Code Zero

by Jonathan Maberry

  Her voice was never once raised above an arctic snarl.

  The moment held as the two women glared across the width of the desk and a frozen wasteland at each other.

  “Making modifications on MindReader is not part of your job,” said Auntie, but her voice had lost some of its edge. “All modifications are overseen by—”

  “By Bug, I know. So what? He’s smart, sure, but he isn’t the smartest person in this building by a long stretch. You don’t believe that, look at our last performance evaluations. Hell, look at our scores on game simulator speedruns.”

  Aunt Sallie did not reply, and Bliss knew that she’d scored big with that. Either Auntie already knew those scores or she hadn’t checked. In either case she was short one card.

  Bliss’s heart was going a million miles an hour but she’d be damned if she’d let it show on her face. Instead she played her next card.

  “Tell you what, Auntie,” she said, her voice about twenty degrees colder, “why don’t you go through the field reports of the last forty missions. Pick any teams at random, any missions. Then do the math to see whose software contributed most to preserving the lives of our operators and insuring the success of the missions. Match that against Bug or anyone else, then if you have anything to say to me we can do it as part of my exit interview. Otherwise I’m done with this bullshit and I have work to do.”

  She stood up, intending to use the objectivity of the height of a standing person over one sitting to put Aunt Sallie in a defensive position. Instead, Aunt Sallie smiled and folded her hands primly on her desk.

  “Sit your ass down,” she said. Her voice was on the cold side of dangerous.

  Bliss gave it a moment, then sat. Slowly, and with control.

  “You spoke your mind, and it’s nice to know that you have a backbone. After all these years I was beginning to wonder. And maybe you’re being straight up and not simply wiping your ass with the flag, but I have two things you need to hear.”

  Bliss said nothing, knowing that any response would weaken her hand. Instead she arched one eyebrow. Half interested, half mocking.

  “First,” said Aunt Sallie, “you do not have full clearance on MindReader, and that means you will attempt no further intrusions into the system. I don’t care if there are missiles inbound and that’s the only way to save the day. You. Don’t. Hack. MindReader.” Aunt Sallie spaced those last four words like gunshots.

  Instead of replying or acknowledging that, Bliss asked, “And what’s the other thing?”

  “Don’t ever get in my face again,” said Aunt Sallie.

  Bliss leaned back in her chair and crossed her legs. She gave it a moment while she composed the best response, given the nature of the implied threat, the nature of her own faux pas, and the echo of her own words which still hung in the air.

  “A lot of people are afraid of you, Auntie,” said Bliss, her tone conversational. “Maybe they have reasons. There are a lot of tall tales floating around about you. And even if half of them are true then once upon a time you were hot shit. Well, here’s a news flash, that’s not even yesterday’s news. It’s last century’s. You’re a bitchy, foul-mouthed, and disgruntled old woman who likes to bully people and you probably get some kind of contact high every time you verbally bitch-slap someone. It’s all very interesting and maybe it would make a good movie. But in the real world, in the world of right now, I’m more valuable to the DMS than you are. You’re not a scientist and you’re long past being a field agent, and this organization’s entire effectiveness is built on geeks and shooters. I’m worth ten of you. Now either fire me or fuck off.”

  Later, back at her desk, Bliss tried not to smile.

  An official reprimand went into her file. And that wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on, since she worked for a secret organization. Besides, she could take her skills anywhere—even outside of the Department of Defense, DARPA, or any related group—and if she couldn’t file patents on what she’d done as part of the DMS, she knew that she had a lot more game. She’d come up with something brand new. Something that would kick the ass of everything else on the market.

  That evening she lay in the warm circle of the vice president’s arms in a hotel room guarded by Secret Service agents who were totally owned by Collins. The vice president’s wife was on yet another charity trip. Bliss told Collins everything that had happened.

  They both laughed until they cried.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Surf Shop 24-Hour Cyber Café

  Corner of Fifth Avenue and Garfield Street

  Park Slope, Brooklyn

  Sunday, August 31, 1:17 p.m.

  I tapped my earbud for Bug but got Nikki instead.

  I told her about the attack and ordered her to put it into the system with A-clearance priority.

  “God, are you all right?”

  I had glass splinters in my hair and a case of the shakes I was sure would never go away. I wanted to curl up on my couch with a pint of Ben and Jerry’s and watch daytime TV until I no longer believed that there was a real world.

  “Sure,” I said, “I’m just peachy. Listen, kid, have you guys made any progress on those text messages? ’Cause I got one right before the hit.”

  “Not so far, but—”

  “Put more people on it,” I barked, and told her about the one I got right before the attack. “These have to be coming from Mother Night. Which means she knows my cell number and she can bypass MindReader. I don’t care what you have to do, but get this solved.”

  Then my brain shifted gears so fast that I nearly hurt myself.

  “Wait a goddamn minute. The message before that last one. You always hurt the one you love. Christ, it sounded stupid at the time but it sure as shit doesn’t now. It sounds like a threat. Junie is at FreeTech. I want two security guards bookending her and I want it right fucking now. And call her to let her know they’re coming. Don’t talk to me. Make it happen.”

