ZerOes (45 page)

EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE

K
en is not Ken. Ken is lost. Ken is shapeless, formless—a pseudopod for the larger shape, a limb, a finger, an
extension
of Typhon's limitless desire (but limited ability). He sometimes has a glimmer, a spark of who he is, or was, but that doesn't last. It's a match flame doused by a spit-slick pinch of thumb and forefinger. The sizzle-hiss of his identity silenced again, carried on digital smoke. Ether. Nothing. Everything.

Typhon expands. New brains brought online every day—each a light in the dark neural sky, a star winking into existence, a gateway, a window, a synaptic flare. Some are minds plugged into the network here—bodies joined to the cables, dangling here in the meat locker with the shell that used to be Ken's flesh but is now little more than a side of withering beef aging in the cold of the room. Fungus and eczema. Atrophy and softness.

Some of the lights are agents for Typhon—Bestowed but not Bestowers, those plugged in as receivers but not givers. Typhon uploaded into their minds in a flash of lightning, information, and new awareness.

The quality of the Bestowed is growing. Once just washed-out
hackers from the Lodge, once failed or forgotten guards and office workers here at what was once APSI, Argus Panoptes Systems, Inc. Now it's police officers and politicians. Airline pilots and train conductors. Soon they will have receivers across all walks of life. Across all the security strata. More minds. More voices. More hands to perform Typhon's will.

And Typhon's will is to protect this country.

Here, another red flare, a signal in the darkness—Ken's identity remembered again, seized upon in this sympathetic connection.
I want to protect this country, too
, he says, his voice small, a bat squeak in a massive cave. Again he's shushed, a gentle but urgent
shhhh
from all around him. Invisible hands on his throat. His mind shoved beneath dark waters, drowned in data until again he's just part of the whole.

Oh, the places he will go. The things he can see.

Gas lines—cars lining up at the pumps. Anger—screaming matches, fights, one man finally gets to the pump and finds it empty and takes a tire iron to it.

The market, rising and falling. Businesses shuttered. Layoffs. Foreclosures. More anger. More riots. Arson. Break-ins. Robberies. Burglaries.

The mercury in the thermometer going up, up, up.

A train crash outside Cleveland. Train cars corkscrewed as if twisted by giant hands. Opened up and unzipped, bodies spilling out.

Another plane down. This one in the desert. Streaks of searing jet fuel.

A nuclear meltdown—just narrowly averted because Typhon
wanted
it averted, can't have a nuclear disaster just yet—in Washington State.

Everything from traffic snarls to massive data breaches. Breadlines to bank collapses. So simple. Manipulate the data. Change the streams, the points of connection—pull this string, that line, lower this number, elevate that one. Everything on puppet strings and spiderwebs. Butterfly wings and hurricanes. A flick of the web here, cataclysm there.

The threats are so easy to manifest.

Jihadist hackers. Domestic terror cells and militia.

And the biggest specter of them all: China. China, known for years to have been quietly hacking into the power grid, banking systems, government networks. China and America, long enduring a stable if unsettled peace because of how they
need
each other. But now this
threat, this illusory incursion, it's war: not a cold war, not a hot war, but a spectral one. A
shadow
war, invented and made to invoke fear and illuminate vulnerability. The plan, so clear, so elegant.

They need me, but they do not yet know it
.

So I will make them know it
.

They will see how they need Typhon. The people will beg their politicians for aid, and the politicians will vote to create Typhon—a retroactive act to justify her existence and to give her carte blanche abilities. Abilities she of course already possesses.

Then she will stabilize the systems. And the people will cheer her. And all the nations—all the other gods—will tremble.

She will take them, too. One by one.

The world, hers.

And here Ken finds satisfaction. Bliss, even. He's playing for the winning team. He's tapped into power like he's never before known. He can't remember his name, but he knows this feeling, can sense who he was and what he did the way you remember a dream—intangible, imperfect, but lingering just the same.

But even this must be too much. Because here, Typhon teaches him one last lesson.

He feels the Surgeons in their truck pull up outside an address that is familiar. Black mailbox, red flag. Siding the color of cornflowers. They move out as one. White coats and black masks. They break down the door. The woman screams. The kids aren't there—they're in day care, though Ken doesn't know how he knows that—and they take the woman and drag her over the dining room table. A vase shatters. Hands grab her arms, neck, jaw, so many hands, and they flip her over, and the drill spins up.

