ZerOes

by Chuck Wendig

  His ears ringing, Chance runs.

  He doesn’t make it far. Someone is already in his bedroom. The butt of a shotgun cracks hard across the side of his head and he goes down against a rickety end table he picked up at a yard sale. His clock radio catapults across the room. He paws at the bed, trying to stand up—

  A man steps into view. An older black dude with close-cropped hair and big muttonchop sideburns. He’s a tall bundle of sticks stuffed into a rumpled government suit.

  The man pops gum in his mouth. Pops it as he chews. “They beat your ass pretty good, huh,” he says.

  “You hit me,” Chance says, but the words sound mushy. His face aches.

  “And I’ll do it again if you try to run.”

  Chance coughs. “I don’t know you, but way I figure it, you’re trespassing.”

  That gets a chuckle. “I’m allowed to trespass,” the man says. No Southern twang, none of that easy, muddy North Cackalacky slide. His words are short. Clipped like with a little pair of scissors. “I’m Mr. Government.”

  Then Mr. Government sticks a stun gun to Chance’s neck and the world goes bright and alive.

  CHAPTER 2

  DeAndre Mitchell

  SAUSALITO, CALIFORNIA

  DeAndre presses the earbuds into his ears with two pokes of his long fingers, swings his legs out of a Honda Accord that’s not his, and walks over to the gas pump. He tells his jailbroken iPhone to play some music. Chiddy Bang queues up. He thumps drums on his chest with one hand as he pumps gas.

  Then he holds his phone over the card reader for five seconds.

  He feels the phone vibrate as it finds the Bluetooth signal. It starts the download. Credit card numbers—hundreds of them, digits and mag stripe data from all the people who used this pump over the past week—zip into his phone. It vibrates again when it’s done.

  DeAndre pockets the phone. Bobs his head to the music. Slaps an open-palm drumbeat against his thighs. Then he stops pumping gas—just six bucks worth, not even two gallons—and gets back in the car and drives away.

  He’ll sell 90 percent of these credit card numbers. The carder markets online always have scammers looking for fresh dumps of digits. At ten bucks a pop, that makes today a three-thousand-dollar day. And this ain’t the only place he’s running skimmers. He’s got devices at the Valero off 82, at the Sev on Shoreline, at the Safeway on Marina. After a couple of weeks he’ll move ’em to new locations. Cycle ’em around.

  He’ll turn the other numbers into plastic. He’s got a top-shelf card printer, spits them out fast. He gets a refresh of cards, can use them quick, then toss them.

  All that will come later. Right now, it’s time to go see his moms.

  This is going to be a good day, he thinks.

  And it will be. Until it’s not.

  MARIN CITY, CALIFORNIA

  The houses on Nogales Street aren’t much to look at. Like a bunch of shoeboxes sitting next to one another in an ugly line. The hedges between them are dead or overgrown.

  DeAndre parks the car, gives the side-eye to the housing project across the street—the Olima Apartments, where a bunch of reedy, weedy gangbangers mill around mismatched lawn furniture in the middle of the apartment courtyard. A few whoop and yell as he gets out—they don’t know him and he doesn’t know them, but that’s how they are.

  DeAndre could have been one of them. Thinking he’s a little Tupac in the making—so proud they all come from the same town as the long-dead rapper—slinging drugs and packing a nine. But his moms kept him straight. She made DeAndre do his time at the library. At the comic book store. At the two-dollar movie theater. Most important of all, in the computer lab at the library. He did anything to get out of that house. Anything to get away from those bangers and slangers across the street.

  Miss Livinia pokes around the front lawn of the little lemon-yellow house next door to the one he grew up in. She’s all hunched over, a little pile of raisin-wrinkled lady squinting from behind praying-mantis eyeglasses. She’s picking pieces of mailbox out of the overgrown grass, setting them on a flattened cardboard box to collect them.

  That’s when DeAndre sees—it’s not just the mailbox. The house is all shot up. Windows broken. Bullet holes in moldy siding. A gutter hangs loose. He hurries over, calling, “Miss Livinia, hey.”

  The old woman lifts her head—a small act that seems to take a lot of effort. Her pinched eyes search him up and down. Finally she adjusts her glasses and laughs. “That you, Stringbean?”

