ZerOes

by Chuck Wendig

  Just as a tractor trailer comes through.

  Whoever was in that coupe isn’t in this world anymore. The truck damn near atomizes it.

  Hydraulic brakes shriek and squeal. The back trailer leans, tilts—and starts to topple over on its side.

  Chance has no time to do differently. He mashes the accelerator so hard to the floor he damn near expects to feel asphalt under his boot. The shadow of the trailer looms over them as he blasts through the intersection. The pickup truck is just ahead—its tail end hanging out right in front of them.

  Chance yells as he braces for the hit. The SUV clips the corner of the pickup and the trailer falls just behind them, crashing down with a booming echo that he can feel all the way up through his heels and into his teeth.

  Ahead, the SUV powers its way through the intersection.

  The trailer crashes down just behind it. Its tarp becomes unmoored and red apples roll out across the intersection—across the shattered glass and scrap metal and, the Compiler sees, across a limb that may or may not be someone’s arm.

  His targets made it through. Only barely, a statistical anomaly (they are increasingly an error, a line of broken code that he is now forced to correct), but his way is now blocked.

  He whips the car around. The intersection is now a dread mess—a point of chaos in a normally organized juncture of traffic. This, she has created. Chaos will be necessary. Things must be broken before they can be remade. The code, torn apart, stripped of its errors, flushed of its disease. Rebuilt.

  It should unsettle him. It normally would. Particularly this moment—the scene of an accident. The human mind is cruel and so it has visited upon him (or, rather, revisited) scenes from that accident five years before. All that glass and blood. The love of his life crushed between her seat, the door, the dashboard. Bubbles of blood clinging to her lower lip. Tears on her face.

  A horrible moment.

  But also the moment that made him. And that moment led to this one.

  Now he hears her. In his head. Her presence is like music. His faith has turned real: the transition from faith to belief, even to trust. The revelation and birth of a god. The joy of being able to put yourself entirely in another creature’s hands. To let her surround you. Control you. Have you as her own.

  And soon, she will be everywhere.

  He steers the car around all the glass, metal, and blood. He has an erection. Firm as the gearshift. Hard as a gun barrel. Ahead he sees the black SUV bounding forth. It’s fast, but not fast enough. His own vehicle accelerates effortlessly. It feels almost frictionless, as if he’s flying. Velocity from the turbocharged V-8, chewing up the road, the air, everything.

  He speeds up on the back of the SUV. The pistol in his hand is light, airy—almost as much a data point as it is a weapon made of steel and plastic. It’s a weapon so small he can almost palm it in his hand: a Ruger LC9, 9mm Luger, barrel length barely three and a half inches. It wouldn’t be a precise weapon in the hands of most shooters, but he is not most shooters.

  He targets the back tire of the SUV. He knows how this will go: the tire will peel away, shredding its rubber. The back end of the vehicle will drop. Chance Dalton is a capable driver, but not capable enough to keep the handicapped vehicle on the road. The SUV will slow, even stop. And then the Compiler will dispatch them and be gone.

  He eases his arm out the window. Points the gun.

  But once again he is reminded that these models are not so easily predicted. They continue to insert errors into the code.

  The back hatch of the SUV swings open wide, and there sits one of the deviants. Shaggy gray hair. Bit of a patchy beard. Eyeglasses—smudged, crooked, old—perched on the end of his bulbous nose. Wade Earthman, the Compiler recognizes.

  Earthman has a submachine gun. In a blink, the Compiler knows the gun—a Heckler & Koch MP7, barrel length of 7.1 inches, an HK 4.6 x 30mm cartridge, a rate of fire roughly equal to 950 rounds per minute, 40 rounds in the magazine. The Compiler does not know this because he has a fetishistic knowledge of firearms but rather because he is connected to all things—and his net of data has been cast all the wider now thanks to those in the SUV before him. He knows that this is the weapon of the strike force sent to take out the Hunting Lodge. Likely where Earthman picked it up.

  The Compiler realizes all of this in a fraction of a second.

  That’s all the time it takes for Earthman to begin firing.

