DAVID KOEPP is a celebrated American screenwriter and director best known for his work on Jurassic Park, Spider-Man, Panic Room, War of the Worlds and Mission: Impossible. His work on screen has grossed over $6 billion worldwide.

Cold Storage

David Koepp

An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

Copyright

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2019

Copyright © David Koepp 2019

David Koepp asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Ebook Edition © September 2019 ISBN: 978-0-008-33452-9

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FOR MELISSA, WHO SAID, “YEAH, SURE!”

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Dedication

Prologue

December 1987

One

Two

Three

Four

March 2019

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

The Next Four Hours

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

The Last Thirty-Four Minutes

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

Thirty-Five

Thirty-Six

Thirty-Seven

Thirty-Eight

Afterwards

Thirty-Nine

Acknowledgments

About the Publisher

Prologue

The world’s largest single living organism is Armillaria solidipes, better known as the honey fungus. It’s about eight thousand years old and covers 3.7 square miles of the Blue Mountains in Oregon. Over eight millennia it has spread through a weblike network of lines underground, sprouting fruiting bodies above the earth that look like mushrooms. The honey fungus is relatively benign, unless you’re an herbaceous tree, bush, or plant. If you are, it’s genocidal. The fungus kills by gradual takeover of the root system and moves up the plant, eventually choking off all water and nutrients.

Armillaria solidipes spreads across the landscape at a rate of one to three feet per year and can take thirty to fifty years to kill an average-sized tree. If it could move significantly faster, 90 percent of all botanic growth on Earth would die, the atmosphere would turn to poison gas, and human and animal life would end. But it is a slow-moving fungus.

Other fungi are faster.

Much faster.

December 1987

One

After they’d burned their clothes, shaved their heads, and scrubbed themselves until they bled, Roberto Diaz and Trini Romano were allowed back into the country. Even then they hadn’t felt entirely clean, only that they had done everything they could, and the rest was up to fate.

They were in a government-issue sedan now, rattling down I-73 just a few miles from the storage facility at the Atchison mines. They followed close behind the open-air cargo truck in front of them, tight enough that no civilian vehicle could get in between them. Trini was in the front passenger seat of the sedan, her feet up on the dashboard, a posture that always infuriated Roberto, who was behind the wheel.

“Because it leaves footprints,” he told her, for the hundredth time.

“It’s dust,” Trini replied, also for the hundredth time. “I wipe it right off, look.” She made a half-assed attempt to wipe her footprints off the dashboard.

“Yeah, but you don’t, Trini. You don’t wipe it off, you kind of smear it around with your hand and then I wipe it off when we return it to the pool. Or I forget and I leave it, and somebody else has to do it. I don’t like making work for other people.”

Trini looked at him with her heavy-lidded eyes, the ones that didn’t believe half of what they saw. Those eyes and what they could see were the reason she was a lieutenant colonel at forty, but her inability to refrain from commenting on what she saw was the reason she’d go no further. Trini had no filter and no interest in acquiring one.

She stared at him for a thoughtful moment, took a long drag off the Newport between her fingers, and blew a cloud of smoke out the side of her mouth.

“I accept, Roberto.”

He looked at her. “Huh?”

“Your apology. For back there. That’s why you’re bitching at me. You bitch at me because you don’t know how to say you’re sorry. So I’ll save you the trouble. I accept your apology.”

Trini was right, because Trini was always right. Roberto said nothing for a long moment, just stared out at the road ahead.

Finally, when he could, he muttered, “Thank you.”

Trini shrugged. “See? Not so bad.”

“I behaved badly.”

“Almost. But not quite. Seems like pretty small potatoes now.”

They’d talked endlessly about what had happened in the four days since it had all started, but they were pretty much talked out now, having relived and re-examined every moment from every conceivable angle. Except for this one moment. This one had gone unspoken, but now they were speaking about it, and Roberto didn’t want to leave it that way.

“I didn’t mean with her. I meant the way I talked to you.”

“I know.” Trini put a hand on Roberto’s shoulder. “Lighten up.”

Roberto nodded and stared straight ahead. Lightening up did not come easily to Roberto Diaz. He was in his midthirties, but his personal and professional accomplishments had raced ahead of his chronological age because he never lightened up, he Got Shit Done. He ticked boxes. Head of class at the Air Force Academy? Tick. Major in the USAF by the age of thirty? Tick. Superb physical and mental conditioning with no obvious flaws or weaknesses? Tick. Perfect wife? Tick. Perfect baby boy? Tick. None of this could be accomplished through patience or passivity.

Where am I headed?, where am I headed?, where am I headed?, Roberto would ask himself. The future was all he thought about, planned for, obsessed over. His life moved fast, it stayed on schedule, and he played things straight.

Well. Most things.

They both just stared at the truck ahead of them for a while. Through the canvas flap over the rear gate they could see the top of the metal crate they’d flown halfway across the planet. The truck hit a pothole, the crate slid back a foot or so, and they both sucked in their breath involuntarily. But it stayed settled in the back. Just a few more miles to the caves and this would be over. The crate would be safely stashed three hundred feet underground till the end of time.

The Atchison Caves were a limestone mine back in 1886, a massive quarry that went down 150 feet under the Missouri River bluffs. They started out producing riprap for the nearby railroads and dug as far down as God and physics would allow, until the pillars of unmined rock that held the place up reached the very outside limit of any sane engineer’s willingness to sign off on their safety. During World War II the empty caverns, now a sweet eighty acres of naturally climate-controlled underground space, were used to house perishables by the War Food Administration, and eventually the mining company sold the whole space to the government for $20,000. A couple million dollars in renovations later, it had become a highly secured government storage facility used for disaster and continuity of government planning, storing impeccably machined tools in a state of well-oiled readiness, set to ship them anywhere, any time, only please God let there be a nuclear war first so this was worth all the money.

It would be worth it today.

The call had been a weird one from the first ding. Technically, Trini and Roberto were with DNA, the Defense Nuclear Agency. Later it would become part of DTRA, but that particular government mishmash wouldn’t be cobbled together until the Defense Department’s official reorganization in 1997. Ten years earlier they were still DNA, and their brief was simple and clear: stop everybody else from getting what we have. If you smell a nuclear program, find it and wreck it. If you get a lead on some nightmarish bioweapon, make it go away forever. Expense will not be spared; questions will not be asked. Two-person teams were preferred, to keep things compartmentalized, but there was always backup if you needed it. Trini and Roberto rarely needed it. They’d been to sixteen different hotspots in seven years and had sixteen liquid kills to their names. Kills were not literal; it was agency-speak for a weapons program that had been neutralized. But there had been casualties along the way. Questions were not asked.

Sixteen missions, but none remotely like this one.

THE USAF TRANSPORT HAD ALREADY BEEN WARMING UP AT THE BASE when they bounded up the stairs and came on board. There was only one other passenger, and Trini took the seat directly opposite her. Roberto sat across the aisle, in a backward seat also facing the bright-eyed young woman in well-worn safari gear.

Trini held a hand out to her and the young woman took it. “Lieutenant Colonel Trini Romano.”

“Dr. Hero Martins.”

Trini just looked at her, nodding and popping in a piece of Nicorette, taking Hero’s measure, unafraid to hold silent eye contact while she sized her up. It was disconcerting. Roberto just gave Hero a half salute; he never enjoyed playing the whole I-see-right-through-you game.

“Major Roberto Diaz.”

“Nice to meet you, Major,” Hero said.

“What kind of doctor are you?” Roberto asked.

“Microbiologist. University of Chicago. I specialize in epidemiological surveillance.”

Trini was still looking at her. “That your real name? Hero?”

Hero hid her sigh. It was a question with which she was not unfamiliar after thirty-four years. “Yes, that’s my real name.”

“Hero like Superman or Hero like in Greek mythology?” Roberto asked.

She turned her gaze to Roberto. That was a question she didn’t hear nearly as much.

“The latter. My mother was a classics professor. You know the story?”

Roberto looked up, squinting his left eye and staring into the space just above and to the right of his head, the way he did when he was trying to pull an obscure fact out of his brain’s nether regions. He found the nugget of information and dragged it up out of the swamp.

“She lived in a tower on a river?”

Hero nodded. “The Hellespont.”

“Somebody was in love with her.”

“Leander. Every night he’d swim the river to the tower and make love to her. Hero would light a lamp in the tower so he could see his way to the shore.”

“But he drowned anyway, right?”

Trini turned and stared at Roberto, her displeasure plain. Roberto was good-looking to an irritating degree. The son of a Mexican father and a California blonde mother, he radiated good health and had a head of hair that would last forever. He also had a smart and funny wife named Annie, whom Trini actually found tolerable, which was saying something. Yet he’d been on this plane all of thirty seconds and was clearly trying to charm this woman. Trini had never picked her partner for a jerk before and hoped he wouldn’t turn out to be one now. She watched him, chewing her gum like she was mad at it.

But Hero was engaged. She kept on talking to Roberto, ignoring Trini.

“Aphrodite became jealous of their love. One night she blew out Hero’s light, and Leander was lost. When she saw he had drowned, Hero threw herself out of the tower to her death.”

Roberto took a moment and thought about that. “What exactly is the moral there? Try to meet somebody on your side of the river?”

Hero smiled and shrugged. “Don’t piss off the gods, I guess.”

Trini, weary of their banter, glanced back at the pilots and spun a finger in the air. The engines immediately whined, and the plane started to move down the runway with a jerk. Subject changed.

Hero looked around, concerned. “Wait, we’re going? Where is the rest of your team?”

“You’re looking at us,” Trini said.

“Are you—I mean, are you sure? This might not be something we can handle on our own.”

Roberto conveyed Trini’s confidence, but without the edge. “Why don’t you tell us what it is,” he said to Hero, “and we’ll let you know if we think we can handle it.”

“They told you nothing?” she asked.

“They told us we’re going to Australia,” Trini said, “and that you’d know the rest.”

Hero turned and looked out the window, watching as the plane left the earth. No turning back now. She shook her head. “I will never understand the army.”

“Me neither,” Roberto said. “We’re in the air force. Seconded to the Defense Nuclear Agency.”

“This isn’t nuclear.”

Trini frowned. “They sent you, so I assume they suspect a bioweapon?”

“No.”

“Then what is it?”

Hero thought about that for a second. “Good question.” She opened the file on the table in front of her and started talking.

Six hours later, she stopped.

WHAT ROBERTO KNEW ABOUT WESTERN AUSTRALIA COULD FIT INTO A very small book. More of a flyer, really: one page and with large type. Hero told them they were going to a remote township called Kiwirrkurra Community, in the middle of the Gibson Desert, about 1,200 kilometers east of Port Hedland. It had been established a decade earlier as a Pintupi outstation, part of the Australian government’s ongoing attempts to allow and encourage Aboriginal groups to move back to their traditional ancestral lands. They’d been mistreated and cleared out of those same territories for decades, most recently in the 1960s as a result of the Blue Streak missile tests. You can’t very well be living on land that we want to blow up. It’s unhealthy.

