Zero Day

by Ezekiel Boone

  “Yes.”

  “And now the fellows who invented this machine have figured out how to determine precisely where the commands are coming from?”

  “Yes. We think so. I mean, that’s why Gordo and Shotgun and a few Marines are going to Atlantic City. To make sure that this actually works. They were . . . I don’t know. Somewhere in Virginia? Anyway, the closest signal was in Atlantic City.” She glanced down at her watch, a sporty number with a yellow band. “They should be there within the hour.”

  “Okay,” Manny said. “So, assuming they don’t get eaten, they know about the hazmat suit thing?”

  Melanie nodded.

  “Okay. So, again assuming they don’t get eaten, once they get to Atlantic City, what then?”

  It had been a bit like watching an odd tennis match, Manny thought, the way the attention in the room bounced from Melanie to Steph to Melanie to Fred to Manny to Fred to Melanie and then back, and then a nice little rally back and forth between him and Melanie. Except, with this last question, Melanie clearly hadn’t been expecting the ball to be hit back, because she looked flummoxed.

  “That,” Melanie said, “is a great question.”

  There was a buzz in the room as people started talking, and Melanie looked over at the other scientists and her two civilians.

  Manny felt a slight pressure on his shoulder and realized that while he’d been asking Melanie questions, an aide had come into the room and was leaning over the back of the chesterfield and whispering into Steph’s ear.

  And, judging by the way her face went pale, it was not good.

  Steph turned to him and whispered, “Operation SAFEGUARD is compromised.”

  “What? How? It should have taken Broussard at least another two days to work around—”

  “There was a mutiny in the bunker.”

  Manny slumped over, resting his head on his hand. He took a deep breath and then sprang to his feet. “Okay. Shut it!”

  It was like a balloon popping. The room had been full of noise and people talking, and suddenly it was deathly quiet. He pointed at Melanie. “How good is this?”

  “How good?”

  “How confident are you in what you’ve told us? How confident are you that we can disrupt the Hell Spiders by tracking down the signals, and how confident are you that we can track down the signals?”

  Melanie glanced nervously at the other scientists. “Maybe eighty percent.”

  “That’s not good enough,” Steph said. “I know what you’re thinking, Manny. But I need better than eighty percent.”

  Julie motioned upward with her thumb and Melanie upped her estimate. “Maybe eighty-five percent?”

  “It’s one hundred percent.” The voice was loud and self-assured. The man who came with the dog. Frank? No, Fred. He had his arms crossed and looked fierce as he continued to talk: “My husband said it works, and if he says it works, it’s one hundred percent.”

  Everybody turned to look back at Steph. She took a deep breath. “One hundred percent? You’re telling me that I can trust your husband—”

  “Ma’am,” Fred said, cutting her off. That was not something one did to the president, and Manny heard somebody in the room gasp. “Don’t take this the wrong way, because I voted for you and we gave a lot of money to your campaign, but you don’t question Shotgun. If you ever tell him I said this, I’ll deny it, but that man is brilliant. If he said it’s going to work, it’s going to work. He’s . . .” Fred trailed off, seeming to suddenly realize that the way he was speaking to the president might not be completely appropriate.

  Steph turned to Billy Cannon. “Billy, Operation SAFEGUARD is compromised.”

  Billy went white, which, given his reputation and the medals he’d won for bravery under fire, was more than terrifying.

  “Ma’am, are you talking about Matthew 5:45? You’ve got to do it.”

  She turned to Manny. “Manny?”

  “Do it.”

  Stephanie took a deep breath, held it in, and then closed her eyes while she exhaled. “God help us all if I’m wrong,” she said. “Bring me the football.”

  The room exploded in noise, and Manny once again had to shout to bring order. “Not a peep out of any of you, or I’ll have the room cleared.”

  The president’s emergency satchel was always carried by a military aide with Yankee White security clearance. The aide on duty, a stout woman who was a Marine, was in front of Steph in less than ten seconds. Normally the aide would have taken Steph aside, but Steph pointed to the coffee table.

