ZerOes (33 page)

The Compiler enjoyed that. Another error, eradicated.

Now, back to the larger code corruption at hand. He whips the gun back toward the SUV.

Earthman hangs there, half out of the back of the vehicle, his one arm straining as he holds on. The other arm, extended out. A pistol in his grip. A Glock 21, the Compiler's mind tells him.

They both fire.

Everything feels out of control. The SUV is pushing one hundred miles per hour, and the lines of the road are a hot white blur, drawn up out of darkness and given life in the headlights before being swallowed once more into shadow.

Out the back Chance can hear gunfire. Chattering. Then the warble-warp of a police siren. Everyone in the car is yelling. Aleena is saying something but he can't hear what.

Ahead a billboard shines bright in the night. One of those digital ones: like a slideshow at the movies, cycling ads one after the next. Looks like it's advertising a car dealership. Hyundai. But then that ad pixilates, distorts, is replaced by five words. Big, bold, white text on black.

           
AND THE GODS DID FLEE.

The words flash. Again and again.

Suddenly the SUV's stereo turns on. The volume jacks. Chance shoots a look at DeAndre, but he's staring at the dashboard in shock, too. Radio stations go one after the other, then the sound dissolves into distorted audio blips and beeps and grinding, growling aural artifacts.
Chance grabs the knob to turn it down but it doesn't do anything except spin.

The GPS begins to go corrupt. Blocks of the map replacing other blocks like one of those puzzles with the moving squares before suddenly becoming a blue screen. Then the blue screen goes black. It flashes one word again and again:

           
FLEE.

           
FLEE.

           
FLEE.

Chance doesn't know how, but Typhon is watching.

“Exit!” DeAndre says, pointing ahead—clearly he's on the same wavelength. Chance again yells for everyone to hold on, then cuts the wheel sharply to the right.

Wade holds the gun out.

The BMW driver's head is a mask of blood. The head slumps backward. The black car pulls sharply to the left, bounds off the shoulder and disappears into some trees.

Wade's ears keen like an emergency broadcast signal. He looks down at himself. No blood. No bullets. He laughs.

Just as Chance yells,
Hold on!
and the car cuts hard to the right.

Chance takes the exit ramp fast, too fast. He punches the brakes of the SUV. They don't do a damn thing. He pumps them hard, harder, but it's like pressing down on a piece of paper—it has no tension, no pressure, no
giveback
—

The SUV heads right for the guardrail.

Chance pulls the wheel hard as he can. Tires scream. The side of the SUV slams into the guardrail.

The SUV flips over it. Tumbles down an embankment.

Chaos. Crumpling metal. Popping windows.

Then: darkness before all goes still.

WALMART PARKING LOT, I-80

U
nder the streetlights in the parking lot, the glass glitters. Light pools in the black steel of the crumpled SUV, trapped in the metal like ghosts.

Cops have cordoned off the area with yellow tape. They hang back while Golathan walks the scene, trying to figure out just where everything went wrong.

They've got a lot of bodies. All the wrong ones, as it turns out.

Corpses and car crashes in the intersection. Those left alive tell the story of how all the lights went green at the same time. How a black car—one man said a Mercedes, though a younger girl correctly identified it as a BMW, good for her—sped around the intersection chasing some black SUV.

Then: a dead man in a rolled-over minivan. And a dead cop. Shot in the head before crashing.

Two more wrecks: first up is the SUV, which is clearly one of the Lodge vehicles, resting on its side in this Walmart parking lot at two o'clock in the morning after having apparently rolled down off an exit ramp into the lot before coming to a stop against a streetlight. (The
post now kinked and bent like a broken umbrella.) The second is the BMW. Smashed up in a small copse of trees right off the highway.

In each case, there's blood but no bodies.

Golathan forms an O with his lips and exhales. Without looking at her, he curls a finger and summons Cassandra “Sandy” Molinari, a young woman with hard steel eyes and a face like a fire ax. Lesbian. Just got married to her partner, Tina. Two of them have been trying to adopt, if he remembers correctly. Or shit, is the new wife's name Toni? Whatever. Point is, she's one of the only fellow agents on this project that he can truly trust.

Molinari comes up, smacking her lips in disappointment, like this is less a scene of twisted metal and mystery and more like a wall graffiti-sprayed by jerkoff teenagers. “What is it, Ken?”

He pulls her close, lowers his voice. “Here's the narrative we're spinning. This is terrorism. On our soil. A dispute between two terrorist groups. Don't name them—I'm not sure if we'll spin it as one Muslim group and one domestic, or what.”

“Terrorist war spilling out onto our streets.”

