Zero Day

by Ezekiel Boone

  They were all armed, a mix of hunting rifles and shotguns, and Mike made out five men and one woman. One of the men was older, near Rex’s age, a big man holding a double-barreled shotgun and looking extremely displeased, but the other four and the woman were all closer to his age.

  For all that, Rex seemed quite pleased with himself. “No worries,” he said. “I know a guy.”

  Leshaun and Mike looked at each other, and then Leshaun shrugged and mouthed the words He knows a guy.

  C-17 Globemaster III, Nazca, Peru

  “Double-check your hazmat suits. Make sure every seam is sealed. We know the third-wave Hell Spiders can compromise the integrity of the suits, but they’ll keep you safe from the first- and second-wave spiders. Wheels down in ten minutes. Everybody make sure you’re strapped in.” Cannon had already split them up into the JLTVs, keeping Gordo and Shotgun together with the ST11 in the first vehicle, driven by Kim, but dividing Melanie and Julie into separate trucks. “There is exactly zero extra length on this runway. Our pilot says he’s got it under control, but it might get a bit bumpy. As soon as we stop, the crew is going to release the securing straps, drop the ramp, and we’re going to hit it. I want the JLTVs at speed as soon as possible. We know there are Hell Spiders on the ground here. Let’s not go slow enough to pick up any hitchhikers. Gordo’s given us coordinates, so once we’re rolling we’ll know where we’re going, but keep your traps shut in case something comes up and we need to correct course. Questions?”

  There were none, and Cannon banged on the hood of the truck that Melanie was in and then hopped into the front passenger seat. She was behind the driver, so he turned partway and gave her a thumbs-up. “We good, Dr. Guyer?”

  “I sure hope so,” she said. The truth was, she felt horrible. Her arm ached where the spider had half burrowed into the skin, she was tired, and she was scared.

  “You’ll be fine,” Cannon said. “Okay, crew, one more time. We get as close as we can in the JLTVs. First preference is to identify the target from a distance and call in a strike. We’ve got two Super Hornets with air-to-surface weapons inbound, and they’ll be circling by the time we’re on-site. But we need to see the target. No guessing. If we can’t stay at a distance and call in the cavalry, next preference is to engage using the mounted .50-cals. And if that doesn’t work, well, I hope you guys are ready to toast some spiders.”

  Melanie could hear the Rangers respond with a hearty cheer, but she knew that if they got to vote for it, she was picking door number one.

  “Gordo,” she said, once the cheering died down. “Still looking good on location?”

  “It’s on the screen like a bonfire in the dark,” he said. “This is it. No question. Each mile the signal’s stronger and stronger. And . . . Okay. You’re not going to believe this.”

  “Try me.”

  “Overlaying the signal with the maps. It’s out on the Nazca Lines, about seven or eight hundred meters off the road. Want to take one guess which of the Nazca Lines the ST11 is telling us the signal’s coming from?”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “Well, unless you’re thinking it’s the monkey or something other than the spider, no, I’m not kidding you.”

  There was a little bit of nervous chatter for the next five minutes, and then Cannon had them check their hazmat suits one last time, each person going over their own setup and then checking the person next to him or her. After that, it was just the bounce and screech of the plane’s tires hitting tarmac. Because the JLTVs had been backed into the plane, Melanie felt herself pushed deeper into her seat as the pilot jammed the engines into reverse. She’d never experienced such an abrupt landing. It was over too quickly for Melanie to panic, but she was glad she couldn’t see the shortness of the runway. According to the information they had, the airport outside Nazca was designed for the sort of small planes that Melanie had ridden in years ago, with Manny, when they’d come here as tourists. It wasn’t the sort of airport that handled military transport aircraft.

  She could still feel the plane moving when crew members started scurrying to unsecure the JLTVs. Melanie figured they could have fit at least one more inside the belly of the C-17, but she also figured that if their small crew couldn’t get the job done, adding one more truck wouldn’t have helped. She was in the second vehicle, behind the one driven by Kim that carried Shotgun and Gordo and the ST11. Although the view was obscured, she could see the rear hatch opening to the inky darkness of Peru.

