ZerOes

by Chuck Wendig

  There’s no time for anything else. Chance throws open the driver’s-side door and tumbles out.

  The Compiler climbs into the dirt-caked Jeep and tosses the Remington in the back. Then he reaches into the passenger side and grabs a SOCOM special forces rifle—SCAR, 7.62 x 51mm cartridge. He busts out the windshield and props the rifle up over the dashboard. As he drives down off the flat-topped hill, he pulls the trigger: the gun spits suppressing fire.

  DeAndre hunkers down. Clamps his hands over his ears as Wade and Reagan throw open the windows and begin firing pistols. He looks over, sees Aleena kneeling there, too, eyes shut like this is all overwhelming her. But then Wade is crawling over to her and handing her his pistol. He says something in her ear and her eyes snap open. Then she goes to the window and starts firing, too.

  Wade lifts up the rug on the floor, shouldering aside an old rocking chair. He rolls the rug part of the way, then begins removing boards and pulling out rifles. He stares at DeAndre. Wordless shouts—just noise over the gunfire. Pointing finger. The message is clear. Get to the window. Help out.

  DeAndre grits his teeth, grabs a little semiauto rifle, then heads to the window.

  A roar of an engine and a chatter of automatic weapons fire. Bullets ping off the two vehicles and pock the ground, kicking up little dust devils and knocking the tops off tall grasses nearby.

  Hollis is cradling his hand and wincing. “We’re pinned down out here.”

  From the cabin, gunfire erupts. That might give them the edge they need.

  Chance peeks up over the hood of the Duster. “He’s coming,” he says. “Shit. Shit. We’re gonna have to run for it. You game?”

  “Yeah. I think so,” says Hollis.

  “On three,” Chance says. “One.”

  The gunfire stops.

  “Two. Thr—”

  Something lands in the grass between the cars and the cabin.

  It starts hissing.

  Aleena thinks: This is what it’s like. This is what it’s like in Damascus. Or Kabul. Or Baghdad. Or Cairo or Beirut or the Gaza Strip or . . .

  She used to sit behind a screen. Sometimes she’d see what would happen via a camera or through audio. The gunshots always sounded so tinny, so fake. Blood was just a black, pixilated blob. But now she’s in the middle of it.

  The gun is heavy in her hand. It isn’t her weapon. Her weapon is a keyboard. A screen. A limitless connection.

  She peers out the window. There’s Chance and—who is that?

  “It’s Hollis!” she yells, her voice drowned out by the pop-pop-pop of gunfire.

  Then a Jeep skids into sight. Tires blown from incoming fire. A dark shape hops out, disappears on the other side. Something suddenly lobs out of the air—

  A canister.

  It lands in the grass. Smoke starts hissing out, filling the air with a volcanic plume.

  The Compiler likes this hardware. SCAR rifle, pregnant at the front with a grenade launcher. One smoke grenade, and in moments a curtain of fog fills the air—a screen behind which he can move swiftly, almost invisibly. He pops up, darts past the front of the Jeep. Fires rounds into the cabin. Then at the pair of vehicles ahead of him.

  Obtaining this hardware is easy now. Typhon controls it all. She’s inserted herself into everything—every bolt-hole, every link in the chain. Military supply is easy to come by.

  More gunfire through the smoke. None of it hits him.

  He runs and guns. Pop, pop, pop.

  This will all be over soon.

  Adrenaline scorches a path through Wade like a trail of jet fuel set aflame. He knows he’s going to be paying for this later—his back will hurt, his muscles and joints will ache like real sumbitches. And he knows too that grief will come at him like a black horse. He didn’t love Rosa, but he admired her. Her death will hit him worse than any physical pain.

  But right now he’s still alive. So are these people he now thinks of his companions—hell, his friends. In this moment of panic and spent powder, he feels a strange sense of brotherhood with these people. The weird warm rush of connection that you feel when you’re drunk—either on a bottle of peach schnapps or the high-octane rush of adrenaline.

  He grabs the Ruger Mini-14, goes to the window, starts firing through the haze.

