Zero Day

by Ezekiel Boone

  “Sorry,” Amy said. “We haven’t heard anything back, but it’s only been a couple of hours, and we agreed ahead of time that if they weren’t sure they could charge their phones they would only turn them on once a day. But both our phones show a signal and connection. The texts went through.”

  Even though Melanie knew the door to the lab was closed, with two sailors standing guard outside, she still looked at the door. She and the other scientists had been told of the “change in leadership,” and they’d been given a chance to present their findings to Ben Broussard, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. When Melanie said they weren’t quite ready yet, she’d been swiftly and rudely shuttled back to the lab. After an hour or so, however, a young soldier bringing coffee slipped Melanie a note: President safe. In NYC. Wants info. Help on the way.

  It was all a little much for Melanie. She’d never actually enjoyed the politics part of being married to Manny, and she sure as hell hadn’t expected to be in the middle of a coup; but, as Manny always said, even in the midst of their divorce, you play the cards you’re dealt. And the cards, in this case, were that they were trapped in a makeshift lab on an aircraft carrier in the middle of an attempted overthrow of the United States government during the spiderpocalypse. Which were some messed-up cards. Plus, ostensibly, there were people on board the USS Elsie Downs who were still on President Pilgrim’s side, and Melanie and company were supposed to wait for some sort of rescue attempt. In the meantime she had information that she needed to get to Steph as soon as possible, and the two least useful people on the whole ship, Fred and Amy, evidently had satellite phones.

  Melanie sighed. She had a headache, and she realized she’d been grinding her teeth. “Okay. Obviously, that’s great. Seriously, though, how did they let you keep your satellite phones? Nobody searched you? I got searched. We all got searched.”

  “Of course they searched us,” Fred said. “Ask me where I hid mine!”

  “Don’t!” Amy sighed. “For the love of god, don’t ask him where he hid his phone. He’s just looking for an excuse to use that stupid ‘Wrecked him? Almost killed him’ joke.”

  “Party pooper,” Fred huffed.

  “It’s not really the time, Fred,” Amy said. She turned back to the scientists. “They gave us a cursory search, I guess for weapons or whatever, but neither of us seems too threatening. Plus everybody always gets distracted by the dog. Evidently, Claymore is more interesting than either me or Fred.”

  “Maybe you,” Fred said drily.

  Amy ignored him. “Anyway, I don’t think the kid who searched us realized they were satellite phones. If you don’t know any better, they look like crappy old-school dumb phones. He probably thought we were just old people with old-people phones. He looked at them and then handed them back. I think they were all a lot more focused on you guys. Fred and I don’t matter much in the scheme of things.”

  “Hey!”

  “Well, it’s true, Fred. We’re an afterthought. I bet the only reason they’re letting us stay here in the lab instead of confining us to quarters or putting us with the rest of the civilians is that nobody’s actually thought of us one way or another. It’s easier, anyway; they still only need one set of guards on the door. I suspect they are going to leave us alone as long as we don’t upset the apple cart.”

  She fiddled with her satellite phone and then held it out to Melanie. “You might not get another chance with this. I’m sure if they figure out we’ve got satellite phones, they’ll confiscate them.”

  Melanie had to think for a second to remember the number. She was so used to just hitting Manny whenever she wanted to call him that having to come up with the actual number took some effort. He’d kept the same number he had when they were married, and it was the number associated with their loyalty accounts at the bookstore, the coffee shop, even the grocery store, but it had been years since she’d had to rattle it off. Fortunately, it came back to her. She punched it in, waited, and then shook her head. “No dice.”

  “It’s not working?” Amy was surprised.

  “No,” Melanie said. “I mean yes. I think it’s working on your end but not on his end. I’m getting a message that the cell phone circuits are overloaded.”

  “What about sending an e-mail?”

  “You can do that?”

  “Sure,” Amy said. “It’s slow, so we can’t send a video or anything, but a text file would be fine. And that might get through, right?”

