ZerOes

by Chuck Wendig

  Already the article is a paragraph deep—he can barely read it, can’t even focus on it, though he catches some precious keywords and phrases like deep fucking and dickbutt, and he hears his own voice growing louder and louder in cries of frustration and he’s pounding on the walls and the door but nobody’s coming, and Reagan types ninja fast and he can’t do a single freaking thing about it, except, except—

  He reaches for the computer. Just as he gets his hands around the desktop, the screen flashes white, then red. Text pulses across the screen:

  She withstood all the gods, hissing out terror with horrid

  jaws, while from her eyes cast forth a hideous glare. And the

  gods did turn to common beasts.

  AND THE GODS DID FLEE.

  Something about that sends a bolt of terror running through Chance, sharp like a pin. He pauses. Thinks: What is this? Why is Reagan doing any of this?

  He grabs the computer. Wrenches it from its wires. Pop, pop, pop. Then he flings the computer against the wall. It’s heavy. He’s imbalanced. His heel skids out, and suddenly he’s going ass over teakettle (as his grandma used to say)—head snapping against the chair, chair banging against the edge of the desk, monitor slamming forward with a crack. Pain radiates up his butt bone to his midback.

  At least, he thinks, it’s done.

  But it’s not. Soon as he starts to sit up, he hears footsteps outside shaking the decking beneath him. Then the door is sliding open. The sun is right outside the door, and all he sees is a pair of shapes. He puts his hands up for good measure, hears a pop sound—and then something sticks in his side and every part of him lights up like the Fourth of July.

  CHAPTER 15

  Undertow

  THE LODGE

  They dragged Chance out. He remembers that much. The Taser knocked him sideways, made every part of him feel like it was imploding on itself—teeth pushing together so hard they might turn to dust, like chalk against a hard sidewalk. The other pod doors open and he sees his own crew there, staring at him in horror—someone throws him forward and he points at Reagan, is about to accuse her loud as he can manage, but then the Taser hits him again and all he can do is stutter-scream.

  Hands underneath him. They pull him toward the far western corner of the property, then down a set of steps and over a broken stone walkway—moss underneath, weeds growing up, the path hedged in by curls of blackberry briar and sharp grass. A couple of blue jays complain in the trees overhead, take flight.

  Out there is a building. Like a springhouse. Old stone. Looks like it wants to fall apart, like it’s giving the world one last shrug.

  Someone—Roach, Chance sees it’s Roach, that brick-jawed bastard—starts unlocking a handful of padlocks from a door that clearly isn’t the original door: red, metal, with a porthole window bolted into the center. They fling him inside. He slides across a new concrete floor, hits an industrial-looking office chair, which rolls away, caster wheels squeaking.

  The springhouse is divided in two. One side is just this: the chair, a table, a toolbox. The walls are still old stone. Mossy, cobwebby. Millipedes crawl and centipedes run. Above, in the shelter of fluorescent light fixtures, cellar spiders spin silk.

  The other side is behind a big Plexiglas divider. In there is something that looks like one of those lean composite storage boxes that might sit atop a Subaru Outback—it’s got the shape of a shoe or a spaceship escape pod.

  Chance rolls over. Looks up and sees three Lodge guards standing there—Roach, in his dark suit, and two others: a doughy guy with a patchy beard (name tag: Chen) and a grim-faced scowl-beast of a woman (name tag: Metzger).

  “First day,” Roach says. “First day you pull this shit.”

  “Most prisoners wait a couple days,” Metzger says. When she speaks, the lines in her face turn to deep crevices. “But you? Ballsy.”

  Chen just laughs.

  “I didn’t—” Chance starts to say, but talking feels like he’s trying to push sound through a tunnel of fiberglass insulation. “It wasn’t—”

  “Get up,” Roach says, then steps behind him, picks him up, and drops him into the chair. “What’s that?” Roach tilts an ear. “I don’t like threats.”

  Chance protests: “Whoa, what? I didn’t say—”

  Roach pistons a fist into his side.

  “God damn it,” Chance says. Adrenaline kicks up like a fast storm and Chance launches himself upward, swings a clumsy fist—but Roach is fast, turns his head, gets clipped in the ear, then brings a hard knee up into Chance’s middle. He doesn’t let Chance fall, though: he grabs for Chance’s back, holds him there as he knees him a second time, then a third. Then Roach shoves him back into the chair.

