Element Zero (18 page)

“Mr. Deatherage?” I said. He looked up at me, but didn’t respond. “Mr. Deatherage, can you understand me?”

I scanned his head and saw a dark blotch inside the brain pan. Revivors relied on existing brain pathways. The kill switch had caused some damage in there.

I looked around the room. The computer equipment was all dark and surrounded by smoke. Cables and wires trailed across the floor.

An icon flashed in my periphery as the data miner came back with its first round of results. Information began to scroll by in front of me. The model numbers were getting hits on some very specialized equipment used to develop and test nanotech code. A high-security clearance and a federal permit were required to obtain half the technology on the list.

Whatever he was working on here, it was something major,
I told Alice.
The electronics in here are worth millions.

Did he get it through Heinlein?

You need permits for this stuff; they’d never have signed off on it. This was something he didn’t want them knowing about, or he’d have done it there.

I looked around the room, waving smoke and gas fumes away from my face. The revivors had been sent by Fawkes to destroy evidence, so he knew a place like this existed. Deatherage’s main residence was hit first, though, which suggested he hadn’t known exactly where it was. Whatever they were doing, the others, Chen and Shaddrah, had to be in on it, but they hadn’t known the location either, or hadn’t told Fawkes.

Their work was tied to Chen’s, then. Was there more to it than just safeguarding against the shutdown virus?

Wachalowski, a tech team is on its way, but we’re working against the clock here,
Alice said.
Wind patterns could put fallout over that area in an hour; get what you can and get out of there.

Understood.

“Mr. Deatherage?”

He lunged, and the desk jumped an inch as his arm was pulled taut. Jin and Anders’s guns came up, but neither fired. Deatherage bared his teeth and reached with his free hand to grab me.

“It’s okay,” I told the two men. “I’ve got him.”

I looked through the musculature of his neck and was able to make out the nodes that had formed around the spine. The communications node was active, and I connected.

There wasn’t much contained in the memory; Deatherage hadn’t been a revivor long. He’d switched over long after the original kill code was sent, so Fawkes must have had him on a separate trigger. A safeguard, maybe. Deatherage was supposed to be in on his plan, but when Fawkes realized he’d been betrayed, he used it to make sure he didn’t talk.

“Mr. Deatherage, can you understand me?” I asked. Spittle hung from his lip as he stared at me and strained against the plastic tie. With his free hand, he thumped his palm against his stomach twice.

“Why’d they restrain him?” Anders asked.

“I think he restrained himself,” I said.

“Why?”

“Maybe so he wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

They bite.

The words appeared in front of me, floating in front of Deatherage’s face. They’d come over my connection to his revivor node. He was trying to communicate.

What happened here?
I asked him. His eyes rolled in their sockets.
What did you do?

They bite.

What did Fawkes have you working on?

He didn’t answer. His brain was scrambled. He used his free hand to thump his belly again.

When I moved my scan away from the revivor nodes around his spine to look down at the hand, I caught a flash of something behind the muscle wall in his abdominal cavity. He was trying to tell me something.

“Hang on. I’ve got something here,” I said. I zoomed in and peered through the soft tissue. Inside his stomach, there was a small piece of plastic with electronics inside.

A data spike.

Deatherage lunged again suddenly, his cold fingers brushing my face before grabbing a fistful of my jacket. Without thinking, I drove my dead fist into the side of his face and his head snapped to one side. A gob of blood splashed the desktop next to him as I pulled back and grabbed his wrist, peeling his fingers away from my lapel.

Do it . . .

I bent his fingers back until I heard a series of dull pops, then twisted his arm around so his broken hand faced the floor. I drove the heel of my palm down onto his elbow, and the bone crunched. Anders took a quick step back.

“Woah!”

Deatherage’s arm bent the wrong way, but his face didn’t change. He didn’t feel it, but I didn’t care. The same urge that came over me at the hospital was back, stronger than before, and I fought to control it.

I kicked the chair out from under him, then shoved him face-first down onto the floor. As the chair toppled, the tie twisted his wrist and I heard it snap. Before he could move again, I drew my field knife and stuck the point between two vertebrae just under the revivor nodes. Careful not to damage the nodes themselves, I drove the blade through the spinal cord, and he went limp.

Calm down.
My heart rate was spiking.
Just calm down.
The other two officers stood a few feet away, guns still drawn as I took a deep breath and let it out.

Do it . . .

“Wait outside,” I said. Anders backed out of the room as I jerked the knife free again.

I flipped Deatherage over, the tie cutting his wrist deeper until the fingers of his hand turned dark and fat. I pulled his shirt open to expose the pale skin underneath, and found the outline of the data spike under the surface. I pushed the knife in below his ribs and cut open his belly.

