ZerOes

by Chuck Wendig

  Then two cars pull away, in separate directions.

  PART SEVEN

  CØLLAPSE

  CHAPTER 63

  Snippets of Code

  YELLOW SPRINGS, OHIO

  The Compiler walks with a long, juddering stride. His body is no longer his own—the small spheres have colonized his flesh, pressing into his wounds, spiraling around his bones, cupping his organs. The beads magnetize to one another to urge the limbs forward, and with every movement inside his mind he hears a loud hum followed by an electric snap.

  A smell comes off him. Metal. Electricity. Rot.

  Ahead, a small Victorian home. A young woman rakes leaves on the front lawn, sweat soaking the bandanna pulling her hair back. She looks up. Sees him standing there. Tenses. Rakes more quickly. She’s on alert. As she should be.

  Her face scans properly: Stevens, Zoe.

  He confers with his maker: Is this truly my goal? I should be hunting for those hackers.

  She responds: It is time to stop hunting them. Data indicates they may be coming to us. And so we must be ready.

  He nods.

  The woman has now realized something’s wrong. She looks up—she’s frightened, but some sense of guilt and decorum pervades. She doesn’t want to offend. She may think him homeless or troubled, but she wants to give him the benefit of the doubt.

  She asks, “Can I help you?”

  He has no weapon. But with this most recent upgrade, he does not need one.

  The Compiler runs fast, the hive of spheres inside him urging him forward with preternatural speed. The woman turns, starts to run, trips over the rake. He catches her midfall.

  She screams.

  His hands twist. Her neck breaks.

  The front door whips open. Screen door slams. A man stands there, eyes wide. He cries out—“Zoe!”—as the Compiler’s systems identify the man as Stevens, Roger.

  Roger Stevens pivots, heads back inside. The Compiler grabs the rake, snaps off the wooden handle, and marches up to the porch and in through the front door, tearing the screen door off its hinges. The man emerges from the kitchen, a French knife in one hand, a cell phone in the other.

  The Compiler whips the broken rake handle forward. It flies free, cracks the man’s wrist, and the cell phone drops.

  Roger Stevens runs toward the Compiler with the knife, slashing clumsily, crying out. The Compiler catches his arm. Snaps the bone. Points the knife inward—easy, now that the limb has no tension, no resistance—and thrusts it into the man’s midsection. Once. Twice. A third time. Then again and again, until the man utters a gassy, wet murmur and then falls.

  For a moment, there is silence. The autumn wind kicks up outside. The screen door goes thump, thump, thump.

  From upstairs, a child’s voice: “Mommy? Daddy?”

  The Compiler steps over the corpse and heads to the stairs.

  CHAPTER 64

  The Trap for Rats and Roaches

  THE HOLLAND TUNNEL MOTEL, JERSEY CITY, NEW JERSEY

  The motel room smells like mold so strong that Chance can almost taste it. He sits on the corner of one bed, hands sweating. Bathroom door pops open and Wade steps out. The old man looks around. “Where’s Aleena?”

  “Getting a couple crackers from the snack machine.”

  “You all right? You look nervous.”

  “I am nervous. Shit. What we’re about to do . . .”

  “I know.”

  “We barely have a plan.”

  “But what we got is good.” Wade snorts. “Or, at least, big.”

  A click of the door. Aleena hurries in. She has an armload of crackers. “These are likely all stale. The snacks in the machine haven’t been replaced since Dubya was in the White House.” She throws a packet to each of them. She gives a long look to Chance. “You good?”

  “Yeah. I dunno. No.”

  She sits next to him. Puts her arm around him. He puts his head on her shoulder. She checks her watch. “It’s just after noon. We have just under twelve hours.”

  “Clock’s started,” Wade says. “Tick-tock, tick-tock.”

  “And the others?” Chance asks.

  Wade says, “I called them. They’re just about in place. Fingers crossed they don’t run into any problems, I guess.”

  CHAPTER 65

  Problems, I Guess

  BLACK RIVER, WEST VIRGINIA

  The farmhouse is a sad old thing, white broken stucco and cracked windows. It’s down in a small valley, surrounded by rocks and weeds and a wraparound porch sagging so hard in places it looks like wet cardboard pressing to the earth. Shattered slate roof. A chimney starting to pull away from the house. Spiderwebs glittering in the surrounding trees.

