ZerOes (37 page)

The elevator is still open. He uses the far wall of it to brake his momentum. Sandy hurries after him, looking trauma bombed.

Ken paws at the touch screen, not sure what he's even doing. Nothing is lighting up. But then the doors slide closed.

His breaths come in gulping gasps. Like he just can't get enough air. “This is fucked,” he says. “This is so fucked.”

Sandy says, “I know.”

Then she pulls her gun. She fires it into his thigh.

Pain is a sharp hook. It brightens everything. Ken raises his own gun, but Sandy grabs his wrist and twists, and the gun drops into her hand. He clutches his leg, sliding down the elevator wall. Blood wells through his fingers.

He looks up at her. Sandy looks horrified for a moment, but that fades. Then she looks only resolute.

“Why?” he croaks.

“Typhon promised me so much. Me and Trina, we've been trying to adopt, and the system . . .” Her nostrils flare and she closes her eyes. “Typhon promised us a little girl. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, but you're Number Fourteen whether you like it or not.”

“Trina,” he says, laughing a little. “That's her name.”

Then he passes out.

THE EMPTY BOOT BAR, RIVERTON, WYOMING

M
idnight.

Reagan isn't drunk. From under her hoodie she looks up at the empty glass—which is, literally, an empty cowboy boot mug—and notes idly that there was beer in it only a few moments ago. She wants to look around at this dusty-ass dive bar in this sleepy snooze-fuck of a town and start demanding who drank her beer, but then she
urp
s into her fist and thinks:
It is entirely possible that I drank it
.

Her lips are numb. She can feel her hair follicles.

Okay, she's drunk.

Not
drunk
-drunk. Not blackout, piss on the floor, wing an empty beer mug at the bartender drunk. But beyond buzzed. Hazy, buzzy, fuzzy. As if the little person who pilots her has suddenly discovered all the levers and buttons and wheels that control her are slick with Vaseline, and he's having a hard time
coordinating
this clumsy shell she calls a human body.

She looks up at the empty mug and slides it forward. In a deep, fakey-fakey John Wayne voice she says, “Hit me another, barkeep.” She's not sure that made sense. And why is she calling him
barkeep
? Is that a cowboy thing or a medieval castle thing?

Feh.

Reagan looks down at her lap. A phone sits there. Samsung Galaxy. She plucked it from the too-tight back pocket of a pair of Daisy Dukes on some Podunk Dogpatch East Jesus Barbie who was trolling for dude-meat earlier tonight. The woman was probably thirty, but dressed like she was eighteen, and she was drunk off her ass on vodka Red Bulls, and it didn't take much to accidently elbow her drink over, and during the distraction pilfer the phone and then smile and help this double-wide Paris Hilton clean it all up before buying her another one.

Finally, the broad went home with some Latino lad almost half her age. Maybe she was a hooker. Reagan's usually good at identifying those things.

Anyway.

The phone.

She licks her lips. Knows she shouldn't be doing this. If the others find out she went “off reservation,” they're gonna be pissed. But she needed this. She tells herself all it is is a night out away from those other miscreants. It's
definitely
not that she was planning on somehow stealing a cell phone and using it to look up information on her daughter, because why would she do that? That would surely be a good way to get everybody mad. And, worse, maybe,
just maybe
, get caught.

The cell phone sits in her hand. Warm. Slick with her palm sweat. It's warm outside but she's wearing this stupid hoodie because: disguise. It's not a good disguise, she knows that. She looks like some late-nineties Assassin's Creed reject. But it hides her face, so whatever.

She turns on the phone.

Thunk
. Another beer is slapped down in front of her. Piss yellow. Foam topped, slopped over onto the dark wood of the bar. Shining on the various old pennies and nickels lacquered onto the bar top. The “barkeep” is a man who looks like he took all his human skin and replaced it with tanned deer leather. Too tan, too wrinkly, and yet soft looking, too. He looks sleepy, bored, old, but then he's got these real severe Clint Eastwood eyes, so the overall effect is a bit creepy.

Reagan pulls the beer closer as the barkeep takes her money and walks away. Sips. Ahhh.

Above the bar, the TV is on. Flashing the bad news with the volume off. Images of a world on the edge. Stock market yo-yoing like a . . . well, like a yo-yo (
shut up, not drunk
). Increased domestic drone presence.
North Korea flinging missile tests in every direction. Cascading power outages across major metropolitan areas. A rash of abductions—men and women of “genius caliber” taken.