  Takes what feels like two, maybe three seconds for the MP7 to roar through the magazine—in that time, bullets chew into the BMW, shattering glass, peeling bits of black metal off the hood and the frame. The headlights pop like eyeballs. The grille is broken apart like a hammer hitting teeth. Wade can barely keep control of the gun, the vibrations up his arms, the roar of the rounds keening in his ears.

  The gun goes click.

  He blinks. Looks down at the car. Doesn’t even see anybody driving.

  Except—there. At the top of the wheel: white fingers like spider legs clutching prey. Then the bald, scarred-up freak show sits upright again, wiping glass bits off—and out of—his scalp. Without missing a beat, the driver lifts the small pistol.

  Wade thinks: I’m gonna die.

  The driver pulls the trigger just as Chance shouts: “Hold on! Car!” The SUV jerks suddenly to the right, and Wade goes the opposite direction—the bullet digging into the roof of the SUV right above his head. The SUV goes back the other way—braking, then accelerating anew—and he starts to roll out the back. He darts out a hand, catches a handhold right at the edge of the door—an actual handle built into the molding of the interior—and feels his shoulder light up with pain as something pops loose of its mooring. He grits his teeth and quashes a scream as he hangs on for dear life inside the SUV—

  There, the BMW. Right behind and speeding up.

  Another car goes past along the right side—just some passerby, some poor tired salesman in a minivan staring at the two other vehicles in horror.

  The BMW’s driver points the pistol again, and Wade wings the submachine gun toward the BMW. As if it’s a fucking Frisbee.

  The submachine gun cracks the driver in the top of the head, and the son of a bitch jerks the wheel same time as he pulls the trigger—the shot goes wide, pings off the side of the SUV’s frame, nearly clips the minivan. The minivan’s driver jerks his own wheel, then suddenly that car flips—rolling like a can kicked down a hill.

  Wade thinks: No weapon now. Not that he had any more magazines for the MP7.

  But then he thinks: shit, hold up. Copper’s pistol. He feels its weight tucked just above his ass-crack.

  He silently thanks Copper. Then says sorry, too. An apology with the heft of a prayer, if not the faith behind it.

  He draws Copper’s pistol.

  Flashing lights. The red-and-blue strobe. He detects the police car even before it turns these on, even before the siren wails in the night. Typhon has given him this gift. This awareness. And so when the police car rockets up behind him—and then, inevitably, alongside him—it takes nothing at all to already have the gun pointed.

  The cop’s head rocks to the side before he can even look over. The cruiser veers off to the right. It slams into a sign noting an upcoming exit.

  The Compiler enjoyed that. Another error, eradicated.

  Now, back to the larger code corruption at hand. He whips the gun back toward the SUV.

  Earthman hangs there, half out of the back of the vehicle, his one arm straining as he holds on. The other arm, extended out. A pistol in his grip. A Glock 21, the Compiler’s mind tells him.

  They both fire.

  Everything feels out of control. The SUV is pushing one hundred miles per hour, and the lines of the road are a hot white blur, drawn up out of darkness and given life in the headlights before being swallowed once more into shadow.

  Out the back Chance can hear gunfire. Chattering. Then the warble-warp of a police siren. Everyone in the car is yelling. Aleena is saying something bu
t he can’t hear what.

  Ahead a billboard shines bright in the night. One of those digital ones: like a slideshow at the movies, cycling ads one after the next. Looks like it’s advertising a car dealership. Hyundai. But then that ad pixilates, distorts, is replaced by five words. Big, bold, white text on black.

  AND THE GODS DID FLEE.

  The words flash. Again and again.

  Suddenly the SUV’s stereo turns on. The volume jacks. Chance shoots a look at DeAndre, but he’s staring at the dashboard in shock, too. Radio stations go one after the other, then the sound dissolves into distorted audio blips and beeps and grinding, growling aural artifacts. Chance grabs the knob to turn it down but it doesn’t do anything except spin.

  The GPS begins to go corrupt. Blocks of the map replacing other blocks like one of those puzzles with the moving squares before suddenly becoming a blue screen. Then the blue screen goes black. It flashes one word again and again:

  FLEE.

  FLEE.

  FLEE.

  Chance doesn’t know how, but Typhon is watching.