  “If he’s checking his e-mail, yeah. He wouldn’t get it on his phone, obviously, not without Wi-Fi, but I’m sure they’re somewhere with Wi-Fi and laptops.”

  Laura Nieder raised her hand like an impatient schoolchild and then, when everybody looked at her, she spoke. Her voice was glum. “I hate to be a Negative Nancy, but the Internet is broken.”

  Will sighed. “The Internet is not broken. The problem is—”

  “Holy crap, Will, seriously?” Laura said. “This isn’t the time to be pedantic.” Melanie thought if Laura rolled her eyes any harder they would have popped out the back of her head.

  “You know,” Fred said, “every few months there’s some stupid meme and everybody’s all, like, ‘It broke the Internet!’ And finally something actually broke the Internet! I guess what it really took was man-eating spiders.”

  Will couldn’t help himself. “It’s not broken. There are only so many relays . . .”

  Melanie felt the words washing over her like white noise. She folded her arms and then rested her head on the desk in frustration. Fred she could live with. There was something charming about his willful childishness, but trying to keep the other scientists on the same page drove her kind of crazy. Will getting sidetracked into explaining the root cause of the Internet’s failure was pretty standard, and all of them had their own peccadilloes. She rested for a few seconds, the hum of Will and Laura arguing its own sort of comfort.

  “Okay,” Melanie said, even though she knew that with her head resting on the desk her voice was muffled. “I can’t get through on the phone, I can’t send an e-mail, but I’ve got to get through to Manny and the president. How are we going to do that without getting off this ship? Send a frickin’ telegram? A carrier pigeon?”

  Nobody answered, and, in the quiet, Melanie thought she heard a thud followed by another. She wasn’t sure what the first noise was, but the second thud was distinctive and sure sounded a lot like a body hitting the door.

  And then, slowly, the door to the lab swung open. The man standing there was so big that Melanie couldn’t see his face, but she didn’t need to: Special Agent Tommy Riggs was easy to pick out of a crowd.

  Riggs stepped to the side, and Melanie saw the body of a sailor on the ground. He looked as if he were sleeping peacefully, knocked out. In place of Riggs, Billy Cannon moved into the doorway.

  “Quit staring and get hustling,” Cannon said, grinning at them. None of them budged, and he shook his head. “Good god, you civilians. Oh, and great. You’ve got a dog.”

  “The dog is coming,” Amy said in a tone of voice that brooked no dissent.

  “Of course he is,” Cannon said. “Why not? We’re just trying to escape from the middle of a coup in the middle of the apocalypse. Sure, let’s bring a dog!”

  Melanie stared at him. He looked . . . he looked like he was having fun.

  Cannon clapped his hands together. “Chop-chop. Come on, let’s go. This here’s a rescue mission. Broussard’s got the bulk of the military behind him right now, but there are enough sailors on board throwing their lot in with the president and the rule of law that we can get you out of here. I think. But let’s not be lackadaisical about it, okay?”

  As the scientists scrambled, grabbing notes and laptops and tablets, Melanie could have sworn she heard Fred giddily say, “Now that’s how you make an entrance.”

  Nazca, Peru

  Dr. Botsford was paying for dinner, which was both rare and unimpressive. Rare, because although Dr. Botsford liked to cultivate the
image of a freewheeling, devil-may-care bon vivant, those impulses did not extend to the inclusion of his graduate students in his acts of largesse. Unimpressive, because even though he had offered to pay tonight, the bill wasn’t going to be more than the equivalent of twenty-five or thirty bucks no matter how much Pierre and the other students ate and drank. As a graduate student, however, Pierre thought, free food and beer was free food and beer.

  Pierre actually liked Dr. Botsford, despite everything. He was a good professor in most ways. He was engaging and engaged, and if he could be condescending at times, he could also be inspiring. There was a reason Pierre had chosen to study with him, after all. Probably his biggest issue with Dr. Botsford was his penchant for trying to dress like Indiana Jones. According to Dr. Botsford, people frequently told him, unprompted, that he looked like Harrison Ford. Raiders of the Lost Ark is what Dr. Botsford said, though given Botsford’s age, The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was a more accurate comparison. Still, he wore an old bomber jacket and a fedora as often as he could. During the day, the heat of the Peruvian high plains was too much, but tonight, despite the temperature still being in the low seventies, he was wearing both.

