teacake could hear the quaver in it.

He turned back to Mrs. Rooney. “Go!”

“Thank you,” she said. She took off in the direction he’d indicated.

“You hear me?!” Griffin shouted again. “I’m all loaded! I’m coming in strapped!”

Teacake turned and shouted back, “Griffin! Be cool, man, it’s me! Teacake!”

Griffin yelled, “I got a gun, shithead!”

Teacake bent down next to Naomi and pulled her hands gently from her ears. Naomi looked up at him. Her whole head hurt, but the left side had a strange numbness to it, a total, disorienting silence that felt like a weight. The loud, sharp ringing in her right ear more than canceled out any quieting effect the silence might have had, and her whole head throbbed. Her vision was fine; she could see Teacake was just in front of her, his eyes full of concern. His mouth was moving—he was saying something to her. She couldn’t hear a word, but she could read his face, every expression heightened and more easily understood with her attention focused on it.

Maybe not hearing him was just the right thing for her at the moment. She watched his lips; she looked into his eyes and registered every minute change of his features. She didn’t know what he was saying, but better than that, she knew what he meant. That she was going to be okay. That he would not let her down.

She saw him turn and shout angrily back over his shoulder, at someone around the corner—maybe the police were coming? She saw the smear on the floor that had been Mike, and it was moving, seething, as if still alive. It was inching toward them.

Now Teacake was pulling her to her feet, urging her to do something. To leave? Yes, that was it, he wanted her to leave, in the other direction. Whatever the danger or whatever had to be done, he didn’t want her to be a part of it. Naomi was moved, maybe because she could only feel him, and his feelings were so powerful. He was saying one thing over and over again; she was no lip reader but could recognize her daughter’s name—he was telling her to get out of there right now because maybe he didn’t matter and maybe she didn’t either, but her daughter did, and she had to take care of her.

Teacake turned and shouted something over his shoulder again. Naomi couldn’t make it out, but whoever was at the other end of the hall was coming this way, and there was danger. Teacake turned his body and shoved Naomi behind him, pushing her down the corridor in the other direction. She could tell by the strength of the shove that he would not be argued with. She staggered back and moved around the corner, just out of sight of whoever was going to come down the hallway.

She lingered there for a moment, hidden, unsure what to do next. She couldn’t hear, her head felt like it was going to split in half from the pain rattling around inside it, she had no idea who was coming, and the only person who could explain it to her had just told her in no uncertain terms to get the hell out of there. Naomi froze.

A second later, Griffin came around the corner at the other end of the hall from Teacake, gun in front of him. His body was hunched, coiled in a SWAT team crouch. He swung the gun from side to side, as if expecting someone to lunge from one of the units and go after him.

Teacake shouted to him from his end of the hall. “Griffin, you asshole, put the fucking gun away!”

Instead, Griffin put both hands on the grip and extended it in front of him, pointing it at Teacake’s head as he advanced. “Hands in the air!”

Teacake put his hands up. “It’s me, okay?!”

Griffin kept coming, stalking forward on bent legs, both hands on the gun, unconsciously mimicking the movements and posture of his avatar in his copy of School Shooter. “Drop the gun!”

Teacake looked up at his own hands, which were both empty. “What gun?”

“Drop it!”

“Griffin, I don’t have a gun, okay?”

From behind Griffin, Dr. Friedman peeked out, assessing the situation. “It’s true, Darryl, he does not appear to have a gun.”

Teacake, trying to keep his hands in the air, pointed at the mess on the floor that had been Mike a short while ago. “Don’t get any closer to that, man.”

Griffin stopped, staring down at the remains. Revolted, he looked back up at Teacake, pointing the gun at him again. “Down on the floor!”

“Why?”

“Against the wall!”

Teacake, who had been about to get down on the floor, stopped. “Which?”

“Do it!”

“Seriously, you want me to get down on the floor or up against the wall?”

Griffin, hearing something behind him, whirled around with the gun. Dr. Friedman, whose right boot had squeaked on the floor, barely got his head out of the way as the barrel swung toward him, aimed wildly around the empty hallway, and then swiveled back to Teacake.

“Where is the shooter?!” Griffin shouted, bringing some focus to his ever-changing list of demands.

“He’s gone,” Teacake said, lying only in the sense that he used the wrong pronoun. “Took off as soon as he shot.”

Griffin looked down at Mike’s body again. “Who is that?”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Teacake said, taking a step forward.

“Don’t come any closer!”

Teacake sighed and stopped. The night had been weird, then exciting, then terrifying, and now with Griffin in the mix it was just annoying. “I don’t know. He’s got some kind of disease or something. It’s contagious. It’ll kill you. The fucking army’s coming, or at least some guy who knows the army or— Can I put my hands down or what?”

“You called the cops?”

“Yeah. Sorta. DTRA.”

“What the hell is that?”

Before Teacake could answer, a sharp banging sound from the right startled Griffin and he swung the gun around again. Dr. Friedman dove out of the way faster this time, doing a good job of not getting his head shot off, and Griffin pointed the gun at the storage unit right next to them. “What’s that?!”

Voices shouted from inside the unit, more fists pounded on the door. Griffin recognized them. “Ironhead?! What the fuck are you doing, man?!”

The voices shouted some more, the door rattled and banged, and Griffin noticed the lock, hanging unlocked in the hasp. It was enough to hold the door closed, but it wasn’t clicked shut, so if the door rattled long enough it was bound to be dislodged.

Griffin turned the gun back on Teacake. “What’d you lock ’em in there for?!”

“I didn’t. That guy did.” He pointed to Mike’s residue. Griffin frowned, his reptilian brain trying to process it all. Keeping the gun on Teacake, he moved toward the locker.

Teacake took a step forward. “Don’t, man.”

Griffin stopped, swinging the gun back on him. “Why not?”

“They’re infected.”

Dr. Friedman stepped out of Griffin’s shadow, recognizing he might have some role in this conversation after all. “Infected? With what?”

“I don’t fucking know!” Teacake said, his patience nearing an end. “Bad shit! For the last time, will you put that fucking gun down already?!”

Griffin squinted at him. There was a dead guy on the floor, his friends were all locked in a storage unit, and Teacake was the only one in the hallway. No, he would not put the fucking gun down, no goddamn way. He took two steps back from the storage unit, gesturing with his gun from Teacake to the door. “You open it,” he said.

Teacake looked at him. There was no reasoning with this lump. He looked over at the door. He saw the lock, dangling in the hasp, clicking against the sides of the metal loop as the people inside the storage unit continued to pound on the door, demanding to be let out.

“No fucking way,” he said.

“Now!” Griffin shouted, taking a step forward with the gun. As he moved, his sweaty right index finger tensed on the trigger, which he’d adjusted for maximum sensitivity. He inadvertently squeezed off a round, which leaped from the barrel and sliced through the very outer edge of Teacake’s left ear, drawing a spurt of blood before it flew the rest of the way down the hallway, ricocheting off two metal doors and finally burying itself in a cement wall.

Teacake screamed and grabbed his ear in pain. “What the fuck, man?!” he shouted. He pulled his hand back in amazement and saw it was now smeared with blood. It wasn’t much of a gunshot wound, more like a razor slice, but it was a gunshot wound, Griffin had definitely shot him, the fuckwit had shot him.

“You shot me!” Teacake pointed out.

“You shot him!” Dr. Friedman confirmed.

Griffin did everything he could to conceal the fact that he had in no way meant to do that. He took a second to erase the stunned look from his face, then stiffened, pointing the gun back at Teacake. “And I’ll do it again if you don’t open the goddamn door! Those are my friends in there!”

