Zero State

by Jameson Kowalczyk

  He took a few deep breaths. He felt his heart rate slow. The beeping of the monitor slowed with it, stopped.

  A voice spoke through the intercom. "Everything okay, Dr. Smith?"

  "Yeah. Just a nightmare. Thanks." His voice didn't sound like his. It wheezed, like his breath was leaking from his airways.

  "Let us know if you need someone. Myself of another member of the staff would be happy to come in and spend some time with you."

  "Thanks, but I'm okay right now. Think I might try to fall back asleep."

  "We'll leave you to it, then. Just know that we're here."

  The intercom went silent.

  Smith sighed. He was in a hospital bed. The room around him was huge and empty. The walls were a light green, the same color as his bedroom at home. A plastic pitcher of water and a cup sat on a nightstand next to him. Wires were taped to his chest. Tubes ran into his veins, filling him with a steady trickle of fluids, medicines, and nourishments. A control panel on the side of the bed let him adjust his position, the color of the walls, the lights, the flatscreen TV that was bolted to the wall across from him.

  He had regained enough strength to get out of bed and pace from one end of the room to the other. He could do this five times before he needed to rest. But the doctors had asked him to limit his movements and effort.

  His body was badly damaged. There were external signs: his visible ribs and emaciated frame; the scabs on his nose, lips, and genitals, like some psycho had mutilated him with a dull blade; the discoloration, like deep bruising, where fluid had pooled underneath his skin.

  Then there was the less-visible damage. The wheezing in his voice. The uneven tumbling of his heart. The painful emptiness inside his chest and throughout his limbs, almost like hunger, but in places where hunger should not exist. A sense that the inner landscape of his body had changed.

  And then there was the near-invisible damage. He didn't have a background in psychology, but he had acquired enough casual information about the subject to understand that he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Nightmares, anxiety attacks, claustrophobia.

  He didn't know who his caretakers were, who they worked for, or what they wanted. He knew they weren't from his company, the CDC. In all likelihood, they had kidnapped him from that island.

  Smith didn't care. He was alive and he was receiving medical attention. Extremely good medical attention. The doctors and nurses who were caring for him were professional, well-trained, and compassionate. He'd worked in medicine for two decades and could tell the difference between the people who were just earning a paycheck and the people who actually gave a shit about who they were caring for. The people here fell into the latter category, and he counted himself lucky.

  All he had to do was make a request and someone from the staff would arrive in his room to keep him company. Read to him. Play cards or a board game. Or just sit and talk. They'd even share his charts if he asked. They'd let him see his blood work. They'd let him know what medicines they were feeding into him and at what doses. They'd asked for his feedback on the treatment they were providing.

  He knew his immune system had beaten the virus, but his body was battling dozens of secondary injuries and infections that might kill him yet. He had a long way to go before he was in the clear, and his body was never going to be the same, but Smith was okay with that. For now, he was just happy to be alive.

  His caretakers had answered any questions he had asked, except who they worked for and where the facility was located. Smith didn't push for answers. He'd been around long enough to know how things worked.

  He thought of their offer for company, and again dismissed it. The idea of someone coming down here filled him with anxiety. Not because of any need to be alone, or because he was technically a prisoner, but because of what the person would be wearing.

  A hazmat suit. Because there was still enough of the monster in his blood to infect another person.

  How many hours had he spent alongside people in those suits? How many hours had he spent inside one? But after what had happened to him in the jungle, the sight of the suits terrified him.

  Before the plane crash, he'd been at a lab in Antarctica. The diseases they were working with were the worst known to man, which is why they had built the facility on the southern-most continent. Thousands of miles of frozen landscape and near-interstellar temperatures provided a great natural barrier between the deadly pathogens and the rest of the world.

  He had no idea how the bug had made it inside his suit. He couldn't recall any instance where his protection had been even slightly compromised. There were enough layers of redundancy in place to make getting one of the bugs out of the lab theoretically impossible.

  But something had gotten inside his suit, had gotten inside his body. Because he'd woken one night with blood spewing from both ends of his digestive tract. More blood was leaking from his eyes and nose. The infrared thermometer read 104-degrees when he aimed it at his skin.

  There were at least three contagions in the lab that could cause these symptoms.

  They had protocols in place for this type of situation. The first rule: Assume the worst.

  He called it in. A collection squad suited up and carried him out of the room in a containment pod. A testing kit confirmed what the infection was: Prospero virus. Smith was given a handful of pills to swallow, standard antivirals. Then he'd been given something else. The mousy chemical engineer, Samantha, came to see him, sealed up inside a hazmat suit. He didn't get the chance to ask her if giving him the experimental treatment was a group decision or something she'd decided to do on her own.

  The contents of his room were burned. Anyone he'd had contact with was quarantined. A plane carried him away from the facility. The lab was equipped to study monstrous diseases, but wasn't equipped to treat them. His destination was a secure treatment center in a non-disclosed CDC location in the U.S.

  But they'd never made it there.

  His next truly clear memory was waking up in the jungle, the containment pod open, the plane smashed to pieces.

