ZerOes

by Chuck Wendig

  Everything talks to each other. Infinite handshakes. Links in the digital chain that connect to the real world beyond.

  He can feel minds out there, too. Brains hooked up to Typhon, tethered by invisible tentacles.

  Ken knows now that there are two kinds who join with Typhon—the Bestowers and the Bestowed. He is of the former: minds who are important enough to contribute to Typhon, to be tied into the network and made a part of it. The Bestowed do not have the privilege or the genius necessary to give themselves to Typhon. They are receivers. Ken, and the thirteen, are transmitters.

  There are many receivers out there in the world. Ken can feel them. Some used to work here. Others were hackers at the Hunting Lodge who washed out. (And there again he is reminded how little of that was under his control. Typhon had it in her grip all along.) All are cultists now of Typhon: servants of the many minded, worshippers of the dragon. They’ve been plugged in. The virus has been uploaded into their minds—forced into their programming. Their number grows every day.

  The first among them is the one known as the Compiler. The one who gathered the thirteen. Leslie Cilicia-Ceto’s most beloved subject. Her husband: Simon. Ken can see the man’s memory of it—all the crumpled steel and glittering glass. His own face a mask of blood. Taking her back to the lab at her command. Hooking her up as the first of Typhon, the first mind to give itself to the algorithm, to become part of the program. For Simon, weeks became months became two years as he sat and helped her gather all the tools and technology necessary to sustain Typhon. Simon—brain damaged from the accident, plugged into Typhon not to be a part of his wife but just to connect with her in some way, again—going madder and madder until she has to wipe him like a bad hard drive. Freezing all those bad sectors, locking them away, crushing part of his identity. Bolstering the damage to his brain with her own processing power. And in that . . . giving him a mission.

  The hunter-gatherer. The Compiler of new code.

  He’s out there now. Ken can feel him. Can trace his path as a streak of light—from here to a small airport in Maryland. Planes aren’t flying right now—the FAA has grounded all air travel—but Typhon controls what can be seen and what cannot, and so the Compiler boards a small private jet piloted by one of the Bestowed, and then the streak of light takes him, an arc over the midland, flying over the flyover states, landing finally in Laramie, Wyoming. He is just now exiting the plane in the early morning . . .

  Ken sees glimpses of the hackers. Chance. Reagan. He can see them walking past a trailer park. Just last night. They don’t understand. Nobody understands. Not yet.

  Ken didn’t. At first, he didn’t grasp why it was necessary—why, if Typhon was designed to protect America, she must first invoke chaos. Plane crashes. Market crashes. Gas spikes.

  Because they have to be willing to accept us, she said. Because sometimes the child has to touch the hot stove to learn why he shouldn’t do it again. Because in chaos, there is opportunity.

  He asks her, why do we care about these hackers?

  They can hurt us. So we must hurt them first. And that can work to our advantage. And he sees the plan, clear as a cloudless sky: the Zeroes are being set up to be the bad guys. Able to manipulate things well beyond their ken. They will expose the vulnerabilities of the system.

  And the masses will cry for a solution. They will cry for Typhon.

  CHAPTER 54

  Shooting Gallery

  WADE’S RANCH, OUTSIDE RIVERTON, WYOMING

  The sun is a bleeding edge at the horizon. Chance didn’t sleep worth a damn. He’s not sure anybody did. He walks out toward Rosa’s pickup, squinting against the rising sun. The bag slung on his shoulder holds clothes that aren’t his, toiletries that aren’t his, and it occurs to him he hasn’t had much of his own since heading to the Hunting Lodge.

  Hell, maybe since his parents died.

  He goes to the back of the truck. Rosa has the tailgate down. On the bed some of Wade’s guns are spread out. Along with five bundles of money and five phones.

  Rosa sniffs. “Take a gun and a bundle. A thousand dollars apiece. The phone is a burner. Use it sparingly. Don’t give your name. Don’t—”

  Reagan walks up with the huff and wrangle of an incoming storm. “We get it.” She reaches out, hand floating over the guns. “Ugh. Guns.” Still, since being out here, they’d all been doing some target shooting (Wade’s idea), so her comfort level must be higher. She snatches up a boxy pistol, a wad of bills, and one of the yellow clamshell phones. “When do we leave?”