They were also his customers, but he didn’t bother with that detail. In his mind, there was a chance, admittedly an outside one, but at least a tiny chance that the rest of the stolen TVs could still be moved out of here before the cops or the army or whoever showed up. There was still $450 on the table, and Griffin intended to take it home with him.

Teacake needed time to think. He wiped the blood from his ear on his pants and walked forward toward the door, as slowly as he could. He kept an eye on Griffin, who was following him with the gun and an increasingly unhinged look on his face—he’d never shot anyone before—and on Dr. Steven Friedman, who was backing up, putting a bit more distance between himself and Griffin. Teacake looked back at the lock, dangling there, unlocked. The sounds from inside, which had stopped for a few moments after the gunshot, had resumed, frantic voices calling, hands pounding on the door, people demanding to be let out. Their tone of panic was rising.

Teacake got closer. He reached out to the lock. He closed his fingers around it.

From the other end of the hallway, a woman’s voice cried out. “Hey, Griffin!”

Griffin turned, and then everything happened at once. Foam exploded from the spout of the fire extinguisher Naomi was holding from about thirty feet away, and it sprayed Griffin and Dr. Friedman in the face, momentarily blinding them. Griffin swung his gun crazily and another shot went off, again by accident.

Teacake reached out to the lock and snapped it shut, and Dr. Friedman, who’d had enough of Griffin’s reckless bullshit, grabbed Griffin’s gun hand and tried to wrestle the thing away from him before he actually killed somebody.

That was all the opening Teacake needed. He turned and took off, racing down the hallway toward Naomi. She was turning as he got to her, dropped the fire extinguisher with a noisy clang, grabbed his hand, and they took off into the other hallway. They headed for the side door through which Mary Rooney had just escaped.

At the storage locker, Griffin wrestled his gun hand free and gave Dr. Friedman a ferocious shove, knocking him on his ass. “The fuck is the matter with you?!” he shouted at the dentist, wiping foam from his eyes. He turned back to the locker door and pawed at the lock. There was more pounding from inside the locker, frantic now, and the voices were changing, rising in pitch and intensity. There was panic inside the locker, the situation in there was changing, something was happening, and it wasn’t good.

Griffin shouted at the door. “Ironhead! You got my key! You got my key, shithead!”

From inside the locker, there were sounds of a struggle and a body slammed up against the door, hard. Griffin stumbled back. Something else hit the door, something heavy, maybe another body, and the door dented outward. The struggle seemed to intensify, the shouting and screaming accompanied by unfamiliar sounds now: a low gurgle, a wet slap, the sound of a Samsung Premium Ultra 4K smashing into a million tiny pieces.

And then it went quiet.

Griffin and Dr. Friedman just stared at the door for a long moment.

“Ironhead?” Griffin asked, sotto voce.

There was no answer.

“Cedric?”

Nothing.

But then the door lifted an inch. A shadow moved inside. And with the soft scrape of metal on cement, a key slid out from inside.

Ironhead’s voice came from the other side, calm now. “Griffin?”

Griffin didn’t answer.

“You there? Griffin?”

Griffin picked up the key. He looked at Dr. Friedman.

Ironhead’s voice came from the other side of the door again, a low chuckle. “All’s cool, man. Just got a little hairy there for a second.”

They didn’t answer.

“Hello? Griffin?”

Griffin hesitated.

“You there?”

Griffin and Dr. Friedman just looked at each other, no idea what to do.

Ironhead spoke again. “Griffin? Griff?”

Griffin turned back to the door. He had waited thirty-one years for someone to use his self-chosen nickname. Hearing it was a balm on his soul.

He put the key in the lock.

Twenty-Eight

Roberto answered the phone on the first ring. “I’m a minute and a half out.”

Abigail replied, puzzled. “I had you there six minutes ago.”

“Bit of a snag. I worked it out. I’m just west of the Missouri River and about to make the turn onto White Clay Road. What have you got?”

“I got a hold of Stephanie.”

“And?”

“The name of the guy at ADF-E is Ozgur Onder. He’s not on duty right now.”

“Shit.”

But Abigail wasn’t done. “Better than that. He’s in bed with her, at her place. And he can redirect a KH-11 from his laptop.”

Roberto closed his eyes and promised God that if this worked out, he would never take His name in vain again. “Goddamn!” You know, after tonight. “That’s great. Will he do it?”

“He’s not happy, but he’s doing it. Apparently, it’s something he’s done before, to impress her. On their third date, he grabbed video of them in front of her house, waving up at the sky.”

“Our national security is in good hands. I hope he got laid.”

“It would seem.”

Roberto slowed, his headlights revealing the entrance to a long gravel driveway through a break in the tree line up ahead. “Do we have visual yet?”

“Yes. Nine minutes left of a look-down before we lose orbital view and control passes off to Canberra.”

“Anybody leave the place?”

“One, a little over a minute ago. A woman, late sixties, driving a late-model Subaru Outback. Do you want the license number?”

“If she was able to drive a car, I’m not worried about her. Let it go. Anybody on foot, I need to know immediately.” He turned into the driveway and approached the crest of a hill. He could see the lights of the storage facility glowing just over the rise. He slowed. “I’m pulling into the driveway now. You have Ozgur live?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Stay with him. Anything you know, I need to know, when you know it.” He reached up to his earpiece to end the call, but then had another thought. “Hey, Abigail?”

“Yes, sir?”

“You know what I have to do, right?”

“Yes, I do, sir.”

“You’re okay with that?”

She paused. “I read the white paper, sir.”

There were good, smart young people out there. Roberto hoped they’d get to stick around to be good old people. It wasn’t so bad, being old. As long as you were with the right person. But better not to think of Annie right now. Don’t tug on that thread, the whole sweater’ll come apart and you won’t do what needs to be done.

“Tell me quick what you found out about the people inside,” he said. Abigail told him what she knew, he made mental notes of what he could remember, and wrapped it up.

“I’ll have to use my cell. That means Jerabek will know I’m here and he might get curious. Watch your back.”

“I always do, sir.”

Roberto hung up. Over the crest of the rise now, he saw the front entrance of the storage place, sticking out from the hillside like a fat lip. Up at the top of the hill, just to his right, he saw a car pulled over at the side of the drive, its trunk hanging open. Not a good sign. In its trunk he thought he detected a slight phosphorescent glow, and traces of more of it scattered out on the hillside behind it. It was faint, damn faint, and he could have easily been wrong about it, but he had a feeling he wasn’t.

Down at the bottom of the drive, a Honda Civic and half a dozen Harleys were parked in front of the main entrance. He turned off his headlights and pulled to a stop a hundred feet short of them. He was halfway between the entrance and the car with the open trunk.

He took a breath, let it out slowly, and got out of the van.

Twenty-Nine

Teacake and Naomi banged through the broken side door of the building, took a sharp right turn, and ran toward the parking lot. “My car’s right here!” Teacake shouted. Naomi could hear his voice, just barely, over the ringing sound in her right ear, but her left ear was still dead. They raced along the side of the building, triggering the motion-detector lights all along the upper part of the wall as they ran. They came around the front, past the Harleys, and were just reaching Teacake’s Honda when a halogen beam flicked on and a commanding voice shouted from fifty feet away.

“STOP.”

The order was clear, and the voice was the kind you don’t argue with, so without even thinking about it, they stopped. They turned toward it, raising their hands in the air.

The flashlight beam was brilliant, piercing, and they both winced, blind to whoever was behind it. There was another light coming from the same spot, and this one was a sharp red beam. Teacake looked down and saw the laser dot right over his heart. As he watched, it flicked over to Naomi and centered up on her chest.