  “Yeah. It’s DeAndre, Miss Livinia.”

  “All right, all right, I’m sure I got some candy in the house for you. Got some M&Ms, the kind with the peanuts in ’em—but they’re getting harder to find, you believe that? Those chocolates are a classic and nobody seems to want ’em anymore. But that’s the way with old, good things—”

  He laughs and stops her from going inside the house. “No, Miss Livinia, I don’t need any candy. I’m good.”

  She looks him up and down behind the lenses of her bug-out spectacles. “You need to eat something, boy. You skinnier than a cat’s tail. I’ll make you some chicken and rice.”

  “I gotta get to my moms,” he says. “But yo, what happened to your house?”

  “Those dopeheads came by and shot it up. They musta thought Demetrius was back in town, but he ain’t even out of jail yet, those donkeys.”

  “Damn! You okay?” Demetrius, her grandson. Always used to push DeAndre around, beat him up after school, steal his shit.

  She waves him on. “I’m fine, Stringbean. I’m fine. God ain’t seen fit to take me yet and no dopeheads spraying my gutters with bullets are gonna be the ones who do it.” She sighs and hmms. “Guess I do need a new mailbox, though.”

  He grabs Livinia’s hand. It’s dry and papery, like the pages of a Bible. DeAndre makes sure to turn his back to the slingers across the street. He presses a handful of money into her palm: just shy of five hundred bucks. She peers down at it like she’s trying to read the fine print on a newspaper ad—then her eyes go big enough to match those glasses of hers. “This what I think it is?”

  “Take it, Miss Livinia. Buy what you need.”

  “Boy, whatchoo been up to lately?”

  “I got a job.”

  “It a good job?”

  “It’s a real good job.”

  His moms answers the door. She looks him up and down with an eyebrow cocked so high he thinks it might float up above her head and take off like a spaceship. Then she laughs and gives him a big hug and tells him to come inside, get something to eat, he’s too skinny. She turns and sways those big hips, sashaying to the kitchen.

  But DeAndre doesn’t go inside. Instead he calls after her.

  “Moms,” he says. “Let’s take a ride. I got something to show you.”

  “What are you gonna show me?” she says with a wry smile.

  He winks and waves her on.

  MILL VALLEY, CALIFORNIA

  “Whose house is this?” his moms asks, again with the arched eyebrow. “This is a richie-rich house. You got business here?”

  The house is—what did the real estate agent call it? Mission style. Three bed, two bath. Couple of palm trees out front. Privacy fence with pretty flowers climbing all over it. Little fountain burbling and gurgling. Pool in the back. Golf course across the street.

  “This ain’t business, Moms,” DeAndre says, laughing. Then he fishes into his pocket, past his phone, and fetches a set of keys. He dangles them in front of her.

  “What the hell is this?”

  “They’re keys.”

  “You’re a smart-ass, you know that?”

  It’s a familiar refrain, and DeAndre has a familiar response: “Smart-ass is better than a dumb-ass.”

  “Yeah, yeah. You still didn’t answer the question. Why you dangling a set of keys in front of my eyes like I’m a little kitty cat? I don’t care much for shiny things.”

  “You oughta start.”

  She sits there, quiet
for a second. Finally, she says, “You’re telling me this is your house. That what you’re telling me?”

  “I’m telling you this is your house.”

  Blink, blink. “What’d you just say?”

  He drops the keys in her lap and claps his hands, thrilled by having taken her by surprise. The woman’s a rock. She isn’t surprised by anything. All his life she’s been five steps ahead of him. But not this time.

  He hops out of the car and yells for her to follow after.

  Inside the house. Big foyer. Spanish tile. Steps made of some kind of redwood going up to the second floor. He takes her right to her favorite place: the kitchen. This one has granite countertops, stainless steel appliances. DeAndre doesn’t know much about that, but the real estate agent said that’s what everybody wants. He understands why. It looks nice. Feels nice, too—the counters are cool to the touch, clean and smooth. Like he could lay his head on one after a hot day.

  Moms walks through real slow, real cautious, like she’s afraid if she moves too fast the whole thing will come down around her ears like it’s made of playing cards. “This is an expensive house,” she says.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I do know that. I know who lives in Mill Valley. Rich white people.”

