ZerOes

by Chuck Wendig

  She wonders if maybe she should call Courtney. Put on her Dave voice one last time—for kicks. She has a naturally deep voice and it’s easy to do.

  But then her phone dings and the upload is finished. Time to go home.

  Reagan heads back to her car.

  She doesn’t see the man in the backseat at first. Reagan hops in, fishes around the glove compartment for her pack of smokes, and then someone in the backseat says, “Looking for these? You shouldn’t smoke.”

  Reagan reacts fast. She reaches deeper into the glove compartment, wraps her hands around the pepper spray, whips around and hoses the backseat with the stuff. The man thrashes around like a cat covered in bees.

  Reagan throws open the car door to get the hell out of there.

  Reagan hoofs it to the bus stop. Then takes the bus to her apartment.

  She thinks about calling the cops, but given who she is and what she just did to Courtney Gurwich, maybe that’s not such a hot idea. Instead, Reagan decides she’ll go back to the car the next day, when creepy backseat black dude will be long gone. She seems to remember him wearing a suit. Odd for a tweaker. Or for a homeless guy. Though sometimes they buy third-hand suits from the thrift shops.

  Tired, she staggers into her dirty butthole of an apartment, throws her phone and bag on what little counter space she has—

  “Pepper spray, huh?” says the man in the suit, rounding the corner by the coat closet and stepping into the kitchen. Reagan utters an incomprehensible curse—some panicked pastiche of fuck and shit—and grabs a knife out of the block next to the oven. She slices through the air with the serrated blade. “I’ll stab the crap out of you,” she says.

  The man blinks a pair of raw, red-rimmed eyes. He sighs. “I’m an agent of the government,” he says, and flips his identification toward her. “Spraying me with that toxic shit already gives me complete and total license to stick a bullet in you. Stabbing, slashing, or slicing me open will get you a lot worse than that.”

  It’s now Reagan notices he has a gun in his hand. A black, boxy pistol. The knife wavers. “How’d you get here so fast?” she asks.

  “You left your car with the keys in the ignition. I took it.”

  “That’s stealing.”

  He laughs. “I call it ‘licensing public goods for the public good.’”

  “That’s clever. You think you’re really clever.”

  “Maybe. You think you’re clever, too. And maybe you are, because that’s why, right now, I got a team of folks on the way. I’d like to have a conversation with you somewhere other than . . . here.”

  She thinks for a minute. “I like conversations.” She sets the knife down on the counter. “Let’s go.”

  “No fight?”

  “No fight. I’m curious.”

  His eyes narrow. “They say curiosity killed the cat.”

  “Well, I’m no pussy, dude. So let’s do this.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Wade Earthman

  COLLBRAN, COLORADO

  Wade wakes out of a dream of burning jungle and screaming women, of helicopter rotors and machine gun fire. He hears something he first thinks is part of the dream but soon realizes is not: the sound of a helicopter’s blades chopping the air.

  Wade drops down off his bed—a bed handmade by a local boy down the road, a real autistic type who doesn’t do well with people but can make a set of fresh-cut logs sing beneath saw and sandpaper. He groans and winces. He’s old now, and feels the movements of the morning especially keenly; often he feels like a beater car that takes a while to start up. But this, this has him starting up—regardless of the arthritis squeezing his knees and the popcorn crackle of his back.

  The sound of the chopper thuds up through his feet and down from the rafters of his attic bedroom, so he rushes to the window, peers out.

  He can’t see it. But he can hear it passing overhead. Black helicopter, he thinks.

  That’s when his alarms go off. Klaxons and red sirens. Loud enough and bright enough to wake a dead man out of his dreamless sleep. That means someone’s breached the perimeter. Coming over the cattle gate. Probably cut the electric fence.

  It’s over. They’re here.

  It’s just past midnight and Wade’s got the man on this side of the cattle gate pinched neatly at the center of the rifle’s night-vision crosshairs—the rifle, a .30-30 lever-action, is his coyote gun. Coyotes are always trying to get in here, take his chickens. Any time he sees one of those tricksters traipsing down his driveway or through his irrigation ditches, he drops it. If he sees coyotes on the butte behind his house, he leaves them alone—he figures they’re not bothering him, he won’t bother them with lead to the lungs.

