Zero State

by Jameson Kowalczyk

  They were still standing on the driveway. Logan took his keys from his pocket and went inside. Zoe followed. The familiarity of his home barely registered.

  "I'm going to take a shower," he said, and went into the bathroom.

  His skin crawled and he stank, a mix of dried sweat and urine from when his bladder had given out during the attack with the sound grenade, and whatever filth had been in the air inside the feral city. The clothes he'd worn went into the trash. He left the lights in the bathroom dimmed, finding some primal comfort in the near dark. He turned the water on hot and stepped under it. He breathed steam, and imagined it was cleaning his lungs.

  He heard Zoe's clothes drop to the floor outside. A second later, she pulled aside the glass door and stepped into the shower with him. The low light made it impossible to see her body in detail. He could only make out the shape of her curves and muscles.

  And then her body was against his, her hands reaching for his shoulders, pulling his mouth toward hers as she stood on her toes.

  The excitement was instant. He recognized the feeling. The kind of excitement that only comes after a battle or a near-death experience. He thought of his last real lover, an Irish mercenary he'd worked with in South America, and then he thought of nothing.

  He cupped Zoe's breasts, noticing the weight. He ran his hands down her back, feeling the hardness of her body, soft skin over compact muscle. Her teeth bit down on his shoulder.

  There was a moment of awkward struggle as they found a position, ending with Zoe's breasts flattened against the tile wall, and Logan's hands bracing her under one arm and under one thigh, her toes lifting off the ground as he thrust into her.

  ***

  Afterward, they sat in his bed, naked and wrapped in blankets, sipping tea from mugs. Rain beat against the windows. On a day like today, had he been alone, Logan might have gone for a run, following the road to the point where it branched off into the trails that veined the miles of surrounding woodland.

  Zoe was talking. He had asked her how she'd gotten into their line of work. Something he had always wondered about.

  "I was an army recruit right out of high school. Grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania. Not a bad place, but not the kind of place where there's much in the way of jobs. The army was my only option if I wanted college or any kind of job training.

  "I did reserves as I worked my way through a computer science degree. Ended up a drone pilot at a base outside Las Vegas. I had no desire to go overseas, to have guns aimed at me or get blown in half by an IED, and I was a fucking great drone pilot.

  "You don't even push a button. They have this thing that responds to your voice commands. It's called Daisy. So all you do is line up the shot and say, 'Daisy, lock onto target,' and 'Daisy, eliminate target,' and it's out of your hands. She steadies the aim and guides the missile and kills whoever it is you put the crosshairs on. Then you sit around and stare at the screen, watching the aftermath. That's how you confirm kills. So you watch high-res images of people crawl around your monitor, like a swarm of insects someone stomped with their shoe, and you say, 'Daisy, capture image,' and she takes a screenshot for the official record.

  "We didn't have a quota to meet, but they kept our kill count written on a whiteboard right next to the break room, and the pilots treated it like a quota, like some sort of high score in a video game. They kept saying we would have a party when we hit two thousand. There were 889 on the board when I arrived. Fifteen months later, we had added a thousand more. I kept praying that it wouldn't be me that had to give Daisy the order for number two thousand. I missed it by a half hour. Shortly after that, I had a nervous breakdown, or what I think was a nervous breakdown. I was lucky that it happened when I was on leave. Or I was lucky that I held my shit together long enough till I was on leave. The same way I was lucky enough to pull my shit back together by the time leave was over. I spent entire days locked in my apartment, drinking, chain-smoking, getting high, scrubbing every inch of the place till my hands were raw. Two thousand fucking people. Two thousand bodies blown to pieces or just fucking obliterated into nothing. I was so fucking scared when you were on that island, when you kept pushing it further and further and the clock kept running down. I wanted to plead with you to just go to the extraction site, say fuck the job. I don't know how I didn't have another nervous breakdown during that."

  She had tears in her eyes, Logan noticed. She sniffled and wiped her nose with the back of her hand, then a moment later placed it on his thigh. He didn't mind. She kept talking.

  "I never went to the army psychs or counselors or reported any of this to anyone. There's still a major stigma about drone pilots not being actual soldiers, that the stress of the job is bullshit compared to what soldiers on the battlefield deal with, and I didn't want that on my record. I gutted out the next eight months, but I was drinking daily, getting high. I stopped exercising, ate nothing but junk food, put on a ton of weight. I didn't touch a line of code for months and let those skills go to waste.

  "Then, it was over. My enlistment was up. I took my payout and left."

  Zoe sipped her tea. Logan asked, "What brought you into the private sector? After that, I would think you'd want to stay away from anything involving military operations, even if it was for a corporation and not a government."

  She laughed. "The same reason girls take off their clothes in front of a camera or a crowd—I needed the money. The payout from the army was enough to get me set up somewhere else, but they never give you enough to stay comfortable, in the hope that you'll come back. I had a nine-to-five job, but I was living paycheck to paycheck—I was a competent programmer, not a brilliant one, not one of the six-figure salaries you read about. Plus, you know, I'm a woman, and tech is still a boys club, especially when you're low on the corporate ladder. I had been contacted by a few recruiters for corporate military work. I decided I didn't have much to lose by giving it a shot. They tested me out on some freelance jobs, basic stuff, with the promise of something more lucrative if it went well."

