Zero World (47 page)

Finn shrieked.

At first Skyler didn’t know what he’d heard, so shrill and high was the sound. Then the pilot started to kick wildly at something below the dashboard.

“What is it?” Skyler asked, unbuckling himself. “Snake? What?” Something nasty must have crept aboard while they’d been sitting outside, waiting.

The pilot kept screaming between desperate sucking breaths. His boots mashed frantically at the pedals in the footwell.

“Knock it off,” Skyler rasped. “You’re going to break something—” He placed a hand on the captain’s shoulder. Finn recoiled so violently his head cracked into the low ceiling. The man thrashed now, clawing at his harness, pushing Skyler away. Kicking all the
while at something in the darkness of the footwell. A kick grazed the rudder control, lurching the aircraft to the left and throwing Skyler off balance. He fell, caught himself on the armrest of his own seat.

“Captain, get ahold of yourself! Go in back, I’ll take care of whatever’s down there.”

A flicker of recognition in terrified eyes. The pilot had his legs fully outstretched now. He drew breaths like a man deprived of oxygen. Lurching heaves of the chest, followed by almost childish whimpering exhales.

“Go,” Skyler repeated, more forceful now despite talking to his superior officer. “I mean it.” He tried again for the shoulder. This time Finn only flinched at the grip. His breaths were coming easier now, too.

“My…my…,” the pilot said between rapid inhales. “My shoes…”

“A scorpion? Spider?”

“I, I…Please…help.”

A goddamn spider. Skyler fought the urge to slap the man. He activated the autopilot and leaned, awkwardly in the cramped space, to untie Finn’s boots. A bead of sweat dripped off his brow as he pulled the first one off. The pilot was holding his breath.

When the shoe came away Finn exhaled.

Skyler peered in. Held it upside down and shook. Nothing. He glanced at Finn. The man was pale. Sweating visibly, lip quivering. His gaze met Skyler’s, only for a second, but in it Skyler saw profound terror and something else, too. Embarrassment.

Grimacing, Skyler took the other boot in one hand and pulled, ready to drop his fist on whatever nightmare fell out. The boot resisted, then gave. A centimeter, no more, but Finn flew into hysterics unlike anything Skyler had ever witnessed before. He pulled away so fast the boot in Skyler’s hands flipped upward, spinning before it slammed into the ceiling.

Finn flailed as if fighting invisible restraints. Skyler just managed to keep focus on the falling shoe as the other man made a frantic
scramble from his chair. He was out through the rear of the cockpit before the boot landed, slamming the door behind him.

Through it all Skyler had never taken his eyes from the shoe. Nothing had come out. He tipped it over, cautious until his patience ran dry. Finally Skyler lifted and shook it as he had the other, one fist raised and ready.

Nothing.

“Empty!” Skyler shouted toward the door.

No response came. Then something thudded against the door.

“Captain? The shoe was empty. Relax, okay?”

Skyler heard Finn speaking then, difficult to discern thanks to the door and the low, fractured voice. Skyler pressed his ear against the cool barricade.

“…don’t…want…to be like this. Like them. Like me. I will save you.”

Save me? Skyler turned the handle and pushed. The door didn’t budge. He put his shoulder into it and managed a few millimeters, just enough to get a crack of light through from the galley space and the cargo bay beyond. Not enough to see his pilot, or what blocked the door.

“Stay away!” Finn shrieked. “It’s all…falling.”

“Open the door, Captain. I’ll help you.” Sedate you, more likely. Skyler racked his mind, unable to recall the contents of the medkit on board. Surely there must be something suitable in there.

“The door,” Finn said. “The door.”

“That’s right. Come on now, everything’s—”

Hydraulics hissed to life, then an incredible rush of air that sucked the cabin door open enough for Skyler to get his hand through. Frigid wind buffeted his hair and clothes. He should have acted more quickly. Should have known instantly what Finn intended. With all the shocks that afternoon the sudden loss of cabin pressure just left him numb, baffled. Frozen for precious seconds, tugged against the door by a violent sucking rush of air out through the back of the plane. By the time Skyler had the presence
of mind to override the cargo door and seal the aircraft, Finn was long gone.