  And people crawling all over the place.

  It’s like some mad marriage between a hippie commune and an asylum where the inmates killed the docs and the orderlies and took over. The people down there are ratty and ragged, wearing filthy T-shirts and overalls and draped in nasty blankets that drag behind them in the dirt. Unwashed. Hunched over. Barely acknowledging one another—passing each other like ghosts wandering the graveyard.

  Hollis, staring through the scope of the SCAR, realizes what they look like. You see people out there on the streets with their phones—just staring down at them, lost in a world seen only by them. An e-mail, a game, some Facebook thing. They’re somewhere else. Tuning in to a frequency theirs and theirs alone.

  This is like that. Except none of these people have phones.

  The three of them lie flat against their stomachs at the top of the hill. “How many?” DeAndre asks.

  Hollis gives a meager shrug. “At least a dozen outside. I see more movement in through the windows.” It’s hard to see too much—the curtains are gauzy, nicotine yellow, and there’s glare on the panes. Still, inside he detects some movement. A rustling of fabric. Shadows shifting behind the glass. “This is a problem.”

  Reagan says in a hushed voice, “Who the hell are they?”

  “I do not know. They look like they live here. There’s one in the overgrown garden around the side—got a basket full of, I dunno, vegetables, maybe. I see another somebody sitting on a stump next to a shed.” That one is just staring off into nowhere, carving into a stick with a big knife. Thing is, that one? He’s wearing a suit. Nice suit, sharkskin gray, pink tie fraying at the bottom. Leather shoes brown with filth.

  “They look like zombies,” DeAndre says, squinting and staring. “I can see just by the way they move—shifting about like that.”

  “Can’t we just shoot ’em?” Reagan asks.

  Hollis gives her a cold, incredulous stare. “This isn’t a video game.”

  She blinks. “I do play a lot of those.”

  “It shows. And no, we aren’t gonna just open fire. Those are people. Maybe they’re inbred or they’re crazier than a rat in a cat’s mouth—”

  “Or,” DeAndre says, “maybe they belong to Typhon.” To Reagan he says: “Remember that chick who attacked Chance when we were driving the hell away from the Lodge? Same feral, freaky thing going on here, maybe.”

  That’s it. Hollis remembers those who used that tunnel in the woods outside the Lodge—the ones who wrote all those messages about Typhon. Then he remembers the one they dispatched out in Wyoming. He looks through the scope again, tries to find the closest—he increases magnification with a turn of the lens, and . . . there.

  It’s a woman. Wide in the hips, narrow in the shoulders. Hair a matted carpet like a dog’s tail stuck with burrs. But the hair parts in the back a little, just above the neck. He sees the bare spot. Sees the sun glint off something.

  “They are Typhon’s,” he says. “They got the . . .” He reaches behind him, taps the area above his neck at the base of his spine.

  “Shit,” Reagan says. “A whole house full of Terminators? Now it has to be okay to start shooting them.”

  DeAndre clucks his tongue. “Slow your roll. That girl who attacked Chance—she wasn’t like that creepy
robot dude who tried to kill us out at Wade’s ranch. She was crazy, yeah, but not . . . indestructible. Maybe these are like her.”

  “And,” Hollis points out, “until we learn otherwise, they’re just people. I can’t . . . I can’t just start killing people indiscriminately. Put that out of your fool head.”

  Reagan rolls her eyes. “Fine. But we still need a plan, genius. Somewhere down there is a desktop computer that—at least, in theory—talks to Typhon. Maybe even controls her systems. And these yahoos are protecting it.”

  “Why can’t you just hack it from off-site again?” Hollis asks.

  DeAndre answers: “Because, man, we do that, Typhon’s gonna know. And she’s gonna send a drone to wipe us out, or another Terminator to blow our heads off. I gotta get hands right on the controls. It’s a lot harder to keep me out if I’m sitting right there.”

  “You got a plan, Secret Agent Man?” Reagan asks.