“Jesus,” I heard Jin mutter.

“Wait outside.”

I used the backscatter to help guide the knife as I cut through the stomach wall. When the opening was big enough, I pushed my fist through and felt around until I found the edge of the plastic. I grabbed it and pulled it free.

They bite.

“I get it.”

I wiped the spike as dry as I could on his shirt before guiding it into the bay of my cell phone. It was loaded with data, some kind of specs, maybe, for the code he’d worked on, but there was a text message included with it:

Fawkes lied. He wasn’t supposed to kill them all. What I did, I did for the good of all mankind. It was only supposed to wake them up. No one was supposed to die. That’s what I was told.

Ang was just supposed to provide protection for their network, but I found his secret location and now I know what he really worked on. His lab is at Black Rock Yard. He worked on dissemination. I don’t know where she worked, but I found out Dulari was one of the Huma payload specialists. She figured out how to make them self-replicate. This kind of research is illegal for a reason. This isn’t how it was supposed to be.

None of us knew what the other was doing, or I would never have done it. Alone, any one of these traits could be explained away, but together they could prove unbelievably dangerous. This cannot get out.

If she is still alive, tell my wife I’m sorry—about Panya and everything else. Tell her that no matter what she hears in the days to come, I swear I didn’t know.

Included were some images that didn’t mean much at first glance. There were rows of photos, close-up shots of dog bites. There were also rows of X-rays, each panel showing the progress of what looked like revivor nodes growing in the skulls of different dogs. There was a satellite map as well, with The Eye and the nuclear deterrent shield called out. Another map had locations circled and connected with lines, including the Stillwell base, Black Rock train yard, Palos Verdes, and Heinlein Industries.

The last image, though, stopped me cold. I stared at it in the HUD, realization slowly sinking in.

Alice, come in.

Hsieh here.

The image was a satellite photo of the city that included a section of the coast. The image was dotted with tiny red points, and as I watched, more began to appear. As the dots began to bleed together to form clusters, a timer counted off the seconds, minutes, and hours in a fast time-lapse. As days ticked by, the red clusters began to slowly cover the map, then leak out over the bridges, out of the city. At the base of the map were two words:

PROJECTED SPREAD

Alice, I know why Fawkes went back to Heinlein.

What we found at the train yard suddenly made sense. Fawkes didn’t care about reanimating animals, and he wasn’t testing the new code on them either, not directly.

We already know that,
Alice said.

We were wrong,
I said. Dissemination, self-replication . . . the simulation wasn’t charting the spread of revivors through the city, it was charting the spread of a disease. Fawkes didn’t just switch off the ghrelin inhibitors of the people he’d converted, he’d changed them far more fundamentally than that.

No matter what else happens, Alice, we can’t allow Heinlein’s transmitter to be damaged or destroyed.

It’s how he’s controlling the satellites, Nico. It’s how he’s controlling revivors across such a wide radius.

I know, but it’s also the only way to introduce any change to their existing systems. It might be the only way to undo what Fawkes has done.

And what is that, Agent? What is it? What did you find?

I think Fawkes knows he can’t hold Heinlein forever. He wants to spread the Huma variant to the rest of the city before that happens.

How?
I looked over at Deatherage as that bitter taste filled my mouth again. His body was paralyzed but his eyes pleaded as he continued to repeat his message:

They bite.

They bite.

They bite.

Zoe Ott—Alto Do Mundo

When I came to, I was sitting on a hard, uncomfortable chair. The room was quiet, and I could hear the soft buzz of an electric light over my head.

I took a deep breath and opened my eyes. I was sitting on a folding metal chair in front of a table near one end of a small, concrete room whose walls were painted green. A single light flickered overhead, throwing shadows in the dark.

“This place,” I whispered. A heavy metal door that led out of the room was open, and the doorway was dark. From outside, I heard footsteps echo, then disappear. My head hurt and my throat hurt. Every time my heart beat, pain went up the back of my neck.

For a long time, the Green Room was just another nightmare place I ended up in when I blacked out, but now I knew it existed, or would exist, and that I was one of only a few people to ever see it, which meant I was one of the few people who might be around to see it. It was a vision from inside the void, something from the aftermath of the event. I hadn’t seen it in a long time.

I looked at the tabletop and thought it wasn’t the same one as last time, but I wasn’t sure. It was worn, with laminate peeled up in one corner. I thought maybe it was a different shape. Certain things were always the same, like the green paint and the basic layout of the room, but sometimes the details changed. Not enough people had seen it to be sure. No one knew what the room was for.

