ZerOes (32 page)

Chance reaches out for the phone. Catches an acrid whiff of skunky weed coming off the guy like stink off hot swamp water. He pulls away, taking the phone—it's an older clamshell style. “Hello?”

“Chance Dalton,” says a woman's voice. It's a voice he recognizes. He cups his hand over the phone, whispers to the car: “It's
her
.” Then, back on the phone: “Hell do you want?”

“I want to extend an olive branch to your pod.”

“I don't follow.”

“Come back to us. What happened at the Hunting Lodge was a mistake. You did so much good for us. You should not be unduly punished for your service.”

Again he says to the others in the car: “She says she wants peace. She wants us to surrender. Give ourselves up.”

“Tell her I'd sooner put my head in an alligator's mouth,” Wade says.

Reagan says: “Tell her she's a cunt, and we don't cunt it up with cunts.”

Aleena doesn't offer any advice of her own, just grabs the phone out of Chance's hand. “We're done doing your dirty laundry just so we can end up as more of it. I don't know who you are or why you built Typhon—I don't know why you needed those twelve other people; I don't know what your endgame is. I don't care. We're done being pawns on your chessboard. Stay. Away. From us.”

Chance watches Aleena's face go from angry and triumphant to horror struck, all her features going slack. He can't hear what's on the other line, but Aleena looks up. “Oh God, we have to go,” she says. Then, with an injection of panic: “We need to go!
She knows where we are
. They're coming for us—”

Chance fumbles with the keys, starts the engine.

“Hey,” Mr. Crunchy says, leaning in. “Hey! That's my—”

Outside: a
pop
. Crunchy's body shudders and slumps forward. DeAndre screams. Chance cries out, grabs a hank of the dreadlocked
hair, and throws the guy's head back—he sees a black bloom in the center of the man's forehead, an exit wound, he realizes—and then, as Crunchy falls, Chance sees a sleek black car bounding hard into the gas station lot. A bone-white hand holding a pistol is hanging outside the driver's-side window.

Chance punches the accelerator.

The pistol fires three more times—
pop! pop! pop!—
and the back window by Aleena spiderwebs and then shatters into a rain of tinted-glass hail. The SUV is slow to move, but once it gains momentum, it barrels forward like a locomotive. Behind them, the car skids, drifts on the cracked gas station lot, its back end nearly taking out a rack of propane tanks. But it catches momentum out of its turn and rockets toward them.

In the rearview, Chance sees the face of their pursuer. Pale as fireplace ash. Scarred. Hairless. Face cold, dead, emotionless.

Chance blasts the SUV out of the lot and back onto the road. The SUV's engine grumbles like a growling dog. The black car—a BMW, he thinks, maybe a 7 series—whips out of the gas station like a wasp leaving its nest.

Ahead, there's an intersection. Staying straight will take them to I-80. The other way is highway 940, by the signs. Chance thinks,
We got a green light
. He prays it holds.

But his eyes catch something. He can see the red glow of the light on the opposing side against the night. But then it goes green. He looks back at their light: still green. The light is green all four directions. Which means—

“Hold on!” Chance yells. It's late, but the roads aren't empty. As he watches, a pickup truck goes through the light at the same time as a little red coupe. He wants to look away, but—

The truck wipes out the coupe. Takes out the front end like it was a piñata filled with metal shavings. The truck skids to a halt, the coupe flipping on its side—

Just as a tractor trailer comes through.

Whoever was in that coupe isn't in this world anymore. The truck damn near atomizes it.

Hydraulic brakes shriek and squeal. The back trailer leans, tilts—and starts to topple over on its side.

Chance has no time to do differently. He mashes the accelerator so
hard to the floor he damn near expects to feel asphalt under his boot. The shadow of the trailer looms over them as he blasts through the intersection. The pickup truck is just ahead—its tail end hanging out right in front of them.

Chance yells as he braces for the hit. The SUV clips the corner of the pickup and the trailer falls just behind them, crashing down with a booming echo that he can feel all the way up through his heels and into his teeth.

Ahead, the SUV powers its way through the intersection.

The trailer crashes down just behind it. Its tarp becomes unmoored and red apples roll out across the intersection—across the shattered glass and scrap metal and, the Compiler sees, across a limb that may or may not be someone's arm.

His targets made it through. Only barely, a statistical anomaly (they are increasingly an error, a line of broken code that he is now forced to correct), but his way is now blocked.

He whips the car around. The intersection is now a dread mess—a point of chaos in a normally organized juncture of traffic. This, she has created. Chaos will be necessary. Things must be broken before they can be remade. The code, torn apart, stripped of its errors, flushed of its disease. Rebuilt.

It should unsettle him. It normally would. Particularly this moment—the scene of an accident. The human mind is cruel and so it has visited upon him (or, rather, revisited) scenes from that accident five years before. All that glass and blood. The love of his life crushed between her seat, the door, the dashboard. Bubbles of blood clinging to her lower lip. Tears on her face.

