Zero Day

by Ezekiel Boone

  They started moving at a light jog. The Rangers were on point this time, the room wide and open enough for them to go four abreast: two flamethrowers, two machine guns. Beside her, Julie kept up well enough.

  “As soon as you identify the queens, frag them,” Billy Cannon said. His voice was deep and full of authority, and it somehow made Melanie feel slightly less afraid.

  As the first four Rangers approached the corner, it was as if the Hell Spiders had been jolted with electricity. When the men made the turn, the spiders began to close ranks, rushing in from where they’d been moving across the walls, sweeping across the floor in a wave, dropping from the ceiling like black snow. She heard the flare of one of the flamethrowers bursting to life, and the harsh beat of a machine gun, but all of that was overlaid by the sound of first one person screaming and then another.

  She felt the pitter-patter of spiders smashing into her hazmat suit, bouncing across her face shield, and then suddenly something much bigger banged into her, and she saw one of the Marines—it was the woman, Kim—rush desperately past her, into the room, toward the queens, her machine gun in firing position.

  And then all Melanie could concentrate on was the sudden realization that her fear about the third-wave spiders was right. She could feel the fabric of the hazmat suit splitting open along her arm, felt the unmistakable tactile sensation of a spider’s leg touching her flesh.

  It was a tearing, sizzling sensation, like a torch held to the nerve endings in her arm, and Melanie began screaming. A cacophony of sounds, of shrieks and gunfire and the hot jet of the flamethrowers. The searing pain on her forearm grew from the size of a grain of rice to a dime to a quarter, and all Melanie hoped for was that it would be quick.

  Then, with a suddenness that startled her, it stopped. The spot on her arm throbbed and burned, but it had stopped growing, and she felt the spiders sliding off her hood and her suit, her face mask suddenly clear again as the spiders that had been clinging to it dropped to the ground. She was gasping for air, and frantically, without even thinking about how dumb it was, fumbled with her face mask until she had it off and could pull back the hood to expose her entire head. She gasped in a great gulping lungful of air, the smell an odd mix of smoke and gunpowder and the burned stink of Hell Spiders. She worked her gloves off and then used her hand to tear her sleeve wide open where it had already been gashed by the third-wave spider.

  She stared at it with an almost grim curiosity. Where her arm hurt, where it had felt like acid poured on bone, she could see a Hell Spider hanging halfway out of a ragged hole in the skin. Its back had a silver slash on it. She almost expected it to jump as if she were in a horror movie, giving just one more thrash of its body, but it was completely still. Carefully, trying to make sure that no pieces broke off, she pulled it out. It made a sucking sound, like pulling a boot out of mud, and if it hadn’t hurt so much, she might have thrown up. As soon as it was out of her skin, however, the pain dialed back to more of a five or six on the pain scale.

  She heard the sound of retching and looked over to see Shotgun, his face shield off, throwing up by the wall. A few feet away from him, Gordo was sitting down on the ground and looking at the laptop. They both appeared shaken but fine. Julie was right behind. “You okay?” Melanie asked. Julie nodded, although Melanie wasn’t sure she believed her.

  Melanie saw that even though several people, including Kim, were standing, there were at least five or six bodies down in the next room. All Rangers. The first ones into the room. They’d been unbelievably brave, she thought. Charging forward, when all she’d wanted to do was run away. They’d given their lives, but it had been worth it, Melanie thought. She could see two queens. They were right next to each other, shredded by machine-gun fire and then both cooked by a flamethrower, flames still dancing off one of their backs. And all around them, the smaller Hell Spiders lay still. Whatever spark of life they’d once had was gone. Kim slowly lowered her machine gun and then glanced over at Melanie. There was no need for machine guns or flamethrowers here, not anymore. The only tool that was needed now was a broom, to sweep up their carcasses and throw them away.

  USS Elsie Downs, Atlantic Ocean

  Broussard sank down heavily in his chair. It was never about power. It was never personal. That’s what he had just told the president. It wasn’t about her. It wasn’t about him. It was about defending the country. And they knew what they needed to do now.

