Zero State

by Jameson Kowalczyk

  The dome-shaped huts were part of a network of shelters. They reminded Logan of igloos. He'd read about structures like these, during the days leading up to his arrival. They had been used by engineers and surveyors, the people who'd designed and built the continent's research stations and outposts and military bases. They were still here because you didn't tear down shelters on a landscape where shelter wasn't readily available, because you never knew when you might need it again.

  Yesterday's storm had dispersed or moved on, and he saw nothing in the distance but more white: white land, white mountains, white sky.

  The goggles he wore were basic things, designed to protect his eyes from the wind and cold, with none of the display features or night vision or thermal optics that he'd been using the day before.

  He moved across the snow and ice.

  ***

  The swarm drone resembled a massive insect that had landed and frozen solid. It was half-buried in a snow drift, but intact and undamaged. The machines were programmed to land once their fuel reserves reached a certain low. He wondered how long the drones had kept circling in the sky after he'd gone into the crevasse, after he'd destroyed the marker using it like a pugil stick. He wondered how much live ammo was still scattered out here.

  He started to walk away and then stopped, nagged by a half-formed thought. He thumbed buttons on the GPS unit and a red flag appeared on the small screen, marking the drone's location.

  He walked on.

  Ten minutes later, Logan crested a hill and looked down at the valley below. To his left, stretching on for a half-mile or more, the snow and ice was covered in all manner of frozen carnage. Bodies and pieces of bodies and blackened scraps of metal and the burned-out husks of vehicles.

  Straight ahead was the crevasse, like a moat dug at the battlefield's edge in an attempt to contain the violence.

  And to his right, a collection of manmade structures.

  ***

  Logan found a rifle amid the bodies scattered on the outskirts of the battlefield. The rifle was Russian-made, because that nation had a long history of fighting in this type of climate. Deep cold could easily render a weapon ineffective. Snow and ice could collect in the barrel. Subzero temperatures could cool the explosion of a bullet's primer and powder before it was even done exploding, causing a bullet to fire with as much velocity as a gumball rolling out of a vending machine. Like most materials, metals contracted when cold, and barrels could constrict and become too narrow for a bullet to pass through.

  But this rifle was designed for this type of environment. Made from composite materials that wouldn't constrict. Designed to be fired dry, without the lubricants or oils that would have frozen after prolonged exposure. The muzzle still had a strip of tape covering it to keep out snow and ice—its owner had been killed before he or she had the chance to fire a single shot.

  He stared out across the flat white plain covered in twisted shapes of dead bodies and destroyed machinery, awed by the scope of the destruction he'd wrought on this place. He'd long ago come to terms with the fact that he was a man capable of violence. It had been a long time since he'd felt regret over the death of an enemy, because he'd made a point of never killing anyone he might regret killing. But the violence here was at such a scale that he would not have been human if it didn't weigh on his conscience.

  He acknowledged the moment, then began the walk toward the base.

  ***

  Logan kept his approach slow and cautious.

  When he was fifty yards out from the nearest building, he aimed the rifle toward the sky and fired off three shots, pausing for five seconds between each. He did this to test that the weapon was functioning, and to see if the sound drew attention.

  But Logan saw no guards. He saw no motion of people running for cover or taking up defensive positions. There were no shots fired back.

  He waited, his hands and feet going numb in the cold. Warm air flowed out of chimney vents. There were a dozen small buildings that reminded him of shipping containers, that he imagined sheltered supplies or access panels or emergency exits. There were short comm towers, like frozen trees. This was all there was to see on the surface. The rest of the lab was underground.

  Logan stood and walked fifty yards across the white landscape, still moving cautiously, still expecting to encounter soldiers on guard duty. He figured he'd killed off most of their roster the day before, but there had to be at least a few people left. You never sent every single person you had into battle.

  But all he found were bodies.

  Four of them, each had a black antenna sticking from its chest. Up close, he saw that the black antennas were arrows. A fragment of memory shook loose. An arrow fired down into the blue wall of the crevasse, carrying the wire that had been used to haul him back from his imminent death.

  He moved on. Past the chimney vents. Past the shipping containers that, up close, looked like something designed to haul supplies in space.

  Massive ramps had been dug into the ice, leading down to blast doors that were tall enough and wide enough for the armored vehicles that had rolled into battle the day before. The doors looked too big to be manmade, more like something that had been unearthed, a gateway built by an ancient civilization in a time before the continent was covered in ice, or by a species far better evolved to live in such a harsh environment.

  The blast doors were open, just wide enough for a person to squeeze through.

  Through that narrow passage, and into the dark tunnel beyond. One time he'd gone hiking and come across an abandoned rail tunnel, and walked from one end to the other. This space had a similar feeling.

  He kicked off his snowshoes and lifted his goggles from his eyes onto his forehead. The walls were so smooth he mistook them for ice, before he touched one and realized they were stone, carved using antimatter charges. The floor was made from squares of rough material to provide traction for boots, tires, treads. Storage rooms and narrow passageways were hollowed into the walls.