But by the midseventies the tests were over, political sensitivities were on the rise, and so the last of the Pintupi had been trucked back to Kiwirrkurra, which wasn’t even the middle of nowhere, but more like a few hundred miles outside the very outer rim of nowhere. But there they lived, all twenty-six Pintupi, as peaceful and happy as human beings can be in a stifling desert without power, telephone lines, or any connection to modern society. They rather liked being cut off, in fact, and the elders in particular were pleased with their return to their ancestral lands.

And then the sky fell.

Not all of it, Hero explained. Just a chunk.

“What was it?” Roberto asked. He’d been holding eye contact with her throughout the brief history so far, and don’t think for a second Trini didn’t notice. In fact, she was glaring at Roberto, as if psychically willing him to stop.

“Skylab.”

Now Trini turned her head and looked at Hero. “This was in ’79?”

“Yes.”

“I thought that fell into the Indian Ocean.”

Hero nodded. “Most of it did. The few pieces that hit land fell just outside a town called Esperance, also in Western Australia.”

“Close to Kiwirrkurra?” Roberto asked.

“Nothing is close to Kiwirrkurra. Esperance is about two thousand kilometers away and has ten thousand residents. It’s a metropolis by comparison.”

“What happened to the pieces that fell in Esperance?”

Hero turned to the next section of her notes. The pieces that fell in Esperance had been, rather enterprisingly, scooped up by the locals and put in the town’s museum—formerly a dance hall, but quickly converted to the Esperance Municipal Museum & Skylab Observatorium. Admission was four dollars, and for that you could see the largest oxygen tank from the orbiter, the space station’s storage freezer for food and other items, some nitrogen spheres used by its attitude control thrusters, and a piece of the hatch the astronauts would have crawled through during their visits. A number of other chunks of unrecognizable debris were also put on view, including a piece of sheet metal that rather suspiciously had the word SKYLAB neatly lettered in undamaged bright red paint across its middle.

“For years NASA assumed that was all that would ever be found, as the rest of it either burned up on re-entry or is at the bottom of the Indian Ocean,” Hero continued. “After five or six years, they figured anything else on land would have turned up by then or was somewhere uninhabitable.”

“Like Kiwirrkurra,” Roberto offered.

She nodded and turned another page.

“Three days ago, I got a call from the NASA Space Biosciences Research Branch. They’d gotten a message, relayed through about six different government agencies, that someone was calling from Western Australia because ‘something had come out of the tank.’”

“What tank?”

“The extra oxygen tank. The one that fell on Kiwirrkurra.”

Trini sat forward. “Who called from Western Australia?”

Hero looked down at her notes. “He identified himself as Enos Namatjira. He said he lived in Kiwirrkurra and his uncle had found the tank in the dirt five or six years earlier. Uncle had heard about the spaceship that crashed, so he moved it in front of his house and kept it there as a souvenir. But now there was something wrong with it, and he was getting sick. Quickly.”

Roberto frowned, trying to piece it together. “How did this guy know what number to call?”

“He didn’t. He started with the White House.”

“And it got through to NASA?” Trini was incredulous. Such efficiency was unheard of.

“It took him seventeen calls, and he had to drive thirty miles to get to the phone every time, but yes, he finally got through to NASA.”

“He was determined,” Roberto said.

“He was, because by that time, people were dying. They finally put him in touch with me about a day and a half ago. I do work for NASA sometimes, inspecting their re-entry vehicles to make sure they’re clear of any foreign bioforms, which they always are.”

“But you think this time something came back?” Trini asked.

“Not quite. This is where it gets interesting.”

Roberto leaned forward. “I think it’s pretty interesting already.”

Hero smiled at him. Trini tried not to roll her eyes.

Hero continued. “The tank was sealed, and I highly doubt that it could bring anything back from space that it wasn’t sent up with. I went through all the Skylab files, and on the last resupply it seems this particular oxygen tank had been sent up not for O₂ circulation, but solely for attachment to one of the outer pod arms. There was a fungal organism inside the tank, a sort of cousin of Ophiocordyceps unilateralis. It’s a cool little parasitic fungus that can adapt from one species to another. Known to survive extreme conditions, a bit like Clostridium difficile spores. You know those?”

They looked at her blankly. Knowledge of Clostridium difficile was not a requirement in their line of work.

“Well, they’re pernicious. They can survive anywhere—inside a volcano, bottom of the sea, outer space.”

They just looked at her, taking her word for it. She went on. “Anyway. The sample in the tank was part of a research project. The fungus had some peculiar growth properties and they wanted to see how it was affected by conditions in space. Remember, it was the seventies, orbital space stations were going to be the next big thing, so they needed to develop effective antifungal medications for the millions of people who were going to go live up there. But they never got the chance.”

“Because Skylab crashed.”

“Right. So, after five or six years sitting outside in front of Enos Namatjira’s uncle’s house, the tank started to rust. Uncle wanted to spruce it up a little bit, make it shiny and new again, maybe people would pay to come see it. He tried to remove the rust, but it was resistant. According to Enos, his uncle tried a number of different cleaners, finally using a folkloric solution: cutting a potato in half, pouring dish soap on it, and rubbing it on the surface of the tank.”

“Did it work?”

“Yep. The rust came off easily, and the thing shined up. A few days later, Uncle got sick. He started to behave erratically, not making a great deal of sense. He climbed onto the roof of his house and refused to come down, and then his body started to swell uncontrollably.”

“What the hell happened?” Trini asked.

“From this point forward, everything I say is hypothesis.”

She paused. They waited. Whether Dr. Martins was aware of it or not, she knew how to tell a story. They were transfixed.

“I believe the chemical combination that Uncle used dripped through microfissures in the tank’s exterior and landed inside, where the dormant Cordyceps fungus was rehydrated.”

“With the potato stuff?” Roberto wondered. Didn’t sound very hydrating.

She nodded. “The average potato is seventy-eight percent water. But the fungus wasn’t just rehydrated; it was given pectin, cellulose, protein, and fat. And a nice place to grow. The average temperature in the Western Australian desert at this time of year is well over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Inside the tank, it’s probably closer to a hundred thirty. Deadly for us, but perfect for a fungus.”

Trini wanted to get to the point. “So, you’re saying the thing came back to life?”

“Not exactly. Again, I’m speculating, but I think it’s possible the polysaccharide in the potato combined with the sodium palmitate in the dish soap to produce a pro-growth environment. Normally, they’re both large, boring, inert molecules, but you put them together, you might have some good unpredictable fun. Don’t blame Uncle; I mean, the guy was trying to produce a chemical reaction.”

She was getting warmed up now—her eyes shone with the intellectual exercise of it all—and Roberto couldn’t help it, he couldn’t tear his eyes away from hers.

“And he did?”

“He sure the fuck did!”

Lord, she swore too. Roberto smiled.

“But I don’t think either the polysaccharide or the sodium palmitate was the underlying change agent.”

She leaned forward, as if telling the punch line to a joke that everyone was absolutely going to love.

“It was the rust. Fe₂O₃.nH₂O.”

Trini spit her gum into a tissue and popped in a fresh piece. “Do you think, Dr. Martins, that somewhere inside you lurks the capacity to summarize?”

Hero turned to Trini, her demeanor matter-of-fact again.

“Sure. We sent up a hyperaggressive extremophile that is resistant to intense heat and the vacuum of space, but sensitive to cold. The environment sent the organism into a dormant state, but it remained hyper-receptive. At that point, it must have picked up a hitchhiker. Maybe it was exposed to solar radiation. Maybe a spore penetrated the microfissures in the tank on re-entry. Either way, when the fungus returned to Earth it was reawakened and found itself in a hot, safe, protein-rich, pro-growth environment. And something caused its higher-level genetic structure to change.”

“Into what?” Roberto asked.

She looked from one to the other of them, the way a teacher looks at a pair of slightly dim students who refuse to grasp the obvious. She spelled it out for them.

“I think we created a new species.”

There was silence for a moment. Since it was Hero’s theory, she claimed naming rights. “Cordyceps novus.”

Trini just looked at her. “What did you tell Mr. Namatjira?”

“That I needed to check some things and he should call me back in six hours. He never did.”

“What did you do then?”

“Called the Defense Department.”

“And what did they do?” Roberto asked.

She gestured. “Sent you guys.”

Two

The next six hours of the flight passed in relative silence. As they flew over the western coast of Africa and night fell, Trini did what she always did on the way to a mission, which was to take sleep when it was available. She also never passed an available bathroom without using it. It was the little things. Limit your needs. Hero got tired of looking at Trini’s boots on the seat next to her, so when the plane was mostly dark, she got up, climbed over her, and crossed the aisle to Roberto’s side.

“Do you mind?” she whispered, gesturing to the empty seat next to him. He did not mind. Not in the slightest. He shifted his legs, giving her room to squeeze through, and she made herself as comfortable as possible, settling into the seat next to him. The ostensible reason for the move was that this new seat would give her a place to put her own legs up, but she could have done that in the other seat, Roberto figured. Maybe the real reason had something to do with the slightly furtive eye contact they’d been making since she’d finished the briefing, but it worked better for him, psychologically anyway, if he assumed the obvious was the case, while knowing full well it was not.

The things you tell yourself.

The absolute truth was that Roberto was much less than innocent in this situation. He’d felt an immediate attraction to Dr. Hero Martins, and though it was the last thing in the world he would ever act on, he needed to know that the old charm was still there when he needed it. He and Annie had been married for just about three years, and it had been a rough start. Work was overwhelming for both of them in the first year, Annie had gotten pregnant much sooner than they intended, and the pregnancy was a difficult one, forcing her to stay in bed for the last four or five months of it. That’s hard enough for anybody, but Annie had been a perpetual motion machine; she was a journalist and accustomed to life on the road. Home confinement felt like a punishment. Then the baby came, and it was, you know, a baby.

That was pretty much it for their easy years. Where were the just-us years, where was the blissful early marriage time when we enjoyed our youth and beauty and freedom and each other, and where, as long as we’re talking, was the sex, for God’s sake? Roberto hated being this particular cliché, the married dude who laments the post-baby sex life wipeout, but still. He was a human male in the prime of his life. It was difficult, at this point, for him to picture himself and Annie making it to their emeritus years together. Not at this rate.

But he loved her. And he didn’t want to cheat.

So he flirted. He’d never really been good at it when it counted, but something about not wanting it to lead anywhere made it easier. Roberto surprised himself with the ease with which he could talk to attractive women at this point in life and how positively they responded to him. A stable and unattainable man with a job in his midthirties was a lot different from a twenty-four-year-old grunt with a hard-on and a tongue tied in knots.

It played neatly into Hero’s own predilections and preference. Since the end of her overlong, overly tortured post-college relationship with Max, a man-child doctoral student more or less her own age, she’d had a thing about married men. Not a thing for married men—that would suggest a certain amoral craving, doing a thing because it was bad, not doing it in spite of it being bad. No, Hero had a thing about married men, i.e., a personal rule or guideline, based on all the obvious advantages, which she had laid out in a notebook one day during an exceptionally dull class on laser micromachining. The advantages were, in order of importance:

1 They tended toward the adult in demeanor, having embraced life’s changes by showing a willingness to marry and some concept of shared existence, which by definition involved compromise and other-directed thinking.

