Zero Site 1607

by Andrew Calhoun

  Mr. Toad pushed himself backward and found his own space to sit on the floor. His face was a blend of shock and morbid curiosity.

  Soup was next to Dallas, more out of solidarity than any practical use.

  The pilot had gotten out of his chair completely and was staring back into the hold with wide eyes.

  For the next two or three minutes, nobody did anything. Everyone stayed where they were. Soup, Mr. Toad, the pilot and Eliska all exchanged looks that conveyed more than words could have. As the minutes passed, Saeliko’s breathing eased and approached normalcy. She spit a few more times to try to get the excess blood out of her mouth.

  Dallas was the first to speak. The Marine got himself to his feet, offered a hand to Mr. Toad, pulled him up to his feet, and said, “We’re good now. Saeliko can come with us.”

  “Huh?”

  “You heard me.” The Marine then turned to look at Saeliko, who had managed to lift herself off the deck and onto all fours.

  Eliska put her hands around Saeliko’s left bicep and helped the Saffisheen rise to her feet. When she was up, she shook her head a like a drunkard fighting to fix blurred vision. “You all right?” Eliska asked.

  Saeliko didn’t answer. Instead she motioned for Dallas to come closer. The big man complied, crossing the distance in three steps until he stood right in front of her. The two of them locked eyes again and Saeliko feared the worst.

  Saeliko inched closer and put her cuffed hands on Dallas’ chest. She then positioned her bloody lips so that she could whisper into his ear.

  Eliska was close enough to hear the Saffisheen’s words. “Shen was a good woman.”

  2.6 KETTLE

  Vasper led them straight into the trees. Overhead, a cluster of flares – at least six of them – lit up the night in a reddish glow, giving the forest a surreal Ridley Scott sci-fi noir tone. In the distance (but close enough to invoke considerable unease), the frantic barking of dogs provided an unwelcome soundtrack.

  No one said anything. They just ran as fast as their abused leg muscles would permit and tried to ignore the scratching and clawing of the shrubbery and low-hanging branches against their skin. Kettle wondered if Vasper had made the right choice. Taking them out of the field and into the trees had seemed like the obvious solution to avoid being seen under the light of the flares. Staying in plain sight made for easy targets. But now their progress was invariably being slowed by the undergrowth in their way. That was a problem the dogs weren’t going to have.

  Three more flares went off above the forest canopy. Kettle afforded a quick glance backward and didn’t see anything other than the red light filtering down through the tall trees, but he imagined armed soldiers entering the forest, led by big dogs with sharp teeth.

  “We’re not going to make it,” Haley hissed at Vasper through clenched teeth. Vasper had said they were still about five kilometers from Zero Site 1607. It seemed like such a small number compared to the distance they had already covered through the jagged Yensh topography, but she was right; they weren’t going to outrun the dogs.

  “Keep running,” Vasper told them, turning to look at them briefly. His breathing was ragged, and his steps were clumsier than before. His eye sockets seemed hollower and deeper. He kept snagging his rifle on branches, which would send him careening this way and that, but the sergeant continued to push forward. Kettle admired the man’s resolve but feared it would be for nothing.

  “This way,” he said after another minute or two of struggle through the foliage. They had popped out of the brush and onto a small, dry creek bed that led in a generally downward direction. Kettle and Haley followed him and discovered that the benefit of being clear of the undergrowth was mitigated by the difficulty of having to navigate across the rocks that made up the creek bed. Some were as big as basketballs, others more like baseballs, many of them loose and unstable. Kettle forced himself to concentrate. The last thing he needed now was a broken ankle.

  It occurred to him that Vasper had a plan. The man didn’t do anything without thinking it through fist. He didn’t seem like someone who would panic under pressure and make rash decisions. Then again, after running for so long, it wouldn’t be surprising if Vasper was suffering from hallucinations and leading them toward an imaginary ice cream stand.

