Countdown Zero

by Chris Rylander

  I had no clue how many darts I had left in the tranquilizer gun, but it didn’t matter. I’d have acted the same way even if I were completely unarmed. I reached up and grabbed the edge of the roof with my free hand. Then I swung myself up, gun hand first, and began blindly firing random shots onto the roof as I pulled my body up and over the ledge.

  My hope was that the threat of being hit again would distract the guard from firing his own weapon just long enough to give me a chance to at least get onto the roof and get a look at what I was dealing with. In the best-case scenario, I envisioned that one or more of my blind shots would actually hit the guy. Or at the very least, once I was on the roof, I’d do a cool action roll to my right and then dive back to my left, evading the spray of his machine gun while firing a perfect shot right into the center of his forehead. Just like in the movies.

  But it’s not always like it is in the movies. And so, of course, that’s not what happened. Not at all what happened.

  What happened was this:

  I rolled onto the roof like I planned, but in the process of doing so lost my grip on the tranquilizer gun. While I landed (quite painfully) midroll on the hard surface of the roof, my gun clattered harmlessly across the surface, sliding at least six feet away and well out of my reach.

  Not that it mattered. I landed squarely on my back and knocked the wind out of myself. I could barely breathe, let alone pick up any gun that was within reach. Which it wasn’t anyway.

  The guard, who had most definitely not been hit by one of my blind shots, emerged from his cover behind an air duct. He grinned as I sat up and tried to get my lungs functioning again. I wheezed as he started taking slow, deliberate steps toward me while letting his machine gun drop to his side.

  “What the heck?” he said. “You’re just a kid? You’re the punk who did this to me?”

  He held up his hand. The needle from the tranquilizer dart I had fired earlier had passed right through his palm so that it was sticking out the other side. Which I supposed explained why not enough of the tranquilizer within had passed into his bloodstream.

  What happened next was straight out of a Looney Tunes cartoon as opposed to some cool action movie. He took a few more steps toward me, but on his last step, his thick army boot landed on one of the cylindrical tranquilizer darts that I’d blindly fired onto the roof. It was made of some ridiculously strong metal and so instead of getting crushed, it rolled. His boot rolled with it and he lost his balance, flailing wildly in midair, one hand with a dart stuck in it, the other holding a heavy machine gun. The guard went sprawling backward.

  Once again, I acted faster than my brain could think. I found myself springing into a somersault toward my tranquilizer gun. I reached it and had it in my hand in less than two seconds.

  I rolled myself into a natural crouch and pointed, aimed, and fired off a shot, all in one single motion.

  The guard had just been getting to his feet when the dart struck him. This time it hit him squarely in the crotch of his pants. He let out a scream and then dropped his gun as his hands clasped instinctively around his wounded . . . uh, area.

  He rolled on the ground, writhing for a second or two, before the tranquilizer kicked in and he passed out.

  But I didn’t even have time to admire what I’d just done, because my only concern right then was whether I’d run over to the roof’s edge to find Danielle still barely hanging on, or just a set of parallel scratches in the concrete where her desperate last attempts to hold on had failed.

  WHEN I SCRAMBLED OVER TO THE EDGE OF THE ROOF, Danielle’s fingers were still clinging to the concrete. They were pure white from the strain. I reached down with both hands and grabbed her forearms just as her fingers finally slid off the edge.

  “What took you?” she gasped.

  “Ready?” I asked.

  She nodded. I leaned back and pulled her up onto the roof ledge. Exhausted, we both toppled back onto the gritty concrete roof. We just lay there next to each other for several seconds, breathing hard but not saying anything.

  Even with the not-so-distant sounds of the gun battle happening on the other side of the building, the star-blanketed sky looked almost surreal. I know I talk smack about North Dakota a lot, but I forget that it does have its perks from time to time. Not many places in the world offer night-sky views like the Dakotas.

  But the euphoria of having just saved Danielle’s life was perhaps making it seem even better than it really was in that moment.

