ZerOes

by Chuck Wendig

Aleena hesitates, but then admits: “Um. No.”

  Chance reaches up, rubs her arm. A reassuring gesture. It feels nice.

  Reagan looks over to DeAndre: “Your food is delicious.”

  “My what?”

  “Sorry. Your people’s food.”

  “My people? Black people?”

  She holds up a mauled chicken drumstick bone and waggles it. “Mm-hmm. I mean, God damn. This chicken is basically a chicken you would find in heaven, prepared by one of the angels up there for us lowly mortals to eat. And these greens and ham hocks? If Typhon stomped in through the front door right now like some giant bitchy Transformer and fired her boob-rockets at me and killed me, I would die so happy. Your people have been keeping all the good food to themselves, brother.”

  DeAndre laughs. “Man, whatever. This isn’t my kinda food. I like sushi.”

  She pffs at him. “Californian.”

  “Damn right.”

  “What about me?” Copper asks. “I’m black.”

  “You’re government,” Reagan says. “Which basically makes you white.”

  “I figure this is more the food of my people,” Chance says. “Southern boy and all. I guess everywhere’s got its own food. The taste of its people. Something in the blood—”

  “It’s in the dirt,” Reagan says. “Dirt, climate, everything. It’s called terroir.” She sees their looks. “What? I know stuff. I can be cultured.”

  DeAndre’s eyes brighten. “That’s it.”

  “What’s it?” Wade asks, a glop of banana pudding perched at the end of his fork.

  DeAndre laughs. “It’s in the dirt. It’s in the dirt. Typhon is in the motherfucking dirt.”

  “Okay,” Reagan says. “I’m pretty sure sushi-boy here just blew a fuse.”

  “No, wait, yo, hold up—listen. That geothermal company? Unterirdisch Elektrizitätssystem? Remember how they had a two-ton heat pump sent to that farmhouse? Why would a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere need something that big?”

  Wade shrugs. “Maybe that’s where Typhon is.”

  “Then why,” Aleena asks, “did they have a mirrored control computer on-site? If Typhon was there, they wouldn’t need the control.”

  “Maybe that farmhouse wasn’t the last stop for the delivery,” Reagan says.

  DeAndre snaps his fingers. “Bingo. And I think I know where it might’ve gone. You guys ever heard of the Sandhogs?”

  “That’s my new band name,” Reagan says.

  “No, shut up. They’re a union in New York.”

  Hollis jumps in: “Local 147. They’re the ones who dug . . . well, the city underneath the city. Subways, access tunnels, water tunnels, everything. You think Typhon is there? In Manhattan?”

  DeAndre nods. “Yeah. I saw that the Germans had all these maps and data on the Sandhogs, but no contracts, nothing. Maybe they found an area the workers dug out but never used for anything, and that’s where they put Typhon. Underground. Protected from attack. Powered by geothermal energy.”

  “That tracks,” Copper says.

  Nods all the way around.

  “Not that we know where in Manhattan,” Wade says. “Isn’t exactly a small town where we can just look for a big hole.”

  “But it’s a start,” Aleena says. “Guess I’m going home, after all.”

  CHAPTER 61

  Systems Diagnostics

  HOOKER COUNTY, SANDHILLS, NEBRASKA

  At the edge of oblivion, a shudder and a shake.

  Voices. Murmuring. Like talking underwater. Womp, womp, waaaah.

  Bright light of the morning as the bucket’s pulled off the Compiler’s head and the tinfoil swaddling is unwrapped with eager hands.

  All is white. Then the light resolves into a pair of shapes. Human shapes. Two children: one a girl, the other a boy. On the cusp of adolescence. Ten, perhaps eleven, years old.

  His sight begins to resolve. Boy’s got a mop top of orange hair and a rattail hanging down from the back of his head, draped over his shoulder. Girl’s got red hair, too—though darker, less orange, more the color of copper wire or a handful of shined pennies.

  “Hey, uhhh, hey, mister,” the boy says. “You all right?”

  The girl punches him in the shoulder. “Shut up, wing nut, of course he’s not all right. Looks like somebody shot him up.”

  “Maybe he deserved to get shot.”

