by James Knapp
Something hit my head hard. Spots swam in front of my eyes as one of them bit down on her arm and she screamed again. I tried to bring the gun around again, but my arm didn’t move. The platform started to tilt.
Vika …
A band of static flicked in front of me and the JZI puked out a stream of errors. I heard Vika yell something, but I couldn’t see her. Feet stomped down around me as more of them ran to join the fray.
My eyes rolled and another band of static rippled by before the lights went out. The last thing I heard was Vika’s high-pitched scream as it echoed from somewhere down the tunnel.
Zoe Ott—Alto Do Mundo
The tromping of boots echoed down the hall as we headed toward the stairwell at the far end. The hall ended in a giant pane of glass that looked out over the city, and through it I could see the TransTech Center, lit up and towering above the surrounding buildings. Osterhagen was still inside; I could sense him. I couldn’t make out what he was thinking, but something was very wrong.
This city will be gone within the hour….
We walked as fast as Ai could manage. I watched the back of her large head as we went, and saw sweat roll down her thin neck. One of the guards should have just carried her, but even under the circumstances, no one dared suggest it.
“Is the roof secure?” one of the men said into his radio.
“The Chimeras are still active,” the reply came. “But we’ve got surface-to-air missile capability set up on all—”
Something flashed outside the window at the end of the hall, and something rumbled up above us, loud enough to shake the floor. The lights flickered as the sound of helicopter rotors got louder.
“Come back,” the guard said into the radio. “Is the roof secure?”
The rotors thumped louder, then something big flew past the window. A loud shriek rose over the drumming sound, and three bright lights whipped by after it. A shadow banked past one of the buildings below, and I saw three thin smoke trails spin toward it. They hit the building face and exploded, sending a big, bright cloud of fire into the night air.
“We’ll keep them off you, but—”
The rest of the reply got cut off by another crash from overhead. Chunks of metal and glass fell past the window, and I saw a flailing body tumble down along with it. Another loud shriek sounded, followed by a thud.
When we got to the stairwell, one of the guards opened it while another signaled for us to go through, but I was pretty sure I didn’t want to go up there. Penny didn’t seem too sure either.
“Come on!” the guard said. “We’re going up—”
Light flashed at the end of the hall, through the window. It tinted in response, but even so, it was so bright I had to shield my eyes. Through the glare, I saw the window glass warp and then blow out into the open air. The sky outside was filled with a cloud of pulverized glass as the other windows on the building face, and those of the buildings around it, all exploded with an earsplitting crash.
A wave of hot air blasted down the hallway, stinging my hands and face. Through my fingers, I saw a huge arc of light pass over the buildings below and hit the TransTech Center.
No…
People were screaming, but I couldn’t hear them over the sound of the beam sizzling through the air. Energy arced off and struck buildings nearby as it rippled over the city like a huge, electric worm. Shards of glass jumped and danced on the tiled floor as the building shook.
My clothes flapped around me as I gaped, unable to register what I was seeing. All I could do was stare out through the snow as a huge cloud of fire boiled up from the base of the tower. Fear pulsed outward from inside the building, like streams of raw, white adrenaline. They hit me like a truck, and before I could push them out I’d slipped and almost fallen to the floor. In front of me, Ai staggered, and Penny caught her. The rush left me feeling sick, pain burning in my chest.
One of the guards was barking into the radio, but I couldn’t hear him. The TransTech Center was crumbling, collapsing down in a cloud of smoke and fire. The threads of fear began to fall off and go dark. They were dying. I felt Osterhagen’s consciousness wink out, along with the rest of the thousands of others. They were dying. They were all dying.
“Get back!” one of the guards shouted into my ear as cold wind blew through the opening and peppered us with powdered glass. “Back away from the window!”
I couldn’t move. The light outside just kept getting brighter and brighter. It washed everything out, until it forced my eyes shut and I screamed. Distantly, I felt a hand grab my arm and pull me back….
The noise stopped.
Not just the racket outside, but the voices, the screaming, the wind, everything. In the quiet, my ears rang.
I opened my eyes. I was outside, on the street. There was no explosion and no falling debris. Snow fell gently through the night sky.
Where am I?
Neon lit up the dark. I was on a sidewalk, with my back to a parked car. There was snow piled up along the curb between the walkway and the street. The street was full of cars, and people streamed by all around me. None of them even seemed to notice I was there.
I stood up and brushed myself off. My breath trailed as I looked across the street and saw the towering face of Alto Do Mundo, all glass and neon. It was completely intact. The UTTC still stood in the distance, and far off, I could see the third needle of the CMC Tower.
Is this real?
I shook my head, and snow went down the back of my neck. No one looked at me, and no cars honked, even when I wandered out into the road.
They can’t see me. This isn’t real.
From the dark mouth of an alley I saw a pair of eyes flash, low to the ground. They stared up at me, and I heard a low growl.
I took a step back as a dog moved out onto the sidewalk to face me. It was big, with matted, mangy fur. A patch was shaved on one side and I could see an ugly, scabby bite mark on the bare skin there.