  He should have found a match or a lighter or a flare. Used the jet fuel to immolate himself. He hadn't been thinking clearly, sick with fever and fluid-loss and the terror of his body being taken over by disease and the shock of the crash.

  He'd wandered into the jungle and then into a village. He had no recollection of this; he'd either been in a state of functioning blackout or his brain had been running too hot to record a memory of what was happening.

  Then, people in hazmat suits. Four of them. They had guns and a flamethrower, a truck and a pod almost identical to the one he'd been inside during the flight. At first he thought they were a rescue team.

  In his fever-clouded memories, they weren't even human. They were like some kind of prototype human being, barbarians with eyes like lizards, monstrously strong. They'd shoved him in the containment pod like he was already dead, like he'd been a piece of meat to collect.

  And now, they were what he saw whenever he looked at a hazmat suit.

  Smith reached for the pitcher and poured a glass of water. He reminded himself that he was alive, that he was receiving the treatment he needed, that the people looking out for him genuinely cared about his wellbeing.

  It didn't matter who his caretakers worked for.

  It didn't matter that they couldn't tell him where he was.

  It didn't matter that his employers, his family, and his friends had no idea what had become of him.

  He was alive. If he stayed that way, he'd find time to worry about everything else later.

  He dimmed the lights and adjusted the color of the walls, making them a shade darker. His pulse was calm and steady. He closed his eyes.

  ***

  Smith woke to the sound of beeping.

  Heart rate, he thought. The alarm was telling him to wake up before the nightmare gave him a heart attack or stroke.

  But no, he
hadn't been in the middle of a nightmare. He hadn't been dreaming. His pulse was steady inside his chest.

  The sound was a fire alarm, accompanied by a pair of flashing orange lights mounted near the door.

  The alarm went silent as a voice spoke over the intercom.

  "Dr. Smith?" The voice was female. He recognized it. A doctor named Julia.

  "I'm here," he said. "What's happening?"

  "Dr. Smith, we need to evacuate the facility. Do you think you're able to leave your room on your own? If not, we can send a team to assist you." The tone of the voice told him there would be no judgments if he needed help. It also told him that something was seriously wrong; there was an edge to Julia's voice, a tense urgency. This was not a fire drill.

  Smith sat up and let his legs hang over the side of the bed. He lowered his feet to the floor. The monitor next to the bed showed a slight spike in heart rate.

  He stood. His legs were stiff.

  "I can walk out of here on my own," he said. "What do I do?"

  There was a trace of relief in Julia's voice. "We're going to open the door. There will be a closet to your right with a containment suit inside. We need you to put on the suit and continue down the hall. We'll then guide you through a series of chemical showers."

  "Got it." He pulled the wires from his chest and watched the monitor flatline. He closed the valves on the IV drips leading into his wrists and forearms and disconnected them, then walked away from the bed, thankful he hadn't needed a catheter.

  The door slid open with a hiss of escaping pressure. The hallway outside was white on all sides. More flashing orange lights were set at even intervals along the ceiling. The air was cold.

  A containment suit waited for him in an open closet to his right, just like Julia had said.

  Smith pulled off the hospital gown, and for a moment he wondered what to do with it. Then he balled it up and threw it back into the room behind him.

  He stared at the empty hood of the containment suit and felt his pulse start to climb, felt sweat start to run from under his arms. He was going to have to put it on.

  Fuck it, he thought. He reached for the skintight base layer. It was like taking the first few steps of a run when he didn't feel like exercising—once he was in motion, it was harder to stop, easier to keep going.

  Muscle memory took over. He was used to hazmat suits that were designed to keep stuff out. This suit was designed to keep stuff in, but it was still the same process he'd gone through ten thousand times.

  He checked and rechecked his work. There was a keypad on the back of his left glove. One of the keys had a phone icon. He tapped it and heard a comm line open inside his helmet.

  "Dr. Smith?" Julia's voice.

  "Here. I'm suited up."

  "Walk down the hall and through the door. Once you close the door behind you, a chemical shower will start. You'll proceed through three separate showers. A security team is waiting for you on the other side."

  "Can you tell me what's going on?"

  "The facility is under attack by an unknown number of individuals. We're confident our security personnel are capable of handling the situation, but regardless, the assault means this site has been compromised and we will need to move to another secure location."

  Smith followed Julia's instructions. It was twenty-three steps to the end of the hallway. He heard the door to his room slide shut behind him.

  The door at the end of the hall wasn't locked, or had already been unlocked by Julia. He stepped through, into a small chamber with doors on either side, large enough for one person.

  The moment the door closed behind him, Smith heard liquid moving through pipes. Nozzles were mounted on the walls, ceiling, and floor. A bluish liquid sprayed at him from all sides. The sound reminded him of a carwash. He turned, letting it drench every inch of the suit.

  Outside the chamber: another hallway, another door, another chamber. This time the chemical spray was orange.

  The one after that was purple.