  "What made you stay? I can take a guess at what you make. Even low-balling it, a year's work would have set you up for a while."

  She started to speak, then laughed. "Two things. One, I kind of liked the work. I mean, piloting drones did appeal to me at some point, military work wasn't completely out of the question."

  "And the second thing?"

  "You. I liked working with you."

  ***

  They spent the afternoon in bed.

  As evening approached, they showered, dressed, and ventured outside the apartment. Zoe needed to collect her clothes and gear from the place she'd been staying.

  They took Logan's truck. He drove. Before they left, he took a pair of handguns and gave one to Zoe. She held onto the parcel Barnes had given her, not wanting to leave it at the apartment.

  It was an hour each way. On the drive out, the sky was the same gray overcast it had been all day. As they drove back, it was night.

  "We should eat something," Zoe said.

  "What are you in the mood for?"

  "Something filling, and nothing too healthy."

  Logan drove to a pub he'd gone to maybe twice a year since moving to the area, for the rare occasions when he felt the need for a drink, or to be around other people. He remembered the food here being decent.

  He started to get out of the car, but Zoe put her hand on his forearm. When he turned toward her, she kissed him. He closed his eyes. It was different than the way they had kissed in the shower, or afterward in his bed. This had a level of connection that had been missing from those earlier, purely physical encounters. Logan brought his hand to the back of her head and combed his fingers through her feathery hair, and allowed himself to be drawn deeper into the moment.

  CHAPTER 14

  The last hours of the day were filled with the brightness of fire and the screams of those in the flames. The battle for control of The Farm had begun before dawn, w
hen Eliza and her siblings had crept through the dark to silently dispatch the guard tower snipers. A few well-placed explosives had sent The Farm into blackout, cutting off communication with the outside world, and from there, the day had devolved into a series of firefights and close-quarter battles.

  Now, at sunset, Eliza stood on the muddy field at The Farm's center, a place where she had spent countless hours training. Her left arm throbbed where a bullet had sliced across the bicep. Her soldiers were gathered around her. Their warpaint had smeared. Some were bleeding from minor wounds. And there were three fewer than there had been at dawn.

  But they'd dealt their enemies casualties in far greater numbers.

  The surviving members of The Farm's staff knelt in the mud, their arms and legs bound with zip-ties, their mouths gagged with tape. These were the people who had surrendered without a fight, begging for their lives.

  Eliza watched as another prisoner was dragged forward. It was the doctor, the one who had recommended that she be killed and replaced. She watched two of her brothers hang a tire around his neck and douse him with gasoline. A flare was tossed into the puddle of fuel at the doctor's knees, and the screams of the remaining prisoners rose in volume.

  The air was already polluted with burning fuel, burning rubber, and burning flesh, and the smell thickened as the doctor roasted alive.

  Another prisoner was dragged forward. A man with dark hair and a large chin.

  "Wait," Eliza said, holding up her hand. The man was dropped at her feet. She crouched down and tore the tape from his wide face.

  A deluge of babbling speech erupted from the man's mouth. He begged her to spare him. He called her by her name.

  Eliza pressed a thumb into one of his eyes. "Shut up."

  The man went silent.

  "Can you connect us to the secondminds?"

  The man looked up at her with total confusion and incomprehension, like she'd spoken some other language.

  "The secondminds, the ones who answer the questions in our thoughts, who help us know things, can you connect us with them?"

  Understanding spread across the man's face. "The squids!" he said. "Yes, yes I can! Please don't kill me, I can link you with the squids, I can!"

  Eliza stood. "Don't burn this one," she said.

  The man was dragged away, and another was pulled forward and fitted with a tire.

  Eliza looked to the west, past the buildings, past the surrounding woodland, and saw that the sun had left the sky. Night had arrived.

  CHAPTER 15

  It was still early enough that it was dark outside. Logan had been awake for one minute, maybe two. Zoe was in bed next to him, still asleep, wrapped in sheets, breathing silently.

  He slipped out of bed without waking her and walked through the dark apartment. Despite everything, it felt good to be here. The idea of abandoning this place had gnawed at him ever since he'd walked away from that airfield. If he was to be completely honest with himself, he'd felt a sense of relief when he'd logged on to the secure site and learned that someone had opened one of the doors. It had given him a reason to come back to this place at least one last time.

  He had to remind himself that he wasn't here by choice. It was a strange feeling, to be in your own home against your own will.

  He went through his normal morning routine. He stood in the kitchen and drank a glass of water before moving toward the back of the apartment, to his gym and workshop. A collection of clothing hung from a coat rack. He pulled on a shirt and a pair of shorts.

  He started with a foam roller, working his calves, quads, hamstrings, and traps, before moving on to a small hard ball that he used to knead out the knots of soreness in his arms and chest and shoulders. As he did this, he thought of what it had felt like when the sound grenade had compressed every muscle in his body. Worse than the pain had been the feeling of complete helplessness as the half-dozen men in black body armor and noise-blocking headphones had walked in and pried him and Zoe apart and taken them away.

