Zero Day

by Ezekiel Boone

  But it had been a long while since George and President Stephanie Pilgrim had been in love. Which wasn’t to say that they didn’t love each other. They got along wonderfully. They just weren’t in love. Manny, who was closer to the president than anybody alive—including her husband—had never seen them fight or heard Steph say a bad word about him. And though he was sure George must have known that Manny and Steph had been carrying on an on-again, off-again decades-long romance ever since Manny had split from his wife, Melanie, George never let it show. For a while, one of Manny’s big political worries had been that George would get tired of the marriage, but the man had been stalwart. Amazingly so.

  “Manny,” George said, shaking his head. He opened the door wide. It was the captain’s quarters, and big by the standards of a ship’s accommodations. Much bigger than Manny’s, which would have been considered small even by the standards of a New York City bathroom. Of course, Steph was the president and he was only the White House chief of staff, and they were on an aircraft carrier, and spiders were eating people and nukes were falling, so Manny was trying not to be precious about it.

  George glanced at Special Agent Riggs and then whispered, “Did Tommy tell you?”

  Manny lowered his voice, too. “He said she’s in a bit of a mood.”

  George grimaced. “That’s one way of putting it. I’m sure that if I drew upon my Texas roots I could come up with a great colloquial expression having to do with rattlesnakes or something, but yeah. Be forewarned.”

  “Unfortunately, we’ve got work to do,” Manny said, and stepped in.

  Manny was shocked. He’d expected Steph to be hopped up and angry, but she was sitting on the bed. Her elbows were on her knees and she had her head resting on her hands. She was staring at the floor. She looked, Manny thought, defeated.

  He turned to George. “Uh, hey, do you mind—”

  “No worries,” George said. “I was thinking maybe I’d head down to the mess and see about getting some breakfast. Half an hour enough time?”

  Manny nodded and then closed the door as George left the room. He walked across the room, stood in front of Steph, hesitated, and then sat down next to her. He put his arm around her shoulder but she stayed rigid, and it worried him.

  This wasn’t the Stephanie he knew. She’d been miserable after the one election she’d lost, when she’d fallen short in her Senate bid by barely fifteen hundred votes. Worse still, the saddest he’d ever seen her had been after her second miscarriage, when the doctors told her that she and George should stop trying, which was the moment, he thought, when her marriage to George had truly stopped being about love. But even though she’d been devastated by both events—she’d cried and cried in private, no matter how well she held up in public—he’d never seen her like this. Defeated.

  Broken.

  Her voice was hollow. “I can’t do it. I can’t go to the meeting. My entire life I’ve had to push back against the assumption that, because I was a woman, I wasn’t strong enough to be the president. And I’ve done it. I’ve stared down all the double standards and all the crap that came from the old boys who thought talking down to me was a good strategy. I made the hard decisions when I was a governor and when I was a senator, and I’ve made the hard decisions since I’ve become president. But I can’t do it, Manny. My god, it was bad enough ordering the Spanish Protocol, to bomb our own roads and bridges, to tear the whole country apart. But bombing our own cities? The uniforms can throw around the word ‘tactical’ all they want, but at the end of the day? I ordered nuclear weapons to be used on our own soil. Denver. Chicago. Minneapolis. How many millions of people died because of my orders? How many millions of people did I save? Did I make the right decision, Manny? I don’t know. What I know is that I pretty much maxed out that card.”

  Manny was quiet. She was right. The damage from the nuclear weapons was incalculable. It had been an almost impossible decision. It was like treating an aggressive cancer. If you did nothing, you’d die. But if you used heavy-duty chemotherapy, the chemicals in the chemo regime might kill you faster than they killed the cancer. Same thing for the nukes. It was the quickest way of destroying and containing spiders in the places where they knew of—or suspected—infestations and outbreaks, but the costs were so high.

  They’d tried to be careful. They had. There were ways to use nuclear weapons to cause maximum long-term damage—you could irradiate an area beyond redemption—but they’d tried to avoid that. The strikes had been tactical. Although there was no real “safe” use of nuclear weapons, the military had done everything to minimize fallout and radiation. Still, the scientific consensus was that they were already pushing their luck. To keep using nukes was to push America past the point of no return. If the spiders were the cancer, well, they were going to have to let the cancer run its course. There were some members of the military who were pushing Steph hard to pursue a scorched-earth policy—the goddamned chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Ben Broussard, was back to being a pushy son of a bitch—and destroy all the spiders, whatever the cost.

  “What was the point of it, Manny? Do you think Broussard’s right?” Steph asked. “Too little, too late?”

  They were both quiet then. He knew she didn’t really want an answer. Broussard had been pressing his case over and over again. He’d backed off a little last week when they authorized the Spanish Protocol, making nice with Steph so he could have the win. But he was trying to lay blame. He was now claiming that much of the damage from the spiders could have been averted if Steph had acted more aggressively in the first place. If she’d gone nuclear the minute the spiders hit the shore in Los Angeles. If she’d done that, Broussard kept saying, then America would have been safe.

  They were quiet, because there was a chance Broussard was right.