A horrible moment.

But also the moment that made him. And that moment led to this one.

Now
he hears her. In his head. Her presence is like music. His faith has turned real: the transition from faith to belief, even to trust. The revelation and birth of a god. The joy of being able to put yourself entirely in another creature's hands. To let her surround you. Control you. Have you as her own.

And soon, she will be everywhere.

He steers the car around all the glass, metal, and blood. He has an erection. Firm as the gearshift. Hard as a gun barrel. Ahead he sees the black SUV bounding forth. It's fast, but not fast enough. His own vehicle accelerates effortlessly. It feels almost frictionless, as if he's flying. Velocity from the turbocharged V-8, chewing up the road, the air, everything.

He speeds up on the back of the SUV. The pistol in his hand is light, airy—almost as much a data point as it is a weapon made of steel and plastic. It's a weapon so small he can almost palm it in his hand: a Ruger LC9, 9mm Luger, barrel length barely three and a half inches. It wouldn't be a precise weapon in the hands of most shooters, but he is not most shooters.

He targets the back tire of the SUV. He knows how this will go: the tire will peel away, shredding its rubber. The back end of the vehicle will drop. Chance Dalton is a capable driver, but not capable enough to keep the handicapped vehicle on the road. The SUV will slow, even stop. And then the Compiler will dispatch them and be gone.

He eases his arm out the window. Points the gun.

But once again he is reminded that these models are not so easily predicted. They continue to insert errors into the code.

The back hatch of the SUV swings open wide, and there sits one of the deviants. Shaggy gray hair. Bit of a patchy beard. Eyeglasses—smudged, crooked, old—perched on the end of his bulbous nose. Wade Earthman, the Compiler recognizes.

Earthman has a submachine gun. In a blink, the Compiler knows the gun—a Heckler & Koch MP7, barrel length of 7.1 inches, an HK 4.6 x 30mm cartridge, a rate of fire roughly equal to 950 rounds per minute, 40 rounds in the magazine. The Compiler does not know this because he has a fetishistic knowledge of firearms but rather because he is connected to all things—and his net of data has been cast all the wider now thanks to those in the SUV before him. He knows that this is the weapon of the strike force sent to take out the Hunting Lodge. Likely where Earthman picked it up.

The Compiler realizes all of this in a fraction of a second.

That's all the time it takes for Earthman to begin firing.

Takes what feels like two, maybe three seconds for the MP7 to roar through the magazine—in that time, bullets chew into the BMW, shattering
glass, peeling bits of black metal off the hood and the frame. The headlights pop like eyeballs. The grille is broken apart like a hammer hitting teeth. Wade can barely keep control of the gun, the vibrations up his arms, the roar of the rounds keening in his ears.

The gun goes
click
.

He blinks. Looks down at the car. Doesn't even see anybody driving.

Except—there. At the top of the wheel: white fingers like spider legs clutching prey. Then the bald, scarred-up freak show sits upright again, wiping glass bits off—and out of—his scalp. Without missing a beat, the driver lifts the small pistol.

Wade thinks:
I'm gonna die
.

The driver pulls the trigger just as Chance shouts: “Hold on! Car!” The SUV jerks suddenly to the right, and Wade goes the opposite direction—the bullet digging into the roof of the SUV right above his head. The SUV goes back the other way—braking, then accelerating anew—and he starts to roll out the back. He darts out a hand, catches a handhold right at the edge of the door—an actual handle built into the molding of the interior—and feels his shoulder light up with pain as something pops loose of its mooring. He grits his teeth and quashes a scream as he hangs on for dear life inside the SUV—

There, the BMW. Right behind and speeding up.

Another car goes past along the right side—just some passerby, some poor tired salesman in a minivan staring at the two other vehicles in horror.

The BMW's driver points the pistol again, and Wade wings the submachine gun toward the BMW. As if it's a fucking Frisbee.

The submachine gun cracks the driver in the top of the head, and the son of a bitch jerks the wheel same time as he pulls the trigger—the shot goes wide, pings off the side of the SUV's frame, nearly clips the minivan. The minivan's driver jerks his own wheel, then suddenly that car flips—rolling like a can kicked down a hill.

Wade thinks:
No weapon now
. Not that he had any more magazines for the MP7.

But then he thinks:
shit, hold up
. Copper's pistol. He feels its weight tucked just above his ass-crack.

He silently thanks Copper. Then says sorry, too. An apology with the heft of a prayer, if not the faith behind it.

He draws Copper's pistol.

Flashing lights. The red-and-blue strobe. He detects the police car even before it turns these on, even before the siren wails in the night. Typhon has given him this gift. This awareness. And so when the police car rockets up behind him—and then, inevitably, alongside him—it takes nothing at all to already have the gun pointed.

The cop's head rocks to the side before he can even look over. The cruiser veers off to the right. It slams into a sign noting an upcoming exit.