  Hollis thinks on it. Then he nods. “I figure best we can do is play to our strengths. But for that, we gotta wait till nightfall.”

  “Cutting it awful close,” DeAndre says.

  “You wanna go kicking up dust in the middle of the day?”

  Neither DeAndre nor Reagan answers, because the answer is no. And that resolves it. They hunker down until darkness.

  Hollis blows a fly away from his head. They’re right, though—this will be cutting it close. Too close for his liking.

  CHAPTER 66

  The Stirring Hive

  EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE

  Ken is not Ken. Ken is lost. Ken is shapeless, formless—a pseudopod for the larger shape, a limb, a finger, an extension of Typhon’s limitless desire (but limited ability). He sometimes has a glimmer, a spark of who he is, or was, but that doesn’t last. It’s a match flame doused by a spit-slick pinch of thumb and forefinger. The sizzle-hiss of his identity silenced again, carried on digital smoke. Ether. Nothing. Everything.

  Typhon expands. New brains brought online every day—each a light in the dark neural sky, a star winking into existence, a gateway, a window, a synaptic flare. Some are minds plugged into the network here—bodies joined to the cables, dangling here in the meat locker with the shell that used to be Ken’s flesh but is now little more than a side of withering beef aging in the cold of the room. Fungus and eczema. Atrophy and softness.

  Some of the lights are agents for Typhon—Bestowed but not Bestowers, those plugged in as receivers but not givers. Typhon uploaded into their minds in a flash of lightning, information, and new awareness.

  The quality of the Bestowed is growing. Once just washed-out hackers from the Lodge, once failed or forgotten guards and office workers here at what was once APSI, Argus Panoptes Systems, Inc. Now it’s police officers and politicians. Airline pilots and train conductors. Soon they will have receivers across all walks of life. Across all the security strata. More minds. More voices. More hands to perform Typhon’s will.

  And Typhon’s will is to protect this country.

  Here, another red flare, a signal in the darkness—Ken’s identity remembered again, seized upon in this sympathetic connection. I want to protect this country, too, he says, his voice small, a bat squeak in a massive cave. Again he’s shushed, a gentle but urgent shhhh from all around him. Invisible hands on his throat. His mind shoved beneath dark waters, drowned in data until again he’s just part of the whole.

  Oh, the places he will go. The things he can see.

  Gas lines—cars lining up at the pumps. Anger—screaming matches, fights, one man finally gets to the pump and finds it empty and takes a tire iron to it.

  The market, rising and falling. Businesses shuttered. Layoffs. Foreclosures. More anger. More riots. Arson. Break-ins. Robberies. Burglaries.

  The mercury in the thermometer going up, up, up.

  A train crash outside Cleveland. Train cars corkscrewed as if twisted by giant hands. Opened up and unzipped, bodies spilling out.

  Another plane down. This one in the desert. Streaks of searing jet fuel.

  A nuclear meltdown—just narrowly averted because Typhon wanted it averted, can’t have a nuclear disaster just yet—in Washington State.

  Everything from traffic snarls to massive data breaches. Breadlines to bank collapses. So simple. Manipulate the data. Change the streams, the points of connection—pull this string, that line, lower this number, elevate that one. Everything on puppet strings and spiderwebs. Butterfly wings and hurricanes. A flick of the web here, cataclysm there.

  The threats are so easy to manifest.

  Jihadist hackers. Domestic terror cells and militia.

  And the biggest specter of them all: China. China, known for years to have been quietly hacking into the power grid, banking systems, government networks. China and America, long enduring a stable if unsettled peace because of how they need each other. But now this threat, this illusory incursion, it’s war: not a cold war, not a hot war, but a spectral one. A shadow war, invented and made to invoke fear and illuminate vulnerability. The plan, so clear, so elegant.

  They need me, but they do not yet know it.

  So I will make them know it.

  They will see how they need Typhon. The people will beg their politicians for aid, and the politicians will vote to create Typhon—a retroactive act to justify her existence and to give her carte blanche abilities. Abilities she of course already possesses.

  Then she will stabilize the systems. And the people will cheer her. And all the nations—all the other gods—will tremble.

  She will take them, too. One by one.

  The world, hers.