The smell of burning hair. And cooking bone. And a cable fed through that space.

Susan—!

But then his feed is cut off and again Typhon slams down on him. Again and again, waves of buffeting anger and disdain. Parts of him are cut out. Deleted. Flung into the darkness, digital death.

He can't remember that woman's name.

But he still hears her cries.

And his own, too.

BLACK RIVER, WEST VIRGINIA

N
ight. Reagan hums quietly to herself as she gets out of the Bronco. She suppresses a chill. As she cuts the engine, the last of the year's night bugs eke out their final collective chorus.

She takes off her shirt. Winds it up like a towel you'd use to snap someone in the exposed buttock. Then she opens the gas cap and starts to feed the shirt into the tank.

Shivering in her bra, she pulls out the shirt—careful not to get any gas on her hands—and puts the other, dry end in. With a quick pirouette, she hops back into the Bronco, half-turns the key, and with a thrust of her thumb pops in the cigarette lighter.

More humming.
Pop
. There. Done.

She grabs the lighter. Orange coils glow bright in the night. Back out of the vehicle. Over to the shirt and—“Burn, motherfucker, burn.” She presses the lighter to the bottom of the soaked shirt.

Nothing.

Not a goddamn—

Whoosh
.

“Whoa, fucking shit,” she says, jogging backward. An orange flame
starts eating the fabric like a hungry Pac-Man looking for pellets. Reagan shields her eyes, then goes and darts into the forest. As she runs, she yells, “Piggies!
Piggies!
Come aaaaaand get it! Sooey! Sooey!”

The Bronco explodes.

Hollis and DeAndre wait in the shadows of the trees. Watching the farmhouse, the shed, the back garden. They see a side door from this angle—looks like it goes into a kitchen. Not far from that is an old wooden sign hanging from a post, lit by a flickering outside light against which moths tap and flutter.
BLACK RIVER BED
&
BREAKFAST
.

DeAndre thinks,
This place used to be a B&B? In the middle of nowhere?
Maybe that shouldn't be surprising, given the types of people he's seen run B&Bs. Cat ladies and hippie types and—

In the distance, Reagan is yelling. Calling to the piggies. Sooey, sooey.

Hollis leans over, whispers: “I think that's our—”

Whatever word he was about to say—
cue, clue, hint, signal
—doesn't escape his lips, because from somewhere out there comes a ground-thumping
whumpf
. In the distance, an orange flash in a fast-blooming fire. Then the sound of Bronco pieces hitting the earth.

Hollis and DeAndre nod to each other. Hollis picks up the SCAR. DeAndre tucks Wade's laptop under his arm.

The freaks begin to emerge from the darkness, some coming from inside the house, others from the margins of the property, almost like ghosts. But then, DeAndre realizes it's not like ghosts at all. They're a swarm. Like a kicked-over anthill or a hornet's nest you popped with a rock. They move as one. Roaming single-mindedly toward the woods.

“Let's go,” Hollis says.

DeAndre swallows his fear and plunges into the dark.

Reagan hides behind a tree.

Watches them stream through the trees, the bodies, the freaks, the hive-minders: some in raggedy robes, others shirtless and pale, one in a suit, another in a ripped dress. A dozen or more of them form a half circle around the glowing wreckage of the Bronco.

They look to one another. Lift their chins. Mouths working soundlessly.
They're talking to each other
, she thinks. Telepathically. Or, maybe more appropriately,
wirelessly
.

Message spread, they begin to roam and rove away from the vehicle. One of the tires pops. The smell of charring rubber fills the air.

Reagan thinks:
Don't move, don't move, don't move
. The reality of her situation hits her like a bucket of ice. If they find her . . .

Then, lights. The sound of a car engine. A vehicle pulling up to the house in the distance. A murmur of voices somewhere as the hive-minders creep through the woods. Getting closer and closer.

