Element Zero (17 page)

Faye Dasalia—Heinlein Industries, Pratsky Building

The sounds of gunfire and screams faded behind me. I spotted a stairwell door at the end of the hall and headed for it. To my left, windows looked over the tarmac, off to the distant skyline. As I moved down the corridor, I saw a door slam open outside and a group of men and women came running out. They made a break for the far-off perimeter, but before they made it a hundred yards, there was a bright flash from the sky. A beam of energy rippled down through the clouds and washed over them. In an instant, the tarmac melted underneath them and they were gone in a cloud of smoke. The thick glass buckled in the heat and cracked down the center with a thud as wet ash and tar rained against it. Wind whistled through as I turned the corner and headed away. I needed to get out of sight, and soon.

There was no way for me to know where Fawkes was. I could no longer locate any of them, and it surprised me how lost that made me feel. I’d come to rely on that command network, and without it I felt a little bit blind. I had to watch and listen more carefully. By now Fawkes was rallying them against me. My former allies were now my enemies, and that sense of connection I’d felt to them was gone, leaving a void behind it.

I should have let him kill me,
I thought as I ran.
In another second, it would have been done. Now—

As I came to a T in the corridor, I almost ran headlong into a soldier who stepped out in front of me. Its gun, held in one gray hand, hung by its side. It saw me, but took a second to react.

I rushed it, closing the distance in three strides. My forearms split apart and I triggered both the bayonets at once. As it raised its weapon, I knocked it back onto the floor then thrust both blades down, deep into its neck. They crossed just in front of its spinal column, and two spastic jets of black blood painted the walls to either side of us. I jerked and scissored the two blades together. Its head nearly severed, the soldier fell back and crashed down onto the floor.

Faye.
It was Fawkes. I could sense him trying to reestablish the command spoke to retake control of me, trying to locate exactly where I was. I stepped through the oily pool growing across the tiles and picked up the soldier’s gun.

Faye, answer me,
he said. And that’s when I saw a second flash out the window, much, much brighter than the first.

It came from somewhere far off, out between Heinlein and the city proper. The source was beyond the mouth of Palm Harbor, maybe ten miles or so from the coastline. The light was so intense, the window tinted and a large, dark spot danced in front of my eyes. A huge dome of flame had begun to expand over the water’s surface.

What was that?

The overhead lights flickered and then went out. I heard a collective gasp from back down the way I’d come; then, just as suddenly, the lights came back on. A chest-thumping boom followed, then a low, steady rumbling sound. The wind began to pick up, and snow streaked past the window.

Fawkes, what was that?
The ball of light grew larger by the second. There had been a detonation of some kind. Whatever it was, it was huge. . . .

I realized then what I was seeing. A dark cloud began to emerge from the blast and rise into the sky on a column. My heart hadn’t beat for years, but still, the cloud’s mushroom shape inspired dread.

What did you do?
I asked. The words floated in front of the growing cloud, as a huge electrical arc flashed through it.

This is bigger than either one of us, Faye. Come back.

The rumble went on and on, even after the light was gone and the windows cleared. The mushroom cloud continued to grow high into the sky.

This is what we’ve worked toward, Faye. Your existence no longer matters. I know you believe—

I cut the connection and put a block on his ID. I saw him try to reestablish the link, but I didn’t pick up. I checked the pistol’s magazine; it was full. For a moment, I stood over the body, not sure what to do next.

Find Robert MacReady,
Dulari had said. I wasn’t sure who he was, but I scanned the JZI nodes inside the building and found a match for his name. He was inside, then.

I put in a call request, then sprinted to the stairwell door and pushed it open. At the rail, I looked down and saw that it descended several stories. Until then I hadn’t realized how deep the structure really went.

I started down. If the revivor I’d just destroyed had a chance to report my location, then there were already more on their way. My best bet was to head down and try to disappear until I could decide what to do next.

I’d descended five flights when my call request was picked up. MacReady was alive.

Faye Dasalia, what do you want?
He’d responded, but the circuit hadn’t come through the transmitter; Fawkes couldn’t monitor the conversation.

Dulari Shaddrah gave me your name,
I told him.

Something pricked at my control nodes remotely, some kind of low-level scan. Before I could cut it off, a stream of data went out on the wire.