Shoes crunched on gravel as the figure walked toward them, cautious. As the man drew closer and came into the light, he slipped the flashlight into his belt but still held the gun on them. He had a pair of green, owl-like goggles on his head, but not down over his eyes. He was holding an M16 with a laser scope.

Naomi spoke first. It came out more of a shout, as she could barely hear herself. “Roberto?”

Roberto stopped. “Naomi?”

Teacake wiped more blood from his dripping, injured ear. “Do you mind?” he said, gesturing down at his chest, where the red dot had recentered itself over his heart. “I’ve had about enough of fucking guns pointed at me, okay, fucker?!”

Roberto lowered the rifle. “And you must be the other guy.”

Teacake looked around the parking area, the driveway, the hillside. “Where’s the rest of your crew, man?”

Roberto took a moment. “I’m it.”

“You’re it?” Naomi shouted.

Roberto looked at Teacake. “Why is she shouting?”

“Gunshots. A .45, next to her ear. I think she can hear a little bit in the right.”

Roberto looked at the building. “Who’s got a gun in there?”

“So far, everybody but us.”

Roberto nodded and hoped Trini still knew how to pack.

WHAT WAS ESPECIALLY SWEET ABOUT THE MINIVAN WAS THAT BOTH the side doors could slide open electronically, and the back hatch went up too. Teacake had been singularly unimpressed by the white Mazda when Roberto first led them toward it—“You gotta be kidding me, they sent one guy, and he’s in a fucking Hyundai or whatever?”—but he’d come around as soon as the doors opened and he saw the array of military crates inside. The first one Roberto opened held one of the hazmat suits, neatly folded, with its dead-faced helmet staring up at them like a Scream mask. The next several cases were standard Navy SEAL gear: a tactical vest, Ka-Bar knife, Heckler & Koch machine pistol, sniper rifle, half a dozen breaching charges for removing iron doors that might stand in the way, and a surprising number and variety of MREs. Trini was a mom, and she worried about people getting hungry.

But there’s nothing that really catches your attention like a nuclear weapon. Naomi’s eyes had fallen on the half-barrel-sized backpack immediately, and its obvious age, military origin, and strange shape gave it away as the joker in the deck. “What the hell is that?” she’d asked. But Roberto declined to answer right away, arming up instead.

Given all that had transpired in the past four or five hours, they required very little bringing up to speed. Roberto told them what he knew about the fungus, and they were already perfectly aware of its lethality. After Roberto was satisfied that they were both uninfected, there was a brief period of debate during which he unconvincingly offered them the chance to leave. But that argument had collapsed under the weight of reality—there were now as many as seven infected humans inside the storage facility. The three of them out here, three of the only people on the planet who had seen Cordyceps novus in action firsthand, were the ones who truly understood the need to eradicate it right here and now. And Roberto couldn’t be in two places at once. The only way to pull off his plan was with someone upstairs, making sure no infected bodies left the building, while the others went back down to sub-level 4.

“Back downstairs?” Teacake asked. “Are you crazy? To do what?”

Roberto reached in and pulled the pack forward, feeling his back twinge again. How long would it take him to learn that leaning at bizarre angles and trying to move heavy weights was a bad idea, from an orthopedic standpoint? This time he felt the pain shoot out from his sacroiliac and radiate all the way down his right leg, a hot searing feeling that reached his big toe. The muscles of his lower back, having voiced their objection, released their hold on his spine after a few seconds. But their point had been made. Roberto bent his knees and dragged the pack carefully to the edge of the cargo area. He stopped and thought for a long moment. There was no escaping reality. He could bob and weave for as long as he wanted, but eventually it was going to punch him in the face. He decided to stop dancing with it.

He turned and looked at Teacake and Naomi. “You’re going to have to place the device.”

Naomi, who had most of the hearing back in her right ear, picked up that part clearly. She stared down at the half-barrel shape. “What kind of device?” she asked.

“Think of it as a big bomb.”

“How big?” Teacake asked.

Roberto gave it to them straight. “Point-three, five, ten, or eighty kilotons. It has a selectable yield.”

Naomi closed her eyes, her fears confirmed, but Teacake went through the motions of pretending he had not seen that one coming. “It’s a nuke?! A fucking suitcase bomb?”

“No, it isn’t a suitcase bomb,” Roberto said, irritated, as he strapped on the tactical vest. “There’s no such thing as a suitcase bomb. What kind of invading ground force carries suitcases?”

“Dude, you know what I mean. It’s a—”

Roberto cut him off. “Yes. It is.” He turned to Naomi. “You asked if we had a contingency plan. This is it. You saw how that fungus spreads. How fast and how far and how lethal. A group of us have spent thirty years thinking about this. Precautions have been taken. Arrangements were made. This is the only way.”

Teacake looked at Naomi, who seemed calm, but he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You’re gonna kill everybody in eastern Kansas.”

“We’re not going to kill anyone. Detonation will be hundreds of feet underground. This immediate area will be irradiated, and they’re gonna sell a lot of bottled water around here for the next twenty years, but there will be no atmospheric fallout, and the problem will be solved. Once everything sorts out, we’ll all get awards. Let’s just hope they aren’t posthumous.”

“You’re out of your goddamn mind,” Teacake said.

“No. He’s right.”

Roberto smiled at Naomi, strapping the Ka-Bar knife to his thigh. She’d sounded smart when he talked to her on the phone; he was glad it was true. He turned to Teacake and looked him up and down. “How much can you deadlift?”

“I don’t know. Two hundred?”

Roberto looked doubtful.

“What? Is that too much?”

“We’ll find out,” Roberto said. “You two are going to carry this down to sub-level 4 and activate the triggering mechanism. I’ll show you how. I’m going to stay up top and remove any infected organisms that try to escape the area prior to detonation.”

“‘Remove’?” Naomi asked. She knew, but she asked anyway.

“I’m going to kill them,” he said. “I’m going to execute people whose only crime is that they were exposed to a deadly fungus. Would you rather do my part of the job or yours?” They didn’t answer. Roberto continued. “After you start the timer, you’ll have between eight and thirteen minutes to get back up here, get in the van, and get at least half a mile away.”

“Eight to thirteen?” Naomi asked.

“The timer duration is unstable without a mechanical wire.”

Teacake was aghast. “So it could blow up at any fucking time?!”

Roberto looked at him and repeated himself, keeping his tone neutral. “The timer duration is unstable.”

Teacake looked at the backpack, incredulous. “What did they used to say to the poor fucking grunts they sent out with these?”

“‘Tell your parents that you love them.’”

“And they still did it? Blew themselves up?”

“No, Travis, no one did it. These were never used. You would have heard about that in school. But people were willing to do it, because they thought the future of the world depended on it. Which it does. Right now.” He picked up the Heckler & Koch, slapped a fresh magazine into it, and straightened, using every inch of his height advantage over Teacake in an attempt to inspire. “E-3 Seaman Meacham, you’re what I’ve got right now, and frankly it’s more than I expected. You were on a ballistic sub, so you’re no dummy, and you know at least the fundamentals, if you weren’t too stoned in recruit training. I suspect you’re a much better soldier than the ‘General Discharge, Honorable Conditions’ they gave you. C’mon, Squid, why don’t you prove it tonight?”

Travis looked at him, stunned. “How’d you know—?”

“We had your first names and your place of business, these aren’t state secrets.” He turned to Naomi. “I know you’ve got a child at home, Ms. Williams. But that pack is fifty-eight pounds, and Travis can’t get it down the tube ladder by himself, not safely. Can you shoot a gun?” She nodded, sort of. Roberto took a Glock 19 from an open case, loaded it, and turned it around, offering it to Naomi handle first. “Travis will have his hands full, so you’ll watch both your backs. You’ve got a twelve-shot magazine, a trigger safety here, and a thumb lock over there. You need to flip both of them to pull the trigger. Once you’ve pulled, each shot requires another pull, but the safeties won’t re-engage unless you take your finger off the trigger. Got it?”

