Zero Bomb

by M. T Hill

  Remi stares at the fox.

  ‘In truth,’ the woman continues, ‘we once tried to prepare our recruits for moments like these. Cognitive dissonance… detachment… fear.’

  Remi looks at her. ‘Recruit?’

  ‘Recruit! Of course! Why call it anything but? Back then, mind you, when all this started, it was a tap on the shoulder and a little chat. Except we find the approach never ends too well in this new regime. So much profiling can only teach one to underestimate the fractures in all of us. We still profile, yes, but we also listen, and gather, and watch, and wait for a fracture to present itself. A fracture wide enough. This fracture we prise open before we introduce a series of terrible shocks. And you have a fracture, Remi! A deep fracture within you, and not of your bones. And all this, I suppose, constitutes your first shock.’

  Remi rubs his temples. ‘You’re secret services?’ A wooziness under the wax smell and the heat, and the rich stink of this half-real creature acting as though it’s merely tame. There’s nothing more to offer, he decides. There are no words.

  The woman doesn’t answer, or rather lets the silence do it for her. She creaks to a stand, huffing, and glides to the cube-side towards him. Her gnarled fingers wrap into the mesh, nails whitening.

  ‘You might say that which is broken is rarely fixed,’ she says, staring directly at him. ‘How’s about that for a recruitment strategy?’

  ‘I don’t get you,’ Remi admits. He wants to sit down. He wants to close his eyes.

  ‘We’ve asked you here to fulfil a role,’ she tells him. ‘There is a cost, and there is a reward.’

  ‘Reward,’ Remi repeats.

  ‘You are a courier, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you have taken government contracts before.’

  Remi shakes his head. ‘Never.’

  ‘False. Don’t be dishonest.’

  ‘I haven’t. I thought about it, but… no. I don’t—’

  ‘Walthamstow is one example. The literary agent. Come on. Are you really so foolish? Don’t be disappointing, Remi…’

  ‘I don’t—’

  ‘I am well aware of my idiosyncrasies,’ the woman says, and she cracks a smile. ‘But you can say a lot about this government before you accuse it of workplace discrimination.’

  Remi pinches his eyelids towards his nose. ‘So this is a government agency?’

  The woman’s smile is static, thin.

  ‘You’re MI5?’

  The woman purses her lips. ‘The point,’ she says, ‘is not what I’m doing here, or who we are, but who you are. Because, Remi, we need a man like you, and we hope you might see why. An opportunity like this could serve you very well.’

  Remi shrugs. An opportunity like what? There’s no real way to remonstrate, to reject the experience. Consciously or not, he tries to disengage. Shut it down.

  Except something about the woman says she won’t allow it.

  ‘You have to understand,’ she tells him, ‘that we understand you. We’ll get to your role. First, we have to get into what motivates you.’

  ‘Martha?’ he says. ‘The picture?’

  The old woman nods carefully. ‘Oh, yes. Her and the rest. But why not – let’s talk about Martha first, shall we? Let’s talk about this thing you’ve taught yourself to believe. Let’s talk about what you really are. Rupal?’

  The fox rounds the mesh cube, paws clicking on the floor.

  ‘Show our guest to his briefing room. There’s a girl.’

  11

  Remi follows the fox’s narrow body through blank corridors, watching her ears swivel and tic. He doesn’t see another person; there is no bustling of staff or harried agents, nothing of the industrious scene you might imagine given the same cues. The only thing more unsettling is the fox, the steady whine and whir of whatever drives her legs. Remi’s own soles are soft enough to mute his steps, but his ankle occasionally cracks. Over his shoulder, the corridor stretches back to a vanishing point. How long has he been down here?

  At last the fox stops by a numberless door and scratches three times on the jamb. The door hisses open. Improbably, the woman in grey is waiting for him inside. Remi gapes at her.

  ‘How did—’

  The woman taps her nose, beckons him in. Remi enters warily. His eyes are drawn immediately to a glass tank set on an ornate wrought-iron table. The tank contains three liquids of differing viscosities, suspended uneasily in resistance to each other. The pigeon collars are stationary on the surface.