2 They were usually better in bed, not just from volume of experience, but from repeated experience with the same woman, which couldn’t help but lead to a sense of how to give pleasure as well as receive, unless they were complete narcissists, which was usually unlikely, given reason 1.

3 They were polite and grateful and didn’t leave a lot of shit on the floor, having been housebroken for at least a few years by an adult woman not their mother.

4 They had somewhere to go, usually within a reasonable time frame after sex, which freed up her evenings for work.

5 They were, by definition, unable to pursue an exclusive relationship, which left her free to do as she liked, on the off chance something better came along.

Hero knew perfectly well that there were many, many reasons that did not work in their favor, that did not speak to the good character of the married lover, which she neatly summed up in a single item on the facing page of her journal:

1 They’re cheaters.

And so was she, and she knew it. She didn’t cheat on them; she never had multiple lovers—one romantic complication at a time was more than enough in her life. And she wasn’t cheating their unlucky spouses, by her estimation, because she didn’t know them and had never promised them anything. The only person she was cheating was herself, by hanging out with a succession of people who it seemed, by the very nature of their relationship, did not know how to love.

Still, here she was, and here Roberto was, and here they were, possibly headed to their own doom (rationalize much?), and there surely could be no harm in making a little pleasant, life-affirming conversation with a handsome soldier in his midthirties who clearly had a thing for her. The fact that he wore a wedding ring was a total coincidence.

While Trini slept, Roberto and Hero stretched their legs out on the seats in front of them, reclined as far as they could, and whispered to each other. They weren’t tired—the frisson in the air between them was too invigorating—so they talked about his life, with the exception of his wife and kid, and they talked about hers, with the exception of her romantic history with Guys Like Him. They talked about her work, and about his, and the dangers he’d faced, and the exotic and frightening places she’d been in search of new microorganisms. And as they talked, they slid lower and lower in the seats, and their heads inclined ever so slightly closer together, and when the cabin took on a bit of a chill somewhere over Kenya, Roberto got up, found a couple of harsh wool blankets in the storage cabinet nearby, and they snuggled underneath them.

Then she scratched her nose.

And when she put her hand back down, it was on the seat between them, her little finger brushing against the outside of his right thigh. He felt it, and she left it there. Another twenty minutes went by, another twenty minutes of effortless, breathy talk, none of it with even the whisper of impropriety to it, and the next move was his, which he made by shifting in his seat, theoretically to stretch his stiff legs, but when he put them back up on the seat in front of him, his leg was now fully pressed against hers, and she returned the pressure almost immediately. Neither of them spoke of it; neither of them acknowledged it in any way. If you listened to their conversation, you could assume they were two colleagues from slightly different fields who had met at a professional conclave and were having the most innocent, upstanding, and rather boring conversation in the world.

But she never moved her hand, and neither released the pressure in their legs. They knew. They just weren’t saying.

After a while, Hero stretched and stood up. “Bathroom.”

He pointed toward the back. She smiled thanks, squeezed out of the row, and walked off toward the rear of the plane.

Roberto watched her walk away. Inside, he was panicked, and had been for several hours. He couldn’t quite believe what was happening. None of his relatively innocent flirtations had ever gone nearly so far, and it was like sliding into a mud-slicked hole that he couldn’t climb out of. Every movement he made only pulled him deeper in, and when he didn’t move it was worse, gravity took over and pulled him down.

And he liked it. He was angry, not getting what he wanted or deserved at home, and why not this woman, this brilliant, beautiful creature who asked so little of him and found him so fascinating and was clearly, genuinely interested in him? Why not, other than the fact that it was completely wrong? Or maybe it wasn’t even happening. Maybe the pressure of her hand and leg had easily explainable and innocent reasons behind them—she probably hadn’t even noticed, for Christ’s sake—and he was letting his overactive sex drive run away with his rational mind, as usual.

Or maybe it was happening, and maybe he wanted it to. Maybe he would get up, wander to the back of the plane, talk to her some more there, and if her eyes happened to linger on his for a few seconds longer than they ought to, he’d kiss her. Maybe that’s exactly what he’d do. Maybe that’s what he’d get up and do right now.

Roberto summoned every bit of resentment he could find, every ounce of righteous indignation he’d acquired over three frustrating years of marriage, and he stood up.

That’s when he felt the hand on his arm.

He turned. Trini was awake, staring up at him, the fingers of her strong right hand clamped around Roberto’s left forearm.

Roberto looked down at her, his face turning into a poorly rendered mask of utter innocence. Trini just looked at him, her penetrating gaze bright even in the dim cabin light.

“Sit down, Roberto.”

Roberto’s mouth opened, but no words came out. He wasn’t a very good liar, even worse at wholesale invention, and rather than stammer out something stupid, he just closed his mouth again and shrugged an I don’t know what you’re talking about shrug.

“Sit down.”

Roberto did. Trini leaned over and put a hand on the back of his neck.

“That ain’t you, kid.”

Roberto felt a hot flush rise in his cheeks—anger, embarrassment, and thwarted desire sending any spare blood to his face on the double. “Stay out of it.”

“My advice exactly.” Trini kept staring.

Roberto looked away. He felt humiliated and wanted to make her feel the same. He turned back to Trini. “Jealous?”

He’d wanted to lash out, and he did; he’d wanted to hurt, and he hit the target. Trini’s face fell, ever so slightly, less in wounded pride than in disappointment.

Trini had been on the other side of her first and only marriage for ten years already, and the fact that she’d ever married in the first place was remarkable in itself. The marriage fell apart not because of the travel and secrecy required in her line of work, but because of her innate distaste for other human beings. People were okay; she just didn’t like looking at or listening to them. She’d been alone for a decade now and liked it.

In her mind, she’d always thought of her occasional attraction to Roberto as a purely chemical response to his rather overstated good looks. She liked him fine, she enjoyed working with him, she deeply admired his professionalism and the fact that he felt no compulsion toward small talk, but she’d never had any romantic interest in him whatsoever. He was her co-worker. Her incredibly good-looking co-worker. Sometimes even people who don’t like sweets admire a piece of chocolate cake. That’s what it’s designed to do: it’s supposed to look good. So was he. And he did, usually. No big deal. Trini kept it to herself.

But in ’83 she had been in a jeep accident and had broken two bones in her lower back, an exceptionally painful injury that resulted in her subsequent addiction to the painkillers the base physician had liberally prescribed to her. It was at bedtime that Trini liked them best; she’d take one an hour before bed and then nod off into drifty opiate sleep, feeling like nothing hurt, and not only that, even more than that, nothing ever would hurt, then or ever again. And where else in life can you get that assurance?

The addiction dug in and grew. It went on for nearly six months, undetected by everyone except Roberto. He confronted his friend about it and then gave enormous amounts of time, energy, and emotional support to help Trini get clean. Trini insisted on doing it without any other outside help whatsoever, and Roberto agreed to try. Early on, during one of Trini’s worst shaking, sweating, sleepless nights, she’d started to panic, and Roberto had climbed in bed with her and held her, just trying to get her through it all. Trini had looked up at him at one point, told Roberto she was in love with him and always had been, and moved to kiss him. Roberto deflected, told his friend to shut up and go to sleep, and Trini did.

They slept that way all night, and nothing happened. Roberto never told Annie about it, and in fact he and Trini had never spoken of it again themselves.

Until now, when Roberto wanted to hurt her.

Which he had.

From the other end of the plane, the bathroom door closed with a soft click. Hero came out and headed back to her seat.

Trini turned the other way and slouched down to go back to sleep.

Roberto moved to the window, shoved a pillow up against it, pulled the blanket up to his chin, and pretended to be out like a light when Hero got back.

In this way, the three of them flew on to Australia carrying considerably more baggage than they’d left with.

Three

The biohazard suits were uncomfortable as hell, and the worst part, in Trini’s opinion, was that there was nowhere to put a gun. She waved her Sig Sauer P320 around in the air near her hip, flapping her lips inaudibly behind the glass of her face piece.

Hero just looked at her, still puzzled by these soldiers and their inexperience with the very sort of event they’d been sent to investigate. She tapped the buttons on the side of the helmet, and her voice crackled in Trini’s headset.

“Use the radio, please.”

Trini fumbled on the side of her head until she found the right button and pressed it.

“Doesn’t this goddamn thing have a pocket?”

Outside Kiwirrkurra, they had changed into level A hazmat suits, which were fully encapsulating chemical entry suits with self-contained breathing apparatuses. They also wore steel-toed boots with shafts on the outside of the suit and specially selected chemical-resistant gloves. And no, there were no pockets, which would sort of defeat the purpose of the whole thing, providing both a nook and a cranny for God knows what to ride home with you.

Hero decided a simple “No” would suffice to answer Trini’s grumpy question. Trini had sucked down three cigarettes in quick succession after they’d landed—she’d been on Nicorette and the new nicotine patch for the entire flight—and she was wound tighter than the inside of a golf ball. Best to keep one’s distance, Hero decided.

Roberto turned and looked behind them, at the vast expanse of desert they had just crossed. Their jeep had kicked up a massive fantail of dust and the prevailing winds were blowing their way, which meant a few hundred kilometers’ worth of sediment was airborne and swirling toward them.

“Better get started while we can still see,” he said.

They turned and started the walk into town. They’d parked half a mile away and the going was slow in the suits, but they could see the structures that dotted the horizon from here. Kiwirrkurra was a collection of one-story buildings, a dozen at the most, unpainted, a patchwork of colors coming from the cast-off wood and scrap particle board that had been given to the residents by the resettlement commission. As far as planned communities went, it didn’t show much planning—just a main street, structures on either side of it, and a few outbuildings that had been thrown up later, possibly by latecomers who preferred a bit of space between themselves and their neighbors.

The first odd thing they saw, about fifty yards outside of town, was a suitcase. It sat in the middle of the road, packed and closed and waiting patiently, as if expecting a ride to the airport. There was no one and nothing else around it.

They looked at one another, then went to it. They stood around the suitcase, staring at it as if expecting it to reveal its history and intentions. It did not.

Trini moved on, holding the gun in front of her.

They reached the first building, and as they came around the front of it, they saw this one had only three walls, not four, built that way on purpose for maximum airflow in the intensely arid environment. They paused and looked inside, the way you’d look into a doll-house. There were cutaway areas: a kitchen, a bedroom, a bathroom (that room had a door), and another tiny bedroom at the far end of the structure. In the kitchen, there was food on the table, buzzing with flies. But there were no people.

Roberto looked around. “Where is everybody?”

That was the question.

Trini backed away, into the street again, turning in cautious semicircles, scanning the place.

“Cars are still here.”

They followed her gaze. There were cars, all right, just about one per driveway, a jeep or motorcycle or pickup or old sedan. However the residents had managed to get where they were going, they hadn’t driven.

