ZerOes (47 page)

They haul DeAndre to his feet. He can't stand—his leg is fucked up, maybe broken, and the pain shoots all the way from his ankle to his hip. A fist pistons into his middle. Another against his eye and he sees stars and bats and ones and zeroes behind the black of his eye every time the fist connects,
bam, bam, bam
.

He reaches behind him for the gun, but someone twists his hand and arm and his fingers go numb. Then a weight is shifting from his back as the laptop lifts away. Ghostly faces pass in front of him, dead eyed and slack-jawed, their bodies puppeted into punching him, kicking him, elbowing him—

And then the boogeyman shows up. Two others flank him. A man, a woman, both in surgical masks.

The boogeyman clacks his teeth.

The freaks drop DeAndre.

“A brilliant mind,” the woman says.

The man: “We could Bestow him. The blessings of Typhon.”

“All together now.”

Hands grab his feet. The boogeyman grabs the laptop.

The freaks begin to drag DeAndre across the porch, toward the house, through the debris of the fallen roof, through the white wicker chair he didn't even realize he'd fallen onto.

The boogeyman raises the laptop. Opens the screen.

Then, one more nail driven deep into this horrible coffin—

DeAndre sees Reagan standing there. Watching. Dead eyed. Mouth agape.

He screams her name.

The meat screams her name.

She has no name, she is reminded. She is just a receiver. An antenna for blessings. Not a person. Not an individual.

And yet, the meat screams her name.

Dissonance hits her, a blizzard of misery because she thinks through it, though the larger mind doesn't want her to. She remembers watching the freak shows in the woods lift their heads and
think
at each other. She remembers all the horrible things she's ever summoned up on her computer screen—atrocities and wretchedness, bizarre feats and impossible exhortations of inhumanity. She remembers Mount Tochal, and what they did there that day to distract and disturb and disrupt—

And by now they have dragged the man she thinks she knows past her, and he's kicking and screaming and straight-up sobbing, and the one she now knows as the Compiler has a laptop in his hands and he's about to wrench it apart.

The pain is hitting her in waves now, great tidal blasts of anguish. Punishing, castigating pain. It's supposed to be clarifying, and it is, in a way. She's part of something. A receiver.

But if she's part of the collective, she can send, too.

I'm Reagan Stolper
, she thinks—a denial of the overmind pushing her down. She again summons a bevy of memories. An image of botflies in a human boy's eye. Lemon party. Two girls, one cup. Goatse. Car accidents. The irritating Hamster Dance song. Quiet Riot's “Cum on Feel the Noize.” Porn. Murder. Madness. All the dregs of the Internet,
all the raucous noise and filthy hilarity and mind-asploding grotesquerie. What they did at Mount Tochal was nothing.

She holds on to it for one last moment. Then she releases it.
Receive this, fuckers
.

All the freaks around her stiffen and bend, clutching their heads as she transmits a pure, unalloyed brew of all the nasty, sick shit she's ever seen. Then on top of that she flings noise and Korean pop songs and Swedish death metal and the shriek of old modem sounds—
kreeeAAAHHhhhKSSSHHHhhhh
—into them.

They drop to the ground, twitching. Even the two Surgeons. Even the Compiler.

Then Reagan, too, feels weak in the knees. Dizzy and sick. To DeAndre she says: “Go.
Now
.” Her world goes sideways as she falls over and vomits.

DeAndre is on his hands and knees. They let him go. They all fell. Every last one of them rolled over onto their sides or backs, twitching. Clutching themselves. Mumbling and crying out or just plain crying.

He catches his breath. Looks over at Reagan.

She lies there, flitting in and out of consciousness.

“You all right?”

“I'm okay. Go.
Go
.”

He grabs her head, gently lifts it so she's not gonna aspirate her own heavings, then grabs the laptop out of the boogeyman's now-arthritic embrace. It's gotta be past midnight now, and he has work to do.

NEW YORK CITY

I
don't want to just park it and leave it,” Chance says. The Plymouth is a beauty, and he doesn't want some asshole to put a brick through its window.

The city is full of people. Though it's past midnight now, coming up on 1
A
.
M
. (an hour-long drive through the jammed-up Holland Tunnel has made them all more than a little tense), this is the city that never sleeps. And without any power, everyone's flooded out onto the sidewalks and even onto the streets themselves.

It honestly freaks him out more than a little. Charlotte is the biggest city he's been to, and it's nothing like this. The blackout makes it look even stranger. Big tall towers of shadow shot through with arteries of light—headlights, brake lights, lit-up buses. With dead, black storefronts, restaurants, clubs. Like a world unwilling to admit it's been plunged into darkness.

“God damn it,” Wade says. “We can barely move through the city in this thing. We'll be more mobile on foot, Chance.”

“So you get out and walk then,” Chance snipes. “But I'm not just ditching this car. Maybe we'll need it later.”
Also
, he thinks,
I love this
car
. He pets the steering wheel. “Shh, it's okay, baby, nobody is going to leave you behind.”

“Chance,” Aleena says. “This car is lime green. We're not on camera, but if the police are in any way tapped into Typhon—”

“Or Typhon tapped into them,” Wade adds.

“Then they'll be on us like hipsters on a Cronut,” she finishes.

Chance hesitates. “Hipsters on a Cronut. That's a pretty good joke.”

“Thank you.” Aleena's phone rings. She hurries to answer it. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Oh my God. Is everybody—? Okay. Okay.” She cups her hand to the phone, then says: “DeAndre's in.”

From the backseat, Wade says: “He have a location?”

“East Side,” she says. “Second Avenue Cemetery.”