  Chance gasps, pain radiating out from his middle—all the way down to his balls and up to the drumming pulse beat in his neck. He holds up his hands. “Stop. Stop.”

  “Time to give him the spiel?” Metzger asks.

  “Think so,” Roach says. He turns to Chance, plants his hands on the arms of the chair. As he talks, he gently eases the chair back and forth—a small, sickening movement. “Here’s the deal. This is hacks versus the hackers. We hate you. We’re stuck in here, same as you. Every one of us is away from our families, our friends, our lives, while we hang out in the middle of nowhere to babysit a bunch of nerdy, disrespectful, antiauthoritarian criminals. So now and again we like to blow off a little steam, but we can’t just do that. We gotta have a reason. Good news is, you mopes tend to give us plenty of reasons, and so we drag you in here and we work you over. Then we toss you in there.” He gestures with his chin over Chance’s shoulder. “Into the Dep. Short for sensory deprivation chamber.”

  “Oh, it’s horrible,” Metzger says. “Each of us hacks has to spend a half hour in there when we sign on to see what it’s like.”

  Chen doesn’t say a word but makes a sound: “Yuggghh.”

  Roach nods. “You go in there, you start to lose sense of time. You hallucinate. Piss and shit yourself. We put you in there for six-hour stretches—and each subsequent time you get sent to the Dep, it’s another six hours. You get four turns in the box, and that last trip is a doozy—twenty-four hours long. We hook up an IV so you don’t need to eat or drink while you’re in there. After that, you fuck up again, we ship you out. Prison.”

  “This sounds worse than prison,” Chance says.

  Chen belly-laughs.

  “You think?” Roach says. “Real prison sucks. Chen there used to be a guard at Rikers. Forty percent of the population is fucking schizo. Half of them will rape you soon as look at you. Guards like to go on blanket parties—anybody who stares at them sideways gets a blanket tossed over their heads and beaten with batons and chair legs. This is a vacation, you little hick. Hell, it even has therapeutic value, they say.”

  “REST,” Metzger says. “R-E-S-T. Restricted Environmental Stimulation Therapy. We get to pretend this is good for you instead of a total nightmare.”

  “So,” Roach says, leaning in close. “You ready for your first six-hour stint?”

  “No, you don’t understand,” Chance says, swallowing hard. “I didn’t do anything—I was there in the pod—”

  “Oh, so you didn’t hack the cameras so they played back a loop of you just sitting there, twiddling your thumbs? You didn’t turn off the keylogger? You didn’t then, for some mysterious reason, decide to pick up your computer and smash it?”

  “I . . . I did that last part, but the other stuff, that wasn’t me—I got hacked.”

  “The hacker got hacked. Sure, sure, sure. That sounds legit.” To the other guards: “Metzger, get his legs. Chen, look lively—go open the door to the Dep chamber.”

  Chen nods, hurries over, pops the door in the Plexiglas.

  Chance screams as Roach gets under his arms. “Get off me, motherfucker!” He kicks his legs and thrashes about—his foot almost catches Metzger under her chin but she yanks her head back and chuckles. They move him toward the door.

 
“Put him down.”

  Chance never thought he’d feel relief at hearing Hollis Copper’s voice. But turns out pigs do fly, because that’s what happens.

  Except, the guards don’t put him down. “Look who it is,” Roach says. “You see something else out in the woods, Agent Copper? Maybe the Blair Witch is out there. Or Bigfoot.”

  “Shut up, Roach. Put Dalton down.”

  “Golathan sanctions this. He knows the deal.”

  “I don’t care what he sanctions. One thing he has sanctioned is that you have a Taser hanging at your hip. I have a Glock.”

  Roach breathes heavily. Like he’s pissed and wants to say something more. But instead, Chance watches the man nod to Metzger. They set him down. He scrambles away from them, almost knocking over the table and chair.

  Hollis nods toward the door. “Let’s go, Dalton.”