  “Thank you, Carson,” Danielle said quietly, finally breaking the silence.

  “That’s what friends are for,” I said, sitting up. “You know, saving each other from thirty-foot plunges and maniac guards with automatic weapons. No big deal.”

  She managed to laugh through her shock. “Or rescuing them from a secret spy base inside of a huge stone bust of an ex-president that is about to implode, you mean?”

  I laughed back and nodded. “Exactly. What good’s a friend if they haven’t done that for you at least once. Right?” I got to my feet and held out my hand to help her up. “Come on. Our mission’s just getting started.”

  We ducked behind a metal air duct. Way across the roof of the building, through the glass of the Snakedome sticking up in the center, we saw guards running along the edges of the roof. They were firing machine guns out into the forest surrounding Snaketown and ducking for cover in chaotic tandem.

  If any of them came back here or even looked our way for any amount of time, it wouldn’t take long to spot us or figure out that something was amiss. We had to get inside quickly.

  We removed the cover to the vent with a small, motorized screwdriver, and then climbed inside. We replaced the cover behind us, just in case another guard came back this way.

  Once inside, we switched on tiny flashlights attached to headbands and Danielle turned on the little tracking monitor Agents Nineteen and Blue had given us. It looked a lot like a smartphone. It was basically just a little device with a touchscreen that had the blueprints of Snaketown loaded into it.

  Danielle pulled up the blueprints and found the flashing red dot that indicated the current location of the virus. She studied it for a few seconds, and then looked up at me. The light from her headband blinded me momentarily.

  “Sorry,” she whispered.

  “No problem,” I said, rubbing at my eyes.

  “All right, we’re going to crawl for a little while, and then turn a corner and enter the Snakedome. It’s going to be a pretty long crawl around the perimeter, where we’ll exit through another vent. From there, it should be a straight shot to where the virus is being kept. Are you ready?”

  I nodded, pretending that I wasn’t worried. That I completely didn’t care that in a few moments we’d be crawling through a thin metal vent above a giant atrium filled with poisonous snakes and one monster eighteen-footer named Gus. And that this flimsy vent was all that would be between me and a literal snake pit.

  “Yeah, sure,” I said. “Whatever. It’s just snakes, right? No big deal.”

  DANIELLE TOOK THE LEAD SINCE SHE HAD A MUCH BETTER IDEA where we were going than I did. The first thing I noticed once we started crawling through the vents was just how sore my knees were from having to do the same thing twice before earlier that day. Sure, crawling around in vents wasn’t exactly tortuous, but the metal surfaces weren’t really all that soft either. But I pushed on, knowing that we were getting close to getting the virus back and quite literally saving the world for real this time.

  The thin metal vents clanked and popped as we moved. These ducts seemed less sturdy than the vents inside Teddy Roosevelt’s head. Which actually made a lot of sense since those had been encased by mountain rock. Whereas these ducts probably rested on drywall and insulation, if anything at all.

  I just hoped that any guards underneath us wouldn’t hear it. The metal sides were definitely too thin to stop bullets. And we had literally nowhere to run or hide if we got caught.

  A few minutes int
o our journey, Danielle suddenly stopped and switched off her headband light. I did the same without needing to ask why. There were voices below us.

  Once my eyes adjusted to the relative darkness, I noticed a few streams of light just ahead of Danielle. We were about to pass over an open vent cover. The sound of voices grew louder.

  “So what’s next?” one of the voices said.

  It was Jake.

  “In thirty minutes we rendezvous with Medlock at the House of Scandinavia,” the other voice said. “We’ll hand off the virus to him there.”

  So Medlock was involved in all this after all. Somehow it didn’t surprise me. Had he figured the Agency might use me again in a pinch and recruited Jake to tail me? Did he have Phil strike right before our field trip to ensure this would play out just as he wanted? I clenched both of my fists. Once again, it was my fault that we were in this predicament.

  “What then?” Jake asked. “What will he do with it?”