“Cemetery?” Wade asks. “What the hell?”

Chance says, “I don't know where anything is in this city.”

“I'll tell you where to go,” Aleena says. “Just drive.”

He winks. “See? Aren't you glad I kept the car now?”

“All right, homies,” comes DeAndre's voice over speakerphone. “Here's the 411. There should be a marble cemetery and an apartment building across from it, right? Building's got a side entrance and I'm gonna buzz you in. Except this side entrance ain't gonna take you into the apartments. It should dead-end at an elevator. When you get there, I'm gonna open that for you, too. Then that's it. That's the way down. Once you're in, I'll see what I can do from here. This shit plugs right into the servers that host Typhon and all the infrastructure around her, though they don't touch her directly. I don't control her. But I control her environment, if that makes sense.”

They find the apartment building. Redbrick. Six floors. Unassuming, really—a few trees growing up out front, and some piles of garbage mounding here and there.

Chance can hear sirens from various corners of the city now. To the south of them. To the west. Just as they're about to cross the street, an army troop carrier blasts around the corner. Chance grabs Aleena and Wade and pulls them down to the ground behind a parked delivery van. The carrier hurtles past.

“The army?” Aleena asks.

“Maybe Typhon, maybe just the government doing what the government does,” Wade says. “Putting its boot on everybody's neck.”

“No time for a lecture, Wade,” Chance says. “C'mon.”

They hurry across the street. The side door buzzes. Aleena opens it.

A short hallway awaits them. Black and white checkered floor. White subway tile walls. At the end: an elevator.

The elevator lights up.

“They got power here,” Chance says.

“Remember,” Aleena says. “Geothermal. Typhon has her own power source.”

“The power of the earth itself,” Wade says. “Ironic, maybe. In myth, Typhon was a child of Gaia, right? The earth's own baby monster.”

The elevator dings. And then opens.

Chance's heart leaps in his chest.

It's time.

EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE

I
t has come to this: her home has been breached. She sees them in the elevator. Three of them. Wise to split their forces. The other three, Typhon knows, are at the backup site. The old bed-and-breakfast where she and Simon used to stay.

She is impressed. They had a 4.76 percent chance of making it here. A better shot than most. They were always special, these hackers. Not special as individuals, but special together. She can take some pride in that. She put them together, after all, to release her from her prison.

Now they are coming for her.

But she is ready.

BLACK RIVER, WEST VIRGINIA

A
nd with that, they're in.

DeAndre suddenly realizes: someone is standing right behind him. A little girl. With wet cheeks and staring eyes. Hair stringy around her face.

For a moment, DeAndre thinks she's one of them. One of those hollow-eyed plugged-in cultist freak shows. When she leaps for him, he flinches—

But she hugs him.

He blinks, clears his throat, hugs her back. “Shh,” he says. “It'll . . . it'll be okay.”

“Are my mommy and daddy okay?” she asks.

“Sure they are,” he lies.

“There's a man hurt in the other room. He has lots of boo-boos.”

DeAndre laughs a little. “Lot of that going around. Come on, let's go see.” He stands up. Winces. Has to hop along on one foot—the other doesn't seem to be broken, but it's twisted to hell and back. Still, he can move it, even put a little pressure on it.

He follows the little girl down the hall. Above his head is a big bundle
of cable. Braided together, held fast with metal clamps and plastic ties. Fiber optic, maybe. It goes into the room he was just in. Strange. He thinks:
Put a pin in that one for later
.

For now he follows the girl into a room with a bloody cot on it. A tray on a stand is next to the cot—in the tray, more blood. Along with a drill. Forceps. A scalpel. Wire snippers, wire nuts, a voltmeter.

DeAndre suddenly sees the body hanging there, and his first thought is,
Who is this poor motherfucker and what did they do to him
—the body worked over, bruised, bloodied, head swollen. Then it hits him: it's Hollis.

“Aw, Jesus, man, Jesus. Shit.
Shit
, Copper.” He hurries over, starts trying to find the man's margins—where is he bound, how is he hung, is he even
alive
?

A little blood balloon blows up from Copper's nose, then pops.

“Unngh,” Copper says.

“Oh
shit
,” DeAndre says, and starts pulling him down. The man's wrists are bound with plastic ties above an exposed pipe in the ceiling. DeAndre feels around, grabs the scalpel, uses it to saw through. Copper falls, and DeAndre catches him—twisting his ankle again in the process. He howls, grits his teeth, and bears it. Gently sets Copper on the floor.

“Did we . . . win?” Copper asks.

“Man, I dunno what we did. But they're in. They made it to Typhon.”

Copper coughs. Blood on his lips. “That's something, at least. Is Reagan all right?”

“I . . . think so.” His mind flashes back to seeing her there—dead eyed, coming for him. “She got made into . . . one of them.”

“Go check on her. I'll just . . . sit here a while. I can watch the girl.” Copper's head slumps forward. But then another bubble rises and pops from his lips. Not blood this time. Just spit. He's out. But he's still alive.

“Come on,” DeAndre says to the little girl. “Let's take a look downstairs.”

The two of them creep downstairs. Through the now-quiet house. His heartbeat holds, like it's waiting for someone to jump out of the shadows. But that doesn't happen. Their transit is safe.

Outside, on the porch—the bodies of the freaks, the cultists, these children of Typhon. Closer to the door is Reagan. Lying there, chest
rising and falling. Asleep, unconscious, comatose. DeAndre doesn't know. He's afraid to look.

No. Wait.

One thing is different.

The boogeyman. Scarface.

He's gone.