  Another slug. The boy yelps. “Don’t say that. Mama says you’re too cruel.”

  “I just mean maybe he was trespassing out here.”

  “And then what? Someone tied him up, cut the tires on his Jeep, shot him a bunch of times to teach him a lesson? Trespassing gets you a butt full of rock salt. Not this.”

  The boy gasps again. “I think he’s looking at us. Crap!” The boy waves his hands. “Were you trespassing somewhere?”

  “God, shut up, Matty.” The girl stoops. Reaches into her jeans, pulls out a pocket knife. Flicks it open, starts sawing away at the bonds between his feet. Then his hands.

  But the Compiler is barely paying attention.

  Because nearby: a signal. It signals to him. He signals to it. Only ten feet away.

  From underneath the Jeep, something drops with a clang. A long metal box—shallow in depth but the length of a poster tube—hits the dirt.

  The boy cries out, takes three hasty steps backward.

  The girl startles, but doesn’t make a sound.

  That changes in short order.

  The box pops open. Not on the top, but rather, one of the narrow ends. A spring hinge opens it, and from within the box, something moves. Something serpentine begins to slide through the grass.

  The boy sees it. Shouts for his sister. “Shelly! Move! Snake in the grass! Rattler!”

  Now the girl is up. She hops to her feet, first dances in the direction of the snake and then, seeing it, hops away from it.

  The serpent reaches him. It is no serpent. It is, instead, a writhing mass of tiny spheres—metal, gleaming, glowing, though the light is hard to see in the day. The spheres break apart, begin rolling over him, sliding under his shirtsleeves, under his collar—he feels them begin to fill his wounds, pressing into the injured flesh. Some crawl to his ears, his mouth, pushing up through bulging nostrils.

  His back arches. Pain courses through him.

  From the Jeep, another box drops. More spheres begin to slalom through waving grass.

  The boy yells. The girl screams. They hightail it.

  The Compiler receives his upgrade.

  CHAPTER 62

  Paper Airplanes

  LUNA CREEK PARK, NEAR NEW LEXINGTON, OHIO

  Daybreak. They’re all tired. Run ragged. Across the way, a few pop-up campers and tents can be seen through the trees. A creek burbles nearby. The trees have begun their descent toward autumn. Everything has begun to sag, like a bouquet of flowers on the table a week after you buy them.

  Wade and Reagan get out of the Bronco, start unloading breakfast bags on the hood. Bagels, doughnuts, coffees.

  “So this is it,” DeAndre says. “Last meal together.”

  “Maybe ever,” Wade notes. He starts handing out phones. “Burners. Everything is turned off, all the tracking. You know the drill. Don’t use these before their time.”

  They go over the plan one last time over breakfast. Three of them head to Manhattan: Chance, Aleena, and Wade. Three of them head to West Virginia: DeAndre, Reagan, and Hollis. In West Virginia, hopefully they can use the system to figure out exactly where the hell Typhon is buried. Then, when the first group makes their way there, the second team can hack the systems, get them inside.

  After that, everything will have to get improvisational.

  “Feels about as solid as a paper airplane,” Hollis says. “I mean, it’ll fly, but I don’t know how well it’ll land.”

  DeAndre jumps the cut and says: “Relax. That’s hackers for you. We kinda make the parachute after we jump out the plane, homie.”

  Aleena looks at her watch. “
Before we do anything, I have work to do,” she says.

  “Do you have to poop?” Reagan asks.

  Aleena gives her the finger. “Shut up, Phantom of the Opera.”

  “Oh!” Reagan whoops and claps her hands. “Little Baby Stick-Up-Her-Ass is loosening up. That was a sly little burn. Because of the bandages on my face!” She turns to DeAndre, beaming. “This is a good day, Papa. Our little baby is all growed up.”

  Aleena takes Wade’s laptop. In her pocket is the USB wireless dongle. She heads off to a little trio of rotting picnic tables next to a half-collapsed playground set and plugs the device in. She can almost feel the Internet coming off this thing like heat off a car hood.