They continued on, past what might have been a playground, more or less in the center of town. An old metal swing creaked on its chain, blowing in the wind that now swept the desert sand and dust into town ahead of it. Roberto turned and squinted into the coming clouds. The sand ticked against the glass of his faceplate, and it was hard not to blink, though of course he didn’t need to.

Another thirty yards and they reached the other side of town. The front door to the biggest house was ajar, and Trini pushed it open the rest of the way, using the barrel of the Sig Sauer. Roberto gestured to Hero to wait on the porch, and he and Trini stepped inside, one after the other, in a practiced maneuver.

Hero waited in front, watching their movements through the open door and the dirty front window. They searched the place, room by room, Trini always in the lead, gun in hand. Roberto was the more thorough and perhaps the more cautious of the two, moving carefully and steadily and never facing in the same direction for too long. Hero admired the grace and ease with which he moved, even in the cumbersome suit. But she also knew there was nothing to fear in there. Everything about Kiwirrkurra so far suggested a ghost town—she was sure of their result before Trini came out a few minutes later and announced it.

“Fourteen houses, twelve vehicles, zero residents.”

Roberto put his hands on his hips, relaxing his guard a bit. “What the actual fuck?”

That was when Hero saw what they’d come for. There, at the far end of town, in front of one of the best kept of the very modest houses, was a silver metal tank, its finish recently polished to a bright and reflective shine.

“I don’t think that’s from here.”

They walked toward the tank, wary. The wind swirled harder, and the dust in the air billowed around the houses, rearing up in columns in front of them before dust-deviling back to the ground in a corkscrew and moving on. It was getting hard to see.

“Stop here.” Hero held a hand out when they were still ten feet from the tank. She scanned the ground around them as best she could in the billowing sand, then continued on, searching the ground carefully before she placed each step.

“Walk in my footsteps.”

They did, following her in single file, careful to place their feet directly onto her boot prints as they went.

Hero reached the tank and squatted down. She saw the fungal covering immediately, but only because of her practiced eye. An untrained observer wouldn’t have perceived anything more than a greenish patch on the rounded surface of the tank, a bit like oxidized copper. The tank wasn’t in pristine condition anyway; it had made an uncontrolled re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere, after all, that’s going to put a few dents in anything. But to Hero, the unremarkable greenish patch read like a semaphore.

Trini looked around them, still with her gun at the ready, just in case. She took a few steps toward the house, watching where she walked. She stopped, studying the building, which wasn’t very different from the other ones. But there was one thing she noticed—the car. An old Dodge Dart, it was parked at an odd angle to the house, its hood pushed almost right up against a porch pillar. The porch had a low-slung, corrugated roof that bent down at an angle, and from where the car was parked it wasn’t a very big step up from the hood to the roof. Trini looked up, thinking.

Back at the silver tank, Hero bent down, pulling her sample case around in front of her. She clicked it open, snapped out a 20x magnifying lens, and squeezed it to activate the LED lights around the edge of the beveled glass. Through the lens, she got a closer look at the fungus. It was alive, all right, and florid, visibly seething even at this magnification. She leaned as close as she dared, looking for active fragmentation. There was movement there, and she wished like hell she had a more powerful magnifier, but twenty power was the most the field kit carried, which meant she had to get closer still.

She looked back, over her shoulder, at Roberto.

“Slide your hand through the loop in the suit between my shoulder blades.”

Roberto looked down. There was a tight vertical flap of fabric sewn into the back of the suit, a handle of sorts, with just enough space to get his fingers through. He did as she asked.

“Now hold on tight,” she said. “I’ll pull against you, but don’t let me go. If I start to fall, give me a hard pull back. Don’t be shy about it. Don’t let me touch it.”

“You got it.”

He held on tight. Hero braced her feet just short of the tank, about a foot away from it, and leaned forward, putting the magnifying glass and her mask as close to the surface of the middle of the tank as she possibly could. Roberto hadn’t expected her to have quite as much confidence in him as she apparently did, and he swayed a little as she let her weight fall forward. But he was strong and recovered quickly, resetting his feet and holding her steady.

The faceplate of Hero’s helmet moved to within three inches of the surface of the tank, she switched the lens to max magnification and close focus and flicked the LEDs to their brightest setting.

She gasped. Through the lens, even at this minimal magnification, she could clearly see fruiting bodies sprouting off the mycelium, stalks with a capsule at the top, swelling at their seams with ready-to-spread spores. The mycelium’s growth was so fast it was visible.

“Jesus Christ.”

Roberto couldn’t see around her bulky suit, and the curiosity was killing him. “What is it?”

Hero couldn’t tear her eyes away.

“I don’t know, but it’s huge, and it’s fast. And heterotrophic; it’s got to be pulling carbon and energy out of everything it touches, otherwise there’s no way it …” She trailed off, staring at something intently.

“No way what?”

Hero didn’t answer. She was fascinated by one of the fruiting bodies. Its capsule was bloating beneath the lens, ballooning up off the surface of the tank.

“This is the most aggressive sporing rate I’ve ever—”

With a sharp pop, the entire fruiting body burst, and the lens of the magnifying glass was flecked with microscopic bits of goo. Hero shouted and involuntarily lurched backward, away from the tank. She was more startled than frightened but lost her balance for a moment and threw her right foot out to the side to steady herself. Her boot squished through something soft before finding solid ground next to the tank, but it was too little too late; she was past the tipping point and on her way down, right into whatever she’d just stepped in. She watched as the ground moved up toward her in slow motion.

And then she was moving upward again. With one strong, controlled tug on the loop at the back of her suit, Roberto pulled her onto her feet next to him.

She looked up at him, grateful.

He smiled. “Careful.”

A voice called from nearby. “Hey.”

They turned. Trini was standing on the roof of the house, about ten feet above them. “I found Uncle.”

It wasn’t much of a climb, even in the suits. First onto the hood of the car, then one big step up onto the porch roof, then a sort of jump with a shoulder roll, and they were all the way up. Roberto went last, so he could give Hero a shove up onto the roof if needed, and he was so preoccupied with making sure she didn’t fall that he failed to notice the sole of her boot, even when it passed within a foot of his face. He would have had to be pretty eagle-eyed to see it anyway, because there wasn’t much of the stuff, but it was there.

Near the heel, between the fourth and fifth hard rubber corrugated ridges of her right boot, there was a smear of green fungus she’d picked up when she lost her balance back at the tank.

Hero scrambled the rest of the way over the edge of the roof, Roberto flipped himself up to join her, and they walked the few paces over to where Trini stood looking down at something. The wind and dust had picked up substantially, so her view was partially obscured, but Trini knew a human corpse when she saw one. This one was in rough shape. Uncle couldn’t have been dead for all that long, but the damage to his corpse was extensive, and it wasn’t postmortem. The flesh wasn’t mangled from the outside, by scavengers or weather.

“He exploded,” Hero said.

Boy, did he ever. What used to be Uncle was now a husk that had been turned inside out, everything internal made external. His rib cage was wrenched open cleanly and violently at his sternum, parted like a suit coat lying on the floor with nobody in it. His arms and legs were denuded of flesh, their bones pockmarked with what looked like more tiny explosions from within, and the plates of his skull had been split apart along their eight seams, as if the glue that held him together suddenly failed all at once.

Roberto, who had seen a lot of ugly things, had never seen anything like this. He turned away, and as he did so the wind let up, the dust cleared for a moment, and all at once he had an unimpeded view looking back the way they’d come. Every building in town was more or less the same height, and from up here on top of Uncle’s house, he could see onto all the other rooftops.

“Oh my God.”

The others turned and saw what he saw.

The rooftops were covered with dead bodies, every single one of them burst open in the same way as Uncle’s.

Roberto didn’t need to count to know there would be twenty-six.

AT THE MOMENT THEY STOOD ON THE ROOF, PIECING TOGETHER WHAT had happened to the residents of the doomed village, the fungus was busily at work between the corrugated rubber ridges of Dr. Hero Martins’s right boot. Cordyceps novus had reached a barrier, the hard rubber sole between the boot and her foot, and if there was one thing it hated, it was a barrier. But every good villain has a henchman.

In its mutated state, the fungus housed an endosymbiont, an organism that lived within its body in a mutualistic relationship. What the fungus couldn’t do, the endosymbiont could—in this case, catalyze the synthesis of random chemicals in a special new structure in order to break through barriers. It was like having your own chemistry set.

The endosymbiont, which lived on the surface of the fungus in the form of a light sheen, was exposed to the atmosphere every time Hero took a step. It absorbed as much oxygen as it could, combined it with carbon drawn from the dust and dirt particles that had stuck to the goo, and formed a tight network of carbon-oxygen double bonds. These carbonyl groups, now active ketones, pushed their way upward, toward the sole itself, until stopped there by the hard, unyielding mass.

So it hybridized again. The new ketone sampled available elements from the rubber and dirt and dust and cycled quickly through a variety of carbon skeletons. It mutated into oxaloacetate, which is great if you want to metabolize sugar but no use getting through the sole of a boot. Undaunted, it mutated again, into cyclohexanone, which would have been good for making nylons, and then into tetracycline, superb if you’re fighting pneumonia, and then, finally and most damagingly, it recomposed itself as H₂FSbF₆—fluoroantimonic acid.

The powerful industrial corrosive began eating its way through the rubber bottom of Hero’s boot.

The mutation process so far had taken just under ninety seconds.

Hero, of course, was unaware of what was happening. As they climbed down from the roof and hurried back to the tank, she was distracted, trying to explain what they had just seen. The fungus, she speculated, was mimicking the reproductive pattern of Ophiocordyceps, a genus that consisted of about 140 different species, each one of which reproduced by colonizing a different insect.

“How’s it do that?” Trini had her gun out again and her head was on a swivel as they climbed down onto the roof of the car.

Hero explained: “Let’s say its target species is an ant. The ant walks along the forest floor, and it passes over a tiny spore of the fungus. The spore adheres to the ant, digs through its outer shell, and nests inside it. It moves through the body as quickly as it can, making its way to the ant’s brain, where the rich nutrients send it into an exponential growth phase, helping it reproduce up to ten times as fast as it would in any other part of the body. It spreads into every portion of the brain until it controls movement, reflex, impulse, and, to the extent that an ant can think, thoughts. Even though the ant is still technically alive, it’s been hijacked by the invader to serve its needs.” She jumped to the ground. “And the only thing a fungus needs is to make more fungus.”

Roberto looked around, understanding the town better now. Or the people, anyway. Jesus, the people, all of them.

Hero walked quickly to the tank and knelt down beside it, flipping open her sample case again. “The ant stops acting for itself. All it knows is it has to move. Up. It climbs the nearest stalk of grass, clamps its jaws down as hard as it can, and waits.”

“For what?” Trini asked.

“Until the fungus overfills the body cavity and it explodes.”

Roberto looked up at the roofs of the houses and shivered. “That’s why they climbed. To spread the fungus as far as they could.”

