Cold Storage

I fell in love with this book from the outset, it’s bit horror-ish, bit fantasy with some humor thrown in and just appealed to me. We start off going to a desert in Australia with agents that have not seen anything like this before and they decide to bury it in cold storage beneath a little used military repository. Some 15 odd years later something goes wrong, very wrong!

Lt Colonel Trini Romano and Major Roberto Diaz get sent on a mission with Dr. Hero Martins, a Microbiologist from University of Chicago. She specialises in epidemiological surveillance. They were going to a remote township called Kiwirrkurra in the middle of the Gibson Desert. In 1979, part of the skylab fell outside Esperance. Three days ago, a call came from NASA Space Biosciences Research Branch. A message had come through about six different agencies, that someone was calling from West Australia to say ‘something was coming out of the tank’. ‘There was an extra oxygen tank. This fell on Kiwirrkurra. The caller identified themselves as Enos Namatjira. His uncle had found it five or six years ago and moved it in front of his house, he kept it as a souvenir. But now there was something wrong with it, and he was getting sick. Quickly.’ ‘Since then people have started dying.’

Sixteen years later in 2003, the DTRA decided the mine complex was a Cold War complex that was no longer needed so it was cleared out, cleaned up, given a coat of paint and sold to Smart Warehousing for private use. The self storage company put up some drywall, got 650 locking overhead garage doors and opened it to the public. Teacake managed to get a job working at the storage facility and got nights, Thursday through Sunday. He always tried to get there a bit early at the start of a shift.  When he first started a shift, he checked the twelve monitors, to see if anyone was in and what state the place was in. Then a quick glance at the other entrance to see if she had turned up for work, she had, then to work out a way to bump into her. She, Naomi, was on the move with a full bin under her arm. She was heading to the dumpsters. Thanks to Griffin, Teacake had a full bin so he had an excuse to bump into her, so off he went. Naomi had just emptied her bin when Teacake burst into the loading bay, making her jump. They introduced themselves as they hadn’t met before and chatted before Naomi turned to leave before she mentioned that there was a ‘beep’ coming from Teacakes side of the facility. Teacake then realised what the intermittent noise had been that he couldn’t put his finger on. The beep was very faint but there. They got back to Teacakes’ reception desk and listened, the beep was coming from the wall behind the desk. Teacake threw his desk chair at the wall, it went through really easy and made an even bigger hole when he pulled the chair back out. In the hole there was a red flashing light, at eye level, three feet to his left. BEEP. On the concealed interior wall, there were dials and gauges, long out of use and cut off from power which were set in an industrial looking corrugated metal framework unit which was painted in a sickly institutional green used back in the ‘70s.  They needed a flashlight to read the writing on the unit. Teacake got himself into the hole and read ‘NTC Thermistor Breach, Sub-basement Level Four.’ ‘What the hell is sub basement level four? I thought there was only one.’ They find a schematic which shows SB-2, SB-3 and SB-4, which is where the light is flashing. Also, it shows what appears to be a tube ladder allowing access to the lower levels. They just have to find the entrance to it.

This is a great story, well written and thought out. I enjoy this type of book as I like horror and fantasy and I certainly don’t read enough of them. I rated this 5 out of 5.

When Pentagon bioterror operative Roberto Diaz was sent to investigate a suspected biochemical attack, he found something far worse: a highly mutative organism capable of extinction-level destruction.

Now, after decades of festering in a forgotten sub-basement, the specimen has found its way out and is on a lethal feeding frenzy. And only Diaz knows how to stop it.

He races across the country to help two unwitting security guards – one an ex-con, the other a single mother. Over one harrowing night, the unlikely trio must figure out how to quarantine this horror again . . . before it’s too late.

Fast paced, relevant to the current climate today and a brilliant read. Don't really need to say any more.