ZerOes (30 page)

Chance screams: “Let me out! Let me out of this box!”

The face shifts again and becomes his mother's. The image is not perfect resolution like Leslie's or Sarno's; this is fuzzier, blurrier—it's from a video that Chance recognizes from about six, maybe seven years ago. His mother, the actress, doing a community theater piece:
Harvey
, the one about the man who sees the giant rabbit. She played—well, he can't remember the character's name, but it was the sister. The one who has her brother committed for seeing the rabbit. The video zooms in on her and when she speaks, it's not lines from the play.
“Sweetheart. You were a horrible son, and I'm glad I died so I didn't have to see the waste of skin and breath that you'd become
.
That poor girl, Chance. Angela Slattery. That poor, poor girl
—
”

Chance feels tears burning hot at the edges of his vision. He walks to the monitor, and as he does so his mother's face shifts, warps, this time becomes a static image: Angela Slattery's yearbook photo from the year she died.

The image starts to distort. It bleeds—red pixels pulling apart, smearing, Angela's eyes gone to dark holes, her mouth a yawning, stretching cavern—

Over it, Leslie Cilicia-Ceto's voice:
“You can run, Chance Dalton. But I will see where you scurry
.
”

Chance picks up the monitor, unmoors it from its cables, and throws it against the wall. The plastic frame splits, and from the rift erupt sparks. The monitor goes black.

The pod door opens.

Took him a while to find the margins of the panel along the wall, but eventually DeAndre felt them blind—his eyes were no use since it was dark in the pod. Even with his vision adjusting, he had zero chance of actually eyeballing it. Once he finds the panel, he and the others work to open the wall up next to the door—that takes a bit of doing, and they have to bust open one of the desktops and use screws and other parts to wedge under the panel and pry it off.

Together, he, Reagan, and Aleena manage to bend back the panel. That's when they hear the gunfire just outside.

“That's bad,” DeAndre says. “Real bad.”

“Thanks, Professor Obvious,” Reagan says.

Aleena lets loose a panicked breath. “What's happening out there? I don't understand.”

“We did something,” Reagan says.

“We
triggered
something,” DeAndre says, feeling along inside the panel. The smooth texture of wires meets his fingertips. He can't see what wires are what. As he slides his palm up and down the length of the inner wall, he says: “Some Pandora's box–level shit. We just had to go picking those damn locks.” Frustrated, he says: “Ah, hell with it.”

He rips a handful of wires out.

A shower of blue sparks.

The door opens.

Hollis bleeds. The bullet dug into the meat of his biceps, then kept on going and popped into his ribs. He's not sure how much farther it went than that, but what he does know is that every breath feels like he's got a wasp's nest stuck in his lung.

He tries to sit up, but a cloud of pain fills his chest and he slumps back. Darkness threatens to take him again.

He looks around. Where the hell is Wade?

He looks at his own hand.
Where the hell is my gun?

There are screams all around him. Gunfire behind him. A cafeteria worker—a Venezuelan woman whose name he forgets, Maria or Marita?—runs past, not far from his feet, and suddenly the top of her head shakes and there's this little cloud of blood and she pitches forward, face-first. Zebkavich follows after. Plodding step after plodding step.

Hollis backs up, reaches back with a blood-slick hand, tries to pull himself upright using a cafeteria chair. Zebkavich turns toward him. She raises the pistol. “The gods did flee,” she says. Her voice is empty of inflection. Like a dead dial tone on an old phone. Hollis thinks:
A phone old as me. A tone dead as I'm about to be
.

Bang
.

A red bloody rose blooms in the center of Zebkavich's chest. “Typhon is,” she croaks, then topples over.

Wade comes up behind her, then steps over the body. He kicks the gun away from her hand, toward Hollis. “Hey, Copper. You dead yet?”

“Not nearly.”

“Then you better get up, because I think the whole manure truck just hit the fan.”

The door opens, and Chance steps out. A thick-necked man in full tactical body armor swings toward him.