Hero nodded. “It’s a treeless wasteland. The roof was the highest spot they could find. You work with what you’ve got.” Her gloved hands picked carefully through the sharp metal tools in the case. She picked a flat-bladed instrument with a ring grip, slipped it over her right index finger, and flipped open a sample tube with her left hand. Carefully, she scraped as much of the fungus into the tube as she could. “It’s an extremely active parasitic growth, but that’s about all we’ll know until I can isolate the proteins with liquid chromatography and sequence its DNA.”

Roberto stared as she flipped the tube shut with a practiced gesture.

“You’re bringing it back?”

She looked up at him, not understanding. “What else am I supposed to do?”

“Leave it. We’ve got to burn this place.”

“Go right ahead,” she said. “But we need to take a sample with us.”

Trini looked at Roberto. “She’s right. You know she’s right. What’s the matter with you?”

Roberto didn’t get scared very often, but suddenly he was thinking about his little boy and about the possibility that he might never see him again. He’d heard having a kid could do that to you, make you tentative, aware that you served some purpose larger than yourself. To hell with the rest of the world, I make my own people now, and I have to protect them. Nothing else mattered.

And then there was Annie. I have a wife, a woman I love completely whom I was this close to betraying, and I would like very much to get back and get a head start on making that up to her, for the rest of our lives. That’s what was the matter with him, that’s what he was thinking, but he said none of it.

Instead, he said, “For Christ’s sake, Trini, it has an R1 rate of 1:1. Everyone who came in contact with it is dead, every single person. The secondary attack rate is a hundred percent, the generation time is immediate, and the incubation rate is … we don’t know, but less than twenty-four hours, that’s for goddamn sure. You want to bring that back into civilization? We’ve never seen a bioweapon with anything remotely close to this kind of lethality.”

“Which is exactly why it has to be tanked and studied. C’mon, man, you know that. This place won’t stay a secret, and if we don’t bring it back, somebody else’ll come get it. Maybe somebody who works for the other side.”

It was a valid debate, and while they carried on with it, the corrosive inside Hero’s boot heel continued to work with single-minded purpose. The fluoroantimonic acid had proven to be just the thing for eating through hard-soled rubber, but it wasn’t so much digging a hole as changing the chemical composition of the boot itself as it went along. Minor mutations occurred almost in a spirit of experimentation as the strength of the boot’s chemical bonds varied. The substance was a nifty adapter, zipping through most of the benzene group till it found the exact compound it was looking for. Finally, it reached the other side of the sole, evolving out onto the surface of the inner boot, just beneath the arch of Hero’s right foot. Benzene-X—it had hybridized so many times at this point that it defied classification according to current known chemical compounds—had opened a door for the fungus, which was so much larger in molecular size, to pass through to the interior of Hero’s suit.

Which is where Cordyceps novus found nirvana. The boot, like the rest of the hazmat suit, was loose-fitting, designed to encourage air circulation to prevent the wearer from overheating. The breathing apparatus contained a small fan for oxygen recirculation, which meant a fresh supply of O₂ was continually moving through the inside of the suit. Strands of grateful fungus spun off into whispery tendrils and went airborne, drifting upward on a rising column of warm CO₂, until they landed lightly on the bare skin of Hero’s right leg.

Still unaware of the enemy invasion going on inside her suit, Hero screwed the top onto the sample tube, broke a seal on its side, and the tube hissed, a tiny pellet of nitrogen flash-freezing it until it could be reopened in a lab and stored permanently in liquid nitrogen. She dropped the tube back into the foam-padded slot in the case, clicked it shut, and stood up. “Done.”

The debate over what to do next had been resolved the way it always was, which is to say that Trini prevailed. She heard Roberto’s arguments, let them go a little bit past the point she felt was necessary, given the difference in their ranks, then looked directly at her friend, lowered her voice a tone or two, and said just one word.

“Major.”

The conversation was over. Trini was the officer in charge, and the advice of the scientific escort was on her side. The outcome had never been in doubt, but Roberto had felt a humanitarian urge to object anyway. What if, just this once, they did what was obvious and right, even if it was directly contrary to procedure? What if?

But they’d never find out, and in the end, Roberto settled on a secondary assurance: they would take one sample, one, carefully sealed in the biohazard tube, and would not leave Western Australia until the two respective governments had agreed to drop an overkill load of oil-based incendiary bombs on the place. Anything would suffice, even old M69s or M47s loaded with white phosphorous would do the job. There was nothing left to save here anyway.

They left town and walked back toward the jeep.

Four

Inside Hero’s suit, Cordyceps novus found what it had been looking for: a tiny scratch in the surface of Hero’s calf. Even an overwide pore opening would have been big enough for it to gain entry into her bloodstream, but the open scratch, which cut through two layers of her skin, fairly yawned with possibility.

Hero didn’t even know she had an open wound. It had been an absent-minded scratch; she was reacting to an itch produced by a changed cleaning product—the hotel that washed her jeans last week had used a cheap optical brightener with a higher concentration of bleach than she was used to. So it itched. And she scratched. And the fungus entered her bloodstream.

“What’s that smell?” Hero asked. They were fifty yards from the jeep.

Roberto looked at her. “What smell?”

She sniffed again. “Burnt toast.”

Trini shrugged. “Can’t smell anything.” She looked back, glad to leave the town behind. “This whole place is gonna smell like burnt toast by the end of the day.”

But Roberto was confused, still looking at Hero. “In your suit?”

Hero held up an arm and regarded it, as if reminding herself she was wearing a sealed biohazard suit. “That doesn’t make sense, does it?”

In fact, it made perfect sense. Cordyceps novus was really warming up and had superheated the starches and proteins just inside Hero’s epidermis. As a by-product of the reaction, they outgassed acrylamide, producing the same smell as burnt toast. It was generating heat as well, and the sudden rise in temperature on Hero’s skin would surely bother her soon. But the fungus was attentive to that possibility and was moving fast through her bloodstream, racing to get to her brain, where it would intercept the messages from her pain receptors. This in itself was no great trick—a tick does the same thing, releasing a surface anesthetic as soon as it burrows into its victim’s skin so its bloodsucking can go unnoticed for as long as possible. But the fungus had a long way to travel and a lot of receptors to block. Hero’s heartbeat accelerated, which circulated her blood faster, inadvertently helping her would-be killer.

She stopped walking. “There can’t be a smell in my suit, it’s sealed and overpressured. There’s nothing in here but oxygen and clean CO₂. Why is there a smell in my suit?”

She was starting to panic. Trini tried to defuse it. “There are probably a lot of jokes I could make here—”

“It’s not fucking funny,” Hero snapped.

“It’s not, Trini, shut the hell up. Something penetrated her suit.”

“That’s not possible,” Hero said, to convince herself as much as anyone else.

“Just keep moving,” Trini advised. “We’ll lose the suits at the jeep. We can’t take them out of here anyway, they need to burn. We’ll check yours for breaches.” She looked at Hero, her manner serious. “Do you feel anything?”

Hero thought. “No.”

Roberto persisted. “Take a minute. Focus on each part of your body. Anything different at all?”

Hero’s breathing steadied. She considered the question, going through her anatomy from the bottoms of her feet to the top of her head. “No. Nothing different.”

Inside her body, it was a different story. The fungus had penetrated Hero’s brain and was reproducing at nightmare speed, seeking out and blocking her nociceptors the way an invading army shuts down the internet and television stations. There was a red alert blaring in Hero’s brain, flags were waving, alarm bells ringing, but the ends of her sensory neurons’ axons had been taken over and blocked from responding to damaging stimuli. They could no longer send potential threat messages to her thalamus and subcortical areas. They were screaming into a void.

Hero Martins was dying, but the neural message she got from her brain was that everything was fine, just fine, don’t worry about a thing.

“I’m okay.”

“You’re sure?” Roberto asked.

She nodded. “Let’s just get out of here.”

They started walking again, now forty yards from the jeep. Hero’s brain thought through possible reasons a foreign smell should have presented itself inside her suit. Nothing believable came to mind. She decided she would not destroy this suit; she was going to tank and return it, she wanted to have a chance to take it apart and look at every inch of it in case there was a tear or foreign substance inside, in which case somebody in PPE was going to get an earful about procedure.

The jeep was now thirty yards away. Hero felt light-headed and realized she hadn’t eaten since nine or ten hours ago. Then again, looking at Uncle’s mutilated corpse wouldn’t exactly stimulate anyone’s appetite, so there was no reason to think anything unusual about that. She ran through her physical inventory once again, but other than an elevated heart rate and some quickened breathing, there wasn’t anything physically different about her that she could detect. She squinted up at the sun, and as she did a thought floated through her mind.

except there’s no telephone service out here

Well, no, there wasn’t. What did that matter? She looked down at the case in her hand, thinking about what she had inside the tube. People were going to lose their minds over this one. She wondered if the CDC would even accept it.

so there’s no telephone poles

She shook her head to clear it and resumed her train of thought. There were only a handful of labs in the Western Hemisphere that were set up to store biosafety level 4 pathogens, and Atlanta and Galveston would reject it outright, improperly classifying it as extraterrestrial because of its trip outside Earth’s atmosphere.

maybe an electrical tower

The U.S. Army would fight for it, no question about that, but Fort Detrick had suffered a breach eighteen months ago and no one was eager to—

they’ve gotta have power right don’t they have power?

She snapped her head to the side, Come on, focus. They were ten yards from the jeep. Her image of it suddenly shuddered and divided into sixteen identical rectangular boxes, sixteen images of the jeep, neatly separated and replicated. Hero felt her skin go cold because that wasn’t something you could easily ignore or pass off to hunger or exhaustion, but then again, she thought, I used to faint when I was a kid, in school assemblies sometimes, and didn’t it feel like this?, wasn’t there a prickling in her scalp and then her vision would go weird and she’d see double right before she keeled over sure that was probably it low blood sugar or

a radio tower, fifty kilometers back, didn’t I see something, wasn’t it a radio tower?

The image swam through her mind, crisp and clear: they had driven past a radio tower in the middle of the desert, just alongside the road, about a hundred meters high, with a small black utility box at the base of it.

“That’s exactly what it was.”

She’d said that last bit out loud, and Roberto and Trini turned and looked at her.

“What?” Roberto asked.

She looked at him. “Huh?”

“That’s exactly what what was?”

Hero had no idea what he was talking about. Was it possible that Roberto had somehow become infected by the fungus, that it was his suit that had malfunctioned, and that he was starting to lose his mind? She certainly hoped not, he was a nice enough guy, even if he was a total flirt, she really had to lay off the married men, never again, she vowed, right there and then, from now on either find someone appropriate or be content with

It can’t be that hard to climb.

Oh, shit. She had to think this through.

To climb. The radio tower. It had lateral struts about four or five feet apart, but there’s probably a service ladder inside the structure, how else would they repair anything that broke near the top of the thing? I could climb that.