  He reached into the duffle bag and came out with a road flare. He uncapped the end and raked it across the floor like it was a giant match. There were sparks and heat and a familiar chemical smell as the flare ignited. He threw the flare forward and it painted the walls in eerie red light.

  An armored vehicle was parked up ahead, silent and cold and as still as if it were on display in a museum. Two shapes were leaned against it, on the ground. He walked forward, rifle ready, and kicked one of the bodies in the boot. The leg was stiff. He clicked on his headlamp. The bodies were two men, dead for hours. Icicles of frozen blood hung from their mouths. More frozen blood darkened the flanks of their white coats. Their killer had used a knife, pushed the blade in at the armpit, through a narrow gap in body armor and directly into a major artery that Logan could never remember the name of. He clicked off his headlamp and let his eyes readjust to the dark.

  He walked away from the red glow of the burning flare, further into the cold, dark earth.

  ***

  In the days leading up to this job, Logan had studied blueprints of the facility, and knew the tunnel was roughly a hundred meters from end to end. Even at his creeping pace, moving through the dark without a light source, it wasn't long before the tunnel ended in a round chamber. It felt like he'd entered the tomb of some leviathan god.

  The facility was a silo, a giant metal cylinder set into an empty core in the ice and rock. Right now he was basically standing on top of a building that had been built underground. The floor at his feet was metal. The smooth, stone walls were ribbed with pipes that cycled in fresh air. The ceiling above was a lid placed over the hole they'd dug into the frozen earth. This whole empty space had been carved out with antimatter charges, by engineers who had spent hundreds of man hours calculating blast radii and the density of ground that had been frozen for tens of thousands of years, and then run it all through computer simulations to map out each controlled detonation with exacting precision.
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  There were stacks of crates, small vehicles that rode on treads, and trailers to haul supplies. Logan walked to the center of the chamber, where there was an elevator enclosed in a metal cage. He lifted the cage open. Inside, there was enough room for twenty people.

  There were two buttons. This elevator only traveled between the uppermost floor and the surface. As the platform lowered, doors slid shut above Logan's head, sealing the top of the elevator shaft.

  The uppermost floor was labeled Level 1, and was a staging area. Row after row of open lockers occupied the floor space. The rows were uneven, like they'd been installed posthaste. The lockers that weren't empty were packed with cold weather gear—base layers and outer shells, boots and goggles, gloves and snowshoes. But most lockers were empty or mostly empty. The gear those lockers had contained was outside, stuck to the frozen skin of the bodies that littered the battlefield.

  "Hello?" Logan called out, his voice friendly.

  No one answered. There was no movement, no signs of life.

  Logan moved among the lockers until he found what he was looking for: a gun rack. Protocol for extreme cold temperatures was to have guns designated for outdoors and guns designated for indoors. Bringing a gun in from the cold resulted in condensation, as frozen moisture that had collected on the weapon melted. The rifle Logan carried in his hands was a prime example, its barrel sweating like a can of cold soda on a summer day. Long term, moisture like this could cause the weapon to rust. Short term, it could decrease accuracy or cause the weapon to jam.

  He unloaded the rifle and left it in one of the empty lockers, and pulled a new weapon off the rack, a compact submachine gun. The submachine gun would have been almost useless outside in the wind, but was an excellent choice for close quarters, like an office or an apartment.

  He stripped off the layers of cold weather gear and hung it up to dry in case he needed it later. His skin was tacky with sweat. Searching the lockers that still contained clothing, he found green cargo pants and a gray thermal shirt that was a size too small but still fit him well enough. He searched more and found fresh socks and underwear and a pair of boots. He kept the body armor he'd been wearing when he came in.

  He stuffed three ammo mags into each cargo pocket of the pants, and took a backup weapon, a semiautomatic pistol he tucked at the small of his back, and headed for a door marked STAIRS.

  Then he stopped, turned around, and walked back to where he'd hung up the clothing he'd been wearing outside. The outer layer was dripping with melting snow. The base layer was damp with sweat. He took a long look at each item, then walked down the row of lockers and returned a moment later. Bundled in his arms were a thick jacket, insulated pants, tights, goggles, boots. He compared each article to what he'd been wearing outside, and every article was a match. The gear that had been left for him had been taken from this room.

  ***

  Stairs brought Logan to the floor below. Level 2. He knew the basic layout from the floor plans he'd studied. Level 1 was a transition area, a place for people to change and drop their gear when heading outside or coming back in. The rows of lockers were a modification made by the group that had taken the place over in recent weeks. Level 2 was living space—dorm rooms, the kitchen, cafeteria, lounge—because you wanted the place where people slept to be as close to the surface as possible in case of an emergency. If there was a fire in the middle of the night, the people who lived here would only need to travel up one floor, put on their outdoor gear, and take the elevator up one more level. The tunnel would be stocked with emergency supplies. If the situation demanded more distance, there were the storage units Logan had seen outside, which he imagined contained temporary shelters. They could also trek to the old camp he'd woken up inside.