Your command spoke is locked,
he said.

Yes.

That’s interesting. Why?

Fawkes meant to kill me. I am no longer part of his network.
He paused for a minute, considering or perhaps verifying that, then:

I can help you. Come to the lab.

Help me do what?

Come to the lab,
he said.
If you’re on the run as you say, you need to get off of Fawkes’s radar.

I took a step down the stairs and then stopped there, uncertain. Fawkes hadn’t told me everything, but I’d worked for years to make sure these events could unfold. I still did believe in his ultimate goal. Everything was moving so fast, I hadn’t had time to think. Why had I even run from Fawkes? Was the human survival mechanism so ingrained? I had no life to lose. Why did I run? What did I want?

You were a slave for the last part of your life, Faye, I know that,
MacReady said.
But ask yourself if what Fawkes offered you was any better. The control that command spoke provided was more absolute than anything you experienced in life. But you’re free now. Come to the lab.

He’s luring me,
I thought. Some old intuition was bubbling up. There was something too silky about his words.

Is Dulari alive?
he asked.

The last time I saw her, she was alive.

And Mr. Chen?

Alive, but they’re killing the rest.

I know,
he said.
And I know what you are. I know better than you do. I know there are still residual ties to your old identity. Fawkes knows too. It’s why even though he needed a seventh-generation to gain access to our systems, he considers you a liability now.

What he said made sense, but I wasn’t sure if he was right about me or not. Some people would die; I’d always known that. But people died all the time.

I need you.
Nico’s message still floated near the corner of my eye. He’d understood. Not letting anyone get hurt was my ideal in life, but it was unrealistic. He’d known that, believed it. Was he right? I stood on the stairs, not knowing what to do.

Where are you?
I asked MacReady. A map of the underground levels appeared in the air in front of me.

I’ll direct you. What floor are you on now?
I looked up at the placard tab on the wall next to the gray stairwell door.

Sublevel five, stairwell E3.

Continue down to level eight.
I looked over the railing; the stairs wound down into shadows far below. I had no reason to trust this man MacReady, but I didn’t have too many options left.

I took another step down and then continued for three flights. Following the path traced on MacReady’s map, I opened the stairwell door and into a long, dimly lit corridor.

Follow it to the end, and then through the lab on the other side. Security is down; you’ll be able to walk right in.

The hall was strangely quiet, with only the hum from the overhead lights and another, more subtle source of white noise. My footsteps echoed quietly behind me as I approached the heavy metal lab door and gripped its cold steel handle. The scanner mounted there on the wall was dark and inactive.

I pushed, and the door opened with a low thud that turned my skin to gooseflesh. My dead skin never did that unless it was near an electrical field. I traced the thud and the hum that followed it to somewhere over my head, where I saw large coils of thin, shiny wire. Beyond that, the room was dark.

Noise suppressors.

I took a step, and lights snapped on overhead. I was standing on one side of a huge room where rows and rows of figures hung from above, each one covered in thick, clear plastic sheeting. Silhouetted by the light, their feet and toes dangled around head level, where bundles of wires hung down to the floor, then snaked across the tile. Dim light from overhead flickered eerily.

To the other side,
MacReady said.
Quickly.

What is this place?
I asked.

It’s the culmination of an old experiment,
he said.
One your leader started a long time ago.

I took a step, and something wet touched my cheek. When I wiped it, my fingers came away black. I looked up and saw three small children’s corpses tented underneath a single plastic sheet. Two black-skinned boys looked dormant, but the girl’s large, glowing eyes stared down at me. On the map MacReady had provided, the chamber I was in was marked as SEMANTIC/EPISODIC MEMORY RECLAMATION FACILITY.

Are you taking their memories?

As I’m sure you know, Faye, revivor memories are much simpler to package and transfer than human memories. They’ve been known to even share them in the field during long deployments.

Yes.

The light coming from overhead was from them. When I stepped past the door, they’d opened their eyes. Hundreds of them, all staring down to see me. The wires that trailed from them were connected to plugs under the skin. Another black drop dripped down from the end of the girl’s toe. More of the eyes looked my way, causing the eerie electric light to shift. The little girl’s legs hung still. She stared, conscious, but didn’t answer when I tried to contact her.

