ZerOes (46 page)

Hollis stands there. Rifle pointed. A sound comes out of him. Mournful. Angry. Somehow at the same time.

Downstairs there's the sound of a door slamming open. Footsteps shaking the house.

“You need to
hide
,” Hollis hisses.

Then the agent marches out of the room and begins to fire the rifle.

JERSEY CITY, NEW JERSEY

C
hance gnaws on a thumbnail. “Almost midnight. Still nothing.”

“Nope.” Wade looks down at his phone. “Phone's on. Still working.”

Aleena sighs. “Let's go to the roof. We can't stop what's about to start. Let's see if my deal with the Widow comes true.”

Across the Hudson River, Manhattan.

Aleena knows it as home. She misses it. Even just looking at it, she yearns to go back—though not like this, not under these circumstances. But to go and share a meal with her parents. Go back to Columbia, visit with professors. Get a Stumptown coffee. Grab breakfast at City Bakery. Or any one of a dozen different foods: Malaysian, Ethiopian, Moroccan, some fancy haute cuisine hot dog at that little underground dive-bar-that's-really-secretly-a-fancy-restaurant—

Really, she just wants things to be normal again.

She looks at her watch.

Midnight.

The lights go out. Manhattan goes dark from north to south. From Harlem all the way down to Tribeca. The city is all color and light—even the Empire State Building tonight is a shimmering cascade of red and orange—until it's not. Until darkness sweeps across it like something in a movie.

“Looks like the Widow made good,” Chance says.

Wade says, “And that's our cue.”

Aleena hesitates. “We haven't heard from the others yet. We don't know anything. We could wait—just a little while.”

“We don't know how long this thing lasts,” Wade says. “Power outages are tricky things. Power grids self-organize, and when that fails, it can be a cascade effect—similar to what you get with an earthquake or tremors in the financial market. This could be ten minutes or ten days. Right now, though, Typhon's eyes are blackened and her ears are plugged up. No cameras on in the city. Cell towers will be down, too.”

Chance frowns. “Hey, whoa, wait, if the cell towers are down, how's that gonna work? We need the burners.”

“These are a small carrier. Shouldn't be overwhelmed with traffic like the big boys, and there are a couple independent towers just outside the city—here in Jersey, plus Bronx, Brooklyn, and so on. We just gotta hope they still work. Whatever the case, if we move now, we can get into the city without being seen.”

“All right,” Chance says. “I think Wade's right.”

Aleena hesitates. She's afraid. What if Typhon sees her? What if Typhon has her family? She doesn't even know what Typhon is, really. And without word from the others . . .

Still. Wade is right. This is their chance.

She gives a stiff nod. “We go in now. We hope the others come through for us in time.”
We hope they're not hurt, or dead, or something worse that we don't even understand yet
. “And if not, then we're on our own.”

BLACK RIVER, WEST VIRGINIA

T
he attic is dark. Smells damp—the tang of mold, the astringent whiff of animal waste. DeAndre thinks he might very well be lying on a floor covered in squirrel piss or rat shit or—

Something moves above his head. A flutter of wings—something passes in the dark above his scalp, brushing past him. He grits his teeth. Tries not to scream. Hugs the laptop to his chest.

Focus. They're just bats. You got worse problems. Relax, Bruce Wayne
.

He peers down through the crack in the attic hatch. The same one he used to get up here when Hollis told him to run and hide.

Below: the hallway. Lights are on in the house now—a generator runs somewhere. DeAndre sees water-stained walls. Peeling paisley wallpaper. Floorboards buckling. Two of the freak shows stand by the doorway to the computer room. DeAndre still has a pistol, tucked in the back of his pants. He could go in shooting. But that didn't seem to do Hollis much good, did it?

He hasn't heard from Hollis in—well, he doesn't know how long he's even been up here. Fifteen minutes? An hour? The minutes run together like threads of melting wax. All he knows is, Hollis went out shooting. DeAndre ran. Found the hatch. Pulled it down and clambered
up as Hollis gave him time, marching down the steps,
pop, pop, pop—
and then not long after DeAndre made it up here, the gunfire stopped. Something hit the floor downstairs, hard enough to shake the house. Sometime after, he heard Reagan screaming. Then the sound of something mechanical. Like a power drill. And then she was quiet again. Everything was, except for some little girl crying somewhere.

Another bat brushes his hair. DeAndre reflexively goes to swat it away, but then stops. It hits him: bats don't just hang out in attics. They go hunting. Them flying around means they're flying in and out.

Maybe there's a way out.

Gently, slowly, he lifts himself up to his knees. Looks around, searching for any kind of variation in the shadow, any little glimpse of light—
there
. Far end of the attic. Several lines shining in, one band over the other, strata of moonlight.

His eyes adjust slowly. It's a fan. An attic fan. Kind you install to blow out the hot air that rises up, to cool the whole house down. He can't get out that way, but it's the only option he has.

With gingerly steps, he walks that direction. Around boxes. Around an old rocking horse and a dollhouse. Past boxes of Christmas decorations and an old coffeemaker and folding table. A bat flutters past him, bangs into the fan, and he sees its little dark shape wriggling out through the vent. Squeaking as it flies.

He reaches out to the fan, presses on it . . . It pops open. It's on a hinge. This is his lucky day.

He pokes his head out. Down below there's no movement in the moonlight.

The laptop. Okay. He tucks it in the back hem of his pants. Pushes it till it's snug. Then he looks out. The trim along the edge of the house is big enough for the fronts of his feet.

He eases himself down onto his belly, then goes reverse out the open space. Slides until he catches himself with his fingers. His toes touch the trim.

