Zero Day

by Ezekiel Boone

  “I fear not,” the Prophet Bobby Higgs said. He kept his voice deep and made sure he projected it so that not just Macer and Lita but everybody around could hear him. “I fear not, for the Lord is my armor, and the Lord keeps the just and the true safe from harm. I have come from the land of lost angels, and I have come through the desert, and I have walked here with my disciples and my flock.” He turned slowly, his hands raised to take in the people around him. He cast a quick glance at the top of the hill. It was three hundred, perhaps four hundred yards away. He couldn’t see the Angels of Death, but he knew they were there. “I fear not.” He kept both hands raised.

  Macer tilted his head back and let out a loud, cackling laugh. “Ah, for the love of it. Don’t tell me that you’re swallowing your own crap, Bobby?”

  Lita, Bobby noticed, was not laughing. She was scanning the crowd of men and women who were beside Bobby. Her eyes were narrowed, and she turned her head a bit and said something indistinct to the guards standing behind Macer. One of the men moved a little bit to have a clearer look.

  “The Lord is just, and the Lord provides, and the Lord demands that those who have sinned against him pay.” His arms were still up, the soft breeze kissing his hands.

  Macer had stopped laughing. He was angry now. “Get the hell out of here, Bobby. I did you a favor when I left you on the side of the road. Figured it wasn’t worth wasting a bullet on you. I was wrong. Not too late to fix that mistake, though. Lita?”

  One of the men who’d walked down the hill with Bobby—a man named Glen Twaits, a car salesman from Cozad who’d done two tours in Afghanistan—slid partly in front of Bobby, shielding him with his body.

  It was a nice gesture, and Bobby appreciated it, but it wasn’t necessary. He was perfectly safe. All he had to do was drop his arms.

  As he did, Lita crumpled. Macer’s other bodyguards were on their way down before Lita hit the ground. The echo of the gunshots was still washing over them when Macer realized what was happening.

  Bobby looked back at his snipers on the hill and nodded his approval. He could hear people screaming, but his focus was now fully on Macer. He reached out and patted Glen on the shoulder, and the man moved out of the way so that there was nobody standing between Bobby and Macer.

  Macer had turned pale. It might have been the first time Bobby had seen the man look surprised, and he couldn’t stop himself from giggling. “Didn’t see that one coming, did you? I have to admit I was surprised you didn’t have any sort of patrol or guards out watching for something like this.”

  Macer recovered quickly. “I kind of figured, given where we were, it was a waste of effort.” He looked down at Lita’s body and sighed. “It hadn’t occurred to me that you’d track me down.” There was something in the studied nonchalance with which Macer then shrugged that enraged Bobby.

  “You thought you were safe here? You’re not safe from the wrath of the Lord anywhere, Macer.”

  He meant it to be frightening, threatening, to let Macer know exactly what he was in for. He still burned with the bright shame of having been used and then dumped unceremoniously on the side of the road. He didn’t just want to kill Macer—he wanted to punish Macer.

  Except Macer didn’t react the way Bobby had expected. The man actually had the temerity to smile.

  “You’re kidding, right?” Macer looked around him, making eye contact with as many people as he could. “Is he kidding?” He stared at Bobby again. “Of course I didn’t think I was safe here, Bobby. Nobody’s safe here. Nobody’s safe anywhere. I just wasn’t worried about being ambushed by a two-bit hustler from Hollywood.”

  Bobby seethed, and he was about to order his men to restrain Macer, but then Macer said, “The spiders are already here, Bobby.”

  The response from the men and women around him came like a flood. Harsh whispers turned into moans and then into the kind of fear that was palpable. It took Bobby several seconds of raising his hands and shouting to the crowd to get them quiet again.

  “Peace! Peace!” he yelled. To Macer, he spoke with a deadly seriousness. “Here?”

  Macer pointed. “That truck. Why do you think I’ve got men guarding it? What, you think it’s full of televisions or cell phones or something? Civilization is on its way out, man. There aren’t any things that are worth protecting. That truck could be full of cash and it would be completely worthless. Sure, I suppose food and weapons and things for survival are going to have some currency, but none of that matters if the spiders come romping through.”