  “Soon,” Rosa says. “Still waiting on the others.”

  DeAndre’s next. Yawning, stretching. A long loping walk. He lifts his head toward Chance. “Hey, man. You sleep?”

  “’Bout as well as a coked-up hop-frog. You?”

  “’Bout as well as a . . . I dunno, thing that doesn’t sleep? I’m too tired for homie metaphors, homie. What’s this?” he asks, lifting his chin toward the truck. Rosa tells him. DeAndre nods. “Cool, cool. Hey, Rosa—you hear any more about the plane?”

  She hesitates, but finally says: “You . . . they . . . it released a video. To the news. It was like a video from a terrorist group. You were speaking.” Rosa pokes Chance in the chest. “Looked like your face. Mostly. Sounded like you, too. You—it—said that you were going to hurt more people if the United States didn’t stop its ‘reign of global terror.’ It also claimed that your group was behind the manipulation of the stock market.”

  DeAndre rubs his face. “Shit.”

  Chance leans back against the truck. Tries to relax, breathe. Everything feels wrong. Blood slick and slippery.

  “This is gonna turn out to be one helluva prank,” Reagan says. “I’m gonna go take a squat. Let me know when the Get the Fuck Out of Here Express is leaving.”

  “Man, this is all so crazy,” DeAndre says.

  “You ain’t wrong,” Chance says.

  “Come with me. Like I said, you got nobody here.” DeAndre sucks air between his teeth, then holds up his hands in surrender. “I don’t mean that as an insult. I just mean, you aren’t all . . . entangled in shit. Or with people. You’re free like a bird, man, so let’s fly.”

  “Eastern Europe?”

  “Croatia, brother. No extradition. Stable government. I know some people there. And if that doesn’t work we push on. Bhutan.”

  “Bhutan? That a real place?”

  “Sure is. Himalayas and spicy food and . . . I dunno, yaks or whatever. And the government actually measures Gross National Happiness. You believe that?”

  Chance whistles. “Sounds like some Orwell 1984 nonsense to me, man.”

  “Nah, it’s like, Buddhist and shit, homie.”

  “I dunno, dude. What about your mom?”

  DeAndre hesitates. “She’ll be all right. I’ll take care of her at a distance.”

  “You’ll be abandoning her.”

  “She’s black in America. She’s used to that.”

  “Not from her own son.”

  DeAndre waves him off. “Psssh. You’re bringing down my Gross National Happiness, dude. I’m gonna go take a piss.”

  Chance stands there for a while. Pickling in a brine of bad thoughts. He senses someone next to him. The smell of leather and gun oil. Rosa. “Your friend is right. Get out now. It’s not going to get any better here. You got one chance, little fishie, to climb off this hook. I suggest you take it.”

  It hits him then. “Maybe I don’t want off the hook,” he says. And then, like that, it’s all settled. It all clicks into place, all the puzzle pieces locking together. He can’t just abandon this thing. He knows what happens when you do that. Turn away from evil and it grows stronger. You gotta reach into the soil and rip it out from the root.

  Angela Slattery . . .

  He flinches. Then stands, marches to the cabin. Inside, he’s surprised to see Wade and Aleena sitting down. Almost knee to knee. The intimacy not of lovers but of two people negotiating a fraught topic. They look up, see
him, and Aleena’s eyes fix on his. He’s good at reading people. He can see the conflict flickering in her eyes. A sadness there, but an eagerness, too.

  Wade doesn’t give him much of a look.

  “I’m not leaving,” Chance says. “Or, not running, at least. I wanna go at this thing. I wanna take a run at Typhon.”

  That conflict in Aleena goes poof. A small smile pinches the corners of her mouth. She looks right at him. He reminds himself: She’s not why you’re doing this, Chance, remember that. But it feels nice, just the same.

  “We agree,” she says. “Wade and I aren’t running, either.”

  Chance lets his stare flit between the two of them. “You two?”

  “Yep,” Wade harrumphs. “Never thought I’d be working so closely with one of her kind.” He arches his eyebrows and blows a gray ringlet from his face.