  Aleena was never one of those Internet addicts, not really—she could’ve thrown Facebook out the window, and on Twitter she tweeted maybe five times ever. Amusing videos rarely amused. But the rest of it—all the structure, all the data, all the wizards behind the curtains—fascinated her. Always made her feel connected and in control. Even when things on the ground were going haywire somewhere half a world away, she always felt, I’m the driver, this is my road, shut up and trust me. Something she always felt she had to prove to everyone else as much as to herself.

  She used the laptop once before on this trip—a few days ago at a rest stop outside St. Louis. She logged on to every hacker forum and online hive of scum and villainy she could find. There she left not a trail of bread crumbs so much as a whole damn bakery. Two words: Tochal. Restitution. And then that same last word again, written as .

  It was bait. A lure. And it didn’t work. No response. Well—untrue. Lots of response. None of it valid. Trolls. Weirdos. Conspiracy nuts. Not one of them appeared to be the Widow of Zheng.

  It was a long shot. She knew that. And yet—they need her. Without the Widow, this gets a whole lot more dangerous. Because Typhon has so many eyes . . .

  A crunch of dry leaves behind her. Chance, probably. She says: “I don’t think it’s going to work—”

  Someone who is definitely not Chance walks past the table and sits down. A woman. Holy shit. Not a woman but the woman. “You,” Aleena says.

  “Me,” the Widow responds. She tilts her head like a curious mantis studying its prey. Her hair is long, pulled behind her and bound up in a knot. She leans forward and the leather of her coat creaks and squeaks as she does. “So. You want to make restitution for your errors with Mount Tochal.”

  “I want to take down Typhon.”

  “A fool’s crusade.”

  “This is definitely a ship of fools, yes.” Aleena blinks. “Wait. I don’t get it. How are you here? Why are you here? Am I hallucinating?”

  “Some would say that all of life is a shared hallucination. Maybe even a simulation—a hologram. Wouldn’t that be something? We could hack reality itself.” A wry smile on the Widow’s otherwise icy countenance. “But it’s not. This is it. Life. Trees and dirt. Mud and blood. Ones and zeroes kept to little boxes like the laptop in your hand.”

  “My friends and I. They called us ‘Zeroes.’”

  “Maybe you are. Or maybe you’re more like me. A one amongst zeroes.” That wry smile tightens. “To answer your question, I have always been here. And I do not mean that in a philosophical way, but the United States is my home.”

  “I thought you were Chinese—”

  “I am Chinese.” There, a burr of irritation. “My family is from Taipei. But I choose to live here because it’s safer for me. My group remains in China and sometimes I go there to work with them. But I live here, and so I tracked you here.” She must see the trepidation on Aleena’s face. “Don’t worry, little girl. I’m the only one watching. The monster you hunt is a thousand hammers hitting in a million directions. I am a single scalpel. I am cautious when I cut—and flawless.”

  “I’m not your little girl. We’re probably the same age.”

  A pfft of dismissal from the Widow. She starts to stand. “If you don’t want to make honest restitution—”

  “Wait! Wait. I need your help.”

  The Widow hovers, then sits down once more. “What kind of help?”

  “It’s a . . . big favor.”

  “Big favors incur massive debts.”

  “Fine. Whatever the debt. We’ll pay it. Somehow.”

  The Widow’s fingers slide together, her hands merging. “Tell me what you need.”

  Aleena takes a deep breath. Then she tells her.

  The Widow’s eyebrows arch. “That is big.”

  Wade counts ammo by himself. Copper comes up, says, “I never did thank you.”

  “Hunh?”

  “You saved my ass, back at the Lodge. That cook—she came out of nowhere.”

  “She NSA or something? Or one of Typhon’s?”

  Copper shrugs. “I wasn’t in on that meeting. But I think Typhon’s been running this show and Ken Golathan figured that out. And when he did—”

  “He went missing.”

  “Mm.”

  “You gonna tell me about Fellhurst?”

  That hits Copper like a fist to the middle. It shouldn’t. But that word, that name—he has a visceral reaction to it. That, he suspects, will never change. He draws a deep breath, then says: “I shot someone. A teenager.”

  Wade blanches. “What?”