Nailed it.

Bursts of noise plunge into Reagan's brain like knives. The back of her head is numb. She rolls over. Winces. Her mind feels
heavy
, like there's
something else in here with her, like she's in a crowded elevator where once she was all by herself. Every time she pushes against that new presence there's more noise, more static, more shrieking and cutting and pain that shoots through her like sticking needles. But when she stops, when she lets it in, everything goes quiet, peaceful. Blooming flowers. Blue skies. A song. A woman's voice. Urging her:
Stop resisting. Begin receiving
.

Reagan's never been good at passive resistance. She pushes back, again. This time the cacophony—cars crashing, animals screaming, mirrors breaking—drives her to her knees. A steady stream of screamed words are thrust into her head with all the delicacy of a thumb pressing its way into cake icing:

                  
The gods did flee

                  
Mother has you now

                  
Receive receive receive

                  
You are Bestowed you are blessed

                  
Join the one mind

                  
Become part of something

Images and memories hit her—they're her own memories, plucked out of the meat of her mind and slapped against her—

—children running from her on the playground because she was too weird or too fat, and of course she can't catch them because no matter how much Coach Barthard tries to get her to run the mile faster she can't run fast and they outrun her easily, laughing—

                  
Receive.

—seeing her geek friends out at the movies without her because they think she's a bitch and fights with them too much about which superhero is cooler or why they don't appreciate this movie or that TV show, and Jesus, do you guys really like
Firefly
I mean c'mon Joss Whedon
isn't really God
wait where are you all going—

                  
Receive!

—sitting by herself at the computer night after night with the blue
glow of the monitor and a half-eaten pint of gelato sitting next to her as she reaches out online and finds she's not alone at all, because there are others like her, a whole tribe of people who have opinions and are too smart for gen-pop and fuck anybody who disagrees—

                  
RECEIVE.

—and then she just doesn't want to hear it anymore because the last memory is her sobbing, giving up her baby in a Target bathroom, leaving the child there in a bassinet with a bag of formula and a new blanket and a bunch of toys, all of which she
just bought
, and someone else will do better by this kid because she's not very good with other people or with love and her father certainly didn't want her to keep it but she learned about the pregnancy too late . . . God, she's like one of those girls on those shows about
pregnant and didn't know it
,
had my baby on a toilet or in a dressing room because I wasn't aware of having a baby in my belly until it was too late
, so weak, so stupid, loveless and horrible, worthless family that doesn't care about her, father who cares only about his political career, mother who cares only about her father's political career, and . . .

                  
You are a part of something now.

                  
We are all equal here.

                  
We are all Typhon.

                  
You belong here, Reagan Stolper. You have such a strong mind.

                  
Your daughter belongs here.

                  
Receive, receive, receive . . .

Reagan wants to belong to something. She wants to be loved. She wants to connect. With a great exhalation, she gives up and gives in.

DeAndre tries to tell himself:
You're a ninja. You're an assassin. A badass motherfucker who gets shit done, son. You can do this
.

He slides along the trim.

Bats dance in front of the moon. Somewhere, a dog barks.

Then he sees it. The window. Gotta belong to the bedroom where he found the computer. His fingers cling to the top margins of the trim above, his feet on the trim below, as inch by inch he creeps along.

There. The wraparound porch roof. He steps off the trim onto that.

Easier now. He takes a deep breath, then keeps going. Sidling around the edge until finally he's at the window. He tilts his too-tall body down—

Nobody in the room, though he can see the shapes of the two freaks standing just outside it. He paws gently at the window, trying to see if he can open it.

Something shifts beneath him. A faint crack.
Oh no
.
Hurry, hurry, hurry
.

He presses his hands flat against the window, tries to urge it open. The humidity causes it to stick, and when it unsticks, it does so with a
pop
.

The sound is loud. Those outside the bedroom door hear it. They pivot, hurrying into the room—a saggy-bellied man in a dirty T-shirt, an even saggier woman with a face like an inbred basset hound. Both start to scream. The man has a shotgun—

The roof beneath DeAndre cracks like a stick broken over a hard knee. The next thing he knows, he's dropping straight down through it to the porch below—a rain of boards, shattered slate, and dust streaming down with him.

The signal blooms bright in Reagan's mind. An alarm. She must protect the collective.

She gets to her feet without thinking twice. Finally she notices the room around her. A cot spattered with blood (
Your blood
, she thinks, but even that tiny independent thought is immediately crushed). A tray with tools in it. Nearby, sleeping on a foul pile of blankets, is a little girl. She recognizes this girl—

                  
Override.

                  
RECEIVE.

And recognition is lost to the static, the noise, the command. Reagan
knows what her purpose is: stop transmitting her thoughts into the void and start receiving Typhon. Give in. Give up. Let go of the noise and become part of the signal.

Beyond the girl is a man hanging by his hands from a busted pipe, his face bruised and swollen, mouth and nose caked with blood, and she thinks she knows him, too, but instantly she flinches away from that knowledge, from that memory, because even before it hits she senses the disapproval of the collective—her hair raising on her arms and her neck like lightning's about to strike her where she stands.

She heads downstairs. An intruder is here. A trespasser. Someone who would do harm to her mother.

Typhon is not your mother you dumb bit—

                  
OVERRIDE.

She draws a sharp breath, her original thought lost.

Others are moving with her, now, too—more of the Bestowed. They move downstairs as one, almost in perfect lockstep. They never bump into one another, no jostling, perfect movement without fail, and for once she feels like she truly belongs. Reagan moves with the hive.