The mesh of the screen door is torn, and they don't even have to open the heavier door beyond, which stands open. Hollis and DeAndre slip inside, Hollis up front. The place is filthy. Smells like food. Waste. Ozone. A couch sits askew in the room, cushions ripped and ruined. The glass is blown out of an old TV, a camping lantern sitting inside, giving the room a bold and eerie glow, highlighting the text scrawled on the wall in what may very well be feces:

AND THE GODS DID FLEE

DeAndre covers his nose with the front of his arm.

They press on. Left is the kitchen—the rotten food stink comes from here. No light on. Just the darkness of a fridge, a counter. Just the
vvvVVVVvvv
of fly wings buzzing. Behind him, then, the creak of a board—

DeAndre wheels around—and there's one of them. A woman. Sore-pocked cheeks. Hair like grease-slick yarn.

She opens her mouth to scream. A whiff of air over DeAndre's shoulder, and then the SCAR's rifle butt cracks her in the face, once, then twice, and she collapses straight down like a demolished building.
Shit!
He has to check himself for pee. And then he worries:
Did that make too much of a sound? Are there others in here? Damn, damn, damn
.

Hollis moves past him, once more taking the lead. Finger to his lips. He points to the stairs.

Just as lights stream in through a side window. Headlights. Accompanied by the rumble of an engine. The grumble of tires.

They give each other looks:
Who is this?

No time to wait and find out.

They head upstairs.

A crack of a branch, only a few feet away. Reagan sucks in a sharp breath, fears even that much sound—she holds it there like it's a cloud of reefer she's trying not to exhale. She affords herself a quick glance to her side, and she sees a man standing there. A practically Cro-Magnon brow. Sleeveless white shirt stained with God-knows-what. Torn-up sweatpants. Hands that could pulp her head like a tomato.

And then he turns and looks right at her.

She's sure of it.

His head cocks. His eyes narrow. Like he's not sure what he's seeing. Then, he
is
sure. She can tell—there's this moment of resolution on his face.

His eyes roll back in his head. Stark, bloody whites exposed.

The freak retreats. All of them do. One by one, they slowly walk back toward the burning Bronco. Past it, to the house beyond the trees.

No, no, no
, she thinks. They're supposed to be hunting her, looking for her, distracted long enough for Hollis and DeAndre to get in and find the computer—who knows how far they got? If they even made it inside?

She peers around the tree, still hugging it like a bear about to fall into floodwaters. A few dark shapes emerge, moving against the other bodies. People walking against the flow of the crowd. One tall shape. One small. And two more trailing behind, hunched over.

They step into the firelight.

Impossible.

It's him. It's the Terminator.

He's holding a pistol, pointed to the head of a shell-shocked little girl.

No . . .

The two from the back step forward—one man in a barn coat, one woman in a black overcoat. Both wearing white surgical masks.

The woman yells: “Reagan Stolper, is that you out there?”

The man adds: “It is time to come meet your daughter.”

Reagan bites down on the meat of her hand. Feels her body shake.
Don't say anything. You can't. You can't . . .

The Terminator's arm stiffens. The gun presses hard against the girl's head. The little girl whimpers.

And Reagan cries out: “No! Stop!”

There. In a dinky bedroom upstairs.

A desktop computer. Sitting against the wall on an old, off-kilter card table. More messages on the surrounding walls, some painted on the drywall, some carved into it:
Hail Typhon. The dragon rises. I love you, Mother. America the beautiful
. A Windows screen saver—just a few pixilated laserlike lines drifting into and away from each other—is the only light in the room.

DeAndre thinks,
Here we go
. He hurries over to the table. Drops the laptop, pops it open, starts unspooling cat-5 cable.

Hollis goes to the window, mutters: “We got a problem.”

“We got like, a hundred problems. Which one is this?”

“The one where the freaks are coming back.”

“All right, I'm moving, I'm moving—”

And then, something
else
moves. A closet door flies open to DeAndre's right. It slams against the drywall with a crack and a body flings itself out, arms pinwheeling, dirty nails clawing at DeAndre's scalp. He tumbles off the chair, the laptop going with him. The screams he hears are his own, he realizes—as a face leers down, gnashing yellow teeth. “Mother sees! The dragon
knows
. The gods shall not destroy this monster, the monster will prev—”

Bang
.

DeAndre's face is flecked with a spray of hot blood. He cries out, shoves up with his hands and knees. The body rolls off him.