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.”

Thirty

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.

Thirty-One

A full hazmat suit weighs about ten pounds, the oxygen tank and breathing apparatus another twenty-one, and the T-41 unit Teacake had strapped to his back was nearly sixty. That meant every step he took, he was moving an additional ninety pounds over his own body weight, give or take. His shoulders ached almost right away as the straps bit into them through the suit, his thighs started to burn after the first dozen steps, and by the time they reached the front door of the building the sweat was running down his neck and into the suit. Naomi had less weight on her back, but the burden of being the sole lookout and guard, coupled with the amount of effort it took to keep turning from side to side in the bulky suit, meant she was expending as much effort as he was. The gun in her hand felt like a stone.

They’d gotten into the suits quickly enough, with Roberto’s help. The idea of climbing back down the ladder in the bulky things was harder to imagine, but they tried not to think too far ahead. Roberto secured the suits around their wrists, ankles, faces, necks, and waists, and showed them how to use the two-way radios in their headsets. He flirted briefly with the notion that he could somehow Bluetooth his cell phone into their headsets but gave up on the idea. There wasn’t much he could have done to help them from this point anyway. He’d shown them both how to arm and activate the T-41, which was fairly straightforward. It had been designed for soldiers in the field to operate under pressure, and simplicity was at its core. That, and fissile fuel that could sustain a nuclear chain reaction.

There was no third suit for Roberto. Teacake had asked why he’d brought two in the first place, and Roberto had just looked at him blankly. “For the same reason I brought two of everything else. What if one breaks?” Roberto would never understand some people.

With that he wished them luck, told them to hurry, and sent them on their way into the building. He watched them walk toward the front doors the way a parent watches his kid walk into a freshman dorm for the first time, thinking of a thousand things he should have said, a million pieces of advice he could have given, and knowing it was too late for all of that. Roberto knew he should be the one wearing the pack. He knew it should be him carrying it down to sub-level 4 himself and, if necessary, waiting there with it to ensure successful detonation, the way he and Trini and Gordon had planned and discussed thirty years ago. And he also knew with complete certainty that he couldn’t. Accepting that reality and trusting two twentysomethings he’d met fifteen minutes ago was the most difficult decision he’d ever made in his life. But he’d had no choice.

Of course, he’d left himself a failsafe. A contingency for the contingency. He hadn’t shared that part with Teacake and Naomi. They had plenty of information already, more than they could probably handle, and the rest would be revealed at the exact moment they needed to know it.

He watched them open the doors and walk into the building, then turned his attention to the parking area in front. Next order of business: make sure nobody goes anywhere. He pulled the Ka-Bar from the sleeve on his thigh and started with Teacake’s Honda Civic, parked on the far right side. He drove the blade deep into the edge of the back right tire and jerked it forward six inches. A puncture would take too long to drain the air and was no guarantee the car couldn’t limp out of the parking lot, but a slash did the job immediately. The tire deflated, and he moved on to the other rear wheel and did the same thing. The car’s chassis dropped a few inches. Anybody who tried to drive it now would be on the rims by the time they turned around, and the axle would snap before they got up the driveway.

The Harleys were easier; he only had to stab and slash one tire on each bike. They maybe could have limped out of the lot with a flat rear, but a flat front would break the fork. Nobody was driving out of this place unless they took his Mazda, and you can have my minivan keys when you pry them from my cold, dead hand.

He’d slashed four of the bikes and had three to go when his cell phone rang. He touched the Bluetooth in his ear to answer.

“You have incoming,” Abigail said.

Roberto straightened sharply and looked around. “Where?”

“Around the corner of the building. Ten seconds. Male, moving fast, major heat signature.”

Roberto turned, taking a few quick steps to his left, toward the front door, far enough to clear the sight line between him and the eastern edge of the building. He pulled the machine pistol from a holster on his hip and flipped the safety off with his right thumb. With his left hand he reached up and pulled down his thermal imaging goggles, which activated with a hum and a whir, showing the landscape in vivid purple-and-orange-tinted images. He didn’t need the goggles for light; there was plenty to see by, and more streamed around the corner of the building as the motion sensor lights went on, triggered by whoever was running toward him.

What Roberto needed was heat detection. When he’d first put on the goggles and looked at the hillside, the bits of fungus scattered there had glowed a warm red, and traces of that same red were visible in the open trunk of Mike’s abandoned car. There was live growth in those areas, and the chemical reactions of the growing fungus gave off heat. If he could see the heat, he could avoid contact with the fungus and could get a quick read on whether a human being was infected. It would be pleasant to avoid killing innocent people. If possible.

Roberto’s eyes stung at a sudden blast of harsh yellow inside the goggles, every last cone in his retinas getting a wake-up call at the exact same moment. He hadn’t fully adjusted when the figure came barreling around the corner of the building, looking less like a human being through the goggles than a blazing, burning, white-hot chunk of melted iron.

That answered the infection question.

“Get this shit off me!” the figure screamed.

Roberto didn’t pause to wonder how the man in motorcycle leathers had come to be completely covered front and back in mutating fungus yet still remain in possession of his faculties. He just aimed the machine pistol, pulled the trigger, and put five rounds in the center of Dr. Steven Friedman’s chest.

A Heckler & Koch machine pistol has a short-recoil action, meaning the barrel moves back sharply, rotates the link, and causes the rear of the tube to tip down and disengage from the slide. It’s a hard, jerking motion, and its effect on the shooter is usually mitigated by putting a stabilizing hand on the front handle. Because he’d had so little reaction time and he needed his left hand to pull down and activate the goggles, Roberto had been forced to fire the gun with one hand. That in itself was no big deal, all it meant was that his right elbow needed to be snugged up against his right hip to reduce uncontrolled movement. He’d made that firing maneuver dozens of times in the field and at the range.

But he’d never done it at the age of sixty-eight.

His body absorbed the first three recoils without incident, but on the fourth one his back rebelled. The spasm was sudden and fierce, the low back tissues seizing up and sending a red alert throughout his nervous system. The recoil from the fifth shot, which Roberto’s brain had already ordered before he could countermand it and remove his finger from the trigger, finished the job.

A blinding pain lit itself on fire in his back and lower extremities, and Roberto’s legs went out from under him. He collapsed, hitting the ground just a second after Dr. Friedman did, the difference being that the dentist’s problems were over for good and Roberto’s were just beginning. He landed on his side and rolled helplessly onto his back, staring up at the stars overhead. He knew immediately, the way you know, that he hadn’t just pulled something, he’d torn it in half. Could be ligaments, could be tendons, or maybe he’d ruptured a disk. Whatever it was, it didn’t matter.

What mattered was that he couldn’t move.

Thirty-Two

A few 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.

Thirty-Three

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 CO₂ that 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.

Naomi, indeed, had problems of her own. Climbing down with two hands had been difficult enough with no suit, but now she faced all the same obstacles as Teacake, plus she was clutching a fully loaded Glock 19. She’d had to climb every rung with her left hand, while her right held the gun free. That meant her left arm, her weaker arm, had been doing all the work, and it already burned so badly she almost couldn’t feel it.

And then there was her hearing. She was still deaf in her left ear, and the ringing in the right, though it had abated, intensified whenever the radio frequency was activated. It was as if the suit was deliberately trying to mute everything Teacake said, raising the level of the ringing to obscure his words, then going back down when he was silent.