  “Let’s get this over with.”

  “Excuse me!” The voice was loud, insistent. Manny had a sinking feeling in his stomach, and even before he looked he knew it was Fred.

  Manny stood up. “I warned you I’d have—”

  “I am not talking to you.” For one of the few times in his life, Manny found himself speechless. Fred was seemingly incapable of observing the decorum attendant to the president’s station. He either completely missed the seriousness of the situation or simply didn’t care. As he continued talking, Manny realized it was the latter. “Are you planning to launch more nukes? Because we have people out there that we love, and I am not going to let you sacrifice them. I’m telling you that if my husband—”

  Steph held up her hand, and to Manny’s surprise, Fred actually stopped talking. “I believe you.”

  “What?” Fred looked taken aback.

  “I believe you. And because of that, no, I’m not ordering a launch. This is so ridiculously classified that there are fewer than twenty people in the United States government who know about it, but, heck, he found out about it somehow,” she said, nodding toward Billy Cannon. “No. I’m about to shut it all down, and after I do this, we aren’t going to be able to launch any nukes. So I hope your husband is as great as you say he is. Is that okay with you?”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  Steph tilted her head, curious. “You really didn’t get that I was asking a rhetorical question? Good gracious. Never mind.” She turned back to the task at hand.

  Manny had grown used to the sight of the black leather bag that went everywhere the president did, but he never expected to see Steph have to actually use it. Apparently, neither had Steph.

  “Second time in a week I’ve had to open this,” she said, sliding the metal briefcase out of the leather jacket. Manny nodded, but he hadn’t been in the room when she authorized the thirty-one strikes. That time, although they’d been scrambling, she did it properly, keeping the sanctity of the football intact. This time, he realized, it wasn’t going to ever matter again.

  Manny was a little surprised at how unimpressive the contents of the briefcase were. A bound black book that was maybe one hundred pages thick, a bound green book that was significantly thinner, a manila folder with maybe a dozen stapled pages inside, and a single large index card dense with type. And . . .

  “Is that a BlackBerry? Do they even make those still?” Manny asked.

  Billy Cannon had come across the room to stand beside Manny. “Modified. It’s got an extended battery so that it can be on standby for sixty days without a charge. Honestly, the BlackBerry part is more of a shell than anything. The insides are all proprietary, but Matthew 5:45 didn’t need to reinvent the wheel. It just needed to figure out how to smash it so it never rolled again.”

  Steph had picked up the BlackBerry and was now staring at them, annoyed. “First of all, Cannon, when all of this is done, you’re going to tell me how the hell you found out about Matthew 5:45. Second of all, for the love of God, would you please be quiet?”

  She didn’t wait for an answer. She typed in an extended phrase, her thumbs moving quickly enough that even though Manny tried to figure out what she was spelling, he lost track. She stopped, her thumb hovering over the green send button.

  The room was dead quiet, the loudest noise a panting from that ridiculous dog. Claymore was sitting, but like everybody else in the room he was also staring intently at Steph
as if he, too, knew something serious was on the line. The thing that caught Manny’s attention was that while everybody else seemed to be holding their breath, the dog was panting. It caught Steph’s attention, too. For the first time she seemed to notice the chocolate Lab.

  “Why is there a dog in here?”

  Fred arched a single eyebrow. “He has a name, you know. It’s Claymore. And, what, we were just supposed to leave him behind?”

  The president stared at Fred for a beat, nodded as if that made perfect sense, and then pressed the button.

  The Interstate 80 High Times Truck Stop and Family Fun Zone Restaurant and Gas Station Taco Bell Pizza Hut Starbucks KFC Burrito Barn 42 Flavors Ice Cream Extravaganza Coast-to-Coast Emporium, Nebraska

  They knelt underneath the midwestern sun, bodies casting short shadows. The Prophet Bobby Higgs registered fidgeting from some of the pilgrims around him. His own flock, he knew, was without question, but he’d absorbed many men and women and children from the group that Macer had gathered. They had come to this oasis seeking not the glory of God but simple shelter from the wrath of those eight-legged devils that had come crawling up from the depths of hell.