“It’s almost time,” a voice said.

I turned around and saw the dead woman, the one with the short blond hair and the nice cheekbones, standing next to a silver metal panel that was fixed to the wall. Her skin looked thinner than the last time I’d seen her, with more of those black veins underneath. She stared at me from near the switchbox, her eyes glowing in the dark like moonlight.

“I know who you are,” I said. “Your name is Faye Dasalia.”

She was the one Nico used to be in love with. The one he was still in love with. She tried to kill me once, but instead I almost killed her—almost.

“We will meet one last time,” she said.

“When?”

She reached over to the electrical box and threw the switch. A spark flashed with a loud bang and fell down onto the floor, where it sputtered out. Two of the lights at the end of the room slowly got a little brighter, while the one in the middle stayed out. Another spark spit from the socket there.

As the lights came up, I saw two figures had appeared, one standing under each of them.

The first one was Nico, and when I saw him, I put one hand over my mouth. A few years back he’d ditched me and never tried to contact me again, so I had mixed feelings about him, but even so, he looked horrible. He was wearing slacks and a sleeveless undershirt, and the scar that covered his neck and chest ended on his left side at a neat seam where his whole shoulder and arm had turned pale and gray. Black veins stood out over the bicep and down the forearm. There were big, dark bruises on the right side of his body, especially his face. The eyelid that drooped showed only white underneath. He looked half-dead.

“You can help him,” the dead woman said, “but you can’t save him. He will destroy Fawkes forever.”

“I stop Fawkes.”

She didn’t say anything.

I got up out of the chair, and when I stood, my head pounded. It was all I could do to limp a few steps closer. I couldn’t stop shivering. I was almost sure I hated him for turning his back on me, but still, I could barely stand to see him like that.

“He will need you,” she said.

“I needed him,” I said. My voice was low and hoarse.

The dead woman didn’t answer. She pointed to the other figure, Flax, with her short hair and mean face. I felt my face get hot.

“She will bring about destruction,” the woman said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I know. She’s a carrier. They’re going to use her as a back door to shut down the rest of them.”

She didn’t say either way. In the quiet, I could hear the low hum from her chest.

“She will take the last thing that is dear to you,” she said.

I clenched my fists, and felt tears well up in my eyes. My hand shook as I pointed one index finger up at her face.

“Enough!” I said. “I’ve had enough! She’s not taking anything else from me! Nothing else! They’re going to kill her, like they should have done a long time ago! The next time I see you, I’ll put you down for good. Do you hear me? If I so much as see you I’ll—”

Faye moved closer to me. I backed away until I bumped against the concrete wall, and her cold hands grabbed my arms. The cool, lifeless skin of her cheek pressed against the hot red of my own, and she spoke into my ear.

“He will call to you one last time,” she said. “If you accept him, you could still—”

“Screw you!” I said, and shoved her back. She staggered into the table and caught herself before she fell, as the chair clattered to the floor. “You’re not real!”

I put my hands over my eyes and pressed. My head throbbed so bad it made me feel sick.

“I’m tired of this! All of this! Get out of my head and just leave me alone!”

I took my hands away and opened my eyes. Dark spots swam in front of me. I was still in the Green Room and the chair was still knocked over, but the dead woman was gone. It got quiet, and I could hear myself panting. I wiped my mouth and looked around. No one else was there.

My heart rate started to slow down as I took a deep breath, like Ai had shown me. There was no reason to get upset. The visions weren’t something to be afraid of; they were glimpses into a possible future. They provided valuable information, and visions that came from the place even Ai couldn’t see into were the most valuable of all. I had to try to calm down and pay attention.

I picked the chair back up and put it in front of the table. I could be pulled back at any time, and with things going the way they were, I might never be back in this place. This might be my last chance to learn something, anything, that could help us. I smoothed down my hair and leaned back against the cool concrete wall, breathing slowly.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay . . . pull it together . . . ”

As I let my eyes lose focus, the hard lines at the corners of the room seemed to vibrate and hum, like a tuning fork. I forgot about what the dead woman had said and about what was happening back in the real world. I relaxed and let the light get brighter.

Show me . . .

Slowly, an outline, like a ghost, appeared in the room with me. Three more appeared around it, but I couldn’t tell who they were. As the color bled away, the outlines of the ghosts got sharper. There were three men. . . .

I brought them into focus. They weren’t like my visions of the dead woman or Karen or the others who tried to pass me information. . . . These people had really been here, or would be here, someday. Prior to then, it had been just a location, a staging ground for psionic feedback that I couldn’t control. Now I saw the room as it really was and its true occupants. Somewhere, in someone’s future, this was happening.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. The ghosts flickered, and I was afraid I might lose them.

