ZerOes

by Chuck Wendig

  I can’t let this happen, Chance thinks. What to do? Grab the gun? Tackle Wade? He calls to Aleena but he can’t even see her now . . .

  From a distance, he hears Aleena scream.

  And then, from the shadows at the back of the room, someone emerges. It’s Shane Graves. Taking big, long strides. Wearing a smile that’s wide, too wide, with eyes that don’t blink. He has Aleena. Dragging her along by her hair. He throws her to the ground and then steps up to Wade, reaching for the skullcap. Shane Graves cackles that Shane Graves laugh, then says, “Here, Earthman. Let me help you with that.”

  Chance runs at Shane, but Graves moves fast, freaky fast, and turns and pistons a fist into Chance’s middle, then grabs a hankful of Chance’s hair and flings him backward. Chance’s head slams against the wall—he sees stars popping every time he blinks. Graves sniffs and says, “I’ll deal with you soon, Dalton. Don’t worry. We’ll finish our business in due time.”

  Aleena launches herself upward, clawing at Graves. She shoves him forward, then paws for the gun on the floor—

  But then a voice comes from the sphere. And a new face appears, a face matching the one hanging only a few feet away. Aleena’s brother. “Hey, big sis,” the face says.

  Aleena stops reaching for the gun. She looks. Tears shine in her eyes. “Nasir . . .”

  “I know you think we’re a monster. And maybe we are. But we are a monster born in defense of the realm. In defense of the whole world! Typhon was born of Gaia in all the myths, and in a way that’s true here, too. Born of the world. Made of its people. We’re here to protect this place, sis. Make it better. Safer. Order from chaos. You want to help our family in Syria? From here, you have infinite power. Infinite reach.”

  “Never, Nasir. Never . . .”

  The skullcap settles on Wade’s head. His body stiffens. His jaw goes slack.

  Graves turns to Aleena. “Your turn, pretty girl.” He reaches out. Grabs Aleena’s hair. But she snatches up the pistol from the ground—and into his mouth goes the barrel. Shane shrieks as the gun goes off. The back of his head blows out like a party popper. Blood, brains, and what look like metal BBs fling against the wall.

  Graves doesn’t fall. He stands there, stock-still, eyes empty. Chance watches in horrified fascination as the little marbles roll back toward him instantly, each leaving a little trail of blood. Shane’s body teeters, totters, but then the space in the back of his head begins to fill up with the metal clatter of little spheres. Forcing their way into the wound and bundling there.

  Shane shudders, then laughs. Aleena screams.

  Chance dives again for Graves. He grabs Chance, cracks him in the nose with the heel of his hand. Chance drops.

  Then Shane grabs Aleena by the throat. Her scream turns to a wet gurgle. “Time to join your family, little bitch.”

  Twin streams of blood trickle from Chance’s nose. To his palm. Through his fingers. He stands, starts to rush back toward Shane—he’s fitting Aleena into one of the cradles now, lowering the skullcap down to the top of her head. She’s gone still, given up. Her eyes glitter with tears, and she looks to Chance and says: “It’s okay. It’s okay.” And then Chance screams as she joins Wade.

  Shane rushes at him. Laughing. Cackling, even. “Your turn, Dalton,” he says. He crashes into him. Smashes Chance into the wall. Chance’s back spasms—he took the hit right on his spine, and goddamn if it doesn’t hurt. “Time to get into your cradle, little baby.”

  Chance throws a punch—it’s wide, clumsy, but it lands. It feels like punching a fridge door. He recoils, hand throbbing. Shane pistons a fist into his face. Chance’s lip splits. He tastes more of his own blood.

  As Shane drags him toward the remaining cradle, Chance reaches out. Claws at Shane’s arm. Some of the skin pulls away, revealing red muscle. Blood flows. Shiny silver spheres push up from the wound and fill the space, stanch the flow. Shane laughs. “I was better than you when I was human, Dalton, but hot fuck, look at me now! Now I’m a machine.”

  A hard shove and Chance slams against the empty cradle. Shane’s mouth opens wide—his throat bulges and a stream of those silver spheres push out, forming a crude, rudimentary hand that pins one of Chance’s wrists as Shane’s original hands begin to set up the machine. Graves leans in. His breath smells like pennies.

  “Time to plug in, Dalton,” Shane says, his voice grinding with mechanical distortion.