  The first JLTV lurched forward, and then Melanie’s followed. She couldn’t stop herself from turning around to make sure the other two vehicles were still close behind. As she straightened up again to look ahead, the truck lurched and bumped, wheels on the ground in Peru. The driver floored it, and the JLTV’s wheels bit down, thrusting the armored vehicle forward. It was almost completely dark out, which confused Melanie for a moment. It was an airport. It should have been lit up. But then she caught a glimpse of a skittering dark mass and the baseball-size bodies held aloft by eight legs, and she realized that of course it made sense that the airport was dark. There was nobody left to turn on the lights.

  Nazca, Peru

  Kim had caught a couple of hours of sleep on the plane, and she’d spent most of the rest of the time staring at the map. Cannon had put her in the position of lead driver, and she didn’t want to make any false moves. Everybody seemed clear that speed was their friend. The idea of having to stop and figure out where they were, or of getting stuck and having to back out of some dead-end alley, was not appealing. The spiders in the casino and hotel in Atlantic City seemed not to have even noticed them, but the museum had not been an experience she enjoyed. It was hard to argue against the notion that the spiders seemed to be learning, and since the ones with silver slashes on their backs could evidently chew their way through the hazmat suits . . .

  Grimly she pushed her foot down, picking up speed. The roads were in better shape than she had expected, and she hit top speed as soon as they were out of the airport and on the main drag. According to Gordo, it was eighteen miles along roads from the airport, and from there the signal was about twenty-five hundred feet out into the dirt. Thankfully, though there were dead cars and trucks in their way, they were spread out far enough that she could either drive on the wrong side of the road or, in some places where the wide dirt shoulder wasn’t encroached by buildings, kick up dust for a few seconds before getting back onto the hardtop. She made sure to check her mirror regularly; the other three JLTVs kept pace. They had to head into the town of Nazca and then back out, and once they were out on the high-desert highway, it was smooth sailing. Thankfully, they were moving fast enough that the bodies stripped down to bone on the side of the road were barely caught in the sweep of the headlights before she passed them by. It meant the corpses were almost removed of their menace. Almost.

  “Gordo?”

  “Still going strong, Kim. Signal’s holding steady.”

  Even if she hadn’t asked, she would have been pretty sure. By the airport, there had been a few spiders, and in town she’d seen clusters and, in places where the light pooled, dark shadows that betrayed themselves with their alien movement. Out here, however, even with just the beams of her headlights, she could see that there were more and more. One flew up and hit the windshield with a loud splat, leaking guts all over the glass. Kim turned on the wipers. It left a thick, nasty smear.

  The Ranger sitting in the passenger seat was carrying one of the homemade flamethrowers. He shook his head. “Gross.”

  “Gordo, how close?” Cannon asked over the headset.

  “Maybe four miles.”

  “Okay. Let’s do this. I want eyes on the target before I call in an air strike. Can’t risk being wrong on this.”

  Nobody responded to Cannon.

  Kim kept her fingers wrapped around the steering wheel. Three miles out, and then two, and the spiders were thick enough that she had to concentrate to make sure she stayed on the road. T
hey obscured the boundaries between the blacktop and the dirt. The thrum of the truck’s tires on asphalt turned into something else, like driving in snow. A wet, crunching crush of spiders under rubber.

  Gordo leaned forward to tap Kim on the shoulder. “Another mile.” Then he remembered that he was wearing a headset under his hazmat suit and that everybody was on the same frequency. “Hey, guys, be ready. In about forty-five seconds we’re going to pass a viewing tower on the left. Not like a real tower. More ramshackle. Once we pass that, one-tenth of a mile and then a hard left out onto the dirt. From there . . . Hell, let’s just see what we find.”

  Another spider bounced up and into the windshield, but with a bang this time. Kim could feel her heart jackhammering in her chest and she almost swerved off the road when she heard the scream through the headset.

  “It’s in my suit! It’s in my suit!”

  “Jackson, just—”

  “My leg!”

