Zero State

by Jameson Kowalczyk

  A pickup truck was parked at one end of the road, the engine idling.

  Logan stared at it a moment, questioning whether the dirty plume of diesel exhaust was some trick of the eye. Then someone emerged from one of the buildings. The person was dressed in a hazmat suit, similar to his, but white instead of camouflage, and without the exterior layer of body armor.

  "Logan…" Zoe said, but she didn't finish the thought. She was seeing what he was seeing, watching the feed from the small camera at the brow of his faceplate.

  The countdown showed 33:03.

  He waited. Three more people in hazmat suits emerged. One was carrying a rifle. The tip of the weapon's barrel glowed pilot-light blue, and it was another second before Logan saw the fuel tank on the figure's back and realized that the weapon was a flamethrower.

  Two others were carrying a coffin-sized pod, similar to the empty one he'd found at the crash site, similar to the one that was strapped to the back of the mule. Only this pod wasn't empty. A red hand pressed against the inside of the transparent dome, smearing it with blood.

  Logan spoke into the comm line. "I count four total, plus the guy in the pod."

  "Same," Zoe said, her voice tense.

  "Wait here," he whispered.

  He moved off the road and into the cover of trees, leaving the mule behind. The jungle grew all the way to the outer walls of the village, branches and roots pressing against and between the long-forgotten buildings. He moved into a narrow alley, leading with the rifle, stepping over a rusted air conditioning unit that had fallen from a window.

  Logan crossed a muddy side street to another row of shacks. He had lost sight of the body and the four figures in hazmat suits. The buildings here were built a few feet above the ground, each standing on short stilts with a space dug out underneath to give water a place to run during heavy rains.

  Logan went prone and crawled underneath one of the shacks. Short sections of pipe were wedged into the sides of the ditch, a simple drainage system. A few inches of stagnant water were pooled at the center. Mosquitoes clouded the air.

  He slithered forward, pushing himself across the muddy ground with his knees and elbows. At the front of the shack, he was eye level with the truck's tires and the knees of the four people that were here to do the same job he was. The pod containing the infected body was already on the bed of the pickup.

  He whispered to Zoe, "Any intelligence that says these are U.S. government, or CDC?"

  "No."

  Three of the hazmat-suited figures were carrying heavy machine guns. The fourth, a flamethrower. In the bed of the pickup, the red hand continued a steady beat against the shatter-proof glass.

  "Twenty-nine minutes, Logan."

  Less time than that. They were getting ready to leave. They were doing one last sweep of the village before they went.

  Maybe looking for another survivor from the plane crash, someone who might have helped the cargo walk here. Two infected bodies would be better than one.

  "Logan..."

  Zoe wanted him to walk away. At the same time she knew it was far too late for that. Everything they were seeing was being recorded and would be reviewed by their employers. Situations like this were the reason they hired Logan, the reason they gave him a gun.

  "Get close. Be ready to move," he said.

  "Moving. What are you going to do?"

  "Just be close, be ready."

  For the second time since arriving on the island, Logan switched the magazine on his assault rifle to one loaded with explosive rounds. He pointed the barrel through the open space between the ground and the bottom of the shack, steadied his aim, and fired a three-round burst into the tank of the flamethrower.

  It was like the birth of a small star. In a fraction of a second the fireball swelled to the width of the street, incinerating the flamethrower's carrier and swallowing one of the other hazmat-suited figures.

  Leaving two.

  Logan's next target barely had time to turn toward the fireball before it was hit in the back with a half-dozen rounds and the white torso of its suit burst apart in a spray of blood and mulched tissue.

  Logan rolled down into the center of the drainage ditch as the wooden structure above was turned to splinters by machine gun fire.

  The shooter thought Logan was inside the shack. Logan hadn't been spotted. The shooter was only approximating where the shots had come from.

  The gunfire paused and moved on to the neighboring shack. Zoe said something but the words were lost in the cannonade. Logan crawled out the way he'd come in, emerging onto the muddy side street.

  The gunfire stopped, and Logan knew the shooter was going for the driver's seat of the truck. It's what he would do. Empty a magazine to buy himself a few seconds, grab what he was here for, and run. Leave the asshole who'd just shot his friends to be obliterated in the imminent bombing.

  Logan stomped mud as he ran parallel to the town's main road, glancing down alleyways over his gun sights, moving toward the truck.

  As he neared the edge of the village, he cut through a narrow alley and onto the main road. And almost immediately he pulled the trigger. The shooter was at the driver's side door of the pickup, one leg already inside. The explosive impact of the rounds ripped the door from its hinges and painted the side of the vehicle with blood. The shooter's body tumbled away.

  Logan reloaded.

  He was checking the bed of the pickup, confirming the presence of the body inside the pod, when pain slammed through his ribcage. He hit the mud ten feet away from where he'd been standing. His rifle was gone from his hands. He struggled to pull air into his lungs.

  In a career that had spanned two decades, Logan had been shot with a dozen different firearms. He'd had grenades and mines detonate mere steps from his body. He'd survived car wrecks and mortar fire. But whatever had struck him just now hit harder than anything in his past. His body armor—designed to take a point-blank shotgun blast—absorbed and dispersed most of the force, saving him from ruptured organs and a broken spine.