  He could hear voices now. Not hallucinatory voices. Real voices. The Yensh were closing in, calling out to each other as they followed their dogs. Were the dogs still on leashes? Had they let them loose?

  “Vasper?” Haley said.

  “Almost there. Keep running.”

  Haley stumbled and fell. Kettle stopped and helped her back to her feet. “You okay?” he whispered. She nodded, but her eyes told him that she was worried. He understood.

  “Come on,” Vasper called out in a low grumble. He had stopped to wait for them.

  They plodded onward on unsteady feet, half running and half stumbling down the creek bed, which now and again fell over one- and two-foot drops as it descended.

  Then he heard it. Somewhere down below, the sound of running water echoed up through the trees. And then Kettle understood Vasper’s plan. That’s how he was going to lose the dogs. The three of them were going to go for a swim.

  It might work, too, at least for a while. Kettle’s brain cycled through memories of adventure movies where the main characters swam across lakes and rivers so that dogs would lose their scent. He wondered if that worked in the real world and decided it was worth a shot. All they needed was to buy time – enough time to run the last five kilometers and disappear in the Zero site, if that was even possible.

  “Clever bastard,” Haley mumbled. She had figured it out.

  Another flare went off overhead in a loud bang. The sound of running water grew louder, too, and Kettle wondered what they were heading toward. It sure didn’t sound like a tranquil little stream.

  Vasper stopped running. Kettle and Haley pulled up beside him. A full-on river barred their way. It was maybe thirty or forty feet across, broader than it was deep, for Kettle could see lots of boulders sticking up in the middle, causing the water to cascade up in waves against their surfaces. The banks on either side were steep, suggesting that in the spring when the snow melted off the mountains, the river would roar and rage. As it was now, it still looked dangerous enough, with channels of fast-moving water moving quickly through the red-tinged night.

  “Try to stay together,” Vasper told them. “We’ll let the current carry us downstream about a kilometer.” He set his eyes on Haley first and then Kettle, making sure they knew what he was telling them. “You good?” he asked after a few seconds.

  “Yeah,” Haley said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  They stepped forward and almost right away found themselves knee-deep in ice-cold water. Kettle was surprised how strong the current was as it pushed against his legs. On the bright side, the bracing shock of cold water made him forget the aches and pains in his body. It cleared his mind, too, forcing him to focus on the details of what he was doing. One foot forward, one hand gripping the nearest rock for balance, the next foot plunging forward searching for grip beneath the water.

  It got deeper more quickly than he would have thought. Kettle realized that his initial impression had been inaccurate. The river was broad and deep.

  Vasper fell first. He dropped over to his right and was swept away by the current. For a second, he disappeared, but his head and shoulders reappeared and bobbed in the water as he was carried downstream.

  “Kettle, we should . . .”

  Haley slipped before she finished, tumbling head-first into the water with a surprised “ahh” sound. Kettle reached out a hand to grab her, but she was gone before he could even get close. Like Vasper, she bobbed back up to the surface and bounced downstream.

  Another flare went off overhead, and Kettle was certain that the dogs were getting closer.

  “God damn it,” he said and jumped forward into a deep spot be
tween two sharp rocks.

  He felt like his heart missed about three or four beats, frozen by the frigid water that came up around his shoulders and neck, splashing against his face. He tried to stay in a sitting position with his arms stretched out to either side for balance and his legs in front of him to deflect any boulders or fallen trees and protect his more vital body parts.

  Ten seconds in and his ass ricocheted off a rock on the riverbed. Kettle grunted in pain and wondered if his bum was bleeding now. It didn’t matter, as long as he was still moving away from the dogs.

  He saw Haley’s head ahead of him and tried to keep himself moving in the same direction. He couldn’t see Vasper but hoped that Haley had him in sight. If they lost the sergeant, they’d be in bigger trouble than they already were. He was their sole source of navigation. Without him, they might as well just turn themselves over.