  ‘It can be confusing, at first,’ the woman in grey tells him, ‘to accept that which your instincts reject. What I will tell you, though, is that your gracious offerings afford simpler passage. These collections form our contract. They foment our mutual trust.’

  ‘The fox brought them to me,’ Remi says. ‘How was I meant to collect anything like—’

  ‘Of course she did,’ the woman snips. ‘As I said – Rupal likes you. She has known you long enough.’

  Remi looks down to the fox. The fox yawns widely, indifferent. She angles her face to the light source. Her eyes flash green as her pupils contract to slits.

  ‘Please have a seat,’ the woman in grey says, and this time she’s gesturing. By the door are two chairs, one of them dripping with straps and crowned with a padded head restraint. Remi swallows a hard lump.

  ‘I’m all right standing,’ Remi says.

  The woman in grey rolls her eyes. ‘This was the only available room. That’s all.’

  Remi relents and takes the non-padded chair, and the woman beams at him. ‘Good,’ she says. ‘We can begin.’

  She claps twice in quick succession. The spotlight above the tank clicks off. As it does, the entirety of the facing wall vibrates into life and enters a warm-up state. A screen, on to which floods a litany of boot messaging.

  ‘It helps to keep in mind that foxes in general are as adept at scavenging as they are hunting,’ the woman in grey tells him. She has pulled around her face a strange cowl whose sheer fabric is stretched over a number of hollow squares. It mimics the aesthetic – perhaps even the properties – of the Faraday cage in the warehouse. Then, towards the screen, she says, ‘Show him from the start.’

  The screen resolves to a rectangle of grainy foliage, shot from a low angle. Surveillance footage of some kind. The camera is nested in bushes, where loose twigs and undisturbed mud blur. From the edges of the shot come hints of habitation, or rather abandonment, in brambles growing freely across concrete walling. The light is neutral, an overcast morning, a guess suddenly confirmed when the camera jerks up to expose heavy cloud bank.

  A pounding, gravelly soundtrack fills the room. Remi watches as the camera straightens, and two thin, articulated beams of light flash across the frame, out of focus. Legs, he realises. Those were running shoes. Then, with a sudden jerk, the camera tips over on itself. Black soil, pulled back from to reveal the lifeless gaze of a grey-furred animal, a rabbit or hare, half-concealed in the earth. Its front is torn open, the cavity empty. Remi startles in his seat, and saliva fills his mouth. He’s recognising something, though he’s not sure what. Something from the past. He turns away.

  ‘There’s no point,’ the woman in grey tells him. ‘The system is calibrated to detect reflections in the moisture of your irises. It will pause the feed if it parses anything more than your blinking.’

  Remi forces himself to look again. The camera jitters and moves forward. The image is stabilised, but the effect is nauseating: a fish-eye rush, reflattened in post-production, that creates an unnatural, irregular aspect. The environment is squashed, depth of field shortened. It’s claustrophobic to look at, and that’s only the medium. The message is even more unsettling. On the screen stands a man in running clothes, who bends down as if to tie his laces. The man is standing on a bridge. There’s a large body of water beside him, held in by enormous concrete slabs… a reservoir. The man’s posture is poor, his head jutting away and shoulders slouching. The leg muscles
are fairly well defined. A gleaming, nearly bald crown. The man turns and moves on, breaking into a shallow jog. There comes the sound of someone spitting heavily, and the camera accelerates in pursuit, pausing briefly to take in a square of purplish entrails left in the centre of the bridge.

  In his seat, Remi mouths something. He has a sense of time and space dissolving. The man on the screen is him. The camera is attached to a fox. He remembers that morning. A reservoir, a fox with a bloodied maw. Later, running to a church.

  This footage was captured the morning they buried Martha.

  ‘How long have you been following me?’ he asks the darkness.

  ‘Not just following,’ the woman in grey says. ‘Collecting. Assessing. Here – see? Perfect timing.’ The camera is locked to a thick oyster of spit in the gravel. The camera crash-zooms into it, a congealment, fine bubbles popping, then rises away.

