ZERO STATE
© 2018 Jameson Kowalczyk
All Rights Reserved
PART 1: DATA GRAB
CHAPTER 1
When the light above the cargo bay door changed from red to green, Logan walked to the edge of the ramp and jumped into a bright, empty sky.
He'd read somewhere that one of the benefits of distance running was the effect forward motion had on the human mind: the runner's thoughts moved away from the past, toward the future. Falling from the sky had a similar effect. As his body accelerated to terminal velocity, he became a man without a past. Forty-one years of life faded into the background; there were only the next ninety minutes and the thing he needed to steal in that time.
***
He was somewhere in the Caribbean. He didn't know exactly where. He'd met his employers in Puerto Rico and they'd crossed a stretch of ocean before landing on an airfield in the middle of a jungle. The airfield looked like it was on loan from a drug cartel or political revolutionaries. A handful of neglected buildings and a long runway. A barbed-wire fence with vegetation pressing in on all sides. One unpaved road leading to a gate. No control tower.
There were a few dozen people already there, most of them carrying guns and guarding the buildings or watching the gate. Logan was a freelancer, but most of these guys were probably full-time soldiers. Mercenaries with retirement plans and health insurance. Company men.
Logan kept to himself, passing his time inside a barracks-style building that housed two rows of bunks and a locker room. He stayed loose by beating on an old freestanding heavy bag that had been left behind by a previous occupant. Occasionally, one of the company men brought him food. He slept as much as he could. He didn't know what the job would require, only what it would pay.
Two days passed.
Then, the third day, early morning: Logan was hitting the heavy bag when one of the company men arrived and told him it was time. Outside, a cargo plane had appeared at one end of the runway. Logan was escorted into a cavernous hanger. Waiting inside was a pressure-sealed container that was roughly the size and shape of a bank vault.
The company man unlocked the vault with a twelve-digit code, punched in by memory. The doors separated with a hiss of escaping air. A wide assortment of weapons—rifles, submachine guns, pistols, shotguns, grenade launchers—lined the walls inside. At the vault's center was an armored hazmat suit. And next to it, something that looked like a coffin with a transparent dome for a lid.
The company man spoke:
"In one hour you will parachute onto an island and recover a piece of cargo from a plane crash. The cargo is a human body, male, forty-five years old. It is infected with a contagion classified as level six by the Corporation for Disease Control. The contagion is transmitted through contact with bodily fluids. The contagion is also believed to be vapor-borne—airborne in close quarters. Symptoms of infection appear within the first one hundred and twenty minutes and include bleeding from the eyes, nose, and anus. The cargo may be alive or dead. It may be violent due to hallucinations or psychosis brought on by high fever. It is most likely contained in an atmospheric pod, which you will need to cut open in order to transfer it into our own container." The company man pointed to the coffin-pod.
"If the cargo is alive, you may need to subdue it. You will be provided a stun gun. You are also authorized to kill the cargo if necessary, though we ask you to use this option only as a last resort and that you do not destroy any of the major organs in the process. Asphyxiation is recommended.
"During the operation, you will be assisted by your handler. You will maintain an open line of communication with her at all times. She will also pilot a Remote-Operated Rough Terrain Mule that will be dropped onto the island alongside you, and that you will use to transport the cargo.
"NATO has issued a warrant for the complete destruction of the island, and according to our latest intelligence, Air Force drones are being prepped onboard an aircraft carrier stationed in the Gulf of Mexico. The CDC has challenged the warrant and requested a chance to recover data from the crash site. Our predictive analysis forecasts this request will be denied. We expect the Air Force will drop antimatter bombs onto the island approximately one hour and forty minutes after you land.
"Factoring in a ten-minute cushion, that gives you ninety minutes to reach the crash site, locate the cargo, and travel a safe distance from the island. A small watercraft will be waiting for you on the island's southern tip. Your extraction point is five miles off the beach, on the open water. Do you have any questions?"
"Should I expect resistance?" Logan said. "Locals or other operatives attempting to recover the cargo?"
"The island is uninhabited. Or rather, no longer inhabited. There are several abandoned villages and plantations scattered throughout. Ghost towns. There's a small chance you'll encounter squatters or feral animals."
The island was chosen for that reason, Logan thought. Limit the risk of exposure. Either they shot the plane down over the island or instructed the pilot to land there when something malfunctioned—sabotage. They knew where the plane was going, when it would arrive…
He stopped himself. He wasn't paid to think about these details. He was paid to not think about them.
The company man continued. "Our intelligence shows no sign of any other organization moving on the cargo. The CDC won't risk putting any people on the island with the destruction warrant pending approval. Should you encounter any third party, you should consider them hostile, consider their motivations terroristic in intent, and use any means necessary to prevent them from acquiring the cargo."
***
From the plane, the island had been a vague, dark shape on the blue ocean. As Logan's parachute carried him closer, the landmass swelled and details emerged. Coral reefs beneath the glassy, shallow waters. Endless branches woven into a solid green canopy. Colorful buildings, like dripped paint, scattered randomly.