  Bobby glanced at Glen. The man was the sort of salt-of-the-earth midwesterner who could be counted on to come through. Bobby doubted that, under normal circumstances, Glen would have had anything to do with him. Macer hadn’t been too far off the mark calling Bobby a two-bit hustler. But that had been before, and Bobby took some strength from Glen’s unyielding solidness. The crowd around them positively radiated with anxiousness, but Glen trusted him. Glen was counting on him. Bobby bowed his head for a moment, closed his eyes, took a deep breath and then another. It calmed him and, in ways he couldn’t understand, it seemed to calm the crowd around him. It was, all of a sudden, as quiet as several thousand people could be.

  “Okay, Macer. So why, then, if there is nothing of value—if there aren’t televisions or cash or whatever in that truck—why are you guarding it? Who exactly are you trying to keep out of that truck?”

  Macer shook his head sadly. “Not out, Bobby. In. We’ve got four of them in there.”

  “Spiders?”

  For the second time in as many minutes, Macer seemed taken aback. “No. Not spiders. Carriers. Are you telling me you haven’t checked your people? The signs are—”

  But Bobby wasn’t listening anymore. He didn’t need to. He knew exactly what Macer was saying. There were people locked in the back of that tractor-trailer, and each of them bore the telltale mark of a person who’d been bitten by a spider, who’d had a spider slip through the thin membrane of their skin, take up residence, and lay eggs.

  “Grab him,” he said to Glen. The man moved without hesitation, and several other members of his flock helped, holding Macer by his arms and frog-marching him after Bobby.

  As Bobby walked, he felt a sense of serenity that he could attribute only to the knowledge that he walked in God’s path. He stopped in front of the men guarding the tractor-trailer. They looked nervous, and the two white men glanced at the black guy, who was smaller but also older, so that was whom Bobby addressed.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Deke.”

  “Deke, you have people in here who have been bitten, yes? Who you think have spider eggs inside them?”

  Deke nodded.

  “Why haven’t they been disposed of?”

  “Working on it, man.” Deke glanced over Bobby’s shoulder at Macer but barely hesitated before continuing. “Macer has a crew putting together a, uh, well, I guess an incinerator of sorts. Until then, this is the best thing we can do for a quarantine.”

  “And you’re sure the spiders can’t get out?”

  “Worked it over pretty good. It’s not exactly airtight, but it’s close enough,” Deke said. “Nothing’s getting out.”

  Bobby smiled. “It must be pretty uncomfortable in there.”

  Deke shrugged, unsure of what to say. It was clear that the idea bothered him, but the situation had made pragmatists out of many people. He heard Macer say something foul behind him, and then the thump of a fist on flesh and a grunt. By the time he turned around, Macer was on his knees spitting out blood and fragments of teeth. The sight made Bobby happy, but then he had a better idea. He turned to Deke again.

  “Can you be completely sure that there are no spiders that have hatched in there right now?”

  “Actually, yeah. We rigged it up with a camera and a couple of LED lights on the ceiling so there’s enough light to see.” He reached over to the bumper and handed Bobby a baby monitor. The picture was grainy, but it showed two people sitting, one
lying down, and a fourth person pacing back and forth.

  “Open it up,” he said.

  “Pardon me?”

  “You heard me,” Bobby said. “Open up the truck.”

  Deke blinked hard and then took the measure of the crowd around him. “Forgive me for saying this, man, but are you out of your frickin’ mind? No way we’re letting those people out. They’ve got spiders cooking up inside them. Sooner or later those spiders are going to hatch, and I’m sure as anything I’ve ever been sure about in my whole life that I’d rather have them locked up inside that truck than out here with us.” He licked his lips nervously. “You’ve clearly got yourself some sort of . . .” He spun his hand in the air, taking in the armed men and women who were escorting Bobby. “I don’t know what’s going on, but I know that we do not want to let these people out.”