  Aleena stiffens. “My kind? What kind is that? A woman? An Arab? Oh, oh, let me guess: a terrorist. Right?”

  “A New Yorker,” Wade says. And then busts out laughing.

  She rolls her eyes, but she’s smiling, too. Still, she punches him hard in the shoulder. “Jerk.”

  Wade stands up. “This thing ain’t gonna be easy. But we got family on the line. And blah-blah-blah, something about truth, justice, and the American way.”

  “I don’t know about the American way,” Aleena says. “But I know right is right.”

  Chance nods. “My thinking, too. Let’s go tell the others.”

  They head out for the door. Rosa stands against the front of the truck, arms crossed, hat slung low like she’s taking a power nap standing up. DeAndre paces in front of her. Reagan sits by the wheel in the dirt, fiddling with a single bullet that she must’ve taken out of the gun. She looks up and says, “We ready or what? Let’s get this wagon train rolling.”

  Wade says: “Something you oughta know. Something we decided.”

  He keeps talking, too, but Chance sees something—something beyond Aleena, in the distance. A winking flash atop one of the faraway hills. Like a pulse from a flashlight.

  It’s facing the sun. Which means it’s probably light reflecting off—

  Oh God. “Get down!” Chance yells, grabbing Aleena, pulling her down next to the truck.

  The crack-and-tumble of a rifle report echoes across the valley. A white cowboy hat, speckled with fresh blood, drops to the ground. A hand lies splayed out at the end of the truck—Rosa’s hand. Her long, dark hair trapped beneath it.

  Wade cries out.

  Another rifle shot echoes across the big sky. Dirt and stone kick up near Wade’s hand, and he scrabbles backward, a sound in the back of his throat mirroring that of a wounded animal. At first Chance thinks he’s hurt, but the look on his face is one of a far deeper pain than the merely physical.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” Reagan says. She pulls the gun she was playing with. Fumbles it. Catches it.

  “That’s a sniper,” DeAndre says. “A damn sniper.”

  Chance says: “We get in the truck, we all just pile in, heads low, and—”

  Another crackle of rifle thunder, and the truck shudders and sinks on its back corner. A second shot right after causes the truck to sink on its front, too.

  “Tires,” Aleena says.

  “Damn it!” Chance says, and pounds the door with a fist. Okay, he thinks. We’re pinned down. Nowhere to go. Wade’s face is a tightened rigor mortis mask—grief struck and staring off at nothing. Chance pats him hard on the chest. “We gotta go back in the cabin. You got guns in there.”

  Wade clenches his eyes, seems to focus up. “Yeah. Okay, yeah. Got a good thirty feet between here and the cabin door. Lotta open space.” He’s right.

  “The truck,” Aleena says. “Drivable that distance.”

  Chance nods. “Yeah. Yeah. I’ll drive it. Reverse it slow toward the cabin. You all creep along with it. Then I’ll hop out, too.”

  Wade crawls to Rosa. Chance can’t hear what he’s saying, but he’s whispering something—something that sounds half like a prayer, half like a confession. Then he’s back. He hands Chance the keys. “You good to do this?”

  “No sweat,” Chance says, trying to sound tough. But he can hear the vibration in his voice. He literally feels the tops of his thighs to make sure he hasn’t pissed himself. The keys feel heavy in his hands. The fob is a rabbit’s foot—dyed electric blue.

  Lucky me, he thinks, and throws open the truck door.

  The Compiler is an excellent shot.

  It’s not something he was trained to do. Not when he was . . . someone else. In that life, he was a technician, a professor.

  In this life, he is whatever Typhon needs him to be. Now, Typhon needs him to be a killer. The people down there, by that truck, by that cabin and that trailer, are agitators. They know too much. They are too capable. They must be removed. And, given their last exchange, the Compiler will take great satisfaction in ending them. Typhon allows him this because she, too, will take great pleasure in seeing them deleted from the program.

  It could be done differently. These five are targets of the justice system now. Typhon ensured that when she brought down the airliner and blamed them for the act. But sending a team of police, FBI, or military would be like trying to swat a fly with a hail of boulders. Typhon can be more efficient.