A lot of this, they've been able to read in the newspaper Rosa brings every day.
Newspaper
, Reagan thinks with an internal snort-laugh. Might as well convey news via smoke signals or cave paintings.

She can't help but wonder: How much of this is Typhon? Is Typhon really loose? Does it even really exist? The memory of that time in the Hunting Lodge was not so long ago, and yet feels . . . distant. Slippery. Like it was all a dream. Or weirder still, a simulation.

Okay, now she
knows
she's drunk.

Whatever. Fuck the news. Fuck Typhon. Fuck Wade, Rosa, this bar, everybody, everything. She looks down at the phone. It's not protected by any code because Barbie doesn't know that she should.

Reagan goes to the browser. Her thumbs hover over the keypad. She goes to Google, types in the name:
Ellie Belle Stevens
.

A stool next to her judders and groans as someone sits.

She looks up. Instant eye roll. “Oh, hey, Patches.”

“I think I preferred it when you called me Chauncey,” Chance says. No hoodie on him. But he's grown a beard. Sorry—a “beard.” It's really just a rough, patchy configuration of hair, like shrubbery pruned by a meth addict.

“The hell are you doing here?”

“Looking for you.”

“I get it. You're finally tired of chasing Aleena and getting the coldest of shoulders, so you decided to try an open door instead of a closed one.” She reaches across, grabs his hand, rubs her thumb along the top of it. “It's cool. I'm in. We can find some cheap cowboy motel near here and you can ride me like a bull.”

He gently extracts his hand. “Hey, man, c'mon. It's not like that.”

“I could ride
you
, then. I'm sure this sleepy town has a sex shop somewhere. I'll strap it on for you, baby. I'll give you the ol' lubricated lady-peg.” She kisses the air.

“Now you're getting weird.”

“I've
been
weird, hombre.” She sighs. “I am serious, though. I'd go for a tumble with you.”

“You're drunk is what you are.”

“Aleena doesn't like you.”

“No,” he says, a strained smile on his face. “I don't suppose she does. Not like I want her to. And it doesn't matter anyway because in less than a week, it's the Great Divorce. Then I won't have to see her anymore.”

The Great Divorce. Her idea. Her name. She was surprised they all agreed. But they can't stay like this, huddled together in the dark rectum of Wyoming, waiting for something, anything, nothing. Been out here a couple months already. Any more than that and someone's gonna freak out. “You know where you're going yet?”

He shakes his head. “Nah.”

“Go with DeAndre.”

“I might.”

“You two are buddy-buddy these days.”

“He's cool. We get along.” He grabs her beer, takes a pull off it. “You?”

“No idea,” she lies.

I'm going to get my daughter
. That thought, clear as polished Waterford crystal. Like the decanter her father used to keep on his desk.
I'm going to find her, then I'm going to steal her, then I'm going to get out of this country
. Canada or Mexico. She hasn't decided yet. It's a surprising thought, an alarming plan. For so long now she'd been content to keep all that pushed away, like it happened to someone else. But things have changed. The Lodge. Typhon. Life has become suddenly precious.

“Let's go,” he says. “C'mon. Nobody else knows you're gone.”

She shrugs. “So what if they do? Wade's not my dad.”

“Rosa would probably beat your ass if given half a chance.”

Reagan laughs. “God, she probably would. She's a cougar, that one. Not, like, an older lady who likes younger dudes. I mean
an actual cougar
.” She sighs. “Nah. You go ahead, I'll catch up.”

As she adjusts herself on the barstool—her ass is falling asleep—the cell phone drops to the floor with a
cla-thunk
. Chance looks down. “Damnit, Reagan.” He scoops it up before she can get to it.

“I need that.” She swipes at it.

“You can't have it. If Typhon is still looking for us, we can't be sending up signal flares—”

“I'll do it right! I'll do it safe.
I need to find my daughter
.”

“Not now.” He lowers his voice. “I don't know how much of all this Typhon is doing—” His eyes flit toward the TV above the bar. And then the words die in his mouth.

She turns to see what he's looking at.

Breaking news. A plane crash.

The barkeep sees it, too, turns on the sound.

Commercial airliner. Southwest Airlines. Flight 6757. An Airbus A380.