  The restaurant was on the second floor of a stubby building on the main drag. It was covered by a roof but was otherwise completely open, a waist-high barrier running the perimeter. The kitchen and bar were crowded into the back corner, and the rest of the space was overtaken with a mishmash of tables and chairs, no one matching another. It was raucous and fun, and it was the only restaurant that Pierre had been to in Nazca. That was partly because they went into town so infrequently—Dr. Botsford was the kind of professor who insisted that proper research meant living and working in the field—and partly because, when they did go to town, Dr. Botsford insisted they eat at this specific restaurant. He claimed that after all his years coming here to do research, it had the best food in all of Nazca. Cynthia Downs, who could be a bit of a snob, had remarked that “the best food in all of Nazca” wasn’t setting the bar too high, but to Pierre the food seemed spectacular. Back home in the United States, it might even have been the sort of hipster restaurant that billed itself as serving “street food.” Tonight he’d ordered sanguche de chicharron: a pork-cracklings sandwich with salsa, onions, and cilantro, served with a side of rice and beans. And since his professor was paying, he was washing everything down with as much beer as he could drink.

  He caught the waitress’s eye and made the universal motion for another beer. They kept bottles of Cusqueña behind the bar in a huge bin filled with ice. Beer that was weeping with cold felt like an unimaginable luxury in general, because, well, Peru, and specifically because Pierre had grown wearily accustomed to drinking all his beverages warm and tepid out in the field. He didn’t even know if beer was normally served cold or kept on ice or how it was supposed to be done in Peru, but he didn’t care. He wasn’t even sure if he liked Cusqueña, but that wasn’t going to stop him from trying to run up Dr. Botsford’s bill.

  In some ways it was surprising that Dr. Botsford didn’t prefer a more formal restaurant, he thought, leaning back in his chair against the railing and looking out at the street below. A restaurant with walls, at least. Although maybe he shouldn’t have been surprised. The general rowdiness played to Dr. Botsford’s self-image, and the patrons were almost exclusively ex-pats and English-speaking tourists, which meant that for all the noise and loud music and the occasional fight between tank-top wearing, sunburned, college-aged macho brats, it was safer than seeking out something more authentic. The food, however, was authentic. Slow to come out because it was made fresh. And tonight the restaurant was going double time. Not just tonight. He’d talked to an Australian backpacker who’d been stranded in Nazca since the spiders emerged, and she said the restaurant was mobbed every night.

  “We’re all just looking for somewhere to be, you know?” She had long, dark blond hair that had been bleached in streaks from the sun, and she wore it braided down over her shoulder. She fidgeted with the braid while she talked to Pierre and occasionally glanced back at the two other women sitting at her table. “Nazca’s just a stop. Just a day or two. You’ve got to do it if you’re in Peru. Come on. But once you’ve done the flight, there’s no point in staying. Of course, there’s no point in leaving right now either.”

  She shrugged.

  Pierre wondered if she’d have felt so sanguine about her existence in Nazca if she’d been there when he and Dr. Botsford and the other graduate students had tossed the egg sac into the fire by their campground. If she’d seen the way the sac split open as spiders spilled out into the coals, turning to ash as quickly as they could skitter out.

  When he turned back to his own table, Beatrice was scowling at him.

  If he were a braver man, he would have confronted her. He would have pointed out that they were not dating, that he was not her boyfriend. He would have reminded her that they were sleeping together only because everybody else was paired off and they were bored, and you could spend only so many nights alone in a tent watching videos on your laptop. He would have said that there was nothing wrong with his having a completely innocent conversation with another woman, and besides, if she really wanted to be worried about another woman, it should be Julie Yoo, who he was sure was the love of his life.

  Pierre was not a braver man, however.

  Instead, he took a sip of his beer and picked up his sandwich. He offered it to Bea. “Want a bite?”