“You again,” I said. It stopped a few feet away and bared its teeth. Its gums were black, and its fangs were stained red.
“You were in my dream—”
The dog jumped. I slipped and fell back onto the sidewalk with it on top of me. I could feel its breath on my face as it snapped, and I crossed my arms between us.
Its jaws clamped down on my wrist and I screamed. Blood gushed out of the wound, and my hand went numb as the dog huffed out a breath through its cold nose. I tried to kick away, but it wouldn’t let go.
A warm feeling crept up my arm from the spot where it had me. The warmth moved up to my shoulder, into my chest, into my heart. My body began to feel relaxed and a little numb. It was a little like being drunk.
The dog let me go. It barked once, then turned and ran off.
“Son of a bitch …”
I rolled over and got on my knees. None of the people on the street even glanced at me. When I held up my forearm, I could see muscle through the tear in the skin. It looked like it should hurt, but it didn’t. It didn’t hurt at all.
The weird heat coursed through my whole body, and my body relaxed. I looked around, but the dog was gone.
The neon lights flickered. I felt sick for a second, and then out of nowhere, words appeared in the air in front of me. They were like words on a computer terminal, but they just hung there in the air, like they were floating in space a few inches from my face.
Control node initialized (103.9 seconds).
“What the hell?” someone next to me asked.
I turned and saw a man standing on the sidewalk. He was staring at the air in front of him with his brow scrunched, like he was reading something.
When I looked around, I saw the others, all around me, doing the same thing. Some rubbed their eyes. They all looked confused and afraid.
“They see the words too,” a voice said. I turned and saw a woman standing a few feet away from me, her stringy black hair whipping in the wind. She had a tattoo of a snake that swallowed its own tail around her
neck, just like me and just like Penny.
“You’re Noelle,” I said. Her shirt was stained with blood around a slit in the fabric. Through the hole, I could see a deep stab wound.
“They all have it,” she said.
“Have what?”
She waved for me to follow, and I did as she limped down the sidewalk to a rusted metal door just inside a nearby alley. Men bundled under dirty blankets watched us from the shadows as she pulled the door open. She waved again and stepped through.
As soon as I was through the door, it slammed behind me and everything went black. As I turned back, though, a light came on from overhead and I saw Noelle standing near an electrical switchbox on one wall. The light flickered across concrete walls that were painted green. Three electric lights, all dark, hung near the far wall. There were no bodies, and this time the table and chair were missing. When I looked around, I saw a series of wire cages along the back wall. Inside each one was a dirty-looking bedroll.
The floor was littered with trash, and the air smelled like BO and piss. In with the empty food containers and cardboard cups were torn white wrappers marked STERILE. In one corner was a used syringe with a broken needle. Noelle looked at the mess sadly.
“It’s almost time,” she said.
“I don’t understand,” I said, but she didn’t seem to hear me.
“You see your mind’s interpretation of the quantum data streams it receives,” she said. “Information can only be sent back.”
“What information? What are you talking about?”
“By now, Fawkes has released the nanovirus,” she said. “He does this in an attempt to end our influence over the rest of them.”
“Maybe he should,” I said.
“His plan will fail,” she said. “It was only supposed to replicate a set number of times. Enough to spread throughout the world, and then degenerate of its own accord. The violence of the spread would stop, leaving the world free from us, but something went wrong. Something alters the virus. The replication never stops. It can’t be allowed to spread beyond the city.”
“The bombs,” I said.
“The city’s destruction overshadowed and hid the real disaster. We couldn’t see past it. Fawkes never intended to destroy the city, but because of him, because of us, someone will have to. It will come down to the city, or the world.”
My throat burned, and I felt tears in my eyes as I leaned back against the cold concrete wall. I wanted to cry, but I didn’t have the strength. Was what she was saying true? Was any of this even real at all?
“What is this place?” I asked. “Why do I keep coming here?”
“The green zones are all that is left.”
Green zones. It was true, then; there was more than one. The Green Room changed from vision to vision because at some point in the future, there would be more than one of them.
“What are they for?”
“Refugees are brought here to see if they can be saved. This is all that’s left of humanity.”
My forearm itched. When I scratched at it, I saw the scab from the dog bite there.
“That’s how it spreads,” Noelle said, “at least at first. People without our abilities will begin to realize that we’re among them. They’ll wake up and regain their memories, but the mechanism to wake them up was fashioned on revivor technology. We didn’t know what we were dealing with until it was too late. We now believe the countervirus we developed corrupted the original variant somehow and caused the mutation. Pushed past the limits of its design, Fawkes’s variant eventually remembers its original purpose.”
“And what’s that?”
“To make revivors,” she said. “And that is what it tries to do.”
The ceiling spun over my head and a high-pitched whine filled both my ears. Pressure built up in my head and behind my eyes until every time my heart beat, pain throbbed through my skull. I felt like I was going to be sick.
What’s happening? The whine got louder, until it was all I could hear.