Not now . . .

The phone buzzed again. I took it from my pocket but stayed focused on the figures who had appeared in the room. Two of the men were part of a group. They were older, and wore some kind of uniform I didn’t recognize, with their names stitched over the front pocket. The first man was a big, blocky guy named Gein. The second guy had very pale skin and an angular face. He had a scar under one eye. He looked different from when I’d last seen him, skinnier and more tired, but I recognized him right away; it was Hans Vaggot. The expression in the men’s eyes scared me.

The two of them half dragged a third man to the back of the Green Room and shoved him against the wall.

“Don’t move,” Gein said. The man looked scared. He stood against the wall under the middle light with his hands held up in front of him.

“I’m okay,” he said. His voice was hoarse. “I’m telling you I’m—”

“Shut up,” Vaggot said, and right then a woman walked through the door. My eyes widened. The phone buzzed again in my pocket, then stopped, but I barely noticed.

The woman wore the same uniform as the men, with leather jackboots and a pistol that hung from one bony hip. Her red hair was cut short, and I saw the scar from a bite wound on one side of her neck. Her beaky nose had been broken at some point.

It’s me,
I thought. I checked the name patch to be sure. It read OTT.

I stared, stunned, as she crossed the room to the table and dropped an electronic pad down in front of her. She turned it on and started opening programs with a stylus. Her face looked mean, and unlike me, she was stone cold sober. Her eyes were hard, and focused.

“Hit the lights,” she said. Gein went over to the switchbox and threw the switch.

The room got dark except for the single light over the man against the wall. It shone dimly, and made shadows under his brow.

“Starting the scan,” she said.

A bright red line flickered across the far wall, near the ceiling. I followed it back and saw a small lens mounted in the cinder block that I’d never noticed before. A light fixed on one side began to flash.

The line began to move down the wall, tracing contours over the man’s face and neck before traveling down the rest of his body.

“I have a kid,” the man wheezed, as the laser moved down his body. Next to him, I could see divots where bullets had punched into the concrete. I hadn’t noticed them before.

“Shut up,” she said.

I looked at the screen and saw an outline of the man displayed there. Information was being called out, but the text was too small for me to read. I moved closer and leaned in; then the screen turned red and flashed.

“You’ve made a mistake,” the man said. He looked terrified. The red laser went out. The other me tapped the screen in front of her, and it went dark too.

“I said shut up,” she said. She turned to the uniformed men. “Cover him.”

Their guns came out and they aimed at the man from halfway down the room. He held up his hands feebly.

“What are we looking at?” Gein asked.

“It changed again,” she said. “Goddamn it, it changed again.” She crossed to the silver panel on the wall and swiveled it around to reveal a handset. She picked it up and spoke into it.

“We need a containment team down here,” she said.

“You’ve made a mistake,” the man whimpered. “You’ve made a terrible mistake. . . . ”

“If he says another word, shoot him,” the other me said. Gein and Vaggot glanced at each other nervously.

“You can’t stop this,” the man said. The other me slammed down the handset.

“Gein, shoot—”

The man seized up all of a sudden, and the cords in his neck stood out. It happened really fast; in a second, the back of his skull melted away under his skin. His neck shriveled and his eye sockets sank until his eyes bugged out of shadows.

“Shit!” Vaggot shouted. He looked ready to piss himself, but stood his ground. The two men stood there, weapons aimed, but not shooting for some reason.

The man’s deformed head bobbed at the end of his chicken neck while his clothes draped over a body that wasted away beneath them. He looked around the room like he didn’t recognize anything he saw.

“You can’t stop this,” he gurgled. It looked like his tongue had split down the middle.

“Hold him,” the other me said. “The team is on their—”

“You can’t stop this!” the man shrieked, and shambled forward, toward the two men. He held out his hands and they were like spindly claws.

The man stumbled, and when the soldiers moved out of the way, he just kept going like they weren’t even there. They followed him with their guns as he reached the table and shoved it aside. It flipped and crashed into the wall as he kicked past the folding chair and came right toward me, the real me. It was like he could see me. I backed away, into the wall, and dropped my phone. It clattered to the floor, and I saw the screen light up as a voice came over its speaker.

“If anyone is receiving this message, listen carefully,”
a woman shouted through the phone, as the thing stopped a few feet from me.

“Wh-what?” I asked. The men in the room were taking aim, ready to fire. When I looked down at the phone, I could just make out the caller’s name on the LCD.