  Bobby recognized that maybe he had lost his mind somewhere along the way. It wasn’t that long ago that he really was just a grifter. He’d been good at it, but he had never resorted to violence. It was unlike him to do what he had done to Macer, condemning him to a terrifying death trapped in a barely lit, poorly ventilated tractor-trailer with four people who were surely infested with spiders.

  And yet it was so clear to him that what he was doing was right. The voice of God was truly speaking to him. He didn’t know exactly when, but there had come a point between Los Angeles and here when he stopped playing the Prophet Bobby Higgs and had become the Prophet Bobby Higgs. He was the Lord’s agent. And as he knelt there, the Nebraska sky enfolding him, he thought that perhaps these questions were the Lord’s way of telling him that he should let Macer out of the back of the truck and allow him to enjoy a quick and merciful death. No man deserved to be devoured by these spiders, not even Macer.

  He got to his feet. Making sure to project, he called out in a booming voice, “Rise!”

  The sound of thousands of people standing up was awe-inspiring. Not a word was spoken, but the hush and brush of clothing and feet scuffling against grass and asphalt sounded like lush curtains opening. Bobby raised his arms in the air and turned to address all of his followers. “The Lord has spoken, and he has decided I must show mercy.”

  He walked over to the tractor-trailer. The men standing guard were his men now. “Open it,” he said.

  The guards hesitated.

  “Open it,” Bobby insisted.

  One of the guards finally moved, hopping up onto the rear gate and then lifting the bar that kept the doors sealed shut. As he was doing so, Bobby realized he could hear someone pounding on the doors from the inside, accompanied by a man’s muffled yelling.

  It was too late for him to say anything, too late to realize that perhaps the Lord had not, in fact, been speaking to him.

  As the door swung open, Macer stumbled out screaming, his face a mask of horror. A thick, swarming carpet of black spiders covered his legs and chest, and Bobby saw one dart into Macer’s open mouth. Even as Macer was falling, Bobby saw past him into the deep interior of the truck. The four other people who’d been in there, the poor men and women bearing the mark of carriers, were all lying on the ground, writhing and bursting open like sausages left too long on the grill. Streams of spiders were pouring out of the gaping holes, an infernal tornado of skittering legs and bodies scrambling to their first meal outside their hosts’ bodies.

  The Prophet Bobby Higgs had just enough time to register that some of the spiders had red stripes across their backs before he felt something hideously burning on his neck and then pain lance through his body so sharply that he couldn’t stop himself from screaming. Except he couldn’t scream. He couldn’t open his mouth. He couldn’t do anything other than slowly topple backward. The last thing he saw before cobwebs clouded his vision was the blue beauty of a Nebraska sky.

  Berlin, Germany

  The air felt blistering over her newly naked body. The husk she’d just shed lay discarded in a side tunnel. She wasn’t ready to travel yet, and she wanted to keep her little ones close. It would be a while before her body hardened. There had been heat and fire aboveground, a neat circle of death surrounding this city, but the sewers had not been blocked off. Not to her, not to the little ones.

  She’d been disturbed by how many of her sisters had emerged into the light and then stopped talking. And yet each pulsing pinprick of light that came to her told her that for every sister who was gone, there were still two more who had finished molting, as she had. All she had to do now was rest, to let her new skeleton harden so that she and all of her sisters could emerge and take what was theirs.

  Airspace above Buffalo, New York

  There had been no question whom to side with. He’d flown the Chicago mission, and by the time he’d released the missile, the videos and pictures the military had been able to gather of the city as it was overrun by spiders were chilling. He knew the seriousness of what he was doing. He knew what it meant to those who were still alive—knew that nothing would survive in the molten heat that came with what he was about to unleash—but he also knew that it was unquestionably the right decision.

  Just as he knew now that the orders he’d been given were essential. They had to finish the job.

  The missile detached cleanly, and he made distance, pushing the plane to its limits.

  But as the time came and went, there was no sign that anything had happened.