Chance stands there, dumbfounded, mouth slack. The man brings his submachine gun up—

A laptop, flung like a ninja star, clips the soldier in the head. The gun goes wide, bullets barking up, pinging off the pod wall. Chance leaps forward and tackles the man and they hit the ground together. He gets a knee down on the man's wrist, the fingers open like the legs of a jumping spider, and the gun spins away. The soldier brings a hard fist into Chance's side. Chance
oof
s and topples off.

The soldier scrambles to stand, then leaps for the submachine gun. Chance grabs his boot, pulls him back. The soldier's other foot jabs out, and Chance's head rocks back from the kick.

When his vision clears, he sees the man standing. The gun up.

Reagan plows into him.

It's like watching a garbage truck slam into a mailbox. The soldier's arms pinwheel and he goes down. Next thing Chance knows, there's DeAndre, too, getting up behind the man and ripping his helmet off and clubbing him in the head with it.

The soldier drops. Lies still, though his chest still rises and falls under his vest.

Chance rubs the top of his head, where the boot connected.

Then he sees.

All around them, in the circle of pods, bodies are spread across the deck. The bodies of the other hackers. Some facedown. Some staring up, the horror of their last moments frozen on their faces. Blood pooling, sliding between the wooden boards the Lodge is built upon.

DeAndre holds out a hand. Chance takes it, sits up. He hears footsteps.

“They're coming!” Aleena says.

From the direction of the Ziggurat comes a pair of soldiers. Chance looks around—tries to figure where they can escape to. They'll have to jump off the deck, run into the woods. He's about to say
this way
when gunfire erupts.

One of the soldiers drops. The other staggers, but remains standing. He wheels around the other direction, brings up his gun—and there's Hollis Copper. Getting up under the gun, bullets firing into the trees, leaves raining down. Wade's there, too. He brings the base of a pistol against the soldier's head—again and again, the visor cracking, splitting, until the man drops.

Chance and the others meet Wade and Hollis halfway across the platform. “You have to leave,” Hollis says. “Run. Into the woods.”

Wade says, “You're coming with us.”

Hollis wheezes. Chance sees now that he's been shot—his black suit is darker than usual, and his white shirt is starting to bleed red and pink. The FBI agent shakes his head. “I'll stay here. I'll deal with this mess.”

They all look to one another. Hesitating.

Copper growls: “You wanna get killed? Run, God damn it!”

Chance grabs his hand. “Thanks, Agent.”

“Don't thank me. I brought you here. Now
go
.”

They flee. They do as Hollis says—they head for the woods.

As they duck into the trees, they hear Hollis Copper yelling—then a staccato pop of gunfire. Reagan yips and suddenly cradles her arm—blood already crawling down to the ends of her fingers. They dart into the forest as bullets gnaw into the trees and greenery around them.

Chance can no longer hear Hollis.

He can hear only gunfire.

OUTSIDE ULAN-UDE

A
bucket of cold, filthy water hits him in the face.

Chance wasn't asleep or anything. They just do this. A campaign of shock and awe against him, it seems. (Well, shock, at least, though their technique hasn't been particularly
awe
some, has it?) Sometimes the old man slaps him. Sometimes the attaché grabs one of his fingers and bends it back—not to the point of breaking, but to the point of reminding Chance how easy it would be for him to break it.

They do this and then they ask him questions.

About the NSA.

About his pod.

About Leslie Cilicia-Ceto and the others on the list of thirteen.

And, of course, about Typhon.

He withholds as much as he can. And lies about a lot, too. He can't give them everything. And he damn sure can't give it to them quickly.

The train rocks.

Every time the train rocks left, his guts go right.

His head goes from feeling light and airy to boggy, soggy—like a balloon half filled with water, sloshing about. He splutters, spitting the
dirty water away from his lips. It tastes like an animal. A goaty edge to it. A small voice inside him says:
You're probably gonna get hepatitis from this, dude
. A larger, crueler voice reminds:
Hepatitis won't matter much when you're dead, which is where this is headed, “dude.”

He says, “Sorry, what was your question again?”

The old cinder-block head growls to the translator, who says:

“We grow impatient. He asked you: What was the purpose of the Hunting Lodge? How did it relate to the artificial intelligence known as Typhon?”

