ZerOes (41 page)

But right now he's still alive. So are these people he now thinks of his companions—hell, his
friends
. In this moment of panic and spent powder, he feels a strange sense of brotherhood with these people. The weird warm rush of connection that you feel when you're drunk—either on a bottle of peach schnapps or the high-octane rush of adrenaline.

He grabs the Ruger Mini-14, goes to the window, starts firing through the haze.

Bullets chip away at the cabin windows—splinters kick up from the frame. Reagan shrieks, starts pawing at her face, and Wade thinks:
She's hit
. He fires a few more rounds, then throws his gun down and drops to his knees, turning her toward him.

Her face is a mask of blood.

Then she sits up. Her hand swipes at her face, smearing the blood but clearing some space. Black beads rise up from little pinpricks peppering her cheek—splinters got her, but the bullet didn't.

Wade grabs her face, kisses the cheek that
isn't
hit.

He picks up the gun again and starts firing.

The smoke doesn't burn, but Chance can't see squat through it. But then he thinks:
That's our advantage much as it is his
. He grabs Hollis by the elbow, tugs on it, waves him on—and the two of them dart out from behind the cover of the Plymouth toward the cabin.

A dark shape somersaults through the darkness: A canister. A grenade.

It lands in front of them.

Chance turns back around, hooks Hollis with the crook of his arm—springs—and the two of them fall back behind the Plymouth.

The grenade goes off.

A swirl of darkness. Dirt peppers the ground—clumps of grass, stone, clay. With a loud
clang
, the back bumper of the pickup truck lands hard. Fire crackles from the hood.

Chance rolls over. His hearing has gone from a high-pitched whine to an empty
wahhhh-wahhhh-wahhhhhh
, as if the world is pulsing, giving off some frequency that he can hear but not understand.

A shape, tall and dark, stalks through the dust. It's him. The scarred man.

Chance is frozen. He can only watch as the man raises the rifle.

But at the same time, another shape stirs behind the monster. Something on the ground—a dark lump that grows tall, tilting sideways like a leaning tree.

The tall man starts to whip around and three gunshots pop through him. He wheels, and three more shots hit in quick succession. He drops.

And Rosa staggers over to Chance, her hair akimbo, her face slick with blood and dirt.
“Puta,”
she says, and spits.

EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE

W
hen it happens, when the Compiler goes down, Ken is lost—everything goes red inside Typhon, a cascade of rage and terror and panic. With it, a flood of memories: the husband named Simon blowing out candles on a birthday cake, tacking a sailboat through clear lake waters, having a street monkey in Lahore steal his kulfi dessert right out of his hands as Leslie loses her breath laughing.

Or: Simon in the wreckage of an intersection, his face cut and gushing, picking up his dying wife and carrying her through crowds and traffic, sirens blaring somewhere far away, hurrying down an alley, weeping, dizzy, lost . . .

Ken's persona is tossed about. He cannot be safe from Typhon's grief. He cannot find a mooring; it is him and he is it and it occurs to him now that he's not in control of anything, he's just a cog in this machine of meat and data, just a buzzing bee in the hive who dances when the queen tells him to dance—he tries to stop it, tries to cry out, tries to force himself on the system. To
imprint
rationality and caution and reason—

But something swats him down. A great pressing weight, a crushing
depth. Until soon he can't think at all, can't remember his wife or daughter, can't remember his own name—

He has only one handhold.

Simon.

The Compiler.

He cries out in the static:
He's not dead yet
.

Immediately, the rage subsides. Everything once again cold, clinical, neatly ordered.

In that void, Typhon writes her response.

DUGWAY PROVING GROUND, UTAH

T
hree drones take off from Dugway Proving Ground.

Each is a Reaper model, loaded for bear with Sidewinder missiles.

They lift from the runway, pivot like waving hands, and head north.

Hempstead asks: “Where are they headed?”

“Wyoming, I think? Near Laramie,” Ritchie says nervously. “I got the alert—took me a minute to dial into them, it was like they kept evading. But I activated the protocols you had installed and it let me find them. You're right. I think we've been hacked.”

Hempstead hesitates. He thinks, but doesn't say:
It isn't just here, Ritchie
. Drones have been going weird all over. Mostly overseas, but some stateside, too. And yet, nobody's been able to find a hack. Or any kind of installed malware.

One of the DARPA techs, Dave Sullivan, said,
These things all talk to each other, sir. The more they do that, the more vulnerabilities we create—doorways, really, because each way out is also a way in
. He said
they're working on drones that defy that connection—“hack-proof” quadcopters as a first wave, and then larger drones thereafter.