  “Middle-class white people, Moms.”

  “They’re rich to me. And I thought rich to you, too.”

  “I got money now, Moms.” He figured this conversation would come. He swallows a hard knot and steadies himself. “I got a good job now.”

  “What kinda job?” Now she’s studying him real good. Way a cat studies a mouse. That’s how he feels, too—like a mouse pinned by a heavy paw.

  “I work with computers.”

  Now her hands are on her hips. “What kinda computers?”

  “The kind with a keyboard and a monitor.” Before she can say it, “I know, I know, smart-ass. I’m doing some programming, okay? It’s good money. Shoot, good money doesn’t even cover it.” He sees her suspicious look, pulls it back a little. “I got a good deal on the house. Foreclosure-type deal. A . . . a . . . whadda they call it? Short sale. Low interest and all that.”

  DeAndre neglects to mention that he’s got the kind of money you could spread out on a bed and roll around in the way a dog rolls around in its own mess. Enough money that if he ever lost any of it, he could be like, Yo, whatever, I’ll just go buy more.

  She’s still got that look. Like she doesn’t believe him. Like she’s picking him apart with a fork and tongs the way you shred meat.

  But then her expression softens and a big goofy smile spreads across her face and she crashes into him with a big hug. “I always knew you’d make something of yourself,” she says.

  He kisses her brow. “Come on, Moms. Let’s go upstairs, check out the bedrooms.”

  The master bedroom’s damn near as big as the whole downstairs of the house on Nogales Street. His moms does a slow orbit of the room, whistling low and slow like she’s seeing something she just can’t believe. Each whistle followed up by a little mm-mm-mmm.

  DeAndre laughs.

  But his laugh gets cut short.

  Out the window, he sees something that doesn’t make sense. Past the pool, past the patio furniture and the built-in Weber grill, he sees a black round something. Like a bowling ball covered in fabric. Hiding in the shrubs and vines next to the pretty purple flowers.

  A radio squelches outside.

  DeAndre’s palms glisten with cold sweat. It’s five-oh. The cops. It’s the cops. That’s no bowling ball. It’s someone’s head. A helmeted head. A cop in SWAT armor.

  “Hey, Moms,” he says, trying to stop his voice from cracking, trying to stop the panic from leaching out. “You, uh, you hang here for a minute. I gotta run out, meet the real estate agent for, ah, a quick thing at the corner diner.”

  He ducks into the bathroom. Travertine tile. Shower big enough to have a party inside. A shower with a window. A window that looks out over the neighbor’s house.

  DeAndre thinks, I can do this. He can jump. Like they do in the video games. Free running. Parkour. Whatever they call it.

  He climbs up, crouches in the bathroom window like a gargoyle. He’s tall but lean, and can close himself up like a folding chair if need be. He looks down at the stone wall separating his moms’s new house from the neighbor’s place. The wall is as wide as DeAndre’s foot is long, and just ten feet away. Beyond it is the neighbor’s house, with a sloped roof. If he can make it to the wall, he’s free.

  The trick is, he’s got to run—but they’ve got to follow his ass, too. He runs and they go kicking down the door to this house, what will Moms think? If she doesn’t have a heart attack, she’ll know his job is a lie, the house is a lie.

  She’ll know he’s a lie.

  He swallows hard. Catches movement down below, up past the little shed along the side of the house, near the birdbath.

  He jumps. His feet plant hard on the flat top of the wall—the shock goes up through his knees, into his hips, a javelin of straight pain, and he knows he should have crouched more as he hit to absorb the shock, but no time to worry about that now.

  Now he’s landing on the neighbor’s roof, cracking a terracotta tile and sending it spinning to the ground. He hears another radio squelch and mumbled police chatter. Just to make sure, he calls out, “Up here, homies.”

  Someone calls out in alarm from below. The cops. Good. He scrambles to stand, spits blood, jumps to another roof. He slams his shoulder hard against a window—it’s just a screen, and it pops out as he tumbles inside, pitching forward against what is mercifully plush carpet. He hears a high-pitched shriek and realizes it’s his own.