  He tried to stand, made it halfway, and was lifted off the ground. For a second, he was face to face with his opponent. It was a female face. Pale skin, blunt features, eyes like swamp water. Her faceplate was half-melted and her suit's outer layer was streaked with black burns. Logan realized she was the shooter that had been standing near the guy with the flamethrower, and then he was airborne.

  His hurtling body smashed through the wall of a shack. Boards splintered. He landed on the floor inside, expecting his faceplate to start flashing red, telling him that his suit had been punctured, ruptured, compromised. But the man-sized pressurized environment was still intact and he was still inside it.

  He tasted blood. There was a knife of pain in his right lung. The countdown at the edge of his vision read 22:09 and he thought, I'm not even going to live that long.

  He lifted his head toward the splintered wall. The female was walking toward him, a few meters away from the edge of the shack.

  All Logan could think was: She threw me that far?

  The Remote-Operated Rough Terrain Mule had been clocked at a maximum speed of 53.7 miles per hour, and Zoe must have had it running at or near that speed when it collided with the female.

  The charred hazmat suit crumpled against the metal mule and rag-dolled out of sight.

  There was no moment to celebrate.

  Logan stumbled out of the shack. "Taking the truck," he half barked, half coughed. Blood flecked the inside of his faceplate.

  He got in behind the wheel, shifted into drive, and U-turned, flooring the gas pedal. The tires struggled for grip on the muddy, unpaved surface. In another moment, the truck was out of the village and tearing up the narrow road, branches beating the roof and sides, the engine straining. The mule ran ahead, Zoe leading the way to the extraction.

  Logan's head was fogged with concussion and it was a full minute before his mind processed the flicker of movement h
e'd glimpsed in the rearview mirror just before the village fell out of sight—a hazmat suit, streaked with black burns, picking itself up off the ground.

  ***

  The countdown read: 8:55, 8:54, 8:53.

  The heavy shadows of the jungle gave way to sunlight and a view of the ocean. The waypoint was 400m away. The truck slowed as Logan drove off the dirt road and onto sand.

  7:01.

  He was no longer following the mule, no longer looking at the waypoint. The watercraft was visible up ahead, waiting at the water's edge.

  4:59.

  Pain burned Logan's ribs as he dragged the pod off the truck bed. Thirty seconds of work with a chemtorch opened the encapsulation. Weak, bloody hands gripped his armored sleeves as he lifted the body. It fell unconscious or died as he moved it from one coffin into another.

  –1:04.

  The mule and truck were left behind on the beach. Logan piloted the small boat over the surf and onto the flat blue ocean and then pushed the throttle forward. He didn't look back, didn't look up from the dashboard's instruments as he picked up speed.

  –9:09.

  He was four miles out from the island's shore when the first bomb hit. There was no boom or heat wave, just the distant concussion, a vibration he felt in his organs and bones. Followed by another, and another, and another. He eased off the speed and let the boat coast. He'd seen antimatter bombings before, but never at this scale.

  With each impact a piece of the landmass was erased, as miles of dense jungle and steep mountains and white beach were blown apart at the molecular level. The island seemed to collapse in on itself, not unlike the controlled demolition of a building.

  He thought about how antimatter worked. It wasn't true antimatter, not the kind thought up by theoretical physicists. This stuff worked by causing a chain reaction in any matter it came in contract with, rearranging molecules into a kind of gray goo. It had gotten the name "antimatter" from a marketing team.

  More bombs fell, deleting the island from the map, and when it was over all that remained were mushroom clouds of gray particles that turned to silt as they settled into the ocean.

  On the floor of the small boat, a hand smacked the clear lid of the coffin, leaving a bloody smear on the inside of the shatterproof glass.

  CHAPTER 3

  Adrenaline faded, and Logan fought to stay awake as he waited to be collected from the open blue ocean that was now more open than it had been a few minutes earlier. Zoe was offline, though he hadn't noticed when she'd signed off. A text message at the bottom of his faceplate read:

  Call me when you’re back, let me know you’re safe. -Z

  He knew she was still monitoring his vital signs, knew she would be for as long as he was sealed inside the suit, which he hoped wouldn't be much longer.

  A helicopter arrived and a claw-like device descended from its underside and latched onto the roof of the watercraft. Logan strapped himself into a seat as the boat was lifted off the water. He spent the forty-five minute return flight trying not to throw up inside his helmet.

  Upon arrival at the airfield, he remained in his seat as the boat was washed inside and out with chemicals and water sprayed through high-pressure hoses.

  The coffin-pod was removed by two company men in hazmat suits. Logan would never see the pod or its occupant again.

  He was permitted to exit. More company men directed him into a hanger and a maze of plastic curtains. Logan passed through a series of showers, eventually arriving at a kind of decompression chamber. Before entering, he removed the suit and the rest of his gear and placed it inside an orange barrel marked with a biohazard symbol.

  Naked and locked inside the chamber, Logan stretched out on what was either a wide bench or a cot with no mattress. The right side of his torso was bruised, with the impression of a boot's tread clearly visible amid the broken blood vessels. The rest of his body ached. He picked dried blood from his nostrils.