  Out here, coyotes are like rats. Now he’s got a whole new rat to worry about: the fella who just climbed over his cattle gate. Black fella, he thinks, though it’s hard to tell through the infrared scope. No matter the color of the man’s skin, this damn sure counts as trespassing, which means he could peel this son of a bitch’s scalp like an orange with a squeeze of the trigger. The bullet would cross the four hundred yards between them, give this fella one hell of a surprise.

  Still. He hesitates. He’s never killed anybody before. Also, not many black fellas up in these parts. Killing one would be problematic. They’d say he was a racist, but Wade’s sure that he’s not—he wouldn’t be shooting this person because of his skin color but because he’s planting his feet on Wade’s land. That’s Wade’s property. He’s got signs up all over down there: NO TRESPASSING. DON’T TREAD ON ME. FUCK THE DOG, BEWARE OF OWNER. All of them hand-painted.

  Wade looks closer. The black fella ain’t alone. Two others are coming up along the sides. Two more come in from the east. All jacked up in military gear.

  It’s time to get his bug-out bag.

  The BOB, the bug-out bag, is a duffel filled with water, beef jerky, dried fruits, some cookies (shut up, cookies are delicious), a first-aid kit, a rain poncho, a cammie suit meant to match the scrub desert of western Colorado, a change of socks and underwear, a radio, a flashlight, a netbook, a hunting knife, a .380 Smith & Wesson pistol.

  It’s not meant to get him far. It’s meant to get him to his bunker, out there in the BLM—the Bureau of Land Management territory that he technically doesn’t own, but hey, the government doesn’t seem to want to do much with it either.

  He slings the bag over his shoulder. He passes by his computer room—a series of old and new desktops and laptops piled floor to ceiling. PCs. Macs. Unix boxes. Servers running his BBS software. Disconnected from the Internet. Hooked up only to phone lines. These are his babies. He’s been sysop of these bulletin board systems since he was a much younger man. Since before the Internet even mattered. Liberty Bell BBS. The Shadowlands BBS. The Patriot’s Amendment BBS. Havens away from the clamor and the overconnectedness of the Internet. Receptacles for information. Dangerous information—or, at least, information dangerous to the government. WikiLeaks ain’t got shit on the cables and memos he’s got in these boxes. Classified information loyal dial-up customers have been giving him and his other users for a decade now—men and women in the service, across various agencies, in police departments across the country. Patriots, every last one of them.

  Wade brushes a gray ringlet out of his eye. Thinks for a moment that he might want to shed a tear or two over all this—his life’s work. But he has neither the time nor the inclination toward sentimentality. So he flips the switch on the wall. A series of electromagnets beneath the floorboards hum like yellow-jacket wings in a wasps’ nest. The noise rises to a crescendo and then it’s gone.

  Wade opens a small desk drawer, and from behind it pulls a little remote control—the kind that starts fireplaces, like the one he has downstairs under the big-ass elk head hanging there. He’s not sure if this is going to work.

  He presses the button. At first nothing happens. But suddenly, behind the vents and inside the cases of the computers, he sees a faint orange glow—and then a small sh
ower of blue sparks followed by a sound that conjures the memory of Fourth of July sparklers. Kkkkkshhhpop.

  In each system, a little fire burning. The hard drives melting down to worthless slag.

  Those fires may go out. They may not, might burn the house down. That last part is regrettable, of course. He owns this place. This is his home. He beat the system and the home ownership scam and bought this place outright in cash, not feeding the greedy banks their pound of flesh month after month.

  Still. The cost of doing business.

  He heads downstairs to the four-wheeler parked out front.