  “Out?” Bobby showed his teeth. “Who said anything about letting them out? Nobody’s getting out of that truck.” He stepped forward, clapped Deke on the back, and then pointed at Macer.

  “He’s going in.”

  Soot Lake, Minnesota

  “You know what I really wish?” Mike popped the clip out of his pistol. He checked it for what had to have been the tenth time that morning. He’d already cleaned his Glock and reassembled it twice.

  Leshaun, who was relaxing on the top bunk, grunted. “That spiders hadn’t come out to eat everybody?”

  “Well, yeah, but what I really wish—”

  “That the president didn’t decide to bomb the ever-loving heck out of our country?”

  “Okay, sure—”

  “Or, no, wait for it . . . You wish that the president didn’t decide to use nuclear weapons, so we could have stayed here in this lovely cottage on this picturesque lake and simply gone fishing and hung out while we waited for the whole spider thing to be sorted out, instead of being so worried about fallout that we’ve decided it’s actually safer to try to get your daughter and your ex-wife’s unborn child out of the radioactive Midwest and all the way to the East Coast with no real plan besides trying to sort of drive even though all the highways have been bombed into oblivion? Is that it? Is that what you really wish?”

  Mike put the clip back into his pistol and secured it in his holster before turning to the dresser. The Mossberg 500 and his other pistol, a Glock 27, rested on a blanket that had been neatly folded to cover the top of the dresser. The Glock 27 was a subcompact. It fit well in Fanny’s hand, and she was a better-than-average shot with it. She was also, Mike thought, the kind of person who would pull the trigger if necessary. He was less sure what to do with the shotgun. Fanny’s husband, Rich Dawson, had already come close to accidentally shooting Mike once. On the bed, which he’d made out of habit, he also had four rifles. The Remington 700 was his. Neither he nor Leshaun was really a gun guy, but the Remington was a great rifle. It was what both of them had trained on when they’d done SWAT work and, with the scope, either one of them was comfortable to three or four hundred yards. The other three rifles they’d taken off the yahoos who had tried to do them dirty, sneaking through the night with plans to do God knew what to Mike and his family. Not for a second did he feel guilty about or second-guess the decision to take those men down. Their rifles, though, were the kinds of crappy bargain buys that felt flimsy in your hand. And when he and Leshaun had broken them down and cleaned them, it seemed clear that it was the first time anybody had done such a thing. They hadn’t fired them either, figuring that, with the limited ammunition for the rifles, they didn’t want to waste a shot. That made Mike nervous. Which was an answer in and of itself, he thought. He picked up the Remington and put it on the dresser with the shotgun and the spare Glock. They’d leave the three crappy rifles behind.

  “Are you done?” Mike asked. He was trying to suppress a grin, but he couldn’t. “Yes, sure. Those are all good things to wish for. When you say it like that, I feel kind of stupid; and even though I thought my thing was pretty good, now I don’t want to say it.”

  Leshaun chuckled. They’d been partners long enough that half the fun was that almost everything was an inside joke, and they had a long history of interrupting each other when one of them was trying to get a punch line off. Leshaun sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the bed.

  “Come on, man. Just say it.”

  “Nope. You ruined it. I’m not saying it until you apologize.”

  “Okay, fine. I’m sorry. What, Mr. Mike Rich agent man, do you really wish?”

  “If I’m being totally honest here—and obviously I’m excluding wishes that have to do with making it so none of this ever happened, because, well, those would be good wishes . . . so if I could, what I would have changed is that I really, truly wish I hadn’t bothered paying my taxes this year.” Mike checked the shotgun now. He wasn’t sure whether it was worse to hand it over to his ex’s husband loaded or unloaded.

  Leshaun pushed off, landing lightly on the floor. He really didn’t look too bad, given the bullet he’d taken in his arm a few weeks earlier and the broken ribs. Mike looked him up and down. Maybe Leshaun had been milking it a bit when he’d made Mike fix the gutter. He went back to checking the shotgun and continued: “I’d forgotten that I was going to have to write a check come tax time. I kept looking at my savings account and getting excited. I was planning on taking Annie to the Caribbean over the summer. Go to one of those all-inclusive resorts, one that has activities for grown-ups and kids. Snorkeling, paddle boarding, windsurfing, beach volleyball, fishing. Some of the ones I was looking at even had circus stuff.”