  I expected Phil to deflect the question. That’s what the Agency would do with me. They’d likely say, “That’s not something you need to know right now, Agent Zero.” But I was wrong.

  “He’s going to use it to blackmail the Agency,” he said. “He’ll get them to provide him with money, resources, and information. The US government never negotiates with terrorists. But that’s why they have the Agency: a division totally off the books. They’ll give us what we want.”

  “How can Medlock be so sure?” Jake asked. It’s the same question I would have had. “I mean, I know he used to work for them and all. But how does he know how they’ll act in this situation?”

  “Because they’ll realize they have no choice,” Phil said confidently. “The only alternative will be to sit back and watch as Medlock releases the virus at next Friday’s North Dakota State Bison football game, infecting tens of thousands of people at once, ensuring a near apocalyptic loss of life. And the deaths would be on the Agency’s hands. After all, they’re the ones who created the virus, and it’s one of their own who took it from the lab. Negotiating with Medlock will be a no-brainer.”

  “But he’s going to release it anyway, right?” Jake said.

  “Of course,” Phil said. “We need the chaos to ensure that Medlock can put the rest of his plan into motion.”

  Why was Phil telling Jake all this? It was like they trusted him as much as any of Medlock’s other agents.

  “Come on,” Phil continued, “let’s gather the virus and get ready to make for the extraction point. The technician should have the tracking device removed by now.”

  “What about the guys attacking the front gate?” Jake asked as they continued walking again.

  “Don’t worry about them, our guards can handle themselves,” Phil said as their voices faded. “In fact, I’ve heard one of the attackers has already been taken down.”

  The voices trailed off completely.

  “Did you hear that?” I whispered. “One of them was hit!”

  “We can’t worry about that right now,” Danielle said, but I could see the fear in her eyes, too. “You also heard that plan, right? They’re going to release the virus, and they’re heading to the lab right now to get it and take it to an extraction point. We have to get there first, Carson. If they found a way to remove the tracking device, we can’t let it leave this compound.”

  “You’re right,” I said, fighting back the tears at the possibility that either Agent Nineteen or Agent Blue might already be dead.

  “Let’s keep going,” Danielle whispered. “But keep your light off for now.”

  We continued crawling, making more of an effort to stay quieter this time. I trusted Danielle knew where she was going and so didn’t ask questions as we pushed forward. I followed her lead when she eventually switched her light back on.

  The vent shafts continued to groan under our weight, and at one point the creaks got even louder. Each move forward caused another popping dent to form under my hands and knees.

  And that’s what I was thinking about when the vent completely broke in half and I started falling.

  The last thing I saw was Danielle spinning around as the panel beneath me gave way. I closed my eyes and waited for impact. For certain death. But it never happened.

  My descent did come to a jarring stop, but it wasn’t from hitting the ground. Instead, the straps of my backpack dug hard into my armpits and I found myself dangling from the broken section of metal air duct by nothing more than the loop on my backpack.

  I looked down, shocked and delighted at my luck. But that feeling quickly faded as I realized I was dangling above the Snakedome. Just eight or nine feet below me were a bunch of tropical trees and plants and foliage. And below them, snakes. Lots of snakes. There weren’t thousands of them piled up together in some crazy mound or anything like that. The place was a zoo, after all, and that would obviously be inhumane. But I did see several snakes: a small red one coiled up in a bush, a huge constrictor, probably named Gus, wrapped up in a nearby tree, and what looked like a black or brown cobra sliding smoothly through the brown brush directly below me.

  Danielle’s whisper came from above me. “Oh, no, Carson! Are you okay?”

  I looked up. She had poked her head out of the section of vent above me that had not fallen down. It was still secured to the upper wall that ran along the perimeter of the glass dome. At least she hadn’t fallen.

  “Not really,” I said back.

  “I heard it break and when I turned around and saw you were gone, I thought . . .” She stopped and shook her head.

  “Nope, I’m still here, just hanging around,” I said, holding out my arms as I dangled from the broken vent.