  She was gone.

  I stood trembling in the street, but now the shakes had nothing to do with gun battles or flesh wounds.

  “No,” I said to the day—to this awful, awful day. “No.”

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Fulton Street Line

  Near Euclid Avenue Station

  Brooklyn, New York

  Sunday, August 31, 1:18 p.m.

  NYPD transit officer Maureen Faustino stared into darkness.

  “What happened to the damn lights?” she asked as she reached for her flash.

  A few feet away, her partner, Sonny Dawes, clicked his light on. The beam reached twenty yards down the subway tunnel before being consumed by the intense darkness. Faustino turned her flash on and swept it along the ceiling and the damp walls. Rows of security lights in wire cages were dark.

  With her other hand, Faustino clicked her shoulder mike and reported the power outage. The dispatcher noted it and told them to proceed with caution.

  Use caution walking into a pitch-black tunnel? thought Faustino. No shit.

  “How far’s the train?” asked Dawes.

  “Dispatch says six hundred yards.”

  They looked at the utter blackness beyond their flashlight beams.

  “Well, fuck a duck,” said Dawes.

  They glanced at each other for a moment, nodded, and drew their guns.

  Faustino and Dawes were down here responding to a call from the conductor. There had been some cell calls from people trapped on the train, but those calls were badly distorted by some kind of interference, and then they all abruptly stopped. To prevent a collision, the transit company halted all other trains on that line, so now people were in stations all along it, getting impatient, getting pissed, demanding answers.

  No further contact had been established with anyone on the train.

  Faustino swallowed nervously. Nothing about this felt right.

  “Think we should call for backup?” asked Dawes.

  “For what?” answered Faustino. Though, in truth, she
wanted to do just that. She didn’t, though. The transit authority had begun installation of cellular carrier boosters in the subway system, but there were still cell phone dead spots, and they seemed to be in one. Hardly justification to ask for additional units when everyone was already stretched thin because of Labor Day. Besides, they were both experienced at this sort of thing—the New York version of tunnel rats. Faustino had lost track of how many times she’d had to walk through these stone veins beneath the city.

  “Let’s go,” she said, and together they moved single-file along a narrow concrete service walkway.

  The smell was damp and electrical, with undertones of rot and waste.

  The tunnels were bad enough when the lights were on. Vermin of every kind. Cockroaches big enough to mug you. Shit from homeless people coming down here to take a dump. Syringes and crack vials underfoot—though Faustino could never imagine anyone coming down here to get high. And the constant drip of water and puddles that never seemed to evaporate.

  Dawes pointed. “There’s a light up there.”

  She looked past him and saw something. Not a train light or a service light. This was small and red. And as they approached they saw that it was a small security camera of a kind they’d never seen before. Very compact and brand new, stuck to a pillar with some kind of adhesive.

  “Since when are they putting CCTV down here?” asked Dawes. “And what for? To watch rats fuck each other?”

  “Hey, watch your language,” cautioned Faustino in a whisper. She pulled him away from the camera. “You don’t know who’s watching. Don’t want to get written up.”

  He nodded and they pressed on, but soon found a second camera. And a third.

  “Must be something new,” decided Faustino. “Quality control or something.”

  “Not our problem,” said Dawes. Then he stopped and squinted into the shadows. “Wait … you hear that?”

  Faustino listened.

  She heard nothing.

  And then she heard something.

  Very faint, very far away. Soft. Distorted by distance and …

  “You hear that?” asked Dawes.

  “Yeah. But I can’t…” Her words trailed off as the sound came again, a little louder now.

  It wasn’t a scream or a yell for help. Nothing like that.

  But it was a human sound.

  Almost like … singing. Faustino frowned, trying to understand what she was hearing. No, not singing. This noise was not musical. Not humming either, though that was a little closer to the quality of the sound that drifted on the fetid breaths of bad air.

  It was like someone was keening.

  The way old women do sometimes at funerals. The way her aunt Maria used to do. A steady, keening sound that chilled Faustino to the marrow.

  Whatever it was, it was wrong in ways she could not identify.

  Something worse than any malfunction of motors or generators.

  “Call this in,” whispered Dawes. “We need someone else down here.”

  This time Faustino did not argue. She keyed her mike for dispatch.

  And got a burst of sharp static.

  Faustino adjusted her squelch and tried it again.

  More static, but this time she could hear a voice.

  “… at … ituation … all back and…”

  Just pieces.

  Then nothing as the signal faded and died.

  Faustino could feel Dawes’s breath on her cheek and throat. As close as a lover, the exhaled air warmer than anything down in this tunnel.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  They both knew she wasn’t asking about the message from dispatch.

  The sound filled the tunnel, rolling in waves, rising and falling.

  Human voices.

  Not singing.

  Not humming.

  They were … moaning.