  It was time to stand down.

  White House Manhattan, New York, New York

  Manny tried not to look away while the medic bandaged Melanie’s arm. The medic had put in something like sixty stitches to close up the wound where the spider had tried to bore its way into her body, and now, thankfully, he was wrapping it in clean white gauze, so Manny wouldn’t have to look at the ragged railway of stitching.

  “You’ll have a good scar from that,” the medic said.

  “Thanks.” Melanie was seated on the chesterfield in Steph’s office. There were men dead, and two of the Rangers and one of the Marines had injuries that were bad enough for them to go to the infirmary on the basement level, but, aside from looking scared and tired and overwhelmed, the rest of the group of men and women who’d gone to Atlantic City and then raced back to run through the American Museum of Natural History seemed like they were in pretty good shape.

  The two men who had built the spider-radar machine were at Steph’s desk, working on two separate laptops. The tall, skinny one was working on a military model, while the other was doing something to the laptop connected to their machine, the ST11. The tall, skinny one looked up and caught Manny’s eye. “We’re good,” he said. “The program is available for download, and schematics are up. Assuming you can get the word out, people should be able to get their own versions up and running.”

  “Shotgun, right?”

  The man nodded.

  “Your husband . . . He’s . . .”

  Shotgun smiled. “Yeah, I know.”

  Manny heard the hustle and bustle before Steph came through the door. She didn’t waste any time, even going so far as to clap her hands to get the attention of everybody in the room. “We can’t screw around on this. Every single minute matters here. If they were in New York, we can’t be sure they aren’t anywhere else. This is it, people. Melanie”—she turned and pointed to where Manny’s ex was sitting on the chesterfield—“how did you say it? Kill the queens; kill them all? We’ve got a dozen squads formed up and ready to go. All we’re waiting on is our targets.” She looked now at where Manny was standing, by the desk. “Do we have our locations? How many queens do we have?”

  Everybody in the room looked at Manny. He looked at Shotgun. Shotgun looked at the other man, who looked up. “Eighty-seven in North America.”

  The room exploded in sound. It was like turning on a television that had been left with the volume at full blast, and it took Manny yelling for several seconds to quiet everybody down.

  “Are you sure?” he asked. “Eighty-seven? We’ve got nearly ninety of those queens out there—nearly ninety colonies or broods or whatever you call them of Hell Spiders ready to run rampant?”

  “I’m sure,” Gordo said. “Sorry. We hooked the ST11 up so it’s reading through the US government satellite system. We’re picking up everything. What’s nuts is, there’s a second signal sort of piggybacking on the first. There’s the signal coming from each of the queens, and then there’s this other, second signal that’s being bounced with it. It’s like it’s using the queens as repeaters.”

  Manny slid around so he could look at the laptop over the man’s shoulder. “A second signal? What do you mean by ‘repeaters’? Sorry, what’s your name?”

  “Gordo. Okay, so, do you have Wi-Fi at home?”

  Manny nodded.

  “Well, you probably get your Internet through your cable, and wherever that comes into the house, you’ve got a modem hooked up, and then connected to the modem you’ve got a Wi-Fi router.”

  Ma
nny didn’t say anything. The truth was that he had no idea how his Internet was set up at home. He was the White House chief of staff: he didn’t screw around with setting up the Wi-Fi!

  “If you’ve got a condo or a small house,” Gordo continued, “you’ve probably just got a single router. It’s where the Wi-Fi signal comes from. Now, it used to be that if you had a big house, you might not get Wi-Fi in all the nooks and crannies. So you could buy a repeater and plug it in upstairs or in the basement or wherever, and that way you’d have Wi-Fi wherever you wanted. The problem is that the signal strength gets diminished with repeaters. The Wi-Fi’s never as good. That’s why most people have switched to mesh. But the point is, we’ve got the signals that are coming from the queens, but with the signal boost through the satellites I’m pretty sure there’s another signal riding piggyback.”