“Right. People believe any horseshit shoved in their ears long as you say ‘terrorist.' Plus we got Aleena Kattan as our standard-bearer, a hacker known for dipping her toes in the Arab world. Reference her for now, but don't name her. Not yet.”

She leans in, says: “So. What really happened here?”

“For all intents and purposes, this
is
what really happened. Spin it.”

“Consider it spun.” She marches off. Always the trouper, that one. It occurs to him she might be a sociopath. It occurs to him
he
might be one, too. Hell, anybody who works in this job has to be, right?

Golathan twirls his finger like it's a lasso, then looks to the officer in charge, some sleepy-eyed slackjaw named Gomez or Gonzalez or whatever. “Clean this shit up,” he says. “Make sure everything that needs to be is bagged and tagged.”

Then he steps over the yellow tape.
Don't sweat
, he tells himself.
Don't show them you're nervous. Act like all this is under control
. More important:
Act like you know what the fuck is going on
.

He walks his confident, cocky stride, trying not to let his hand shake or his face demonstrate the sheer panic he's feeling, then heads over to another one of the parking lot lights. He leans against it. Pops a piece of gum in his mouth. Wishes like hell he still smoked.

He picks up his phone. Starts to scroll for Leslie Cilicia-Ceto in his contacts. Soon as he lands on her, before he even dials, his phone rings. It's her.

“Leslie—” he starts to say.

“You look rather stressed,” she says.

He tenses up. “What?”

“You're trying to put on a good show. But your heart rate is up, isn't it? The agency doesn't know about your heart problems, do they.” A statement, not a question. “Quite a thing to hide from your own people.”

“Spying on me now, huh? That's a mistake, Leslie.”

“I'm simply concerned for your well-being, Ken. You're a very important man now. You've always wanted control, and now you have it.”

“What have you done? What happened at the Lodge? And the man in the BMW. Do you know who that is? Is it—” He lowers his voice, because he realizes he's starting to yell. “Is it the same one from Maryland? Dead cop? Stolen car?”

“You're worrying about details that are irrelevant.”

“He had someone in his trunk, Leslie. He had one of the . . .” He has to keep forcing himself to lower his voice. “He had one of the Hunting Lodge hackers.”

“You're worrying about what ants are doing as you walk over them. This is bigger, now, Ken. Bigger than the both of us. I'm giving you control. Take it.”

He makes an animal sound in the back of his throat: a frustrated snarl. “You keep saying that, but I don't know what the fuck you mean. Speak plainly, Leslie.”

“Typhon is free. Typhon is with us now.”

“Typhon is just a program.” He hears the anger in his voice: bitter like a snake's venom, sharp like its fang. “It's just
software
. Sitting on a
machine
.”

“It's more than that. You know that. You've always suspected it. We're both patriots, Ken. We're both in service to this country. Now we have the power to change things. I'm giving you this, Ken. For believing in the work. You deserve to be rewarded for your faith.”

“Fuck you, Leslie. This is out of control. We need to meet. We need to get control of this situation. Together.”

“Yes,” she says, without missing a beat. “I think now is the time for a site visit, Ken. I think it's time to see what Typhon is. Time to see what it can do for you. For this country. For all of mankind. I'll be watching. We all will.”

The call ends.

For a while, Ken stands there, quaking. He needs a fucking cigarette.

ROYAL, KANSAS

L
ightning flicks the horizon and thunder rumbles, but no rain falls. Chance sits upright suddenly, sucking in a hard gasp of air—some remnant of a dream remains behind. Something about his mother in a hospital, something about his father in the next bed over. Chance remembers being caught between having time to say good-bye to his mother and the chance to convince his father not to die, not to leave him alone, forever and ever with the memory of yet another funeral so fast after the first.

The dream breaks apart and falls away, leaving him less with the hard memory of what transpired and more with a bad feeling, a septic feeling all the way down to his marrow. He blinks the sleep out of his eyes.

A moan next to him. Aleena rolls over, pulls the sheet over her half-naked body.
That
memory comes back to him full-tilt-boogie. Just a few hours ago, watching the sunset over the dry grass and swaying wheat. Creeping down past a rust-red harvester. They talked for a while. He about his farm—a farm absent of anybody, no parents, no dogs, no friends. Just a barn cat that he knew he didn't own. She told
him about her family—parents pretty liberal, only loosely religious. She talked about how much she loved New York City. The High Line. The Cloisters. Her school: Columbia. (She said, though, that the best bookstore and pizza place weren't in Manhattan, but rather Brooklyn: Paulie Gee's for pizza, WORD for books. He told her he'd just have to take her word for it.)