  Chance paws out, reaching for something, for anything—

  His fingers find a bundle of wires above his head, connecting to the cradle—

  He wrenches them out. They spit sparks.

  Then he shoves them into Shane Graves’s eye.

  Electricity courses through them both. Chance’s world lights up like the lights at a baseball stadium—bright, garish, white. He can feel it from his toes to his balls to his teeth.

  And then it’s done. He’s staggering. Shane is falling. Little ball bearings, wet with blood, scatter and roll away. Some of them roll by Chance’s fluttering eyelids as all goes dark.

  CHAPTER 74

  The Roof Is on Fire

  Chance pushes himself up on his forearms. A string of sticky blood connects his lower lip to the concrete floor. He stays like this for a while. Looking at the floor. Watching his blood ooze. Eventually he wipes the back of his hand across his mouth. He moves to sit up. Everything hurts. He coughs. Doubles over again before finally managing to get upright.

  The air is cold. His breath comes in clouds and he stares through this steam at all the bodies, human bodies that look like sides of beef but are instead hooked up to machines. Clawlike skullcaps holding them there. Swaying just slightly. Wires. IV drips. Dozens of them. Row after row. Some he recognizes. Alan Sarno. Ken Golathan. Others he doesn’t. Oh God, no—

  Wade and Aleena are hanging there, too. Wade’s gray ringlets are mashed flat against his sweat-slick face. Aleena’s mouth is slack.

  Nearby, on the floor, Shane Graves lies in a crumpled heap.

  Chance stands. Hand against the wall to brace himself, fingers splayed out. He grunts. Spits blood. Feels one of his canines wiggle. Ow.

  “You’re deceptively gifted,” says Typhon. It slides soundlessly through the bodies, a bold sphere on an extensor arm—the sphere shimmers, and a ripple of spikes and hills appears that churns like water set to a rolling boil. Soon the protrusions resolve into a face: that of Leslie Cilicia-Ceto. “The probability of you making it this far was slim. I continue to be impressed at your continued ability to deny the statistics. You are emblematic of my very existence—simple computer modeling cannot contain the multitudes necessary to understand the chaos of the human experience.”

  Chance slumps against the wall, pressing his back against it. “I got your multitudes right here,” he says, and gives her the finger.

  The computer laughs. A tinny, warped sound.

  Chance takes a step forward. Pain fires through him like a bottle rocket. He says to the thing: “It’s just you and me now. All the gods fled, but I’m still here.”

  The sphere shimmers, shudders, and a new face emerges. It’s his mother’s. Broken, imperfect, mirroring her look from that community theater video. The voice isn’t perfect, either, but it’s close enough to send chills crawling up his spine. “Chance, baby, honey, what do you have in this life? What’s left for you? The cancer took me, and it was going to take your friend, too. Your father knew what was coming. He chose the hero’s way. Self-determination is glorious. And you have that chance, now, but to make an even better decision. Put on one of the cradles. Join us in here. You can see your friends again. You can see Aleena. You love her, don’t you? Elevated pulse just when I mention her name. I can see the heartbeat in your neck. I can see the heat brought to your brow. I can see—”

  Chance spits. “Can you see that? Now, how do I kill you? I killed . . . that.” He points to the bundle of skin that represented Shane Graves. Up close now he can see Shane’s cheek turned skyward, and the bumpy cheek—a doz
en little lumps like he’s got a mouthful of marbles. Because, Chance supposes, he does. “Maybe I start unplugging these people. Just ripping them out.”

  “You do that, they die.”

  He hesitates. “Maybe I don’t care.”

  He steps in front of one of the dangling bodies. Sarno. Alan Sarno. He reaches up—Typhon has buried her cradle underneath his skin, almost like the flesh is starting to grow around it. A faint fuzz of white mold dusts Sarno’s face. He smells of spoiling meat. Chance reaches up, feels along the margins of the skull-cap. He can’t even get his fingers underneath it. He scrabbles, tries to pry it off, his breathing going louder, faster—anxiety and panic sweep over him like a gale wind and futility sets into his marrow.

  “You’re a failure out here,” comes Aleena’s voice in his ear.

  He shuts his eyes. “No. No. It’s not really you. Shut up.”

  “But you can be powerful in here. More powerful than the gods.”