  The idea had been consuming Manny since they’d landed on the USS Elsie Downs. What if the moment that cargo ship had crashed into the port of Los Angeles—what if the moment they knew those spiders were loose in LA—they’d just wiped the whole city off the map? It was a terrible exercise, to second-guess like this. Monday-morning quarterbacking. It was crazy. It was impossible. At that point there’d been no way for them to understand how bad it was going to be, no way for them to know in that moment what needed to be done.

  Steph broke the silence. “It’s too late to change anything. Broussard can talk all he wants. It’s just talk. I get that. He’s maneuvering himself to make sure he doesn’t take the blame.” She gave a short, hard, bitter laugh. “Always with the politics, isn’t it? Even now, in the middle of an existential crisis, there’s politics.”

  Manny said, “You’ve got to give us humans that, at least. Nothing can save us from ourselves. Maybe, given enough time—”

  “Time!” She barked the word out, interrupting him, and then her voice grew quiet again. “God. I wish there were enough time. Your ex-wife is telling me that if I can just give her three days, four days, she thinks she’s got an answer. Or, and I’m quoting Melanie now, ‘something close to an answer.’ Something that is going to help us figure out how to survive without killing ourselves. Otherwise, what’s the point? What’s the point of fighting back if it just means we’re killing ourselves quicker than the spiders can? Three or four days. Do you think we have three or four days to spare, Manny? Do you?”

  He wanted to tell her that of course they did, that all she had to do was trust Melanie—brilliant, hardworking Melanie—and everything was going to be okay; but he didn’t know, and that’s what he said.

  “Yeah, me neither.” Steph shifted a little. “But I’ve got to go into that conference room and try to sell that idea to a bunch of gold stars, try to convince the whole lot of them that the best thing we can do right now is to wait. I’m going to have to beat back Broussard, who thinks that the only thing to do is to keep bombing, and I’m going to have to say ‘Trust me.’ I don’t even know if I trust myself, Manny. They are all waiting for me in that conference room, and when I wa
lk in, they’re all going to stand up and call me Madam President, and they are going to expect me to know what I’m doing. But I don’t know anymore. I don’t. Maybe Broussard is right. Why don’t we just go ahead and drop all of the bombs? Humanity won’t survive, but at least we’ll take those beasts with us.”

  “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

  “No. No, I don’t. I think we’ve got to have hope. We’ve got to give ourselves a chance to survive. We’ve . . .”

  She stopped. The room was as quiet as anywhere on the aircraft carrier, which was to say that there was still a solid thrum of energy under and around them. The USS Elsie Downs was not under way, but it never truly stopped moving on the great scything ocean, and that meant there was never a true silence anywhere on board. It was the same sort of hum you could hear in places that were out in nature but still wired for electricity. The static of human ingenuity.

  Manny had kept his arm around her shoulder, and at last she relaxed into him. She was crying, he realized. Nothing dramatic. That wasn’t her style. Just a soft whimper and her chest shaking. She let her head tuck against his chest.

  There were times when he wondered if the two of them should have gotten married. Even though she was three years older than he was, they’d dated in college and off and on again—well, perhaps dated wasn’t the right word, but they spent a lot of time together—in all the years since.

  Did she know that he’d thought about it—that he’d considered proposing to her? She might have laughed if he’d gotten down on one knee and presented her with a ring in a velvet-covered box, but there were a few months, before she started dating George, before Manny met Melanie, when it seemed like a good idea to him. And maybe if they had been different people, if they hadn’t both been so driven by politics, if they didn’t have their eyes on their prize, maybe then he would have asked her and maybe then she would have said yes. Maybe then it would have been enough for the two of them simply to have each other, for their whole worlds and lives to be about a life together. Maybe they could have done without the power and the politics, without the trade-offs they’d made to keep climbing all the way to the White House. Maybe they would have been happy with smaller lives, smaller dreams, with their love filling all the gaps. Except, he knew, even back then, even when he was in his twenties, that the idea was a mirage: if they’d been different people, if they’d been the kind of people who could find happiness in something so simple, they wouldn’t have been together in the first place.

  But here they were, after so many years together, and what he needed to do wasn’t about power. It wasn’t about Stephanie being the president. It was about one man, one woman. It was about the love he had for her filling the gaps.

  So he just held her for a few more minutes. His body turned toward her, his arms wrapped around her like a blanket, letting her cry against his chest, rocking together just a little bit.

  And then, as her crying eased, he did what the two of them had been doing together for so long. He made sure she remembered that she wasn’t just the girl from his dorm.

  “Okay,” he said. “That’s enough now. You’re going to wash your face and you’re going to fix your makeup, and then you are going to walk into that room and you are going to be Stephanie Pilgrim, the president of the United States of America.”

  She wiped her eyes and then she actually managed to laugh.