That's when she started freaking out. Not crying. Not hysterics. More anger. And frustration. Over how she couldn't contact anyone. Couldn't call her family. Couldn't even Google them or have them Googled
for
her, because if anyone—if
Typhon
—were to see the ripples from that tiny little pebble thrown, they'd be done for.
But I have to know how they're doing. I feel lost and alone and
—and then he reminded her that she wasn't alone, that they were all in the same boat, and as soon as they got to where they were going they'd figure it out.

Then she kissed him.

Then they found this little shed, threw the double doors open, stumbled up the ramp onto the hay-strewn floor. She grabbed what looked like an old horse blanket, threw it down, and they fell onto it, trapped in the shadows of a lawn mower, a snowblower, a set of shovels and rakes. It was soft until it wasn't. It was slow until it was fast.

And now, here they are. Lightning and thunder. No rain. Nighttime.

Normally he'd check the time by grabbing his phone. But he doesn't have a phone anymore. He doesn't have much, actually. None of them do. Their health—that's what Wade keeps saying.
Everybody shut up, quit whining. At least we have our health
.

Wade, as it turns out, has been their lifeline. He knew a fella at the west end of Pennsylvania, not far from Pittsburgh, who was a farm vet. Had some pretty powerful antibiotics and helped dress Reagan's wound, too. Now Reagan is back up to speed.

The vet—Gray Lyle was his name—had an old beater Class B camper. They were able to ditch the car they stole (an old Chevy Nova, which Chance hot-wired) for the camper, which, at least at a passing glance, seemed legit. And so began the slow crawl across the country. A crawl that hasn't even ended—they've still got to push on to Colorado.

But all this—it's too much to think about right now. Threatens to overwhelm an otherwise beautiful night. Hot, but not humid. The distant storm coloring the clouds with pulses of red and purple. Aleena next to him, smelling of soap and a sheen of sweat.

Chance rubs his eyes, and when he opens them again, a little girl stands there. Little girl so pale she might disappear in the moonlight. Hair so blond it's almost white. Chance's first thought—admittedly, not his proudest one—is
Holy shit, a ghost
.

Then he looks closer. The girl's got footy pajamas on, and it occurs to him ghosts are probably not the kind to wear footy pajamas—they wear bloody robes or old wedding dresses and other garb tied to the nature of their deaths—and he realizes this is one of their host's three daughters.

Their host is a man named Cal Brockaway. He and his wife, Nellie, live out here with their three daughters (five, eight, thirteen, though Chance can't remember their names). They're preppers—folks who prepare for some flavor of the Apocalypse. Wade explained that some folks prepare for very specific outcomes, but he figures that's like narrowing your bet too much at the roulette wheel. He—and Cal—prefer a more
generalized
outlook on the End Times, recognizing it could come from anything: superstorms, polar shift, invasion by the Chinese, attack by the U.S. government on its own people, aliens, EMP, God's wrath on a sin-filled world, killer bees. (Chance notes that no one mentions “rogue AI with a penchant for Greek mythology.” He figures someone should update their menu, because this one's riding to number one on the charts with a bullet.)

He makes sure the horse blanket is covering him and Aleena up okay. To the little girl he says in a quiet voice: “Hey.”

“Hey,” she says.

“It's late.”

“I saw monsters in my room.”

“Monsters, huh?”

The girl shrugs. “They were probably just shadows. Daddy says the real monsters are usually out there in the daylight and most of them are runnin' this country.”

“Oh. Uhh. Okay then.”

“Daisy says you guys are criminals.” She pronounces it
crin-a-mulls
. “Or maybe terrorists.”

“Tell Daisy we are no such thing, sweetheart.”

“Okay.” She stands there. “Are you sure there aren't monsters in my
room? I think I heard them growling. But it's probably just thunder. Never mind.” She totters off.

Chance looks down at Aleena, who mumbles a little but doesn't wake. He gets up, toes around in the dark for his boxers, tugs them on, then heads out to one of the fields, goes and takes a leak by a wall of corn.

When he gets back, Aleena isn't there. Her clothes are gone, and for a moment, Chance panics. He looks toward the house, though, and sees her ducking in through the side door, her shape illuminated by the porch light.

The Brockaway family doesn't fool around when it comes to breakfast. Looks like they're trying to feed a regiment of soldiers. Pancakes the size of Frisbees. Eggs with yolks so big and so orange they look like cartoon suns. Fresh apples. Corn fritters. Corned beef hash. Bacon. Sausage. Little waffles. Berries. If Chance didn't know better, he'd think these prepper types were planning on fattening them up in order to butcher them in time for the coming Armageddon.