But his second shouted “I can’t see!” had gotten through—clearly enough, anyway—and she shouted back, “Why not?”

“Sweat. Fogged up. Can you?”

“Yeah. Mostly.”

“How much farther?” he asked.

She paused, wrapping her left arm through the rungs of the ladder, bending her torso back and to the right as much as she possibly could, and strained her eyes all the way to the edge of her mask. “About fifty rungs. Maybe less.”

“Okay.” He kept climbing down.

Naomi’s left arm shook violently, and she knew she’d have to take a chance and switch gun hands. She pulled her right arm up and reached behind the rungs, to pass the gun to her left. It clanked against the rungs and she lost her grip on it. Her hand lashed out, pinning the gun against the wall. She was no longer holding it; she was just sort of trapping it there with pressure.

Teacake must have heard the clank and he asked her something in the headset, but it was lost to her under the ringing sound. She ignored him, eyes focused on the gun, still held tenuously up against the cement wall of the tube. She stretched out the fingers of her left hand, got one of them through the trigger housing, and pulled her right arm free. The gun spun over, upside down, held up only by her left index finger. She readjusted her grip on the ladder, now with her freed right arm, and slowly withdrew her left from behind the ladder.

She closed her left hand around the handle of the gun and moved that arm free of the ladder. Blood flowed through her left biceps again, washing away enough of the built-up acid to give her some amount of relief. She closed her eyes, grateful. She looked down. Teacake was about ten rungs below her. She continued her descent.

Thirty-Four

Flat on his back, Roberto stared up at the sky. This is why, he thought. This is why I didn’t take the backpack. In case this happened. God, I hate being right all the time.

There weren’t as many stars out as before; heavy clouds had blown in and obscured them, making the night darker. He looked up at the heavens and wondered if the satellite look-down window was still open, if the thing was somewhere overhead right now. Were Ozgur Onder and his girlfriend, Stephanie, watching him at this very moment on Ozgur’s laptop, sitting up in bed, wondering why the hell the guy who fired the gun was just lying there on his back, not doing anything?

Being right was little comfort to Roberto, given his current position. Initially, he’d thought he was paralyzed from the waist down, but after a minute or two some of the tingling had eased, replaced by intense, paralyzing pain in the lower half of his body. Getting up was out of the question, as were crawling, rolling, and any other form of locomotion he could think of. He was on his back with his head near the front door of the building, and if he turned it to the left—which was only possible with its own unique hell of shooting pain—he could see Dr. Friedman’s dead body on the ground five or six feet away from him.

Okay, Roberto thought. Okay. He counted breaths to steady himself. I’m here now. I’m here now.

He was still wearing the thermal imaging goggles, and he could see that the dense amount of thick fungus on the dead man’s body was very much alive and quite industrious. The churning ooze was already moving off the corpse to explore its environment, but it seemed to have slowed as soon as it hit the gravel on the ground beneath him. Slowed, but not stopped.

Roberto heard a chirping sound from nearby and his eyes searched the area around him. His Bluetooth had been knocked out when he hit the ground, and lay about five feet from him, lighting up with a soft blue glow as it rang. It would be Abigail, calling in to say, “What are you doing, man? Why don’t you get up?” But getting himself five feet across the gravel to answer a phone call was beyond his capabilities.

Roberto turned his head again, this time craning it backward, digging the back of his skull into the gravel as hard as he could and rolling his eyes up, to get a look at the entrance to the building. It was upside down, but he could see it. The lights were on inside, and he could hear screaming and shouting. No one appeared to be coming out, at least not yet, and he wasn’t sure what he would do if they did.

He looked down at the ground and saw the machine pistol, just a foot away from his right hand. A foot. Twelve inches. That was maybe possible. He dug his fingers into the gravel, summoned himself, and clawed toward it. His upper body moved an inch and a half, and he screamed in agony. His vision blurred and doubled, and he felt himself nearly pass out.

But then it cleared, and he was an inch and a half closer.

He raised his eyes, looking at the three still-operative Harleys, leaning on their kickstands, awaiting their riders.

Nobody leaves.

Roberto dug his fingers into the gravel again, repeated the motion, screamed again, and felt the darkness nearly descend.

Nearly. But not quite. Nine inches to go.

He would get to the gun or pass out trying.

BACK IN THE HALLWAY OUTSIDE G-413, GRIFFIN HAD PIVOTED FROM Dr. Friedman as soon as the dentist had disappeared around the corner. He pointed the gun at Ironhead and Cuba, swinging it wildly from one to the other. “Stay the fuck away from me the fuck away from me stay the fuck!” he’d managed to spit out, though they were making no attempt to advance on him.

Cuba raised her hands and spoke first. “Easy, man.”

“Yeah, come on, Griff,” Ironhead chimed in soothingly. “We’re all in the same boat here.”

Griffin looked at the locker behind them, its walls, ceiling, floor, and TV boxes covered with pulsating globs of fungus. “What boat, what the fuck kind of boat, what fucking boat are you fucking talking about?! What the fuck is going on?!”

Ironhead took a step forward, his hands up, palms out, and his tone calm. “Definitely some strange what-have-you taking place here, my friend, I know. You weren’t even in there, man.”

“That was horrible,” Cuba added, and she meant it.

It’s okay, her brain told her. Everything’s fine. Better if you all just get out of here.

“What do you say we all get out of here?” she suggested.

“Yeah, no shit we’re leaving! You first!” Griffin said, gesturing with the gun. “You go ahead of me!”

“Sure, man, no problem,” Ironhead said. He turned and looked at Cuba, nodded his head toward the entrance, and started walking that way. She fell into stride beside him.

Ironhead was cool. Best he’d felt in a long time. That dude behind you is crazy, his brain told him. Don’t do anything to upset him. He doesn’t know up from down. Let’s just go.

They kept walking. As they reached the corner, Griffin looked back over his shoulder, at the mess in the hallway, and the greater mess oozing out of the storage locker. Forget figuring out what was going on, none of it made any sense, he just wanted to get gone. He turned back to the front and watched Ironhead and Cuba as they walked ahead. There was something on the backs of their necks, or in the backs of their necks, maybe. The skin was mottled and moving, pulsating from underneath. He didn’t care what they did once they got outside, but for himself, he was getting on his Fat Boy and putting as many miles between him and this place as he possibly could. If anybody got in his way, they were going down.

Ahead of him, Ironhead and Cuba were calm. They weren’t thinking much, but the thoughts they had were clean and focused. Cordyceps novus was a quick study and had modulated its technique with enormous success in the last twenty-four hours. The singular urge to climb that had been effective as a means of escape from sub-level 4 had proven less useful in the case of Mr. Scroggins, who blew his guts at the top of a tree for relatively little payoff. Mike Snyder, on the other hand, had proven the vastly superior dispersal possibilities available in lateral movement, and the minicolonies of the fungus that had sprung up in human beings needed only to find others like themselves to ensure maximum spread and reproduction.

Though it can’t think in those terms, or think at all, per se, a fungus knows what works and what doesn’t, and it pursues the former as vigorously and completely as it disregards the latter. Climbing houses and trees was out. Spreading further into the human population was in.

Ironhead and Cuba were completely at peace, focused on one goal: leave.

Go to town, their brains told them. Ride out of here and into town. Where more people are.

They rounded another corner. Up ahead, the fluorescent lights of the lobby were visible. They headed toward them.

Thirty-Five

The floor of the sub-basement thunked into the bottom of Teacake’s boot. Didn’t see that last step coming this time either. He stepped off the ladder and wedged himself back against the wall of the tube as far as he could get, but it wasn’t far enough to clear any room for Naomi to join him. “Hang on,” he said into his helmet.