  The night air is cold here. Whistling through his shaggy hair, keening through his teeth. The quad bounds away from his house, away from the agents, away from captivity—he knows what they do to people like him. Like Bradley (or is it Chelsea now?) Manning or that snooty WikiLeaks fuck or that NSA fella, Snowden, or hell, any of the good patriots who break the poisonous chains of command to give their true bosses—the American people—a hard dose of high-test truth for once in their lives. They catch him, they’ll put a bag over his head and throw him in some black-site prison in eastern Europe where they’ll experiment on his brain or torture him for information like something out of that movie Marathon Man.

  Or worse, they’ll just shoot him in the head and dump him in a hole.

  Probably that one, actually.

  But they won’t catch him today. He knows this area. They don’t.

  The quad rocks and shudders, and he hears a sound like gunfire. Four pops, maybe not loud enough to be guns going off, which means—

  The quad’s momentum, dead. The four-wheeler suddenly handles like he’s driving through mud despite everything out here being flat and dry as a skipping stone. The tires are blown. All four of them. God damn it!

  Wade hops off the quad. He kills the engine. He pulls the .380 out of the BOB and tears the lining of the bag to get at another small remote control.

  He looks back. Behind him, twenty feet back, sits a strip of spikes rolled out on black rubber. The strip is half covered in scrub and dirt. They didn’t just lay this out. This has been here for a while. That bakes his noodle a little. How’d they know? Then he realizes: tire tracks. He makes this run once every two weeks. For practice. That means they’ve been watching him. More than that, studying him. They knew where he’d go. They knew to place the tire strip right here.

  That means his bunker is compromised.

  He has backup plans. Up at the reservoir he has an old dirt bike stashed. If that fails, he could hoof it all night to 70, thumb a ride somewhere—if he makes it that far. And given that he hears the shuffle of clothing and armor and the loose rattle of weapons in hands, he knows now that he will not.

  Two soldiers come over a scrubby berm of dirt and stone. They’ve been waiting for him. Of course they have. One has a shotgun. The other, a small submachine gun tucked against his shoulder. Moonlight gleams in their helmet goggles. He sees a band of winking green behind the goggles—night vision. He forgot to pack his own night-vision goggles, didn’t he? Shit. Guess it doesn’t matter now.

  He drops the pistol, but keeps the remote.

  They hold him there for a while, their guns up. A cold wind sweeps over the area, kicks up a red cloud in the darkness. Nobody says a damn thing. The remote is small, but feels heavy in Wade’s hands.

  A few moments later, the black fella shows up. Panting a little, with four other soldiers jogging alongside. “Wade Earthman,” the fella says.

  “’Sright.”

  “Hollis Copper.”

  “That’s a helluva name.”

  “Says the man with the name Earthman.”

  Wade frowns. “It’s not Earthman, like you’re saying it. It’s Earthman. It’s from the German. Erdmann, I think.”

  “Okay.” Hollis dusts off his pants. “What you got there, Wade?”

  “Mr. Earthman, if you please.”

  “Question remains the same no matter how I address you.”

  Wade tilts the little remote. “This old thing? It’s a remote control.”

  “Okay. You going to tell me what it does?”

  “You predicted me coming out here on the quad, but looks like you didn’t predict what I might do when you caught me.”

  “Our models aren’t perfect.”

  Wade grunts. “I press this button”—his thumb hovers just over it—“and we all blow to king hell and back.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Oh yeah. I got fifty-five-gallon drums buried all over the place out here. Hard digging in this ground; had to use an excavator I rented from Grand Junction. And even still, lot of stone. Just the same, I managed to bury these barrels—a dozen of them—and wire ’em all together and set them to a trigger box and antenna that—drumroll, please—connects up to this little doohickey right here. Did I mention that each one of them barrels is loaded to the tippy-top with . . . well, let’s just say I hit this trigger, it’s going to get real hot and real noisy around here. Two of those twelve barrels are here with us right now, like ghosts waiting to be called up out of their graves. One over there under that hill. And one right under the ground where you’re standing, Mr. Copper.”

  That last part’s a lie. Two barrels are buried nearby. If Wade blows those barrels they might die from the debris, but it won’t be the explosions that take them out. But the government man has bought the lie, because he stiffens. Hands flexing in and out of fists.