  “The NSA—via Ken Golathan—gave us a tip about a terrorist cell of young jihadis operating out of a private school in upstate New York. Fellhurst Academy. This wasn’t long after 9/11, so everyone was on high alert, a real taut wire. Story is, this group had insinuated itself as custodial staff, guards, same way they might settle into airport jobs or jobs at a courthouse. So I led a team in on the QT before classroom hours even started, thinking we were gonna get the jump on these guys. We had been given information about some of the suspected terrorists, and lo and behold here comes one around the corner. Baseball hat backward, hoodie over that, moving quickly carrying something that looked like a bomb, and I yelled stop and this person ran and . . .”

  “You shot him.”

  “I shot her. Just a girl, Wade. She was carrying her goddamn science project. Ironically, a science project meant to help detect residue of bomb-making materials. She wasn’t Arab. Young Puerto Rican girl. Genius, all her teachers told the media after.”

  Wade stares, warily. “They said it was a school shooting.”

  “That was Ken’s spin on it. Everyone’s always saying that school shootings are false flag operations, and ninety-nine point nine percent of the time, that’s bullshit. But this one time—we fucked up. And he covered it up. We’ve been keeping each other’s secret since. Ironic component number two: Ken was acting on bad information based on something some early artificial intelligence gave him. Something that predates Typhon, something that Typhon was supposed to fix and replace. Wasn’t any terrorist cell operating out of that school. Everyone was clean. Was all wrong.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah.” Hollis feels tears at the edges of his eyes. He blinks them away, clears his throat a little. Then he reaches into his pocket, pulls out a pill bottle. “Here. Got these for you.” On the bottle: CASODEX.

  “My meds. How . . . ?”

  “I definitely did not break into a CVS to steal pain pills after I escaped the hospital, and while there—which I wasn’t—I most certainly did not then scare up a bottle of these for you.”

  “Well, shit. Thanks.”

  “You feeling good?”

  “Feeling all right, thanks. Some pain but nothing I can’t handle.”

  “We’re gonna make it through this,” Copper says. He claps Wade on the shoulder.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  When Copper walks off, Wade throws the pill bottle in the creek nearby. He doesn’t like how they make him feel, those pills. Moody and withdrawn. He feels good now. More alive than he’s been in a long while.

  We’re gonna make it through this.

  “Horseshit,” he mutters under his breath, then laughs. Either Typhon will take him, or the ca
ncer will. But truth is, nobody gets out of this life alive.

  DeAndre licks a glob of jelly from a doughnut off his finger. He sits on a rock overlooking the creek. Reagan comes up, says: “So we’re heading to hillbilly country together. That’ll be fun.”

  “Yeah. It’ll be a real hoot.”

  “You wanna fuck?”

  “What?”

  “I’m just saying, feels like things are really coming to a head, and I figure if you want a taste of this sweet rump roast, now’s your chance.”

  He pulls her close, puts his arm around her. She flinches. “I do not want to have sex with you, Reagan Stolper.”

  “You sure? I’m super good in the sack.”

  “I don’t doubt that. Maybe we can just sit here for a while.”

  “Fine. Prude.” Eventually, she says, “You think we’ll actually . . . y’know, do this thing? Stop Typhon and live to tell the tale?”

  “I don’t know. I’m scared to find out.”

  “Me too.”

  Aleena finds Chance waiting for her halfway between the pavilion and the cars. He’s leaning up against a tree, picking his teeth with a stick.

  “You’re seriously picking your teeth with a stick?” she asks.

  “What? It works. Toothpicks are basically this.”

  “Basically.”

  “Basically!”

  “You’re such a hick,” she says, but she’s smiling when she says it, and then she grabs his hands, clasps them between hers, and reaches up on her toes to kiss him. A kiss long as a river, deep as the sea. When finally she pulls away, he takes a deep breath and blinks, reeling.

  “Whoa. Dang.”

  “We survive this thing, there’s more where that came from.”

  She kisses his cheek, then walks past. A sway in her step.

  He hurries after. “Wait, does that mean you contacted the Widow?”

  She just walks and whistles and smiles.

  They pack up the cars. They say their good-byes. Together, just in case the scary cyberbitch is watching, they all lift their middle fingers to the sky. Then it’s one last round of hugs made firmer by the unspoken acknowledgment that some of them might not make it through this thing unscathed.