  They sit in Hollis’s non-office. A repurposed supply closet, far as Chance can tell. They must not like this guy very much, he thinks. “Hey,” he says, “I just wanna thank you—”

  Hollis sits forward in his chair. “No. Do not thank me. What you tried to pull today is serious business, Mr. Dalton.”

  “I didn’t pull any shit, dude. Okay? I got hacked. Reagan Stolper hacked me.”

  “That’s a bold accusation.”

  “It’s true. I mean—at least, someone hacked me. It had to be her.”

  Hollis crosses his arms. His eyes are framed in dark circles. He seems to literally chew on all this, his jaw working slowly, diligently, like he’s got a sunflower seed stuck in a back tooth somewhere. “I don’t understand much of what goes on here, and honestly, I don’t care. Next time you get the urge to smash a computer, don’t. You think you’re getting hacked? Say something instead of destroying government property. Because right now none of this looks good for you.”

  “You gotta help me—”

  “I don’t. I don’t have to help you. I’m not your friend, Mr. Dalton. I’m not your ally, your bodyguard, I’m not even your damn babysitter. I’m just a guy sitting around waiting for you flunkies to flunk out so I can go the hell home.”

  Chance levels his gaze. “So why’d you help me today, then?”

  “Because I don’t like Roach. And because, much as I don’t like you, I also can’t have my conscience burdened by letting you get your ass beat to a grapefruit pulp.”

  “Like I said: thanks again—”

  “Shut up. You can thank me by just shutting up.”

  It’s hours later that Copper finally lets him go. He tells him to skedaddle—Copper’s word, skedaddle—to the cafeteria lest he miss dinnertime.

  Chance heads downstairs from the administrative offices of the Ziggurat. His hands are balled up into fists. It’s too much. He’s already bad at this. Why the hell did Reagan hack him? All she had to do was let him weave together his own rope, tie his own noose, slip it over his neck, and kick out the chair. He didn’t need any help.

  He shoulders open the door, sees his pod sitting there at their table all the way toward the edge of the room—fringe dwellers. Reagan’s not with them. The others see him coming, and suddenly it’s a flurry of questions: What happened? What did you do?

  “Where’s Reagan?” Chance asks, voice a ragged rasp. “Where’s the troll?”

  Nobody points. All he has to do is follow their eyes. She’s sitting all the way across the room. With Shane Graves. Ivo Shandor. Of course. Of course.

  Reagan sees him looking. Her big pink cheeks stretch into a big cheeky smile. She winks and waggles her fingers in another toodle-oo wave. Shane sees her looking, then turns toward Chance. He grins and gives Chance a sarcastic thumbs-up. Then their whole table laughs and laughs and laughs.

  Chance growls, starts to storm over. But DeAndre is up fast, stepping in front of him. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, firecracker. This ain’t your move. Just sit down. Cool your shit. Eat some pizza.”

  “He set this up,” Chance says, pointing to Shane. “That son of a bitch did me in. And one of our own helped him.” How fast he’s come to thinking of the pod as his own. A group to which he belongs. “I wanna go break bad on his ass with a dinner tray. I can’t hack a computer worth a damn, but I can sure hack his nuts with my foot.”

  Aleena is next to him now. “DeAndre is right.” Her hand on his arm is warm and cool at the same time, and just that small touch feels unusually nice. Chance looks down at it and she pulls it away quickly. She clears her throat and stands up straight.

  “I’m gonna go cool down,” Chance says, and walks away from the table. He heads to the rec room side, checks out the arcade cabinets. On the way he feels eyes on him—Shane and Reagan staring holes through him like cigarettes burning through a bedsheet. He feels his cheeks flush, go red with anger, but he keeps walking.

  The rec room isn’t much to look at. But at least it’s empty, what with people still eating. Three machines sit in front of him: Joust. Sinistar. Street Fighter II. Chance only knows that last one—he’s heard of Joust, but it’s before his time. Sinistar, though, that’s entirely new to him. So he heads over to it. Of course, it needs quarters.

  He’s about to walk away when the Joust machine chimes. Ready Player One, the screen says.

  Chance hmms, then thinks, Aw, hell with it. He sidles up to the arcade cabinet, plays a game of Joust. It’s pretty simple to understand—the old arcade games always are—but the simplicity of the game betrays the difficulty of the execution, and he keeps dying, either getting beaked by the buzzards or accidentally launching his bird into the eight-bit magma abyss.

