ZerOes (44 page)

DeAndre licks a glob of jelly from a doughnut off his finger. He sits on a rock overlooking the creek. Reagan comes up, says: “So we're heading to hillbilly country together. That'll be fun.”

“Yeah. It'll be a real hoot.”

“You wanna fuck?”

“What?”

“I'm just saying, feels like things are really coming to a head, and I figure if you want a taste of this sweet rump roast, now's your chance.”

He pulls her close, puts his arm around her. She flinches. “I do not want to have sex with you, Reagan Stolper.”

“You sure? I'm super good in the sack.”

“I don't doubt that. Maybe we can just sit here for a while.”

“Fine. Prude.” Eventually, she says, “You think we'll actually . . . y'know, do this thing? Stop Typhon and live to tell the tale?”

“I don't know. I'm scared to find out.”

“Me too.”

Aleena finds Chance waiting for her halfway between the pavilion and the cars. He's leaning up against a tree, picking his teeth with a stick.

“You're seriously picking your teeth with a stick?” she asks.

“What? It works. Toothpicks are basically this.”

“Basically.”

“Basically!”

“You're such a hick,” she says, but she's smiling when she says it, and then she grabs his hands, clasps them between hers, and reaches up on her toes to kiss him. A kiss long as a river, deep as the sea. When finally she pulls away, he takes a deep breath and blinks, reeling.

“Whoa. Dang.”

“We survive this thing, there's more where that came from.”

She kisses his cheek, then walks past. A sway in her step.

He hurries after. “Wait, does that mean you contacted the Widow?”

She just walks and whistles and smiles.

They pack up the cars. They say their good-byes. Together, just in case the scary cyberbitch is watching, they all lift their middle fingers to the sky. Then it's one last round of hugs made firmer by the unspoken acknowledgment that some of them might not make it through this thing unscathed.

Then two cars pull away, in separate directions.

YELLOW SPRINGS, OHIO

T
he Compiler walks with a long, juddering stride. His body is no longer his own—the small spheres have colonized his flesh, pressing into his wounds, spiraling around his bones, cupping his organs. The beads magnetize to one another to urge the limbs forward, and with every movement inside his mind he hears a loud
hum
followed by an electric
snap
.

A smell comes off him. Metal. Electricity. Rot.

Ahead, a small Victorian home. A young woman rakes leaves on the front lawn, sweat soaking the bandanna pulling her hair back. She looks up. Sees him standing there. Tenses. Rakes more quickly. She's on alert. As she should be.

Her face scans properly:
Stevens, Zoe
.

He confers with his maker:
Is this truly my goal? I should be hunting for those hackers
.

She responds:
It is time to stop hunting them. Data indicates they may be coming to us. And so we must be ready
.

He nods.

The woman has now realized something's wrong. She looks up—
she's frightened, but some sense of guilt and decorum pervades. She doesn't want to offend. She may think him homeless or troubled, but she wants to give him the benefit of the doubt.

She asks, “Can I help you?”

He has no weapon. But with this most recent upgrade, he does not need one.

The Compiler runs fast, the hive of spheres inside him urging him forward with preternatural speed. The woman turns, starts to run, trips over the rake. He catches her midfall.

She screams.

His hands twist. Her neck breaks.

The front door whips open. Screen door slams. A man stands there, eyes wide. He cries out—“Zoe!”—as the Compiler's systems identify the man as
Stevens, Roger
.

Roger Stevens pivots, heads back inside. The Compiler grabs the rake, snaps off the wooden handle, and marches up to the porch and in through the front door, tearing the screen door off its hinges. The man emerges from the kitchen, a French knife in one hand, a cell phone in the other.

The Compiler whips the broken rake handle forward. It flies free, cracks the man's wrist, and the cell phone drops.

Roger Stevens runs toward the Compiler with the knife, slashing clumsily, crying out. The Compiler catches his arm. Snaps the bone. Points the knife inward—easy, now that the limb has no tension, no resistance—and thrusts it into the man's midsection. Once. Twice. A third time. Then again and again, until the man utters a gassy, wet murmur and then falls.

For a moment, there is silence. The autumn wind kicks up outside. The screen door goes
thump, thump, thump
.

From upstairs, a child's voice: “Mommy? Daddy?”

The Compiler steps over the corpse and heads to the stairs.

THE HOLLAND TUNNEL MOTEL, JERSEY CITY, NEW JERSEY

T
he motel room smells like mold so strong that Chance can almost taste it. He sits on the corner of one bed, hands sweating. Bathroom door pops open and Wade steps out. The old man looks around. “Where's Aleena?”

“Getting a couple crackers from the snack machine.”

“You all right? You look nervous.”

“I
am
nervous. Shit. What we're about to do . . .”

“I know.”

“We barely have a plan.”

“But what we got is good.” Wade snorts. “Or, at least,
big
.”

A click of the door. Aleena hurries in. She has an armload of crackers. “These are likely all stale. The snacks in the machine haven't been replaced since Dubya was in the White House.” She throws a packet to each of them. She gives a long look to Chance. “You good?”