Skyler found himself standing alone in an empty cargo bay. The pilot and everything else had been yanked unceremoniously from the aircraft, four thousand meters above Madrid. All parachutes accounted for, still in their locker. Captain Finn Koopman had committed suicide. Skyler swayed on his feet, unable to concentrate. Nothing that had happened this day made sense.

And yet it did. The realization hit him so suddenly he felt his knees buckle. Seated on the floor, Skyler forced himself to say the words aloud. It was the only way he could believe it.

“It reached us. The disease. Finn…we both were exposed.”

I’m a dead man,
Skyler thought over and over. The next few hours went by in an erratic blur. He took the co-pilot’s chair—couldn’t bring himself to sit where Finn had. The radio he turned off. To check in now, to report what had happened, would probably result in the aircraft’s immediate destruction. He wouldn’t blame them, either. He didn’t want to be the man who brought this ailment home. But he could see beyond that, could see himself differently. A sample, racing ahead of the infection, that could be studied.

He set to work.

Two hours later an aircraft set down in an empty field three kilometers outside Volkel air base. A message, automatically sent upon touchdown, brought swarms of soldiers in hazmat suits and a small armada of vans emblazoned with disease-control logos.

When the engines cooled sufficiently a huge tent was erected over the quiet vehicle. Quick-drying cement sealed the special structure to the ground.

The rear cargo door opened. Soldiers readied their weapons. Orders were to take the single occupant alive, if possible.

When the heavy door finished its rotation downward and crunched into the dirt, the warriors in yellow suits hesitated.

The man inside—a Lieutenant Luiken, co-pilot with a spotless service record, noted for his levelheaded conduct—crouched on the floor of the aircraft with his hands chained and locked to a tie-down. A set of keys lay a few meters away, well out of reach. He wore a full-face mask attached to a tank of air. When he spoke, his muffled voice sounded apologetic. “False alarm, perhaps,” he said. “I feel fine, but take all precautions.”

One of the suited people came forward, carrying a small tube instead of a rifle. “Sorry about this,” she said, and pressed the cylinder against Skyler’s neck.

The world melted away.

When his senses returned, Skyler found himself lying on a bed of white sheets in a white room. The air smelled like plastic. Brilliant LEDs on the ceiling brought tears he blinked away. His neck hurt, as if something had bitten him. The tube, he recalled. Sedated, then, which meant they’d taken him seriously. “Good,” he said aloud. More of a croak, really.

“What’s good?”

Skyler turned toward the woman’s voice. She stood nearby, wearing the white and blue uniform of the medical division. Unsuited, unmasked. He wanted to shout at her for her carelessness, until he realized what it meant. “I’m okay, then,” he said.

“Yes. How, exactly, we’ve no idea.”

He tried to touch the bruise on his neck only to find his hand, both hands, cuffed to the gurney. The chains rattled when he yanked. “I suppose these are unnecessary?”

The doctor stared at him. Karres, the name on her uniform read. “Are you one hundred percent sure you were exposed, Lieutenant?”

He’d explained what happened in his message. It dawned on him
suddenly they might not believe it. They might think…“Ninety-nine,” he said. “I don’t know how it spreads. I was in the cockpit with him, though. We were both in Africa—shouldn’t you have your mask on?”

“The tent is sealed.”

“But you’re inside.”

The woman’s lips tightened. She came closer. Her voice fell to a whisper. “Not just Africa, Lieutenant. It’s…spread.”

He studied her face, saw fear and fatigue.

“They’re calling it SUBS,” she said.

“How far, dammit?”

Her lower lip quivered. She bit it, then stood and crossed the room. “I’ve maintained the seal on the tent because I don’t want it to get in.”

The weight of the words seemed to press him down on the bed. “Uncuff me.”

“Not yet,” she said.

“Why?”

She turned back to him, another tube in her hands. “Because I don’t want you to try to stop me.”

“What? What are you doing?”

She stepped closer, priming the syringe. “Listen to me carefully. You’re immune. You may be the only such person, so you must survive. You have to get to the WDC facility in Abu Dhabi. They’ve got the best chance of finding a cure for this thing.”

