Element Zero (28 page)

10

APPROACH

Nico Wachalowski—Heinlein Industries, Pratsky Building

Cracks in the tarmac thumped under the tires as I picked up speed, easing around a large, glassy crater. Snow accumulated on the wiper blades as I huffed past the burned-out husk of a jeep that lay on its side.

Heinlein proper was mostly dark, but I could make out the red lights that ran up the length of the transmitter. The huge curve of the dish was just visible against the moonlight. They hadn’t destroyed it yet.

Normally Heinlein’s security deactivated any nonregistered JZIs inside the perimeter, but it looked like the field was down with the rest of their systems. I pulled up an aerial view and began scanning for revivor signatures.

There were hundreds of them clustered inside the processing plant and some of the surrounding buildings as well. Pratsky was empty, though; the Leichenesser had worked. Signatures clung to the outside of the building where the ones that made it were forced to retreat. It was possible they hadn’t detected me.

I had the computer sift through the signatures and start pulling IDs. Most of them either weren’t on file or had been moved over from the processing plant earlier. I didn’t care about them.

“Come on . . .” The filter flagged an entry and brought it to the front as a ragged shelf of blacktop appeared in front of the car. I cut the wheel, fishtailing on the wet snow.

Fawkes, Samuel.

He was there, outside Pratsky. There were three other revivors with him. They were separated from the bulk of them, who looked like they were beginning to crowd around the entrances. They were preparing for the coming assault, but not Fawkes. He was moving away from the rest, following the building’s perimeter back toward the rear of the facility.

The transmitter.
He was heading for the dish.

I pulled up the layout of the Pratsky Building. Like the other structures at Heinlein, it was built low to the ground. A lot of it was underground, but it still covered a significant area; it would take him a while to make it all the way around. The transmitter could be accessed from the southern side of the building, which was a straight shot from an underground entrance in the northwestern parking garage. Fawkes couldn’t cut through because of the Leichenesser, but I could.

I veered around another huge scar burned into the tarmac’s surface. The guard posts were dark and the floodlights were out, but with the help of the computer I was able to call out the ramp up ahead. A group of signatures had massed down there, but they hadn’t organized in force yet.

A concrete pylon whipped past on the driver’s side as I aimed for the garage entrance and gunned it. Through the snow, I made out a pair of eyes as they flashed in the dark up ahead, then a second pair.

Gunfire punched through the car’s side, but I didn’t see the source. Before the revivor in front of me could take aim, it was crushed against the grille. I saw it tumble across the hood, and its head left a divot in the windshield before it spun past the passenger’s window. The car caught air for a second as the ramp descended, then the undercarriage scraped the concrete and the car lurched toward the guardrail.

The right headlight popped out as I glanced the rail. I hit the brakes and turned as the ramp circled around, tires shrieking as I flew out between two rows of parked cars. More eyes stared from the darkness ahead. The computer put three of them at the entrance.

One of them fired, and a bullet punched through the windshield a foot to my left. I accelerated, bearing down on the two I could see as car alarms squealed behind me. When I hit the first one, I stomped on the brake. The momentum carried us into the second one before the car slammed into the pylons in front of the entrance. I felt the rear tires come up off the ground and the seatbelt dig hard into my chest as I was thrown forward.

A spray of black splashed across the windshield as the rear tires crashed down. I could hear footsteps moving outside the car as I groped for the seat belt and released the catch. Fingers had already begun to claw at the door when I pushed it open and drew my gun, sticking the nose through the crack and pulling the trigger three times. A dark shape fell back, but more footsteps were close behind it.

The entrance was up ahead. I climbed over the body crumpled between the pylons and ran. The glass door was shut, the scanner dark. I pulled it open as several figures darted from between the vehicles parked to my left and began to run toward me. An organic smell blew over me as I ran through.

Halfway through the small lobby, I heard something slam into the door behind me. I turned and saw several figures at the door, eyes glowing in the darkness. I caught the rustle of cloth as a cold hand clamped down on my wrist and something big crashed into me.

I fell back onto the floor as fingers pawed at my face. I managed to land two shots but it didn’t stop. Teeth flashed as the body pushed down, forcing its way closer.

Something began to hiss, and I felt cold air with the stench of decomposition blow into my face. Through our tangled arms I saw white mist bubbling from the skin of the revivor’s face. The door slammed behind it.

It leaned back, holding up one hand and watching as the fingers shriveled, then dissolved to expose the yellowed bone underneath. There was no comprehension on its face.