  “You’re willing to just blow yourself up,” Hollis says.

  “’Sright. I’m old.”

  “I wouldn’t call sixty-three old.”

  “It feels old.”

  “Sorry to hear that, Wade. I have a third option I’d like to discuss. Can I get something from my pocket without you turning this place into the end of a Die Hard movie?”

  “I said, call me Mr. Earthm—”

  Copper holds out a photograph. It’s wallet size blown up to eight and a half by eleven. Printed out from a color laser. It flutters and flaps in the wind. Hollis nods, and one of the soldiers points a gun at the photo, clicks on a flashlight at the end of the barrel.

  That’s when Wade sees whose face is in the photo. “Shit,” he says. Everything inside him goes slack, like a fishing line after the fish has bitten off the bait and gone to the current.

  “You going to come with us, Wade?”

  “Come on, man. You can’t do this to me.”

  “I’ll ask one more time. You going to put that remote down and come with us?”

  The photo. The girl’s face. Wade sets the remote down on the seat of the quad. He lets the duffel slide off his shoulders and thud into the dust. Then he holds up his hands and puts them behind his head, and closes his eyes as they swoop in to claim him.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Hook

  A ROOM, LOCATION UNKNOWN

  They each end up in a room, alone, after a long flight on a C-130 military plane. Seated at a table. Walls of cinder block. Black ceiling, black floor. Glass of water. Little sleeves of cookies—Fig Newtons, Oreos, Chips Ahoy—laid out in front of them.

  They each hear a similar pitch. Though each pitch is tailored differently, because Hollis Copper knows that everyone has a story and if you want to speak to someone, you better find a way to speak to his or her story.

  Hollis: “How are the cookies?”

  Chance: “Little stale.”

  “Our pastry chef is on vacation.”

  “I bet.”

  “You know why I’m here.”

  Chance shrugs, trying to play it cool. “I know, man. I know. Overdue library books. I’m a slow reader, what can I say?”

  “You’re a funny guy.”

  “I was hoping for ‘handsome gentleman,’ but I figure that’s reaching.”

  “Shut up.”

  Chance shuts up. Hollis can see, despite all the lip, the kid is scared pissless. “Two of those football players you messed with are facing a year, maybe five if the judge is a hard-ass w
ho doesn’t give much of a shit about football. But my guess is, around where you live, everybody gives a shit about football.”

  “Shoot, I played baseball.”

  “Yes, you did. Pitcher. Good arm on you, I heard. You also ran the computer lab all four years in college, which leads me to my next point. Way the laws are set up, what you did and what those boys did is not equal in the blind eyes of Lady Justice. They’ll do a couple years. But you’ll do ten.”

  Chance stiffens. “Ten for what? You haven’t said what.”

  “You know what.” From behind him, Hollis pulls a white mask attached to a black hood. Looks like the one from the serial killer in that movie Scream. He gestures with the mask as he speaks. “Nice mask. A Faceless mask. Bunch of iconoclast punks throwing stones at giants. We’ve been looking to get one of them on the hook for a while and—well, look at that—now we got you. Chance Dalton, aka Shad0wman91. That’s a zero instead of the o, and a 91 for the year of your birth, right? So. You hacked a couple websites. Broke into some e-mail. You went on the Internet and exposed a little cabal calling itself the Yellowjacket Rape Posse. Shit that would have stayed hidden because everybody wanted it hidden. But you can’t turn a blind eye when this shit gets to Myspace, isn’t that right?”

  The kid looks freaked. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He crosses his arms over his chest, tucks the flats of his palms under his armpits. “And nobody uses Myspace anymore.”

  Hollis ignores that. Computers aren’t his thing. “I’m not judging you. Those boys will get far less than they deserve. You ask me, they deserve to have the same thing done to them that they did to all those girls. But then again, I’m a real Old Testament, eye-for-an-eye, karmic-debt type.”

  “I don’t think karma’s in the Old Testament.”

  “I’m not a big reader.”

  “So.” Chance gnaws his fingernail. “Who told them? Bogardian and his pops. How’d they know it was me?”