  ‘Over the years, Rupal has created a beautiful taxonomy of you. Hair, blood. The dead sperm from tissues in your refuse. Indeed, I think one of the few samples we’re missing is the horrid, faecal-smelling balls of matter accreting in your tonsil cavities. But I’m sure she’ll be able to reap one of those soon.’

  ‘No,’ Remi whispers, and he tongues the roof of his mouth instinctively.

  ‘It is a dataset,’ the woman goes on. ‘A form of insurance. It’s how we know you. And it is vital to our work. Absolutely vital.’

  ‘No,’ Remi whispers, and he stands up.

  The woman in grey takes his shoulder. More force in her hand than should be possible. ‘Calm down,’ she says. She makes him sit. ‘Your data is safe,’ she tells him. ‘These are merely the stakes. It is gravely important you acknowledge me. This way you can apprehend what comes next.’

  ‘I don’t want it,’ Remi says, meeker now. ‘I don’t want this.’ He slumps, overcome with a sense of helplessness and violation. A physical pain, as though he’s being infected: a sharp line that seems to cut him down the middle.

  ‘Please watch,’ the woman says.

  Cut to another scene. A smoky light. A London light. A figure through pyro-glass: Remi, filmed in his apartment kitchenette, unaware and apparently getting ready for work. Remi, in his apartment, being filmed by the Gilper bug he allows to hover outside the window each morning. Remi, in his apartment, being spied upon by the closest thing he has to a companion.

  Cut to another morning. Another morning. And another. Now a time-lapse of Remi’s morning routines: his eating of toast, drinking tea; his standing at his kitchenette stove, rotating the knobs for the hob. Turning on the gas. Turning off the gas. Clicking, calmly, with his mouth, as if to mimic the sound of the stove’s ignition switch.

  ‘But…’ he manages to say.

  ‘It’s an electric hob,’ the woman in grey says. ‘There is no gas supply to your flat, or to any of the flats in your block.’

  Remi turns to her. The footage pauses instantly. ‘What is this?’ he asks. ‘What are you showing me?’

  ‘Well, that you are doomed to repetition,’ she tells him. ‘More of an animal than you realise.’

  ‘I don’t remember doing this. You’ve doctored it.’

  ‘We’ve doctored nothing,’ the woman snaps. ‘The point is, your body remembers. That is the nature of trauma. We have your data here, remember – it is the exact same impulse that once caused you to refresh the same websites at least fifty times a day. The searches you made tell us so much. Your patterns are extraordinary, Remi: the data is a sight to behold. But what do you think you are looking for? What are you hoping will change? It’s as if you almost know, deep in there, the truth of the matter.’

  Remi’s shame stays any kind of answer. There is no response. He’s counted out and tallied up.

  ‘Tell me, Remi, if you can – when did you stop watching the news? Do you know today’s date?’

  Remi tips his head forward, pushing his hands into his hair.

  ‘Can you say? Can you tell me?’

  Remi’s lips part, but he doesn’t speak.

  ‘There’s so little to be ashamed of,’ the woman continues. ‘The world is a cold stone, and we are its rotting flesh.’

  ‘I remember arguments,’ Remi admits quietly. ‘At home. I remember arguing. I think that’s when things started to change.’

  ‘Change? If our records of your transactions during that period allow us to draw inferences, they would be that you stopped leaving the house at all. Is that what you mean?’

  ‘My transactions? I don’t—’

  ‘Were they political arguments?’

  He nods. ‘Closer to home. Friends and family falling out. My mother and father… it drove a wedge between them.’ More of it is coming back to him now, a wave of sorrow and prickling heat. His stomach knots, then cramps. A hot coal within him. His face throbs. He recalls the fighting. War speeches. The news showed it all. His body is very stiff. People were behaving like animals – on streets at home and in faraway places. Battlecruisers launched rockets, and children foamed from their mouths. The news showed him. Bodies were smeared under tracked vehicles. The high sheen of camera lights in fresh blood. He couldn’t stop watching the news. Men and women at lecterns, frothing with ire. Falsehoods and weak pretexts. Lies and disinformation. Endless commentary and speculation, and the insidious ramping-up of fear and confusion. And through it all, Remi’s stomach was his nerve centre: he lived on cortisol and adrenaline, developed a sense of always being on, always watching the news and waiting and dreading. A belief that England’s streets and cities had grown teeth, that anyone and everything was a threat; a belief that the very apocalypse, acid rains and all-consuming, was rolling in. And Martha – it was Martha who would have suffered it all. The news showed him.