Before it could react, I slammed my fist into its chest. The softened tissue underneath gave way and a jagged edge of bone cut into my knuckle. It tipped back, the shirt collapsing around the dark pocket in its torso. Kicking back, I broke free and climbed back up on my feet. The hiss had gotten loud as the revivor was consumed, disappearing into the mist.

I ducked through the doorway and into the building. A small fire smoldered in the far corner, throwing shadows between rows of cubicles where shell casings were littered. Shapes were sprawled across the floor.

I approached the closest figure. It looked like a body in uniform, but when I nudged it with my toe, I found the clothes were empty. The shirt and pants were still in the shape of a man, pant cuffs still tucked into the boots, but the only things left inside were pieces of metal. A mechanism that housed a long bayonet poked from the end of one sleeve. There were more uniforms crumpled on the floor ahead. It looked like they were headed farther into the building when it happened.

A gun went off somewhere up ahead, and I ducked through the office door next to me. A bullet punched through the cubicle wall on the other side and into the computer monitor on the desk behind it. Two more shots went off; then I heard someone mutter something.

“Hold your fire. I’m a Federal Agent!” I yelled.

The office window exploded and the cubicle across from me was riddled with bullets. I spotted the shooter, a young male, taking cover behind a support column. I fired and clipped his arm. Blood dotted the drywall as he pulled back, but not fast enough. I put the next bullet in his head, and he staggered back against the wall before crumpling to the ground.

I darted out of the office and stepped through the scattered clothing toward the figure. The young man made a choking sound, and red blood ran from his mouth. He’d been human.

Reloading, I stepped past the body. An exit on the far side of the room was the most direct route to the transmitter. That’s where Fawkes would be.

My footsteps echoed down the long, dark corridor in front of me as I moved farther into the building.

Calliope Flax—Third Street Station

When I came out of the tunnel and saw lights again, the railcar was there, like Nico said it would be. There were other people on the platform, some lined up by the wall, others hanging around the train looking for a way on. I showed them my gun and they got out of the way. The scanner turned from red to green when I showed it my military ID tag, and the doors opened to let me on. Some of the seats still had people’s coats and bags on them from when they ran, and there was an open suitcase in the row to my right with most of the clothes pulled out.

I stepped through then turned and stood just inside the doorway looking out. One guy looked like he might try to push his way past me, but he didn’t. The doors closed, and the staring faces on the platform fell away as the train took off. The last thing I saw before disappearing back into the tunnel was two guys on their knees, robbing a dead body.

To hell with this place.

“Confirm military ID,” the computer croaked. I rattled it off.

“Flax, Calliope,” the computer said. “Citizen First Class. Decorated Emet Corporal. Your destination has been preprogrammed. Do you wish to override?”

“No.”

“Please enjoy your trip.”

I hung on to the pole as the train took off down the tunnel, and stood there like a zombie until the dark of the tunnel fell away and the city lights filled up the windows. I watched Alto Do Mundo, that big, fucking tower of rich assholes, get closer as the slums flew past. It made me think about Luis, that kid I met in the tank a million years ago. He used to live there. I wondered if the rest of my squad was there and if they managed to get in. I wondered if it would still even be there when the sun came back up.

Why do they always die?

Luis died hard. The old man who looked after me when I came back from my tour, Buckster, died hard too, but I was just a dreg back then. I was a soldier now. That kid was right next to me. I could have reached out and grabbed her. I was armed and I knew it was coming. She’d saved my life. We were supposed to get out of there together.

Pain drilled into my head and my knees gave out for just a second. A scramble of code streamed by in front of me, as I grabbed the pole next to me and held on. Spit filled my mouth, and my eyes burned. Everything inside me felt fucked up. I checked my wrist and saw two big, dark veins creeping down my forearm, right across the join where the dead hand was grafted on.

Necrotic bleed-through. I had it too. Between that and the revivor nodes that had formed I wondered if they could even fix me, if it even mattered whether I got out of the city or not.

“You could be a champ,”
a voice said. I thought someone said it anyway. When I turned around, no one was there.

The car phased out for a second and I was somewhere else. I was back at the Porco Rojo, in the locker room. It was postfight, and I had a butterfly clip over a cut on one cheek. There was a knot on my right wrist and a nasty purple bruise was forming there. It throbbed, but I felt good. I fought hard and I won. The air smelled like a mixture of BO and soap, along with fifty different deodorants and colognes. The smell took me back, and on the train, I smiled.

I remember this.