  Manny didn’t even bother trying to unpack the comment about mesh. “So the queens are sending out, like, what, two broadcasts? Two sets of commands from each queen?”

  “No,” Gordo said. “The Wi-Fi analogy holds true. There’s a single source, and all the queens out there are just acting like repeaters.”

  Nobody said anything for a few seconds, and then Melanie spoke up. “Gordo.”

  “Yes?”

  “Gordo.” Her voice was relatively calm, but there was something in there, a dark tinge that Manny recognized from when they were married. It had never worked out well for him when he heard it in her voice, and yet, miraculously, she stayed calm now. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but it sounds like you’re saying that there is one single source that is broadcasting to all the spiders.”

  “Not broadcasting exactly; more—”

  “Gordo. Stop. Where, precisely where, is this coming from?”

  He moved his fingers across the trackpad and clicked on a button. “Peru,” he said.

  “In Nazca?”

  “Yeah, how did—”

  But Melanie was already on her feet and moving behind the desk to look at the map. So was Steph. It was quite a crowd, Manny and Shotgun and Melanie and Steph all looking over Gordo’s shoulder at the laptop’s screen.

  “Steph,” Melanie said, “forget about anything else. Gordo can give you the locations of those eighty-seven queens and you can do whatever you can do, but I need him. I need him and a bunch of people with guns and flamethrowers and hazmat suits, and I need the fastest plane you can give me.”

  Manny held up his hands. “Whoa. Give me a second here.”

  “Manny,” Melanie said. “Eighty-seven queens. That’s how many there are just in the United States. Think how many there are around the world.”

  “Okay,” Manny said. “I’m missing something.”

  Gordo’s eyes were wide-open, and he looked as if he’d just won a million bucks. “Holy crap! It’s like a zero-day exploit.” He banged Manny on the shoulder with his fist. “It’s a hacking term. It means there’s a flaw in the operating system you can hack into. It’s a zero-day exploit when there’s no time to fix it. They can talk to each other, right? But talking to each other is one thing, and having one single spider talking to all of them is another.”

  “Wait,” Manny said. “You’re saying that there’s, like, what, a queen of the queens? Melanie?”

  Melanie looked down and touched the bandage around her arm almost tenderly. “I’m going to Peru. We can put an end to this.”

  C-17 Globemaster III, Twenty Thousand Feet and Rising

  They were wheels-up in less than thirty minutes. Kim was amazed at how fast you could drive through Manhattan during the apocalypse, particularly when paced by police cars and military vehicles. On the tarmac, they stopped just long enough to switch to JLTVs, already loaded up with hazmat kits and flamethrowers and M16s, and then backed the four trucks right up the loading ramp and onto the C-17 Globemaster III.

  There were four civilians: Melanie and Julie, plus Gordo and Shotgun and their trusty ST11. The Rangers who hadn’t died in Atlantic City or the museum all volunteered, as did Kim. “I want to finish this thing off,” she’d said. Billy Cannon had agreed, and they’d cycled in enough fresh Rangers to make the full complement. Sixteen people in all. Four in each JLTV.

  The plane took a steep angle into late-afternoon sky, and Kim tried to get comfortable. She suddenly realized that she had no idea what time zone Peru was in. It would be dark, though. She knew that. The C-17 could boogie, but even going close to three-quarters the speed of sound and with a midair refueling, it was going to be another six hours. Still plenty of time for her to get nervous. But in the meantime she closed her eyes. If she’d learned nothing else in the Marines, she’d learned that: Get shut-eye when you could.

  Berlin, Germany

  Her little ones swirled and pooled around her. She’d been about to send them forth into the night when she felt the sharp disappearance of one of her sisters. It had happened a number of times already, but this one was different. There had been some who had gone from her consciousness, but for those it had been instantaneous disruptions of light and heat. This sister, however, had a moment of clarity before she was torn apart. And then, only a short time later, it happened again.

  For the first time she felt fear.