  “Exit!” DeAndre says, pointing ahead—clearly he’s on the same wavelength. Chance again yells for everyone to hold on, then cuts the wheel sharply to the right.

  Wade holds the gun out.

  The BMW driver’s head is a mask of blood. The head slumps backward. The black car pulls sharply to the left, bounds off the shoulder and disappears into some trees.

  Wade’s ears keen like an emergency broadcast signal. He looks down at himself. No blood. No bullets. He laughs.

  Just as Chance yells, Hold on! and the car cuts hard to the right.

  Chance takes the exit ramp fast, too fast. He punches the brakes of the SUV. They don’t do a damn thing. He pumps them hard, harder, but it’s like pressing down on a piece of paper—it has no tension, no pressure, no giveback—

  The SUV heads right for the guardrail.

  Chance pulls the wheel hard as he can. Tires scream. The side of the SUV slams into the guardrail.

  The SUV flips over it. Tumbles down an embankment.

  Chaos. Crumpling metal. Popping windows.

  Then: darkness before all goes still.

  CHAPTER 41

  Blood and Glass

  WALMART PARKING LOT, I-80

  Under the streetlights in the parking lot, the glass glitters. Light pools in the black steel of the crumpled SUV, trapped in the metal like ghosts.

  Cops have cordoned off the area with yellow tape. They hang back while Golathan walks the scene, trying to figure out just where everything went wrong.

  They’ve got a lot of bodies. All the wrong ones, as it turns out.

  Corpses and car crashes in the intersection. Those left alive tell the story of how all the lights went green at the same time. How a black car—one man said a Mercedes, though a younger girl correctly identified it as a BMW, good for her—sped around the intersection chasing some black SUV.

  Then: a dead man in a rolled-over minivan. And a dead cop. Shot in the head before crashing.

  Two more wrecks: first up is the SUV, which is clearly one of the Lodge vehicles, resting on its side in this Walmart parking lot at two o’clock in the morning after having apparently rolled down off an exit ramp into the lot before coming to a stop against a streetlight. (The post now kinked and bent like a broken umbrella.) The second is the BMW. Smashed up in a small copse of trees right off the highway.

  In each case, there’s blood but no bodies.

  Golathan forms an O with his lips and exhales. Without looking at her, he curls a finger and summons Cassandra “Sandy” Molinari, a young woman with hard steel eyes and a face like a fire ax. Lesbian. Just got married to her partner, Tina. Two of them have been trying to adopt, if he remembers correctly. Or shit, is the new wife’s name Toni? Whatever. Point is, she’s one of the only fellow agents on this project that he can truly trust.

  Molinari comes up, smacking her lips in disappointment, like this is less a scene of twisted metal and mystery and more like a wall graffiti-sprayed by jerkoff teenagers. “What is it, Ken?”

  He pulls her close, lowers his voice. “Here’s the narrative we’re spinning. This is terrorism. On our soil. A dispute between two terrorist groups. Don’t name them—I’m not sure if we’ll spin it as one Muslim group and one domestic, or what.”

  “Terrorist war spilling out onto our streets.”

  “Right. People believe any horseshit shoved in their ears long as you say ‘terrorist.’ Plus we got Aleena Kattan as our standard-bearer, a hacker known for dipping her toes in the Arab world. Reference her for now, but don’t name her. Not yet.”

  She leans in, says: “So. What really happened here?”

  “For all intents and purposes, this is what really happened. Spin it.”

  “Consider it spun.” She marches off. Always the trouper, that one. It occurs to him she might be a sociopath. It occurs to him he might be one, too. Hell, anybody who works in this job has to be, right?

  Golathan twirls his finger like it’s a lasso, then looks to the officer in charge, some sleepy-eyed slackjaw named Gomez or Gonzalez or whatever. “Clean this shit up,” he says. “Make sure everything that needs to be is bagged and tagged.”

  Then he steps over the yellow tape. Don’t sweat, he tells himself. Don’t show them you’re nervous. Act like all this is under control. More important: Act like you know what the fuck is going on.

  He walks his confident, cocky stride, trying not to let his hand shake or his face demonstrate the sheer panic he’s feeling, then heads over to another one of the parking lot lights. He leans against it. Pops a piece of gum in his mouth. Wishes like hell he still smoked.