  “Keep driving!” Cannon’s voice cut above the yelling, and Kim didn’t let off the gas. Jackson was one of the Rangers in the third JLTV. The one that had Julie Yoo in it.

  The truck was eating up the road, moving as fast as it could go, but it didn’t seem fast enough as she heard screaming and yelling.

  “Oh, Jesus!” She yanked her right hand off the wheel to swat at her left. A spider had just run across her wrist; she’d felt it through the hazmat suit before she’d seen it. Okay. Okay. All-black first-wave spider. “We’ve got hitchhikers.”

  She saw the tower in the headlights: maybe three flights of stairs, but in the glow from her headlights, she could see that the structure seemed to writhe and move, the second skin of spiders making it seem alive.

  “Left! Left!” Gordo yelled.

  His voice was almost lost in the yelling and screaming that was still coming from the third truck, but then the noise stopped and was replaced with Julie’s voice. “I think we’re good. Taping up Jackson’s suit with duct tape. Looks like we’re clean otherwise.” She sounded shaky to Kim, but that seemed reasonable enough, since Kim felt shaky herself.

  She slowly turned the wheel and hit the brakes so that she didn’t lose control, but she was still doing thirty miles an hour as she angled off the asphalt and out into the dirt. Or at least she was pretty sure it was dirt. The entire landscape was a tangled nightmare of spiders, their black bodies and legs both reflecting the headlamps and seeming to absorb all light at the same time. “Which way?”

  Shotgun answered. “Left about ten degrees. You’ve got this, Kim. Keep driving. It’s out there.” His voice was surprisingly calm, and it was enough to settle her down a bit.

  And then she could see the spiders starting to roil and shake, the black mass covering the ground beginning to gather and move, shifting in waves. It was as if—

  Kim yelled it as soon as she realized what was happening. “She knows we’re coming!”

  “Don’t stop!” Cannon shouted. “All the way in, eyes on, and then we engage. The only way out is through. Let’s end it!”

  Kim could feel sweat curling down the back of her neck, her bones jostling with each bounce of the truck across the uneven ground. Ahead of her, the shifting swarm rose up, turning into a wall of spiders that was now at least as high as her bumper. She hit the accelerator harder, ticking her speed up even as she could hear the Hell Spiders pinging and bouncing off the truck like hail.

  “Two hundred feet!”

  There was a burst of screaming over the radio again, garbled voices, and this time Kim had no clue who it was. She risked a glance in the rearview mirror and saw that the headlights of one of the JLTVs were moving away at an angle, the driver obviously no longer in control.

  “One hundred!”

  “Oh my god!”

  Ahead of her, it was like a growing tidal wave. Fifty feet in front of her, the Hell Spiders seemed to be pulling back on themselves. They streamed away from her, building up five, ten, fifteen feet high, leaving the high-desert dirt uncovered. “I’m stopping,” she yelled, and slammed on the brakes. She got jerked back by her seat belt and then undid it so she could scramble up to the .50-cal, cursing about the way the hazmat suit slowed her down. The Ranger who’d been sitting next to her came sliding out through the passenger door, the flamethrower sparking before he even had his boots on the ground. Behind her, the other two JLTVs rocked to hard stops, their doors swinging open, great glorious arcs of flame spitting out from them as well.

  She had enough presence of mind to realize that the only saving grace was that instead of continuing to try to overwhelm them, the Hell Spiders had pulled back to surround and protect whatever was behind the living curtain.

  “Circle around the point vehicle!” Cannon yelled. “Keep them back!”

  As the men with flamethrowers took their positions, fanning their fire back and forth, the wave of Hell Spiders suddenly came crashing toward them with a sound loud enough to carry over the guzzling hiss of the flamethrowers. It was the worst sound Kim had ever heard. She steadied herself and grabbed the trigger, swinging the .50-cal to bear on the greatest concentrations of spiders.

  And as the spiders began to rush toward them, the curtain parted and she saw it.

  The queen.