“Artificial,” Chance says. “That's good, real good. Makes it sound like it wasn't real, like it's fake cheese or a vegetarian ‘chicken nugget.'” The translator gives a barely perceptible nod to the attaché, and Chance knows what that means: the attaché steps in, hand rearing back to slap him, but he babble-shouts: “Whoa, no! No, no, no, hold up, I'll answer the question. The Lodge, ahhh, the Lodge was all . . . pretense, smoke and mirrors. We were ignorant. Dumb as a sack of kickballs.”
Will they get that reference? Kickballs?
The translator's face shows a moment of bewilderment. He keeps going. “But the people above us, they knew our real purpose: to pen-test—you know, to penetrate and find vulnerabilities—in Typhon. You follow?”

None of them nod or show much signs of following along.

He continues on:

“Thing is, we were
all
in the dark. The hackers and the hacks were all clueless. I don't even think everybody at the NSA knew what was up.”

The translator translates. Gets a message back from the old man.

“What, Mr. Dalton, was ‘up,' as you say?”

“Typhon was a supersecret program. Totally untested. It wasn't meant to be out there . . . splashing around in the pool where everyone could see it. But then we came along and opened the box. All part of its plan. Typhon herded us in that direction the whole damn time. That was the beauty of it—the monster had invited us to its cage and shown us where the key was, all without alerting its keepers. Then it convinced us that we needed to open it. It enticed us. Dangled itself in front of us. So we unlocked it.
We
let it out. And when it was free, the Lodge became instantly expendable. We were already all off the books. Not processed through any system. It was easy to make us officially dead or missing. Typhon got what it wanted. It was free. And we were not.”

More murmuring.

Chance asks them: “What's the deal with all this? What the hell do you people want from me, anyway? Wait, wait, lemme guess. You have your own little AI project going on, right? And you either wanna know how to make it better or how to kill Typhon so yours can do the same thing—crawl up into everything like poison ivy. We found that. Lots of other countries with their pet project machine intelligences. Verethragna. Far Thought. Merkabah.”

The translator: “How did you escape?”

Chance grins. “Who said we escaped?”

Pow
. A slap across his face. This time by the translator.

“No more . . . dramatic American answers,” the translator says.

Chance winces. Cranes his jaw left and right. “We escaped by—”

The attaché's phone rings. He thrusts up a finger and pulls out a long, sleek phone. Answers it. He seems angry. Then confused. He says something to the translator, who gives a slight shrug. Meanwhile, the old man's consternation deepens.

The translator's phone rings, too. Eyes big as moons, he looks to the old man. The old man wears a scowl so deep it looks like it might cut his head in half. Cinder Block reaches down and snatches the phone off the translator's belt, then presses it to his ear and answers the call.

Behind the men, the door opens suddenly with a rattle and a bang. A young woman enters—she's small but looks tough. Taut and thin like a tow cable. Her hair is messily pulled into a topknot, her cheeks smudged with filth, a crooked hand-rolled cigarette hanging out of her mouth like she's a dog carrying a broken stick.

She starts barking at the men. Chance, of course, can't understand her—but he can hear in her tone she's . . . irritated with them? Though she looks young, her tone is that of a mother frustrated by her shitty little insubordinate children.

Then comes a moment—she turns toward Chance and he gets a good look at her face, dead-on.
Oh holy hell on a hang glider
.

It's her.

It's the Widow of Zheng.

Suddenly she says—in English—“Do it now.”

The two phones in the room flash and spark. The old man and the attaché suddenly stiffen, mouths craning wide, eyes pried open by electric current. Then each collapses downward, crumpling like a cigarette stubbed out in an ashtray.

The translator is left.

He holds up his hands.

The Widow kicks him in the balls.

He doubles over with an
ooooooh
. Cradling his crotch.

She offers a hand to Chance.

He takes it.

“You smell like yak,” she says, hauling him up out of the chair.

“It's my natural cologne.”

She frowns at him. And stares. Again like he's just some impudent toddler.

“Come,”
she snaps. “We don't have much time. Grab their phones.”