  USS Elsie Downs, Atlantic Ocean

  “It’s like we’re dropping rocks. I don’t understand it.” General Roberts slammed his hand on the table. “Operation SAFEGUARD is online and in our pocket, but the nukes won’t go. They’re useless.”

  Broussard stared up at the ceiling. What the hell had the president done?

  Central Park, New York, New York

  “Let’s go! Go, go, go!”

  Melanie picked up her pace, Julie right beside her, but she had to admit that having Billy Cannon yell at her wasn’t actually as motivating as one would have thought. She was already nervous enough that it was all she could do not to barf as she ran from the police car to the helicopter.

  The crazy thing was that Cannon had actually volunteered to go. He seemed excited about it. Melanie and Julie had to go. They needed to have the scientists on-site to confirm everything. Melanie was going to Atlantic City because Steph wanted Melanie to see with her own eyes, and Julie was enlisted because it made sense to have scientific backup, but Cannon wanted to go.

  They were keeping the party lean and mean, with a dozen men to accompany Melanie and Julie. Well, a dozen plus Cannon. She thought they were Army Rangers or maybe Navy SEALs, but, honestly, it had happened so quickly that she wasn’t actually sure which branch of the armed forces her personal guard was from. All she knew was that half of them were carrying wicked-looking machine guns and the other half were carrying homemade flamethrowers. They’d gotten moving so fast that there was only time for Fred to proudly point out that the flamethrowers the men were carrying were based on a design that Shotgun and Gordo had come up with.

  God. Fred. That man. She swore that if she didn’t die, she was going to either kill him or make sure he got a medal.

  One of the uniforms hauled Julie up into the helicopter and then reached down to help Melanie. She’d barely gotten into her seat when the bird leapt into the sky. It was already moving forward before it was even ten feet off the ground, and she bet the pilot was pushing the limits of what was safe in terms of how quickly he rotated the engines so the Osprey would be flying like a plane instead of a helicopter.

  Cannon handed her a headset, and when she put it on, she heard his voice. “She can do a bit more than three hundred miles an hour at top speed, so we’v
e got twenty minutes to gear up. If this guy of yours is right about there being Hell Spiders in Atlantic City, I sure hope you’re right about the efficacy of the hazmat suits. If I’m going to die, I really don’t want it to be in one of these ridiculous outfits.” He handed her one of the hazmat duffels.

  “You make sure your men don’t act unless I tell them to, okay?”

  “You don’t have to yell, Melanie.” Cannon tapped his microphone. “I can hear you.”

  “Sorry. Just make sure they don’t go shooting at the spiders or firing up those flamethrowers on their own.”

  Cannon grabbed a duffel bag for himself. “Don’t worry. Trust me when I tell you these guys are some of the most well-trained men in the world. If I ordered them to stop breathing, they would. They’re here to watch our backs.”

  She nodded and started getting the hazmat suit on. Nobody else, including Julie, seemed bothered by the movement of the Osprey, and one of the men helped Melanie with the finishing touches. As Melanie sealed up her helmet, the outskirts of Atlantic City were in sight. She pulled the satellite phone that Amy had given her out of the pocket of her jacket and awkwardly, because of her gloved hands, checked for a new text.

  Here. Entrance to Pleasure Paradise Casino.

  She relayed the location to the pilot, and after checking to make sure that everybody was suited up, Cannon ordered the pilot to take them down. He came in hard and fast over a couple of buildings before dropping down in an empty section of a parking lot. The Osprey gave a light bounce, enough for Melanie to have to grab onto her chair, and then settled. Six of the men went out first—three with guns, three with flamethrowers—and then Cannon helped Melanie and Julie out. The rest of the men followed. As soon as they were clear, the Osprey sprang back into the sky. No sense risking a stray spider getting onto the helicopter.

  It was eerie how devoid of life the landscape around her seemed. The streets were completely empty, and though the parking lot was maybe a quarter full, with all the cars clustered near the entrance to the casino, there wasn’t a sign of anybody other than Melanie and her entourage.