  Hours passed. He dozed for a few minutes at a time. His body was ripe from its time inside the suit. He wanted a shower.

  Logan watched through a round porthole on the chamber door. More company men in hazmat suits sealed the orange barrel containing his gear and wheeled it away on a hand truck. Others disassembled the maze of plastic curtains and showers. He'd seen an industrial-sized incinerator in one of the hangers the day before, and he imagined the materials were headed there—he imagined he'd be headed there too if he were showing any signs of infection. He watched the company men work and thought about the other moving parts of this operation, the parts he could see, the parts he couldn't see.

  He was left alone. Time passed, with no way for him to measure the minutes or hours. Eventually, a voice from an overhead speaker ordered him to take a blood test. There was a kit under the bench. Logan already knew the results would be negative. The bright side of a disease that caused you to hemorrhage from the eyes and nose and ass within two hours of infection—it didn't leave you wondering. At least not for very long.

  Two company men released him from the isolation chamber and took him to a medic. The medic aimed a flashlight into his eyes and asked him simple questions.

  "What year is it?"

  Logan gave the year.

  "Month?"

  Logan said the month.

  "Who is President of the United States?"

  Logan answered.

  "Count backwards from ten."

  Logan did as he was told.

  "How do you feel?"

  "Tired."

  The medic examined the rest of him.

  "Mild concussion—it looks like your suit and helmet did what they were designed to do. Your ribs are bruised, maybe fractured. I'm going to give you an injection to accelerate healing. Have you ever had an allergic reaction to a healing accelerant or any other medications?"

  "No."

  The injection felt like a piece of hot iron against his ribs, but within a minute, the pain began to fade. The medic recommended rest and Logan was happy to follow the advice.

  He shielded his eyes from the sun as he walked back to the barracks where he'd spent most of the past two days. There were no company men to escort him this time, he was free to roam. There was no debriefing. Any questions his employers had would be answered by audio and video recordings. And there wasn't much need for discussion—despite a few complications, the job was done. They had what they wanted.

  He was too tired to replay the day's events in his mind, or to speculate about who or what had tried to kill him.

  He showered in a tile room meant to accommodate a dozen bodies. He drank a bottle of water and ate an energy bar, and then collapsed onto his cot. There was no pain in his ribs now, only numbness.

  CHAPTER 4

  He dreamt of Zoe.

  In his dream, she was a voice in the dark, whispering to him as her hands explored his body and guided him inside her mouth. This was not the first time he'd had such a dream. Her voice was the only part of her familiar to him. He had never been in her presence. He had never even seen a photo.

  Before the sensations of dream-Zoe intensified enough to rouse him from sleep, the darkness and her pleasure gave way to a different dream. He was being lifted from the ground. He looked down at a white face inside a half-melted helmet. The face was square and generic and devoid of any emotion. The eyes seemed not to be thinking but processing. He wondered if she had a voice and what it sounded like, and also how she was lifting him with such ease.

  His body hurtled through the air, thrown, and he woke before he crashed into a wall of boards that would splinter on impact.

  He jolted upright on the cot, inside the empty barracks.

  For a moment or two he just lay there, in the dark, thinking that he weighed 185 pounds and with the weight of the armored hazmat suit, the guns, ammo, and gear, he was pushing 250. And his female opponent had thrown him as if he weighed no more than a child.

  How many fights had he been i
n? How many hours had he spent sparring and grappling? How many men and women had he seen perform feats of strength in gyms and on battlefields? Had he ever encountered anyone that strong?

  The armored shell of his suit was designed to absorb a point-blank shotgun blast. He'd worn this type of armor before and had this ability tested firsthand. The shotgun blast had barely left a mark. The boot that had struck his side had left an impression of its treads on his ribs. And this was after she'd been knocked flat by the exploding flamethrower.

  It occurred to Logan that she was not human. He'd been hearing about that kind of thing for years. Soldiers grown in vats. Or woman-born men so heavily modified by science that they would rightfully fall on a different stage of human evolution. Children raised on steroids and growth hormones and trained in simulated heavy gravity.

  He thought of the female's face and its blunt, brutish features. He thought of what it felt like to be thrown through the wall of that shack. He thought of the robotic mule sweeping her away at over fifty miles per hour and that instant of movement he'd caught in the rearview mirror. A half-ton moving at over fifty miles per hour and she'd stood up afterward.

  Zoe had saved his life. He'd known this all afternoon but it was only now that he put the knowledge into words.

  He found his phone and typed out a short message:

  Awake. Alive. Clean. Thank you.

  And he felt awkward pushing SEND, thinking of his dream and her smoky voice urging him into her throat.

  A response arrived ten seconds later. He held his thumb to his phone's touchscreen to decrypt it:

  Stay safe. Be in touch. I'm trying to figure out who tried to kill you.

  He found clothes—jeans, a t-shirt, boots—and tucked his phone into a pocket. He wandered outside. The sky was as cloudless as it was when he'd jumped into it twelve hours earlier. Now dark, it had revealed a brilliant map of bright stars.