For now, though, Dave has given them a new control chip. Something that will let them do a manual override.

“Do the full override,” Hempstead says. “Bring them back to base.”

Ritchie nods. On the screen, the drone cameras begin to swoop and turn. “All right, sir. They're headed back . . .” He taps one more key. “Now.”

Hempstead nods. “When they get back, pull them out of commission for now.”

“Why did you do that, David?”

“Stan?” Hempstead asks.

There, behind a van in the parking lot, stands Stan Karsch. He looks pale. Jittery. An ocher jaundice to his eyes. “The drones. You pulled them back.”

“They went rogue. We can't have drones off the reservation, Stan.”

“You should've told me. I should've been
informed
.”

Hempstead looks around. The lot is empty. Which was intended—he looks down at the crumpled pack of cigarillos in his hand. His wife will kill him for smoking these, but it's been one of those days. (Truth be told, he's had a lot of those days, recently.)

Stan steps out from behind the van. Hand shaking. Something's wrong.

“You don't look good, Stan.”

“Those drones are CIA drones,” Stan hisses.

“No, you
co-own
those drones with the army. And we have authority over them, particularly in domestic airspace. You know that.”

“Turn them back around, David.”

“Stan, I'm not gonna do that. Hell, I
can't
do that.”

Stan's hand flashes from within his suit jacket. He points a pistol at Hempstead—a small automatic.

“How'd you—” Hempstead's about to ask how the man got a pistol onto the base, but then he realizes: Stan's CIA. The gun-free zone applies to army, DOJ, but not intelligence officers. “Stan. You don't want to do this.”

Stan's face stretches into a rigor mortis smile. His eyes go momentarily unfocused. “The gods did flee, David.”

Then he pulls the trigger.

The Surgeons—that's what Typhon calls them—are waiting nearby. Two of them this time, though Typhon has more. Men and women. Medical professionals, once.

The back of the gray van nearby pops open and they emerge: a tall man and a shorter, squatter one. The first the shape of a crooked stick, the second built like a toad on a bowling ball. Each in white coats and full black face masks.

Hempstead's already down. The tranquilizer dart stuck in his neck is already doing its job. The two Surgeons look at him, then to Stan, and Stan gives the nod.

He doesn't even need to do that.
Nod
. They're connected, the three of them. And not just those three—but a whole network of voices, the Bestowers and the Bestowed, all the children of Typhon. He merely needs to think:
This is the one
, and they know, instantly, that he means Hempstead.

They grab the man, haul him into the van, and the door slams.

They will do to Hempstead what they did to Stan. As they and the other Surgeons have done to so many now.

They will strap him, facedown, onto a table. They will use a wide-bore drill to open an aperture in the back of the skull. One will stitch electrostatic pads under the scalp and hairline while the other feeds a wire from the back of his head into the head of the “patient.” That will upload Typhon into the patient's mind.

Then Hempstead will be brought back online. Reprogrammed and rewritten. Still himself, at least in part, because Typhon will allow him that. For now.

He'll just be made to serve. Service, Stan thinks, is the greatest glory. This time, to something far bigger than just a government. Now it's to the people of the government, to the ideals of those people, to the whole country. Glory in obligation.

This takes a bit of time. Hempstead won't be brought online in time
to get the drones back in the air—which is regrettable. But he'll be one more piece of the puzzle. One more hand in service to Typhon. She has the networks of this country bound and knotted around her fingers, and soon she will have the people, too.

Inside the van, Stan hears the sharp, acid whine of the drill.

He smiles.

WADE'S RANCH, OUTSIDE RIVERTON, WYOMING

F
ading smoke hangs over everything.

The front end of the pickup is shrapnel blown, like a coffee can exploded by a shotgun blast. The Duster is okay, except for all the bullet holes.

The grass is scorched. Fingers of char radiate out from a crater.

“Guys,” DeAndre says. But no one hears him. They're busy—understandably so—checking each other over for injuries, talking, defraying all the panic and adrenaline. Wade goes inside and gets Reagan a towel for her face. Aleena's shaking and so is Chance, and those two are over by the hood of the Duster, holding each other. Rosa is pacing like a pissed-off barn cat. Turns out, the bullet she took rode her scalp like a Jet Ski—carved a furrow across her skull but left her alive to tell the tale. Her hair is matted to her head with blood. Makes her look like someone who rose from the dead to get vengeance on her killer. Which, in a way, is maybe true.