  She folded her legs under her and carefully allowed her body to rest on the damp concrete of the sewer tunnel. Her new exoskeleton had hardened, but she didn’t wish to cause damage to the eggs she carried. She was still, even as thousands of black and red-striped and silver-slashed little ones swirled and swarmed and skittered over her, moving in the darkness, impatient to be out to feed. She counseled them that it would not be much longer, and she listened.

  Her heart beat as one with her sisters, all of them listening to the one singular heartbeat that said to wait, wait, wait. There were still many of her sisters who were recovering from their molts, whose eggs were not quite ready. Soon, soon, soon they would move as one, the heartbeat told her.

  She knew it was dark outside these tunnels, but it wouldn’t be long before the sun rose again, and by then it would be time.

  USS Elsie Downs, Atlantic Ocean

  The sailors were lined up along the hallways, each one holding a hard salute as he passed. He took his time, acknowledging each and every one of the men and women who’d followed his lead. He wasn’t sure what would happen to them, and he owed them at least this much. Nobody knew what would happen in this new world, but he hoped there would be a way forward for the military. As for himself, he didn’t care what happened. He’d done what he thought was right. He would stand in front of the president and take full responsibility. There was no walking away from the consequences.

  All he could do now was make sure his mistake didn’t cost any more lives.

  As Broussard walked to the flight deck, he realized he had a grim admiration for President Pilgrim. He’d had her beaten, and she still won. Operation SAFEGUARD had been in his hands, but somehow he’d been outmaneuvered. And even though he understood it meant the end of his career—and almost certainly his life, because he would be tried and found guilty of treason—he didn’t regret it. For all he knew, if he hadn’t made this move, without the desperation of being chased, the president might still be dithering around with half measures. At least, that’s what he told himself.

  On the flight deck he chatted briefly with the crew manning the refueling aircraft, then he retreated to a safe distance and watched the plane take off. There was something satisfying about seeing it shrink into the sunset, about knowing that, at least in this one small way, he had made the right decision.

  One Mile off the Coast of Maine

  Annie was practically bouncing, which would have been fine, but Mike’s knees were killing him from being cramped in the Cessna for so long. He’d swapped spots with Carla—she didn’t have her pilot’s license, but she knew what she was doing more than Mike did, and Rex wanted her up front for the ocean landing—and Annie had insisted on sitting on his lap as they came closer and closer.

  “Is that it
? Is that it?” She was pointing out the side window at a small, forlorn-looking rock sitting in the ocean.

  “No.” He laughed and then turned her so that she was looking forward. “Pretty sure that would be a little too small for us. But there, if you look straight ahead, I think that’s where we’re going. See the harbor? You can see the boats.”

  He caught Fanny smiling at him, which was nice. They had an amicable relationship that bordered on actual friendship, and it still gave him a warm feeling to know that she thought he was a good dad. It was weird, he thought, to be like this with an ex-wife. They’d gotten along okay since the divorce, with the usual ups and downs, but since everything had fallen apart, he’d spent a lot more time with her and her husband than he would have otherwise. And, at least for the time being, that wasn’t going to change. From what Rex said and from what he could see through the cockpit window, the island wasn’t much of anything.

  They were already low, a few hundred feet above the ocean, so it wasn’t a steep descent. Thankfully the water was dead calm. So flat that it looked as though it had been painted on a canvas. That had been Rex’s one worry, that the ocean would be heaving, but they had more than enough fuel to turn around and find a place on the mainland. There were at least two airfields close by, but it would have meant finding a car and then a boat to get them to the island. The landing itself felt like nothing. Just a gradual sense that they were slowing down, the ocean seeming to come up until it kissed the pontoons.

  Rex kept the propellers spinning, carefully maneuvering the Cessna through the lobster boats moored in the harbor, bringing it near but not up to the pier.

  “Uh, folks, I don’t mean to be a buzzkill, but we’ve got a not-so-welcoming party.” Leshaun was pointing to a small group standing on the edge of the pier.