  Bullets chip away at the cabin windows—splinters kick up from the frame. Reagan shrieks, starts pawing at her face, and Wade thinks: She’s hit. He fires a few more rounds, then throws his gun down and drops to his knees, turning her toward him.

  Her face is a mask of blood.

  Then she sits up. Her hand swipes at her face, smearing the blood but clearing some space. Black beads rise up from little pinpricks peppering her cheek—splinters got her, but the bullet didn’t.

  Wade grabs her face, kisses the cheek that isn’t hit.

  He picks up the gun again and starts firing.

  The smoke doesn’t burn, but Chance can’t see squat through it. But then he thinks: That’s our advantage much as it is his. He grabs Hollis by the elbow, tugs on it, waves him on—and the two of them dart out from behind the cover of the Plymouth toward the cabin.

  A dark shape somersaults through the darkness: A canister. A grenade.

  It lands in front of them.

  Chance turns back around, hooks Hollis with the crook of his arm—springs—and the two of them fall back behind the Plymouth.

  The grenade goes off.

  A swirl of darkness. Dirt peppers the ground—clumps of grass, stone, clay. With a loud clang, the back bumper of the pickup truck lands hard. Fire crackles from the hood.

  Chance rolls over. His hearing has gone from a high-pitched whine to an empty wahhhh-wahhhh-wahhhhhh, as if the world is pulsing, giving off some frequency that he can hear but not understand.

  A shape, tall and dark, stalks through the dust. It’s him. The scarred man.

  Chance is frozen. He can only watch as the man raises the rifle.

  But at the same time, another shape stirs behind the monster. Something on the ground—a dark lump that grows tall, tilting sideways like a leaning tree.

  The tall man starts to whip around and three gunshots pop through him. He wheels, and three more shots hit in quick succession. He drops.

  And Rosa staggers over to Chance, her hair akimbo, her face slick with blood and dirt. “Puta,” she says, and spits.

  CHAPTER 55

  Rage Virus

  EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE

  When it happens, when the Compiler goes down, Ken is lost—everything goes red inside Typhon, a cascade of rage and terror and panic. With it, a flood of memories: the husband named Simon blowing out candles on a birthday cake, tacking a sailboat through clear lake waters, having a street monkey in Lahore steal his kulfi dessert right out of his hands as Leslie loses her breath laughing.

  Or: Simon in the wreckage of an intersection, his face cut and gushing, picking up his dying wife and carrying her through crowds and traffic, sirens blaring somewhere far away, hurrying down an alley, weeping, dizzy, lost . . .

  Ken’s persona is tossed about. He cannot be safe from Typhon’s grief. He cannot find a mooring; it is him and he is it and it occurs to him now that he’s not in control of anything, he’s just a cog in this machine of meat and data, just a buzzing bee in the hive who dances when the queen tells him to dance—he tries to stop it, tries to cry out, tries to force himself on the system. To imprint rationality and caution and reason—

  But something swats him down. A great pressing weight, a crushing depth. Until soon he can’t think at all, can’t remember his wife or daughter, can’t remember his own name—

  He has only one handhold.

  Simon.

  The Compiler.

  He cries out in the static: He’s not dead yet.

  Immediately, the rage subsides. Everything once again cold, clinical, neatly ordered.

  In that void, Typhon writes her response.

  CHAPTER 56

  The Response

 
DUGWAY PROVING GROUND, UTAH

  Three drones take off from Dugway Proving Ground.

  Each is a Reaper model, loaded for bear with Sidewinder missiles.

  They lift from the runway, pivot like waving hands, and head north.

  Hempstead asks: “Where are they headed?”

  “Wyoming, I think? Near Laramie,” Ritchie says nervously. “I got the alert—took me a minute to dial into them, it was like they kept evading. But I activated the protocols you had installed and it let me find them. You’re right. I think we’ve been hacked.”

  Hempstead hesitates. He thinks, but doesn’t say: It isn’t just here, Ritchie. Drones have been going weird all over. Mostly overseas, but some stateside, too. And yet, nobody’s been able to find a hack. Or any kind of installed malware.

  One of the DARPA techs, Dave Sullivan, said, These things all talk to each other, sir. The more they do that, the more vulnerabilities we create—doorways, really, because each way out is also a way in. He said they’re working on drones that defy that connection—“hack-proof” quadcopters as a first wave, and then larger drones thereafter.