None of them can respond. Leave them, Faye.

I looked into her eyes a minute longer, then turned back toward the exit MacReady had called out for me. I sprinted between rows of bundled cable, the soft light shifting as their eyes followed me. As I passed between their dangling bodies, I sensed that their signatures were active, but they were cut off from me and each other. Many of their eyes moved around spastically, the way they sometimes did when streaming data.

What do you do with the memories, once you’ve taken them?
I asked.

Come to the lab,
he said,
and I’ll show you.

Up ahead of me, several sets of toes twitched as I slipped through a second hanging plastic sheet, down past rows of metal hatches that were covered with thin layers of frost. Light seeped from under a door at the far end.

Without looking back, I opened it and moved on.

6

VEIL

Nico Wachalowski—Palos Verdes Estates

Impact.
The word flashed in the air in front of me as the horizon lit up and began to grow brighter.

Satellites had detected the launch and tracked the missile as it entered the atmosphere, but the defense shield wasn’t designed to respond to a strike sourced from inside the net itself. There was no way to stop it. The helicopter had just begun its approach to Palos Verdes when the missile detonated above the water, past the mouth of Palm Harbor. A blinding flash lit up the night sky, and spots still swam in front of my eyes as the huge dome of light began to boil into a cloud of radioactive fire. Even at that distance, it was awe inspiring. As the signature cloud rose over the skyline, panic set in for real, and I could see mobs surge through the streets below us. Not even the Guard could control the flow of bodies as they scrambled to clear the area.

I couldn’t raise anyone on the JZI. Our people were scattered. Calls were flooding in from all over the city, jamming the switchboards, and it was about to get worse.

You will kill Fawkes—that’s what they think—but Zoe will stop him.

I thought about Van Offo’s last words as the column of smoke continued to rise above the skyline. I fished the card he’d given me with her number on it out of my jacket pocket. The way things were playing out, I might not get another chance. As we moved over the crowd that had spilled into the street, I dialed it.

It rang several times, but she didn’t pick up. When it bounced through to her voice mail, I stared at the mob below and didn’t speak.

“We’re closing in!” the pilot said.

“Zoe—”

Scrambled code streamed in the corner of my eye and then winked out as the chopper hit turbulence. My stomach rolled, and my dead right arm seized as the scene in front of me changed abruptly.

“
Just tell me what you want
,” I asked. I was sitting in my car, with Zoe next to me. The sign for Pleasantview Apartments shone from across the street through falling snow as I waited for her to answer.

I remember this.
It had happened years ago, back before Faye had been killed.

Zoe sat in the passenger’s seat, her eyes turned down toward the floor. Her hair covered most of her face, but I saw a tear roll down her cheek.

“I want you . . . to like me . . . ”
she said. Her voice was so soft, I could barely hear her.

“I do like you, Zoe. I . . . ”

She turned and stared up into my eyes. The color was gone from them, replaced with shiny black. I felt the strength drain out of my body.

“Don’t say anything,”
she said.
“This is hard enough.”
Her eyes returned to normal.

“You really don’t get it, do you? You really don’t see it.”
She shook her head.
“You and me . . . there’s got to be a reason for it . . . I kept seeing you . . . something made me find you . . . we were supposed to meet. Didn’t you feel it too?”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t know what to say. Zoe always seemed emotional to me, but I hadn’t realized until then just how much she kept buried.

“You mean so much to me . . . don’t you see it? You changed my life. . . . ”

“Zoe . . . look . . . ”

“Am I anything to you at all?”

I realized then that she had feelings for me. More than that, she’d pinned some kind of hope on me. I’d been so caught up in what was happening that I hadn’t even noticed.

Zoe was deeply disturbed. She was a late-stage alcoholic, prone to outbursts and paranoia. I thought she might also be critical to my investigation, but she’d asked a straightforward question. Whatever it was she felt, I didn’t feel it, but I thought she deserved an answer. Even before I could frame what I was going to say, though, she knew.

“Don’t . . . don’t say it,”
she said, shaking her head. She was crying now.
“I don’t want to hear you say it.”

