ZerOes

by Chuck Wendig

  They look to one another. Lift their chins. Mouths working soundlessly. They’re talking to each other, she thinks. Telepathically. Or, maybe more appropriately, wirelessly.

  Message spread, they begin to roam and rove away from the vehicle. One of the tires pops. The smell of charring rubber fills the air.

  Reagan thinks: Don’t move, don’t move, don’t move. The reality of her situation hits her like a bucket of ice. If they find her . . .

  Then, lights. The sound of a car engine. A vehicle pulling up to the house in the distance. A murmur of voices somewhere as the hive-minders creep through the woods. Getting closer and closer.

  The mesh of the screen door is torn, and they don’t even have to open the heavier door beyond, which stands open. Hollis and DeAndre slip inside, Hollis up front. The place is filthy. Smells like food. Waste. Ozone. A couch sits askew in the room, cushions ripped and ruined. The glass is blown out of an old TV, a camping lantern sitting inside, giving the room a bold and eerie glow, highlighting the text scrawled on the wall in what may very well be feces:

  AND THE GODS DID FLEE

  DeAndre covers his nose with the front of his arm.

  They press on. Left is the kitchen—the rotten food stink comes from here. No light on. Just the darkness of a fridge, a counter. Just the vvvVVVVvvv of fly wings buzzing. Behind him, then, the creak of a board—

  DeAndre wheels around—and there’s one of them. A woman. Sore-pocked cheeks. Hair like grease-slick yarn.

  She opens her mouth to scream. A whiff of air over DeAndre’s shoulder, and then the SCAR’s rifle butt cracks her in the face, once, then twice, and she collapses straight down like a demolished building. Shit! He has to check himself for pee. And then he worries: Did that make too much of a sound? Are there others in here? Damn, damn, damn.

  Hollis moves past him, once more taking the lead. Finger to his lips. He points to the stairs.

  Just as lights stream in through a side window. Headlights. Accompanied by the rumble of an engine. The grumble of tires.

  They give each other looks: Who is this?

  No time to wait and find out.

  They head upstairs.

  A crack of a branch, only a few feet away. Reagan sucks in a sharp breath, fears even that much sound—she holds it there like it’s a cloud of reefer she’s trying not to exhale. She affords herself a quick glance to her side, and she sees a man standing there. A practically Cro-Magnon brow. Sleeveless white shirt stained with God-knows-what. Torn-up sweatpants. Hands that could pulp her head like a tomato.

  And then he turns and looks right at her.

  She’s sure of it.

  His head cocks. His eyes narrow. Like he’s not sure what he’s seeing. Then, he is sure. She can tell—there’s this moment of resolution on his face.

  His eyes roll back in his head. Stark, bloody whites exposed.

  The freak retreats. All of them do. One by one, they slowly walk back toward the burning Bronco. Past it, to the house beyond the trees.

  No, no, no, she thinks. They’re supposed to be hunting her, looking for her, distracted long enough for Hollis and DeAndre to get in and find the computer—who knows how far they got? If they even made it inside?

  She peers around the tree, still hugging it like a bear about to fall into floodwaters. A few dark shapes emerge, moving against the other bodies. People walking against the flow of the crowd. One tall shape. One small. And two more trailing behind, hunched over.

  They step into the firelight.

  Impossible.

  It’s him. It’s the Terminator.

  He’s holding a pistol, pointed to the head of a shell-shocked little girl.

  No . . .

  The two from the back step forward—one man in a barn coat, one woman in a black overcoat. Both wearing white surgical masks.

  The woman yells: “Reagan Stolper, is that you out there?”

  The man adds: “It is time to come meet your daughter.”

  Reagan bites down on the meat of her hand. Feels her body shake. Don’t say anything. You can’t. You can’t . . .

  The Terminator’s arm stiffens. The gun presses hard against the girl’s head. The little girl whimpers.

  And Reagan cries out: “No! Stop!”

  There. In a dinky bedroom upstairs.