“Yeah. I dunno. No.”

She sits next to him. Puts her arm around him. He puts his head on her shoulder. She checks her watch. “It's just after noon. We have just under twelve hours.”

“Clock's started,” Wade says. “Tick-tock, tick-tock.”

“And the others?” Chance asks.

Wade says, “I called them. They're just about in place. Fingers crossed they don't run into any problems, I guess.”

BLACK RIVER, WEST VIRGINIA

T
he farmhouse is a sad old thing, white broken stucco and cracked windows. It's down in a small valley, surrounded by rocks and weeds and a wraparound porch sagging so hard in places it looks like wet cardboard pressing to the earth. Shattered slate roof. A chimney starting to pull away from the house. Spiderwebs glittering in the surrounding trees.

And people crawling all over the place.

It's like some mad marriage between a hippie commune and an asylum where the inmates killed the docs and the orderlies and took over. The people down there are ratty and ragged, wearing filthy T-shirts and overalls and draped in nasty blankets that drag behind them in the dirt. Unwashed. Hunched over. Barely acknowledging one another—passing each other like ghosts wandering the graveyard.

Hollis, staring through the scope of the SCAR, realizes what they look like. You see people out there on the streets with their phones—just staring down at them, lost in a world seen only by them. An e-mail, a game, some Facebook thing. They're somewhere else. Tuning in to a frequency theirs and theirs alone.

This is like that. Except none of these people have phones.

The three of them lie flat against their stomachs at the top of the hill. “How many?” DeAndre asks.

Hollis gives a meager shrug. “At least a dozen outside. I see more movement in through the windows.” It's hard to see too much—the curtains are gauzy, nicotine yellow, and there's glare on the panes. Still, inside he detects some movement. A rustling of fabric. Shadows shifting behind the glass. “This is a problem.”

Reagan says in a hushed voice, “Who the hell are they?”

“I do not know. They look like they live here. There's one in the overgrown garden around the side—got a basket full of, I dunno, vegetables, maybe. I see another somebody sitting on a stump next to a shed.” That one is just staring off into nowhere, carving into a stick with a big knife. Thing is, that one? He's wearing a suit. Nice suit, sharkskin gray, pink tie fraying at the bottom. Leather shoes brown with filth.

“They look like zombies,” DeAndre says, squinting and staring. “I can see just by the way they move—shifting about like that.”

“Can't we just shoot 'em?” Reagan asks.

Hollis gives her a cold, incredulous stare. “This isn't a video game.”

She blinks. “I do play a lot of those.”

“It shows. And
no
, we aren't gonna just open fire. Those are people. Maybe they're inbred or they're crazier than a rat in a cat's mouth—”

“Or,” DeAndre says, “maybe they belong to Typhon.” To Reagan he says: “Remember that chick who attacked Chance when we were driving the hell away from the Lodge? Same feral, freaky thing going on here, maybe.”

That's it. Hollis remembers those who used that tunnel in the woods outside the Lodge—the ones who wrote all those messages about Typhon. Then he remembers the one they dispatched out in Wyoming. He looks through the scope again, tries to find the closest—he increases magnification with a turn of the lens, and . . .
there
.

It's a woman. Wide in the hips, narrow in the shoulders. Hair a matted carpet like a dog's tail stuck with burrs. But the hair parts in the back a little, just above the neck. He sees the bare spot. Sees the sun glint off something.

“They are Typhon's,” he says. “They got the . . .” He reaches behind him, taps the area above his neck at the base of his spine.

“Shit,” Reagan says. “A whole house full of Terminators? Now it
has
to be okay to start shooting them.”

DeAndre clucks his tongue. “Slow your roll. That girl who attacked Chance—she wasn't like that creepy robot dude who tried to kill us out at Wade's ranch. She was crazy, yeah, but not . . . indestructible. Maybe these are like her.”

“And,” Hollis points out, “until we learn otherwise, they're just people. I can't . . . I can't just start killing people indiscriminately. Put that out of your fool head.”

Reagan rolls her eyes. “Fine. But we still need a plan, genius. Somewhere down there is a desktop computer that—at least, in theory—talks to Typhon. Maybe even controls her systems. And these yahoos are protecting it.”

“Why can't you just hack it from off-site again?” Hollis asks.

DeAndre answers: “Because, man, we do that, Typhon's gonna know. And she's gonna send a drone to wipe us out, or another Terminator to blow our heads off. I gotta get hands right on the controls. It's a lot harder to keep me out if I'm sitting right there.”

“You got a plan, Secret Agent Man?” Reagan asks.

Hollis thinks on it. Then he nods. “I figure best we can do is play to our strengths. But for that, we gotta wait till nightfall.”

“Cutting it awful close,” DeAndre says.

“You wanna go kicking up dust in the middle of the day?”

Neither DeAndre nor Reagan answers, because the answer is no. And that resolves it. They hunker down until darkness.

Hollis blows a fly away from his head. They're right, though—this will be cutting it close. Too close for his liking.