For the last time, the weight and pressure of the healthy, functioning neurons in Hero’s brain outweighed those that had been consumed, destroyed, or shut down by Cordyceps novus. Her prefrontal cortex, which handled reasoning and sophisticated interpersonal thinking skills, reasserted itself in a burst of clarity and control, and told her quite clearly that based on:

1 her disordered thought processes;

2 the smell of burnt toast inside her suit that indicated a foreign contaminant;

3 the expressions on the faces of Trini and Roberto, who clearly thought something was wrong with her; and

4 her sudden and irrational fixation on the feasibility of climbing a fucking radio tower, for Christ’s sake, she had likely been infected by the fungus and was moments away from coming under the control of a rapidly replicating fungus that constituted an extinction-level threat to the human race.

Still walking, she glanced to her right and saw Trini was carrying her handgun loosely at her side as she and Roberto looked back and forth from her to each other, trying to communicate their concern wordlessly rather than over the radio system, which she would be able to hear.

Take the jeep and drive to the tower.

Hero walked faster, headed for the jeep. They let her, happy to fall behind so they could keep an eye on her.

Climb the tower.

As Hero neared the jeep, she saw the keys, the sunlight shining off them in the ignition. She felt pulled toward them.

Climb the tower.

Hero’s frontal lobe was in a doomed fight for control. It made up a third of the total volume of her brain, but was now overrun with a florid, healthy colony of Cordyceps novus. Her flag of intellectual independence fell. Still, her conscious thought didn’t give up; it merely darted away, blew through the wasteland of her already conquered temporal lobe, and turned in desperation to the last part of her mental apparatus that was still free—her parietal lobe. There, her thought stream was precariously her own, but severely limited.

just math now, math and analytics, where X = regeneration of healthy brain tissue probability is zero-X, try recovery rate, recovery rate in event of default

She was pulling up a freshman economics class now, but it was the only scrap of useful knowledge left kicking around unfettered in her head, the only avenue of reasoning left open to her, and it was going to have to do. So, let’s try a calculation, shall we? The equation to be formed would need to answer only one question: Could she survive this?

recovery probability versus loss given default (RP < or > LGD) dependent on instrument type (where IT = hypereffective mutating fungus), corporate issues (where CI = major default of more than 50 percent of healthy brain tissue), and prevailing macroeconomic conditions (where PMCs = every single other person who ever encountered this thing is dead), so RP = IT/CI × PMC = there is no fucking chance whatsoever.

The answer was no. She could not recover. She was going to die. The only question was how many people she was going to take with her when she did.

CLIMB THE TOWER, her brain told her.

And with the tiny bit of volition Dr. Hero Martins still had left, she replied.

NO, she said.

She turned around, fast. Trini didn’t have time to react, in part because she was too stunned by the sight of Hero’s swollen, heaving face, which was distended and discolored, the skin stretched so tight it was cracking. Hero was on her before Trini knew what was happening. She wrenched the gun from Trini’s hand—

“Gun out!” Trini shouted, but Roberto had already seen it. He yelled at Hero to stop, but she was backing away from them already, backing away and turning the gun around on herself. She reached up with her left hand and ripped her suit’s Velcro flap over the zippered O₂ access port, tore that open, shoved the gun inside the suit, sealed the Velcro flap around the barrel, pressed the barrel of the gun up against her chest—

“Don’t!” Roberto yelled, knowing it was too late even as he said it.

Hero pulled the trigger.

The bullet broke her skin and crashed through her breastbone, tearing open a hole in her chest the size of a quarter. Like a balloon popped by a pin, the rest of her went all at once, bursting at the sudden release of pressure. All Trini and Roberto saw was her head, which in one moment was a disfigured, although recognizable, human head, and the next moment was a wash of green gunk that completely covered the inside of her faceplate.

Hero fell, dead.

But she’d kept her suit intact.

LESS THAN SEVENTY-TWO HOURS LATER, TRINI AND ROBERTO WERE IN the car, just over three miles away from the Atchison mines, their eyes glued to the box in the back of the truck just ahead of them. Hero’s field case had been packed, unopened, into a larger sealed crate filled with dry ice.

So far things had gone smoothly. Gordon Gray, the head of the DTRA, had taken Trini and Roberto exactly at their word, because they were the best, and he ordered their explicit instructions be followed to the letter. When Gordon Gray gave an order, people followed it, and since all the residents of the town were dead and the land itself held no value, there was no one and no reason to object. The firebombing of Kiwirrkurra was agreed to without debate by the respective governments. The unlucky place burned, and with it every molecule of Cordyceps novus, except for the sample in Hero’s biotube.

The question of what to do with the tube was tougher to answer. As Hero had speculated, the CDC wanted no part of storing something that had been born, or at any rate partially bred, in outer space. Though the Defense Department was willing, its only suitable facility was Fort Detrick, which was out of the question. The breach there eighteen months earlier had triggered a top-down review that was only now entering its second stage, and the idea of cutting short a safety analysis in order to store an unknown growth of unprecedented lethality was not met with enthusiasm.

Atchison was Trini’s idea. She’d worked with the National Nuclear Safety Administration in the early ’80s on weapons dismantlement and disposition readiness, as the idea of nuclear disarmament became politically palatable under the Reagan administration’s INF Treaty initiative. Sub-level 4 of the Atchison mine facility had been conceived and dug out as an alternative to the Pantex Plant and the Y-12 National Security Complex, disposal centers that were at capacity already, dealing with outmoded fission devices from the late ’40s and early ’50s. But as INF negotiations dragged on it became clear that Reagan’s strategy was really to get the other guy to disarm, and Atchison’s lowest sub-level sat empty and secure, never to be used.

The location was ideal for their needs. Because the mines were uniquely situated over a second-magnitude underground cold spring that pushed near-freezing water up from the bedrock at 2,800 liters per second, the lowest subterranean level at Atchison never rose above 38 degrees Fahrenheit. Even in the unlikely event of an extended power outage, the temperature at which the fungus would be stored was guaranteed to remain stable, keeping it in a perpetual low-or no-growth environment, even if it somehow broke free of its containment tube. It was a perfect plan. Cordyceps novus was thus given a home, sealed inside a biotube three hundred feet underground in a sub-basement that didn’t officially exist.

AS TIME WENT BY, FEWER AND FEWER PEOPLE AT DTRA CAME TO SHARE Trini and Roberto’s alarmist view of the destructive capabilities of Cordyceps novus. How could they? They hadn’t seen it. There were no photographic records. The remote town had been incinerated, and the only remaining sample of the fungus was locked away, out of sight and out of mind. People forgot. People moved on.

Sixteen years later, in 2003, the DTRA decided the mine complex was a Cold War relic that could be dispensed with. The place was cleared out, cleaned up, given a coat of paint, and sold to Smart Warehousing for private use. The self-storage giant threw up some drywall, bought 650 locking overhead garage doors from Hörmann, and opened it up to the public. Fifteen thousand boxes of useless crap were thus given a clean, dry, and permanent underground home. That thirty-year-old drum kit that you never played could now survive a nuclear war.

The storage plan for Cordyceps novus was a perfect one.

Unless, that is, Gordon Gray took early retirement.

And his successor decided sub-level 4 was better off sealed up and forgotten.

And the temperature of the planet rose.

But how likely was any of that?

March 2019

Five

Your Honor, I get it. I mean, you are looking at a man who gets it.”

Teacake hadn’t prepared anything, but for him words came whether he wanted them to or not, so even though he knew he wasn’t the best person to speak in his own defense at his sentencing hearing, he figured he was the most qualified to wing it.

“Okay, so the last time we met, here in Your Honor’s courtroom, a few years ago, you made a great suggestion. ‘Hey,’ you said, ‘what if instead of me sending you to Ellsworth, you join the military instead?’ That was a great idea, thank you for that, and I totally took Your Honor up on that one. Two years in the navy, submarine corps, and let me tell you, that pressure testing is no picnic. Great experience for me, though. Honorable discharge.”

The judge looked down at the sentencing report on the bench in front of him. “Says here ‘General Discharge, Honorable Conditions.’”

“Right, yeah. Exactly. So, similar thing there.”

The public defender assigned to Teacake gave him a look that said, You are not helping.

But Teacake pressed on. “Point is, I got it then, and I get it now. Victim of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, I mean, I know that’s not gonna cut it with you, but there are, like, super-mitigating circumstances here. I get talked into stuff, that’s my problem, but my personal feeling is I should never have to do time for this. Not for basically sitting in a car, basically. I mean, it’s no way to treat a veteran, for starters. But you probably took one look at me and were like, ‘You again,’ and I get that, I do.”

“Are you finished?”

“Yeah, I’m gonna wrap up. Long story short, if you have a buddy who goes by Hazy Davy and he ever asks you to stay with the car while he runs in to do this one quick thing super quick and you already know your name is sorta mud in Pottawatomie County, Kansas, you should for sure remember a previous commitment. That’s all I’m saying.”

He started to sit down, then stood up again.

“Sorry, one more thing, real quick. I also been sick with the modern disease known as white privilege, for which I am very sorry. Although, that one’s kinda not on me, I gotta say, I can’t help I’m white. Anyway, uh, thank you.”

Teacake sat down abruptly and didn’t dare glance at his lawyer. He could read a room. The judge put on his glasses, picked up the sentencing report, and said six words.

“Thank you, Mr. Meacham. Nineteen months.”

By the time he got out of prison, Teacake’s post–high school résumé had exactly two things on it: a mediocre service record and his stint in Ellsworth Correctional. So the job at Atchison Storage was the best thing that could have possibly happened to him, even at $8.35 an hour. Corporate didn’t like a lot of employees to chase around and look after, so everybody did twelve-hour shifts, six to six, four days a week. Teacake was the new man and got nights, Thursday through Sunday. Truth is, he didn’t much like the few friends he still had around here, and he wasn’t looking to make any new ones unless maybe one of them was Her, so saying he’d take the social graveyard shift was no big deal. It might have been the reason he got the job. That, and the fact that he had all his teeth, which meant he was reasonably clean. Around here a full toothy smile was the only character reference you needed to sit at a reception desk and look after 650 locked underground storage units in the middle of the night. It was not, as they say, the science of rocketry.

Teacake always tried to get to work early on Thursdays because he knew Griffin liked to get a jump on his weekend buzz and would beat ass out of there a few minutes before his shift was over. Griffin knew he could bail early because he could count on how badly Teacake needed the job and for nothing to go wrong. Sure enough, as Teacake came around the long curve at the base of the bluffs, he could see Griffin’s sweaty bald head glowing in the setting sun as the thickneck popped open a Pabst Blue Ribbon tall boy, two or three of which were kept in his Harley Fat Boy’s saddlebags for—well, they were kept in the saddlebags at all times.

Griffin drained the beer, tossed aside the empty can, kicked the bike to life, and raised a middle finger to Teacake as he blew gravel out of there.

The thing about Griffin, and everyone would agree on this, was that he was an asshole. Teacake flipped the bird back at him, a more or less friendly gesture at this point, and it was what passed for human contact in his day. As Teacake’s Honda Civic passed the motorcycle, he breathed a sigh of relief that his boss had given him a miss, that he wouldn’t have to have that same goddamn conversation with him again.