“Zoe—”

“Don’t!”
Her pupils expanded again and her eyes turned coal black. My head began to reel.
“Forget it! Just forget it! Forget this whole thing! We never had this conversation, so forget—”

The helicopter bucked, and as fast as the vision had come, it was gone. The phone was still in my hand. Zoe wasn’t there. I snapped it shut as the pilot began his descent.

I was sure that time; that was a memory. Zoe had wiped my memory, and somehow it had returned.

The dead arm ticked once, and I felt it in my shoulder. The first flash came after Fawkes took over Heinlein Industries, after he sent the transmission to alter the code of the Huma carriers. They had to be connected.

I set up a data miner to dig up instances of revivor bleed-through and memory recall. It began its search, but the networks were jammed and it was slow going. After a minute or two, it had trawled up some garbage, but nothing substantial. There was no tie between nanoblood contamination and memory, at least none on record.

“Hold on!” the pilot said as he brought us in. Maybe Deatherage would have some answers, if he was still alive.

We were closing in on the street below, and the crowd surged beneath the helicopter as people were buffeted by the wind of the rotors. We passed between the buildings and veered down Stark Street, where the traffic was jammed bumper to bumper. As the wire was flooded with warnings about the approaching radiation, people were abandoning their vehicles to escape to anywhere away from the shore. Throngs of bodies shoved their way down the sidewalks on either side. One man trudged along the side of a snowbank with a pistol clenched in his hand. Farther down, two men guarded a storefront with automatic rifles slung over their shoulders.

“It’s coming up,” the pilot said over the headset. Through the windshield, the building towered above us.

Palos Verdes was a low-rent apartment complex that dominated the block. It was closed off from the main street by a blockade of Stillwell soldiers who kept anyone from entering. On the other side of the cordon it was chaos, but so far the area behind it was clear. One of the soldiers waved the pilot in to a small lot bordered by military vehicles, and he descended into the clearing.

A shot went off down the street and I saw a figure stagger behind a row of cars, but couldn’t tell if it was human or not. People on the sidewalk shielded their eyes as the rotors kicked up sand and salt. The pilot brought us down on the icy pavement while soldiers watched from the main entrance.

I climbed out and signaled to the pilot.

Wait here.

Roger that
, he said,
but if that cloud blows in they’re going to have to try a mass evac. Be ready to move.

The roar of the crowd rose over the chopper. Another shot went off somewhere as I made for the front entrance. As I approached, one of the officers broke the line and came forward to meet me.

“Agent Wachalowski?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m Sergeant Lansky. We heard you were on your way.”

“What’s going on here?”

“Multiple revivors were spotted inside. We isolated them to the unit you’re after.”

“Is the target alive?”

“Heat signatures show no one living inside; it looks like we’re too late. We secured the site and were waiting for you to arrive.”

I looked at the entrance. People stood outside in groups, shivering in the cold. Eyes darted nervously toward the glow out over the water.

“Is the perimeter secure?”

“Yes, sir. No one’s come in or out.”

“How many revivors?”

“At least two. My men inside can tell you more. Basement level, unit 102. Sir, the launch. Do you know any—”

“Take the rest of your men and cover the street,” I told him. “This whole place could be contaminated in an hour; this is only going to get worse.”

I climbed the front steps and looked out from the main entrance. Back at the cordon, a soldier stood on top of a truck and barked over a bullhorn while the crowd shoved their way through the street. A mass evacuation would never happen in time. If the wind changed direction, most of the people there were going to be caught in it.

Pain pulsed in my head and I felt my jaw clench, the teeth grinding together. I needed to get back to headquarters to get checked out, but there was no place left to go back to. Even if there had been, there wasn’t time.

I pushed open the door. The lobby inside had glass scattered across the floor and I saw shell casings littered in with the debris. Some of the overhead lights were out, and some flickered where the ceiling had taken a stream of gunfire. A handful of tenants sat along one wall, watched by a pair of soldiers.

I drew my weapon and headed down a stairwell with concrete walls. The door clanged shut behind me as I reached the landing and entered the hallway. Following the unit numbers, I turned right, then down a long hallway where two soldiers waited. The younger one’s name patch read JIN. The other read ANDERS. When they saw me, they waved me over.