  Bea shook her head and returned her attention to her stew. Her refusal of the sandwich was a relief to Pierre. It was a peace offering but, unlike most peace offerings, it was begrudging. He had no real interest in sharing his sandwich. The bun was light and fluffy, and the fried pork cracklings inside were crunchy and hot, and salsa dripped down his hand and wrist when he took the first bite. Good god, he thought, was this the greatest sandwich ever? He could die a happy man having eaten this sandwich.

  As he had the thought, he glanced over the railing to the street below again and saw a young man—a boy, really—run past at a full sprint.

  Huh. He put the sandwich down and surreptitiously wiped his hand on his pants. Below, a few more people ran past. And then a moped sped by, the woman driving it with a look of terror on her face. She glanced behind her several times—quick looks, the moped wobbling a little each time.

  Of course.

  Of course, he thought. How stupid could he have been?

  The whole reason he, Dr. Botsford, Natalie, Bea, Cynthia, and JD were here was to work on the Nazca Lines. It was an academic coup, unprecedented access, and sure to make Pierre’s career. And when they carefully dug the calcified egg sac out from where they’d found it, buried near the spider line, Pierre shipped it to Julie for study, thinking it was going to be something cool to write a paper about. But then there’d been the horror. Spiders everywhere, people eaten alive, spiders hatching out of people’s bodies. And the attempts to contain the spiders were worse. All that seemed far away, however. In Nazca, out by their campsite, with the sky so dark at night that the stars seemed like coins in a video game, Pierre figured he was safe. The spider line, so much older than the other Nazca Lines, was a warning, and he’d been warned. They’d found that other egg sac and burned it. That was it.

  Naturally he’d worried about Julie’s safety. She’d sent him a few e-mails before the Internet stopped working, but he figured she was on the East Coast of the United States. So far, that had seemed out of harm’s way. He had other friends, school friends who he hoped were okay, and he despaired over the general destruction of the world; but his parents and grandparents had all passed away before he graduated from college, and he was an only child. If he was being completely transparent, he figured that as long as he and Julie weren’t the people getting eaten, well, how bad was it really? When everything was done, he’d even have some extra credibility with Julie because he’d sent her that egg sac. Really, in some ways he was a hero!

  Except that, right then and t
here, he didn’t feel like a hero. He felt sick.

  A small car, something that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a circus, came barreling down the street and then veered left and into the building across from the restaurant. By that point, anybody who hadn’t noticed the people running on the street was alerted that something was wrong.

  Pierre stayed in his chair. He watched Dr. Botsford trying to push and shove his way to the exit, his hat knocked from his head and his panic and his thinning hair making him look decidedly unlike Indiana Jones. Not once did Dr. Botsford look back for Natalie, the graduate student with whom he’d been having an affair since the day they landed in Peru. On the side of the restaurant opposite the exit, Pierre saw a group of young backpackers climbing over the railing and jumping the ten feet to the ground. In the middle of the scrum of people mobbing the doorway that led to the stairs down to the street, he could see Cynthia tugging at her fiancé JD’s arm. JD was frozen, swiveling between looking at the group jumping over the railing and the group that was bunched up at the door. But Bea was still sitting there next to him. She hadn’t made any move to flee.

  For whatever reason, looking at her made him feel calm and composed. He offered up a weak smile. “Doesn’t seem to be much point in running, does there?” he said.

  She rolled her eyes and stood up. “You’ve been an absolutely crap boyfriend. You know that, right?”

  Without giving him a chance to respond and without another word, she turned and walked over to the mass of bodies trying to get out the door.

  A part of him wanted to yell after her, to insist that he wasn’t her boyfriend—that he’d never been her boyfriend—but instead he took another bite of his sandwich. He scraped the chair back against the floor so that he could easily see out over the railing and into the street. He could see the first people from the restaurant emerging onto the street and running away. One of them, the Australian he’d talked to earlier, stumbled, her braided hair bouncing, but she managed to stay on her feet. She was fast, Pierre thought as he watched her run.