  “I know. I know. You don’t have to tell me. But you’re the only person I can do this in front of. I can’t start crying in front of Billy Cannon or, god forbid, Ben Broussard, can I? Broussard already thinks I’m not up to the job. He’s waiting, looking for any sign of weakness, any opening to pounce. It doesn’t matter what I do. No action I take is ever going to be enough for him and the rest of the uniforms. And if I start crying? They want to act, even if it means destroying our chance to survive. All they can think about is winning, no matter what the cost. What the hell is it with those military guys? Some of them understand there’s another way. Billy Cannon gets it. But for most of them? What’s that saying? To somebody with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” She laughed again, and under it was the ghost of a sob. She stood up and pulled her skirt smooth, tucked her blouse back in. “Nobody said it would be easy, did they? Nobody said being the president would be easy.”

  “No,” Manny said. He stood up, too, and walked over to the desk and picked up her tablet. “Nobody said it would be easy. If you haven’t read the briefings yet, I’ll give you the rundown on the way up to the meeting.”

  She stepped into the bathroom and started touching up her makeup. “Nobody said it would be easy, but I’m pretty sure nobody said I’d have to contend with spiders running amok. What the hell are we supposed to do, Manny?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t. But I do know that you were born to be president.”

  “Do the job,” she said.

  “Do the job.” Manny started to open the door and then stopped. “Listen, if you feel like you might break in there, just look at me. Just look at me and know I’ve got your back.”

  The president stepped out of the bathroom and stared at him. Whatever hollowness she’d had, whatever fragility she’d shown, was gone. “Manny, the second we step out of this room, you aren’t going to have to worry about me. Who am I, Manny?”

  Manny straightened. “You’re the president of the United States of America.”

  “I’m the goddamned president,” she said. “Now let’s go to work.”

  He could practically feel his heels click together as he said, “Yes, ma’am.”

  Now that was the Stephanie Pilgrim he loved working for.

  Osaka University, Osaka, Japan

  Koji was sure that he would have been much more comfortable if he was wearing his normal lab outfit: a pair of khakis and a button-down shirt topped with a lab coat. The isolation suit was miserable, and it made it difficult to manipulate the specimens, but he wasn’t going to risk it. He’d traipsed through a spider-infested Buddhist temple in Shinjin Prefecture, but he’d made it out alive. The scientists who’d tried going in wearing normal clothing hadn’t. Hence, the isolation suit was staying on as long as he was in the same room as these monsters.

  It meant, however, that he could spend only so long in the lab before having to go through the series of doors and procedures that had been installed to ensure that there was no chance of any of the spiders getting out. It was a little ridiculous, the lengths to which he had to go to get in and out of the lab, which he knew was an odd thing to hear from a scientist who was still having nightmares about the twenty minutes he’d spent in the temple and who insisted on wearing an isolation suit even though all the spiders were in insectariums, safely behind glass. Even when he did take a single spider out, there were so many precautions that the chances of anything going wrong were so slim . . .

  It didn’t matter. One mistake was one mistake too many. All you had to do was look at a map and think about how many cities could be scratched out to know that was true.

  He’d been in the lab for nearly an hour, and he figured he had about five more minutes before he needed to take a break. The suit was so hot that by the end of each of the last few days, he’d sweated out more than three kilograms of water weight. He’d taken to eating as much salty food as he could in the hope that he’d retain some fluid. Five minutes was enough time for him to clean up, though. He was done with the vivisection, and all that was left was to put the remains in the incinerator and clean up his instruments.

  Not that he was any closer to an understanding. He’d been against burning the temple in the first place. Yes, of course it made sense to contain the menace, but it also meant there was no hope of his understanding what was happening. No hope of figuring out how to stop it. He was sure that if they’d only given him a little more time . . .

  Still, at least he’d been allowed to take thirty spiders with him back to his lab. He had to obey all the restrictions placed on him, including allow
ing the military to wire his lab with explosives so they could blow up the whole thing at a moment’s notice if there was some sort of breach. That didn’t make him happy, but what could he do? He simply agreed to all of the conditions, put on his isolation suit, and did his work as best he could. The misery was just something to be endured.

  The misery was worth it. The spiders hadn’t acted the way he had expected at all. He had no doubt that they were still dangerous—hence the isolation suit and all the precautionary measures—but there was none of the savagery. They appeared completely uninterested in feeding. It made more sense once he realized that his samples had begun ecdysis. Like most spiders, they fasted in the time immediately prior to molting. What worried him, however, was what it meant. Given that these spiders were nothing like anything he’d seen before, was this simply a case of their shedding their exoskeletons so they could increase in size, or was it something worse?

  He hated that he was essentially working blind. He’d been able to share some information with the lead American scientist, but he hadn’t been able to get in touch with Dr. Guyer for more than forty-eight hours. He didn’t know if it was because communications were down or if something worse had happened. News was just one more thing that had become unreliable since the onset of this crisis.

  He scraped what was left of the spider he’d been working on into the incinerator and then placed his tools in the autoclave. Laboriously he went through every checkpoint and inspection, and it was another ten minutes before he was able to take off the isolation suit. His hair was matted with sweat, and he’d soaked through his clothes. He was spent, and he couldn’t decide what he needed more, a shower or a nap. He thought for a moment about trying to get through to the Americans again, but he was too tired. In the morning, he thought.