At the door, I switched to the backscatter filter and peered through. I didn’t see anyone on the other side. The scanner LED was green; the door was unlocked.

“There’s three inside,” Jin said. “We got them on camera.”

He angled the screen so I could see. From floor level, I saw a crumpled figure, and a woman’s face dotted with blood.

“That’s your guy’s mistress, Panya Garg,” the other officer said. “She’s confirmed dead. No word yet on whether your guy is in there or not, but we’re not picking up any vitals.”

“Power’s cut,” Anders said. “But we’ve got electrical activity and some light, so they’ve got some kind of backup.”

On the camera I saw a flicker—a flashlight beam, maybe. I heard movement from somewhere on the other side of the door.

“I’m going inside,” I said.

They nodded. I pushed open the door, and they took position behind me.

The front entrance opened into a short hallway, and up ahead I could see what looked like the living area. Heavy footsteps moved in one of the rooms nearby. I scanned through the walls on either side of the hall and didn’t see anyone.

I approached the woman’s body. She was dressed to go out, and there was a suitcase next to the front door. Blood had pooled behind the body from a wound in her back that probably came from a revivor’s bayonet. It was the wrong day to be associated with Harold Deatherage.

The living room was small and crowded with old, mismatched furniture. A set of dirty boot tracks crossed the matted carpet, away from the body and through a doorway on the far end of the room. A short connecting hallway extended from there. A flashlight swept through the room on the other side.

I approached, and the soldiers followed. The doorjamb was splintered where the door had been forced, and through the doorway I could see three male figures; two were standing and one was seated. None registered any body heat.

I’ve got three revivors here.

The room had been converted into some kind of makeshift work area. Two wall racks bordered a workstation, both stacked with equipment that looked out of place in such a run-down unit. Deatherage had been doing more here than just cheating on his wife.

The air inside was hazy, and I smelled smoke. I watched for a minute as one of the revivors rooted through a desk drawer, and the other pushed a collection of data disks from a shelf mounted behind the workstation so that they scattered onto the floor. It moved off to one side, out of my line of sight.

They’re looking for something.

The third revivor was seated in a chair in front of the workbench. The monitor glowed softly, silhouetting its face.

The equipment was still running on backup power, but the computer screens were blank. Threads of smoke rose from several chassis mounted in the racks. I zoomed in and pulled any names and model numbers I could read, then handed them off to a data miner to see what it could find.

The revivor in the chair shifted, and I heard a low scrape against the floor as the workstation desk moved. It had one wrist tied to the desk frame with a plastic zip tie. Blood leaked from a gash where it had dug through the skin, but the blood was red; human. A carrier, maybe.

The first revivor gave up on the drawers and looked around the room. After a minute, something sloshed, and the second came back into view, carrying a plastic gas can. It approached the seated revivor, and I smelled fumes as it poured a stream of gasoline down on top of its head. As the liquid splashed down over the desk and floor, I spotted an unlit road flare clenched in the revivor’s other hand.

I stepped inside, Jin and Anders moving in behind me. The revivors turned as I fired at the one with the can and caught it in the forehead. Its head pitched back and the can thudded to the floor as Jin fired at the second. The first round tore through its neck, and the second was a clean headshot. It fell back against the bookshelf and crashed to the floor. The second body staggered and left a streak of blood down the wall before it slumped down against the computer table. The road flare rolled behind a chair.

“Hold your fire!” I said.

The third revivor looked up from where it sat, hair plastered to its head. There were black blotches in the whites of its eyes. The first two were dressed in old, dirty clothes, but this one had on a buttoned shirt and a tie. Jin had his gun pointed at the revivor’s head, his finger on the trigger.

“Just wait,” I said.

I moved closer to the third revivor and scanned its face. The computer pulled up a match.

“It’s him,” I said. “This is Deatherage. Stand down.”

I lowered my gun and removed a penlight from my jacket pocket. I shined it in one of the revivor’s eyes. The black hemorrhages branched through the whites.

Alice, I’ve located Harold Deatherage.

Is he alive?

No. He’s been reanimated. It looks like a Huma case. I found some kind of work area here, but it looks like most of it has been destroyed.

The chair creaked under Deatherage’s body as he strained against the plastic tie.