  Barely fifty feet away. It was the same size as the one she’d seen in Atlantic City, like a keg balanced on broken broomsticks, except that was where the similarity ended. This queen was stunning. Her legs were covered in thick, matted black hairs that were the color of the night sky in summer, and her exoskeleton shimmered, so black that it was almost blue.

  She could see the onrushing spiders immolated by the wrath of the flamethrowers, but there were too many of them. The first Ranger was overrun and fell.

  She steadied herself, concentrated, and pulled the trigger. As she did, she realized she was screaming, “Eat this!”

  She felt the gun coughing, the sound more a physical experience than something she could hear. She held the trigger down. The Browning could spit out five hundred rounds a minute, and she intended to keep squeezing forever.

  It was the most glorious thing she’d ever seen in her entire life.

  The queen danced miserably, her body jouncing as it was torn to shreds by the .50-cal. Kim kept firing, tracking the queen’s body as it moved, turning the spider into nothing more than a piece of liquid meat.

  Finally she let go of the trigger. The heavy thump of the .50-cal was replaced with the hurricane of the flamethrowers, but then those went off one by one.

  It wasn’t quiet. Even with the hood of the hazmat suit making it difficult to hear, the sound of hundreds of thousands of Hell Spider carcasses sliding and settling was overwhelming, like that of a freight train or an ambulance. But there was no mistaking the fact that they were lifeless. Just corpses succumbing to gravity.

  The next thing Kim heard was the sound of cheering.

  Nazca, Peru

  Melanie stood next to what was left of the queen. Even destroyed, the queen was a beautiful monster.

  She was holding her face shield in one hand and had her hazmat suit peeled down with the arms tied around her waist. There had been a rip near her hip, but unless her adrenaline was pumping too hard for her to feel it, she was pretty sure she was unscathed. This time. Her arm still hurt and she could feel it throbbing under the bandages. Still, it felt good to be standing there in the night sky, the cool desert air drying the sweat.

  It felt good to be alive.

  “Dr. Guyer,” Cannon said. He glanced at the destroyed remnants of the giant Hell Spider. “I’m sorry, but we’ve got to move. We’ve got several men who need medical attention.” He didn’t say anything about the truck full of men that had veered off course, or the other three men who were beyond the need for help. “We’re going to be able to do a lot more for them back at the plane.”

  Melanie nodded.

  They heard yelling from where the three remaining JLTVs were parked. A jolt of ice ran through her body, but then she realized it wasn’t
the sound of panic. The yelling was excitement. She jogged over with Cannon.

  “Sir! You’re not wearing your headset.”

  “Sorry, son. What did I miss?”

  “Reports in from Berlin, Boston, uh, heck, a couple of other places. It’s like we cut the cord! The spiders are just done. Turned off, sir. All of them!”

  Cannon nodded and looked at Melanie. For the first time she thought he looked his age, and she realized he must be as tired as she was. But at least in that moment she felt wildly wide-awake.

  “Dr. Guyer. Melanie. I know we don’t have all the information, but—” Cannon stopped.

  “What does it mean? That’s what you were going to ask, right?” Melanie couldn’t stop herself from grinning. “It means we did it.”

  She started to laugh. “We won.”

  Nazca, Peru

  Shotgun grunted every time the truck jostled his leg, which meant he was constantly grunting. They still had to travel several hundred feet before they could turn back onto the relatively well-paved road, and even though Kim was driving slowly, it was a bouncy ride.

  Gordo tried to hold Shotgun’s leg as steady as he could. He’d cut away the hazmat suit so he could dress Shotgun’s wound, which was pretty gruesome. The Hell Spiders had done a real number on his calf and ankle.

  For all that, his friend had an extraordinarily broad smile plastered on his face.

  Nazca, Peru

  One of the Rangers had recovered the errant JLTV, driving it over so they could load the additional dead bodies inside. They weren’t leaving anyone, living or dead, behind. Kim was thankful that she got to drive the living.

  She was also thankful when she finally got her wheels off the dirt and back on the highway. Shotgun had been given painkillers already, but they clearly hadn’t kicked in yet. It would be good to get him back to the airfield. Shotgun wasn’t the most badly injured man, but he needed more than just a field dressing.