But no such luck. He could see in the rearview Griffin was looping back, bringing the Fat Boy around the hood of the Civic. He pulled up next to the driver’s door, idling as Teacake got out.

“Well?” Griffin asked.

So, it would be that conversation again. “Told you, I can’t help you.”

“Knew you were stupid didn’t think you were that stupid.” Griffin spoke in staccato bursts, some words so fast they slammed together, others with odd pauses in between them, as if punctuation hadn’t been invented yet.

“I’m not stupid,” Teacake said. “Like at all. Okay? I would love to help you if I could, but it’s fucked up for me vis-à-vis my, you know, personal situation, and I’m just not gonna do it.”

“Okay so you’ll think about it.”

“No! I wish I didn’t even know about it.”

The truth was he knew only a part of it, the part about the two dozen fifty-five-inch Samsung flat screens that Griffin was selling off one by one, but Teacake guessed that where there was hot-stolen-consumer-goods smoke, there was hot-stolen-consumer-goods fire, and it was the last thing he needed in his life.

Griffin wasn’t giving up. “I’m asking you to buzz the gate for a few friends of mine every once in a while and use your master key what’s the big fuckin’ deal.”

“They don’t have accounts with us. I can’t let in anybody who doesn’t have an account.”

“Who’s gonna know?”

“I have heard these words before,” Teacake said. “You do it.”

“I can’t.” Griffin shrugged.

“Why not?”

“Nobody’s gonna fuckin’ come in the daytime and I don’t work nights.” Case closed. “Just do it, so you and me don’t have a problem.”

“Why do we gotta have a problem?” Teacake asked.

“’Cause you know stuff and you’re not in and if you’re not in and you know then there’s a problem. You know that.”

There was no getting rid of him and he was never going to drop it, so Teacake did what he’d been doing for the past six weeks, which was to slow play it and hope it would go away. Was it a strategy that had shown even the slightest signs of working? No, but that was no reason to give up on it. “Yeah, well, you know, I don’t know about this thing, or these things,” Teacake said, “or what have you. I mean, just, whatever, right? Okay?”

There was no imaginable way a person could have made it any vaguer than that, not without a law degree and decades of experience testifying before Congress. Teacake hoped it would do. He turned and walked toward the building.

Griffin revved the bike and pulled his goggles down. He shouted something at Teacake as he dropped the bike in gear, just two words, but here’s where Griffin’s essential nature as an asshole came in again—he’d hooked up a noncompliant straight-pipe exhaust on his bike to make it extra loud and annoying to the rest of the world, so there was really no shot at all that his words would be understood over it. To Teacake it sounded like he yelled “Monday’s bleeding,” but in fact what his boss had shouted was “Something’s beeping.”

Teacake would find that out for himself soon enough.

THE FACT THAT GRIFFIN WAS PUT IN CHARGE OF ANYTHING WAS A JOKE, because not only was he dumb, racist, and violent, but he was a raging alcoholic to boot. Still, there are alcoholics and there are functioning alcoholics, and Griffin managed to be the latter by establishing a strict drinking regimen and sticking to it with the discipline of an Olympic athlete. He was dead sober for three and a half days of the week, Monday through Wednesday, when he worked the first three of his four twelve-hour shifts, and he didn’t start drinking until just before six P.M. on Thursday. That, however, was a drunk that he would build and maintain with fussy dedication, starting right now and continuing through his long weekend until he passed out on Sunday night. Really, the Monday hangover was the only hard part, but Griffin had been feeling them for so long now they just seemed like part of a normal Monday morning. Toast, coffee, bleeding from the eyeballs—must be a new workweek.

Griffin was born over in Council Bluffs and spent six years working in a McDonald’s in Salina, where he’d risen to the rank of swing manager. It was a tight little job, not least because of the tight little high school trim that he had the power to hire and fire and get high with in the parking lot after work. Griffin was an unattractive man—that was just an objective reality. He was thick as a fireplug, and his entire body, with the notable exception of his head, was covered with patchy, multicolored clumps of hair that made his back look like the floor of a barbershop at the end of a long day. But the power to grant somebody their first actual paying job and to provide the occasional joint got him far in life, at least with sixteen-year-olds, and when he was still in his not-quite-midtwenties. Soon enough the sixteen-year-olds would wise up and the last of his hair would go and his “solid build” would give way to what could only be called a “fat gut,” but for those few years, in that one place, Griffin was a king, pulling down $24,400 a year, headed for a sure spot at Hamburger U, the McDonald’s upper management training program. And nailing underage hotties at least every other week.

Then those little fuckers, those little wise-ass shitheads who didn’t really need the job, who just got the job because their parents wanted them to learn the Value of Work, those little douchebags from over in the flats—they ruined everything. They were working drive-through during a rush when it happened. Why Griffin had ever scheduled them in there together is beyond him to this day; he must have been nursing a wicked hangover to let those two clowns work within fifty feet of each other, but they started their smart-ass shit on the intercom. They’d take orders in made-up Spanish, pretend the speaker was cutting in and out, declare today “Lottery Day” and give away free meals—all that shit that’s so hilarious because real people’s jobs don’t mean anything, not when you’re going to Kansas State in the fall with every single expense paid by Mommy and Daddy, and the only reason this job will ever turn up on your résumé is to show what a hardworking man of the people you were in high school. There they are, your fast-food work dues, fully paid, just like your $10,000 community service trip to Guatemala, where you slowed down the building of a school by taking a thousand pictures of yourself to post on Instagram.

On that particular day there was a McDonald’s observer from regional in the parking lot, a guy taking times on the drive-through and copious notes on the unfunny shenanigans going on in there. The good-looking creep—the smarmy one, not the half-decent redheaded kid who just went along with the bullshit, but the handsome fucker, the one who was sleeping with the window girl in the docksiders whom Griffin himself could never get to even look at him—that kid knew the guy was out there. And he sat on that nugget of information for a good half hour, until he finally smirked past the office and said, “Oh, hey, there’s a McDonald’s secret agent man parked out by the dumpster.”

Griffin was demoted to grill the next day, and he quit before he ended up at the fry station. He had the job at Atchison Storage three weeks later, and when the current manager there moved to Leawood to get married, Griffin inherited the fourteen-dollar-an-hour job, which, if he never, ever took a week off, meant $34,000 a year and three free days a week to get wasted. He also figured he could pull in another $10K in cash for housing the Samsungs and other items of an inconvenient nature that showed up needing a temporary home from time to time. The previous manager had clued him in about the side gig, which Griffin understood was a common perk of the self-storage management community. Hang on to this stuff, let people pick it up, take a cut of whatever it sells for. Zero risk. All in all, it was a decent setup, but not half as good as what could have been. He could have had a career in management, real management. Sitting at a desk all day so you can help a parade of freaks and hillbillies get access to their useless shit is a hell of a lot different from presiding over a constant parade of job-seeking teenage sluts. But you takes what you can takes. Atchison, Kansas, was not a buffet of career opportunity.

Despite everything that happened, Griffin’s only regret in life so far was that he could never get anyone to agree to call him Griff. Or G-Dog. Or by his goddamn first name. All the man wanted was a nickname, but he was just Griffin.

TEACAKE PUNCHED IN BEHIND THE FRONT DESK. HE HEARD THE BEEP, but he didn’t hear the beep; it was one of those things. Whatever the part of your brain is that registers an extremely low-volume, high-pitched tone that comes once every ninety seconds, it was keeping the news to itself for the first half hour he was at the desk. The faint beep would come, it would register somewhere in the back of his mind, but then it would be crowded out by other, more pressing matters.

First, he had to check the monitors, of which there were a dozen, to make sure the place was clean and empty and as barren and depressing as always. Check. Then a quick glance over at the east entrance to see if She had shown up for work yet (she had) and to think for a second whether there was any plausible reason to orchestrate running into her (there wasn’t). There was also the stink. Griffin was never a big one for tidying up, and the trash can was half full of Subway wrappers, including a former twelve-inch tuna on wheat, from the smell of it, and the reception area reeked of old lunch. Somebody would have to do something about that—twelve hours with tuna stench would be a long-ass shift. And finally, there was a customer, Mrs. Rooney, coming through the glass front doors, all frazzled and testy and all of a sudden.

“Hey, Mrs. Rooney, what up, you staying cool?”

“I need to get into SB-211.”

Teacake was not so easily deterred. “It’s hot out, right? Like Africa hot. Weird for March, but I guess we gotta stop saying that, huh?”

“I need to get in there right quick.”

In unit SB-211 Mary Rooney had twenty-seven banker’s boxes filled with her children’s and grandchildren’s school reports, birthday cards, Mother’s Day cards, Father’s Day cards, Christmas cards, and all their random notes expressing overwhelming love and/or blinding rage, depending on their proximity to adolescence at the time of writing. She also had forty-two ceramic coffee mugs and pencil jars made at Pottery 4 Fun between 1995 and 2008, when her arthritis got bad and she couldn’t go anymore. That was in addition to seven nylon duffel bags stuffed with newspapers from major events in world history, such as coverage of the opening ceremonies of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, and a vinyl Baywatch pencil case that was stuffed with $6,500 in cash she was saving for the day the banks crashed For Real. There were also four sealed moving boxes (contents long forgotten), so much old clothing that it was best measured by weight (311 pounds), and an electric metal coffeepot from 1979 that sat on top of the mountain of other crap like a crown.

At this moment Mrs. Rooney had two shoeboxes under her arm and that look on her face, so Teacake buzzed the gate that led to the storage units with no further attempt at pleasantries. Let the record show, though, that the heat that day was most certainly worthy of comment: it had been 86 degrees in the center of town at one point. But whatever, Mary Rooney needed to get into her unit right quick, and between her stuff and Mary Rooney you had best not get.

Teacake watched her on the monitors, first as she passed through the gate, then into the upper west hallway, her gray perm floating down the endless corridor lined with cream-colored garage doors, all the way to the far end, where she pushed the elevator button and waited, looking back over her shoulder twice—Yeah, like somebody’s gonna follow you and steal your shoeboxes filled with old socks, Mary—and he kept watching as she got into the elevator, rode down two levels to the sub-basement, stepped off, walked halfway down the subterranean hallway in that weird, shuffling, sideways-like-a-coyote stride of hers, and slung open the door on unit SB-211. She stepped inside, clicked on a light, and slammed the door shut behind her. She would be in there for hours.

When you find yourself staring glassy-eyed at a bank of video monitors, watching as a moderately old lady makes her slow and deliberate way through a drab, all-white underground storage facility so she can get to her completely uninteresting personal pile of shit—when you do this with no hope whatsoever that this lady will do anything even remotely interesting, that is the moment you’ll know you’ve bottomed out, entertainment-wise. Teacake was there.

And then everything changed.

His eyes had fallen on the upper right-hand screen, in the corner of the bank of monitors, the one that covered the other guard desk, on the eastern side of the facility.

Naomi was on the move.