  The woman in grey places her hand on the back of Remi’s head. She cradles him.

  ‘You were dangerously obsessed with the news, Remi. We have your viewing data. You barely slept. The news infected you. The news was your window, but the window was cracked. And over the course of perhaps six or eight weeks, you stopped wanting to be the first to know. You entered what we might term a dissociative state, inflamed by emotional trauma, simply by watching the news. It was a cycle. It bloated you. The hatchlings feasted. In this cycle you convinced yourself you were better away from your family, or that they were better away from you. So you decided to abandon your family. You abandoned your role as a father. You murdered yourself in order to live again.’

  ‘No,’ Remi says.

  ‘You don’t remember? You don’t remember what you did?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘The night you left Joan and Martha, you left the gas on. You burned the house down. Didn’t you? You tried to kill them.’

  ‘Kill them? No!’

  ‘And you got away with it. They never even knew. The fire service, being so thin, had little time to investigate. They said it was an accident – there was no evidence of tampering. You were all so… oh, Remi, I’ve seen it all. You ran away and left them to burn. But we know differently, don’t we? I know. I know what you thought you were doing. I know exactly what you are.’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ Remi says. ‘It was Martha’s funeral—’

  ‘Look at me, Remi!’ the woman in grey shouts. She claps. ‘Look at this.’

  The room’s sound and colours change. On to the screen flows footage from a church graveyard. Bleak uplands behind. A congregation around a fresh grave. Mounds of earth. He recognises some of the faces standing there. He recognises his wife Joan – brow darkened and eyes downturned. He can’t see her eyes and yet he knows their colour, their shape under the duress of frowning. Lidded stare, once her stoned expression, here a picture of desperation. He watches the man he recognises as himself step forward, take up a shovel, and begin to shift soil into the cavity. The shovel face flashes as he works the ground. After four or five loads, he returns to the group, head bowed.

  Here Remi notices the hand outstretched. A small hand wrapping his arm
and pulling him in. His organs swell up inside him. A girl’s nose, then chin, then forehead emerge from the crowd. A ponytail, with strays hanging out of the bobble.

  ‘That’s Martha,’ he says.

  ‘This was captured at your mother-in-law’s funeral,’ the woman in grey says. ‘Rupal was in attendance. And yes, so was Martha.’

  Remi balls up his hands and strikes his head and neck. The screen stutters as his eyes open and close.

  ‘You didn’t bury your daughter that day,’ the woman in grey tells him. ‘You buried Joan’s mother. Later that night you left them, and you left the gas oven turned on.’

  The footage ends. The viewing room floods with piercing light, so powerful he’s sure it will erase him. The woman in grey is holding his face, long fingers wrapped under his ears. Her thumbs over his larynx. She tips his head back.

  ‘You wanted to save them, in some warped way,’ the woman says. ‘The news had told you what the future would do to Martha. You were deeply ill, and we believe that was your intention. Insulate, envelop them. But you didn’t save her, Remi. You only truly saved yourself. Do you see now?’

  Remi slides from the chair. The floor swallows him. The woman in grey steps over him and holds on to his face.

  ‘Quickly comes the fear,’ she whispers.

  Remi tries to turn his head, manages only a fraction. The woman wasn’t addressing him. She wasn’t saying fear at all. Fur. Emerging from a corner, Rupal’s moon-silver eyes and exposed metal shins reflecting the light. Their radiance makes the rest of the fox’s body seem like a phantasm, a suggestion.

  ‘Quickly,’ the woman urges. ‘While they’re still fresh.’

  Rupal canters over to Remi. The woman clamps Remi’s head in position while Rupal sets about licking the tears from his face, his eyes, his ducts. The fox’s breath is coppery. Her tongue is dry and rough. Remi manages to squeezes his knees around the fox’s body, a slight give in the ribs, and she rolls away from him with a wounded look.