A second parachute glided in the sky above him, carrying the mule. The machine was more than twice the size of the animal it was named after. Four oddly-jointed limbs extended from its underside.
The pressurized suit Logan wore looked like a form-fitting spacesuit. Standard hazmat suits, the kind designed for lab work, consisted of four layers of various materials. The one Logan wore had a fifth layer, an exoskeleton of flexible armor. In addition to keeping out single particles from the surrounding environment, his suit was designed to stop bullets and shrapnel, and absorb blunt force impact.
The suit also insulated him from the heat of the jungle as he glided above the treetops. He steered onto a bald ridge and his boots kicked red dirt as he again made contact with the ground.
A moment later, he watched the mule crash into the treetops, a hundred meters away.
"Gatsby," he said. At the recognition of the password, the inside of his faceplate flickered and a stack of numbers appeared in his peripheral vision—battery life for the suit's systems, outside temperature, his heart rate.
And at the bottom of the stack, a timer, counting down: 01:27:32. Eighty-seven minutes.
The sound of his self-contained respiration was joined by the canned silence of an open communication line and a female voice.
"I know, I know..."
"Your landing was a bit off." In the background, he heard fingers prattling on a keyboard.
"How far?"
"A hundred meters," he said.
"The cameras are blocked."
"I think it might be caught in some trees."
"Setting a waypoint."
A red flag pinned on the center of Logan's faceplate, marking the location of the mule. Below the flag, the distance: 97m.
"That 'hundred meters' estimate was a bit
unfair, don't you think?" Her voice was deep and youthful. They had never met in person, but by this point the sound of her voice was so familiar, hearing it felt something like trying to imagine the face of a lost friend.
He left his parachute on the ridge where he landed, weighed down with a stone.
At the bottom of the ridge, he paused to loosen the strap that secured his assault rifle to his body. The rifle's sights—as well as the stock, grip, trigger, and magazine release—had all been modified to accommodate the suit's bulky gloves, faceplate, and hood. The .40 caliber pistol strapped to his right thigh had similar modifications. Whoever had put his kit together hadn't overlooked any details.
Even with the modifications, firing the weapons would be awkward. Awkward, but not unfamiliar. He'd trained in hazmat suits during his time in the military. The suits he'd worn back then hadn't been as lightweight or as well-armored as the one he wore now—the gear was always more cutting edge in the private sector.
***
The world was dark and green underneath the canopy of trees. The distance to the waypoint counted down as he moved forward:
50m.
The faint tapping of computer keys followed him as he picked his way through the dense jungle. He glanced at the countdown on the edge of his vision:
01:21:03.
Eighty-one minutes.
"How accurate is that timeframe?"
"Accurate. Latest reports have drones en route. The warrant is still being held up by lobbyists for the CDC, but forecast says the government is going to win this one."
There were a dozen more questions he wanted to ask. About the contagion they were after. About the plane crash. About the identity of their employers. He wanted to know what Zoe thought about these things. He wanted to know if she thought about them. But he was outfitted head to toe in company gear, cameras and microphones stuck all over him. Their employers were watching, and listening. Too many questions, too many signs that he and Zoe were thinking too much, and they might be considered a loose end.
He was paid to acquire. She was paid to coordinate. So he kept his thoughts to himself.
The location of the crash—the Caribbean—meant the plane had taken off somewhere far south. South America, maybe even Antarctica. Someplace with little oversight on engineering and experimentation, or someplace so isolated you could pretty much get away with doing whatever you wanted. The fact that the body was being transported and not incinerated led him to believe that the person was a high-salaried researcher or upper management, someone the company would bring stateside in an attempt to save. An infected janitor or student would never have left the lab. They would have been put in isolation while the research team took notes and blood samples and watched with fascinated interest as the disease progressed to its final stage. The unfortunate victim's family would get a letter explaining their loved one had died in an accident.
Maybe Zoe was thinking the same thing. Maybe she was better at putting thoughts like these out of her head. Maybe he shouldn't trust her as much as he did. Maybe the company didn't even need to monitor their conversations when she could brief them on his behavior, suggest that his skill set no longer outweighed the risk of him walking around with a head full of thoughts.
"You still there?" she asked.
"Yeah. Sorry."
He abandoned that line of thinking and focused, again.
The waypoint read 15m.
Then 10m.
And at 5m, he looked up and found it dangling twenty feet off the ground, a half-ton metal bug caught in a web of branches and paracord.
"Do you see it?"
"Yeah."
"Can you get it down?"
His eyes searched the canopy of branches, like he was sorting out the strands in a knot. He found the branch that seemed to be holding most of the weight, and then he switched the magazine on his assault rifle to one loaded with explosive rounds.
He took aim and fired. The weight-bearing branch separated from the tree with a shower of splinters. The mule fell, more branches snapping under the force of the drop.
Despite its bulk, the mule landed with the nimbleness of a spider, its jointed legs bending to absorb the impact as it connected with the ground.