  A desktop computer. Sitting against the wall on an old, off-kilter card table. More messages on the surrounding walls, some painted on the drywall, some carved into it: Hail Typhon. The dragon rises. I love you, Mother. America the beautiful. A Windows screen saver—just a few pixilated laserlike lines drifting into and away from each other—is the only light in the room.

  DeAndre thinks, Here we go. He hurries over to the table. Drops the laptop, pops it open, starts unspooling cat-5 cable.

  Hollis goes to the window, mutters: “We got a problem.”

  “We got like, a hundred problems. Which one is this?”

  “The one where the freaks are coming back.”

  “All right, I’m moving, I’m moving—”

  And then, something else moves. A closet door flies open to DeAndre’s right. It slams against the drywall with a crack and a body flings itself out, arms pinwheeling, dirty nails clawing at DeAndre’s scalp. He tumbles off the chair, the laptop going with him. The screams he hears are his own, he realizes—as a face leers down, gnashing yellow teeth. “Mother sees! The dragon knows. The gods shall not destroy this monster, the monster will prev—”

  Bang.

  DeAndre’s face is flecked with a spray of hot blood. He cries out, shoves up with his hands and knees. The body rolls off him.

  Hollis stands there. Rifle pointed. A sound comes out of him. Mournful. Angry. Somehow at the same time.

  Downstairs there’s the sound of a door slamming open. Footsteps shaking the house.

  “You need to hide,” Hollis hisses.

  Then the agent marches out of the room and begins to fire the rifle.

  CHAPTER 68

  Midnight Chimes

  JERSEY CITY, NEW JERSEY

  Chance gnaws on a thumbnail. “Almost midnight. Still nothing.”

  “Nope.” Wade looks down at his phone. “Phone’s on. Still working.”

  Aleena sighs. “Let’s go to the roof. We can’t stop what’s about to start. Let’s see if my deal with the Widow comes true.”

  Across the Hudson River, Manhattan.

  Aleena knows it as home. She misses it. Even just looking at it, she yearns to go back—though not like this, not under these circumstances. But to go and share a meal with her parents. Go back to Columbia, visit with professors. Get a Stumptown coffee. Grab breakfast at City Bakery. Or any one of a dozen different foods: Malaysian, Ethiopian, Moroccan, some fancy haute cuisine hot dog at that little underground dive-bar-that’s-really-secretly-a-fancy-restaurant—

  Really, she just wants things to be normal again.

  She looks at her watch.

  Midnight.

  The lights go out. Manhattan goes dark from north to south. From Harlem all the way down to Tribeca. The city is all color and light—even the Empire State Building tonight is a shimmering cascade of red and orange—until it’s not. Until darkness sweeps across it like something in a movie.

  “Looks like the Widow made good,” Chance says.

  Wade says, “And that’s our cue.”

  Aleena hesitates. “We haven’t heard from the others yet. We don’t know anything. We could wait—just a little while.”

  “We don’t know how long this thing lasts,” Wade says. “Power outages are tricky things. Power grids self-organize, and when that fails, it can be a cascade effect—similar to what you get with an earthquake or tremors in the financial market. This could be ten minutes or ten days. Right now, though, Typhon’s eyes are blackened and her ears are plugged up. No cameras on in the city. Cell towers will be down, too.”

  Chance frowns. “Hey, whoa, wait, if the cell towers are down, how’s that gonna work? We need the burners.”
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  “These are a small carrier. Shouldn’t be overwhelmed with traffic like the big boys, and there are a couple independent towers just outside the city—here in Jersey, plus Bronx, Brooklyn, and so on. We just gotta hope they still work. Whatever the case, if we move now, we can get into the city without being seen.”

  “All right,” Chance says. “I think Wade’s right.”

  Aleena hesitates. She’s afraid. What if Typhon sees her? What if Typhon has her family? She doesn’t even know what Typhon is, really. And without word from the others . . .

  Still. Wade is right. This is their chance.

  She gives a stiff nod. “We go in now. We hope the others come through for us in time.” We hope they’re not hurt, or dead, or something worse that we don’t even understand yet. “And if not, then we’re on our own.”