  Every time he dies and the game ends, though, it starts back up after a few seconds. Ready Player One again and again. Eventually, he starts getting a little further. Killing one more wave of buzzard riders, then another, and then another—

  It’s on his sixth or seven try that the screen flashes. Big fat pixels move out of place. First just a few—makes the screen look like holes in a punch card. Then more. Some pixels blink, reappear elsewhere. Some drift, blipping left or right, one pixel space at a time.

  Chance taps the joystick left and his rider gets caught in midair, flapping against some invisible wall. “Oh, c’mon, c’mon,” he complains, jiggling the joystick. A buzzard rider clocks into him. Kills him. Last life, game over.

  Except, it never makes it to the game-over screen. Everything glitches out good and proper. The image distorts—a spray of broken Minecraft pixels. The screen goes black.

  “I killed it,” Chance says. “I killed the Joust machine.” That’ll earn him plenty of new friends here, he thinks.

  Then the screen flashes again. Text begins to scroll, bottom to top. Big blocky arcade font. When the gods had overcome the giants, the marriage between man and beast was brought forth. In size and strength and knowledge did she surpass all the offspring of Earth. She had legs of man and was as tall and as heavy as the mountains. Her head did brush the stars. One of her hands reached to the west, the other reached to the east, and from them grew a hundred dragon heads, screaming. Wings sprouted and unkempt hair streamed. Fire flashed in her eyes. She made for the heavens, breathing fire.

  “What the . . .” Chance says.

  Then the screen flashes again. Hello, Chance Dalton.

  Suddenly, someone shoulders in next to him. Aleena. “Hey,” she says.

  “Uhh,” Chance says, startled. “Hey. You gotta see this—”

  “I know. Of course Shane Graves has his fingerprints all over this, too.”

  When Chance looks at the screen again, it’s showing high scores. Seven of the ten high scores displayed are marked with the three-letter code IVO.

  “No, wait,” Chance says. “It was saying this . . . crazy stuff, and then I think it—”

  “I get it,” she says. “It’s hard here. I’m going to help you.”

  “Help me . . . do what?”

  She frowns. “I’m going to help you with your work here. So you don’t wash out.”

  “Uh-huh.” Chance hesitates. �
��Reagan said she was gonna help me, and that didn’t turn out so hot.”

  “I’m not Reagan Stolper, am I? In fact, I look at this as a perfect opportunity to teach her a lesson.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t like her kind. She misuses the power we have. She punches down when she should be punching up.”

  “I don’t know what that means.” He furrows his brow. “So, lemme get this straight: I’m like a . . . battleground.”

  “Maybe. Is that a problem?”

  “Hell, if it keeps me out of prison and sticks a big old middle finger in Reagan’s smug troll mug, I’m in.” He’s about to say something else when a third person suddenly elbows his way next to them. It’s the kid with the shop-teacher glasses, Dipesh. He looks left, looks right, then thrusts up a napkin, inside of which are swaddled two big cookies, like those from lunch. “Here. C’mon, c’mon, quick. Quick! Take them.”

  Chance takes one and so does Aleena. She looks relieved and confused at the same time. Chance says thanks, but Aleena asks: “What are we supposed to do with these? Put them down our pants?”

  Dipesh shrugs. “Just eat them! Miranda and I saved them for you from lunch.”

  And then, as if summoned, the dandelion wisp of a woman appears with another cookie, out of which she takes a bite. “I’m Miranda,” she says, speaking around the crumbs, and catching a few falling from her lips with an open palm. “Sorry.”

  Dipesh laughs. “You, Chance Dalton, are a first-day badass, my friend.”

  “It was a little crass,” Miranda says, her voice as light and airy as her fairy’s frame. Her chin lifts and she stares down at Chance. Her eyes suddenly light up. “But still, we were all very impressed.”

  “I don’t understand,” Chance says.

  “Some folks freak out eventually, you know?” Dipesh says. “But nobody does it on the first day. Everybody’s always running around like scared little mice afraid somebody’s going to steal their cheese. But not you! And we know who you are. You have ties to Faceless. That’s why Graves doesn’t like you. You’re stealing his thunder.”