  Chapter Forty

  Tactical Operations Center

  The Hangar

  Floyd Bennett Field

  Brooklyn, New York

  Sunday, August 31, 1:20 p.m.

  Bug perched on his chair, eyes darting from screen to screen as his slender fingers danced like hummingbird wings over the keys. A lot seemed to be happening in the world, and none of it was good. Bombings in Kentucky and Pennsylvania, a bizarre spike in random violence ranging from gang attacks in upscale neighborhoods in five states to eight separate attacks on salespersons in stores in different parts of the south, and arson in three sporting goods warehouses in Indiana. Individually, they were the kind of events that would make headlines and be top stories on any news broadcast. Collectively, they were likely to make this the most violent day in the country in a decade. News services were already slanting their coverage that way.

  Bug and his team were running it all through MindReader’s pattern-recognition software. There was no known connection and no reason to believe that these events were connected, but Bug didn’t like coincidences any more than his boss did. Also, the Mother Night cyberhacking had everyone on edge. Her message used anarchist rhetoric, and the craziness sweeping the country felt like things were falling apart. So Bug created a search argument for anarchistic behavior and asked MindReader to create a list of possible connections. Sadly, this being America, the list of apparently random acts of violence grew too rapidly to read.

  Sighing, Bug let that compile and worked on ways to refine the search so it didn’t include everything from road rage to jaywalking.

  His intercom buzzed and he hit a key to take a call from his senior assistant, Yoda—which, sadly, was his real first name. Yoda’s parents were ultrageeks even by Bug’s standards.

  “Bug!” gasped Yoda. “Jesus, man, you have to see this.”

  “See what?”

  “It’s from my friend at the NYPD. He sends me stuff when there’s something hot. This is direct from the subway in Brooklyn. You have to see this shit to believe it.”

  “I’m really swamped here, Yoda, and…”

  Bug’s words trailed off as a video feed filled the main screen with dozens of smaller windows, each one showing a crowd of civilians crammed into a tight space. It was clear that the crowd was standing in darkness and lit only by the glow from cell phones and tablets. The pictures were erratic. People were screaming, yelling for help, shouting at one another.

  Then one by one most of the phones fell or were knocked from the hands of the people making the calls. Instead of normal angles, the phones lay on the floor or on seats of what was obviously a subway car.

  “What the hell…?” whispered Bug.

  The people on the subway car were tearing one another to pieces.

  They were eating one another.

  Chapter Forty-one

  Joseph Curseen, Jr., and Thomas Morris, Jr., Processing and Distribution Center

  900 Brentwood Road, Northeast

  Washington, D.C.

  Sunday, August 31, 1:21 p.m.

  The mailroom at the Brentwood processing center receives tens of thousands of pieces of mail each day addressed to the White House and Congress. It operates twenty-four hours a day and rarely pauses for holidays. Items marked for the personal attention of select individuals in the succession of powers were culled from the mass and sorted separately, put in sacks and sent by cart to a senior sorter for screening.

  On Sunday morning, Jorge Cantu loaded the fourth mail sack onto the conveyor belt that fed the sacks through a high-tech scanner. There were several sections of the scanner, including an X-ray, a metal detector, an explosives detection system—EDS—and a bio-aerosol mass spectrometer typically called a BAMS unit. If any of these machines so much as coughed, Cantu stopped the belt and hit an alert button. Different alerts resulted in different kinds of responses.

  The nitrite sniffer never, in Cantu’s experience, beeped, because there were similar explosives detection devices used by the Post Office and Secret Service before the bags were ever sent to the mailroom. Ditto for the metal detectors. Once in a while something lik
e a bolo tie from a western resident or a tin of chocolates from a sewing club in New England would make it as far as the White House mailroom, but never any farther. No matter how well-intentioned, gifts of that kind sent through the mail seldom made it even as far as the president’s staff. Never to the desk in the Oval Office.

  The same scrutiny was afforded to the vice president, Speaker of the House, and other notables. There had been enough problems, even before 9/11, that no one took chances. And there were so many stages of screening that Cantu seldom encountered anything more dire than junk mail. Once, though, a load of dog crap sealed in plastic made it to the desk of the press secretary’s assistant before it was discovered. The package included a note that said, “At least this shit is honest.”

  No return address.

  There was a rumor that the press secretary had the letter framed.

  Otherwise, the mailroom at Brentwood was busy but not particularly interesting.

  Until the morning of August 31.

  A warning light flashed red and a small bell suddenly started ringing.

  Not the bomb alert.

  Not the metal detector.

  This bell was one that had never rung once in the seven years Jorge Cantu had sorted mail for this administration.

  It was the warning alert for the mass spectrometer.

  The device whose sole purpose was to detect dangerous particles. It had four colored lights. Green for normal. Yellow for suspicious. Orange for likely toxins.

  And red for a verified hit on one of four possible threats.

  Spores.

  Fungi.

  Bacteria.

  Or viruses.

  Cantu stared at the light as the bell jangled in his ear. He said, “Oh my god!”