  Logan opened the door gently and stepped through, into a corridor that was crowded with boxes of supplies, most of it food. He held the door open and listened and heard only silence. He shoved the door shut and stepped across the hall into the nearest room, a laundry room.

  The door slammed, a sound as loud as a thunderclap in the dead silence. Logan listened, heard nothing. No one came to investigate the sound. He heard no whispered conversation, no breathing, no footsteps.

  "Hello?" Logan called out.

  No response.

  He went through the entire level, room by room.

  Most of the rooms here were living quarters. Each had a bed, a desk, a closet. Some of the beds were made, others were unmade. Laptops and books had been left out. Laundry had been hung over furniture. Photographs and posters had been tacked to the walls and a few people had strung up Christmas lights. He thought about using one of the laptops, but would have felt wrong using someone's personal computer without asking permission. There was a difference between stealing from a company and going through someone's personal belongings. At least there was to Logan. He was a thief by trade, but he valued privacy and personal property.

  He found a lounge with a coffee maker and set it to brew a single cup. While he waited, he searched the cupboards and found boxes of energy bars. He compared it to the wrappers from the energy bars that his unknown rescuer had left him. It was a match.

  The coffee maker let out a final gurgle. Logan sat in a chair and sipped his mug of coffee and speculated about the person who had rescued him.

  ***

  The next level down, Level 3, had been an open floor office, with rows of work stations and conference rooms for meetings and presentations, but most of that had been cleared away to transform the space into barracks. The room was filled with bunks and footlockers that had been haphazardly arranged. The air was heavy with the smell of unwashed bodies.

  The sight of all the empty bunks weighed on his conscience the same way the sight of the mangled, frozen bodies had outside. Death aggregated. Difficult to process.

  He turned away and walked back into the stairwell.

  ***

  The facility went down another three levels. Level 6, the bottommost level, was a Hot Room, a pressure-sealed lab built to house the world's most lethal contagions—viruses, unkillable bacteria, engineered bioweapons, and ancient plagues like the one that Logan had first encountered on the island. Prospero virus, the thing that had started him down this path. Going down to Level 6 would require a hazmat suit and chemical showers and a long list of safety regulations that Logan was not familiar with. But none of that mattered because Logan was not going down to Level 6.

  He would also not be going into Level 5, which were kennels where the research team kept live animals that were used for tests.

  He stepped out of the stairwell onto Level 4, pushing the door open gently, letting it close quietly. The corridor was like all the others in the floors above, linoleum floor and florescent lights and walls that had been painted a light gray. He listened, and he heard a din of conversation from the rooms ahead.

  Logan loosened the strap on the submachine gun, letting it hang by his side in a way that looked almost casual, but would allow him to draw and fire in a fraction of a second. If someone charged him, he'd stop them with a push kick or a block with his left forearm, and his right hand would raise the gun. It was a technique he had drilled thousands of times.

  He straightened his posture, put on his most boyish grin, and rolled up the sleeves to reveal his battered forearms, putting his bruises on full display. The goal was to look nonaggressive but also intimidating. From his experience, no one ever wanted to fuck with a guy that had traded a beating and walked away with a smile on his face.

  He walked down the corridor, toward the sound of conversation. There were offices on either side of the corridor, empty chairs and cluttered desks and screen savers glowing from laptop screens. Up ahead, the corridor opened into a white room. There were long countertops crowded with expensive-looking equipment. There were shelves stocked with bottled chemicals and glassware. There were refrigerators with clear doors that contained racks of test tubes with handwritten labels. There was
a closet with lab coats and shelves that held goggles, gloves, protective masks. There was a shower and an eyewash station.

  It looked more or less what Logan had expected it to look like, like any number of other labs he'd broken into over the years.

  He counted a dozen people on his first glance at the room, and then five more, for a total of seventeen, as he eyed the room more carefully. A mix of men and women. The youngest faces looked to be early twenties. The oldest, late forties. Underneath their lab coats they were dressed in jeans, sweaters, thermals, hoodies, boots. The men had scruffy beards. The women had their hair pulled into messy buns and ponytails.

  Conversations fell silent as all eyes turned to Logan.

  "Hello, everyone."

  One of the men stepped forward. Two of the women did the same. Aggressive posture from all three.

  "Relax," Logan said. He held up a hand, showing off his bruised knuckles and the welts that covered him from wrist to elbow, and smiled wider.

  "My name is Logan. I work for Paradime."

  "The social media company?" someone asked.

  "That's the one."

  "What the fuck are you doing here?" asked the guy who'd stepped forward. He was a few years older than Logan, with a salt-and-pepper beard and a lumberjack's build, broad shoulders and thick limbs. If he took another step, Logan would put him down with a hard strike to a nerve or an artery, something painful that wouldn't do any lasting damage.

  But the man stayed where he stood.

  Logan smiled. "You're employees of the CDC. A few weeks ago a bunch of people with guns showed up and took over. Your security forces surrendered without a fight—a smart decision, considering the numbers and firepower they were up against—so they were sent home, along with a lot of other people. You were kept here. Is that a mostly-accurate description of events?"