Naomi winced at the screech and crackle in her ear and couldn’t make out the words, but she caught the meaning. She stopped and turned, looking down. She could see Teacake at the bottom, but the half-barrel-shaped pack was so big he could barely turn around, much less move enough to make room for her. Opening the pack and activating the device in that tiny space was out of the question.

“You’re going to have to open the door,” she shouted into her microphone.

An enraged, inarticulate screech came back from Teacake, but she understood perfectly well what it meant: under no circumstances would he open that door. She proceeded on that assumption and replied, “There’s no room to take that thing off!”

Teacake looked up at her through the thickly clouded face mask. He could see the white blur of her suit and her arm, extended, pointing toward the heavy metal door. He turned, tried shaking his head in the hope that some beads of sweat would fly off his face, hit the mask, and streak paths through the condensation. It worked, sort of, and a tiny ribbon was wiped clear, just enough for him to get a sense of where the large handle was that would release the door mechanism. He reached out and gripped it. If he hadn’t been wearing the hazmat gloves, Teacake would have felt the heat immediately, and there’s no way in hell he would have opened the door. But through the thick plastic layer, he couldn’t tell there was any difference.

On the other side of the door, the situation had changed radically in the past ten minutes. The trail of fungus that had been creeping across the floor from the depleted mass of the Rat King had reached the small puddle of water on the floor beneath one of the sweaty cooling pipes. Throughout its entire history as a species, Cordyceps novus, in all its mutated forms, had never run across pure H₂O. From its birth inside a sealed oxygen tank, through its brief childhood in the arid Australian outback, and even in its recent experiences inside the bloodstream of human bodies, water had been a rare and heavily diluted substance. Even in abundance, inside a mammal, it was corrupted by other elements, its essential power limited.

The moment the fungus broke the surface tension of the water molecules at the edge of the puddle, it had undergone a profound and spectacular blossoming. It bloomed into the puddle like a time-lapse film of a flower in springtime, it shot up the rivulet that had run down the wall within a matter of seconds, and it attacked the outside of the sweaty overhead pipe with fervor. It grew along the length of the pipe in both directions, sprouting and dripping onto the floor in great gobs of living organism. Everywhere it contacted the pipe, it set to work with great industry, deploying copious amounts of Benzene-X, now a steel-eating acidic substance determined to chew through the pipe and free the flowing waters within. Once it broke through, it would open the way for the fungus to spread like wildfire through the pipe, into the groundwater and then the Missouri River beyond.

As the chemical reactions raged, the temperature in the hallway had risen. It topped 80 degrees when Teacake turned the handle on the door. The interlocking metal bolts slid out of their guide tracks, and the door swung inward.

“Holy Jesus Christ,” he said, looking into the hothouse, now dense with active, visible growth. Aerosolized bits and spores hung and swirled heavily in the air all around him.

Through Naomi’s headset, all she heard of his voice was a tooth-grinding shriek. But she saw what he saw and had no interest in pausing to admire it. She spun Teacake around, shouting into her microphone, “Unbuckle the front straps!”

He set to work with fumbling hands to undo the leather straps and get the T-41 off his back so they could activate it and get the hell out of there. The buckles on the bottom came off easily enough, and his shoulders seemed to float as Naomi lifted the weight off from behind. He fell forward, his upper body surging with relief, and for a moment he felt like he was flying. He could hear the backpack thud to the cement floor behind him, and he stumbled forward against the tube wall, staring in disbelief at the gurgling mass of fungus covering the walls and floor of the hallway. He could hear the snap of the leather and the rustle of canvas as Naomi opened the pack in the way Roberto had demonstrated.

“Son of a bitch!” she said.

Teacake pushed himself against the wall and turned around. Naomi was on her knees, bent over the backpack. Its top was opened, a tangle of belts, ropes, and buckles dripping off its sides. There were enough warning stickers plastered to the inside of the lid to scare off all but the most dedicated kamikaze soldier. Nestled on the padded bottom of the pack was an impossibly antiquated-looking pair of metal tubes lying side by side. There was a small square box beside each of them, a neutron generator, and a red fitted cap at one end of each, the “bullet” that would fire into the tube’s fissile core. There was a snarl of wires that led from the explosive caps to a thing that looked suspiciously like an on/off switch, set in its downward position. It seemed like it could be maneuvered manually if necessary, but it was also connected by a web of wires to a small, square digital timer.

The timer was the problem. It was set at four minutes and forty-seven seconds.

And it was already counting down.

Naomi looked up at Teacake.

“The son of a bitch started it!”

Thirty-Six

Upstairs, the son of a bitch sincerely hoped they’d reached the bottom, opened the pack, and seen the timer by now. He’d hated to do it to them, but there really was no other choice. They’d looked strong and fit, and if they’d made it this far through the night without dying, he’d figured, it was reasonable to think they’d be resourceful enough to get themselves out in time. He truly believed that.

Or maybe he’d just decided to believe it.

As for himself, things didn’t look promising. He finally had his fingers on the butt end of the machine pistol, but the darkness kept creeping in around the corners of his consciousness every time he moved. The kind of pain he’d experienced in moving his body twelve inches across the gravel had been entirely new to him, an intensity of discomfort he hadn’t dreamed possible. Still, he’d managed to get his hand on the gun, and with one last superhuman effort he brought it up, off the ground, aiming it unsteadily at the last three motorcycles and squeezing the trigger. The Heckler & Koch could hold magazines of either fifteen, thirty, or forty rounds, but Roberto didn’t know which was in at the moment. There’s no way Trini would have left him with just fifteen, but the forty had an extra couple of inches that made the gun harder to maneuver, so he was betting on thirty.

The first two-shot burst collapsed the front end of the first bike, which toppled over into the second. As the second bike fell away from him, he closed one eye and aimed for its rear tire, but on its side, it now offered a more slender angle. It took three shots for him to be certain that bike was disabled, and when it fell it left a clear path to the third bike. That one was farthest away, and the thermal imaging goggles weren’t helpful with no heat coming off the thing, so he sprayed four shots along the length of the Harley to be sure it was left unusable. If his count was true, he had used fourteen shots, which left him with sixteen for anybody who came out the door.

Behind him, he heard voices. He arched his head back again, digging the back of his skull into the gravel and looking at the door to the lobby, upside down through the heat-vision goggles. He blinked the sweat out of his eyes and could make out figures coming this way—a man and a woman in front and someone behind them. They’d heard the gunshots and were running.

The man and woman were infected. They glowed red hot, not quite as vivid as Dr. Friedman had been, but clearly alive with mutating fungus. The figure behind them looked normal, but the angle of his arm suggested that he had a gun. Roberto sucked in his breath, and with a great groan of pain, he flopped the machine pistol over onto his chest. Gritting his teeth so hard he thought he might crack a molar, he slid the gun up the length of his body and over his left shoulder, trying to get the barrel as far away from his ear as possible. That wasn’t very far, maybe six inches at the most.

The lobby door swung open, inward. The man was in front of the woman, a blurry red-hot target, almost impossible to miss. Roberto knew that as soon as he fired, the others would start to disperse, so it was going to have to be three very short and precise bursts of gunfire rather than one long one. He squeezed the trigger as the first man came out the door.

Ironhead’s chest exploded and he staggered back, into Cuba. That was a bad bit of luck for Roberto, as it meant his aim was obscured and he’d need to take a moment to wait for another clean window. He found it quickly, as Cuba moved to the side, against the doorframe, burdened by Ironhead’s weight as he fell, dead, into her. Three shots had been spent on Ironhead, and four more ought to take out Cuba quickly enough.