“I am a champ,”
I said. Leaning against the lockers across from me was Tito Gantz, a fight scout. Getting noticed by Tito was a good thing. I was psyched, but I still had my guard up. I didn’t expect to find him back there waiting, and definitely not for me.

“You’re a good fighter,”
he said,
“but you’re not a champ.”

“I’m on TV.”

Tito snorted.
“TV,”
he spat out.
“Where your show is so deep in the muck, even the fucking data miners can’t find you.”

“You found me.”

“I’m paid to find you,”
he said.
“That’s my job. I take people like you and put them in front of actual viewers, on actual networks with actual advertisers. You want to knock heads in this hellhole until you finally burn out? Or do you want to at least have a shot?”

“A shot at the big time, huh?”
I sneered.

“I’m not psychic,”
he said.
“I wouldn’t call it the big time, and it’s a shot—that’s all. Maybe you can hold your own and maybe you can’t. You want to find out or not?”

He didn’t oversell. I liked that. It was a rung, just a bottom rung, but sometimes that’s all you needed. It was the first step up, out of the pit, maybe. I grinned and held out my hand, still with the tape on it.

“I—”

Before I could get an answer out, the word fizzled in my mouth. Three guys I’d never seen before came walking into the locker room like they owned the place; two big guys in suits and one smaller guy in a tight silk shirt. He was lean and looked like he spent way too much time in front of a mirror. His duds looked like they cost a fortune, and I’d have bet money the diamond in his ear was real. He had ice-blue eyes, real light, almost gray. When he came closer to us, he smiled, and I saw he was wearing eyeliner.

“Who the fuck are you?”
Tito asked. He was pissed, but when the little guy looked over at him, he just shut up and got real interested in the floor.

“Quiet,”
he said.
“I’m a fan.”

“I got a lot of fans,”
Tito said.

“Not of yours,”
the guy said.
“Of hers. I like to come here. I like to mingle with the thirds. I like to bet on Flax, here, and I almost always win.”

He smiled, looking into my eyes, and I saw his pupils get big.

“Even when I don’t,”
he said,
“it’s always entertaining.”

He turned to Tito, who was still looking down at the floor.

“She’s not interested,”
the little guy said.
“Just forget this ever happened, and go back to your business. Both of you.”

Tito looked like he was on dope or something, but even so, he didn’t look sure.

“But I could book her in the Capital,”
he said.
“I mean, the suburbs, but still, the Capital, man. . . . ”

The little guy with the eyeliner looked annoyed.

“I’m not driving all the way out there,”
he said.

The locker room faded, and I was back on the train. All of a sudden, Alto Do Mundo was practically on top of us. How long had I been zoned out?

What the hell was that?

I didn’t remember ever getting a meeting with Tito Gantz. If you’d asked me yesterday, I’d have said you were crazy, but I knew what I’d just remembered was real. It was real. It happened, then it got wiped out. . . .

“Wait,” I said. The train kept moving.

“Wait,” I said again. “This is Flax. I changed my mind. I want to change my destination.”

“State your override destination,” the computer said. I thought for a second. My heart rate was starting to pick up again, cutting through the fog.

“Voodoo Proper,” I said. “Heinlein Industries.”

“Destination is blocked,” the computer said. “Would you like to choose another?”

“Piece of shit . . . ”

“Would you like to choose ano—”

“Alto Do Mundo Station,” I said, pointing out the window. “There. Pull in there.”

The car veered so suddenly, I almost lost my footing. It went down into the nearest tunnel and picked up speed.

I chewed the inside of my lip until I tasted blood. I wanted to bite something. I wanted to sink my teeth into something so bad, I wondered if maybe I had turned. Maybe the inhibitor died, and I was one of them and I didn’t even know it.

The train evened out and air whooshed as it came out of the tunnel and into the station. Lights popped up outside the windows again and I saw a wall decorated with little, fancy colored tiles that spelled out the station name.

ALTO DO MUNDO CENTRAL STATION

Sorry, Nico.

As the platform flew past, I saw a few bodies facedown among the trash. A bench was knocked over on its back, and glass was scattered across the tiled floor. Black stains trailed along one walkway, and I saw spent shells. No revivors, though. The underground looked secure.

The train slowed, then stopped. The doors opened, and I drew my pistol and stepped out onto the platform. Voices echoed through the station from back up at street level, a dull roar over the pop of gunshots. The toe of my boot scattered shell casings that jingled off across the floor as I started to move toward the closest stairwell. There’d been a major fire fight down there as well.