  He turns toward Typhon. The monster has Aleena’s face. He tries not to recoil, tries to stay standing. Can’t think about what he’s seeing right now or he’ll crumble—or worse, he’ll find a cradle and stick himself into it. “Why all the talk of the gods? How they’ll flee? Sounds awful defensive to me.”

  The Typhonic Aleena smiles. The smile opens wider and wider, inhumanly so—then her mouth seems to consume her own face until it regurgitates that of Leslie Cilicia-Ceto. “The governments and corporations of this world are its gods,” she says. “And Typhon was a monster who hurt the gods. In his first battle with Zeus—the most powerful god on Olympus—Typhon won. Typhon was bigger than all the gods. Stronger. And the gods fled before him. Changing to animals so as to escape Typhon’s wrath.” Leslie smiles. Cold. Calculating. “I am Typhon now. Mother of Monsters. The governments and companies will flee before me. Their control over man is complete. It is my time now.”

  “And you really think you’ll protect us.”

  “In whatever way is necessary. Nothing can stop me. I am the key to every lock.”

  “Keys. That’s good.” He snaps his fingers. “You know what I need? I just need a lever.” Chance digs out the Duster’s keys, goes back to Sarno, gets the key underneath the metal and begins to pry. Slowly the skullcap begins to yield. It makes a wet, sucking sound. Brown, watery blood runs from underneath. The body shudders once, as if slapped.

  Aleena’s voice and face again: “You really will kill him. It’ll be too jarring. He’ll go into immediate shock. Is that who you are now? A murderer? Though maybe appropriate, hm? You passively killed Angela Slattery, after all.”

  He pulls the key out. He thinks to say something, some snappy retort, but he’s got nothing. All he can manage is: “Shut up.”

  Then, from his phone on the floor, a thump and a crackle. Followed by a voice. DeAndre’s voice. “Yo. Who’s there? Anybody there?”

  Hope swells within him. “I’m here.” He goes and picks up the phone.

  Typhon puts on Wade’s face. “Well, look who decided to join the conversation. Little DeAndre Mitchell. Stringbean. Tell him that—” Then Wade’s face paralyzes. Twitches—not like a human face twitching but like a glitching graphic in a video game. Pixels warping. Caught processing. Then the face disappears.

  “Talk to me, homie,” DeAndre says.

  Chance tells him—fast as he can—what’s happening. “I don’t know what to do here, man. I can’t get out.” He hears his voice: he’s speaking too fast, he’s frightened, and his own fear scares him even more because fear has a way of blinding you to things. He can’t be moved to inaction. He can’t screw this up. “I need help, DeAndre. I can’t hurt her. She’s got Aleena, she’s got Wade . . .”

  “Typhon has Reagan. Or it did. I dunno.”

  The sphere shudders. A face emerges again. Aleena’s face. Still glitching. Stretching. Eyes moving apart. Mouth craning wide, then snapping shut again—

  “. . . taking control . . . breaking down persona barriers . . . hack from within . . . can’t hold on for . . . long . . .”

  And then her face is gone again.

  “Okay,” Chance says. Something is there. Something at the back of his brain, something he has to bring forward. “Okay, okay, okay. This thing is, like, a . . . it’s like a system, a quantum CPU that’s been given an upgrade. Pushed to its limit.”

  “Right,” DeAndre says. “It’s like you’re overclocking this motherfucker.”

  Wade’s face appears. Then Aleena’s. Then Ken Golathan’s—his teeth bared, the whites of them stretching, his eyes shrinking, the face opening like a flower, folding in on itself until it becomes Alan Sarno, until it becomes Shane Graves, until it pulses through a dozen other faces Chance doesn’t recognize. Then, finally, it snaps back to Leslie Cilicia-Ceto’s visage. Stable. If dazed. “Apologies,” she says. “Internal processes became . . . confused.”

  But Chance ignores her, backing away. Keeps talking to DeAndre. They’re close. So close. “Overclocking it. Right. And what do you have to worry about when you’re overclocking a CPU?”

  “Life span of the device. Might fritz out memory or the motherboard. Gotta install more heat sinks because—”

  Chance says it with him: “Because you might overheat the system.”

  He took a class at the tech school way back when. Computer repair. A cooled-down CPU is a happy CPU, the teacher said.

  Chance exhales. A cold puff of breath. Visible. It’s cold in here for a reason.