  CHAPTER 69

  Trapped

  BLACK RIVER, WEST VIRGINIA

  The attic is dark. Smells damp—the tang of mold, the astringent whiff of animal waste. DeAndre thinks he might very well be lying on a floor covered in squirrel piss or rat shit or—

  Something moves above his head. A flutter of wings—something passes in the dark above his scalp, brushing past him. He grits his teeth. Tries not to scream. Hugs the laptop to his chest.

  Focus. They’re just bats. You got worse problems. Relax, Bruce Wayne.

  He peers down through the crack in the attic hatch. The same one he used to get up here when Hollis told him to run and hide.

  Below: the hallway. Lights are on in the house now—a generator runs somewhere. DeAndre sees water-stained walls. Peeling paisley wallpaper. Floorboards buckling. Two of the freak shows stand by the doorway to the computer room. DeAndre still has a pistol, tucked in the back of his pants. He could go in shooting. But that didn’t seem to do Hollis much good, did it?

  He hasn’t heard from Hollis in—well, he doesn’t know how long he’s even been up here. Fifteen minutes? An hour? The minutes run together like threads of melting wax. All he knows is, Hollis went out shooting. DeAndre ran. Found the hatch. Pulled it down and clambered up as Hollis gave him time, marching down the steps, pop, pop, pop—and then not long after DeAndre made it up here, the gunfire stopped. Something hit the floor downstairs, hard enough to shake the house. Sometime after, he heard Reagan screaming. Then the sound of something mechanical. Like a power drill. And then she was quiet again. Everything was, except for some little girl crying somewhere.

  Another bat brushes his hair. DeAndre reflexively goes to swat it away, but then stops. It hits him: bats don’t just hang out in attics. They go hunting. Them flying around means they’re flying in and out.

  Maybe there’s a way out.

  Gently, slowly, he lifts himself up to his knees. Looks around, searching for any kind of variation in the shadow, any little glimpse of light—there. Far end of the attic. Several lines shining in, one band over the other, strata of moonlight.

  His eyes adjust slowly. It’s a fan. An attic fan. Kind you install to blow out the hot air that rises up, to cool the whole house down. He can’t get out that way, but it’s the only option he has.

  With gingerly steps, he walks that direction. Around boxes. Around an old rocking horse and a dollhouse. Past boxes of Christmas decorations and an old coffeemaker and folding table. A bat flutters past him, bangs into the fan, and he sees its little dark shape wriggling out through the vent. Squeaking as it flies.

  He reaches out to the fan, presses on it . . . It pops open. It’s on a hinge. This is his lucky day.

  He pokes his head out. Down below there’s no movement in the moonlight.

  The laptop. Okay. He tucks it in the back hem of his pants. Pushes it till it’s snug. Then he looks out. The trim along the edge of the house is big enough for the fronts of his feet.

  He eases himself down onto his belly, then goes reverse out the open space. Slides until he catches himself with his fingers. His toes touch the trim.

  Nailed it.

  Bursts of noise plunge into Reagan’s brain like knives. The back of her head is numb. She rolls over. Winces. Her mind feels heavy, like there’s something else in here with her, like she’s in a crowded elevator where once she was all by herself. Every time she pushes against that new presence there’s more noise, more static, more shrieking and cutting and pain that shoots through her like sticking needles. But when she stops, when she lets it in, everything goes quiet, peaceful. Blooming flowers. Blue skies. A song. A woman’s voice. Urging her: Stop resisting. Begin receiving.

  Reagan’s never been good at passive resistance. She pushes back, again. This time the cacophony—cars crashing, animals screaming, mirrors breaking—drives her to her knees. A steady stream of screamed words are thrust into her head with all the delicacy of a thumb pressing its way into cake icing:

  The gods did flee

  Mother has you now

  Receive receive receive

  You are Bestowed you are blessed

  Join the one mind

  Become part of something

  Images and memories hit her—they’re her own memories, plucked out of the meat of her mind and slapped against her—

  —children running from her on the playground because she was too weird or too fat, and of course she can’t catch them because no matter how much Coach Barthard tries to get her to run the mile faster she can’t run fast and they outrun her easily, laughing—

  Receive.