Two of them hit her, but the gun’s recoil triggered a spasm of hideous pain in Roberto’s back. His hand twitched and the gun jumped to the side. The other two shots hit the doorjamb, shattering the lower hinge and sparking off its metal surface. One of the slugs ricocheted back at Roberto, slamming into the dirt just a few inches from his face.

Ironhead and Cuba fell backward, out of his line of fire, but the few seconds he’d used to adjust his aim had given the third guy time to flee. Griffin was on the move, heading for the front desk, and was nearly there already. Roberto sucked his breath in, held it, and fired unsteadily at Griffin as he vaulted over the counter. Roberto counted seven shots, all of which went wide of their mark, smashing through the broken drywall behind the counter but missing Griffin. Somehow, the lucky bastard had threaded the needle; he’d made it over the counter unhurt and landed on the other side, out of harm’s way.

Shit. Roberto had just used, to the best of his knowledge, twenty-eight shots, which left just two in the clip. There was an armed man who had taken cover behind a wooden counter that completely obscured him. And Roberto still couldn’t get off the ground.

The situation was less than ideal.

Roberto blinked as something pattered onto the lens of the goggles. He looked up at the sky, and a few drops of water appeared in his field of vision, accompanied by a low rumble somewhere in the distance.

It was starting to rain.

Hearing a sound from his left, Roberto turned and looked over at the body of Dr. Steven Friedman. The green globules of fungus were swelling outward off his dead flesh, ballooning up as the raindrops hit them, as if activated. Cordyceps novus greeted the rain with unbridled joy. The fungal mass, re-energized, dripped off the dentist and moved, expanding across the gravel driveway on the light carpet of water that the rain was laying down.

It moved toward Roberto.

Thirty-Seven

Teacake and Naomi had both stepped in smears of active fungal colonies when they were in the main hallway of sub-level 4. It would have been impossible not to, even if they had been aware that Benzene-X had the adaptive capability to eat through the thick rubber soles of the boots. The bottoms of all four of their boots were alive with that process even now, as they made their frantic way back up the tube ladder. They didn’t know it, but they had less than a minute to get out of the suits before Benzene-X finished its work and the fungus would be able to pass through and make contact with their flesh.

That wasn’t the only clock they were on. As soon as they’d seen that the timer on the T-41 was already activated, the only thing left for them to do was to get the hell back upstairs and get out. Teacake was livid, cursing Roberto with every step, but Naomi saw the logic behind what he’d done. They’d had limited time to do the job, he couldn’t take the chance that they’d fail to activate the device correctly, and so he’d made a judgment call. All he really needed them for was transportation and placement of the device anyway, and he’d gambled they had a better chance of getting it down there quickly than he did. And, more important, that they could get back up even faster. Tactically speaking, it made sense.

Teacake fairly flew up the ladder, fifty-eight pounds lighter than when he’d climbed down. Naomi, who still had to hold the gun in one hand, was a bit slower, but only a dozen rungs behind him. She looked up and could see the small round circle of light where they’d removed the manhole cover. They climbed fast, both running mental timers that told them they had at best three minutes to get in a car and get a survivable distance away from the underground blast.

Whatever the hell that was going to be like.

Teacake got to the top and pulled himself up through the manhole cover with all the grace of a dog climbing out of a swimming pool. He got the bulk of his body up onto the floor, rolled over on his back, and unzipped the neck area of his hazmat suit, ripping the helmet off his head. The burst of fresh air was great, but having clear vision again was even better. He slid his body over, clearing the way for Naomi to come up through the manhole, and he started wriggling out of the suit, rolling it down over his torso and hips.

Naomi came out of the hole a few seconds later, and the first thing she saw was the moving green ooze on the bottoms of Teacake’s boots. She gasped and shouted, but he could only hear her muted voice from inside her mask. He got the gist, though—there was something on his boots—and he didn’t bother to look, just moved even faster, wriggling desperately to get the suit and the contaminated boots off him. Naomi shouted louder from inside her mask, and this time he could hear her. “What are you doing?! You can’t take it off!”

“We’ll never get out of here in these things! Take yours off!”

She saw his point—they were hard enough to walk in, forget running. She rolled herself the rest of the way out of the hole, pulling off her helmet. Teacake, freed from his suit, got the hell away from it and its contamination and moved over to her. Avoiding her boots, he ripped the suit off her as fast as their combined efforts would allow. She kicked the suit away, got to her feet, and they took off down the hallway in their socks.

Downstairs, there was less than two minutes showing on the timer.

But Roberto’s voice floated through Naomi’s mind as she ran.

“The timer duration is unstable,” he’d said.

Thirty-Eight

In front of the building, the rain was falling harder now, and the creeping fungus was bubbling across the gravel in lively fashion, only a foot or two from Roberto. Through the thermal imaging goggles, he saw it as a blazing white foam, headed right for him. He turned his head and looked toward the lobby entrance again. The shooter was still out of sight, hidden somewhere behind the front counter, but Roberto had a more immediate concern. And an idea. His eyes went to the front door, the lower hinge of which had been shot off by the errant rounds he’d fired at Cuba. The glass door was hanging at an angle, held in its frame by just its upper hinge now. The door was designed to open inward, and Roberto was lying directly in front of it. Or at least he hoped he was.

He glanced over at the advancing fungus, which was dancing exuberantly in the falling rain. It was only a foot or so from his left hand now, and Roberto took a breath and dragged his arm closer to his body. The movement produced a stabbing pain that radiated all the way down his left leg and caused his foot to spasm, which in turn produced a fresh round of torment. But that gave him a few more seconds.

He looked back up at the top door hinge, tilted the barrel of the gun upward, steadied his aim on it as best he could, and prayed he’d counted the shots correctly.

He had.

The two remaining rounds tore into the metal of the top hinge, blasting it off the doorframe, and the glass door fell over like a domino, straight toward him. Roberto closed his eyes as the heavy door whooshed downward, slamming into his body hard. He screamed underneath the heavy glass as his body torqued unnaturally, but he made use of the moment of agony, dragging himself to his right as far as he could so that the door settled on top of him at an angle.

Its left edge bit into the gravel; it sloped upward over his left arm, hip, and leg and angled out at its top edge, like a lean-to. It now lay like a shield between him and the advancing fungus.

And just in time. The fungus oozed up onto the doorframe, slithering and spreading over the glass just above Roberto. Benzene-X got down to business immediately, trying to decipher this new silicon-based barrier and how it might burrow its way through it.

Roberto hadn’t bought much time, but a little was better than nothing.

Inside the lobby, Griffin poked his head up over the counter. Whoever was out there shooting at him, he’d heard their gun go dry with a series of soft clicks. Griffin didn’t so much care if the guy lived or died, he just wanted to get out of there before he ended up dead like everybody else. He’d seen the pile of trashed Harleys so he knew that was a no-go, but whoever that was, lying out there, they had to have gotten here somehow. Which meant they had car keys.

Griffin straightened, holding his gun in front of him, and headed for the space where the front door had been. He stepped over the bodies of Ironhead and Cuba, trying not to look at them, instead keeping the gun trained on the figure beneath the glass door. Somehow, the dumb shit had managed to miss him with an automatic weapon, and in his last desperate act the guy had shot a door off its hinges and pinned himself beneath it. Joke’s on you, motherfucker.

Griffin stepped through the door and looked left and right, to make sure there was no one else outside. He saw Dr. Friedman’s dead body, covered with the same bizarre foam that had been spattered all over the inside of the storage locker. Griffin shuddered: Teacake had been right, there was some zombie shit going on here, all right, and he needed out, fast. He double-checked the bikes, confirmed they were all down and unusable, and then spotted the minivan parked a little way up the hill. It must belong to the shooter trapped under the door.