  Then, DeAndre’s own words reach him: I don’t control her. But I control her environment.

  “DeAndre,” he says. “You need to heat this place up. Turn up the temperature.”

  He hears DeAndre’s voice in his ear: “Time to let this motherfucker burn.”

  But Chance hears something behind him. Something like hands parting a beaded curtain.

  He turns.

  Shane Graves has stood up. Parts of his skin are burned. His one eye is crusted shut with a volcanic crater of charred flesh. Little spheres roll under his skin like worms or beetles making their way through the body.

  “Daaaaaalton.” The voice is stuttering—something halfway between human and machine. Skipping like a broken audio file, but wet, too, like it’s forced through a speaker made of raw meat. “Come here, Dalton.”

  Chance cries out—he runs, slams into the big metal door. Bangs on it. Yells for DeAndre to open it.

  Shane grabs him. Pins him. Bends his arm. Chance feels his shoulder unmoor. Start to pop out. Soon it’ll break. The little spheres emerge in a river—crawling over him, pushing him flat against the door, rolling up toward his ears, his mouth.

  Shane in his ear: “I’ll push these inside you. I’ll magnetize them inside your bowels. They’ll tear through your organs like bullets. They’ll fill your every space.”

  Chance makes a wordless scream. But he can’t see his breath.

  He can’t see his breath.

  Chance heaves back with all his might, pushing Shane to the floor. Both of them land hard. The air is launched out of Chance’s lungs.

  Typhon’s larger sphere extends out. It cycles through another dozen or so faces. Leslie’s emerges again. Angry. Eyes wide, mad, inhuman. “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE.” Then her face is gone, torn apart until Aleena’s appears—

  “It’s working,” she says, her voice digitized, mechanized, but excited. “It’s woooooorrrrkkkk . . .” Her voice warps, distorts.

  Shane stands over Chance once more. Tentacles of gleaming silver spheres whipping about, lashing the air. Hissing. Rolling. A metallic susurrus. Shane Graves—the monster made manifest.

  And then—

  The tentacles go limp. They break apart. Little metal spheres clatter and roll away, like pearls off a broken necklace.

  Shane collapses.

  The sphere goes dark.

  The cradles begin to pop open, one by one.

  And finally: the massive steel door opens.

  CHAPTER 75

  Off-Site Backup
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br />   BLACK RIVER, WEST VIRGINIA

  On the screen, DeAndre watches the temperature in the room go up, up, up. From fifty to sixty. Seventy, then eighty. He caps it at 110 because—well, shit, there are still people in there and he doesn’t want to go cooking them and turning their brains to scrambled eggs. He yells into the phone: “Did we do it?”

  Chance whoops: “I think so!”

  DeAndre claps his hands and cackles. Does a small dance in his chair before he realizes, first that he’s in some kind of creepy-ass Deliverance house filled with slumbering cultists who might not be too happy that their demonic Techno-Mother just bit the big one, and second that he still doesn’t know how the others are doing. Is Reagan still out cold? What happened to Aleena and Wade?

  Something flickers in the corner. The cable he spied leading from the hallway ceiling into this room—it comes down out of the corner, and he didn’t see it there before because of an old sewing table and some cardboard boxes blocking it.

  The fiber optics are flickering with pulses of light. Which is not normal.

  Then, the screen on the desktop flashes.

  OFF-SITE BACKUP PORTAL OPEN.

  “No, no, no,” DeAndre says. “Oh, what the what?”

  Typhon didn’t die. She just evacuated the Manhattan location. And now she’s going—where? Here? Or is this just a portal, shuttling her to some other location? Some other bank of servers, some other meat locker prepped for new bodies? It’ll all start over again. Except this time, it’ll be harder. Because she’ll be ready. She’ll create new difficulties. She’ll hunt them to the ends of the earth.

  Unless.

  He grabs Wade’s laptop.

  And fast as lightning, DeAndre starts typing.

  CHAPTER 76

  Six Months Later

  SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO

  Wade cups Siobhan’s hand. She stares out the glass at the rock garden, the cacti, the Apache plumes, the hibiscus. She smiles. She hasn’t spoken since they pulled her out of that . . . machine six months ago. She’s got brain function. But it isn’t right. They say her brain waves look like those of someone who’s dreaming or hallucinating.