  The third chamber opened into a large room with tiled walls and sterile brushed-steel surfaces. The empty shells of hazmat suits were strung along one wall. There were large plastic bins with biohazard labels. There were shower stalls and hoses and half a dozen doors leading to what he presumed were other isolation rooms or other wards. This was a staging room for the doctors and nurses. Smith had seen dozens of rooms like this in his career.

  At the room's center were four people in hazmat suits, all armed with assault rifles. One of them held a tablet computer inside a bulky case, designed to be used with heavy gloves.

  The one with the tablet stepped forward. It was Julia.

  "Hello Dr. Smith. Are you still feeling up to walking out of here? We have a wheelchair if you need one."

  "I'm feeling strong, I don't need the chair."

  "Come with us."

  Julia put away the tablet computer and unshouldered her rifle. They moved out of the room and into a wide corridor with linoleum floor and florescent lighting. The security team moved, covered, moved, keeping Smith at the center of the pack, protecting him from all sides. Their coordination spoke of military training.

  They passed offices and meeting rooms, all empty. From another part of the building, Smith could hear what sounded like a rapid series of small explosions. It took him a moment to place the sound: gunfire.

  They passed through an emergency exit and a stairwell. Smith felt his heart start to tumble inside his chest.

  They went up. This didn't surprise him, his room had felt like it was underground.

  A garage waited on the other side of the next door, a wide empty space with rows of armored vehicles.

  They were six steps beyond the door when blood sprayed across the outside of Smith's faceplate and the man on his right dropped.

  An instant later, gunfire pounded them from all sides. Bullets ricocheted off the concrete floor and thudded against the bodies that surrounded Smith.

  He ducked down and wiped blood from his faceplate. A hand pushed against his back, urging him forward. He took cover behind the nearest vehicle. He couldn't see what was happening.

  He looked back and saw two bodies. One's head had exploded out of the hood of its hazmat suit. The other was still alive, trying to pick up a gun with hands that had been horrifically injured. Blood ran from holes in the suit's legs and torso. Smith watched as the man went still, either dead or unconscious.

  A hand tapped on Smith's shoulder. Julia crouched next to him. One arm of her suit was torn, body armor visible through the gash. Blood leaked from another gunshot wound at her hip. She grabbed Smith by his hood and put her face in front of his.

  "Have you been shot?"

  Smith shook his head.

  She wiped away the blood on his faceplate, inspected his hood, his arms, his chest. He felt hands on his back and turned to see the other living member of the squad inspecting the rest of his suit.

  "He's good," said the man at his back.

  Julia pulled something from a pocket on her belt. A handheld device, the size and shape of a phone. She used it to scan a code etched into the lock on the driver's side door next to them. An instant later, the car's motor began to hum. Julia pulled the door open.

  "Get inside," she said to Smith.

  He crawled in, climbing into the back. Julia followed. The other man got behind the wheel, handing Julia his assault rifle.

  The car shot out of the space. Immediately, bullets peppered the vehicle from all sides. Smith put his head down. The windows were bulletproof, the body of the car was plated with armor. The driver gunned it for the far end of the garage. Up ahead, a set of blast doors began to separate, bright sunlight filling the gap between.

  The doors widened. Beyond them, Smith could see the first details of a burnt landscape.

  The noise felt more powerful than the actual explosion, a loudness that shot through everything around it.

  Smith felt t
he tires lose contact with the ground. There was a long second of weightlessness before the car rose and tilted and came crashing down on its side.

  He was thrown against the door to his left. He felt something pop inside his back, along the spine—a vertebrate cracking, or a disc forced out of place.

  He lay on his side, pain gripping him from his lower back to his neck.

  In the front seat, the driver was trying to free himself from the mangled dashboard. Julia was on top of the driver, unconscious or dead or stranded at some waypoint in between.

  A pair of heavily-gloved arms reached through the broken windshield and pulled Julia free. The driver tried to fight the arms away as they reached back in.

  Had Smith been able to hear through the ringing in his ears, he would have heard the brief bursts of gunfire that followed a moment later, as Julia and the driver were executed.

  ***

  Smith was dragged outside into a rust-colored desert. He could have been on Mars.

  Behind him, the entrance to the facility was a yawning black portal amid the red earth, like the mouth of a cave. Smith saw that the whole thing was contained inside a jagged swell of land that looked too big to be called a hill and too small to be called a mountain.

  Standing alongside him were three figures in hazmat suits. All three carried assault rifles. The faceplates were like mirrors in the bright sun, but Smith had the idea that this was the same crew that had found him in the village after the plane crash.

  He ignored them, staring ahead and trying to appreciate the harsh beauty of his surroundings.

  Not a bad place to die, he told himself. His concussed brain accepted the idea.

  A truck rolled into view, the engine made silent by the hood of his suit and the ringing in his ears.

  Two sets of hands grabbed him on either side and forced him onto his knees. His injured back screamed.

  The ringing in his ears grew louder as his hood was pulled free. He didn't fight, didn't resist. A chemical cutter appeared in a gloved hand next to him and his suit was unseamed to the waist. Hot sun beat down on his neck and back. It felt glorious.