The last is the one newest to their crew: Agent Hollis Copper. Who lies on the hood of the Duster groaning like he's just been put through the wringer.

But DeAndre, he's still got a lot of that crazy
holy-shit-I'm-gonna-die
juice coursing through him like a stampede of skittish horses. So he's been off on his own, pacing, kicking stones, trying not to cry out and scream and laugh and act like a total weirdo. Plus, he's seen horror movies. He knows the bad slasher motherfuckers
always
get back up again. Next thing you know, Freddy's standing right behind you with his wiggly knife-fingers, then he says some scary-jokey shit and sticks those pointy-ass murder-digits right through your heart because you thought you were safe, dummy.

With that in mind, DeAndre went back over to look at the dead boogeyman. He's glad he did, because
boogeyman ain't dead
.

The scar-faced Lurch-shaped Terminator is lying there, faceup. Eyes look dead, glassy. Blood rims his nose, gathers in crusted pockets at the corners of his lips. His whole front is a slick red vest, darkening to brown and black.

But there's a little moth-wing flutter in the well of the man's throat. A pulse. And the chest is rising and falling: short, shallow breaths.

“Guys,”
DeAndre says, this time more insistent.

Copper slides off the hood, eyebrows perked. Chance and Aleena come over, too. Aleena asks, “Are you okay?”

“It's not me. It's
him
.” DeAndre kicks the boogeyman's boot. “Dude ain't dead.”

Rosa marches over, pistol in hand. “He is now.” She points it.

“Wait-wait-wait!” Reagan says, waving her one hand. (The other holds a bloody towel to the one half of her face.) “Roll him over. I see something.”

Rosa looks to Wade. Wade nods. She puts away the gun and curses.

Chance and DeAndre give each other a shrug, then together they reach down and turn over the body. As they do, Hollis kicks away the SCAR rifle that the creepy bastard was carrying all along.

“Holy shitting shit,” Reagan says.

“Motherfucker
is
a Terminator,” DeAndre says.

Even Hollis looks stunned.

There, at the base of the body's neck, is a round metal ring. A port of some kind. Inside it is some kind of . . . DeAndre reaches down. There's a cable in there, a cable that ends in some kind of claw.

The claw snaps shut on his thumb. He screams. Starts trying to rip the thing out at the base.

Reagan clamps down on his wrist. “Stop.
Stop
. Hold still.” She gets under there with her thumb, pops the metal claw, then lets it go. It retracts back into the skull, clicking and snapping like a spider's chelicerae.

Beads of blood balloon from little puncture wounds around DeAndre's thumb tip. He growls, shakes his hand, flecking blood in the grenade-charred grass.

“Cabin,” Copper says. “Now.”

Wade has their back to them all, then suddenly he's turning and thrusting the Ruger up in Hollis Copper's face.

“Whoa,” Copper says, hands out and up.

“Yeah, what the hell?” Chance asks, stepping in and tilting the barrel of Wade's rifle away from Copper. “Wade, think about what you're doing—”

“I am thinking, Chance. What I'm thinking is, outside right now we got a goddamn fucking
robot-man
on the ground like something out of a science fiction story. We've seen weird shit, but this qualifies as the tippy-fucking-top of Weird Shit Mountain. Stuff like this makes all the conspiracy theories—Bilderbergs, MK-ULTRA, 9/11 as an inside job—look like tales you tell at Sunday school. So how do we know Hollis Copper is on the up-and-up? How do we know
he's
not compromised?”

“Jesus Crispy Pork Cracklings Christ,” Reagan says. “Even
I'm
inclined to agree with your crazypants assessment, Wade. Hollis—your appearance here is
awful
convenient, isn't it?”

“Oh yeah, sure,” Hollis says. “Real convenient. Moment I pull down your driveway I get shot up, blown up, and now I get a gun in my face. This is so convenient it might as well be a delicious Slurpee from 7-Eleven.”

Wade sniffs, looks over to Copper. “You gonna tell us how you're still alive?”

Hollis shrugs, eyes wide on the barrel of that Mini-14. “Got shot. Ended up in the hospital. Ken Golathan—who hasn't been seen since that day—came in and was way too buddy-buddy with me, which told me he was sending a very clear message: get the fuck out. I suspect they were planning on killing me, so I pulled out all my tubes and
all those sticky electrode things, which sent the machines haywire. Nurses came in with one NSA spook—I choked him unconscious with some medical tubing, took his gun, shot a second spook in the leg, then got way the fuck out of there. My legs were like noodles and it felt like I was breathing through a bundle of fiberglass insulation, but I managed to get clear. I still got people in the Bureau I can trust. Been staying with friends on the inside for the last month or so, trying to find you sorry sad sacks.”