ADM Station looked to me like some third-world thug’s palace. Even the stations I’d seen in what I’d call the good parts of town were nothing like it; before the fighting it must have looked like the inside of a fucking five-star hotel. Instead of pizza joints and food carts there were fancy restaurants, and bars. There was no graffiti, and the floor was tiled and shiny. There were green plants arranged to make the inside look like a park, and water ran down the walls at either end into a pair of big fountains. Right in the middle, under the huge vaulted ceiling, was a bronze statue of a huge, ripped dude with a giant globe on his back. It was hard to believe I was still in the same city.

The place had seen fighting, though. From the look of it, revivors must have pushed their way down to try to get in from underneath, then been forced back. There’d been a lot of gunfire, and blood, both human and revivor, ran across the stone-tile floor. Up ahead, divots were dug out of the sides of a fountain where a body lay facedown in the rubble. Glass from the storefronts had been blasted out and covered the floor. I counted more than twenty bodies before I got halfway across.

I didn’t see any sign of Singh or the others. Checking through the squad’s last orders, it looked like they were tracking their target using a GPS signal in one of their phones up in the penthouse. I punched in the ID and picked up the signal. According to the map, it was close, maybe half a block from where I was, but the signal strength put it high up above me.

Past the statue, I saw a wall of elevators and a big, fancy sign that said LOBBY ACCESS. The call lights were lit, so it looked like they were still running.

I punched up the closest one and the doors opened into a car big enough to hold fifty people. There was only one in there at the time, though. It was Ramirez, sitting on his ass, leaning into the corner of the elevator with a hole in his head. The mirrored wall behind him was shattered and specked with blood.

Stepping through broken glass, I leaned down and pulled his ID off his belt. It looked like the elevator only went to ground level. I hit the button and rode it up.

As it rose, I could hear the racket above get louder: gunfire, screaming, and someone yelling over a bullhorn. The doors opened onto a landing where all the gold, marble, and crystal was still in one piece, but across the lobby on the other side was the main entrance, and outside it was chaos.

The entryway was all bulletproof glass, scarred with gunshots where bodies lay slumped on the other side. It looked out over that huge, semicircular stone stairway I’d only ever seen from the other side, where bodies clashed in a huge, sprawling mass.

There were hundreds of revivors out there. They’d surged through the streets from all sides. The square was completely mobbed, and they pushed toward the building front where Stillwell had set up a makeshift military barricade. Bodies thrashed on the other side of a row of military trucks and a wall of soldiers holding up riot shields. Flood lamps shone down over the crowd as the revivors tried to break through, fingers clawing through gaps in the line. Shots cracked through the night air, but there were too many of them. Even as I watched, a group of revivors shoved their way through the gap in the shields and made a run for the line of vehicles. A turret opened up and an arm flipped back into the crowd in an explosion of gray meat. Across the square, another group managed to get over the trucks, and I saw a body throw itself against the glass before it was pounded with gunfire. A thick, black streak was smeared down the surface as it slumped to join the other bodies.

On the other side of the lobby was the main elevator hub, and I ran to it. At the far right end was an express that went up to the penthouse. According to the last reports, that’s where she’d be.

The doors had a security scanner. I put Ramirez’s ID to it and the light flashed.

“Ramirez, Edward,” the door said. “First-Class Citizen. First Sergeant. State the nature of your business.”

“It’s an emergency.”

“State the nature of the emer—”

“National security. Open the fuck up.”

Outside, more revivors had pushed through. One jumped over a fallen body, and when its coat opened, I saw black wiring bundled around a blue LCD readout. It pitched forward as automatic gunfire tracked across its back. It hit a pane of glass and began to go down onto the concrete. I saw the detonator flash in its hand.

“Open the doors!” I barked.

The blast shook the floor, and the glass panel exploded through the entryway on a blast of hot air as more bodies began to storm past the barricade. One of the vehicle-mounted turrets spun around and opened up, cutting two revivors in half as they approached the hole but it was no use. I saw more of them climb up the side of the vehicle and grab the gunner from behind. They were through.

The elevator doors opened, and as the jacks began to fill the lobby, I jumped in.

“Destination?” the car asked.

“Penthouse!”

Through the doors I saw another explosion go off, and there was a surge of screams as another turret opened up. More revivors had made it to the lobby and begun to scatter. Figures broke off in every direction. A stairwell door banged open and some of them crowded through. Others were heading in my direction, toward the elevators, and a bullet whined past my ear, punching into the glass behind me.

“Can you shut down all elevators but this one?” I asked the computer.