  For a moment, he paused the exercise he was doing and thought of retaliation, of tracking down Barnes and putting a bullet through the man's head. Then Logan dismissed the thought. He had enough enemies.

  His muscles warmed, he moved on to bodyweight exercises. Pushups, squats, and rows from a pair of suspension straps anchored to a wall. After that, he spent a few minutes on the gymnast rings that hung from the ceiling.

  He was sliding plates onto an Olympic barbell when he looked toward the room's entrance and saw Zoe standing in the doorway, wrapped in one of the sheets from the bed. Her pixie cut was a crown of bedhead.

  "Mind if I join you?" she asked.

  "Not at all."

  "Be right back."

  She returned a moment later, having traded the bed sheet for a sports bra and a pair of shorts.

  "You keep a sports bra in your bug-out bag?"

  "I was actually wearing this outfit when the three goons showed up outside my place."

  He lifted the barbell off the floor. A basic deadlift.

  Zoe said, "Bet you never imagined we'd be in this room together, talking about my dirty underwear."

  Logan laughed.

  Zoe smiled.

  She moved onto an empty spot on the floor and began to go through a series of yoga poses—child, downward dog, lizard. The pain of each stretch was visible on her face. "Are you incredibly sore?" she asked.

  "It's the aftereffect of the sound grenade. The frequency scrambles the nervous system, causes the muscles to lock."

  "That was without a doubt the worst thing I've ever felt. You've been through that before?"

  "No, but I've seen them used, and talked to people who've experienced it."

  He continued a series of lifts and watched Zoe go through her own routine of stretches and bodyweight exercises. From her familiarity with the movements, it was clear she did this every day, or nearly every day.

  When Logan was training for a specific job, he planned his workouts around what the work demanded. If it demanded time in the wilderness, he spent time running the trails near his apartment. If he was going to be climbing, he worked out on the gymnast rings. If he was going to be near water, he swam. If he was going to be moving something heavy—for example, a pressurized coffin with an adult male inside—he worked on deadlifts, sled drags, sandbag carries.

  The rest of the time, when he didn't know exactly what he was training for, he tried to keep himself conditioned with equal parts strength, endurance, and speed. He accomplished this with a very basic approach. Each workout was a warm up of foam rolling, bodyweight exercises, and gymnastics, followed by a heavy compound lift (a squat, deadlift, overhead press, or bench press), followed by a circuit of exercises done with lighter weight at an intense pace. He trained like this every other morning. On the days in between he hit the heavy bag and double-end bag, and trained with sticks and knives. He ran three times a week. Once every ten days he did a twenty-mile trail run. Twice a week he drove an hour west to train with a martial arts instructor who taught a hybrid of jujitsu, military combatives, and edged and impact weapons.

  It was a lonely existence.

  It was also an existence he had apparently gotten used to, because it was a little awkward having someone else here. Even someone he had been in constant contact with for three years. Even someone whom he had shared his bed with the night before.

  Logan pushed the awkward feeling aside and focused on what he was doing. Compared to gunfire, explosions, blood loss, broken bones, concussions, and all the other things he had trained himself to ignore, awkwardness was relatively easy.

  Zoe was strong. Logan had known this the moment he'd looked at her in the diner. He'd felt it the times her body had been against his. And he witnessed it now. She could have outworked most of the field operators he'd known.

  "So this is where you spend your time?" she asked, taking a break between sets.

  "Most of it. Where did you
train?"

  "A gym a few blocks from my apartment. I liked it because it was open twenty-four hours, so I could go in at two, three in the morning when no one was there. I spent a lot of time on my own. You know what it's like. It just gets easier after a while. The routine."

  "You let yourself fall into a line of work because you think it offers you more freedom, but really your world just shrinks. Someone who works in an office, gets married, buys a house, you think that they're trapped. But you start to realize all that stuff is a hell of a lot easier to walk away from than the shit you've got going on in your life. Then you end up like Barnes."

  "Is that what you're afraid of? Ending up like one of those guys?"

  "That's where I'm headed, isn't it?"

  They stood facing one another on the matted floor.

  "What do we do when this is over?" Zoe asked.

  "If you're asking me if there's another job after this, the answer is no, not for me. When this is done, I'm done. It's not the stress, it's not my conscience, it's not that my skills are getting dull, I just have no interest in earning a living doing this anymore."

  Zoe was pensive, choosing her words. "You know it was never about earning a living. You haven't needed money in years. There's something else motivating you. I see it. Barnes and whoever he reports to sees it too. That's why they like you."

  Logan shook his head. "There's only one reason anyone should do this kind of work, and it's money. Money and freedom, which are more and more the same thing in this world. The moment this job starts being about something else, that's when it's time to get out. The people I've killed, the times I've been shot or had my ribs kicked in, or had to handle bioweapons or radioactive material, what's any of that worth if all it gets me is the chance to keep risking my life?"