“Hey, fucker!” Griffin said, and Roberto squirmed, turning his head slightly to look up at him. Griffin edged closer, the gun shaking in front of him. He’d kill this guy if he had to; he’d kill anybody who got in his way now. Griffin came around to the side, staring warily at the green ooze that was moving over the glass, just a few inches above the guy’s face.

Roberto looked up at him. His eyes asked for help, but he wasn’t saying so. Wouldn’t matter if he did, Griffin thought. Fuck you I’m gonna help you. This is some every-man-for-himself kind of shit going on here. He squatted down and shoved his hand inside the guy’s right pants pocket, feeling around for his car keys.

Roberto screamed in pain at the movement. Griffin didn’t care—the others were all dead, and he didn’t plan on joining them. He felt the fob of the car keys and yanked them out. Still squatting, he turned and pointed his gun at Roberto’s head. The last thing he needed was this guy surviving the night by some miracle and pointing a finger at him in a courtroom and saying, “That’s him, Your Honor, that’s the guy who left me to die.” Griffin wasn’t sure what crime that would be exactly, but why take chances?

“Don’t look at me!” he shouted, and stiffened his arm, aiming the gun at the center of Roberto’s forehead.

“Griffin!”

The voice called from behind him, a woman’s voice, and Griffin turned. It was her, the hottie; somehow she’d come back. She had a gun too, but she wasn’t bothering to point it at him, it was dangling at her side. “We have to get out of here!”

Griffin looked at her, cold.

Well, you know what? She was gonna have to go too, and that little shit Teacake along with her, because he wasn’t taking any chances with any more semi-infected motherfuckers. Once a life-or-death situation starts, you gotta play it out, all the way down the line. And was she or was she not coming at him with a gun? Those two had to go. If that made him an asshole, so be it.

Griffin started to stand, springing out of his crouch. The barrel of his gun, which had been just underneath the lip of the glass, caught there, just by an inch or so and only for a second, but combined with the force of his rapid rise, it was enough to tip its aim downward, pointing it straight at the ground. The sudden unpredictable movement in his hand caused Griffin to tense up his grip, and he blasted off a shot as he stood up.

Straight into his foot.

Griffin screamed as an angry fire erupted in his foot, and he hopped up, to take the weight off. He lost balance, windmilled his arms, and toppled over onto his right side. His gun hand pinned beneath him, the barrel pressed against his chest, the thick, fleshy weight of his torso crushed his fingers, and the gun fired again. This time, the bullet went into his heart.

In this way, Darryl Griffin became the latest in a long line of Homo sapiens killed not for being an asshole, but by being an asshole.

Teacake turned away and saw the green foam on the glass, just over Roberto’s face. He ran to the fallen door, dug his fingers underneath the edge, and flipped it off, freeing him.

Roberto shouted up at them. “Car keys are in his hand!”

Naomi clawed the keys out of Griffin’s exposed left hand and looked back at Roberto. “Get up!”

“I can’t. Drag me.”

Figuring he’d been shot but knowing there was no time to dwell on it, they each grabbed him by an arm and dragged him, screaming, up the short driveway to the minivan. The heat-vision goggles had fallen off Roberto’s head, but he didn’t need them to see the fungal growth anymore. As they hauled him up the hillside, he could see the forest floor lit up with its glowing green tendrils, spreading rapidly in the now-heavy rain.

They reached the minivan and threw him into the back, producing more screams. Teacake jumped in beside him, Naomi slid behind the wheel, and she started the engine.

Teacake shouted at Roberto, “You started the timer on us!”

“I knew you could get out.”

“You did not know that!”

“But you did.”

“But you didn’t know!”

“But you did.”

Naomi dropped the van in reverse, threw her arm over the seat, and floored it, backing up at top speed. “Guys, shut up.” She reached the top of the driveway, spun the wheel, and the minivan slid around, almost knocking Roberto and Teacake out the still-open side door. “How much time do we have?” she asked Roberto.

He turned his head, painfully, and looked at the timer that he’d set on his watch when he first activated the device. It was at –1:07 and counting. “It should have gone off a minute ago.”

Naomi dropped the van in drive and they took off, down White Clay Road and toward the highway. For a moment, nobody spoke.

Finally, Naomi did. “Well. The timer is unstable. You said.”

“Yep,” Roberto replied.

They drove. Still nothing. No bright light, no tremors in the earth, no fire and brimstone. Nothing.

“How will we know if it goes off?” Teacake asked.

“You’ll know,” Roberto said. He looked at his watch again: –1:49.

Naomi drove, fast. They rode in silence, waiting.

Every second seemed to take forever, and Teacake’s vivid imagination went to work. He had time to imagine three possible scenarios, each more vivid than the last. In the first scenario, the T-41 failed to detonate. The pipes in the basement buckled under Cordyceps novus’s assault within a few minutes, and the fungus exploded in growth, billowing through the water in the pipes, flowing into the groundwater and eventually into the Missouri River. Within a matter of days, the powerful waterway would be converted to a carpet of solid green fungal matter, which would spread over the surrounding lands, unchecked and unstoppable, rewriting the rules for life on the planet and bringing about a Sixth Extinction, a mass die-off that this time would include all human and animal life on Earth.

So that one was pretty bad.

In the second scenario, Teacake imagined the blasting caps went off and the device detonated as planned. But a few hundred feet underground wasn’t nearly deep enough for a nuclear explosion, and in this version, he imagined the explosion erupting out of the ground, billowing up into the sky in a massive mushroom cloud just like the ones he’d seen in movies and on TV. The poisonous cloud of radiation would blow eastward on prevailing winds, spreading death and disease over the eastern half of the United States.

Admittedly, this scenario wasn’t as bad as the first one, but it wasn’t a lot of fun either.

The third scenario was Teacake’s favorite, and it was for this that he now prayed to a God he didn’t believe in. In this version, the blasting caps went off, better late than not at all, exploding inward on the metal tubes and beginning the process of nuclear compression. The chain reaction commenced, producing an outpouring of heat somewhere between 50 million and 150 million degrees Fahrenheit. The sub-basement and the layers of rock closest to the backpack would be vaporized instantly, forming a crater into which the entire contents of the storage facility would collapse.

All the unneeded furniture, the contents of homes that would never be reoccupied, the pack-rat hoardings of a thousand unhappy people, the stolen Samsung TVs, Mrs. Rooney’s twenty-seven banker’s boxes filled with her children’s school reports and holiday cards, her forty-two ceramic coffee mugs and pencil jars made at Pottery 4 Fun between 1995 and 2008, her seven nylon duffel bags stuffed with newspapers from major events in world history, and even her vinyl Baywatch pencil case stuffed with $6,500 in cash she was saving for the day the banks crashed For Real—all of it, all the junk in all the sealed boxes in all the lockers, some of their contents long forgotten, all the shit, shit, shit, shit—all of it would melt, collapsing downward into the cavity, forming a rubble chimney that would swell upward.

From ground level, Teacake imagined, a perfectly round crater might emerge, sucking the entire facility and the hillside all around down into it in a matter of seconds, as if it were on some giant round elevator, as if God had pushed the Down button and called everything back inside Mother Earth to be reconfigured, repurposed, used another day for a greater end. The fungus itself would be incinerated, Teacake thought, burned off the face of the planet for good, and as the explosion settled, a harmless cloud of dirt and dust would rise up, all that was left of the Atchison Storage Facility and this fucked-up night.

And in the end, two minutes and twenty-six seconds behind schedule, that was exactly what happened.