A minute later, Logan had cut away the tangle of broken branches and paracord, and the mule was following him toward another waypoint stuck on the inside of his faceplate, this one marking the crash site.
814m.
Half a mile away.
***
Zoe used a satellite map to help Logan navigate the jungle, avoiding geographical features that would slow his progress—rivers, rock formations, ravines. Otherwise, few words were spoken as he moved through the jungle and she guided the mule. It was always this way—banter died off as the objective neared. Once, Zoe had joked that they were like one of those couples you saw at a restaurant, the kind that went silent the moment their food arrived.
There was another layer to their silence, an unspoken paranoia: their profession demanded a layer of emotional distance—from human life in general, and from one another in particular. It was better that an operative and a handler didn't sound too close, too comfortable. Personal relationships were considered a liability, one that could result in their names being blacklisted, their work assigned to other teams.
The crash site appeared out of nowhere. Even with the waypoint ten meters away, Logan was looking into a wall of green. Then a few more steps and he was in a clearing, a recent addition to the landscape. Trees were chopped in half where the plane had sheared through the canopy like a ten-ton piece of shrapnel. Others were uprooted where the fuselage had plowed into the ground.
"I'm here," he said.
The soil and surrounding foliage were wet with fuel. He paused to change out the ammunition on his rifle, from the explosive rounds to normal metal slugs that had a lesser chance of turning the jungle into an inferno if he had cause to fire his weapon.
Logan crept forward, the mule moving alongside him and a half-step behind, its jointed legs at a stealthy crouch.
The plane was a commuter-sized jet with a white body, no logos of any kind designating a corporation or agency. It had crashed quietly, or as quietly as a plane can crash. No burning fuel, no explosion. The tail had broken off, but the rest was mostly intact. No one had shot it down or detonated a bomb inside it.
Sabotaged, either before takeoff, or sometime while it was in the air. A martyr was unlikely, but someone could have parachuted out, or hacked the controls while following in another aircraft, or—
Logan stopped himself. He was doing it again, putting the pieces together. It didn't matter how the plane got here. Thinking about it wasn't his job.
The plane's nose was pointed toward the severed tail, having turned 180 degrees as one wing pivoted into the ground before snapping off. The windshield of the cockpit was cracked and spattered with blood.
Inside, rows of seats were uprooted from the floor and smashed against one another. Bodies were pressed between some. A few unclaimed limbs and a few gallons of blood rounded out the carnage. Logan didn't look closely and didn't dwell on the details. He didn't find the pod or the body it was supposed to contain inside the tail section or the fuselage.
"Cargo isn't here," he said.
"Split up, I'll circle the crash site." The mule broke away, still moving quietly.
Logan panned left and right, looking through his faceplate, trying to see a pattern to the destruction wrought by the crash, trying to determine what direction the pod would have been flung toward. There were sixty-four minutes left on the countdown. Still plenty of time. More time than he should need. Enough time that he shouldn't be feeling the growing sense of unease in the pit of his stomach.
Just beyond the crash site, where the jungle resumed unscathed, the pod was waiting for him.
Even before he was standing over the pod and looking through its clear domed lid, Logan could see that it was empty.
>
CHAPTER 2
The countdown read: 55:02.
If the body Logan was searching for had not been bleeding—and bleeding profusely—there would have been no chance of finding it. He would have wasted twenty minutes searching around the crash site and then headed to the boat empty-handed.
But the body that had pulled itself from the pod and walked into the jungle was leaking blood and fluid by the pint, leaving a thick trail for Logan to follow. The question was how long the body had been walking, and how quickly.
51:04.
"What's up ahead?" Logan asked.
"A village. Abandoned." There was tension in Zoe's voice, and the mule was walking five or ten steps ahead of him, frequently stopping and waiting so he could catch up. Body language transmitted over thousands of miles of distance. Wherever in the world Zoe was, she was anxious. She wanted him to pack this in, to walk away. She'd been working with him long enough to know that he wouldn't.
It wasn't that he needed the money the job paid. It wasn't even a matter of professional pride. Something far more basic pushed Logan deeper into the island, making the task more dangerous with every step forward and every passing second.
He wasn't the type of person who could let something go. He never had been, never would be. Regardless of the risk involved, Logan had never been able to ignore a solution when one presented itself.
46:59.
Which was really only twenty-two minutes. He would need twenty-five to get back across the island, to the boat. At least that's what he estimated. He didn't think about it too hard.
Next to him, he saw a bloody handprint on the trunk of a tree, a puddle of fluid in the dirt underneath. The body had paused here. It had started to bleed more, from disease progression or exertion or a combination of the two.
35:55.
The jungle gave way to a narrow dirt road. Logan could see the walls of the village through the screen of vegetation in front of him. He crept closer and looked out over the ghost town. It was maybe a half-mile square, a grid of cinderblock buildings and clapboard huts. There was a wide road that ran down the center, unpaved.
Zero State Page 1