  For now, though, Dave has given them a new control chip. Something that will let them do a manual override.

  “Do the full override,” Hempstead says. “Bring them back to base.”

  Ritchie nods. On the screen, the drone cameras begin to swoop and turn. “All right, sir. They’re headed back . . .” He taps one more key. “Now.”

  Hempstead nods. “When they get back, pull them out of commission for now.”

  “Why did you do that, David?”

  “Stan?” Hempstead asks.

  There, behind a van in the parking lot, stands Stan Karsch. He looks pale. Jittery. An ocher jaundice to his eyes. “The drones. You pulled them back.”

  “They went rogue. We can’t have drones off the reservation, Stan.”

  “You should’ve told me. I should’ve been informed.”

  Hempstead looks around. The lot is empty. Which was intended—he looks down at the crumpled pack of cigarillos in his hand. His wife will kill him for smoking these, but it’s been one of those days. (Truth be told, he’s had a lot of those days, recently.)

  Stan steps out from behind the van. Hand shaking. Something’s wrong.

  “You don’t look good, Stan.”

  “Those drones are CIA drones,” Stan hisses.

  “No, you co-own those drones with the army. And we have authority over them, particularly in domestic airspace. You know that.”

  “Turn them back around, David.”

  “Stan, I’m not gonna do that. Hell, I can’t do that.”

  Stan’s hand flashes from within his suit jacket. He points a pistol at Hempstead—a small automatic.

  “How’d you—” Hempstead’s about to ask how the man got a pistol onto the base, but then he realizes: Stan’s CIA. The gun-free zone applies to army, DOJ, but not intelligence officers. “Stan. You don’t want to do this.”

  Stan’s face stretches into a rigor mortis smile. His eyes go momentarily unfocused. “The gods did flee, David.”

  Then he pulls the trigger.

  The Surgeons—that’s what Typhon calls them—are waiting nearby. Two of them this time, though Typhon has more. Men and women. Medical professionals, once.

  The back of the gray van nearby pops open and they emerge: a tall man and a shorter, squatter one. The first the shape of a crooked stick, the second built like a toad on a bowling ball. Each in white coats and full black face masks.

  Hempstead’s already down. The tranquilizer dart stuck in his neck is already doing its job. The two Surgeons look at him, then to Stan, and Stan gives the nod.

  He doesn’t even need to do that. Nod. They’re connected, the three of them. And not just those three—but a whole network of voices, the Bestowers and the Bestowed, all the children of Typhon. He merely needs to think: This is the one, and they know, instantly, that he means Hempstead.

  They grab the man, haul him into the van, and the door slams.

  They will do to Hempstead what they did to Stan. As they and the other Surgeons have done to so many now.

  They will strap him, facedown, onto a table. They will use a wide-bore drill to open an aperture in the back of the skull. One will stitch electrostatic pads under the scalp and hairline while the other feeds a wire from the back of his head into the head of the “patient.” That will upload Typhon into the patient’s mind.

  Then Hempstead will be brought back online. Reprogrammed and rewritten. Still himself, at least in part, because Typhon will allow him that. For now.

  He’ll just be made to serve. Service, Stan thinks, is the greatest glory. This time, to something far bigger than just a government. Now it’s to the people of the government, to the ideals of those people, to the whole country. Glory in obligation.

  This takes a bit of time. Hempstead won’t be brought online in time to get the drones back in the air—which is regrettable. But he’ll be one more piece of the puzzle. One more hand in service to Typhon. She has the networks of this country bound and knotted around her fingers, and soon she will have the people, too.

  Inside the van, Stan hears the sharp, acid whine of the drill.

  He smiles.

  CHAPTER 57

  Metal and Blood

  WADE’S RANCH, OUTSIDE RIVERTON, WYOMING

  Fading smoke hangs over everything.

  The front end of the pickup is shrapnel blown, like a coffee can exploded by a shotgun blast. The Duster is okay, except for all the bullet holes.

  The grass is scorched. Fingers of char radiate out from a crater.