The cave complex was enormous and cut right through the heart of the bluffs, so to save the trucks from Kansas City having to drive all the way around Highway 83 to Highway 18 to Highway E, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had cut in two entrances, one each on the eastern and western sides of the massive chunk of rock. As a result, Atchison had two reception areas and two people working the place at any given time, although they had different sections to monitor, so running into your co-worker almost never happened.

Unless you made it happen, which Teacake had been trying to do for two weeks now, since the day Naomi started. Her schedule was erratic—he could never put his finger on when she was going to be working and when she wasn’t—so he’d tried to just keep an eye on the monitors and engineer a run-in, but it hadn’t happened yet. There’d been a few times she was doing rounds when he almost took a shot at it, but when she was on the move he never knew where she was headed, so he hadn’t come up with a scenario that would have given him quite the right degree of natural. The place was so big that the only way to make it work would be to check her location and then go into a full-on sprint to get near her while she was still even remotely in the area. It would have been more hunting her down than running into her. There’s something about showing up breathless and sweaty for a “coincidental” bump-in with an attractive woman that is bound to come off as scary.

Now, however, opportunity was pounding on his door with both fists, because Naomi was walking down the long eastern main hallway with a full trash can under her arm, and that could mean only one destination: the loading dock, where the dumpsters were.

Teacake grabbed the brimming trash can from next to the reception desk—Thank you Griffin, you pig, you bet I’ll clean up your disgusting lunch—and he took off for the loading dock.

Six

Three things Naomi Williams knew about her mother—that she was smart, athletic, and had horrible taste in men. Worse, Naomi knew that she herself was exactly the same in all three respects. The difference was that Naomi had seen her mother’s mistakes, she’d watched them play out, one after another, as easily predictable slow-motion car wrecks. She was keenly aware of where each and every twist of the wheel and stomp of the brake had caused the careening momentum of her mother’s life to go into an unrecoverable spin. She knew from careful observation how to drive a life in order to crash it, and she was not about to make the same desperate moves with her own. She kept up her grades, she had decent extra-curriculars, and she knew what she wanted. She had planned and rehearsed her post–high school escape route so many times she could drive it in her sleep.

But then the night of graduation she got pregnant, and all that shit was out the window. Because she had to have the baby. It wasn’t her family who were the religious freaks; she and her mom and whoever her current stepfather was went to church on Christmas and for funerals, like most people did around here. But Mike’s family—Jesus Christ, no pun intended, the Snyders banged the God drum hard. That wasn’t unusual; there were a lot of religious people in this part of the country, ever since the big wave of evangelism that spread around the South and Midwest in the late 1970s. But the Snyders were born-again chest beaters, not the haunted, reliably depressive old kind of Catholic, but the joyful new kind of Catholic. They loved everybody. I mean, they really, actually loved you.

The Snyders had five kids, and though each one of them started out fairly normal and willing to grab the occasional beer or take a hit off a joint, by the time they hit fourteen or fifteen their parents had roped them into the family spiritual racket. It wasn’t like it was a scam or anything—they really meant it. Naomi thought it was cool at first; it was a lot of love and attention, way more than she got at home, and when she and Tara Snyder became best friends in eighth grade, Naomi started sleeping at their house two or three nights a week. Her own mother, distracted by her decaying third marriage, seemed grateful that Naomi had a place to go.

As the God love spread throughout the Snyder family over the next couple of years, Naomi and Tara managed to skate around it. Everybody’s got their familial role to play, and Tara was happy to be the wild child. She and Naomi drank too much, partied too much, and hung out with the wrong kinds of guys. But it was all working. Admittedly, it worked better for Naomi than for Tara. Naomi got mostly A’s in school without trying very hard, she could still score in the teens at a basketball game even if she’d been up most of the night drinking, and she’d already gotten into Tennessee-Knoxville with a kickass grant-and-aid package. Yes, she would finish with sixty grand in debt, but UT had a great veterinary program, and she’d be done and licensed and making at least that much per year in five and a half. If anybody had a right to party and sleep around a little, it was Naomi Williams. The God-loving stuff was something she was happy to fake, or even mean it a little sometimes, in exchange for the Snyder embrace, which was warm and undeniable, even in its sappiest and most suffocating forms.

God wasn’t the problem.

Mike Snyder was the problem.

He was two years older than Naomi and started hitting on her when she was about fifteen. Mike was something of a mythical figure around town. He had a reputation so thoroughly unearned that it defied reason, but there is almost no limit to what a person can achieve early in life when he has the total and unwavering support of a large and uncritical family. It’s later that it all turns back on you. But in his early years and in the Snyder view, Mike was an artist and interpretive dancer and brilliant musician. He was an immensely gifted child of God who must be given space and respect and freedom and money. Plus blow jobs, in Mike’s opinion. Naomi held off for a while, but he was so earnest, so tortured and pleading and clearly screwed up beyond his family’s ability to see, that she took pity on him. She knew it wasn’t right, it wasn’t how things were supposed to be, and looking back, she can’t believe she was ever so passive. Why did she feel this weird obligation to him that she didn’t feel to herself?

But she did. They’d go through periods where things would heat up and cool down; there were times she thought she loved him, times she was pretty sure she hated him, but most times she just felt vaguely bad for him. The kid knew he was an imposter even if he couldn’t come out and say it, and she wanted to make him calm down and leave her alone.

Mike never wanted intercourse, even when Naomi did, probably because he was tortured by the holdovers of the family’s start in rigid Catholicism. Mike was the oldest, the only one who’d gone to Catholic grade school, and the talons of guilt were sunk into him but good. There was no sexual encounter with Mike that was not wholly shot through with his crippling sense of shame. Naomi, whose own feelings toward physical love were about a billion times less complicated, didn’t press the issue. The last thing she needed was a short, unsatisfying coupling on the floor in the Snyder basement, followed by an image of Mike seared onto her eyeballs: Mike, naked, sobbing in the corner of the half-lit, deep-pile-carpeted basement; Mike, curled up over there next to the Addams Family pinball machine, rocking on his haunches and apologizing to God.

But that’s exactly what she got on graduation night.

Mike had been desperate to find some cultural or chronological benchmark by which he could move fucking Naomi into the realm of the Spiritually Acceptable, and he’d seized on her high school graduation with the fervor of a horny zealot. He planned his seduction for months. When the moment finally came, she was half-drunk, he was half-erect, and the result was All-World fumbly, but at least it was quick and now it was done. Naomi stared at him, over there in the corner, just a sad, twisted little kid, really. She still felt sorry for him, but mostly she felt relieved that this, at least, would never come up again.

So of course she got pregnant.

At that point Naomi made three huge mistakes in quick succession that altered the trajectory of her life. First mistake: she told Mike. Mike, she told, the Uncritically Loved Artistic Genius who was now twenty years old, still living in his parents’ house with no job, no plans for school, and no real artistic talent, a message that the world was in the process of tattooing on his forehead in the unloving and inconsiderate way that the world has with guys like him. But who else was she going to tell?

Strategically, it was hard to see that move for the gigantic tactical error that it was until it played out. Because Mike was overjoyed. Mike loved her. Mike wanted to marry her. And Mike immediately told his parents. That really threw Naomi; she rarely miscalculated when it came to guessing human behavior, but she missed this one by a mile. She’d assumed Mike—sobbing-naked-after-bad-sex Mike—would be overcome by remorse and do anything to keep his filthy secret to himself, but she didn’t consider the full impact of the adoration he had received all his short life. That, coupled with a terrifying early exposure to the ecstasy of the Catholic guilt-and-confession wash-and-dry cycle, made him a real loose cannon. The way Mike saw it, he’d been given a rare gift, the chance to do the right thing, and by God he was going to do it. His parents were similarly overjoyed—they had a couple of sinners to forgive, and it was time to get busy forgiving. The fact that Naomi was one of only a few hundred African Americans in Atchison to boot only made it better. It made them better.

Plus they’d all have a baby to raise. Everybody wins.

Mistakes two and three for Naomi fell fast after that first one, and they were things she failed to do rather than things she did. She failed to drive immediately to CHC in Overland Park to get an abortion, and she failed to tell Tara Snyder, who would have driven her immediately to CHC in Overland Park to get an abortion. Instead, she allowed the Snyder parents to sit her down and paint a picture of such joyous, multigenerational familial love around the presence of this new young life that it carried her through her first trimester and most of her second in conspiratorial silence. It wasn’t until her well-conditioned eighteen-year-old body finally started to show in the fifth month that she knew, for sure and for real, that she had made a massive mistake. But by then it was too late to do anything about it.

Sarah turned four the other day, and Naomi would be the first to tell you that she thanked God she had the kid after all. It was impossible to look at that little face and think otherwise, but that didn’t mean Naomi’s life was any better because things turned out this way. It was just different. Mike had taken off to join the Peace Corps within a week after the baby was born, and in truth that was a relief; he’d turned into a real pain in the ass once it sank in that Naomi wasn’t going to marry him, or sleep with him ever again. He would have made a lousy father anyway.

The Snyders made good on their offers to help raise the kid, but Naomi’s hand to God, they were morons, and she ended up living with her sister in a half-decent two-bedroom in a new development called Pine Valley, which had nary a pine tree nor a valley within its borders. But the apartment was clean, and things were okay. Naomi had gotten used to radical changes in her domestic situation with her mom, so what she was most comfortable with was something that was safe, temporary, and had an uncertain future. Boxes checked on all that. She’d started a job and classes at the community college once Sarah was old enough for day care, and if she played it all just right, she could be done with veterinary school in another six and a half years.

The most painful part of all of it was the part she never told anyone. Naomi Williams didn’t like her child. Yes, she adored her. Yes, she felt a deep and uncompromising love for her. But in moments when Naomi was honest with herself, she would silently admit that she didn’t really like her kid. Sarah could be the most loving child you’d ever met in your entire life, and also the most hateful, angry, and debilitating. For two years after Naomi’s father died of a sudden heart attack at age fifty-three, Sarah, just picking up on the concept of death, had brought up the sensitive issue to her young, grieving mother with the painful consistency of an abscessed tooth. Someone would mention fathers and the kid would say, “But you can’t ever talk to your daddy again, right, Mama?”

Or the subject of parents in general would come up, and Sarah would look at Naomi and say, “You only have one parent now, and your other one won’t ever come back, right, Mama?”

Or, shit, people would just mention that they’d called somebody on the goddamn phone, and the kid would say, “Your daddy won’t ever call you again, will he?”

Everybody would wince and laugh and say, “She’s trying to make sense of death, the poor thing!” but Naomi knew vindictiveness when she saw it. Her own kid didn’t like her, and she guessed that was okay, because it cut both ways. Yeah, yeah, she loved her, but … she didn’t know. Maybe someday. Right now, she just wanted to keep her head down, grab night shifts at the storage place whenever she could, and put a little more money away. Vet school. That was the prize. Both eyes on it at all times.

NAOMI DUMPED THE TRASH IN THE BIG BIN IN THE FAR CORNER OF THE

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