  He hurries through the house. Carpet on his feet, air in his teeth, no time to think. He runs through the hall, sees a woman in frumpy pink panties throwing clothes into an over-under laundry machine. DeAndre gives her a panicked look—sorry, lady—and a little wave. She screams. He runs into a master bedroom the color of Caribbean waters. He flings open the window and—

  Long jump. Ignoring the pain now. Adoring the freedom. His hands catch the ledge of another house’s roof—and here he has it all played out in his head. He’ll plant his feet. Kick off like a swimmer. Wrap his arms around a palm tree like a stripper at her pole and then he’ll be up on another roof with some kickin’ Assassin’s Creed moves—

  The gutter he’s holding onto shifts downward. It makes a gonk sound, then rips out of its moorings and breaks away from the roof.

  DeAndre lands hard on his ass bone and feels firecrackers of pain popping up his spine, into his neck, to the base of his skull.

  He hears the crackle of shrubs and hedge. Incoming.

  He wants to lie down and whimper, but that ain’t an option. So he’s up. Running toward the sounds of traffic, past a little swing set, past a hibachi grill, to a breach between two tall bougainvillea hedges. That breach means freedom. He sees the road beyond it. Cars and trucks whipping past. Once he hits the street, that’s it. He can go anywhere—lose himself in the park, disappear into traffic, grab a golf cart.

  He charges hard for the breach in the hedge.

  Someone steps in his path.

  He cries out, “No, no, no, no!”

  A shotgun goes up, then off.

  DeAndre drops. Gasping. He can’t breathe. He can barely see. Everything is a strobing white light of pain, up and down, left and right, wheeze, cough, whine. He feels around his midsection for the hole. Looking for the blood. But nothing. His shirt’s not even torn.

  A man steps into view. Tall, like he is, but not so lanky. Broad shoulders, bit of a gut straining against the white shirt and black jacket. African American, like him. Darker skinned. Midnight skin.

  The man lets the nickel-plated pump-action hang by his side. “Hey, DeAndre,” he says. “My name’s Hollis. You busy right now?”

  CHAPTER 3

  Aleena Kattan

  NEW YORK CITY

  Reminder,” Melanie the
vampire says, standing at the front of the room by the whiteboard. “Next Thursday is the Fourth of July, and the Wednesday before we’re doing Cruiseapalooza, where every floor is a different”—she makes bunny-ear quotes in midair—“‘cruise destination,’ and here on the accounts floor we’re going to be Hawaii, so, aloha, mahalo, dress Hawaiian.”

  Aleena sits at the back of the room, listening to Melanie—whose skin is the alabaster hue of a river-logged corpse—drone on and on. Mel’s the wrong person to lead the department and these monthly staff meetings. Everyone hates her. She’s got a voice like a mosquito humming in your ear. But that’s middle management for you: smart enough to get promoted, stupid enough to have to stay.

  Aleena thinks a lot of these people are stupid.

  She feels bad about that. It’s very judgmental. But she also feels these people are due a bit of judgment. This batch of half-done cookies is an ignorant, corn-fed lot happy to watch sitcoms on their too-big TVs while the rest of the world struggles and cries and burns. They have their own problems, but Aleena knows they’re not real problems. Like the hashtag says: #firstworldproblems.

  Her phone vibrates in her pocket. A text. She pulls out the phone, gives it a quick look. Her heart lodges in her throat.

  The text reads, in Arabic: We are advancing—the timetable has moved up

  The message is from Qasim.

  She texts back: I’m not ready. Nobody told me!

  Khalid has been shot—sniper fire

  Her pulse goes from stopped to stampeding horses. No, no, no. She tries to think. It’s 10 A.M. here, which means in Damascus it’s 5 P.M. Where are they? What are they doing right now? Not the protest.

  The station. They’re attacking one of the state’s TV stations. Trying to take it over in the name of Suriya al-shaab, the people’s station, to broadcast truth in the name of those who oppose the regime. That’s today. That’s now.

  Her phone buzzes: Get to a computer

  Not now. She can’t. She can’t. She needs this job if she’s going to do her . . . other work. Firesign is one of the country’s biggest ISPs. She has nearly infinite bandwidth here, and as smart as they think they are about network security, she can dip in and out with ease.