Nighttime images of the plane—streaks of fire across a Nebraska wheat field. Bits of the plane scattered about here and there, illuminated by pockets of flame. Helicopters overhead. Fire trucks. Media. Floodlights. The faint outline of bodies.

The news anchor says two horrible words: “No survivors.” And then: “Breaking information: a hacker group is claiming responsibility for the crash . . .”

Chance stands. “We should go.”

The anchor continues, saying that a group of
terrorist hackers
has claimed the crash as their doing—a group calling themselves Typhon's Bane.

And then their pictures flash across the screen. And their names.
CHANCE DALTON
.
REAGAN STOLPER
.
ALEENA KATTAN
.
DEANDRE MITCHELL
.
WADE EARTHMANN
(they spell his name wrong because of course they do).

“C'mon,” Chance says, pulling her out the door.

The warm night isn't enough to repress Reagan's chills. The lot beneath their feet is broken asphalt, pitted and potholed, with gravel along the margins. They hurry toward the road, moths whirling in front of them.

“Oh God, oh God, oh shit, oh God,” Reagan says. “Did you see that?”

“Of course I saw that.”

“That's fucked. We're fucked. Oh
fuck
.”

Then, from off to the side, some girl's voice: “That's her! That's it.” Reagan recognizes the voice. Hillbilly Barbie.

She's got another man with her—this time some skeevy-looking gas-miner type in rough denim and a John Deere trucker hat slung low. Chance keeps pulling Reagan along, but the girl points and shrieks: “Him! He's got my phone, look.”

Chance stops. “What? Oh, sorry, was an accident.” He tosses her the phone. She tries to catch it but it hits her forearm—the girl juggles it a bit, but it ends up on the asphalt with a hard
crack
.

The skeevy dude steps forward. Smooths down his dirty Fu Manchu mustache with a knobby-knuckled hand, says: “You're gonna pay for that.”

“No, we're not,” Chance says and he starts to move past.

But the guy steps in front of him and holds out a hand. “Whoa, partner. I figure that phone's worth a few hundred bucks easy. You're gonna pay the nice lady for that phone, you hear me?”

“Nice lady?” Reagan scoffs. “She's basically a barn hooker.”

“Hey!” the man barks, points a finger. “You fat fuckin' sow—”

Chance decks him. The man's head snaps back and he tumbles back on his ass. He starts crying. The skeevy fucker actually starts crying. Once that would've thrilled Reagan, but right now she's just scared and she wants to go home.

Wherever that is.

Chance keeps moving, cradling his hand like it hurts. Reagan hurries after. They move at a brisk pace until the girl's freaky shrieks die back and can no longer be heard.

RIVERTON, WYOMING

J
aney Gardner has a double-wide trailer in the Black Saddle trailer park. It's a nice enough trailer—not like the homes of some of the dirty birds who live here—and she keeps it well maintained. Particularly on the outside, where she has a nice little birdbath painted all colorfully in the Mexican style sitting inside a xeriscaped desert garden of cacti and Turkish Veronica ground cover and some flowers like sunset hyssop and rabbitbrush (oh, how the butterflies do love that).

Janey's old, but it gives her some pleasure to present the best version of herself—and her home!—to the world.

Thing is, someone has been playing havoc with her things. She's found
cigarette butts
in her birdbath. And last week someone mashed flat some of her beautiful rabbitbrush. As her niece, Missy, would say:
So not cool
.

Janey may be old, but Janey is not technologically deficient. Where some of her elder cohorts might think you control a computer mouse by waggling it around in midair (or worse, feeding it cheese, har-har-har), Janey knows how to install new memory in her little MacBook Air laptop. Janey can install software and update it, too. And Janey knows how to set up a webcam.

So that's what Janey did. She set herself up a nice little webcam and pointed it out the window, knowing that if anybody comes to smoke their nasty cigarettes or step on her very nice rabbitbrush, the webcam will catch it.

She turns it on before she goes to bed. It's on all night. It points toward the road and turns on only when it catches movement—any movement, really. A jackrabbit dashing. A deep shadow drifting. Or even a couple of folks walking toward the south bridge out of town.

Janey doesn't care about those kinds of folks, of course. She only cares about the kinds of folks who would think to accidentally—or willfully!—do her hard work harm.

But others care.

Others
most certainly
care.