  “Guys,” DeAndre says. But no one hears him. They’re busy—understandably so—checking each other over for injuries, talking, defraying all the panic and adrenaline. Wade goes inside and gets Reagan a towel for her face. Aleena’s shaking and so is Chance, and those two are over by the hood of the Duster, holding each other. Rosa is pacing like a pissed-off barn cat. Turns out, the bullet she took rode her scalp like a Jet Ski—carved a furrow across her skull but left her alive to tell the tale. Her hair is matted to her head with blood. Makes her look like someone who rose from the dead to get vengeance on her killer. Which, in a way, is maybe true.

  The last is the one newest to their crew: Agent Hollis Copper. Who lies on the hood of the Duster groaning like he’s just been put through the wringer.

  But DeAndre, he’s still got a lot of that crazy holy-shit-I’m-gonna-die juice coursing through him like a stampede of skittish horses. So he’s been off on his own, pacing, kicking stones, trying not to cry out and scream and laugh and act like a total weirdo. Plus, he’s seen horror movies. He knows the bad slasher motherfuckers always get back up again. Next thing you know, Freddy’s standing right behind you with his wiggly knife-fingers, then he says some scary-jokey shit and sticks those pointy-ass murder-digits right through your heart because you thought you were safe, dummy.

  With that in mind, DeAndre went back over to look at the dead boogeyman. He’s glad he did, because boogeyman ain’t dead.

  The scar-faced Lurch-shaped Terminator is lying there, faceup. Eyes look dead, glassy. Blood rims his nose, gathers in crusted pockets at the corners of his lips. His whole front is a slick red vest, darkening to brown and black.

  But there’s a little moth-wing flutter in the well of the man’s throat. A pulse. And the chest is rising and falling: short, shallow breaths.

  “Guys,” DeAndre says, this time more insistent.

  Copper slides off the hood, eyebrows perked. Chance and Aleena come over, too. Aleena asks, “Are you okay?”

  “It’s not me. It’s him.” DeAndre kicks the boogeyman’s boot. “Dude ain’t dead.”

  Rosa marches over, pistol in hand. “He is now.” She points it.

  “Wait-wait-wait!” Reagan says, waving her one hand. (The other holds a bloody towel to the one half of her face.) “Roll him over. I see something.”

  Rosa looks to Wade. Wade nods. S
he puts away the gun and curses.

  Chance and DeAndre give each other a shrug, then together they reach down and turn over the body. As they do, Hollis kicks away the SCAR rifle that the creepy bastard was carrying all along.

  “Holy shitting shit,” Reagan says.

  “Motherfucker is a Terminator,” DeAndre says.

  Even Hollis looks stunned.

  There, at the base of the body’s neck, is a round metal ring. A port of some kind. Inside it is some kind of . . . DeAndre reaches down. There’s a cable in there, a cable that ends in some kind of claw.

  The claw snaps shut on his thumb. He screams. Starts trying to rip the thing out at the base.

  Reagan clamps down on his wrist. “Stop. Stop. Hold still.” She gets under there with her thumb, pops the metal claw, then lets it go. It retracts back into the skull, clicking and snapping like a spider’s chelicerae.

  Beads of blood balloon from little puncture wounds around DeAndre’s thumb tip. He growls, shakes his hand, flecking blood in the grenade-charred grass.

  “Cabin,” Copper says. “Now.”

  Wade has their back to them all, then suddenly he’s turning and thrusting the Ruger up in Hollis Copper’s face.

  “Whoa,” Copper says, hands out and up.

  “Yeah, what the hell?” Chance asks, stepping in and tilting the barrel of Wade’s rifle away from Copper. “Wade, think about what you’re doing—”

  “I am thinking, Chance. What I’m thinking is, outside right now we got a goddamn fucking robot-man on the ground like something out of a science fiction story. We’ve seen weird shit, but this qualifies as the tippy-fucking-top of Weird Shit Mountain. Stuff like this makes all the conspiracy theories—Bilderbergs, MK-ULTRA, 9/11 as an inside job—look like tales you tell at Sunday school. So how do we know Hollis Copper is on the up-and-up? How do we know he’s not compromised?”