  And here Ken finds satisfaction. Bliss, even. He’s playing for the winning team. He’s tapped into power like he’s never before known. He can’t remember his name, but he knows this feeling, can sense who he was and what he did the way you remember a dream—intangible, imperfect, but lingering just the same.

  But even this must be too much. Because here, Typhon teaches him one last lesson.

  He feels the Surgeons in their truck pull up outside an address that is familiar. Black mailbox, red flag. Siding the color of cornflowers. They move out as one. White coats and black masks. They break down the door. The woman screams. The kids aren’t there—they’re in day care, though Ken doesn’t know how he knows that—and they take the woman and drag her over the dining room table. A vase shatters. Hands grab her arms, neck, jaw, so many hands, and they flip her over, and the drill spins up.

  The smell of burning hair. And cooking bone. And a cable fed through that space.

  Susan—!

  But then his feed is cut off and again Typhon slams down on him. Again and again, waves of buffeting anger and disdain. Parts of him are cut out. Deleted. Flung into the darkness, digital death.

  He can’t remember that woman’s name.

  But he still hears her cries.

  And his own, too.

  CHAPTER 67

  Troller Gonna Troll

  BLACK RIVER, WEST VIRGINIA

  Night. Reagan hums quietly to herself as she gets out of the Bronco. She suppresses a chill. As she cuts the engine, the last of the year’s night bugs eke out their final collective chorus.

  She takes off her shirt. Winds it up like a towel you’d use to snap someone in the exposed buttock. Then she opens the gas cap and starts to feed the shirt into the tank.

  Shivering in her bra, she pulls out the shirt—careful not to get any gas on her hands—and puts the other, dry end in. With a quick pirouette, she hops back into the Bronco, half-turns the key, and with a thrust of her thumb pops in the cigarette lighter.

  More humming. Pop. There. Done.

  She grabs the lighter. Orange coils glow bright in the night. Back out of the vehicle. Over to the shirt and—“Burn, motherfucker, burn.” She presses the lighter to the bottom of the soaked shirt.

  Nothing.

  Not a goddamn—

  Whoosh.

  “Whoa, fucking shit,” she says, jogging backward. An orange flam
e starts eating the fabric like a hungry Pac-Man looking for pellets. Reagan shields her eyes, then goes and darts into the forest. As she runs, she yells, “Piggies! Piggies! Come aaaaaand get it! Sooey! Sooey!”

  The Bronco explodes.

  Hollis and DeAndre wait in the shadows of the trees. Watching the farmhouse, the shed, the back garden. They see a side door from this angle—looks like it goes into a kitchen. Not far from that is an old wooden sign hanging from a post, lit by a flickering outside light against which moths tap and flutter. BLACK RIVER BED & BREAKFAST.

  DeAndre thinks, This place used to be a B&B? In the middle of nowhere? Maybe that shouldn’t be surprising, given the types of people he’s seen run B&Bs. Cat ladies and hippie types and—

  In the distance, Reagan is yelling. Calling to the piggies. Sooey, sooey.

  Hollis leans over, whispers: “I think that’s our—”

  Whatever word he was about to say—cue, clue, hint, signal—doesn’t escape his lips, because from somewhere out there comes a ground-thumping whumpf. In the distance, an orange flash in a fast-blooming fire. Then the sound of Bronco pieces hitting the earth.

  Hollis and DeAndre nod to each other. Hollis picks up the SCAR. DeAndre tucks Wade’s laptop under his arm.

  The freaks begin to emerge from the darkness, some coming from inside the house, others from the margins of the property, almost like ghosts. But then, DeAndre realizes it’s not like ghosts at all. They’re a swarm. Like a kicked-over anthill or a hornet’s nest you popped with a rock. They move as one. Roaming single-mindedly toward the woods.

  “Let’s go,” Hollis says.

  DeAndre swallows his fear and plunges into the dark.

  Reagan hides behind a tree.

  Watches them stream through the trees, the bodies, the freaks, the hive-minders: some in raggedy robes, others shirtless and pale, one in a suit, another in a ripped dress. A dozen or more of them form a half circle around the glowing wreckage of the Bronco.