  The Compiler jacks the bolt on the Remington. The brass tings against a nearby rock as it ejects. He slams the bolt forward, urging another bullet into the chamber.

  One of them has gotten into the truck. Chance Dalton. He’s smart enough to duck below the window line.

  Dalton is smarter than his academic measurements suggest. But he’s still only human.

  The Compiler takes a shot. Pops the passenger window.

  The truck grumbles. Coughs white smoke, then black.

  Another shot. The front windshield shatters.

  The truck starts.

  It’s easy to see the plan. Dalton begins to enact it with clumsy judiciousness. The truck begins to drift backward—the two blown tires don’t hamper the effort. They’ll go to the cabin. They’ll hide there. Which is, for the Compiler, quite ideal. Rats climb into a barrel. Then you drown them all at once.

  They will be armed. The likelihood of this is high—a 97.6 percent chance that they have at least one gun in there, and likely more. Perhaps an entire arsenal, given Wade Earthman’s history. That’s fine. He has no intention of letting them get off a shot.

  Everything in his mind is plotted. Many variables accounted for.

  Except for the one that manifests presently.

  As Chance eases the pickup truck backward to the cabin, a new player enters the scene. A car comes barreling down the long drive to the ranch. A classic car—the Compiler blinks, and in a hairsbreadth of a moment the snapshotted image from his eyes reaches Typhon, who in turn processes it through a thousand identifying databases. The return is nearly instant: it’s a Plymouth Duster, 1971 Twister model. Sharktooth grill. A 318 cid engine. The color is reminiscent of lime, but on paper, the company called it “Sassy Grass Green.”

  Cognitive dissonance assails the Compiler. Chance Dalton was the owner of a Plymouth Duster—1972, 340 model, V-8. And yet, this is not that car, and Chance is not the one driving it. It’s a momentary confusion—a glitch.

  The Compiler does not dwell on it.

  All he can do is watch, and then act.

  Chance shakes free all the windshield glass—a few nicks and cuts here and there, but mostly he’s untouched. He tilts the rearview mirror, sees the hunched-over shapes of the others ducking into the cabin. He’s about to spring the door and dart in, too, but then he sees the car.

  Plymouth Duster. Not quite like his, but close. Thick black band on the hood. Black racing stripes.

  He squints, tries to see through the glare on the windshield. Who is coming for them now? Who has Typhon sent?

  Then the car takes the last bend in the driveway, and Chance sees just who the hell it is.

  Oh shit. He pu
nches the pickup’s accelerator.

  The Duster’s engine growls and grumbles, taking each dip and divot in the dirt road hard—the seats in this thing aren’t as comfortable as Hollis Copper remembers, and each bounce rocks his bones like a kick to the tailbone. His injuries have healed—mostly—but the ghost of that misery remains to haunt him. Doubly so in times like this.

  He rounds the last bend of the driveway, not sure if this is even the place.

  Is that a—? Jesus, that’s a body out there.

  A pickup truck with a shattered windshield suddenly peels rubber and starts hard-charging toward him, rocking hard on tires flattened on the passenger side. Hollis blinks and sees Chance behind the wheel—he’s peering up over it, waving his hands, honking the horn, wonk, wonk.

  Hollis doesn’t have complete situational awareness here, but he knows something bad is going down. He slams on the brakes just as a rifle shot takes off the side mirror of his car.

  He tilts sideways, hugging his body hard against the passenger seat. He paws at the door handle, flings it open—

  The pickup truck skids, slides, and hits the Duster bumper-to-bumper. Not enough to do real damage, but enough to slam the door he just opened back on him, closing on his hand. Pain jolts up his arm like an arcing whip.

  Cursing Chance Dalton, Hollis shoulders the door open again and crawls out.

  Chance shakes with the impact—not too hard a hit, but enough. He throws the truck into reverse just as a bullet clips the top of the pickup. Teeth gritted, he ducks once more, stomps on the accelerator—

  And the truck engine dies.

  Chance turns the key again. Whuff, whuff, whuff—damn thing turns over and over but never catches its spark. “Start, God damn it, start,” he says, his voice getting higher and higher pitched. Another bullet punches into the hood of the truck.