  He grimaced again as his right leg slammed into something under the water, causing him to turn sideways and then go into a barrel roll. He slipped under the water and did a complex twisting somersault that would have made an Olympic ski jumper proud. Oh, shit, shit, shit. He wasn’t coming up. The current held him down and continued to toss him around like a shoe in a washing machine. He knew he needed to get back to the surface, but with all the tumbling, he didn’t know anymore which direction the surface was. He flailed his limbs around, half hoping he could locate the bottom and push upwards and half realizing there was nothing else he could do.

  In the end, he burst back up to the surface at the whim of the river rather than through his own efforts. He took a greedy gulp of oxygen and got dunked under the water again. It was only for a moment though. The river grew shallower, and Kettle could feel his feet bounce off the bottom repeatedly. He steadied his trajectory and re-positioned himself back in his original sitting position.

  Haley was nowhere to be seen. He didn’t know what that meant. She might have been underwater, or she might have already gotten to the other bank in an effort to get out of the river. Had they gone a kilometer already? It didn’t feel like it, but he had no idea.

  He decided to try to swim for the shore. The sky was dark above him. There were no flares, and he couldn’t hear any barking.

  He pivoted himself over into a front crawl swimming position and pumped his arms into the water, which did nothing. The current was too powerful, and he now realized that he was being carried head-first downstream. If he hit a rock, he would probably knock himself unconscious.

  This was a terrible idea.

  He tried to come up with a plan but came up empty. Other than putting himself back in a protective sitting position, there wasn’t a lot he could do.

  He saw a dark mass approaching in front of him. At first, he couldn’t decide what he was looking at. A tangle of black shapes formed a barricade in the river a couple hundred feet ahead. It was too randomly crumpled together to be manmade.

  That’s a logjam, a voice in his brain informed him. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? another voice in his brain asked.

  With luck, he could climb on top of the logs and get out of the river. On the other hand, all that water had to go somewhere, which meant that the current probably went straight under the logjam. If he got trapped underneath, he would drown. On top of that, he was pretty sure that logjams tended to have lots of sharp, pointy broken branches to impale yourself on.

  There wasn’t much point in overthinking it; he didn’t have any choice. The closer he got, the more obvious it became that there was nothing he could do to avoid the mass of broken wood. He was going to hit it somewhere in the middle. All he could do was try to keep himself as high in the water as possible when he slammed into it.

  The last few seconds were a terrifying rush, even with his Zero Stock genetic legacy pumping a sense of calm determination into his thought processing. He hurtled toward the black mass, making it seem like the logjam had been thrown at Kettle’s head by an angry titan.

  He threw his arms up in the air and took the impact in his upper chest. The air burst out of his lungs in an angry, violent rush, and only the adrenaline coursing through his veins kept him from blacking out. He frantically grasped at anything his hands could get a hold of, which turned out to be a branch and a clump of rocky earth that was piled up on top of the logjam.

  The river sucked at his legs, pulling them under and pinning him against the log he had struck with his chest. The water behind him pushed against his shoulders and splashed up around his neck and ears. For the moment, it was a stalemate. He wasn’t getting dragged under, but he didn’t have the wherewithal to pull himself up to safety, so he stayed there and waited for the air to come back into his lungs.

  Pain grated up and down his chest. He decided that he might have cracked some ribs, and then he hoped that they were only cracked and not broken. He didn’t know how to tell.

  He was cold, too. And getting colder. His fingertips felt numb, and he had to exert effort to make sure that they stayed locked onto the handholds he had found lest he lose his grip altogether.

  Pull yourself up, Kettle, he told himself. You have to get out of the water. His arm muscles strained as he tried to inch himself upward. He didn’t move, and he worried that if he tried to squirm too much, he would get pulled under.

  Okay, what do I do? What now?

  And then a hand appeared out of nowhere and grabbed Kettle’s right forearm. Kettle looked up in surprise and saw Sergeant Vasper, face grim and determined, but calm and powerful.