“Then release—”

“Be silent.”

Before he could speak again she jabbed the tube against the side of his neck.

He woke to an utterly silent room. The cuffs had been removed. A note waited for him on a rolling table beside the bed:

She lay on the floor a few meters away, head propped against the wall, chin resting on an unmoving chest. Her lips were blue, her face unnaturally pale beneath the splay of blond hair that hung across her cheeks. She’d cuffed herself to a cabinet rung on the wall, and an open bottle of pills lay on the floor beside her.

Skyler lay still for a long moment, letting a wave of nausea and grief pass.

On a chair opposite the doctor’s body lay Skyler’s neatly folded uniform, boots on top. He swung off the bed and lifted the footwear away. Beneath lay a set of keys and a hand-drawn map of the nearby air base with one hangar circled.

Skyler dressed in silence, trying not to look at the dead body. She’d killed herself rather than breathe air from the outside. The idea made his gut twist.

Clothed, he lifted the first boot and paused just before inserting his foot. The memory of Finn, of the panic attack he’d suffered, rushed in. He’d leapt from the plane because of some imagined terror in his goddamn boots. The disease, SUBS, had turned the most casually confident man Skyler had ever met into a gibbering maniac in mere hours.

Whatever was happening outside, this woman had judged it so dangerous that she’d sedated Skyler to prevent him from rushing outside to help. He would have, too. She’d seen it in him.

Mind reeling, he left the room, which turned out to be a portable unit mounted on a flatbed truck. His aircraft still rested where he’d landed it, under a massive white tent just like those he’d seen in Africa
days earlier. They’d sprayed it with something, leaving a milky residue on every surface.

He left it there. The airlock at the edge of the tent lay open, unguarded.

Outside he found bodies. The sun had just risen, and the air was cold. Soldiers and doctors alike lay in the grass. Many had pressed their hands to their heads before succumbing. Those with their necks exposed showed signs of a rash on either side of the spine.

Skyler went to the nearest soldier and took the man’s assault rifle.

Lotte’s note rattled in his head. He should listen to her. Fly to Abu Dhabi and help if he could.

His eyes were drawn north, though, toward Amsterdam, where his family lived. He couldn’t just flee. He had to know if they were like him. Immune, a genetic trait. It was possible, wasn’t it?

Somewhere in the darkness a person screamed with inhuman terror. Another sound answered. It could only have been called a roar, yet he knew this to be a human as well. Both sounds ended abruptly. Then a third, farther off, just at the edge of hearing. Laughter.

If his family shared the immunity, and they were stuck in a city with sixteen million diseased…

Skyler stole the nearest truck and drove toward Amsterdam.

The world had fractured.

Fires dotted the landscape. Flames no one fought. Bodies were everywhere. Splayed out on the road or still in the seats of smashed cars run astray.

Not everyone had died, though. The dead outnumbered the living, but the survivors…something was horribly wrong with them. Most that Skyler glimpsed were either fleeing, terrified at the sight of his truck, or rushing toward him with snarled features and blood on their clothes.

He swerved away from the aggressive ones at first. But their numbers were too great, and the roads were already crammed with the
crumpled husks of vehicles. Eventually he just focused on avoiding the cars.

Each thud of a body against his truck drained a little more of his compassion until he felt cold, almost robotic, in his quest to reach home.

On the outskirts of Amsterdam the expressway became too clogged. He left the truck and moved on foot along a canal. Away from the hellish landscape of the road, his numbness began to fade. He wasn’t sure if that was a good thing. The weight of the calamity lurked behind it, anxious to crush his determination. He paused at the bank of a canal and stared at the gentle current.

You may be the only such person…

He had no idea what he would do if that were true. It was not, he found, something he wanted to consider. Not something he would accept until he’d searched every corner of the globe for another like him.

A splash in the narrow canal focused his attention. An elderly man crouched on the opposite bank, one hand thrust into the murky water. He had filthy gray hair matched by an unkempt beard. Sores dotted his face and arms. As their eyes met, the ragged man pulled his fist from the water, drew it high over his head, and slammed it down again. The water that splashed into his face did not break his intense, icy gaze.