Cold Storage

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The Last Thirty-Four Minutes

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Afterwards

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Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Prologue (#ulink_bad43418-e75f-5950-b236-1eb24147d5a9)

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 (#ulink_7b4fb937-180f-50f7-acec-1223733320e9)

One (#ulink_14bcbed4-7075-57f0-a03c-f12e89f5ee82)

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.”