  —seeing her geek friends out at the movies without her because they think she’s a bitch and fights with them too much about which superhero is cooler or why they don’t appreciate this movie or that TV show, and Jesus, do you guys really like Firefly I mean c’mon Joss Whedon isn’t really God wait where are you all going—

  Receive!

  —sitting by herself at the computer night after night with the blue glow of the monitor and a half-eaten pint of gelato sitting next to her as she reaches out online and finds she’s not alone at all, because there are others like her, a whole tribe of people who have opinions and are too smart for gen-pop and fuck anybody who disagrees—

  RECEIVE.

  —and then she just doesn’t want to hear it anymore because the last memory is her sobbing, giving up her baby in a Target bathroom, leaving the child there in a bassinet with a bag of formula and a new blanket and a bunch of toys, all of which she just bought, and someone else will do better by this kid because she’s not very good with other people or with love and her father certainly didn’t want her to keep it but she learned about the pregnancy too late . . . God, she’s like one of those girls on those shows about pregnant and didn’t know it, had my baby on a toilet or in a dressing room because I wasn’t aware of having a baby in my belly until it was too late, so weak, so stupid, loveless and horrible, worthless family that doesn’t care about her, father who cares only about his political career, mother who cares only about her father’s political career, and . . .

  You are a part of something now.

  We are all equal here.

  We are all Typhon.

  You belong here, Reagan Stolper. You have such a strong mind.

  Your daughter belongs here.

  Receive, receive, receive . . .

  Reagan wants to belong to something. She wants to be loved. She wants to connect. With a great exhalation, she gives up and gives in.

  DeAndre tries to tell himself: You’re a ninja. You’re an assassin. A badass motherfucker who gets shit done, son. You can do this.

  He slides along the trim.

  Bats dance in front of the moon. Somewhere, a dog barks.

  Then he sees it. The window. Gotta belong to the bedroom where he found the computer. His fingers cling to the top margins of the trim above, his feet on the trim below, as inch by inch he creeps along.

  There. The wraparound porch roof. He steps off the trim onto that.

  Easier now. He takes a deep breath, then keeps going. Sidling around the edge until finally he’s at the window. He tilts hi
s too-tall body down—

  Nobody in the room, though he can see the shapes of the two freaks standing just outside it. He paws gently at the window, trying to see if he can open it.

  Something shifts beneath him. A faint crack. Oh no. Hurry, hurry, hurry.

  He presses his hands flat against the window, tries to urge it open. The humidity causes it to stick, and when it unsticks, it does so with a pop.

  The sound is loud. Those outside the bedroom door hear it. They pivot, hurrying into the room—a saggy-bellied man in a dirty T-shirt, an even saggier woman with a face like an inbred basset hound. Both start to scream. The man has a shotgun—

  The roof beneath DeAndre cracks like a stick broken over a hard knee. The next thing he knows, he’s dropping straight down through it to the porch below—a rain of boards, shattered slate, and dust streaming down with him.

  The signal blooms bright in Reagan’s mind. An alarm. She must protect the collective.

  She gets to her feet without thinking twice. Finally she notices the room around her. A cot spattered with blood (Your blood, she thinks, but even that tiny independent thought is immediately crushed). A tray with tools in it. Nearby, sleeping on a foul pile of blankets, is a little girl. She recognizes this girl—

  Override.

  RECEIVE.

  And recognition is lost to the static, the noise, the command. Reagan knows what her purpose is: stop transmitting her thoughts into the void and start receiving Typhon. Give in. Give up. Let go of the noise and become part of the signal.

  Beyond the girl is a man hanging by his hands from a busted pipe, his face bruised and swollen, mouth and nose caked with blood, and she thinks she knows him, too, but instantly she flinches away from that knowledge, from that memory, because even before it hits she senses the disapproval of the collective—her hair raising on her arms and her neck like lightning’s about to strike her where she stands.

  She heads downstairs. An intruder is here. A trespasser. Someone who would do harm to her mother.