“Noelle, help me …I can’t do this…. ”
I couldn’t hear my own words. The whine got louder and louder, and the room spun faster and faster.
The lights went out, and it all stopped. The tone in my ears was gone and I could hear the hum of the air system again. I opened my eyes, and the ceiling had stopped moving, for the most part.
Huma variant 34000174T initialization complete.
The words appeared and floated in front of me.
Initialization successful.
The headache was gone. The tremors were gone. I looked around. Noelle still stood there watching me.
“What happened?” I asked. She didn’t answer.
“Hello?” My voice echoed in the room.
I didn’t feel drunk anymore, which was weird. I didn’t have the shakes anymore either. Instead I felt clear, clearer than I had in a long time, and maybe even ever.
It was so quiet, a quiet like I’d never known before, and after a minute, I realized why. That constant stream of sensation that always lingered in the back of my mind was gone. Noelle was standing a few feet away, but I couldn’t sense her. I couldn’t sense any of the stray thoughts that were always there, like white noise in the background. The sensation was gone altogether. It was as if I’d suddenly woken up blind and deaf.
For a second I felt panic, but then, just like that, it vanished and instead I felt something else: relief. I felt profound relief.
It’s gone. The thing people called my gift, the ability I never asked for and that had haunted me my entire life was gone. It was gone, and it took the visions and the nightmares and that horrible, crushing weight of responsibility away with it.
“It’s gone,” I whispered. Noelle smiled a little, but she didn’t look happy.
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. It felt good. I remembered once, years ago, the first time I’d come face-to-face with a revivor and I realized I couldn’t sense or control it. I remembered how scared it had made me feel, how lost I felt without that ability. It was different now. Now it felt liberating. If I didn’t know the future, then I was under no obligation to try to change it. I didn’t have to feel any guilt for not being able to change the things that couldn’t be changed. I didn’t have to live in fear.
“It’s gone,” I whispered again; then something moved under the skin in back of my neck. Phantom fingers wormed into the muscle and sent a shiver down my spine.
Error. The word appeared in front of me and flashed.
Error.
Something shocked me. My whole body jerked, and I almost fell to the floor. Before I could wonder what happened, the skin on my face felt tight all of a sudden. My lips peeled back and pain pricked at my gums.
What’s happening?
Something was wrong. Inside me, something was very wrong. The scratching in the back of my neck started to burn. I reached back, and when my hands touched the back of my head, I felt the skull melt away under the skin and hair there. Heat trickled down into my stomach, and under my fingers the skin pulled tight across the knobs of my spine.
Error.
Pain pricked my gums like needles and I felt my tongue peel down the middle into two pieces. My cheeks collapsed as the skin pulled taut around my neck, and the walls around me shifted from green to a colorless gray.
The word flashed more urgently, then winked out. The crawling under my skin stopped.
Primary node network construction failed. The new words floated under the first ones. A few seconds later, they both faded.
My head felt big and heavy. It wobbled as I turned, and when I did, I noticed a strand of drool had oozed down from my lower lip. When I wiped it with my hand, I saw something black in it.
I turned again and caught my reflection in the steel of the headset panel. I tried to scream, but nothing came out.
“This is how it begins,” Noelle said.
I stared at my face, distorted in the polished metal of the switchbox. My neck was shri
veled to a bent stick, and my head bobbed at the end. I could barely support it. The back of my skull had melted away under the skin. My lips were pulled back to show my teeth. The gums pulled away and there was blood there, and saliva that drooled from the end of my chin. It was what Ai and the others had termed the Vaggot Deformation.
My eyes stared out of sunken sockets, the whites spotted with broken black veins. I turned back to Noelle and tried to speak, but I couldn’t form the sounds. All that came out was a guttural wheeze.
“Without the building blocks it requires, it tries to use the tissue around it,” she said. “It fails, but drags its victims into a state between life and death, and the spread never stops.”
I got a flash of streets full of surging bodies, eyes blank and staring, and deformed heads that shook at the end of crooked necks. They moved through the wreckage of an abandoned city, not understanding the things around them.
“The living are forced underground,” she said. “You are seeing the last remnants of humanity.”
My reflection worked the swollen halves of its black tongue as I tried to speak. Noelle stepped close to me and looked into my eyes.
She leaned in and put her arms around me. I felt her cold hand on the back of my vulture’s neck, and rested my chin on her bony shoulder. I felt her breath in my ear as she whispered one last time.
“Someone has to do it,” she said. “You know in your heart this is true. Destroy the city, and you can stop this. It’s the only thing that can stop this. You have to—”
The room warped in front of me. I staggered forward as Noelle disappeared. The green concrete walls faded and I was back at Alto Do Mundo, in the war room, where Penny stood shaking me.
“Zoe!”
I touched my face. It was normal. I ran my hands over the back of my neck. I was okay. It wasn’t real. None of it was real, but …
“What happened?” Penny asked. “What did you see?”
I turned and vomited onto the tiled floor. Even as I retched, I couldn’t shake the horrible feeling of being trapped in that deformed body.
“Zoe, come on. We’re leaving.”