  Vasper’s free hand reached down and grasped Kettle’s shirt collar at the back of neck. The sergeant then began heaving Kettle upward in short, iterated pulls, each one lifting him a few more inches out of the water. Pain pierced through his chest with each yank, but he was happy to suffer through it if it meant getting out of the river and onto the top of the logs. After he got high enough in the water, he was able to work his right leg up onto the top of the logs and leverage the rest of his body out.

  Vasper plunked his butt down on top of the log jam and then laid back, exhausted to the core. Kettle went down on his hands and knees and shivered in the darkness. He took a few moments to process everything that had just happened. “Where’s Haley?”

  “I’m here.” The voice came from Kettle’s left. He looked over and saw the Korean sprawled on top of a tangle of branches and debris. Relief flooded through Kettle’s mind, replacing the fear of losing her. Despite the pain in his chest and freezing numbness in his limbs, he smiled.

  “You injured?”

  She shook her head. “I’m fine. The river spit me out right on top of this thing.”

  He smiled again. Lucky girl.

  At the same time, he recognized that their luck had limits. He noticed the shake in Haley’s voice; she was just as cold as he was. And it wasn’t like they could stop and build a campfire in the woods to warm themselves up. Their jump into the river had bought them some time, but that’s all it had done. The hunters would bring their dogs along the riverbank until they picked up the scent again.

  “We have to keep moving,” Vasper said as if reading Kettle’s thoughts. The sergeant slowly stood up and began adjusting his pack and clothing.

  “Will our guns still fire?” Kettle asked. His pistol was still strapped to his hip, and Vasper’s rifle was secure on his back.

  “Affirmative. Fully waterproof. My pack, too, so our rations should be okay.”

  “Good. Hey, I don’t suppose you have extra shirts in that pack of yours. I think I’m starting to go hypothermic.”

  “No, but I can help with that.”

  “How?”

  “You’re going to like this.” Vasper maneuvered himself so that he stood next to Kettle, careful to keep his balance atop the mess of logs and branches. He reached out with both hands and grabbed the cuff of the shirt at Kettle’s right wrist. There was a tab built into the soaked fabric. Kettle had noticed it earlier but thought nothing of it. Vasper squeezed it hard for about five seconds and then let go. “Okay,
you’re good to go.”

  “What?”

  “Just wait. You’ll see.” Then he bent down and felt the fabric around Kettle’s right ankle. Apparently there was another tab down there; Kettle hadn’t noticed that one.

  “Haley, come here,” Vasper said when he finished. “Let’s get you warmed up.”

  Kettle frowned. “I’m confused. What’s supposed to happen?” Then he noticed a wisp of steam coming off his right arm. Even in the dim moonlight, he could clearly see the little grey tendril rise and disappear in the night air. A moment later, a hundred more tendrils lifted off his shirt. They shook and twisted in the air due to the shivers that racked his body, and Kettle imagined that this might be something he would hallucinate after consuming just the right number of magic mushrooms. They made delightful little patterns in front of his eyes.

  Then he felt heat. Joyous, wonderful, unadulterated, life-saving, bliss-inducing heat. The fabric warmed up to a temperature that was hot against his skin, but not so hot that it would burn him. “Oh, God, this is good.” Kettle watched more steam rise off his pant legs. Unfortunately, his underwear was still freezing, but he was still far better off than he was a minute ago. “Jesus, Vasper, why didn’t you tell us about this earlier?”

  “Jesus?”

  “Never mind. Answer the question.”

  “It’s a one-time shot. Nano-tech inside the fabric. It’ll last a little over three minutes, and then it needs about three and a half hours to recharge.”

  “Recharge? How?”

  “It runs off your body energy.”

  “Oh.”

  All three of them were steaming heavily now as the fabric evaporated the river water soaked in its fibers. It would’ve been comic in other circumstances. “This way,” Vasper said and pointed to the end of the logjam that was butted up against a steep section of river bank. The water frothed around the lower logs and splashed up against the edge of the bank, but for all the river’s anger, it was easy for the three of them to navigate through the upward-facing tree branches and jump from the logs onto solid earth.