  “Circus stuff? You mean like clowns?”

  “More like trapeze classes. How cool would that have been? Don’t you think Annie would have loved that?” Mike said. He made sure the safety was on the shotgun before putting it down. Loaded, he thought. He’d just make sure Dawson kept the safety on. He picked up the Glock he was going to give to Fanny and released the clip. “And it would have been perfect, because they have a sort of camp thing for kids. She could have gone in and out of it however she wanted. If she wanted to do something with kids her age, she could do the camp thing, and if she wanted to hang out with me . . . I had the whole thing priced out and was on the verge of booking it. I even got a new credit card, one that doesn’t have any foreign-transaction fees and came with a big bonus of points when you spent a couple grand in the first three months. I figured it would be like a two-for-one. I’d use the credit card to pay for the trip with Annie; then, when I paid my credit-card bill, I’d get a bunch of airline miles and I could use those for another trip with Annie the next year. It would have been amazing. And then I did my taxes and realized that all the money I thought was going to go into a trip to the Caribbean was going to have to go back to the same dang government that gives me my paycheck.”

  “How long have you and Fanny been divorced now?” Leshaun motioned to the bed. “We leaving those junk guns here?” Mike nodded and Leshaun didn’t argue. “Never mind. Doesn’t matter how long you and Fanny have been divorced, because one thing I know is that every year since you’ve been divorced, you’ve been surprised come tax time. Every year it’s the same thing. ‘Ah, man, Leshaun,’ ” he said, doing a surprisingly good impression of Mike’s voice, “ ‘I forgot I was going to owe on my taxes.’ And every year I get on your case to put in a new W-4 so that your withholding is done properly. Look at me, man. Come April? No surprises. I zip through TurboTax, get a refund for a couple hundred bucks, and have a great weekend.”

  There was a knock, and Mike opened the door. Annie stood there wearing the hoodie he’d given her. “Mom says we’re ready.” She looked past him to Leshaun. “Do I get a gun?”

  “Uh, not yet,” Mike said. The truth was, he’d thought about it. Part of being his kid meant that she was familiar with firearms. He knew Fanny and Dawson weren’t pleased with it. Neither of them thought Annie was old enough. It wasn’t an argument, however. He was a federal agent and he had guns. It was as simple as that. As long as he had gu
ns in his apartment, it was better to make sure Annie knew gun safety than to pretend there were no guns around. He had a gun safe in the back of his closet where he kept the shotgun and rifle and his spare Glock and all his ammunition, but he wasn’t naïve. Kids were curious creatures, and sooner or later Annie would figure out how to get into the safe. Or, more likely, his bad bachelor habits would catch up with him. Most nights when he came in, he dumped his keys and wallet and holster on the kitchen counter. What if he did that one of the nights he had Annie? So, despite his ex-wife and Dawson’s concerns, he’d gone through gun-safety training with her and even taken her on a couple of trips to the range. The Glock 27, Mike’s backup—a gun he thought of as almost dainty but that was well sized for his ex-wife—looked like a cannon with Annie firing it two-handed. The lock-screen photo on his cell phone was of Annie wearing the earmuff-style hearing protectors and safety glasses while she was shooting. He thought it was adorable. Fanny, however, was not amused.

  The funny thing, which he’d tried to tell Fanny and Dawson, was that Annie was a natural. By the end of the first trip to the firing range, Annie could consistently hit a body-mass shot from ten meters. After their third trip she was a better shot than some of the federal agents he knew who skimped on range time. She wasn’t exactly ready to enter shooting competitions or anything, but it did make him feel less nervous about the accoutrements of his profession. He was confident that she understood guns well enough that if he did screw up and leave his gun out, she wouldn’t accidentally kill herself. Or, for that matter, him. Still, that didn’t mean he was ready for her to carry a gun of her own. Not right now. “I think we’ll leave the guns to the grown-ups.”