  “This is hardly the time for bad jokes,” she said.

  “That’s a great joke and you know it!”

  I didn’t really think this was a good time for puns either. But it was the only thing distracting me from the snakes below. There really weren’t many things that creeped me out. Spiders on my face in my sleep? Eh, no big deal. Fish guts baking in the sun? Not really. Giant rats eating a dead bird? Whatever. Scorpions in my shoes? Ouch, but also kinda cool. But snakes? No thanks. Refer back to eight-year-old me crying under a kitchen table at the mere mention of a harmless corn snake nearby.

  “Seriously, what are we going to do?” Danielle asked, looking panicked. “Can you climb back up the vent?”

  I reached behind me and tried to grab the edge and pull myself up. From the angle where I was, though, it was impossible. I was stuck there. A sitting duck for any guards who passed by.

  “What should I do?” she said. “I can’t just leave you here.”

  “You have to. Keep going and finish the mission,” I said. “I’ll be fine here. Once you get the virus and rendezvous with Agents Blue and Nineteen, just let them know where I am. It’s the only choice we have. Someone has got to get that virus! You heard Jake and Phil back there. We don’t have much time.”

  Danielle nodded and took a deep breath. She knew I was right. Our mission was more important than me. Or her. Or any one person, or any handful of people. That virus could literally kill billions of people over time. We had to get it back. And thankfully they’d given each of us our own gas masks and canisters of sleeping gas in our packs, so she could still complete the mission without me. It had only been a precaution, but it turned out to be a necessary one.

  “Good luck, and be safe,” I said.

  Danielle nodded. “You, too. I promise I will come back for you, one way or another.”

  Then she was gone.

  And it was just snakes and me.

  AS I DANGLED THERE, LOOKING DOWN, I BEGAN TO UNDERSTAND what made Snaketown so popular. There were a lot of snakes. After just a few minutes, I’d seen at least seven different species. And that’s a lot considering that visibility inside the glass dome at night wasn’t great.

  There was enough light coming from my headband, four faint yellow emergency lights posted around the dome’s perimeter, and the lig
ht from the moon and stars coming in through the dome’s glass panels to just make out most of what was in my immediate vicinity. But it was a lot harder to see in the shadows of the trees and bushes. The lighting created a lot of dark pockets of potential death.

  A few of the snakes I saw were bundled up and immobile. But most of them were active. They were slithering around, climbing the trees, moving way more than any of the snakes I ever saw at the regular zoo or pet stores. Were snakes nocturnal? Like fish and owls and bats? It had to be the case. Unless the zookeepers here pumped them full of stimulants or adrenaline or something so they provided a better show for the tourists?

  By this point, several of them had noticed me. I know that seems absurd, but I was convinced they knew I was there. I was pretty sure that snakes hunted by detecting body heat or something. And they almost looked as if they were trying to get closer to me to figure out what I was.

  Needless to say, it was pretty horrifying when my backpack straps started to tear. It began with a little ripping noise followed by me lowering a few inches closer to the snake pit.

  I desperately reached up behind me again, trying to find anything to hold on to. My fingers brushed against the smooth metal of the broken vent, but it was slick and there were zero handholds. There was another dull ripping noise, and then I was falling as the backpack straps tore completely. I reached up and snagged one of the straps in a last-ditch effort. And for a moment, I thought I’d saved myself. But the nylon strap wasn’t particularly easy to hold on to and it slid out of my grip before I had a chance to get my other hand up to help.

  Seconds later, I was sprawled out on the surprisingly soft dirt ground below. I twisted my ankle slightly in the fall, and it definitely didn’t feel great. But overall, I was probably pretty lucky I hadn’t broken any bones.

  Especially because that would have kept me from leaping to my feet and running toward a nearby clearing where there seemed to be less plants and trees for snakes to hide in. Every step I was sure I was about to step on a deadly poisonous snake. Or a giant constrictor named Gus. Or even just a harmless small snake would have adequately freaked me out.