They're all sitting around the table. Reagan is mainlining coffee like they just made it illegal. Wade is standing, sipping black tea. DeAndre is shoveling food in, using both a fork and a knife and making sounds as he eats:
mmm, ohhh, yeah, mm-hmm
. Reagan mutters to him: “You and that pancake better go get a room.”

Suddenly the five-year-old—the one from last night, the one afraid of the monsters—says, “Why would they need to get a room? Is the pancake tired? Does it need a nap?”

Reagan kneels in front of her and says with total earnestness: “Yes.”

Everyone laughs. Even Aleena, who sits there and hasn't said anything to Chance about last night. She's been polite—a little crisply so, almost coldly.

Cal and Nellie are washing up in tandem. Their kitchen is homey, very country—lots of rooster ceramics and powder blues and lemon yellows. One whole wall is a massive shelf of jars and containers. Canned goods. Various pickled things—at first Chance thinks they're just cucumbers, okra, things like that, but then he sees fibrous pig feet floating in jars. Like something in an autopsy room.

Cal's a big guy. Broad. Real lumberjack type. Got a red beard so dense it looks more like steel wool made from copper wire. To Wade he says: “You know you can stay as long as you need.”

To which Wade nods and answers: “I appreciate that, Cal. We'll hang for a couple, then head back to the road again.”

“Colorado, huh?”

“Mm-hmm. Got a bunker up near Silverton.”

“You gonna push straight through?” Nellie asks. She's pretty—but she's got this rough-hewn frontier vibe to her. A cactus with a flower blooming on top of it. “Don't we know someone down near . . . Pueblo City? George! George Pinkner.”

Wade sighs. “Pinkner had a heart attack couple years back. He was a good guy, George. Sysop of one helluva BBS. High-strung, though. Didn't take care of himself.”

“All this madness over
whelmed
him,” Cal says. “It's hard. Can't trust your own government to watch over you—instead, they just
watch
you. We've entered the period of the panopticon, folks. Privacy is long out the window but nobody's able to watch the watchers, and—”

DeAndre says: “Panopticon. Wasn't that company Pantopti-something?”

“Argus Panoptes Systems,” Wade says. “APSI.”

Aleena nods. “It's all connected, isn't it? Panoptes the many eyed. The panopticon: a house or prison where all can be watched by one man.”

“Or one
woman
,” Reagan says.

“Or one artificially intelligent asshole named Typhon,” DeAndre says. Chance fist-bumps him.

Cal whistles, shakes his head. “This is what it comes down to. Control. Loss of privacy. Automating us so we don't step out of line. Stasis versus dynamism. Oppression versus freedom. I'd rather have the freedom to make my own decisions—even bad ones.”

“Somebody found himself a dictionary,” Reagan says in a fakey whisper.

Wade frowns. “Reagan, you're being rude.”

“Sorry,
Grandpa
.”

Nellie jumps in: “It's not even like the government holds some kind of
moral
high ground. All the things they don't want us to do, they do. We can't go into debt, but they go into debt. Murder is illegal unless it's sanctioned by a presidential seal. It's like discovering your own
parents have been doing all the drugs they told you not to do, like everything they said they were doing to protect you was just a lie so they could have all the fun instead. They keep the freedoms that we keep losing.”

“I can, with certainty, say that this is
literally
true,” Reagan notes. “My father is a
total
pillhead. Oxy, mostly. And yet, it didn't hurt him during reelection.”

Everyone looks around, confused.

“Oh, is your father a politician?” Nellie asks, popping the bewilderment bubble.

Reagan sniffs, nods. “Yep. Dad's an Ohio state senator.
Mother
raises various show poodles. He's a pill popper and she drinks wine like it's water.”

The five-year-old says: “What's a pill popper?”

The one just older—this one with a band of freckles across her cheeks and nose, with hair as red as her father's beard—says: “It means they take those little capsule pills like from a pill bottle and they squeeze them until they go—
pop!
”

“No, it means he is addicted to pills, jeez.” This from the thirteen-year-old, just coming into the room, still wearing pajamas, yawning, looking mopey.

“Morning, Lucy,” Nellie says. “You're late waking up again.”

“I'm a teenager now. It's what I
do
.”

Cal jumps in: “Chores start in thirty. Goats need milking, eggs need collecting, and somebody's gotta sweep the garden and work on canning. Grab a quick bite and then take your sisters upstairs to get cleaned up—”

Suddenly, all three children are protesting. A loud cacophony of noises. Chance never grew up with any siblings, so it's something he isn't really used to. Man, is it loud. Like feeding time at the primate house.