  He picks up his phone. Starts to scroll for Leslie Cilicia-Ceto in his contacts. Soon as he lands on her, before he even dials, his phone rings. It’s her.

  “Leslie—” he starts to say.

  “You look rather stressed,” she says.

  He tenses up. “What?”

  “You’re trying to put on a good show. But your heart rate is up, isn’t it? The agency doesn’t know about your heart problems, do they.” A statement, not a question. “Quite a thing to hide from your own people.”

  “Spying on me now, huh? That’s a mistake, Leslie.”

  “I’m simply concerned for your well-being, Ken. You’re a very important man now. You’ve always wanted control, and now you have it.”

  “What have you done? What happened at the Lodge? And the man in the BMW. Do you know who that is? Is it—” He lowers his voice, because he realizes he’s starting to yell. “Is it the same one from Maryland? Dead cop? Stolen car?”

  “You’re worrying about details that are irrelevant.”

  “He had someone in his trunk, Leslie. He had one of the . . .” He has to keep forcing himself to lower his voice. “He had one of the Hunting Lodge hackers.”

  “You’re worrying about what ants are doing as you walk over them. This is bigger, now, Ken. Bigger than the both of us. I’m giving you control. Take it.”

  He makes an animal sound in the back of his throat: a frustrated snarl. “You keep saying that, but I don’t know what the fuck you mean. Speak plainly, Leslie.”

  “Typhon is free. Typhon is with us now.”

  “Typhon is just a program.” He hears the anger in his voice: bitter like a snake’s venom, sharp like its fang. “It’s just software. Sitting on a machine.”

  “It’s more than that. You know that. You’ve always suspected it. We’re both patriots, Ken. We’re both in service to this country. Now we have the power to change things. I’m giving you this, Ken. For believing in the work. You deserve to be rewarded for your faith.”

  “Fuck you, Leslie. This is out of control. We need to meet. We need to get control of this situation. Together.”

  “Yes,” she says, without missing a beat. “I think now is the time for a site visit, Ken. I think it’s time to see what Typhon is. Time to see what it can do for you. For this country. For all
of mankind. I’ll be watching. We all will.”

  The call ends.

  For a while, Ken stands there, quaking. He needs a fucking cigarette.

  PART FIVE

  INTRUSIØN

  CHAPTER 42

  Ghosts

  ROYAL, KANSAS

  Lightning flicks the horizon and thunder rumbles, but no rain falls. Chance sits upright suddenly, sucking in a hard gasp of air—some remnant of a dream remains behind. Something about his mother in a hospital, something about his father in the next bed over. Chance remembers being caught between having time to say good-bye to his mother and the chance to convince his father not to die, not to leave him alone, forever and ever with the memory of yet another funeral so fast after the first.

  The dream breaks apart and falls away, leaving him less with the hard memory of what transpired and more with a bad feeling, a septic feeling all the way down to his marrow. He blinks the sleep out of his eyes.

  A moan next to him. Aleena rolls over, pulls the sheet over her half-naked body. That memory comes back to him full-tilt-boogie. Just a few hours ago, watching the sunset over the dry grass and swaying wheat. Creeping down past a rust-red harvester. They talked for a while. He about his farm—a farm absent of anybody, no parents, no dogs, no friends. Just a barn cat that he knew he didn’t own. She told him about her family—parents pretty liberal, only loosely religious. She talked about how much she loved New York City. The High Line. The Cloisters. Her school: Columbia. (She said, though, that the best bookstore and pizza place weren’t in Manhattan, but rather Brooklyn: Paulie Gee’s for pizza, WORD for books. He told her he’d just have to take her word for it.)

  That’s when she started freaking out. Not crying. Not hysterics. More anger. And frustration. Over how she couldn’t contact anyone. Couldn’t call her family. Couldn’t even Google them or have them Googled for her, because if anyone—if Typhon—were to see the ripples from that tiny little pebble thrown, they’d be done for. But I have to know how they’re doing. I feel lost and alone and—and then he reminded her that she wasn’t alone, that they were all in the same boat, and as soon as they got to where they were going they’d figure it out.