“Why us?” Aleena asks.

“You're the only people who have survived long enough to make any sense of all this. I'm on the inside of it, but I'm still outside. I thought Typhon was just some computer program, something maybe a little smarter than the average bear—government's been trying to figure out surveillance and predictive technology for a good while now. I guessed that this was just the next baby step forward. I didn't know it was bigger than that. I
still
don't know what it is we're dealing with.”

“Better question,” Wade says, “is
how
did you find us?”

“I found you once,” Hollis says, shrugging. “I know about all your bolt-holes, Earthman.”

“And how come Typhon doesn't know?”

“I'd say she figured it out. But I don't think that one's on me. I kept all my notes on you either on paper or”—he taps his temple—“up here.”

“If she found us, it's our fault,” Chance says. “Going into town and all that.”

Hollis says: “So, we good here?” He cranes his neck, pokes at the spot where the top of his spine meets his skull. “Can you put down the gun?”

“No robo,” Reagan says.

Wade lowers the gun. Cheeks puff out as he lets the tension go in an exasperated sigh. “You're good.”

“Well, I'm not
good
. Time for the obligatory
I'm too old for this shit
.”

“Me, too, Copper. Me, too.”

Chance asks, “What the hell are we gonna do? We can't just sit back now. Can't just go our separate ways. Can we?”

“Running might be your best bet,” Hollis says.

“I'm not running,” says DeAndre. He clucks his tongue. “Hunh-nnh. No way. Running means getting chased by one of those things.”

“Me neither,” Reagan says. “I'm in. Though with what, I have no idea.”

“I know,” Aleena says. “I know what we do.”

“Don't keep us in suspense,” Rosa growls. “I'm still bleeding, little girl.”

“We hack his brain.”

Nobody knows what to say to that, it seems. Except Wade. Wade's grin gets only bigger. “That's right,” he says. “We hack his brain. That's genius. Whatever that cable is that sticks into his head—we can tap that like we're tapping a maple for syrup. Old Scarface out there is our key.”

Chance says: “Now we just need to find the door.”

“I know one door,” DeAndre says. “And it sits on a desktop computer somewhere in the middle of Bumblenuts, West Virginia. Anybody up for a road trip?”

Outside, Reagan is the one who kicks off the deed.

She does it because, let's be honest, she likes trolling. Lying is her thing. Fucking with people's perceptions is basically how magic works. Make them think one thing. They act on bad information. The magician wins. Trolling is like magic.

At her feet, the creep is still alive. So Reagan says to everyone and no one: “I think this ups the timetable. This is it, guys. Game over. I'm getting the hell out of Dodge. We all have our marching orders?”

DeAndre nods. “I'm headed to Mexico, bitches. Get my drink on Puerto Vallarta style. Margaritas, fish tacos, and no creepy NSA intelligence network.”

“Forget the margarita, get a Paloma,” Rosa says. She puckers her lips and kisses the air. “Sweet and sour. But your choice. Wade and I will be somewhere we can hide. Mexico City. If ever there is a place in which to get lost—that is it.”

Chance looks to Aleena. “Should we tell them?”

“I've got a cousin in San Francisco. Going to catch a boat there. He works on a cruise ship and I think we can sneak on board.”

Then it's Reagan who finishes off the lie: “Rest in peace, Agent Copper. Sorry this robot asshole made you dead.”

Hollis sits down inside the cabin. He hurts all over.

Chance comes in, a weary smile on his face. “We're alive.”

“I'm not sure I feel much like it.”

“Sorry.”

“No, forget it. I'm being ungrateful. You saved me, Dalton. More than once in a span of minutes. I owe you for that.”

Chance shrugs. “You brought me a Plymouth Duster. That makes up for it.” He raises an eyebrow. “Why'd you bring that, anyway?”

“I know Typhon has a lot of eyes and I figured I'd better drive something that has no way, no how when it comes to connecting to the damn Internet. Besides, I thought you might
appreciate
a car like that.”

“You ain't wrong there.”

“You guys really going at this thing?”

“I think so.”

“Why?”

“Seems the right thing to do.”

Hollis narrows his eyes. “Still the Boy Scout, huh?”

“Naw. I'm no Boy Scout. Boy Scout does the right thing because it's the right thing. I dug a hole with an ugly shovel and now I'm trying to fill it in with good dirt.”